Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life.

Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

In case you don't get my monthly emails, this episode is my July blog entry with an invitation to join me for a live Q&A on Buddhist boot camp's

Facebook page to further discuss this topic of better understanding hatred on

July 7th. If you missed the live video feed don don't worry, I would likely record another

podcast episode with the discussion highlights. If I was to ask you to list five

red items as quickly as possible, you would likely say roses, tomatoes, maybe fire trucks and stop signs,

maybe even Rudolph's nose. And that's because we compulsively file everything we see in

experience into groups, categories, and types.

Ever since infancy, we have rapidly developed an advanced mental filing system

to make the world less overwhelming.

We notice something, we cross-reference it with everything that is already familiar to us, and quickly

label it as either harmless or dangerous, cute, or scary, and so on. But where do those labels come from?

One problem is that we label everything unconsciously and

automatically as individuals, hence my constant advocacy for

mindfulness, and the second problem is that we do it collectively as a culture. We use pre-assigned labels

for whatever we don't understand by looking for society's pre-existing

categories as a guide. These values may have been set by our parents, our close circle of friends, or worse yet, the internet.

Many of our thoughts, opinions, and beliefs, it turns out, are founded on information we subconsciously

received from sources as unreliable as the grapevine.

As Ethan Hawk recently pointed out, the people with the most money have the biggest megaphones,

but it doesn't mean they have the most interesting things to say.

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