Thoughts: The word from Alice….
Thoughts: Response, reaction & oh, yeah, changing the world….
I love Brandon Stanton’s “Humans of New York.” He talks to ordinary people & they say the most ordinary things, which stick to you, and make you come back for more. I really liked this one, in an exchange he had with a South Asian couple:
“It is important to maintain your equanimity. You cannot let yourself get too ‘up’ or too ‘down’ based on your circumstances.”
“Too ‘down’ I understand. But why not too ‘up?’” Stanton asks.
“Because the higher your mountains are, the deeper your valleys will seem. You should not react to the world. You should respond, but not react. A response is an action based on logic. A reaction is an emotional state. Your reaction will not change the world.
“Your reaction only changes you. Your response will change the world.”
Poetry of Music: Noah and the Whale, ‘Give a Little Love’
When you do something for someone else, the circle is begun. It always comes back around to you.
Trust me on this one.
Here’s Noah and the Whale, ‘Give a Little Love.’
Thoughts: See?
A young couple moves into a new neighbourhood.
The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the young woman sees her neighbour hanging the wash outside. “That laundry is not very clean; she doesn’t know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.”
Her husband looks on, remaining silent.
Every time her neighbour hangs her wash to dry, the young woman makes the same comments.
A month later, the woman is surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and says to her husband: “Look, she’s finally learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this? ”
The husband replies, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”
ENC: Pope says weapons manufacturers can’t call themselves Christian
REUTERS/GIORGIO PEROTTINO
People who manufacture weapons or invest in weapons industries are hypocrites if they call themselves Christian, Pope Francis said on Sunday.
Francis issued his toughest condemnation to date of the weapons industry at a rally of thousands of young people at the end of the first day of his trip to the Italian city of Turin.
“If you trust only men you have lost,” he told the young people in a long, rambling talk about war, trust and politics after putting aside his prepared address.
“It makes me think of … people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons. That leads to a bit a distrust, doesn’t it?” he said to applause.
He also criticized those who invest in weapons industries, saying “duplicity is the currency of today … they say one thing and do another.”
Francis also built on comments he has made in the past about events during the first and second world wars.
He spoke of the “tragedy of the Shoah,” using the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.
“The great powers had the pictures of the railway lines that brought the trains to the concentration camps like Auschwitz to kill Jews, Christians, homosexuals, everybody. Why didn’t they bomb (the railway lines)?”
Discussing World War One, he spoke of “the great tragedy of Armenia” but did not use the word “genocide”.
Francis sparked a diplomatic row in April calling the massacre of up to 1.5 million Armenians 100 years ago “the first genocide of the 20th century,” prompting Turkey to recall its ambassador to the Vatican.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella; Editing by Rosalind Russell)
Thanks to our friends at Reuters for reporting this story:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/21/us-pope-turin-arms-idUSKBN0P10U220150621
Writings: Walking in the dharma, with Ram Dass
When I start to get angry, I see my predicament and how I’m getting caught in expectations and righteousness. Learning to give up anger has been a continuous process. When Maharaj-ji told me to love everyone and tell the truth, he also said, “Give up anger, and I’ll help you with it.” Maharaj-ji offered me a bargain: “You must polish the mirror free of anger to see God. If you give up a little anger each day, I will help you.” This seemed to be a deal that was more than fair. I readily accepted. And he’s been true to his end of the bargain. I found that his love helped to free me from my righteousness.
Ultimately I would rather be free and in love than be right.
If you feel a sense of social responsibility, first of all keep working on yourself. Being peaceful yourself is the first step if you want to live in a peaceful universe.
Have you ever noticed how many angry people there are at peace rallies? Social action arouses righteousness. Righteousness ultimately starves you to death. If you want to be free more than you want to be right, you have to let go of righteousness, of being right.
That reminds me of a story. There’s this Chinese boatman, and he hits another boat in the fog. He starts swearing at the other boatman. “You SOB! Why didn’t you look where you were going?” Then the fog lifts for a moment, and he sees there is nobody in the other boat. And he feels like a fool.
Righteousness is roughly the same thing. Say, for instance, you hold a grudge against your father, and you talk to him in your mind as if he’s there inside you. But he isn’t there. Psychologically you think he is there, because you’re identified with who you think you are, but once you begin to see this is all just a bunch of thoughts, your psychological father is just another set of empty phenomena. You are busy saying, “I forgive you, I forgive you,” to that psychological father, but it’s like saying “I forgive you” to a clock. There’s nothing there. You’re the same as the boatman.
There’s no rush. Go on being right just as long as you can. You’ll see that being right is actually a tight little box that is very constraining and not much fun to live in. Righteousness cuts you off from the flow of things. When I’m locked in a situation in a relationship with someone, it isn’t that they have done something to me. They’re just doing what they’re doing. If I get caught up in judging, the responsibility lies with me, not with them. It becomes my work on myself. I often say, “I really apologize for whatever suffering I’ve caused you in this situation.” We start to work from there. And after a while they will come forward and will examine themselves and say, “Well, maybe I was . . .”
Our predicament is that our ego wants to be right in a world of people who don’t understand how right we are.
There is a way of representing what is right, the dharma of the moment. But if you get emotionally attached to a model of how the world ought to be that excludes how human beings are, there’s something wrong with where you’re standing. You should be standing somewhere else. Getting lost in your emotional reactivity isn’t where you want to be. Just allowing your humanity and that of others to be as it is, is the beginning of compassion. We are in a human incarnation. We can’t walk away. To walk in the dharma is also to hear other human beings.
– Excerpt from Ram Dass’ new book Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from your Spiritual Heart. (Purchase here.)
This dharma talk is from ramdass.org: Here. Now. (And reposted here, with permission. Thanks.)
For more of Ram Dass’ teachings visit his website.
Writings: Waiting for something better…
A man was trapped in his house during a flood. He began praying to God to rescue him. He had a vision in his head of God’s hand reaching down from heaven and lifting him to safety. The water started to rise in his house. His neighbour urged him to leave and offered him a ride to safety. The man yelled back, “I am waiting for God to save me.” The neighbour drove off in his pick-up truck.
The man continued to pray and hold on to his vision. As the water began rising in his house, he had to climb up to the roof. A boat came by with some people heading for safe ground. They yelled at the man to grab a rope they were ready to throw and take him to safety. He told them that he was waiting for God to save him. They shook their heads and moved on.
The man continued to pray, believing with all his heart that he would be saved by God. The flood waters continued to rise. A helicopter flew by and a voice came over a loudspeaker offering to lower a ladder and take him off the roof. The man waved the helicopter away, shouting back that he was waiting for God to save him. The helicopter left.
The flooding water came over the roof and caught him up and swept him away. He drowned.
When he reached heaven and asked, “God, why did you not save me? I believed in you with all my heart. Why did you let me drown?” God replied, “I sent you a pick-up truck, a boat and a helicopter and you refused all of them. What else could I possibly do for you?”
Writings: Patterns, and the chance to change…
Time to change, isn’t it?
If you don’t have something you need to work on to change, it’s possible you’re not really alive…
Look around and there’s always something to make better. To make prettier. To make smooth. To make different. To colour, to shape, to whittle or to add to.
And usually the only thing getting in the way is habit. Doing it the old way.
And that’s why we don’t quit smoking so easily. Because of the patterns. The habits.
Or changing the way we think, or work, or play. Stuck in a web of patterns, the comfortable old place we go when change rears its head.
The key here, I think, isn’t to hide from change, but to recognize that things aren’t usually gonna be different, all on their own.
So it’s up to you to lay a new rail, cut a new trail, find a new road. And take it.
Is that the same as creating a new pattern? Maybe. But at least you picked this one, hey…
Let me know where you end up!
Loving you,
Brother Ian
About Brother Ian
Over the centuries, Brother Ian has been collecting stories & information & discourses for the purpose of elevating the human condition as needed, dissecting it when necessary, and building the case for hope.
In the spirit of noting that organized crime, organized baseball, organized labour, and organized religion tend to engender controversy & occasional discord, I promise to be neither organized or critical of those who are.