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Via Daily Dharma: Being Truthful

 There is an essential connection between truthfulness and personal integrity. If one goes, so will the other.

—Matthew Gindin, “What Did the Buddha Say About Lying?”

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Via Daily Dharma: Identify with Consciousness

 Suffering exists until we identify not with the changing conditions of our lives but with consciousness itself.

—Nina Wise, “Sudden Awakening”

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Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History: JOHN M. MCNEILL

 

Father John M. McNeill

1925 -

JOHN M. MCNEILL, Jesuit scholar, psychotherapist, born (d: 2015); For more than twenty-five years John J. McNeill, an ordained priest and psychotherapist, devoted his life to spreading the good news of God's love for Lesbian and Gay Christians. One year after the publication of The Church and the Homosexual (1976), McNeill received an order from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican ordering him to silence in the public media. He observed the silence for nine years while continuing a private ministry to Gays and Lesbians which included psychotherapy, workshops, lectures and retreats.

In 1988, he received a further order from Cardinal Ratzinger (soon to become Pope Benedict XVI, the first Pope to resign in a millennium) directing him to give up all ministry to Gay persons which he refused to do in conscience. As a result, he was expelled by the Vatican from the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for challenging the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on the issue of homosexuality, and for refusing to give up his ministry and psychotherapy practice to Gay men and Lesbians. McNeill had been a Jesuit for nearly 40 years.

After enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II at the age of seventeen, McNeill served in combat in the Third Army under General Patton and was captured in Germany in 1944. McNeill spent six months as a POW (Prisoner of War) until he was liberated in May of 1945. John enrolled in Canisius College in Buffalo after his discharge from the army and, upon graduating, entered the Society of Jesus in 1948. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1959.

In 1964, McNeill earned a Doctorate in Philosophy, with highest honors (Plus Grande Distinction), at Louvain University in Belgium. His doctoral thesis on the philosophical and religious thought of Maurice Blondel was published in 1966 as the first volume of the series Studies in the History of Christian Thought edited by Heiko Oberman and published by Brill Press in Leyden, Holland.

During his professional career, McNeill taught philosophy at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY, and in the doctorate program at Fordham University in NYC. In 1972, he joined the combined Woodstock Jesuit Seminary and Union Theological Seminary faculty as professor of Christian Ethics, specializing in Sexual Ethics.

In 1974, McNeill was co-founder of the New York City chapter of Dignity, a group for Catholic Gays and Lesbians. For over twenty-five years, he has been active in a ministry to Gay Christians through retreats, workshops, lectures, publications, etc. For twenty years John was a leader of semiannual retreats at the Kirkridge Retreat Center in Pennsylvania.

Via Daily Dharma: Becoming Independent

 By facing our internal conflicts, we learn to be strong, independent, and responsible for our own emotions.

—Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, “The Wisdom of Emotions”

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - September 2, 2020 💌

 

One part of getting free, free into the soul or the witness, is the ability to stand back a little bit because now you are identified with being the witness rather than being the player, and thus you can see the play more clearly.

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Leveling the Ego

 Sincere Zen practice is a mirror where attempts to inflate the ego are leveled again and again.

— Eido Frances Carney, “Zen and the Art of Begging”

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Via Mushim Patricia Ikeda

 

Anger that is motivated by compassion or a desire to correct social injustice, and does not seek to harm the other person, is a good anger that is worth having. 

 

-- The Dalai Lama, "The (Justifiably) Angry Marxist," Tricycle

 

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Via Daily Dharma: Healing Through Compassion

 The gateway to compassion and lovingkindness is to be able to feel our own pain, and the pain of others. If we are able to open in this way, our hearts can melt, and the healing salve of compassion can anoint all our wounds.

—Lama Palden Drolma, “The Gateway to Compassion”

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Via // How do Buddhists handle coronavirus? The answer is not just meditation

Millions of Buddhists seeking protection and healing from the novel coronavirus are turning to traditional religious rituals.

Since the emergence of COVID-19, the Dalai Lama, other senior monks and Buddhist organizations in Asia and worldwide have emphasized that this pandemic calls for meditation, compassion, generosity and gratitude. Such messages reinforce a common view in the West of Buddhism as more philosophy than religion – a spiritual, perhaps, but secular practice associated with mindfulness, happiness and stress reduction.

