Via Ram Dass

As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.

Via Daily Dharma / Asking Questions

Because people try to conquer others instead of gaining victory over themselves, there are problems. The Buddha taught that one should simply gain victory over oneself.

—Sayadaw U Pandita, "The Best Remedy"

Via Daily Dharma / Thou Shalt Not Covet

Not coveting a single thing is the greatest gift you can give to the universe.

—Kodo Sawaki Roshi, "To You"

Via Daily Dharma / Discovering the Mind

We do not need to be afraid of our mind. We can go on a journey of discovery and experiment. Then we are able to play with our mental processes and develop our mental ability in wisdom and compassion.

—Martine Batchelor, "Life’s Meditation, Mental Habits, and Creative Imagination"

Via Daily Dharma: A Daily Discovery

Revisiting [meditation] on a regular basis provides each of us with a unique and intimate rhythm of discovery.

—Lauren Krauze, "A Watchfulness Routine for Writing"

Via Ram Dass

You get to be at home with change. You get to be at home with uncertainty. You get to be at home with not knowing how it all comes out. and you make a plan knowing full well that it may be totally irrelevant a moment later, and you’re at peace with that.

I find that when I’m at a choice point, the best thing to do is to quiet and empty and go back to square one. But I try to stay at the choice point as long as I can, because that’s as interesting a place as any other place, to stay with not knowing what to do. But if you listen, it all becomes apparent in time. Patience is good. The tolerance for not knowing what’s what is quite an art form.

Via Daily Dharma / The Sustenance of Life:

We humans have a way of touching each other’s lives deeply even despite ourselves. In finding our way to each other, we find what is, after all, already there, waiting to be found, wanting to be found.

—Andrew Cooper, "Life’s Hidden Support"

Via Daily Dharma / Heart Workout

We have to work diligently to keep our hearts open, just as we have to work to keep other muscles in the body strong.

—Valerie Mason-John, "Brief Teachings"

Via Daily Dharma / Social Responsibility

When I begin taking care of how I suffer—how I too am greedy, angry, or confused—then I develop my capacity to respond to those same energies in individuals and institutions alike.

—Michael Stone, "G-20 Dharma"

 

In the early stages of sadhana (spiritual work), you take your dominant thing and you work with it. You keep doing it and doing it, and you love it, and it gets thicker and thicker. But later on in your sadhana, for me anyway, I began to taste freedom and yearn for it so much that I looked and I shifted around.

There’s a point where you go towards the fire of purification, towards the places you’re stuck. You can feel where your stuff is – what’s got your number, and you realize that as long as there’s any aversion left in you, you’re stuck and you end up wanting to eat your aversions.

Via Daily Dharma / Everything Is Useful

 Whatever the circumstance, bodily movement or stillness, feeling well or distressed, with good concentration or scattered attention, everything can be brought back to awareness.

—Kittisaro, "Tangled in Thought"

Via Daily Dharma / Finding Stability in Impermanence

Change is good, we’re told. A fresh breeze blown through life keeps us on our toes, fully alive until we die.

—Joan Duncan Oliver, "Love, Loss and the Grocery Store"

Via Daily Dharma / Moments Make a Life

Our entire lives are nothing but a chain of moments in which we perceive one sight, taste, smell, touch, sound, feeling, or thought after another. Outside of this process, nothing else happens.

—Cynthia Thatcher, "What’s So Great About Now?"

In the clarity of a quiet mind, there is room for all that is actually happening and whatever else might also be possible.

As we've discovered, it is possible to notice a single thought, sensation, or situation arise, but not get totally lost in identifying with it. We observe the cloud but remain focused on the sky, see the leaf but hold in vision the river. We are that which is aware of the totality. And our skills develop with practice.

First, we have to appreciate the value of such qualities of mind and desire to develop them. Next, we have to have faith in the possibility that we can indeed make progress. Finally, we have to explore and practice appropriate techniques.

Twenty minutes per day of such practice can lead to results and the incentive to go deeper still. Continuous practice brings about great transformation of mind and leads to a new quality of service.

Via Daily Dharma / Forgiveness Liberates

I think the reason that remarkable stories of forgiveness take our breath away is that we instantly feel the liberation in the lifting of boundaries, the end of separation, of “inside” and “outside.”

—Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker, "The Seventh Zen Precept"

Via Daily Dharma / Do Less, Live More:

It has been said, and with good reason, that dying people never wish they had spent more time in the office. Doing matters little to the dying. As death draws near, it is relationships—with family, with friends, with God—that hold the greatest appeal.

—Dr. William Thomas, as quoted in C. W. Huntington, Jr.'s "The Miracle of the Ordinary"

Via vice.com/Broadly: Trump Strips LGBT People of Workplace Protections, Then Erases Them from Census

This week, President Trump quietly nullified an order that required companies receiving large federal contracts to show that they have complied with various federal laws, many of which relate to discrimination in the workplace.

Below is what happened on Trump's 47th day in office. You can find out what damage was done every other day so far on the Saddest Calendar on the Internet.
 
Not even two weeks after the US Department of Health and Human Services eliminated questions about LGBT people on two crucial national surveys on the elderly and the disabled, the Trump administration extended their erasure of LGBT Americans yesterday when they announced they would not include the option to declare sexual orientation and gender identity on the 2020 US Census. Earlier in the morning, LGBT advocates thought they had a triumph, as the Census Bureau released a list of proposed subjects for 2020 that included questions relating to the above, which were new additions that LGBT rights advocates have been pushing for. But then the Census Bureau made a follow-up announcement.

"The Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey report released today inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix," the Census Bureau said in a statement. "This topic is not being proposed to Congress for the 2020 Census or American Community Survey."

The mistake was more than just a gaffe, as advocates have been stressing the need for the Census to acknowledge the gender and sexuality of those from whom its collecting data to ensure that LGBT people are getting equal access to the rights and protections granted to heterosexual and cisgender individuals. In a statement from the National LGBTQ Task Force, Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director Meghan Maury expressed her organization's disappointment.

Continue reading on Broadly.

Via Ike's Man-Cave / FB:

Via Daily Dharma / Finding a New Kind of Connection

As a student of the dharma, I believe that what we call difference in the negative sense of the word is only a perceived lack of connection, and that difference offers the potential to create or manifest connection in a new and fulfilling way.

—Patricia Mushim Ikeda, "Not What I Thought"