Historian Daniel Boorstin called the human animal the "asking animal." Our instinct to question everything is what drives us to grow and thrive. Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. All too easily, however, we can become distracted, scared, frustrated, gullible, cynical, or just plain inattentive. We suppress our natural questing spirit. We plow ahead without taking a good, hard look at what we're doing and why. And whether we realize it or not, we buy into ready-made systems of thought, habit, and belief sold to us by our culture, families, friends, and associates. We fall into step with the herd and almost unthinkingly adhere to whatever cult(ure) we're brought up in, unconsciously living out our received beliefs and assumptions, for the most part without question or examination.
— Lama Surya Das, The Big Questions