This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The development of the Observer can allow a person considerable access to observing different identity states, and an outside observer may often clearly infer different identity states, but a person himself who has not developed the Observer function very well may never notice the many transitions from one identity state to another.
Poor is a state of mind you never grow out of, but being broks is just a temporary condition.
Mind |
Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
Stress happens when your mind resists what is. If your spouse or lover leaves you, the amount of stress or suffering each of you experiences depends upon the meanings each of you places on the event.
Man is here to experience the unity of his own consciousness, to rise from suffering to perfection, and in the triumph of enlightenment to reclaim the earth as a heaven designed from him. Beneath the mask of suffering, the meaning of life is limitless freedom and the conquest of death.
Conquest | Consciousness | Death | Earth | Enlightenment | Experience | Freedom | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Perfection | Suffering | Unity |
Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
Pain is a relativity objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering.
Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi
In the absence of discriminating thoughts, the mind as we know it ceases to exist. Our suffering - our feeling of discomfort, alienation, loneliness - arises because we create a dualistic way of perceiving everything that separates us from the external. When we view the so-called external phenomenal world as distinct from ourselves, then fear arises, fear that we will lose our lives, that we may not continue to exist. Out of that fear come anger, jealousy, greed, hatred, aversion, attachment - all kinds of clinging. All our problems arise out of seeing ourselves as separate entities. We cling to what we perceive as me; my physical body and my ideas, my mind, my thoughts, my understanding, my beliefs, my concepts, my opinions.
Absence | Alienation | Anger | Body | Fear | Greed | Ideas | Jealousy | Loneliness | Mind | Problems | Suffering | Understanding | Will | World |
Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
When the state is most corrupt, then laws are most multiplied.
Dante, full name Durante degli Alighieri, aka Dante Alighieri NULL
Three sparks - pride, envy, and avarice - have been kindled in all hearts.
A state without some means of change is without the means of its conservation.
Change | Conservation | Means |
Dudjom Rinpoche, fully Kyabje Dudjom Rinpoche or Dudjom Jigdral Yeshe Dorje NULL
Action is being truly observant of your own thoughts, good or bad, looking into the true nature of whatever thoughts may arise, neither tracing the past nor inviting the future, neither allowing any clinging to experiences of joy, nor being overcome by sad situations. In so doing, you try to reach and remain in the state of great equilibrium, where all good and bad, peace and distress, are devoid of true identity.
Action | Distress | Future | Good | Joy | Nature | Past | Peace |
Obstinacy, sir, is certainly a great vice; and in the changeful state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great mischief. It happens, however, very unfortunately, that almost the whole line of the great and masculine virtues - constancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firmness - are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which you have so jut an abhorrence; and in their excess all these virtues very easily fall into it.
Cause | Constancy | Excess | Fidelity | Firmness | Fortitude | Magnanimity |
No one... who lives in error is free. Do you wish to live in fear? Do you wish to live in sorrow? Do you wish to live in perturbation? “By no means.” No one... who is in a state of fear or sorrow or perturbation is free; but whoever is delivered from sorrows and fears and perturbations, he is at the same time also delivered from servitude.
Happiness depends not on what happens, but on how we handle what happens. Our happiness is determined by how we interpret, perceive, and integrate what happens into our state of mind. And how we perceive things is determined by our commitment… Happiness comes from experiencing moments of happiness… Making comparisons is probably the shortest route to unhappiness. We can never be happy if we compare ourselves to others.
Commitment | Happy | Mind | Unhappiness | Happiness |
People in a hurry cannot think, cannot grow, nor can they decay. They are preserved in a state of perpetual puerility.
What thou avoidest suffering thyself seek not to impose on others.
In the present state of medical knowledge a pronouncement of the sentence of "Incurable" on a patient places a serious responsibility on the physician and implies a greater knowledge than he possesses.
Knowledge | Present | Responsibility |