This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Our hesitation before such a colossal thought will perhaps be diminished by the recollection... that the ultimate dreamer of the vast life-dream is finally, in a certain sense, but one, namely the Will to Live, and that the multiplicity of appearances follows from the conditioning effects of time and space [the morphogenetic field whereby the Will to Live assumes forms]. It is one great dream dreamed by a single Being, but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything links and accords with everything else.
Life | Life | Sense | Space | Thought | Time | Will | Thought |
Many have declared the ultimate truth openly: that only the self is, that you are nothing other than the Self, that the universe is a mere manifestation of the Self, without inherent reality, existing only in the Self. This can be understood by the analogy of a dream. The whole dream-world with all its people and events exist only in the mind of the dreamer. Its creation or emergence takes nothing away from him, and its dissolution or reabsorption adds nothing to him; he remains the same before, during, and after. God, the conscious Dreamer of the cosmic dream, is the Self, and no person in the dream has any reality apart from the Self of which he is an expression. By discarding the illusion of otherness, you can realize that identity with the Self which always was, is, and will be, beyond the conditions of life and time. Then, since you are One with the Dreamer, the whole universe, including your life and all others, is your dream and none of the events in it have more than a dream reality. You are set free from hope and desire, fear and frustration, and established in the unchanging Bliss of Pure Being.
Desire | Events | Fear | God | Hope | Illusion | Life | Life | Mind | Nothing | People | Reality | Self | Time | Truth | Universe | Will | World |
Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken ismade whole again, what is soiled is made clean.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Day |
George Moore, fully George Augustus Moore
Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn't the dream destroy reality?
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
Men |
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotized by reality.
No matter what looms ahead, if you can eat today, enjoy the sunlight today, mix good cheer with friends today, enjoy it and bless God for it. Do not look back on happiness - or dream of it in the future. You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated out of it.
James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
The first party of painted savages who raised a few huts upon the Thames did not dream of the London they were creating, or know that in the lighting the fire on their hearth they were kindling one of the great foci of Time... All the grand agencies which the progress of mankind evolves are formed in the same unconscious way. They are the aggregate results of countless single wills, each of which, thinking merely of its own end, and perhaps fully gaining it, is at the same time enlisted by Providence in the secret service of the world.
Mankind | Progress | Providence | Service | Thinking | Time | Wills | World |
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not, for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty... The Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream - he awoke and found it truth.
Beauty | Heart | Imagination | Love | Nothing | Truth | Beauty |
The imagination may be compared to Adam's dream - he awoke and found it truth.
Imagination | Truth |
The elusive nature of a concrete, permanent, unchanging self is quite a hopeful observation. It means that you can stop taking yourself so damn seriously and get out from under the pressures of having the details of your personal life be central to the operating of the universe. By recognizing and letting go of selfing impulses, we accord the universe a little more room to make things happen. Since we are folded into the universe and participate in its unfolding, it will deter in the face of too much self-centered, self-indulgent, self-critical, self-insecure, self-anxious activity on our part, and arrange for the dream world of our self-oriented thinking to look and feel only too real.
Life | Life | Little | Means | Nature | Observation | Self | Thinking | Universe | Will | World |