Best Of
Re: Don’t be a Buddhist, be a better whatever-you-are
I believe that for some people the beneficial/inspiring/happy option will be to be better whatever-they-are, while for others it will be to convert. Others still might go back-and-forth. No general rule here.
The DL's sentiment under such conditions, not to force any option, is for me extremely commendable.
marcitko
Yes, this meditation, of a kind.
Really, I have no desire to start a discussion. I watched a video on the Web yesterday, and through it, experienced a state that would, I am sure, been impossible to know otherwise. If I succeed in uploading the video, you will know why, if you watch it. However, it is so powerful that, if I don't succeed in uploading it, here is the webpage: 
Do take the trouble to watch, it's only just over three minutes! I feel that it comes into the category of a meditation, hence my posting under this heading. If the video does not appear underneath these words, I did not find a way to upload it. Others don't have any problem doing this, but there is no button to click, or any way of doing it that is obvious.
Metta to all!
Finding more opportunities for generosity in daily life
There are only a few immediately obvious ways to be generous in my daily life but I want to discover more.
Some immediate recollections of things that have given me feel-goods...
Donating stuff I don't use any more
Nurturing some plant life
Greeting my neighbors warmly
Absorbing shock waves of family gatherings
Forgiving myself for my mistakes
Any others?
Re: Is being empathic a good thing?
My take on it is not that being empathetic is bad. I think the solution for people who are sensitive and empathic isn't to shut oneself off, but to deepen one's practice of no self or letting go. Such that the negative energy has little place to land and can pass through more quickly.
The analogy I relate it to is that of Chogyam Trungpa. That the practice is like the sense of constantly falling but then realizing that there is no place to land.
Yet another way to think about it is that the feelings are even more so not yours. I find when a negative emotion is overwhelming me from an outside source that it still often feels like it is your own experientially and its easy to get caught up in it and spin out, reinforcing the feeling. It is often harder to process and let go of when you're not familiar with the feeling, to me it can feel like swimming upstream. I'll say letting go often does get easier with familiarity. And on the positive side, even with negativity directed at you it does offer great insight.
person
The nature of jealousy
Last night I had an experience while I was half asleep… I was going to dig, into a great glowing mass, because “I wanted what they had”. It struck me this morning that this was an insight into the nature of jealousy, that it hangs together with the concept of possessing things, desire, my-making, and perceiving in others these things.
As soon as you acknowledge the idea of ownership, that things that you perceive are owned by people, then you embark on the journey of ego expansion through owning more, of becoming somehow greater because all these things are “yours”. You see that things are other people’s but not yours, and then you are inspired by a thought of how wonderful it would be to have them for yourself.
The truth is that there is no such thing as ownership, not even such a thing as ‘I’. The ego clamouring that it wants more, that it wants to be bigger by ‘owning the things outside itself’, that it wants to do whatever it likes despite the impermanence of the world, is just a shadow of desire, and itself casts off further shadows of jealousy and other darknesses. But the reality is that we do not really own things, we just use them for a while.
I find it so beneficial to explore these relationships… it is like by understanding the way they fit together, I can let go of them. For me, these insights and the working out of them are the true gift of the dhamma, freedom from the chains of the mind.
Jeroen
Re: Season's Greetings From Aotearoa (Down Under )
@Fosdick said:
Has anyone else noticed a sort of sketchy resemblance between Hotei and Santa Clause?
Hmm a tubby jolly fellow carrying a sack full of gifts for children, then yes ...but thus have I heard... Santa tends to be judgemental when it comes to handing out gifts..he only rewards children who are well behaved... 
Shoshin1