Whole and Free

Arinna Weisman              Have you ever freely given away something you value?  Arinna Weissman, a teacher at a nearby Buddhist meditation center, told us about a gift she gave.  When she was teaching in a center in Massachusetts, one of the staff was diagnosed with breast cancer.  One day the woman left the center to go for treatment and surgery.  Arinna had a teddy bear which had traveled everywhere around the world with her for almost 20 years. Without thinking about it beforehand, when the staff member came to say good-bye, Arinna gave her the beloved teddy bear and said she hoped that it would comfort the woman as she moved through her treatment and healing.         Arinna asked us if we could remember a time when we freely gave, not necessarily money, but something important to us.  Did we remember how it felt?  Did we remember the wide open expansive feeling? Arinna wanted us to st...

One bonobo comforts another.              Frans De Waal is a scientist who studies bonobos and chimpanzees, animals that are most like human beings.  He noticed some natural behaviors  that seemed to show that these animals had empathy and a sense of fairness.  Empathy means the ability to identify with another and imagine what the other feels.  The picture showing a bonobo comforting another with a hug suggests that one animal feels empathy for pain or disappointment the other felt.               De Waal conducted experiments that seem to prove that bonobos and chimps show empathy and fairness.  Apparently, grapes are highly prized by both kinds of animals.  If two bonobos are both given grapes, they are happy but if only one gets a grape and the other gets a cucumber, the one with the cucumber gets angry. They stay angry until they get a grape too...