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You learn when you want to be like somebody, so you copy them, you learn from them. You learn when you’re curious. And you learn when you’re willing to try something and it doesn’t work and you try something else. Caring about something, being curious about something, and recognizing that something doesn’t work—you have to have a certain degree of emotional security. You have to be able to be open and vulnerable.

Children who become peer oriented, because the peer world is so dangerous and so frought with bullying and ostracization and dissing and exclusion and negative talk, how does a child protect himself from all that negativity in the peer world?

Those children become very insecure, and emotionally, to protect themselves. They shut down. They become hardened, they become cool. Nothing matters. Cool is the ethic. It’s all about aggression, and cool, and no real emotion. When that happens, curiosity goes because curiosity is vulnerable, because you care about something and you’re admitting that you don’t know. You won’t try anything, because if you fail your vulnerability is exposed. You’re not willing to have trial and error.

—Gàbor Mate

The hungry ghost is one of the six realms of the mandala, the Buddhist Wheel of Life. The realm of the hungry ghost is one of emptiness and insatiability, the endless search for satiation from the outside, which is essentially what our society is all about. Our society is full of hungry ghosts looking to the outside to fulfill their unmet needs.

—Gabor Màte

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man—present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is tragic indeed when a person whose mind is still young and alert struggles uselessly with a dying body. I am sure, however, that the body dies because it wants to. It finds it beyond its power to resist the disease or to mend the injury, and so, tired out with the struggle, turns to death. If the consciousness were more sensitive to the feelings and impulses of the whole organism, it would share this desire.

—Alan Watts