Thursday, June 8, 2023
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Social Action
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Via Daily Dharma: The Freedom of Embodied Presence
Embodied
presence is an invitation, again and again, to soften, to settle, to
relax, to open up to what’s here. When we’re driven along by our
habitual thinking patterns, we’re holding those tensions. A free body is
a relaxed body, an open body.
Martin Aylward, “The Power of Not Knowing”
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE COURSE EXCERPT
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Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Via Rachael - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Ram Dass on Accepting the Paradox of our Humanity [with video] 💔
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Ram Dass: Every experience is a vehicle for awakening or a vehicle for going to sleep. This is the bizarre thing that you're dealing with. The paradox, [outlined in] the Bhagavad Gita, which is a very good Hindu text, cautions about two things that keep catching you: One is the identification with being the actor, with being the doer, and the other is the identification with the fruits or the attachment to the fruits of the action. Like at this moment there is talking going on, and if I identify with being the speaker that forces you into being the listener.
People say to me, “Should I get psychotherapy?”
And I say, “As long as the therapist doesn't think they are only a therapist, because if they think they're a therapist, then you've got to be the patient.”
I mean, I remember when I was a therapist, when my patients got better, I used to punish them because I needed them [so I could] be a therapist. I needed them for me to be a therapist.
I'll be the therapist, you be the patient, you'll be a therapist, whichever doesn't matter. We'll play whatever parts we have to play, but we won't get lost in the drama of the action. We won't get lost in the actor.
Like, if I go outside and just walk down the street ahead of you all and then hide in the bushes and listen to what you say, what you think you heard me say, I'll absolutely climb the walls because I'll hear people saying that I said exactly the opposite things of what I thought I said, because each person is receiving what I'm saying through a set of filters based on their own needs and desires and perceptions.
This is an old story of psychology, that motivation affects perception. Like if three of us are driving through a town and you are hungry, but you don't want to admit it because none of us wants to eat. At the other end of town, if I say, “What was in that town, what was it? What do you remember about that town?”
You say, “Well, there was a McDonald's and there was a health food store I saw down the street.” And now I'm an old car buff, you see, and so I'm driving my car and I'm listening for the squeaks and I'm figuring where it's going to have to be towed to next. So, if you ask me what was in the town, I'll say, “Well, it was a Shell station and there was a foreign car service.”
And if the third member is horny, what they will remember is who was standing under the clock. That's what they'll remember of the town. Each of us went through a different town...
Continue Reading & Watching...
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Frivolous Speech
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Daily Dharma: Widening the Self
We
can place the self between our ears and have it looking out from our
eyes, or we can widen it to include the air we breathe, or at other
moments we can cast its boundaries farther to include the oxygen-giving
trees and plankton, our external lungs, and beyond them the web of life
in which they are sustained.
Joanna Macy, “Positive Disintegration”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
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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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Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 7, 2023 💌
"Meditation helps other parts of your life become more simple. As you
enter quieter spaces you will see how clinging to desires has made your
life complicated. Your clinging drags you from desire to desire, whim to
whim, creating more and more complex entanglements. Meditation helps
you cut through this clinging.
If, for example, you run around filling your mind with this and that,
you will discover that your entire meditation is spent letting go of the
stuff you just finished collecting in the past few hours. You also
notice that your meditations are clearer when you come into them from a
simpler space. This encourages you to simplify your life."
- Ram Dass -
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