This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Reality has three natures: imagination, interdependence, and the nature of ultimate perfection One considers interdependence. Because of forgetfulness and prejudices, we generally cloak reality with a veil of false views and opinions. This is seeing reality through imagination. Imagination is an illusion of reality which conceives of reality as an assembly of small pieces of separate entities and selves.
Forgetfulness | Illusion | Imagination | Nature | Perfection | Reality |
Art teaches us to respect imagination as something far beyond human creation and intention. To live our ordinary life artfully is to have this sensibility about the things of daily life, to live more intuitively and to be willing to surrender a measure of our rationality and control in return for the gifts of soul... Leonardo da Vinci asks an interesting question in one of his notebooks: "Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" One answer is that the eye of the soul perceives the eternal realities so important to the heart. In waking life, most of us see only with our physical eyes, even though we could, with some effort of imagination, glimpse fragments of eternity in the most ordinary passing events. Dream teaches us to look with that other eye, the eye that in waking life belongs to the artist, to each of us as artist... Without art we live under the illusion that there is only time, and not eternity.
Art | Control | Dreams | Effort | Eternal | Eternity | Events | Heart | Illusion | Imagination | Important | Intention | Life | Life | Question | Rationality | Respect | Sensibility | Soul | Surrender | Time | Respect | Art |
Some authors today argue that romantic love is such an illusion that we need to distrust it and keep our wits about us so that we are not led astray. But warnings like this betray a distrust of the soul. We may need to be cured by love of our attachment to life without fantasy. Maybe one function of love is to cure us of an anemic imagination, a life emptied of romantic attachment and abandoned to reason. Love releases us into the realm of divine imagination, where the soul is expanded and reminded of its unearthly cravings and needs. We think that when a lover inflates his loved one he is failing to acknowledge her flaws - "Love is blind." But it may be the other way around. Love allows a person to see the true angelic nature of another person, the halo, the aureole of divinity.
Distrust | Divinity | Illusion | Imagination | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Need | Reason | Soul | Think |
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one odd and precious life you have been issued. Whether you're going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over people and circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it, and find out the truth about who you are.
Circumstances | Good | Illusion | Life | Life | People | Power | Taste | Truth |
Life is inherent in cosmic forces, and as we live and think, so the Universe responds to us. This is prayer, with our life fields or auras carrying an electrical charge to attract negative ions to us and be more stimulated. In this way our life fields remain positively charged and attract the negative particles or ions. This is the secret of life. Retaining communication and unity with the Universe ... our Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy … which is energy in harmonic interaction with neighboring galaxies and galaxies beyond into inter-galactic space … ad infinitum … where wave patterns create harmonic chords that can be read like a score of music … and the illusion of matter strung together with electromagnetic and nuclear forces of light.
Energy | Illusion | Life | Life | Music | Space | Unity | Universe |
Although it is undifferentiated, Brahman is dynamic and creative. From its ultimate 'being' comes the temporary 'becoming' of the manifest world, with its attributes, functions and relationships. The cycles of samsara [individual lifetimes] ... are the lila of Brahman: its play of ceaseless creation and dissolution. In Indian philosophy, absolute reality is the reality of Brahman. The manifest world enjoys but a derived, secondary reality and mistaking it for the real is the illusion of maya... The traditional Eastern conception differs from the view held by most people in the West... [that] reality is material. The things that truly exist are bits or particles of matter... Matter moves about in space, acted on by energy. Energy also enjoys reality (since it acts on matter), but space does not: space is merely the backdrop or the container... and is passive in itself... space is not experienced... it is only the precondition of experience... [this last comment exposes the Western reliance on sensory experience and therefore its entrapment within the illusion of the empirical world or Maya] The view that space is empty and passive, and not even real to boot, is in complete opposition to the view we get from contemporary physics... it is clear that what they describe as the unified vacuum – the seat of all the fields and forces of the physical world – is in fact the primary reality of the universe... What we think of as matter is but the quantised semi-stable bundling of the energies that spring from the vacuum. In the last count matter is but a waveform disturbance in the nearly infinite energy-sea that is the fundamental medium – and hence the primary reality – of this universe, and of all universes that ever existed and will ever exist.
Absolute | Dynamic | Energy | Experience | Illusion | Opposition | People | Play | Reality | Space | Will | World | Think |
The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.
Orson Welles, fully George Orson Welles
We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone
Illusion | Love | Friendship |
When love and understanding wholly replace greed and fear, then the illusion of time is conquered.
Greed | Illusion | Love | Time | Understanding |
Better a dish of illusion and a hearty appetite for life, than a feast of reality and indigestion therewith.
Appetite | Illusion | Indigestion | Reality |
Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan
Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.
Illusion |
It is by union with his will that one enjoys and possesses God,and it is an illusion to seek for that enjoyment by any other means. The will of God is the universal means. This means does not belong to this or that method, but it has the virtue of sanctifying all methods and special calls.
Enjoyment | God | Illusion | Means | Virtue | Virtue | Will | God |
Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.
Every generous illusion of youth leaves a wrinkle as it departs. Experience is the successive disenchanting of the things of life; it is reason enriched with the heart's spoils.
Experience | Illusion | Reason | Youth | Youth |
From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone — an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remedial suffering of the world.
Capacity | Danger | Dependence | Illusion | Individual | Insanity | Power | Suffering | Will | Danger |
How strange when an illusion dies. It's as though you've lost a child.
Illusion |
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, fully Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky
I recognize nothing that is not material. In physics, chemistry and biology I see only mechanics. The Universe is nothing but an infinite and complex mechanism. Its complexity is so great that it borders on randomness, giving the illusion of free will.