A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
The
only really intolerable enemy is hatred itself. To defeat the enemy of
hatred, meditate one-pointedly on patience and love until they take root
in your being.
Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, “Teachings on the Nature of Mind and Practice”
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)
When sitting, one is aware: “I am sitting.”. . . One is just aware,
just mindful: “There is body.” And one abides not clinging to anything
in the world. (MN 10)
Reflection
The Zen meditation practice called zazen
means “just sitting.” This is a form of the early Buddhist practice
described here. The idea is to always do only one thing at a time. Not
sitting and reading, or sitting and watching TV, or sitting at your
computer—but just sitting. This is an exercise in being rather than
doing. The only activity you are doing while sitting is “being aware.”
Aware of what? Aware that you are sitting.
Daily Practice
Spend some time
every day, either regularly or adventitiously, just sitting. At first
the tendency might be to “sit and think about stuff,” or “sit and
remember,” or “sit and plan.” But this is a mindfulness of the body
practice, so it involves being aware of all the microsensations of the
body as you sit. There is a lot going on when you just sit and take the
time to notice. Notice it all without clinging to anything in the world.
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)
Breathing in long, one is aware: ‘I breathe in long’;
or breathing out long, one is aware: ‘I breathe out long.’
This is how concentration by mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated,
so that it is of great fruit and great benefit. (A 54.8)
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
Ignorance
means that we don’t have all of the elements we need to make informed
choices about life. We’re all looking for comfort, or meaning, but we
make clumsy choices that lead to painful results.
"Truth is one of the vehicles for deepening spiritual awareness through
another human being. And if there is a license for that in any
relationship: with guru, with friend, with lover, with whatever it is,
it is an absolutely optimum way of coming into a liquid spiritual
relationship with another person.
"
In this week's dharma talk, Melvin Escobar encourages us to meditate on two Koans:
"What is your original face?"
and
"What was your original face before your parents were born?"
He offers the perspective on aspects of the 3 Jewels: The Buddha - representing the Oneness of all things; The Dharma - representing the Diversity of all things; The Sangha - where Oneness and Diversity merge in harmony.
He
reminds us that our authentic self is shaped by all of our past
experiences, including the experiences of our ancestors before we were
born.
Melvin
Escobar is a core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center, a licensed
psychotherapist, and a certified yoga instructor. Melvin has walked the
path of service for much of his life, drawing on his experiences as a
queer man of color born and raised in Los Angeles, CA.
Having
encountered the priceless wisdom embodied in Buddhism and Yoga, he
continues daily to learn the revolutionary potential of body-centered
contemplative practices for personal and social healing. You can read
his latest article in Lion’s Roar Magazine “Loving-Kindness: May All
Beings Be Happy,” and visit his website www.melvinescobar.com for more information.
RIGHT EFFORT Restraining Unarisen Unhealthy States
Whatever a person frequently
thinks about and ponders, that will become the inclination of their
mind. If one frequently thinks about and ponders unhealthy states, one
has abandoned healthy states to cultivate unhealthy states, and then
one’s mind inclines to unhealthy states. (MN 19)
Here a person rouses the will, makes an effort, stirs up energy, exerts
the mind, and strives to restrain the arising of unarisen unhealthy
mental states. One restrains the arising of the unarisen hindrance of
sense desire. (MN 141)
Reflection
There are two
popular conceptions that may well be wrong. One is that we have free
will to do whatever we want, and the other is that we have no control
over what our unconscious minds throw up into consciousness. This text
speaks to the ability to use our powers of conscious intention to
influence what rises into awareness from preconscious or subconscious
realms. There are ways to guard against unhealthy states.
Daily Practice
When sense
desire arises, it has the effect of hijacking the mind and driving it in
unhealthy directions. See what you can do to guard against certain
kinds of content arising. One example is learning not to follow the
"clickbait" that keeps popping up on your computer, urging you to go to
specific websites. An internal example is to stay mindful of thoughts
arising and passing away, seeing them as impersonal events, without
following the content down the rabbit hole.
Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Body and Abiding in the First Jhāna One week from today: Abandoning Arisen Unhealthy States
Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media #DhammaWheel
Spiritual
realization is relatively easy compared with the much greater
difficulty of actualizing it, integrating it fully into the fabric of
one’s daily life.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE's
Sonnets were first published on this date in London, perhaps illicitly,
by the publisher Thomas Thorpe who was known to steal manuscripts. Even
so, if it weren’t for him we would not have this priceless work by the
master. Among the greatest and well known and loved poems in the English
language, most people do not realize that Shakespeare wrote these
sonnets to "a fair youth." The 'Fair Youth' is an unnamed young man to
whom sonnets 1-126 are addressed. Shakespeare clearly writes of the
young man in romantic and loving language, a fact which serves to
confirm a homosexual relationship between them.
