Nick — thank you for the references to meditation and empathy. I felt very excited when I read about this. I don’t have the background to fully appreciate the scientific aspects of this, but I’ll get what I need from it.

herbert browne — While I’m glad you’re thinking about poor people, I believe that the idea of the poor as being free of the burden of possessions is too romantic. (I have to rant a bit about this subject, but I don’t want you to think I’m directing the rant at you, because I’m really not.)

Chris Hedges discusses this romantic notion of the poor that is taught in religious environments, in particular, in LOSING MOSES ON THE HIGHWAY, where he describes his experience working in Mission Hill in Boston while at Harvard Divinity School. Having come from a similar religious experience, I remember the way so-called radical Christians in the 1960′s romanticized the poor (Blessed are the poor, etc.), imagining that they had so much more than the rich. And I remember what a seductive concept it was. Poor people don’t have the very basic requirements for survival. While the rich can afford to sit back and think about creativity and spirituality, for instance, two very popular subjects these days among people with a lot of leisure time, the poor, even when working two and three jobs, have their focus narrowed to finding the money for the T to work, dinner, and the toilet paper they need to buy that day. And if you’re not getting one of those pathetic salaries low-wage workers make, you spend a lot of time on the street, trying to keep going all day, desperate to find a way to buy or steal cheap food, aware of where all the public bathrooms are — and success in these areas, alone, begins to feel like the most you can hope for. Finding a job would be a miracle on the level of changing water into wine. It is a crushing experience that kills people by inches. The figure I heard this week was something like 16 million people in the United States are desperately poor, while the number of people who have serious “food insecurity” (the government’s term for hunger) is around 35 million. In this society, we’re taught that it’s not our problem: it’s the responsibility of these individuals. Not true. This country has become a hell for millions of people, who do not feel blessed, and by imagining that it’s alright, somehow, each of us determines that ALL of us will live in a hellish world rather than the rich world it could be, where we are all blessed. My thinking is idealistic, as it should be.

“as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there”

…can be understood to mean that ‘evil’ is phantasmical. No more ‘real’ than an apparition. As ‘real’ as a garden variety ‘monster’ lurking beneath a child’s bed.

I can’t guess whether it was your intent to illuminate that interpretation, but thank you nevertheless.

Wasn’t it Socrates – “The only evil is ignorance. Knowledge the only good.”?

I think this quote from Mr.Elon demonstrates just that.

Re: “If empathy stems from a part of the brain and science can detect it, why is it so impeded in everyday living? What facet of Buddhist meditation can we learn to practice, without having to adopt along with it the metaphysics that knuckleheaded science-minded dopes like me don’t find appealing?”-

Perhaps the framework of the metaphysical aspects are a sort of “protective” measure… something to inhibit a tendency to want to Rule the Earth, once one is endowed with these great mental capacities. It may have been apocryphal, but I recall stories of certain groups of SS officers being trained in meditational exercises by Tibetan Buddhist monks… ^..^

While reading a book review in the latest Discover magazine (March, 2007, page 65) I found this:

“This unusual syncretic exercise between (a scientific) academy and a major world religion (Buddhism) may rouse suspicion among hard-nosed skeptics, but an open mind here will be rewarded. The research does not concern metaphysical claims regarding reincarnation and karma; rather, it involves measurable, replicable effects of Buddhist mediation practices on the mind and brain. This rigorous mental training drives neuroplasticity in ways that awe many of the scientists studying it. Brain scans reveal that the neural activity of highly trained monks is off the charts, relative to meditation novices, in circuits that involve maternal love (caudate), empathy, (right insula), and feelings of joy and happiness (left prefrontal cortex). Even when these monks are not meditating, their brains bear the imprints of their psychic workout. The latter two structures, for instance, are anatomically enlarged. Based on results like these, (author Sharon) Begley holds out hope that our emotional lives and personalities, far from being carved in stone by our genes and early experiences, will prove as sculptalbe through mental training as our bodies are through physical training.”

The book is Train Your Brain, Change Your Mind

Also reviewed: The Brain That Changes Itself

The implications of that one review paragraph are, well, fascinating. For instance, although I knew that Buddhism is a mental training practice along with being a godless ‘faith’, I’m thrilled to read of the physical, anatomical effects of meditation. And I didn’t know that empathy stemmed from any one place in the brain, such as the insula. Wow. Food for thought, hmmm?

If empathy stems from a part of the brain and science can detect it, why is it so impeded in everyday living? What facet of Buddhist meditation can we learn to practice, without having to adopt along with it the metaphysics that knuckleheaded science-minded dopes like me don’t find appealing?