Good afternoon. It's nice to be here. I don't know how much do people know about me or not, or just sort of throwing myself into the ocean here. So my name is Angel Kyoto Williams, and I actually... have a book coming out. Technically, it comes out on next Tuesday. It's called Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. I co-authored it with two folks, a fellow named Lama Rod Owens, who I'll talk about a little bit, and Yasmin Saidullah, who's a practitioner that's been with me for quite some years. You get to have the book out early on here because I'm here apparently. So we're breaking rules already.

[01:00]

And you'll quickly find out that as a practitioner and other things in my life, that's what I tend to do is break rules and turn them a bit upside down. So I wanted to share just a little bit about the... development of this book. And just to say a caveat, this is the only second time I'm reading. Fortunately, the first time I read was the other night at City Center, which was great because City Center was the first place that I had meditation instruction, even though I'm originally from the East Coast. My first formal meditation instruction was there. And my first touch into Buddhism and to Zen was Zen mind, beginner's mind, and so I have a great affinity and connection with the Suzuki Roshi lineage through that, and up until today, I am connected with the Brooklyn Zen Center that Heather has lorded over for a little lordy, yes.

[02:13]

Yeah, a little bit. So, back then, I... You know, as many of us do, we try to figure out, like, how do we do this? How do we sort of figure out this strange lifestyle of being a practitioner? And I, up until that time, you know, did ordinary things. I come from a mixed-class background. My people are mixed race. And I had nothing, you know, really to go to. Like, you did jobs. And especially in the East Coast, you did jobs. regular old jobs. My dad was a fireman, and that was sort of like his way out there as you got. But when you're trying to deepen your practice, you want to figure out things like you're doing now, like how do I be at a place for periods of time when I have things like rent to pay and all of that kind of thing. So it occurred to me... to write a book because the only people that I knew that had a lifestyle that could accommodate like a three-month retreat were both authors.

[03:21]

And I was fortunate. Those two people were Alice Walker and Gloria Steinem. And, you know, of course I figured out that I wasn't them, but, you know, that I could eke out something. And so I, as a result of, you know, we tend to write and think about things from where we are. And I was very much in the deepening of my practice with my community there in New York and trying to figure out, like, where are the colored folks? Where are they? And I was, I've come to say mildly naive and thought, well, oh, they just need an invitation. And so if I, like, made an invitation, people would just come running. It didn't actually work out like that, but I tried. I wrote a book called Being Black Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace. And almost as soon as the book got out, owing to several things, not the least of which was the, as I shared a city center, one of the things that the promotion people came back and said, well, you know, we're having a little trouble.

[04:36]

We had this... this odd animal at those times that we still call Buddhist bookstores, like Amazon hadn't eaten everything up and eaten all of the bookstores that were sort of very specific to a particular genre or type. So we had Buddhist bookstores still all across the country, and it was kind of going on a circuit of Buddhist bookstores, but the promotion team said is, people are saying to us, this is a black book, not a Buddhist book. And... With that and other things, what I quickly realized is that I had written this book, Be Black, as an invitation. And it was an invitation into a community, both on a small level and also on a national level, to which they were not welcome. And that the communities of the Buddha Sanghas and communities were not welcome and not welcoming, not in their... people's individual heart necessarily, but as a structure and as an institution.

[05:38]

And so it's been a kind of, even though I don't usually like this phrase, it's been kind of a meditation for myself over the last 15 years now since I wrote that book. And one of the many results of that is radical dharma and the choice to try to bring this conversation back to... the heart of communities that I have belonged to and been a part of and feel like there's such great potential in, but for this illness that plagues many of our communities. It's been changing. I can already see as I sit here in the last few years some, but it would not be accurate to say that it has changed nearly enough, and it certainly would not be accurate to say that the landscape of the Dharma, of Buddhist communities, and I want to say spiritual communities, Eastern-based spiritual communities writ large, are still plagued with the challenge of creating a space of welcome.

[06:44]

And over the years, my thinking about it has changed, and I'll point to one of those pretty significant shifts in terms of what I think is... important about how we begin to shift that. So I'm going to read a little bit from the other two authors so you just get a little sense of a flavor of them. Shani will, we can put it out later, I bought a copy of Lion's Roar magazine because both Lama Rod and I are in that the way we got to this is that December 2014, so you're going to come back on the time machine journey with me. Please come on in. December 2014, the decision from the Eric Gardner case was the gentleman, the black man that was choked clearly on video, came down. There was a decision not to prosecute him.

