This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
If your goal is to avoid pain and escape suffering, I would not advise you to seek higher levels of consciousness or spiritual evolution.
Consciousness | Evolution | Pain | Suffering |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
Purpose, resolution and harmony unify life and give it meaning by transforming it into a seamless flow experience. Whoever achieves this state will never really lack anything else. A person whose consciousness is so ordered need not fear unexpected events, or even death. Every living moment will make sense, and most of it will be enjoyable.
Consciousness | Death | Events | Experience | Fear | Harmony | Life | Life | Meaning | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Resolution | Sense | Will |
When Judaism speaks of immortality… its primary meaning is that man contains something independent of the flesh and surviving it; his consciousness and moral capacity; his essential personality; a soul.
Capacity | Consciousness | Immortality | Man | Meaning | Personality | Soul |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
In the lives of many people it is possible to find a unifying purpose that justifies the things they do day in, day out – a goal that like a magnetic field attracts their psychic energy, a goal upon which all lesser goals depend… Without such a purpose, even the best-ordered consciousness lacks meaning.
Consciousness | Day | Energy | Goals | Meaning | People | Purpose | Purpose |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The essential proof of Self-realization - of God’s consciousness in you - is to be truly and unconditionally happy.
Consciousness | God | Happy | Self | Self-realization |
The greatest pleasures of which the human mind is susceptible are the pleasures of consciousness and sympathy.
Consciousness | Mind | Sympathy |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
We are what we think we are. The habitual inclination of our thoughts determines our talents and abilities, and our personality... So whatever you want to be, start to develop that pattern now. You can instill any trend in your consciousness right now, provided you inject a strong thought in your mind; then your actions and whole being will obey that thought. One must never give up the hope of becoming better.
Better | Consciousness | Hope | Inclination | Mind | Personality | Right | Thought | Will | Think | Thought |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling I have always cultivated.
Consciousness | Future | Inferiority | Life | Life | Past |
The dispute between the theory of a predestined future and the theory of a free future is an endless dispute. This is so because both theories are too literal, too rigid, too material, and the one excludes the other... The opposites are both equally wrong because the truth lies in the unification of these two opposite understandings into one whole. At any given moment all the future of the world is predestined and existing - provided no new factor comes in. And a new factor can only come in from the side of consciousness and the will resulting from it.
Consciousness | Dispute | Future | Theories | Truth | Will | World | Wrong |
The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting.
I will now close my eyes, I will stop my ears, I will turn away my senses from their objects, I will even efface from my consciousness all the images of corporeal things; or at least, because this can hardly be accomplished, I will consider them as empty and false; and thus, holding converse only with myself, and closely examining my nature, I will endeavour to obtain by degrees a more intimate and familiar knowledge of myself.
Consciousness | Knowledge | Nature | Will |
Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
The value of human life lies in the fact of suffering, for where there is no suffering, no consciousness of karmic bondage, there will be no power of attaining spiritual experience and thereby reaching the field of non-distinction. Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
Consciousness | Distinction | Experience | Life | Life | Power | Suffering | Will | Value |
Teilhard de Chardin, fully Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The world seems to me to ‘tumble’ forward and upward upon the spiritual... Entropy has been replaced for me by the highest consciousness as the essential physical function of the universe.
Consciousness | Universe | World |
The doer of the favor is the firmer friend of the two, in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in his debt; while the debtor feels less keenly from the very consciousness that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.