Thursday, October 27, 2022

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Social Action

 

RIGHT ACTION
Reflecting Upon Social Action
However the seed is planted, in that way the fruit is gathered. Good things come from doing good deeds; bad things come from doing bad deeds. (SN 11.10) What is the purpose of a mirror? For the purpose of reflection. So too social action is to be done with repeated reflection. (MN 61)

A person is content with any lodging places they may get, speaks in praise of such contentment, and does not try to obtain these things in improper or unsuitable ways. Not getting these things, one does not worry, and getting them, one makes use of them without being greedy, obsessed, or infatuated, observing such potential dangers and wisely being aware of how to escape them. (AN 4.28)
Reflection
Just as you can practice contentment by appreciating whatever you eat or wear, so too can you take this approach to where and how you live. For monks and nuns, who in the early days wandered from place to place, this meant adjusting to a different lodging situation almost every night. The practice of feeling content wherever you are can be extended to laypeople as well. Contentment is a mental state that can be cultivated.

Daily Practice
It is not difficult to find the flaws in any situation. However, this leads to discontent, which is a state of mind conducive to suffering. Practice instead finding the benefits of things in your life, such as your living situation. It could always be worse. There is always something in any situation that can be noticed, raised in awareness, and appreciated. Practice doing this whenever you can; contentment contributes to your well-being.

Tomorrow: Abstaining from Intoxication
One week from today: Reflecting upon Bodily Action


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Via LGBTQ Nation Daily Brief // Ghost hunting in America's oldest gay bar

 


Via Daily Dharma: Stilling the Mind to See with Wisdom

As the reordering of our life, brought about by moral training, creates the environment for meditation, the stillness of mind created by meditation will make possible the examination of reality that is the hallmark of wisdom.

Lama Jampa Thaye, “Living by Meditation Alone”


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Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Via Attitude

 


Via Facebook


 

Via Pete Buttigieg asks the question we all want an answer to about Republican inflation solutions

 


Via NYT: How the ‘Black Death’ Left Its Genetic Mark on Future Generations


 

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Speech: Refraining from Frivolous Speech

 

RIGHT SPEECH
Refraining from Frivolous Speech
Frivolous speech is unhealthy. Refraining from frivolous speech is healthy. (MN 9) Abandoning frivolous speech, one refrains from frivolous speech. One speaks at the right time, speaks only what is fact, and speaks about what is good. One speaks what is worthy of being overheard, words that are reasonable, moderate, and beneficial. (DN 1) One practices thus: “Others may speak frivolously, but I shall abstain from frivolous speech.” (MN 8)

A person should examine things in such a way that while examining them their consciousness is not stuck internally, and not clinging, they do not become agitated. Then there is no origination of suffering. (MN 138)
Reflection
Suffering arises when consciousness gets stuck internally. That is to say, the mind gets attached to the things flowing through it and cannot let go of one thing to allow the next thing to arise. This can happen a lot when we are communicating. How often do you appear to be listening to someone when in fact you are rehearsing what you are going to say next? Right speech requires unsticking the mind from its internal clinging.

Daily Practice
Encourage your mind to work like Teflon, encountering everything but not getting attached or stuck to the objects it becomes aware of. This requires listening to a person speak, for example, without grabbing hold of a particular word or phrase but remaining open to everything that is said. Stay focused on what is happening in the present moment and respond appropriately, without projecting your own internal attachments.

Tomorrow: Reflecting upon Social Action
One week from today: Refraining from False Speech

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
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Via Daily Dharma: The Gateway to Compassion


The gateway to compassion and lovingkindness is to be able to feel our own pain, and the pain of others. 

Lama Palden Drolma, “The Gateway to Compassion”


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White Crane Institute  Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989
 

This Day in Gay History

October 26

Born
Desiderius Erasmus
1466 -

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS, Dutch humanist and theologian, born (d: 1536); Desiderius Erasmus was a classical scholar who wrote in a "pure" Latin style. Although he remained a Roman Catholic throughout his lifetime, he was critical of what he considered the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church. Imagine that.

