I'm not 100% sure that the Jewish religion can be associated with Israeli foreign policy. Israel would be fighting with Palestine whether any Jewish believers lived there or not.
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-n...
100% agree. I was born a Buddhist and was a devout Buddhist until I was 13-14 years old (then I became an atheist). I went to monasteries for weeks on end to meditate. But what I found was that meditation is not for me. I cannot get rid of my recurring mental sufferings (anger, fear/anxiety, jealousy/envy, self-/guilt) just by spending more and more time in meditation.
One thing that I found extremely useful is stoicism (at least in the way I interpret it). I simply learned to accept that these bad feelings come and go, and that is the nature of being a human. There's nothing wrong with having such bad feelings, which I personally call as 'bad karma'. I just need to be aware of them (which meditation supposedly helps detect, but I find myself being able to do without meditating equally well) and be at peace with the fact that they come and go in my life as a human.
What is in my control is how long I dwell on these moments of bad karma. For that, I always try to get myself out of these bad-karmic situations by trying to see things in a bigger picture or in longer term (e.g., 'Well, I am not making as much money as I want to now, but that's okay because even if I don't earn more than what I do now, I can still retire pretty comfortably by living a minimalistic life. Alternatively, I just need to work maybe 2-3 more years with the current income to save up to the level of savings at which I want to retire. In the worst case scenario in which I get sick/disabled, I will just learn to adapt as human beings and other living beings are observed to do in adversity.') Trying to see things from such larger perspective makes me feel pretty content and thus, releases me from a lot of anxiety issues.
Honest question, not looking to berate you.
I meditated to find Nirvana back then. But as I grew older, I realize that Nirvana is interpreted very differently even among Buddhist scholars, and thus is a relative/personal term. Nowadays, my definition for Nirvana is just to have a day without a lot of bad karma (hate, jealousy, anger, fear, anxiety) in my head. If I don't meet that daily goal, that's okay as well. For that, I find myself not needing to meditate and just need to be aware to distract my mind if I catch it in a state of bad karma. Maybe meditation will help some people catch their mind of dealing with bad karma, and maybe that approach might yield better results than me simply trying to be more self-aware and be more stoic. :)
But enough about me. About 1 in 7 US children are food insecure [1] and will go hungry at some point this year. One in 9 girls and 1 in 53 boys under the age of 18 experience sexual abuse or assault at the hands of an adult.[2] There is a lot of pain experienced by the world, and there's no age cutoff.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States#Ch... [2]David Finkelhor, Anne Shattuck, Heather A. Turner, & Sherry L. Hamby, The Lifetime Prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse and Sexual Assault Assessed in Late Adolescence, 55 Journal of Adolescent Health 329, 329-333 (2014)
My point is that the author claiming "I don’t think this last idea even crosses most of our minds" seems off given that "change yourself not the world" is arguably the dominant theme regarding suffering for most philosophies throughout human history, from religions to pop-psychology self-help books (even the idea of "self-help" implies working on yourself to solve your problems).
Even deeper, the clear divide between the "external" and "internal" is pretty suspect in nearly all Western philosophical traditions in at least the last 200 years. This is something I would expect a PhD in Philosophy at Oxford to at least be passingly familiar with.
Yes, there are external events that are beyond one's control, but often one's reaction to those events is amenable to reason and/or meditation.
(A thought expressed, e.g., by Epictetus: "ταράσσει τοὺς ἀνθρώπους οὐ τὰ πράγματα, ἀλλὰ τὰ περὶ τῶν πραγμάτων δόγματα" — people are disturbed not by events, but by their opinions about events).
The author is referring to the common man, whom we in the west have been conditioned to think much more highly of than is evidently deserved.
It should not be controversial to say that people by and large are ignorant.
There is an entire community within instagram that is focused on this. I think they call themselves the "positivity movement". I have a cousin who is heavily involved in it. They mean well but as a skeptical outsider I always find it a bit dogmatic; they tend to focus to much on improving point of view without the concomitant work on the material self.
Really? I'm pretty sure there are thousands of years of philosophical and religious traditions that teach something along the lines of "looking for happiness in the external world is a bad idea, instead try working on yourself".
I mean the four noble truths of Buddhism, a religion with roughly 0.5 billion followers, are (paraphrased):
1. There is suffering
2. That suffering is caused by attachment to worldly things
3. The way to get rid of that suffering is to work on not being attached to those things
4. The best way to work on not being attached to those things is, surprise surprise, Buddhism.
But this idea seems pretty prevalent in pop-psychology as well. So I'm not sure who the we in "our minds" is, but I think even most instagram celebrates of realized that maybe "self work" is a good idea.
Unfortunately there are some philosophers that, in the last 300 years, have started to question whether there is such a clear divide between the external and internal world... but I don't expect most people to spend their time reading a lot of philosophy.