Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Frivolous Speech

 

RIGHT SPEECH
Refraining from Frivolous Speech
Frivolous speech is unhealthy. Refraining from frivolous speech is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning frivolous speech, one refrains from frivolous speech. One speaks at the right time, speaks only what is fact, and speaks about what is good. One speaks what is worthy of being overheard, words that are reasonable, moderate, and beneficial. (DN 1) One practices thus: "Others may speak frivolously, but I shall abstain from frivolous speech." (MN 8)

When a person commits an offense of some kind, you should not hurry to reprove them but rather consider whether or not to speak. If you will not be troubled, the other person will be hurt, and you can help them emerge from what is unhealthy and establish them in what is healthy—then it is proper to speak. It is a trifle that they will be hurt compared with the value of helping establish them in what is healthy. (MN 103)
Reflection
So many of our speech patterns are habitual and unfold automatically. The practice of right speech gives us an opportunity to notice this, because we are bringing greater awareness to the action of speaking. It also enables us to change our habitual patterns because it gives us time to respond differently. The ability to pause and reflect before responding is particularly important when in the presence of offensive speech.

Daily Practice
The next time you feel offended by something someone says to you, slow down enough to not react automatically and to take some time to consider whether or not to speak. Not every putdown requires a comeback. The critical factor in the analysis above is whether or not what you say will make a difference. It is okay to hurt someone’s feelings if you "can help them emerge from what is unhealthy" and get on a better track.

Tomorrow: Reflecting upon Social Action
One week from today: Refraining from False Speech

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

Questions?
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© 2023 Tricycle Foundation
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Via Daily Dharma: Strengthening Generosity

 Like any form of strength, generosity needs to be intentionally cultivated over time, and everyone must begin in whatever state of mind they already happen to be.

Dale S. Wright, “The Bodhisattva’s Gift”


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - February 15, 2023 💌


 

The sooner one develops compassion in this journey, the better. Compassion lets us appreciate that each individual is doing what he or she must do, and that there is no reason to judge another person or oneself. You merely do what you can to further your own awakening.

- Ram Dass -

[GBF] New Dharma Talk: Kinship with the Spirit World

 Our latest dharma talk from Sean Feit Oakes is now live:



Sean's upcoming online course on the topic begins March 9:
"Animal, Spirit, Human, God: Karma & the Cycle of Samsara"

Tuesday, February 14, 2023

Via NPR // Four couples are petitioning India's Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage

 


Via FB

 


Via White Crane Institute // TODAY'S GAY WISDOM Harry Hay…The Mattachine Society

 

 

Today's Gay Wisdom
Harry Hay (upper left), then L to R: Konrad Stevens, Dale Jennings, Rudi Gernreich, Stan Witt, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, and Paul Bernard
2018 -

 TODAY'S GAY WISDOM

 Harry Hay…The Mattachine Society

In 1948, as Senator Joseph McCarthy railed against homosexuals in the State Department, Harry Hay, working on the Henry Wallace presidential campaign, wrote a startling document, declaring homosexuals an oppressed minority. While the idea is widely accepted today, at the time the notion of homosexuals as a minority was considered absurd. But it was this key concept that would eventually bring the Gay and Lesbian rights movement together.

Harry's platform for the Wallace campaign was never voted on, but he remained determined to organize homosexuals to fight for their equal rights. Two years later, he met Rudi Gernreich (who would later go on to become a noted fashion designer, most famously of the “topless” bathing suit for women) and together they canvassed beaches in the Los Angeles area known as homosexual gathering places, inviting people to a discussion group about the just released Kinsey Report. In November 1950, Harry showed the plank written for the Wallace campaign to Bob Hull, a student in his Southern California Labor School class. Bob shared the document with two of his friends, Chuck Rowland and Dale Jennings, and on November 11, 1950, the five met for the first time to discuss forming a political group that would later become the Mattachine Society. All of the founding members identified themselves as leftist.

Given the fearful political climate, Mattachine Society meetings often took place in secret with members using aliases. Like the Communist Party, the organization was organized in a cell structure that was non-centralized so that should a confiscation of records occur only limited information would be available to the authorities. In 1951 the group of five was joined by two other members, Konrad Stevens and James Gruber, and together they created the Mattachine Society Missions and Purposes statement and held their first conference. Given the risk that homosexuals presented to the Communist Party, Hay resigned from the Party in that same year.

Over the course of the next two years, the Mattachine Society worked to organize and increase regional chapters throughout most of Southern California, but it was not until the arrest of member Dale Jennings on police entrapment charges that the Mattachine Society took on its first political battle. Police entrapment was a common form of harassment against homosexuals during that period. Suspects' names were printed in the newspapers, which caused many to lose their jobs and become estranged from their families. By standing up to defend Jennings, the Mattachine Society not only rose to the defense of one of their members, but also took on the notorious Los Angeles Police Department for its pattern and practice of homosexual harassment.

Jennings charges were dismissed due to the judge catching the arresting officers in a lie. This victory was not reported in the papers, but the Mattachine Society took it upon themselves to publicize the event through flyers distributed throughout Los Angeles to areas where homosexuals met.

The result was a swelling of attendance at Mattachine Society meetings. But the newcomers, nervous about the founders ties to leftist political causes, called for a statewide convention. On the last day of the conference the original Mattachine founders (Hay, Rowland, Hull, Jennings, Stevens, Gruber) resigned due to political differences with the new membership.

The Mattachine Society grew into a national movement, and in conjunction with a Lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, became the above ground civil rights organizations for Gays and Lesbians until the Stonewall riot in 1969. The final Mattachine Society office closed in the 1980s.

