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Embodying the Best of Humanity
Begin by forming the motivation to discover your own buddha nature and to help all other beings do the same.
Next, let go for a few moments and give yourself permission to simply be. You don’t need to focus or concentrate. Just be present and aware.
Now bring to mind someone who represents the very best of humanity. It could be a historical figure or someone you actually know. As you bring them to mind, reflect on what qualities or virtues they embody, and see if you can highlight one specific quality, like generosity or integrity.
Imagine that this person is sitting in front of you now and that you can feel them radiating this quality, like they are the sun — radiating love, wisdom, or whatever quality inspires you about them.
Imagine that everything they embody dissolves into light and that light flows into you. Now, you embody this quality, just like they did. Feel the presence of this quality in yourself, in its perfected state. You are the perfect manifestation of this quality. Rest in that truth and confidence.
To conclude, let go of the reflection and rest in awareness again. Whatever you are feeling and thinking, let that happen without any attempt to change or control your mind. Simply be present and aware.
A development stage meditation in Vajrayana.
Elena
Elena is a Russian domestic thriller that won the Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. The director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, has won over 40 international awards for his films. He has described this one as dealing with "a moral catastrophe." The setting is Russia under the authority of Vladimir V. Putin where the gap between the rich and the poor has grown into an abyss. We see how this inequality affects the marriage of one rich couple who are in their sixties.
Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) is a wealthy man who married the younger Elena (Nadezhda Markina) who had been his nurse when he was in the hospital a decade ago. Now they reside in a large and luxurious apartment and sleep in separate bedrooms. Each day she rises before him, prepares breakfast, awakens him, opens the drapes, and leaves him to his morning rituals. She has become his caregiver, and he is somewhat appreciative of all she does for him.
But there is palpable tension between them that has put a chill on their relationship. Her unemployed son, Sergei (Alexey Rorin), relies on her pension money that she regularly brings him. But now he needs a large sum to make sure that his slacker son Sasha (Igor Ogurtsov) can go to college and avoid the army draft. Sergei, his wife, their young baby, and Sasha live in a crowded space and rely completely on his mother's handouts.
When Elena asks Vladimir for the money for Sasha, he responds in anger criticizing Sergei for being a lazy man who wants the world handed to him on a platter. She retorts with a verbal slam on his rebellious daughter Katarina (Yelena Lyadona) who hasn't seen her father for a long time and when she does visit, has no respect for him. Yet Vladimir is willing to give her money without any strings attached.
Things go from bad to worse when Vladimir suffers a stroke while swimming at his fancy health club. Recuperating at home, he decides to finalize his will. Fearing for the future of her son and his family, Elena decides to take matters into her own hands.
The "moral catastrophe" of contemporary Russia is that the Moscow shown here is a mirror-image of the dark side of American capitalism with its worship of money, its sleazy media, its unemployment, and its violence (Sasha's night out with his buddies and their attack on a band of men sleeping in a park). "We're all rotten seeds," says Katerina and she's right.
Special features on the DVD include: a 30-minute interview with director Andrey Zvyagintsev; a "Making-of" video on the poster screen-printing; and the U.S. theatrical trailer.
A Russian domestic thriller set in Moscow where the gap between the rich and the poor has grown into an abyss.
Secrets of the Talking Jaguar
After spending 13 years in a Mayan village in Guatemala, Martin Prechtel obeyed his Tzutujil mentor who told him to return to the United States to preach and teach the good news of the indigenous soul. This incredibly engaging spiritual memoir, which Robert Bly calls "a great encyclopedia of beauty," is a complex testament to the stout-heartedness of the Mayan sacred tradition.
Prechtel was raised on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. A series of dreams led him to Santiago Atitlan, the Mayan village that became his spiritual home. The renowned shaman Nicolas Chiviliu Tacaxoy there told him he had been sent by the spirits to get his soul "cooked" and to train up his power so he could become "an advocate of the village heart." With lyrical passion, Prechtel writes about the Mayan love of the natural world, the eloquence of their language, the significance of ceremonial clothing, the use of rituals as "memory feasts," the importance of dreams, and the great respect given elders.
There is drama in the author's descriptions of his initiation as a shaman, a calling he sums up as being "a fix-it person" and "a spirit dog catcher." Since the traditional Mayan way described in these pages has been decimated in Santiago Atitlan by a violent civil war and the spread of Christian fundamentalism, Prechtel now tries to keep these values alive by bringing to the fore what is "indigenous, natural, subtle, hard to explain, generous, gradual, and village-oriented in each of us." When you have finished this remarkable book, pass it on to a friend so the indigenous soul can keep moving with all of its lively juices intact.
An engaging testament to the stout-heartedness of the Mayan sacred tradition.
