Disconnect From Everyone Quotes

It is growing up different. It is extreme hypersensitivity. It is a bottomless pit of feeling you're failing, but three days later, you feel you can do anything, only to end the week where you began. It is not learning from your mistakes. It is distrusting people because you have been hurt enough. It is moments of knowing your pain is self inflicted, followed by blaming the world. It is wanting to listen, but you just can’t anymore because your life has been to full of people that have judged you. It is fighting to be right; so for once in your life someone will respect and hear you for a change. It is a tiring life of endless games with people, in order to seek stimulus. It is a hyper focus, so intense about what bothers you, that you can’t pay attention to anything else, for very long. It is a never-ending routine of forgetting things. It is a boredom and lack of contentment that keeps you running into the arms of anyone that has enough patience to stick around. It wears you out. It wears everyone out. It makes you question God’s plan. You misinterpret everything, and you allow your creative mind to fill the gaps with the same old chains that bind you. It narrows your vision of who you let into your life. It is speaking and acting without thinking. It is disconnecting from the ones you love because your mind has taken you back to what you can’t let go of. It is risk taking, thrill seeking and moodiness that never ends. You hang your hope on “signs” and abandon reason for remedy. It is devotion to the gifts and talents you have been given, that provide temporary relief. It is the latching onto the acceptance of others---like a scared child abandoned on a sidewalk. It is a drive that has no end, and without “focus” it takes you nowhere. It is the deepest anger when someone you love hurts you, and the greatest love when they don't. It is beauty when it has purpose. It is agony when it doesn’t. It is called Attention Deficit Disorder.

People often ask me what they can do to be moresuccessful. I say disconnect. Even if just for a few hours. Unplug. Turn off your phone and Wi-Fi. Focus. Write. Practice. Create. That’s what’s rare and valuable these days. You get no competitive edge from consuming the same stuff everyone else is consuming.

Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct. A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensues: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place.

Tone, inflection, timing, volume, pacing—everything you do with your voice communicates something and has the potential to help you connect to or disconnect from others when you speak.

When I’m aligned with my presence, I’m breathing easily, words come to me without overthinking, I feel genuinely confident, and people resonate with my energy. I feel safe, calm, and in the flow with whatever is happening around me. When I’m out of alignment with the power of my presence, I feel stuck, weak, tired, anxious, and annoyed. No one wants to be around me, and I feel disconnected from everyone. It’s invaluable for me to clearly know the difference between what it feels like to be connected to my presence versus what it feels like when I’m not. This awareness helps me witness when I’m out of alignment so I can choose to realign in an instant.

The corporate world is also a manifestation of people’s disconnection from their heart, where people believe manipulation is the path to getting what they want and therefore the way to succeed. People often use the excuse that “everyone does it.” When a child learns at home that not everyone does it, things can start to change. The corporate world even celebrates the cutthroat approach of stepping over others, knifing them in the back, and scrambling to the top of the ladder at the expense of colleagues—behavior that reflects an inability to connect with and care for others.

It's like we're all going up a flight of stairs together and at a certain point I say 'this is as far as I go'. And on that step, higher up, they're all happy and I watch them from below. Had he always been like that? It wasn't shyness or reserve or adolescence, as other people thought. He wasn't going to get over it. He could dance when he was alone, he could get emotional in his room with a book, but when the party started he disconnected, the others turned into a movie that he could watch but not participate in. So he acted like he was invisible, which wasn't hard when everyone was drunk. And he withdrew into his room, where he felt the purest kind of relief.

The object of such historiography is to disconnect everyone from a real sense of a living past and a living culture.

Disconnect your behavior from your emotional life. That’s what Zen teaches us.

