Attention Seeker Quotes

Narcissists are consumed with maintaining a shallow false self to others. They're emotionally crippled souls that are addicted to attention. Because of this they use a multitude of games, in order to receive adoration. Sadly, they are the most ungodly of God's creations because they don't show remorse for their actions, take steps to make amends or have empathy for others. They are morally bankrupt.

People can become addicted to fame, money, and attention as deeply as they become addicted to drugs.

Boys seek attention, men demand respect.

we only shout when we neglect what silence can do

In a social media world, the danger is being overexposed and when something is overexposed it is no longer interesting...if ever it was.

Emotions are some merciless attention seekers you know. You ignore them they destroy you.

It's always worthless sort of person who puts himself out in order to get somebody else worked up.

I mostly lived in my dimension Built up of fantasies and dreams, Hardly a seeker of attention, Yet, I preferred to act on whims.

When is an attempt not a real act of self-destruction but merely an attention-seeking device? We may never know; however, since even attention-seekers kill themselves, it may not matter. The question we should really be asking is: Why would anyone have to get attention in such a morbid way?

What a strange fellowship this is, the God seekers in every land, lifting their voices in the most disparate ways imaginable to the God of all life. How does it sound from above? Like bedlam, or do the strains blend in strange ethereal harmony? Does one faith carry the lead or do the parts share in counterpoint and antiphony where not in full throated chorus? We cannot know. All we can do is to listen carefully and with full attention to each voice in turn as it addresses the divine.

If you reach out to your phone every few minutes, it isn't the urgency you are catering to but your need to be needed by others, you are seeking attention while battling loneliness

Trying to be offensive for the sole purpose of being offensive should always deem one the least offensive of offenders.

People with an unbridled thirst for attention is usually very empty and trying to fill themselves at the expense of others.

Seek respect not attention.

Ego is neither positive nor negative. Those are simply concepts that create more boundaries. Ego is just ego, and the disaster of it all is that you, as a spiritual seeker, have been conditioned to think of the ego as bad, as an enemy, as something to be destroyed. This simply strengthens the ego. In fact, such conclusions arise from the ego itself. Pay no attention to them. Don’t go to war with yourself; simply inquire into who you are.

All writers, Julian went on, are attention seekers: why else would we be sitting up here on this stage? The fact is, he said, no one took enough notice of us when we were small and now we're making them pay for it. Any writer who denied the childish element of revenge in what they did was, as far as he was concerned, a liar. Writing was just a way of taking justice into your own hands. If you wanted the proof, all you had to do was look at the people who had something to fear from your honesty.

Some people love attention so much that they usually wish for their rhetorical question to be answered.

Breathing attentively is yoga. Complete absorption in your work is yoga. Thinking about others instead of yourself is yoga. Anything which makes you forget your small self and become one with the infinite is yoga.

I don't want to be looked at and grab attention, that's exhibitionism.. I would rather be seen more for my intelligence, for my elegance, for not being just another girl seeking attention. I don't want to catch someone's eyes because those kind of attention spans are short and easily shifted to the next exhibitionist, I would rather stay in the memory as someone who refused to be a performer yet made an impact.

What matters most on your journey is how deeply you see, how attentively you hear, how richly the encounters are felt in your heart and soul.

Everyone is trying to be famous and everyone is trying to trend. These people and the ones who are seeking attention on social media .They are more pandemic than corona virus, because they are misleading, hurting and destroying lot of lives while they are at it.

How to recognize a medical serial killer: • majority of cases take place in a hospital setting • attention-seeking behavior • odd behavior after a patient death or seeming “happy” • disciplinary record • thrill seeker • tendency to predict when a patient will die • frequently moving hospitals • insulin poisoning the most common method

Who's the Joker, playing with our perception? Who's that thief, grabbing our attention?

Love is not for thrill-seekers, dreamers, or children with short attention spans. And you, son, fit into all three of those categories.

Enough with climbing the greasy pole of validation! Grab hold of your backbone, toughen up your conviction.

