This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Neil Gaiman, fully Neil Richard Gaiman
There's never been a true war that wasn't fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.
You can only live in the present… only act in the present… only experience in the present. What you call the future, things that you may be planning, or things that you may be dreading – all this is still but a present state of mind. This is the real meaning of the traditional phrase, The Eternal Now. The only joy you can experience is the joy you experience now. A happy memory is a present joy. The only pain you can experience is the pain of the present moment. Sad memories are present pain.
Eternal | Experience | Future | Happy | Joy | Meaning | Memory | Mind | Pain | Present |
Spiritual values have meaning only in human relations and are as much a part of the evolutionary process as the physical structure of man.
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
The mind searches for meaning and is therefore circuitous in that it can reach only its own definitions of meaning. In Reality, nothing has any meaning for it has no attributers to be discerned. Everything merely exists as it was created – complete and perfect. Everything fulfills its purpose by merely being what it is. Everything is the fulfillment of its own essence and potentiality. The only `requirement’ for anything that exists is just to `be’.
Fulfillment | Meaning | Mind | Nothing | Purpose | Purpose | Reality |
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 |
The seeker after truth, however, is not a conqueror but a supplicant. Because there’s no one easier to deceive than ourselves, and no bigger credibility gap than that between our truth seeking and our truth twisting, our only path to truth (and its resultant freedom) is to be transformed by it rather than trying to conquer it… We must conform to truth –or, more accurately, become captive to it. Ultimately the question for each of us is not how thoroughly we’ve searched for the truth but how searchingly the truth has examined us.
Too much to live with, too little to live for… In our own day this question of life purpose is more urgent than ever. Three factors have converged to fuel a search for significance without precedent in human history. First, the search for the purpose of life is one of the deepest issues of our experiences as human beings. Second, the expectation that we can all live purposeful lives has been given a gigantic boost by modern society’s offer of the maximum opportunity for choice and change in all we do. Third, our fulfillment is thwarted by this stunning fact: Out of more than a score of great civilizations in human history, modern Western civilization is the very first to have a no agreed-on answer to the question of the purpose of life… Most of us in the midst of material plenty, have spiritual poverty.
Change | Choice | Civilization | Day | Expectation | Fulfillment | History | Life | Life | Little | Opportunity | Plenty | Poverty | Precedent | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Search | Society | Expectation |
David R. Hawkins, fully David Ramon Hawkins
Spiritual truth is beyond meaning; it doesn’t `mean’ anything. It can only be known, and that knowledge can only come about by becoming. Meaning is a mentation and a definition. Spiritual truth is a subjective awareness which is innately beyond intellection. For instance, what does a beautiful sunset `mean’? It doesn’t `mean’ anything; it is just startling that which it is, complete and total in and of itself. God is direct awareness and experience, a realization, a revelation, and the absolute perfection of pure subjectivity.
Absolute | Awareness | Experience | God | Knowledge | Meaning | Perfection | Revelation | Truth | God | Awareness |
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 |
How does time become holy? It becomes holy when a part of it is given to others, when we share and care and listen. Time is sanctified when we use it – to forgive and ask forgiveness; to remember things too long forgotten and to forget things too long remembered; to reclaim sacred things too casually abandoned and to abandon shabby things too highly cherished; to remember that life’s most crucial question is – how are we using time?
Care | Forgiveness | Life | Life | Question | Sacred | Time | Forgive |
Kenneth Hanson, aka Ken Hanson
Sufficient time must be devoted to the process of “being” rather than “doing.” This is perhaps life’s greatest lesson of all. It is not only true that mindless materialism leaves us empty; materiality alone means that we do not know the value of time. We are actually afraid of time, as well as meaning and value; and this is why we turn to materialism.
Lesson | Life | Life | Materialism | Meaning | Means | Time | Afraid | Value |
Existence embraces both life and death, and in a way death is the test of the meaning of life. If death is devoid of meaning, then life is absurd. Life’s ultimate meaning remains obscure unless it is reflected upon the face of death.
It is not enough for me to be able to say `I am’; I want to know who I am and in relation to whom I live. It is not enough for me to ask questions; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?
I believe the ultimate meaning of existence is to be a religious witness.