[07:49]

And I think the sort of beginning sense of like, oh, this might be a little bit of a pattern. was beginning to emerge, and it was enough so that Lions Roar magazine, still called Shambhala Sun, asked Lama Radha and I to have a conversation. And that conversation was videotaped and got a lot of feedback from Dharma practitioners. And what we felt was the hunger for a way to begin to have these conversations and to probe more. It's not everywhere, and it's always, you know... There's always generalizations, but it was enough for us to say, oh, there's a window here. And unfortunately, the unfolding of events in the country in terms of what we've become aware of and increasingly aware of on a national scale has furthered that conversation so it didn't just disappear. That's both good and bad. It's good in the sense that these things have, of course, always been occurring, and the

[08:53]

only difference is that people are being made aware. It's bad for obvious reasons in that it's still occurring and doesn't seem to be abating in any way whatsoever. Lama Rod is fantastic, really funny. He talks about snacks a lot. And as I said the other day, the reason I hung out with him is because we have some similar views about what's necessary to change our relationship to a sense of healing, liberation, and the bridging of spiritual community with movements because we need to do that for ourselves because that's where we live. We live both in spiritual community, but we also live in social movements. And he's stranger than I am being one of the four now, I think, black teachers in the community. and he's stranger than I am because he's a black llama. And so there are, I want to say, two and a half.

[09:57]

One of them I'm not so sure about. So there are two and a half black llamas in the country. That's recorded. Get that out there. So I'd like to ask permission. Can I speak French here? Because there's a little French in this. Okay, good. Okay. So I'll open with a quote. Some of our essays begin with quotes. I like to arrive ten minutes early just to let bitches know who the fuck they're dealing with. That's RuPaul. Is that French? Yes, sweet. We quickly understand what French I mean. If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution. That's Emma Goldman. The title of this essay is Radical Presence, and I'll start here.

[10:58]

A friend admitted during her introduction before one of my Dharma talks that I had intrigued her because she never heard a Dharma teacher say the things I did during teachings. I was tickled because she was right, and this is very common feedback I receive. Over the past several years of being a formal Dharma teacher, my style of teaching has evolved to be very informal in what seems to be an unorganized flow of thoughts, impressions, insights, and direct references to pop culture happenings. I almost never prepare written notes, and even if I have already selected a topic and teaching description, I often have no idea what I will be saying on the topic until I sit on the cushion and open my mouth. I know that this scares the shit out of most people. But I noticed that when I prepared a Dharma talk, I was expecting people to show up and meet me where I was. This began to feel a little manipulative and insensitive to the needs of folks in the space. Unconsciously, my goal became to meet people where they are in the moment we begin to share space together.

[12:00]

I do not know where the group is until I am in the group. I can write a Dharma talk beforehand, but that talk is based upon where I think the group will be. at the time of the talk and therefore doesn't take into consideration the unique causes and conditions that inform how individuals are showing up at that moment and how that particular showing up has to be seen, appreciated, and spoken to. Overall, I just try to trust where I am led. So I share that because that's how I tend to approach talks. And it took me a little while to realize that that wasn't actually the case for a lot of people, even though I had been around for a while, especially the whole scare the shit out of people. This is from, this is called What the World Needs Now, and it's my co-author Yasmeen Saidullah. And she opens with a quote, the perception that human life has differential exchange value in the marketplace of death when it comes to civilized and uncivilized people is not only quite common in liberal democrat

[13:06]

democratic countries, it is necessary to a hierarchical global border. Contrary to popular belief in the United States, freedom is a prison. The notion may strike the modern American imagination as counterintuitive or just plain wrong, but if we are to turn to the language of the Constitution, we find this loophole. a glaring time warp of contradiction that legitimates the ongoing presence of slave-like conditions within our national practice of liberty. The 13th Amendment, the constitutional abolition of slavery in 1865, remains one of this country's crowning achievements, proof positive that democracy works and is an ever-evolving, self-correcting system of consensus, justice, and deliberation. The amendment states that, quote, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

[14:09]

