Speaker: Jessica Kross
Jessica Kross has been a member of this congregation for almost 50 years. A retired Professor of History at USC she specialized in the Atlantic World between 1500 and 1800 CE. Always interested in the way that people thought about reality and attempted to navigate their lives within that understanding, she began a Buddhist sitting practice in 1984 and has sat some 50 week-long or longer retreats. She was a co-lay teacher of the Insight Meditation Community of Columbia during the seven years of its existence and more recently taught a nine-week course on Buddhism for the Trenholm Road Shepherd’s Center.
Buddhism’s “Heavenly Abodes:” Friendliness, Compassion, Sympathetic joy, Equanimity
Buddhism gives us some tools to make us more compassionate and useful to ourselves and others. Among these are the “heavenly abodes” in which the mind can find ease and clarity. The four abodes are friendliness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. A mind which can rest in any or all of these states will find satisfaction, … Continue reading Buddhism’s “Heavenly Abodes:” Friendliness, Compassion, Sympathetic joy, Equanimity
Gratitude: A Buddhist Perspective
Buddhism recognizes that life is filled with dissatisfactions and ultimately, all is impermanent. We can wallow in our misery or we can stop and see how much joy there really is and feel gratitude.
Impatience and Helplessness
Buddhism gives us tools to look at and manage our all-too-human feelings of impatience and helplessness.
The Can’t and The Won’t
We all want to believe we won’t rather than we can’t. Buddhism gives us the tools to see what the reality of the situation is.
Humility and Gratitude
Buddhism recognizes the interdependent web of all existence. Understanding our true place in the cosmos fosters both humility and gratitude.
Religion in Early America
Our national mythology suggests that our religious history was the simple story of a band of brave Englishfolk (mainly men), who came to New England in search of religious freedom. What that meant in the context of Early America and the Reformation is this Sunday’s exploration.
Buddhism’s Three Refuges: The Buddha, The Dharma and the Sangha
Buddhism is a worldview and an attitude toward life. It rests on three foundations: Our ability to know the truth, the reality of truth, and the community which supports our journey toward the truth. Select the Play button for an audio version of this sermon.
The Eight Worldly Conditions
The Buddha’s Eight Worldly Conditions are: gain and loss, fame and disrepute, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. Each can be a vehicle for us to examine our dissatisfactions.
Buddhism’s Three Conditions of Existence
The Buddha taught that his purpose was to alleviate suffering–to give ordinary people the tools they would need to lead compassionate, peaceful, useful lives. Among those tools was a clear-eyed recognition that we must understand impermanence, dissatisfaction, and the absence of an solid self.