Patrick Barker

“Many others do not make this transition so seamlessly: they become enamored of the observing self that beginning meditation empowers and use that capacity for self-observation as a way to avoid personal responsibility. They observe their own pain, but not their contribution to its making.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“As cartoonist Jules Feiffer puts it: “I grew up to have my father’s looks, my father’s speech patterns, my father’s posture, my father’s walk, my father’s opinions and my mother’s contempt for my father.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

“There’s a big difference between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life. Certainly the experiences that psychedelics provide, while significant, perhaps even uniquely powerful, are generally still transitory unless you have a prepared mind. I think of a life lived as creating compost or humus in which advanced experiences can take root. If a perfect master could touch the forehead of an eight-year-old, youthful and unformed, and instill one minute of enlightenment, over time that experience would fade and so would not have a truly lasting transformative effect on the child’s life—even though the person might still remember it. If that same one minute of enlightenment were provided to an older person who’s been a meditator for fifty years, it could be the tipping point that initiates profound advancement.”
― Neal M. Goldsmith, Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development

“Common to all schools of thought, from Sri Lanka to Tibet, the unifying theme of the Buddhist approach is this remarkable imperative: “Pay precise attention, moment by moment, to exactly what you are experiencing, right now, separating out your reactions from the raw sensory events.” This is what is meant by bare attention: just the bare facts, an exact registering, allowing things to speak for themselves as if seen for the first time, distinguishing any reactions from the core event.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective