This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
To save one’s soul is not an instantaneous deed, but a life-long adventure… The creation of a type of personality through loyalty to concrete values as these are at issue in everyday experience.
Adventure | Experience | Life | Life | Loyalty | Loyalty | Personality | Soul |
If you want to find out how well you are living up to your spiritual values and higher principles, pay close attention to how you behave in the middle of an argument or a tense moment involving someone you live with, work with, or are in love with.
Argument | Attention | Love | Principles | Work |
Storytelling can be a powerful agent of personal transformation. The right stories can open our hearts and change who we are.
We are on the brink of a historic convergence as novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers move toward multiform stories and digital formats; computer scientists move toward the creation of fictional worlds; and the audience moves toward the virtual stage. How can we tell what is coming next? Judging from the current landscape, we can expect a continued loosening of the traditional boundaries between games and stories, between films and rides, between broadcast media (like television and radio) and archival media (like books or videotape, between narrative forms (like books) and dramatic forms (like theater or film), and even between the audience and the author. To understand the new genres and the narrative pleasures that will arise from this heady mixture, we must look beyond the formats imposed upon the computer by the older media it is so rapidly assimilating and identify those properties native to the machine itself.
Books | Computer | Television | Will | Understand |
Stories are the maps of the geography of a human life, showing us where to find the important things. Stories remind us what to look for when we are frightened or lost… To have someone know the story of how we came to be here, how we came to be this way… no single story is ever large enough to hold us. After we have told our story once, twice, or ten times… it ceases to be a practice of awakening; it becomes a performance. While it may elicit certain levels of sympathy and support, it does not move us along the path of healing, and it does not open our eyes. In fact, it closes our eyes to anything that does not fit into our story.
Awakening | Enough | Important | Life | Life | Practice | Story | Sympathy |
The road to unity is the road to repentance. It demands resolute turning away from all those loyalties to the lesser values of the self, the denomination, and the nation, which deny the inclusiveness of divine love.
Love | Repentance | Self | Unity |
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.
There is a force within that gives you life - seek that. In your body there lies a precious jewel - seek that. Oh, wandering Sufi, if you are in search of the greatest treasure, don’t look outside, look within, and seek that.
A study of comparative religion gives insight into the values of the various faiths, values which transcend different symbols and creeds and in transcending penetrate to the depths of the spiritual consciousness where the symbols and formulas shrink into insignificance.
Consciousness | Insight | Insignificance | Religion | Study |
A scientist had a bird in his hand. He saw that it had life and, wanting to find out in what part of the bird's body its life lay, he began dissecting the bird. The result was that the very life he was in search of disappeared. Those who try to understand the mysteries of the inner life intellectually will meet with similar failure. The life they are looking for will vanish in the analysis.
Open your eyes and look for some man, or some work for the sake of men, which needs a little time, a little friendship, a little sympathy, a little sociability, a little human toil. Perhaps it is a lonely person, or an invalid - or some unfortunate inefficient, to whom you can be something. It may be an old man or it may be a child. Or some good work is in want of volunteers who will devote a free evening to it or will run on errands for it. Who can reckon up all the ways in which the priceless fund of impulse, man, is capable of exploitation! He is needed in every nook and corner. Therefore search and see if there is not some play where you may invest your humanity.
Good | Humanity | Impulse | Little | Man | Men | Play | Search | Sympathy | Time | Will | Work | Old |
At the end of our lives, after we have passed on, all that is left of us is our story… our ticket to immortality. Telling personal stories is also a bequest, a deeply meaningful and intimate legacy.
Immortality | Story |
He who sets out in search of Truth must leave Superstition forever and wander down into the land of Absolute Negation and Denial. He must then go… where the mountains of Stern Reality will rise before him. Beyond them lies Truth.
Absolute | Land | Reality | Search | Superstition | Truth | Will |