Flow of mental distraction

By sitting still for half an hour each morning and each evening you will meet the crowd. And in meeting it you will free yourself from it. The inner crowd is made up of all the splintered selves that the ego keeps producing; all the voices that clamour competitively for recognition, for self-assertion, for domination; all those wounded and broken parts of ourselves, the little bits of our experience, the dangling ends of unfinished stories; the desires and fears with their unrestrained voices crying for the unattainable. The crowd is always desperate because it feels that what it longs for is not there — whereas its desires can only be attained when it becomes whole, becomes a single self. The noise of the crowd in us is the flow of mental distraction.

The Selfless Self by Laurence Freeman OSB