Emphasis by the author. I could not have arrived at this insight, excuse me, even ever since the loophole of the 13th Amendment empowered the United States to democratize the experience of captivity far beyond the color line. far beyond the physical space of the prison, the United States has become one of the planet's largest jailers, representing almost one quarter of the world's total prison population. As much as we want to believe in the promise of the American dream, the complete autonomy of the nuclear family, the domestic privacy of home ownership, the protections of our private property from the interference of the national government in our everyday lives, this halcyon image wholesome image of freedom is only thinkable because of the fictions we spin around it. It is, in reality, a thing rendered unfathomable for a large population of those this country seeks to protect. One of Yasmin's particular focus in her work as an academic is the arc between slavery

[15:22]

historic slavery and current prison institutions and how black peoples in particular as a result of slavery have always been in a pursuit of liberation. And so she speaks about that in different ways in the book. And when we wrote the book, one of the things that we wanted to do was to begin to try to answer questions for people about where we come from as black folks that are participating in this institution that has its challenges and is in many ways replicating the illness of society of both white supremacy, various forms of oppression. And so we set out to do this series of conversations and we went across country. And we went to Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn, and Berkeley. the four places we went. It was kind of a breakneck speed.

[16:23]

But what we ended up with is this sort of massive amount of material of conversations that were happening. And they were really quite fascinating because they were mixed in all the groups, all of the places that we went with were Dharma centers, except for Harvard. We were at Harvard Divinity School where Lama Rod is a student. And, but all of the conversations were mixed. They were mixed with white folks. They were mixed with colored folks. black folks, there were people that were Dharma people, there were people that were movement people, there were Zen people, Shambhala people, Vipassana people. It was really quite rangy. And one of the unusual things that showed up in the book, and we could really only see it after we did the transcription, was that because there were two black teachers sitting in the front of the room, the tone of the conversation changed. And what would happen is that the Black folks, in particular in the room, and as well as people of color, would have conversation amongst ourselves as if white folks weren't in the room.

[17:28]

That is to say, we had conversations in the same vernacular and style that we have when y'all aren't here. And it was very interesting because as it emerged in the book, you could see it, you could feel it, and it's one of the, I think, one of the crowning achievements, if you will, of the book. When we were in the editing process, there was a point at which the editor, lovely man, and progressive and white, and his wife works on racial justice work, but he got to a point and he wanted to make some edits. And I went with a small publisher, partially because you get to say what you want and what you don't want. In a big publisher, you can forget that. This could never have come out from a big publisher. It just wouldn't have worked like that at all. So he suggested these edits, and I didn't accept the edits. It was like, yes, thank you. There's this moment we're having this conversation, you kind of feel a little bit of the puffiness about it.

[18:29]

And then he just came out and said it. He was like, well, I'm actually kind of aggravated that you didn't accept those edits. And then he set out on the gingerly path of the way in which white folks often talk to people of color. And he said... because this is a way to really meet the intersectional audience that you're trying to get to. And I looked and I said, Tim, that's code for white folks. You mean that the editors are trying to make it more accessible to white folks. And this is an important point. I said, but this book is not for white folks. It was never meant for white folks, which is to say that the idea of the book is not that white folks shouldn't read the book, absolutely should, but that the language of the book centers blackness, and that that in itself is an act of liberation, and that the invitation for white folks to read the book as we are, not edited out by the pen of white publishing America,

[19:46]

is an invitation into liberation and an invitation of love. It's to say that at this point it's time for us to actually see each other and to relate to each other as we are. And by people of color choosing to be seen as they are and to not reshape themselves so that they fit within the veneer of the construct of whiteness and what is acceptable inside that construct is to begin to give permission to white folks to be who you are. To not blur into this sort of entirely created falseness that takes the color of people's skin and says somehow you're the same. And that we've all then fallen into that And very much a part of our collective liberation is to actually find our way out of that false construct.

[20:47]

And I say particularly to Dharma communities that we understand that deeply, which is why it was so important to write this from the perspective and to, as a love note, to Dharma communities. Because unlike, I wouldn't say it's exclusive to us, but unlike the large number of people in America, we have shared... within our teachings this notion of ego as a construct. And so we get what it means to say, oh, here this thing is that we perceive as real and it's entirely a construct. And our job is to explore this construct and to not get all our bridges in an uproar when someone says, oh, ego, and points to it. And then we go, oh my God, I don't have an ego, which is basically what happens when we talk about whiteness. We say whiteness and people go... And so the offering is to recognize that whiteness is a social ego that was constructed.

