This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Thank you. Thank you for having me again in this beautiful hall and beautiful community. And speaking about awakening, I've been noticing how unenlightened and unawake our world is. I don't know whether you've noticed or not recently that we don't live in an enlightened world. You know, this larger culture and especially the body politics feels more than fragmented, almost shattered. And this disruption really destabilizes all of the challenges that all of us go through, the aging, the illness, the dying process, whether it's ourselves or our loved ones or raising families in such an atmosphere with disparities becoming more and more severe rather than equalizing.

[01:27]

So what we do do in this room is so important. It is so really vital. It is so precious. How we connect our inner world to the world that is around us. This awareness, this mindfulness practice that can be so... mainstreamed in the main media. I just googled the New York Times recently and you put in mindfulness and 40,000 articles turn up. That it is not just about being mindful of our own experience. That there is a direct connection between this internal practice that we cultivate and and our collective practice of how we live together in the world.

[02:31]

So this personal transformation that we go through is intricately involved in the social transformation that is needed. Sometimes it can feel like we're meditating to create the stillness and the peace and the equanimity in our own hearts. Creating less suffering, maybe even around our circles of care, our family, our loved ones. And we may even find that insight and wisdom arises through a growing compassion in our hearts ability to meet events in our life. But I also really believe that these teachings that originate with the Buddha, if we follow it all the way back, has a larger intention of transforming the world so that we lift our lives

[03:48]

from the unconscious harm that we create to creating less and less harm for all of us. So I use this term, beautiful and beloved community. The word beautiful is consciously used because beauty in the Dharma is not an aesthetic quality. That is not the definition of beauty. So Sayadaw Upandita says that the beautiful is that which leads to freedom. That is what makes it noble and beautiful. And of course, beloved community is the term coined by Josiah Royce, the theologian philosopher in the mid-1800s that was so... wonderfully explicated in the teachings of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King.

[04:50]

Our goal is to create a beloved community and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives. This is the modern contemporary mirror of the verse in the Satipatthana Sutta that says the noble ones contemplating internally, they contemplate externally, and they abide contemplating externally and internally. So, as many of you know, in the four foundations of mindfulness, there are multitudinous instructions and invitations to turn the practice of awareness towards body, vedana, mind constructions, thoughts, emotions, dharmas, of which they are infinite. And at the end of each invitation is this refrain. It occurs 13 times in the sutta.

[05:52]

And I don't think that the Buddha repeated himself without due cause. That this is actually a core teaching beyond the mindfulness is the external and internal dance. being aware of our internal experience as well as the experience of the world and others around us. And we do this incrementally. As you have practiced here, even though you may not know people in the room, you may not know the particulars of their life, but there may feel an intimacy in simply knowing that there is a common aspiration in the room, in a world that feels so troubled, to be able to come here for refuge from that in order to create something that's more liberating.

[07:00]

I think that every invitation that the Buddha gave was an invitation both around our internal experience, feeling the breath, feeling the awareness of the body. But can we feel the collective experience of doing this together? That the breath, you know, what is said is, I thought this was an interesting analogy, I don't know how it can be scientifically proven, but it is said that every in-breath that you take, you are taking one molecule of Julius Caesar's last exhale. Yes. Wow. We are breathing each other in a way that we take for granted. We don't even think about. Maybe it's too intimate to think about in this way. But the breath is this orchid. You never breathe the same as anybody else.

[08:05]

It's this orchid. You know, each breath is a note. What's the orchestration that's happening in the room when we sit together? To be able to expand these invitations to think collectively as a collective humanity. So the eating instructions may be different for different traditions, but one of them I think is common is just to be with others. the beauty of the food and the appreciation that not everybody has this privilege of eating whenever they want, usually whatever they want. And if we haven't had a meal for a while, the brilliance of the sensations cascading into the five-cent stores. And one of the invitations around the eating practice is to stop eating

[09:08]

five bites from full. How do you do that? How do you do that without one's awareness? Because you know that usually when we're sitting at a meal, you know, when I'm in the workplace or when I'm with my family, I'm usually eating either my mother's instructions to finish the plate or eating my emotions Or eating the news on the, you know, whatever it is. I'm eating way beyond five bites from full. So it's a practice. But again, it's not just about our practice. What would it be like to live our lives five bites from full? Buy our clothes five bites from full. Use our vehicles five bites from full.

