Via Daily Dharma: Calm Your Breath

 If we examine the body and mind carefully, we notice a connection between the breath and how we feel. When the breath is calm and relaxed, we notice that the body’s energy is also calm.

—Anyen Rinpoche and Allison Choying Zangmo, “Tibetan Yoga Techniques for Better Breathing”

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Via Daily Dharma: Staying on the Path

 Once you recognize that everyday reality is merely a reflection of some deeper truth that’s close at hand but hidden from view, you’ve embarked on a search that you can never really abandon, no matter how far you seem to stray. 

—Stephan Bodian, “Encountering the Gateless Gate”

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CIRCUS OF BOOKS Trailer (2020) Netflix

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - December 27, 2020 💌

 

Of course, it’s embarrassing not to be infinitely wise, but I feel that what we can offer each other is our truth of the growing process, which means we fall on our faces again and again. Sri Aurobindo says, “You get up, you take a step, you fall on your face, you get up, you look sheepishly at God, you brush yourself off, you take another step, you fall on your face, you get up, you look sheepishly at God, you brush yourself off, you take another step…” That’s the journey of awakening.

If you were awakened already, you wouldn’t do that, so my suggestion is you relax and don’t expect that you will always make the wisest decisions. Realize that sometimes you make a decision and, if it wasn’t the right one, you change it. 

- Ram Dass -

Via Daily Dharma: Acknowledge Your Thoughts

 Don’t feel disturbed by the thinking mind. You are not practicing to prevent thinking, but rather to recognize and acknowledge thinking whenever it arises.

—Sayadaw U Tejaniya, “Observing Minds Want to Know”

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Via Tricycle // Forgiveness

Forgiveness Is Not Buddhist

Buddhist teachings do not advise asking others to absolve us from our misdeeds. Instead, they outline a path to purification that will change our relationship to reactive patterns.

 

In contemporary Buddhist settings, forgiveness is interpreted in several ways. One is as a way of letting go of our expectations and disappointments in others—in other words, letting go of our attachment to a different past. Another interpretation is as an extension of lovingkindness. In the Tibetan tradition, it is sometimes presented as an extension of patience or of compassion. These are all key practices, and they appear in virtually every Buddhist tradition, but to call them forgiveness? Well, that may be unforgivable. As Idries Shah writes in Knowing How to Know: A Practical Philosophy in the Sufi Tradition, when you adopt the methods developed in another culture, those methods and the ways of thinking associated with them eventually take over, and you lose touch with your own understanding and training. In the same way, by importing the foreign (to Buddhism) notion of forgiveness, contemporary Buddhists are unwittingly importing a very different system of thought and practice and undermining the powerful mystical practices in Buddhism that may have inspired them in the first place.

 

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Via Daily Dharma: Lead Yourself Toward Peace

 The content of life, the what, is always what it is at any given moment, just the fact, but it’s how we relate to that moment that will either lead us toward or away from more suffering.

—Mark Van Buren, “Relating to Life”

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Via Daily Dharma: The Gifts Beyond Gifts

 When someone gives you something precious it means that, beyond the usefulness of the gift, you are precious. The gift marks a moment when you are welcomed into the other person’s heart.

—John Tarrant, “The Erotic Life of Emptiness”

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"Nurturing Compassion" Trailer | Film available on iTunes, Google Play, ...

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Lamp in the darkness ~ 17th Karmapa

 

Lamp in the darkness ~ 17th Karmapa https://justdharma.com/s/mdcw7  

However much fighting there is in the world, however much darkness there is, we must be able to serve as small lamps in that darkness.  – 17th Karmapa  source: https://bit.ly/2JznYwH  

17th Karmapa on the web: http://kagyuoffice.org http://kagyu.org http://kagyumonlam.org http://rumtek.org http://karmapa.justdharma.com  

17th Karmapa biography: http://kagyuoffice.org/karmapa/

Via Tricycle // Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter

 

Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter
By Ruth King

In Black and Buddhist, Ruth King shares reflections from her journey to find freedom in a world of continuing racial discrimation.

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Via Daily Dharma: Remember You’re Always Connected

 If I ever find myself alone and feel a pang of fear that I have been cast aside and removed from the world, I can remember that it is not even possible for me to be completely alone. I am inextricably woven into an ever-changing web of connections.

—Lauren Krauze, “Not Alone During the Holidays”

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Via White Crane Institute // On this day

 

Died

John Boswell

1994 -

JOHN BOSWELL, A groundbreaking American historian died on this date (b. 1947); A prominent historian and a professor at Yale University, many of Boswell's studies focused on the issue of homosexuality and religion, specifically homosexuality and Christianity.

A gifted medieval philologist who spoke (inter alia) fluent Catalan, he received his doctorate from Harvard in 1975, whereupon he joined the Yale history faculty as its rising star; he was made full professor in 1982. In 1987, Boswell helped organize and found the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center at Yale, which is now the Research Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He was named the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History in 1990, when he was also appointed to a two-year term as chair of the Yale history department.

Boswell was a gifted and devoted teacher. His undergraduate lectures in medieval history were renowned for their organization, erudition, and wit, with the course often making the "top 10" for highest enrollment. The multi-talented Boswell would pen his comments on student papers in perfectly executed medieval calligraphy.

Boswell was the author of the ground-breaking (one might say ground-moving) and, to some, controversial book Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980), which, according to Chauncey et al (1989), "offered a revolutionary interpretation of the Western tradition, arguing that the Roman Catholic Church had not condemned gay people throughout its history, but rather, at least until the twelfth century, had alternately evinced no special concern about homosexuality or actually celebrated love between men." The book was crowned with the American Book Award for History and the Stonewall Book Award in 1981.

He is known primarily, however, as author of The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Villard, 1994), in which he argues that the adelphopoiia liturgy was evidence that attitude of the Christian church towards homosexuality has changed over time, and that early Christians did, on occasion, accept same-sex relationships.

Rites of so-called "same-sex union" (Boswell's proposed translation) occur in ancient prayer-books of both the western and eastern churches. They are rites of adelphopoiesis, literally Greek for “the making of brothers.” Boswell, despite the fact that the rites explicitly state that the union involved in adelphopoiesis is a "spiritual" and not a "carnal" one, argued that these should be regarded as sexual unions similar to marriage.

This is a highly controversial point of Boswell's text, as other scholars have dissenting views of this interpretation, and believe that they were instead rites of becoming adopted brothers, or "blood brothers." Boswell pointed out such evidence as an icon of two saints, Saints Sergius and Bacchus (at St. Catherine's on Mount Sinai), and drawings, such as one he interprets as depicting the wedding feast of Emperor Basil to his "partner", John. Boswell sees Jesus as fulfilling the role of the "pronubus" or in modern parallel, best man.

Boswell made many detailed translations of these rites in Same-Sex Unions, and claimed that one mass Gay wedding occurred only a couple of centuries ago in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, the cathedral seat of the Pope as Bishop of Rome. Boswell's writings touched off detailed debate in The Irish Times, and the article that triggered off the debate, a major feature in the "Rite and Reason" religion column in the paper by a respected Irish historian and religious commentator, has been reproduced on many websites.

Boswell himself was throughout his life a devout Roman Catholic. Although he was orthodox in most of his beliefs, he strongly disagreed with his church's stated opposition to homosexual behavior and relationships. To a certain degree much of the work and research Boswell did regarding the Christian church's historical relationship with homosexuality can be seen as an attempt (which some regard as successful) to rationalize his own sexual orientation (as opposed to the “church fathers’” opposition being a way to rationalize theirs).

In Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories (1982, revised), Boswell compares the constructionist-essentialist positions to the realist-nominalist dichotomy. He also lists three types of sexual taxonomies:

• All or most humans are polymorphously sexual ... external accidents, such as socio-cultural pressure, legal sanctions, religious beliefs, historical or personal circumstances determine the actual expression of each person's sexual feelings.
• Two or more sexual categories, usually, but not always based on sexual object choice.
• One type of sexual response [is] normal ... all other variants abnormal.

Boswell died of complications from AIDS on December 24, 1994, age 47.

Via Daily Dharma: Honoring Loved Ones

 You hold the qualities of those who have passed away in your heart and mind, and you also put those qualities into practice in the way that you live.

—Guo Jun, “A Special Transmission”

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - December 23, 2020 💌

 

Surrender to the One. Surrender to your atman, because you have the One inside of you. That means you don’t surrender to the God with a beard, you surrender to the God inside. My relationship with Maharajji is an inside job. Once he left his body, I could very much identify him inside of me, and I would surrender to that voice inside. That voice is joyful, compassionate, loving, peaceful, and wise. I find it very enjoyable to surrender to that God inside.

If you shift your identification into the atman, you will see what the world looks like to the One. It’s quite different than the world you perceive through your ego. It’s a fun thing to surrender. 

- Ram Dass -