Via Tricycle // Celebrating Buddhism’s Inclusivity

 

Celebrating Buddhism’s Inclusivity
By Wendy Biddlecombe Agsar

Happy Pride Month! Celebrate Buddhism’s spirit of inclusivity and the path to equality with these eight essays and articles from the Tricycle archives.

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Via Daily Dharma: Cultivating Mindful Listening

 

Deep listening is a practice of deep connection. Cultivating the ability to listen in relationship takes a healthy dose of self-awareness. As in the practice of mindfulness of sound, you are training to remain peaceably with whatever you hear or feel in the moment.

—Pamela Gayle White, “Simply Hear, Simply Here”

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Via Be Here Now Network // Alan Watts – Being in the Way – Ep. 1 – Following the Taoist Way

 

https://beherenownetwork.com/alan-watts-being-in-the-way-ep-1-following-the-taoist-way/?utm_source=Ram+Dass+%5BMain+List%5D&utm_campaign=fcdab096ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_11_13_08_12_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_199b04576a-fcdab096ad-94672917&mc_cid=fcdab096ad&mc_eid=472da7a04f

Via Daily Dharma: Knowing Your Boundaries

Preserving yourself and knowing your boundaries is not the same thing as exclusively seeking your own happiness. It’s about the healing process of learning to skillfully discern what will and will not serve all beings, yourself included.

—Pilar Jennings, “Boundaries Make Good Bodhisattvas”

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Obama criticizes Republicans for embracing 2020 falsehoods

Via Daily Dharma: Why Are We Unhappy?

We all seek happiness, but I believe that we are already surrounded by happiness. The teachings of the Buddha have taught me that everything is neutral and perfect in its own way. 

—Reverend Earl Ikeda, “The Bird’s Song”

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Via Tumblr / Navajo Pride

 

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 9, 2021 💌

 

The predicament with loving is the power of the addiction of the practice of loving somebody, of getting so caught in the relationship that you can’t ever arrive at essence of dwelling in love. Imagine that you are cut off in your heart from love, so you feel hungry. What that hunger is, is the hunger to come home, to be at peace, to be feeling at one in the universe, where lover and Beloved merge. It’s the place to feel fulfilled, fully in the moment.  - Ram Dass -

Via Lion’s Roar // LGBTQ Buddhism

 

LGBTQ Buddhists: Teachings, Profiles, and Conversations

A collection of teachings from, profiles on, and conversations with LGBTQ folks in Buddhism.

Via LGBTQ Nation // A school sent a boy to a psychologist for wearing a skirt so male teachers wore them in solidarity

 

 

 

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Via BBC Outlook

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct1jt3

Via White Crane Institute -- KENNETH LEWES

 

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Psychologist Kenneth Lewes

1943 -

KENNETH LEWES was an Renaissance scholar who became a psychologist who went on toe question modern psychoanalysis of homosexuality. He was born on this date and grew up in a post-World War II working-class neighborhood of the northeast Bronx, the son of an immigrant couple who never got beyond grade school. He guessed even before he entered junior high school that he was gay.

But it wasn’t until he was nearly 50 — and publishing what would become a critically acclaimed takedown of post-Freudian psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality — that he confided his sexual orientation to his parents.

“I remember finding my way to the local public library and checking out books on psychology and human development,” he said in an interview in 2019 with the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Mental Health, “in hopes of finding some reassurance that my interest in handsome boys was only a stage that I would soon pass through.”

Dr. Lewes was married at 23 and divorced by 32 — the age when he had his first homosexual experience. “It seemed only natural for me to be out of the closet to my friends, colleagues and family,” he said, “with the important exception of my parents, who, it had become clear over the years, did not want to hear anything on that particular subject. I came out to them almost 15 years later.”

In his signal book, Dr. Lewes took on the psychoanalytic establishment over what he called its “history of homophobia.” He concluded, “Many analysts have violated basic norms of decency in their treatment of homosexuals.” Dr. Lewes’s major work, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Male Homosexuality  (1988), traced the evolution of the prevailing view that homosexuality was a curable illness and explored what he called the psychoanalytic establishment’s “century-long history of homophobia.” The book’s title was changed to Psychoanalysis and Male Homosexuality in later editions.

