[QUOTE=Leaffan]
Sorry, but that made me laugh! 
[/QUOTE]
Horrible person! It does sound sort of funny. But I do think people undersestimate the damage catcalls, leching, etc. (and the subsequent insults when they’re ignored) can do to young girls. Even a wolf whistle can ruin your day when you’re 12.
Buddhism being all about lovingkindness and compassion the OP is actually seeking ANTI Buddha moments, to my mind.
Buddhists are largely known as not being offended by much.
I have to say though, having my Lord’s name connected to your ‘moment of hatred’ epiphany is offensive.
[QUOTE=elbows]
Buddhism being all about lovingkindness and compassion the OP is actually seeking ANTI Buddha moments, to my mind.
Buddhists are largely known as not being offended by much.
I have to say though, having my Lord’s name connected to your ‘moment of hatred’ epiphany is offensive.
[/QUOTE]
What is the First Noble Truth?
[QUOTE=elbows]
Buddhism being all about lovingkindness and compassion the OP is actually seeking ANTI Buddha moments, to my mind.
Buddhists are largely known as not being offended by much.
I have to say though, having my Lord’s name connected to your ‘moment of hatred’ epiphany is offensive.
[/QUOTE]
Maybe you should lighten up, enlightened one.
I never claimed to be enlightened.
And I am aware that all of life is suffering.
Joking aside though, if someone made a reasonable and polite point about the offensiveness of my words, intended or otherwise, I might be inclined to consider their point.
BTW, from the points made in this thread, I did go ahead and make my own, complementary, thread.
[QUOTE=Cat Fight]
When I was in my teens my friend and I were entering a building. She held the door open for an elderly man.
He called her a cunt.
It was definitely not the first time she or I had been at the receiving end of nasty words or rudeness, but it made us both feel like crap all day.
[/QUOTE]
This makes me really, really sad.
[QUOTE=Rigamarole]
Some guy yelled at your dog and now the world is full of “unvarnished hate”? Come on man, pull it together.
[/QUOTE]
When you’re three and your world is small and feels pretty good, and full of people who are nice to you, someone threatening to maim your loved one could be pretty weighty.
I don’t know that I’ve experience anything that made me think the world is full of evil. I grew up fearful and on guard and when I was hurt it almost felt like, well, of course, that was just a matter of time. So I guess the world was never a happy place, but neither is it completely mean.
I agree that the thread is wrongly titled but leaving that aside, what gets to me constantly is the absolute idiocy of some people. I should, by now, be reconciled to it but, apparently, I have yet to reach my level of saturation.
Today another example.
I’m walking home for lunch and there’s this little bird on the
sidewalk. A starling, I think. It’s not tiny, it looks big enough to
fly but it doesn’t fly away when I walk past. It’s just standing there
chirping. I turn and watch it for a bit and it’s on the road and
almost gets hit by a couple of cars so I’m thinking something’s up with
why it’s not flying (too young maybe). I walk back to beside the bird
to try to herd it onto the sidewalk and off the road. I didn’t want to
pick it up because they can get very scared and because his mom might
reject him if he smells like a human.
Meanwhile, there are two couples out walking dogs - one couple has two
on leashes and the other has 3. But they’re crossing the road behind
me.
Next thing I know, the moron with the 3 dogs is beside me and the *&^%$
dogs are attacking the little bird!!! Idiot female is saying ‘stop’
like that’ll help. Each dog is picking up & dropping the bird 
Needless to say, they killed it. Stupid asinine idiot moron female -
why would she let three dogs approach a little bird like that? Why
didn’t she keep them across the road with her? WTF did she think
they’d do - sniff it and look like a calendar photo? Shit. Dammit and
shit some more.
I’m SO MAD. It was pointless saying anything to the moron because
she’s too stupid to understand, I’m sure.
Shit. Sometimes I hate people. I don’t even remember the first time a human disappointed me. But ‘hate’? No. People don’t hate so much as are just plain clueless and stupid sometimes.
I don’t have a personal moment to add, but will say that I thought the OP was referring to Siddhartha’s awakening to pain and suffering of life, as Diogenes posted.
From this site:
So, not a Buddha moment in the enlightened sense, but an essential awakening on Siddhartha’s path. As Dio said, as well, it’s the basis of The First Noble Truth. The rest of the Buddha’s story is on that same site.
I’m Buddhist, and was not at all offended by the OP. To me, Buddhism is about seeing things clearly, acknowledging some awful acts and appearance of being, and then cutting through acts of ignorance for a better truth. What you are to try to do as a Buddhist is to get beyond “awakening to the awareness of hatred”, as the OP put it. and not succumb to that ignorance.
Hope I’m not being too long-winded here, but think it helps clarify a Buddhist view, and history, of that realization of negativity. Don’t ask me for handy hints; I’m still workin’ on it.
