Monday, June 21, 2021
White Crane Institute // BOB BARZAN
Noteworthy
1989 -
BOB BARZAN publishes 1st issue of White Crane Newsletter, forerunner of White Crane Journal and GayWisdom.org. Bob has since moved on to found the Modesto Museum of Art in…you guessed it, Modesto, California. I am proud to call him a friend.
He has also made
three of his other projects available online. White Crane and GayWisdom
happily endorses each of them and strongly recommends readers check them
out:
Sex and Spirit
Songs for Winter Solstice
Leaving the Priesthood
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Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -
By Bob Barzan
In the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Abraham
Maslow was watching a parade of citizens marching to patriotic tunes.
Deeply moved, he resolved at that moment to explore a “psychology of the
peace table”, to discover the best and loftiest ideals and
possibilities of the human species. It was clear to him that to learn
about the complete and authentic individual he had to study men and
women that were remarkably healthy. He offered this analogy for what he
was to do.
“If we want to know how fast human beings can run, we don’t study a
runner with a broken ankle or a mediocre runner. Instead, we study the
Olympic gold medal winner, the best there is. Only in that way can we
find out how fast human beings can run. Similarly, only by studying the
healthiest personalities can we find out how far we can stretch and
develop our capacities.”
This new perspective, a focus on health and thriving, and the best that
we are rather than the common focus on illness and surviving, gave
birth to a new school of psychology that came to be known as
“humanistic”. This perspective, in turn, became popular through the
human potential movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Psychotheorists gave
different names to this healthy life. Maslow called it the actualized
life, Karl Jung, the individuated life, and Carl Rogers the fully
functioning life, but what they described are individuals with very
similar characteristics.
Healthy individuals are men and women who are, first of all, authentic.
They do not try to live lives denying who they are in order to please
society or others, but rather they live lives that are true or faithful
to their inner callings. And here a distinction was made between a
person’s true inner self and a superficial self. Second, these people
excel, or strive to excel in the virtues that make it possible for us to
live together harmoniously; love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness,
joy, courage, patience, truth, peace, tolerance, generosity, and other
similar virtues. The presence of these two characteristics, authenticity
and what I call healthy spiritual virtues became for me indicators of
what it means to be a healthy man or woman and they became the bases for
my definition of spirituality.
For more than twenty years I’ve been aware that most people make at
least one false assumption in the area of spirituality. Most people
assume that all things having to do with spirituality, and they usually
mean religion, are good and beyond judgment or evaluation. As I
reflected on my own life, on my own coming out as a gay man, and on my
experience of eleven years as a Jesuit, it became clear to me that
spirituality and religion are not the same; rather religion is just one
of many spiritual paths. More importantly I saw that some spiritual
paths, including many religions, are not helping people live actualized,
fully functioning, in other words healthy, lives, but making them sick
or unhealthy. Instead of helping them live authentic lives characterized
by healthy spiritual virtues, some spiritual paths encourage hate,
greed, revenge, intolerance, and all the characteristics that make it
impossible for people to live together in peace.
Like many gay men, I had tried to live in a society that made me
suppress my own sexuality, my own identity. It was a society that
deceived me, and told me that being gay is bad, unnatural, a sin. It was
a society that encouraged me to be alienated from my self, and so was
in violation of the first principle of healthy living, authenticity.
Right from the beginning I was living a lie, truth had been sacrificed
for some other priority, and I was expected to build a healthy
spirituality on this false foundation. I realized that a spiritual path
that had me denying the truth, especially about myself, may bring me all
sorts of “benefits” like acceptance, security, position, and power, but
it wasn’t life giving, it was making me sick.
Several years ago a wonderful story circulated in San Francisco about
the opening of a new Zen center. A distinguished straight Zen master
addressed the assembly of mostly gay Zen practitioners. Everyone
expected he would give a typical dedication address, saying nothing of
consequence. He astounded everyone, however, by proclaiming that unless
you are out of the closet you are not practicing Zen. These are amazing,
insightful, and rare words from a religious leader. But in these words
he confirms what Maslow and others discovered years ago; the importance
of authenticity for a healthy life. A healthy spirituality then is
really about two major concerns; authenticity and the development of
life giving spiritual virtues. An unhealthy spirituality is the
opposite.
There is a tendency in our society to compartmentalize our lives so
that spirituality has little or nothing to do with how we live
day-to-day. Spirituality, however, is not something we do only when we
are meditating, analyzing our dreams, or worshiping on any given day.
Our spirituality is our whole way of life and that includes our
sexuality, our play, how we make our money, how we spend our money, how
we use our time, drive a car, make decisions, and how we treat people
every day. Everything that is part of our life is part of our
spirituality whether we are conscious of it or not. And everything we do
can either help us live more authentically, help us develop healthy
spiritual virtues, or it can do the opposite.
