Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation: Dive deeper into your relationships with wisdom from Ram Dass

Hi there,

I’d like to talk about relationships for a minute. When looking at the “big picture” how do they fit into our existence?

I have to admit that sometimes I get addicted to the idea of loving somebody; and I get so caught up in the relationship that I can’t ever arrive at the place where I’m dwelling in love – not as an external tangible force to gain or lose, but at a place where I’m being love, as Ram Dass would say.

I wanted to find out how to break out of this addictive pattern, and I found that a lot of Ram Dass’ teachings helped me to open myself up to the possibility of dwelling in love without conditions.

With that, I invite you to explore our new free offering. It’s a goldmine of knowledge and wisdom on relationships from Ram Dass that we’ve curated just for you. This “hub” includes audio podcasts, videos and articles that help you to answer big questions like:

- How can you integrate sexuality and spirituality?

- How do you overcome fear of opening up to love?

- How do you maintain conscious relationships?

Access to the Ram Dass relationships collection is completely free, and I encourage you to take some time this week to check it out and expand your view of what connection means to you. Whatever type of relationship you find yourself in, this wisdom will help you to navigate it in a more healthy and balanced way.

Click Here to check it out.

I hope you enjoy this offering, feel free to reply to this email and let me know what you think about it.

Have a great week!

Rachael

Via Sen's Daily: Interfaith group asks US government to reject report of U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

Editorial, October 12, 2016.
Kit Bigelow, who was Director of external affairs for the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of the U.S. until her retirement in June 2010, has appeared as co-signer of a controversial letter from an ad-hoc group of religious leaders. Kit Bigelow is not a leader of the Bahai community. The letter was sent to President Barack Obama, Orrin Hatch as Senate leader (pro-tem) and House Speaker Paul Ryan. The letter states:

We wish to express our deep concern that the Commission has issued a report, Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Non-Discrimination Principles with Civil Liberties, that stigmatizes tens of millions of religious Americans, their communities, and their faith-based institutions, and threatens the religious freedom of all our citizens.
The Commission asserts in its Findings that religious organizations “use the pretext of religious doctrines to discriminate.”

What we find even more disturbing is that, in a statement included in the report, Commission Chairman Martin Castro writes:

“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”

Kit Bigelow’s name appears as a signatory in her individual capacity as “Religious Freedom Advocate.” The term has been tainted in the USA in the last two election seasons because of its use as a cover for religiously-motivated discrimination, but Kit Bigelow’s activism for real religious liberties goes back much further, and not primarily in relation to the USA. 

Current policies in the Bahai community do not allow for the recognition of the legally performed civil unions or marriages of same-sex couples. The policy of the Universal House of Justice is that individuals who are in same-sex marriages should not be allowed to enrol in the Bahai community. This means that they cannot vote, or be elected, for the Spiritual Assemblies that govern the affairs of local Bahai communities, and cannot participate in the open consultations on community affairs by enrolled members which are part of the ‘Feasts’ held in each local community 19 times every year. Those who are excluded from enrollment are not shunned and are not barred from other occasions of worship. The Bahai community today does not campaign against the legal recognition of same-sex marriages.

While the exclusion of individuals in same-sex marriages from membership of the Bahai community is discriminatory, this has not been justified by Bahais under the highly politicized banner of preserving religious freedom. There is nothing in the Bahai teachings that would justify Bahais in discriminating against homosexuals in their business activities, or in any role they might have as public officials. It would be unfortunate if the description of Kit Bigelow as “Religious Freedom Advocate” gave the impression that she, or the Bahai community, were aligned with the political movement that has claimed a religious liberties justification for discrimation in public life. 

A PDF of the controversial letter is available here.

The report it criticizes is available as a PDF here.

An example of the dialogues within the Bahai community on this question can be found here.
Short link: http://wp.me/pNMoJ-2Jx


Make the jump here to read the orginal and much more here

Via Ram Dass

October 12, 2016

When meditation works as it should, it will be a natural part of your being. There will no longer be anything apart from you to have faith in. Hope starts the journey, faith sustains it, but it ends beyond both hope and faith.

Via Sri Prem Baba

Via Daily Dharma / October 12, 2016: Beyond the Status Quo

We come to the Buddha-dharma precisely because the suffering we have experienced in the world of relativity forces us to question “conventional” truth and the status quo.

—Charles Johnson, "The Dharma of Social Transformation"

'The Tyler Oakley Show' with Senator Tim Kaine

Via Towleroad: NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY

National Coming Out Day, Galaxy Note 7, Billy Bush, Austin, Depeche Mode, Tyler Oakley: HOT LINKS

Previous

Next

by Andy Towle
October 11, 2016 | 12:22pm

Share13 6

It’s that day again: “28 years ago, on the anniversary of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, we first observed National Coming Out Day as a reminder that one of our most basic tools is the power of coming out. One out of every two Americans has someone close to them who is gay or lesbian. 