Not every emotion deserves the same attention” 

Some people know what is right and what is wrong. They may justify their actions and reason beyond any doubt, but deep down inside. They know very well what they are doing and why they are doing it.

I don't want to be looked at and grab attention, that's exhibitionism. I would rather be seen more for my intelligence, for my elegance, for not being just another girl seeking attention. I don't want to catch someone's eyes because those kind of attention spans are short and easily shifted to the next exhibitionist, I would rather stay in the memory as someone who refused to be a performer yet made an impact.

We face no such difficulty if we see that what is being transmitted genetically is not ADD or its equally ill-mannered and discombobulating relatives, but sensitivity. The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.

The aim of any practice of concentration and meditation is to free the aspirant from his usual way of thinking, feeling and being, so that he manages to become aware of himself in a manner which is totally different from the way he is normally. This self-awareness, inaccessible to the seeker in his ordinary state of being, is closely linked with a very special inner presence which is liberating, transforming and therapeutic at the same time.

People who are used to constant attention and flattery become inured to the merely pleasant and become "peak seekers." They expect the highs, and when their unrealistic goals or expectations are not met, they are not simply disappointed, they are devastated.

She was also completely beautiful: blonde with a face that was ridiculously photogenic and a tall, yet curvy figure that always got plenty of attention from the male population. Basically, she was the kind of friend that I tried never to be photographed with because my fragile self-esteem just didn’t need that kind of torture.

No one should have to live in secret shame. The burning desire of every self-injuring person I've ever spoken with is simply to be seen as human and not as a freak or an attention seeker—despite their scars, despite the fact that, yes, cutting is self-inflicted. As we begin to see that people who self-harm can be found in nearly every neighborhood, school, college, house of worship, or school group, we must become better informed so that we can better understand their language of pain and help them find a way out of their suffering. The first step, however, takes no special training or sophisticated understanding of psychology or neurochemistry. It simply takes the effort to listen with compassion.

If we want to create something significant in our lives, we need highly focused attention. The focus gathers the energy, enlarges it, and births ideas, experiences, and manifestations. The energy makes the creation. Spiritual seekers have inclusive and well-intentioned desires from which to create. Their creations do not have a downside and are harmful to neither their maker nor anyone else.

I refuse the definitions of love ⁣ in dictionaries and philosophy,⁣ for today I know love.⁣ I had sought you for years, ⁣ but find that you were always the seeker⁣ and I the sought. ⁣ I suddenly appeared ⁣ reverent before you⁣ to bear witness to your beauty, ⁣ to dance in your silky attention,⁣ but you were always my wild destiny, ⁣ my heart’s pilgrimage—⁣ the meeting place of all my joy⁣ and self-forgetting.⁣ When I first loved you, ⁣ life for me had just begun.⁣ I look forward to so much with you—⁣ our togetherness in a world of wounds, ⁣ our children awaiting birth.⁣ I look forward to so much life with you, ⁣ and yet, I am perfectly content ⁣ with this moment here.⁣ It matters not to me if I die ⁣ before finishing this poem,⁣ for today I know love.⁣ For today,⁣ I am free.

As you watch anything—a tree, your wife, your children, your neighbor, the stars of a night, the light on the water, the bird in the sky, anything—there is always the observer—the censor, the thinker, the experiencer, the seeker—and the thing he is observing; the observer and the observed; the thinker and the thought. So, there is always a division. It is this division that is time. That division is the very essence of conflict. And when there is conflict, there is contradiction. There is “the observer and the observed”—that is a contradiction; there is a separation. And hence where there is contradiction, there is conflict. And when there is conflict, there is always the urgency to get beyond it, to conquer it, to overcome it, to escape from it, to do something about it, and all that activity involves time…. As long as there is this division, time will go on, and time is sorrow. And a man who will understand the end of sorrow must understand this, must find, must go beyond this duality between the thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experienced. That is, when there is a division between the observer and the observed, there is time, and therefore there is no ending of sorrow. Then, what is one to do? You understand the question? I see, within myself, the observer is always watching, judging, censoring, accepting, rejecting, disciplining, controlling, shaping. That observer, that thinker, is the result of thought, obviously. Thought is first; not the observer, not the thinker. If there was no thinking at all, there would be no observer, no thinker; then there would only be complete, total attention.