Thanks, elelle, I feel vindicated.
Yikes, I didn’t mean to threadkill Guy’s OP with Buddhist yakkin’. I think his OP is a very good one, and interesting, for everyone to say their point of realizing sucky hardship in the world. Sometimes it helps to let that out. Often those worst pains stay hidden, and letting that out is a cathartic release.
Here’s a painful one for me. I worked in an Arthouse theatre in my college town. I was working as a ticket taker, in a nice little booth on the main street. The movie showing was Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters”. An above average crowd, there, ya’d think.
On a weekend evening, with a long line down the street, a woman in line started to have convulsions, on the ground. I called 911, told my coworkers, got someone to take tickets in the booth, and went out to help her. I was amazed that everyone in line just ignored her, and stepped over her to get their tickets. This was a Hot movie at the time, but , shit, it appealed to intelligent people. No one asked to help, they just stepped over her epileptic seizure body. That was a point of sad realization for me, and anger at that behavior.
I held her head up so she didn’t choke, and waited for the EMR to get there. The experience left me very angry, no one wanted to see her seizure, and really, stepped right over her body to get the movie tickets. It was amazingly callous. Rather than dwell on and despair, though, this was an event, that after great disheartenment, and real anger, made me want to find out how to Not Be Like That, Ever. Buddhism has helped with strengthening my pittance of a mind.
In preview, I see your last reponse, Guy.
Very nice post, elelle, and exactly what I was going to post.
That story about Siddhartha was the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the OP. Certainly, he was not referring to Buddhist practice in general, but to a defining moment in Siddhartha’s life, which set his feet upon the path.
I’m sure that no offence was meant.
[QUOTE=elelle]
I’m Buddhist, and was not at all offended by the OP.
[/QUOTE]
If you had been offended, could you still be Buddhist? 
Interesting question. Basically “When did you realize that some things just frigging suck and there’s no rhyme nor reason to it?” I suppose.
I’m tempted to recall this time when I was spraying tar on a road and just as we were ready to go this snot nosed little kid’s dog ran up and got his footprints in the tar an… nah, I’ll go with another.
I grew up on a farm with a lot of elderly relatives and a bipolar mother so there was always some animal or person dying or getting wished dead so I’m not sure when it would have happened. I remember- the full story is too gross to go into- but a puppy we had who developed what I can only describe as a “flesh eating virus” when he was only about 3 or 4 weeks old and his being abandoned by his mother and siblings; it started with a hole the size of a quarter and within a day it was rotting alive on almost an entire side and it was clear there was no way he could live and that he was absolutely miserable and we had an old “horse doctor” (i.e. non-formally educated vet) who worked for us sometimes give it a lethal injection to end its misery. That bothered me a lot but I can’t say I found it anything more profound than sad and gross.
So I’ll move up a lot later than the ones above when I was 15. My father had died two weeks before, very suddenly (heart attack) and we were still reeling from the shock of the death. My father had identical twin aunts, Kitty & Carrie (I’m the boy in the middle*, the twins are to my left), who were much more like twin grandmothers to us than great-aunts; they lived on our farm in the cabin where they were born and they slept in the bed where they were born for 93 years. They were both innate Zen-masters (though they could be ornery, but I don’t think either of them ever had ill-will for another person or desire for anything beyond general contentment) and true to form they even looked like Yoda.
Two weeks after my father died one of the twins, the “prettier” and “feistier” of the two, lit her gas heater as she’d done for godknowshowmany years and caught the hem of her dress ablaze. When it was over she had 3rd degree burns over 90% of her body, no lips, no ears or eyelids or facial features of any kind, her upper dentures were melted into the roof of her mouth, and she was still alive. Her twin witnessed all of this, her twin flagged down an car (they had no phone and could not have used it if they had) to get her help- struck paydirt as the first car was a deputy with a CB- and her sister was taken in a helicopter (first time airborne of course) to the burn tank in B’ham many miles away (Birmingham has one of the best burn treatment units in the world) but it was hopeless. We were told that a 21 year old in perfect physical condition would have had a 50/50 chance of surviving the night and a 10% chance of surviving 2 days, and 93 year old Kitty survived for more than a week.
I saw her in the hospital even though my mother tried to physically restrain me from entering. I wish she’d been able to because it’s of course imprinted forever on my brain- not sure what was grosser- the charred black skin or the bits that still looked like Kitty just somehow for no apparent reason still there like islands amidst them. Gross. But the thing that really hit me was that until this I’d always been taught to believe God had a plan, He was merciful, it didn’t make sense to us but it did to Him, etc., and I sat in the pasture a few days later while my mother was still in B’ham and I was avoiding a gaggle of crazy cousins telling Carrie (Kitty’s twin) “The Lord’s gonna heal her and she’s gonna be just fine” and other crazy shit, and I thought to myself "There is absolutely no conceivable possible way that a 93 year old woman who has never done anybody on Earth harm being burned that horribly and yet left alive to feel it can possibly be orchestrated by a loving God or that it can possibly serve any good purpose, and if any good does come out of it I can tell you here and now that I’m a 15 year old borderline D student in the sticks of Alabama and I can come up with another way of achieving that same “noble goal” that doesn’t involve this absolute nightmare. (The room in the cabin smelled of smoke, burned flesh and vomit for years- the vomit was from an EMT, that’s how bad it was.)