You don't have to slander everyone you disconnect from. Just move on in peace. The true mark of maturity is when somebody hurts you and you try to understand their situation instead of retaliating.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

THE COUNCIL WAS NOTHING LIKE Jason imagined. For one thing, it was in the Big House rec room, around a Ping-Pong table, and one of the satyrs was serving nachos and sodas. Somebody had brought Seymour the leopard head in from the living room and hung him on the wall. Every once in a while, a counselor would toss him a Snausage. Jason looked around the room and tried to remember everyone’s name. Thankfully, Leo and Piper were sitting next to him—it was their first meeting as senior counselors. Clarisse, leader of the Ares cabin, had her boots on the table, but nobody seemed to care. Clovis from Hypnos cabin was snoring in the corner while Butch from Iris cabin was seeing how many pencils he could fit in Clovis’s nostrils. Travis Stoll from Hermes was holding a lighter under a Ping-Pong ball to see if it would burn, and Will Solace from Apollo was absently wrapping and unwrapping an Ace bandage around his wrist. The counselor from Hecate cabin, Lou Ellen something-or-other, was playing “got-your-nose” with Miranda Gardiner from Demeter, except that Lou Ellen really had magically disconnected Miranda’s nose, and Miranda was trying to get it back. Jason had hoped Thalia would show. She’d promised, after all—but she was nowhere to be seen. Chiron had told him not to worry about it. Thalia often got sidetracked fighting monsters or running quests for Artemis, and she would probably arrive soon. But still, Jason worried. Rachel Dare, the oracle, sat next to Chiron at the head of the table. She was wearing her Clarion Academy school uniform dress, which seemed a bit odd, but she smiled at Jason. Annabeth didn’t look so relaxed. She wore armor over her camp clothes, with her knife at her side and her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. As soon as Jason walked in, she fixed him with an expectant look, as if she were trying to extract information out of him by sheer willpower. “Let’s come to order,” Chiron said. “Lou Ellen, please give Miranda her nose back. Travis, if you’d kindly extinguish the flaming Ping-Pong ball, and Butch, I think twenty pencils is really too many for any human nostril. Thank you. Now, as you can see, Jason, Piper, and Leo have returned successfully…more or less. Some of you have heard parts of their story, but I will let them fill you in.” Everyone looked at Jason. He cleared his throat and began the story. Piper and Leo chimed in from time to time, filling in the details he forgot. It only took a few minutes, but it seemed like longer with everyone watching him. The silence was heavy, and for so many ADHD demigods to sit still listening for that long, Jason knew the story must have sounded pretty wild. He ended with Hera’s visit right before the meeting.

Blind compassion is rooted in the belief that we are all doing the best that we can. When we are driven by blind compassion, we cut everyone far too much slack, making excuses for others’ behavior and making nice in situations that require a forceful “no,” an unmistakable voicing of displeasure, or a firm setting and maintaining of boundaries. These things can, and often should, be done out of love, but blind compassion keeps love too meek, sentenced to wearing a kind face. This is not the kindness of the Dalai Lama, which is rooted in courage, but rather a kindness rooted in fear, and not just the fear of confrontation, but also the fear of not coming across as a good or spiritual person. When we are engaged in blind compassion we rarely show any anger, for we not only believe that compassion has to be gentle, we are also frightened of upsetting anyone, especially to the point of their confronting us.

Once you have disidentified from your mind, whether you are right or wrong makes no difference to your sense of self at all, so the forcefully compulsive and deeply unconscious need to be right, which is a form of violence, will no longer be there. You can state clearly and firmly how you feel or what you think, but there will be no aggressiveness or defensiveness about it. Your sense of self is then derived from a deeper and truer place within yourself, not from the mind. Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity. By making this pattern conscious, by witnessing it, you disidentify from it. In the light of your consciousness, the unconscious pattern will then quickly dissolve. This is the end of all arguments and power games, which are so corrosive to relationships. Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within, and it is available to you now. So anyone who is identified with their mind and, therefore, disconnected from their true power, their deeper self rooted in Being, will have fear as their constant companion. The number of people who have gone beyond mind is as yet extremely small, so you can assume that virtually everyone you meet or know lives in a state of fear. Only the intensity of it varies. It fluctuates between anxiety and dread at one end of the scale and a vague unease and distant sense of threat at the other. Most people become conscious of it only when it takes on one of its more acute forms.

HISTORY AND THE TRIPLET OF OPACITY History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what's inside the box, how the mechanisms work. What I call the generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions. This disconnect is similar to the difference between the food you see on the table at the restaurant and the process you can observe in the kitchen. (The last time I brunched at a certain Chinese restaurant on Canal Street in downtown Manhattan, I saw a rat coming out of the kitchen.) The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize; b. the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical reality); and c. the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they "Platonify.

