Via Ram Dass

You gotta remember that the ego is built on fear. It’s not built on love; it’s built on fear. It’s built on the fear of non-survival, and so you build a structure in order to make you safe. And it’s beautiful instrument, but if you’re identified with it, you’re fearful all the time. And because you’re fearful you’re always going to overcompensate and make ego decisions that are a little inappropriate, because they’ll be colored by your looking from inside this place.

When you’re outside of it you see that you use your ego as you need to to make decisions. You come back into sombody-ness. You and I are meeting back here behind this dance that we’re doing which is charming and fascinating. And that’s really the beauty of playing with the ego and the higher consciousness. And it’s only when those two planes work that the ego becomes really functional, okay?

Via Daily Dharma / Graceful Suffering:

There is grace in suffering. Suffering is part of the training program for wisdom.

—Ram Dass, "America’s Guru"

Via Daily Dharma / Creating Our Own Suffering:

In short, it’s our reactivity that generates dukkha, keeping us agitated and therefore unable to contemplate the actual, direct, here and now experience of it.

—Thanissara, "The Grit That Becomes a Pearl"

Via Daily Dharma / Making Space

Like a forest fire, anger tends to burn up its own support. If we jump down into the middle of such a fire, we will have little chance of putting it out, but if we create a clearing around the edges, the fire can burn itself out. This is the role of meditation: creating a clearing around the margins of anger.

—Mark Epstein, "I’ve Been Meditating for Ten Years, and I’m Still Angry. What’s the Matter with Me?"

Via Daily Dharma / The Achievement of Altruism:

According to the scriptures, the mere inclination to generate bodhicitta thus shows a certain degree of spiritual evolution and maturity.

—Karma Trinlay Rinpoche, "What We’ve Been All Along"

Via Ram Dass

 

We don't need to wait until we are enlightened before we act in the world, and we don't need to withdraw from the world to become enlightened. Conscious social action can be our own work on ourselves that becomes the vehicle for our awakening.

Via Daily Dharma / For All Sentient Beings

Without bodhicitta, there can be no enlightenment. And all of us—no matter who we are and what we have done—hold this seed of bodhicitta within ourselves.

—The 17th Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorje, "No Easy Answers"

Via Daily Dharma: Seeing Another

When you’re not entrapped by another person’s appearance or behavior, you can see behind all that to a deeper level of their being because your mind has tuned itself; you’ve shifted your focus just that little bit to see their soul. That soul quality is love.

—Ram Dass, "Tuning the Mind"

Via Tricycle/ Rama Dass: Tuning the Mind

When I look at relationships, my own and others, I see a whole range of reasons we get together and ways we interact. Some are transactional, but the deeper impulse of every human relationship is to evoke the love and oneness that unites us. But what actually happens is that many relationships reinforce our separateness because of our misperception of ourselves as separate beings, and because of our desire systems, which are based in separateness or ego. Relationships only work in a spiritual sense when you and I really see that we are one.  

 

Relationships and emotions can reinforce our separateness, or they can be grist for the mill of awakening. When it comes to love relationships, we are like bees looking for a flower. The predicament is that the emotional power of loving somebody can get you so caught in the interpersonal melodrama that you can’t get beyond the emotion. The problem with interpersonal love is that you are dependent on the other person to reflect love back to you. That’s part of the illusion of separateness. The reality is that love is a state of being that comes from within. 

The only thing you really ever have to offer another person is your own state of being. When you’re not entrapped by another person’s appearance or behavior, you can see behind all that to a deeper level of their being because your mind has tuned itself; you’ve shifted your focus just that little bit to see their soul. That soul quality is love.

♦

From Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart by Ram Dass. © 2913 Love Serve Remember Foundation. Reprinted with permission of Sounds True. www.soundstrue.com. 

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Peter Fällmar Andersson: This is how we let Hans Rosling rest in peace

Hans Rosling, 1948-2017.

This is a translated version of an article first published on February 12th, 2017. Read it in Swedish here.

Hans Rosling was said to be unable to deliver bad news.

That is a misconception.

Three years before passing away, he remarked that the one thing that had surprised him the most during his tenure as a global educator was that he became so famous – despite having so little influence over people’s real knowledge. He realized he was stuck in ”persona hell”, and that people remained ignorant at a level worse than random guessing when they took Gapminder’s tests. Not because of a lack of knowledge, but because of ”an actively upheld ignorance”.

He had discovered that people actively had set their minds to remaining ignorant.

Hans Rosling had devoted decades to try to throw out our Tintin-like perspective, but kept on having to say ”wrong, wrong, wrong” when the Swedish people answered the question of how many children are born per woman in Bangladesh.

So how do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?

By forgetting that he sometimes swallowed swords in a heavy metal style tank top.

And by remembering that mothers in Bangladesh no longer give birth to five children on average, nor four, but TWO POINT TWO children.

How do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?

By forgetting that he got more clicks than Lady Gaga online.

And by remembering that 80 percent of the children of the world now have access to the most important and most cost efficient of all vaccines: the one for measles.

How do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?

By forgetting that Time Magazine put him on some list.

And by remembering that Hans Rosling was certain that the world, if it got it’s act together, can reach the goal that the United Nations set for the year 2030: to exterminate extreme poverty for everyone, everywhere.

How do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?

By forgetting that he was a ”data rock star” at the lecture network website Ted.

And by remembering that life expectancy globally has skyrocketed, and now averages 72 years.

How do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?

By forgetting false quotes, distributed by people who want everything for the world but Rosling’s humanism.