But for many people around the world Buddhism is a religion – a belief system that includes strong faith in supernatural powers. As such, Buddhism has a large repertoire of healing rituals that go well beyond meditation.

Having studied the interplay between Buddhism and medicine as a historian and ethnographer for the past 25 years, I have been documenting the role these ritual practices play in the coronavirus pandemic.

Talismans, prayer and ritual

Buddhism originated in India about two and a half millennia ago. Today, with well over a half-billion adherents across the world, it is a highly diverse tradition that has adapted to many cultural and social contexts.

There are three main schools of traditional Buddhism: Theravāda, practiced in most of Southeast Asia; Mahāyāna, the form most prevalent in East Asia; and Vajrayāna, commonly associated with Tibet and the Himalayan region.

In Buddhist-majority places, the official COVID-19 pandemic response includes conventional emergency health and sanitation measures like recommending face masks, hand-washing and stay-at-home orders. But within religious communities, Buddhist leaders also are using a range of ritual apotropaics – magical protection rites – to protect against disease.

A Nepalese Buddhist monk offering ritual prayer, May 7, 2020. Narayan Maharjan/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In Thailand, for example, Theravāda temples are handing out “yant,” talismans bearing images of spirits, sacred syllables and Buddhist symbols. These blessed orange papers are a common ritual object among Buddhists in Southeast Asia who see crises such as epidemic illnesses as a sign that demonic forces are on the rise.

Theravāda amulets and charms trace their magical powers to repel evil spirits not only to the Buddha but also to beneficial nature spirits, demigods, charismatic monks and wizards.

Now, these blessed objects are being specifically formulated with the intention of protecting people from contracting the coronavirus.

Mahāyāna Buddhists use similar sacred objects, but they also pray to a whole pantheon of buddhas and bodhisattvas – another class of enlightened beings – for protection. In Japan, for example, Buddhist organizations have been conducting expulsion rites that call on Buddhist deities to help rid the land of the coronavirus.

Mahāyāna practitioners have faith that the blessings bestowed by these deities can be transmitted through statues or images. In a modern twist on this ancient belief, a priest affiliated with the Tōdaiji temple in Nara, Japan, in April tweeted a photo of the great Vairocana Buddha. He said the image would protect all who lay eyes upon it.

The Dalai Lama, the Buddhist spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. Pixabay

The third major form of Buddhism, Vajrayāna, which developed in the medieval period and is widely influential in Tibet, incorporates many rituals of earlier traditions. For example, the Dalai Lama has urged practitioners in Tibet and China to chant mantras to the bodhisattva Tārā, a female goddess associated with compassion and well-being, to gain her protection.

Vajrayāna practitioners also advocate a unique form of visualization where the practitioner generates a vivid mental image of a deity and then interacts with them on the level of subtle energy. Responses to COVID-19 suggested by leading figures in traditional Tibetan medicine frequently involve this kind of visualization practice.

Buddhist modernism

Since the height of the colonial period in the 19th century, “Buddhist modernists” have carefully constructed an international image of Buddhism as a philosophy or a psychology. In emphasizing its compatibility with empiricism and scientific objectivity they have ensured Buddhism’s place in the modern world and paved the way for its popularity outside of Asia.

Many of these secular-minded Buddhists have dismissed rituals and other aspects of traditional Buddhism as “hocus pocus” lurking on the fringes of the tradition.

A former Buddhist monk practices visualization meditation during the coronavirus crisis, April 24, 2020. Danny Lawson/PA Images via Getty Images

Having documented the richness of the history and contemporary practice of Buddhist healing and protective rituals, however, I argue that these practices cannot be written off quite so easily.

In most living traditions of Buddhism, protective and healing rituals are taken seriously. They have sophisticated doctrinal justifications that often focus on the healing power of belief.

Increasingly, researchers are agreeing that faith in itself plays a role in promoting health. The anthropologist Daniel Moerman, for example, has identified what he calls the “meaning response.” This model accounts for how cultural and social beliefs and practices lead to “real improvements in human well-being.” Likewise, Harvard Medical School researcher Ted Kaptchuk has studied the neurobiological mechanisms for how rituals work to alleviate illnesses.

