This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?
Question | Television |
The beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder, or fear. The root of religion is the question what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder, or fear. Religion, the end of isolation, begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us. It is in that tense, eternal asking in which the soul is caught and in which man’s answer is elicited.
Awe | Beginning | Consciousness | Eternal | Faith | Fear | Isolation | Man | Mystery | Question | Religion | Sense | Soul | Wonder |
He must summon his people to be with him – yet stand above, not squat beside them. He must question his own wisdom and judgment – but not too severely. He must hear the opinions and heed the powers of others – but not too abjectly. He must appease the doubts of his critic and assuage the hurts of the adversary – sometimes. He must ignore their views and achieve their defeat – sometimes… He must respect action – without becoming intoxicated with his own. He must have a sense of purpose inspiring him to magnify the trivial event to serve his distant aim – and to grasp the thorniest crisis as if it were the merest nettle. He must be pragmatic, calculating, and earthbound – and still know when to spurn the arithmetic of expediency for the act of brave imagination, the sublime gamble with no hope other than the boldness of his vision
Action | Boldness | Critic | Defeat | Hope | Imagination | Judgment | People | Purpose | Purpose | Question | Respect | Sense | Vision | Wisdom | Respect | Crisis |
The universe is the outward visible expression of the Real, and the Real is the inner unseen reality of the Universe.
What the world needs is a sense of ultimate embarrassment. Modern man has the power and the wealth to overcome poverty and disease, but he has no wisdom to overcome suspicion. We are guilty of misunderstanding the meaning of existence; we are guilty of distorting our goals and misrepresenting our souls. We are better than our assertions, more intricate, more profound than our theories maintain.
Better | Disease | Existence | Goals | Man | Meaning | Poverty | Power | Sense | Suspicion | Theories | Wealth | Wisdom | World | Guilty |
The divine in the creation is only adequately represented when the whole of the time-process is gathered up into its final meaning and purpose, when, in fact, the mode of becoming is united with the mode of being. This I conceive to be the eternal world – not a world of immobility in contrast with a world of change, but a world in which the antinomy of becoming and being, of motion and rest, is transcended.
Change | Contrast | Eternal | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose | Rest | Time | World |
Truth is essentially a relation between two things, an idea, on the one hand, and a reality outside the idea, on the other.
Mohammad Ḥejāzi, Moḥammad Moṭiʿ-Al-Dawla
Death is a reality in which no living creature believes.
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
The serious problems in life… are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so, it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seems not to lie in its solution but in our working at it incessantly.
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 |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
To ask the right question is already half the solution of a problem.
The construction of a coherent, unified sense of self is an ongoing process. We have seen how old people express an identity through themes which are rooted in personal experience, particular structural factors, and a constellation of value orientations. Themes integrate these three sources of meaning as they structure the account of a life, express what is salient to the individual, and define a continuous and creative self.
Experience | Individual | Life | Life | Meaning | People | Self | Sense | Old | Value |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall, by carefully analyzing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and time again in a thousand disguises on the path of life. This, however, is a truth which only profits the man who is temperamentally convinced of the individual and irreducible reality of his fellow man.
Individual | Life | Life | Man | Personality | Reality | Time | Truth |