Making money just for the sake of making money is a game, like bridge, in which people can find extreme pleasure and which can occupy almost all their waking hours. But one of the rules of the game is that you must pretend not to enjoy it. It must most definitely be classified as work, as that which you have, to do as a duty to your family and community, and which therefore affords many businessmen the best possible excuse for staying away from home and from their wives. The nemesis of this attitude is that it flows over into the so-called leisure or nonwork areas of life in such a way that playing with children, giving attention to one´s wife, exercising on the golf course, and purchasing certain luxuries (which are largery symbolic) also became duties. Survival itself becomes a duty and even a drag, for the pretense of not enjoying the game gets under the skin and tightens the muscles which repress joyous and sensuous emotion. To same extent this may be a penance for the exploitation of poverty, but, as should be well understood by this time, penances do nothing to correct evil, they are simply payoffs which allow business as usual.

It is thus that most businessmen work in enviromnemts, such as the average office, which are unpardonably ugly. I was astonished, in coming to America, to find that even doctors had offices - as distinct from consluting rooms, which were often pleasant libraries set about with works of art, with a surgery set off behind. Only quite rarely do people involved in the money game know what to do with money when they make it. They make ritual gifts to charity, religion and the arts, but their beatific vision is crisp green paper in the hand , and this wholly abstract, inedible, and spiritual satisfaction far surpasses harems of fair women, wide lands and forests, gorgeous palaces and solemn temples, silks and furs, and even reasonably palatable food. By and large, no one is poorer in real wealth than a man of business. For he is a very strict ascetic. In this atmosphere the arts and literature also become serious business instead of simple delight. Paintings and works of sculpture are bought and sold as investments, Picassos and Pollocks having ups and downs like shares in General Dynamics. William Earle, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern, pointed out that his up-to-date colleagues would not even dream of lying awake at night pondering vast problems of the universe. Instead, they arrive with briefcases at their offices, punctually at 9:00 AM, and "do philosophy" (as they say) until 5:00 PM, whereafter they return home to martinis, dinner, and television just as if they were accountants. Performing musicians must join a trade union managed by goons who can barely whistle.

There must be some connection between the commercialization of life and the separation of religion from mystiticsm and magic. It is, of course, well known that the lords spiritual and temporal of the feudal system gradually lost their power to the bankers and merchants during the centuries following the Reformation, and it is understandable that this new ruling class would want the Church to have no power of its own, but to be subservient to the mysticism and ascetism of money.

(Alan Watts - In my own way)

"You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place." - G. I. Gurdjieff

“If we’re going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path. And I know it’s seductive to stand outside the arena, because I think I did it my whole life, and think to myself, I’m going to go in there and kick some ass when I’m bulletproof and when I’m perfect. And that is seductive. But the truth is, that never happens. And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that’s not what we want to see. We want you to go in. We want to be with you and across from you. And we just want, for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with, to dare greatly.”

(Brene Brown - Listening to shame)

“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