A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
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 devoid of aversion, one is aware "the mind is
devoid of aversion" … One is just aware, just mindful: "There is mind."
And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)
Reflection
Mindfulness can
be established and sustained by focusing on the quality of
consciousness itself. Consciousness is colored in every moment by subtle
or obvious emotional tones, in particular by various forms of greed,
hatred, and delusion. These states are toxic, but the mind is often free
of them for fleeting moments. Here we are invited to notice when the
mind is free from hatred in its many forms.
Daily Practice
Aversion is a
quality of mind that comes and goes. Sometimes we are annoyed at
something, and sometimes we are not. Sometimes we hate something and
wish it would go away, and sometimes we do not. This is a practice of
noticing the flickering moods of the mind, of becoming aware of the
emotional strands that arise in the mind and then vanish. In particular,
notice when your mind is free of any trace of aversion.
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)
When one sees oneself purified of all these unhealthy states and thus
liberated from them, gladness is born. When one is glad, joy is born; in
one who is joyful, the body becomes tranquil; one whose body is tranquil feels pleasure; in one who feels pleasure, the mind becomes concentrated. (MN 40)
Reflection
Pleasure is as
natural and inevitable a part of human experience as pain, and like pain
it is not to be feared or avoided. The challenge is to not be carried
away by either, and to abide with both with equanimity. The unhealthy
pursuit of pleasure can lead to all sorts of problems, but there are
some cases, like this one, when pleasure is an ally. There is a healthy
pleasure that comes simply from the experience of a tranquil body.
Daily Practice
Pleasure can be
a gateway leading from tranquility to concentration. Allow yourself to
feel how pleasant it is to be calm. Temporarily free from the rush of
restlessness, and not, for the moment, driven by all kinds of pressures
to do and accomplish things, take some time to allow yourself to fully
feel the deep pleasure of a calm and tranquil moment. This is the
pleasure of being, not doing.
Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and the Fourth Jhāna
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel
We
can easily come to believe that dukkha is a sign of our failure or
unworthiness. However, if we can learn to find the confidence to turn
toward dukkha, many of the agitations in our life will calm.
Christina Feldman and Chris Cullen, “An Appropriate Response”
According
to Bhikkhu Santi, a New York City-based Thai Forest monk, meditation is
only as hard as we make it. We don’t need to suffer more in our
attempts to liberate ourselves from suffering. In fact, a little levity
might get us a lot further in our practice.
As you quiet your mind just a little bit, you get so that you’re not
automatically reacting to everything. You become what’s called
responsive rather than reactive. In other words, something happens and
there’s a moment when it’s just happening, you’re just with it. As your
awareness expands to include more than your separate self, it’s as if
you’re part of the gestalt of it all, and you experience the totality of
it. And then, out of that quietness comes an act that is appropriate to
that moment.
On this date Germany's PARAGRAPH 175was
finally revoked. Originally adopted in 1871, Paragraph 175 was a
provision of the German Criminal Code that made homosexual acts between
males a crime. The statute was amended several times. The Nazis
broadened the law in 1935 and increased §175 StGB prosecutions by an
order of magnitude; thousands died in concentration camps, regardless of
guilt or innocence. East Germany reverted to the old version of the law
in 1950, limited its scope to sex with youths under 18 in 1968, and
abolished it entirely in 1988. West Germany retained the Nazi-era
statute until 1969, when it was limited to "qualified cases"; it was
further attenuated in 1973 and finally revoked entirely in 1994 after
German reunification.
2023 -
THE GERMAN SYNODAL ASSEMBLY ON THE REFORM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
voted on this date in Frankfurt, Germany, to bless same-sex couples,
with 176 of the 202 assembly members voting for the proposal, including
two-thirds of the bishops in attendance.
According to a report from the newspaper Donaukurier,
same-sex blessings have already been going on in the German church —
but were in a canonical grey area and took place in private, rather than
openly in churches.
The move stands in direct contradiction to the Vatican, which has explicitly declared that “the Church does not have, and cannot have, the power to bless unions of persons of the same sex.”
The Vatican
argued that while God and the Church can bless individuals, including
homosexuals, it cannot bless sin, including sexual activity that takes
place outside of a valid marriage.
The issue of
same-sex couple blessings is one of the main demands from the German
Synodal Path, a series of conferences of the Catholic Church in Germany
since 2019 that have been looking to greatly transform the Church.
The Synodal Way
has proposed radical reforms, such as ordaining priestesses, declaring
homosexual acts not to be sinful, and allowing all priests to be
married.
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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
How can our practice inform encounters with dark times, when we feel loss or face a turning point with trepidation?
Laura
Burges shares that we can find "fountains of joy" even in going to the
places that scare us. Our practice is not separate from the dark places -
we can turn towards the darkness and examine it clearly and experience
the "soft heart of sadness" in being alive.
She draws
a parallel with the Greek myth of Persephone whose time spent annually
in Hades results in the joy reflected in the return of Spring each year.
In fact, those times that challenge us most can be a garden for
developing empathy and compassion for others in the world when they
suffer.
______________
Listen to the full talk on your favorite podcast player or our website:
Buddhist Film Festival Presented by Tricycle March 15-24, 2024
We
invite you to join us for our first-ever Buddhist Film Festival from
March 15-24, offering five feature-length films, five short films, and a
live screening and Q&A with filmmaker Lana Wilson!
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 joy-awakening factor. (MN 141)
Reflection
Happiness is a
skill that can be learned, and it can be practiced again and again as a
living presence. We are all capable of experiencing happy and healthy
states of mind, but sometimes we need to remember to experience them as a
conscious and deliberate act. At any point, we can in principle draw
out of a pool of latent tendencies the active manifestation of a
positive state such as joy, thus waking it up and bringing it to life.
Daily Practice
Try the
exercise of deliberately cultivating joy as an active and present state
of mind. This does not mean pretending to be joyful as a kind of false
overlay to feelings that are not joyful. It means consciously developing
actual joy and allowing it to replace whatever other feeling might be
in the mind at the moment. Joy is accessible; it is just a matter of
remembering to get in touch with it as a living emotion.
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