Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - September 6, 2020 💌

If we live in the moment, we are not in time. If you think, "I'm a retired person. I've retired from my role," you are looking back at your life. It's retrospective; it's life in the rearview mirror. If you're young, you might be thinking, "I have my whole life ahead of me. This is what I'll do later." That kind of thinking is called time-binding. It causes us to focus on the past or the future and to worry about what comes next.

Getting caught up in memories of the past or worrying about the future is a form of self-imposed suffering. Either retirement or youth can be seen as moving on, time for something different, something new. Aging is not a culmination. Youth isn't preparation for later. This isn't the end of the line or the beginning.

Now isn't a time to look back or plan ahead. It's time to just be present. The present is timeless. Being in the moment, just being here with what is, is ageless and eternal.

- Ram Dass -

Via Apple News // Remembering Chadwick Boseman

Remembering Chadwick Boseman

How the Black Panther star created an indelible cultural legacy. Plus: the uncompromising arrival of director Chloé Zhao, how The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby became indie royalty, and Stranger Things star Caleb McLaughlin saddles up for the big screen. The Hollywood Reporter

 

Via White Crane Institute // "TREATMENT ACTIVIST GUERRILLAS" (TAG)

 

Noteworthy

The TAG condom on Jesse Helms House

1991 -

On this date a group of AIDS activists called "TREATMENT ACTIVIST GUERRILLAS" (TAG) accomplished one of the funniest and most outrageous bits of public activism when they literally put an enormous condom over the home of rabid homophobe and AIDS death accomplice Senator Jesse Helms in Arlington, Virginia.  The activists knew they only had seven minutes before the police showed up.  You can see the action in the 2012 documentary How To Survive and Plague. Here: https://youtu.be/Nrr0eA34CSM 

Via White Crane Institute // FREDDIE MERCURY

 

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Freddie Mercury

1946 -

FREDDIE MERCURY, Zanzibar-born singer and songwriter (Queen) (d. 1991) Widely regarded as one of the great singers in popular music, Freddie Mercury possessed a distinctive voice, with a recorded range of nearly four octaves. Although his speaking voice naturally fell in the baritone range, he delivered most songs in the tenor range.

Biographer David Bret described Mercury's voice as "escalating within a few bars from a deep, throaty rock-growl to tender, vibrant tenor, then on to a high-pitched, almost perfect coloratura, pure and crystalline in the upper reaches." On the other hand, he would often lower the highest notes during live performances. Mercury also claimed never to have had any formal training.

Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé, with whom Mercury recorded an album expressed her opinion that "the difference between Freddie and almost all the other rock stars was he was selling the voice." Despite the fact that he had been criticized by Gay activists for hiding his HIV status, author Paul Russell included Mercury in his book The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present. Other entertainers on Russell's list included Liberace and Rock Hudson.

Via White Crane Institute // JOHN CAGE

 This Day in Gay History

September 05

Born

John Cage

1912 -

JOHN CAGE, American composer born (d. 1992). American composer. He was a pioneer of Chance music, non-standard use of musical instruments, and electronic music.

He is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, whose three movements are performed without a single note being played. Though he remains a controversial figure, he is generally regarded as one of the most important composers of his era. Cage was a long-term collaborator and romantic partner of choreographer Merce Cunningham. In addition to his composing, Cage was also a philosopher, writer, printmaker and avid amateur mycologist and mushroom collector.

Cage always referred to his The Perilous Night (1943) as his "autobiographical" piece, and biographer, David Revill has associated it with the traumas associated with Cage's sexual reorientation, culminating in divorce from his wife (1945) and the beginning of his monogamous partnership with Merce Cunningham, that lasted to the end of his life.

Via Daily Dharma: Returning to Focus

 Each time we let go of distractions to return to our focus, whatever that is, we practice letting go. Letting go of thoughts, scenarios, judgments, conceptual thinking—little chunks of self.

—Erik Hansen, “Bartelby the Buddhist”

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Medicine Buddha Mantra

 

TAYATA, OM BEKADZE BEKADZE
MAHA BEKADZE BEKADZE,
RADZA SAMUNGATE
SOHA

This is pronounced:

Tie-ya-tar, om beck-and-zay beck-and-zay
ma-ha beck-and-zay beck-and-zay
run-zuh sum-oon-gut-eh
so-ha.

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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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