Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Via Daily Dharma: Finding Practice

 

Practice needs to be weaved into the fabric of our lives so that every moment and place is an opportunity for practice and progression.

—Rev. Grace Song, “Zen All Day”

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Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Via Daily Dharma: Enjoying the Mystery

 

Spiritual transformation, like love, is not a matter for abstract reason and analysis. It partakes of mystery, of unpredictability, or grace.

—Lewis Richmond, “Enlightenment Needs a Minyan”

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Monday, October 11, 2021

Via White Crane Institute // NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY

 


Original Keith Haring Poster for National Coming Out Day 1988
1988 -

NATIONAL COMING OUT DAY -- National Coming Out Day was founded by Robert Eichberg and Jean O'Leary on October 11, 1988 in celebration of the first Gay march on Washington D.C. a year earlier. The purpose of the march and of National Coming Out Day is to promote government and public awareness of Gay, bisexual, Lesbian and transgender rights and to celebrate homosexuality. National Coming Out Day is a time to publicly display Gay pride. Many choose this day to come out to their parents, friends, co-workers and themselves.


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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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Via LQBTQ Nation // Astronaut Sally Ride will be the first out LGBTQ person on United States currency

 


Via Acesso ao Insight // Bansky

 

Se não podemos mudar o mundo,
podemos mudar a nossa atitude em relação ao mundo
Arte: Bansky

Via Daily Dharma: Finding Determination

When you admit to yourself, “I must make this change to be more happy”—not because the Buddha said so, but because your heart recognized a deep truth—you must devote all your energy to making the change. You need strong determination to overcome harmful habits.


—Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Getting Started”

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Sunday, October 10, 2021

Via Daily Dharma: Turn On Your Light

 

Simply by turning on the light, you can instantly destroy the darkness. Likewise, even a rather simple analysis of ego-clinging and afflictive emotions can make them collapse.

—Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, “An Investigation of the Mind”

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 10, 2021 💌


 


When we have the compassion that comes from understanding how it is, we don't lay a trip on anybody else as to how they ought to be. We don't say to our parents, "Why don't you understand about the spirit and why I'm a vegetarian?" We don't say to our husband or wife, "Why do you still want sex when all I want to do is read The Gospel of Ramakrishna?"

A conscious being does all that he or she can to create a space for being with God but does no violence to the existing karma to do it.

- Ram Dass -

Saturday, October 9, 2021

Via Daily Dharma: Real Kindness

 

Kindness doesn’t mean just being nice or pretending like you care. Cultivating kindness means opening your heart, with patience and attention, to your painful feelings—and to other people’s painful feelings.

—Kimberly Brown, “Be Kind, Not Just Nice”

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Via FB // Fans of John Shelby Spong

 


Friday, October 8, 2021

Four myths about Zen Buddhism’s “Mu Koa

 

Four myths about Zen Buddhism’s “Mu Koan”

Via White Crane Institute -- Today's Gay Wisdom

Reverend Nancy Wilson
2017 -

"In such a toxic environment, the poor, the minorities, and the politically vulnerable populations will be the first to exhibit signs and symptoms of the deteriorating immunological picture. It is the canary-in-the-mines syndrome. When miners wanted to know if a particular mineshaft was safe from poisonous gases, they sent a canary in first. If the canary returned, the miners felt safe to go in. On our planet today, poor people, people of color, women and children, and gays and lesbians are the canaries (or sitting ducks if you prefer). Those who have any kind of privilege (gender, race, class, sexuality, age) are better able, for a time, to buffer and insulate themselves from the toxic environment — from AIDS, cancer, and other diseases. But not forever.

"There is also a moral and religious toxicity in reaction to so much upheaval, change, and worldwide political challenges. This phenomenon is called in many religions fundamentalism. In a century of increasing relativity in values, morality, and religion, fundamentalism provides absolutes and identifies the enemies. It is a kind of collective mental illness that includes obsessive thinking, tunnel vision, and functions much like other addictions." 

