A beautiful article about a beautiful book that helps us realize:
“The only thing we distance is ourselves from ourselves” AND “we are losing so much because of greed.”
For the full article check out Tricycle at:
Lynn J Kelly provides another great summary of how we might grow individually by helping a community grow. A quick excerpt is below. For the full post see the link below.
“Trust is the foundation of any well-functioning community, and trust is built through truthfulness, kindness, common goals that are visibly being pursued, and commitment to each other and the stated purposes of the community.
Every family and community culture is unique, and they fluctuate with time, but there are hallmarks of wholesome behavior we can look for and encourage wherever we find ourselves. This mutual respect and care is at the root of growing virtue.”
“War represents the worst and feeding the hungry the best of human nature.”
Below is an excerpt of Matthew Fox’s latest meditation on the killing of the World Central Kitchen aid workers in Gaza last week. It highlights the words of Jose Andres. For the full articles see and/or watch:
dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/2024/04/06/jose-andres-wisdom-hope-for-a-transformed-humanity/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-WKEDxrb9Y
Jose Andres:
Wisdom & Hope
for a Transformed Humanity
04/06/2024
Jose Andres is founder of World Central Kitchen and a well-known chef. He knew and worked alongside the seven people who were trying to relieve starvation in Gaza and were blown up by the Israeli army on Monday.
In a moving and powerful article in the New York Times, Jose says this about his co-workers: “they risked everything for the most fundamental human activity: to share our food with others.”*
Jose worked among these people in very difficult circumstances as they tried to provide food for people suffering from war and earthquakes, hurricanes and other disasters in Ukraine, Turkey, Morocco, the Bahamas, Indonesia, Mexico, as well as Gaza and Israel.
The hungry are not judged for their ideology or their religion or their being rich or poor or left or right. The work of the murdered food workers “was based on the simple belief that food is a universal human right.”
Andres tells us that from the beginning of the war in Israel, they fed both Israelis and Palestinians more than 1.75 million hot meals and 43 million meals all told in Gaza. “Food is not a weapon of war,” he declares, and
“Israel is better than the way this war is being waged,” including the killing of aid workers.
He offers this advice, “after the worst terrorist attack in its history, it’s time for the best of Israel to show up.”
Half the population of Gaza’s 1.1 million people are currently facing an “imminent risk” of famine.
Food and hospitality are integral to the spiritual traditions of both Israelis and Muslims. … Spirituality and eating together go together, these are ancient archetypes that inspire Jewish, Christian and Muslim beliefs … One sign is simply the courage and generosity of people like Jose Andres and his co-workers. War represents the worst and feeding the hungry the best of human nature. “Feed the hungry and you feed me.”
Below is an excerpt of a Tricycle teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh. For the full article, see: tricycle.org/article/zen-peace-practice
“Breathing in, I see myself as still water. Breathing out, I reflect things as they are.” When we are agitated or possessed by a strong emotion, we cannot see things clearly. If we only listen to our irritation, our despair, our anger, we cannot listen to the voice of the truth.
The refreshing moon of the Buddha
Is traveling in the sky of utmost emptiness.
If the pond of the mind of living beings is still,
The moon will reflect itself beautifully in it.
This beautiful old poem tells us that when the lake of our mind is calm, the moon will reflect itself in the water. The truth breaks through to us if the water in our mind is calm. These are the two aspects of Buddhist meditation practice: samadhi and vipassana.
Samadhi is calming, stopping: stopping forgetfulness, calming our emotions, our agitation.
Vipassana is looking deeply in order to understand the true nature of things, to have the insight that can liberate us. But we can’t look deeply to get insight if we are not calm. So the practice of vipassana (insight meditation) contains the practice of samadhi and the practice of samadhi already contains the practice of vipassana.
Suppose that walking in the twilight you see a snake. You scream. But when someone brings [over] a flashlight, you discover that the snake was only a piece of rope. You did not see things clearly, because you were not calm.
In our daily life, we distort many things and make a lot of mistakes just because we are not calm enough. So we need to practice “water/reflecting” in order to become calm.
Below is an excerpt from a Tricycle article on Inner Peace, Outer Peace. For the full article shared below see: tricycle.org/article/bhikkhu-bodhi-peace/
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A Theravada monk and scholar outlines three steps toward real peace, and the role of our spiritual practice in achieving it.
When I reflect on the challenge of achieving peace in today’s world, I have found it useful to treat the subject under three main headings: (1) The Obstacles to Achieving Peace—the barriers that maintain tension and foment conflict; (2) The Prerequisites of Peace—the goals we should pursue to achieve peace; and (3) The Means to Realizing these Goals. Each can in turn be analyzed into three secondary aspects.
