I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar).
When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and asked how to take actual action to help them out.
Instead of engaging with the real life actual emergency right in front of them where they could practice actually doing loving-kindness people wanted to discuss how they could "use their suffering as an object of meditation". Few even stood up to look. Averting their eyes from suffering was a very strange response.
It was unreal, I'm used to 90% of the people in a room during an emergency being stunned and uncertain (but attentive and worried), but there's always a few people who jump into action... there are times for action and times for contemplation and emergencies are not times to work on self-improvement.
It was eye opening -- thankfully one of them had a more normal response and had experience so we were able to connect them to the Episcopalian church next door which operated a shelter and had people there trained in how to help. It was disturbing though that the people in the class who spoke so eloquently about the importance of kindness and helping others, who were actively practicing mindfulness and learning about themselves, had such a strange response to an emergency 20 feet away.
One might almost describe it as faking being nice while changing little on the inside. Hippie and good person camouflage. A way to feel empathy so hard and so calmly that you don't feel any urgency to take actual action.
Over my career, I've also seen some variations of this theme.
A group of experienced, task-saturated senior auditors were pulled in from the field to attend an anti-stress seminar. During the guided meditation, an intense but non-destructive earthquake hit (in a high-rise building in downtown Los Angeles). It was the auditors who kept their wits and made clear decisions to calmly exit the structure. In marked contrast, the stress-reduction instructors were a wreck.
A friend and I used to go out to eat on a regular basis. He reasonably decided to change his diet to more healthy foods. For all I know, it did improve his health, but I did observe that at a ball game, he opted for a hamburger and then his body rebelled. He had lost the ability to eat commonplace foods.
Among meditators (of which I was one), I observed a heighten sensitivity to being knocked off kilter by anything or anyone that conflicted with the world view of the practitioner.
My friends who were into body building routinely lifted weights for many hours a week, but when suitcases or scuba tanks need to be carried, there a was strong aversion. I surmised that the unbalanced loads greatly threw-off how they had trained themselves to lift weights with good form.
Among Python programmers who use Black and isort in order to improve the appearance of code, it is common to become intolerant of code that they used to consider perfectly readable. Likewise, it is common to become highly judgmental of people who don't use that tooling (and even more so with type annotations where proponents seem to have an almost religious fervor).
I don't really know what conclusion to draw from these events, but there is something of interest going on.
> it is common to become intolerant of code that they used to consider perfectly readable
Before this tooling, my experience is that people are less tolerant of whatever isn't they prefer. If familiarity breeds readability, why not adopt a standard?
I also assume your characterisation is sensationalised to fit the comparison: all valid python is readable, but some can be read faster, and more importantly - errors are easier to spot, if its in a familiar format.
wrt the lifting scenario, I'd have to ask what "strong aversion" means; presumably good form is intended for situations that you repetitively lift weights, where long-term unbalanced lifting would cause damage. If that's not the case, maybe we should all lift with good form?
Oh, thanks for this insight, it's a useful one to me.
I would totally believe that it was more an unpracticed response while in a relaxed and learning state of mind than anyone's actual underlying meanness, these were nice folks as far as I could tell otherwise. That one situation was just astoundingly weird.
And indeed, it wasn't a person in the class that responded, it was an assistant who had done the material many times. The teacher didn't seem to know what to do either, I think it may be as you say that the assistant just happened to be in a "run the stuff" state of mind rather than a "teach" or "listen/contemplate" state of mind.
That definitely would explain a lot, a mental context switch takes a significant amount of time and meditation absolutely can do that. It would also explain why I felt like a bit of an alien bringing it to anyone's attention, I had arrived ten minutes late from another activity so I wasn't "in the zone" yet.
At least, I've yet to hear a better explanation. I've attributed it to long ingrained habits showing up in class because in no other location with the same group (edit: not the same people, the same organization) did I encounter something similar. But that can certainly be coincidence.
