This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The Sermon on the Mount has (and very justly I believe) been compared to Zen in that it describes the undifferentiated consciousness of one who lives in the here-and-now with joy and without care.
Care | Consciousness | Joy | Zen |
O what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all - what is it?
Consciousness | Counsel | Mind | Nothing | Study | Will | World |
The beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder, or fear. The root of religion is the question what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder, or fear. Religion, the end of isolation, begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us. It is in that tense, eternal asking in which the soul is caught and in which man’s answer is elicited.
Awe | Beginning | Consciousness | Eternal | Faith | Fear | Isolation | Man | Mystery | Question | Religion | Sense | Soul | Wonder |
There exists a continuum of consciousness uniting individual minds that could be directly experienced if the psychophysical threshold of perception were sufficiently lowered through refinement in the functioning nervous system.
Consciousness | Individual | Perception | Refinement | System |
There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, of being called upon at certain moments to reciprocate, to answer, to live in a way which is compatible with the grandeur and mystery of living.
Awareness | Consciousness | Gratitude | Man | Mystery | Sense | Awareness |
We pass into mystical states from out of ordinary consciousness as from a less into a more, as from a smallness into a vastness, and at the same time as from an unrest to a rest. We feel them as reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than to the no-function in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully closes the account.
Consciousness | Mystical | Rest | Time |
Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
The future must have as its basis the consciousness of sanctity in existence – in common things, in the events of human life, in the gradually comprehended interlocking whole revealed to the human desire for knowledge, n the benedictions of beauty and love, in the catharsis, the sacred purging, of the moral drama in which character is pitted against fate and even deepest tragedy may uplift the mind.
Beauty | Character | Consciousness | Desire | Events | Existence | Fate | Future | Knowledge | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Sacred | Tragedy | Fate | Beauty |
Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
Nothing so promotes the growth of consciousness as [the] inner confrontation of opposites.
Consciousness | Growth | Nothing |
Faith is the soul’s consciousness of its Divine relationship and exalted destiny.
Consciousness | Destiny | Faith | Relationship | Soul |
Prayer is the best means to uplift our consciousness from the imprisonment of personal gratification to the oneness and union with all beings. Prayer consecrates all our actions, removes ignorance, and leads us to an expanded vision of who we really are and feel the richness of life.
Consciousness | Ignorance | Life | Life | Means | Oneness | Prayer | Vision |
Religion in its true sense emphasizes the insight into our experiences and the consciousness that insists upon learning something from them.
Consciousness | Insight | Learning | Religion | Sense |
To identify consciousness with that which merely reflects consciousness - this is egoism.
We are shown that our live exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the vegetable life, that we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In our ways, spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics… We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits an be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifested in matter - grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force which produces the species of grass, and it is manifest to us in the form of real grass.
Consciousness | Energy | Force | Life | Life | Politics | Spirit |
When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and your discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.
Consciousness | Mind | Purpose | Purpose | World |
Eventually all successful storytelling technologies become “transparent”: we lose consciousness of the medium and see neither print nor film but only the power of the story itself. If digital art reaches the same level of expressiveness as these older media, we will no longer concern ourselves with how we are receiving information. We will only think about what truth it has told us about our lives.
Art | Consciousness | Power | Story | Truth | Will | Art | Think |
The joy and meaning of life is enhanced through increased self-realization, through the fulfillment of each being’s potential. Whatever the differences between beings, increased self-realization implies broadening and deepening of the self… Part of the joy stems from the consciousness of our intimate relation to something bigger than our own ego, something which has endured for millions of years and is worth continued life for millions of years.
Consciousness | Ego | Fulfillment | Joy | Life | Life | Meaning | Self | Self-realization | Worth |
When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of being at once excessive and identical with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be me.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, fully Sir or Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
A study of comparative religion gives insight into the values of the various faiths, values which transcend different symbols and creeds and in transcending penetrate to the depths of the spiritual consciousness where the symbols and formulas shrink into insignificance.
Consciousness | Insight | Insignificance | Religion | Study |