Using humanist techniques Erasmus prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament that raised questions that would be influential in the Reformation. He also wrote Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, and many other works. Known as “the Voltaire of the Renaissance” simply stated, it has been argued that Erasmus “laid the egg and Luther hatched it”…the “egg” being the Reformation. As to what else or who else Erasmus may have laid is anyone’s read-between-the-lines guess. But while at the Augustinian monastery Stein near Gouda around 1487, Erasmus wrote passionate letters of friendship to a fellow monk, Servatius Rogerus, whom he called "half my soul", writing, "I have wooed you both unhappily and relentlessly"; this correspondence contrasts sharply with the generally detached and much more restrained attitude he showed in his later life.

And, in the great archetype of same-sex people as “jester,” “joker” and “contrary,” as well as speakers of truth to power, Erasmus's best-known work was The Praise of Folly (published under the double title Moriae encomium (Greek, latinized) and Laus stultitiae (Latin)), a satirical attack on the traditions of the Catholic Church and popular superstitions, written in 1509, published in 1511 and dedicated to his friend, Sir Thomas More.

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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 - October 26, 2022 💌

 


“Just what’s on your plate, that’s your vehicle to liberation. If you’re turning away from anything, it’s got you. As you cultivate the emptiness and start to feel safe in the formless, you will be able to dive more deeply into the form. Most people are afraid of the form that are on the spiritual journey, for fear they’ll get lost in it. When you really want truth and want freedom, you need have no fear. You’ll go under for a moment, but you’ll come up.” 



From Here & Now Podcast - Ep. 209 – Your Vehicle to Liberation

Via LGBTQ Nation

 


Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Via White Crane Institute // DAVID McREYNOLDS

 


Activist David McReynolds
1929 -

For more than three decades, DAVID McREYNOLDS, who was born on this date (d: 2018) was among the most outspoken socialists and pacifists in America, a leftist organizer who combined a belief in wealth redistribution with a fierce opposition to the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons.

As a leader of the War Resisters League, he spurred a wave of antiwar demonstrations in 1965, when he joined four other men in lighting their draft cards on fire, defying a federal law that could have sent him to prison for five years and earned him a $10,000 fine.

He went on to become one of the first candidates to come out as Gay to run for Congress and president. Although he never came close to winning office, he helped “define modern pacifism in the United States,” said his friend Bruce Cronin, chair of the political science department at the City College of New York.

McReynolds, who died in August 2018 at a hospital in Manhattan, drew the attention of the FBI and landed in jail several times as a result of his activism. His political career was all the more remarkable given his upbringing in Los Angeles, where he was raised by a family of conservative Baptists and joined the Prohibition Party in his youth.

Though he came to don tie-dye shirts, beads and patchouli cologne with other Vietnam-era peaceniks, he honed his public speaking skills with a group called the Traveling Temperance Talking Team, in which sharply dressed teenagers competed to see who could best denounce the evils of alcohol.

Indeed, McReynolds was described as more professorial than proletarian, with interests that ranged far beyond political rallies and campaigns. He was a prolific photographer, taking more than 50,000 pictures of New York City streetscapes and activists such as the gay civil rights leader Bayard Rustin (whom McReynolds described as a mentor) and the pacifist A.J. Muste (for whom he worked as a top lieutenant).

McReynolds was also a member of the Bromeliad Society, an international botanical group, and filled his East Village apartment with tropical plants and hundreds of bottles of perfume, which he created himself and arranged on floor-to-ceiling shelves. He was found unconscious in the apartment Wednesday, several weeks after suffering a fall, said his younger brother, Martin McReynolds.

Active in the anti-Korean War and civil rights movements, McReynolds joined the War Resisters League in 1960 and was soon named field secretary. Alongside Norma Becker and Sidney Peck, he became a behind-the-scenes architect of the anti-Vietnam War movement, Cronin said, known for maintaining unity in a coalition that included members of the political left and right.

“If you can bring together labor, teachers, students, folks from all walks of life, then you can turn the country. That’s painstaking work,” said Cronin, who met McReynolds while preparing for a 1982 nuclear disarmament rally that, by some estimates, drew 1 million people to Central Park.