That was not the beginnning of my atheism but it was the end of my Christianity as most would describe the term. It was the beginning of my “life is an illusion we are in Maya” transmigration and New Age-ish “Jesus was a turned on dude but hardly the only one” neo-Mormon neo-pagan neo-Hindu neo-Buddhist phase that lasted off and on for about 10 years before I stopped adding epicycles and pericycles to the system I’d envisioned and just realized “Or not- maybe there is no God and no meaning— and in a way, I really like that better”. (If I were to say what made me an atheist it would probably be reading Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield Goes to Heaven combined with an Occam’s Razor moment and the comfort that came from “She didn’t burn horribly because of karma or past lives and it wasn’t illusion and she did exist- she burned horribly because her hem fell into a heater that day and it was horrible, but it didn’t really mean anything and it wasn’t anything personal against her, it was just bad shit and it happened”.
Or maybe it was when *Sigmund and the Sea Monsters * was cancelled. It was totally uncalled for, and yet they let Soul Train remain on, OR when my brother ran over my beloved *KORG 70,000 BC * lunchbox. Or when my mother ran over Freckles. The third time.
*This is that same wall today, just for shits and gigles.
Your goodness was a beautiful thing, elelle.
When I was living in Seattle back in '77, there was an incident at a grocery store, I think it was. I was one person away from checking out when the lady that was before me collapsed. Just up and collapsed. And so the lady at the register called someone to come and deal with her. And I don’t recall but, I think they got her going, or for sure were working on her.
But to my everlasting shame, I, like those people in line at the theater you mentioned, just kinda stood there and did nothing. I just basically had the attitude that it wasn’t my problem and went on to pay for my things. I have to say, however, that the lady at the register sorta started talking to me about the excitement (that’s probably not the right word) of just a moment before having that lady go down, when in the middle of it, she gave me this look that said, “Oh, and you just coldly stood there and did nothing.”
I got out of there feeling like a bit of a shit.
These days I’m still not comfortable with people, but I’m pretty sure that I would step out of my comfort zone and at least try to mimic what I think a person with a real heart would do (as mine has been put through a shredder due to various life experiences).
I guess it shows that we’re all at various stages of development with ourselves, or something. I do hope to keep making an honest effort to become a better person, as what could possibly be more important in the Lord’s eyes?
[QUOTE=EJsGirl]
Very nice post, elelle, and exactly what I was going to post.
That story about Siddhartha was the first thing that popped into my mind when I read the OP. Certainly, he was not referring to Buddhist practice in general, but to a defining moment in Siddhartha’s life, which set his feet upon the path.
I’m sure that no offence was meant.
[/QUOTE]
True, didn’t intend to offend. 
As far back as I am able to remember adults in my family spoke the most brutal racism you can imagine. It was part of life, and even as a very young child I knew instinctively that it was wrong. In 1968 I was in the second grade, my next youngest brother was in the first grade and my youngest brother was in kindergarten, and in our all white neighborhood a house sold at the end of the second block straight down from us. A bi-racial couple moved in, a very dark skinned man, a very pale white woman, and they had three or four kids. Negative comments were made amongst the adults in the neighborhood within hearing of all the neighborhood kids, but as far as I know none of the children in the neighborhood gave it much thought.
One of the new kids was in my youngest brothers class, and I remember with clarity the day he brought the new kid to our house to play. The sun was shining, it was a beautiful September day in our Seattle suburb, and we were all playing in the front yard. I wasn’t playing with the boys, I was off to the side of the yard playing with the mock orange blossoms which I turned upside down into imaginary ladies in beautiful gowns, while the boys were romping and wrestling in the grass. All of a sudden my father’s big red Ford pickup pulled into the driveway, and I saw the uncontrolled rage in his face as he barreled out screaming the most horrible obscenities at the little neighbor boy, culminating in threats to kill him if he was ever found in our yard again. It was a spectacle observed by all of the neighborhood kids, and I remember the little boy running home, scared to death with tears streaming down his face.
My father then ordered the three of us into the back yard and he forced me to watch while he beat my brothers, and then turned and told me that I would get the same if he ever caught me with a n*****.
