Really well articulated.
Haredis are innocent? Their vision for a the state of Israel is revanchist and purely Jewish. Their votes are squarely in a right-wing corner.
Only half?
Ok, what does that actually mean when you apply the sound bite to reality? What are your specific expectations for “the people” as individuals?
Much more dubious is Buddhism’s claim that perceiving yourself as in some sense unreal will make you happier and more compassionate. Ideally, as the British psychologist and Zen practitioner Susan Blackmore writes in The Meme Machine, when you embrace your essential selflessness, “guilt, shame, embarrassment, self-doubt, and fear of failure ebb away and you become, contrary to expectation, a better neighbor.” But most people are distressed by sensations of unreality, which are quite common and can be induced by drugs, fatigue, trauma, and mental illness as well as by meditation.
I find this particular angle of criticism trite.
Are most people distressed by sensations of unreality? Maybe. Some, for sure. But so what?
Isn’t the sensation of distress a sensation to move through by perceiving its “unrealness”? Seems to me the discomfort is, in many cases, the finger pointing at the moon. Be with it and the opportunity to disappear your suffering about it arises.
If you disappear enough suffering, what’s left? Something new… new opportunities for being… opportunities for compassion and wisdom… and those opportunities would almost certainly have never arisen inside the prison of sensation escapism.
You don’t need to be angry to speak and act.
I mean, maybe you feel like you do, but to anyone else reading this—that’s a trap.
Anger is poison.
Find a way to be happy and live well and stand for what matters to you.
“If you don’t apply your morals consistently, don’t bother applying them at all”…?
Human beings are not rational actors. It’s a recipe for burnout and depression to walk around expecting them to be.
For anybody feeling the way parent commenter feels, do yourself a favor and let it go. We’re human beings. What we are is what we are.
Parent comment is the best thing I’ve read all week.
Oh, that’s the complaint?
Yea that tracks for me too. Well said.
I appreciate your sincerity. Please accept mine:
What do you think the vast majority of people care about?
Skill Windows
I’ve read that you can teach a child perfect pitch (how to recognize the key of a tone without reference to the sound of a known key) before the age of 4.
What other skill windows exist that I can take advantage of to teach my kid before the window closes?
Dad reflexes failed over the weekend
We got lucky.
My 2-year old is a climber, which I’ve happily encouraged. We went to a new park over the weekend. He naturally gravitated to the biggest play structure with a tall slide and a rope net to get up to the landing of the slide. The landing was about 10-12 feet high.
Youngster climbed up the rope net onto the landing and slid down once, twice… but on time #3 he slipped while swinging his foot onto the landing.
I had prepped myself to catch him if he fell backwards but to my horror he bounced off a rope and then fell through the rope net under the structure the whole 10-12 foot height. With the rope net in between us, there was no way to get to him in time. He landed on his back on the wood chips of the playground.
And in that moment I was scared out of my goddamn mind.
But. Fortunately. We got lucky.
I say we got lucky because:
- his landing was perfect. His lower back took the contact and then transferred the momentum to his upper back and neck, in the way martial artists train to fall.
- the ground was a thick bed of wood chips that clearly absorbed enough of the energy
- the impact on him caused him to bite his tongue and……that’s it. He cried, of course, and bled a bit from that small wound, but after 20 minutes or so had normalized and was ready to try the rope net again. I let him, holding on to him lightly this time, in support of him moving past the creation of a deeper trauma response than what he already had just gone through. And he did the route 2 more times.
It’s been two days since then. A healthcare professional checked up on him yesterday and gave a thumbs up. Youngster has gone on with life like nothing happened. I’m the one still processing the fear and horror. 😂 so it goes.
I will say my reflex blind spots have humbled me a bit. I’ll still encourage adventure but I’ll be making a bigger effort to figure out how I can reduce risk and catch what I might be missing.