This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Once you have given an emotional meaning to an event, you are less able to be fully aware of the next moment because you are caught up in emotion. You will not be able to see your play clearly, only through the mists of fury… negative statements become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
We are capable of finding unending meaning in a world of constant, shimmering, sometimes threatening change. The task is to keep the question of life in question, and to find in it an unending source of joy and possibility, even in the darkest of times. It is within the constant overcoming of our own limitations and habits, and of the established views of our age, that passive happiness and unreflective contentment are lost, then to be replaced by joyful activity and a glimpse of a broader, more enriching, and more responsible awareness than we have been capable of before.
Age | Awareness | Change | Contentment | Joy | Life | Life | Meaning | Question | World | Awareness | Happiness |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
Whether or not you decide to emulate that which you have come to understand through empathetic identification, you will never be quite the same again. In learning to think and to feel, to understand and to value more like another you will have grown in your own self-understanding and in your capacity to speak and interact with others. You, and that which you are now able to embrace, may well find in one another nurture, respect, protection, and enrichment. It is in such qualities of living that true meaning will be encountered, however tentative and fluctuating that meaning may be. It is in the very midst of the flux of the meaningful that its perpetuation and its renewal is to be found.
Capacity | Learning | Meaning | Qualities | Respect | Self | Understanding | Will | Think | Understand | Value |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
Values do not exist apart from our experience of them… what is not an experience cannot be of intrinsic value… intrinsic values, or immediate values, are subjective, or dependent on the state of mind of the beholder.
Experience | Mind |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
The meaning of life is to be found in the living of it, and even for the individual a considerable range of possibilities and an unending flow of reflections upon your life constitutes part of that meaning. Play has no ultimate goal, no serious goal that will bring it to an end, but rather renews itself in constant repetition, with no repetition being an exact repeat of a prior instance. Living has a series of goals and is serious as well as playful, and yet the goals are always in transformation, or at least always in doubt. Circumstances are often similar, but it is not easy to specify exactness in your lived experience, even with someone with whom you have lived most of your life.
Circumstances | Doubt | Experience | Goals | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Play | Will |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
However complex the background of a so-called meaningful life, the meaning itself is directly experienced. And the ultimate ground or place of meaning arising is the individual human being, in the specific situations of his or her life. While the sources of meaning are almost predictably outside the individual self, the experiences of meaningfulness are necessarily someone’s experiences.
Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | Self |
It was for the sake of security that the people of ancient ties turned to the Baals and other idols. Today, our oppressors turn to money and military power and to the so-called security forces. But their security is insecurity. We experience their security as intimidation and repression, terror, rape and murder. Those who turn to the idols for security demand our insecurity as the price that must be paid.
Experience | Insecurity | Intimidation | Money | Murder | People | Power | Price | Security | Terror |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
The achievement of meaning in life is akin to the gaining of knowledge: neither can be simply handed on; we all must gain each for ourselves
Achievement | Knowledge | Life | Life | Meaning |
There do remain dispersed in the soil of human nature diverse seeds of goodness, of benignity, of ingenuity, which being cherished, excited, and quickened by good culture, do by common experience thrust out flowers very lovely, and yield fruits very pleasant of virtue and goodness.
Experience | Good | Human nature | Humanity | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Virtue | Virtue |
How we view life is ultimately that which gives us meaning, value and purpose… Our worldview determines how we solve these problems: What are we? Where did we come from? What does it mean to be human? What is truth? What is the meaning and purpose of life? Why is there so much evil in the world? How should we live? What happens when we die? Does it matter?
Evil | Life | Life | Meaning | Problems | Purpose | Purpose | Truth | World | Value |
Peace is more than simply the absence of aggression and war. Peace transcends the end of a conflict or a statement of policy. While we may force the outward appearance of peace upon a people or a nation, it is the underlying thinking that must change to create a true and lasting peace.
Absence | Aggression | Appearance | Change | Force | Peace | People | Policy | Thinking | War |
Every new experience is a new opportunity of knowing God. Every new experience is like a jewel set into the texture of our life, on which God shines and makes interpretation and revelation of Himself.
Experience | God | Knowing | Life | Life | Opportunity | Revelation | God |
Seymour Cohen, fully Seymour Jay Cohen
The starting point of religious experience is wonder.
Experience | Wonder |
The opportunity offered by a shrinking economy to experience simple pleasures might be one of God’s better gifts to this generation.
Better | Experience | God | Opportunity |
The essence of the Jewish concept of life seems to me to be the affirmation of life for all creatures. For the life of the individual has meaning only in the service of enhancing and ennobling the life of every living thing. Life is holy; i.e., it is the highest worth on which all other values depend.