This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. If love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service.
Compassion | Cost | Doctrine | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Organic | Pain | Phenomena | Relationship | Service | Suffering | Truth | Unity | Universe | Witness |
Life is a process, a seamless garment, and there is a universal nexus connecting all phenomena so that every part pulsates sensitively to every other part. The truth is inexpressibly deeper than a harmony-between-parts relationship, but this can only be experienced mystically. Pragmatically, on the plane of our sensory experiencing, love is the witness of the unseen yet ever potent law of unity. The root of all sins is to be blind to this fundamental fact regarding the inner nature of the universe. IF love rules us, no sins can be committed. En passant we may say that the doctrine of karma is a phenomenal expression of the organic unity of the universe. The individual cannot gain at the cost of the whole. Pain and suffering check us when harmony is disturbed. Love restores harmony and registers through us a deep compassion which dissolves our separative carapaces and releases our energies for impersonal service.
Compassion | Cost | Doctrine | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Love | Nature | Organic | Pain | Phenomena | Relationship | Service | Suffering | Truth | Unity | Universe | Witness |
A.C. Benson, fully Arthur Christopher “A.C.” Benson
What we have to do is to see as deep as we can into the truth of things, not to invent paradises of thought, sheltered gardens, from which grief and suffering shall tear us, naked and protesting; but to gaze into the heart of God, and then to follow as faithfully as we can the imperative voice that speaks within the soul.
Most do violence to their natural aptitude, and thus attain superiority in nothing.
Aptitude | Nothing | Superiority |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning.
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Patriotism depends as much on mutual suffering as on mutual success; and it is by that experience of all fortunes and all feelings that a great national character is created.
Character | Experience | Feelings | Patriotism | Success | Suffering |
Mediocrity obtains more with application than superiority without it.
The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.
There is a difference between the two temporal blessings - health and money; money is the most envied, but the least enjoyed; health is the most enjoyed, but the least envied; and this superiority of the latter is still more obvious when we reflect that the poorest man would not part with health for money, but the richest would gladly part with all his money for health.
Blessings | Health | Man | Money | Superiority |
There is this difference between the two temporal blesses - health and money; money is the most envied, but the least enjoyed; health is the most enjoyed, but the least envied; and this superiority of the latter is still more obvious when we reflect that the poorest man would not part with health for money, but the richest man would gladly part with all his money for health.
Health | Man | Money | Superiority |
Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
Stress happens when your mind resists what is. If your spouse or lover leaves you, the amount of stress or suffering each of you experiences depends upon the meanings each of you places on the event.
Man is here to experience the unity of his own consciousness, to rise from suffering to perfection, and in the triumph of enlightenment to reclaim the earth as a heaven designed from him. Beneath the mask of suffering, the meaning of life is limitless freedom and the conquest of death.
Conquest | Consciousness | Death | Earth | Enlightenment | Experience | Freedom | Heaven | Life | Life | Man | Meaning | Perfection | Suffering | Unity |
Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
Pain is a relativity objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering.
Dennis Genpo Merzel, aka Genpo Merzel Roshi
In the absence of discriminating thoughts, the mind as we know it ceases to exist. Our suffering - our feeling of discomfort, alienation, loneliness - arises because we create a dualistic way of perceiving everything that separates us from the external. When we view the so-called external phenomenal world as distinct from ourselves, then fear arises, fear that we will lose our lives, that we may not continue to exist. Out of that fear come anger, jealousy, greed, hatred, aversion, attachment - all kinds of clinging. All our problems arise out of seeing ourselves as separate entities. We cling to what we perceive as me; my physical body and my ideas, my mind, my thoughts, my understanding, my beliefs, my concepts, my opinions.
Absence | Alienation | Anger | Body | Fear | Greed | Ideas | Jealousy | Loneliness | Mind | Problems | Suffering | Understanding | Will | World |
What thou avoidest suffering thyself seek not to impose on others.
A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame that sustains them yields to circumstances and changes its habit.