(1) Profit-seeking: Driven by the urge to expand profits, global corporations and other mammoth enterprises flood the market with harmful or frivolous commodities. They spend billions on advertising, despoil the natural environment with toxic waste, and scuttle laws that protect workers and consumers. They take wild risks which, when successful, benefit management and shareholders, and when failures, push the costs on to the public. The neoliberal economy has led to wider inequality of incomes and wealth. Recent figures reveal that the richest 70 people now own more wealth than the poorest half of the world, while in the US a mere 40 individuals own as much wealth as the bottom half. High levels of income inequality are associated with economic instability and crisis, whereas more equal societies tend to be more stable and to enjoy longer periods of sustained growth. More unequal societies show higher rates of violent crime and lower levels of social trust; more equal societies have lower crime rates and greater social trust. Greater economic equality thus contributes to peace.
(2) Plunder: Since the dawn of the industrial era we have been plundering nature’s treasures with reckless abandon. Today, this extractionist frame of mind drives us ever closer to the edge of calamity as rapacious economic activity disrupts the natural climate cycles on which human life depends. The big fossil fuel corporations plunder the earth for oil, coal, and gas, clearing ancient forests, blasting mountains to bits, and drilling down into the ocean depths. They transport the substances they extract over vast distances from source to refinery to market. Factories fill the skies with carbon dioxide, particulate matter, and harmful toxins. Extraction operations discharge toxic waste into rivers and lakes, poisoning the water resources on which whole communities depend.
Cumulative carbon emissions are cooking the planet and warming the seas. We’ve already had a taste of the future in the strange weather events that occur with greater frequency: droughts, floods, heat waves, and crop failures. As large regions of the earth turn barren, we will face mass migrations that can raise tensions and ignite violent confrontations. States may fail, unleashing chaos and giving the chance for tyrants to seize power and launch campaigns of conquest.
(3) Power projection: Driven by narrow economic interests, the powerful nations seek to enhance their might by projecting strategies of full-spectrum dominance across the globe. They finance ever more sophisticated weapons systems, spend billions on armaments, and spy on their citizens. They manipulate international protocols to their advantage, heightening tensions among old rivals. Weapons corporations thrive on the tensions, which they regard as new opportunities for profit. Global hostilities boil, and in certain hot spots periodically explode in outbursts of lethal violence.
(1) Protection: To achieve real peace, we need a global commitment to protecting people everywhere from harm and misery. This commitment must be rooted in a universal perspective that enables us to see all people as brothers and sisters, worthy of care and respect regardless of their ethnic, national, and religious identity. As Americans we can’t go on thinking that American lives are more important than the lives of people elsewhere—in Iraq and Afghanistan, in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We can’t think that only the lives of middle-class people count, but not the lives of black youths in Chicago, herdsmen in Ethiopia, rice farmers in the Philippines, or factory workers in Bangladesh. Rather, we must regard all people as endowed with intrinsic value, which we must affirm by establishing greater economic, social, and political justice.
(2) Preservation. The greatest challenge of our time is to avoid climate chaos. The earth is our irreplaceable home, and if we destroy it, we will have no other place to go. At the rate we’re spitting out greenhouse gases, within a few decades we may raise the earth’s temperature to the point where the planet becomes inhospitable to human life. All the money in the world will be worthless on a planet where the grain belts have withered and oceans have turned deadly acidic.
We need to start making a rapid and full-scale transition to a new economy powered by clean and renewable sources of energy. The sun, wind, and heat of the earth are capable of providing us with all the energy we need. The main obstacle to date has been the lack of political will, whereby a band of powerful corporations, lobbyists, and compliant politicians reject the hard truths of science and even the clear decrees of rational self-interest.
We must stand up against moneyed interests and press our governments and civil groups to expedite the transition to a clean-energy future. Our window of opportunity is closing, and we must act fast before it slams shut. We need a sense of urgency, as if our clothes were on fire, an urge to act to preserve this precious planet—a miracle in a sea of cosmic dust, a blue-green pearl teeming with living forms.
(3) Prosperity. While extreme wealth for a few means misery for many others, prosperity is a good in which we all should be able to share. There is certainly enough wealth in the world to ensure that everyone can obtain sufficient food, clothing, housing, and medical care. The problem is not lack of wealth but its uneven distribution.