We pass a church with a massive blue neon cross, and I am spiritually lifted by feelings of great religiosity. No, I’m not, for crying out loud. Don’t be ridiculous. But what I do love about this road is how the gaudy becomes grand, how tastelessness is a way of everyday life. You have to admire how these people shamelessly try to get your attention as you drive by, whether they’re trying to feed you a hamburger or a savior. (p.37)

If others were to look attentively into themselves as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of emptiness and tomfoolery. I cannot rid myself of them without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in them, each as much as the other; but those who realize this get off, as I know, a little more cheaply. That commonly approved practice of looking elsewhere than at our own self has served our affairs well! Our self is an object full of dissatisfaction: we can see nothing there but wretchedness and vanity. So as not to dishearten us, Nature has very conveniently cast the action of our sight outwards. We are swept on downstream, but to struggle back towards our self against the current is a painful movement; thus does the sea, when driven against itself, swirl back in confusion. Everyone says: 'Look at the motions of the heavens, look at society, at this man's quarrel, that man's pulse, this other man's will and testament' - in other words always look upwards or downwards or sideways, or before or behind you. That commandment given us in ancient times by that god at Delphi was contrary to all expectation: 'Look back into your self; get to know your self; hold on to your self.' Bring back to your self your mind and your will which are being squandered elsewhere; you are draining and frittering your self away. Consolidate your self; rein your self back. They are cheating you, distracting you, robbing you of your self. Can you not see that this world of ours keeps its gave bent ever inwards and its eyes ever open to contemplate itself? It is always vanity in your case, within and without, but a vanity which is less, the less it extends. Except you alone, O Man, said that god, each creature first studies its own self, and, according to its needs, has limits to its labours and desires. Not one is as empty and needy as you, who embrace the universe: you are the seeker with no knowledge, the judge with no jurisdiction and, when all is done, the jester of the farce.

The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.

You need to be something they said, not an attention seeker they never said...

wanted to have an evening where no one gets kidnapped or blown up. Except on film. Who knows what might happen to Romeo?” “Anyone who has read the play,” Caprice said. “Someone read the play to me, and I definitely think there might be a bomb scene.” “It’s almost like you weren’t paying attention at all when I read to you,” Caprice said. “I tend to zone out after a massive head wound,” he said.

The services Henry and Sandra were so taken with were not evangelistic events; they were regular services designed for the praise of God and the strengthening of believers. There were Bible readings, songs, prayers, creeds and preaching-all the things that have always been part of church gatherings. Henry and Sandra were eavesdroppers, as it were. And this, I think, is part of the power of services like these. Visitors to church can easily feel threatened if they suspect the whole event is pitched at them. But when they feel the freedom simply to observe what Christians do-praying to the Lord, giving thanks to him, listening to his Word-visitors are often more at ease, less defensive and more open to the things they hear. They are more attentive to our “praises” of him who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light. I still think there is a place for the evangelistic church service and even for the so-called seeker service. I also think it is important to consider making small adjustments to our gatherings to make them more comprehensible to the uninitiated. However, I want to stress in the strongest terms that visitor-focused services are not an evangelistic necessity. Normal church meetings conducted exceptionally well will not only inspire the regulars; they will draw in visitors and, through the powerful vehicle of our corporate praise, promote the gospel to them. The burden is on us-whether we are laypeople or leaders-to do everything we can to enhance what goes on in our services and to invite our friends and family to eavesdrop on what we do.

Those who focus on attention never attain ascension, those who live for ascension don't have time for attention.

