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.
Saturday, June 5, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Make Friends With Your Mind
Friday, June 4, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Liberate Your Breath
Thursday, June 3, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Tasting Freedom
Não vamos voltar ao normal.
Não
vamos voltar ao normal. Normal nunca foi. Nossa existência pré-corona
não era normal, a não ser que normalizamos a ganância, a injustiça, a
exaustão, o esgotamento, a extração... Não devemos voltar por muito
tempo, meus amigos. Estamos tendo a oportunidade de costurar uma nova
roupa. Aquela que se adapta a toda a humanidade e a natureza.
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Living Harmoniously With Others
For spiritual practitioners,
Even if you have awakened to your enlightened nature,
there is still further to go in your spiritual journey
if you’re not living harmoniously with others.
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 2, 2021 💌
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Returning the Gift of Life
Life
is given to us for free. How can we repay such a gift except with the
fullness of our own life? What could be better than to return life
entirely to itself?
—Caitriona Reed, “Coming Out Whole”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Monday, May 31, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: The Essence of Spiritual Practice
The
essence of spiritual practice is remembrance, whether it’s remembering
to come back to the present moment or recalling the truth of
impermanence.
—Andrew Holecek, “The Supreme Contemplation”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Sunday, May 30, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Transforming the World
By transforming ourselves, we transform the world, making it a saner, more compassionate place.
—Pema Düddul, “Practicing in Hell”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - May 30, 2021 💌
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Saturday, May 29, 2021
Listen to the vintage 1969 Ram Dass talk 'The Way of Harmony' 🌊
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Listen Here
Via Daily Dharma: The Dynamics of Life
Every
moment is a moment of birth. Every moment is a moment of death. Birth
and death are the two dynamics of life. Life itself is still.
—Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi, “A Matter of Life and Death”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Friday, May 28, 2021
Planetary
Directed by Guy Reid
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Via Daily Dharma: Recognize Your Motives
When
we recognize, without any doubt, that if we act from unwholesome
thoughts or motives we will experience suffering, it really helps us to
live a life more beneficial not only to ourselves but to everybody
around us.
—Zenkei Blanche Hartman, “Brief Teachings”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via White Crane Institute // Today's Gay Wisdom
TODAY'S GAY WISDOM
More From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS
The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different.
With us, prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain. . . .
I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.
I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he said –
'Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark And has the nature of infinity.'