Best Of

Tough situation to be in… but getting drunk and stealing is not the way to get yourself out of it, it just leads to more trouble. Still if you’re so desperate that you have to steal shoes then things must be pretty bad.

On my jolk this morning, I saw an intoxicated young Maori woman approach two young couples who were setting up a sun shade tent on the beach , at first I thought the couples were also Maori, but when I got closer I saw that one of the women was wearing a Hijab and they looked Middle Eastern...

I couldn't quite hear the conversation the Maori woman was having with them, I just heard her greet them in a somewhat drunken friendly manner, then all of a sudden things turned nasty, the young woman started to angrily abuse them and took a swipe at one of the woman...

The two women in the group had to hold one of the guys back, as he stepped in to defend the women who was being attacked...

As I was approaching the group, the Maori woman left...I asked if the couples were okay, they seemed quite shaken up by the incident... They said they were okay and thanked me for asking...

And as I made my way up the same stairs to the road which the young Maori woman had walked up, I was hoping to have a friendly chat with her to calm her down, when a police car turned up, a young police officer got out of the car and approached the young woman and started to question her...

At first I though another person at the beach had seen the incident and called the police, but it turned out, someone had called the police because the intoxicated young woman had also stolen a pair of shoes from one of the houses on the beachfront...

She ended up taking the shoes off and giving them to the officer who gave them back to the person from the house where she had stolen them ...The owner of the shoes had been following the young woman...

It was such a sad thing to witness, a troubled and hurt young Maori woman lashing out at the world, the young Muslim couples who became the targets of her hurt and frustration and the Pakeha woman who had her shoes stolen now feeling a sense of guilty that the police had arrested the young Maori woman...

Sadly I think this may have been the same young Maori woman who came to our office last week, (I wasn't on duty at the time) because she had been sleeping rough on one of the beaches and a local good Samaritan who felt sorry for her told her to come to our office, we provide clients with the contact details of organisations who can help them...

She had just spent a year in rehab getting herself clean, hoping to reunite with her partner and children who live on the island, however her partner had not told her that during her time in rehab he had found a new partner and she had moved in with him and the children...and he no longer wanted anything to do with her....

Thanks for posting @person,...

I watch the video a couple of weeks ago and watched it again just now....

The ability for both groups to show some empathy for both view points is the key point of the 'middle ground' video...

Something which both the Israeli government and Hamas seem to be in short supply of ...

Empathy vs compassion: A Buddhist perspective

Empathy is what happens when we experience another person’s emotions as if they were our own. When they feel relief, joy or elation, we do too. When they feel depressed, ditto. Neuroscientists tell us that, with empathy, the same parts of our brain are activated as if we were going through the same thing as the other person. Their feelings become ours.

Is it any surprise that if we’re surrounded by the chronically miserable, desperate, or anxious, as empaths we are going to suffer from their torment? But in so doing, we face exhaustion, maybe the impulse to flee, and ultimately perhaps even to lash out at the source of our vicariously induced distress.

Compassion, by contrast, comes from a very different place. Our wish to help the other person is motivated by love, which in Buddhism is defined as the wish to give happiness to others. We understand their suffering because we have suffered too. And based on that empathetic foundation, our wish is to help them get out of their pit, to whatever extent that may be possible. We are not taking on their pain as our own. In fact our experience of reality is ideally one of boundless peace and wellbeing.

As benevolent and calmly objective carers, we can offer far more than if we are caught up in empathetic emotion. Interestingly, this is something that seems to come with medical training. I have no doubt that the medics and psychs who come to our Buddhist centre are compassionate people, but I also know from observation over the years that, in a crisis, they keep their heads. The ability of someone to emote is quite different from their ability to take compassionate action. Emoting may very well be an obstacle!

Neuroscience shows that very different networks of the brain are activated when we focus on the wish to benefit someone else, versus empathising with their suffering. Ground-breaking work by Dr. Richard J. Davison of the University of Wisconsin-Madison using an fMRI machine, showed that when we focus our compassionate attention on the wellbeing of others, we ourselves are likely to experience a state of profound wellbeing.

Two caring people, in other words, may be working in similar circumstances helping others, and while one of them faces despair and exhaustion, the other thrives. The difference could be empathy versus compassion.

@Shoshin1 said:
The Occupation Of The American Mind

I watched the whole docu in the end, but found the incessant repetition of violent images from history to be hard to sit through. The images used over the actual talking points are more a history of the media coverage, so there’s a fair share of bodies and blood.

It makes me wonder why I have to know about a 1982 massacre in Israeli-occupied Lebanon and watch the images of that atrocity in order to understand that the Israelis in the US embarked on a program to control the media.

But the other thing to note is the basic bankruptcy of people’s ethics. Both the media, the marketing, the people who do the lobbying, the politicians, they are all motivated by money and not by honesty and truth. The days of the freedom of the press are long gone.

@person said:
I believe either now or in your past you were either an immigrant in America or are now an immigrant in the Netherlands.

I was an immigrant in the States, and have my experiences being part of a group in the communes where I grew up. I reckon I’m probably a bit too alternative to be considered a “solid citizen”, which is fine by me.

And, children in the experimental classroom rated themselves as significantly happier.

This is interesting to me. Maybe human beings are happier being part of a tribe.