"Faith is not a belief. Faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell. Faith is in the heart, while beliefs are in the head. Experiences, even spiritual experiences, come and go. As long as you base your faith on experience, your faith is going to be constantly flickering, because your experiences keep changing."
- Ram Dass -
Excerpt from Be Love Now: The Path of the Heart
Make the things you want to do easy, and the things you don’t want to do difficult.
—Gregg Krech, “Meditating Every Day and What to Do When You Don’t”
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—David Rome, “Focusing”
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Joy
creates a spaciousness in the mind that allows us to hold the suffering
we experience inside us and around us without becoming overwhelmed,
without collapsing into helplessness or despair.
—James Baraz, “Lighten Up!”
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Just
understand your mind: how it works, how attachment and desire arise,
how ignorance arises, where emotions come from. It is sufficient to know
the nature of all that; just that gives so much happiness and peace.
—Lama Thubten Yeshe, “Chocolate Cake”
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I would say that the thrust of my life has been initially about getting free, and then realizing that my freedom is not independent of everybody else. Then I am arriving at that circle where one works on oneself as a gift to other people so that one doesn't create more suffering. I help people as a work on myself and I work on myself to help people.
- Ram Dass -
The Buddhist Way invites us to take refuge in openness and in accepting that to do this we must transcend all rigid identities.
—Fabrice Midal, “Brief Teachings”
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Last night after a shocking series of bizarre and mean emails from my mother, I was in a funk and upset and sad all day. ((How a 65+ year old man can be nonplussed by a mother is stuff for future postings... But I digress)). Then some rotten stuff from work, all of which set me off in a seriously non-Buddhist way. Ugh... Tests and dhukka!
So… when I zoomed into a meeting with folks in Guatemala, I was, to be quite honest, somewhat reticent... The last encuentros with Bahá’ís for me didn’t end well…
I was so surprised last night.
I felt a sense of refuge and well a bit of “saudades” for the first time in years.
The remembrance service for Bob Porter sponsored by the Bahá'ís de Guatemala was simple, sweet, and lovely. People saying hello for maybe 15 minutes before… and Marcy was a joy! At one point there were over 100 folks from maybe 5 countries!
It was the first Bahá’í gathering I went to in over 2 decades. And it felt nice, it felt like home, people were sweet, and it was good to see some old friends. It bought back some good memories and adventures. The Porter family was great, KC even played a song, Kristy and Curt & Sonia shared sweet memories. All of us that are not there in Guatemala expressed our sense of, what we say in Portuguese “Saudades”.
What was magic for me, it was the first time in years that I could go to my prayer book and read without a block, a sense of loss, rancor…
So during the service, I dug out my Bahá'í books and found the above picture, which made me smile. Doña Marcy had me drive Khánum around Guate in their teeny tiny suzuki pickup!
To say I miss Bahá’í sangha, the kind like last night, when folks were just pure love and light goes without saying. When I came back to the States, it was rough, I missed community and probably the adrenaline from serving there, my relationship with my son’s mother was upside down, grad school, coming to terms with my sexuality, my son, my work… and I had no community to stand on, to support me. In fact, the Bahá’ís sort of cast me adrift until they eventually threw me out for activism and well love. It took me years to trust anything spiritual, indeed even the thoughts of God and community. To that I am eternally grateful to the Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group, who pulled me out of my anger hole and set me right.
So em fim, I will always be a BaBu = Bahá’í Buddhist, or the Bahá'ís might say, "a friend of the Faith". And will continue to wait on the sidelines for the day they will come to their senses re: inclusion and homophobia.
Visualize a guy, at the Metta bus bus stop, patiently checking his dharma watch, over and over, and over:
Breathe in. May all the Bahá’ís be happy. Breathe out.
Breathe in. May all the Bahá’ís be healthy. Breathe out.
Breathe in. May all the Bahá’ís be safe. Breathe out.
Breathe in. May all the Bahá’ís be at ease in all the Worlds!
¡Gracias Don Roberto y Muchas Gracias Team Porter! y un grande gracias a los Guatemaltecos, - may your sweetness, energy and love keep shining!
Life is good!
Nature teaches us simplicity and contentment, because in its presence we realize we need very little to be happy.
—Mark Coleman, “A Breath of Fresh Air”
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Immoral and moral actions ~ Tai Situ Rinpoche
https://justdharma.com/s/7st2u
We have to overcome our defilements, and they are fueled by immorality. An action is defined as either "immoral" or "moral" depending on whether it feeds the defilements or not. If it does it is immoral and if it purifies and transforms them it is moral. Things do not become moral or immoral because rules have been made up for convenience. They become one or the other for this simple reason.
– Tai Situ Rinpoche from the book "Ground, Path and Fruition" ISBN: 978-1877294358 - https://amzn.to/16Njb20
Tai Situ Rinpoche on the web: https://www.palpung.org/ Tai Situ Rinpoche biography: https://www.palpung.org/
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Like
music, intention can influence our mood, thoughts, and feelings—setting
an intention in the morning we set the tone for the day.
—Thupten Jinpa, “Two Exercises for Turning Intention into Motivation”
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