Via Daily Dharma: An Unbroken Sequence

 A stable, solid body is a mental image superimposed onto a stream of events in the same way that a spinning propeller is seen as a circle. The constant succession of discrete acts of cognition or feeling appears as a monolithic event, just as the rapid change of frames in a film appears as a smooth continuum.

The Dalai Lama and Thubten Chodron, “An Unbroken Sequence”

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Via LGBTQ Nation

His grandparents found out he's gay from a news article. So they sent him an email about it.

No one told grandma and grandpa when he came out and now their adorable response has lit up the internet.

 

via khenposodargye // FB

 

https://www.khenposodargye.org/

Via Meditation RamDass // Aditya Hridayam Punyam Sarva Shatru Vinashanam

 

 

 

Ram Dass leads a meditation using the Heart of Aditya (the sun god) mantra: 

Aditya Hridayam Punyam Sarva Shatru Vinashanam

 

Via Dhamma Wheel // Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering

 

RIGHT VIEW Understanding the Noble Truth of the Way to the Cessation of Suffering

And what is the way leading to the cessation of suffering? It is just this noble eightfold path: that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. (MN 9) It happens that a fully awakened Buddha arises in the world, endowed with wisdom and impeccable behavior. Having realized awakening himself, he teaches the Dhamma, lovely in the beginning, middle, and end, and demonstrates a purified spiritual life. The Dhamma taught by the Buddha is heard by people, who gain trust in the Buddha and his teaching. (DN 2)

Reflection

After the first three noble truths have pointed out the existence of suffering, identified its cause as craving, and attested that craving can be ended, the fourth noble truth focuses on the treatment plan to follow in order to cure suffering. The eightfold path is an integrated path of gradually purifying behavior in the world, developing the mind through meditation, and understanding the nature of things more clearly.

Daily Practice

This path is a call to adventure, an invitation to undertake the process of gradual transformation that will carry anyone from a condition of affliction, moderate or grave, to one of greater happiness and well-being. It starts with hearing the teachings and having just enough trust to take your first steps and begin putting those teachings into practice. The path calls for many small steps taken carefully and mindfully.

Tomorrow: Cultivating Equanimity
One week from today: Understanding the Noble Truth of Suffering

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: The Power of Ritual

 The primary benefit of ritual is that it slows us down in a world that is moving at warp speed. Rituals invite us to be quiet and still. And they teach us that we are connected through time and place.

Barbara Becker, “Honoring the Water Children”

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Via White Crane Institute // Allen Ginsberg's AMERICA

 

Today's Gay Wisdom

2018 -

Allen Ginsberg's

AMERICA

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we end the human war? 
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb 
I don't feel good don't bother me. 
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. 
America when will you be angelic? 
When will you take off your clothes? 
When will you look at yourself through the grave? 
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? 
America why are your libraries full of tears? 
America when will you send your eggs to India? 
I'm sick of your insane demands. 
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? 
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. 
Your machinery is too much for me. 
You made me want to be a saint. 
There must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. 
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? 
I'm trying to come to the point. 
I refuse to give up my obsession. 
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. 
America the plum blossoms are falling. 
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for 
murder. 
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. 
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry. 
I smoke marijuana every chance I get. 
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. 
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. 
You should have seen me reading Marx. 
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. 
I won't say the Lord's Prayer. 
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. 
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over 
from Russia.

I'm addressing you. 
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine? 
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. 
I read it every week. 
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. 
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. 
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie 
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. 
It occurs to me that I am America. 
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me. 
I haven't got a chinaman's chance. 
I'd better consider my national resources. 
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals 
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and 
twentyfivethousand mental institutions. 
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in 
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. 
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. 
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? 
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his 
automobiles more so they're all different sexes 
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe 
America free Tom Mooney 
America save the Spanish Loyalists 
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die 
America I am the Scottsboro  boys. 
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they 
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the 
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the 
workers

it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835

Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have 
been a spy. 
America you don're really want to go to war. 
America it's them bad Russians. 
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. 
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take 
our cars from out our garages. 
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our 
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations. 
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. 
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. 
America this is quite serious. 
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. 
America is this correct? 
I'd better get right down to the job. 
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts 
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. 
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

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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

Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org

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Via LGBTQ Nation // BYU threatens to arrest students who protest the Mormon school's anti-LGBTQ policies

 

BYU threatens to arrest students who protest the Mormon school's anti-LGBTQ policies

The new school rules also say that student protests may not “deliberately attack or deride” the church or its leaders.

Via White Crane Institute // GEORGE MERRILL

 

L to R: George Merrill and Edward Carpenter

1928 -

GEORGE MERRILL, who died on this date (b: 1867) was the life partner of Edward Carpenter, an English utopian socialist, poet, philosopher and early activist for gay rights.

Merrill was a working-class man who was born and grew up in the slums of Sheffield; he had no formal education. He met Edward Carpenter on a train in 1891, and moved into Carpenter's home, a small holding at Millthorpe, Derbyshire, in February 1898, when Carpenter's previous domestic help, George Adams and his family, moved out when Adams retired. Merrill arrived at Millthorpe in a blizzard, "trundling with the help of two boys all his worldly goods in a handcart over the hills, and through a disheartening blizzard of snow." His arrival was commemorated by Carpenter in the poem "Hafiz to the Cupbearer", part of Carpenter's Towards Democracy which was published in stages between 1882 and 1902.

Merrill had previously worked in a newspaper office, a hotel, and in an ironworks. He was always officially Carpenter's servant, and he undertook the cooking and cleaning in the home, decorating and placing flowers in every room. Carpenter noted that "George in fact was accepted and one may say beloved by both my manual worker friends and my more aristocratic friends." He had a fine baritone voice and liked to sing comical songs.

