This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Some of my thinking and reflecting and hopefully have a chance to have some back and forth. And you'll see I have a PowerPoint. The PowerPoint is long, so we won't get through all of it. What I plan to do, I think Rev said we go to about nine, is that right? So the PowerPoint, I'll probably do about 40 minutes, 45 minutes, and then the rest of it will be discussion and then closure. If there's something that just grabs you that you can't wait, don't. So this is a chance to really share with you. It's not to get to the end. So I really want to engage you.

[01:01]

Because I don't know your names, it would be nice if you ask the question or make a comment, if you just tell me your name at that time. I won't remember them all, but still it would be a good beginning. And my name is John Powell. I teach at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. And if anyone in the back or front can't hear me, please let me know and I'll try to speak louder. So what we're going to be talking about is implicit bias and race toward a structural understanding of race and disparities and how this relates to the understanding of the self. So to some extent, what I'm really interested in and what this discussion is about is implicit bias and and which is part of what's now referred to as the mind science, and meditation and contemplation, and social justice.

[02:07]

So those are the three categories. And I think they're related, but they're not usually talked about in the same breath. Some of you may appreciate, I had been in academia and in policy work for years. And then maybe 10 years ago, I decided to write a piece on spirituality. And some of my colleagues rushed to me and said, you have this really great career. Don't ruin it. But I did write it, and I don't think I ruined it. Some of you may know Ken Jones' work. I'll give you a minute to read this. The well-informed bodhisattva strives to respond to the three great goals... moral imperatives of our time to heal the violated planet and to enable both the underclass at home and the wretched of the earth to win dignity and freedom.

[03:09]

To the traditional Buddhist task of calming the mind is that of employing it to transform and dismantle social systems and processes with surcharge. excuse me, supercharge suffering of our humanity, as well as encompassing the ruins of the planet and its creatures. This is sort of my journey, I guess, is to sort of think about the relationship between our spiritual practice, our world, and justice. And I follow Ken Jones and others who have also been in a similar practice. And I'm sure you may have seen this quote by Dr. King. We are all caught up in an inescapable web of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects the one directly affects all of us indirectly.

[04:12]

Good Buddhist statement, right? Written by Dr. King. And yet, if we think about the way our lives are organized, and especially here in the United States, they're organized as if we are completely separate and very private. And it's not just our, quote-unquote, personal lives that are structured that way. Our structures themselves are structured that way. If you look at architecture, for example, since 1970, most houses that are built today, if they have a porch, they're built in the back so you don't have to see your neighbor. So we actually structure our society so that we actually try to deny our interconnectedness. This is also, in some ways, one could say part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially, and I've written about this, especially in terms of Protestantism. And I'm not here to knock Protestantism, but part of Protestantism was the idea that instead of relating to God through

[05:22]

your other brother and sister in the world, you relate to God privately. Your relationship with God became very private. And that was one of the big splits between Martin Luther and Catholicism. And again, it's not to uplift Catholicism and knock down Protestantism, but it actually has sort of informed us in many ways, including what we would call a secular ways. Let you know that The Buddhist self is a very different way of thinking about it. And what we're finding is that stuff coming out of the mind science, stuff coming out of what's quote-unquote called the heart science, is actually suggesting that the self is not isolated. The self is radically interrelated and radically fragmented, if the self exists at all. And so I'll be talking more about that. So in the context of race, part of what this means is that when we think about blacks, for example, that there were no blacks.

[06:33]

Africans were not blacks until the British became white. There was a relationship. And so it's not a descriptive relationship. It's not just looking at someone. And there's actually an interesting history of how there's a number of books written about this. But there's a great book by Theodore Allen called Invention of the White Race. And he talks about the very construction of whiteness. But it required the other. In order for there to be whites, they had to be blacks. In order for there to be blacks, they had to be whites. And so there's this relationship. this sort of symbiotic but uneven relationship between the races. So to some extent then, I would say that when we talk about race, and it's actually a very complex concept, and it's more than just a concept, when we talk about the racial other, the racial other already exists inside of us. So whites actually exist in blacks, and blacks actually exist in white.

[07:35]

In that sense, plurality, or plurality, we call sometimes multiculturalism, it's not just an external project. That the self, we think of the self as being multiple or unstable, we're populated by the racial other. And what that would mean if we embraced that would be a radical shift in the way we think and do race here in this country. Most people don't notice this multiple population or this multiple consciousness around race, or around any other thing. Again, a part of Buddhist practice, there is a recognition of the self being unstable, the self being multiple, if you will. It's not recognized in much of Western society, and what it is, it's usually recognized in a disturbing way. So, you know, something's wrong with you if you can't be, you know, consistent. If you can't always be the same, and of course none of us can be.

