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, October 23, 2021
Friday, October 22, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: You Create Your World
Thursday, October 21, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Learning From Others
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 20, 2021 💌
You and I are in training to be free. We’re in training to be so
present, so spacious, so embracing, we’re in training to not look away,
deny or close our hearts when we can’t bear something. The statement, “I
can’t bear it,” is what burns you out in social action. When you’re in
the presence of suffering and contracting, it’s the contraction that
starves you to death.
When you close your heart down to protect yourself from suffering, you
also close yourself off from being fed by that same life situation.
If you can stay open to both the suffering and the joys and the stuff of
life, all of it, then it’s like a living spirit. It just connects to
your living spirit and there’s a tremendous feeding going on.
Once you see all this, what else is there to do but keep working on
becoming conscious? You’d be a fool not to. You’re only going to
perpetuate your misery and suffering and everybody else’s if you don’t.
The other thing is to do it joyfully! When you meet somebody that’s
suffering, what do you have to offer them? You could offer them your
empathy. That’s a good thing to offer because they feel somebody else is
listening to them. The other thing you can offer them is your joy, your
presence, and your ‘not getting caught in it all.’
Having that empathy for another means your heart is breaking, because
you understand the intensity of their experience, and at the same
moment, you are absolutely, equanimously, present. You are not clinging
to anything, just watching the phenomena of the universe change.
- Ram Dass -
Via Tricycle // Ten Teachings by Thich Nhat Hanh for His 95th Birthday
By Tricycle
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Via Daily Dharma: Know Your Conditioning
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 17, 2021 💌
Via Daily Dharma: Entering the Sphere of Action
Via Daily Dharma: Deepening Our Equanimity
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: The Wisdom of Openness
Saturday, October 16, 2021
Via White Crane Institute // Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -
The Wit of Oscar Wilde A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal. A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her. A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction. A poet can survive everything but a misprint. A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. A true friend stabs you in the front. | ||
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute "With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 |
Via Daily Dharma: What Is Renunciation?
Friday, October 15, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Transform Your World
—Radhule Weininger, “How to Follow the Bodhisattva Path Without Burning Out”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Daily Dharma: Life Is Not Personal
Via White Crane Institute // VIRGIL
This Day in Gay History | ||
October 15Born
0070 BCE -
VIRGIL, Roman poet, born; the author of epics in three modes: the Bucolics (or Eclogues), the Georgics and the substantially completed Aeneid, the last being an epic poem in the heroic mode, which comprised twelve books (as opposed to 24 in each of the epic poems by Homer) and became the Roman Empire’s national epic. In themes the ten eclogues develop and vary epic song, relating it first to Roman power, then to love, both homosexual (ecl. 2) and panerotic (ecl. 3), then again to Roman power and Caesar's heir imagined as authorizing Virgil to surpass Greek epic and refound tradition, shifting back to love then as a dynamic source considered apart from Rome. Hence in the remaining eclogues Virgil withdraws from his newly minted Roman mythology and gradually constructs a new myth of his own poetics: he casts the remote Greek region of Arcadia, home of the god Pan, as the place of poetic origin itself. In passing he again rings changes on erotic themes, such as requited and unrequited homosexual and heterosexual passion, tragic love for elusive women or magical powers of song to retrieve an elusive male. He concludes by establishing Arcadia as a poetic ideal that still resonates in Western literature and visual arts. Since Virgil depicted his hero Aeneus seeking advice from his father Anchises in the underworld, Dante Alighieri made the shade of Virgil his own guide for his pilgrimage through the inferno and part of purgatory in his own epic poem The Divine Comedy.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute "With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
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Wednesday, October 13, 2021
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 13, 2021 💌
If I can see a soul that happens to have incarnated into a person that I
don’t care for, then my consciousness becomes an environment in which
they are free to come up from air if they want to.
That person can do so because I’m not trying to keep them locked into
being the person that they have become. It’s liberating to resist
another person politically, yet still see them as another soul.
Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean
to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so
deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness
is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being
love is a supreme creative act.
- Ram Dass -