This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
The merging of action and awareness is made possible by centering attention on a limited stimulus field. To insure that people will concentrate on their actions, potentially intruding stimuli must be kept out of attention. Some writers [such as Abraham Maslow] have called this process a "narrowing of consciousness" or "a giving up of the past and the future."
Action | Attention | Awareness | Consciousness | Future | Giving | Past | People | Will | Awareness |
Apela Colorado, aka Pamela Colorado
The data from indigenous science are not used to control the forces of nature; instead, the data tell us ways and means of accommodating nature... The purpose of indigenous science is to maintain balance... Indigenous science is holistic, drawing on all senses including the spiritual and psychic realm. Indigenous science collapses time ands space, with the result that our fields of participation and inquiry extend into and overlap with past and present.
Balance | Control | Inquiry | Means | Nature | Past | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Science | Space | Time |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
Do little things in an extraordinary way; be the best one in your line. You must not let your life run in the ordinary way; do something that nobody else has done, something that will dazzle the world. Show that god's creative principle works in you. Never mind the past. Though your errors be as deep as the ocean, the soul itself cannot be swallowed up by them. Have the unflinching determination to move on your path unhampered by limiting thoughts of past errors.
Determination | God | Life | Life | Little | Mind | Past | Soul | Will | World |
Historic continuity with the past is not a duty, it is only a necessity.
We cannot leave behind us the sins of our past. We must not forget that nothing disappears. Everything is eternal. Everything that has been is still in existence. The whole history of humanity is the “history of crime”... Man must go back, seek for, and destroy the causes of evil however far back they lie. It is only in this idea that the hint of the possibilities of a general evolution can be found. It is only in this idea that the possibility of changing the karma of humanity lies, because changing the karma means changing the past... There will be no possibility of thinking of evolution of humanity, if the possibility did not exist for individually evolving man to go into the past and struggle against the causes of the present evil which lie there.
Crime | Destroy | Eternal | Evil | Evolution | Existence | History | Humanity | Man | Means | Nothing | Past | Present | Struggle | Thinking | Will |
Phyllis Bottome, aka Phyllis Forbes Dennis (married name)
When you make a mistake, don't look back at it long. Take the reason of the thing into your mind, and then look forward. Mistakes are lessons of wisdom. The past cannot be changed. The future is yet in your power.
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no past at my back.
Experiment | Past | Sacred |
There are always two parties, the party of the Past and the party of the Future; the Establishment and the Movement.
The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in why they revel to us none but the best of their thoughts.
Reading good books is like having a conversation with the highly worthy persons of the past who wrote them; indeed, it is like having a prepared conversation in which those persons disclose to us only their best thinking.
No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.
Experiment | Past | Sacred |
Arthur Wing Pinero, fully Sir Arthur Wing Pinero
I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
Shunryu Suzuki, also Daisetsu Teitaro or D.T. Suzuki or Suzuki-Roshi
The conception of time as an objective blank in which particularly events… succeed one after another has completely been discarded. The Buddha… knows no time-continuity; the past and the future are both rolled up into this present moment of illumination.
What is our life but this dance of transient forms? Isn’t everything always changing: the leaves on the trees in the park, the light in your room as you read this, the seasons, the weather, the time of day, the people passing you in the street? And what about us? Doesn’t everything we have done in the past seem like a dream now? The friends we grew up with, the childhood haunts, those views and opinions we once held with such single-minded passion: We have left them all behind.
Childhood | Life | Life | Light | Past | People | Time | Friends |
What really counts in the final analysis, is the motivation behind our every action, and that there is no escaping the effects of our past actions, words, and thoughts, and the imprints and habits they have stamped us with. It means that we are entirely responsible, not only for this life, but for our future lives as well.
T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, where the past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point , the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time. The inner freedom from the practical desire, the release from action and suffering, release from the inner and outer compulsion, yet surrounded by a grace of sense, a white light still and moving...
Action | Desire | Freedom | Future | Grace | Light | Past | Sense | Suffering | Time | World |