Via Daily Dharma: A Clean Relationship with Karma

 When we talk about “cleansing karma,” we sometimes have this illusion that we’re going to wash it all off and it’s going to go away. But what we really do is cleanse our relationship with it... We drop our old ways of responding and our old traps of habit energy. 

A talk by Kyogen Carlson, edited by Sallie Jiko Tisdale, “When Ghosts Come Back to Haunt Us”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 29, 2022 💌

 
 

When you stand back far enough, all of your life experiences, independent of what they are, are all learning experiences. From a human point of view, you do your best to optimize pleasure, happiness, all the nice things in life. From your soul’s point of view you take what comes down the pike. So from the soul’s perspective, you work to get what you want and then if you don’t ‘ah, so, I’ll work with what I’ve got.’

- Ram Dass -

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Harsh Speech

 

RIGHT SPEECH
Refraining from Harsh Speech

Harsh speech is unhealthy. Refraining from harsh speech is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning harsh speech, one refrains from harsh speech. One speaks words that are gentle, pleasing to the ear, and affectionate, words that go to the heart, are courteous, and are agreeable to many. (DN 1) One practices thus: “Others may speak harshly, but I shall abstain from harsh speech.” (MN 8) How does there come to be insistence on local language and overriding of normal usage? In different localities they call the same thing by different words. So whatever they call it in such and such a locality, one speaks accordingly, firmly adhering to that word and insisting: “Only this is correct; anything else is wrong.” (MN 139)

Reflection

One way of refraining from harsh speech is to be adaptable to different modes of speech and not insist on your own particular way of stating things. In ancient India the Buddha moved from one region to another and encountered local variations of dialect. Today also we often move in different circles and encounter different populations, and it would help facilitate effective communication if we remained flexible in our speech.

Daily Practice

Try as a practice reframing your own thoughts and words in the vernacular of another. Today this seems especially important. Each person and each community has their own particular way of perceiving and expressing things, and we can only learn from each other if we are open to different modes of speech. Notice when you restate something said by another, perhaps diminishing their voice, and learn not to do this.

Tomorrow: Reflecting upon Mental Action
One week from today: Refraining from Frivolous Speech

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

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: Living Happiness

 Because living our real best life is tethered to our intention to be happy and free and to help everyone else be happy and free, we don’t have to feel ashamed, regretful, or guilty, even when we make mistakes or forget our blessings. We can learn from our actions and start again and again. 

Kimberly Brown, “Living Your Real Best Life”

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Genuine friends

 

Via Tumblr // The Four Noble Truths for a 4 yr Old

 

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Intention: Cultivating Appreciative Joy

RIGHT INTENTION
Cultivating Appreciative Joy

Whatever you intend, whatever you plan, and whatever you have a tendency toward, that will become the basis on which your mind is established. (SN 12.40) Develop meditation on appreciative joy, for when you develop meditation on appreciative joy, any discontent will be abandoned. (MN 62)  The purpose of appreciative joy is to ward off discontent. (Vm 9.97)

Reflection

It is so easy to feel discontent. There are lots of things, both within and around us, with which we can find fault. But the mind does not have to go there. It may do so on its own, but we can intervene and change the focus of our mind. Choose to turn your attention to all the things within and around you about which you can feel good. Seek out goodness and you will find it. This is a practice in itself.

Daily Practice

The next time you experience discontent, deliberately cultivate appreciative joy—gladness at the good fortune of others—as an antidote. Everything need not always be about us. Other people deserve to feel happy and have good fortune, and even if we ourselves are in the doldrums for some reason we can vicariously experience the well-being of others. Appreciative joy is always accessible; we merely need to reach for it.

Tomorrow: Refraining from Harsh Speech
One week from today: Cultivating Equanimity

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

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via Daily Dharma: Eyes as Mirrors

 While sitting zazen, but also when we go back out into the world, our eyes can be mirrors, as we see all the world’s struggle and chaos. The endless separate things and scenes of this world are all, always, the mirror.

Jundo Cohen, “Mind as Mirror”

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Via White Crane Institute // Edward Carpenter

 

Died

Edward Carpenter and George Merrill

1929 -

EDWARD CARPENTER, English poet and Gay pioneer, died (b: 1844); Edward Carpenter was a pioneering socialist and radical prophet of a new age of fellowship in which social relations would be transformed by a new spiritual consciousness. The way he lived his life, perhaps even more than his extensive writings, was the essence of his message.

It is perhaps not surprising that his reputation faded quickly after his death, as he lived much of his life modestly spreading his message by personal contact and example rather than by major literary works or through a national political career. He has been described as having that unusual combination of qualities: charisma with modesty.

His ideas became immensely influential during the early years of the Socialist movement in Britain: perhaps Carpenter's most widely remembered legacy to the Socialist and Co-operative movements was his anthem England Arise!

A leading figure in late 19th and early 20th century Britain, he was instrumental in the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Labor Party. A poet and writer, he was a close friend of Walt Whitman and Rabindranath Tagore, corresponding with many famous figures such as Isadora Duncan, Havelock Ellis, Mahatma Ganghi, Jack London.William Morris and John Ruskin among many others.

But it is his writings on the subject of homosexuality and his open espousal of this identity that makes him unique. If you are unfamiliar with Carpenter, find him…read him. He is unquestionably one of the formative, foundational Gay philosophers in the late 19th and early 20th century. His influence was widespread at the time, and is no less innovative and profound, today.

His important writings include:

• • Towards Democracy (1883)
  • England's Ideal (1887)
  • Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure (1889; reissued 1920)
  • Homogenic love and its place in a free society (1894)
  • Love's Coming of Age (1896)
  • Days with Walt Whitman (1906)
  • Iolaus — anthology of friendship (editor, 1908)
  • The Intermediate Sex: a Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (1908)
  • The Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk (1914)
  • My Days and Dreams (autobiography, 1916)
  • Pagan & Christian Creeds: their origin and meaning (1920)

A strong advocate of sexual freedom, living in a Gay community near Sheffield, he had a profound influence on both D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster. On his return from India in 1891, he met George Merrill, a working class man also from Sheffield, and the two men struck up a relationship, eventually moving in together in 1898. Merrill had been raised in the slums of Sheffield and had no formal education.

Two men of different classes living together as a couple was almost unheard of in England in the 1890s, a fact made all the more extraordinary by the hysteria about alternative sexualities generated by the Oscar Wilde trial of 1895 and the Criminal Law Amendment Bill passed a decade earlier "outlawing all forms of male homosexual contact". But their relationship endured and they remained partners for the rest of their lives. Their relationship not only defied Victorian sexual mores but also the highly stratified British class system. Their partnership, in many ways, reflected Carpenter's cherished conviction that same-sex love had the power to subvert class boundaries.

It was his belief that at sometime in the future, Gay people would be the cause of radical social change in the social conditions of man. Carpenter remarks in his work "The Intermediate Sex":

"Eros is a great leveler. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies". p.114-115

(Note: The term “uranian", referring to a passage from Plato's Symposium, was often used at the time to describe someone who would be termed "Gay" nowadays. Carpenter is counted among the Uranians himself.)

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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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Why Is Homophobia on the Rise?

 

Via Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation // Support for our LGBTQIA+ Friends and Allies

Practitioner Resources

Support for our
LGBTQIA+ Friends and Allies

 

To support our LBTQIA+ community and our aspiration to deepen our understanding of interbeing, particularly around questions of sexual orientation and gender identity, here are several helpful resources:

• Dharma talk by Sister Boi Nghiem at a Wake Up Earth Retreat last year about the importance of supporting the LGBTQIA+ community. In a section of the talk on gender inclusivity (around minute 41), she says: “Our society has hurt you enough. You seek to come to the Plum Village tradition to find peace, love, and refuge.”

• Sister The Nghiem (Sister True Vow) Dharma talk: Given at Blue Cliff Monastery in 2018 during the LGBTQIA+Wake Up retreat, “For a future to be possible.”

• In this article from the Plum Village Newsletter, Brother Chan Troi Bao Tang (Brother Treasure) explains the value and benefit of the Rainbow Family: communities of LGBTQIA+ people within the Plum Village tradition.

• Plum Village App-Rainbow Family, a special section within the mobile app, includes a collection of Dharma talks and guided meditations from and in support of the LGBTQIA+ community, allies, and friends.

Via Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation // The Raft: Be a Beautiful Lotus Flower

“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don't try to be a magnolia flower.” 

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Art of Power

Via Daily Dharma: The Constellation of Mind

 Right understanding (and right functioning) of the mind does not come from thinking, but from actively and attentively observing the complex constellation of energies and activities of mind.

Stuart Smithers, “Minding the Storehouse”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right View: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering

RIGHT VIEW
Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering

What is the cessation of suffering? It is the remainderless fading away and ceasing, the giving up, relinquishing, letting go, and rejecting of craving. (MN 9) When one knows and sees feeling tone as it actually is, then one is not attached to feeling tone. When one abides unattached, one is not infatuated, and one’s craving is abandoned. One’s bodily and mental troubles are abandoned, and one experiences bodily and mental well being. (MN 149)

Reflection

Feeling tones, the raw sensations of pleasure and pain, are not in themselves a problem. The problem comes from attachment to them—the craving for good feelings to persist and bad feelings to stop that naturally arises in response to those feelings. Craving is the cause of suffering, not feeling. The key challenge is how to separate the two: How can we experience both positive and negative feelings without giving rise to craving?

