Via Lions Roar: One Simple Practice That Changes Everything

The bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara embodies universal compassion and the intention to save all sentient beings from suffering. Photo courtesy of the Norton Simon Art Foundation, from the estate of Jennifer Jones Simon.

I’ll never forget my astonishment when I heard the Tibetan teacher Nyshul Khen Rinpoche say, “Everything hangs on intention.” I thought, “Of course! Nothing happens without intention. It’s so crucial!”

Wise intention is one of the steps of the Buddha’s eightfold path, and it might be the most important one.

Wise intention is what keeps our lives heading in the right direction. If I want to drive north to Seattle from my home in the Bay Area, I need to keep checking that the sun is setting on my left to be sure I’m heading in the right direction. The practice of wise intention is like checking the sun: it’s a way to make sure our actions and our lives are going in the direction we want.

Wise intention is the cornerstone of wise effort, of actions that are wholesome and positive. The instructions for wise effort call for us to continually evaluate our actions and choose those that lead to less suffering and eschew those that lead to more suffering. This is easily determined by checking if the action is being fueled by wholesome or unwholesome intentions. So clarity about our intentions needs to be present to inform wise effort.

Here’s an example of the importance of wise intention.

The date was September 12, 2001, the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City. It was a Wednesday, the day of my regularly scheduled class at Spirit Rock Insight Meditation Center.

Many more people than usual filled the room. People told stories of connections they had to people who had been in the buildings, or to family and friends who lived in New York. Others spoke about where they were when they heard the news and how they’d felt at that moment. The atmosphere was calm and sober, and I remember thinking that having permission to talk about upset in a community of shared values is a grace.

At the end of the class, I suggested that we recite these Buddhist precepts, which express our intentions as practitioners:

I undertake the precept to abstain from harming living beings.
I undertake the precept to abstain from taking that which is not freely given.
I undertake the precept to speak without being abusive or exploitive.
I undertake the precept to abstain from sexuality that is exploitive or abusive.
I undertake the precept to refrain from intoxicating my mind into heedless behavior.

  
The experience of affirming together our dedication to wise and kind behavior was like a soothing balm to our frightened minds. I felt consoled, and I believe that others did as well. It seemed to restore some faith and confidence in the future to be surrounded by people who trust the Buddha’s teaching that “Hatred is never ended by hatred. By non-hatred is hatred ended. This is the eternal law.”

I think of this experience as supporting the profound centrality of wise intention. Here is one more example.

My friends Dwayne and Sara expressed their wedding vows this way, in their own version of the Buddhist precepts. They said to each other:

Because I love you, I promise never to harm you.
Because I love you, I promise to never take anything you don’t want to give me.
Because I love you, I’ll speak only truthfully and kindly to you.
Because I love you, I’ll treat your body with love.
Because I love you, I will keep my mind free from confusion so that I act only out of wisdom.

Dwayne and Sara are now into the second decade of their marriage, and they continue to say these vows to each other every morning. 

Reaffirming their intentions for how they will be together sets up a signal in their minds so they can catch a thoughtless word or action in advance of it manifesting. 

They are very happy.

Although I have argued for the primacy of wise intention, every aspect of the eightfold path is equally crucial. That’s because each part of the path is integral to all the others.

Traditional lists of the eightfold path are numbered from one through eight, and therefore seem to have a beginning and an end. 

Wise understanding and wise intention often top the list and are described as the impetus for beginning a dedicated practice. These lists then continue with the three aspects of ethical training—wise action, speech, and livelihood—and end with the mental discipline cultivated through wise effort, mindfulness, and concentration. Other lists begin with ethics, continue with mind training, and end with the wisdom components that manifest as kindness and compassion.
Although the traditional lists describe these trainings as steps on a path, they seem to me to be more like points on a circle, since every one of the eight aspects is intimately reflected in and supported by every other aspect.

In a sermon the Buddha preached for his son, Rahula, he called for considering before, during, and after every action whether it was potentially abusive or exploitive or genuinely rooted in kind intent. 

This requires sufficient clarity of mind, through wise mindfulness and concentration, to discern negative intent, and sufficient wise effort to exercise self-restraint. Wise understanding deeply intuits the legacy of losses that we share with other livings beings, and wise intention expresses our ever-growing resolve to respond to all life with compassion.

In this way, all eight aspects of the path work together to help us lead a wholesome and awakened life, with wise intention the guide that points us in the right direction and brings us back on course when we lose our way.

Make the jump here to read the original and more 

Via Daily Dharma / Forget Yourself

When you focus attention on someone or something that inspires awe in you, you forget yourself. You also forget yourself, and you may even forget your Self.

—Ken McLeod, "Where the Thinking Stops"

Via Daily Dharma / Accomplishing Now

[The] drive for future accomplishment just builds up the habit of always striving for something other than what we have right here and now. The result is that even when we reach our goal, we’re still being driven by those habits to look for the next thing.

—Brad Warner, "How to Not Waste Time"

Via Ram Dass

 

When the faith is strong enough, it is sufficient just to be. It’s a journey towards simplicity, towards quietness, towards a kind of joy that is not in time. It’s a journey that has taken us from primary identification with our body and our psyche, on to an identification with God, and ultimately beyond identification.

TED 2017: His Holiness Pope Francis: Why the only future worth building includes everyone

Via Daily Dharma / Acknowledging Destructive Emotions

If an emotion, such as hatred or envy, is judged to be destructive, then it is simply recognized as such. It is neither expressed through violent thoughts, words or deeds, nor is it suppressed or denied as incompatible with a “spiritual” life.

—Stephen Batchelor, "Foundations of Mindfulness"

Via Daily Dharma / The Benefits of Heightened Awareness

If you’re sensitive to what’s going on around you—sensitive to the weather, to your immediate environment—then you’re going to be sensitive to current events and everything else that enters your life.

—David Budbill, "A Voice from the Outside"

Via Daily Dharma / Rejecting Consumer Consciousness

A world that truly understands the nature of consciousness could shift away from the hedonic treadmill of consumerism and toward the infinitely renewable resource of genuine happiness that is cultivated by training the mind.

—B. Alan Wallace, "Within You Without You"

Via Daily Dharma / How to Meditate Anywhere

Anytime you can go out and keep all of your visual and auditory senses alive—looking above eye level, hearing behind you as well as in front of you—you’re performing meditation in the natural world. You’re poised for any stimulus coming from anywhere. It’s as down-to-earth as you can get and still be up in the sky.

—James H. Austin, quoted in Zenshin Michael Haederle’s, "This Is Your Brain on Zen"

Carpool | Google Home now supports multiple users

Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object.

Via Daily Dharma / Changing Your Way of Being

Meditation is not merely a useful technique or mental gymnastic, but part of a balanced system designed to change the way we go about things at the most fundamental level.

—Judy Lief, "Meditation Is Not Enough Alone"

Via Daily Dharma / Breaking Habits

Habituation devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.

—Viktor Shklovsky in Henry Shukman’s, "The Unfamiliar Familiar"

Via Daily Dharma / Are You Ready to Meet Reality?

In order to open—in meditation and in life in general—we must let go of our familiar thoughts and emotions, we must step out from behind the safe curtain of our inner rehearsals and onto the stage of reality, even if it’s for just a brief moment.

—Michael Carroll, "Bringing Spiritual Confidence in the Workplace"

Via Ram Dass

My path is the path of Guru Kripa, which means ‘grace of the guru’. It seems like a sort of strange path in the West, but my path involves my relationship to Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba. The way I do that is that I just hang out with him all the time. I have an imaginary playmate in a way, I mean, he’s dead. He dropped his body, yet he seems so alive to me, because I have invested that form in my mind as an emotional connection to that deeper truth.

Because for me, Maharajji is the cosmic giggle. He is the wisdom that transcends time and space. He is the unconditional lover. He is the total immediate presence.

Via Daily Dharma / What Makes a Good Sit?

Great ecstatic meditation periods have never been celebrated by teachers; we’re always told to go back to the cushion, to let go of all that arises.

—Trudy Walter, "Leaning into Rawness"

Fight Back!

Via Daily Dharma / What the World Needs Now

The overcoming of clinging through the wisdom of selflessness, the development of empathic love, and the expression of both in conscientious compassion have today become imperatives.

—Venerable Bhikku Bodhi, "The Need of the Hour"

Via Daily Dharma / Working with Your Mistakes

In human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don’t try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary.

—Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, "Your Life is Your Practice"

Via Daily Dharma / Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

Comparing yourself is an almost instantaneous way to connect with suffering.

—Denise Di Novi, "This Buddhist Life"

Via Baha'i Quotes Syndication Service: Be Not a Hypocrite...

Be thou of the people of hell-fire,
but be not a hypocrite.

Be thou an unbeliever,
but be not a plotter.

Make thy home in taverns,
but tread not the path
of the mischief-maker.

Fear thou God,
but not the priest.

Give to the executioner thy head, but not thy heart.

Let thine abode be under the stone,
but seek not the shelter of the cleric.

Thus doth the Holy Reed intone its melodies, and the Nightingale of Paradise warble its song, so that He may infuse life eternal into the mortal frames of men, impart to the temples of dust the essence of the Holy Spirit and the heavenly Light, and draw the transient world, through the potency of a single word, unto the Everlasting Kingdom.

Baha'u'llah, From a Tablet - translated from the Persian
Compilations, The Compilation of Compilations vol II, #2050. p. 337

 

People who are very enamored with their intellect don’t trust the inner space. They don’t know how to tune to it. They just haven’t noticed its existence, because they were so busy thinking about everything. There’s very little you can say to somebody who’s going through that, because it isn’t real to them. It doesn’t exist.

You can remind them of moments they’ve been out of their mind, because once you have acknowledged the existence of that other plane of reality, in which you know that wisdom exists, then immediately all the moments when you had it in life that you treated as irrelevant or as error, or as, “I was out of my mind,” suddenly become real to you, and you start to trust that dimension more.

Via Daily Dharma / What Really Matters

We can’t live ethically without caring about ourselves as well as others.

—Winton Higgins, "Treading the Path with Care"

Via Daily Dharma / What Really Matters

If we're not reflecting on the impermanent nature of life, then there are a lot of unimportant things that seem important. Our jobs seem important. Money seems important. But if we're really reflecting on impermanence then we can see that the important things are compassion and loving others—giving to others and taking care of others.

—Allison Choying Zangmo, "Living and Dying with Confidence"

Via Daily Dharma / What Is the Self?

A human being is a storytelling machine. The self is a story.

—Paul Brooks, "The Space Between"

Via Ram Dass

As we grow in our consciousness, there will be more compassion and more love, and then the barriers between people, between religions, between nations will begin to fall. Yes, we have to beat down the separateness.

Via Daily Dharma / Asking Questions

Because people try to conquer others instead of gaining victory over themselves, there are problems. The Buddha taught that one should simply gain victory over oneself.

—Sayadaw U Pandita, "The Best Remedy"

Via Daily Dharma / Thou Shalt Not Covet

Not coveting a single thing is the greatest gift you can give to the universe.

—Kodo Sawaki Roshi, "To You"

Via Daily Dharma / Discovering the Mind

We do not need to be afraid of our mind. We can go on a journey of discovery and experiment. Then we are able to play with our mental processes and develop our mental ability in wisdom and compassion.

—Martine Batchelor, "Life’s Meditation, Mental Habits, and Creative Imagination"

Via Daily Dharma: A Daily Discovery

Revisiting [meditation] on a regular basis provides each of us with a unique and intimate rhythm of discovery.

—Lauren Krauze, "A Watchfulness Routine for Writing"

Via Ram Dass

You get to be at home with change. You get to be at home with uncertainty. You get to be at home with not knowing how it all comes out. and you make a plan knowing full well that it may be totally irrelevant a moment later, and you’re at peace with that.

I find that when I’m at a choice point, the best thing to do is to quiet and empty and go back to square one. But I try to stay at the choice point as long as I can, because that’s as interesting a place as any other place, to stay with not knowing what to do. But if you listen, it all becomes apparent in time. Patience is good. The tolerance for not knowing what’s what is quite an art form.

Via Daily Dharma / The Sustenance of Life:

We humans have a way of touching each other’s lives deeply even despite ourselves. In finding our way to each other, we find what is, after all, already there, waiting to be found, wanting to be found.

—Andrew Cooper, "Life’s Hidden Support"

Via Daily Dharma / Heart Workout

We have to work diligently to keep our hearts open, just as we have to work to keep other muscles in the body strong.

—Valerie Mason-John, "Brief Teachings"

Via Daily Dharma / Social Responsibility

When I begin taking care of how I suffer—how I too am greedy, angry, or confused—then I develop my capacity to respond to those same energies in individuals and institutions alike.

—Michael Stone, "G-20 Dharma"

 

In the early stages of sadhana (spiritual work), you take your dominant thing and you work with it. You keep doing it and doing it, and you love it, and it gets thicker and thicker. But later on in your sadhana, for me anyway, I began to taste freedom and yearn for it so much that I looked and I shifted around.

There’s a point where you go towards the fire of purification, towards the places you’re stuck. You can feel where your stuff is – what’s got your number, and you realize that as long as there’s any aversion left in you, you’re stuck and you end up wanting to eat your aversions.

Via Daily Dharma / Everything Is Useful

 Whatever the circumstance, bodily movement or stillness, feeling well or distressed, with good concentration or scattered attention, everything can be brought back to awareness.

—Kittisaro, "Tangled in Thought"

Via Daily Dharma / Finding Stability in Impermanence

Change is good, we’re told. A fresh breeze blown through life keeps us on our toes, fully alive until we die.

—Joan Duncan Oliver, "Love, Loss and the Grocery Store"

Via Daily Dharma / Moments Make a Life

Our entire lives are nothing but a chain of moments in which we perceive one sight, taste, smell, touch, sound, feeling, or thought after another. Outside of this process, nothing else happens.

—Cynthia Thatcher, "What’s So Great About Now?"

In the clarity of a quiet mind, there is room for all that is actually happening and whatever else might also be possible.

As we've discovered, it is possible to notice a single thought, sensation, or situation arise, but not get totally lost in identifying with it. We observe the cloud but remain focused on the sky, see the leaf but hold in vision the river. We are that which is aware of the totality. And our skills develop with practice.

First, we have to appreciate the value of such qualities of mind and desire to develop them. Next, we have to have faith in the possibility that we can indeed make progress. Finally, we have to explore and practice appropriate techniques.

Twenty minutes per day of such practice can lead to results and the incentive to go deeper still. Continuous practice brings about great transformation of mind and leads to a new quality of service.

Via Daily Dharma / Forgiveness Liberates

I think the reason that remarkable stories of forgiveness take our breath away is that we instantly feel the liberation in the lifting of boundaries, the end of separation, of “inside” and “outside.”

—Roshi Nancy Mujo Baker, "The Seventh Zen Precept"

Via Daily Dharma / Do Less, Live More:

It has been said, and with good reason, that dying people never wish they had spent more time in the office. Doing matters little to the dying. As death draws near, it is relationships—with family, with friends, with God—that hold the greatest appeal.

—Dr. William Thomas, as quoted in C. W. Huntington, Jr.'s "The Miracle of the Ordinary"

Via vice.com/Broadly: Trump Strips LGBT People of Workplace Protections, Then Erases Them from Census

This week, President Trump quietly nullified an order that required companies receiving large federal contracts to show that they have complied with various federal laws, many of which relate to discrimination in the workplace.

Below is what happened on Trump's 47th day in office. You can find out what damage was done every other day so far on the Saddest Calendar on the Internet.
 