Sexual taboos are man’s invention. Sexual repression and misogyny are the result of a paternalistic society with a fundamental disconnect from its own basic nature. From angry, gynophobic mullahs hell-bent on covering women up to their eyeballs, to the denizens of Vatican City, who look and dress like a bunch of drag queens, some truly perverted individuals have been allowed to make the sex rules for everyone else. Marriage

Isn't she doing this too? Connecting and disconnecting. Facing grief then turning from it. One minute she is caught up in minutiae. Will her feet get sore standing in heels at the church? Have they made enough food? Will the kitten get scared by dozens of strangers in the house? Should she shut him in a room upstairs? The next moment she is weeping uncontrollably, taken over by pain so profound she can barely move. Then there was the salad bowl incident; her own fury scared her. But maybe these are different ways of dealing with events for all of them. Molly and Luke are infantile echos of her, their emotions paired down, their reactions simpler but similar. For if they have difficulty taking in what has happened, then so too does she. Why is she dressing up, for instance? Why can't she wear clothes to reflect the fact that she is at her lowest end? A tracksuit, a jumper full of holes, dirty jeans? Why can't she leave her hair a mess, her face unmade up? The crazed and grieving Karen doesn't care about her appearance. Yet she must go through with this charade, polish herself and her children to perfection. She, in particular, must hold it together. Oh, she can cry, yes, that's allowed. People expect that. They will sympathize. But what about screaming, howling, and hurling plates like she did yesterday? She imagines the shocked faces as she shouts and swears and smashes everything. But she is so angry, surely others must feel the same. Maybe a plate throwing ceremony would be a more fitting ritual than church, then everyone could have a go...smashing crockery up against the back garden wall.

There’s something to be said for detaching from others. When we are alone and disconnected from technology, we can reflect on our feelings, vent silently to ourselves or our diaries, and imagine what we might say or do while considering the impact of any real action. Everyone who grew up without digital technology recalls having written a letter we’re glad we never sent or having a rant we’re glad no one heard. Using private time to express and get to know a feeling lets the feeling come down to size, teaches us a great deal about ourselves, and acquaints us with our internal resources for managing distress. Social disconnection also allows time to develop a considered plan about how (or if!) we want to act on hard feelings. In other words, we have time to keep our thoughts and our feelings separate from our actions.

In this country faith is absolute and universal. The choice, if there is a choice, is made at birth. Everyone believes. For these people, God is a near neighbour. I thought of Sundays at home when I was a child, buttoned up in an uncomfortable tweed jacket and forced to go to Sunday communion. I remember mouthing the hymns without really singing, peering between my fingers at the rest of the congregation when I was supposed to be praying, twisting in my seat during the sermon, aching with impatience for the whole boring ritual to be over. I can’t remember when I last went to church. I must have been since Mary and I were married but I can’t remember when. I don’t know anyone who does go to church now. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I know I live amongst scientists and civil servants, and Mary’s friends are all bankers or economists, so perhaps we are not typical. You still see people coming out of church on Sunday morning, chatting on the steps, shaking hands with the vicar, as you drive past on your way to get the Sunday papers, relieved you are too old now to be told to go. But no one I know goes any more. We never talk about it. We never think about it. I cannot easily remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer. We have moved on from religion. Instead of going to church, which would never occur to us, Mary and I go to Tesco together on Sundays. At least, that is what we did when she still lived in London. We never have time to shop during the week and Saturdays are too busy. But on Sunday our local Tesco is just quiet enough to get round without being hit in the ankles all the time by other people’s shopping carts. We take our time wheeling the shopping cart around the vast cavern, goggling at the flatscreen TVs we cannot afford, occasionally tossing some minor luxury into the trolley that we can afford but not justify. I suppose shopping in Tesco on Sunday morning is in itself a sort of meditative experience: in some way a shared moment with the hundreds of other shoppers all wheeling their shopping carts, and a shared moment with Mary, come to that. Most of the people I see shopping on Sunday morning have that peaceful, dreamy expression on their faces that I know is on ours. That is our Sunday ritual. Now, I am in a different country, with a different woman by my side. But I feel as if I am in more than just a different country; I am in another world, a world where faith and prayer are instinctive and universal, where not to pray, not to be able to pray, is an affliction worse than blindness, where disconnection from God is worse than losing a limb.

