Monday, June 21, 2021

The Devotion Project: Build Your Wings

The Devotion Project: Say Only Yes

Via FB / Lama Surya Das


 

Via FB

 


Young Royals | Official Trailer | Netflix

Via Tumblr

 


Froma few Years ago

 



White Crane Institute // BOB BARZAN

 

Noteworthy
Bob Barzan
1989 -

BOB BARZAN publishes 1st issue of White Crane Newsletter, forerunner of White Crane Journal and GayWisdom.org. Bob has since moved on to found the Modesto Museum of Art in…you guessed it, Modesto, California. I am proud to call him a friend.

He has also made three of his other projects available online. White Crane and GayWisdom happily endorses each of them and strongly recommends readers check them out:

Sex and Spirit
Songs for Winter Solstice
Leaving the Priesthood

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Today's Gay Wisdom
2017 -

By Bob Barzan

In the days following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Abraham Maslow was watching a parade of citizens marching to patriotic tunes. Deeply moved, he resolved at that moment to explore a “psychology of the peace table”, to discover the best and loftiest ideals and possibilities of the human species. It was clear to him that to learn about the complete and authentic individual he had to study men and women that were remarkably healthy. He offered this analogy for what he was to do.

“If we want to know how fast human beings can run, we don’t study a runner with a broken ankle or a mediocre runner. Instead, we study the Olympic gold medal winner, the best there is. Only in that way can we find out how fast human beings can run. Similarly, only by studying the healthiest personalities can we find out how far we can stretch and develop our capacities.”

This new perspective, a focus on health and thriving, and the best that we are rather than the common focus on illness and surviving, gave birth to a new school of psychology that came to be known as “humanistic”. This perspective, in turn, became popular through the human potential movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Psychotheorists gave different names to this healthy life. Maslow called it the actualized life, Karl Jung, the individuated life, and Carl Rogers the fully functioning life, but what they described are individuals with very similar characteristics.

Healthy individuals are men and women who are, first of all, authentic. They do not try to live lives denying who they are in order to please society or others, but rather they live lives that are true or faithful to their inner callings. And here a distinction was made between a person’s true inner self and a superficial self. Second, these people excel, or strive to excel in the virtues that make it possible for us to live together harmoniously; love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, joy, courage, patience, truth, peace, tolerance, generosity, and other similar virtues. The presence of these two characteristics, authenticity and what I call healthy spiritual virtues became for me indicators of what it means to be a healthy man or woman and they became the bases for my definition of spirituality.

For more than twenty years I’ve been aware that most people make at least one false assumption in the area of spirituality. Most people assume that all things having to do with spirituality, and they usually mean religion, are good and beyond judgment or evaluation. As I reflected on my own life, on my own coming out as a gay man, and on my experience of eleven years as a Jesuit, it became clear to me that spirituality and religion are not the same; rather religion is just one of many spiritual paths. More importantly I saw that some spiritual paths, including many religions, are not helping people live actualized, fully functioning, in other words healthy, lives, but making them sick or unhealthy. Instead of helping them live authentic lives characterized by healthy spiritual virtues, some spiritual paths encourage hate, greed, revenge, intolerance, and all the characteristics that make it impossible for people to live together in peace.

Like many gay men, I had tried to live in a society that made me suppress my own sexuality, my own identity. It was a society that deceived me, and told me that being gay is bad, unnatural, a sin. It was a society that encouraged me to be alienated from my self, and so was in violation of the first principle of healthy living, authenticity. Right from the beginning I was living a lie, truth had been sacrificed for some other priority, and I was expected to build a healthy spirituality on this false foundation. I realized that a spiritual path that had me denying the truth, especially about myself, may bring me all sorts of “benefits” like acceptance, security, position, and power, but it wasn’t life giving, it was making me sick.

Several years ago a wonderful story circulated in San Francisco about the opening of a new Zen center. A distinguished straight Zen master addressed the assembly of mostly gay Zen practitioners. Everyone expected he would give a typical dedication address, saying nothing of consequence. He astounded everyone, however, by proclaiming that unless you are out of the closet you are not practicing Zen. These are amazing, insightful, and rare words from a religious leader. But in these words he confirms what Maslow and others discovered years ago; the importance of authenticity for a healthy life. A healthy spirituality then is really about two major concerns; authenticity and the development of life giving spiritual virtues. An unhealthy spirituality is the opposite.

There is a tendency in our society to compartmentalize our lives so that spirituality has little or nothing to do with how we live day-to-day. Spirituality, however, is not something we do only when we are meditating, analyzing our dreams, or worshiping on any given day. Our spirituality is our whole way of life and that includes our sexuality, our play, how we make our money, how we spend our money, how we use our time, drive a car, make decisions, and how we treat people every day. Everything that is part of our life is part of our spirituality whether we are conscious of it or not. And everything we do can either help us live more authentically, help us develop healthy spiritual virtues, or it can do the opposite.

Over the years I have learned to discern when I am on or off a healthy spiritual track by watching the results of my decisions, my attitudes, and way of living. A healthy spiritual life manifests itself differently in every individual, but in general you can recognize it because you will see an increase in love, compassion, generosity, kindness, courage, patience, and an ability to live harmoniously with other people and all of nature.

Bob Barzan lives in Modesto, California where he created the Modesto Museum of Art.

Via Gay Buddhist Fellowship / Donald Rothberg

 

A new talk has been added to the audio archive at the GBF website:

2021.06.20 Donald Rothberg (Faith Confidence Trust in Practice).mp3

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Enjoy 600+ free recorded dharma talks at www.gaybuddhist.org

Via Tricycle // What’s in a Word? Samādhi

 


What’s in a Word? Samādhi
By Andrew Olendzki
Samādhi (“concentration”) isn’t just the practice of focusing the mind on a single object. It’s the path to a state of profound equanimity and a deep inner sense of well-being. 
Read more »

Via Daily Dharma: Get to Know Yourself

 

First, one must get to know oneself. Then, having become familiar with oneself, one can live one’s life more deeply. Living one’s life more deeply is the meaning of dharma.

—Ogyen Trinley Dorje, “Intelligence & Investigation”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Sunday, June 20, 2021

The Devotion Project: More Than Ever

Via Daily Dharma: Work Directly With the Mind

 

To cultivate a steady mind independent of circumstances, we must work with the mind itself. Working directly with the mind uncovers the inherent quality of meditative awareness.

—Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche with Helen Tworkov, “The Good Shepherd”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - June 20, 2021 💌

 


Love holds the universe together. Love is the emotion of connection and merging. Viewed from the soul, this world is a manifestation of love. Love is the bridge, the transfer of energy between form and formless, matter and spirit.

 - Ram Dass - 



From the memoir Being Ram Dass co-authored by Rameshwar Das

Saturday, June 19, 2021

Via White Crane Institute // JUNETEENTH

 


2018 -
JUNETEENTH, also known as Juneteenth Independence Day or Freedom Day; Winston Churchill famously quipped that “America always does the right thing...after it tries everything else. Juneteenth is an American holiday that celebrates our finally getting this part right. It commemorates the June 19, 1865, announcement of the abolition of slavery in the state of Texas, and more generally the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans throughout the former Confederacy of the southern United States. Its name is a portmanteau of "June" and "nineteenth", the date of its celebration.
 
Juneteenth is only recognized as a state holiday or special day of observance in forty-five states, and primarily in local celebrations. Traditions include public readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, singing traditional songs such as "Swing Low Sweet Chariot" and "Lift Every Voice and Sing", and reading of works by noted African-American writers such as Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou. Celebrations may include rodeos, street fairs, cookouts, family reunions, park parties, historical reenactments, and Miss Juneteenth contests. The Macogos descendants of Black Seminoles of Coahulla, Mexico also celebrate the Juneteenth.
 
In 1996 the first legislation to recognize "Juneteenth Independence Day" was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.J. Res. 195, sponsored by Barbara Rose Collins (D-MI). In 1997 Congress recognized the day through Senate Joint Resolution 11 and House Joint Resolution 56. In 2013 the U.S. Senate passed Senate Resolution 175, acknowledging Lula Briggs Galloway (late president of the National Association of Juneteenth Lineage) who "successfully worked to bring national recognition to Juneteenth Independence Day", and the continued leadership of the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation. In 2018 Apple added Juneteenth to its calendars in iOS under official US holidays.
 
On June 15, 2021, the Senate unanimously passed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday; it subsequently passed through the House of Representatives by a 415–14 vote on June 16. President Joseph Biden signed the bill on June 17, 2021, making Juneteenth the eleventh American federal holiday and the first to obtain legal observance as a federal holiday since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was designated in 1983.

Via FB // Pride is...

 


Via Daily Dharma: Find Your Ground

 

Anger and rage can be all-consuming and render us ineffective. Meditation practice becomes a way to re-center ourselves and find our ground, time and time again.

—Cheryl A. Giles in conversation with Pamela Ayo Yetunde and James Shaheen, “Black, Buddhist, and Free”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Via Lama Surya Das // FB

 

All the peace and happiness of the whole globe,
the peace and happiness of societies,
the peace and happiness of family,
the peace and happiness in the individual persons’ life,
and the peace and happiness of even the animals and so forth,
all depends on having loving kindness toward each other. 
~Lama Zopa Rinpoche
 

Friday, June 18, 2021

Via Lama Surya Das / FB

 


tAbandon your notions of the past,
without attributing a temporal sequence!
Cut off your mental associations
regarding the future, without anticipation!
Rest in a spacious modality, without clinging
to [the thoughts of] the present.
Do not meditate at all,
since there is nothing upon which to meditate. Instead, revelation will come
through undistracted mindfulness —
Since there is nothing
by which you can be distracted.
~Padmasambhava