[Buddha-l] Wealth and excess

[Franz Metcalf]

Gang,

Thanks, Joanna, for quoting the part of the article that quotes D. W.  
Winnicott. That made me go and read the whole thing. Lovely and also  
terribly sad.

Mandatory Buddhist content: Winnicott's embrace of kindness grows  
directly from his view of the person as fundamentally inter-personal.  
We exist most fully--Winnicott might even say *only*--when we play in  
the potential space, a space that is neither part of our interior  
world, nor part of the external world, but not separate from either.  
One might say it is the place Thich Nhat Hanh calls "interbeing." Not  
everyone can do this, of course, as Winnicott says in the article.  
Rather, it is an achievement of love, the sort of love that arises  
from wisdom and compassion.

Franz

On Jan 16, 2009, at 9:34 AM, jkirk wrote:

>
> Thanks Alberto for this article link.
> Here's a telling excerpt that fits right in with what I wrote
> last night about the insanity of money-madness-excess:
>
> ""A sign of health in the mind", Donald Winnicott wrote in 1970,
> "is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and
> accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of
> another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to
> us." To live well, we must be able to identify imaginatively with
> other people, and allow them to identify with us. Unkindness
> involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens
> not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring about others, as
> Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, is what makes us fully human. We
> depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very
> being. The self without sympathetic attachments is either a
> fiction or a lunatic. "
>
> Wall St pyramid schemes and money-mad accumulative delusions
> could only thrive under the absence of caring described in the
> article (a review of a book on the phenomenon of dumping kindness
> from human behavior.)
>
> Best, Joanna
> =======================
>
> I just came across Reagan and Thatcher in this essay about
> kindness being out of fashion:
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/03/society-politics
>
> The article mentions a host of other people, such as Hume,
> Rousseau, Freud and Richard Dawkins. I imagine the book
> introduced by this article would make interesting and relevant
> reading for Buddhists.
>
> Best,
>
> Alberto Todeschini