"Your Erroneous Zones" by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer (From: DailyOM, 1977)

Your Erroneous Zones

Look over your shoulder. You will notice a constant companion. For want of a better name, call him Your-Own-Death. You can fear this visitor or use him for your personal gain. The choice is up to you.

With death so endless a proposition and life so breathtakingly brief, ask yourself, "Should I avoid doing the things I really want to do?" "Should I live my life as others want me to?" "Are things important to accumulate?" "Is putting it off the way to live?" Chances are your answers can be summed up in a few words: Live ... Be You ... Enjoy ... Love.

You can fear your death, ineffectually, or you can use it to help you learn to live effectively. Listen to Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych as he awaits the great leveler, contemplating a past which was thoroughly dominated by others, a life in which he had given up control of himself in order to fit into a system.

Soul Connections --by Gary Zukav

Gary Zukav

Soul Connections are not things you can make. You already have seven billion of them. Your job is to choose how you will relate to them, even though you will meet only a few during your life. Will you look at them as ways to get what you want, what you think you need? Will you see them as potential sources of emotional, psychological, financial, or sexual satisfaction? Or will you see them as fellow souls whose lives are as complex, challenging, and painful as your own? In short, will you relate to them with love or with fear? That is the ever-present question in the Earth school. It is the longest running show on Broadway, and you are the one who must answer it each time you encounter a Soul Connection.

Look at yourself as having seven billion soul mates. These are not people who can complete your life or relieve your burdens. They are souls who offer you opportunities to grow spiritually and to whom you offer the same. Will you use the opportunities they offer, especially when you are angry, jealous, feeling superior, or feeling inferior to challenge your anger, jealousy, superiority or inferiority (by not acting on them), or will you indulge your anger, jealousy, superiority, or inferiority (by acting on them as you have in the past) and miss the opportunity?

I am grateful to be one of your Soul Connections, and I am grateful that you are one of mine.

Love,
Gary

Group Outing: "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" - Belcourt Theatre, Nashville, TN, 6/17-19

NYFF Review:  Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is one of the coolest titles to come in a long time. This critically acclaimed entry from the often overlooked Thailand cinema scene is the latest from up and coming auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul who won the Palme D’Or aka the highest honor earlier this year at the Cannes International Film Festvial. It is film filled with mystery and beauty, touching on a myriad of themes ranging from reincarnation to animals entwined with spiritual mythology among others....

 

Losing the Ego: A Conversation with Ram Dass --by Eliezer Sobel

It was 1997. I was visiting the Neem Karoli Baba ashram in Vrindaban, India, when I learned that my old friend and spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, had had a major, possibly life-threatening stroke. How strange to hear such news in that particular place, which took me over 20 years to visit since first hearing Ram Dass's wondrous stories about Maharaj-ji in the mid '70s. ("Maharaj-ji" is the less formal, affectionate honorific used by Neem Karoli Baba's devotees.)

In a shamefully narcissistic manner, one of my first thoughts had to do with me. Because of all his work in the field of death and dying, not to mention being my teacher, I always assumed that if push ever came to shove and I was lying in my death bed somewhere, I'd call on Ram Dass to come sit with me through the process and all would be well. It simply never dawned on me that he was 22 years my senior, and, barring unforeseen tragic events, he was quite likely going to pre-decease me. I was a bit in shock at what should have been an obvious revelation, and felt orphaned.

Ram Dass demonstrated through his stroke experience what it means to truly walk one's talk, for he managed to re-frame a frightening, painful and shocking event that would completely change his life and abilities forever, into what he would eventually refer to as "fierce grace" (which also became the title of a wonderful film about his ordeal.) The teaching he offered is that all circumstances -- seemingly good or bad from our own perspective -- can be seen, felt and even known as God's grace, if one is but willing to hold them that way and learn from them rather than merely complain and be the unfortunate victim of a terrible turn of events in one's life.

Do Buddhists Believe in God? –by Lewis Richmond, Buddhist writer and teacher



Buddha and Christ

In my upcoming book, Aging as a Spiritual Practice (Gotham Books, January 2012), I tell the following story:

Once, when I was on a live radio show being interviewed by a Christian talk show host, her first question to me was, "Do you Buddhists believe in God?"

