Via Gay Buddhist Sangha

Via Daily Dharma: Observe Without Judgment

In the practice of meditation, we use our nonjudgmental awareness to get in touch with our feelings and what’s going on in our bodies without adding our narratives or dramas to it. We just see what comes up.

—Gerry Shishin Wick, “The Great Heart Way”

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Via Daily Dharma: Enter Your Practice with Ease

Practice isn’t about being intense; it’s about coming back to ease—letting the mind and body settle into an experience that holds the seeds of expansiveness.

—Justin von Bujdoss, “Tilopa’s Six Nails”

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Via Daily Dharma: What Is Personal Transformation?

The path of personal transformation is about deconstructing and reconstructing the self, or, more precisely, the relationship between the self and its world.

—David Loy, “Awakening in the Age of Climate Change”

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

"When talking about awareness, most of us identify with our awareness through the ego, through the mind and senses. But the true self is in the middle of our chest, in our spiritual heart. So, to get from ego to the true self I said, 'I am loving awareness.' Loving awareness is the soul. I am loving awareness. I am aware of everything, I’m aware of my body and my senses and my mind, I’m aware of all of it, but I notice that I’m loving all of it. I’m loving all of the world."

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Letting Your Desires Pass

The next time you have some wanting or desire in the mind, investigate what the wanting feels like and then notice how it feels when the wanting passes away. Given the great law of impermanence, it always will.

—Joseph Goldstein, “The End of Suffering”

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Via Budissmo / FB:

Via Tricycle: Unity In Difference

Tibetan Buddhism’s nonsectarian rimé philosophy offers four steps for folding ideological diversity into your spiritual practice.

By Khentrul Rinpoche

 

In Tibetan, we use the term rimé to describe a mind “free from bias.” It is a particular attitude that helps people work with diversity in a way that supports their own personal development while promoting greater harmony with those who hold different views. We can call this attitude the rimé philosophy.

When you first begin a spiritual journey, having a rimé philosophy can provide you with a basis for choosing a path. Then, as you begin to progress along that path, it can help you overcome obstacles by showing you alternative ways of thinking about a given situation. And finally, when you reach more advanced stages, it provides you with a greater flexibility of mind that can be used to adapt to a wide variety of situations, helping you to bring greater benefit to those around you. In this way, the rimé philosophy is helpful in the beginning, middle, and end.We can break this attitude down into four distinct qualities that develop a gradual process over time. As you strengthen one quality, it naturally creates the conditions for the next quality to arise. In this way, we can think of the rimé philosophy as being like a flower that starts off as a seed and eventually blooms into a beautiful display of color.

Tolerance

The first quality we need to develop is tolerance, built on a basis of mutual respect. A mind that lacks this type of tolerance is openly antagonistic toward people who hold different views. It is a mind that clings very strongly to one’s own beliefs and feels threatened by the mere presence of other viewpoints. We need to loosen this grip in order to be able to communicate in a meaningful way.

Developing tolerance for a view is based on developing respect for a person. 

Respect means being able to connect with a person in such a way that even if we don’t agree with their views, we can still value their right to hold those views. The key to developing this sort of tolerance is to separate the validity of an idea from the validity of the person holding the idea. Behind every idea is a motivation that is shaped by hopes and fears. If we are able to identify this underlying motivation, we will see the wish to find happiness and to be free from suffering. Ultimately we all want the same thing; we just have different ways of going about it. Mutual respect can grow from understanding this basic commonality of motivation that unites us as people. If you connect with that basic motivation, then you establish a working basis for dialogue to occur.

Ultimately we all want the same thing; we just have different ways of going about it.

Receptivity

Tolerance makes it possible to establish a basic connection with another person. On the basis of that connection, you can then begin to open up to the possibility of communication. All forms of communication involve the transmission of ideas and the reception of those ideas. At this point, our main focus is on acquiring new information, and therefore we need to cultivate a greater quality of receptivity.

The basic idea behind receptivity is to create space in the mind for new ideas. As long as our mind is full, it will be unable to acquire anything new and therefore we will be unable to learn anything. Fortunately the mind is infinite in nature, and it therefore, has the capacity to accommodate as much as we like. It is only because of our grasping that we effectively limit that capacity. We box it in and solidify it, making it difficult for us to grow.

