shadiahm 's List: Religion and spirituality

• But for so many of us our longing to love and be loved has always been about a time to come, a space in the future when it will just happen, when our hungry hearts will finally be fed, when we will find love.
• Significantly, Buddhism began to attract many more Western followers because it linked the struggle for world peace with the desire of each individual to be engaged in meaningful spiritual practice.
• As a style of ethical practice engaged Buddhism may be seen as a new paradigm of Buddhist liberation
• What I witness daily is the longing for that renewal and the fear that our lives will be changed utterly if we choose love. That fear paralyzes. It leaves us stuck in the place of suffering.
• Speaking with such tenderness he told me, “Hold on to your anger and use it as compost for your garden.”
• Whenever anyone asks me how they can begin the practice of love I tell them giving is the place to start.
• Dominator thinking and practice relies for its maintenance on the constant production of a feeling of lack, of the need to grasp. Giving love offers us a way to end this suffering—loving ourselves, extending that love to everything beyond the self, we experience wholeness. We are healed.

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• The way I understand it is that we rob ourselves of being in the present by always thinking that the payoff will happen in the future
• Anything that has us looking ahead is missing the point.
  
• I give up both the hope that something is going to change and the fear that it isn't.
• Often if there's too much hope you begin to have a strong sense of enemy. Then the whole process of trying to alleviate suffering actually adds more suffering because of your aggression toward the oppressor. Don't you see a lot of people who have such good intentions but they get very angry, depressed, resentful?
• This means that when you see yourself being aggressive, or stuck in self-pity, or whatever it might be, then you train again and again in not adding things on top of that—guilt or self-justification or any further negativities. You work on not spinning off and on being kinder toward the human condition as you see it in yourself.
• It seems what blocks seeing things truly is our tendency to self-denigrate, to disassociate continually, to edit continually. When you don't close down and shut off, then insight begins to come. This insight is the wisdom that completely cuts through the conventional way of seeing.
• So accountability seems to mean you can be honest, incredibly honest. You see that harm is being done. You see someone harming a child, an animal, another human being. You see that clearly and your strongest wish is to de-escalate that suffering.
• It has everything to do with communication: how can you communicate so that someone can hear what you're saying and you can also hear what they are saying?
• Theism doesn't just have to do with God; it has to do with always feeling that you're incomplete and need something or someone outside to look to. It's like never growing up.
• You are still looking for the security of having someone else to praise or blame.
  
• One of the things I've been thinking about a great deal is poverty.   >
• I feel very strongly that in our society people have been made to feel that you can't lead a meaningful life if you are poor. So much of the agitation in the lives of the poor in this society has to do with this disdain.
• The question is how to help people, no matter how desperate their lives are, to realize that they are worthy to live on this earth, that they do not have to feel inferior or be ashamed of themselves.
• In the past people have felt that this is some kind of reward for your suffering, that you will have compassion.
• For me the spiritual path has always been learning how to die.
• But we are strangely conditioned to feel that we're supposed to experience just the birth part and not the death part.
• Yet the true nature of things is that you're never in control. You're never in control. You can never hold on to anything. That's the nature of how things are. But it's almost like it's in the genes of being born human that you can't accept that. You can buy it intellectually, but moment to moment it brings up a lot of panic and fear. So my own path has been training to relax with groundlessness and the panic that accompanies it. Training to allow all that to be there, training to die continually. That seems to be the essence of the lojong teachings—to stay in the space of uncertainty without trying to reconstruct a reference point.

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• It can be done but only with both sides acknowledging that the other won't change. For this to work, people are going to have to be able to talk about the stuff they disagree about and they're going to have to talk about it in heated ways. Which is one reason that I think the Hitchenses and the Sam Harrises have a real value. If we're going to somehow accommodate this divide in our country, we've got to make sure the conversation is out there and loud and even angry if it has to be.
• Faith can be, and often is, an engine for positive social change. And it's why, on the question of faith-based initiatives, I'm ambivalent.
• But I've seen for myself that churches are often the most decisive institutions in poor communities and are often the places that catch people who are otherwise going to fall.

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• the spirit of Christmas continues through the Feast Day of the Presentation of our Lord in the Temple on February 2. How marvelous and rich to celebrate the birth of the Son of God in all its many facets during the Christmas cycle!