Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Intention: Cultivating Equanimity

 

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RIGHT INTENTION Cultivating Equanimity Whatever you intend, whatever you plan, and whatever you have a tendency toward, that will become the basis upon which your mind is established. (SN 12.40) Develop meditation on equanimity, for when you develop meditation on equanimity, all aversion is abandoned. (MN 62)  The purpose of equanimity is warding off attachment. (Vm 9.97) When a person seeing a form with the eye is not attached to pleasing forms and not repelled by unpleasing forms, they have established mindfulness and dwell with an unlimited mind. For a person whose mindfulness is developed and practiced, the eye does not struggle to reach pleasing forms, and unpleasing forms are not considered repulsive. (SN 35.274)

Reflection Equanimity is the antidote to aversion. Just as we can develop an aversive tendency through practice and habit, we can develop equanimity as a primary character trait and latent tendency. We can practice this at the level of primary sensory contact, such as described here using visual information. Practice just seeing what is there, without attachment or aversion; gaze upon your visual sphere with equanimity. Daily Practice When you are looking at something using your eyes, notice when this is accompanied by a subtle “I don’t like this” or “This is not good.” When you are aware of this happening, try replacing the aversion with an attitude of equanimity: “This is the way this is. I don’t need to judge it or disapprove of it. Let it be.” In this way the eye is not struggling against unpleasing forms and is thus not attached to their being different than they are.  Tomorrow: Refraining from Frivolous Speech One week from today: Cultivating Lovingkindness Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

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Via Daily Dharma: Clear Faith

 Clear faith blooms when we recognize in another the possibility of living a free, happy, peaceful life, and this recognition compels us to look for a way to get there ourselves.

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, “Good Enough Faith”

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Via White Crane Institute // THOMAS MANN

 This Day in Gay History

June 06

Born

Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann

1875 -

THOMAS MANN, German writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955); a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual.

His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

 

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912).

 

Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy. Considered a classic of homoerotic passion (if unconsummated) Death in Venice has been made into a film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann’s old enemy, Alfred Kerr, to have ‘made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle classes’, it has been pivotal to introducing the discourse of same-sex desire to the common culture.

 

Mann himself described his feelings for young violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg as the "central experience of my heart." Despite the homoerotic overtones in his writing, Mann chose to marry and have children; two of his children, Klaus, also a writer, who committed suicide in 1949, and Erika, an actress and writer who died in 1969 and who was married to W.H. Auden for 34 years, were also Gay. His works also present other sexual themes, such as incest in The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut) and The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte).

 

 

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