Not even two weeks after the US Department of Health and Human Services eliminated questions about LGBT people on two crucial national surveys on the elderly and the disabled, the Trump administration extended their erasure of LGBT Americans yesterday when they announced they would not include the option to declare sexual orientation and gender identity on the 2020 US Census. Earlier in the morning, LGBT advocates thought they had a triumph, as the Census Bureau released a list of proposed subjects for 2020 that included questions relating to the above, which were new additions that LGBT rights advocates have been pushing for. But then the Census Bureau made a follow-up announcement.

"The Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey report released today inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix," the Census Bureau said in a statement. "This topic is not being proposed to Congress for the 2020 Census or American Community Survey."

The mistake was more than just a gaffe, as advocates have been stressing the need for the Census to acknowledge the gender and sexuality of those from whom its collecting data to ensure that LGBT people are getting equal access to the rights and protections granted to heterosexual and cisgender individuals. In a statement from the National LGBTQ Task Force, Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director Meghan Maury expressed her organization's disappointment.

Continue reading on Broadly.

Via Ike's Man-Cave / FB:

Via Daily Dharma / Finding a New Kind of Connection

As a student of the dharma, I believe that what we call difference in the negative sense of the word is only a perceived lack of connection, and that difference offers the potential to create or manifest connection in a new and fulfilling way.

—Patricia Mushim Ikeda, "Not What I Thought"

Via Daily Dharma / Managing Your Corner of the Universe

Zen practice, however, teaches you to completely be yourself—if you don’t, who will? Someone’s got to hold down your corner of the universe, and no one else is qualified.

—Shozan Jack Haubner, "Middle Way Manager"

Via ThinkProgress: Trump revokes executive order, weakens protections for LGBT workers

LET ME BE CLEAR: if you voted for Donald Trump, you voted to attack me and people like me. 

You voted to roll back our civil and human rights, allow discrimination against us, and relegate us once again to second-class status. You voted to allow this evil man and his monstrous administration to come after LGBT people, our families, our lives, our jobs, and our love. We warned you, we tried to reason with you, some of us even pleaded with you... but you did it anyway, and then you had the gall to gaslight us, telling us we were wrong to worry about Trump because he managed to spit out the letters "LGBTQ" at his convention and grabbed a rainbow flag onstage once. But whaddya know -- we were right after all, and the destruction of our basic civil liberties that your vote has enabled is unfolding now before our very eyes.

We will defeat this evil because we will outlive and outlast and outfight it, but we will *never* forget the way you voted to oppress and degrade and dehumanize us. 

SHAME on you.

----- 

An executive order President Trump signed Monday rescinded an executive order President Obama implemented that would have required companies that contract with the federal government to provide documentation about their compliance with various federal laws. Some have argued that this will make it harder to enforce the LGBT protections President Obama implemented for employees of federal contractors — as well as many other protections those workers enjoyed.

Trump rescinded the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order, also known as Executive Order 13673, that President Obama issued in 2014. That order required companies wishing to contract with the federal government to show that they’ve complied with various federal laws and other executive orders. 

Notably, Obama issued that order in tandem with Executive Order 13672, which prohibited contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Executive Order 13673 was enjoined by a federal judge in Texas back in October, but had it been implemented, it would have improved accountability for businesses that contract with the federal government. Enforcement of 13672, the LGBT protections, does not require this order, but would have been stronger with it. Whatever its fate in court may have been, it’s now gone forever.

LGBT people are particularly vulnerable to discrimination, even with 13672 still in place. Obama’s LGBT executive order amended previous presidential orders that also protected the employees of contractors on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and age, but all of those other categories are also afforded protection under various federal laws (the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act). Sexual orientation and gender identity are the only identity categories without explicit nondiscrimination protections under federal law, and fewer than half the states offer LGBT protections at the state level. 

That means Obama’s executive order is the only legal force protecting over a million workers.

Camilla Taylor, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, was the first to raise concerns that this change would impact the LGBT community. As she explained to Keen News Service, “It’s sending a message to these companies…that the federal government simply doesn’t care whether or not they violate the law.”

