Gaza, Sadness And Social Media – Readers Respond To The ‘“Resist Not Evil”?’ Cogitation

I don’t doubt that I have lived a privileged and sheltered life, but before Israel’s genocide in Gaza I had never seen a hospital patient on an intravenous drip being burned alive. I didn’t want to see it. Social media is like that – before you realise what you’re seeing, you’ve seen it. And it can’t be unseen.

I had not seen distraught fathers carrying their headless babies. I had not seen toddlers torn in half. I had not seen civilians being literally blown up far above rooftops by bombs. I had seen plenty of images of displaced refugees, but I had never seen 2 million people, an entire population – wounded, traumatised, sickened, starved – being herded from one side of their homeland to another, and then somewhere else, and then back again, and then somewhere else, and then back again, and then somewhere else – endlessly bombed, without any detectable trace of mercy from the rogue state hunting them. Examples in history abound, of course, but I had not myself seen human beings treated as hated vermin on this scale. It has changed my idea of who I am, because I am human and I see with a new clarity just what my species is capable of. This, again, can’t be unseen.

Knowing the traumatic impact on us at Media Lens of these images on social media, we have always been concerned about the effect of our own work on readers. After all, our aim is to draw attention to suffering and injustice, to dispel the illusions of propaganda and promote change away from violence and hatred towards compassion and reason. Our aim is absolutely not to propel our readers into misery, depression and despair. We have never agreed with the harsh reply that ‘It’s not my job to cheer you up’; if you can’t handle it, that’s your problem! So, we take very seriously all anguished responses from readers who have clearly suffered from paying attention to the crises we write about.

Having said that, one of the great joys of our work is precisely that it brings us into contact with sensitive, knowledgeable, compassionate people who care deeply about the issues we’re discussing.

A fine example was provided by one of our readers, Julia Turner, who responded to the latest cogitation: ‘“Resist Not Evil”?’ on Substack. In the exchanges below, it quickly became apparent that the sadness Julia describes is in part rooted in the horror we have all witnessed in Gaza. The discussion of how to manage this emotional distress is not an indulgence, as some stoics on the left seem to imagine – it’s a crucial question that concerns us all.

‘Hi David, Thank you for your lovely thesis. It brought up a lot of ideas and responses in my mind so I thought I’d reply (first ever on Substack). I may be odd but I cannot meditate. Still, I can relate to the idea of being love, bliss, watching that star from a distance. The idea of love in itself, not being relative to an object (of love), I think can also apply to liberty or freedom. When I was younger, I really needed to be free from a person who was damaging me and who I couldn’t get away from. Eventually I found a way. At first the freedom, as exhilarating as it felt, was definitively tied to that person: being “free from”. After some time it became freedom in itself, liberty that didn’t always refer back to the ancient chains. That way of being was very different. It sounds abstract but it was one of the brightest moments of my whole existence.

‘I have been thinking a lot about sadness these days. I don’t really understand how to separate myself from it and watch it. So there’s tension and suffering in fighting or resisting our feelings. Yes. For a long time I was struggling with the recognition of the sadness in me. I felt bad that it was there, as though somehow it was a betrayal of those who suffered and for whom I felt that sadness. I came to understand that resisting my feelings was creating stress, and everything was muddy and confusing. Through acceptance of the sadness things became clear. I feel so sad for what has happened to those close to me and I feel so very sad for what is happening now in this world. This acceptance is like coming home. I really feel that I am at one with all the terrible things and at one with those who suffered. It is a kind of becoming sadness. And I guess the thought of becoming separate from the sadness is jarring. Maybe I don’t know how to respond to life but I think I need to become the thing or just go mad.’ (Julia Turner, 11 May 2025)

I replied:

‘Hi Julia

‘Thanks for sending such a tremendously thoughtful and honest email; I really appreciate it. You write: “I may be odd but I cannot meditate.”

‘For a long time, I thought I couldn’t meditate.

‘Can you take a moment just to let your hands rest in your lap? Can you feel any sensations in your hands? If you close your eyes, how do you know you have hands? It’s because of the sensations, of course. Can you feel them tingling? Can you feel the tension, the energy pulsing? If you can feel these sensations, you can meditate because that’s meditation. You can do the same with your feet – do they feel tense, warm, cold? Can you feel the energy pulsing through them?

‘Spending five minutes feeling your left hand, your right hand, your left foot and your right foot can have such an impact that you fall asleep. In fact, when I wake up in the night and can’t sleep, that’s my meditation – I go from one hand and foot to another in a circle, feeling the sensations. If you do five minutes at both ends of the day, you’ll build up a habit that makes it much easier to detect the sensations. You could then try noticing when you feel sadness or anxiety in your chest for five minutes. The mind is so relentless – this endlessly spinning, grinding torture machine – that even five minutes spent directing attention to the body can be tremendously relaxing. You write:

‘“I don’t really understand how to separate myself from it [the sadness] and watch it. So there’s tension and suffering in fighting or resisting our feelings.”

‘Often, we’re feeling sad without real awareness – we have a dim recognition that we feel terrible, but we’re mostly focused on the mind machine generating endless thoughts about the sadness: “I miss him/her… This time last year, she was here… I should have… I shouldn’t have… They should have…”

‘The thing is to separate from that relentless thought process generating sadness – we turn from focusing on thoughts about sadness to feeling the sadness in our chests and bellies. I love this quote from Eckhart Tolle:

‘“There are many pseudo escapes — work, drink, drugs, anger, projection, suppression, and so on — but they don’t free you from the [emotional] pain. Suffering does not diminish in intensity when you make it unconscious… So don’t turn away from the pain. Face it. Feel it fully. Feel it — don’t think about it! Express it if necessary, but don’t create a script in your mind around it. Give all your attention to the feeling, not to the person, event, or situation that seems to have caused it…

‘“So give your complete attention to what you feel, and refrain from mentally labelling it. As you go into the feeling, be intensely alert. At first, it may seem like a dark and terrifying place, and when the urge to turn away from it comes, observe it but don’t act on it. Keep putting your attention on the pain, keep feeling the grief, the fear, the dread, the loneliness, whatever it is.”

‘You write:

‘“I feel so sad for what has happened to those close to me and I feel so very sad for what is happening now in this world.”

‘Me, too. Gaza, Syria, Libya, Iraq, climate collapse… it all constantly generates sadness and grief. Again, we can take a break from thinking about these things – from the hellish flood of images and footage on X, for example – and focus on feeling the sadness, which alchemises into peace, love and bliss. We don’t get overwhelmed by the sadness; we get overwhelmed by our minds thinking about the sadness. So, we’re ‘separating from’ overthinking about the sadness but actually joining with the sadness through feeling; going deeply into it. If we push it away, it remains and intensifies. I’ve chatted about these issues more here and here.

‘All best wishes

‘David E’ (12 May 2025)

Julia responded again:

‘Hi David, Thanks for your reply and your cogitations. You are very encouraging. I’m going to read them three times to let them sink in. It took some time for me to feel my hands. (It was somewhat alarming at first because I was expecting to feel them but there was nothing coming.) The signal is faint but, yeah, I got some tingles.

‘If you look at the photo on the cover of Norman Finkelstein’s book on Gaza you might see an image of “beyond sadness”. That’s not a cynical “moving on from sadness” type of beyond, but a kind of beyond that takes your words away… because it’s too much. Beyond, that place where we find ourselves in sadness that is so deep and it goes so far, you think maybe it doesn’t have an end. I don’t know what to do, what to think, or even what to feel, when the father in Gaza, who lately lost his children through traumatic death from a bomb, said that he was happy because now his children won’t starve to death. He wasn’t able to provide for them when they told him they were hungry.

‘I’m going to try to follow your advice. I don’t know if I can do it. The sadness, I think, is too much. So from my personal history and from what is happening now to the children, mothers, fathers who have become targets..there’s this great big surge in my belly and chest that is bigger than me. It’s like a bloody tsunami. I don’t have the words to express what I sense. I think it’s too much. This morning I sat down on a bench in the park and just slumped. That felt like all I could do. I’ll let you know how it goes.

‘All the best,

‘J’ (14 May 2025)

I responded:

‘Thanks, Julia.

‘“It took some time for me to feel my hands. (It was somewhat alarming at first because I was expecting to feel them but there was nothing coming.)”

‘Well done, that will improve with practice. You can also search for short, guided “body scan” meditations online – find one with a voice that doesn’t sound too irritating. :o) That really helps if you’re struggling with motivation or focus.