Upon discovering several different ways of self-transformation, one often realizes that, as far as understanding is concerned, it is not so much the process or work style which counts. What makes all the difference is your willingness to go on a path. Looking at several good master's lives, one sees they didn't necessarily start at a high level. They had to face far greater obstacles sometimes than those you might find on your way. But they endured, endured, endured, to the point that no obstacle could hold them down, and they were opened to enormous enlightenments. One of the most essential qualities that a seeker can develop is ‘supernatural persistence.’ Those who seem to get through high consciousness without needing to go through any spiritual discipline are usually people who, in their former lives, have been through long and intense cycles. Whatever stage you may be at, success will come to you with constant attention to all facets of the practice.

In short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest attention seekers insist, for better or worse, on the superlative degree of comparison only, leaving you, dear reader, in a binary abyss alternating between the virtual and the real. 

Keeping the trapdoor open means being uncomfortable and uncertain. It means treating the world as a question and yourself as a worthy seeker of answers. That can be wholly terrifying. Or immensely depressing. Or honestly? Just … boring. The modern attention span combined with our learned shame is a perfect excuse not to open the trapdoor that day. Who am I to be a sorceress? I don’t want to swim in the needle-water of my full capacity of aliveness today. I’d like to be a little less sad and work a little less hard. I don’t want to know myself—I don’t love what I’ve got so far.

Anyone can call a circle a square, hurl a racist insult, make a sick joke, or defame, degrade, demean, or dehumanize. It is the calling card of attention seekers and class clowns since history began.

RAGING MIND - A HAIKU Uncontrollable, Thoughts flow, attention decides, If there's peace, or pain!

Everything is happening, I'm not paying attention. Everything is happening, I'm overwhelmed by it! Everything is happening, I’m unconcerned.

The worst thing you can do is give an attention-seeker attention.

Loving God "with all thy mind", means withdrawing one's attention from the senses and giving it to God, giving to Him one's whole concentration in meditation. Every seeker of God must learn to concentrate. A prayer that one utters while at the same time thinking of other things in the background of his mind is not a true prayer and is unheeded by God. Yoga teaches that in order to find the Father it is first necessary to seek Him with all one's mind with concentration that is one-pointed.

The Invitational Church In the invitational church, the focus is on growth. The goal of the church is to reach out and gather people into the church. Therefore, the church is designed as a consumer-oriented place that takes special care to make sure the red carpet is rolled out for visitors and guests. A highly trained staff puts forth great effort to ensure the very best experience for everyone who comes to the church, with special attention paid to visitors. Invitational churches are often successful at growth because this is a large part of their goal and focus. There are many wonderful aspects of the invitational church. I believe God sovereignly birthed the church growth and seeker movements to help the institutional church get beyond itself and start caring about the millions of people trying to find God who were unable to fit into the institutional church. I deeply appreciate and value invitational churches, because they have come up with a way to re-create a modern day “Court Of The Gentiles” aspect of the temple, a place where God-seekers can come and find God. They have unselfishly set aside their desire for church to be about themselves, and they have designed church services for lost people and seekers. What a refreshing change when invitational churches hit the scene! They have really harvested many people for Jesus and helped thousands of churches become outward-focused. This is a good thing! The difficulty with the invitational church is that the individual is essentially irrelevant. What I mean is, when most people walk into an invitational church, it really doesn’t matter whether or not they show up. Why is this true? Because the invitational church has, by default, set the bar very low to make sure that whosoever will may come. However, the inadvertent message is that the individual is not really needed. Little is asked or required of people, and it is very clear that if they aren’t part of the overall goal to facilitate growth, their gifts may not be needed. To prove the point: where do many of the people who have left institutional churches go? They often sit in the back of invitational churches where they can go unnoticed and where they can have very little asked of them. The invitational church is a great place to recover from the institutional church. Some go on and become involved in meaningful ways. But often over time, two negative things happen to believers who have been in invitational churches. One, they become sedentary, consumer-oriented Christians. Those who joined the institutional church and who wanted to make a difference have all but lost their initial fire. Often they no longer burn with zeal for God and His purposes. Instead, they unwittingly adopt the culture of the invitational church into their Christianity, and they, too, lower the bar to the point where, for all intents and purposes, they are now just showing up at a weekend service. Or two, they begin to feel the need for a more personal, relational church, and they move on to something more personal and meaningful to them.

