#481 Why Become Educated - through School AND Meditation?

     To know: "How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. ...
      The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.
     That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."                                           David Foster Wallace

      David Foster Wallace's entire 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Speech (below) is WELL worth 22 minutes of your time.