To reply to violence with more violence just means peace gets further away for everyone. The children in Gaza who watch their playmates get killed are tomorrow’s hardened Hamas supporters. I don’t think that what Israel is doing is a measured response… it is an emotional response.
I remember once seeing Thich Nhat Hanh giving a retreat on peace to a mixed group of Israelis and Palestinians. I thought it was beautiful, a life changing beacon of hope for those involved.
The horrendous situation in Gaza...
( I know the history of Palestine and the issues faced by its people (both Palestinian and Jews) there is a complex one and dates back many years...)
Yes the attack on Israeli settlers by Hamas and the amount killed and the taking of hostages was horrendous and my heart goes out to the families who have lost loved ones, but Israel's response, the indiscriminate slaughter of over 15 thousand mostly innocent Palestinian civilians, including over 5,000 children and more than 3,000 women was uncalled for , it's barbaric, yet most Western governments do nothing but pay lip service...to the heart wrenching scenes from Gaza...
From what I've seen there are many Jewish people around the world (including Israelis) who are appalled at the heavy handed use of force by the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) and strongly voice their opposition...and if non Jewish people voice their concerns about the more often than not brutal tactics used by the Israeli military toward Palestinian civilians, they are labelled anti Semitic ...which is ridiculous, but it has become a weapon used by the present Israeli government against non Jewish people who have concerns about how the Palestinian people are being treated...
I have nothing against the Israelis people who want to protect what they call their homeland, but sadly the use of extreme violence by the Jewish state will no doubt lead to a backlash where more cases of Jewish people being targeted around the world, even the Jewish people who oppose Israel's present government and their polices when it comes to the treatment of Palestinian people...
And as usual the first casualty of any conflict/war is the truth... but in the case of the suffering of thousands of Palestinian people at the hands of the IDF the Truth is undeniable ...
Sadly this is what happens when hatred, anger and greed AKA ignorance clouds the mind....
May all involved find peace soon.... ...but I won't hold my breath....
@Jeroen said:
One thing I would add to the thread: the Buddha did condemn theater and games as being a cause for heedlessness, might he not also have been negative about martial arts as training?I am tending to agree these days that once you end up in a physical fight the important part of the conflict which is a meeting of hearts and minds is already lost. I’ve not been in a fight since my school days, it hasn’t been necessary.
Equating martial arts with heedlessness is a fundamental misunderstanding of martial arts.
Now if you refer to MMA on television, I'd say you're spot on. Differentiating real martial arts from entertainment that calls itself martial arts is a big challenge to the art.
I am glad you haven't needed to fight. I've practiced martial arts for 16 years (nearly as long as I've been an admin here) and I've never needed to fight either! The real battle is within, and martial arts is another tool to help.
Did you know the person who brought both Buddhism and martial arts to China is the same person? I practice a lineage of martial arts that believes you cannot separate meditation from the art, regardless of your beliefs.
For a while I've had a sort of instinctive reaction against some of the ways trauma is being used and talked about today. This 5 minute segment of The Psychology Podcast gets to the heart of my objection. Its not that trauma doesn't exist, its that it gets presented in a way that traps people in a victim narrative, rather than teaching them to grow and learn.
...By going deep into that (trauma) as a victim, they're disempowering themselves and that's a problem, you know. Because then they're not accessing their inner core strength and belief in themselves...
In addition to that a quote of the day on the Insight Timer app came up that related to this.
By telling yourself the story that you've been traumatized rather than you've overcome or grown creates a narrative in your mind of what the world is like. A specific example that sticks in my mind was in the Dan Harris interview with Gabor Mate, where he talks about the trauma of his youth leading him to strive and become a therapist. Its a true story, but is that story he tells himself more true than a story of gratitude about your success in life and a desire to let go of the suffering that striving causes any less true? And which story in the present lends itself to a happier more meaningful state of mind?
The human condition seems predicated on a self-serving dominance of thought, whose primary purpose has been the maintaining of its own rulings' storyline. This is a description of a coup of the mind where our thoughts have been habitually promoting themselves above all of the incoming data available from all of our other sense gates.
Meditation simply offers a level playing field where a potential reversal of such power imbalances can occur with no one sense gate getting preferential support in seeking dominance over another.
Neither attaching, rejecting or ignoring our thoughts,
a sleeper can awaken to an equanimity beyond the limits of it's former attachments.
From a me-first agenda, arising thoughts remain deeply intertwined in an identity and the self-oriented interests that they reflect.
While such thoughts may feel powerful for the emotional overlay that our identity imparts to them, they are equally hobbled by the same self-limiting interests.
From a more selfless agenda, arising thoughts, not being so tied to a self-identity, are able to unfold with freedoms that better represent the underlying fluidity of all truths.
When meditation allows one to objectively observe all of our data flows without our habituated editing of those data flows getting in thoughts way, then our interactions with life will simply reflect those truths.
Just don't confuse the detachment from thoughts with inactivity, apathy, indecisiveness or with giving it values below or above of what you also are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting or feeling.
The most common difference between mindfulness within stillness and mindfulness in activity.....is one of objectivity.
Mindfulness dependent on stillness, describes an attachment to one's mentality.
Mindfulness when independent from such attachments describes objectivity.
In some Zen traditions, a teacher might suggest that you do kinhin until the objectivity in stillness is indistinguishable from that which you experience in movement.
Of course, since I've just tested positive for Covid 19 and have a fever, who knows what gibberish I'm currently penning here?
I worked in healthcare for years. My wife worked in healthcare her entire career until retiring a few weeks ago. In the critical care fields, ICU, CCU, Neurotrauma, etc it is an overwhelmingly widely held perspective among the caregivers that euthanasia should be much, much more widely available. These are people who see the prolonged suffering firsthand, and care for the patients and their families.
Every human life will end. Every single one. Euthanasia has no impact on that inevitable outcome; instead it compassionately establishes the how and when.
Cruelly and deliberately prolonging agony, pain, and suffering — How can we justify it?
@Linc said:
... I'm focused on making some new software that rethinks how moderation works and will reach out to folks when it's time.
Well that's me looking forward to a lucrative redundancy package... 😁
What do people think about the normalization of euthanasia?
Life necessitates the consumption of other life to exist.
For this Buddhist, the 1st precept is not an ideal that offers an escape from that truth.
It is a teaching that asks a practitioner to minimize the suffering caused by that necessity whenever possible. Otherwise, I'd be a Jain.
A practice that is having to address the question of euthanasia need only ask whether an individual considering euthanasia for themselves will result in more or less suffering for all concerned.
The answer is probably different for each case. Trying to reduce it to a black-and-white pronouncement of righteousness for everyone seems the more obvious breakage of the 1st precept that you expressed so much concern about.
It is not just the people of the "West" who seek to justify whatever they want.