This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
In the axial mode, human life is understood as involving a journey in which those who are successful move from a Lower to a Higher Realm. This journey is central to the meaning of life. Through an elevated mode of knowing, the world as we ordinarily experience is largely left behind, deemed less if not illusory, and the domain of reality itself is approached.
Experience | Journey | Knowing | Life | Life | Meaning | Reality | World |
Three claims: (1) Consciousness exists. There exist conscious mental states, events, and processes that have the property of being conscious. (2) Consciousness has depth, hidden structure, hidden and possibly multiple functions, and hidden natural and cultural history. Conscious mental states supervene on brain states. (3) Conscious mental states, processes, events – possibly conscious supervisory faculties, if there are any – are heterogeneous in phenomenal world. A theory of consciousness will in the end be part of a unified theory of the mind.
Consciousness | Events | History | Mind | Property | Will | World |
The history of mankind is crowded with evidences proving that physical coercion is not adapted to moral regeneration; that the sinful dispositions of men can be subdued only by love; that evil can be exterminated from the earth only by goodness… that there is great security in being gentle, harmless, long-suffering, and abundant in mercy; that it is only the meek who shall inherit the earth, for the violent, who resort to the sword, are destined to perish with the sword.
Coercion | Earth | Evil | History | Love | Mankind | Men | Mercy | Security | Suffering |
Axial sensibility: the sense that we find ourselves caught up largely in appearances and are trapped in and subject to various forms of bondage, such as political, psychological, and possibly spiritual ones. Coupled with this sense is the further sense that there must be an elsewhere, or another and better way of being here in the world as it is not, one that better engages reality and gives us a sense of liberation rather than confinement. This axial sense may prove to be but an inchoate [just begun, lacking order, origin] and unrealistic longing, but it has been and continues to be experienced by many as genuine and inescapable. It has often been described as a longing for a belonging, driven in part by a sense of not belonging to the world as it is, of being displaced in it.
Better | Longing | Order | Reality | Sense | Sensibility | World |
In our loss of the perception of the Void and our conviction that particular things are finally real, we come to believe in the separate, isolated reality of some enduring self within us for which we a plan and hope great things. Alas, we are frustrated in our hoping because all through our lives our hopes are incompletely attained or, if fulfilled, strangely unsatisfying after all.
Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm
It is the emancipation from the security of Paradise which is the basis for man’s truly human development.
Does your calculus of success include the bottom line of death, or are you mortgaging your future for the immediate and the short term? Have you been tranquilized by the trivial, or does your sense of life grow from a close attention to reality and time?
Attention | Death | Future | Life | Life | Reality | Sense | Success | Time |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
The ultimate reality is beyond all names. “I” signifies the radical subjectivity of the state of Realization. It is in itself the complete statement of Reality.
Reality |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Faith is the conviction that there is a divine reality beyond appearances.
Langdon Gilkey, fully Langdon Brown Gilkey
Idealism tends to absorb all of objective reality into a system made up solely of experience… Sooner or later the idealist has to admit that his experience touches something beyond its own content.
Experience | Idealism | Reality | System |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
If the goal of life is to do the very best one can do at each unfolding moment of existence, then, through spiritual work, one has already escaped the primary cause of suffering. In the stop-frame of the radical present, there is no life story to react to or edit. With this one-pointedness of mind, it soon becomes obvious that everything merely `is as it is’ without comment or adjectives. The illusion of `Now’ is replaced by the reality of `Always’.
Cause | Existence | Illusion | Life | Life | Mind | Present | Reality | Story | Suffering | Work |
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.]
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Love is beyond duality; it does not need a subject or an object. It is a quality of Reality which is independent of circumstances.
The only security that man has ever had has been in the warm enfoldment of the natural and social environment.