This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
When a child takes his first steps alone, stumbles, and falls, we would never say he failed. Failing is a part of the learning process. Reframing the meaning of our own shortcomings and failures can be an important step in our personal growth.
In a human context, love means sharing an experience, showing compassion, and helping one another. But our love of God is akin to reverent love. God is infinite life. Thus the most elementary ethical principle, when understood by the heart, means that out of reverence for the unfathomable, infinite, and living Reality we call God, we must never consider ourselves strangers toward any human being.
Compassion | Experience | God | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Means | Reality | Reverence | God |
Don’t judge. Just hear what the person has to say. Thoughtfully consider its meaning for him. When you attend to another’s speech in this way, you may come to recognize the miracle of words. This is sacred listening. To such an ear, story, in all of its forms, is transformed into a melodious language. When the listener is this receptive, both he and the teller are elevated to a new realm of communication. This is the foundation of building trust and safety in any relationship.
Language | Listening | Meaning | Relationship | Sacred | Speech | Story | Trust | Words |
Meanings are symbolic. Meaning is what the phenomenon symbolizes to a viewer.
Meaning |
The Zen attitude is that meaning isn’t something to be sought. Meaning comes to us, or not. If it comes, we accept it. If not, we accept that too.
Meanings track relationships… Our lives become intrinsically valuable to us by becoming instrumentally valuable to others. Meaning can be our gift to each other.
Meaning |
Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
It’s not about positional power; it’s not about accomplishments; it’s ultimately not even about what we do. Leadership is about creating a domain in which human beings continually deepen their understanding of reality and become more capable of participating in the unfolding of the world. Ultimately, leadership is about creating new realities.
Power | Reality | Understanding | World | Leadership |
And what is the education of mankind if not the passage from faith in authority to personal conviction and to the sustained practice of the intellectual duty to consent to no idea except by virtue of its recognized truth, to accept no fact until its reality has been, in one way or another, established.
Authority | Duty | Education | Faith | Mankind | Practice | Reality | Truth | Virtue | Virtue |
The meaning and purpose of the world remain to a large extent inexplicable. But one thing is clear: the purpose of all events is spiritual. The purpose of existence is that we human beings, all nations and the whole of humanity, should constantly progress toward perfection. If we do this, our finite spirit will be in harmony with the infinite.
Events | Existence | Harmony | Humanity | Meaning | Nations | Perfection | Progress | Purpose | Purpose | Spirit | Will | World |
Faith, then, is a quality of human living. At its best it has taken the form of serenity and courage and loyalty and service; a quiet confidence and joy which enable one to feel at home in the universe, and to find meaning in the world and in one’s own life, a meaning that is profound and ultimate, and is stable no matter what may happen to oneself at the level of immediate event. Men and women of this kind of faith face catastrophe and confusion, affluence and sorrow, unperturbed; face opportunity with conviction and drive; and face others with cheerful charity.
Charity | Confidence | Courage | Faith | Joy | Life | Life | Loyalty | Loyalty | Meaning | Men | Opportunity | Quiet | Serenity | Service | Sorrow | Universe | World |
Olaf Stapledon, fully William Olaf Stapledon
I should like to persuade religious people that some of us who reject their faith, nevertheless do have an experience which is at least very much like their essential religious experience. We feel, sometimes with remarkable intensity and clarity, our `at-oneness’ with something which might be the fundamental reality behind appearances.
Experience | Faith | Oneness | People | Reality |
Robert V. Taylor, aka The Very Reverend Robert V. Taylor
If there is a time of judgment, instead of theological or institutional litmus tests, the only question asked about our life and spirituality will be "Did you love with abandonment?"
Judgment | Life | Life | Love | Question | Spirituality | Time | Will |
The question is not: Do we identify with something or not? The question is: What do we identify with?
Question |
Making the meaning of life depend on the Infinite threatens to deny the meaning of a purely finite life. We have rejected the assumption that only the infinite or the unlimited or the Absolute has meaning, or that finite things can have meaning only in relation to the Absolute.
Religion is an explanation (Creed) of the ultimate meaning of life, and how to live (Code and Community–structure) accordingly, which is based on the notion of the Transcendent (Cult). Because Religion is an explanation of the ultimate meaning of life it provides a code of behavior in the fullest possible sense, including all the psychological, social and cultural dimensions of human life, and is hence a “Way of Life” – for humans.
Behavior | Creed | Cult | Life | Life | Meaning | Religion | Sense |
Evolution is not necessarily a reductive theory: it does not explain away or reduce meaningfulness and value, any more than it explains away or reduces mathematics, economics, or even sociobiology itself. It aims to provide a naturalistic explanation of biological characteristics, including the capacities that enable us to recognize value and meaning. Giving a causal explanation of the origin of capacities is not the same as giving an account of the relevant meaning or content.
Aims | Economics | Evolution | Giving | Mathematics | Meaning | Value |