This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is probably no direct way to get in touch with our inner selves or to seek out satisfaction and happiness. It’s best to live by sound principles – honesty, courage, liberty, and love – and then to await what unfolds. When, inevitably, we go astray for a time, we must return, once again, to living by the principles we cherish. The formula isn’t all that difficult to understand; applying it is the work of a lifetime.
Courage | Honesty | Liberty | Love | Principles | Sound | Time | Work |
We may call it spirituality, enthusiasm, spontaneity, outlook, insight, - many names will do, - but what we mean by all of them is essentially the same. It is the power to see the element of eternal principles in which things live, - to see the way in which each fact and act is a true wave on the great ocean of infinity, to see all life full of the life of God, - and so to lose the sense of hardness and separateness in the things which happen and things we do.
Enthusiasm | Eternal | God | Insight | Life | Life | Power | Principles | Sense | Spirituality | Will |
Man strives for reconciliation with God – could he aspire to anything higher? Since identity with God is a paradoxical notion, reconciliation with Him remains man’s only goal because it represents no less than his redemption from the conflicting forces within his own nature.
God | Man | Nature | Reconciliation | Redemption | God |
An organism lives by growth, by processes of change, by powers of generation, but its interfusion with other organisms and with its environment, also by its `mental state’ in which is vested the unifying principles pervading all its parts and subdivisions, rising in man to the conscious mental state, to self-awareness, and with this self-awareness to advance further by directed effort.
Awareness | Change | Effort | Growth | Man | Principles | Self | Self-awareness |
James Frazer, aka James George Frazer
The old view that the principles of right and wrong are immutable and eternal is no longer tenable. The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
Change | Eternal | Law | Little | Principles | Right | World | Wrong | Old |
Character is distilled out of our daily confrontation with temptation, out of our regular response to the call of duty. It is formed as we learn to cherish principles and to submit to self-discipline. Character is the sum total of all the little decisions, the small deeds, the daily reactions to the choices that confront us. Character is not obtained instantly. We have to mold and hammer and forge ourselves into character. It is a distant goal to which there is no shortcut.
Character | Deeds | Discipline | Duty | Little | Principles | Self | Temptation | Learn |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
There is no inherent authority of `truth’ to any concept except for the subjective value ascribed to it. Credibility is a subjective decision and purely experiential and indefinable. What is convincing to one person may be dismissed as nonsense by another. The realization and knowingness of God is radically and purely subjective. There is not even the hypothetical possibility that reason could arrive at Truth. Truth is knowable only by virtue of the identity of being it.
Authority | Decision | God | Nonsense | Reason | Truth | Virtue | Virtue | God | Value |
When it is said and done, life’s journey isn’t about humanity in general, or even the person next door. It’s about you and me. Our individual lives are the focus, a picture framed by our birth and death. Our personal goals and principles are under scrutiny; our personal success or failure is in the balance.
Balance | Birth | Death | Failure | Focus | Goals | Humanity | Individual | Journey | Life | Life | Principles | Success | Failure |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
That which is `provable’ is not Reality but perception or mentation only. Reality is subjective and knowable only by virtue of identity with the known. “Provables’ belong to the classification and level of limitation and are arbitrary abstractions whose sole `reality’ is merely the consequence of selection and identification. The phenomenal is not the same as the noumenal [understood by intellectual intuition without the aid of the senses – opposed to phenomenon.]
It’s often said that there are three requirements for a fulfilling life. The first two – a clear sense of personal identity and a strong sense of personal mission – are rooted in the third: a deep sense of life’s meaning. In our time especially, many people are spurred to search for that meaning because they’re haunted by having too much to live with and too little to live for
Life | Life | Little | Meaning | Mission | People | Search | Sense | Time |
The island of existence is washed by the two oceans of eternity and nothingness, eroding it into what is less and elevating it into what is more than existence, into nothingness and into a higher reality, namely, the identity of event and value, the unity of being and meaning.
The same principles [that apply in polytheism] naturally deify mortals, superior in power, courage, or understanding, and produce hero-worship.
Courage | Hero | Power | Principles | Understanding | Worship |
An individual does not comprehend his or her self as a linear sequence – a succession of roles or a trajectory of “socialize” beings, learning and then acting out (or deviating from) a set of socially appropriate rules of behavior. Moreover, identity in old age is not merely the sum of the parts, whether roles, achievements, losses, or social norms. Instead, people dynamically integrate a wide range of experience – unique situations, structural forces, values, cultural pathways, knowledge of an entire life span – to construct a current and viable identity.
Age | Behavior | Experience | Individual | Knowledge | Learning | Life | Life | Old age | People | Self | Unique | Old |
The focus on themes in the lives of the elderly allows us to conceive of aging as continual creation of the self through the ongoing interpretation of past experience, structural factors, values, and current context…. Identity is built around themes, without regard to time, as past experiences are symbolically connected with one another to have meaning for a particular individual.
Experience | Focus | Individual | Meaning | Past | Regard | Self | Time |
Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
Purity and stillness are the correct principles for mankind.
Mankind | Principles | Purity |
The construction of a coherent, unified sense of self is an ongoing process. We have seen how old people express an identity through themes which are rooted in personal experience, particular structural factors, and a constellation of value orientations. Themes integrate these three sources of meaning as they structure the account of a life, express what is salient to the individual, and define a continuous and creative self.
Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | People | Self | Sense | Old | Value |
People do not define themselves directly through a chronology of life experiences. Rather, they define themselves through the expression of selected life experiences... people crystallize certain experiences into themes… considered building blocks of identity. Identity in old age – the ageless self – is founded on the present significance of past experience, the current rendering of meaningful symbols and events of a life.
Age | Events | Experience | Life | Life | Old age | Past | People | Present | Self | Old |
Personal identity as a phenomenon can be studied only in the present; the researcher cannot know about those themes which have been altered or abandoned, because the integration of experience takes place only through presently existing frameworks of understanding.
Experience | Integration | Present | Understanding |
Reading is actually plunging into one’s own identity and, one hopes, emerging stronger than before. You see, unconsciously, we are seeking to find an affirmation to our own world perception and set of values.
Perception | Reading | World |