The more prudish
and near-sighted prefer to call it "platonic." But it is quite clear
that he addresses a man and once read, "platonic" seems a ridiculous
attempt at denying the obvious. Do you remember Shakespeare's famous
Sonnet 18? ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"). That poem,
taught to us as a poem of heterosexual love, is in fact written between
men, and is from Shakespeare to another man in a tone of clear romantic
intimacy. While Sonnet 20 explicitly laments that the young man is not a
woman.
Through the years
there have been many attempts to identify “the Fair Youth.”
Shakespeare's one-time patron, the Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of
Southampton is the most commonly suggested candidate, although
Shakespeare's later patron, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, has
recently become a popular candidate. Both claims have much to do with
the dedication of the sonnets to 'Mr. W.H.', "the only begetter of these
ensuing sonnets": the initials could apply to either Earl. However,
while Shakespeare's language often seems to imply that the 'friend' is
of higher social status than himself, this may not be the case.
The apparent
references to the poet's inferiority may simply be part of the rhetoric
of romantic submission. An alternative theory, most famously espoused by
Oscar Wilde's short story "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." notes a series of
puns that may suggest the sonnets are written to a boy actor called
William Hughes; however, Wilde's story acknowledges that there is no
evidence for such a person's existence. Samuel Butler believed that the
friend was a seaman, and recently Joseph Pequigney in "Such Is My love"
argued for the idea that "Mr. W.H." was an unknown commoner.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18) William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|
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
SALLY FLOYD
(d: 2019) A computer scientist whose work on the early 1990s on
controlling congestion on the internet that continues to play a vital
role in its stability was born on this date.
Dr. Floyd was
best known as one of the inventors of Random Early Detection (RED), an
algorithm widely used in the internet. Although it is not readily
visible to the average internet user, it helps traffic on the internet
to flow smoothly during periods of overload.
The internet
consists of a series of linked routers. When computers communicate with
one another through the internet, they divide the information into
packets of data, which are sent out to the routers in sequence/ A router
examines each packet and sends it to its intended destination. But when
routers receive more that they can handle immediately, they queue those
packets in a holding area called a buffer, which can increase the delay
in transmitting data.
We've all been there, right?
The buffer has a
limited capacity, so if the router continues to receive traffic at a
higher rate than it can forward, it will discard incoming traffic. For
all the ingenuity of the internet its creators did not anticipate some
of the difficulties that arose as it grew.
Well into the
1980s the internet frequently experienced a period of huge degradation
in performance known as "congestion collapse". The network's capacity
was consumed by computers repeatedly transmitting packets which routers
were forced to discard due to overload.
Dr. Floyd's
Random Early Detection was an enhancement of the work done by Van
Jacobson who was credited with saving the internet from collapse. He
and Dr. Floyd developed RED together.
With RED, a
router would generate a signal saying "I've got enough backlog that I'm
going to tell senders I'm backed up." This meant that by occasionally
discarding the occasional data packet earlier, routers could avoid
getting completely clogged. The work required a great deal of careful
mathematics and the development of simulations.
One of the
by-products of Dr. Floyd's work, reflected her passion for keeping
things fair to all intenet users. The work on congestion control was
about keeping the internet working for everyone.
Dr. Floyd was
born in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the University of
Michigan. One of her first professional positions was working for the
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in San Francisco. She went on to
study computer science at UC Berkeley for her M.A. and PhD. In addition
to her seminal work in applied computer science, Dr. Floyd was well
known for her mentoring of graduate students.
Dr. Floyd died in August, 2019 of gall bladder cancer and is survived by her wife, Carole Leita.
|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|
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
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 compassionate to all living beings. (M 41) One practices thus:
“Others may harm living beings, but I will abstain from the harming of
living beings.” (MN 8)
A layperson is not to engage in the livelihood of trading in poison. (AN 5.177)
Reflection
The guideline
calling for laypeople to earn their livelihood in ways that do not
inflict harm on themselves or others can be taken literally, as in not
producing or deploying pesticides, but the scope of what is meant by
poison can be expanded beyond a physical substance to include a wide
range of mental toxins as well. For example, trading in misinformation
or prejudice, or conducting all sorts of unethical enterprises could
also be considered toxic.
Daily Practice
Take stock of
what you do for a living and inquire into how much harm it may cause. If
the answer is “none” then take joy in that and carry on. But if your
profession causes harm, even from subtle toxic activity, be aware of
that and do what you can to diminish the harm. It is a blessing to
engage in a harmless profession and even more of a blessing to do work
that actively contributes to the welfare of others.
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