Sunday, May 28, 2023

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Mindfulness and Concentration: Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and the Second Jhāna

 


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RIGHT MINDFULNESS
Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling
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 feeling a mental pleasant feeling, one is aware: “Feeling a mental pleasant feeling”… one is just aware, just mindful: “There is feeling.” And one abides not clinging to anything in the world. (MN 10)
Reflection
We forget sometimes that it is okay to feel joy. In fact, it is encouraged. It is attachment to joy that is a problem, not the good feeling that comes with mental pleasure. The aggregate of feeling, which includes both physical pleasure and pain and mental pleasure and pain, is an inevitable and natural aspect of all experience. The challenge is to experience pleasure with equanimity, rather than with desire.

Daily Practice
Just as you can find both pleasure and pain when you review bodily sensations, the same is true of mental life. Take a few moments to inventory the contents of your mind. Certain things you think of are accompanied by happiness, while others arise with mental pain. Allow yourself to experience mental pleasure when it arises, and carefully observe the inevitable tipping point when the mind becomes attached to that pleasure.


RIGHT CONCENTRATION
Approaching and Abiding in the Second Phase of Absorption (2nd Jhāna)
With the stilling of applied and sustained thought, one enters upon and abides in the second phase of absorption, which has inner clarity and singleness of mind, without applied thought and sustained thought, with joy and the pleasure born of concentration. (MN 4)

Breathing in short, one is aware: ‘I breathe in short’; or
breathing out short, one is aware: ‘I breathe out short.
This is how concentration by mindfulness of breathing is developed and cultivated, 
so that it is of great fruit and great benefit. (SN 54.8)

Tomorrow: Understanding the Noble Truth of the Cessation of Suffering
One week from today: Establishing Mindfulness of Mind and Abiding in the Third Jhāna

Share your thoughts and join the conversation on social media
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© 2023 Tricycle Foundation
89 5th Ave, New York, NY 10003

Via Tricycle Foundation // The Fourth Quality of the Heart



The Fourth Quality of the Heart
By Pascal Auclair
Equanimity is a powerful component of Buddhist practice. As one of the four “qualities of the heart,” equanimity, or composure, can be developed with a bit of intention. With an equanimous mind, we can maintain access to an inner stability even in the midst of difficulty.
Read more »

Via Daily Dharma: Use Your Insight

The techniques we learn on the meditation cushion are not meant just for the cushion. After all, we’re not creating suffering for ourselves only on the cushion. We go through life. So we’re going to take those techniques and use them on a day-to-day basis. 

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “The Buddha’s Alternative to Acting Out in Anger”


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE


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Via White Crane Institute // More From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS

 

Today's Gay Wisdom
2018 -

TODAY'S GAY WISDOM

More From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS

The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different.

With us, prison makes a man a pariah. I, and such as I am, have hardly any right to air and sun. Our presence taints the pleasures of others. We are unwelcome when we reappear. To revisit the glimpses of the moon is not for us. Our very children are taken away. Those lovely links with humanity are broken. We are doomed to be solitary, while our sons still live. We are denied the one thing that might heal us and keep us, that might bring balm to the bruised heart, and peace to the soul in pain. . . .

I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I am trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he said –

'Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark And has the nature of infinity.'


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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 - May 28, 2023 💌

  


 

"My path is the path of Guru Kripa, which means ‘grace of the guru’. It seems like a sort of strange path in the West, but my path involves my relationship to Maharajji, Neem Karoli Baba. The way I do that is that I just hang out with him all the time. I have an imaginary playmate in a way, I mean, he’s dead. He dropped his body, yet he seems so alive to me, because I have invested that form in my mind as an emotional connection to that deeper truth.

Because for me, Maharajji is the cosmic giggle. He is the wisdom that transcends time and space. He is the unconditional lover. He is the total immediate presence."

- Ram Dass -




Saturday, May 27, 2023

 


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RIGHT EFFORT
Abandoning Arisen 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)

Abandoning worldly sense desire, one abides with a mind free from sense desire, one purifies the mind of sense desire. (MN 51) Just as a person who had taken a loan would pay off their debts and have money left over, so would one rejoice and be glad about the abandoning of sense desire. (DN 2)
Reflection
When an unhealthy state arises, what do you do? First, acknowledge it rather than try to ignore or suppress it, and then understand that it is unhealthy and likely to bring harm to yourself and/or others. Finally, let it go. Letting it go is simply aligning yourself with the law of impermanence. All mental and emotional states will pass away naturally; the trick is not to encourage the unhealthy ones by getting caught by them.