[10:08]

Use our national consumption five bites from full. This is where I think these teachings lead. We can become preoccupied with our experience if we just follow the internal invitations. And that is just basically... a creation of ego, of self. So I was sitting in a different tradition at a local meditation center and it was a week-long non-residential retreat. I write about this in my book. And it was very interesting because it was very a development of a practice to explode the mind into space, you know, the spaciousness of the possibility of our awareness.

[11:11]

Beautiful practice. And as it is a non-residential retreat, the meditation center may be held slightly less than this group, but in order to get there, what do we do? We drive. And this meditation center happened to be in a residential neighborhood. And this was for seven days. And so whenever the session opened, 40 cars would what? Impact a residential area and you know how parking is difficult at Zen Center. So all of a sudden in the middle of this retreat was the input from the community as to what's going on here. And they finally identified where the source was. And so it was brought to the attention of the people leading the retreat.

[12:12]

And so we were told to do something different. And so what happened was somebody found a different area to park in. And everybody went and parked there. And what happened? It was the same unconscious pattern of impacting a different neighborhood in the middle of this retreat that had completely different intentions. And unfortunately, the karma of all of that created so much tension in the community that the meditation center lost its lease. there was not that dance between this internal practice and the external impact on the world. It means that the experience doesn't just belong to us.

[13:15]

It's the image that sometimes that I use is when we practice it's like a stone that drops into a clear still pool and as soon as it touches the surface of the water it begins to radiate in all directions. So given the state of the world, if we only stay internally and do not use that to act in the world, to create less suffering, we actually create more suffering. And we can be overwhelmed by everything that's happening. And so then there's a paralysis, which is not helpful either. Edward Everett Hale, who was a Unitarian minister, says, I am only one, but I am still one.

[14:22]

I cannot do everything, but I still can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. That is the awareness practice, staying connected. with the internal and the external. Because, and some of you may be in the social activist world, we can also get lost in the external, right? We can get lost in the suffering of the world that even Avalokiteshvara with the 10,000 hands cannot fulfill. So Thomas Merton, who's writings are, I find to be still so relevant in this day and age, writes, there is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs, activism and overwork.

[15:28]

The Russian pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form of this innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns. To surrender to too many demands. To commit oneself to too many projects. To want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. because it kills the root of inner wisdom, which makes the work fruitful. This practice is inherently relational, internal and external. Relationship itself, being connected with each other, is a very powerful tool for transformation.

[16:34]

Because without... Without relationship, everything gets so much more difficult to accomplish. So when difference and when in relationships, especially collective ones in community, inevitably difference comes into the room because none of us are homogenous with each other. Even we have multiplicities of identities within ourselves to navigate and contend with. So the unconscious collective mind, when difference comes into the room, is really conflict. That if there's a difference of opinion, somebody has to be what? Right. Right. And usually people in the world feel that they're right and then another person will feel they're right and another person... Usually when difference comes into the room, people fragment.

[17:48]

But relationship is not saved for our loved ones or our ones who are close to us. The invitation of both the insight and the loving-kindness practice is to extend our consciousness to beings without exception. And it is so, it is going against the stream of our particular cultural conditioning of individualism, of that we can do this practice alone, that it is good, actually, you know, peace for myself. But I don't believe that the Buddha designed a practice that we are supposed to do alone. We are not supposed to do. We never walk alone in this world. Many of you have been to Asia to practice, and so you know, particularly in the Southeast Asian countries,

[19:04]

there is this daily practice, this daily reminder of the relationship between the monastics and the community called Pindapat. That as a monastic, I took off my shoes, got my bowl, and at dawn, we walked for our food. And we were not allowed to cook for ourselves, to buy food for ourselves, to store food overnight. Because it was a daily reminder that while the temple offered the teachings to the community, the community had to support the teachings on a daily basis. That's how interdependent that form is meant to remind us. But it's not always as easy as that reminder. My abbot used to say, building community is like putting volcanic rocks in a millstone and rocks grind and grind against each other until they are individually shaped and smooth.

