Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Via Daily Dharma: Embracing Kindred Believers

 

We all believe in something: self, nonself, an omnipotent creator, karma, science, reality, emptiness, dragons, elves. . . When we see that belief gives color to every stratum of our experience of reality, we can embrace others as kindred believers, regardless of the shades we tend to favor.

—Pamela Gayle White, “Real Belief”


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Monday, December 6, 2021

2 Quotes Via GBF Email today

“Find something that needs help, and help it, then you work on yourself to make it a conscious act. As Gandhi said, ‘The act that you do may seem very insignificant, but it is important that you do it.”
– Ram Dass

 

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.”
– Maya Angelou

 

Via Daily Dharma: It’s Not Rocket Science

 

When you’re kind to someone else, it feels good. It’s not rocket science. It feels good to you, and it feels good to them. It makes for a very happy, peaceful mind.

—Andy Puddicombe, “10 Tips for Living More Mindfully”


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Sunday, December 5, 2021

Via FB

 


Via Rumi Quotes// Try not to resist the changes that come your way

 

Rumi

“Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?”


Rumi
Read more quotes from Rumi

IN-PERSON and Online: Sunday meditation and practice talk: Com Muito Gratidão! with Daniel Orey (Zen) August 8

A Practice Talk I gave @ SBMG in August

August 8 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Com Muito Gratidão!

Practice Talks by sangha members give us an opportunity to learn how we are arriving at this point of our lives and our practice.

Daniel has been a member of SBMG for over 15 years, and currently serves on Scheduling Committee, while living and working in Ouro Preto, Brazil. . He is a university professor of Mathematics.

We will end with a Melvin Escobar-inspired Metta:

Meditation
Here is a typical series of metta contemplations you can practice, reciting them three times as you change the subject of your prayer from “I” to “you” to “all.” But feel free to create your own or adapt these to resonate with your own experience.

May (I/you/all beings) be safe and protected, free from inner and outer harm.
May (I/you/all) be happy.
May (my/your/everyone’s) body support the practice of loving awareness.
May (I/you/all) be free from ill-will, affliction, and anxiety.
May (I/you/everyone) love (myself/yourself/themselves) as (I am/you are/they are).
May (I/you/all) be happy and free from suffering.
May (I/you/all) find peace in an uncertain world.
May (I/you/all) find ease on the middle path between attachment and apathy.

When you lose concentration, simply and kindly return to your phrases. Try not to judge the judgments that inevitably arise. Meet each moment with unstoppable friendliness. May you be inspired by the transformative potential of this practice.

Via Melvin Escovar

Sunday Night Sit Online Schedule:
6:25 Zoom opens
6:30 Welcome and announcements
6:45 Meditation
7:20 Break
7:30 Dharma talk
8:30 Closing bell



 Make the jump here to listen to the talk

Via Dhamma Wheel // RIGHT MINDFULNESS: Establishing Mindfulness of Body

 


RIGHT MINDFULNESS
Establishing Mindfulness of Body
A person goes to the forest or to the root of a tree or to an empty place and sits down. Having crossed the legs, one sets the body erect. One establishes the presence of mindfulness. (MN 10) One is aware: "Ardent, fully aware, mindful, I am content." (SN 47.10)
 
Mindful, one breathes in; mindful, one breathes out. . . . One is just aware, just mindful: "There is body." And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)
Reflection
The path factor of right mindfulness will be explored by going carefully through the meditation instructions found in the classic text Satipatthāna Sutta, or Establishment of Mindfulness Discourse. The first thing we notice about it in this introductory section is how deliberate and intentional the practice is: one goes to a quiet place, sits down, and engages deliberately in the establishment of mindfulness.

Daily Practice
Mindfulness of the body begins with breathing. Take some time to sit quietly and just breathe in and out. Breathing mindfully simply means bringing full awareness to the various micro-sensations that accompany every in-breath and out-breath. As the refrain prompts us, see if you can attend to these sensations directly, without thinking about them and without clinging in any way by favoring or opposing any sensation. 


