Thich Nhat Hanh in Paris
By Fred Eppsteiner
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A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
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Meditation
is not necessarily about generating intense concentration. It can be
about the exact opposite: a slow, steady gentleness that adds no
intensity to what already exists.
—M. Sophia Newman, "Straight Outta Kapilavastu"
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"When somebody provokes your anger, the only reason you get angry is because you’re holding on to how you think something is supposed to be. You’re denying how it is. Then you see it’s the expectations of your own mind that are creating your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn’t the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You’ll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is."
- Ram Dass -
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Meaningful
acts of the individual—our practice included—can take place only in the
context and with the support of a strong community.
—James Shaheen, “Finding Community”
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The Best Possible Life
By Seth Segall
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May
we carry each other through these dark times through the strength of
our practice, sitting in silence and stillness, breathing as one.
—Brandon Dean Lamson, “Meeting Violence with Kindness”
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Generosity is the ground of compassion; it is a prerequisite to the realization of liberation.
—Marcia Rose, “The Gift That Cannot Be Given”
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HOWARD OVERING STURGIS, the novelist and eccentric was born on this date. A millionaire American expatriate, Sturgis passed his life in England knitting, embroidering and writing novels. He is best known for two: Tim: A Story of Eton and Belchamber. Affable and witty, Sturgis was a favorite with Henry James, Edith Wharton, and A. C. Benson, and the subject of a memorable sketch by E. M. Forster. Sturgis maintained a lifelong relationship with a much younger man, William Haynes-Smith, familiarly known as "the Babe", to whom his novel "Belchamber" is dedicated.
The scion of a wealthy New England family, his parents sent him to be educated at Eton College. He went on to study at Cambridge where he became a friend of the novelists henry James and Edith Wharton.
After the death of his mother in 1888 he moved, with his lover William Haynes-Smith, into a country house named Queen's Acre, near Windsor Great Park. Sturgis's first novel, Tim: A Story of School Life (1891), was published anonymously and was dedicated to the "love that surpasses the love of women." It describes the love of two youths at boarding-school.
He died on February 7, 1920. After his death appreciations of him were published by A.C. Benson, Edith Wharton, E.M. Forster and George Santayana, his cousin.
Alan Watts may be credited with popularizing Eastern philosophy in the West, but he owes the entire trajectory of his life and legacy to a single encounter with the Zen Buddhist sage D.T. Suzuki (October 18, 1870–July 12, 1966) — one of humanity’s greatest and most influential stewards of Zen philosophy. At the age of twenty-one, Watts attended a lecture by Suzuki in London, which so enthralled the young man that he spent the remainder of his life studying, propagating, and building upon Suzuki’s teachings. Legendary composer John Cage had a similar encounter with Suzuki, which profoundly shaped his life and music.
In the early 1920s, spurred by the concern that Zen masters are “unable to present their understanding in the light of modern thought,” Suzuki undertook “a tentative experiment to present Zen from our common-sense point of view” — a rather humble formulation of what he actually accomplished, which was nothing less than giving ancient Eastern philosophy a second life in the West and planting the seed for a new culture of secularized spirituality.
But by 1940, all of his books had gone out of print in war-torn England, and all remaining copies in Japan were destroyed in the great fire of 1945, which consumed three quarters of Tokyo. In 1946, Christmas Humphreys, president of London’s Buddhist Society, set out to undo the damage and traveled to Tokyo, where he began working with Suzuki on translating his new manuscripts and reprinting what remained of the old. The result was the timeless classic Essays in Zen Buddhism (public library), originally published in 1927 — a collection of Suzuki’s foundational texts introducing the principles of Zen into secular life as a discipline concerned first and foremost with what he called “the reconstruction of character.” As Suzuki observed, “Our ordinary life only touches the fringe of personality, it does not cause a commotion in the deepest parts of the soul.” His essays became, and remain, a moral toolkit for modern living, delivered through a grounding yet elevating perspective on secular spirituality.
Zombie thriller franchise The Walking Dead just clapped back at homophobic internet trolls in a concise but oh-so-satisfying tweet.
The show's non-negotiable commitment to showcasing LGBTQ+ characters and relationships has already won praise in the past. The recent tweet only solidified the franchise's solid footing as an ally.
The homophobic hullabaloo all began when actor Jelani Alladin appeared on the podcast Talk Dead to Me.
He discussed how proud he was to play his character in the show who—among many heroic attributes—just so happens to be one half of a same-sex couple.
"There was no kind of need to explain anything further and I love that The Walking Dead is kind of putting that forward, that LGBTQ relationships are nothing different than any other kind of relationship."
"They have the same struggles, they have the same complexities, they get mad at each other, they love each other just as hard."
The onscreen couple is made up of Alladin and fellow actor Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender fluid.
The
quality of our life is determined by our mind’s response to the
circumstances of our life. It is not determined directly by the
circumstances.
—Yoshin David Radin, “Brief Teachings”
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"It’s amazing how the nature of your relationships change when it’s coming out of love instead of trying to get love."
- Ram Dass -
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There
is insight to be gained in seeing how we transfer life patterns of
control, anxiety, or self-consciousness into our meditation practice.
Learning to undo some of these patterns within our practice is a
meaningful step in learning how to release their grip on the rest of our
lives.
—Christina Feldman, “Receiving the Breath: Meditation Q&A”
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