Via TRICYCLE TALKS: The Problems With ‘Buddhist Exceptionalism

 

Each month, the Tricycle Talks podcast features leading voices and important conversations from across the contemporary Buddhist world.

This month, Tricycle editor and publisher James Shaheen sits down with philosopher Evan Thompson to discuss his critique of what he calls “Buddhist exceptionalism”: The idea, widespread among modern practitioners, that Buddhism holds a unique place above other religions.

That shows up in statements like “Buddhism is the most scientific of all religions” and “Buddhism isn’t a religion, it’s a ‘science of the mind.’” In his new book Why I’m Not A Buddhist, Thompson challenges the popular belief that science and Buddhism are uniquely compatible—and that Buddhism’s relationship with science gives it a kind of superior status. Instead, Thompson argues that Buddhism is fundamentally a religion, and in order to understand it properly, we have to think of it that way.

You can listen to new and past episodes of Tricycle Talks on the Tricycle website, iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and iHeartRadio.

Via Daily Dharma: The Power of Simple Acts

Simply by turning on the light, you can instantly destroy the darkness. Likewise, even a rather simple analysis of ego-clinging and afflictive emotions can make them collapse.

—Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, “An Investigation of the Mind”

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation / Words of Wisdom - January 29, 2020 💌

You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Be Grateful for Nothing

Here’s our challenge: to allow our hearts and minds to be touched by gratitude without the presence of a hurricane. To appreciate life and the grace by which we wake up each day and go to sleep in safety.

—Gregg Krech, “Grateful for Nothing”

Now there is a term for it!

Now there is a term for it! When they removed my rights when I married the love of my Life I Meghan Markled myself the hell outa there...

Noteworthy via Gay Wisdom / White Crane Institute

2018 -

Today is INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY

Why today? Well on this date in 1945 the Soviet Red Army arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland and liberated the survivors.

This is the day we remember the genocide of approximately 11 to 17 million people by the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler during World War II. This figure includes the deliberate extermination of six million European Jews, and the Nazi's systematic murder of Roma; Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war; ethnic Poles; the disabled; Homosexual men; and political and religious opponents. Millions of lives taken by hatred and intolerance.

The term “holocaust” comes from the Greek holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt".  It is also known as The Shoah.

The treatment and killings of the over 15,000 homosexual men is less known but we observe and remember them today. Between 1933-45, more than 100,000 men were arrested and registered by police as homosexuals ("Rosa Listen" or "Pink Lists"), and of these, some 50,000 were officially sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps. It is unclear how many of these 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in the concentration camps.

The leading scholar Ruediger Lautman however believes that the death rate in concentration camps of imprisoned homosexuals may have been as high as 60%. Homosexuals in camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by their captors and were also persecuted by their fellow inmates. This was a factor in the relatively high death rate for homosexuals, compared to other "anti-social groups".

James D. Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than criminal acts, and the "gesundes Volksempfinden" ("healthy sensibility of the people") became the leading normative legal principle. In 1936, Himmler created the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion". Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment," and homosexuals were consequently regarded as "defilers of German blood." The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others. They encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbors.

Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation" where they were identified by yellow armbands and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right trouser leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse. Hundreds were castrated by court order. They were humiliated, tortured, used in hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed. Steakley writes that the full extent of Gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany. Around two percent of German homosexuals were persecuted by Nazis.

More recently however German state television channel Deutsche Welle updated this figure to "almost 55,000" deaths following the study of documents from archives in East Germany that had been inaccessible to researchers for decades after the war.

After the war, the treatment of homosexuals in concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries. Some that did escape were even re-arrested and imprisoned based on evidence found during the Nazi years. It was not until the 1980s that governments acknowledged this episode, and not until 2002 that the German government apologized to the Gay community.

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Concentration camp prisoners with pink triangle marks

2018 -

THE PINK TRIANGLE: One of the oldest symbols of the modern Gay rights movement is the PINK TRIANGLE, which originated from the Nazi concentration camp badges that Homosexuals were required to wear on their clothing. It is estimated that as many as 220,000 gays and Lesbians perished alongside the 6,000,000 Jews whom the Nazis exterminated in their death camps during World War II as part of Hitler's so-called final solution. For this reason, the Pink Triangle is used both as an identification symbol and as a memento to remind both its wearers and the general public of the atrocities that Gays suffered under Nazi persecutors. ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) also adopted the inverted pink triangle to symbolize the "active fight back" against the disease "rather than a passive resignation to fate."

Via Daily Dharma: The Opportunities that Karma Presents

It is common to think of karma as a sort of fate to which we are subjected, but it is more central to the Buddha’s message that karma is the opportunity we have each moment to choose what sort of person we are to become next.

—Andrew Olendzki, “The Search for Meaning”

Via Daily Dharma: How to Respond Thoughtfully

By witnessing how we are, in our body, heart, and mind, we become armed with the necessary information needed to respond thoughtfully and with care.

