Via Tashi Choling Center for Buddhist Studies // Prayer for the People and Nations of the Earth

Via Daily Dharma: Heighten Your Sense of Connection

The word [sangha] can be extended to encompass all sentient beings—and even all inhabitants of a unified ecosystem... This inspiring vision brings with it a heightened sense of connection, a greater appreciation of mutual interdependence, and a shared responsibility for all beings to respect and care for one another.

—Andrew Olendzki,“What’s in a Word? Sangha”

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Via Ticycle // 5 Questions That Help Us Wake Up

5 Questions That Help Us Wake Up

Trying to push away our emotional distress can throw us into “cognitive shock” that turns our mind into a muddle. Ezra Bayda shares five simple questions to help us cut though confusion.

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 10, 2020 💌

Find something that needs help, and help it, then you work on yourself to make it a conscious act. As Gandhi said, "The act that you do may seem very insignificant but it is important that you do it."

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Mindfully Witnessing the Suffering of Others

Willingness to patiently accompany another in their time of suffering with care and awareness—while realizing it is not one’s own, despite feeling empathic distress—may be the necessary means for discovering how we can best help that person.

—Fleet Maull, “From Empathy to Compassion”

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Via Daily Dharma: Generate Lovingkindness

By nature [the heart] contains both love and hate. It contains ill will, rejection, resentment, and fear, and also love. But unless we diminish the hate and enlarge the love by doing something about it in our daily life, we have no chance of experiencing that peaceful feeling that lovingkindness generates.

—Ayya Khema, “Love Is a Skill”

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Adittapariyaya Sutta: The Fire Sermon

Adittapariyaya Sutta

The Fire Sermon

I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying at Varanasi in Gaya, at Gaya Head, with 1,000 monks. There he addressed the monks:

'Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Visual consciousness is aflame. Visual contact is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on visual contact, experienced as pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say, with birth, ageing death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, grief’s despairs.

'The ear is aflame. Sounds are aflame...
'The nose is aflame. Odors are aflame...
'The tongue is aflame. Flavors are aflame...
'The body is aflame. Tactile sensations are aflame...

'The intellect is aflame. Ideas are aflame. Mental consciousness is aflame. Mental contact is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on mental contact, experienced as pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say, with birth, ageing, & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, grief's & despairs.

'Seeing thus, the instructed Noble disciple grows disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with visual consciousness, disenchanted with visual contact. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on visual contact, experienced as pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: He grows disenchanted with that too.

'He grows disenchanted with the ear...
'He grows disenchanted with the nose...
'He grows disenchanted with the tongue...
'He grows disenchanted with the body...

'He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with mental consciousness, disenchanted with mental contact. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on mental contact, experienced as pleasure, pain, or neither-pleasure-nor-pain:

He grows disenchanted with that too. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is released. With the release, there is the knowledge, "Released." He discerns that, "Birth is depleted, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world."'

That is what the Blessed One said. Glad at heart, the monks delighted at his words. And while this explanation was being given, the hearts of the 1,000 monks, through no clinging (not being sustained), were released from the mental effluents.

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Via Daily Dharma: Become a Revolutionary of Your Mind

To break with the norm means to be first a revolutionary in your own mind, someone who breaks down the rigid power structures and egoic defenses within through mindfulness and awareness training, and through love and compassion. 

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

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Via Insight LA // Mindfulness in Times of COVID-19

Media channels around the world are calling now for more mindfulness for avoiding the risk of infection with COVID-19. The great news is that this is exactly one of the things mindfulness practice teaches: 

To become aware of automatic patterns, to stop them and to choose a new response.

Here are four main areas how mindfulness helps with preventing infection:

1. Reduces automatic behavior
2. Chooses a better behavior
3. Stress reduction supports the immune system
4. Stay informed but don’t panic

Mindfulness practice also has a proven track record of lowering anxiety and worry. With the media on the coverage of the coronavirus from around the world does what the media does, it’s easy to fall into worry or even panic.

Mindfulness helps being aware of the presence of anxiety or worry in the form of thoughts and as sensations in the body and to observe them with friendliness instead of trying to push them away. Repeatedly returning to the sensations of the breath or the grounding feeling of the feet on the floor help to reorient to the present moment instead of racing towards the anticipated future. 

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Via Insight Meditation / The Forest Refuge, Empty in Spring

They go to many a refuge,
to mountains, forests, parks, trees, and shrines:
people threatened with danger.

That’s not the secure refuge,
that’s not the highest refuge,
that’s not the refuge, having gone to which, you gain release from all suffering and stress.

But when, having gone for refuge,
to the Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha,
you see with right discernment the four noble truths —
stress,
the cause of stress,
the transcending of stress,
and the Noble Eightfold Path, the way to the stilling of stress:

That’s the secure refuge,
that, the highest refuge,
that is the refuge, having gone to which, you gain release from all suffering and stress.

– Dhammapada 188-192

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 7, 2020 💌

"Even though we find ourselves afraid, and not feeling peaceful, and less than fully loving and compassionate, we must act. There is no way you can be in an incarnation without acting. We cannot wait until we are enlightened to act. We all hear the way in which our silence is itself an act of acquiescence to a system. That is as much an action as walking. Since we must act, we do the best we can to act consciously and compassionately. But in addition, we can make every action an exercise designed to help us become free.
Because the truth that comes from freedom, and the power that comes from freedom and the love and compassion that come from freedom are the jewels we can cultivate to offer to our fellow sentient beings for the relief of their suffering." 

