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In another Bhakti-steeped podcast, Krishna Das sings kirtan and answers questions about practice on the spiritual path, surrender, sexuality, death, clinging, and Maharaj-ji’s love....

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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Developing Unarisen Healthy States

RIGHT EFFORT
Developing Unarisen Healthy States

Whatever a person frequently thinks about and ponders, that will become the inclination of their mind. If one frequently thinks about and ponders healthy states, one has abandoned unhealthy states to cultivate healthy states, and then one’s mind inclines to healthy states. (MN 19) Here a person rouses the will, makes an effort, stirs up energy, exerts the mind, and strives to develop the arising of unarisen healthy mental states. One develops the unarisen tranquility and concentration awakening factors. (MN 141)

Reflection

Sometimes healthy states of mind come up on their own, apparently spontaneously. Other times we have to make them happen. The word for “develop” in Pali (bhāvana) literally means “cause to be” or “make become” and so is very descriptive of the process. The more you experience healthy states, the more they develop, and the more the mind inclines toward what is helpful and skillful.

Daily Practice

Practice calling to mind thoughts that are likely to bring on healthy mental states. These might be thoughts of a loved one that evoke friendliness and lovingkindness. Or thinking about those in distress might bring about feelings of compassion and wanting to help. Among the best positive states to develop are peacefulness, or tranquility, and focusing the mind with concentration. The more you develop these states, the easier it gets.

Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and Abiding in the Third Jhāna One week from today: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via Daily Dharma: Waking Up to Life

 Reverence is the process of awakening to being alive. It’s the realization that life is amazing, and every living being is our sibling.  

Paul Hawken, “Paul Hawken on Helping Our Planet Heal Itself”

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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Misbehaving Among Sensual Pleasures

 

RIGHT LIVING
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Misbehaving Among Sensual Pleasures 

Sensual misconduct is unhealthy. Refraining from sensual misconduct is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning sensual misconduct, one abstains from misbehaving among sensual pleasures. (MN 41) One practices thus: “Others may engage in sensual misconduct, but I will abstain from sensual misconduct.” (MN 8) Communities are of two kinds: those to be cultivated and those not to be cultivated. Such communities as cause, in one who cultivates them, unhealthy states to increase and healthy states to diminish, such communities are not to be cultivated. But such communities as cause, in one who cultivates them, unhealthy states to diminish and healthy states to increase, such communities are to be cultivated. (MN 114)

Reflection

Collective relationships are as important to examine as personal relationships. Just as the kinds of friends we keep affect our own development so also the communities we are part of make a difference in what qualities are supported in us. It is so easy to fall into sensual misconduct; we are being encouraged here to attend carefully to the larger social forces with which we regularly interact. It makes a difference in who we become.

Daily Practice

Reflect upon the various communities you inhabit and assess truthfully whether they are healthy or unhealthy groups. The criteria are pretty straightforward: Do healthy states of mind increase or decrease when you hang out with this crowd? Do unhealthy states increase or decrease? It is important to ensure that the relationships we cultivate are helping us grow in a positive direction and that we are not being led astray by our peers.

Tomorrow: Developing Unarisen Healthy States
One week from today: Abstaining from Intoxication

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: Working Towards Peace

 Peace requires courage and hard work. Peace means that each and every one of us has an obligation to build mutual understanding and an obligation to reject fear. 

Gyalwang Drukpa, “How to Combat Fear”

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Via Live this Sunday: "Second Sunday" Maitri Bhavana with Noel McLellan

 

“Second Sunday” Maitri Bhavana Practice
Noel McLellan
April 10, 2022

Join us for a Maitri Bhavana Practice led by Noel McLellan. Maitri Bhavana is a regularly scheduled mahayana practice for the seriously ill, or for major global turmoil and disasters. It contains tonglen practice and may be done by anyone. If you would like to add the name of someone who is seriously ill to the maitri bhavana list so people can do practice for their wellbeing, please click here. You can also add the name of a current world event where there is turmoil and we will practice for those affected. Details.

Via White Crane Institute // Harry Hay & John Burnside

 

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Harry Hay

1912 -

HARRY HAY, founder of the Mattachine Society and the Radical Faeries, was born (d: 2002); Although Harry Hay claimed 'never to have even heard of the earlier Gay liberation struggle in Germany- by the people around Adolf Brand, Magnus Hirschfeld and Leontine Sagan - he is known to have talked about it with European emigrés in America including Mattachine co-founder Rudi Gernreich. (However, Gernreich arrived in America at age 14, and Hay had already written his Gay manifesto when they met).

