This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, n some sort, to be malleable.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
All hormonal function, including that of the immune system and even allergic responses, occur as a sophisticated memory system handled primarily by our emotional brain. Because learning and memory are emotional-cognitive functions, the neural pattern, imprint, or “structure of knowledge” (to use Piaget’s term) of specific learning events includes in its content the memory patterns of those emotional hormones prominent in the body at the time of that learning.
Body | Events | Knowledge | Learning | Memory | System | Time |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
No media project succeeds based on “good news only” because good news does not trigger our alert system. Anything good indicates a safe space, the quiet background against which events can play out. The enculturated mind is cued to respond to the negative as a point of focus, which largely screens out or ignores a quiet stable base, and, because it sharpens and maintains our alert awareness, we actually begin to look for the negative.
Awareness | Events | Focus | Good | Mind | News | Play | Quiet | Safe | Space | System |
We are called upon to love in faith – to nurse our firm belief in the stars of sweet reasonableness that continue to shine behind the darkness of events which seem to us our and grim beyond our understanding.
A person who reads and studies and converses on current events in science, philosophy, political will, in the process, escape from the dull self-centeredness, and his participatory awareness of life in its infinite vitality will tend to produce the excitement which is inherent in happiness. Unfortunately, thinking the interesting thoughts which create happiness is a disciplinary process which too few people employ.
Awareness | Events | Excitement | Life | Life | People | Philosophy | Science | Self | Thinking | Will | Awareness | Happiness |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
The great things in life are what they seem to be. And for that reason, strange as it may sound to you, often are very difficult to interpret. Great passions are for great souls. Great events can only be seen by people who are on a level with them. We think we can have our visions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing visions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine.
Enough | Events | Life | Life | Nothing | People | Reason | Self | Sound | Think |
In the breadth and depth of its cosmic stuff, in the bewildering number of the elements and events that make it up, and in the wide sweep, too, of the overall currents that dominate it and carry it along as one single great river, the world, filled by God, appears to our enlightened eyes as simply a setting in which universal communion can be attained and a concrete expression of that communion.
Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
It is perhaps not to be wondered at, since fortune is ever changing her course and time is infinite, that the same incidents should occur many times, spontaneously. For, if the multitude of elements is unlimited, fortune has in the abundance of her material an ample provider of coincidences; and if, on the other hand, there is a limited number of elements from which events are interwoven, the same things must happen many times, being brought to pass by the same agencies.
The great man is not convulsible or tormentable; events pass over him without much impression.
Events | Impression | Man |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
The most fugitive word or deed, the more air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character, and the remote results of character are civil history and events that shake or settle the world. If you act, you show character; if you sit still, you show it; if you sleep, you show it.
Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
Every person, all the events of your life are drawn there because you have them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power... The principal effect of the passions is that they incite and persuade the mind to will the events for which they prepared the body... If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Body | Doubt | Events | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | Power | Truth | Will |
To live with a high degree of artfulness means to attend to the small things that keep the soul engaged in whatever we are doing, and it is the very heart of soul making. From some grand overview of life, it may seem that only the big events are ultimately important. But to the soul, the most minute details and the most ordinary activities, carried out with mindfulness and art, have an effect far beyond their apparent insignificance.
Art | Events | Heart | Important | Insignificance | Life | Life | Means | Mindfulness | Soul |
Regardless of how you have viewed events in the past, you have the ability to learn to view things with a calm and peaceful attitude. Instead of looking at events and situations as overwhelming, you can look at them as interesting and challenging experiences. Give up your demands of how you would have like anything to be and deal with what actually is.
Happiness is a skill that can be learned. To acquire this skill it is necessary to master: the ability to focus on happiness-producing thoughts instead of those which cause unhappiness and the ability to evaluate events and situations as positive instead of negative, or at least lower the degree of negativity... The person with greater control over his thoughts will have greater control over his emotions.
Ability | Cause | Control | Emotions | Events | Focus | Skill | Unhappiness | Will |
David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm
While physical entities seem to be separate in space and time, they are actually linked or unified in an implicit or unifying fashion. Beneath the explicit realm of separate things or events lies an implicit realm of individual wholeness, and this implicit whole connects all things. [paraphrased]
Events | Individual | Space | Time | Wholeness |