Robert Thurman, Inner Revolution
We are aware of the power of brainwashing to develop fanaticism and hatred, but we fail to respect the power of positive conditioning to systematically develop openness of mind, altruistic compassion, and joyous love. We are happy when people are generous, peaceful, and loving, but we think it a surprise, an aberration from the norm of self-concern.
we fail to respect the power of positive conditioning
Safe Journey
Do you dread going on another trip because of your fear of flying? Do you get impatient waiting at the gate or baggage claim areas? Are you the kind of person who gets uptight when the aircraft experiences turbulence and everyone is requested to return to their seats?
Julia Cameron is a prolific writer and a seasoned flyer who has a fear of flying. She is also a spiritual person who feels at ease talking with God while on airplanes and asking for courage, patience, strength, and calm to help her make it through the flight.
In short and snappy chapters on the shuttle, the airport, a wing and a prayer, journey's end, taking flight, and more, Cameron addresses fellow passengers about the value of prayer, explaining how it gives the faith to survive a close encounter with her fears and inability to just completely surrender to God.
Cameron's prayers are short and sweet. Here's an example:
"God, guard me and guide me.
Give me a sense of your safety.
Help me feel your protection.
Give the pilot skill.
Give the crew experience.
Allow me to relax.
Let everything go smoothly.
Give me grace and security.
Amen."
Also peppered throughout the paperback are spiffy quotations like this one:
"Long flights give you more time to reflect, look around, experience your surroundings."
— Mike Foale
We are huge fans of finding spiritual meanings and using devotional practices in everyday activities. Flying plays a central role many people's work and private lives. Cameron offers spiritual practices to help us deal with all the challenges we face as we wing our way from here to there.
Short and snappy chapters on spiritual ways of dealing with the fear of flying and with other challenges as we wing our way from here to there.
Andrew Harvey in The Direct Path
Make a commitment to act on every generous impulse that arises in you. . . . Pray that your anxiety about your own life and possessions and about the future be lessened so that your generosity to others can become more and more fearless.
Make a commitment to act on
Joseph Goldstein, One Dharma
Generosity, morality, respect, service, listening to the Dharma, and meditation — these are actions for the good. Each one is a practice that can be cultivated and further refined, becoming the causes for our own happiness and the happiness of others. These acts for the good become our gift to the world.
The causes for our own happiness
Karen Armstrong, Walking with God in a Fragile World
All the great world faiths emphasize the importance of charity and loving-kindness because they work; they have been found to introduce us into a sacred realm of peace within ourselves. And they do that because they help us to transcend the demands of our insecure, greedy egotism that imprison us within our worst selves.
True religion has little to do with self-righteousness, which is often simply a self-congratulatory form of egotism. The discipline of compassion is the safest way to lay aside the selfishness and greed that hold us back from God and from our best selves.
These are desperate times and the world seems a dangerous place. But for the vast majority of human beings, who are not fortunate enough to live in the First World, it has always been desperate and dangerous. Very few could dream of the security and power symbolized by the towers of the World Trade Center. Now we have joined the dispossessed, but instead of resenting this, we can see it as an opportunity to effect the spiritual revolution which alone can save our troubled world.
Importance of charity and loving-kindness
Master Hsing Yun, Let Go, Move On
We often say in Chinese, "Upon receiving a drop of generosity from others, we should repay it with gratitude in gushing torrents." This is such a wonderful way to relate to others! In reflecting on our lives in this world, the help and generosity we receive from others is far from being just a "drop" — the benefits of all heaven and earth have been bestowed on us! In our lives, our parents' efforts to raise us can hardly be compared to a drop of water. Our teachers educate us, so our gratitude to them should be as immense as the ocean.
Then there is the care and encouragement we receive from our friends and relatives and the daily necessities furnished by people from the different trades and professions. When we want to take a walk, there are parks in every community. When we want to go somewhere, there are broad, smooth highways everywhere. Bus drivers take us to our destinations when we wish to visit our friends. The postal carrier delivers our mail through sleet and snow, and technicians work hard to install the necessary wiring so that we can telephone our loved ones thousands of miles away and our homes can be lit up with electricity. Should we need anything, the shops and malls are full of products to satisfy our every need. At mealtime, the food on the table is nutritious and delicious. We should realize that every stitch of clothing and each morsel of food is not easy to come by. We have received all kinds of causes and conditions from our families and relatives and all kinds of support from our communities that enable us to live in abundance and ease. Therefore, "do not dismiss a drop of water for its small size, and do not regard a small act of kindness as being negligible."
A drop of water is the result of the strength of the universe, and a small act of kindness is the accomplishment of all of one's good intentions. The offering of a small part of our hearts is as good as any other offering to all the Dharma realms and sentient beings in all directions.
Upon receiving a drop of generosity from others
Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Dance of Life
I like to use the word hospitality, not only because it has such deep roots in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but, also, and primarily, because it gives us more insight into the nature of response to the human condition of loneliness. Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveller. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes close-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights.
Hospitality allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears