Via JMG: Majorities In 44 States Now Back Same-Sex Marriage

Just in from PRRI Polling:

Recent dramatic shifts in support for same-sex marriage are also evident at the state level. Today, majorities in 44 states believe gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to legally marry, compared to only 30 states in 2014.

In only six states does the issue of same-sex marriage garner less than majority support: Alabama (41%), Mississippi (42%), Tennessee (46%), West Virginia (48%), Louisiana (48%), and North Carolina (49%). But notably, only one state, Alabama, has a majority of residents who oppose same-sex marriage.

Substantial regional disparities in views of same-sex marriage are evident. New England is generally more supportive of same-sex marriage than any other region in the U.S. Roughly eight in ten residents of Vermont (80%), Massachusetts (80%), and Rhode Island (78%) support the policy.

And nearly three-quarters of Americans living in Connecticut (73%), New Hampshire (73%), and Maine (71%) support it. A number of Southern states have only a slim majority expressing support for same-sex marriage, such as Kentucky (51%), Arkansas (52%), and Georgia (52%).

Read the original and more at JMG here

Via Daily Dharma: True Peace

Suffering comes to an end only when a person is so in touch with life that he or she is completely at peace, regardless of physical or emotional circumstances.

—Ken McLeod, “Bodhicitta Explained”

Via Daily Dharma: Uncontrollable Joy

We can’t control joy. It is something that bobs up when we are truly alive and meet the whole world in an instant.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, “Simple Joy”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 29, 2018

It is important, as we get older, to learn how to grieve. Although this may sound self-evident, experience has taught me that it is not. In a culture that emphasizes stoicism and forward movement, in which time is deemed “of the essence,” and there is little toleration for slowness, inwardness, and melancholy, grieving – a healthy, necessary aspect of life – is too often overlooked.

Over the years, in working with people who are grieving, I’ve encouraged them first of all to surrender to the experience of their pain. To counteract our natural tendency to turn away from pain, we open to it as fully as possible and allow our hearts to break. We must take enough time to remember our losses – be they friends or loved ones passed away, the death of long-held hopes or dreams, the loss of homes, careers, or countries, or health we may never get back again. Rather than close ourselves to grief, it helps to realize that we only grieve for what we love. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Humility and Pilgrimage

There is humility in the act of pilgrimage, akin to the act of bowing; you’re surrendering your own path to follow where others have gone before.

—Pico Iyer, “The Long Road to Sitting Still”

Via Daily Dharma: Where’s Your Sense of Adventure?

As spiritual practitioners we need to have some curiosity about the unknown. When unexplored territory frightens us, we need to ask ourselves, “Where’s our sense of adventure?”

—Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, “Open Stillness”

Via Daily Dharma: You Are Already Complete

Why is it that we yearn to be more or other than we are? It so rarely occurs to us that what we are looking for maybe—indeed, always is—already within us, simply undiscovered.

—Toinette Lippe, “Between Eternities”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Cultivate Equanimity

If a mind state or emotion or mood becomes strong—feelings such as sadness or happiness or anger or desire, restlessness or excitement, interest or rapture, joy or calm—make the mental note of that mind state, feeling it and observing how that too is part of the passing show. It arises, it is there for some time, it passes away.

—Joseph Goldstein, “Breathing”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 25, 2018

There is great delight in tuning through a variety of different methods, and really looking to each method to move you in its own unique way while continuing to open you up. So be very generous in your opening to methods, because if you bring to them a pure heart and a yearning to be free, they will serve you in that way.

The way you get your karmuppance with methods, if you use them for power, you get power - but then you are stuck with the power. If you use them to reinforce your separateness, you get left in your separateness...

 - Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Dismantling Delusion

To experience the everyday sublime one needs to dismantle piece by piece the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing oneself and the world as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and mine.

—Stephen Batchelor, “The Everyday Sublime”

Via Daily Dharma: Active Refuge

Committing to this path is not an act that we can carry out once and for all, like a “conversion” or a baptism, but an act that must be renewed each day.

—Fabrice Midal, “Brief Teachings”

Happy Earth Day!

Happy Earth Day!

The environment is not merely the place where we live and act, for the biosphere is the ground from which and within which we arise. The earth is not only our home, it is our mother.

—David Loy, “Healing Ecology”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 22, 2018

Surrender who you think you are and what you think you are doing into what is. It is mind boggling to think that spirituality is dying into yourself.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Mother of All Beings

The environment is not merely the place where we live and act, for the biosphere is the ground from which and within which we arise. The earth is not only our home, it is our mother.

—David Loy, “Healing Ecology”

Via Daily Dharma: We Are Temporary Too

Know that your precious, infinitely beloved, and irreplaceable self will dissolve like a sand castle, grain by grain—and what a relief it is to know. You exist in a great space of knowing, filled with the shared ephemerality of all things.

—Sallie Tisdale, “Self-Care for Future Corpses”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Truly Relax

When we understand that nothing exists independently, everything that does arise seems more dreamlike and less threatening. This brings a deep sense of relaxation, and we feel less need to control our mind and circumstances.

—Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, “The Theater of Reflection”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Speak with Care

When we speak with greater skill, our true self—our compassionate, loving self—emerges with gentle ease. So before you speak, stop, breathe, and consider if what you are about to say will improve upon the silence.

—Allan Lokos, “Skillful Speech”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 18, 2018

Ramana Maharshi said that God, guru, and the Self are the same. The guru, the true guide, awakens our own deeper being, or ātman, which is God itself. Ramana Maharshi realized that Self directly. His view from the Arunachala mountain, his darshan, his teaching, pointed directly at the ātman, at Self-realization. That unity of God, guru, and Self is the higher truth, and if your veil of attachment is very thin, you may be able, like Ramana, to penetrate directly to that essence in the heart.

But most of us, to get through our busy human incarnation and the profusion of forms we find in our lives, need guidance and help. Seeing the guru as separate from oneself is a way to approach it in steps of lesser truths. It’s a first step toward becoming the One. The reality of the guru or guide as separate from oneself is a method or vehicle for coming to God. It’s using a relationship with a separate entity, dualism, to get to the One, to the reality that the guru is identical with your inmost being.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: The Joy of Giving

At its most basic level, dana [generosity] in the Buddhist tradition means giving freely without expecting anything in return.

—Gil Fronsdal, “The Joy of Giving”