Excerpt from Shambhala Sun--May 2014

On distraction.  It is not just a modern obsession. According to Buddhism, it is the ego’s fundamental defense mechanism. What we are actually distracting ourselves from—what we are protecting ourselves against—is the open space and full intensity of reality.
From the ego’s point of view, enlightenment is the worst possible news.

That to me is the most wonderful thing about any vital spiritual practice. It doesn’t necessarily say, stop doing that. Or if it does, it says, here’s how to stop doing that. Because you can only get so good with sheer will power. You have to look into the way things actually work to empower yourself to do better.
Here is a wonderful metaphor I sometimes use with my students. Imagine you are on a cruise ship in heavy seas. You’re the only person who’s stable, and everybody else is moving around in a crazy way. You decide to have mercy on them, and that’s pretty good, right?
But I think a better model is to imagine you’re on a cruise ship and the surface is made of ice, and you’re carrying six trays, and you’re wearing roller skates, and you’re drunk and so is everyone else.
So nobody’s the boss and the situation is unstable. There’s no fixed point. When I think of life that way, it sums up the proper level of mercy and tolerance. We really don’t know what’s going on, so our feelings of sympathy or empathy is related to our mutual lostness.
                         Everybody’s lost at once.