This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Science provides a vision of reality seen from the perspective of reason, a perspective that sees the vast order of the universe, living and nonliving matter, as a material system governed by rules that can be known by the human mind. It is a powerful vision, formal and austere but strangely silent about many of the questions that deeply concern us. Science shows us what exists but not what to do about it.
Mind | Order | Reality | Reason | Science | System | Universe | Vision | Wisdom |
Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.
Can a man control his future? Yes. Despite the system they live under, men everywhere have, I believe, more power over the future than ever before. The important thing is that we must choose to exercise it. What we do today determines how the world shall go, for tomorrow is made up of the sum total of today's experiences... Far from feeling hopeless or helpless, we must seize every opportunity, however small, to help the world around us toward peace, productivity and human brotherhood.
Brotherhood | Control | Future | Important | Man | Men | Opportunity | Peace | Power | System | Tomorrow | Wisdom | World |
The divisions and boundaries that we perceive based upon our five senses are, in effect, an illusion. It’s my belief that the meaning of life changes from day to day, second to second. I believe we’re here to learn that we’re part of a creative force - I would go so far as to call that force divine. We’re here to learn that we can create a world and that we have a choice in what we create, and that our world, if we choose, can be a heaven or hell.
Belief | Choice | Day | Force | Heaven | Hell | Illusion | Life | Life | Meaning | Wisdom | World | Learn |
Inherent in any system of belief is a self-fulfilling prophecy: what is expected is observed and what is observed confirms the expectations. When an individual alters his belief system he becomes aware of vast new realms of possibility.
If one should tell of a telescope so exactly made as to have the power of seeing; of a whispering gallery that had the power of haring; of a cabinet so nicely framed as to have the power of memory; or of a machine so delicate as to feel pain when it was touched - such absurdities are so shocking to common sense that they would not find belief even among savages; yet it is the same absurdity to think that the impressions of external objects upon the machine of our bodies can be the real efficient cause of thought and perception.
Belief | Cause | Common Sense | Memory | Pain | Perception | Power | Sense | Thought | Wisdom | Absurdity | Think | Thought |
George Augustus Sala, fully George Augustus Henry Sala
Life is a system of relations rather than a positive and independent existence; and he who would be happy himself and make others happy must carefully preserve these relations. He cannot stand apart in surly and haughty egotism; let him learn that he is as much dependent others as others are on him.
Timothy Sprigge, fully Timothy L.S. Sprigge
If this is correct, all that is contained in a single divine consciousness within which an inconceivably vast number of streams of finite experience interact and interweave. When the lower level streams of experience which correspond to the basic items postulated in physics enter into appropriately complex relations with each other they form aggregates (and aggregates of aggregates) which are what living things are in themselves, and which underpin the emergence of the streams of consciousness of animals and men. Within such streams of consciousness, more particularly the human, a not self aspect, which is primarily the physical world as it is for us, confronts a self aspect, and serves as its representation of the system of interweaving streams of experience n the midst of which it exists and with which it must interact appropriately in order to survive, communicate with other similar selves, and realize its personal essence as fully as it can.
Consciousness | Experience | Men | Order | Self | System | Wisdom | World |
James Watson, fully James Dewey Watson
Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward logical manner imagined by outsiders. Instead, its steps forward (and sometimes backward) are often very human events in which personalities and cultural traditions play major roles... [Science moves with][ the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.
Adventure | Arrogance | Belief | Events | Play | Science | Spirit | Truth | Wisdom |
We are exactly like a galaxy in or fine anatomy. Matter moves through you and me as easily as the wind blows through the branches of a tree. And the boundaries we draw at the limits of our skin are as arbitrary as those which separate our solar system from the next one. Everything is indeed connected to everything else, in the best traditions of ecology, but it goes further than that. Everything is everything else. There is no difference - and nothing is impossible.
The constants in all religion are the mystery of the universe, the nostalgia of the human spirit for an order beyond the show and flux of things to which it believes itself akin, and the belief that it has evidence of such an order.
Belief | Evidence | Mystery | Order | Religion | Spirit | Universe |
New research suggests that the brain influences, and may, in fact, be wired to experience God or deep spirituality. Religious experience often stems from temporal-lobe and limbic system function,, and obsessions (religious and others) stem from too much activity in the anterior cingulated gyrus and basal ganglia.
Experience | God | Research | Spirituality | System | God |
You are a self-organizing system in an invisible field of energy organized by your purpose and a stream of continuous information. Information is the nutrient of a self-organizing system… It is by knowing yourself that your purpose is revealed.
José Bergamin, fully José Bergamín Gutiérrez
A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.
Belief | Doubt | Superstition |
Our American system of government by lobbyist guarantees us a form of taxation with representation that the founding father did not foresee: special interests get the representation while the broad public gets the taxation.
Father | Government | Public | System | Government |
I knew that the complete mystic “way” includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to constant recollection of Him.