The new God is the intelligence of a living, sacred universe. The purpose that guides the evolution of species comes from larger, living wholes. The environment creates organisms for its purposes, as much as organisms alter the environment for theirs. The parts create the whole, and the whole creates the parts. 20 Thirteen years ago when I first began telling people I was a Lamarckian, I was met with eye rolls or blank stares. But last week I confessed it to a biologist I met at a conference and he didn’t bat an eye. “Everyone is a Lamarckian now,” he said. “Lamarck was right.” This is no longer fringe science. I refer the interested or skeptical reader to James Shapiro’s Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, Denis Noble’s Dance to the Tune of Life, and Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire. The Whole has created humans too for its purpose. There is a certain comfort in thinking that the planet will be fine without us, yet there is also a certain fatalism. It is akin to the fatalism that comes in response to disconnection from one’s destiny. It induces a kind of aimlessness. As humanity exits the old Story of Ascent and its triumphant techno-utopian destiny, we are indeed experiencing a collective aimlessness. In that story, our purpose was ourselves. That purpose has been exhausted. We are ready to devote ourselves to something greater. In the Story of Interbeing, entrusted with gifts and bound by love, we realize that our passage through the present initiatory crisis is of planetary moment. Out of the wreckage of what we thought we knew, something else may be born.

Fatmah Hassan Tabashe Sufian, sixty-one years old, married and a mother of four, was woken up on 6 April 1993 at three o’clock in the morning. Soldiers broke into her house, pushed her up against the wall and asked her where her children were; they are asleep, she replied. They woke up her son Saad, thirty years old, kicking him and beating him with their hands and rifle stocks, until he was spitting blood all over the place. Her other son, Ibrahim, was badly beaten, and the B’Tselem researcher who took Fatmah’s evidence testified that long after the incident he could still see signs of ecchymosis – subcutaneous bleeding – on his back. Both sons were taken out to the yard and put against a wall. The soldiers found two toy guns and began slashing the two men with them until the toys broke. Then they gathered everyone in the complex, twenty-seven people, into one room and threw in a shock grenade. Saad and Ibrahim were ordered to empty the cupboard while they were continuously beaten by the soldiers shouting at them, ‘You are Hamas and we are Golani [the name of the military brigade to which they belonged].’ Nor did they spare Fatmah’s old, blind brother who was a hundred years old. He too was abused by the soldiers, who threw mattresses and blankets at him.25 Thus, every April from 1987 until 1993 this was the routine of the collective punishment. But it was not only these three days that mattered. Collective punishment in March–May 1993 robbed 116,000 Palestinian workers of their source of living, bisected the Occupied Territories into four disconnected areas and barred any access to Jerusalem.26 Seen from that perspective, when the Oslo Accord was implemented as a territorial and security arrangement, it was just official confirmation of a policy already in place since 1987.

When we have poor vagal tone, we have higher sensitivity to perceived threats in our environment, which overactivates the body’s stress response and leads to reduced emotional and attentional regulation overall. Those of you who experience the discomfort of social anxiety might recognize this disconnect. Imagine walking into a party filled with strangers. You might have obsessed over what to wear to the party, planning every detail, every possible conversation topic, or you may have felt totally neutral about the party—no warning signs that you might feel uncomfortable and act accordingly. Either way, none of it matters once you actually walk into the room. Suddenly, all eyes are on you. Your face grows hot and red when you hear laughter, which you’re certain is about your outfit or your hair. Someone brushes past you, and you feel claustrophobic. All the strangers seem to be leering. Even if you know rationally that this is not a hostile place, that no one is looking at or judging you (and if they are, who cares?), it’s nearly impossible to shake the feeling once you’re trapped in it. That’s because your subconscious perceives a threat (using your nervous system’s sixth sense of neuroception) in a nonthreatening environment (the party) and has activated your body, putting you into a state of fight (argue with anyone and everyone), flight (leave the party), or freeze (don’t say a word). The social world has become a space filled with threat. Unfortunately, this kind of nervous system dysregulation is self-confirming. While it is activated, anything that doesn’t confirm your suspicions (a friendly face) will be ignored by your neuroception in favor of things that do (the stray laugh you felt was directed at you). Social cues that would be seen as friendly when you were in social engagement mode—such as a pause in the conversation for you to enter, eye contact, a smile—will be either misinterpreted or ignored.