Daily Practice

The short answer to that question is mindfulness. Mindfulness allows us to know and see feeling tone as it actually is, in which case, the texts tell us, we will not be attached to it. Clear awareness is one thing, and attachment is something else. They cannot occur simultaneously. Practice knowing and seeing feeling as it actually is by regarding it with equanimity. This is what is happening now, and this is how it actually feels.

Tomorrow: Cultivating Appreciative Joy
One week from today: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering

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

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

 

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and the Second Jhāna

RIGHT MINDFULNESS
Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling

A person goes to the forest or to the root of a tree or to an empty place and sits down. Having crossed the legs, one sets the body erect. One establishes the presence of mindfulness. (MN 10) One is aware: “Ardent, fully aware, mindful, I am content.” (SN 47.10)   When feeling a mental painful feeling, one is aware: “Feeling a mental painful feeling”. . . One is just aware, just mindful: “There is feeling.” And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)

Reflection

Just as physical pleasure and pain are inevitable, so too are mental pleasure and pain. There is no use in trying to avoid mental pain, since it is an integral part of our experience, but it need not inevitably lead to suffering. Just as you might be aware of the pain of a stubbed toe and yet retain your mental and emotional balance, you can also turn toward and experience mental pain and hold it with healthy equanimity.

Daily Practice

Mental pain includes such things as sorrow and unhappiness. When we think about the loss of someone we care about, it hurts. When we open to the suffering of others, it hurts. Such pain is an intrinsic part of the human condition and is not to be avoided. Allow yourself to feel sorrow or even unhappiness and notice that it need not evoke unhealthy emotions such as despair or anguish. This too can just be held in awareness.

RIGHT CONCENTRATION Approaching and Abiding in the Second Phase of Absorption (2nd Jhāna)

With the stilling of applied and sustained thought, one enters upon and abides in the second phase of absorption, which has inner clarity and singleness of mind, without applied thought and sustained thought, with joy and the pleasure born of concentration. (MN 4) One practices: “I shall breathe in experiencing pleasure"; one practices: “I shall breathe out experiencing pleasure.” This is how concentration by mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated so that it is of great fruit and great benefit. (SN 54.8)

Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and Abiding in the Third Jhāna

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

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via White Crane Institute // Feast Day of SAINTS JOHN AND PAUL

 

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Saints John and Paul

2018 -

It is the Feast Day of SAINTS JOHN AND PAUL, martyred lovers According to their Acts, which are of a legendary character and without recorded historical foundation, the martyrs were eunuchs (Galli) of Constantina daughter of Constantine the Great, and became acquainted with a certain Gallicanus, who built a church in Ostia. At the command of Julian the Apostate, they were beheaded secretly by Terentianus in their house on the Cælian, where their church was subsequently erected, and where they themselves were buried. Galli (singular Gallus) was the Roman name for castrated followers of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, which were regarded as a third gender by contemporary Roman scholars, and are in some ways like transgendered people in the modern world. The chief of these priests was referred to as a battakes, and later as the archigallus.

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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 // Obergefell v Hodges

 

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Jim Obergefell

2015 -

The Supreme Court of the United States, in a landmark 5-4 decision, Obergefell v Hodges, rule that the Constitution of the United States assures the right to MARRIAGE EQUALITY FOR LGBT PEOPLE and that every state in the union must recognize and respect same-sex marriages. Heterosexual marriages begin crumbling…oh wait…that didn’t happen. Nevermind.

 

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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 26, 2022 💌

 

"A couple of years ago I stopped lecturing and I just hung out at my house in Boston, taking care of my father. I wasn't full-time doing that. I was just part-time. But I was sort of helping do that. And there were many days each week when I would wake him up, take him to the bathroom, bathe him, toilet him, dress him, feed him, hang out with him. These were extraordinary periods for me, because in my mind somewhere was the idea of, how is this an Upaya, or a spiritual method? I went through so many. I went through so many...

What I did was I kept a diary of what it felt like to do this each day. To see if I could see through the veils that were created. First of all, the relationship between my father and I has changed so much over the years. We never touched each other when we were young. Now I hold him, I massage him, I dress him. When I'm putting on his socks, he pats me on the back and my heart just opens. It's so beautiful..."

Explore a new teaching article + video from Ram Dass: Caring for Family as a Spiritual Practice from a 1985 lecture at the SEVA Foundation Benefit.

Via Tumblr

 

Kamishikimi Kumanoimasu Shrine in Kyushu by Kohei Yamakawa