Via Tricycle / Say a Little Prayer Reaching beyond our limits, we make practice real. By Ken McLeod - Summer 2020

Give me energy for my heart to turn to the spiritual. Give me energy for the spiritual to become a way. Give me energy for this way to dispel confusion. Give me energy for confusion to arise as wisdom.

- Gampopa 

Make the jump here to read the full explanation and more

Via Daily Dharma: Build Your Practice Into Your Life

Living a more awakened life depends on when and where we choose to practice. Are we going to squeeze practice into part of the day, or build the practice so it becomes our lives? 

—Rev. Sangjin Song, “Zen All Day”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Helpful Rebuttals for Racist Points

Via Robert Hartwell / FB

3 weeks ago I found this house online. I said “this is my house”. I called the seller and was told it was a cash only offer and that “I’m sure that takes you off the table”. Don’t you ever underestimate a hard working black man. I saw the house last week and when I walked in I knew I was home. The house was built in 1820 for the Russell family who owned the cotton mill in town. Slavery was still legal. When the agent asked me why I wanted such a large house I said it was “a generational move”. I know this house is bigger than me. I wish I could’ve told my ancestors when they were breaking their back in 1820 to build this house that 200 years later a free gay black man was going to own it and fill it with love and find a way to say their name even when 200 years later they still thought I would be “off the table”. We are building our own tables. I’ve never been prouder to be a black man. Come to my White House any time. I can’t wait to have you! Glory to God in the highest. I’m a homeowner.

Via White Crane Institute // RUDOLF BRAZDA

Rudolf Brazda

1913 -

RUDOLF BRAZDA, believed to be the last surviving man to wear the pink triangle — the emblem sewn onto the striped uniforms of the thousands of homosexuals sent to Nazi concentration camps, most of them to their deaths — was born on this date. Mr. Brazda, who was born in Germany, had lived in France since the Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by American forces in April 1945. He had been imprisoned there for three years.

It was only after May 27, 2008, when the German National Monument to the Victims of the Nazi Regime was unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten park — opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — that Mr. Brazda became known as probably the last gay survivor of the camps. Until he notified German officials after the unveiling, the Lesbian and Gay Federation believed there were no other pink-triangle survivors. Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French organization that commemorates the Nazi persecution of gay people, said that Mr. Brazda “was very likely the last victim and the last witness” to the persecution.

“It will now be the task of historians to keep this memory alive,” the statement said, “a task that they are just beginning to undertake.” One of those historians is Gerard Koskovich, curator of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Museum in San Francisco and an author with Roberto Malini and Steed Gamero of “A Different Holocaust” (2006). Pointing out that only men were interned, Mr. Koskovich said, “The Nazi persecution represented the apogee of anti-Gay persecution, the most extreme instance of state-sponsored homophobia in the 20th century.

During the 12-year Nazi regime, he said, up to 100,000 men were identified in police records as homosexuals, with about 50,000 convicted of violating Paragraph 175, a section of the German criminal code that outlawed male homosexual acts. There was no law outlawing female homosexual acts, he said. Citing research by Rüdiger Lautmann, a German sociologist, Mr. Koskovich said that 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were interned in the camps and that about 60 percent of them died there, most within a year.

“The experience of homosexual men under the Nazi regime was one of extreme persecution, but not genocide,” Mr. Koskovich said, when compared with the “relentless effort to identify all Jewish people and ultimately exterminate them.” Still, the conditions in the camps were murderous, said Edward J. Phillips, the director of exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“Men sent to the camps under Section 175 were usually put to forced labor under the cruelest conditions — underfed, long hours, exposure to the elements and brutal treatment by labor brigade leaders,” Mr. Phillips said. “We know of instances where gay prisoners and their pink triangles were used for guards’ target practices.” Two books have been written about Mr. Brazda. In one, “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” (2010), by Jean-Luc Schwab, Mr. Brazda recalled how dehumanizing the incarceration was. “Seeing people die became such an everyday thing, it left you feeling practically indifferent,” he is quoted as saying. “Now, every time I think back on those terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like everyone in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.”

Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both worked in the coal-mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph 175. After the war, Mr. Brazda moved to Alsace. There he met Edouard Mayer, his partner until Mr. Mayer’s death in 2003.

He had no immediate survivors. “Having emerged from anonymity,” the book “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” says of Mr. Brazda, “he looks at the social evolution for homosexuals over his nearly 100 years of life: ‘I have known it all, from the basest repression to the grand emancipation of today.’ ” He died on August 3, 2011 in Bantzenheim, in Alsace, France. He was 98.

Via Daily Dharma: What It Means to Forget the Self

To forget the self [is] not to eliminate personal qualities or self experience, and it is certainly not to eliminate a sense of self, which has wonderful capacities that allow us to hang in there, let go, tolerate pain, and encounter suffering.

