This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.
Consciousness | Courage | Imagination | Need | Power | Think |
Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.
Consciousness | Man | Men | Purpose | Purpose |
Theologically, however, the freedom and hope of the local tradition of the church depends upon trusting and saying aloud the conviction that the U.S. empire does not finally merit fear, trust, or eventually obedience.
Consciousness | Culture | Perception |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object.
Consciousness | Important | Sense | Temper |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Thus in a primary oral culture, where all verbalization is oral, utterances are always given their greater precision by nonverbal elements, which form the infrastructure of the oral utterance, giving it its fuller, situation meaning. Not so much depends on the words themselves. … (T)exts force words to bear more weight.
Consciousness | Words | World |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
It is of course possible to count as "writing" any semiotic mark, that is, any visible or sensible mark which an individual makes and assigns a meaning to. Using the term "writing" in this extended sense trivializes its meaning. The critical and unique breakthrough into new worlds of knowledge was achieved within human consciousness not when simple semiotic marking was devised but when a coded system of visible marks was invented whereby a writer could determine the exact words that the reader would generate from the text. This is what we usually mean today by writing in its sharply focused sense.
Consciousness | Experience | Harmony | Knowledge | Means |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.
Consciousness | Future | Past | World | Old |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Most persons are distressed, and many depressed, to learn that essentially the same objections commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhumane pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product.
Consciousness | Individual | Knowledge | Meaning | Sense | System | Unique | Words | Writing |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Try to imagine a culture in which no one has ever "looked up" anything. In a primary oral culture, the expression "to look up something" is an empty phrase: it would have no conceivable meaning.
Alienation | Consciousness | Good | Need | Nothing | Praise | Writing | Understand |
Wei Wu Wei, pen name for Terence James Stannus Gray
The practice of meditation is represented by the three monkeys, who cover their eyes, ears and mouths so as to avoid the phenomenal world. The practice of non-meditation is ceasing to be the see-er, hearer or speaker while eyes, ears and mouths are fulfilling their function in daily life.
Awakening | Consciousness | Existence | Service |
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
The positive effect of kindness on the immune system and on the increased production of serotonin in the brain has been proven in research studies. Serotonin is a naturally occurring substance in the body that makes us feel more comfortable, peaceful, and even blissful. In fact, the role of most anti-depressants is to stimulate the production of serotonin chemically, helping to ease depression. Research has shown that a simple act of kindness directed toward another improves the functioning of the immune system and stimulates the production of serotonin in both the recipient of the kindness and the person extending the kindness. Even more amazing is that persons observing the act of kindness have similar beneficial results. Imagine this! Kindness extended, received, or observed beneficially impacts the physical health and feelings of everyone involved!
Wayne Dyer, fully Wayne Walter Dyer
When your higher self is present, it always promotes peace. If you have a question about whether it is your ego or your higher self speaking, the answer becomes obvious when you ask yourself, Will this bring peace or turmoil to my life? Peace is not found in being right or being hurt or being angry.
Abundance | Appreciation | Consciousness | Enough | Kindness | Love | Peace | People | Sense | Trust | Will | Appreciation |
A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.
Consciousness | Pleasure | World |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Terrible things that happen to us force the transformation of consciousness from the attachment to the ego and its boundaries and bring us – without any guarantee – to the Promised Land, the vaster possibilities. Deceptions, betrayals, sometimes illness, natural disasters, these are the forces that break up our little self-centered processes and till the soil, and the more you try to cling to a previous process or step into any kind of deception or deceit at this stage, you are torn apart, because it is inconsistent with what the deeper yearning is, which is to come to wholeness. Your very being, your soul, is at stake, and it requires a conscious process. When we’ve been living a small life and there is expansion, we all love it, but when it comes time for contraction, to let go of what one has identified with, this is when the soul is tested.
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Many people profess unconditional love, and yet below they are still working the mystery of the ego and attempting to compensate inadequacy and powerlessness. Crises are often the first opportunity of coming into wholeness – they are not what we think they are at the level of loss and humiliation. You think there’s nothing left, just a devastation, our eyes are so close to the problem that we can’t see the overview – to me, that’s why we pay attention to dreams, since the dream will reveal the dynamic if we can bring ourselves into accord with it, and we can let go of what we think we need, to move to “What does Life seek from us at this point, and how do we put ourselves into accord with that larger process?
Consciousness | Events | Mind | Reality |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
The Ego is not the primary center of Awareness….the Self is. The Shadow is not the primary center of awareness…the Self is. The ego is the reflecting witness. The unfoldment of a life is driven by the unconscious dynamics between Self...the Shadow…and the Ego. What the ego is aware of is mostly socialization attitudes, biases, preferences, and filtered perceptions. The Self is the only responsible agent for the entire mystery of one’s life. Free will of the Shadow or of the Ego is an illusion generated out of a limited awareness. When witnessing the Divine Play of one’s Life…best not to appropriate any of what is seen, revealed, or experienced as personal.
Consciousness | Deceit | Ego | Force | Guarantee | Life | Life | Little | Love | Soul | Time |
The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages. As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment. Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive. Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either. School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone's bridge in Physics. Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media--one of the technology's greatest achievements. The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla. Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by groups, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection. But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation. Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only ambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.
Consciousness | World |
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
Age | Art | Beauty | Consciousness | Culture | Elegance | Evidence | Excitement | Failure | Family | Good | Hate | Health | Life | Life | Loneliness | Marriage | Past | People | Politics | Recreation | Reward | Science | Self | Talking | Time | Work | World | Failure | Loss | Art | Beauty |
An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond. But a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed.