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.
Harsh speech is unhealthy.
Refraining from harsh speech is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning harsh speech,
one refrains from harsh speech. One speaks words that are gentle,
pleasing to the ear, and affectionate, words that go to the heart, are
courteous, and are agreeable to many. (DN 1) One practices thus: “Others
may speak harshly, but I shall abstain from harsh speech.” (MN 8)
It is a mistake to return anger with anger. Not giving anger for anger,
one wins a double victory. One behaves for the good of both oneself and
the other person. Knowing well the other’s anger, be mindful and remain
calm. In this way you are healing both yourself and the other person.
(SN 11.14)
Reflection
This call for
calm in the face of anger is timeless—and timely. Anger can be an
effective emotion, but it is also toxic. Not only can things escalate
and get seriously out of hand when you return anger with anger, but
cultivating anger has a corrosive effect on your own heart and mind. If
you regard the angry person as caught up by a hostile force, you can
feel compassion for them rather than anger. This contributes to healing
both of you.
Daily Practice
Make a point of
remaining calm when someone else is angry and see what it feels like.
You may feel the impulse to get angry in return, but you can recognize
that this is an impulse you can abandon when it arises. By not giving in
to anger when it is provoked by others, you are not only protecting
yourself from the harmful effects of the toxic emotion but also helping
the other person, who often, like you, is a victim of anger.
Tomorrow: Reflecting upon Mental Action One week from today: Refraining from Frivolous Speech
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Whatever you intend,
whatever you plan, and whatever you have a tendency toward, that will
become the basis on 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 is like a mother with a son who is young, for she just
wants him to long enjoy the benefits of youth. (Vm 9.108)
Reflection
Appreciative
joy is what lovingkindness transforms into when we witness something
good and beneficial happening to another person, just as it turns to
compassion when we see harm being done. Appreciating the good fortune of
others is a readily available source of joy, as there are many
blessings that can be counted. You can choose to focus on the harm or
the good in the world around you and thereby feel either joy or sorrow.
Daily Practice
Practice
focusing on the good things around you, the many ways other people can
experience good fortune and well-being. Notice how your mind is uplifted
when you appreciate the positive aspects of others' experience. This is
a skill that can be developed with practice. It is not about shutting
out the misfortunes that abound in the world but about balancing them
with recognizing the many blessings that also exist.
Tomorrow: Refraining from Harsh Speech One week from today: Cultivating Equanimity
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Every
moment of awareness is a hammer stroke on this chain of conditioning.
Striking it with the force of wisdom and awareness, the chain gets
weaker and weaker until it breaks.
Joseph Goldstein, “Dependent Origination: The Twelve Links Explained”
MICHEL FOUCAULT,
French philosopher, historian and sociologist[d: 1984]. Foucault held a
chair at the Collège de France, giving it the title "History of Systems
of Thought," and taught at the University of California, Berkeley.
Foucault is best
known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most
notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system,
as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. Foucault's
work on power, and the relationships among power, knowledge, and
discourse, has been widely discussed and applied. Sometimes described as
postmodernist or post-structuralist, in the 1960s he was more often
associated with the structuralist movement. Foucault later distanced
himself from structuralism and always rejected the post-structuralist
and postmodernist labels.
Three volumes of The History of Sexuality
were published before Foucault's death in 1984. The first and most
referenced volume, The Will to Knowledge (previously known as An Introduction in English — Histoire de la sexualité, 1: la volonté de savoir
in French) was published in France in 1976, and translated in 1977,
focusing primarily on the last two centuries, and the functioning of
sexuality as an analytics of power related to the emergence of a science
of sexuality (scientia sexualis) and the emergence of biopower
in the West. In this volume he attacks the "repressive hypothesis," the
widespread belief that we have, particularly since the nineteenth
century, "repressed" our natural sexual drives. He shows that what we
think of as "repression" of sexuality actually constituted sexuality as a
core feature of our identities, and produced a proliferation of
discourse on the subject.
The second two volumes, The Use of Pleasure (Histoire de la sexualite, II: l'usage des plaisirs) and The Care of the Self (Histoire de la sexualité, III: le souci de soi)
dealt with the role of sex in Greek and Roman antiquity. Both were
published in 1984, the year of Foucault's death, with the second volume
being translated in 1985, and the third in 1986. In his lecture series
from 1979 to 1980 Foucault extended his analysis of government to its
'wider sense of techniques and procedures designed to direct the
behavior of men', which involved a new consideration of the 'examination
of conscience' and confession in early Christian literature. These
themes of early Christian literature seemed to dominate Foucault's work,
alongside his study of Greek and Roman literature, until the end of his
life. However, Foucault's death from AIDS-related causes left the work
incomplete, and the planned fourth volume of his History of Sexuality on Christianity was never published. The fourth volume was to be entitled Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair).
The volume was almost complete before Foucault's death and a copy of it
is privately held in the Foucault archive. It cannot be published under
the restrictions of Foucault's estate.
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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 the five aggregates as they actually are, then
one is not attached to the five aggregates. 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
The five
aggregates are the medium in which human experience unfolds, like the
water in which fish swim or the air in which birds fly. At every moment
all five aspects of experience co-arise: material form, feeling tones,
perceptions, volitional and emotional formations, and consciousness. The
skill to learn is how to be in this world without attachment, without
infatuation, and with craving and troubles abandoned.
Daily Practice
When you know
and see these aggregates as they actually are—that is, as impermanent
and interdependently conditioned processes with no essential core—it is
natural to no longer feel attached to them and thereby driven by them.
Try deconstructing your troubles by recognizing the extent to which they
all eventually boil down to experiential components of the aggregates
and as such are inherently empty.
Tomorrow: Cultivating Appreciative Joy One week from today: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering
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