Quotes by Gary Wright

“Gary Weber.””

“The central role of clinicians conducting assessments should be to answer specificquestions and make clear, specific, and reasonable recommendations to help improvefunctioning.””

“The commission paid attention as Clouser made his case against the offensive sign at Menard Park, then voted to have the sign removed. Moreover, they designated a square block, bordered by Avenues P and Q and 41st and 42nd streets, as a playground for black children. This was a magnificent, though short-lived, victory for Galveston’s blacks. Unfortunately, it created a backlash among a group of white racists. White vigilantes burned crosses at the site of the proposed park, and held a series of indignation meetings. Eventually, they forced a referendum vote, the first in Galveston’s history. By a two-to-one margin the commission was overturned, and the site became a park for white children instead. To placate the blacks the commission voted to turn a second site on what had been the old Lasker homestead into Wright Cuney Park for blacks. Most blacks accepted the compromise, but not John Clouser, who waited a chance to strike back at the power structure.””

“The excerpt featured Gary Weber, whom we met in chapter 11. He’s the one who participated in that Yale brain-scan study and whose default mode network, it turned out, was inordinately quiet even when he wasn’t meditating. In my Bloggingheads.tv dialogue with Weber, I asked him about a line of his I recalled reading, something to the effect of: The bad news is that you don’t exist; the good news is that you’re everything. Elaborating on that passage, Weber said to me, “If you’re nothing, if you disappear, you can then be everything. But you can’t be everything unless you are nothing. It just logically follows that’s the case.””