- Ram Dass -

Budistas contra o Racismo e Fascismo

Silence is itself an act of acquiescence to a system - Ram Dass

Peace requires action. Peace requires a real sense of urgency. Peace requires courage and hard work. Peace means that each and every one of us has an obligation to build mutual understanding and an obligation to reject fear.

—Gyalwang Drukpa,“How to Combat Fear”

Via White Crane Institute // ALAN TURING

Died

Alan Turing

1954 -

ALAN TURING, British mathematician and computer scientist died (b. 1912) from cyanide poisoning, eighteen months after being given libido-reducing hormone treatment for a year as a punishment for homosexuality. Turing is generally considered to be the Father of Modern Computer Science. He provided an influential formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine.

 

In 'the Turing Test" Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give correct answers to questions, only how closely answers resemble those a human would give.

 

With the Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built.

 

In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers. During WWII Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's code breaking center, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis.

 

He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electro-mechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing was Gay in a period when homosexual acts were illegal in Britain and homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness and subject to criminal sanctions.

 

In 1952, Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old recent acquaintance of Turing’s, helped an accomplice to break into Turing's house, and Turing went to the police to report the crime. As a result of the police investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray, and a crime having been identified and settled, they were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Turing was unrepentant and was convicted of the same crime Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years before. He was given the choice between imprisonment and probation, conditional on his undergoing hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido.

 

To avoid going to jail, he accepted the estrogen hormone injections, which lasted for a year, with side effects including gynecomastia (breast enlargement). His lean runner's body took on fat. His conviction led to a removal of his security clearance and prevented him from continuing consultancy for GCHQ on cryptographic matters. At this time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents. In America, Robert Oppenheimer had just been deemed a security risk.

 

On June 8, 1954, his housekeeper found him dead; the previous day, he had died of cyanide poisoning, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple he left half-eaten beside his bed. The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, and cyanide poisoning as a cause of death was established by a post-mortem.

 

Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was reenacting a scene from "Snow White", reportedly his favorite fairy tale. Because Turing's sexuality would have been perceived as a security risk, the possibility of assassination has also been suggested. His remains were cremated at Woking crematorium on June 12, 1954.

 

There is an urban legend that the Apple Computer “bite out of an apple” logo is a tribute to Turing. It is exactly that: an urban legend. But that’s not to say that the idea of paying homage to Turing is something the creators of Apple were against. When actor Stephen Fry once asked his good friend Steve Jobs if the famous logo was based on Turing, Jobs replied, “God, we wish it were.” Hodges biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma is the basis of the film The Imitation Game (a reference to “the Turing Test” which is also referenced in the film Ex Machina.

Via FB

A Statement of Allyship from Love Serve Remember Foundation

"Silence is itself an act of acquiescence to a system."
 

- Ram Dass -

Via White Crane Institute / HARVEY FIERSTEIN

---

The inimitable Harvey Fierstein

1952 -

HARVEY FIERSTEIN, American actor, born; An American Tony Award-winning and Emmy Award-winning actor, playwright, and screenwriter is perhaps known best for the play and film Torch Song Trilogy, which he wrote and starred in and originating the role of Edna Turnblad in the Broadway musical Hairspray.

The 1982 Broadway production won him two Tony Awards, for Best Play and Best Actor in a Play, two Drama Desk Awards, for Outstanding New Play and Outstanding Actor in a Play, and the Theater World Award, and the film earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination as Best Male Lead. Fierstein also wrote the book for La Cage aux Folles (1983), winning another Tony Award, this time for Best Book of a Musical, and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Book. Legs Diamond, his 1988 collaboration with Peter Allen, was a critical and commercial failure, closing after 72 previews and 64 performances.

His other playwriting credits include Safe Sex, Spookhouse, and Forget Him. Fierstein developed a new musical titled A Catered Affair in which he starred with Faith Prince, Leslie Kritzer, and Tom Wopat. Fierstein is an occasional columnist writing about Gay issues and appears regularly on the PBS series In The Life. He was out at a time when very few celebrities were. His most recent Tony was for Kinky Boots, with Cindy Lauper.

Via White Crane Institute / THOMAS MANN

This Day in Gay History

June 06

Born

Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann

1875 -

THOMAS MANN, German writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955); a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual.

His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

 

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912).

 

Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy. Considered a classic of homoerotic passion (if unconsummated) Death in Venice has been made into a film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann’s old enemy, Alfred Kerr, to have ‘made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle classes’, it has been pivotal to introducing the discourse of same-sex desire to the common culture.

 

Mann himself described his feelings for young violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg as the "central experience of my heart." Despite the homoerotic overtones in his writing, Mann chose to marry and have children; two of his children, Klaus, also a writer, who committed suicide in 1949, and Erika, an actress, and writer who died in 1969 and who was married to W.H. Auden for 34 years, were also Gay. His works also present other sexual themes, such as incest in The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut) and The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte).

Via Be Here Now Network / Francesca Maximé – ReRooted – Ep. 29 – Legacy Burden, Implicit Racism, and Activism with Dr. Richard Schwartz

Dr. Richard Schwartz joins Francesca to discuss legacy burden, implicit racism, privilege, social activism, and healing the planet. Richard Schwartz, PhD, is the founding...

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Via Daily Dharma: Transforming Actual Lives

If spiritual or transcendent insight doesn’t lead to healing and transformation in our actual daily lives, it is clearly incomplete.

—Henry Shukman, “Light and Dark”

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