Here before you lies the memorial to St. Cefnogwr, though he is not buried here, of course.” At her words, an uncanny knowing flushed through Katy and, crazy-of-crazy, transfixed her. “Why? Where is he?” Traci stepped forward, hand on her hip. A you’re-right-on-cue look crossed the guide’s face. She pointed to the ceiling. Traci scoffed. “I meant, where’s the body?” Her American southern accent lent a strange contrast to her skepticism. Again, the tour guide’s arthritic finger pointed upward, and a smile tugged at her lips, the smokers’ wrinkles on her upper lip smoothing out. “That’s the miracle that made him a saint, you see. Throughout the twelve hundreds, the Welsh struggled to maintain our independence from the English. During Madog’s Rebellion in 1294, St. Cefnogwr, a noble Norman-English knight, turned against his liege lord and sided with the Welsh—” “Norman-English?” Katy frowned, her voice raspy in her dry throat. “Why would a Norman have a Welsh name and side with the Welsh?” She might be an American, but her years living in England had taught her that was unusual. “The English nicknamed him. It means ‘sympathizer’ in Welsh. The knight was captured and, for his crime, sentenced to hang. As he swung, the rope creaking in the crowd’s silence, an angel of mercy swooped down and—” She clapped her hands in one decisive smack, and everyone jumped. “The rope dangled empty, free of its burden. Proof, we say, of his noble cause. He’s been venerated ever since as a Welsh hero.” Another chill danced over Katy’s skin. A chill that flashed warm as the story seeped into her. Familiar. Achingly familiar. Unease followed—this existential stuff was so not her. “His rescue by an angel was enough to make him a saint?” ever-practical Traci asked. “Unofficially. The Welsh named him one, and eventually it became a fait accompli. Now, please follow me.” The tour guide stepped toward a side door. Katy let the others pass and approached the knight covered in chainmail and other medieval-looking doodads. Only his face peeked out from a tight-fitting, chainmail hoodie-thing. One hand gripped a shield, the other, a sword. She touched his straight nose, the marble a cool kiss against her finger. So. This person had lived about seven hundred years ago. His angular features were starkly masculine. Probably had women admiring them in the flesh. Had he loved? An odd…void bloomed within, tugging at her, as if it were the absence of a feeling seeking wholeness. Evidence of past lives frozen in time always made her feel…disconnected. Disconnected and disturbed. Unable to grasp some larger meaning. Especially since Isabelle was in the past now too, instead of here as her maid of honor. She traced along the knight’s torso, the bumps from the carved chainmail teasing her fingers. “The tour group is getting on the bus. Hurry.” Traci’s voice came from the door. “Coming.” One last glance at her knight. Katy ran a finger down his strong nose again. “Bye,” she whispered.

Could we then have a bumper sticker that reads, “Christians aren’t perfect, just committed to Liberation”? Quite possibly. The current gospels, left and right, exhibit the very same type of conceptual disconnection from, and practical irrelevance to, the personal integrity of believers—and certainly so, if we put that integrity in terms of biblically specific “Christlikeness.” And both lack any essential bearing upon the individual’s life as a whole, especially upon occupations or work time and upon the fine texture of our personal relationships in the home and neighborhood. This is true even though everyone agrees that it ought not to be so.

Again, if we shield ourselves from all feedback, we stop growing. If we engage with all feedback, regardless of the quality and intention, it hurts too much, and we will ultimately armor up by pretending it doesn’t hurt, or, worse yet, we’ll disconnect from vulnerability and emotion so fully that we stop feeling hurt. When we get to the place that the armor is so thick that we no longer feel anything, we experience a real death. We’ve paid for self-protection by sealing off our heart from everyone, and from everything—not just hurt, but love.

The reality is that there is a huge section of this country that feels like D.C. is filled with a bunch of self-serving careerists who’ve never built anything in their lives, and that Wall Street is filled with people making ungodly amounts of money, and Silicon Valley is just totally disconnected from everyone, and all of them are trying to tell me how to live my life,” he says. “If you put aside all the stupid, offensive shit that Trump does and says, the fact is that he is posing some big, important questions about how we are thinking about our labor pool, our trade agreements, NATO, and our international relationships.