—Joseph Bobrow, Roshi,“The True Person of No Rank: A Zen Story for Our Troubled World”

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FULL TALK

Via El Pais // “É preciso apagar a ideia de que reduzir a desigualdade é coisa de comunista”

Uma hora de conversa com Martin Ravallion (Sidney, 1952) é o mais parecido a um livro de macroeconomia aberto em duas páginas: a da desigualdade e a das falhas do capitalismo do século XXI. Pai da tabela de um dólar (4 reais) diário como linha global de pobreza quando era economista do Banco Mundial — onde anos depois dirigiu seu prestigioso grupo de pesquisa para o desenvolvimento —, é desde 2013 professor da Universidade Georgetown (EUA). Ravallion, instalado há anos entre os 100 economistas mais reconhecidos do mundo de acordo com a classificação do Ideas-Repec, sabe bem o significado da desigualdade: nasceu em uma família pobre, sofreu na própria carne o que significa viver com dificuldades e decidiu que “não queria ser pobre” nunca mais, como disse quando recebeu o prêmio Fronteiras do Conhecimento BBVA, em 2016. “Todos os meus papers são muito chatos”, diz rindo ao EL PAÍS pouco depois de dar uma conferência organizada pela Oxfam no Colégio do México. Não é verdade: o australiano é um dos especialistas que melhor explicam, com palavras ao alcance de todos, por que a iniquidade é um dos grandes problemas globais de nosso tempo.

Pergunta. A pobreza extrema caiu bastante nas últimas décadas, mas a desigualdade ofuscou essa boa notícia.

make the jump here to read the full article

Via FB

Via Daily Dharma: Rediscovering an Unscathed Mind

At the heart of the teachings is our discovery that inside all of us there is a Pristine Mind unscathed by life experiences, awaiting our rediscovery.

—Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche,“Living the Yogi-way”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 24, 2020 💌

The devotional path isn’t necessarily a straight line to enlightenment. There’s a lot of back and forth, negotiations if you will, between the ego and the soul. You look around at all the aspects of suffering, and you watch your heart close in judgment. Then you practice opening it again and loving this too, as a manifestation of the Beloved, another way the Beloved is taking form. Again your love grows vast.

In Bhakti, as you contemplate, emulate, and take on the qualities of the Beloved, your heart keeps expanding until you see the whole universe as the Beloved, even the suffering.

 

- Ram Dass -

Via Medium-Politics // Exploring the ‘Liberal Bias’ of Reality

Right now, conservatives have a reality problem. This is incredibly well-documented. The willingness of the right to eat up obviously fake news from Russia or 4Chan is an area of intensive academic study. The problem is one of the greatest facing a country that wants to continue to improve. How did we get to this point? There are multiple contributing factors—and four major ones.

Make the jump here to read the full article and more here

Via Daily Dharma: Internalizing Unity

To understand that others are much like oneself creates a different perspective, a startlingly changed worldview. When this is internalized, you are not confronting another over a divide, but meeting someone with whom you have so much in common.

—Jeffrey Hopkins, “Equality”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Daily Dharma: Revealing and Clarifying Our Minds

We have two faces: our intrinsic nature and our reactive patterns—the bad habits of the psyche. Effective practice mirrors both, gradually revealing our nature, while at the same time, clarifying what obstructs it. 

—Interview with Anne C. Klein by Donna Lynn Brown,“Across the Expanse”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Redwood Meditation with CC

Via Budismo e Sociedade // Um Guia Budista para “sobreviver” ao Apocalipse

O mundo passa por um momento delicado. Deterioração do meio ambiente, pandemia, tensões sociais e raciais. Como budistas, nos perguntamos como “sobreviver” ao Fim do Mundo? Bhante Akaliko nos recorda que o Buda já fez essa pergunta séculos atrás ao Rei Pasenadi e o diálogo entre os dois serve como ensinamento para os dias de hoje.

Make the jump here to read more

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 21, 2020 💌

You and I are not only here in terms of the work we’re doing on ourselves. We are here in terms of the role we’re playing within the systems of which we are a part, if you look at the way change affects people that are unconscious.

Change generates fear, fear generates contractions, contraction generates prejudice, bigotry, and ultimately violence. You can watch the whole thing happen, and you can see it happen in society after society after society.

The antidote for that is a consciousness that does not respond to change with fear. That’s as close to the beginning of that sequence as I can get.

 - Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: You Are Deserving of Love

Not only are we buddhas (or at least in the process of becoming buddhas), we are somehow, remarkably, deserving of being loved.

—Taylor Plimpton, “Who My Dog Thinks I Am”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

RACISMO, COISA DE BRANCO

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBfw2WqNDj0

HISTÓRIAS CRUÉIS DEMAIS PARA SEREM IGNORADAS | Bianca DellaFancy