To lay the foundations for real peace, both national policies and international institutions must give precedence to uplifting people from the worst extremes of poverty. In today’s world, 900 million people live in perpetual food insecurity, while at least two billion suffer from malnutrition. Six million people a year, over half of them children, die from chronic hunger and related illnesses. The UN estimates that it would take just $30 billion a year to solve world hunger, a small fraction of the $737 billion that the US spent on defense in 2012. Tackling global hunger is not only a moral and ethical obligation but a policy that would have positive economic impacts and promote global solidarity. It could be a giant step in the direction of world peace.
Here in the US, some 50 million people—one out of seven—live in poverty. A half-century ago, the US had a social system that, while far from perfect, excelled in its public services. Over the past 30 years, many of these services have been downgraded or slashed. As the wealthiest country in the world, we can easily provide for the basic needs of all our citizens. But this will require new values. Instead of exalting individualism and ambition, we should prize cooperation and compassion. Instead of inciting competition, we should nurture harmonious communities and social solidarity.
Peace. Peace is not only the goal of our efforts but also a means for reaching that goal. Peace belongs to the means because in order to establish peace, we must be peaceful ourselves. If our minds are agitated by anger and resentment, our efforts to promote peace are more likely to create more conflict and perhaps ignite more violence. An angry mind is not a reliable instrument for promoting peace. But when our minds are peaceful, our bodily actions will be peaceful, and we will convey an ambiance of love, care, and mercy, which will help to establish peaceful relations.
Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi lives and teaches at Chuang Yen Monastery in Carmel, New York. He is a translator of texts from the Pali canon and the cofounder of Buddhist Global Relief.
Below is an excerpt from a Tricycle article written in 2003.
Dr. Stephen Fulder, a peace activist in Israel, sees a world conditioned to believe in war.
In Israel you live under the constant threat of terror attack. How do you cope with the fear and avoid reactivity? The terror here has been going on for twenty or thirty years, in different ways, whether it’s the threat of war or the constant military response to terror attacks. Everyone here is a soldier, everyone carries a gun, and there’s a general sense of underlying alarm. So this is not new, and in the dharma community we do work with it, and we do address it in retreat, and people do practice to cultivate equanimity in the face of insecurity. However, what the dharma community finds difficult is the low-level anxiety that creeps in under their guard; it’s constantly picked up. Those who don’t practice intensively really feel that it slowly and surely eats away at their joy of life and their relationships, and it is something that changes, very slightly, the color of the mind. This anxiety is our real problem. It very commonly emerges in retreats.
As a peace activist, how do you respond to somebody who says, “Listen, we’re under attack. Violence is our only effective response, and any other method is unrealistic.” Violent response fuels a very clear cycle of reactivity. Such a response is not only ineffective, damaging to both sides, it also prolongs conflict. We have to protect life, but this is not done by becoming more oppressive of another community. Indeed, if you ask whether we’d physically restrain a suicide bomber in order to stop him from blowing up a bus, I think everybody would say sure. But would you bomb a community of Palestinians in order to prevent it? I would say that’s a disaster, and it mustn’t be done. Other ways have not been exhausted. People in the peace movement in Israel talk about pursuing other strategies, but often nobody’s listening. Both Israel and Palestine are like two runaway buses. The public is locked into reactivity on a national level. Out of despair, people say, “Oh, there’s no other way, only violence works.” That simply isn’t true, it’s merely conditioning.
You say nobody is listening. Is that disheartening? What motivates you to continue, then? We’re in this for the long term. It’s not disheartening, because there are always a few people who listen. I have no way of predicting, forcing, or expecting results. We’re really throwing our bread on the water and continuing on. You will despair if you expect results or major change. There are forces here that are so much bigger than we are. But there’s hope. I’ll give you an example: We had three years of intensive dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. We used to bring Israelis over to the Palestinian communities and sit in dialogue for several days together. This was a very difficult project, but it went on year after year, and major changes happened to people who participated. Along came the second Intifada [Palestinian uprising], and it seemed to wipe the whole thing out. The same Palestinians we were talking to went back to the streets, and Israelis who were more peace-oriented were suddenly taking an aggressive stance. But there was also an irreversible change in some people, and they went on to become the strongest peace activists now working in the Israeli and Palestinian communities. So results do happen, but we cannot predict where they will happen or how. Things have to take their course. So that’s our response: to reduce expectations, to keep going, and to look for small joys, small flowerings of wisdom along the way.
