We're all just walking each other home.
- Ram Dass -
Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Via Tricycle // How to Follow the Bodhisattva Path without Burning Out
By Radhule Weininger
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Via Daily Dharma: What Is Equanimity?
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Let Yourself Live Fully
Via Daily Dharma: Hearing Silence
Monday, June 28, 2021
Via Lama Surya Das
When we’re motivated by compassion, our minds are relaxed and at ease. Fear and suspicion make us anxious so that even if we’re well-off we’re unhappy. Having a sense that other human beings are our brothers and sisters sets the mind at rest. These days we often rely on material things to be happy. What we need to do is to introduce a sense of inner values, compassion and affection, into our system of education. ~His Holiness the Dalai Lama
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 27, 2021 💌
We get so emotionally preoccupied with the thing that is wrong with us,
that it starts to color all of the ways in which we see the world around
us...
In the course of spiritual awakening, our social perceptions keep
changing as we do this spiritual work. Many of us are in the peculiar
predicament that we have built an entire ego structure about who we are
and how we function, based on these emotionally-laden habits about
individual differences...
...Maharaji kept saying to me, ‘Ram Dass don’t you see it’s all perfect? Everybody is being just who they are.’
- Ram Dass
Excerpt from Ram Dass Here & Now Podcast - Ep. 103 - Individual Differences
Via Tricycle // How to Choose Joy
By Amanda Gilbert
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Via Daily Dharma: Clear Your Path
Saturday, June 26, 2021
Via White Crane Institute // RUDOLF BRAZDA
RUDOLF BRAZDA, believed to be the last surviving man to wear the pink triangle — the emblem sewn onto the striped uniforms of the thousands of homosexuals sent to Nazi concentration camps, most of them to their deaths — was born on this date. Mr. Brazda, who was born in Germany, had lived in France since the Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by American forces in April 1945. He had been imprisoned there for three years.
It was only after May 27, 2008, when the German National Monument to the Victims of the Nazi Regime was unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten park — opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — that Mr. Brazda became known as probably the last gay survivor of the camps. Until he notified German officials after the unveiling, the Lesbian and Gay Federation believed there were no other pink-triangle survivors. Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French organization that commemorates the Nazi persecution of gay people, said that Mr. Brazda “was very likely the last victim and the last witness” to the persecution.
“It will now be the task of historians to keep this memory alive,” the statement said, “a task that they are just beginning to undertake.” One of those historians is Gerard Koskovich, curator of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Museum in San Francisco and an author with Roberto Malini and Steed Gamero of “A Different Holocaust” (2006). Pointing out that only men were interned, Mr. Koskovich said, “The Nazi persecution represented the apogee of anti-Gay persecution, the most extreme instance of state-sponsored homophobia in the 20th century.
During the 12-year Nazi regime, he said, up to 100,000 men were identified in police records as homosexuals, with about 50,000 convicted of violating Paragraph 175, a section of the German criminal code that outlawed male homosexual acts. There was no law outlawing female homosexual acts, he said. Citing research by Rüdiger Lautmann, a German sociologist, Mr. Koskovich said that 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were interned in the camps and that about 60 percent of them died there, most within a year.
“The experience of homosexual men under the Nazi regime was one of extreme persecution, but not genocide,” Mr. Koskovich said, when compared with the “relentless effort to identify all Jewish people and ultimately exterminate them.” Still, the conditions in the camps were murderous, said Edward J. Phillips, the director of exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“Men sent to the camps under Section 175 were usually put to forced labor under the cruelest conditions — underfed, long hours, exposure to the elements and brutal treatment by labor brigade leaders,” Mr. Phillips said. “We know of instances where gay prisoners and their pink triangles were used for guards’ target practices.” Two books have been written about Mr. Brazda. In one, “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” (2010), by Jean-Luc Schwab, Mr. Brazda recalled how dehumanizing the incarceration was. “Seeing people die became such an everyday thing, it left you feeling practically indifferent,” he is quoted as saying. “Now, every time I think back on those terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like everyone in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.”
Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both worked in the coal-mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph 175. After the war, Mr. Brazda moved to Alsace. There he met Edouard Mayer, his partner until Mr. Mayer’s death in 2003.
He had no immediate survivors. “Having emerged from anonymity,” the book “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” says of Mr. Brazda, “he looks at the social evolution for homosexuals over his nearly 100 years of life: ‘I have known it all, from the basest repression to the grand emancipation of today.’ ” He died on August 3, 2011 in Bantzenheim, in Alsace, France. He was 98.
Via Tricycle // Become Friends with the Moon
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| Become Friends with the Moon | ||
| Ephrat Livni reflects on years of spiritual study with the moon as her guide. | ||
One
night, as I was riding despondently back from practice, a one-hour
journey that took me along a straight, empty stretch of road surrounded
by fields, I noticed the bright moon, round and large. It was right
there with me, every time, every ride, always slightly different, waxing
or waning, lighter or dimmer, and I realized, laughing happily, “The
moon is my friend!”