Connecting is vital for any person who wants to achieve success. It is essential for anyone who wants to build great relationships. You will only be able to reach your potential—regardless of your profession or chosen path—when you learn to connect with other people. Otherwise, you’ll be like a nuclear power plant disconnected from the grid. You’ll have incredible resources and potential, but you will never be able to put them to use.

We often feel like we don't fit in any social structure, we begin to believe we are different from everyone. We live alone having a simple life building fortified walls around us, wanting to isolate from the world, not knowing who we are. I know that darkness, it comes instantly as our brilliant light goes dim. Let us not be fooled by it, it is real, and it wants us down, disconnected from the Divine light, and totally in gloom. What is interesting, not only it hates us, but also wants to be us. Our light is bright, repealing the darkness only because our service is of pure love, wanting nothing in return; we became love. I have broken down these walls and became free of the bondage of the darkening self and I urge you, my family, to find yourself first, find your purpose and mission appointed to you for your journey called life. Furthermore, I feel your light, Lightworkers; Use it. As a remainder: if no one today told you that they love you. I love you with all that I am. K.A.

For decades, long before these new antidepressants were developed, we have been disconnecting—from each other, and from what matters. We have lost faith in the idea of anything bigger or more meaningful than the individual, and the accumulation of more and more stuff. When I was a child, Margaret Thatcher said, “There’s no such thing as society, only individuals and their families”—and, all over the world, her viewpoint won. We believed it—even those of us who thought we rejected it. I know this now, because I can see that when I became depressed, it didn’t even occur to me, for thirteen years, to relate my distress to the world around me. I thought it was all about me, and my head. I had entirely privatized my pain—and so had everyone I knew.

Naming the KCC as the agent of the message, as if it were some entity disconnected from Glencore, is another example of how companies at the top of the chain eschew full accountability for the artisanal miners at the bottom. Consumer-facing tech and EV companies, mining companies, and other stakeholders in the cobalt chain invariably point their fingers downstream, even at their own subsidiaries, as if doing so somehow severes their responsibility for what is happening in the cobalt mine of the Congo. Although these companies consistently proclaim their commitments to international human rights norms, the implementation of these commitments seems to be nonexistent in the DRC. Everyone from the FARDC soldiers to the Chinese mineral traders, the Congolese government, multinational mining companies, and mega-cap tech and EV companies plays their part in preying upon those who dig for cobalt out of every crater, pit wall, and tunnel at KCC, Mashamba East, and other mines near Kapata. The global economy presses like a dead weight on the artisanal miners, crushing them into the very earth upon which they scrounge.

Maybe the closed door, the bad break, the disappointment, is setting you up for something that you have yet to see? Most people, when they have a setback, let it affect their spirit. They seek revenge; they let feelings of bitterness and resentment into their hearts. They become disconnected from God and live a limited life where they blame everyone but themselves for their shortcomings. Don't let a hurt, a betrayal, or a delay; keep you from your destiny.  What you’re unable to see is God behind the scenes orchestrating things in your favour. Lining up the circumstances to lead you in the right direction, moving the wrong people out of the way. What may seem permanent is only temporary.

Spirituality" should only be called spirituality, when it does not come in between you and your fellow human being. "Spirituality" is only spirituality, when it creates genuine connections between you and your fellow human being. We have observed, since time immemorial, how "spirituality" has become a wall that is built in between person and other persons; bringing out segregation, distance and disconnection. When it is this, it is not spirituality, there is nothing spiritual about it. It is but a tool of the ego. Show me a person who can connect to a drunken man on the street, just as profoundly as he can connect to his chosen spiritual leaders, and I will point out to you a spiritual person. The purpose of spirituality is connection; not disconnection. Connection between mind and soul; then connection between yours and others' minds and souls. The most spiritual, highest state of the human being is the state of the small child: there is no knowledge of dissonance, no knowledge of separation. All is connected, all is there because it is so. There is pure joy in an ice cream cone. The small child is far more spiritual than your enlightened teachers. Climbing a mountain, whether metaphorical or physical, in order to segregate oneself into "spirituality", is not spirituality at all. If you must hide the candle flame from the darkness, then it is not really a candle flame, is it? If it disconnects you from another person, especially a person whom you love, then it is not spirituality; it is ego. True spirituality does not need numbers, does not need followers, does not feel the need to persuade. True spirituality acknowledges that you may do as you do and I may do as I do and our opinions of spirit and soul ought to be the very last thing that could ever come in between us. If it brings you together and lights the wicks within your souls, it is spirituality. If it brings you together even when there is nothing in common, it is spirituality. An ice cream cone, in its simple ability to fill everyone's heart with innocent joy, is true spirituality. Not your church. Not your doctrine. If it brings you back to the state of heart, of the small child, it is spirituality.

