Sunday, October 6, 2019

Via Daily Dharma: Turn Meditation into Action

Don’t confuse training with trying: Meditation to develop compassion is not actually being compassionate to others. If you want to weaken your self-centeredness, go on and meditate, but don’t stop there. Take compassionate action.

—Sallie Tisdale, “Self-Care for Future Corpses”


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Saturday, October 5, 2019

Via FB:


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

Via Daily Dharma: What Is the Nature of Your Mind?

You don’t have to believe anything. Just understand your mind; how it works, how attachment and desire arise, how ignorance arises, and where emotions come from. It is sufficient to know the nature of all that; that alone can bring you happiness and peace.

—Lama Thubten Yeshe, “Your Mind Is Your Religion”


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Friday, October 4, 2019

Via Daily Dharma: How to Appreciate Just Being

It is precisely our recognition of life’s inevitable hardships, along with our uprooting of the attachment that exacerbates them, that allows us to appreciate the mere fact of being.

—Reverend Patti Nakai, “Someone Is Jealous of You”


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Via Daily Dharma: Unclench Your Fist

The cultivation of liberation and compassion go together like the front and back of an open hand. Clinging, attachment and mental bondage are like clenching the hand into a fist. When the fist is opened, liberation and compassion are both there.

—Gil Fronsdal, “Why I Walk Two Paths”


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Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - October 2, 2019 💌



"Don’t get caught in righteousness; don’t get caught in helping somebody. It doesn’t mean don’t help them, just don’t get caught in it… If you really want to help somebody, instead of just ripping off the experience of helping them for yourself, give up helping anybody. And then just be with them and see what happens."

- Ram Dass - 

Via Daily Dharma: Mending the True Problem

If your car is broken, you don’t try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems—and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind—lie within.

—Pico Iyer, “Adventures in Going Nowhere”


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Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Via White Crane Insitute / This Day in Gay History: JALAL AL-DIN MUHAMMAD RUMI


JALAL AL-DIN MUHAMMAD RUMI, Persian mystic and poet born (d. 1273) also known as Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, but most famously known to the English-speaking world simply as RUMI.

Rumi was a 13th century Persian (Tajik) Muslim poet, jurist and theologian. His name literally translates as "Majesty of Religion", Jalal means "majesty" and Din means "religion." Rumi is a descriptive name meaning "the Roman" since he died in Anatolia which was part of the Byzantine Empire two centuries before.

Rumi was born in Balkh (in present-day Afghanistan), then a city of Greater Khorasan in Persia and died in Konya (in present-day Turkey). His birthplace and native language/local dialogue indicates a Persian (Tajik) heritage. His poetry is in Persian and his works are widely read in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and in translation especially in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the US, and South Asia. He lived most of his life in, and produced his works under, the Sejuk Empire. Rumi's importance is considered to transcend national and ethnic borders. Throughout the centuries he has had a significant influence on Persian as well as Urdu and Turkish literature. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages in various formats. After Rumi's death, his followers founded the Meylevi Order, better known as the "Whirling Dervishes," who believe in performing their worship in the form of dance and music ceremony called the sema.

It was his meeting with the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi on November 15th 1244 that changed his life completely. Shams had traveled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could "endure my company." A voice came, "What will you give in return?" "My head!" "The one you seek is Jalal al-Din of Konya." On the night of December 5, 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out, never to be seen again. It is believed that he was murdered with the connivance of Rumi's son, 'Ala' ud-Din; if so, Shams indeed gave his head for the privilege of mystical friendship.

Rumi's love and his bereavement for the death of Shams found their expression in an outpouring of music, dance and lyric poems, Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi. He himself went out searching for Shams and journeyed again to Damascus. There, he realized:

Why should I seek? I am the same as

He. His essence speaks through me.

I have been looking for myself!

For more than ten years after meeting Shams, Mawlana had been spontaneously composing ghazals, and these had been collected in the Divan-i Kabir. Rumi found another companion in Salaḥ ud-Din-e Zarkub, the goldsmith. After Salaḥ ud-Din's death, Rumi's scribe and favorite student Hussam-e Chelebi assumed the role. One day, the two of them were wandering through the Meram vineyards outside of Konya when Hussam described an idea he had to Rumi: "If you were to write a book like the Ilāhīnāma of Sanai or the Mantiq ut-Tayr of 'Attar it would become the companion of many troubadours. They would fill their hearts from your work and compose music to accompany it."

Rumi smiled and took out a piece of paper on which were written the opening eighteen lines of his Masnavi, beginning with:

Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,

How it sings of separation...

Hussam implored Rumi to write more. Rumi spent the next twelve years of his life in Anatolia dictating the six volumes of this masterwork, the Masnavi to Hussam. In December 1273, Rumi fell ill; he predicted his own death and composed the well-known ghazal, which begins with the verse:

How doest thou know what sort of king I have within me as companion?

Do not cast thy glance upon my golden face, for I have iron legs.

He died on December 17, 1273 in Konya; Rumi was laid to rest beside his father, and a splendid shrine, the Yesil Turbe "Green Tomb" (original name:قبه لخزراء), was erected over his tomb. His epitaph reads:

"When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men."

Via White Crane Institute: On this day (October 1, 1989)


1989 -
DENMARK: The world's first legal, modern same-sex civil union are sanctioned and called "registered partnership."


Via Daily Dharma: Appreciate the Opportunity to Notice

When I put so much stock in formal meditation, I forget that it’s only one way of helping me see the magic that surrounds me and that is me. Redefining meditation simply as “the opportunity to notice” opens up a world of possibilities.

—Barry Evans, “I Like It … but Is It Meditation?”


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Monday, September 30, 2019

Via Daily Dharma: Notice the Teachings Around You

(my foto - Moon over Ouro Preto)

We have to discover [the real Buddhist teachings] for ourselves through meditation. The real Buddhist teachings are hidden in the lotus. The real teachings are hidden in the full moon.

—Sam Mowe, “Changed by Brightness”


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Sunday, September 29, 2019

Via Daily Dharma: Observing The Results of Our Actions

It is not possible for actions to disappear without residue or result once the action is over. To think it could be otherwise, the Buddha explained, would be like believing you could toss a stone into a pool of water and not create a single ripple.

—Beth Roth, “Family Dharma: Karma and the Tonka Truck”


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Via Ram Dass / Words of Wisdom - September 29, 2019 💌



"The thing I would suggest to most people is you find something that needs help, and you help it. Then you work on yourself to make it a conscious act... you’re driven to work on yourself all the time so that your acts of caring for other human beings aren’t toxic."

- Ram Dass -

Saturday, September 28, 2019

Via Daily Dharma: Facing Our Emotions with Clarity

If you turn your awareness directly into an emotion it stops developing. This doesn’t mean you are analyzing it or thinking about it but rather turning toward it with clear awareness.

—Lama Tsultrim Allione, “Feeding Your Demons”


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Via Daily Dharma: Why Is Suffering So Painful?

Clinging to our notion of what we think should be is what causes the “suffering of suffering.” The suffering itself is not so bad, it’s the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.

—Allen Ginsberg, “Negative Capability: Kerouac’s Buddhist Ethic”


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Thursday, September 26, 2019

Via FB:


Via Blogspot / karmapadevotees



Our prayers and aspirations can reach far. We can see the light of stars that are thousands of light years away. Those stars may not even exist any longer, but the light they sent out can still travel and reach us here. The mind can travel even farther. There is no limit to where our aspirations can reach.

17th Karmapa

from the book “The Heart Is Noble: Changing the World from the Inside Out”

Via intergalactic-yogi on blogspot:

Come to It Empty-Handed

Compassion is not hard to come by when the heart is not filled with the cunning things of the mind. It is the mind with its demands and fears, its attachments and denials, its determinations and urges, that destroys love. And how difficult it is to be simple about all this! 

You don't need philosophies and doctrines to be gentle and kind. The efficient and the powerful of the land will organize to feed and clothe the people, to provide them with shelter and medical care. 

This is inevitable with the rapid increase of production; it is the function of well-organized government and a balanced society. But organization does not give the generosity of the heart and hand. 

Generosity comes from quite a different source, a source beyond all measure. Ambition and envy destroy it as surely as fire burns. This source must be touched, but one must come to it empty-handed, without prayer, without sacrifice. Books cannot teach, nor can any guru lead to, this source. It cannot be reached through the cultivation of virtue, though virtue is necessary, nor through capacity and obedience. When the mind is serene, without any movement, it is there. Serenity is without motive, without the urge for the more.

J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life