Thursday, October 21, 2021

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Via Daily Dharma: Learning From Others

 

We are often the last ones to grasp the impacts of our actions. So we do well not to let our self-concepts get in the way of inviting and deeply considering feedback from others.

—Joseph Bobrow Roshi, “Purify Your Motivation”

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

 
 

You and I are in training to be free. We’re in training to be so present, so spacious, so embracing, we’re in training to not look away, deny or close our hearts when we can’t bear something. The statement, “I can’t bear it,” is what burns you out in social action. When you’re in the presence of suffering and contracting, it’s the contraction that starves you to death.

When you close your heart down to protect yourself from suffering, you also close yourself off from being fed by that same life situation.

If you can stay open to both the suffering and the joys and the stuff of life, all of it, then it’s like a living spirit. It just connects to your living spirit and there’s a tremendous feeding going on.

Once you see all this, what else is there to do but keep working on becoming conscious? You’d be a fool not to. You’re only going to perpetuate your misery and suffering and everybody else’s if you don’t.

The other thing is to do it joyfully! When you meet somebody that’s suffering, what do you have to offer them? You could offer them your empathy. That’s a good thing to offer because they feel somebody else is listening to them. The other thing you can offer them is your joy, your presence, and your ‘not getting caught in it all.’

Having that empathy for another means your heart is breaking, because you understand the intensity of their experience, and at the same moment, you are absolutely, equanimously, present. You are not clinging to anything, just watching the phenomena of the universe change.

- Ram Dass -

Via Tricycle // Ten Teachings by Thich Nhat Hanh for His 95th Birthday

 

Ten Teachings by Thich Nhat Hanh for His 95th Birthday
By Tricycle
Happy Continuation Day, Thich Nhat Hanh! To celebrate, we’re sharing some perennial wisdom and popular practices from the beloved Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher and peace activist.
Read more »

Via Daily Dharma: Know Your Conditioning

Like the Buddha seeing Mara, much conditioning scuffles off, powerless, once it is seen and fully understood. The work is to know the conditioning, not to hide from or fight it.

—Melina Bondy, “Naked: Conditioning Uncovered”

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Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 17, 2021 💌

 



We’re all distracted by phenomena, everything that’s going on all the time.

Mindfulness is one of the practices for slowing down our lives, for finding a way inside, for concentrating self-awareness. It can help us to quiet down and find our way into who we are.   

Finding our true self is a lifelong search. It’s not called practice for nothing. You actually have to tread on the path to get somewhere. Not that there’s anywhere to go, it’s just about becoming more here, being more present in this moment.   

Once we begin to explore our own psyche and mind and heart, we begin to appreciate that everybody else is in the same situation. We’re not so different. Each of us is an individual awareness living with our particular karma or family situation or what we do, our cultural milieu. Awareness itself is something that we all share. It’s what makes us human and divine.   - Ram Dass

Via Daily Dharma: Entering the Sphere of Action

 

If we are to fulfill our ethical responsibilities, it’s not enough simply to adopt the Buddhist precepts as guides to personal conduct, live a life of moral integrity, and cultivate thoughts of lovingkindness and compassion in the comfort of our meditation halls. It’s crucial for us to enter the sphere of action.

—Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, “A Call to Conscience”

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Via Daily Dharma: Deepening Our Equanimity

 

In the deepest forms of insight, we see that things change so quickly that we can’t hold onto anything, and eventually the mind lets go of clinging. Letting go brings equanimity; the greater the letting go, the deeper the equanimity.

—Sayadaw U Pandita, “​​A Perfect Balance”

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Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Via Daily Dharma: The Wisdom of Openness

 

When we are open, we see that essentially everything belongs because it simply is what it is, even our reactivity. We notice that when we actually see and understand something, it drops away.

—Laura Bridgman and Gavin Milne, “Our Inner Threat”

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Saturday, October 16, 2021

Via White Crane Institute // Today's Gay Wisdom

 




2017 -

The Wit of Oscar Wilde

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.

A man can't be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

A true friend stabs you in the front.


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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: What Is Renunciation?

 

Renunciation isn’t about taking monastic vows or exchanging your Tempur-Pedic mattress for a pallet; it’s about the wisdom to realize that holding on to anything impermanent only brings sorrow.

—Joan Duncan Oliver, “Pocket Paramis: Renunciation, Nekkhamma

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Friday, October 15, 2021

Via Daily Dharma: Transform Your World

 

The bigger our heart is, the more permeable the structure of our self, and the more we can think beyond our self-interest. Slowly, our world transforms into a place all of us, as people on the planet, can feel at home.

—Radhule Weininger, “How to Follow the Bodhisattva Path Without Burning Out”

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Via Daily Dharma: Life Is Not Personal


Reminding myself that life is not personal, permanent, or perfect has kept me from falling into sinkholes of despair and destroying rooms with rage. It invites me to pause and turn inward.

—Ruth King, “Wholeness Is No Trifling Matter”

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Via White Crane Institute // VIRGIL

 


This Day in Gay History

October 15

Born
Virgil
0070 BCE -

VIRGIL, Roman poet, born; the author of epics in three modes: the Bucolics (or Eclogues), the Georgics and the substantially completed Aeneid, the last being an epic poem in the heroic mode, which comprised twelve books (as opposed to 24 in each of the epic poems by Homer) and became the Roman Empire’s national epic.  

In themes the ten eclogues develop and vary epic song, relating it first to Roman power, then to love, both homosexual (ecl. 2) and panerotic (ecl. 3), then again to Roman power and Caesar's heir imagined as authorizing Virgil to surpass Greek epic and refound tradition, shifting back to love then as a dynamic source considered apart from Rome. Hence in the remaining eclogues Virgil withdraws from his newly minted Roman mythology and gradually constructs a new myth of his own poetics: he casts the remote Greek region of Arcadia, home of the god Pan, as the place of poetic origin itself.

In passing he again rings changes on erotic themes, such as requited and unrequited homosexual and heterosexual passion, tragic love for elusive women or magical powers of song to retrieve an elusive male. He concludes by establishing  Arcadia as a poetic ideal that still resonates in Western literature and visual arts. Since Virgil depicted his hero Aeneus seeking advice from his father Anchises in the underworld, Dante Alighieri made the shade of Virgil his own guide for his pilgrimage through the inferno and part of purgatory in his own epic poem The Divine Comedy.

 

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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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Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - October 13, 2021 💌

 

If I can see a soul that happens to have incarnated into a person that I don’t care for, then my consciousness becomes an environment in which they are free to come up from air if they want to.    

That person can do so because I’m not trying to keep them locked into being the person that they have become. It’s liberating to resist another person politically, yet still see them as another soul.    

Remember, we are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another. Working on our own consciousness is the most important thing that we are doing at any moment, and being love is a supreme creative act. 

- Ram Dass -

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