Practice
is an act of vision, of faith, and of desire. It means performing
something over and over again, in the face of obstacles and
disappointments, to accomplish the goal.
Diane Musho Hamilton, “Practice Is the Way”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Via Daily Dharma: Practice Again and Again
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 12, 2022 💌
So if you keep your heart open with love towards all people, even though you might say to somebody, ‘That’s wrong, and I’m going to stop you from doing it,’ do it without closing your heart. At least you are offering to all human beings at all times a heart-to-heart resuscitation; you’re offering something of your own being. You’re being with other people in love. And that to me is a gift that you bring, that is the best you can do to heal the situation.
- Ram Dass -
Quoted from the Here & Now Podcast Episode 200
Saturday, June 11, 2022
GBF retreat with Rene Rivera, July 30th 10 am to 3 pm
Cultivating The Heart of Peace
Please join us July 30th at GBF’s Bartlett Street Sangha, 10am to 3 pm. for a half day retreat with Rene Rivera.
The theme is Cultivating The Heart of Peace Mediation.
A
mediation, dharma talk and group interaction will all be part of the
day. We will provide drinks but please bring your own lunch.
As usual we will be hosting you in person or on Zoom.
More information will follow but save the date.
René
Rivera (he, him) is a leader and bridge-builder, working and learning
in all the spaces in between race, gender, and other perceived binaries
as a queer, mixed-race, trans man. He teaches heart-centered,
trauma-informed meditation and mindfulness practices at East Bay
Meditation Center (EBMC) and elsewhere. His path to spiritual leadership
has included the Commit to Dharma and Practice in Action programs at
EBMC and the Community Dharma Leaders program at Spirit Rock Meditation
Center. His experience as an organizational leader guides his practice
as a coach and mentor, supporting you to find your strengths, inner
guidance, and self-accountability. René is committed to ending suffering
due to violence, whether reducing our violence to ourselves through
daily practice, transforming conflict and tensions as a facilitator, or
working to dismantle racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and other
systems of dominance. He works with the Ahimsa Collective as a
restorative justice facilitator.
Enjoy 700+ free recorded dharma talks at www.gaybuddhist.org
SFLGBT Sangha is celebrating our 20th anniversary with a daylong hybrid event at the SF Buddhist Center!
On the agenda: Sitting and walking meditation, lunch, dharma talks and visits from former teachers. Lunch will be provided. Evidence of vaccinations will be required for in-person attendees.
Steven Tierney and Syra Smith will be the core teachers. We will also have virtual appearances from Larry Yang and Arinna
Weisman.
Please register @
https://www.sflgbtsangha.org
No one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Enjoy 700+ free recorded dharma talks at www.gaybuddhist.org
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
RIGHT EFFORT
Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
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Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and the Fourth Jhāna
One week from today: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
One week from today: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: Staying Balanced
Equanimity
acts like the ballast of a ship. Although the ship is blown one way or
the other by the winds of life, it neither sinks nor goes too far
off-course.
Christopher Willard, “How Parents and Children Can Learn Balance and Equanimity from the Eight Worldly Winds”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Friday, June 10, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Intoxication
RIGHT LIVING
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Intoxication
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Intoxication
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Tomorrow: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
One week from today: Abstaining from Harming Living Beings
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
One week from today: Abstaining from Harming Living Beings
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: Send Lovingkindness to Oneself
Metta,
or lovingkindness, is first practiced toward oneself, since we often
have difficulty loving others without first loving ourselves. Sitting
quietly, mentally repeat, slowly and steadily, the following or similar
phrases: May I be happy. May I be well. May I be safe. May I be peaceful
and at ease.
Barry Magid, “Five Practices to Change Your Mind”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Thursday, June 9, 2022
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Social Action
RIGHT ACTION
Reflecting Upon Social Action
Reflecting Upon Social Action
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Tomorrow: Abstaining from Intoxication
One week from today: Reflecting upon Bodily Action
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
One week from today: Reflecting upon Bodily Action
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel
Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.
Via Daily Dharma: Seeing into Compassion
The
practice of seeing clearly is what finally moves us toward kindness.
Seeing, again and again, the infinite variety of traps we create for
seducing the mind into struggle, seeing the endless rounds of
meaningless suffering over lusts and aversions (which, although
seemingly urgent, are essentially empty), we feel compassion for
ourselves.
Sylvia Boorstein, “The Wisdom of Discomfort”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via White Crane Institute \\ Alain Locke
Died
1954 -
ALAIN LEROY LOCKE died on this date (b: 1885); Locke was an American, writer, educator, and patron of the arts, distinguished as the first African-American Rhodes Scholar in 1907. Locke is widely cited as the philosophical architect —the acknowledged "Dean"— of the Harlem Renaissance. On March 19, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke came through the universe."