RIGHT CONCENTRATION
Approaching and Abiding in the First Phase of Absorption (1st Jhāna)
Having abandoned the five hindrances, imperfections of the mind that weaken wisdom, quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, one enters and abides in the first phase of absorption, which is accompanied by applied thought and sustained thought, with joy and the pleasure born of seclusion. (MN 4)
Reflection
Since there are seven days in the week and eight path factors, we dedicate Sundays to practicing both kinds of meditation: mindfulness and concentration. Concentration practice involves focusing the mind on a single object, such as the breath, and returning attention to this focal point whenever it wanders off, which it will do often. All forms of meditation involve some level of concentration, so it is a good thing to practice.

Daily Practice
Formal concentration practice, involving absorption (Pali: jhāna) in four defined stages, requires more time and sustained effort than occasional practice generally allows and would benefit from careful instruction by a qualified teacher. You may begin on your own, however, simply by practicing to abandon the five hindrances, since jhāna practice only really begins when they temporarily cease to arise. 


Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Origin of Suffering
One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and Abiding in the Second Jhāna


Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions?
Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: Seizing Perspective

 

In moments of upheaval and uncertainty, there’s clarity and knowledge and perspective to be gained, but we have to live into those possibilities.

—Interview with Suleika Jaouad by Ann Tashi Slater,
“The Myth of Moving On”


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Via White Crane Institute // 2018 - TODAY'S GAY WISDOM Adam and Steve--Together at Last

 

Today's Gay Wisdom
Katha Pollit
2018 -

TODAY'S GAY WISDOM

Adam and Steve--Together at Last

Kate Pollit

Will someone please explain to me how permitting Gays and Lesbians to marry threatens the institution of marriage? Now that the Massachusetts Supreme Court has declared Gay marriage a Constitutional right, opponents really have to get their arguments in line. The most popular theory, advanced by David Blankenhorn, Jean Bethke Elshtain and other social conservatives is that under the tulle and orange blossom, marriage is all about procreation. There's some truth to this as a practical matter — couples often live together and tie the knot only when baby's on the way. But whether or not marriage is the best framework for child-rearing, having children isn't a marital requirement. As many have pointed out, the law permits marriage to the infertile, the elderly, the impotent and those with no wish to procreate; it allows married couples to use birth control, to get sterilized, to be celibate. There's something creepily authoritarian and insulting about reducing marriage to procreation, as if intimacy mattered less than biological fitness. It's not a view that anyone outside a right-wing think tank, a Catholic marriage tribunal or an ultra-Orthodox rabbi's court is likely to find persuasive. 

So scratch procreation. How about: Marriage is the way women domesticate men. This theory, a favorite of right-wing writer George Gilder, has some statistical support — married men are much less likely than singles to kill people, crash the car, take drugs, commit suicide — although it overlooks such husbandly failings as domestic violence, child abuse, infidelity and abandonment. If a man rapes his wife instead of his date, it probably won't show up on a police blotter, but has civilization moved forward? Of course, this view of marriage as a barbarian-adoption program doesn't explain why women should undertake it — as is obvious from the state of the world, they haven't been too successful at it, anyway. (Maybe men should civilize men — bring on the Fab Five!) Nor does it explain why marriage should be restricted to heterosexual couples. The Gay men and Lesbians who want to marry don't impinge on the male-improvement project one way or the other. Surely not even Gilder believes that a heterosexual pothead with plans for murder and suicide would be reformed by marrying a Lesbian? 

What about the argument from history? According to this, marriage has been around forever and has stood the test of time. Actually, though, marriage as we understand it — voluntary, monogamous, legally egalitarian, based on love, involving adults only — is a pretty recent phenomenon. For much of human history, polygyny was the rule--read your Old Testament — and in much of Africa and the Muslim world, it still is. Arranged marriages, forced marriages, child marriages, marriages predicated on the subjugation of women — Gay marriage is like a fairy tale romance compared with most chapters of the history of wedlock. 

The trouble with these and other arguments against Gay marriage is that they overlook how loose, flexible, individualized and easily dissolved the bonds of marriage already are. Virtually any man and woman can marry, no matter how ill assorted or little acquainted. An 80-year-old can marry an 18-year-old; a john can marry a prostitute; two terminally ill patients can marry each other from their hospital beds. You can get married by proxy, like medieval royalty, and not see each other in the flesh for years. Whatever may have been the case in the past, what undergirds marriage in most people's minds today is not some socio-biological theory about reproduction or male socialization. Nor is it the enormous bundle of privileges society awards to married people. It's love, commitment, stability. Speaking just for myself, I don't like marriage. I prefer the old-fashioned ideal of monogamous free love, not that it worked out particularly well in my case. As a social mechanism, moreover, marriage seems to me a deeply unfair way of distributing social goods like health insurance and retirement checks, things everyone needs. Why should one's marital status determine how much you pay the doctor, or whether you eat cat food in old age, or whether a child gets a government check if a parent dies? It's outrageous that, for example, a working wife who pays Social Security all her life gets no more back from the system than if she had married a male worker earning the same amount and stayed home. Still, as long as marriage is here, how can it be right to deny it to those who want it? In fact, you would think that, given how many heterosexuals are happy to live in sin, social conservatives would welcome maritally minded Gays with open arms. Gays already have the baby — they can adopt in many states, and Lesbians can give birth in all of them — so why deprive them of the marital bathwater?

At bottom, the objections to Gay marriage are based on religious prejudice: The marriage of man and woman is "sacred" and opening it to same-sexers violates its sacral nature. That is why so many people can live with civil unions but draw the line at marriage--spiritual union. In fact, polls show a striking correlation of religiosity, especially evangelical Protestantism, with opposition to Gay marriage and with belief in homosexuality as a choice, the famous "Gay lifestyle." For these people Gay marriage is wrong because it lets Gays and Lesbians avoid turning themselves into the straights God wants them to be. As a matter of law, however, marriage is not about Adam and Eve versus Adam and Steve. It's not about what God blesses, it's about what the government permits. People may think "marriage" is a word wholly owned by religion, but actually it's wholly owned by the state. No matter how big your church wedding, you still have to get a marriage license from City Hall. And just as divorced people can marry even if the Catholic Church considers it bigamy, and Muslim and Mormon men can only marry one woman even if their holy books tell them they can wed all the girls in Apartment 3G, two men or two women should be able to marry, even if religions oppose it and it makes some heterosexuals, raised in those religions, uncomfortable.

Gay marriage —  it's not about sex, it's about separation of church and state.


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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 Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - December 5, 2021 💌

 

It's the expectations of your own mind that creates your own hell. When you get frustrated because something isn't the way you thought it would be, examine the way you thought, not just the thing that frustrates you. You'll see that a lot of your emotional suffering is created by your models of how you think the universe should be and your inability to allow it to be as it is.

- Ram Dass -

Saturday, December 4, 2021

Tina Turner - Lotus Sutra / Purity of Mind (2H Meditation)

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Via Dhamma Wheel // Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Harming Living Beings

 

RIGHT LIVING
Undertaking the Commitment to Abstain from Harming Living Beings
Harming living beings is unhealthy. Refraining from harming living beings is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning the harming of living beings, one abstains from harming living beings; with rod and weapon laid aside, gentle and kindly, one abides with compassion toward all living beings. (MN 41) One practices thus: "Others may harm living beings, but I will abstain from harming living beings." (MN 8)

There is a gift, which is a great gift—pristine, long-standing, traditional, ancient, unadulterated—that will never be suspect. Here a noble person gives up the destruction of life and refrains from it. In doing so, one gives freedom from fear, hostility, and oppression to an immeasurable number of beings. (AN 8.39)
Reflection
The path factor of right living is often called right livelihood, and it has to do with the practical effects of how we work in the world. Right livelihood is primarily a teaching for laypeople, as monks and nuns engage in no worldly affairs. Here we will focus on the so-called "ethical precepts," the first of which is to take care not to kill or cause injury to other living beings. This is the central organizing principle of all Buddhist ethics.

Daily Practice
Ethical integrity can be seen as a gift that you give to others, the gift of harmlessness. It is not a set of rules you have to follow but a set of guidelines to help you calibrate your behavior toward promoting welfare, both your own and that of others, and avoiding harm. Try to gradually develop this attitude so that you will be gentle with other creatures as an act of generosity rather than of forced discipline.

Tomorrow: Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States
One week from today: Abstaining from Taking What is Not Given

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
#DhammaWheel

Questions?
Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.

Via Daily Dharma: The Gap Between Heaven and Earth


Attaining the Way is not difficult,
Just avoid picking and choosing.
If you have neither aversion nor desire,
You’ll thoroughly understand.
A hair’s breadth difference
Is the gap between heaven and earth.

—Jianzhi Sengcan, “Faith in Mind”

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The 2021 Holberg Debate: "Identity Politics and Culture Wars"