This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The most human thing we have to do in life is to learn to speak our honest convictions and feelings and live with the consequences. This is the first requirement of love, and it makes us vulnerable to other people who may ridicule us. But our vulnerability is the only thing we can give to other people.
Convictions | Feelings | Life | Life | People | Ridicule | Learn |
M. Scott Peck, fully Morgan Scott Peck
There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
Learn to detach...Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent... But detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate fully. That's how you are able to leave it... Take any emotion--love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions--if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them--you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that love entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.
Detachment | Experience | Fear | Grief | Love | Need | Pain | Afraid |
Mitch Albom, fully Mitchell David "Mitch" Albom
If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even ,you experience them fully and completely You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, "Alright I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.
Emotions | Experience | Grief | Love | Need | Pain | Afraid |
Morrie Schwartz, fully Morris "Morrie" S. Schwartz
If you hold back on the emotions–if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them—you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid. You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief. You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.
Afraid |
Fifteen years of research have been combined into a list of the top four biggest regrets of the average American: not getting more education, career regrets, regrets in love, not spending enough time with kids. The list is essentially a summary of the biggest traps, pitfalls, and mistakes into which people like you might blunder. Look over the list and try to identify areas of your life that represent the greatest vulnerability to future regret. And act now to avoid regret later.
Enough | Future | Life | Life | People | Regret | Research | Time |
Peter McWilliams, fully Peter Alexander McWilliams
As much as we like to think that we are independent-minded, free-willed, autonomous individuals, the fact remains that some part of us is still susceptible to programming. Programming can happen to anyone. Intelligence, education, common sense, belief, or convictions offer little protection. All it takes is repetition (the slow route) or vulnerability (the fast route) and, eventually, we're hooked. Master programmers - from cult leaders to cigarette companies to government agencies - do both, as often as possible, whether you like it or not. Ironically, the more immune to programming you think you are, the more susceptible you become.
Convictions | Cult | Government | Little | Government | Think |
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.
Poverty |
Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them. Such trusting obedience is valuable for survival: the analogue of steering by the moon for a moth. But the flip side of trusting obedience is slavish gullibility. The inevitable by-product is vulnerability to infection by mind viruses.
Inevitable | Mind | Obedience | Parents | Child |
W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
Most of us who know silence at the starting stages; know it as just not talking. The mind is going a mile a minute but you are not talking and you are writing notes too. That’s your definition of silence. I’ve had a lot of experience over the years watching people in silence and appreciation and note that each person has to struggle with what it actually means to dissolve out of conceptual layers of the psyche and to find the ability to begin to be quiet enough so that not only are you back into tune with nature but you can dissolve on into deeper and deeper places. To be functionally a vehicle that can hear what is called the wee small voice and/or the music of the spheres and/or Divine council and/or visions.
Ego | Experience | Future | Relationship | Thought | Thought |
Timothy Leary, fully Timothy Francis Leary
To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist. The old distinction between artists and scientists must vanish. Every time we teach a child correct usage of an external symbol, we must spend as much time teaching him how to fission and reassemble external grammar to communicate the internal. The training of artists and creative performers can be a straightforward, almost mechanical process. When you teach someone how to perform creatively (ie, associate dead symbols in new combinations), you expand his potential for experiencing more widely and richly.