And something shifted. This moment released me from the vice grip of wishing things were different. |
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Via Daily Dharma: Seeing Goodness
If you look through eyes of openness and freshness, you will see goodness in whatever you do. You just haven’t allowed yourself to see it before.
Friday, June 25, 2021
Via Tricycle // The Threefold Practice of Won Buddhism
With Rev. Grace Song
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Via Daily Dharma: Developing Wise Motivation
—Ajahn Sucitto, “From Turning the Wheel of Truth: Commentary on the Buddha’s First Teaching”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via NPR // Profiles In Queerness
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Thursday, June 24, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Doing and Not-Doing
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
Via White Crane // WILLIAM DALE JENNINGS
The trial of WILLIAM DALE JENNINGS begins and lasts for 10 days. Jennings was born in Amarillo, Texas on October 21, 1917. Not long thereafter his parents moved to Denver, Colorado. After graduating from high school there, he moved to Southern California, where he wrote, produced, and directed stage plays in Los Angeles and Pasadena. He studied dance under Lester Horton and later worked with Martha Graham, two early pioneers of modern interpretive dance.
One night in 1952, as Jennings walked home from Westlake Park (now MacArthur Park), four miles west of downtown Los Angeles, he was followed by a plainclothes vice officer and arrested in his house under charges of indecent behavior.
Jennings, of course, was totally disheartened. If word of this got out, his dream of a career in screen writing would be totally shot. From jail, Jennings called Mattachine cohort, Harry Hay. Hay bailed him out of jail early the next morning, and it was then, over breakfast at the Brown Derby, that they decided to fight the charge in court, under grounds of entrapment.
To this end, they founded the Citizens’ Committee to Outlaw Entrapment. Long Beach attorney George Sibley took on the case. After a dramatic Los Angeles court trial that lasted for ten days, Jennings won a jury acquittal in a rebuke of police harassment, intimidation, and entrapment of homosexuals.
The acquittal energized other persecuted homosexual people into action throughout the nation and brought respect to the Mattachine Society, which had funded Jennings's defense. “The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name” was now on its way out of the closet, and the infamous statutes of “Crimes Against Nature” on the law books in every one of the United States were targeted for eradication. By the year 2000, most States had removed those statutes from their laws, partly due to of the influence of Dale Jennings. The struggle continues. An interesting footnote to this entrapment: designer and co-founder of the original Mattachine Society with Harry Hay, Rudy Gernreich left the bulk of his estate to establish a fund to assist Gay men who were arrested through entrapment.
Via WHITE CRANE // ALAN MATHISON TURING OBE, FRS was born
ALAN MATHISON TURING OBE, FRS was born on this date (d: 1954); An English mathematician, logician and cryptographer. Turing is considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided an influential formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with "the Turing machine," formulating the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the Churq-Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine.
With the Turing Test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think.
The "standard interpretation" of the Turing Test, in which player C, the interrogator, is given the task of trying to determine which player – A or B – is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to written questions to make the determination.
He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built. In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers.
During WWII Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's code-breaking center, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval crypto-analysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the “bombe,” an electromagnetic machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
The 2014 film, The Imitation Game is Turing's story. The title refers to Turing's proposed test of the same name, which he discussed in his 1950 paper on artificial intelligence entitled "Computing Machinery." In 1952, Turing was convicted of "acts of gross indecency" after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo estrogen therapy to achieve temporary chemical castration. The treatment caused him great anxiety and physical pain. An avid runner, he was no longer able to enjoy this exercise.
Turing died after eating an apple laced with cyanide in 1954. His death was ruled a suicide, but this was controversial and many think he may have been murdered to silence him.
Via Daily Dharma: Return to Your True Nature
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 23, 2021 💌
Of course it’s embarrassing to not always be infinitely wise, but I feel
that what we can offer each other is the truth of our growth process,
and that means we fall on our face again and again.
Sri Aurobindo says, “You get up, you take a step, you fall on your face,
you get up, you look sheepishly at God, you brush yourself off, you
take another step, you fall on your face, you get up, you look
sheepishly at God, you brush yourself off, you take another step…” and
that’s the journey of awakening.
If you were awakened already, you wouldn’t do that, so my suggestion is
you relax and don’t expect that you will always make the wisest
decisions, and just realize that sometimes you make a decision, and it
wasn’t the right one, and then you change it.
- Ram Dass -
Tuesday, June 22, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Experiencing Consciousness
Via Lama Surya Das / FB
Monday, June 21, 2021
White Crane Institute // BOB BARZAN
BOB BARZAN publishes 1st issue of White Crane Newsletter, forerunner of White Crane Journal and GayWisdom.org. Bob has since moved on to found the Modesto Museum of Art in…you guessed it, Modesto, California. I am proud to call him a friend.
