This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Joanna Macy, fully Joanna Rogers Macy
Of course, even when you see the world as a trap and posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of society, you can still feel a compassionate impulse to help its suffering beings. In that case you tend to view the personal and the political in a sequential fashion. "I'll get enlightened first, and then I'll engage in social action." Those who are not engaged in spiritual pursuits put it differently: "I'll get my head straight first, I'll get psychoanalyzed, I'll overcome my inhibitions or neuroses or my hang-ups (whatever description you give to samsara) and then I'll wade into the fray." Presupposing that world and self are essentially separate, they imagine they can heal one before healing the other. This stance conveys the impression that human consciousness inhabits some haven, or locker-room, independent of the collective situation -- and then trots onto the playing field when it is geared up and ready.
Consciousness | Impression | Impulse | Self | Suffering | World |
Johann Spurzheim, fully Johann Gaspar Spurzheim or Kaspar or Caspar
Do not press your young children into book-learning; but teach them politeness, including the whole circle of charities which spring from the consciousness of what is due to their fellow-beings.
Children | Consciousness | Teach |
Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.
Consciousness | Power |
Jerome Bruner, fully Jerome Seymour Bruner
The objective of skilled agency and collaboration in the study of the human condition is to achieve not unanimity, but more consciousness. And more consciousness always implies more diversity.
Consciousness | Study |
Pain has its own noble joy, when it starts a strong consciousness of life, from a stagnant one.
Robinson Jeffers, fully John Robinson Jeffers
I think, here is your emblem to hang in the future sky; not the cross, not the hive, but this; bright power, dark peace;Fierce consciousness joined with final disinterestedness; Life with calm death; the falcon’s realist eyes and act married to the massive mysticism of stone, which failure cannot cast down nor success make proud.
Consciousness | Failure | Future | Life | Life | Mysticism | Success | Failure |
Only those within whose own consciousness the sun rise and set, the leaves burgeon and wither, can be said to be aware of what living is.
God is a wider consciousness than we are, a pure intelligence, spiritual life and actuality. He is neither one nor many, neither man nor spirit. Such predicates belong only to finite beings.
Consciousness | Life | Life | Man |
The real history of consciousness starts with one's first lie.
Consciousness | History |
It was under a solemn consciousness of the dangers from ecclesiastical ambition, the bigotry of spiritual pride, and the intolerance of sects... that is was deemed advisable to exclude from the national government all power to act upon the subject.
Bigotry | Consciousness | Government | Intolerance | Power | Government |
Joseph Brant, aka Thayendanegea
No person among us deserves any other reward for performing a brave and worthy action, but the consciousness of having served his nation.
Consciousness | Reward |
Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of activity loses its medium of existence.
Consciousness | Ends | Knowledge | Life | Life | Philosophy | Reality | Science | Speculation |
Behavior now must be changed from within the new consciousness rather than from Mosaic laws carving behavior from without. Sin and desire are now within conscious desire and conscious contrition, rather than in the external behaviors of the decalogue and the penances of temple sacrifice and community punishment. The divine kingdom to be regained is psychological not physical. It is metaphorical not literal. It is "within" not in extenso.
Behavior | Consciousness | Desire | Sacrifice | Sin |
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society — the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Consciousness | Indispensable | Life | Life | Men | Society | Society |
All the masters tell us that the reality of life - which our noisy waking consciousness prevents us from hearing - speaks to us chiefly in silence.
Consciousness | Life | Life | Reality |
Karl Wilheim Friedrich Schlegel, later Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel
Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
Consciousness | Eternal |
[Memory is] A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
We have said that consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog ‘I’, that can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity, excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space.
Consciousness | Space |
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Consciousness | Men |
Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was in behavior first.
Behavior | Consciousness | Mind | Nothing | World |