[20:19]

So in order to create this field of difference so that we can cohere there is a certain sense of safety in order to belong into that community. As I was saying, we come into refuge to develop these skills in the world. And so, at East Bay Meditation Center, we have these culturally affiliated groups, culturally specific groups to create the safety, not to divide or separate, but to develop the sense that we belong in this practice, that we belong in this path, and internalize that so that we can practice anywhere with anyone in any community. And that is actually a sense of freedom. And that this sense of safety that we create, that sometimes is with freedom,

[21:32]

Sometimes it's with a larger mixed group. It's not an individual matter. It takes the awareness and the collective energy to support. Because we know that safety is not an individual matter. It is not my responsibility to feel safe in a group. just as the issues of disability and physical challenge is not just about the person advocating for themselves, or that the current sexism and misogyny that's so in the media these days, which has always been there, is not just the issue of women. Racism and anti-oppression is not just the problem of communities of color. Immigration is not just about the people who have recently landed in this country trying to make it work.

[22:39]

It takes all of us to have that aspiration, to have a community together. This is what Dr. King calls a shift in consciousness from all of us. So even in this aspect of safety, it gets more complex. Because there is the existence of the first noble truth. There is no space, and you can check it out with your own experience. There is no space in this life that's 100% safe. I haven't found it. Because there is this aspect of the first noble truth. How can we create spaces that are safe enough? safe enough so that we can be together enough to feel the complexities and the intersectionalities, to hold the tensions of our differences.

[23:45]

Ajahn Chah, who's the teacher of many of the people in my lineage, said, wrote, Well, it's easy for me to go and be alone and be the fierce ascetic off in the forest. What is difficult is to be with other people and learn how to spend time with them. That's the, how do we hold the tensions between us? How do we break together rather than break apart when we gather into the room? Because the living in the difference, even living in the conflict, is actually the creation of peace. I know that sounds counterintuitive. It is when we cannot live in the conflict, when we turn away and when we fragment, that's when war begins. And that is what we're trying to prevent on an incremental basis.

[24:51]

So if I cannot love you, can I... be with you, even when the differences are strong. This holding the tension is a collective mindfulness practice. It is not resolving the tension. It is not either or, right or wrong, because it's always complex. And invoking... again, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King on his weekend. He writes about this tension in his letter from a Birmingham jail, which is, I cannot imagine a document that was created under more tension as he was incarcerated writing on toilet paper and paper towels. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resistor may sound rather shocking,

[25:54]

But I must confess, I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt it was necessary to create tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so we must see the need. to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, this reconditioning towards the tension, loving the tension itself, is sometimes... called in some of my Dharma circles, cultivating the habits of the heart.

[26:59]

To be able to be with both pleasant, unpleasant, neutral events in our lives. But this term habits of the heart was actually first coined in the 1830s. by a young Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic Democracy in America. And he posited that the future of democracy would be determined by the collective habits of the heart developed by and developed by the integrity or lack of integrity of the sources of spiritual health, including our families, our neighborhoods, classrooms, congregations, and all the places of public cultural life. These habits of the heart are deeply ingrained in our cultural psyche, not because they're associated with any faith tradition.

[28:04]

I actually think it's a human inclination. So I have two examples of these habits of the heart, holding tension. So in Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address, five weeks before the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumner, he writes, we are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may be strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone over this broad land will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature. And then there were over 600,000 military casualties and 50,000 civilian casualties.

[29:17]

in that conflagration. And in his second inaugural address, with malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wound to care for him who shall have borne the battle for his widow and his orphan, to do all that may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations. And a month later, he made his last public address. It was two days after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee, and an understatement, jubilant crowd in front of the White House calling from a statement from President Lincoln. And one reporter wrote, within stood the tall, gaunt figure of the president, deeply thoughtful intent on elucidating a generous policy which should be...

