This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Deliverance is out of time into eternity, and is achieved by obedience and docility to the eternal Nature of Things. We have been given free will, in order that we may will our self-will out of existence and so come to live continuously in a “state of grace.” All our actions must be directed, in the last analysis, to making ourselves passive in relation to the activity and the being of divine Reality. We are, as it were, aeolian harps, endowed with the power either to expose themselves to the wind of the Spirit or to shut themselves away from it.
Character | Docility | Eternal | Eternity | Existence | Free will | Grace | Nature | Obedience | Order | Power | Reality | Self | Spirit | Time | Will |
We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable; that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Character | Liberty | Life | Life | Men | Rights | Sacred | Truths |
Good will, solidarity and wretchedness, and the struggle for a better world have now thrown off their religious garb. The attitude of today’s martyrs is no longer patience but action; their goal is no longer their own immortality in the after-life but the happiness of men who come after them for whom they know how to die.
Action | Better | Character | Good | Immortality | Life | Life | Martyrs | Men | Patience | Struggle | Will | World | Happiness |
The human species... capacity for good is infinite, since they can, they desire, make room within themselves for divine Reality. But at the same time their capacity for evil is, not indeed infinite (since evil is always ultimately self-destructive and therefore temporary), but uniquely great. Hell is total separation from God, and the devil is the will to that separation... To be diabolic on the grand scale, one must, like Milton’s Satan, exhibit in a high degree all the moral virtues, except only charity and wisdom.
Capacity | Character | Charity | Desire | Devil | Evil | God | Good | Hell | Reality | Satan | Self | Time | Will | Wisdom |
John-Roger & Peter McWilliams NULL
Committing to a dream is not a one-time occurrence. They must be done daily, hourly, continually. We must choose to commit to our choice, over and over... And the time to commit is now. And now. And now. And now. And now.
Your true nature is not lost in moments of delusion, nor is it gained at the moment of enlightenment. It was never born and can never die. It shines through the whole universe, filling emptiness, one with emptiness. It is without time or space, and has no passions, actions, ignorance, or knowledge. In it there are no things, no people, and no Buddhas; it contains not the smallest hairbreadth of anything that exists objectively; it depends on nothing and is attached to nothing. It is all-pervading, radiant beauty: absolute reality, self-existent and uncreated. How then can you doubt that the Buddha has no mouth to speak with and nothing to teach, or that the truth is learned without learning, for who is there to learn? It is a jewel beyond all price.
Absolute | Beauty | Character | Delusion | Doubt | Enlightenment | Ignorance | Knowledge | Learning | Nature | Nothing | People | Price | Reality | Self | Space | Teach | Time | Truth | Universe |
Men are not blamed for such actions as they perform ignorantly and casually, whatever may be the consequences. Why? but because the principles of these actions are only momentary, and terminate in them alone. Men are less blamed for such actions as they perform hastily and unpremeditatedly than for such as proceed from deliberation. For what reason? but because a hasty temper, though a constant cause or principle in the mind, operates only by intervals, and infects not the whole character. Again, repentance wipes off every crime, if attended with a reformation of life and manners. How is this to be accounted for? but by asserting that actions render a person criminal merely a they are proofs of criminal principles in the mind.
Cause | Character | Consequences | Crime | Deliberation | Life | Life | Manners | Men | Mind | Principles | Reason | Repentance | Temper |
The present moment is the only aperture through which the soul can pass out of time into eternity, through which grace can pass out of eternity into the soul, and through which charity can pass from one soul in time to another soul in time.
Character | Charity | Eternity | Grace | Present | Soul | Time |
Observe a method in the distribution of your time. Every hour will then know its proper employment, and no time will be lost. Idleness will be shut out at every avenue, and with her that numerous body of vices that make up her train.
James G. Huneker, fully James Gibbons Huneker
All men of action are dreamers.
It seems evident, that men are carried, by a natural instinct or prepossession, to repose faith in their senses; and that, without any reasoning, or even almost before the use of reason, we always suppose an external universe, which depends not on our perception, but would exist, though we and every sensible creature were absent or annihilated.
Character | Faith | Instinct | Men | Perception | Reason | Repose | Universe |
From their own experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
Character | Experience | History | Men | Learn |
The causal process takes place within time and cannot possibly result in deliverance from time. Such a deliverance can only be achieved as a consequence of the intervention of eternity in the temporal domain; and eternity cannot intervene unless the individual will makes a creative act of self-denial, thus producing, as it were, a vacuum into which eternity can flow.
Character | Eternity | Individual | Self | Self-denial | Time | Will |