Opening the Door to Wisdom and Compassion

Imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries, and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn over the ground. As you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you are ready to shout out, "You idiot! What's wrong with you? Are you blind?" But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped into you is actually blind. He, too, is sprawled in the spilled groceries, and your anger vanishes in an instant, to be replaced by sympathetic concern: "Are you hurt? Can I help you up?"

Our situation is like that. When we clearly realize that the source of disharmony and misery in the world is ignorance, we can open the door of wisdom and  compassion.

- B. Alan Wallace, Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground up:

A Practical Approach for Modern Life

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The most violent element in society is ignorance. ~ Emma Goldman

Spiritual practice involves, on the one hand, acting out of concern for 
others' well-being. On the other, it entails transforming ourselves 
so that we become more readily disposed to do so. ~ Dalai Lama

The Rev King Didn't Dream of Better People; He Dreamed of a Better System

by Gary Younge

Published on Wednesday, August 28, 2013 by The Guardian/UK

Martin Luther King at the march on Washington in 1963. (Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORB)The rented run-down former church on West 130th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem, from which Bayard Rustin organised the 1963 March on Washington, "ran on adrenaline and excitement", says Rachelle Horowitz, who organised the transport for the event.

It was very exciting and frenetic ... with everybody working from early in the morning till late into the night. It was very collegial, very primitive and very egalitarian.

At the end of each day there was a meeting during which Rustin would inform the young activists on developments and they would tell him what they had achieved. The closer they got to the date of the march, the broader and more moderate the coalition supporting it became and the less militant the nature of the march would become.

While it would be ludicrous to draw direct parallels between Obama and King (King was a pacifist, Obama has a kill list; King was protester, Obama is president; King had a dream, Obama has drones) they do, however, have one thing in common: their ability to speak across the racial divide.

Originally conceived as a two-day affair that would involve acts of mass civil disobedience, a march around the White House and a speaker's slot for an unemployed worker, rapidly became a one day demonstration with speakers and singers.

Each time Rustin announced that yet another radical element had been dropped, his young staff would berate him, part in jest, part in frustration as a "sell out". "We'd shout: 'Oh Bayard, you're turning it into a circus!'" Horowitz says, laughing now.

Ever the coalition builder, Rustin explained:

What you have to understand is that the march will succeed if it gets a hundred thousand people – or 150,000 or 200,000 or more – to show up in Washington. It will be the biggest rally in history. It will show the black community united as never before – united also with whites from labor and the churches, from all over the country.

But there was one thing on which he would not compromise. There would be no politicians speaking from the platform that day, he insisted. If they came, they would come to listen, not to lecture.

So President Obama's appearance at the podium today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the march illustrates a significant difference in what has changed over the past 50 years. Half a century ago, the keynote speaker Martin Luther King took to the Lincoln Memorial to speak truth to power. Today the keynote speaker is a black man who represents power. This event, of course, is of a more ceremonial nature than Saturday's event in the same place. And yet there, too, the marchers were spoken at by representatives of the political class: including Attorney General Eric Holder (who's black) and Democratic Minority House Leader Nancy Pelosi, among others.

It would be foolish not to acknowledge the progress this represents. Not only did the civil rights movement make it possible for African Americans to vote in the large numbers that would help Obama win in southern states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia; it was also responsible for the affirmative action that would get them into college and help them land the kinds of jobs in both the public and private sectors from which America draws many of its politicians.

Nonetheless the sight of civil rights veteran Julian Bond having his mic cut off after just two minutes while Holder got half an hour on Saturday also tells a a different story. For when Obama takes the mic today he will personify, among other things, the ability of individual black Americans to advance even as the movement that might enable collective gains for black people as a whole has perished.

Please continue this article here:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/28-7

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"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

On War and Love

by Abby Zimet

 

From Syria, amidst the horrific pictures of bodies, the media's persistent drumbeat for war and the carefully amoral rhetoric by U.S. officials comes a small, real, heart-wrenching reality check: A video of the moment a father finds his son, whom he thought was killed, after a chemical attack. This is the truth of what happens, notes Charles Pierce, when "we make war in a place without going to war in a place." There are several versions of the video. In this longer one, the child's devastated father appears about a minute into it.

"When you make war in a place, actual people die actual deaths. Fathers get killed. Children get killed. School buildings and hospitals fall down all around the people inside them. The message you are sending with your missiles gets just a trifle muddled. Make no mistake. If we strike, we will be making actual war in Syria. Ordinary Syrians will not see our missiles as "bomb-o-grams," telling them with every deadly explosion that we're really on their side. We will be another belligerent making their daily lives brutal and deadly, and there will be enough of them to hate us for that to guarantee that we will have to make more war in that place, or in some other place, very soon. That is what we do now. We make war in a place without going to war in a place, and nobody is fooled except ourselves."

Please go here for the full article + video: http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/08/28-1

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  “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” ― Howard Zinn

Lovingkindness Prayer

Lolo Child (Ha Giang - Vietnam) © Lam Thanh

May you be filled with lovingkindness, held in

lovingkindness... may you feel my love now.

May you feel safe and at ease.

May you accept yourself just as you are.

May you be happy.

May you touch great and natural peace.

May you know the natural joy of being alive.

May your heart and mind awaken; may you be free.

- Tara Brach, True Refuge

Widening Rings of Being

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking,

Live in silence,

Flow down and down in always

Widening rings of being.