I more and more have come to feel that if anything positive could result from my teaching, any real benefit for any person, it should be that they get just a hint of the reality of their own former and future lives, that they diminish just the tiniest bit their usual „only this one life“ sense of cosmic disconnection, loneliness, alienation, and meaninglessness. I want everyone to be able to see more clearly their culturally common belief that, „My life only began when I was born and it ends when I die. So my responsibility to the universe is limited and even my responsibility to myself is limited. Nothing really matters because we‘ll be nothing in the end.“ If nothing else,I want to help you free yourself from that trap, that imprisoning way of thinking. To intensify your spiritual evolution, the first and most important step you must take is to embrace your boundlessness, take responsibility for your infinite continuity, and live your immortality here and now. (pp. 3-4, The Nature of Reality)

People often ask me what they can do to be more successful. I say disconnect. Even if just for a few hours. Unplug. Turn off your phone and Wi-Fi. Focus. Write. Practice. Create. That’s what’s rare and valuable these days. You get no competitive edge from consuming the same stuff everyone else is consuming. It’s rare, now, to focus. And it gives such better rewards.

They will tear away at all the careful layers they’ve constructed in their family and expose them for who they are. William won’t come out of it particularly well. Bledsoe disconnects from another

Propaganda only works when you get totally disconnected from real people and get connected to the screen. When you get to know real people, propaganda doesn’t stand a chance. It’s simply impossible to believe that everyone hates you when you see evidence to the contrary every day.

It just like a grain of sand it slipped away from our hand, Our destiny was lay shattered all across the land, we don’t know how to write a new purpose to live by when sorrow is getting invisible to the eye and the happiness is tasteless to the mouth , fate was already knocked us all down and how we’ll accept it all. With ourselves we are in a constant brawl Where did we go wrong ? That this life was blessed us with a curse so strong This world is as big as fate allows it to be Dying is a given…We have never heard of anyone escaping that destiny. Tear might drown us God will always upheld Journey without destination You’ll still search and found us in a place we wish we could’ve left. Our heartbeat almost disconnected from our heart keep saying we do breathe but why don’t we live. Hope it all our fault, yeah it ours, Losing wasn’t our mistake But our my mistake is that we gave up while keep losing. So if we keep gave up and not face those fears, each everyone will just end up same way, People who dream but don’t have courage to achieve it. So we all need to rise and fight again For us and our dream We will fight For our people that have dream But don’t have courage to achieve it. When we WIN WE CAN PROUDLY SAY THAT WE HAVE BEEN WEAK FOR A LONG TIME BUT NOW WE HAVE THE SUCCESS IN OUR HAND.

When I entered motherhood I walked through a little door, 'This Is Motherhood' it read. Everyone sat there in stripey tops Exchanging pleasantries. Things scattered all over the floor Bags over flowing Nervous smiles Connected by motherhood Disconnected by unspoken truths Then someone said, "I love being a Mum, but this is also really hard". Then suddenly I didn't feel alone anymore.

beyond them. The Six Diseases If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up. When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser. The Six Diseases are: The desire for victory I have to be the winner. If I don’t win, I’m a loser. If I win, everyone else is a loser. The desire to resort to technical cunning I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am? The desire to display all that has been learned Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it’s dumb). The desire to awe the enemy I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention. The desire to play the passive role I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn’t like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that’s important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you? The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I’m not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I’m not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I’m trying.

The neighbors in Mount Airy were not so different from working-class people across America. Politically disconnected and angry at those they perceived to be bilking the government, they were turning on each other rather than placing the blame on the exploitative pharmaceutical companies that seeded the epidemic and the power-hungry politicians who rolled out the red carpet for them while doing virtually nothing about growing inequality, poor health care coverage, and declining wages that affected everyone, whether they used drugs or not.