Verbal undermining is fundamental to the maintenance of inequality and injustice. Not challenging it or even drawing attention to it hands power to those who wish to preserve privilege and oppression. Pretending that one’s attackers are fellow seekers after truth who share one’s own values when it’s clear that they regard them with contempt, betrays the entire constituency of the oppressed. It also hands oppressors and their helpers carte blanche to waste everyone’s time with spurious or mendacious objections, which they can produce in endless quantities

This isn’t, however, just a public relations challenge for organizational leaders; corporate social responsibility is a very real issue for job seekers. For the 2007 Cone’s Millennial Cause Study, 68 percent of Generation Y’ers stated that they currently do or will refuse to work for a company that does not have a strong corporate social responsibility record, and 75 percent will pay particularly close attention, both for employment and consumer choices, to companies who have strong CSR records. Numerous studies have found that a company’s CSR record will affect an organization’s ability to recruit and retain qualified employees (i.e., Chesloff, 2010; Greening & Turban, 2000). Murray’s (2008) survey found that one third of the respondents felt working for a caring and responsible employer was more important than the salary that they earned, and nearly one half would turn away from an employer with a negative corporate social responsibility history.

Within each being exists the voice of wisdom: a quiet and unassuming voice that longs to guide us out of darkness, to lift the veil of ignorance and shepherd the seeker to higher ground. Whether one calls it the Sadguru, the Holy Spirit, or the Still Small Voice, one thing is certain—this inner voice will never yell or compete for attention. Only by quieting the mind can this voice be heard. But when you take the time to listen—really listen—this voice is as evident as the warm sun on your face.

When a person life is a world of complaints, they carry that attitude with them, most things are never as perfect as they desire. Most people understand, nothing is perfect, and look at the complainer as the seeker of attention or just selfish and unaware. No one likes a complainer. What happens is life's reflection will give this person something to really complain about. The attitude we show the world will always return to us.

This was not the intent of the reformers who advanced such changes in both parties. They sought to democratize the parties’ internal procedures and so to give the public more of a voice in the earliest stages of the political process. But the result has been a less democratic American party system, because it is one that empowers only the most active fringes of both parties—and especially the small percentage of voters who participate in party primaries. Those tend to be the voters least interested in bargaining and compromise and least inclined to see the point of the accommodationist structure of our system’s core institutions. Primaries have actually empowered elites—elites who are amateur activists with a lot of time for politics, not those who are party professionals but elites nonetheless, and not the broad public. By making office seekers most attentive to those voters rather than to the marginal voters essential for broader coalition building and who had been the focus of party professionals, the modern primary system has drawn into politics a type of politician who is not well suited to the work of the institutions, and so to the office to which he or she is seeking election.

When a person’s life is a world of complaints, they carry that attitude with them, most things are never as perfect as they desire. Most people understand, nothing is perfect, and look at the complainer as the seeker of attention or just selfish and unaware. No one likes a complainer. What happens is life's reflection will give this person something to really complain about. The attitude we show the world will always return to us.

When a person life is a world of complaints, they carry that attitude with them, most things are never as perfect as they desire. Most people understand, nothing is perfect, and look at the complainer as the seeker of attention or just selfish and unaware. No one likes a complainer. What happens is life's reflection will give this person something to really complain about. The attitude we show the world will always return to us.

She doesn’t talk about it, the same way movie stars don’t talk about their stalkers. The worst thing you can do is give an attention-seeker attention.

The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two P.M. all over the world men will begin to talk about their feelings—and women all over the world will be sorry.” If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama. When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.

Attention seekers are immature.