[21:59]

And we can actually, fortunately, point back to the point in which that construct was developed and legalized and set in place for the specific purpose of assigning privileges to a group of people, not because the people that were constructing it so love those people, and I do a whole training that talks about that, but specifically to assure that another group of people did not have those privileges, and it's black people. So there's a lot of conversation and pointing to anti-Black racism as a central feature of what locks this, holds this country in place, not because Black people are special from my perspective, but because they were special from the socioeconomic needs and the class needs of a particular group of people over 400 years ago. And so it's a, I think, valuable,

[23:05]

lens from which Dharma people can begin to start to look at what are the ways in which we have bought into the social ego all while setting out on this path to explore and investigate our individual ego. And that's how we actually make the arc from personal transformation to social transformation. if we're willing, in fact, to really look at how is it that we've fallen into this construct and why is it that we have decided that one of these constructs is worthy of taking on and one of them is worthy of looking into. Not to say that that personal exploration is easy, but we have over the last 50 years developed massive institutions and a network of people that it would seem would get the idea of this social construct with ease.

[24:14]

And the question for us is, and I say this truly us, is what is it about that construct that suggests we'll leave that one in place? Because I don't get to say this to mainstream audiences, right? Because there's not an automatic assumption that ego as a construct is being looked at. But here we have this opportunity to say, huh, we've chosen to look at that. Why is it that we haven't chosen to look at the other thing? So let's talk a little bit about, this is a part of our conversations and Lama Rod says, the question I have is when is enough enough? When do we finally start making the choice to confront, to interrogate, and to strategize around the forces of hate and materialism and devaluing?

[25:15]

How do we create antidotes to the otherness that many of us feel in our communities? How do we practice self-agency and reimagining ourselves, not within the context of someone else's imagination, but within our own? not within an imagination that is about control and domination, about silence and hate, especially self-hate. How do you take that power away from people? These are the questions I started with when I began my Dharma practice those dozen or so years ago. I wanted to seek refuge. I wanted peace from the overwhelming trauma of being all of these identities. I was seeking liberation from this deep, deep hunger, this deep, deep sense of loneliness. this deep, deep sense of feeling like I didn't matter, that I wasn't important, that no one cared. What I was able to see was that liberation was up to me, and that's what my early Dharma teachings were really about. Liberation was a choice, and at some point I had to choose liberation on my own. So I say here, I want to chime in because what I hear a lot is people asking questions about navigating their Dharma centers in their spiritual homes.

[26:26]

and about what those people are doing rather than people taking responsibility for themselves. What we're missing in Dharma communities is that people seem to have forgotten that this is about liberation. And that is a significant challenge I see all over the place. I think that what we're doing is settling for this as a result of white skin privilege and white supremacy and the complacency that it engenders. we've ended up settling for a kinder, gentler suffering rather than actually seeking and seeing our practice in our communities and our sanghas as places for liberation. It's, as this young brother said when I was at Buddha Fest, like a white finishing school and people are just figuring out how to be nicer to each other. But it's all within those confines of Puritan values of whiteness foisted upon the country at large, which are to not interrupt, to not confront, to not challenge, to not say things when you see things. Because I guarantee you that most of the racism that is occurring and most of the really pervasive presence of white supremacy that gives rise to the discomfort that we're feeling and the misalignment that we're feeling in our communities is happening in the presence of perfectly good people who know better.

[27:41]

that know that this is not what they want to see in themselves, but we've all acquiesced to minding our business, and that's not liberation. Lamourad says, part of me wants to articulate this experience of feeling colonized within American Buddhism. Reverend Angel and myself, we have to have a place, we have to have a practice to sit here and talk about white supremacy and racism and valuing others, but even if we do this in a loving way, there are still people who will resist and call it aggressive. when we start talking about how these kinds of systems and structures are reproduced in sanghas, then we are met with this wall. Why are you being aggressive? Why are you being angry? Why are you yelling? Meanwhile, we haven't even begun to raise our voice. And this last piece I'll read. Before I do that, I'll say, so what ended up happening is we took the conversations.

