“In a century where the media publish endless stupidities, the cultured man is defined not by what he knows but by what he ignores.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"When you get right down to the nuts and bolts of understanding what the brain is doing and the relationship between conscious experience and the brain, the data do not support the commonly held principle that you can just will yourself into one mental state or another. It´s a subtle thing, freedom. It takes effort, it takes attention and focus to not act something like an automaton. Although we do have freedom, we exercise it only when we strive for awareness, when we are conscious not just of the content of the mind but also of the mind itself as a process. When not governed by conscious awareness, our mind tends to run on automatic pilot. It is scarcely more "free" than a computer that performs preprogrammed tasks in response to a button being pushed. The power to choose exists only when our automatic mental mechanisms are subject to those brain systems that are able to maintain conscious awareness."

Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, MD

At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment, she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future - the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit - with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerism, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before.

The constant, intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction - and it serves the same purpose. "One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain." So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

Gabor Maté - In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

"Power is like a drug. The need for either is unknown to anyone who has not tried them, but after the initiation the dependency and need for ever larger doses is born, as are the denial of reality and the return to childish dreams of omnipotence. The syndrome produced by protracted and undisputed power is clearly visible - a distorted view of the world, dogmatic arrogance, the need for adulation, convulsive clinging to the levers of command, and contempt for the law."

Primo Levi - The Drowned and the Saved

"There is a special quality of stillness in a person who encounters the shadow wholeheartedly. Your body may relax in their company because it understands, in the subtle communications of their presence, that nothing is excluded in themselves, therefore nothing in you can be rejected. Such a person, who has given up guarding against the shadow, who has come to wear their scars with dignity, no longer squirms from discomfort or bristles at suffering. They no longer brace in avoidance of conflict. They carry a deep willingness to dance with the inconstancy of life. They've given up distancing as a strategy, and made vulnerability their ally."

Excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner

"It is hard to get enough of something that almost works."

Vincent Felitti, MD