There is not one, but two society. One is snobbish, narcissistic and judgmental to the bone. Another is too hungry to judge anyone. If we must serve, let us be servant to the society that nobody cares about, and to hell with the society that everybody tries to impress and wants to be a part of.

In internet slang, a “troll” is an attention seeker who traffics in inflammatory rhetoric to antagonize and sow chaos and discord.

Justice is not a hashtag (The Sonnet) Using a hashtag doesn't make you an activist, Social media trend is not herald of social justice. Justice comes when each lives with accountability, Not when you play pretend justice because it is trendy. A true activist spends their life working for others, Occasionally they indulge in some self-charging activity. Insta-activists spend their life drooling for attention, Humanitarian crisis is just an opportunity for publicity. Human rights violation is just a hashtag for most, So they keep up with the trend by voicing phony endorsement. Once the trend fades 99 percent of those voices disappear, Until the next crisis comes, and the vultures hover again. Violation of human rights is only violation if it is trending. Society that measures social justice by social media trend, is nothing but a bunch of hypocritical, bottom-licking ding-a-ling.

Service over selfies, that is life for the unselfish, whereas to the self-obsessed nimrods even an act of kindness is an opportunity for attention grabbing.

Service over selfies, that is life for the unselfish.

People nowadays do intentional and purposeful mistakes, so they can apologize later. Knowing they would have got what they wanted, from the mistake they intentional and purposefully made.

The top 1% of the world’s wealthy control more than 50% of all wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. In the United States, the 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. The number of millionaires in the world has tripled in the decades since 2000. And the amount of the world’s wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the global population? Under 3%. These inequalities are more than numbers. They are fuel for high emotions and mass social change. They have led to the rise of populist political movements and propelled a variety of unlikely candidates into power. The difference between the top 1% and all the rest gets our attention. So much for money. Let’s now consider something infinitely more valuable: happiness. Specifically, the happiness found in Bliss Brain. Here we also find huge inequalities. Historically, Bliss Brainers are a tiny percentage of the population. Few even attempt the journey to enlightenment, and of those who seek Nirvana, even fewer attain it. When a rare spiritual genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, reached that pinnacle, the event was so significant that it changed the entire course of world history. WITHDRAWING FROM EVERYDAY LIFE The lives of the great spiritual masters of history inspired others to follow their example. But like the saints, these aspirants could not reach enlightenment in the everyday world, with its demons and distractions. So for thousands of years, those committed to the spiritual path went to special places such as hermitages, wilderness retreats, monasteries, and convents. They exiled themselves from ordinary society in order to pursue nonordinary states of consciousness. They couldn’t achieve Bliss Brain amid the hubbub of society, so they turned their backs on it. The rest of society stayed in ordinary consciousness, driven by the desires and demons of the Default Mode Network (DMN). In my book Mind to Matter, I call this survival orientation “Caveman Brain.” It’s hard to find Bliss Brain when surrounded by Caveman Brain, and pulling yourself out of that environment and into a sacred space is usually a prerequisite for enlightenment. What percentage of the population undertook the journey? No census of enlightenment seekers is possible, but one proxy is the number entering religious seclusion. In the early 1300s, England had a monastic population of about 22,000, with another 10,000 in other religious occupations.

CHAPTER 4 THE ONE PERCENT The top 1% of the world’s wealthy control more than 50% of all wealth, according to Credit Suisse’s global wealth report. In the United States, the 1% own more wealth than the bottom 90%. The number of millionaires in the world has tripled in the decades since 2000. And the amount of the world’s wealth controlled by the bottom 50% of the global population? Under 3%. These inequalities are more than numbers. They are fuel for high emotions and mass social change. They have led to the rise of populist political movements and propelled a variety of unlikely candidates into power. The difference between the top 1% and all the rest gets our attention. So much for money. Let’s now consider something infinitely more valuable: happiness. Specifically, the happiness found in Bliss Brain. Here we also find huge inequalities. Historically, Bliss Brainers are a tiny percentage of the population. Few even attempt the journey to enlightenment, and of those who seek Nirvana, even fewer attain it. When a rare spiritual genius, such as Jesus or Buddha, reached that pinnacle, the event was so significant that it changed the entire course of world history. WITHDRAWING FROM EVERYDAY LIFE The lives of the great spiritual masters of history inspired others to follow their example. But like the saints, these aspirants could not reach enlightenment in the everyday world, with its demons and distractions. So for thousands of years, those committed to the spiritual path went to special places such as hermitages, wilderness retreats, monasteries, and convents. They exiled themselves from ordinary society in order to pursue nonordinary states of consciousness. They couldn’t achieve Bliss Brain amid the hubbub of society, so they turned their backs on it. The rest of society stayed in ordinary consciousness, driven by the desires and demons of the Default Mode Network (DMN). In my book Mind to Matter, I call this survival orientation “Caveman Brain.” It’s hard to find Bliss Brain when surrounded by Caveman Brain, and pulling yourself out of that environment and into a sacred space is usually a prerequisite for enlightenment. What percentage of the population undertook the journey? No census of enlightenment seekers is possible, but one proxy is the number entering religious seclusion. In the early 1300s, England had a monastic population of about 22,000, with another 10,000 in other religious occupations.

You don't need to be an activist to be good people, particularly when most activists of today are just attention-craving hypocrites.

Some teachers refuse to call themselves teachers, because they feel they have nothing to teach; their teaching consists in their merely being present. And so on. Psychologist Guy Claxton, a former disciple of Bhagwan Rajneesh, has found the image of the guru as teacher somewhat misleading. He offers these comments: The most helpful metaphor is . . . that of a physician or therapist: enlightened Masters are, we might say, the Ultimate Therapists, for they focus their benign attention not on problems but on the very root from which the problems spring, the problem-sufferer and solver himself. The Master deploys his therapeutic tricks to one end: that of the exposure and dissolution of the fallacious self. His art is a subtle one because the illusions cannot be excised with a scalpel, dispersed with massage, or quelled with drugs. He has to work at one remove by knocking away familiar props and habits, and sustaining the seeker’s courage and resolve through the fall. Only thus can the organism cure itself. His techniques resemble those of the demolition expert, setting strategically placed charges to blow up the established super-structure of the ego, so that the ground may be exposed. Yet he has to work on each case individually, dismantling and challenging in the right sequence and at the right speed, using whatever the patient brings as his raw material for the work of the moment.1 Claxton mentions other guises, “metaphors,” that the guru assumes to deal with the disciple: guide, sergeant-major, cartographer, con man, fisherman, sophist, and magician. The multiple functions and roles of the authentic adept have two primary purposes. The first is to penetrate and eventually dissolve the egoic armor of the disciple, to “kill” the phenomenon that calls itself “disciple.” The second major function of the guru is to act as a transmitter of Reality by magnifying the disciple’s intuition of his or her true identity. Both objectives are the intent of all spiritual teachers. However, only fully enlightened adepts combine in themselves what the Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures call the wisdom (prajnā) and the compassion (karunā) necessary to rouse others from the slumber of the unenlightened state. In the ancient Rig-Veda (10.32.7) of the Hindus, the guru is likened to a person familiar with a particular terrain who undertakes to guide a foreign traveler. Teachers who have yet to realize full enlightenment can guide others only part of the way. But the accomplished adept, who is known in India as a siddha, is able to illumine the entire path for the seeker. Such fully enlightened adepts are a rarity. Whether or not they feel called to teach others, their mere presence in the world is traditionally held to have an impact on everything. All enlightened masters, or realizers, are thought and felt to radiate the numinous. They are focal points of the sacred. They broadcast Reality. Because they are, in consciousness, one with the ultimate Reality, they cannot help but irradiate their environment with the light of that Reality.

Some people might worry that offering too much soothing to a child risks turning them into malingering attention-seekers. We might reply that attention-seekers are never people who have had too much attention; they are people the world tragically forgot existed. No one who has been properly and consistently soothed will spend their adult life in desperate bids to be noticed; the most logical outcome for a child who has been well soothed will be to devote energy to soothing other people.