[30:32]

pursued towards the South, that this was not the sort of speech which the multitude had expected is tolerably certain. And he writes, the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regarding those states is to get them into that proper practical relationship. I believe it is not only possible, but in fact easier to do this without deciding or even considering whether these states have been out of the Union than with it. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relationships between these states and the Union. That was three days before his assassination. But 125 years later, across the world, on February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela gets released from prison. And that began four years of negotiations that led to free elections and a fully democratic South Africa.

[31:44]

But it almost didn't happen. So a man by the name of Chris Haney was the second most popular leader in the ANC after Mandela. And on April 10th, 1993, he was assassinated. And it almost happened. derailed everything. Hani was shot by a European immigrant who was soon after caught by the police because a white Afrikaner woman told the police what had happened. And it was, it pushed the whole country into this tipping point. You could feel that a racial civil war might have occurred that would have engulfed probably the whole continent. And Nelson Mandela, not even president yet, wrote, Tonight, I am reaching out to every single South African black and white from the very depths of my being.

[32:50]

A white man full of prejudice and hate came to our country and committed a deed so foul that our whole nation now... A white woman of African origin risked her life so that we may know and bring to justice this assassin. The cold-blooded murder of Chris Honey has sent shockwaves throughout the country and the world. Our grief and our anger are tearing us apart. Now. is the time for all South Africans to stand together against those from any quarter who wish to destroy what Chris Honey gave his life for, the freedom of us all. And he ends. This is a watershed moment for all of us. Our decisions and actions will determine whether we will use our pain, our grief, and our outrage to move forward to what is the only lasting solution for our country.

[33:51]

an elected government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Echoing Lincoln's Gettysburg address. This is the collective power of being able to hold tension. Noticing the impulse and not needing to act on it. Not because of an internal impulse, but because of an external aspiration not to create more harm in the world. Holding the tension, as Dr. Martin Luther King says, there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but they must take it because conscience tells them that it's right. So holding the tension is doing the wise and compassionate action when nobody agrees with us.

[35:01]

Holding the tension is acting on behalf of others when we don't have to because we are in a position of privilege or power or comfort. Holding the tension is loving. when we do not necessarily feel loved ourselves. Holding the tension is placing a higher value on the greater good for all rather than the gain of individuals or individually selected groups. This is the new social order that I feel personally. that the Buddha prescribed for us. This movement from internal and external. This movement from individual to collective. This non-identification with the personal and the connection with the whole, meaning the universal family.

[36:09]

Not to spiritually bypass into that experience, but to live and create it ourselves. This is what is civilization. Lifting ourselves up. to create less and less harm in a world that suffers so greatly. All the teachings point to this. So in his pivotal book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi writes, strictly speaking, there are no separate individual experiences. There are just many names for one existence. Sometimes people put the stress on oneness, but this is not our understanding. We do not emphasize any point in particular, even oneness. Oneness is valuable, but variety is also wonderful. Ignoring variety, people emphasize the one absolute existence, and this is one-sided understanding.

[37:13]

In this understanding, there's a gap. between variety and oneness. But oneness and variety are the same thing. So oneness should be appreciated in each existence. In a different language, Dr. King writes, in a real sense, all life is interrelated. All people are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. So just as we are so much more than who we think we are as individual people, we are so much more than who we think of ourselves in community.

[38:18]

So one of the fundamental questions of our practice of most Eastern traditions is who am I? Who am I really? And turning that question to who are we And who are we really? It is this repeating question. This koan that we live into. We don't solve. This beautiful and beloved community does not arise because we want it to. Or because we deserve it. Or because we feel entitled to it. It doesn't happen overnight. And it always happens. takes longer than we would like. But the path is the fruit. The development of the community is the community itself.

[39:24]

So at last year's Women's March, Gloria Steinem wrote this passage, we are linked and this is a day that will change us forever because we are together. Each of us, individually and collectively, will never be the same. When we elect a possible president, we too often go home. We have elected an impossible president. We are never going home. We are staying together and we are taking over. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Make sure you introduce yourselves to each other and decide what we're going to do tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and we're never turning back. I think the next Women's March is next weekend. Margaret Wheatley has written, there is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about. That caring is our collective compassion.

[40:24]

And that collective compassion is a door to awakening together. Thank you for your kind attention.

[41:05]

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