[28:46]

You can imagine these are like all at least, you know, hour-long conversations in four different CDs. This is a massive amount of material. I had some idea that this was, you know, an easy way to write a book. I was like, oh, we'll just have conversations. They'll be transcribed and we'll put them in a book. Yeah. And so we transcribed them and we... boiled them down to what we felt like was the essence. And then we realized that one of the constant questions, as I was saying earlier before, is that people would want to understand how do we come to this. So the book speaks to both practitioners and speaks from a lens as practitioners, but it also speaks to movement people. So when I say movement people, I mean people very tightly in movements for Black Lives Matter and Black liberation, but also more broadly as people begin to see the intersections and how different oppressions are locked into this anti-Black racism that began and rooted in slavery and has carried itself forth in terms of institutions that we have.

[29:57]

And it's replicating itself within our communities, within our communities. circles and within our circles of liberation, within our circles of healing, which is the most damaging thing of all. Because what we do is like, it's very much like going to the hospital, right? And then we're taking a drug that is actually damaging our system. But we do it inside of a hospital where we believe that we're healing. And for me, that's what our communities of healing and liberation end up being if we don't start to look at these constructs. But similarly, and on the other end of the spectrum, movement communities are so invested in the struggle for liberation, and I have evicted the word struggle from my own personal language, that the practices that we have of investigating our own internal landscape

[30:59]

separate and distinct from the causes and conditions that are outside, right? To sort of piece that apart and say, who am I? When am I absent of this social structure? When am I beyond that? When I look, I have a young friend and he wrote a song and one of the lines in the song is, who is this being that I shamelessly refer to as me? Kind of captures what I think is the essence of our practice, right, to investigate this I. The movement people are often, not always, but often lacking this kind of personal investigation, acquiescing instead to being entirely shaped by struggles for liberation, being entirely shaped by the causes and conditions that are set up, these structures and institutions. So where we try to sit is to say there's something to learn from each other.

[32:01]

That on the one hand, the communities that are pursuing personal transformation, personal liberation, are doing the kind of deep exploration that is necessary to really understand how is it that we can exist in the midst of suffering? How can we find joy? How can we find healing? How can we... continue to love and to be loved in the midst of conditions that clearly, in many ways, are organized to confine us. Conditions that go beyond what is structured to confine us and cause us suffering, but rather just the truth and the ordinary universal truth of life, that we grow old, we get sick, we die, we suffer. from things small and large, and yet our responsibility, if you will, is to really seek how it is that we find ourselves in a place of, I want to say, enduring joy.

[33:10]

Enduring joy, not because we figure out how to get around the suffering, but in the presence of that suffering. And I would say even further, in deep relationship to that suffering, that in fact our suffering gives rise to our joy. And that that pursuit, if it could find its way into the social liberations, right, the social pursuit of liberation, would give the people that are on that end of the pursuit some relief from to actually be able to show up in their joy more fully, more completely, while they pursue social liberation. On the other hand, many of us disappear into our personal liberation, and I don't say this particularly because of Tassajara being buried down in the middle of nowhere, but...

[34:15]

More broadly, even people that are in communities, that are in urban places day to day have disappeared behind the wall of their pursuit of social liberation, completely ignoring and disavowing any relationship to the structures and institutions that are in fact hindering our collective liberation. And we all suffer as a result of that. The great falsehood is that only the people that we experience and see and witness suffering on a material level, tangible material level, are the ones that are suffering. When in fact, if we look at it further, what we ultimately, I think, realize is that when we cut ourselves off from the relationship to collective liberation, when we leave, when our view gets so narrow and focused on just our personal liberation, there's something that cuts off because we cease to relate to otherness as ourselves.

[35:27]

And when we cease to relate to otherness as ourselves, we can't confine that to outside of ourselves as a system. That cutting off of otherness is actually happening I don't want to say the cutting off of otherness is not causing cutting off in ourselves. It is the result of something that is cut off within ourselves. So we literally can't cut ourselves off from society without having already perfected the art of cutting off something and leaving behind something within ourselves. And that's something that our spiritual communities need to begin to really probe. So we structured the book by starting with what it is that we as black folks in these institutions and trying to survive both of these situations had to leave behind.

