Via JustaBahai: R.I.P. My Friend

Sonja wrote:

April 26, 2019

My friend Lucas Lucas (17 years) started communicating with me in 2014 because of our common interest in Esperanto. He was living and studying in Brazil and had declared as a Bahai 3 months earlier through one of his professors who is a

Bahai. Upon learning that my main concern in the Bahai community was for the wellbeing of gay and lesbian Bahais, his response was: 

“Really?? This is new to me.”

 

To read the full article and more, make the jump here

Via Daily Dharma: Wise Emotion

We find the antidotes to our most painful states of mind by leaning directly into the emotion itself. Our emotions are full of wisdom. They are the keys for deepening our practice and our relationships with our world.

—Judith Simmer-Brown, “Transforming the Green-Ey’d Monster”

Via Daily Dharma: Justifying Ends and Means

In the Buddha’s teachings, the end and the means must share a similar voice; there has to be constructive engagement from the beginning. Finding ways to engage in direct communication and bring people together is both the process and the resolution.

—Christopher Titmuss, “Rising to the Challenge: A Step Toward Peace”

Via Betty Bowers / FB:

Via Daily Dharma: Return Again

Train to return to attention whenever you become aware that you are lost. And then just do it. Place attention and rest. Return and rest. Again and again.

—Ken McLeod, “Forget About Consistency”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 24, 2019 💌

The Chinese philosopher, Chung Tsu, said, “Know the clear, but remain in the tarnished.” Stay in the marketplace, but keep God there too. Remember—serve, love, remember. You’ve got to be in the marketplace and remember.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: A Joyful Mind

When our mind is undisturbed by any concept that might arise, the natural joy and clarity of the mind will dawn.

—Ogyen Trinley Dorje, “Calm Abiding”

Via FB:

Via Daily Dharma: You Are Worthy of Love

To see ourselves as just another person deserving love is a valuable exercise. Here we start to disidentify with ourselves, see ourselves in more objective terms. When we can see ourselves as just another imperfect human, equally deserving of love as anyone else, it becomes easier to offer love to ourselves.

—Kevin Griffin, “May All Beings Be Happy”

Via Daily Dharma: Giving Our All

There may be no greater sense of fulfillment in life than the simultaneous feelings of human interconnection and pure freedom that arise from an authentic act of selfless generosity.

—Dale S. Wright, “The Bodhisattva’s Gift”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 21, 2019 💌

It’s important to respect the intellect, not to demean it by any means, but to realize that it has taken control, when it should be a resource that’s available for you to use when you want to.
What has happened to me over the past several decades, I’m sure partly through psychedelics, partly through meditation, and through grace, and through evolution, is that when I don’t need to think about something my mind is empty. I’m not thinking. I’m just empty. I’m just here.
So that when you ask me a question, I stop for a moment. I go empty. I’m not thinking about the answer. I’m going empty because in the emptiness is the answer—a better answer than I can come up with when I use my analytic mind to figure out what I should say to you.

-Ram Dass -

CHOIR sings OM SO HUM Mantra (Must Listen)

Very, very beautiful! 'Soham' means I am That'. 'That' means the very source of creation. If you bring some awareness into to your breath, become conscious of it, every inhalation makes the sound 'SO' and exhalation has the sound 'HAM'. Try it and see. Our breath itself reminds us that we are part of something much bigger, we are THAT. We aren't individuals but life, there's just life all around. And fundamentally we are all ONE. But we are too caught up in our psychological drama. If only we look beyond that and see, the very way we live life will change. It'll be all inclusive. Which is the most beautiful way to be. :)

Via Daily Dharma: Taking the First Step

Even very basic beginning practice, like mindfulness of the breath or sound, begins to relieve suffering, reduce our stress levels, and motivate us to practice more.

—Interview with Mirabai Bush by Alex Caring-Lobel and Emma Varvaloucas, “Working with Mindfulness”

Via Daily Dharma: Inner Awakening

The taste of freedom that pervades the Buddha’s teaching is the taste of spiritual freedom, which from the Buddhist perspective means freedom from suffering. In the process leading to deliverance from suffering, meditation is the means of generating the inner awakening required for liberation.

—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “The Path of Serenity and Insight”

Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation

Joseph CheahOctober 28, 2011

Oxford University Press

 

While academic and popular studies of Buddhism have often neglected race as a factor of analysis, the issues concerning race and racialization have remained not far below the surface of the wider discussion among ethnic Buddhists, converts, and sympathizers regarding representations of American Buddhism and adaptations of Buddhist practices to the American context. In Race and Religion in American Buddhism, Joseph Cheah provides a much-needed contribution to the field of religious studies by addressing the under-theorization of race in the study of American Buddhism. Through the lens of racial formation, Cheah demonstrates how adaptations of Buddhist practices by immigrants, converts and sympathizers have taken place within an environment already permeated with the logic and ideology of whiteness and white supremacy. In other words, race and religion (Buddhism) are so intimately bounded together in the United States that the ideology of white supremacy informs the differing ways in which convert Buddhists and sympathizers and Burmese ethnic Buddhists have adapted Buddhist religious practices to an American context. Cheah offers a complex view of how the Burmese American community must negotiate not only the religious and racial terrains of the United States but also the transnational reach of the Burmese junta. Race and Religion in American Buddhism marks an important contribution to the study of American Buddhism as well as to the larger fields of U.S. religions and Asian American studies.

About the author

Joseph Cheah is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut.

 

 

 

Via Daily Dharma: Touching Freedom

When the tug of sense desire and aversion has been quieted, when restlessness and sluggishness have been balanced out, and when doubts are put aside for a time, the mind is able to attend to experience more openly and with much greater freedom.

—Andrew Olendzki, “The Ties that Unbind”

Via Daily Dharma: Quality Time

Free time is of a different order than freedom. Freedom, at least in the dharmic sense, depends on the quality of attention that we bring to our interactions. Only to the extent that we can be fully present in our relationships with ourselves, with our children, and with each other, are we free.

—Soren Gordhamer, “Finding What’s Right in Front of Us”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - April 17, 2019 💌

As you progress with your sadhana you may find it necessary to change your occupation. Or you may find that it is only necessary to change the way in which you perform your current occupation in order to bring it into line with your new understanding of how it all is. The more conscious that a being becomes, the more he can use any occupation as a vehicle for spreading light.

The next true being of Buddha-nature that you meet may appear as a bus driver, a doctor, a weaver, an insurance salesman, a musician, a chef, a teacher, or any of the thousands of roles that are required in a complex society—the many parts of Christ’s body. You will know him because the simple dance that may transpire between you—such as handing him change as you board the bus—will strengthen in you the faith in the divinity of man. It’s as simple as that.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Greeting Pain with an Open Heart

We can’t always transform pain from meaningless suffering into a sense of spaciousness, but at least we can practice seeing into the layers of beliefs and resistance that hold our suffering in place, thereby coming closer to gently opening to what is.

—Ezra Bayda, “When It Happens to Us”