To date, there is no known way to prevent COVID-19 other than staying home to avoid contagion, and no miracle cure. But for millions worldwide, Buddhist talismans, prayers and protective rituals offer a meaningful way to confront the anxieties of the global coronavirus pandemic, providing comfort and relief.

And in a difficult time when both are in short supply, that’s nothing to discredit.

[You need to understand the coronavirus pandemic, and we can help. Read The Conversation’s newsletter.]

 

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - August 30, 2020 💌

 

 

 

The art of playing on the playground of life is to do what you do as well as you can, but what happens is not always in your control. The key is not to be attached to the fruits of the action, even though you have worked hard to make it come about. The forces that act upon whether you will win or not are more than what is under your control.

 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Achieving a Moment of Breakthrough

 Enlightenment is initially subconscious awakening, which is spontaneously merged with conscious awakening at the moment of breakthrough.

—Kazuaki Tanahashi, “Fundamentals of Dogen’s Thoughts”

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Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History: EDWARD CARPENTER

 This Day in Gay History

August 29

Born

Edward Carpenter

 

EDWARD CARPENTER, English socialist poet anthologist, early gay theorist, activist, and socialist philosopher, was born on this date (d: 1929); Perhaps Gay Pride ought to consider claiming another week, this one. Ulrichs and Carpenter, both born this week, are two of the founding philosophers of the LGBT Rights Movement.

A leading figure in late 19th and early 20th century Britain, Carpenter was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labor Party. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore, corresponding with many famous figures such as Annie Bessant, Isadore Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Roger Fry, Mahatma Gandhi, James Keir Hardie, J.K. Kinney, Jack London, George Merrill, E.D. Morel, William Morris, E.R. Pease, John Ruskin and Olive Schrener.  In this writers humble opinion, along with Walt Whitman, this man’s date of birth should be a recognized holiday in the LGBT community.

As a philosopher Carpenter may have been the original Radical Faerie. He is particularly known for his publication of Civilization, its Cause and Cure in which he proposes that civilization is a form of disease that human societies pass through. Civilizations, he says, rarely last more than a thousand years before collapsing, and no society has ever passed through civilization successfully. His 'cure' is a closer association with the land and greater development of our inner nature. Although derived from his experience of Hindu mysticism, and referred to as 'mystical socialism', his thoughts parallel those of several writers in the field of psychology and sociology at the start of the twentieth century, such as Boris Sidis, Sigmund Freud, and Wilfred Trotter who all recognized that society puts ever increasing pressure on the individual, which can result in mental and physical illnesses such as neurosis, and the particular nervousness which was then described as neurasthenia.

A strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a Gay community near Sheffield, he had a profound influence on both D H Lawrence and E M Forster. He was also the first person to introduce the wearing of sandals into Britain.

In the 1880s Carpenter developed an intellectual passion for Hindu mysticism and Indian philosophy. During this period, Carpenter received a pair of sandals from a friend in India. "I soon found the joy of wearing them," Carpenter wrote. "And after a little time I set about making them."This was the first successful introduction of sandals to Britain. In 1890 he traveled to Ceylon and India to spend time with the Hindu teacher called Gnani, who he describes his work "Adam's Peak to Elephanta". The experience had a profound effect on his social and political thought. Carpenter began to believe that Socialism should not only concern itself with man's outward economic conditions, but also affect a profound change in human consciousness. In this new stage of society Carpenter argued that mankind would return to a primordial state of simple joy:

"The meaning of the old religions will come back to him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon.”  Edward Carpenter (1889), Civilization: Its Cause and Cure.

This brand of "Mystical socialism" inspired him to begin a number of campaigns against air pollution, promoting vegetarianism and opposing vivisection.

On his return from India in 1891, he met George Merrill, a working class man also from Sheffield, and the two men struck up a strong relationship, eventually moving in together as lovers in 1898. Merrill had been raised in the slums of Sheffield and had no formal education. Two men of different classes living together as a couple was almost unheard of in England in the 1890s, a fact made all the more extraordinary by the hysteria about homosexuality generated by the Oscar Wilde trial of 1895 and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill passed a decade earlier "outlawing all forms of male homosexual contact". But their relationship endured and they remained partners for the rest of their lives. The love of the two men, not only defied Victorian sexual mores but also the highly stratified British class system. Their partnership in many ways reflected Carpenter's cherished conviction that homosexual love had the power to subvert class boundaries. It was his belief that at sometime in the future homosexual people would be the cause of radical social change in the social conditions of man. Carpenter remarks in his work "The Intermediate Sex",

"Eros is a great leveler. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies". p.114-115

(Note: The term "Uranian", referring to a passage from Plato's Symposium, was often used at the time to describe someone who would be termed "homosexual" or "gay" today.)