[36:30]

And for those of us that are ordained, we understand this concept of home leaving. And really, it's something for all of us to explore. But in particular, I want to just read one more passage that talks about, from my own perspective, what one particular group in our demographic might have to offer this conversation and why. So this is from the chapter on liberation. And this actually comes from an interview I was doing with a young black woman. I say young as if I've gotten a little further along than I am. She's probably about the same age as I am. She's a researcher, but she's also a Dharma practitioner. She was trying to figure out two questions. First of all, why is it our communities look the way they do? And from her lens, why is it, as she was seeing, and she wanted to know if I'd seen the same thing,

[37:36]

that diverse communities were springing up under the guidance of black women teachers, regardless of what lineage they were from. So very diverse communities were springing up under the auspices of black women teachers, and she named a few black women teachers in other traditions. And so that's where this comes from. It's called, What Does Liberation Look Like and Where Does It Live? Black women are the canary in the coal mine of the social structure of America. And as the canaries, they seek the air that is most clear because they know what it's like to suffocate. They know what it's like to suffocate as women, people in female-gendered bodies. They know what it's like to suffocate as people in black-skinned bodies. And so as people that have touched the liberatory teachings, when they seek liberation, when they seek a clear space to breathe, They create that space around everyone because they know what it's like to suffer. They know what it's like to suffocate.

[38:37]

In the teachings of the Dharma, the first teaching is that life is suffering. It's not a thought. It's not an idea. It's not something that you should take as you go off into the second noble truth. It's actual teaching. It's something that you actually have to come to know. And if you don't truly know, know intimately that life is suffering, then you cannot know what it means to seek liberation. So black female bodies know suffering. That is the nature of their existence in this society. They know suffering. Therefore, they know liberation when they see it. And they are not capable of not seeking that liberation on behalf of others. Because that's what liberation is. That's what liberation actually gives rise to. You can't possibly come to know the depth of suffering and then have any wish other than to not only be free of your own suffering, but to have others free of their suffering.

[39:40]

Because of who they are, black women have to do that. In the interest of time, I will leave back there. And I'll open it up, and I think there's one more thing I might revisit as we go along, but I want to make sure we have time for conversation. Yeah, would you please say your name? Say your name again. Sagan? Sagan, yes. Would you? Guy Clark. Thank you. Someone have a clock. Thank you. I just, I want to be respectful of y'all's time. Yeah, there we go. Thank you. Digital, thank goodness. Go ahead, please. So, okay, I'll be the canary in the whole time today.

[40:41]

I'm pursuing ordination in this area. We are requesting to have conversations with senior teachers and members of the Abbott's math. And a question that comes up, I think, often for anyone who is pursuing coordination is why Zen? Why is this important? And I'm finding there's an interesting point of departure for me in my conversation. Because I think often it is meant as one of those she's so like challenges of asking me to speak your truth, you know, you could do this in any tradition, you could do this in any way I've been part of this. And this question of how are you here in general, right, is one that I live with in community. I have a lot of people trying to do this, [...] I have a lot of people trying to

[41:53]

My response, which is, it feels like quality. Because I come from a place that honors lineage. Because if you check the names of your ancestors every day, I come from a place that says you call them the ancestors. And these might be names that I'm unfamiliar with, but they're solace in... Yeah, I know what this means. I know what this means. So I guess part comment, part question is, in your conversation, did any of this come up around just literally having to explain why you're here, that people are so surprised, and then taken aback at the very personal nature of it? I guess I'm interested. I want to hear whether I'm wrong in this particular... You know, like, how do you have an affinity for this?

[42:56]

And the only thing I've ever heard is in Dharma, Color, and Culture, the essay, A Child of the South in Mont Rock Rose, she talks about this experience of having an affinity for a spiritual practice that not only demonstrates that activism was different than maybe what I was taught, that sitting is a rap well act of activism but also just to be at home in something where nobody especially would feel at home and what to have to justify and explain is in and of itself problematic and liberating at the same time and I think there's space for that But it's suffering. You know, it's hard to read. So if anyone spoke to that, or if you yourself have experienced that dynamic, being comfortable, how is it that you can be comfortable in these communities that also people thought does?

[44:07]

Yes. So we do, in our different ways, speak about that. I will say, you know, and just name, right, that the surprise is white supremacy, right? That's a manifestation of white supremacy. That doesn't mean someone is intending ill, but the notion of ownership of something, right, is like as foreign, right? Like white folks didn't make this, right? This didn't happen like that, and it's not so far that that should be forgotten. is exactly that sense of ownership, right? It's like, oh, we can go wherever we want and do whatever we want, and so anyone else, any other doing something can become a surprise because we're comfortable everywhere. You can see the Louis C.K. video where he talks about being a white man, and he says he can go to any time.

[45:11]

He can get in a time machine, and he can time travel. He can go anyplace else, and he'll be okay because he's a white man. He's like, where? No, everywhere he goes. He was like, but he said, black, yeah, not so good. What, go back 300 years? Not so cool, right? And so that's how, and when I say supremacy, I really mean in the true sense, we're not talking about hoods and robes, right? We're talking about... You get these, not these ropes. Those other ropes. So we're not talking about thank goodness for the hoods. At least I can talk about that. So we're not talking about hoods and robes when we talk about white supremacy. I'm talking about that construct, right, that places white folks in a place that is supreme, right, that is a ground zero. And that's where the utterance comes from. It's a sense of... without any necessarily malice, I don't know where people are, but without necessarily malice intended, a baseline of ownership of everything and entitlement to everything that then entitles one to question, where do you come from?

[46:19]

And how could you be here? And simultaneously, I think that what most... progressive liberal communities don't really give thought to is the incredible resilience of people of color to be able to live amongst that questioning and inside of that entitlement for generations. And so there's simultaneously, and we have to deal with this as a community, there's a sense of like, well, why aren't you comfortable here? And how could you be comfortable here? And it coexists and it's maddening, right? It's both suffocating, right? And it's liberating because it's suffocating for the obvious reasons of we are in a constant state of having to defend our very existence.

[47:21]

We are in a constant state as people of color, of having to defend our very existence. And simultaneously, people are ignoring the fact of our existence. But that's not about us. That's about them. That's about the ways in which... dominant cultures, now we could leave it away from white folks in particular, but any dominant culture, the way that privilege behaves in dominant culture, that enables us to be completely blind. And that blindness is a shielding of our own discomfort. That blindness is when you come into the room, you call into question, my being here. The assumption of my ownership is actually challenged.

[48:23]

The assumption of my entitlement is challenged. And it comes out in the form of these, you know, what they've come to call microaggressions that voice that concern onto the people that are actually challenging us and mirroring us. And that's what the Dharma... is about, which is to hold the mirror up for us to actually look at ourselves, look at the way that we've constructed ourselves, and do that in a way that allows us to completely deconstruct, to completely deconstruct. But what we've not been doing, and it shows up in that form, is deconstructing whiteness itself. Just the way in which we have, in many ways, traditions and many lineages within Buddhism, maleness is not deconstructed. It's taken as a given. The way that heterosexuality is not deconstructed, it's taken as a given.

[49:23]

Now we see micro forms of it in communities that are more liberal, more progressive, you know, like Suzuki Roshi lineage, but you take little steps in place and the patriarchy is suffocating. and being a woman in those communities is suffocating. You go someplace else and the heterosexuality is utterly suffocating. And so those of us that are called to question when we find ourselves in a place in which we want to question and position someone in defense of themselves for being comfortable in their own skin. You need to turn that around and figure out what is it that is uncomfortable about your skin that causes that question to arise.

[50:27]

It's simply not possible. It's not possible. to have that view if it's not held within you, if that place of discomfort is not within you. It drops away. The contours of that question and where it lives, the way that it puts other outside drops away. which is not to be mistaken with colorblindness, which is not to be mistaken with gender blindness, which is not to be mistaken with, like, just disappearing queer folks into oblivion, into the woodworks, right? And that's a sweet investigation, I think, for us as practitioners, right, is to discern our fixation on asking people to disappear their identity in order to work within dominant cultures and dominant paradigms versus the inquiry into our own, the discomfort that we have around our own presentation and what we are inhabiting that starts to come a little undone when other people, whoever that other may be, walks into the room.

[51:59]

Yes, would you say your name, please? Okay, can I pause for a second? I hope the white folks in the room are not going to be afraid to say anything to me. Let's just clear that out of the room. Say it again, please. Go. Thank you. First, I... I'm grateful to hear that the people, and you and your people, or people, in the same way, apply the same mind to movement or the person. So it's interesting. I think it's a good application. And my question is that... In that context, social issues, social discrimination or legal or ideas, concepts.

