NO BONNET SONNET
not ev’ry itch need be scratched,
not ev’ry egg need be hatched
not ev’ry thought need be spoke,
not ev’ry dream need be woke
colors seen on judgment day,
practice or pose your one way
no aura, no tonal vibe,
no ritual, ‘gyptian scribe
which of us doesn’t belong?
wrong question, don’t sing along
let go ego before burst,
don’t forget that she comes first
deep bow to Wilda Tanner
hat tip to Ian Kerner
“What keeps us from opening to the reality of the world? Could it be that we cannot accept our powerlessness and are only willing to see those wounds that we can heal?
Could it be that we do not want to give up our illusion that we are masters over our world and, therefore, create our own Disneyland where we can make ourselves believe that all events of life are safely under control?
Could it be that our blindness and deafness are signs of our own resistance to acknowledging that we are not the Lord of the Universe?
It is hard to allow these questions to go beyond the level of rhetoric and to really sense in our innermost self how much we resent our powerlessness . . . .
The astonishing thing is that the battle for survival has become so “normal” that few people really believe that it can be different . . . .
Oh, how important is discipline, community, prayer, silence, caring presence, simple listening, adoration, and deep, lasting faithful friendship. We all want it so much, and still the powers suggesting that all of that is fantasy are enormous.
But we have to replace the battle for power with the battle to create space for the spirit.“
For more see henrinouwen.org/meditation/
Woke up this morning in a sunny disposition
but then read my email, the forecast, news highlights and social media.
Truly, we are bombarded daily with thoughts that are not of our own making:
How we handle these thoughts is critical to our mental and physical health. What options do we really have?
Below are two excerpts that have helped me better understand where many thoughts come from and how they may affect us.
How Many Ads Do We See Daily?
“It is estimated that an adult in a metropolitan area may see anywhere from 50 to 400 advertisements per day1. Digital marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 ads each day2. Folks from marketing firm Yankelovich, Inc. estimate that the average modern person is exposed to around 5,000 ads per day3. An average modern individual is estimated to see 300-700 ad messages per day4. thedrum.com
A major obstacle … is the tendency of our mind to get stuck in negative thinking. The mind “rehearses” the scenarios that bother us, ultimately because it wants to resolve the problem and to find a way out. Unfortunately, it may get stuck … repeating the same track ceaselessly.
The mind has been likened to a search engine—you (start with one) thought and it gives you other thoughts related to it. (For example,) if we keep harboring hateful thoughts—even if we don’t act on them—they may lead to more hate and violence. …
Everything we routinely do can be understood as practicing and rehearsing. … In neuroscience, it is known that neurons that “fire together wire together.” ….
When you do or say something negatively the first time, you may feel bad about it, but the second time it may already feel less unsettling. You may tell yourself “You’re not worthy,” — the first time you do it, it is a shock. But the second time you may feel less bad. And then the behavior may become a habit. Every time you get angry, you punch the wall. It can become uncontrollable. A habit becomes a personality, which then determines the course of your life and destiny. …
For those who tend to be gloomy and in despair easily, compounded with the suffering of the past, our habitual mood makes it even more difficult to handle and transform the situation. … It takes a lot of courage to release and let go of our negativity.”
Excerpt adapted from Flowers in the Dark: Reclaiming Your Power to Heal Trauma through Mindfulness by Sister Dang Nghiem © 2021 by Sister Dang Nghiem. Reprinted in arrangement with Parallax Press. For the full article see: tricycle.org/article/sister-dang-nghiem-suffering/
What are you thinking today?
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.”
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.
Two sources connecting to one another. See Lynn J Kelly‘s and Jocko Willink‘s quotes and references for more information below.
The Buddha’s Advice to Laypeople
Steadying the mind by Lynn J Kelly
The perfection or pāramī of concentration is also one of the factors of the Buddha’s 8-fold path. It’s an element of practice that many find challenging or frustrating, but it is essential to making solid progress towards liberation.
Of course, we can concentrate when we’re focused on something we care about, whether it’s making a meal, or a playing a card game, or completing a project. Can we care about refining our minds as much as we care about anything else? Thanissaro Bhikkhu argues that in order to develop a solid mental base through concentration, we have to first commit to the Buddha’s path.
Read the full transcript of the talk this excerpt is taken from here: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/Meditations9/Section0032.html
All too often it happens that when you sit down to concentrate on the breath, you stay with the breath for a little bit and then you’re off someplace else. You come back, you stay with it a little bit longer, but then you’re off again. This happens so many times that you begin to get discouraged. You think, “Maybe this concentration is no good,” so you throw it away. Instead, you should think that it’s like having a baby. You feed it. But then it cries. Then you have to change and wash the diapers. Then you have to feed it again. And it cries. But you don’t throw the baby away. You just realize that it needs extra work, continuous work. It’s the same with your concentration. …
Again, it’s like raising a child. In the beginning, you have to do everything for it: feed it, clothe it, clean it, comfort it. But after a while, the child begins to feed itself, clean itself, look after itself. You still have to watch over it. After all, it is your child and it’s still not an adult. But it’s not as difficult as in the first stage when it was a baby. So even though concentration may be difficult in the beginning, don’t think it’s going to always be that way. It’ll mature. But for it to mature, you have to give it what it needs. Give it your full attention. Be alert. Be mindful. Stick with it. Keep coming back, coming back. Keep encouraging yourself. And that’s how your feeble concentration becomes strong.
By training the mind to collect itself regularly, a number of benefits can accrue. First, experiencing a calm(er) mind is pleasant in itself. Every degree of tranquility that we access represents a commensurate degree of relief from agitation; when anxiety is completely absent, what comes in its place is a form of bliss. The other important purpose of cultivating concentration is that it supports the development of mindfulness as nothing else can. With a good balance of mindfulness and concentration, the inevitable result is growing wisdom; a clarity that can make our whole lives more livable and fruitful.
From Jocko Willink’s book DISCIPLINE EQUALS FREEDOM – Field Manual
“Where does discipline come from? This is a simple answer. Discipline comes from within. Discipline is an internal force.”
http://www.amazon.com/s?k=discipline+equals+freedom+field+manual
Check out this provocative post from Brandy Anderson. I truly enjoy her perspective and thoughtful commentary.
Life Matters 