He has also made
three of his other projects available online. White Crane and GayWisdom
happily endorses each of them and strongly recommends readers check them
out:
Sex and Spirit
Songs for Winter Solstice
Leaving the Priesthood
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By Bob Barzan
In the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Abraham
Maslow was watching a parade of citizens marching to patriotic tunes.
Deeply moved, he resolved at that moment to explore a “psychology of the
peace table”, to discover the best and loftiest ideals and
possibilities of the human species. It was clear to him that to learn
about the complete and authentic individual he had to study men and
women that were remarkably healthy. He offered this analogy for what he
was to do.
“If we want to know how fast human beings can run, we don’t study a
runner with a broken ankle or a mediocre runner. Instead, we study the
Olympic gold medal winner, the best there is. Only in that way can we
find out how fast human beings can run. Similarly, only by studying the
healthiest personalities can we find out how far we can stretch and
develop our capacities.”
This new perspective, a focus on health and thriving, and the best that
we are rather than the common focus on illness and surviving, gave
birth to a new school of psychology that came to be known as
“humanistic”. This perspective, in turn, became popular through the
human potential movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Psychotheorists gave
different names to this healthy life. Maslow called it the actualized
life, Karl Jung, the individuated life, and Carl Rogers the fully
functioning life, but what they described are individuals with very
similar characteristics.
Healthy individuals are men and women who are, first of all, authentic.
They do not try to live lives denying who they are in order to please
society or others, but rather they live lives that are true or faithful
to their inner callings. And here a distinction was made between a
person’s true inner self and a superficial self. Second, these people
excel, or strive to excel in the virtues that make it possible for us to
live together harmoniously; love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness,
joy, courage, patience, truth, peace, tolerance, generosity, and other
similar virtues. The presence of these two characteristics, authenticity
and what I call healthy spiritual virtues became for me indicators of
what it means to be a healthy man or woman and they became the bases for
my definition of spirituality.
For more than twenty years I’ve been aware that most people make at
least one false assumption in the area of spirituality. Most people
assume that all things having to do with spirituality, and they usually
mean religion, are good and beyond judgment or evaluation. As I
reflected on my own life, on my own coming out as a gay man, and on my
experience of eleven years as a Jesuit, it became clear to me that
spirituality and religion are not the same; rather religion is just one
of many spiritual paths. More importantly I saw that some spiritual
paths, including many religions, are not helping people live actualized,
fully functioning, in other words healthy, lives, but making them sick
or unhealthy. Instead of helping them live authentic lives characterized
by healthy spiritual virtues, some spiritual paths encourage hate,
greed, revenge, intolerance, and all the characteristics that make it
impossible for people to live together in peace.
Like many gay men, I had tried to live in a society that made me
suppress my own sexuality, my own identity. It was a society that
deceived me, and told me that being gay is bad, unnatural, a sin. It was
a society that encouraged me to be alienated from my self, and so was
in violation of the first principle of healthy living, authenticity.
Right from the beginning I was living a lie, truth had been sacrificed
for some other priority, and I was expected to build a healthy
spirituality on this false foundation. I realized that a spiritual path
that had me denying the truth, especially about myself, may bring me all
sorts of “benefits” like acceptance, security, position, and power, but
it wasn’t life giving, it was making me sick.
Several years ago a wonderful story circulated in San Francisco about
the opening of a new Zen center. A distinguished straight Zen master
addressed the assembly of mostly gay Zen practitioners. Everyone
expected he would give a typical dedication address, saying nothing of
consequence. He astounded everyone, however, by proclaiming that unless
you are out of the closet you are not practicing Zen. These are amazing,
insightful, and rare words from a religious leader. But in these words
he confirms what Maslow and others discovered years ago; the importance
of authenticity for a healthy life. A healthy spirituality then is
really about two major concerns; authenticity and the development of
life giving spiritual virtues. An unhealthy spirituality is the
opposite.
There is a tendency in our society to compartmentalize our lives so
that spirituality has little or nothing to do with how we live
day-to-day. Spirituality, however, is not something we do only when we
are meditating, analyzing our dreams, or worshiping on any given day.
Our spirituality is our whole way of life and that includes our
sexuality, our play, how we make our money, how we spend our money, how
we use our time, drive a car, make decisions, and how we treat people
every day. Everything that is part of our life is part of our
spirituality whether we are conscious of it or not. And everything we do
can either help us live more authentically, help us develop healthy
spiritual virtues, or it can do the opposite.
Over the years I have learned to discern when I am on or off a healthy
spiritual track by watching the results of my decisions, my attitudes,
and way of living. A healthy spiritual life manifests itself differently
in every individual, but in general you can recognize it because you
will see an increase in love, compassion, generosity, kindness, courage,
patience, and an ability to live harmoniously with other people and all
of nature.
Bob Barzan lives in Modesto, California where he created the Modesto Museum of Art.