—Jill Satterfield, “Meditation in Motion”

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation : Words of Wisdom - January 26, 2020 💌

If we can imagine a wheel whose rim is the cycle of births and deaths, all of the “stuff” of life, conditioned reality, and whose center is perfect flow, formless no-mind, the source, we’ve got one foot with most of our weight on the circumference of the wheel, and one foot tentatively on the center. That’s the beginning of awakening. And we come in, and we sit down and meditate, and suddenly there’s a moment when we feel the perfection of our being and our connection. Then our weight goes back on the outside of the wheel. Over and over and over, this happens.

Slowly, slowly the weight shifts. Then the weight shifts just enough so that there is a slight predominance on the center of the wheel, and we find that we naturally just want to sit down and be quiet, that we don’t have to say, “I’ve got to meditate now,” or “I’ve got to read a holy book,” or “I’ve got to turn off the television set,” or “I’ve got to do…” anything. It doesn’t become that kind of a discipline anymore. The balance has shifted. And we keep allowing our lives to become more and more simple, more and more harmonious. And less and less are we grabbing at this and pushing that away...

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Reforming Your Life

Envisioning death and rebirth serves to rehearse how the mind shapes embodiment and environment, awakening us to our ability to recreate our lives.

—Joseph Loizzo, “The Science of Enlightenment: The Buddha’s Answer to Darwin and God”

Via Daily Dharma: Attaining Lasting Happiness

One could spend years alone in a cave without really letting go of anything. The question is how best to attain the inner solitude that will bring lasting happiness.

—Pema Chödrön, “Cutting Ties: The Fruits of Solitude”

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Via Daily Dharma: What Is Absolute Truth?

Absolute truth is what is eternally true, now and forever, beyond any particular viewpoint or time frame. When we tap into absolute truth, we can recognize the divine beauty or larger perfection operating in the whole of reality.

—John Welwood, “The Psychology of Awakening”

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#lovingramdass Honoring Ram Dass – A Moment to Be Here Now

#lovingramdass

Via LionsRoar / Ram Dass lives on in collaborative album with East Forest

Musician East Forest’s collaborative album with the late spiritual teacher Ram Dass encompasses his lifetime of wisdom in 14 tracks, bringing his teachings to life after death.

In 2018, musician East Forest found himself in Maui, Hawaii, sitting in the upstairs study of spiritual teacher Ram Dass’s home — just the two of them sat in the room with microphones set to record.

“I realized that I’d made my way into what felt like the spiritual White House, and that it was no small feat,” he says.

As East Forest hit record, Ram Dass stared at him, awaiting a question. East Forest asked him about nature, and how we might use it to connect to ourselves in the high speed, the hyper-digitized world we live in.

Ram Dass paused, and thought for a while, staring out to the ocean and thumbing through his mala beads.

Nature embraces us, and we embrace nature
We are nature
We are the trees and the clouds and the waters
When you hug a tree, you’re hugging yourself

The responses became “Nature,” the first track of the East Forest’s album, Ram Dass.

Make the jump here to hear the  interview and more

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation / Words of Wisdom - January 22, 2020 💌

The key is that God, Guru and self are one.
The quickest way to get through your stuff is to learn how to listen inside. The inner guru is always there for you once you recognize it. You must honor your own path. You must be able to trust that there is a place in you that knows what is best. There is a tendency to look to others for guidance. Only you know what is suitable for you.
Trust your intuitive heart. The Quakers call it, "The still small voice within." When it speaks, listen. If it feels "right on" do it.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: How Delight Can Heal Us

Gladness and delight do not merely balance out negative tendencies, they actually heal the aversive mind.

—James Baraz, “Lighten Up!”

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Via Daily Dharma: Grounding Yourself with Breath

The circus of rage, superiority, and judgment is just another invitation to come back home and breathe.

—Tina Lear, “I Wanted to Watch Bill Cosby Suffer”

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Via Tricycle Dharma Talks: Digital Detox

Digital Detox: Reclaim Your Mind From Social Media Addiction

Bodhipaksa

 

The Social Media Sutra

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram—these sites and other social media platforms can be emotional minefields, and they eat up far more time than many of us are OK with. Although the Buddha didn’t offer guidance on how to act mindfully on Facebook, he did outline five practices that can help us disengage from the compelling trains of thought that often dominate our use of social media. In this video, Bodhipaksa shows how these practices can help us to take control of our online impulses.

Bodhipaksa is a Buddhist author and teacher who was born in Scotland but now lives in New Hampshire. He is a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order and the author of This Difficult Thing of Being Human: The Art of Self-Compassion and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Buddha!: What Fake Buddha Quotes Can Teach Us About Buddhism. When not debunking Fake Buddha Quotes, he runs Wildmind (www.wildmind.org), a leading online meditation resource.

Make the jump here to listen to the Dharma Talk and more...



Daily Dharma: Freeing Ourselves from Ignorance

he buddhadharma is optimistic, because it says we all eventually will free ourselves from ignorance. And that liberation is very much within our creative control every minute of every day—your life is a work in progress.

—Interview with Charles Johnson by E. Ethelbert Miller, “Black Coffee Buddhism”

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