The 1890s saw Carpenter produce his finest political writing in a concerted effort to campaign against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. He strongly believed that homosexuality was a natural orientation for people of a third sex. His 1908 book on the subject, The Intermediate Sex, would become a foundational text of the LGBT movements of the 20th century. It can only speculated why Carpenter felt compelled to embark on such an unpopular and even dangerous subject in such hostile times, but one theory is that Carpenter's moral courage was ignited by the death of the gay scholar and middle-class radical John Addington Symonds. In the 1880s Symonds had composed a number of works in defense of homosexuality, which were distributed among a small group of people, including Carpenter. On Symonds' death in 1893, Carpenter perhaps saw the political mantle passing to him and within a couple of years made his first attempt to write on the subject. While engaged in this campaign Carpenter developed a keen interest in progressive education, especially providing information to young people on the topic of sexual education, and was a good friend of John Haden Badley, the social reformer and educationalist and would regularly visit BedalesSchool when his nephew Alfred Francis Blakeney was a student there.

Sexual education for Carpenter also meant forwarding a clear analysis of the ways in which sex and gender were used to oppress women, contained in Carpenter's radical work "Love's Coming-of-Age". In it he argued that a just and equal society must promote the sexual and economic freedom of women. The main crux of his analysis centered on the negative affects of the institution of marriage. He regarded marriage in England as both enforced celibacy and a form of prostitution. He did not believe women would truly be free until a socialist society was established. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, however, this led him to conclude that all oppressed workers should support women's emancipation, rather than to subordinate women's rights to male worker's rights. He remarked

"...there is no solution except the freedom of woman-which means, of course, the freedom of the masses of the people, men and women, and the ceasing altogether of economic slavery. There is no solution which will not include the redemption of the terms free women and free love to their true and rightful significance. Let every woman whose heart bleeds for the sufferings of her sex, hasten to declare herself and to constitute herself, as far as she possibly can, a free woman"

He continued to work in the early part of the 20th century composing works on the "Homogenic question". The publication in 1908 of his groundbreaking anthology of poems, Iolaus - Anthology Of Friendship was a huge underground success, leading to a more advanced knowledge of homoerotic culture. In April 1914, Carpenter and his friend Laurence Houseman founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. Some of the topics addressed in lecture and publication by the society included: the promotion of the scientific study of sex; a more rational attitude towards sexual conduct and problems and questions connected with sexual psychology (from medical, juridical, and sociological aspects), birth control, abortion, sterilization, venereal diseases, and all aspects of prostitution. At this time, he also lectured to the Independent Labor Party and to the Fellowship of the New Life, from which the Fabian Society later grew.

In May 1928 Carpenter suffered a paralytic stroke rendering him almost helpless. He lived another 13 months before he died on a perfect summer afternoon, Friday June 28, 1929. On December 30, 1910 Carpenter had written:

"I should like these few words to be read over the grave when my body is placed in the earth; for though it is possible I may be present and conscious of what is going on, I shall not be able to communicate..."

Unfortunately the existence of his request was not discovered until several days after his burial. The closing words form the epitaph engraved on his tombstone:

"Do not think too much of the dead husk of your friend, or mourn too much over it, but send your thoughts out towards the real soul or self which has escaped — to reach it. For so, surely you will cast a light of gladness upon his onward journey, and contribute your part towards the building of that kingdom of love which links our earth to heaven."

He was interred in Mount Cemetery at Guildford in Surrey. At the time of his death, Carpenter was largely forgotten, but his books were stocked in many libraries' "restricted to adults" sections and proved inspirational to Gay people searching for solace. One such man was the Gay Rights activist Harry Hay. He was so inspired by the work of Carpenter and his prophecy of the coming together of homosexuals to fight for their rights that he decided to put the words into action by founding the Mattachine Society which started advancing homosexual rights in America.