For transgender people, that number is only one in 10. Coming out – whether it is as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or allied – STILL MATTERS. When people know someone who is LGBTQ, they are far more likely to support equality under the law. Beyond that, our stories can be powerful to each other.”

Make the jump here to read the original and more at Towleroad

Via JMG: Democrats Applaud National Coming Out Day

October 11, 2016 2016 Election, LGBT History

Via press release:

Today, on National Coming Out Day, we celebrate one of the most powerful forces in the fight for LGBT equality. When someone decides to come out as member of the LGBT community, it gives their friends, family, loved ones and neighbors a personal reason to support LGBT rights, and it inspires more members and allies of the LGBT community to stand up for what is right, even in the face of discrimination, bigotry and violence.

Despite the great strides we’ve made in recent years – marriage equality, the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and more – the sad fact remains that coming out is still a risky, even dangerous thing to do for too many Americans, young and old. But that’s why it’s so important. Together, we can end the discrimination and build a brighter, safer future for all.

“The Democratic Party is proud to stand with the LGBT community, and proud to support candidates for elected office who are fighting for the promise of full equality. If we hope to continue building on the progress of the last eight years, we must elect Hillary Clinton and Democrats up and down the ballot across the country.”

Make the jump here to read the original and more on JMG

Via JMG: Tim Kaine Denounces Bullying On National Coming Out Day: Adults Need To Promote Acceptance [VIDEO]

October 11, 2016 2016 Election, Activism, LGBT News

Via press release from the Clinton campaign:

In honor of National Coming Out Day, Vice Presidential nominee Tim Kaine sat down with ATTN: Editor-In-Chief Matthew Segal, telling him that it is incumbent upon adults in leadership positions to promote the message of acceptance.

Amid clips of LGBT kids describing the bullying and hate-speech directed at them, Senator Kaine says that National Coming Out Day is important because we need to let kids know that they should “be proud of who you are. You’re made the way you’re made for a reason…celebrate that and accept it.”

Senator Kaine also said that school districts receiving school safety funding should work to reduce the rate of bullying in their schools. As someone who has been standing up to bullies her whole life, Hillary Clinton, together with Tim Kaine, will continue fighting for the the LGBT community and celebrates National Coming Out Day.

 Make the jump here to read the original and see the video on JMG

Via Wasington Post: How one man’s idea for the AIDS quilt made the country pay attention

Twenty-nine years ago, the AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded on the Mall for the first time, with 1,920 panels. Today, it has grown to more than 49,000. The project was the idea of Cleve Jones, a San Francisco gay rights activist. This article is adapted from Jones’s book “When We Rise: My Life in the Movement,” which is being published Nov. 29 by Hachette Books. 
 

Cleve Jones, founder of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, sits on the floor in front of a quilt panel in San Francisco on Mar. 29, 2001. (Eric Risberg/AP)

 

I could see it so clearly in my head, and it was starting to make me crazy. All I had were words, and apparently the words I had were insufficient to paint for others the image in my brain: the Mall, covered in fabric stretching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. But whenever I began to talk about it, I was met with blank stares or rolling eyes.

Even the word had power for me. Quilts. It made me think of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers. It evoked images of pioneer women making camp by the Conestoga wagons. Or enslaved Africans in the South, hoarding scraps of fabric from the master’s house. It spoke of castoffs, discarded remnants, different colors and textures, sewn together to create something beautiful and useful and warm. Comforters.

I imagined families sharing stories of their loved ones as they cut and sewed the fabric. It could be therapy, I hoped, for a community that was increasingly paralyzed by grief and rage and powerlessness. It could be a tool for the media, to reveal the humanity behind the statistics. And a weapon to deploy against the government; to shame them with stark visual evidence of their utter failure to respond to the suffering and death that spread and increased with every passing day.
I couldn’t shake the idea of a quilt.

My friend Joseph and I started making quilt panels. We made a list of 40 men whom we felt we had known well enough to memorialize, and we began painting their names on blocks of fabric. We talked about how much land would be covered if the bodies of our dead were laid out head to toe, each panel the approximate size of a grave.

For more than a year, activists had been working to organize a mass march for lesbian and gay rights to be held in October 1987 in Washington. I was determined to unfold the quilt on the Mall at the march.

