This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Perception is based, to a very large extent, on conceptual models - which are always inadequate, often incomplete and sometimes profoundly wrong. This complex situation arose because signals from the environment itself can be inadequate. The sort of information we need is not always available. And so, knowledge from the past, mixed up with assumptions about that knowledge which may be more or less appropriate, are used to augment information provided by the senses. Which means that our perception of any situation depends only partly on sensory signals being received at that time. And it is only a very short step from there, to perception which occurs in the absence of all immediate signals and has to be labeled “extrasensory”.
Absence | Knowledge | Means | Need | Past | Perception | Time | Wisdom | Wrong |
We need to find a form of life that is valuable in itself. What can make a life meaningful? Candidates for this role need to be worthwhile in themselves and not just means to future ends. They need to treat each human life as an autonomous being-for-itself, not merely a being-in-itself to serve some cause beyond it. They need to satisfy our aesthetic and ethical needs, as being both tied to the present moment and existing across time. And there is no reason why such meaning should not be found in this life and not only in a supposed life to come.
Aesthetic | Cause | Ends | Future | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Need | Present | Reason | Time |
We live in a biochemical, neurophysiological, resonant quantum soup. If this is true, the responsibility for what we have for our inner life is enormous, and extends far beyond one’s own personal and spiritual development. Whatever our inner experience might be in terms of love and passion, hate and greed, abundance and longing, or any other human qualities may well not be ours alone.
Abundance | Experience | Greed | Hate | Life | Life | Longing | Love | Passion | Qualities | Responsibility |
Nobody can, even for the sake of unity, do violence to his conscience and to truth itself. Whoever in conscience feels obliged to understand the Word of God in a certain way cannot and may not declare he understands it otherwise.
Conscience | God | Truth | Unity | God | Understand |
To see altruism itself as the purpose of human life is confuse means and ends. We need to know whether good deeds are essential for life to be meaningful or whether they just comprise one possible road to fulfillment. Helping others cannot be the purpose of life, because helping others is just a means to an end… Altruism is thus not the source of life’s meaning but is something that living a meaningful life requires.
Altruism | Deeds | Ends | Fulfillment | Good | Life | Life | Meaning | Means | Need | Purpose | Purpose | Deeds |
Earle Birney, fully Earle Alfred Birney
Love rests on the preservation of our species; art is our instinctive instrument for the preservation of the individual, of the unique man, woman and child, and the means of evolution of us all into something able and worthy of survival on the living earth.
Art | Earth | Evolution | Individual | Love | Man | Means | Survival | Unique | Woman | Art |
There’s a scheme of evasion that has gotten into everybody. It’s as though people were to say: “I get home dog tired after a terrible day out in that jungle, and then I don’t want to think about it. Enough! I want to be brainwashed. I’m going to have my dinner and drink some beer, and I’m going to sit watching TV until I pass out – because that’s how I feel.” That means people are not putting up a struggle for the human part of themselves.
Day | Enough | Evasion | Means | People | Struggle | Think |
Everything proves the solidarity of individuals, and no one can think at all except by means of the general store of thought, accumulated and refined by centuries of cultivation and experience.
Cultivation | Experience | Means | Thought | Think |
Ken Wilber, fully Kenneth Earl Wilber II
Growth fundamentally means an enlarging and expanding of one's horizons, a growth of one's boundaries. When a person descends a level of the spectrum, he has in effect re-mapped his soul to enlarge its territory. Growth is re-apportionment; re-zoning; re-mapping; an acknowledgment, and then enrichment, of ever deeper and more encompassing levels of one's own self.
Obafemi Awolowo, fully Jeremiah Obafemi Awolowo, commonly known as Awo
Violence never settles anything right: apart from injuring your own soul, it injures the best cause. It lingers on long after the object of hate has disappeared from the scene to plague the lives of those who have employed it against their foes.
Tawfiq al-Hakim or Tawfik el-Hakim
True artistic renewal does not mean being stripped of fetters. It means moving into new fetters.
Means |
William Barrett, fully William Christopher Barrett
The decline of religion in modern times means simply that religion is no longer the uncontested center and ruler of man’s life., and that the church is no longer the final and unquestioned home and asylum of his being.