I did point this disconnect out to the class, and I think any Buddhist would not take awareness of this response as a criticism rather than an observation and opportunity to improve. If any of us were perfect there'd be no need for a class in the first place.
I think in that case, being in San Francisco, if you stopped to engage every crazy person you saw, it's all you'd be doing with your life and would probably end of covered in shit or stabbed. Engaging crazies in the homeless capitol of the world is dangerous and likely pointless.
"Chris was murdered in San Francisco on the evening of Nov, 17, 1979 as he left the San Francisco Zen Center. According to witnesses, Chris was robbed and then stabbed by two strangers near the corner of Haight and Octavia streets. He died shortly after the assault."
I believe you, but if there's any situation in which people should perhaps practice a more compassionate response, that was it.
Imagine if everyone had that response... I know it's fantasy, but I think that if you're studying mindfulness and compassion that's at least the direction you might want to be heading.
Something like this occurred at my buddhist temple during a meditation, except it was one of the members who collapsed. Someone went over help and the rest of us... couldn't do anything more. An ambulance was called. they got medical treatment.
Should we have collectively wrung our hands? To what end?
The point here isn't averting your eyes in the face of suffering, it's about correctly judging the situation and taking only effective action. Collectively performing impotent empathy isn't any more useful to the ailing person than quietly sitting and sending them prayers/lovingkindness/whatever.
I didn't expect everyone to jump into action and mill around pointlessly, I expected them to pause long enough to help me, a newcomer to town, contact people who were trained to help...
And to be clear, I mean this as an example and a warning to not get too disconnected from the physical world while doing these meditations. They were all as friendly of people as any others I met in a city, it was the context that made it stick out in my mind.
Seems like an unfair standard to hold for these people over any other people.
Very few people are equipped to handle crazy people on the street, even among people who are trying to become better people, whatever that may mean to them.
You yourself attended the seminar on "loving-kindness" but couldn't resist dunking on these people some time later. But the thing is that I don't consider that inconsistent just because you were trying to improve yourself.
Even if the seminar were about helping crazy people that were standing in front of self-help seminars, it's still an unfair standard.
This happens even at large zen monasteries. Truth is, Buddhism has no mechanism for distinguishing between mental illness and the usual suffering all samsaric beings experience. Therefore, Buddhist teachers cannot deal with mental health emergencies: all mental suffering is seen through the Buddhist lens
I've seen this too; guy had a bipolar episode. Teacher told him he'd ruined everything, and would have to start again.
More generally, Buddhist medicine would be a good thing, as Ghandi might have put it. The heart of Buddhist medicine is that life is short, suffering is unavoidable, and that the best treatment is to teach and practice Buddhism.
About fifteen years ago, my car broke down in the driveway of a Catholic Church before mass. I’d just pulled into the first driveway I could as my engine was overheating. Something like 40 cars rubbernecked past me under the hood of my car trying to add coolant, and not one stopped to ask if I needed help.
Since then I have realized I think very few people actually care about strangers beyond conspicuously appearing to for selfish reasons.
In my entire life, meeting people from all walks of life (including people I vehemently disagree with, and some I would almost consider enemies, and even some zen Buddhists), when it came to the crunch, I know they/we would all have run towards an emergency as humans/neighbours.
On the other hand, let me assume it's true, then it isn't representative IME.
Have you lived in a large city with a very apparent homelessness crisis, such as san francisco?
The homeless in places like SF are routinely experiencing serious emergencies, invariably need money and shelter, and are passed by tens of thousands of people each day who have the abilities to help them.
Of those tens of thousands of people who pass a homeless person who's clearly in need of help, perhaps 100 will give them some money, perhaps 5 will pause to ask if they can help, and perhaps 1 will actually take a not-insignificant amount of time to try and assist them.
These numbers are certainly not perfectly accurate, but from the people-watching I've done in the bay area, I can easily and confidently say that the average response to a stranger who has the class-signifiers of being homeless, even if that person appears to be having a seizure or other crisis, is to ignore them entirely.