Over the years I have learned to discern when I am on or off a healthy
spiritual track by watching the results of my decisions, my attitudes,
and way of living. A healthy spiritual life manifests itself differently
in every individual, but in general you can recognize it because you
will see an increase in love, compassion, generosity, kindness, courage,
patience, and an ability to live harmoniously with other people and all
of nature.
Bob Barzan lives in Modesto, California where he created the Modesto Museum of Art.
Via Gay Buddhist Fellowship / Donald Rothberg
A new talk has been added to the audio archive at the GBF website:
Enjoy 600+ free recorded dharma talks at www.gaybuddhist.org
Via Tricycle // What’s in a Word? Samādhi
What’s in a Word? Samādhi
By Andrew Olendzki
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Via Daily Dharma: Get to Know Yourself
First,
one must get to know oneself. Then, having become familiar with
oneself, one can live one’s life more deeply. Living one’s life more
deeply is the meaning of dharma.
Sunday, June 20, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Work Directly With the Mind
To
cultivate a steady mind independent of circumstances, we must work with
the mind itself. Working directly with the mind uncovers the inherent
quality of meditative awareness.
—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Helen Tworkov, “The Good Shepherd”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 20, 2021 💌
Love holds the universe together. Love is the emotion of connection and merging. Viewed from the soul, this world is a manifestation of love. Love is the bridge, the transfer of energy between form and formless, matter and spirit.
- Ram Dass -
From the memoir Being Ram Dass co-authored by Rameshwar Das
Saturday, June 19, 2021
Via White Crane Institute // JUNETEENTH
2018 -
JUNETEENTH, also known as Juneteenth Independence Day or Freedom Day; Winston Churchill famously quipped that “America always does the right thing...after it tries everything else. Juneteenth
is an American holiday that celebrates our finally getting this part
right. It commemorates the June 19, 1865, announcement of the abolition
of slavery in the state of Texas, and more generally the emancipation of
enslaved African-Americans throughout the former Confederacy of the
southern United States. Its name is a portmanteau of "June" and
"nineteenth", the date of its celebration.
Juneteenth is only recognized as a state holiday or special
day of observance in forty-five states, and primarily in local
celebrations. Traditions include public readings of the Emancipation
Proclamation, singing traditional songs such as "Swing Low Sweet
Chariot" and "Lift Every Voice and Sing", and reading of works by noted
African-American writers such as Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou.
Celebrations may include rodeos, street fairs, cookouts, family
reunions, park parties, historical reenactments, and Miss Juneteenth
contests. The Macogos descendants of Black Seminoles of Coahulla, Mexico
also celebrate the Juneteenth.
In 1996 the first legislation to recognize "Juneteenth
Independence Day" was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives,
H.J. Res. 195, sponsored by Barbara Rose Collins (D-MI). In 1997
Congress recognized the day through Senate Joint Resolution 11 and House
Joint Resolution 56. In 2013 the U.S. Senate passed Senate Resolution
175, acknowledging Lula Briggs Galloway (late president of the National
Association of Juneteenth Lineage) who "successfully worked to bring
national recognition to Juneteenth Independence Day", and the continued
leadership of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. In 2018
Apple added Juneteenth to its calendars in iOS under official US
holidays.
On June 15, 2021, the Senate unanimously passed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, establishing
Juneteenth as a federal holiday; it subsequently passed through
the House of Representatives by a 415–14 vote on June 16. President Joseph Biden signed the bill on
June 17, 2021, making Juneteenth the eleventh American federal holiday
and the first to obtain legal observance as a federal holiday
since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was designated in 1983.
Via Daily Dharma: Find Your Ground
Anger
and rage can be all-consuming and render us ineffective. Meditation
practice becomes a way to re-center ourselves and find our ground, time
and time again.
—Cheryl A. Giles in conversation with Pamela Ayo Yetunde and James Shaheen, “Black, Buddhist, and Free”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Lama Surya Das // FB
All the peace and happiness of the whole globe,
the peace and happiness of societies,
the peace and happiness of family,
the peace and happiness in the individual persons’ life,
and the peace and happiness of even the animals and so forth,
all depends on having loving kindness toward each other.
~Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Friday, June 18, 2021
Via Lama Surya Das / FB
tAbandon your notions of the past,
without attributing a temporal sequence!
Cut off your mental associations
regarding the future, without anticipation!
Rest in a spacious modality, without clinging
to [the thoughts of] the present.
Do not meditate at all,
since there is nothing upon which to meditate. Instead, revelation will come
through undistracted mindfulness —
Since there is nothing
by which you can be distracted.
~Padmasambhava
Via Lama Surya Das
Thoughts are just thoughts. Feelings are just feelings. Sensations are just sensations. They come and go in waking life as quickly and easily as they do in dreams. ~Mingyur Rinpoche
#LamaSuryaDas #Dzogchen #MingyurRinpoche #Awareness #Meditation #Awakening
Via Tricycle // RAIN: The Nourishing Art of Mindful Inquiry
RAIN: The Nourishing Art of Mindful Inquiry
With Michele McDonald
Available for self-study
With Michele McDonald
Available for self-study
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