Alain Locke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1885 to Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke. He was the only child of a well-to-do family with significant pedigree. His mother Mary, who was a teacher, and with whom he lived until her death, incited in him his passion for education and literature. In 1902, he graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia, second in his class. He also attended Philadelphia School of Pedagogy.
Locke returned to Harvard in 1916 to work on his doctoral dissertation, The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value. In his thesis, he discusses the causes of opinions and social biases, and that these are not objectively true or false, and therefore not universal. Locke received his PhD in philosophy in 1918.
Locke returned to Howard University as the chair of the department of philosophy. During this period, he began teaching the first classes on race relations, leading to his dismissal in 1925. After being reinstated in 1928, Locke remained at Howard until his retirement in 1953. Locke Hall, on the Howard campus, is named after him.
In 1907, Locke graduated from Harvard University with degrees in English and philosophy, and was honored as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and recipient of the prestigious Bowdoin Prize. After graduation, he was the first African-American selected as a Rhodes Scholar (and the last to be selected until 1960). At that time, Rhodes selectors did not meet candidates in person, but there is evidence that at least some selectors knew he was African-American.
On arriving at Oxford, Locke was denied admission to several colleges, and several Rhodes Scholars from the American South refused to live in the same college or attend events with Locke. He was finally admitted to Hertford College, where he studied literature, philosophy, Greek, and Latin, from 1907–1910. In 1910, he attended the University of Berlin, where he studied philosophy.
Locke promoted African-American artists, writers, and musicians, encouraging them to look to Africa as an inspiration for their works. He encouraged them to depict African and African-American subjects, and to draw on their history for subject material.
He was the guest editor of the March 1925 issue of the periodical Survey Graphic titled "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro", a special on Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance, which helped educate white readers about its flourishing culture. In December of that year, he expanded the issue into The New Negro, a collection of writings by African Americans, which would become one of his best known works. A landmark in black literature (later acclaimed as the "first national book" of African America), it was an instant success. Locke contributed five essays: the "Foreword", "The New Negro", "Negro Youth Speaks", "The Negro Spirituals", and "The Legacy of Ancestral Arts".
Locke was Gay, and encouraged and supported other Gay African-Americans who were part of the Harlem Renaissance. However, he was not fully public in his orientation and referred to it as his point of "vulnerable/invulnerability",
Locke died at Mount Sinai Hospital, of heart disease. Howard University officials initially considered having Locke's ashes buried in a niche at Locke Hall on the Howard campus, similar to the way that Langston Hughes' ashes were interred at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City in 1991. But Kurt Schmoke, the university's legal counsel, was concerned about setting a precedent that might lead to other burials at the university. After an investigation revealed no legal problems to the plan, university officials decided the remains should be buried off-site. At first, thought was given to burying Locke beside his mother, Mary Hawkins Locke. But Howard officials quickly discovered a problem: She had been interred at Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C., but that cemetery closed in 1959 and her remains transferred to National Harmony Memorial Park—which failed to keep track of them. (She was buried in a mass grave along with 37,000 other unclaimed remains from Columbian Harmony.)
Howard University eventually decided to bury Alain Locke's remains at historic Congressional Cemetery, and African American Rhodes Scholars raised $8,000 to purchase a burial plot there. Locke was interred at Congressional Cemetery on September 13, 2014. His tombstone reads:
1885–1954 - Harlem Renaissance - Exponent of Cultural Pluralism
On the back of the headstone is a nine-pointed Baha'i star (representing Locke's religious beliefs); a Zimbabwe Bird, emblem of the nation Locke adopted as a Rhodes Scholar; a lambda, symbol of the Gay Rights movement; and the logo of Phi Beta Sigma, the fraternity Locke joined. In the center of these four symbols is an Art Deco representation of an African woman's face set against the rays of the sun. This image is a simplified version of the bookplate that Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas designed for Locke. Below the bookplate image are the words "Teneo te, Africa" ("I hold you, my Africa")
A new biography of Locke by Jeffrey Stewart "The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke," was released in February 2018.
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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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Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Via White Crane Institute \\ ALAN TURING
Died
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.
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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 White Crane Institute \\ 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.”
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.’”
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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 Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation \\ Words of Wisdom - June 8, 2022 💌
My own strategy is to keep cultivating the witness, that part of me that notices how I’m doing it—cultivate the quiet place in me that watches the process of needing approval, of the smile on the face, of the false humility, of all the horrible creepy little psychological things that are just my humanity. And watching them occur again and again and again.
- Ram Dass -
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