doc benway

I hear and feel you @old3bob It is a difficult time. I have been experiencing intense reactivity - anger, fear, disappointment, frustration, despair, and the list goes on. The emotions are more powerful and destabilizing than they have been in me in a very long time. They have shown me both strengths and vulnerabilities in myself and in my practice. I wonder if there would be a place here for a thread where we can share how the current events are affecting us emotionally, psychologically, and physically without getting into discussing the politics per se? Not sure it would work but perhaps it could in the Healing Bums area… I won’t start a thread yet but thought I’d float the idea. I deeply respect the willingness of the mod team to try and keep the board civil and balanced and I don’t want to create more work but it would be nice to be able to offer each other some support in dark times. I have an account at Substack since being introduced to the community by @liminal_luke. When I first joined it was a place where intellectuals would blog in fields like literature, philosophy, history, sciences, and so forth, and it was not very political. With the exodus of people from social media sites like X, Facebook, and the like, it has become a very active place for discussion of politics. It is a growing community fostering advocacy and resistance to current political and social trends, not only in the US but around the world. I mention this because you may find it worth checking out if are not familiar with it @old3bob. On the one hand, it can be a bit of a dark place to be and easy to get lost in the negativity, but on the other hand there is a lot of positivity, advocacy, and community building going on there and it is easy to find writings on many topics like art, literature, history, sciences, spirituality, and so forth. The contributions are far more substantive, with less argument and derision, than what is posted on other social media sites. I appreciate @liminal_luke’s message reminding and encouraging us to find and share beauty, and I’ll add kindness, in hard times. It is never more important and never more difficult than when times are tough. As things get darker and more threatening, I think it is important to try and maintain an open heart for each other, especially for those who may be trying to deconstruct and find a way back to the light. Now is the time for taking care of the body, spirit, and mind, as we will need our health, strength, and resilience to face what is here and what is coming. I’ve recently lost another friend and fellow practitioner, Sarah, to cancer and I’m just coming from a group practice in her memory. The reality of impermanence is vivid and alive in me at the moment. It is a reminder that what I have even, or perhaps especially, now is worth honoring and fighting for. Anyway, enough rambling. Warm regards to you all.

I recently watched Moonage Daydream. Good flick.

Another good reference for the Two Truths is Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty. It’s not an easy read but Journey to Certainty by Anyen Rinpoche is a clear summary and commentary on the Beacon, a great read.

You need to define it first, then we can investigate its existence. Indeed

One of my most treasured members of our little community. She was indeed wise, gentle, and generous. She will be deeply missed and remembered. Thank you for sharing this update @Geof Nanto

One of my favorite spiritual teachers, Anthony Demello, speaks to this with experience and wisdom. He was a psychologist and Jesuit with a Hindu and Buddhist background, born in India. He spoke of his conflict in dealing with people who came to him for help. The psychologist in him wanted to help ease the pain whereas the spiritual guide knew they must go through the pain to experience meaningful growth and liberation.

Can you share with us, or by PM, how to find your poetry? Glad to have you here.

And yet wouldn’t it be beautiful if we could somehow facilitate an explosion of heart? Heart and mind must be balanced in my opinion. The lack of balance is largely responsible for our misuse of the powers of mind alone. Spirituality for me is largely about restoring balance through opening the heart and maturing it as a refuge and a tool. When looking at a spiritual source, be it new or old, my questions are, does it make people kinder and more open? Does it cultivate empathy, honesty, and transparency? Does it strengthen relationships or isolation? Not always easy to get answers to these questions and often takes time and engagement with the view and practice. This is the advantage of the older, established traditions, you can see the effects over time and the kinks have been worked out. Newer ideas and methods are more of a risk, and our time is short as human beings on Earth, but at the end of the day, they could be just what is needed for the right person.

Vibrant

The Place Where We Are Right Yehuda Amichai From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring. The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place where the ruined house once stood.

my quarters are gone shepherded by destruction walking without legs

@Samoobramba I wonder if you’ve come across the book below? It is one of my favorite books on taijiquan. I started reading it early in my taijiquan practice and didn’t understand much. As my skill and experience grew, so did my understanding and appreciation for the book. .

Just finished Dr. No by Percival Everett. It’s a rare book that repeatedly has me laughing out loud. A welcome relief from the heavier reading I’ve been doing lately.