- Rev. Nancy Wilson, Our Tribe: Queer Folks, God, Jesus and the Bible


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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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Via Daily Dharma: Settle Into Now

The body exists in the radical present. Paying attention to it has the power to draw us into this present moment and to show us how to settle into the vividness of our own experience as it is unfolding.

—Willa Blythe Baker, “Being in Body Time”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

 

Thursday, October 7, 2021

Via Love is Love: // FB

 Love is Love: 

21 yrs old Subarna Basnet & 22 yrs old Dhiraj Basnet got married to each other following Nepali culture. Even when it's difficult for people from LGBTQ community to come out publicly in our society, these two people tied the knot together showing the world. Many people have to go through a lot of pressure as they are not accepted for who they are but many people have supported these two people. We wish them congratulations and all the best as they begin a new phase in their life. Let us learn to appreciate and accept everyone for who they are and acknowledge all forms of love.




Via Daily Dharma: Make Room for Joy

 

We know that we cannot make ourselves joyful, . . . but we can learn to make room for joy. We can begin to cultivate our capacities that we have for receptivity, appreciation, attunement, celebrating, and undertaking the wholesome.

—Christina Feldman, “Where to Find Joy and How to Cultivate It”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 6, 2021 💌

 
 

One of the reasons that old age is so disconcerting to many people is that they feel as if they’re stripped of their roles. As we enter old age and face physical frailty, the departure of children, retirement, and the deaths of loved ones, we see the lights fading, the audience dwindles, and we are overwhelmed by a loss of purpose, and by the fear of not knowing how to behave or where we now fit in this play. The Ego, whose very sustenance has been the roles it played in the public eye, becomes irate, despairing, or numb, in the face of its own obsolescence. It may harken back to roles in its past to assert itself, but these strategies bring only more suffering as the Ego fights a losing battle.

As we learn to distinguish between our Egos — marked by our mind and thoughts — and the witnessing Soul — who’s not subject to them — we begin to see the opportunity that aging offers. We begin to separate who we are from the roles that we play, and to recognize why the Ego clings as it does to behaviors and images that no longer suit us. Stripped of its roles, the Ego is revealed as fiction. But for the person without a spiritual context, this is pure tragedy, for seekers of truth who are aware of the Soul, it is only the beginning.

Rather than wonder what new “role” we can invent for ourselves in the world then, the question that concerns us might be better put this way: How can we, as aging people, make our wisdom felt in the world? By embodying wisdom. We can find a happy balance between participation and retreat, remembering that while it is our duty to be of service if possible, it is also important that we prepare for our own journeys into death, through contemplation, quiet time, and deepening knowledge of ourselves.

-Ram Dass

Via White Crane Institute // GERALD HEARD

 


Gerald Heard by Glyn Philpot
1889 -

GERALD HEARD, British historian, philosopher, educator and science writer, born (d: 1971); Born Henry Fitzgerald Heard, Heard was a guide and mentor to numerous well-known Americans, including Clare Booth Luce and Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1950s and 1960s. His work was a forerunner of, and influence on, the consciousness development movement that has spread in the Western world since the 1960s.

In 1929, he edited The Realist, a short-lived monthly journal of scientific humanism (its sponsors included H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Julian Huxley and Aldous Huxley). In 1927 Heard began lecturing for South Place Ethical Society. During this period he was Science Commentator for the BBC for five years.

He first embarked as a book author in 1924, but The Ascent of Humanity, published in 1929, marked his first foray into public acclaim as it received the British Academy’s Hertz Prize. In 1937 he emigrated to the United States, accompanied by Aldous Huxley, Huxley's wife Maria and their son Matthew Huxley, to lecture at Duke University. In the U.S., Heard's main activities were writing, lecturing, and the occasional radio and TV appearance. He had formed an identity as an informed individual who recognized no conflict among history, science, literature, and theology.

Heard turned down the offer of a post at Duke, settling in California. In 1942 he founded Trabuco College (in Trabuco Canyon, located in the Santa Ana Mountains) as a facility where comparative religion studies and practices could be pursued. However, the Trabuco College project was somewhat short lived and in 1949 the campus was donated by Heard to the Vedanta Society of Southern California (Christopher Isherwood’s sanctuary), who still maintain the facility as a monastery and retreat.

Heard was the first among a group of literati friends (several others of whom, including Isherwood, were also originally British) to discover Swami Prabhavanada and Vedanta. Heard became an initiate of Vedanta. Like the outlook of his friend Aldous Huxley (another in this circle), the essence of Heard’s mature outlook was that a human being can effectively pursue intentional evolution of consciousness. He maintained a regular discipline of meditation, along the lines of yoga, for many years.

In the 1950s, Heard tried LSD and felt that, used properly, it had strong potential to 'enlarge Man's mind' by allowing a person to see beyond his ego. In late August 1956, Alcoholic Anonymous founder Bill Wilson first took LSD — under Heard's guidance and with the officiating presence of Dr. Sidney Cohen. According to Wilson, the session allowed him to re-experience a spontaneous spiritual experience he had had years before, which had enabled him to overcome his own alcoholism.

Heard is also responsible for introducing the then unknown Huston Smith to Huxley. Smith became one of the preeminent religious studies scholars in the United States. His book The World's Religions is a classic in the field, sold over two million copies and is considered a particularly useful introduction to comparative religion. The meeting with Huxley led eventually to Smith's connection to Timothy Leary.

In 1963, what some consider to be Heard's magnum opus, a book titled The Five Ages of Man, was published. According to Heard, the prevalent developmental stage among humans in today’s well-industrialized societies (especially in the West) should be regarded as the fourth: the "humanic stage" of the “total individual,” who is mentally dominated, feeling him- or herself to be autonomous, separate from other persons. Heard writes this stage is characterized by "the basic humanic concept of a mankind that is completely self-seeking because it is completely individualized into separate physiques that can have direct knowledge of only their own private pain and pleasure, inferring but faintly the feelings of others. Such a race of ingenious animals, each able to see and to seek his own advantage, must be kept in combination with each other by appealing to their separate interests."

In modern industrial societies, a person, especially if educated, has the opportunity to begin entering the “first maturity” of the humanic “total individual” in his or her mid teens. However, according to Heard — based on his decades of studies, his intuition, and his many years of reflection — a fifth stage is in the process of emerging: a post-individual psychological phase of persons and therefore of culture. According to Heard, the second maturity can be one that lies beyond "personal success, economic mastery, and the psychophysical capacity to enjoy life" (p. 240)

Heard termed this phase 'Leptoid Man' (from the Greek word lepsis: "to leap") because humans increasingly face the opportunity to 'take a leap' into a considerably expanded consciousness, in which the various aspects of the psyche will be integrated, without any aspects being repressed or seeming foreign. A society that recognizes this stage of development will honor and support individuals in a "second maturity" who wish to resolve their inner conflicts and dissolve their inner blockages and become the sages of the modern world. Further, instead of simply enjoying biological and psychological health, as Freud and other important psychiatric or psychological philosophers of the “total-individual” phase conceived, Leptoid man will not only have entered a meaningful “second maturity” recognized by his or her society, but can then become a human of developed spirituality, similar to the mystics of the past; and a person of wisdom.

But collectively and culturally we are still in the transitional phase, not really recognizing an identity beyond the super-individualistic fourth, "humanic" phase. Heard's views were cautionary about developments in society that were not balanced, about inappropriate aims of our use of technological power. He wrote: "we are aware of our precarious imbalance: of our persistent and ever-increasing production of power and our inadequacy of purpose; of our critical analytic ability and our creative paucity; of our triumphantly efficient technical education and our ineffective, irrelevant education for values, for meaning, for the training of the will, the lifting of the heart, and the illumination of the mind."

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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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Via Tricycle // The Issa Wilderness

 

The Issa Wilderness
By Leath Tonino
A haiku master’s reverence for tiny creatures inspires a writer’s awakening to wonder and gratitude. 
Read more »

Via Daily Dharma - Mindfulness Isn’t a Thought

 

Mindfulness isn’t a thought. It’s a full-bodied sensory experience. The language of the body is sensation, and feeling is the way we listen.

—Kate Johnson, “Loyalty to Sensation”

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