I think it is useful to imagine that within all of us exists a room that by nature is silent. I will call it the Room of Remembrance, because when you allow yourself to remain silent and still, it will fill with all the emotions that suffuse you, which is all the emotions from the past that you have not processed, and all the emotions of the present which you have postponed feeling. Now is the time.
Most people, myself certainly included, put a stereo in this room playing random noises that prevents the mists of the past and the present–including present forebodings with respect to the future–from slowly penetrating it, filling it, suffusing it. Distractions fill our days. They fill the empty room with nothings that hold back the somethings.
I honestly think people in the past were in general much less anxiety ridden and fearful–even if they were often delusional as we see things now, they were delusional in cohesive groups–because silence was much more common.
Our world is built perfectly to enable people to remain disconnected emotional children even across long lifetimes. You have to wake up once, to begin waking up again. To learn how to learn you have to remember that learning is possible. Most people have forgotten this. Their rooms are filled with clutter, junk, cliches and other people’s ideas and feelings.