No question there is a big change here. Terms I’ve searched on many occasions are yielding far fewer hits than in the past or no results at all. Reviewing the activity log in my profile only lists activity going back for 2 months - to 2/14. Thanks for looking into this team!

The one telling the parable.

In my view and experience maya and karma are two aspects of the same “thing.” Both speak to the non-separation of self and other, one in terms of appearances and the other in terms of action. While we feel and live the relative truth of our expression of life as individual organisms, there is a level of truth that goes deeper and recognizes the inseparability of all of life. There are no living organisms that exist outside of their environment and through this environment all beings are interconnected in many ways. Any boundary we draw around anything is simply a convention of nomenclature, an artificial categorization, that has no basis in reality, just in concept, although they can be very useful depending on the nature of our practice and understanding. Even modern scientific paradigms in biology, ecology, psychology, sociology, chemistry, and physics acknowledge the non-dual nature of Being, it’s not limited to non-dual spiritual traditions and philosophy. When we see the truth of karma what we (I) see is that I am exactly as I am, this experience at this very moment is exactly as it is, precisely because of every choice, every action taken by myself and every “other" being in time and space going back and forward in time ad infinitum. There is the relative truth of my own actions as an individual and how they affect myself, others, and the environment that I am in contact with. There is also the bigger picture of how everyone I come into contact with is simultaneously in contact with many others, spreading out in an infinite, interconnecting web of actions and reactions that conspire together to create what is here and now in experience, moment to moment. Change anything at all and everything changes to some degree, the butterfly effect. We can certainly isolate individual actions, reactions, and consequences, but that is an artificial distinction. Maya is the misperception of the interconnectedness of Being in terms of appearance. Karma is the expression of the interconnectedness of Being in terms of action and reaction. We can work at categorizing, separating, and healing each and every karmic trace step by step, one at a time and this can be very effective. It can also be extraordinarily complex and time consuming once we get beyond the most obvious and accessible challenges. We can also work at healing karma without all of the separation, dissection, and artificial isolation of individual karmic traces by looking to the root of it all, the misguided sense of separateness itself. This is an equally valid method, more holistic, but not accessible or efficient for everyone. I agree with you. While there is a sense of “self-awareness,” of "awareness recognizing itself,” of “abiding in the nature of mind,” of “non-meditation,” and other such convenient and sexy sounding labels we use to describe our experience (I’m not interested in theory), it’s my opinion and experience that as long as we are human beings, we never completely transcend human experience, although we may come “close,” whether in our day to day life, in our practice, or in the clear light of sleep. These "blessed and pure” enlightening experiences are, in my opinion and experience, what it feels like when a particular obstacle or obscuration is released or dissolved. They are a taste but not a perfect experience of ultimate reality, per se; they are human experiences of a deeper and more pervasive sense of what it is to be human, approaching the purity of the abiding base in an asymptotic manner. This is why distinctions are made in some traditions between base and path rigpa. When different people have these enlightening experiences they use different adjectives and adverbs to describe them - things like pervasive, unbounded, clear, spacious, immortal, unborn and so forth. While all of these are characteristics of the fundamental essence of Being, we are not that, we are human practitioners, and therefore we have human experiences. Each of these experiences represent the transcendence of how we were previously feeling limited in time and space in one way or another.

synth-pop

I was a chem major and worked as an organic lab TA during undergrad. There were always one or two per lab who wreaked havoc, either through inanity or frivolity. They enjoyed seeing me sweat and put out fires, it seemed. Then again, I got to grade their lab assignments...

There is value in visualization for healing, for me. Also in spiritual practice. In Bonpo guru yoga, we first purify the body, speech, and mind first with flame, then wind, then water. It’s a very effective cleansing process.

A time to appease, A time to destroy

One can bring clear and stable attention to the area of pain, or the system, and connect to the feeling of spaciousness that is there if we can open enough to the experience. I think there is a relaxing there as well, @oak and also a loving, caring attention. Touch can be so healing and also the simple touch of awareness. Spaciousness and openness to the experience, not engaging with the psych/emotional side or stories, just being with the direct experience as best you can and open to the genuine warmth that can come up, as if caring for a loved one.

Tears

offal

"The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when shame and sorrow occlude our own light from view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another." -James Baldwin

sorry, I’ll put something else here soon