Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - August 4, 2019 💌

The technique of the witness is to merely sit with the fear and be aware of it before it becomes so consuming that there’s no space left. The image I usually use is that of a picture frame and a painting of a gray cloud against a blue sky. But the picture frame is a little too small. So you bend the canvas around to frame it. But in doing so you lost all the blue sky. So you end up with just a framed gray cloud. It fills the entire frame.
So when you say, 'I’m afraid,' or, 'I’m depressed,' if you enlarged the frame so that just a little blue space shows, you would say, ‘ah, a cloud.’ That is what the witness is. The witness is that tiny little blue over in the corner that leads you to say, ‘ah, fear.’

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Expanding Your Net of Compassion

Not favoring any one thing over another allows you to center yourself within a boundless net of interconnection and to expand your circle of caring.

—Wendy Egyoku Nakao Roshi, “Hold to the Center!”

Via tricycle // Anger How to recognize it, work with it, and even find wisdom in it.

Anger is one of the densest forms of communication. It conveys more information, more quickly, than almost any other type of emotion.” This is how Charles Duhigg sums up a conversation he had with James Averill, professor emeritus of psychology at UMass, Amherst. Averill also noted that a bit of anger can quickly clear up unspoken resentments, unacknowledged boundary violations, and unaddressed imbalances. On the other hand, in Buddhism anger is often regarded as taboo, an emotional reaction to be avoided as much as possible. The 8th-century monk-scholar Shantideva, in The Way of the Bodhisattva, writes that a single moment of anger destroys the good karma built up over a thousand eons. These are two very different views, but both agree that anger is very powerful.

Is there a way to direct the energy, clarity, and power of anger to spiritual or mystical ends? Is it possible to find the peace and clarity of awareness in the experience of anger? Is it possible to use anger to put ourselves in other people’s shoes and so undermine the tendency to treat ourselves as special? Is it possible to step out of the world of conflict and opposition that anger projects? And is it possible to discover the groundlessness of experience in an emotional reaction as intense and potentially destructive as anger? Although I cannot speak for other Buddhist traditions, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the answer to all these questions is an unambiguous “yes.”

For instance, Jan Willis, professor emeritus at Wesleyan, described an occasion when she was furiously angry while at Lama Yeshe’s center in Nepal. She remembers standing outside the temple fuming at something or other. Lama Yeshe crept up beside her and whispered in her ear, “Buddha mind very angry today.” Her mind stopped. The mind that is angry is the same as the mind of buddha? She had never considered that possibility. It changed everything. 

Anger was no longer a force or demon that took you over. It became, instead, a movement in mind, a mind as clear and empty as the sky.

Make the jump here to read the full article and more

Via Daily Dharma: Detaching from Attachment

Emptiness doesn’t mean that the mind is annihilated. All that’s annihilated is clinging and attachment. What you have to do is to see what emptiness is like as it actually appears and then not latch onto it.

—Upasika Kee Nanayon, “A Glob of Tar”

Via a FB chat: Bahais talk about inclusion, even though they tend to practise varying levels of exclusion...

Back in 1985, Joseph Campbell said:

"Now brotherhood, in most of the myths I know of, is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. For example, the ten commandments say, “Thou shalt not kill.” Then the next chapter says, “Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it.” That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other."

https://www.academia.edu/8513271/The_power_of_myth_-_joseph_campbell

In following up the concept of bounded communities, I discovered a journal article that looks at the extent to which  Bahais are a bounded community, and how that plays out -- given the challenge to boundedness that the Internet poses.

"...there are some aspects that the American Bahá’ís must reject withregard to blogging, as outlined by the Bahá’í Internet Agency. One of the aspects discouraged for practising Bahá’ís is the use of confrontational and negative discussion threads on the Internet. This includes any blog post that is seen to undermine or challenge Bahá’í policies or beliefs, which is to be ignored/deleted. If the blogger who makes negative claims happens to be a practising Bahá’í, he/she can be labelled as a covenant-breaker and shunned by the community."

http://bahai-library.com/campbell_fulton_bahai_internet

Via Daily Dharma: How to Be Your Brightest Self

What is the light? You are the light, with your ability to be conscious and mindful, and to act with wisdom and foresight. To serve the light means to show up—by which I mean, to be present—for yourself, as your best and highest self, and to show up for others in your life as well.