“It took somebody like David to bring people together and say, ‘Look, let’s keep the focus on what we want and not break up over trifles.’”

Among the league’s most controversial actions was the burning of draft cards. McReynolds made national headlines when he appeared on a wooden platform in Manhattan’s Union Square to burn his card on Nov. 6, 1965, amid counterprotests from a group chanting, “Drop dead, red.”

The burning was interrupted, the New York Times reported, when a man sprayed McReynolds and his fellow demonstrators with a fire extinguisher: “The pacifists managed to dry the cards over the flame of a cigarette lighter, however, and the cards burned crisply.”

At 36, McReynolds was the oldest member of the group, which included Tom Cornell, Marc Paul Edelman, Roy Lisker and James Wilson. While the others were indicted on charges of defacing their cards (three were sentenced to six months in prison), McReynolds was left alone, reportedly because he was too old to be drafted.

He went on to coordinate antiwar rallies across the country and twice met with dissident groups in Vietnam. According to “A Saving Remnant,” a biography of McReynolds by Martin Duberman, he was visiting Czechoslovakia when the Soviets invaded in 1968 to quash the Prague Spring.

McReynolds — who said he was a socialist, not a communist — was able to return to the United States in time to run for a U.S. House seat that fall, on Eldridge Cleaver's Peace and Freedom ticket. As in 1958, during his first bid for Congress, he was crushed, receiving just 5% of the vote.

Undaunted, he went on to run for president with the Socialist Party USA in 1980, on a platform that called for nuclear disarmament, the breakup of large corporations and sharp reductions in military spending.

“We have no illusions that we will win the presidential election,” he said after a rally with his running mate Diane Drufenbrock, a nun. “Our purpose is to make possible a discussion of socialism and to raise issues on foreign policy and unemployment.”

McReynolds received fewer than 7,000 votes. He ran once more, in 2000, and four years later mounted a Green Party campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York.

In part, he said, his electoral defeats could be chalked up to an imaging problem in a country where “socialism” has long been a dirty word.

“One of the tragedies is that the things a Socialist candidate will say are things that really could be said by a compassionate and moderately insightful Republican,” he told the Progressive magazine in 2000. “If I say we should have much greater mass transit in the major cities, that we should be able to rebuild the railroad system so that Amtrak actually connects all the small towns, that’s a reasonable thing. It’s not a radical proposal.”

David Ernest McReynolds was born in Los Angeles on Oct. 25, 1929, one day after the Black Thursday stock market crash signaled the beginning of the Depression.

 


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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 Dhamma Wheel | Right Intention: Cultivating Equanimity

 

RIGHT INTENTION
Cultivating Equanimity
Whatever you intend, whatever you plan, and whatever you have a tendency toward, that will become the basis on which your mind is established. (SN 12.40) Develop meditation on equanimity, for when you develop meditation on equanimity, all aversion is abandoned. (MN 62) 

When a person, thinking a mental object with the mind, is not attached to pleasing mental objects and not repelled by unpleasing mental objects, they have established mindfulness and dwell with an unlimited mind. For a person whose mindfulness is developed and practiced, the mind does not struggle to reach pleasing mental objects, and unpleasing mental objects are not considered repulsive. (SN 35.274)
Reflection
Some objects in the world are naturally pleasing, and some are displeasing. This goes for our thoughts and other mental objects as well. Of course it feels good to think about some things and it feels bad to think of others, but whether we experience stress or suffering depends not on these facts but on our response to them. When attached, we struggle, and when we abide in our minds with equanimity, we are at peace.

Daily Practice
When you are settled for some time in a quiet place, turn your awareness to the thoughts and images that may be streaming through your mind. When you are caught by the content of these, you are swept along by the mental flow, but if you regard what is happening with equanimity, as a process of arising and passing mental objects, your mindfulness is developed and you are no longer favoring some thoughts over others.

Tomorrow: Refraining from Frivoulous Speech
One week from today: Cultivating Lovingkindness

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
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