The two lived openly as a couple for almost forty years, until Merrill's death in 1928. Carpenter died the following year and was buried beside Merrill at the Mount Cemetery in Guildford, Surrey.

The relationship between Carpenter and Merrill was the inspiration for E. M. Forster's novel Maurice, and the character of the gamekeeper Alec Scudder was in part modelled after George Merrill. The novelist D. H. Lawrence read the manuscript of Maurice, which was not published until after Forster's death. The manuscript and Carpenter and Merrill's rural lifestyle influenced Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which also involves a gamekeeper becoming the lover of a member of the upper classes. Merrill and Carpenter are featured in William di Canzio's homage to Maurice, Alec when Alec and Maurice elope to the countryside.

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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

Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org

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Via Daily Dharma: Help Yourself Help Others

 To help others is to help oneself. It may also be said that to help oneself is to help others, since real, effective help is not possible as long as we ourselves are deluded and filled with greed and hatred.

Francis Dojun Cook, “Bodhicitta’s Ripple Effect”

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Via Dhamma Wheel // Establishing Mindfulness of Mind

 

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 desire, one is aware: "The mind is devoid of desire." One is just aware, just mindful: "There is mind." And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)

Reflection

The mind is merely aware of an object, either a sensory or mental object, much like a mirror reflecting accurately whatever comes before it. Emotional states, such as desire, co-arise every moment and flood the mind, often distorting or coloring what is seen, heard, felt, or cognized. Sometimes desire is present, sometimes it is not. Here we are being encouraged to notice when it is not.

Daily Practice

Our emotional life flickers moment by moment as quickly as our mental life does, and the stream of consciousness is permeated by a stream of attitudes, intentions, and views. By noticing when desire is present and absent, we learn to recognize that it is just a passing state that sometimes occurs and sometimes does not. Practice "not clinging to anything in the world," including the presence or absence of sensory desire.

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)

Reflection

Remember that jhāna practice is not something that can be undertaken lightly or sporadically and usually requires the protected conditions of a retreat center and the guidance of an experienced teacher. The jhānas are mentioned a lot in the early texts and form the core discussion of right concentration. But mostly we just hear the standard formula repeated in various contexts without much detail on how to practice.

Daily Practice

The transition from the second to the third phase of absorption has to do with the mellowing of joy, which is an almost effervescent energetic upwelling of pleasant bodily sensation into an experience of mental and emotional equanimity. The body still experiences pleasure, but the mind settles into an even and balanced awareness of the pleasant feeling tone that is not attached to it in any way.

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
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Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Dhamma Wheel // Developing Unarisen Healthy States

 

RIGHT EFFORT Developing Unarisen Healthy States

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 investigation of states awakening factor. (MN 141)

Reflection

Here right effort is defined as actively encouraging the better aspects of our character to emerge from unconscious potential to conscious embodiment. We are all capable of kindness, for example. Why not try more often to be kind? We are capable of wisdom; let’s actively try to encourage it. This suggests that happiness—the regular manifestation of healthy mental and emotional states—is something we can make happen through effort.

Daily Practice

The positive mental state singled out in this passage is the second factor of awakening, called the investigation of states. When mindfulness is present, it is natural that the mind takes great interest in experience and investigates its mental and emotional states carefully. See what it feels like to be curious about the detailed textures of your experience and see what you can do to evoke and support this sense of regularly looking closely at your mental states.

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

Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: Turn On Your Light

If delusion is walking around in a darkened room, wisdom is turning on the light. People and things, and the room itself, are all the same, but now we can see them clearly.

Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, “Pocket Paramis: Wisdom”

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Via Tricycle // Buddhist Shorts Film Festival 2022

 

Buddhist Shorts Film Festival 2022 Now Streaming!

Check out this year’s lineup of five short films documenting Buddhist diversity around the world.

Watch now »

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Misbehaving Among Sensual Pleasures

 

RIGHT LIVING Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Misbehaving Among Sensual Pleasures Sensual misconduct is unhealthy. Refraining from sensual misconduct is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning sensual misconduct, one abstains from misbehaving among sensual pleasures. (MN 41) One practices thus: "Others may engage in sensual misconduct, but I will abstain from sensual misconduct." (MN 8) A person reflects thus: "If someone were to commit adultery with my partner, that would not be pleasing and agreeable to me. Now if I were to commit adultery with the partner of another, that would not be pleasing and agreeable to the other. How can I inflict on another what is displeasing and disagreeable to me?" Having reflected thus, one abstains from sexual misconduct, exhorts others to abstain from it, and speaks in praise of abstinence from it. (SN 55.7)

Reflection The practical definition of the precept against sexual misbehavior is defined in the context of householder or layperson life as fidelity or honesty in relationships. When an intimate partnership (of any gender combination) involves a mutual promise of exclusivity, this is to be respected. Cheating involves causing hurt and not being truthful, both of which are inherently unhealthy and harmful. Daily Practice Relationships are a rich area for daily practice. This text invites us to explore the application of the Golden Rule in relationships, in both large and small ways. It emphasizes that a pledge of fidelity works both ways and that there are also countless minor instances of abuse of trust and integrity that can come under the gaze of awareness. Look to see if there is anything you do, however small, that you would not want your partner to do. Tomorrow: Developing Unarisen Healthy States One week from today: Abstaining from Intoxication Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel Questions? Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Tricycle // What We Gain When We Learn to Let Go

 

What We Gain When We Learn to Let Go By Gil Fronsdal

Learning to let go skillfully is essential to a happy life—and to the path of awakening.

Read more »