This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
It is time for you to understand the purpose of your life. You are a chalice for God’s Love and a vehicle for Him to bless the world. Realize your Divine purpose and your will is aligned with His. Goodness is the theme of all life. See the Perfection in your life and you recapture your Childhood Vision. As you give up patterns of evaluation and cynicism, you accept the benevolence of God. Pain is born of resistance, and joy is a function of the acceptance of God’s whole and Holy Love for you. Find purpose in your joy, and you find purpose in God.
Acceptance | Benevolence | Childhood | Cynicism | God | Joy | Life | Life | Love | Pain | Perfection | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Vision | Will | World | Understand |
Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
Anticipation | Evil | Fear | Pain |
When men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions. Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know form our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representation is not far removed from the same feeling about realities.
Anger | Change | Character | Courage | Experience | Feelings | Gentleness | Good | Habit | Listening | Melody | Men | Music | Nothing | Pain | Pleasure | Power | Qualities | Right | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue |
The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real object.
Cause | Laughter | Object | Perception |
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 |
Great intellectual gifts mean an activity pre-eminently nervous in its character, and consequently a very high degree of susceptibility to pain in every form.
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 |
There is no more important element in the formation of a virtuous character than a rightly directed sense of pleasure and dislike; for pleasure and pain are coextensive with life, and they exercise a powerful influence in promoting virtue and happiness in life.
Character | Important | Influence | Life | Life | Pain | Pleasure | Sense | Virtue | Virtue | Happiness |
One cannot get through life without pain... What we can do is choose how to use the pain life presents to us.
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
The suspense - the fearful, acute suspense, of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick; the desperate anxiety "to be doing something" to relieve the pain or lessen the danger which we have no power to alleviate; and the sinking of soul which the sad sense of our helplessness produces, what tortures can equal these, and what reflections or efforts can, in the full tide and fever of time, allay them.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Balance | Danger | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Pain | Power | Sense | Soul | Suspense | Time | Danger |
This body is mortal, forever in the clutch of death. But within it resides the Self, immortal, and without form. This Self, when associated in consciousness with the body, is subject to pleasure and pain; and so long as this association continues, no man can find freedom from pains and pleasures. But when the association comes to an end, there is an end also of pain and pleasure. Rising above physical consciousness, knowing the Self as distinct from the sense-organs and the mind., knowing Him in his true light, one rejoices and one is free.
Association | Body | Consciousness | Death | Freedom | Knowing | Light | Man | Mind | Mortal | Pain | Pleasure | Self | Sense | Association |