This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Let’s imagine a visual image of your “life” as an energetic field. This energetic field attracts to you people, opportunities, and events. Within that field is a central point of purpose around which incoming energy is organized. Affecting and modifying that central point of purpose are energetic sub-fields of beliefs, attitudes, past experiences, expectations, unresolved emotional states, and other unconscious material. At all times, we emit a certain energy pattern based on our physical, emotional and spiritual states. The model of a magnetic force field is intended to suggest that we not only radiate our energy from a centralized self-organizing, indwelling purpose, but that energetic field also attracts in, or magnetizes to itself, those people and things that will help fulfill that purpose.
Energy | Events | Force | Life | Life | Model | Past | People | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Will |
Robert E. Carter, fully Robert Edgar Carter
We are fully responsible for who it is that we become. In the final analysis, there is no one else to blame. It is totally our own doing. We are always already free to remake our present and future by disencumbering ourselves of unwanted and unhelpful aspects of our past history. Freedom, choice, and responsibility are the ethical watchwords of existentialism.
Blame | Choice | Existentialism | Freedom | Future | History | Past | Present | Responsibility |
Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson
For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future. Shaped through long eons of evolution, our genes not only make us what we are, but hold in their minute beings the future – be it one of promise or threat. Yet genetic deterioration through manmade [chemical and radioactive] agents is the menace of our time, “the last and greatest danger to our civilization.”
Civilization | Danger | Evolution | Future | Individual | Life | Life | Mankind | Past | Promise | Time | Danger |
Idolatry is the denial of all hope for the future. The idols of the past were worshipped by people who were afraid of change, who wanted things to remain the same, who did not want a future that was different, who found their security in the status quo. The same is true today.
Change | Future | Hope | Past | People | Security | Afraid |
Action makes propaganda’s effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is not obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable.
Absurd | Action | Authority | Justification | Obedience | Past | Receive | Will | Propaganda |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
In spiritual work, there is no tangible worldly gain to be acquired, but there is instead an inner reward of pleasure, satisfaction, and even joy. Goals replace gains as motives. There is a greater freedom from living on the exciting knife edge of the moment than being a prisoner of the past or having expectations of the future.
Freedom | Future | Goals | Joy | Motives | Past | Pleasure | Reward | Work |
Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
He that feels himself alarmed by his conscience, anxious for the attainment of a better state and afflicted by the memory of his past faults, may justly conclude that the great work of repentance has begun.
Attainment | Better | Conscience | Memory | Past | Repentance | Work |
Mohamed Iqbal or Sir Muhammad Iqbal, aka Allama Iqbal
From your past emerges the present, and from the present is born your future.
Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.
Madonna Kolbenschlag, fully Madonna Claire Kolbenschlag
If in the past Christianity, Judaism, or Islam placed itself at the center of the search for truth and unity, there is now a shift away from this kind of tribal centricty to the notion that it is God who is at the center and all the religious traditions of the world must inevitably intersect at this center. One can no longer speak about one’s faith outside the ambience of the plurality of religious traditions.
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 |
Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
In resentment there is no chance of release but only imprisonment in a painful past and the gradual stifling of all serenity, indeed, of all humanity.
Chance | Humanity | Past | Resentment | Serenity |
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Although the tongue of God is busy speaking through all things, yet in order to speak to the deaf ears of many among us, it is necessary for Him to speak through the lips of man. He has done this all through the history of man, every great teacher of the past having been this guiding Spirit living the life of God in human guise. In other words, their human guise consists of various coats worn by the same person, who appeared to be different in each. Shiva, Buddha, Rama, Krishna, on the other side, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammad on the other; and many more, known or unknown to history, always one and the same person.
God | History | Life | Life | Man | Order | Past | Spirit | Words | God | Teacher |
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 |