This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Raúl Juliá, aka Raul Rafael Carlos Julia y Arceley
We tend to think of meditation in only one way. But life itself is a meditation.
Life | Life | Meditation | Think |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
Discrimination and renunciation. Discrimination means to know the distinction between the Real and the unreal. Renunciation means to have dispassion for the things of the world. One cannot acquire them all of a sudden. They must be practiced every day. One should renounce
Distinction | Means |
Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert
You give up not meditating. It's called meditation action. There's no way out of it. Meditation means to be constantly extricating yourself from the clinging of mind.
Means | Meditation |
Ram Dass, aka Baba Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert
I finally awakened to the distinction between getting high and becoming free. Highs are part of the world of polarities: What goes up must come down. The deeper requirement would be to pursue the middle course and be at peace, free form whatever may happen, whether high or low.
Distinction | World |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
There are two ways. One is the path of discrimination, the other is that of love. Discrimination means to know the distinction between the Real and the unreal. God alone is the real and permanent Substance; all else is illusory and impermanent. The magician alone is real; his magic is illusory. This is discrimination.
Distinction | God | Magic | Means | God |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
When divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low.
Distinction | Good | Vision |
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
If you first fortify yourself with the true knowledge of the Universal Self, and then live in the midst of wealth and worldliness, surely they will in no way affect you. When the divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low
Ramakrishna, aka Ramakrishna Paramhamsa or Sri Ramakrishna, born Gadadhar Chattopadhyay NULL
When the divine vision is attained, all appear equal; and there remains no distinction of good and bad, or of high and low.
Distinction | Good | Vision |
At the very least, people ought to think twice before throwing up their hands in horror at manipulating genes to, say, make a child good at music while approving sending a child to a school that is especially good at music. These are the same kinds of things. The genetic equivalent of sending your child to Eton is going to be expensive, too. There is no obvious distinction between spending your money on one kind of child manipulation and the other... You will immediately see the oddness in what you have just said. You are saying that one works and the other doesn't. It's odd to take refuge in lack of efficiency as a defense.
Distinction | Efficiency | Good | Money | Music | People | Will | Child | Think |
Richard Feynman, fully Richard Phillips Feynman
Now if the world of nature is made of atoms, and we too are made of atoms and obey physical laws, the most obvious interpretation of this evident distinction between past and future, and this irreversibility of all phenomena, would be that some laws, some of the motion laws of the atoms, are going one way
Distinction | Nature | Past | World |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.
Distinction | Poetry | Television |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
Thou art wise. And wisdom is the fount of life and from Thee it welleth, And by the side of Thy wisdom all human knowledge turneth to folly. Thou art wise, more ancient than all primal things, And wisdom was the nursling at Thy side. Thou art wise, and Thou hast not learnt from any beside Thee, Nor acquired wisdom from any save Thyself. Thou art wise, and from Thy wisdom Thou hast set apart Thy appointed purpose, Like a craftsman and an artist To draw up the films of Being from Nothingness As light is drawn that darteth from the eye: Without bucket from the fountain of light hath Thy workman drawn it up, And without tool hath he wrought, Hewing, graving, cleansing, refining, Calling unto the void and it was cleft, And unto existence and it was urged, And to the universe and it was spread out; Establishing the clouds of the heavens And with his hand joining together the pavilions of the spheres, And fastening with the loops of power the tent-folds of creation, For the might of his hand extendeth to the uttermost borders, "Linking the uttermost ends."
Art | Distinction | Glory | God | Lord | Reason | Right | Unity | Worship | Art | God |
Salomon ibn Gabirol, aka Solomon ben Judah or Avicebron
My breast I am smiting, My own sins indicting. How then canst Thou draw me To strife and thus awe me, And bring Me to judgment? My branch hangeth ailing, My eyelid is failing, My aims to derision Are turned by the vision Of Thee bringing judgment. The creditor calleth, The dread decree falleth, The awful day breaking God’s creatures sets quaking In fear of His judgment. Through Thy attributes preaching, Almighty, and teaching, O weigh aberration In the scale of salvation, Nor bring us to judgment. In Thy merciful fashion Award us compassion, That man who but dust is May handle with justice The haters of judgment. Like a vapour evanished, Man is melted and banished, His birth is coëval With a harvest of evil, ’Tis Thou must bring judgment. We await—O behold us— Thy love to enfold us. Did Thy warning not hasten Our impulse to chasten? For the Lord loveth judgment.
