This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Under the illusion of passing-time we can have no unity. To be is to have the permanent sense of something else... For integration, ideas that halt time are necessary, and these ideas must feed us continually... The mystery of time is in ourselves... The mystic ocean of existence is not to be crossed as something outside ourselves. It is in oneself... Every further stage of ourselves is within us, above us... Outside us is outer truth; within us, inner truth, and both make up All - the WORLD.
Existence | Ideas | Illusion | Integration | Mystery | Sense | Time | Truth | Unity | Wisdom | World |
Robert C. Pooley, fully Robert Cecil Pooley
Our responsibility as educators is to teach youth to have respect for those who differ from the customary ways as well as for those who conform. In simpler words, we have a profound obligation both to education and to society itself to support and strengthen the right to be different, and to create a sound respect for intellectual superiority.
Education | Obligation | Respect | Responsibility | Right | Society | Sound | Superiority | Teach | Wisdom | Words | Youth | Society | Respect | Youth |
The Cosmos has had no beginning... and this is warrant for its continued existence. Why should there be in the future a change that has not yet occurred? The elements there are not worn away like beams and rafters: they hold sound for ever, and so the All holds sound. And even supposing these elements to be in ceaseless transmutation, yet the All persists: the ground of all the change must itself be changeless.
Bound only by birth and death, life is both the ultimate mystery and the process of solving it. Life is a dance, a leap into the unknown. After you jump and before you land, is God. God is ecstasy: that state of being when everything comes together, nothing is missing, and it’s all vibrating and electric. Life is an excuse for ecstasy.
Birth | Death | Ecstasy | God | Land | Life | Life | Mystery | Nothing | Wisdom | God |
Frederick D. Power, fully Frederick Dunglison Power
Here is a mystery, the stupendous mystery of the Christian religion, the ineffable mystery of three persons in one God. We cannot define it. Every human attempt at definition involves it in deeper mystery. The arithmetic of heaven is beyond us. Yet this is no more mysterious and inexplicable than the trinity of our own nature; body, soul, and spirit; and no man has ever shown that it involved a contradiction or in any way conflicted with the testimony of our senses or with demonstrated truth; and we must accept it by the power of a simple faith, or rush into tritheism on the one hand or unitarianism on the other.
Body | Contradiction | Faith | God | Heaven | Man | Mystery | Nature | Power | Religion | Soul | Spirit | Truth | Wisdom |
The only way to judge an event in life is to look at it from high enough, to see it in the order and dimension of the timeless. When we see pain, suffering and inequalities, we don’t understand or we jump to false conclusions. We see only the broken arc of a complete circle. Instead, life is a field for progress and progressive harmony. Each one of us has a part to play which he alone can execute. This role, based on our real nature - what Hindu scriptures call svabhava - can be discovered. An individual’s aim in life must be to find out the “law of his being” and act according to his svadharma. This discovery is no easy task. Normally, we are aware of our ego, the surface self that is a bundle of contradictory impulses. But we can find the true self, our best self, by a process of standing back and surveying our needs. Abandoning desire and self-assertion, accepting the challenges of life in a state of stable, unwavering peace will result in this supreme revelation. When life’s shocks turn our eyes inward, we rise above contingencies of time and place. Our perspective changes. The greatest sorrows is transformed into a luminous vibration. We see into the life of things. Life itself, a single, immense organism, moves toward a greater and higher harmony as more and more cells become conscious of their uniqueness. Life, then, is not Macbeths’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is a grand orchestra in which discordant notes contribute to the total harmony.
Assertion | Desire | Discovery | Ego | Enough | Fury | Harmony | Individual | Law | Life | Life | Nature | Nothing | Order | Pain | Peace | Play | Progress | Revelation | Self | Sound | Suffering | Time | Will | Wisdom | Discovery | Understand |
A religion without mystery must be a religion without God. In dwelling on divine mysteries, keep thy heart humble, thy thoughts reverent, thy soul holy. Let not philosophy be ashamed to be confuted, nor logic to be confounded, nor reason to be surpassed. What thou canst not prove, approve; what thou canst not comprehend, believe; what thou canst believe, admire and love and obey. so shall thine ignorance be satisfied in thy faith, and thy doubt be swallowed up in thy reverence, and thy faith be as influential as sight. Put out thing own candle, and then shalt thou see clearly the sun of righteousness.
Doubt | Faith | God | Heart | Ignorance | Logic | Love | Mystery | Philosophy | Reason | Religion | Reverence | Righteousness | Soul | Wisdom |
Chögyam Trungpa, fully Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Usually people interested in spiritual development think in terms of the importance of mind, that mysterious, high and deep thing that we have decided to learn about. But strangely enough, the profound and the transcendental are to be found in the factory. It may not fill you with bliss to look at it, it may not sound as good as the spiritual experiences that we have read about, but somehow reality is to be found there in the way in which we relate with everyday problems. If we relate to them in a simple, earthy way, we will work in a more balanced manner, and things will be dealt with properly.
Enough | Good | Mind | People | Problems | Reality | Sound | Will | Wisdom | Work | Learn | Think |
The constants in all religion are the mystery of the universe, the nostalgia of the human spirit for an order beyond the show and flux of things to which it believes itself akin, and the belief that it has evidence of such an order.
Belief | Evidence | Mystery | Order | Religion | Spirit | Universe |
John Blofeld, fully John Eaton Calthorpe Blofeld
The world is full of paradox. For example, [in Buddhism] though no notion of a creator is entertained, great stress is laid upon the need for faith and piety. By faith is meant not trust in a benevolent diety avid for love, praise and obedience, but conviction that beyond the seeming reality misreported by our senses which is inherently unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively unsatisfactory, lies a mystery which, when intuitively perceived, will give our lives undreamed-of meaning and endow the most insignificant object with holiness and beauty.
Beauty | Example | Faith | Love | Meaning | Mystery | Need | Obedience | Object | Paradox | Piety | Praise | Reality | Trust | Will | World |