As the annual Gay Freedom Day celebration approached in San Francisco, we asked Mayor Dianne Feinstein for permission to hang the first five squares from the mayor’s balcony at City Hall, overlooking the main stage and Civic Center Plaza. To our surprise, she readily agreed.

We had a name now: The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt.

On Sunday, June 28, 1987, more than 200,000 attended the parade and celebration. The day was dedicated to the memory of people who had died of AIDS. Everyone in the plaza could see the multicolored quilt sections hanging from the mayor’s balcony. I finally had more than words to describe my vision. People could see it now. They lined up at our information booth to get copies of our first brochure with instructions for creating memorial-quilt panels. Those brochures would travel back to the home towns of all the visitors. Across America, people began to sew.

[Your lifetime risk of HIV by race, state and sexual preference — in four charts]

 

On Oct. 11, 1987, the second National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights drew perhaps 500,000 people. The Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was unfolded at dawn, with 1,920 individual panels, just a small fraction of the more than 20,000 Americans who had already lost their lives to AIDS.


Make the jump here to read the full article and more

Via FB:

Via Philosophical Atheism / FB:

Via Sri Prem Baba:

Via Daily Dharma / October 11, 2016: Finding Happiness

Happiness is not happiness unless it is shared. For happiness is the one thing in all the world that comes to us only at the moment we give it, and is likewise increased by being given away.

—Clark Strand, "The Wisdom of Frogs"

Via Sri Prem Baba

Via Daily Dharma / October 10, 2016: Unfamiliar Territory

Using meditation or therapy to try to shut down parts of our experience is ultimately counterproductive. We do not have to be afraid of entering unfamiliar territory once we have learned how to hold experience within the gentleness of our own minds.

—Mark Epstein, "Stopping the Wind"

Via Ram Dass / October 9, 2016:

 

Getting straight not only applies to people but to things as well, such as favorite music, disliked foods, special treats, avoided places, all your toys, etc. Everything must be rerun through your compassion machine.

Via Daily Dharma / October 9, 2016: On Wishful Thinking

It isn’t the loved ones and gain, per se, that need to be renounced; it’s the unrealistic hopes we place in these things. Wishful thinking can easily become more compelling than the longing of the bodhi heart.

—Pema Chödrön, "Cutting Ties: The Fruits of Solitude"

Via Lions Roar: Life is Tough. Here Are Six Ways to Deal With It

An ancient set of Buddhist slogans offers us six powerful techniques to transform life’s difficulties into awakening and benefit. Zen teacher Norman Fischer guides us through them. Illustrations by Keith Abbott.

There’s an old Zen saying: the whole world’s upside down. In other words, the way the world looks from the ordinary or conventional point of view is pretty much the opposite of the way the world actually is. There’s a story that illustrates this.

Once there was a Zen master who was called Bird’s Nest Roshi because he meditated in an eagle’s nest at the top of a tree. He became quite famous for this precarious practice. The Song Dynasty poet Su Shih (who was also a government official) once came to visit him and, standing on the ground far below the meditating master, asked what possessed him to live in such a dangerous manner. The roshi answered, “You call this dangerous? What you are doing is far more dangerous!” Living normally in the world, ignoring death, impermanence, and loss and suffering, as we all routinely do, as if this were a normal and a safe way to live, is actually much more dangerous than going out on a limb to meditate.


While trying to avoid difficulty may be natural and understandable, it actually doesn’t work. We think it makes sense to protect ourselves from pain, but our self-protection ends up causing us deeper pain. We think we have to hold on to what we have, but our very holding on causes us to lose what we have. We’re attached to what we like and try to avoid what we don’t like, but we can’t keep the attractive object and we can’t avoid the unwanted object. So, counterintuitive though it may be, avoiding life’s difficulties is actually not the path of least resistance; it is a dangerous way to live. If you want to have a full and happy life, in good times and bad, you have to get used to the idea that facing misfortune squarely is better than trying to escape from it.

This is not a matter of grimly focusing on life’s difficulties. It is simply the smoothest possible approach to happiness. Of course, when we can prevent difficulty, we do it. The world may be upside down, but we still have to live in this upside-down world, and we have to be practical on its terms. The teaching on transforming bad circumstances into the path doesn’t deny that. What it addresses is the underlying attitude of anxiety, fear, and narrow-mindedness that makes our lives unhappy, fearful, and small.

Transforming bad circumstances into the path is associated with the practice of patience. There are six mind-training (lojong) slogans connected with this:

1. Turn all mishaps into the path.
2. Drive all blames into one.
3. Be grateful to everyone.
4. See confusion as buddha and practice emptiness.
5. Do good, avoid evil, appreciate your lunacy, pray for help.
6. Whatever you meet is the path.

Read the complete article and more here