Art | Beauty | Compassion | Cunning | Death | Deeds | Destroy | God | Joy | Kindness | Light | Little | Lord | Lying | Meditation | Men | Nations | Peace | Prayer | Prison | Rebuke | Salvation | Sin | Tears | Thought | Truth | Will | Deeds | Art | Beauty | God | Thought |
In the Talmud (some 1800 years ago) it is said that the holy men of old would sit for an hour before prayer. We don’t have an exact idea of what they were doing, but it was probably a kind of contemplative practice. In the Prophets, Elijah says God doesn’t appear in a thundering storm cloud but in a still, small voice. The primary unpronounced name of God in Hebrew is made up of vowel letters that are sounds of the breath itself. The name denotes Being itself. The very rejection of idol worship is akin to liberation from attachment. Hasidism was a popularization of Jewish mysticism or kabbalah. It originated in eastern Europe in the 18th century and drew on a long and complex history of Jewish meditative literature and practice. Hasidism emphasized practicing with intentionality. It taught a notion of dissolution of ego, expanding consciousness, through ecstatic practices but also through contemplative practices. We are not Hasidim, but we are inspired by their teachings. I work with a colleague, Rabbi Jonathan Slater, who teaches a weekly course unpacking Hasidism as a mindfulness practice. Was what we think of as mindfulness meditation exactly what they were doing? Probably not. We integrate other contemporary influences into our worldview such as pluralism, egalitarianism, feminism. But we are in their lineage. The Zohar, the classic mystical text, says that there is no place devoid of God’s presence. The Hasidim say: the whole world is filled with glory. If one is able to come to awareness, one is able to realize one is in God’s presence.
Attention | Desire | Meditation | Mind | Mindfulness | Sense | Teach | Time | Think |
God created one human being, who was male and female. That means ultimately all of us are interconnected. That there is one God means we are all connected. Individual well-being depends on the greater well-being of everyone. There is no separation. This is a call for inclusion. Jews see it as including the weaker, the marginal, the orphans, the stranger. We were slaves in Egypt. Our task is not to replicate Egyptian power. We are free so we can operate differently, and not replicate slavery. Judaism is a complex, ongoing civilization, in which there is more than one view. Judaism is a religion of interpretation. We believe interpretation is part of the unfolding of creation and Divine creativity. Our interpretive tradition draws a connection between spirituality and social justice.
God | History | Literature | Meditation | Men | Mindfulness | Mystical | Mysticism | Work | World | Worship | God | Old | Think |
The kinds of spiritual practices we can undertake are limitless. However, ultimately the form is less important than these factors: the commitment to practice, the ability to keep returning to the intention, the attitude one brings to the uncontrollable and the ability to transfer the benefits of the practice into how we live our lives, how we relate to ourselves and others, how free we become to embody the values and ideals we embrace in our minds, how we deal with temptations of all sorts. In other words we practice to live with the wisdom and compassion, which we already possess. We practice to actualize the pure soul, which God has planted with us.
Ability | Action | Anxiety | Anxiety | Attention | Body | Change | Character | Consciousness | Consequences | Desire | Focus | Forgetfulness | Generosity | Habit | Intention | Language | Meditation | Mind | Nature | Object | Order | Pain | Power | Practice | Prayer | Promise | Reality | Sabbath | Speech | Taste | Temptation | Time | Training | Unconsciousness | Torah | Temptation |
Shlomo Wolbe, aka Wilhelm Wolbe
Patience in the home, with one’s family, requires a separate and unique treatment. The closer the relationship is, the more patience that relationship demands. We come into contact with our friends from time to time, and even when we do, we rarely will quarrel or become angry. In contrast, we come into contact with our neighbors all the time and thus struggle through many instances requiring patience. Indeed, it is more difficult to be a good neighbor than a good friend. However, it is most difficult to maintain our patience when it comes to our family, with whom we spend our days and nights, through all types of situations. It is fair to say that the middah which sustains a proper household is patience.
Change | Distinction | Insult | Kindness | Patience | Sin | Will | Insult | Think |
When we do elect activists, we want them to change the thinking and behavior of other people, rarely our own.
Attainment | Curiosity | Distinction | Life | Life | Passion | Wisdom | Worth |
But unfortunately Locke treated ideas of reflection as if they were another class of objects of contemplation beside ideas of sensation.
Distinction | Sense |