Hay, along with Roger Barlow and LeRoy Robbins directed a short film Even As You and I (1937) featuring Hay, Barlow, and filmmaker Hy Hirsch. A married man (beard/wife Anita Platky) and a member of the Communist Party USA, Hay composed the first manifesto of the American Gay rights movement in 1948, writing:

We, the Androgynes of the world, have formed this responsible corporate body to demonstrate by our efforts that our physiological and psychological handicaps need be no deterrent in integrating 10 percent of the world's population towards the constructive social progress of mankind.

He soon dispensed with the apologetic language and ideas. Though it may seem very dated today, the group was very radical compared to the rest of society at the time of its beginnings. It and Hay were among the first to advance the argument that Gay people represented a "cultural minority" as well as being just individuals, and even called for public marches of homosexuals, predicting later Gay pride parades. Hay's concept of the "cultural minority" came directly from his Marxist studies, and the rhetoric he and his colleague Charles Rowland employed often reflected the militancy of Communist tradition. As the Mattachine Society grew with chapters around the country, the organization saw the Communist ties of its founders, including Hay, as a threat during that McCarthy-ite witch-hunt era, and expelled them from leadership. The organization took a more cautious tack so that by the time of the Stonewall riots the Mattachine Society came to be seen by many as stodgy and assimilationist.

The Communist Party did not allow gay people to be members, claiming that homosexuality was a 'deviation'; perhaps more important was the fear that a member's (usually secret) homosexuality would leave them open to blackmail and was a security risk in an era of red-baiting. Concerned to save the party difficulties, as he put more energy into the Mattachine Society, Hay himself approached the CP's leaders and recommended his own expulsion. However, after much soul-searching, the CP, clearly reeling at the loss of a respected member and theoretician of 18 years standing, refused to expel Hay, instead dropping him as a 'security risk' but ostentatiously announcing him to be a 'Lifelong Friend of the People'.

Hay later became an outspoken critic of Gay assimilationism and went on to help found both Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition and the gay men's group the Radical Faeries, as well as being active in the Native American movements.

"We pulled ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity over us, and that's how we got through school with a full set of teeth," Hay once explained. "We know how to live through their eyes. We can always play their games, but are we denying ourselves by doing this? If you're going to carry the skin of conformity over you, you are going to suppress the beautiful prince or princess within you."

In the early 1980s Hay protested the exclusion of the North American Man/Boy Love Association from participation in the LGBT movement. Though he was never a member of NAMBLA, he gave a number of speeches at its meetings, and in 1986 he marched in the Los Angeles Pride Parade, from which the organization had been banned, with a sign reading "NAMBLA walks with me."

In 1963, at age 51, he met inventor John Burnside, who became his life partner. They lived first in Los Angeles, and later in a Pueblo Indian reserve in New Mexico. After returning to Los Angeles to organize the Radical Faerie movement with Don Kilhefner, the couple moved San Francisco, where Hay died of lung cancer at age 90. Hay was the subject of the 2002 documentary by Eric Slade, "Hope Along The Wind: The Life of Harry Hay" (2002).

Today's Gay Wisdom

John Burnside III

2017 -

TODAY'S GAY WISDOM

From White Crane Issue #47 “The Word”

Who Are The Gay People?

By John Burnside

Part II

What are they like, these Gay people?

Well, the ones I know best are at ease with themselves and with others. They are merry and loving, gentle and open. They are not dogmatic, judgmental, domineering, argumentative nor manipulating, nor do they respond to others who may try to engage them at such levels. They are laughing people, and equally ready with tears. They are very bright and witty, and they love good talk. In talk they place no restrictions on the range of their voices, love to giggle, will scream with astonishment and pretend dismay or swoon with mock embarrassment, and they are constantly acting out and giving wicked impersonations. I have never heard small talk among them, and they are always ready for intensely serious discourse. They love digression and are masters at it, almost never failing to return to the main concern. They love theater, and they are marvelously responsive audiences. They find delight in being alive and have a tremendous capacity for enjoyment.

