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Sunday, August 4, 2024
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Mental Objects and the Fourth Jhāna
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - August 4, 2024 💌
There is a way of shifting consciousness so that you see that you're one in the form of many. You understand that a starving person or a dying person or a frightened person is you. Then the whole trip of, "What's good for me? What do I want? What do I need?" becomes less interesting. And that changes the universe.
- Ram Dass
Saturday, August 3, 2024
Via GBF // "The Sacred Tapestry of Your Life" with Dorothy Hunt
Our latest dharma talk is now available. Here's a 60-second audio preview
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"The Sacred Tapestry of Your Life"
If we are an expression of the whole, why does life feel so personal?
In a talk that examines duality, Dorothy Hunt asks us who and what we really are. Is our awareness something that belongs to us as a separate 'me', or is it instead something that arises from our experience of reality?
She likens reality to an enormous unending tapestry on a loom, consisting of interwoven strands that give rise to the whole.
The vertical cords are the 'warp' - the stable structure that determines the shape of the tapestry, akin to our true nature -- that unchanging awareness for which each person is a vehicle.
The horizontal threads, known as the 'weft,' constantly change to provide color, texture and variety, much like the moment-to-moment experiences, thoughts and words in our lives.
Just as a wave cannot be separated from the ocean, no single thread can be removed without affecting the whole.
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You can watch or listen to the talk on our website or YouTube:
or listen on your favorite podcast player.
Via White Crane Institute //
RUDOLF BRAZDA, (b: 1913) believed to be the last surviving man to wear the pink triangle — the emblem sewn onto the striped uniforms of the thousands of homosexuals sent to Nazi concentration camps, most of them to their deaths — died on this date. Mr. Brazda, who was born in Germany, had lived in France since the Buchenwald camp, near Weimar, Germany, was liberated by American forces in April 1945. He had been imprisoned there for three years. It was only after May 27, 2008, when the German National Monument to the Victims of the Nazi Regime was unveiled in Berlin’s Tiergarten park — opposite the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe — that Mr. Brazda became known as probably the last gay survivor of the camps. Until he notified German officials after the unveiling, the Lesbian and Gay Federation believed there were no other pink-triangle survivors. Mémorial de la Déportation Homosexuelle, a French organization that commemorates the Nazi persecution of gay people, said that Mr. Brazda “was very likely the last victim and the last witness” to the persecution. “It will now be the task of historians to keep this memory alive,” the statement said, “a task that they are just beginning to undertake.” One of those historians is Gerard Koskovich, curator of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Museum in San Francisco and an author with Roberto Malini and Steed Gamero of A Different Holocaust (2006). Pointing out that only men were interned, Mr. Koskovich said, “The Nazi persecution represented the apogee of anti-gay persecution, the most extreme instance of state-sponsored homophobia in the 20th century.” During the 12-year Nazi regime, he said, up to 100,000 men were identified in police records as homosexuals, with about 50,000 convicted of violating Paragraph 175, a section of the German criminal code that outlawed male homosexual acts. There was no law outlawing female homosexual acts, he said. Citing research by Rüdiger Lautmann, a German sociologist, Mr. Koskovich said that 5,000 to 15,000 gay men were interned in the camps and that about 60 percent of them died there, most within a year. “The experience of homosexual men under the Nazi regime was one of extreme persecution, but not genocide,” Mr. Koskovich said, when compared with the “relentless effort to identify all Jewish people and ultimately exterminate them.” Still, the conditions in the camps were murderous, said Edward J. Phillips, the director of exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Men sent to the camps under Section 175 were usually put to forced labor under the cruelest conditions — underfed, long hours, exposure to the elements and brutal treatment by labor brigade leaders,” Mr. Phillips said. “We know of instances where gay prisoners and their pink triangles were used for guards’ target practices.” Two books have been written about Mr. Brazda. In one, “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” (2010), by Jean-Luc Schwab, Mr. Brazda recalled how dehumanizing the incarceration was. “Seeing people die became such an everyday thing, it left you feeling practically indifferent,” he is quoted as saying. “Now, every time I think back on those terrible times, I cry. But back then, just like everyone in the camps, I had hardened myself so I could survive.” Rudolf Brazda was born on June 26, 1913, in the eastern German town of Meuselwitz to a family of Czech origin. His parents, Emil and Anna Erneker Brazda, both worked in the coal mining industry. Rudolf became a roofer. Before he was sent to the camp, he was arrested twice for violations of Paragraph 175. After the war, Mr. Brazda moved to Alsace. There he met Edouard Mayer, his partner until Mr. Mayer’s death in 2003. He has no immediate survivors. “Having emerged from anonymity,” the book “Itinerary of a Pink Triangle” says of Mr. Brazda, “he looks at the social evolution for homosexuals over his nearly 100 years of life: ‘I have known it all, from the basest repression to the grand emancipation of today.’ ” He died on August 3, 2011 in Bantzenheim, in Alsace, France. He was 98. | ||
|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 Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8 |
Via Tricycle //
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Via Daily Dharma: Inclining Toward Nirvana
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Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
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Friday, August 2, 2024
Via White Crane Institute // JAMES BALDWIN
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August 02Born 
1924 -
JAMES BALDWIN, American author, born (d. 1987); One of the most important social commentators in the United States, most of Baldwin's work deals with racial and sexual issues in the mid-20th century in the U.S.. This year marks the centenary of his birth. His novels are notable for the personal way in which they explore questions of identity as well as the way in which they mine complex social and psychological pressures related to being black and gay well before the social, cultural or political equality of these groups was improved. One source of support came from an admired older writer Richard Wright, whom he called "the greatest black writer in the world." Wright and Baldwin became friends for a short time and Wright helped him to secure the Eugene F. Saxon Memorial Award. Baldwin titled a collection of essays Notes Of A Native Son, in clear reference to Wright's novel Native Son. However, Baldwin's 1949 essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" ended the two authors' friendship because Baldwin asserted that Wright's novel Native Son, like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin lacked credible characters and psychological complexity. However, during an interview with Julius Lester. Baldwin explained that his adoration for Wright remained: "I knew Richard and I loved him. I was not attacking him; I was trying to clarify something for myself." This was also the year he met and fell in love with Lucien Happersberger. The boy was a seventeen-year-old runaway, and the two became very close, until Happersberger's marriage three years later, an event that left Baldwin devastated. James Baldwin is one of the most celebrated American writers of the 20th century. He wrote novels, essays, short stories, poetry, and even a screenplay. He's best known for his affecting prose, his depth of thought, and his clear moral vision for the country. He was also a bit of a character. In interviews he's often smoking a cigarette with his legs crossed, casually calling the interviewer "baby" with a big toothy grin. Baldwin is perhaps best known for his philosophies on race. And as an openly gay man, Baldwin also spoke about sexuality in a time when it was unheard of for many Black men to do so. Now, some 40 years after his death, much of what he had to say about America continues to resonate. Baldwin's
writings of the 1970s and 1980s were largely overlooked by critics,
although they have received increasing attention in recent years. Several of his essays and interviews of the 1980s discuss homosexuality and At the time of Baldwin's death, he was working on an unfinished manuscript called Remember This House, a memoir of his personal recollections of civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Following his death, publishing company McGraw-Hill took the unprecedented step of suing his estate to recover the $200,000 advance they had paid him for the book, although the lawsuit was dropped by 1990. The manuscript forms the basis for Raoul Peck's 2016 documentary film I Am Not Your Negro.
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