[53:31]

In that context, what is liberation or what is it's just like... from what... what we... my point is that... my point is that... in that... I feel that... literary interpretation I can't think there is any identity or a world or any kind of mind that obtains this activism of movement needs some particular voice fixed

[54:43]

persistence, force, slow, jack of his liberation is what will suffer. What is the soul of the soul? Yeah, again, I think, you know, Zen has pretty good, strong language. Language, I would say, language to actually offer And a framework to offer is to really think about the difference between absolute and relative, right? And so on an absolute level, of course, there's no identity. There's no difference, right? And we're all truly, deeply one, just, it's not even one thing, just one. Just one. Just one. And then there's the relative, which... in which we recognize the construct of reality that we operate in, in which I can definitely see, right, you're abiding in a male body.

[56:00]

And I then have all kinds of associations that go with that male body. In your Japanese heritage, I have a bunch of associations that just... fittingly popped into my head just about the fact that you're Japanese. And so I can try to inhabit some kind of an absolute place all the time that just disappears that, but that isn't the true, that isn't the relative space that we inhabit. And so we have to actually come to understand how do we allow the taste of the absolute that we touch into as part of practice to infiltrate the way in which we relate to one another in relative space, but not have that disappear relative because the relative has an impact on people insofar as we experience suffering, insofar as we experience the

[57:07]

inequities in society, right? And so the marriage of the absolute and relative and how we live through that so that we're capable of holding the complexity of both of those things, right, that we both recognize the relative. We see it. We feel it. We experience it. We experience pain. We experience suffering. We experience the loss of love. We experience joy. We experience all of these ranges of things. We experience walking into a store and someone talks to her before they talk to me. We experience someone assuming that, you know, the male at the table, male-bodied person at the table gets the check before. We experience seeing someone and assigning them he And that person may identify as she. We experience all of that relative suffering.

[58:08]

And yet what I think Zen mind, in fact, right, and the practice and the Dharma has to offer is the ability to touch into something that is greater, that is that absolute knowing in the deepest part of our being. that all of this is just a facade. It's all a sham. It's all cover-up. And yet, here we are in these bodies. Here it is. Science would tell us that really this is made up of the same thing as this. but I'm not going to try to do this through the table. And that's what we have to offer. That's what I think that we have to offer as Dharma communities to movement, not on a wacky esoteric level where we're like, identity doesn't exist.

[59:17]

It's all in your mind, right? Which is what is the suffering that we have, that misunderstanding, right? Misunderstanding. I want to say we like to call it spiritual bypass, has caused spiritual communities to foist upon people of differences to say, that's your ego. This identity thing and wanting us to pay attention to that, wanting us to have a separate bathroom or wanting us to treat people differently because they come from different cultures and lineages and their culture is not our culture and we as white folks don't get to simply assume the culture that everyone has to step into, how we hold silence, how we move our bodies, whether we're sexualized or not sexualized, what raising our voice means, even the level of my voice and where my voice comes from and sits in my body is part of my heritage, my culture, and my people. And it's threatening when I go into all white spaces sometimes.

[60:21]

And then I'm told to lower my voice or I'm told to be quiet. Or silence as part of our tradition is used as a way to silence people. We have to explore that. And we have that to offer, but not until we get up off of our duffs in terms of taking the lens of the Dharma and having it peer from the outside onto the privilege that has allowed us to cut ourselves off from each other, from the discomfort of the history of the development and making of this country that white-skinned people continue to benefit from. Therefore, it's not in their favor to investigate. It's not in your favor. You get that. But it's not in your favor to explore ego, frankly. So get on with it, is what we say. not in your favor to explore ego, until you have a motivation.

[61:23]

And what is that motivation that crosses the line between both? It's liberation. And what we need to do is recognize, oh, there's another kind of liberation, and that liberation is not separate from my personal liberation. They cannot be made to be separate somehow. And when we realize that, then the motivation, and I love the Tibetan tradition for it really, leaning into the notion of right motivation, right? We're all here for a reason. We're all here for a reason. And this is, you know, just like movies and entertainment and Disneyland and all kinds of things you could be doing other than this. But something in you wants to be liberated, right? You want to experience the potential of being free from this relative suffering. if we understand that that exists on a social level and that our personal liberation is not possible without it, we'll be in the right place.

[62:27]

Thank you. Thank you. our obsession between your sense of free.

[62:49]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_76.75