To counteract this tendency of closing ourselves off, we need to cultivate a mind of humility and non-grasping. The humility counteracts the pride that tells us we know everything. This can be developed through contemplating the uniqueness of the conditions that give rise to a particular situation. When we are able to recognize the potential for learning provided by such a situation, it becomes much easier to open ourselves to what is being communicated.

Meanwhile, adopting a mind that is free from grasping is a direct antidote to a narrow and fixed perspective. This mind can generally be developed either formally through awareness meditation or informally through mindfulness of the present moment. Either way, the essence of this practice is to adopt the capacity to simply observe what is happening without getting carried away by excessive judgments or other discursive thoughts.

VOCABULARY

The Tibetan term rimé, meaning “unlimited, non-partisan, or without bias,” describes the perspective of religious leaders and scholars who have studied and drawn from other Tibetan traditions alongside their own. Two 19th-century teachers associated with rimé are Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo and Jamgön Kongtrul.

Curiosity
As you begin to open yourself more and more to the lessons that life has to offer, you will naturally be influenced by the information you take in. When new ideas are introduced into the mind, they go through a process of integration in which the mind tries to reconcile what this new information means in relation to existing ideas. 

At this point you have a choice. You can choose to disregard the new information, in which case you are left no better off than when you started, or you can choose to actively seek to understand the implications of this new information, which will lead you to a more robust and integrated mind. If you choose the latter, you will need to develop the quality of curiosity.

Curiosity is an inquisitive mind that desires to understand. In a way we can say that curiosity is a reaction to uncertainty. When such a mind sees two conflicting ideas, it desires to reconcile the uncertainty regarding which idea makes more sense. This leads to the asking of questions, and when we ask questions, we get answers. The new information these answers provide helps us to fill in holes in our understanding, leading to the removal of uncertainty.

Related: How to Open Up to a Painful World

To cultivate such a mind we need to nurture our thirst for understanding. We need to counteract the passive mind that complacently just absorbs things. This can be done by engaging with each opportunity as though it were the missing piece in a great puzzle. We develop joy in the very process of working things out and revel in the challenges that life presents us with. In this way, everything becomes fascinating, because everything has the capacity to teach us something. This is the mind of curiosity.

Flexibility
The previous three qualities of tolerance, receptivity, and curiosity combine together to form a powerful engine for the acquisition of information. A person who has cultivated all these qualities will be very much like a sponge. They will pull in as much as they can whenever they can, and because they actively engage in clarifying their understanding, the quality of their view will be very strong and very broad. 

Having such a view provides a practitioner with a very unique opportunity. The more you learn about diverse approaches to similar problems, the more flexibility of mind you are able to exhibit. You can start to see how different ideas are more suited to different conditions. So when those conditions arise, you are able to respond in an appropriate manner that is capable of optimizing the benefit for yourself and others. 

This sort of flexibility arises out of an awareness that clearly perceives what is going on in any given moment. This discriminating awareness can be cultivated by exposing the mind to a wide variety of circumstances and then looking at those circumstances from many angles. Doing so reduces clinging to reality as being just one way and promotes a malleable mind that can adapt very easily to variation.

Developing an unbiased attitude does not mean we have to think of all paths as being equal, as this is simply not true. Each has its own flavor and strengths, and therefore what we are trying to do is develop greater awareness of what diversity has to offer. Our aim is to clearly distinguish between their differences, respecting each as a skillful means to guide different sentient beings toward greater happiness.

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PRACTICE

Opening Up to Others
In a relaxed position, establish a neutral mind through the practice of mindfulness of breathing. 

Begin by identifying a person who holds views different from your own. This can be anyone who provokes a feeling of aversion if you even consider speaking with them. Imagine that this person approaches you in the street and starts a conversation. Observe how you feel. Can you detect any barriers between you? Any resistance to listening? Try to get a sense of this closed-off mindset. 

Now bring an awareness of the present moment into the scenario. When you encounter this person, focus on what is happening here and now. Release the history you have with this person, and simply observe what is being said in this moment. Similarly, let go of any expectations for where this conversation may lead. Stay in the present, engaged and aware of what is going on. How does this change the way you experience the scenario?  

