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Tolerating other people
May. 31st, 2012 01:08 pmNot long in the completely unrelated IRC channel #reddit-mfa (male fashion advice) alex4nder said "Darxus: the solution to existential despair is losing attachment". I didn't think this applied to me, but tried to figure out what I might be attached to. I thought I do have a tendency to hate people I'll never even end up interacting with.
Then I read that article I’m Christian, unless you’re gay. And while I have no problem with gay people, and I'm not generally fond of established religions, it said some interesting stuff about all religions teaching everybody to love everybody. Which seemed like an interesting potential alternative to hating people. One that might be a more pleasant way to live.
And a coworker recently said something about some possibly Buddhist teaching about negative emotions being entirely not useful. I still need to read the stuff she forwarded to me.
And there was a quote on reddit: "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."- Buddha.
None of this stuff is entirely new to me, but I've been trying it out, and liking it so far.
And it worries me that our world gets worse because people do things like this, subconsciously. Avoid paying attention to things that are wrong so they can get on with their lives instead of being miserable. So police in the US are above the law and get away with brutalizing and killing innocent people, and the people in the top 0.1% of wealth run the government, increasing their ability to hoard wealth, increasing their control over the government, so the US is ranked 93rd on income inequality.
Then I read that article I’m Christian, unless you’re gay. And while I have no problem with gay people, and I'm not generally fond of established religions, it said some interesting stuff about all religions teaching everybody to love everybody. Which seemed like an interesting potential alternative to hating people. One that might be a more pleasant way to live.
And a coworker recently said something about some possibly Buddhist teaching about negative emotions being entirely not useful. I still need to read the stuff she forwarded to me.
And there was a quote on reddit: "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned."- Buddha.
None of this stuff is entirely new to me, but I've been trying it out, and liking it so far.
And it worries me that our world gets worse because people do things like this, subconsciously. Avoid paying attention to things that are wrong so they can get on with their lives instead of being miserable. So police in the US are above the law and get away with brutalizing and killing innocent people, and the people in the top 0.1% of wealth run the government, increasing their ability to hoard wealth, increasing their control over the government, so the US is ranked 93rd on income inequality.
