This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Prayer is not only worship; it is also an invisible emanation of man’s worshipping spirit - the most powerful form of energy that one can generate. The influence of prayer on the human mind and body is as demonstrable as that of secreting glands. It results can be measured in terms of increased physical buoyancy, greater intellectual vigor, moral stamina, and a deeper understanding of the realities underlying human relationships. If you make a habit of sincere prayer, your life will be very noticeably and profoundly altered.
Body | Energy | Habit | Influence | Life | Life | Man | Mind | Prayer | Spirit | Understanding | Will | Worship |
If we attribute an intelligence of the same kind as ours, as mechanists and vitalists do, the physiological processes appear to associate together in view of the end to be attained. The existence of finality within the organism is undeniable. Each part seems to know the present and future needs of the whole, and acts accordingly. The significance of time and space is not the same for our tissues as for our mind. The body perceives the remote as well as the near, the future as well as the present.
Body | Existence | Future | Intelligence | Mind | Present | Space | Time |
The body is the soul's instrument, and the soul is God's instrument.
In man, the things which are not measurable are more important than those which are measurable. The existence of thought is as fundamental as for instance, the physiochemical equilibria of blood serum. The sepration of eh qualitative from the quantitative grew still wider when Descartes created the dualism of the body and soul. Then, the manifestations of the mind became inexplicable. The material was definitely isolated from the spiritual. Organic structures and physiological mechanisms assumed a far greater reality than thought, pleasure, sorrow and beauty. This error switched civilization to the road which led science to triumph and man to degradation.
Beauty | Body | Civilization | Error | Existence | Important | Man | Mind | Organic | Pleasure | Reality | Science | Sorrow | Soul | Thought | Thought |
The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience intimately cooperates. There is an inflow and outflow of factors between the bodily actuality and the human experience, so that each shares in the existence of the other. The human body provides our closest experience of the interplay of actualities in nature.
Body | Existence | Experience | Nature |
There is a unity of the body with the environment, as well as a unity of the body and soul into one person.
When the body sinks into death, the essence of man is revealed. Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied. Only those relationships matter.
Happiness... must be some form of contemplation. But, being a man, one will also need external prosperity; for our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of contemplation, but our body also must be healthy and must have food and other attention. Still, we must not think that the man who is to be happy will need many things or great things... for self-sufficiency and action do not involve excess, and we do noble acts without ruling earth and sea.
Action | Attention | Body | Contemplation | Earth | Excess | Happy | Man | Nature | Need | Prosperity | Purpose | Purpose | Self | Self-sufficiency | Will | Think |
Soul is actuality in the sense in which knowledge is so, for the presence of the soul is compatible both with sleep and with waking, and waking is analogous to the exercise of knowledge… the soul is the first actualization of a natural body potentially having life.
The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real object.
Cause | Laughter | Object | Perception |
On realizing one’s true Self one does not change into a different being but simply realizes that one is not a being at all but simply “Being”; one attains freedom from identification with this or any other body-mind complex. The speeding arrow of karma may hit the body, but one is not the body. The body is subject to karma but the pure being of one’s Self is not... A Realized Man sees repercussions that could be called destiny overtaking the body that he occupies, but it does not occur to him that they concern him, and therefore he feels no emotion towards them. His body is subject to destiny, but he is not.
The most potent force in the world is an idea which, when organized into a body of concepts, becomes a culture and way of life. Concepts are psychological lenses focusing our experiences. Our physical eyes bring their reports but our conceptual lenses interpret them. If we would “know ourselves” it is a paramount necessity that we should examine critically and impartially our conceptual heritage and endeavor to discover why we accept or reject it.
Normal perception is completely controlled by the unconscious mind which obeys suggestions implicitly.
Mind | Perception |
Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda NULL
Words are the shell, meditation the kernel. Words are the body of prayer, and meditation its spirit.
Body | Meditation | Prayer | Spirit | Words |
Bhagavad Gītā, simply known as Gita NULL
This [Self] is never born, nor does It die, nor after once having been, does it go into non-being. This [Self] is unborn, eternal, changeless, ancient. It is never destroyed even when the body is destroyed.
One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.
Delusion | Dreams | Feelings | Life | Life | Man | Perception | Truth | Think |
The infinite distance between body and mind is a symbol of the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity; for charity is supernatural.