Now consider what is appearing to you. Here is a person. A person who has unique hopes and dreams. A person who has unique experiences. This person is one of a kind. There is no one else who has the exact perspective on life that this person has, and right now this person is here, talking with you. In what ways could this encounter teach you something? Think of the potential, not merely in terms of factual information but also in terms of who you are as a person and how you react to different things. Run through the scenario again and imagine different ways in which you could really make the most of this situation. 

Rest in any insights that arise.

♦

Excerpted from Unveiling Your Sacred Truth through the Kalachakra Path: Book One, The External Reality, by Khentrul Rinpoche © 2015. Reprinted with permission of The Tibetan Buddhist Rimé Institute, Inc.

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Via Daily Dharma: The Power of a Single Person

You need to pay attention to what is going on. You should never think that you can’t make a difference in this world. You can. That is very, very important to understand.

—Interview with Losang Samten by Anne Doran and Frank Olinsky, “The Mandala Master”

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Via Daily Dharma: Noticing Daily Wonders

To be alive… is to be in full play with mystery and beauty and love. You live on a very strange little speck of rock in a very remote corner of the universe. Cherish it.

—Dick Allen, “Hoping for Snow in Dark December: A Balm in Troubled Times”

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Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - December 1, 2019 💌

"It is the continuing work of life: of learning to trust that the universe is unfolding exactly as it should, no matter how it looks to us. We learn to appreciate that each of us has a part in nurturing this interconnectedness whole and healing it where it is torn. Discovering what our individual contribution can be, then giving ourselves fully to it."

- Ram Dass -

Via White Crane Institute: World AIDS Day

2017 -

WORLD AIDS DAY: dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. AIDS has killed more than 25 million people, with an estimated 38.6 million people living with HIV, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. Despite recent, improved access to antiretroviral treatment and care in many regions of the world, the AIDS epidemic claimed an estimated 3.1 million (between 2.8 and 3.6 million) lives in 2005 of which, more than half a million (570,000) were children.

The concept of a World AIDS Day originated at the 1988 World Summit of Ministers of Health on Programs for AIDS Prevention. Since then, it has been taken up by governments, international organizations and charities around the world.

From its inception until 2004, UNAIDS spearheaded the World AIDS Day campaign, choosing annual themes in consultation with other global health organizations. In 2005 this responsibility was turned over to World AIDS Campaign (WAC), who chose Stop AIDS: Keep the Promise as the main theme for World AIDS Day observances through 2010, with more specific sub-taglines chosen annually. This theme is not specific to World AIDS Day, but is used year-round in WAC's efforts to highlight HIV/AIDS awareness within the context of other major global events including the G* Summit. World AIDS Campaign also conducts “in-country” campaigns throughout the world, like the Student Stop AIDS Campaign, an infection-awareness campaign targeting young people throughout the UK.

Via Daily Dharma: Cracking the Ice of Delusion

The highest expression of our human nature is to purify our minds. To clear away the clouds, the sheets of snow, the ice that we’re encased in.

—Ayya Medhanandi Bhikkhuni, “The Dharma of Snow”

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Via Daily Dharma: How to Truly Address Dissatisfaction

Consumerism promotes desire and dissatisfaction, the very source of suffering, as explained in the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. … What is unique about the Buddhist approach is that it goes to the very root of the urge for more, the desire, the hook that keeps us constantly searching for what will relieve our dissatisfaction.

—Interview with Stephanie Kaza by John Elder, “Ego in the Shopping Cart”

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Via White Crane Institute / MICHAEL COHEN

1997 -

On this date the pioneering gay singer-songwriter MICHAEL COHEN died (b: 1951). Sadly, Cohen has largely been forgotten, but his first album is considered one of the first, if not the first album by a major label by an openly Gay musician.

Released in 1973 on the Folkways label, Cohen's album made no bones about its nature. Titled "What Did You Expect: Songs about the Experiences of Being Gay", it consisted of nine songs that recounted Cohen's coming-out experience, ballads about his lover and a cover of a song by Leonard Cohen (no relation that we know of). The liner notes reveal that he lived in New York and was a taxi driver and very connected to the art scene in the early 70s. That's about it. He recorded two more albums (one more for Folkways, Some Of Us Had To Live" and the third on a smaller label).