There were absolutely no ramifications against my father for what he said to the neighbor child, and never any against him for the brutalities he visited upon my mother, my brothers and I, but that was the day that I learned that the brutal horrors that occurred daily behind the closed doors of my extended family were also part of the world outside.
I don’t know if this is exactly what the OP is looking for, but this was definitely A Moment in which I saw my father for the cruel and ignorant person that he was, and it helped solidify my budding resolve to turn my back on the bigotry and violence, both emotional and physical, which was so much a part of my raising.
Well, Guy, to put it all full circle here, as your OP started with a state of shocking disheartedment, and ol’ Buddah’s take on it, as in opening the eyes to a state you hadn’t seen before…
You saw the bad state of mind when your sweet dog was abused, and that opened you up to nastiness. It was tremendously hurtful. From your last response, you saw my story, which was to react with helpfulness to someone. Basically, you Always have the power and choice to use your best mind to act in a decent manner. Buddhism ia a fine method I’ve found as a very rational, balanced system. I won’t proselytize, with Buddhism it’s really a joke to do that,because it’s a rather personally responsible system, mostly drives Away folks because of that hard work at a deeper level.
To give you something worthwhile, what I have learned most through Buddhist teaching (many books at first, and then good teachers) , is that offering help when needed becomes easy, and wonderful. There is no “Comfort zone”, because, with some learning, that barrier is broken down. It becomes easy to give and be with others. Weird, but humanly so true, I’ve found.
And, fer my good Southern Brother Sampiro,
“If you had been offended , could you still be a Buddhist?”
Yes, absolutely, because it’s all an illusion, so I’m told, and get in Glimpses enough to get it. And, yep, just used to the usual heavy crap. Try to head it off in nice ways taught.
After reading yer last, though, Sampiro, especially with Kitty’s burning (Did you write about this here before?), well, you need to subscribe to Samuel Clemens newsletter.
Aiiiieeee! Yikes, too late at night to make mucho sense, check back tomorrow.
[QUOTE=kaiwik]
As far back as I am able to remember adults in my family spoke the most brutal racism you can imagine. It was part of life, and even as a very young child I knew instinctively that it was wrong. In 1968 I was in the second grade, my next youngest brother was in the first grade and my youngest brother was in kindergarten, and in our all white neighborhood a house sold at the end of the second block straight down from us. A bi-racial couple moved in, a very dark skinned man, a very pale white woman, and they had three or four kids. Negative comments were made amongst the adults in the neighborhood within hearing of all the neighborhood kids, but as far as I know none of the children in the neighborhood gave it much thought.
One of the new kids was in my youngest brothers class, and I remember with clarity the day he brought the new kid to our house to play. The sun was shining, it was a beautiful September day in our Seattle suburb, and we were all playing in the front yard. I wasn’t playing with the boys, I was off to the side of the yard playing with the mock orange blossoms which I turned upside down into imaginary ladies in beautiful gowns, while the boys were romping and wrestling in the grass. All of a sudden my father’s big red Ford pickup pulled into the driveway, and I saw the uncontrolled rage in his face as he barreled out screaming the most horrible obscenities at the little neighbor boy, culminating in threats to kill him if he was ever found in our yard again. It was a spectacle observed by all of the neighborhood kids, and I remember the little boy running home, scared to death with tears streaming down his face.
My father then ordered the three of us into the back yard and he forced me to watch while he beat my brothers, and then turned and told me that I would get the same if he ever caught me with a n*****.
There were absolutely no ramifications against my father for what he said to the neighbor child, and never any against him for the brutalities he visited upon my mother, my brothers and I, but that was the day that I learned that the brutal horrors that occurred daily behind the closed doors of my extended family were also part of the world outside.
I don’t know if this is exactly what the OP is looking for, but this was definitely A Moment in which I saw my father for the cruel and ignorant person that he was, and it helped solidify my budding resolve to turn my back on the bigotry and violence, both emotional and physical, which was so much a part of my raising.
[/QUOTE]
Wow, what a horrible thing to have happen!
I wonder what caused your dad to be that way?
Glad you’re going about things differently.
For me, an actual Buddhist (though not the fashionable kind), I would have to say that my ultimate Buddhist moment was after my brother died, and I was stuck having to talk to my father. Understand that my brother and I were never particularly close to each other (I found out later that he was adopted, but my parents never told me and they still don’t know that I know), and I was kind of emotionally blank.
Having to talk to my father and discuss the fact that my brother had just shot himself all over our veranda was extremely difficult, mainly because he was fighting back tears and I just couldn’t bring myself to have any kind of reaction. My brother had suffered terribly, my parents were suffering terribly, all kinds of relatives and people I’d never met before were showing up and suffering terribly (or sucking up to my father), and I just wasn’t feeling it. I had no desire, and no desire lead to no suffering. Namu tassa bhagavado arahato sama-sambuddhasa.