—Dawa Tarchin Phillips, “What to Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next”

Via Daily Dharma: Plant Yourself in Your Surroundings

Taking refuge is not some kind of evasion or escape, but is the planting of our “selves” deeply in the nature of what surrounds us. We lodge ourselves in the deep waves and in the shallow pools, in the crests and depressions of our lives. Sometimes, even wreckage can make a temporary resting place.

—Gary Thorp, “Shelter from the Storm”

Queer Eye's Fab Five's Most Embarrassing Hair and Fashion Mistakes

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - July 31, 2019 💌

The final awakening is the embracing of the darkness into the light. That means embracing our humanity as well as our divinity. We go from being born into our humanity, to sleep walking for a long time, until we finally awaken and begin to taste our divinity. And then want to finally get free.

We see that as long as we grab at our divinity and push away our humanity we aren’t free. If you want to be free, you can’t push away anything. You have to embrace it all. It’s all God.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Delight in Unexpected Joys

Joy seems to come unbidden, just erupting at the oddest times. It isn’t possible to plan for joy, yet when it comes, it is an unmistakable overflowing of feelings of delight in the world and its mysteries.

—Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, “Simple Joy”

Wipe Out All the Negative Energy(417Hz)┇Erase Subconscious Negative Patterns Music

From my Journal: Bombshell...

Via MyGWork: How LGBT+ Employees Can Prepare for Overseas Work Assignments

In more than half the world LGBT+ people are not protected from discrimination by workplace laws. 70 countries still criminalise homosexuality – 10 with the death penalty – while only 28 recognise same-sex marriage. If you work for a multinational corporation and are given the opportunity for an overseas assignment or relocation these are unfortunately some of the considerations you will have to have if you are LGBT+. Will this new country be safe for me? Will my partner be able to obtain a spousal visa? Will I be protected from discrimination? Will I be lonely or ostracised because of my LGBT+ identity? 

Some of the most common regions large companies send their employees to are less than favourable to LGBT+ people. In Hong Kong 75 percent of gay people are closeted at work, in Singapore it’s 72 percent, in Russia that number jumps to 80 percent.

International assignments are only becoming more common in the corporate world. They have increased by more than 25 percent since the year 2000 and are expected to increase to 50 percent by next year. It is now commonplace that as part of your career you will be sent overseas. Moving between countries with vastly different legal and social systems is part of our increasingly globalised world. It can promote fantastic new business and personal opportunities, and LGBT+ people should not be left behind.

Make the jump here to read the full article and more

Via Daily Dharma: Choose Your Response

One of the finest results of meditation is the increased gap between stimulus and response. That gap before I react gives me time to notice my habitual patterns and sometimes even decide whether to stay a slave to them or break loose.

—Brent R. Oliver, “I Take Refuge in the Humor”

Via Daily Dharma: A World of Compassion

Instead of looking at others, telling yourself your usual story about who people are, visualize every person you see as the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the very embodiment of compassion. Deeply doing this, there’s no way you can feel negative toward them.

—Lama Yeshe, “Visualizations”

Via Tricycle: Happiness is Found Within

Happiness is Found Within

Download Transcript It has been edited for clarity.

 

Today’s divisive political culture can bring out our worst impulses, but with Tibetan Buddhist methods of fostering compassion, we can clear the mind of negativity and connect with our intrinsic qualities of clarity and warmth. Dungse Jampal Norbu, a teacher in the Mangala Shri Bhuti sangha and the son of Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche and Elizabeth Mattis Namgyel, guides us through practices to cool off anger and take a walk in other’s shoes. 

Make the jump here to listen

Via Daily Dharma: Planting Seeds for the Future

In each moment our experience is determined to a great extent by seeds from the past that are bearing fruit right now. In each moment, too, we can plant a seed intentionally that will create fruit in the future.

—Ben Connelly, “Cleaning Out the Storehouse”

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - July 28, 2019 💌

Sometimes you experience a quality of dying or emptiness about life. It’s scary because you built your whole game up — you saved all your money to buy a Mercedes-Benz. Then you buy a Mercedes-Benz and after about a week it’s just another car. How can it be just another car when you spent years buying a Mercedes-Benz? There's a real horror when meaningful stuff becoming meaningless — and you are awakening.

-Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: What Happens When We Stay Present During Terrible Times?

The hard truth is, terrible things happen in life that we can’t control, and somehow we do bear them. We bear witness to them. When we do so with the fullness of our bodies, minds, and hearts, often a loving action emerges.

—Frank Ostaseski, “Washing My Boy’s Body”