- Rumi

No Running Away

Have you ever noticed that there is no running away from anything? That, sooner or later, the things that you don't want to deal with and try to escape from, or paper over and pretend aren't there, catch up with you - especially if they have to do with old patterns and fears? The romantic notion is that if it's no good over here, you have only to go over there and things will be different. If this job is no good, change jobs. If this wife is no good, change wives. If this town is no good, change towns. If these children are a problem, leave them for other people to look after. The underlying thinking is that the reason for your troubles is outside of you - in the location, in others, in the circumstances. Change the location, change the circumstances, and everything will fall into pace; you can start over, have a new beginning. 

The trouble with this way of seeing is that it conveniently ignores the fact that you carry your head and your heart, and what some would call your "karma," around with you. You cannot escape yourself, try as you might. And what reason, other than pure wishful thinking, would you have to suspect that things would be different or better somewhere else anyway? Sooner or later, the same problems would arise if in fact they stem in large part from your patterns of seeing, thinking, and behaving. Too often, our lives cease working because we cease working at life, because we are unwilling to take responsibility for things as they are and to work with our difficulties. We don't understand that it is actually possible to attain clarity, understanding, and transformation right in the middle of what is here and now, however problematic it may be.

- Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are:

Mindfulness Meditation  in Everyday Life

Because of Our Wisdom

Mongolie © Lise Hebuterne

 In many parts of this world water is

Scarce and precious.

People sometimes have to walk

A great distance

Then carry heavy jugs upon their

Heads.

Because of our wisdom, we will travel

Far for love.

All movement is a sign of

Thirst.

Most speaking really says,

"I am hungry to know you."

Every desire of your body is

Holy.

Dear one,

Why wait until you are dying

To discover that divine

Truth?

- Hafiz, The Subject Tonight Is Love 
 

Belonging

© Christina Angquico
  

 When we are free of mental concepts and our senses are awake, the sounds, smells, images, and vibrations we experience connect us with all life everywhere. It is not my pain, it is the earth's pain. It is not my aliveness but simply life - unfolding and intense, mysterious and beautiful. By meeting the changing dance of sensation with Radical Acceptance, we discover our intrinsic belonging to the world. We are "no thing" - not limited to any passing experience - and "everything," belonging to the whole.

- Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance

Due to Global Warming, End Is Virtually Certain for NYC, Boston, Miami, Holland

by Eric Zuesse, Investigative historian

 

 

A new article in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS), is headlined "The Multimillennial Sea-Level Commitment of Global Warming,"and it reports that because of carbon emissions that are virtually certain, on the basis of the lack of policy-response to global warming thus far, sea levels are now set to rise anywhere from around 8 inches to 7 feet within 100 years, and around 5 yards to 10 yards within 2,000 years. The projections are clearer (within a narrower range) for the longer time-frame than for the shorter one. That's because even if the short-term consequences of heat-rise turn out to be relatively slight, the longer-term consequences are clearer, and will be considerably larger, as delayed impacts kick in.

An interview with the article's lead author, Anders Levermann, was aired on the PBS radio program "Living On Earth," during the week starting July 19th. Levermann noted that, as the lead author of the coming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he can reveal that it will be "focusing on the next 100 years," and that because of uncertainties that are yet to be resolved in such short-term predictions, "the sea level projections that we obtain for different climate scenarios range from 20 centimeters and [to] two meters." However, beyond that, "two thousand years is what we looked at," and, "We expect sea level rise of two meters of each degree of global warming that we cause." The interviewer asked, "That's on the order ... of about 7.5 feet," and Dr. Levermann answered, "Yes." That's 7.5 feet for each and every degree Centigrade of temperature-rise.

So, the question is: How many degrees will the atmosphere heat up? Recently (on 26 May 2013), the journal Nature Climate Change headlined "Uncertainty in Temperature Projections Reduced," and reported, "increased probability of exceeding a 2 ºC global-mean temperature increase by 2100 while reducing the probability of surpassing a 6 ºC threshold." Therefore, by merely the end of the present century, there will be at least a 2-degree Centigrade, or around a 4-degree Fahrenheit, temperature-rise. This makes almost inevitable at least a fifteen-foot sea-level rise within no more than 2,000 years.

The "Living On Earth" report also included a map showing "Areas at risk of sea level rise," and the map indicated that the submersion will be the most devastating along the East Coast, from the middle of Delaware down to the tip of Florida; and also along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. All coastal cities there, plus the coasts around NYC and Boston, will be submerged enough, within 2,000 years, so that, not only will they be deeply flooded, but even minor coastal storms will make them uninhabitable for anyone who might otherwise still be living there.

Economists discount the welfare of future generations, and therefore the welfares of our descendants 2,000 years into the future, and even just 100 years from now, are treated as virtually worthless, in today's economic cost-benefit analyses.

Please continue this article here:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/due-to-global-warming-end_b_3628981.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular,economy

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"The reason why future generations are being discounted like that, is that, in current microeconomic theory, people are treated like property, because microeconomic theory started in the 1700s, when the slave trade was very big, and the aristocracy wouldn't have financed or otherwise advanced the careers, or the publications, of any economists whose works made a theoretical distinction between people and property. Furthermore, financial economics requires future values of investments to be discounted by the expected future inflation rate. Consequently, since people are indistinguishable from property, our descendants are treated like property, and they are discounted for inflation, just as if they were property instead of people. The standpoint of today's investors is the standpoint of economic theory, and future people are being treated only as investments." - Eric Zuesse

Loving Ourselves

The moment you see how important it is to love yourself,

you will stop making others suffer.

- Buddha