And by remembering that he spoke of the refugees on the Mediterranean by saying: ”Send a ferry to help them over, instead of saving them when they are about to drown”.

How do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?

By forgetting that he once competed in ”På spåret”, one of Sweden’s oldest and most popular game shows.

And by remembering that Hans Rosling, the man, was a result of a political struggle that created a nation built on social security, that made it possible for him – who grew up in a home without a flushable toilet – to be the first in his family to study at a higher level. His dad worked in a coffee factory, his mother as an assistant at a library. And that he, thanks to that same nation state, was able to receive his first cancer treatment as a father of small children, at age 30. And that the treatment gave him another 38 years to live.

How do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?

By – hesitantly – forgetting that he once turned some colleagues down when they wanted him to take part in a student comic theater celebration: ”got no time. gotta stop ebola. get something online.”

And by remembering that Hans Rosling sometimes was mistaken, or drew the wrong conclusions.

How do we let Hans Rosling rest in peace?

Perhaps by following his example, and whisper a quick ”thank you” when turning on the water faucet, to get clean, fresh, healthy water.

In the spirit and hope of his heavenly harmony, may we finally understand what his Lego blocks, his graphical bubbles and Swenglish accent were all about:

We hold our destiny in our own hands.

Translation from Swedish: Andreas Ekström

Make the  jump here to read the original here

Tiq Milan and Kim Katrin Milan: A queer vision of love and marriage

Via Daily Dharma / Inanimate Inspiration

Disgusting things get thrown on the earth, but the earth isn’t horrified by them. When you make your mind like the earth, neither agreeable nor disagreeable sensory impressions will take charge of it.

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, "The Joy of Effort"
 

Via Tricycle / Spiritual but Not Religious Exploring a growing cultural phenomenon that is here to stay

In this special section from the Spring 2017 issue of Tricycle, religion scholars, journalists, and laypeople share their thoughts on a phenomenon that is here to stay: the rising number of people who identify as spiritual, but not religious.

As Professor of Religious Studies at Rice University William B. Parsons says in his introduction:

“During a year of research among the religiously unaffiliated, for example, the American writer Kaya Oakes encountered many more people who dip in and out of various Buddhist traditions than people who actually identify as Buddhists. To help with background, historian Matt Hedstrom sheds some light on little-known Protestant educational trends that may have paved the way for contemporary mindfulness. Religious studies scholar Andrea Jain offers an example from the world of yoga that parallels some of the strongest critiques—familiar to Tricycle readers—of spirituality as a consumer product. And finally, Diane Winston, a journalist and historian of religion, relates her experience teaching an undergraduate class in which students seem neither religious nor spiritual.”

Table of Contents:

SBNR: Past and Present, with William B. Parsons

Meet the “Buddhish” Nones, with Kaya Oakes

The Case of Bikram Yoga, with Andrea Jain

Scientific Spirituality, with Matthew Hedstrom

Two Sides of the Same Coin, with Diane Winston

Via Ram Dass

 

There is a way of shifting consciousness so that you see that we are all one in the form of many...You see that a starving person or a dying person or a frightened person is you. Then the whole trip of, 'What's good for me? What do I want? What do I need?' just becomes less interesting. And that's where the power is that changes the universe.

Via Daily Dharma / Three Marks of Existence:

Sometimes when I’m asked to describe the Buddhist teachings, I say this: Everything is connected; nothing lasts; you are not alone. This is really just a restatement of the traditional Three Marks of Existence: non-self, impermanence, and suffering.

—Lewis Richmond, "The Authentic Life"

Via BBC / More or Less: Hans Rosling - the extraordinary life of a statistical guru

A huge hole was left in the world this week with the death of the Swedish statistician Han Rosling. He was a master communicator whose captivating presentations on global development were watched by millions. He had the ear of those with power and influence. His friend Bill Gates said Hans ‘brought data to life and helped the world see the human progress it often overlooked’. In a world that often looks at the bad news coming out of the developing world, Rosling was determined to spread the good news, extended life expectancy, falling rates of disease and infant mortality. He was fighting what he called the ‘post-fact era‘ of global health. He was passionate about global development and before he became famous he lived and worked in Mozambique, India and the Democratic Republic of Congo using data and his skills as a doctor to save lives. Despite ill health he also travelled to Liberia during the Ebola outbreak in 2014 to help gather and consolidate data to help fight the outbreak. On a personal level he was warm, funny and kind and will be greatly missed by a huge number of people. 

 

Presenter: Tim Harford
Producer: Wesley Stephenson

Make the jump here to listen to article

Via DailyDharma / The Buddha Within You:

There is a buddha in every one of us, and we should allow the buddha to walk. Even in the most difficult situation, you can walk like a buddha.

—Thich Nhat Hanh, "Walk Like a Buddha"

Via Daisaku Ikeda / To My Friends:

To My Friends

Daisaku Ikeda

February 10th 2017

The hallmark of a leader is
the promptness with which
they encourage others and
their earnest resolve to not
let time slip them by.
Be thorough when reporting
and communicating information,
and go to our members in need
with lightning speed!

Via Daily Dharma / Ask Questions

Then the Blessed One addressed the monks, “If even a single monk has any doubt or indecision concerning the Buddha, Dhamma, or Sangha, the path or the practice, ask. Don’t later regret that ‘The Teacher was face-to-face with us, but we didn’t bring ourselves to cross-question him in his presence.’”

—Thanissaro Bhikkhu, "Skill in Questions"