They are great creators of fantasy, yet they strive always to be rooted thoroughly in reality. Life to them is for love and for play. They love non-possessively, with full regard for the whole being of another. They are ruled by their hearts as by their minds, and their first response to those they encounter is compassionate. Play means in Gay consciousness living every moment at its highest potential. For them the play of feeling and imagination is primary in all things, but a main thrust of their gift for creativity is expressed in what they call their projects. A project is something that one has dreamed up and has launched on its way to being realized. Most Gay people have several projects, with some on the back burner and one or more at any given time getting close attention.

These traits and qualities that Gay people show may well be those qualities of human nature that all people have if they are not deeply identified with and constrained in roles. Roles channel the energy of impulse into rigid preformed pathways. People are drawn into roles to gain power, possessions, and predominance, where they spend their lives in struggling over these with one another. As outcasts, Gays have the opportunity to learn that beyond basic necessities possessions are burdensome and dominance is only a puffing of ego. If a Faerie values money it is because money is useful to pay rent and fund projects. Power to control others is odious to him, and showing off would be a tedious waste of time. He dislikes and avoids rivalry and competition and is as disdainful of authority and rank in others as he is to letting himself be blindly followed. Renouncing these "rewards" means that the Gays have no hidden intent in relating to others; they can be trusted. As they decline to compete, they are no threat. Yet their many gifts make them valued counselors to the powerful. This is why Gay people so often walk where angels fear to tread!

A Faerie likes best to be among other Faeries, but every Faerie I know has a group of people who are not Gay with whom he shares an unbreakable bond. These are people of integrity and spirit whom he values and supports as they do him. A Faerie relates to others subject to subject so far as the others will meet him there. With children, animals, trees, and living things generally Faeries feel a close affinity. Faeries are most at home in a natural setting and they draw strength from nature.

The spirit of the Gay people is very evident in these times when, because of AIDS, death walks among us with terrible insistence and asks his awful question, asks who you really are. If I am he who built up a pile of power, ego, wealth, and status, I know death will take it all, but if I have made myself of things eternal like beauty and love, truth and laughter, the best part of me will never die. The famous AIDS quilt is surely one of the most moving and spontaneous creations of a people ever seen. Each cell of the quilt emits a light deriving from the singular beauty and indomitable spirit of one person, and the conjoining of seemingly infinitely many of these creates a field of surpassing beauty that glows of the tough yet tender love that makes of all Gay people one. The quilt celebrates the bursting through vast sadness of a light that death has been unable to smother. It affirms the great purpose that informed those individual lives and that will always be carried through, no matter what the pain, by Gay people: to be real, to be loving, and to reach for the best. the most joyous, and the deepest levels of experience that life can offer.

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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!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org

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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Mental Action

 

RIGHT ACTION
Reflecting Upon Mental Action

However the seed is planted, in that way the fruit is gathered. Good things come from doing good deeds, bad things come from doing bad deeds. (SN 11.10) What is the purpose of a mirror? For the purpose of reflection. So too mental action is to be done with repeated reflection. (MN 61) When you are doing an action with the mind, reflect upon that same mental action thus: “Does this action I am doing with the mind lead to the affliction of another?” If, upon reflection, you know that it does, then stop doing it; if you know that it does not, then continue. (MN 61)

Reflection

Being mindful allows us to gain access to the flow of internal mental states that might otherwise be overlooked. Insight develops as you are able to reflect upon the quality of your thoughts and understand their impact on yourself and others. Becoming aware of mental states is one thing; understanding their quality—their level of healthiness or unhealthiness—is another. This is the practice described here.

Daily Practice

Whether or not your mental and emotional states cause affliction to yourself and others is something about which you can develop an intuitive sense. It is not about examining the question intellectually and conceptually but about accessing an inner appreciation for what is helpful and what is harmful. If your attitude feels off in some way, abandon it and turn to something else. Use your own wisdom to guide yourself along the path.

Tomorrow: Abstaining from Misbehaving Among Sensual Pleasures
One week from today: Reflecting upon Social Action

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
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Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: The Lion’s Roar

 When a lion roars in the forest, all the animals tremble and scurry to their places of refuge. This is not the fear of a helpless victim but a fear that stirs them to action for their own safety. In the same way, when a Buddha roars out the truth of impermanence, suffering, and nonself, those who are wise are moved by the profound sense of spiritual urgency.

Andrew Olendzki, “What’s in a Word? Samvega”

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