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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.
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RIGHT INTENTION
Cultivating Compassion |
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It’s
not that there’s no self, because that’s ridiculous. You’re you, and
I’m me. But the self doesn’t exist in the way we imagined it does. . . .
Try to find it as it really exists, not as you think it should.
“The Zen of Therapy”, Interview with Mark Epstein by James Shaheen
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Coretta Scott King died in Rosarito Beach, Mexico on this day. The great civil-rights activist and tireless supporter of Gay Rights succumbed to complications from a stroke and ovarian cancer. In arguing against a constitutional amendment banning Gay marriage King said, "Gay and Lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union. A constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages is a form of gay bashing and it would do nothing at all to protect traditional marriage."
In 2003, she invited the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force to take part in observances of the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech. It was the first time that an LGBT rights group had been invited to a major event of the African American community. King said her husband supported the quest for equality by LGBT people and reminded her critics that the 1963 March on Washington was organized by Bayard Rustin, an openly Gay civil rights activist.
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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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When
you are practicing zazen, do not try to stop your thinking. Let it stop
by itself. If something comes into your mind, let it come in, and let
it go out. It will not stay long.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, “Small Mind, Big Mind”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
TULKU URGYEN RINPOCHE
"Shamatha and vipashyana is ultimately indivisible.
Both are naturally included and practiced in Ati Yoga.
The extraordinary shamatha is to resolve and remain in the true emptiness itself. Rather than the mere idea of emptiness, we resolve emptiness in actuality, in direct experience, and remain naturally in that state. The genuine shamatha is not to create anything artificial whatsoever, but to simply remain in the experience of emptiness. Vipashayana means not to deviate from that state."
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When
we begin to feel the benefits of meditation practice, it is like
putting on glasses for the first time. Once we learn to sit with the
breath, be with the present moment, and create space between ourselves
and our thoughts, our lives come into focus, and we awaken to the
possibility of something else—the alleviation of suffering.
Jessica Angima, “The High of New Beginnings—and the Joy of What Comes Next”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Maintaining a strong grip on the habits ~ Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche https://justdharma.com/s/ch8ke Millions of people in this world are interested in some version of meditation, or yoga, or one of the many so-called spiritual activities that are now so widely marketed. A closer look at why people engage in these practices reveals an aim that has little to do with liberation from delusion, and everything do to with their desperation to escape busy, unhappy lives, and heartfelt longing for a healthy, stress-free, happy life. All of which are romantic illusions. So, where do we find the roots of these illusions? Mainly in our habitual patterns and their related actions. Of course, no one of sound mind imagines any of us would willingly live an illusion. But we are contrary beings, and even though we are convinced we would shun a life built on self-deception, we continue to maintain a strong grip on the habits that are the cause of countless delusions. – Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche from the book "Not for Happiness: A Guide to the So-Called Preliminary Practices" ISBN: 978-1611800302 - https://amzn.to/17Vw76H Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche on the web: http://www.siddharthasintent.org/ http://khyentsefoundation.org http://deerpark.in http://lotusoutreach.org http://84000.co http://dzongsar.justdharma.com Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche biography: http://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Dzongsar_Khyentse_Rinpoche
Good
instruction and good teaching do not provide explanations. They tell
you what to do and, to a certain extent, how to do it, and it is through
the doing that you discover how the practice works.
Ken McLeod, “Where the Thinking Stops”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
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Today is INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY
Why today? Well on this date in 1945 the Soviet Red Army arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland and liberated the survivors.
This is the day we remember the genocide of approximately 11 to 17 million people by the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazi) regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler during World War II. This figure includes the deliberate extermination of six million European Jews, and the Nazi's systematic murder of Roma; Soviet civilians, Soviet prisoners of war; ethnic Poles; the disabled; Homosexual men; and political and religious opponents. Millions of lives taken by hatred and intolerance.
The term “holocaust” comes from the Greek holókaustos: hólos, "whole" and kaustós, "burnt". It is also known as The Shoah.
The treatment and killings of the over 15,000 homosexual men is less known but we observe and remember them today. Between 1933-45, more than 100,000 men were arrested and registered by police as homosexuals ("Rosa Listen" or "Pink Lists"), and of these, some 50,000 were officially sentenced. Most of these men spent time in regular prisons, and an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 of the total sentenced were incarcerated in concentration camps. It is unclear how many of these 5,000 to 15,000 eventually perished in the concentration camps.
The leading scholar Ruediger Lautman however believes that the death rate in concentration camps of imprisoned homosexuals may have been as high as 60%. Homosexuals in camps were treated in an unusually cruel manner by their captors and were also persecuted by their fellow inmates. This was a factor in the relatively high death rate for homosexuals, compared to other "anti-social groups".
James D. Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than criminal acts, and the "gesundes Volksempfinden" ("healthy sensibility of the people") became the leading normative legal principle. In 1936, Himmler created the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion". Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment," and homosexuals were consequently regarded as "defilers of German blood." The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others. They encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbors.
Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation" where they were identified by yellow armbands and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right trouser leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse. Hundreds were castrated by court order. They were humiliated, tortured, used in hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed. Steakley writes that the full extent of Gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany. Around two percent of German homosexuals were persecuted by Nazis.
More recently however German state television channel Deutsche Welle updated this figure to "almost 55,000" deaths following the study of documents from archives in East Germany that had been inaccessible to researchers for decades after the war.
After the war, the treatment of homosexuals in concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries. Some that did escape were even re-arrested and imprisoned based on evidence found during the Nazi years. It was not until the 1980s that governments acknowledged this episode, and not until 2002 that the German government apologized to the Gay community.
THE PINK TRIANGLE: One of the oldest symbols of the modern Gay rights movement is the PINK TRIANGLE, which originated from the Nazi concentration camp badges that Homosexuals were required to wear on their clothing. It is estimated that as many as 220,000 gays and Lesbians perished alongside the 6,000,000 Jews whom the Nazis exterminated in their death camps during World War II as part of Hitler's so-called final solution. For this reason, the Pink Triangle is used both as an identification symbol and as a memento to remind both its wearers and the general public of the atrocities that Gays suffered under Nazi persecutors. ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) also adopted the inverted pink triangle to symbolize the "active fight back" against the disease "rather than a passive resignation to fate."
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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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Thoughts
come and go. Feelings come and go. Allow yourself to experience the
transient nature of thoughts and feelings, welcoming everything that
arises as just this, not me, not mine.
Sandra Weinberg, “Eating and the Wheel of Life”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE