Friday, January 19, 2024

Via Daily Dharma: Fuel For Awakening

 

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Fuel For Awakening

We cannot ignore this life, especially the painful, embarrassing, and frustrating parts of it. But through practice, we can transform these experiences into fuel for awakening—and not an awakening somewhere else beyond the rough edges of modern human life—but right here in the middle of it.

River Shannon, “My Foxy Body”


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Thursday, January 18, 2024

Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Social Action

 


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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)

One reflects thus: "A person who speaks in hurtful ways is displeasing and disagreeable to me. If I were to speak in hurtful ways, I would be displeasing and disagreeable to others. Therefore, I will undertake a commitment to not speak in hurtful ways." (MN 15)
Reflection
Social action is not one of the formal categories of action outlined by the Buddha, but today it represents a large part of our activity. The image of reflecting on social interactions as carefully as you would those of body, speech, and mind is a useful one, allowing you to check on the effects of your actions on the world around you. Is what you are doing socially leading to beneficial or to harmful consequences? 

Daily Practice
When people speak to us in hurtful ways, our first reflex is often to respond in kind or to recoil, feeling angry, hurt, or resentful. This teaching is pointing us in an entirely different direction. Instead of trying to get back at or reform the other person, we learn from them what not to do. If you know what it feels like to be hurt, why would you want to hurt anyone else? Try this way of looking at things and see what happens.

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

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Via Daily Dharma: Mindfulness and Kindness

 

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Mindfulness and Kindness 

Mindfulness helps me by highlighting my ego when it arises and reminding me to add a little kindness to the mix.

Laurie Fisher Huck, “Has Mindfulness Made Me a Bitch?”
 

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Boundless Lovingkindness
By Lama Tsomo
A practice for cultivating love for ourselves, even when we feel unworthy of receiving it.
Read more »

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - January 17, 2024 💌


 

The journey passes from eclectic sampling to a single path. Finally, you recognize the unity of your own way and that of other seekers who followed other paths. At the peak, all the paths come together.

- Ram Dass

Via White Crane Institute // Today's Gay Wisdom 2018 - Allen Ginsberg's AMERICA

 

Noteworthy
Ginsberg "America"
1956 -

The poet ALLEN GINSBERG wrote his intensely personal anti-war, love-hate poem "America" on this date. He later published it in his collection "Howl" it is one of the first poems to deal openly and honestly with homosexuality. America is a largely political work, with much of the poem consisting of various accusations against the United States, its government, and its citizens.

Ginsberg uses sarcasm to accuse America of attempting to divert responsibility for the Cold War ("America you don't want to go to war/ it's them bad Russians / Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. / And them Russians"), and makes numerous references to both leftist and anarchist political movements and figures (including Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys and the Wobblies). Ginsberg's dissatisfaction, however, is tinged with optimism and hope, as exemplified by phrases like "When will you end the human war?" (as opposed to "why don't you...?").

The poem's ending is also highly optimistic, a promise to put his "queer shoulder to the wheel," although the original draft ended on a bleaker note: "Dark America! toward whom I close my eyes for prophecy, / and bend my speaking heart! / Betrayed! Betrayed!"

Today's Gay Wisdom
2018 -

Allen Ginsberg's

AMERICA

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. 
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. 
I can't stand my own mind. 
America when will we end the human war? 
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb 
I don't feel good don't bother me. 
I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind. 
America when will you be angelic? 
When will you take off your clothes? 
When will you look at yourself through the grave? 
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites? 
America why are your libraries full of tears? 
America when will you send your eggs to India? 
I'm sick of your insane demands. 
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks? 
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world. 
Your machinery is too much for me. 
You made me want to be a saint. 
There must be some other way to settle this argument. 
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister. 
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke? 
I'm trying to come to the point. 
I refuse to give up my obsession. 
America stop pushing I know what I'm doing. 
America the plum blossoms are falling. 
I haven't read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for 
murder. 
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies. 
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry. 
I smoke marijuana every chance I get. 
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet. 
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid. 
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble. 
You should have seen me reading Marx. 
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right. 
I won't say the Lord's Prayer. 
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations. 
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over 
from Russia.