Daily Practice
Practice experiencing a stream of sensory inputs—sights, sounds, and the rest—without being entangled in them. When you abide in your experience with equanimity rather than desire or aversion, you are free. Even if these moments are brief, they are compared in this text to the freedom of being liberated from debt. The mind is unencumbered, without anxiety, and feels light and at ease. This feels good.

Tomorrow: Establishing Mindfulness of Feeling and Abiding in the Second Jhāna
One week from today: Developing Unarisen Healthy States

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

Questions?
Visit the Dhamma Wheel orientation page.



Tricycle is a nonprofit and relies on your support to keep its wheels turning.

© 2023 Tricycle Foundation
89 5th Ave, New York, NY 10003

Via Daily Dharma: Planting the Seeds for Equanimity


Equanimity is not just a decision that we can will into being: “Let me be equanimous, right now, in the face of this difficulty.” It’s based on a deep understanding of the impermanent, unstable, changing, unreliable, and conditional nature of reality. 

Pascal Auclair, “The Fourth Quality of the Heart”


CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE

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Via White Crane Institute // From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS

 

Today's Gay Wisdom
-

TODAY'S GAY WISDOM

From Oscar Wilde’s DE PROFUNDIS

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also. Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of it in THE YOUNG KING, notably in the passage where the bishop says to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that like a purple thread runs through the texture of DORIAN GRAY; in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make SALOME so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.

It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development. Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul. In MARIUS THE EPICUREAN Pater seeks to reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion, in the deep, sweet, and austere sense of the word. But Marius is little more than a spectator: an ideal spectator indeed, and one to whom it is given 'to contemplate the spectacle of life with appropriate emotions,' which Wordsworth defines as the poet's true aim; yet a spectator merely, and perhaps a little too much occupied with the comeliness of the benches of the sanctuary to notice that it is the sanctuary of sorrow that he is gazing at.

I see a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist; and I take a keen pleasure in the reflection that long before sorrow had made my days her own and bound me to her wheel I had written in THE SOUL OF MAN that he who would lead a Christ-like life must be entirely and absolutely himself, and had taken as my types not merely the shepherd on the hillside and the prisoner in his cell, but also the painter to whom the world is a pageant and the poet for whom the world is a song. I remember saying once to Andre Gide, as we sat together in some Paris CAFE, that while meta-physics had but little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfillment.


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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 White Crane Institute // WILD BILL HICKOK

 

Born
James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok
1837 -

WILD BILL HICKOK is born in Troy Grove, Illinois. His real name was James Butler Hickok. Like many men in the wild west, Wild Bill really was wild with the men on the frontier and used his Lesbian buddy, Calamity Jane as a blind.

Few people ever knew the pair's secret, and in the movies about their lives, not a mention was made by either Doris Day or Howard Keel. The American West of the nineteenth century was a world of freedom and adventure for men of every stripe—not least also those who admired and desired other men.

Among these sojourners was William Drummond Stewart, a flamboyant Scottish nobleman who found in American culture of the 1830s and 1840s a cultural milieu of openness in which men could pursue same-sex relationships.

William Benemann’s recent book, Men In Eden traces Stewart’s travels from his arrival in America in 1832 to his return to Murthly Castle in Perthshire, Scotland, with his French Canadian–Cree Indian companion, Antoine Clement, one of the most skilled hunters in the Rockies. Benemann chronicles Stewart’s friendships with such notables as Kit Carson, William Sublette, Marcus Whitman, and Jim Bridger. He describes the wild Renaissance-costume party held by Stewart and Clement upon their return to America—a journey that ended in scandal.

Through Stewart’s letters and novels, Benemann shows that Stewart was one of many men drawn to the sexual freedom offered by the West. His book provides a tantalizing new perspective on the Rocky Mountain fur trade and the role of homosexuality in shaping the American West. For more: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13594189-men-in-eden

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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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