Net Neutrality II: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Via Daily Dharma / Rethinking Anger

Anger itself can be a positive force: getting angry that you have just lost your job may give you the energy and sheer drive to pursue more fitting work. Likewise, getting angry about the abuse you are suffering in a relationship will help fuel you to form healthy boundaries, providing much of the motivation and strength needed to either improve the relationship or leave it.

—Robert Augustus Masters, “From Spiritual Bypassing”

Via Ram Dass

From a Hindu perspective, you are born with what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you.

Via Daily Dharma / Practicing Skillful Activism

We are more skillful and more sustainable in our activism when we’re not unconsciously playing out emotional dramas on a public stage, or unconsciously looking for emotional fulfillment rather than acting skillfully for the benefit of others.

—Jay Michaelson, “Why You Should Invite President Trump Into Your Meditation Practice”

Via Daily Dharma / Love Grows with Gratitude

Love is rooted in gratitude, it’s rooted in appreciation, and it’s rooted in not forgetting all of the things that are done for you by others every single day.

"O amor está enraizado na gratidão, está enraizado em apreço, e está enraizado em não esquecer todas as coisas que são feitas por você pelos outros, todos os dias."

—Dawa Tarchin Phillips, “What to Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next”

Via Daily Dharma / Meeting “Me” on the Meditation Cushion

Even when awareness appears to be lost because, once again, the “me” has assumed center stage, there is awareness of that. Then awareness remembers itself and knows itself as the presence of everything that arises.

—Joel Agee, “Not Found, Not Lost”

Via Daily Dharma / Finding Religion

[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.

—Friedrich Schleiermacher quoted in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s “Romancing the Buddha”

Via Ram Dass

If I go into the place in myself that is love, and you go into the place in yourself that is love, we are together in love. Then you and I are truly in love, the state of being love. That’s the entrance to Oneness. That’s the space I entered when I met my guru.

Via Daily Dharma / How to Deal with Change

Practice changes our relationship to what would otherwise be upsetting. Facing change, we see how futile and painful it is to try to hold on to what is passing—which is everything.

—Noelle Oxenhandler, "Go Bang Your Head Against the Wall"

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"