Via Ram Dass

God
and I have become
like two giant fat people living
in a tiny
boat.

We
keep bumping into
each other
and laughing.

- Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz

Via Daily Dharma / Nature's Perspective

Animals are people, too. As are plants. And water. And soil. This is the fundamental insight at the heart of all eco-spiritual work. But to get that insight, we have to get with the big picture. To get that insight, we have to climb a tree.

—Clark Strand, "Trees, Butterflies, and the Buddhist Moral Life"

Via Daily Dharma / Understanding Across Difference

Understanding across difference, whatever the difference, lies at the center of spiritual life and aspiration.

—Henry Shukman, "The Meeting"

Freedom to Marry

Via Daily Dharma / Free Time vs. Freedom

Free time is of a different order than free-dom. Freedom, at least in the dharmic sense, depends on the quality of attention that we bring to our interactions. Only to the extent that we can be fully present in our relationships with ourselves, with our children, and with each other, are we free.

—Soren Gordhamer, "Finding What’s Right in Front of Us"

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 26, 2017

You learn not to act out your emotions, but just to appreciate and acknowledge them. That’s part of the way you can use them spiritually. You don’t deny them, you don’t push them down. You acknowledge that, “I’m angry,” but you don’t have to say, “Hey, I’m angry!” You acknowledge it; you don’t deny it. That’s the key.

So, the way you would use emotions in devotional practices is aiming them towards God. For the other kinds of emotional realms, you witness them and you sit with them, and you watch them change and come and go, and you don’t deny them, you allow them; because that’s part of your human condition.

When you talk about service, you’ll see that it awakens intense emotions, and you have to let your heart break. But you’ve cultivated another plane of reality, which is the one that notices and allows it. A quality of equanimity that lies with it.

Via Daily Dharma / The Importance of You

Dharma is what the Buddha taught. It is the way of understanding and love—how to understand, how to love, how to make understanding and love into real things.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, "The Three Gems"
 

Home(less) [Short Film] - Full Movie

FiveFilms4freedom 2017: In conversation with Jonny Ruff

Via Tiny Buddha / FB:

Via Daily Dharma / Facing Pain

You don’t have to be afraid of pain. If it’s going to be there, you can let it be there—but don’t let the mind be in pain with it.

—Upasika Kee Nanayon, "Tough Teachings to Ease the Mind"

Via Daily Dharam / The Value of Inexperience

Unlike a subject like, say, carpentry, where we learn from the experience of those who have gone before us, meditation is defined by spontaneity, by not knowing.

—Barry Evans, "The Myth of the Experienced Meditator"

Via FB: Dorothy Day

"No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless.
There is too much work to do.

~~ Dorothy Day (Catholic social activist)

Via Daily Dharma / Joining in a Common Effort:

We can be true to our own basic insight of what we see as true, but we can embrace other people, knowing that they also may have their truth too, and we try to find where we can join together in common effort.

—Alfred Bloom, "Beyond Religion"

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - March 22, 2017

 

It’s a very delicate task to interpret things like ego and fear because we tend to interpret from where we’re sitting, and we’ve developed these structures around it.

The root of fear is the feeling of separateness that can exist within oneself. The root of fear is within the model one has of oneself. That’s where fear starts. Once that feeling of separation exists, then you process everything from either inside or outside in terms of that model. Then it keeps reinforcing the feeling of vulnerability, because there are incredibly powerful forces moving both inside and outside of you.

The transformative process of spiritual work is reawakening to the innocence of going behind that model of separation that one has, that cuts you off, that made you a tiny little fragile somebody. A lot of the power comes from a freeing of our own fragility.

Via Daily Dharma / The Joy of Problems

People get stuck for decades with the same problems over and over. Focusing expands you. Then you live in more ways and have new problems. Somebody once asked me what I thought mental health was. I said, “New problems!”

—Eugene T. Gendlin, "Focusing"

Via Thinking People / FB: Ignorance

Via FB / Shared brilliance from an anonymous source:

"Why should coal miners pay for PBS"? This was an actual question asked by the Trump administration yesterday. Obviously a blatantly stupid question. We have questions too. Why should a poor black family in Detroit pay for the President to go golfing? Why should a single mother of 3 who's working 2 jobs in Louisiana be denied health-care so that the CEO of Aetna can get a tax-break? Why is the guy washing dishes in Baton Rouge paying for the President's wife's secret service protection so she can live comfortably in NYC? We could do this all day. But here's the real question the Trump administration and the Republicans who empower him need to answer: Do you have a heart? Did no one teach you to care about your neighbors? Do you know what "empathy" means? Did no one ever teach you to "share" when you were in kindergarten? Have you never heard the phrase "do unto others"? I can't think of a group of people who need to watch Sesame Street MORE than the Republican party. Perhaps they would learn some common decency." 

Not sure whose brilliance this is but I was instructed to copy and paste.

Via Daily Dharma / Reality Check

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

—Philip K. Dick, "Drowning in Narcissism"