Drawing on some 500 primary sources, Dr. Lewes’s book, which expanded on his doctoral dissertation, found that most analysts had adhered to “popular prejudice” against gay people and clichés about them. “Many analysts,” he concluded, “have violated basic norms of decency in their treatment of homosexuals.”

He said he had been unable to find a single analysis of the subject written by a psychoanalyst who identified as gay.

Dr. Lewes found that the Oedipus complex could lead to 12 alternative resolutions, six of them heterosexual and six homosexual. “All results of the Oedipus complex are traumatic,” he wrote, “and, for similar reasons, all are ‘normal.’”

Via Daily Dharma: Practicing Effortless Mindfulness

Effortless mindfulness is somewhat like riding a bicycle on a gradual, downward-sloping road: once we learn to let go, trust and balance, we can coast without deliberately pedaling.

—Loch Kelly, “How to Practice Effortless Mindfulness”

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Pride - Tom Goss

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Via White Crane Institute / ALAN TURING

 

Died

Alan Turing

1954 -

ALAN TURING, British mathematician and computer scientist died (b. 1912) from cyanide poisoning, eighteen months after being given libido-reducing hormone treatment for a year as a punishment for homosexuality. Turing is generally considered to be the Father of Modern Computer Science. He provided an influential formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine.

 

In 'the Turing Test" Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so the result would not depend on the machine's ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test does not check the ability to give correct answers to questions, only how closely answers resemble those a human would give.

 

With the Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built.

 

In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers. During WWII Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's code breaking center, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis.

 

He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electro-mechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. Turing was Gay in a period when homosexual acts were illegal in Britain and homosexuality was regarded as a mental illness and subject to criminal sanctions.

 

In 1952, Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old recent acquaintance of Turing’s, helped an accomplice to break into Turing's house, and Turing went to the police to report the crime. As a result of the police investigation, Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray, and a crime having been identified and settled, they were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. Turing was unrepentant and was convicted of the same crime Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years before. He was given the choice between imprisonment and probation, conditional on his undergoing hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido.

 

To avoid going to jail, he accepted the estrogen hormone injections, which lasted for a year, with side effects including gynecomastia (breast enlargement). His lean runner's body took on fat. His conviction led to a removal of his security clearance and prevented him from continuing consultancy for GCHQ on cryptographic matters. At this time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents. In America, Robert Oppenheimer had just been deemed a security risk.

 

On June 8, 1954, his housekeeper found him dead; the previous day, he had died of cyanide poisoning, apparently from a cyanide-laced apple he left half-eaten beside his bed. The apple itself was never tested for contamination with cyanide, and cyanide poisoning as a cause of death was established by a post-mortem.

 

Most believe that his death was intentional, and the death was ruled a suicide. His mother, however, strenuously argued that the ingestion was accidental due to his careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in this ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was reenacting a scene from "Snow White", reportedly his favorite fairy tale. Because Turing's sexuality would have been perceived as a security risk, the possibility of assassination has also been suggested. His remains were cremated at Woking crematorium on June 12, 1954.

 

There is an urban legend that the Apple Computer “bite out of an apple” logo is a tribute to Turing. It is exactly that: an urban legend. But that’s not to say that the idea of paying homage to Turing is something the creators of Apple were against. When actor Stephen Fry once asked his good friend Steve Jobs if the famous logo was based on Turing, Jobs replied, “God, we wish it were.” Hodges biography, Alan Turing: The Enigma is the basis of the film The Imitation Game (a reference to “the Turing Test” which is also referenced in the film Ex Machina.

Via Daily Dharma: Being Present Is an Act of Love

 

Being fully present to what is—without judging or evaluating or wanting something different—is the most basic act of love.

—C. W. Huntington, Jr., “The Miracle of the Ordinary”

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