‘The initial difficulty you had made me think you’re doing a tremendous amount of intellectual work, because it does have that numbing effect on our ability to feel sensations. Then you mentioned Gaza and Norm Finkelstein – a brilliant, very intense analyst – and I’m sure you’re immersed in a huge amount of other analysis, too. For the last quarter of a century co-editing Media Lens, it’s been my self-appointed task to immerse myself in these horrors every day, so I’ve experienced similar symptoms. I’ve written about the problems suffered by Charles Darwin:

‘“My mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years … Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry … I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts …”

‘He added:

‘“If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week … The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

‘A journalist and activist wrote to me last year:

‘“But reading your book, things I had sensed but not addressed came sharply into focus. I have over the years grown numb to feeling, except when it comes to my children… I’ve been noticing more how little other emotional engagement I have in my life. I’ve gradually stopped watching movies, once a great passion. I don’t read books. I’ve stopped long walks and cycle rides, where I loved to be immersed in nature. I rarely listen to music, even in the car. I’m happy sitting in silence, with my thoughts. I build in leisure time. I play badminton a lot. I’m fit. I do yoga. I see a small circle of friends, whose company I enjoy. I go to events where I live. But the love is gone. I’ve been hollowed out by numbness. Darwin and Maugham’s warnings were powerful for me.”

‘“But the love is gone”. Fantastically honest, but how sad. Not that sad, though, because the love is only buried beneath intellectual activity, not gone. Actually, peace, love and bliss are hidden just out of sight; it only needs a bit of meditation – we just need to experiment, grope around in the dark a bit, and we’ll get there. We are never a lost cause.

‘In the early years of Media Lens, I felt similar symptoms from time to time. Then, I was overwhelmed by the suffering in Iraq, where 500,000 children under five were killed by US-UK sanctions. The deaths of children in Gaza have been horrendous, but in Iraq from 1990-2003, child deaths were measured in the 100,000s. I met and talked to John Pilger and Denis Halliday about it, which made it even more real and personal for me. It felt almost unbearable. Then, in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion and occupation, at least one million more Iraqis died – Western politicians and journalists were completely oblivious. Staggering death tolls. When the US attacked the third city, Fallujah, in November 2004, they destroyed 75% of the buildings. We were spared the mobile phone footage tormenting everyone now from Gaza, but we knew conditions in Iraq were catastrophic. Other horrors have hit me even harder over even more years – particularly the very real prospect of human extinction from climate collapse. In this case, we’re not talking tens of thousands, or millions of deaths, but billions of deaths. You can’t get more catastrophic, bleaker than that! How to deal with the sadness of that? We have to find a way, and we can.

‘None of this is intended to diminish the horror of the genocide in Gaza, but it’s so good for our mental health to put it in perspective – similar horrors, on an even greater scale, have been erupting for decades and centuries. I found great sanity in the thoughts of a mystic who said: “The world is in a mess, it has always been in a mess, and it always will be in a mess.” It is not that there are a few terrible issues we need to resolve; violence, injustice and cruelty are deeply embedded in human societies. Why does that help? Because it does provide perspective – we do what we can to the best of our ability, but we shouldn’t let ourselves be overwhelmed by this basic fact of existence. We have to care for ourselves as well as others. That’s my feeling, now.

‘The compassion I have felt for people suffering under US-UK violence is real. But reading Osho and Tolle alerted me to the fact that my ego had a subtle investment in my suffering. I liked the idea that I was battling against an historic injustice. It gave my life a sense of purpose, meaning; it made me one of the Good Guys in a grand drama of great significance. It made my contribution seem crucial. And hopefully the work I’ve done does matter, but the truth is I am a tiny drop, a miniscule speck in an immense ocean of human thought and action stretching over years, centuries and millennia. It helps me to keep my own significance, and the significance of the efforts I make, in perspective. We should do our best but not get consumed, heartbroken by the suffering of the world. In an age of iPhones and social media, we can all too easily keep at it all day until we’re exhausted. It’s vital to take solid breaks and do all the things the anonymous journalist I mentioned used to do and does no longer.

‘All best wishes

‘David E’ (14 May 2025)

One of the great perils and pains of social media, of course – particularly in the early days, when none of us had any idea what we were doing – is what used to be called the ‘Twitterspat’: angry, escalating, often abusive exchanges with often anonymous interlocutors. It initially felt like it was vital to engage in these arguments, and, let’s be honest, to win! On related themes, we received a further interesting response from Edward in Bristol:

‘Thanks for sharing David – i’m really enjoying these series of cogitations :)

‘Clearly you covered many important themes in this essay, but the
following quotes from Robert Adams especially resonated with me:

‘“Something that usually makes you angry, before you would respond, and
you’d want to win the argument, but now your reaction is no reaction.
You simply smile and you watch.