But after that Cohen dropped off the radar. The music though is still fantastic and well produced and although comparisons are never great, Cohen's voice is reminiscent of a smoother Jim Croce. But you give it a listen and tell us what you think. Thanks to the gift of the Folkways archive to the Smithsonian, we can all still hear Cohen's work and even download the two Folkways albums via the Smithsonian Folkways website at http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=1461 and http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=1462

He is definitely someone to know about and listen to. For more about Cohen visit the fantastic Queer Music Heritage site's Michael Cohen page at http://www.queermusicheritage.com/jun2005mc.html

Via White Crane Institute: This Day in Gay History November 28:

1944 -

RITA MAE BROWN American writer, born; Best known for her mysteries and other novels (Rubyfruit Jungle), she is also an Emmy-nominated screenwriter. In the 1960s, Brown attended the University of Florida but was expelled; she states that it was for her participation in a civil rights rally. She moved to New York and attended New York University, where she received a degree in classics and English. Later she received another degree in cinematography from the New York School of Visial Arts. She also holds a doctorate in political science from the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington D.C.

In the late 1960s, Brown turned her attention to politics. She became active in the American Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the Gay Liberation movement and the feminist movement. She cofounded the Student Homophile League and participated in the Stonewall Uprising (pg 243 of the 1997 edition of "Rita Will": "There stood Martha Shelley and I in a sea of rioting Gay men...'Martha, we'd better get the hell out of here.'") in New York City. She took an administrative position with the fledgling National Organization for Women, but angrily resigned in February 1970 over Betty Friedan’s anti-Gay remarks and NOW's attempts to distance itself from Lesbian organizations. She played a leading role in the "Lavender Menace" zap of the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, which protested Friedan's remarks and the exclusion of Lesbians from the women's movement.

In the early 1970s, she became a founding member of The Furies Collective, a Lesbian feminist newspaper collective which held that heterosexuality was the root of all oppression. She is the former girlfriend of tennis player Martina Navratilova, actress and writer Fannie Flagg, socialite Judy Nelson and politician Elaine Noble. Brown enjoys American fox hunting and is master of her Fox Hunt Club. She has also played polo and started the woman-only Blue Ridge Polo Club.

The woman is funny, she’s deadly serious, and you’d better damn well listen up. She’s just like Molly Bolt, the heroine of her semi-autobiographical Rubyfruit Jungle who locks her adoptive mother in the root cellar. She’s a born fighter and doesn’t take any nonsense from anyone. She’d be awfully hard to take if it weren’t for the fact that she’s right in what she says almost all the time. And she says exactly what most people don’t want to hear. Like, for example, “I don’t think there is a ‘Gay lifestyle.’ I think that’s superficial crap all that talk about Gay culture. A couple of restaurants on Castro Street and a couple of magazines do not constitute culture. Michelangelo is culture. Virginia Woolf is culture. So let’s don’t confuse our terms. Wearing earrings is not culture, that’s a fad and it passes. I think we’ve blown superficial characteristics out of proportion…”

Via Daily Dharma: A Thanksgiving Blessing

We receive this food in gratitude from all beings who helped to bring it to our table, and vow to respond in turn to those in need with wisdom and compassion.

—Lama Shabkar, “A Vegetarian Thanksgiving”

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Via Ram Dass // Words of Wisdom - November 27, 2019 💌

"Ours is a journey toward simplicity, toward quietness, toward a kind of joy that is not in time. In this journey out of time to 'NowHere', we are leaving behind every model we have had of who we thought we were.

This journey involves a transformation of our being so that our thinking mind becomes our servant rather than our master. It's a journey that takes us from primary identification with our psyche to identification with our souls, then to identification with God, and ultimately beyond any identification at all.

Life is an incredible curriculum in which we live richly and passionately as a way of awakening to the deepest truths of our being. As a soul, I have only one motive: to merge with God. As a soul, I live in the moment, in each rich and precious moment, and I am filled with contentment."

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Developing Tolerance of Differing Views

The key to developing tolerance is to separate the validity of an idea from the validity of the person holding the idea. Behind every idea is a motivation that is shaped by hopes and fears. If we are able to identify this underlying motivation, we will see the wish to find happiness and to be free from suffering.

—Khentrul Rinpoche, “Unity in Difference”

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