This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Harmonious living tells of harmonious thinking. A turbulent life reveals some kind of inner turmoil or lack of resolution... Outer events are simply the skin and bones of inner thoughts, and to really take control of our lives, we must treat them as one. Concentrate on that which you would become, not that which you now believe you are, and you will enter a new realm of consciousness - one of chosen good.
Consciousness | Control | Events | Good | Life | Life | Resolution | Thinking | Turmoil | Will |
The mind is like the stomach. It is now how much you put into it that counts, but how much it digests.
Mind |
I am not a victim of circumstances. I do not choose to abdicate my responsibility for my own pleasure. It is my responsibility, and my happiness resides in that awareness and in the actions that result from that awareness... You maximize your potential for happiness if you decide right now to accept responsibility for your life.
Awareness | Circumstances | Life | Life | Pleasure | Responsibility | Right | Awareness | Happiness | Victim |
We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives, that it is inside ourselves.
The Western world is now suffering from the limited moral outlook of the three previous generations. Also the assumption of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a lack of reverence in the treatment of natural or aesthetic beauty…
There persists, however, throughout the whole period the fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what is does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of being. It is this assumption that I call scientific materialism. Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situations at which we have now arrived.
Challenge | Materialism | Nature | Space | Following |
The responsibility for change… lies with us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical. This means fighting off the idea-assassins who rush forward to kill any new suggestion on grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, not matter how absurd, oppressive, or unworkable it may be. It means fighting for freedom of expression – the right of people to voice their ideas, even if heretical.
Absurd | Change | Fighting | Freedom | Ideas | Kill | Means | People | Responsibility | Right |
It's not what's happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.
Death is a thing of grandeur. It brings instantly into being a whole new network of relations, between you and the ideas, the desires, the habits of the man now dead. It is a rearrangement of the world... Man imagines that it is death he fears; but what he fears is the unforeseen, the explosion. What man fears is himself, not death.
It was through the feeling of wonder that men now and at first began to philosophize.