‘“It’s just like arguing with a person. What happens if you stop
arguing? The person goes away”

‘Speaking from my own personal experience, I have found that people
often insult or challenge others in their social groups or at work
because they feel threatened or insecure (threatened about their
status, insecure about themselves). And, again in my experience, I’ve
noticed that the best leaders simply brush off these types of
challenges and barbs. It appears that staying calm and collected in
the face of adversity is an important trait that people look for in
their leaders …

‘Lastly, having spent many years practising various meditations, as
well as mindfulness, I can more easily take a step back and simply
observe arguments, rather than get sucked into them … it feels as if
it is our own internal dysfunction that often pulls us into conflicts
… being able to remain calm, it seems, affords a sense of emotional
freedom – a freedom to move throughout the world without getting
sucked into emotional whirlpools and be less perturbed by the
emotional ripples created by others …

‘Best, Edward in Bristol (Email to Media Lens, 8 May 2025)

I replied:

‘Thanks, Edward, interesting points. It’s something I’ve learned over many years of responding to fierce criticism of Media Lens. You receive the hit – you can feel the hit clearly in your chest – and you have a choice: you can react as you always did as a child and as a younger adult by receiving the negative energy and responding with the same negative energy, exactly as you might smash back a tennis shot (with interest! “I’ll show you!”). There is a definite decision to engage the clutch on your ego, so that you are hitting back with the same ego energy.

‘Alternatively, you can feel the pain of the hit, watch the urge to engage the clutch on your anger, resist the urge, and instead respond with a cool, rational energy that does not involve the ego. You can still stand up for yourself with strong counter-arguments, and even note their hostility, but you “don’t go there” in terms of matching their negative energy. As you say, there’s a great sense of freedom that comes with that. After all, when we just respond to their negative energy, we’re like their puppet on a string. The key is that we’re able to simply observe the hit, the pain, for a moment without automatically reacting. Tolle calls this “creating spaciousness” around the anger. As Osho says, the act of observation creates a tiny gap between ourselves and the rising anger – that gap is freedom.

‘The effects of not hitting back are so noticeable. When you react coolly to their heat, it’s almost impossible for them to respond with more heat – you’ve taken the heat out of their heat and if you don’t add your own, they’ve got nothing to fight back against! And for them to then respond to cool reasonableness with more angry abuse makes them look seriously unhinged – they feel that themselves! – and everybody needs to see themselves as fundamentally reasonable; so it’s almost impossible for them to continue being abusive. I find that they then usually also respond coolly and more reasonably, and the end result of the exchange can be that the anger and hatred have been absorbed, dissipated, leaving respect and even friendliness. That’s happened so many times.

‘Best wishes

‘David E’ (Email, 12 May 2025)

Thanks to Julia and Edward for such thoughtful replies. And thanks to all our readers for continuing to read and respond to our work.

David Edwards is co-editor of medialens.org and author of the forthcoming, ‘A Short Book About Ego… and the Remedy of Meditation’, Mantra Books, 24 June 2025, available here. He is also the author of the forthcoming dystopian, Chomskyan, mystical, science fiction thriller, ‘The Man With No Face’, his first novel, to be published by Roundfire Books in 2026. Email: davidmedialens@gmail.com

What People Are Saying About ‘A Short Book About Ego’

‘In this compelling short guide for the head-trapped, David Edwards shows us how meditation has the power to bring each of us a healing, personal bliss by dissolving our insatiable egos. But he offers a powerful, bigger message too: a politics anchored in the love and compassion released by meditation is the only effective path to healing our broken societies.’ (Jonathan Cook, winner of the Martha Gellhorn special award for journalism, author of Israel and the Clash of Civilizations)

‘I have learnt a great deal reading A Short Book About Ego, a thoughtful and gentle book about the change of consciousness we all need to go through. I read it just after reading the Bhagavad Gita while travelling through northern Pakistan, which gave me extra context.’ (Peter Oborne, award-winning journalist and broadcaster, author of The Fate of Abraham: Why the West Is Wrong About Islam)

‘The best way to transcend the ego is to understand it. This book shines a bright light on the machinations of the ego, and shows us a glimpse of freedom beyond it. Best of all, it highlights the clearest path to freedom, through the practice of meditation.’ (Steve Taylor PhD, author of The Leap and Extraordinary Awakenings)

‘A Short Book About Ego is a brilliant and concise call to arms. It shows us that those of us who wish to transform the chaos of the world we see everywhere around us must first learn to transform ourselves inwardly. Our ego is our enemy, the self an illusion (standing at the centre of a circle of mirrors), and the road to freedom lies in inner stillness and learning the ancient art of meditation. David Edwards is one of the most important writers at work today. In a saner and more emotionally wise society, he would be both a household name and a national treasure.’ (Torben Betts, award-winning UK playwright and author of Invincible, Muswell Hill and Murder in the Dark)