It is useless to try to understand Swamiji's ideas by reading my letters. You will understand Swamiji's ideas better if you burn all these letters. You have intelligence. You have a good command of language. I can only give a clue. But I don't understand why you are obsessed with these letters. They are becoming a great obstacle to your ability to think freely. That is why I think you should read Swamiji's books in solitude. For example, read the English version of Karma Yoga repeatedly and with deep attention until you have mastered everything in it. In the letters of Swamiji, you will find the ideal of the Mission, the method of work, and many other things very clearly expressed.

The dopamine, the deceitful dopamine, gives them a false sense of value.

I was Abigail Crowne, fire starter, attention seeker, scandal maker. The Reject Princess. Unloved, uncared for, unwanted. There was only one way to dethrone a princess. As my mom said, you don’t get to stay a princess and marry a pauper, and a Crowne without a castle is just a hunk of metal.

People look for holidays twice a year, revelry twice a month, sex twice a week, food twice a day and attention twice every minute. That explains nearly everything about life.

Like a giant doomed to eat damsels, Q. must fill a vast daily quota of attention and adulation from varied sources. In a small town he might run out of people, but by keeping in constant motion, he's in no such danger. The only danger is to those suppliers of attention who expect some continuity of response, who fail to understand that for Q. people are an inexhaustible natural resource for his sustenance and delight, like air or water or sunshine.

Give your children enough attention and love that they won't go around seeking love and validation from other people, that they end up saying or doing bad things to get love and attention.

In summary, the conclusion that having DID is generally rewarding is unfounded because the vast majority of the attention such patients receive is skeptical, critical, exploitative, or hostile; they are often ignored if they do present symptoms of DID. It is certainly possible that some individuals have attempted to feign the disorder. However, the hostile treatment that one would most likely receive would make feigning another disorder more rewarding.

THE FIVE EXCELLENT PRACTICES OF PILGRIMAGES Inspired by a fifth-century conversation between Zi Zhang and Confucius about the practices of wise rulers in The Analects, here are five excellent practices for travelers on sacred journeys: Practice the arts of attention and listening. Practice renewing yourself every day. Practice meandering toward the center of every place. Practice the ritual of reading sacred texts. Practice gratitude and praise-singing.

The world thought it was an unbalanced thing to do, but anyone who is truly spiritual is both mad and selfish. So many great seekers have spurned family and children, left them bereft for years on end: was not the Buddha similarly guilty? And yet, would anyone say that it was a mistake for him to have left? How many millions over how many generations have been saved because he had the strength to sacrifice his family? My own misguided quest ended in failure of sorts: I learned at the feet of great masters, but my attention wandered. My back ached. My insect bites itched. In short I discovered I was human and pitiful and my physical needs were greater than my spiritual hunger. These are bitter things for me to confess but necessary: the first necessity in the quest for knowledge is truth.

Dennis Michael Lynch, a conservative blogger and the producer of several straight-to-DVD documentaries about illegal immigration, was working on a documentary about the shooting and advising Andy on how to navigate the media. When Andy told Dennis about Kenny’s report, Dennis interviewed him. A few days after that interview, on March 27, Dennis ran an article previewing Kenny’s report.17 But Kenny wasn’t flattered; he freaked out. He had figured that the interview would be part of a documentary that would air a year later. Now a scoop on his report had been published on a conservative clickbait website that, he reflected, “looked like it could give you a computer virus.” Kenny had wanted to write a serious report that would attract meaningful media attention. But now anyone who Googled him might see him as a partisan teenage attention-seeker.

You always find God in the details, but only when you have time.

This “rhythm method” can help anyone besieged by such micromanaging pleasure seekers: try to slow things down, make THEM squirm and suffer as much as you can, and train them to back off and wait. They might just stop badgering you—and turn their attention to more responsive and thus more satisfying targets instead.