White Crane gratefully acknowledges the assistance of historian and Hay biographer, Stuart Timmons.


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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 Them // The Best Queer Romance Novels to Fall In Love With


 

Via Follow.it // Adam and Andy


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Via White Crane Institute // JONATHAN DAVID KATZ



Activist, art historian, educator and author, Jonathan David Katz
1958 -

JONATHAN DAVID KATZ is an American activist, art historian, educator and writer. I only know the year of his birth so I'm choosing this date at random (if you know his actual date, I would appreciate getting that information).

He is currently the director of the doctoral program in Visual culture studies at  SUNY Buffalo. He is also the former executive coordinator of the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University. He is a former chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay studies at the City College of San Francisco, and was the first tenured faculty in gay and lesbian studies in the United States. Katz was an associate professor in the Art History Department at SUNY Stony Brook, where he also taught queer studies. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1996.

Katz is the founder of the Harvey Milk Institute, the largest queer studies institute in the world, and the Queer Caucus for Art of the College Art Association.

Katz co-founded Queer Nation San Francisco. He has made scholarly contributions to queer studies the focus of his professional career. He was the first artistic director of the National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco and has published widely in the United States and Europe.

His forthcoming book, The Homosexualization of American Art: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and the Collective Closet, will be published by the University of Chicago Press. An internationally recognized expert in queer postwar American art, Katz has recently published Jasper Johns' Alley Oop: On Comic Strips and Camouflage in Schwule Bildwelten im 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Thomas Roeske, and The Silent Camp: Queer Resistance and the Rise of Pop Art, in Plop! Goes the World, edited by Serge Guilbaut. In 1995, Katz was kicked out of Rauschenberg conference at the Guggenheim for mentioning Rauschenberg's relationship with Johns.

Katz was co-curator with David C. Ward and Jenn Sichel of the 2010 exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. This was the first major museum exploration of the impact of same-sex desire in the creation of modern American portraiture. David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly was removed from the exhibition in November 2010, causing controversy. Katz was not consulted before the work's removal.


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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 [GBF] New Dharma Talk: "Responding When People Hate Us or Hurt Our Feelings"

 


Our latest dharma talk from Dave Richo is now live: 


"Responding When People Hate Us or Hurt Our Feelings"
https://gaybuddhist.org/podcast/dave-richo/

Find the handouts mentioned in his talk here: 


https://gaybuddhist.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Hate-or-Hurt-Dave-Richo.pdf

Via LGBTQ Nation


 

Via Wondering Wandering Thoughts

 


Sunday, February 12, 2023

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - February 12, 2023 💌

 
 

What I used to do is wait in line and I’d do mantra or breathing. I’d go into my vipassana meditation. But now I’m interested in whether waiting in line at the bank can itself be the thing. I notice my impatience, notice the feeling in my feet as I am standing there, notice the different levels of reality of the people I’m looking at. Am I seeing a bank teller or am I seeing the Divine Mother as a bank teller? I allow myself to play with the moment more, still dealing with the stuff of the moment rather than going away. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Moving Beyond Hope

To cling to hope is also to be shadowed by its opposite, fear, which is ready to pounce whenever we let go of that hope. Bodhisattvas are moved to act by something deeper: a compassionate generosity of spirit that wants to express itself and, although it seeks results, does not require them. 

David Loy, “Don’t-Know Mind and the Election of Our Lives”


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and the Third Jhāna

 


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RIGHT MINDFULNESS
Establishing Mindfulness of Mind
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 the mind is beset by aversion, one is aware "the mind is beset by aversion". . . One is just aware, just mindful: "There is mind." And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)
Reflection
As mental factors flow into consciousness, they color and distort the clarity with which we see what is actually going on, either in the world or in our own minds. Sometimes the mind is "beset by aversion" —that is, we feel annoyance at or distaste for some object of experience. Resenting this, or wishing it were not so, does no good and can even make aversion worse. With mindfulness practice, one simply abides without clinging and lets the experience come and go. 

Daily Practice
The practice of mindfulness is simply to be aware of what is happening in the moment. This includes being aware of both healthy and unhealthy states of mind, and here we are being encouraged to know when the mind has been impacted by the emotional state of aversion, the not liking and not wanting of something. The practice here is to simply note the aversion without clinging to it. Aversion to the aversion is a form of clinging.


RIGHT CONCENTRATION
Approaching and Abiding in the Third Phase of Absorption (3rd Jhāna)
With the fading away of joy, one abides in equanimity; mindful and fully aware, still feeling pleasure with the body, one enters upon and abides in the third phase of absorption, on account of which noble ones announce: "One has a pleasant abiding who has equanimity and is mindful." (MN 4)
Reflection
In some contexts the words "joy" and "equanimity" can seem to exclude one another: it is either one or the other. Here they are combined in the third phase of absorption, where the strong sensory pleasure of the previous two jhānas fades away, to be replaced by equanimity. Then this equanimity itself is subtly pleasurable but not in the same sense as before. The absence of pleasure is itself pleasurable, so to speak.

Daily Practice
Again, never mind the formal levels of jhāna practice. That is something you can get into if you take up formal jhāna practice under proper conditions. But sitting in silence and solitude on a Sunday morning or afternoon, you can allow the mind and body to formlessly unwind and relax to such an extent that you taste the quality of equanimity, of being fully aware of all experience without wanting anything to be different than it is.


Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering
One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and Abiding in the Fourth Jhāna


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

Questions?
Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.



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© 2023 Tricycle Foundation
89 5th Ave, New York, NY 10003