I think my observations align closely with the parent comment's observation, and I absolutely believe it is representative of the people who go to meditation courses in the bay area.
I’m not a fan of SF particularly, and there are some problems unique to it, but my experience has been that individuals treating the homeless as invisible non-persons is pretty universal. Have you observed this to be different elsewhere in some large city?
It was a story that happened in San Francisco, I don't know what else to tell you. You can't decouple homelessness from the reasons why you might need to help someone in an emergency in that city.
Draw what lessons you will, or tell me that I'm making it up wholesale if you seriously think it's implausible if you feel the need. All I can say is that it happened and stood out as particularly strange to me. I didn't take cell phone video to prove it six years later to a stranger on the internet, I just wanted to know who to contact for help in an unfamiliar neighborhood and city.
What I took from the situation was that if you're going to seriously practice compassion in meditation it needs to also be coupled with action or else you end up getting disconnected and numb to the world around you. I don't blame anyone for their responses, and definitely don't judge them as bad people or anything. We're all human and the best of us are open-minded enough to our failings to improve.
I'm saying that if you're going to practice "feeling compassion" you should also practice acting on it. Otherwise when you need to act you will freeze. Acting on compassion is a reflex, a habit, a muscle that needs development as much as the ability to accept that you aren't perfect.
and how do you act after no longer being newly moved to San Francisco?
that incident was imprinted in you, but how has it worked out for you since?
my guess: you failed to learn anything because of course that focused seminar doesn't teach anything related to the kind of mental health emergencies that occur on San Francisco streets, and so thats a decent crutch for you to lean on to not engage with them yourself, overriden by your own self preservation instincts. or are you now a mental health case worker that responds to these instead of the police? or do you know how to call those groups now so that you aren't the confused bystander like when you first moved?
Putting a few numbers in your phone is something I did and would recommend to others in whatever city is relevant. These can of course come in handy regardless of whether you practice mindfulness meditation.
My point was that the context of a class on loving-kindness was especially jarring. I fully advocate for everyone to take a class on basic first aid and know who to contact in response to a few basic classes of emergency, that seems as basic as having clean water in your house in case of an earthquake.
I can perform CPR, stop blood loss within reason, or call someone that knows how to do things I don't. I'm very happy to take suggestions for other skills that should be commonly known to be good community members.
Sorry, I can't actually find a reasonable way to view that instagram post. Odd, I thought they used to be viewable without an account.
Assuming it's some stereotype about new age self-defined gurus, no, these were perfectly regular and generally friendly people. The situation was extremely odd, which is why I remember it.
Someone else suggested it might be because the state of mind in that situation was wrong for the task at hand. I think it's probably correct, in another context they would have taken immediate action to help but were in an unfamiliar role.
I was newly moved to San Francisco and enrolled in a meditation course on literally loving-kindness (they were all mindfulness, this was a focused seminar).
When I was on my way in someone was having a mental health emergency right outside the front door and looked to clearly need care. Not knowing who to call for this since I didn't live in the city, and definitely not wanting to call cops, I went in and asked how to take actual action to help them out.
Instead of engaging with the real life actual emergency right in front of them where they could practice actually doing loving-kindness people wanted to discuss how they could "use their suffering as an object of meditation". Few even stood up to look. Averting their eyes from suffering was a very strange response.
It was unreal, I'm used to 90% of the people in a room during an emergency being stunned and uncertain (but attentive and worried), but there's always a few people who jump into action... there are times for action and times for contemplation and emergencies are not times to work on self-improvement.
It was eye opening -- thankfully one of them had a more normal response and had experience so we were able to connect them to the Episcopalian church next door which operated a shelter and had people there trained in how to help. It was disturbing though that the people in the class who spoke so eloquently about the importance of kindness and helping others, who were actively practicing mindfulness and learning about themselves, had such a strange response to an emergency 20 feet away.
One might almost describe it as faking being nice while changing little on the inside. Hippie and good person camouflage. A way to feel empathy so hard and so calmly that you don't feel any urgency to take actual action.