I had only a few seconds to think of an answer.

"Yes," I said.

"Good!" the host said. "And how do you pray?"

I said that we prayed in silence to reach our divine nature.

"I like that!" the host said.

When I have told this story in talks, some of my Buddhist listeners say, "Oh, that's nice. It's good to be polite." But I wasn't just being polite. I was raised in a Christian church and went to Christian Sunday school. My favorite song as a child was "God is Love." After graduating from college, for a year I attended Christian seminary, with the idea of becoming a minister. I didn't become a dedicated Buddhist until some time after that. I am comfortable with the word God.

It Gets Better --by Dan (Savage) and Terry

We at A Circle of Friends believe deeply that our Creator loves all of Creator's children, and so we accept all.  Some of us are progressive Christians, some of us Hindu, some Muslim, some Jewish, some Straight, some Gay, and a host of other faiths and paths.  We welcome all and look forward to sharing Spirituality with all brothers and sisters.  We honor the Light in You, Also the Light in Me, We are One - All are welcome. 
--ACOF Administration

"We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness."

~Thich Nhat Hanh

Dan Savage is editorial director of the Seattle weekly The Stranger, where he was formerly Editor-in-Chief. He is a regular contributor to PRI's "This American Life" and has been featured as a Real Time Reporter on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher."  Dan heard about the suicides of Justin Aaberg and Billy Lucas and had a reaction so many LGBT adults had. “I wish I could’ve talked to that kid for five minutes before he killed himself,” Dan recently said. “I’d tell him that however bad it was in high school or middle school...it gets better.” The It Gets Better Project was born.  Listen to Dan and his partner Terry talk about their stories and how the project came to be.  Visit here for further information.

Stop Resisting, Stop Feeling Stress --By Gary Zukav and Linda Francis

Stress is the consequence of resistance. Learn how to stop expending energy resisting your life, from Gary Zukav and Linda Francis, authors of The Heart of the Soul: Emotional Awareness.

Stress is the consequence of resistance. It is not caused by circumstances in your life. It is not caused by the painful emotions you experience, either. It is caused by your resistance to your life. It is possible for you to encounter a wide variety of circumstances, but it is your resistance to those circumstances that causes stress.

When you resist a circumstance in your life, it takes energy and that produces stress. It is one thing to observe a circumstance and it is another thing to resist it. Challenging and changing a circumstance and resisting it are different. Challenging a situation is using your will to change what you are experiencing—to change the dynamic within yourself that is producing the situation. Resisting is wishing in that moment that you were not experiencing it. It is attempting to stop the experience.

Osama Bin Laden is Dead: A Mindful Response --by Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.

**Note:  We have received messages stating the MLK, Jr. quote below is not accurate.  We are aware that only a portion of the quote, the last section, is from MLK, Jr.  However, we believe that the words are a truth, and so it doens't really matter who said it, where it came from, etc.  The message itself is worthy.  Accordingly, we leave it as is.  May you enjoy the message itself and leave the worry over attributions to the scholars. 

--ACOF Administration

Martin Luther King Jr. (*or someone) said:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Osama Bin Laden is dead.

What does that mean exactly?

Vindication? A cause for celebration? Justice served? Revenge?

Please Call Me By My True Names --by Thich Nhat Hanh; ACOF's Response to the Death of Osama Bin Laden

Written by Thich Nhat Hanh in 1982 on the way to the U.N. Special Session on Disarmament. Amid the moral pronouncements of other religious leaders addressing the session, he took the dais, read this, then sat down. It has been circulated ever since.

Please Call Me By My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow

because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second

to be a bud on a spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

in order to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and

death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,

and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time

to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,

and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,

feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,

and I am the arms merchant,

selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate,

and I am the pirate,

my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,

with plenty of power in my hands,

and I am the man who has to pay

his "debt of blood" to, my people,

dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring,

so warm it makes flowers bloom

in all walks of life.

My pain is like a river of tears,

so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,

so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up,

and so the door of my heart can be left open,

the door of compassion.

Please Call Me By My True Names (reprinted from Please Call Me By My True Names: The Collected Poems of Thich Nhat Hanh © 1999, Parallax Press