When you say all options have not been exhausted, is there one in particular that you can point to that has not been given a sufficient chance to work? Yes: the option of listening. There is a tremendous amount of political demagoguery on both sides, whipping up anger and hate. There’s very little intentional work at the level of government or NGOs to create more dialogue between people. And dialogue is crucial here, because the vast majority of Israelis and Palestinians do want peace, but people aren’t listening to each other’s stories, or creating a forum where these stories are properly heard. So dialogue and listening, at the level of media or political discourse on both sides, haven’t been explored.
Given the complexity of this conflict, and the mistrust on both sides, how realistic is peace, and how do you respond to those who insist that it isn’t? My response would be that peace is everywhere, you just have to notice it. It’s extremely realistic to know that people are in relationship with each other and that we affect each other’s fate. There’s a total intimacy between our two communities: we live on the same land, use the same water, speak more or less the same language, share the same food. We are like two brothers. So on a local level, interrelation, connection, and peace have already been there. And the Buddhist way is helping us to see that conflict comes only out of despair, out of resignation, out of a negative cast of mind, out of fear and hate. And you see this very, very clearly in the Middle East. Without the fear and hate, slowly these two communities can come together. The minute fear and hate arise, we are far apart again. This has been happening for fifty years. The Buddhist message cleans the psychological landscape of fear and hate, and peace simply happens by itself. People suddenly notice that they no longer need to fight.
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How meditation teacher Martin Aylward learned to stop worrying about the fruits of his actions and instead pay attention to the care with which he engaged in them. By Martin Aylward FEB 01, 2022
When I was 19 years old, I traveled to India with a one-way ticket and no luggage. At that point, I hadn’t learned how to be a human yet, let alone an adult human, and honestly, I didn’t really want to be a human—I wanted to be some kind of spiritual being. After completing my first ten-day meditation course in Dharamsala, I fell in love with meditation, and in a characteristically grandiose adolescent way, I decided to head off to the caves. After all, that was what yogis did (or so I believed). I walked out of Dharamsala straight up into the hills. I was terrified. I didn’t have any food or blankets, and I had no idea what I was doing, but I thought that was the whole point.
Luckily, I ran into an old sadhu, who asked me where I was going. I told him, “I’m off to the cave to meditate.” He rolled his eyes and said, “Why don’t you go across that valley and up that path? You’ll find this one Baba living there. He has a little place. Maybe you can stay with him.”
I went across the valley and up the path to ask the Baba if I could stay with him. He told me I could sleep there for three nights, and I ended up staying for most of the next three years. He never actually instructed me in meditation—he knew I had taken a meditation course, so he said I could keep practicing as I had been. In fact, he never tried to teach me anything at all, but I learned a lot just by being in his presence.
Mindfulness can sound like a technique, which is one reason I prefer to use the term “presence.” I learned about presence from Babaji by osmosis, simply witnessing the way he made tea, the way he moved a piece of firewood around, the way he undid the lid of a jar, or the way we washed pots together. It was like everything was worthy of attention. Everything was worthy of care. And in my scattered, adolescent mind full of overly complicated ideas about meditation, it was incredibly relieving and educational to be bringing my practice into the way I unscrewed the tea lid. On the one hand, I felt very clumsy and awkward next to Babaji, but on the other, I also felt like he was relentlessly kind and forgiving and generous-spirited to me, and that helped invite me to become attentive in a quiet way.
One day, when I was living with Babaji, I decided to repaint the ashram windows. I was very enthusiastic about it and worked eagerly. After the first day, Babaji said to me, “Your problem is you’re trying to paint the windows. Just stop. Just take care of the brushstrokes, and let God paint the windows. It’s not your responsibility. You just take care.” Then I started to notice the smell and the way the light caught the paint. I began to give myself to the process.
After four or five days of sanding and painting, as I stood back and saw the red shutters on the windows of the ashram, I was in awe. Sure enough, I had taken care of the brushstrokes, and God had painted the windows. Babaji taught me how to let go of worrying about the fruits of my actions and instead pay attention to the quality of care with which I engaged in them. This attention is just another word for love. You could say, “I’m giving attention to my breath,” or “I’m giving attention to painting the windows,” but it’s equally, “I’m learning how to love this in-breath, learning how to love this brushstroke.” The practice of attention is learning how to love.
Excerpted from “Coming Back to Embodiment,” an episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s podcast with James Shaheen and Sharon Salzberg.
Read an excerpt from Aylward’s recent book, Awake Where You Are, here.
Martin Aylward is a co-founding teacher of the Tapovan Dharma Community at Le Moulin de Chaves monastery in southwestern France.
Lynn J Kelly provides more thoughts on how to live more skillfully.
Life Matters 