I'm addressing you. 
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine? 
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine. 
I read it every week. 
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. 
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library. 
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie 
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me. 
It occurs to me that I am America. 
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me. 
I haven't got a chinaman's chance. 
I'd better consider my national resources. 
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals 
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and 
twentyfivethousand mental institutions. 
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in 
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns. 
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go. 
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? 
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his 
automobiles more so they're all different sexes 
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe 
America free Tom Mooney 
America save the Spanish Loyalists 
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die 
America I am the Scottsboro boys. 
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they 
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the 
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the 
workers

it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835

Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have 
been a spy. 
America you don're really want to go to war. 
America it's them bad Russians. 
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians. 
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take 
our cars from out our garages. 
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader's Digest. her wants our 
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations. 
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. 
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help. 
America this is quite serious. 
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set. 
America is this correct? 
I'd better get right down to the job. 
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts 
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway. 
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.


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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 // TOM DOOLEY

 


Tom Dooley
1927 -

On this date the American physician and writer TOM DOOLEY was born (d. 1961). Born in St. Louis, Missouri as Thomas Anthony Dooley III, Dooley was an American Catholic who, while serving as a physician in the United States Navy, became increasingly famous for his humanitarian and anti-Communist activities in South East Asia during the late 1950s until his early death from cancer. Based on his experiences working in Vietnam and Laos, he authored a number of popular anti-communist books in the years preceding the Vietnam War.

According to classmate Michael Harrington, Dooley never attempted to hide his same-sex orientation. Even after cancer surgery in 1960, Dooley resorted to the 2nd floor of Bangkok's Erawan Hotel, a "central preserve of his Gay life in Southeast Asia."  The best-known victim of military homophobia in Randy Shilts's book Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military is Thomas A. Dooley, the jungle doctor of Laos and folk hero to millions of American Catholics in the late 1950s. 

Shilts describes the U.S. Navy's frenzied investigation of Dooley's sexuality while Dooley was on the American lecture circuit in early 1956, promoting Deliver Us from Evil, the best-selling, highly embellished account of his role in the Navy's 1954 "Operation Passage to Freedom," which transplanted over 600,000 Catholics from North Vietnam to the new regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in the South. Fearing a scandal that would diminish its own prestige, the Navy hounded Dooley into confessing his homosexuality following a campaign of surveillance and perhaps entrapment by Office of Naval Intelligence operatives who bugged Dooley's phone and eavesdropped on his hotel room conversations.

After leaving the navy, Dooley went to Laos to establish medical clinics and hospitals under the sponsorship of the International Rescue Committee. Dooley founded the Medical International Cooperation Organization (MEDICO) under the auspices of which he built hospitals. During this same time period he wrote two books, The Edge of Tomorrow and The Night They Burned the Mountain about his experience in Laos.

In 1959 Dooley returned to the United States for cancer treatment; he died in 1961 from malignant melanoma, just one day after his 34th birthday. Following his death John F. Kennedy cited Dooley's example when he launched the Peace Corps. He was also awarded a Congressional Gold Medal posthumously. There have been efforts following his death to have him canonized as a Roman Catholic saint.

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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 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)

When a person commits an offense of some kind, one should not hurry to reprove them but rather should consider whether or not to speak. If you will be troubled, the other person will not be hurt, and you can help them emerge from what is unhealthy and establish them in what is healthy, then it is proper to speak. It is a trifle that you will be troubled compared with the value of helping establish them in what is healthy. (MN 103)
Reflection
The guideline to refrain from frivolous speech is a recommendation that we take seriously what we say and say what is meaningful with a sense of purpose and care. It does not mean everything we say has to be profound, just carefully considered. Here we also have guidance for when to speak up and when not to. If we can help someone and make a difference by speaking out, then the fact that it is troublesome is a trifle.
Daily Practice
As you practice considering carefully the way you speak, the suggestion to "not hurry to reprove" someone who does or says something offensive but rather to "consider whether or not to speak" is an important suggestion. This moment of pause and reflection is itself a powerful practice in daily life and should be followed at every opportunity. Try speaking up only when you really can help a person or situation and not simply from habit or reflex.
Tomorrow: Reflecting upon Social Action
One week from today: Refraining from False Speech

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.
© 2024 Tricycle Foundation
89 5th Ave, New York, NY 10003