As you know, the ego’s primary stance is “me against you,” so life is reduced to battling to be right and proving that everyone who disagrees with you is a threat that must be eliminated. This is how you know you are stuck in the ego and disconnected from the spirit. As I’ve said earlier, the ego is consumed with survival, so anyone who doesn’t share your point of view becomes an enemy.

Tribalism becomes dangerous when it turns rivals into enemies, when it suppresses diverse thinking, and when it pushes individuals to do things they wouldn’t do on their own. This type of dangerous tribalism thrives in a sea of disconnected people looking for belonging. And who doesn’t crave belonging these days? We are disconnected from our neighbors, disconnected from nature, disconnected from animals, disconnected from the universe, and disconnected from most things that make us human. Tribes are the magnet that attracts the metal of our craving to belong. They assure us that we’re right and morally superior. They force us into a different reality where it becomes impossible to see—let alone comprehend—another worldview. We become “the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else,” as David Foster Wallace put it.

Everything connects, Grandpa had told me once, but not everyone hear's those connections. I could sense the fragmentation, the disconnection from others and from the earth. I knew every variety of it. The twisted viciousness of Neville, and Terence. The indifference of the Citizens who never spoke out about the Accords because they didn't think our suffering was theirs. The minions, who'd hated themselves so much they'd been willing to do anything to anybody to be part of the world that rejected them.

She has a strange, not unpleasant sense of disconnection from everyone, as if she is floating somewhere high above her head and operating her body by remote control. Stretch lips to smile. Fold palms of hands around pram handle. Tip head towards child in motherly fashion.

What pushed me back to technology wasn’t the communication or logistical inefficiencies, though they certainly added to the speed of my reunion, but rather the malignant sense of missing out on the world. Without social media, I’d become erased and uninvited, defriended and devalued, ostracized from an insistently mobile society; I was the guy everyone avoided, for fear he discover that he hadn’t been asked to the party, and this constant disconnection felt like an unreachable itch in the middle of my back.

Look - what society sells us is that you need self-esteem, motivation and the right self-image to even get started with achieving your goals and being happy. Now here’s the joke - you gain your self-esteem and self-confidence thanks to your effective action and the result it brings, not the other way around. You can actually start with ZERO or almost NEGATIVE self-confidence and a totally wrecked self-image (that’s what I did). That’s a result - not the cause. Do you lack self-worth, motivation and blah-blah-blah or what-not? Disconnect your behavior from your emotional life.

1. I am what I have. My possessions define me. 2. I am what I do. My achievements define me. 3. I am what others think of me. My reputation defines me. 4. I am separate from everyone. My body defines me as alone. 5. I am separate from all that is missing in my life. My life space is disconnected from my desires. 6. I am separate from God. My life depends on God’s assessment of my worthiness.

It was bitterly cold, and the darkness was overwhelming. Everyone who lived through that night was amazed by the intense clarity of the sky overhead and the brightness of the stars. They found themselves in a land without power, television, telephones, a place suddenly plucked up and folded into a pocket of time, disconnected from the twenty-first century.

I noticed that the more severe TMS sufferers had early disconnects with their mothers— some, so overwhelmed by the next fear of separation that they found themselves curled up in the fetal position, unable to move or speak. They had reverted back to an earlier, preverbal state of brain development. Most everyone I communicated with who was suffering from chronic pain had admitted that they had experienced early abandonment fear, or rejection. So there is some form of residual panic in TMSers from infancy —childhood separation anxiety, causing a chronicity of anxiety— most likely mother’s absence due to her attention being directed toward younger siblings, or an infinite number of other reasons.

Imagine you are standing in a circle of people. In the center of the circle, there is a source of light. But rather than facing the center and the light, you are standing with your back to the light, facing outward. When you stand this way, facing away from the light, all you can see is your own shadow. You cannot see the light. You can only look into your shadow. You cannot see the others in the circle with you. From what you can see, you are disconnected and alone in the dark. Now imagine that you turn around to face the light that is in the center of the circle. When you turn toward the light, you no longer see only darkness. When you turn toward the light, your shadow is behind you. When you turn toward the light, you can now see the other people who are standing with you. You can see that the light is shining on everyone and that you are all connected in its radiance. Making the decision to turn around, to turn away from shadow, to face the light—this is metanoia. metanoia.org