This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Illness is the result of imbalance. Imbalance is a result of forgetting who you are. Forgetting who you are creates thoughts and actions that lead to an unhealthy lifestyle and eventually illness... Illness can thus be understood as a lesson you have given yourself to help you remember who you are.
Lesson |
Therefore it is said that the whole universe is just an illusion, unless you immediately realize the vehicle of truth and attain the mystic path all at once, forgetting all about subject and object, arriving at basic unminding, seeing through worldly troubles, understanding gangs of devils. If you effectively understand this, it will make you happy for life. If you still don’t understand, it’s just because you yourselves are avoiding it.
Happy | Truth | Understanding | Universe | Will | Understand |
Time disappears into outer action or inner impulses. Into doings, cravings, or dreamings. But human time is conscious time. And this has been lost, destroyed. In its place there is now animal time (doing, moving about, preying on others, eating, building, killing, etc. ); plant time (dreaming, languishing, imagining); or “mineral” — that is, mechanical — time: the time of devices such as clocks and computers. What we call logical thinking is often just an internal version of these lifeless machines. Implicitly, we even take pride in the mechanicity of our thinking when, forgetting the metaphorical origin of the usage, we refer to a computer’s “intelligence.” This is mental time, “mineral” in its rigidity and sterility. We lay this logical cement over organic life out there and in ourselves. Carried to its extreme, this becomes the mindset that measures the whole of human life solely by the “bottom line.
Fear, lest, by forgetting what you are by nature, you also forget the need that you have of continual pardon, support, and supplies from the Spirit of grace, and so grow proud of your own abilities, or of what you have received from God.
John Yepes “Saint John of the Cross”
Moral good consists in the control of the passions and the restruction of the inordinate appetites. The result for the soul is tranquility, peace, repose, and moral virtue. The soul cannot control the passion without forgetting and withdrawing from the sources of these emotions. Disturbances never arise in a soul unless through the apprehensions of the memory... The soul must go to God by not comprehending rather than by comprehending and it must exchange the mutable and comprehensible for the Immutable and Incomprehensible.
You were very hurt at being slighted. That means you are forgetting too easily who you are.
Means |
Dōgen, aka Dōgen Kigen, Eihei Dōgen, titled as Dōgen Zenji NULL
Studying the Buddha way is studying oneself. Studying oneself is forgetting oneself. Forgetting oneself is being enlightened by all things. Being enlightened by all things is to shed the body-mind of oneself, and those of others. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this traceless enlightenment continues endlessly.
Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.
Meher Baba, born Merwan Sheriar Irani
People ask God for forgiveness. But since God is everything and everyone, who is there for Him to forgive? Forgiveness of the created was already there in His act of creation. But still people ask God's forgiveness, and He forgives them. But they, instead of forgetting that for which they asked forgiveness, forget that God has forgiven them, and instead, remember the things they were forgiven - and so nourish the seed of wrongdoing, and it bears its fruit again.
Forgiveness | God | People | Forgiveness | God |
When suffering comes, we yearn for some sign from God, forgetting we have just had one.
Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.
Consideration | Effort | Giving | Good | Reading | Understanding | Work |
Right now a moment is fleeting by! Capture its reality in paint! To do that we must; put all else out of our minds. We must become that moment; make ourselves a sensitive recording plate. Give the image of what we actually see, forgetting everything that has been seen before our time.
Reality |
Paul Valéry, fully Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry
Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.
To the warriors of light, there is no such thing as impossible love. They don’t allow themselves to be intimidated by silence, or by rejection. They know that – behind the icy mask people wear – there is a heart of fire. That is why the warriors risk more than others. They tirelessly seek love – even if this means hearing, many times over, the word ‘no’, returning home defeated, feeling rejected in body and soul. Warriors don’t allow themselves to be discouraged. Without love, live has no meaning… Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.
Body | Heart | Knowing | Love | Means | People | Risk | Waiting |
Forgetting is painful… Forgive but do not forget, or you will be hurt again. Forgiving changes the perspectives. Forgetting loses the lesson… Fortunate are those who take the first steps… Facing the difficulties, I can choose either to be a poor victim or a great adventurer… Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.
Childhood | Experience | Joy | Knowing | People | Will | Forgive | Victim |
Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan
In the inner life the greatest principle that one should observe is to beunassuming, quiet, without any show of wisdom, without any manifestation of learning, without any desire to let anyone know how farone has advanced, not even letting oneself know how far one has gone. The task to be accomplished is the entire forgetting of oneself andharmonizing with one’s fellowman; acting in agreement with all, meeting everyone on his own plane, speaking to everyone in his own tongue,answering the laughter of one’s friends with a smile, and the pain of another with tears, standing by one’s friends in their joy and their sorrow, whatever be one’s own grade of evolution.
Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli NULL
The mark of Cain is stamped upon our foreheads. Across the centuries, our brother Abel was slain in blood which we drew, and shed tears we caused by forgetting Thy love. Forgive us, Lord, for the curse we falsely attributed to their name as Jews. Forgive us for crucifying Thee a second time in their flesh. For we knew not what we did.
R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that it can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat or meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.
The 20th century merits the name "The Century of Murder." 1915 Turks slaughtered 2 million Armenians. 1933 to 1954 the Soviet government encompassed the death of 20 to 65 million citizens. 1933 to 1945 Nazi Germany murdered more than 25 million people. 1948 Hindus and Muslims engaged in racial and religious strife that claimed more lives than could be reported. 1970 3 million Bangladesh were killed. 1971 Uganda managed the death of 300,000 people. 1975 Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and murdered up to 3 million people. In recent times more than half a million of Rwanda's 6 million people have been murdered. At present times genocidal strife is underway in Bosnia, Somalia, Burundi and elsewhere. The people of the world have demonstrated themselves to be so capable of forgetting the murderous frenzies in which their fellows have participated that it is essential that one, at least, be remembered and the world be regularly reminded of it.
Death | Government | People | Present | World | Government |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
LOSING: Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation. When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.