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.
Whatever you intend,
whatever you plan, and whatever you have a tendency toward, that will
become the basis upon 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)
Appreciative joy fails when it produces amusement. (Vm 9.95)
Reflection
The emotion indicated by the term appreciative joy
is a deep one and is to be distinguished from mere amusement. Noticing
the success of others is not a momentary lift; you are allowing yourself
to be profoundly moved by the beneficial aspects of life that do not
center on yourself. Once we open to all the ways others have good things
happen to them, this becomes a boundless source of our own good
feelings.
Daily Practice
Cultivate
appreciative joy at every opportunity. Get in the habit of noticing the
good things that happen around you, not as they relate to your own gain
but as they affect and benefit others. Being happy about other people
being happy is a practice in itself. It is good to loosen the habit of
always relating what you see to yourself and to develop an appreciation
for the perspective of others. Feel the joy you experience from this.
Tomorrow: Refraining from Harsh Speech One week from today: Cultivating Equanimity
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel
Poet
Arthur Sze explores the ruptures and continuities between classical and
contemporary Chinese poetry, the destruction and renewal inherent in
the process of translation, and why we need translation now more than
ever.
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 material form as it actually is, then one is not
attached to material form. 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
We live in a
material world, and contact with material things makes up a great deal
of our experience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The issue is
whether we allow ourselves to become infatuated with these things, or if
instead we are able to “abide unattached” as we make use of them.
Knowing ultimately that material objects are impermanent and will change
frees us from the suffering attachment to them can bring.
Daily Practice
Notice that you
suffer in direct proportion to the amount of attachment you have to a
material object. If something you care little about gets damaged, it is
no big deal, right? But if something precious to you breaks, it can be
the cause of great distress. Practice reminding yourself of everything
you touch, This is fragile; it cannot last; it will pass away eventually. That sounds depressing, but it can be liberating.
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
I don't regret
for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as
one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not
experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down
the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to
have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have
been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its
secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured
in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of it in THE YOUNG
KING, notably in the passage where the bishop says to the kneeling boy,
'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou art'? a phrase which when I
wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase; a great deal of it is
hidden away in the note of doom that like a purple thread runs through
the texture of DORIAN GRAY; in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in
many colours; in THE SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too
easy to read; it is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make
SALOME so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the
prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure
that liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that
abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At
every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less
than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.
It is, if I can
fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the artistic life. For
the artistic life is simply self-development. Humility in the artist is
his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is
simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its
soul. In MARIUS THE EPICUREAN Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life
with the life of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the
word. But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator
indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to contemplate the spectacle of
life with appropriate emotions,' which Wordsworth defines as the poet's
true aim; yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied
with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary to notice that it
is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at.
I see a far more
intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and
the true life of the artist; and I take a keen pleasure in the
reflection that long before sorrow had made my days her own and bound me
to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN that he who would lead a
Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken
as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in
his cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the
poet for whom the world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide,
as we sat together in some Paris CAFE, that while meta-physics had but
little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was
nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be
transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its
complete fulfillment.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|
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
WILD BILL HICKOK
is born in Troy Grove, Illinois. His real name was James Butler Hickok.
Like many men in the wild west, Wild Bill really was wild with the men
on the frontier and used his Lesbian buddy, Calamity Jane as a blind.
Few people ever
knew the pair's secret, and in the movies about their lives, not a
mention was made by either Doris Day or Howard Keel. The American West
of the nineteenth century was a world of freedom and adventure for men
of every stripe—not least also those who admired and desired other men.
Among these
sojourners was William Drummond Stewart, a flamboyant Scottish nobleman
who found in American culture of the 1830s and 1840s a cultural milieu
of openness in which men could pursue same-sex relationships.
William Benemann’s recent book, Men In Eden
traces Stewart’s travels from his arrival in America in 1832 to his
return to Murthly Castle in Perthshire, Scotland, with his French
Canadian–Cree Indian companion, Antoine Clement, one of the most skilled
hunters in the Rockies. Benemann chronicles Stewart’s friendships with
such notables as Kit Carson, William Sublette, Marcus Whitman, and Jim
Bridger. He describes the wild Renaissance-costume party held by Stewart
and Clement upon their return to America—a journey that ended in
scandal.
Through Stewart’s
letters and novels, Benemann shows that Stewart was one of many men
drawn to the sexual freedom offered by the West. His book provides a
tantalizing new perspective on the Rocky Mountain fur trade and the role
of homosexuality in shaping the American West. For more: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13594189-men-in-eden
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|
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
“Entering the forest, we step out of our separateness to embody something much more than human.”
What is it like to be one of the largest
organisms that has ever existed? How does it feel to host a vast web of
relationships that anchor an ecosystem? In our special interactive
online adaptation of Breathing with the Forest, you are invited
to open your senses to what it might be like to be a part of the hidden
forces that flow through the trees and mycelial networks of the
Colombian Amazon rainforest. Surrounded by an ensemble of birdsong,
moving water, and insect chirr, and guided by narration from acclaimed
British actor Colin Salmon, synchronize the rhythm of your own breath
with the cycles of molecular exchange between soil, tree, and
sky—finding where you end and the forest begins.