National Center for Lesbian Rights Executive Director Kate Kendell also said in a statement, “President Trump’s quiet take-down yesterday of federal safeguards against employment discrimination for millions of LGBT Americans is yet another example of why our elected officials, advocates, and our community must remain vigilant and continue working together to stop this administration’s regressive and harmful policies.”

When a draft of a “religious freedom” executive order that would have licensed discrimination against LGBT people was circulating, the White House tried to stir up some positive press by promising that it would “leave in place” Obama’s 2014 order protecting LGBT workers.

“President Trump continues to be respectful and supportive of LGBTQ rights,” the statement read. 

The New York Times’ Jeremy Peters fell over himself to praise the statement for using “stronger language than any Republican president has before in favor of equal legal protections for gay lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.”

It’s not a surprise, however, that Trump is walking back other executive orders that weaken the LGBT protections. Trump promised to undo all of Obama’s executive orders.

That “religious freedom” executive order hasn’t gone away either. 

A month after the draft leaked and the White House assured LGBT people it wasn’t signing it at that time, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told The Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal that it was still coming. “I think we’ve discussed executive orders in the past, and for the most part we’re not going to get into discussing what may or may not come until we’re ready to announce it,” he said at the time. “So I’m sure as we move forward we’ll have something.”

Make the jump here to read the original article and more 

Via Towleroad: Trump Administration Erases LGBT People from Key 2020 Census Survey

An announcement of Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey put out by the Census Bureau which included Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity on its list was scrubbed and revised on Tuesday, reappearing without LGBT people as a designated group.

RELATED: Trump Administration Erases LGBT People from Key Annual HHS Survey of Older and Disabled Americans

The Washington Blade reports:

With days before its deadline, the U.S. Census delivered to Congress its report on planned subjects for the survey, including gender, age, race, ethnicity, relationship and homeownership status. Under law, the report is due three years before Census Day, with the next one is set to occur April 1, 2020….

…The report outlines the importance of including these questions in either the decennial U.S. Census or the newer and more detailed annual American Community Survey, which was established in 1985 and seeks to ascertain socio-economic and housing statistics.

But apparently an initial version of this report went too far. The U.S. Census issued a notice shortly afterward indicating the report was corrected because the initial appendix “inadvertently” included LGBT categories.

“The Subjects Planned for the 2020 Census and American Community Survey report released today inadvertently listed sexual orientation and gender identity as a proposed topic in the appendix,” the statement says. “The report has been corrected.”

The National LGBTQ Task Force posted an image (above) of the erasure on its website.
Said Meghan Maury, Criminal and Economic Justice Project Director, National LGBTQ Task Force, in a statement:

“Today, the Trump Administration has taken yet another step to deny LGBTQ people freedom, justice, and equity, by choosing to exclude us from the 2020 Census and American Community Survey. LGBTQ people are not counted on the Census—no data is collected on sexual orientation or gender identity. Information from these surveys helps the government to enforce federal laws like the Violence Against Women Act and the Fair Housing Act and to determine how to allocate resources like housing supports and food stamps. If the government doesn’t know how many LGBTQ people live in a community, how can it do its job to ensure we’re getting fair and adequate access to the rights, protections and services we need?”

Last week, the Trump administration erased LGBT people from a key annual Health and Human Services survey of older and disabled Americans.

Via Ram Dass

God
and I have become
like two giant fat people living
in a tiny
boat.

We
keep bumping into
each other
and laughing.

- Shams-ud-din Muhammad Hafiz

Via Daily Dharma / Nature's Perspective

Animals are people, too. As are plants. And water. And soil. This is the fundamental insight at the heart of all eco-spiritual work. But to get that insight, we have to get with the big picture. To get that insight, we have to climb a tree.

—Clark Strand, "Trees, Butterflies, and the Buddhist Moral Life"

Via Daily Dharma / Understanding Across Difference

Understanding across difference, whatever the difference, lies at the center of spiritual life and aspiration.

—Henry Shukman, "The Meeting"