[08:38]

W.B. Du Bois wrote about this. He talked about double consciousness. Again, describing it as a problem instead of just as a reality. So race then is an emergent thing. It's something that happens out of practice. It's not just an idea. It's a way in which we practice, and we can practice it well or practice it poorly, but it's not just an idea. And therefore, racial justice is more than just an idea. It has to be practiced. It has to be practiced in multiple places. It has to be practiced explicitly in our conscious mind, implicitly in our unconscious mind, and in our structures themselves. And I'll talk more about this in a minute. So I want to spend a fair amount of time talking about the implicit mind. or also implicit bias. And let me just ask, how many of you are aware with the recent work in the last, let's say recent, 20 years on the mind science, looking at the unconscious?

[09:44]

Okay, so some of you. In a sense, we'd like, excuse me? That there is such a thing? Is that what you're asking? Is that the question? Well, there's a whole way of studying it now. For example, when Freud and Jung was around, they talked about it, but there was no way to measure it, right? With MRIs, with CAT scans, we can now actually see some of the mental processes going on. We don't necessarily understand them, but we actually can see unconscious mental processes going on. We can see them when the subject doesn't consciously experience them. Freud couldn't do that. And we'll talk about that more. So you've had in the last 30 years, and it's getting more and more refined. Literally, they say they can see a memory being formed in the mind. And Freud couldn't do that. So it gives us access to part of the mind in a way that we didn't have before. And this is now called the mind science. And it's exploded in the last...

[10:46]

30 years, and it's only going to get more significant as we go forward in the future. So that's really what we're going to be talking about, some of the stuff coming out of the mind science. So one of the ways of thinking about that is that the conscious represents about 2% of the cognitive and emotional processes. So we only have access, direct access, to only 2% of our emotional and cognitive process. The other 98%, most of us, don't have a clue. And yet, that 98% is affecting how we feel, it's affecting our judgment, it's affecting what we think. The 98% is affecting the 2%. In fact, what the 2% does oftentimes is rationalize what the 98% is doing. So we do something, and we don't really know why, and we make up a story about it. That's the 2%. And the story makes us feel good, but it oftentimes has nothing to do with what's really going on.

[11:52]

And sometimes there's a conflict between the 98% and the 2%. So we want to believe something, we want to be a certain way, and the 98% is not cooperating. It's actually pushing us in another way. So that's what we're trying to introduce and become more familiar with and become more skillful. So I'm going to play a little game with you. So what I'm going to ask you to do is look down in a minute. And then I'm going to show you some letters. And the letters will be different colors. And so I'll count to three and then you look up. And as fast as you can, I want you to yell out. Not yell, but just say. the colors of the letters. The letters are irrelevant. Your only job is to identify the colors of the line, right? Okay? So look down. One, two, three.

[12:55]

All right, that's pretty good. Look down again. One, Two, three. Okay. All right. We have a couple more, and then I'll talk to you about what you've been doing. One, two, three. Okay, look down again. One, two, three. What happened? What happened? Folks, you're doing so well. Okay, look down again. All right, they missed one of them here. So I'll tell you what the last one was, and unfortunately...

[14:08]

My system was helping me and this one got lopped off. The last one is the color and the words are the same. And what happens in the last one is your ability to identify the colors speed up. So what you're actually doing is association. And the association, and I tell you not to pay attention to the letters, but you're unconsciously paying attention to the letters anyway. And when you see the letter red, With the color blue, the mind goes, you know, so you're consciously trying to do one thing, and the unconscious say, wait a minute, that's red. There's conflict, right? So there's an association, there's a communication between the conscious and the unconscious. This is called a speed test. And if you go online, you can take something called the Harvard Implicit Association Test or Project Implicit, And all it's really doing is saying the unconscious actually connects things, it groups things together, and it groups them together to simplify the world.

[15:15]

If it didn't do that, the world would not be manageable. The amount of data that we receive is overwhelming. It would be like being on 12 hits of acid. And if you look at a little baby, you'll notice that their eyes don't focus. It's nothing wrong with their eyes. We don't see with our eyes. We see with our brain. And the baby has so much information coming in that, in a sense, they can't organize it. And it's not until they learn to organize it and start filtering certain things out and filtering certain things in, they start making associations. But the association is filtering, right? So... we have these associations. An example would be, some of the tests we have, there'll be a spider. There'll be some beautiful sounding names like pretty, nice, soft. Then they throw a spider on the page.

[16:18]

The ability to read those names slow down because you're being distracted by the spider. It's not pretty. Not soft. So... And this is an association test, and they do this for all different categories. And one category they do it for is race. And so oftentimes, if you have, and you can go online and take these tests, if you have a picture of a black man, for example, the ability to identify positive words actually slow down. And this is not with people who are racist or prejudiced. These associations are not individual. They are social. We learned them from society. And they've done this now all over the world. And virtually every part of the world, the dominant group has positive associations with it. And people can identify positive words when they're thinking about that group.

[17:21]

And the subordinated group have negative associations with them. It's harder to identify positive words. And it's not... So if you're in a country where most people are Muslim, then there would be a subconscious positive association for almost everyone in society with Muslim or Islam. If you're in a country where most people are Christian, similar. So race, gender, age, you can do all these associations. So this is what you're actually playing with. Yes? So this includes the minority group as more of a negative association with... picture of someone of their own race. It's true. It's true. And that's actually a very important point. It's not as strong. Women, for example, in our society, have a more negative association with women. But it's not as negative as the male association that men have as women. And so in a society where there's a constant message about women's inadequacy or whatever, everybody, not just men, but women are also

[18:26]

start making that association. Another thing that's interesting is they don't consciously make the association. So you can say to a woman, well, how do you feel about women? You know, my friends are women. You know, I'm a woman. So the 2% says, I prefer women. So if you ask most African Americans, and this has been done on these tests, in terms of your affiliation, do you prefer whites or blacks? Most African Americans constantly will say, blacks, but the majority of African Americans taking this test show us a preference for whites in this country. That's not true of people of African descent in Africa. So that's what's going on. That's what we're sort of getting at. Yes. Is this true against all age categories? I mean, has the civil rights movement made any difference or any changes? Are older people tests different than, say, people who were Good question.

[19:26]

And the answer is we're not sure, but it's probably not. And there are some interesting things happening. One of the things is, and I talked about this a little bit at lunch, before 1945 in the United States, it was common to express that whites were the superior race. You actually can read about it in court cases. And people didn't even associate that with racism. It was just a fact. And I told a story when I was living in Nigeria, and I was invited to come live there long term, and I said, no. And they said, why not? And I said, well, I don't like the way you treat women. You think women are inferior to men, and I have a daughter, and I'm talking to some people, and some of the people in the room are professional women, and they said, but it's true. You know, so it's... Yeah. You know, it's like, what's wrong with you? It's true. And so there was a period of time where people thought, well, blacks are inferior.

[20:30]

I mean, it's not that I dislike them, they're just inferior, right? In 1945, that shifted. And part of because of World War II and World War Germany, and as a country, we started disavowing ourselves of explicit racist attitudes. Then it became racist to believe that. It wasn't racist to believe that before, it was just a fact, right? In fact, racism didn't even become part of the English language in a popular sense until 1937. So when whites owned slaves, it wasn't racism, it was just black people were, that's their natural role. So my point is that what's happened and what's happening now is that consciously people are rejecting racial stereotypes, but unconsciously we haven't done the work. And the unconscious, and we'll see this in a minute, the unconscious is older, is what some people call the reptilian brain. It's faster.

[21:32]

So by the time you consciously see someone, your unconscious has already identified that person, has categorized that person, and made an emotional response. before you consciously can even register, right? So what you might say, I don't even notice that the person was Latino. And you can be telling the truth, but you're only telling the truth from the 2%. the 98% is saying, danger, danger, you know. And it's causing, and we can actually watch it now, right? We can see the parts of the brain that watch up, lights up, you can see increased heart rate, we see heightened blood pressure, we see skin resistance. None of that's registering consciously. And it affects decisions. That's the bad news. The good news is we can change it. But first we have to become aware that it's there because we spend so much time fighting about the 2%. And in our society, the good news is we don't want to be racist or sexist.

[22:35]

So not only do we not know about the stuff that's happening on the unconscious, we don't want to know because it affects our opinion of ourselves. So it's not just lack of consciousness, it's resistance, it's repression. Um... So it's even worse than just unconscious in some respects. But this is the stuff that they were finding out. So, this is an awareness test. How many passes does the team in white make? Pants is 13.

[23:38]

Did you see a good walking bear? Why did you see a good walking bear? Now, about 90% of people don't see the bear. So I won't ask you if you saw the bear, but I'm sure some of you did not see the bear. What this is doing, what's happening here is you're being primed. And priming basically is telling your subconscious and what to notice and what not to notice, right? It's telling your conscious what to notice and what not to notice. And so what the person says is that one team in white. So now you're focusing on white, not black, right? And the passes.

[24:43]

So you're focusing on those two things. So now third things come along. It's very visible, but most people don't see it because you've been trying to look at something else. And you can think of society and culture as one giant priming machine is telling us what to notice and what not to notice and how to make associations. And there's actually some very interesting stuff here. I don't have time to go into great detail. But if I were to flash African-American sounding names and then show the same clip, then about half the people would actually see the bear. Because there's a... an association of animal with African-American names. So even if you don't see the names visually or consciously, it can still prime you. So one of the ways in which we can address some of these things is priming. And priming, in a sense, tells what part of the subconscious to become active. Think of it another way.

[25:45]

And some of our unconscious, they call them networks, are binary. That means if one is on, the other one's off. So to give you an example, if you're in a fear mode, then you're not in a hopeful mode. If you're in a hopeful mode, then you're not in a fear mode. So the same person, right? All of us have those multiple networks. So in the election between George Bush and Kurt, when Bush would get behind in the polls, he would remind Americans that we were at war, that bin Laden was out there, that terrorists was out there. What he was trying to do wasn't the facts he was trying to convey. What he was trying to do was put people into a fear mode. Because in a fear mode, we know that people are less generous. They don't want to share.

[26:46]

they are more likely to vote Republican. And we can actually track this. And they know this, right? So they want people to be scared. Now think about Obama's campaign. Hope, right? He's trying to put people in a hopeful mode. It's not even that the content is unimportant. Once you're in that mode, you start seeing the world through that lens, and you're more likely to vote. Democratic. So a lot of this is stuff that we're unaware of. And part of it is to just make people aware that this stuff is going on. I mean, they're really wonderful examples. Some of them are disturbing. I'll just give you one more. Some of you may have, there was a senator who was running, there was someone who was running for senator in North Carolina. He was up by the polls.

[27:47]

He was African-American. He was up by the polls by 10%. The Republican National Committee ran an ad. They had a white woman and they cropped the picture so that visually she looked like she was naked. She said she had met this guy at the Playboy Club. She ended the ad by saying, call me. Then The end of the ad, it said, so-and-so, there's something wrong with him. He's just not right. But they changed the lettering and the coloring so that unconscious read it, so-and-so, there's something wrong with him. He's just not white. And he plummeted. I mean, he just fell like a rock. And it was the people who, again, if you ask them consciously, most of them would say, race doesn't matter. but they were appealing to racial anxiety. And I'll just end with this on that. It wasn't simply appealing to races.

[28:52]

That's too simple. Because all of us have racial anxiety. And most of us have also strong values around racial fairness. So we have both anxiety and fairness. Which one will become dominant in any given situation depends on all of these things which primed. And so the things you can do to prime. I'll give you one more example. A friend of mine has been one of the major researchers in this area. His name is Claude Steele. He taught at Stanford. He was head of the Stanford Psych Department for many years. So he'd bring in a group of Asian American women, all graduate students, and he'd say, It's so wonderful to be at Stanford, teaching at Stanford, because you have so many bright women here. And then he'd do some stuff, and 20 minutes later, he'd give them a math test, and they'd flunk it. From the same pool, women with the same capacity, he'd bring them in, and he'd say, it's so wonderful to have so many bright Asian-Americans.

[29:58]

That's why I love teaching at Stanford. Then he'd do some stuff for 20 minutes, give them a math test, and they would get an A on the test. both groups had exactly the same ability. The first group, he primed their womaness. And in priming their womaness, the network that showed up was woman. And they have an association that women do not do well at math. And so then they perform consistent with that association. The second group, he primed their Asian-Americaness. There's an association that Asians are good at math. So once they're primed, reminding that they're Asians, they perform consistent with that assumption. And they do well in math. And neither group is aware that they're being primed at all. And so if you ask the group, why did you do bad at math? The 2% test, I'm not good at math. That's why I flunked this test. The 2% rationalized the behavior that's coming from the unconscious.

[31:02]

And virtually all of us are subject to that. And so the mind is organized, and the mind organizes things, and they call schemas. And schemas basically collect information and puts it together. So it makes associations so that we can make very quick judgments. So the word is called schemas. And schemas is one way of talking about stereotypes because it's not based on careful consideration. It's based on... Snap judgments. But the thing is, we cannot survive as a species if we didn't have these unconscious schemas going on. And it's not realistic. You know, so when we hear about stereotypes, we think that's a bad thing. And we say, well, we should just see each other as individuals. As I already suggested, we would not survive in the world if we tried to do that. It's the amount of data that comes at us would just overwhelm us very quickly. So these are evolutionary things, right?

[32:12]

So one of the things is that there's a big cat coming at you. And you say, hmm, is this a good cat or a bad cat? Instead, you say, cat! You have to make judgments very fast, right? And the conscious mind, again, is very deliberate. It does some wonderful things, but it's pokey. And by the time you figured out that this is a bad cat, you know, you're dinner. And so we're making these things to make judgments. And we all do it. I mean, when you're in a car, right, and something happens, and you sort of get this adrenaline rush, and you make judgments. You quickly make adjustments. If you had to think about it, you'd be in an accident. You know, but, you know, you say something took over and I just did the right thing. That thing that took over was the unconscious. It's making these quick judgments critically faster than the unconscious. Those of us who play music or who play sports know when you talk about getting in the zone, that's what you're talking about, you know, is that I can do things that I've had to think about it, I can never do.

[33:19]

And so as hunter-gatherers in a dangerous world, these processes were all important and they still are important. But sometimes they're out of sync. with our conscious values, and that's when it becomes a problem. And so that's why we wouldn't survive. We'd be paralyzed by just all the information. We'd be like that two-week-old baby who couldn't focus. We wouldn't be able to make a decision. So these biases, then, are not necessarily bad things. That's what makes us human. They're human things. And we're not the only ones that have them. Dogs have them. Cats have them. In fact, it's part of the reptilian brain. They make quick judgments. But now we also have a conscious brain that allows us to make more deliberate. This is Malcolm Gladwell. You may know his work. He wrote a book called Blink. And that's what he's talking about.

[34:20]

In Blink, we can make snap decisions. He's talking about the unconscious. So what he's saying is that we make these associations, but what the associations are is largely social. In other words, we're socialized to make certain associations. And many of you remember, you know, especially those of us who are older, like, what was it, Sesame Street, right? You know, it says, which of these things don't belong? You know, we're teaching kids to make associations. And they have, you know, umbrella and boots and then a bicycle. And you say, well, it's the boots and the umbrella belong. Bicycle doesn't belong.

[35:20]

You know, these are not natural categories. We're making associations. And later on, we forget that these associations exist. And anyway, again, so these are social associations. So... And these associations are oftentimes, they're cultural as well. So what is above the woman's head on the left? Can you see that? Anyone? I'll go for a window. Okay. Okay. Okay, so when scientists show a similar sketch to people from East Africa on her head, in a culture containing few angular visual cues, the family scene is sitting under a tree. Westerners, on the other hand, are accustomed to corners and box-like shapes of architecture.

[36:25]

They're more likely to place the woman indoors and to interpret the rectangular above the woman's head as a window from which it's probably can be seen. A couple of them I'll show you this way. This obviously has nothing to do directly with race, but what it's saying is that the associations we make are cultural. The way we make sense of visual cues are based on culture. So everyone seeing the same picture will not see the same thing. So one answer might be, well, can we see what's real? So what do you see here? Okay, so... What's the right, I mean, what is it? Right? It depends. Right?

[37:25]

It could be either. And it probably could be something else. But it's not one or the other, and yet sometimes people will see it, and sometimes when you see something, even knowing that there's an alternative, you can't see the alternative. Right? Either a vase or two people. So here's one. Now... I'm going to show you a woman spinning. The woman is spinning in either direction. And if you get a depth, you can actually change her direction. Did you do that?

[38:29]

It took me a while, but yeah. Now again, this is not, sometimes people call these optical illusions. They're not really optical illusions, they're brain illusions. So you can practice these. I'll leave this. So this is the brain's work. This is not the eye's work. The brain is constantly making sense of the world based on associations and based on culture. So here's a picture of the brain. And if you notice, there's something called the amygdala. The amygdala controls emotions. And one way of thinking about this... This right here, as I say, is the frontal lobe. It's the new part of the brain, a couple hundred thousand years old.

[39:32]

This is the reptilian part of the brain, and as you can see, here's the amygdala. It's part of the old part of the brain. The old part of the brain is fast. It doesn't think logically, and it controls most of what we do. And so what we can see now, we can see literally when the amygdala is firing and lighting up. The other thing that's interesting is the brain is really, I mean, it's just really a complicated thing. It's constantly making itself. So the brain is not just this physical thing, it's also a chemical thing. So there are constant chemical reactions. So when you get angry, The brain actually excretes different chemicals than when you're not angry. Literally, when you have adrenaline, adrenaline is a chemical. But it's not just a chemical, it's also electrical. The brain is constantly, the way the brain communicates with itself is largely through electrical impulses.

[40:37]

Now this is the interesting thing. When the brain fires electrical impulses over a period of time, it actually creates new pathways. They're called neuron pathways. So the brain is actually restructuring its architecture. So when you do a practice, and you may have had this experience, you start, most of us don't think about how to walk, right? We just get up and do it. But you watch a little kid. It's a complicated process of putting one foot in front of the other. What the kid does is create a brain pathway that teaches us how to do that and then doesn't have to think about it anymore. So our practice over a period of time, and some people have tried to actually figure out how many times you have to do something to actually create a new bridge. And it's an amazing thing. For example, people have lost the ability to speak, and the brain sometimes will rewire itself to actually learn to speak. So that's the good news, right?

[41:40]

So what we practice matters. Habits actually are about not just... psychological, there's actually structural mechanisms that come in place that support our habits. And once we have habits, as we know, we no longer have to think about it. You know, it just happens. And they become very hard to break. Literally, we were talking about it's like going into a house and breaking down bridges and building a new structure. So that's the good news. The brain is very placid. We can teach ourselves new things. But it's not, its placidity is not unlimited. Yes? Can you define emotions or what the nebula is doing? No, I can't. I mean, what I can say is that it actually is firing. We know that. I mean, we can see these things, but we don't completely understand them. And, of course, there's a whole debate about what's the brain and what's the mind. The mind is apparently incredibly complicated. And...

[42:43]

It's reacting to the world and it's reacting to itself. So when you do something, when you do a practice, right, and you're watching your breath, you're actually also restructuring your mind. And people used to think, I mean, psychology used to be very crude. Maybe it's still very crude. But remember the thing they say, if you're angry, you need to just get it out. If you yell, you know, just go outside and yell. Now, it's true that you don't want to repress stuff, but if you're practicing being angry, that's your practice. You get good at it. And so, you know, people don't, after a while, they stop saying that. It's like, just go out and punch the bag, you know, get it all out. And the idea was almost like you had a finite amount of anger, and if you spent it, it was gone. Turns out it's not true. You're actually creating pathways. So it really is, I mean, I know you're all in a practice. We're practicing all the time.

[43:43]

Whatever we're doing, we're practicing. And we're strengthening neural pathways or not. But we don't fully understand. I mean, I guess you're asking about the complexity. The exact number we don't know, but somewhere in the neighborhood of a trillion neurons we have firing in the brain. A trillion is a big number. If we had to consciously keep count of all the neuron pathways that are created, again, try to think of a trillion. Try to imagine having to keep a count of a billion things at once. A million things at once. Three things at once, right? We would be overwhelmed. So we don't have to think about it. It just happens. we can largely ignore it so one of the questions I'm going to go quickly now about 20 minutes into it I want to finish another 20 minutes so one of the questions is how does a person that meditates how does that affect one can you if most of us only have access 2% of what's going on in meditation can you get

[45:03]

to 4%, can you get, and there's a debate about this, and there's actually some research on it, and some say yes and some say no, but almost everyone agrees you don't get to 100%, right, that a lot of the unconscious remains unconscious, but that you can have a different relationship with the unconscious through meditation, and part of the thing is how and how far can you go. Clearly you can be more relaxed, You can become aware of some things, maybe not other things. There's a famous German philosopher named Gadamer, and he says, everything that reveals conceals. So what he's suggesting is that you never get to perfect knowledge in a cognitive way. Reb and I were talking about that. The belief in the Enlightenment was that literally you could shine a light on everything, And at some point, you could have perfect knowledge.

[46:04]

You could know everything in a cognitive way. Most people don't believe that anymore. And in fact, Reverend and I were talking about that when you create a light, you create a shadow. You create darkness. And so our way of knowing in a cognitive way, the way that the conscious mind knows, actually conceals some things. So there's no hope that we'll, at some point, have complete knowledge. in a cognitive way. We may have knowledge in other ways and I think there are ways and things we can do to get closer to this awareness and I'll talk about that in a minute. So this is some meditation may expand awareness of multiple awarenesses and And it may have implications in terms of race. Part of it is just relaxing. Remember I suggested that part of the difficulty is not just that we don't know. There are certain things we don't want to know. That we could know. And so one can imagine getting to a practice or getting to a space where we're not resistant to things that are unpleasant.

[47:12]

I like to think that I'm a generous guy and I'm not. And someone points it out to me. Can I hear that or do I get defensive? So there's a capacity, and you can think in at least some meditation practices, you let stuff come up and you don't judge it. And the better you get at that, the more stuff comes up. But most of our practice is that stuff comes up I don't like, I push it back down. It doesn't go away, it just doesn't get into consciousness. And I told at lunch, and someone asked me to share this with the group, so I will, I did an experiment with some students at the University of Minnesota where, and it was mainly white students, I asked them to, have they ever had the experience of dreaming of being an inanimate object? And about 90% of the students had. And I said, so what were your experiences? And let me ask, have any of you ever dreamt of being either an inanimate object or a non-human object? Yes, what did you dream?

[48:14]

That's a new one. I hadn't heard that before. You said you've dreamt being either non-human or inanimate optic? Yeah, it was a sketch pad. Sketch pad, all right. Any others? Okay. So the students, you know, they shared and they said most of them had dreamt they were either, you know, it's like, her dreams are like, sometimes they're like, when people believe in reincarnation, there was a period where everybody was, you know, it's like five lifetimes ago I was a king. It's like no one says five lifetimes ago I was a dishwasher. So when you say a non-human object, I was an eagle, I was a mountain, I was a whale. Usually it's not a can of tuna fish. But maybe you're more humble than most of us. So then what I asked the students is, how many of you have ever dreamt you were a different race or a different gender?

[49:23]

And none of the students had dreamt that. And I said, so what's that about? And the first reaction was, Well, I'm not a black woman, so why should I dream of a black woman? And I say, yeah, but you're not a rock either. And you dreamt you were a rock. So you can be an eagle, but you can't be a black woman. And so I challenged them to, over the course of the semester, to try to relax in their dream. Because what's going on is there's something. They're actually censoring their awareness. And by the end of the semester, all of them had dreamt of being of different gender, a different race, a different sexual orientation. And there was one student who actually was Filipino and American. He called me up five years later, asked me if he could take me to lunch. I said, sure. And we're not to lunch. And he said, that was such an incredible thing you had us do five years ago. And I just want to share with you that I dreamt I was gay, but I'm not.

[50:26]

But I did dream it. And I thought, so obviously there's something significant that he wants to take me out five years later and share this with me, but also to make it completely clear that he's not gay, right? And so what I'm suggesting is that if we relaxed, our capacity to cross these boundaries would also relax. And that meditation may be one of the ways of doing that. And anyway, so I invite you to play with that practice. Did you say you invited them to relax in their dreams? How could you do that? Well, you know, Muhammad Ali used to say, he used to say, if you even dream you're in the rain with me, you better wake up. LAUGHTER So there's a tension, right? Because there has to be, whatever we repress, it's not just a natural not knowing.

[51:31]

It means I'm working at not knowing. It's consciously not knowing. Which actually also means it's taking energy and creating attention. I don't want to know. And so relaxing means allowing that stuff to come up. And to me, again, that's partially what we do in terms of meditation practice. We relax. and stuff comes up, and we, okay, we note it, and you let it come up. You let it come up. You relax. And we don't normally do that. And so we can do the same thing in our dreams, become aware of a point of resisting, knowing something. And maybe we'll get in a ring with Muhammad Ali and stay asleep. Could you have primed the students when you... when you gave them that idea that they could be a different place in general? Good question, good question. Yes, the short answer is yes. But, now this is an interesting thing, you can't prime something that's not there. So all you're doing in priming is letting stuff come that's pushed away.

[52:39]

So you have these different networks. If someone's profoundly... believes that blacks are inferior, you can't prime them to have racial equality. The reason it works is because we have conflict, and all you're really doing is priming one over the other. You're not creating anything new. You're just sort of saying, if a person really has absolutely no fear, if they're such a person, you can't prime them to be afraid. So yes, I may be priming them, but I'm only priming them to let stuff up that's already there. So, this is a test designed for meditators. Can someone describe, there are some lines here, can someone describe the continuous line on either side of the... Can you please?

[53:47]

Thank you. Yeah. What's the color of the continuous line? Red to blue to black? Yeah, from red to black. So look at, all right, on this one it's easy, right? We have black line, then it turns red. On the left-hand side, what's the continuous line look like? It's what? Black to red. gray to blue. Okay, yeah, but I mean, in other words, if it's a straight line, assuming it's a straight line, what's the continuous? So some people said black to gray to blue, right? Okay. The line is black to red.

[54:49]

A straight line is black to red. Not Black to blue. This is an illusion, right? It's a mental illusion. This illusion, meditators actually get it right. People who are experienced meditators, and I don't mean to cast dispersions on anyone. I know you're all experienced meditators. But people who meditate a lot are more likely to not be fooled by this illusion. We don't know exactly why. Uh... But it's an example that certainly meditation does something to our brain process that's different than if we don't meditate. So that's good news, I guess. Thank you. There are other ways of sort of addressing unconscious bias. Part of it is talking about it. Learning to become... And actually, I talk to my staff a lot.

[55:54]

I have a fairly large staff. And I talk about learning to talk to the unconscious, learning to communicate to the unconscious. The unconscious is very different than the conscious. So we need to become skillful at sort of both giving space for the unconscious as well as relating to it and the things you can do. Like sometimes drawing pictures. The unconscious likes pictures. It likes stories. It doesn't like facts so much. It's not interesting in facts. And people get this. So when the people were trying to kill the health care bill and they were saying the death squads, they're going to take your mother out and kill her if we pass health care. What they were doing in part was appealing to unconscious anxiety and fear. So the people who were supporting health care, what they came back with is facts, right? And they thought, these are ridiculous arguments. No one wants to kill your mother. Well, maybe someone, but we don't want to kill your mother.

[56:57]

What they didn't realize is that people were not talking factual. They were making emotional appeals to the unconscious. They were saying, you should be nervous. And when they talked about President Obama being... not born in the United States. Again, we go get the birth certificate. He was born in the United States. And then the argument doesn't go away and we figure out why won't these people believe facts? What they're saying is not that President Obama wasn't born in the United States. What they're saying is he's not like us. He's strange. We don't trust him. They're trying to activate unconscious anxiety. And so they speak to the unconscious, and our response is to the conscious. And we can't figure out why we're losing the argument. Because our argument is so much more logical than theirs. And logic is exactly the wrong type of argument to be making. So we have to learn to become skillful at talking to the unconscious.

[58:05]

And I just had this experience myself. doing a big project in Portland, and I've gotten all these groups who have never worked together to work together, and there's this very prominent woman who's a wonderful organizer who's Native American, and she said, I don't want to work with these people. this planning for the Portland area going forward. And she said, these people are racist, blah, blah, blah. And I don't trust them. They never talk about race. They never talk about equity. They never talk about fairness. All they talk about is the spotted owl and environment. I don't like them. So we had this big meeting and all of these environmentalists were there. There was the mayors and city council people. And they all talked about race. They all talked about fairness. They all talked about inclusion. And I was sort of, you know, feeling very good. And I went up to this woman afterwards and I said, so what do you think? They all talked about these things. And she said, well, I guess I have to give them credit, but I don't know. The next day she came to me and said, I'm pulling out of the coalition, I'm quitting.

[59:11]

And I realized that the message she had been sending me was from the unconscious. And she had been talking, so she used these things. And when she got these things, it actually did not make her happy. Because it wasn't that, and she said, I mean, she was like livid. She said, these people are liars. You know, it's like, I don't trust them. They're just setting us up for failure. And I'm sure you've had this experience, right, where someone asks you for something, you give it to them, and then it's like, what, do you think I'm going to be bought off? You know, and what's going on oftentimes, again, is they're sending you messages, trying to send you messages from the unconscious, You take them literally. And sometimes they don't even know they're doing this. And I realized afterwards that she was feeling something else. And I was responding to her literally. And it was like this. And so I had to go back and start talking to her, figure out how to talk to her unconscious. And how did that result?

[60:13]

What was she wanting? She wanted to be heard. She wanted to be valued. You know? And... I mean, and actually she said some of that later. She said, it's almost like, which would be hard to do, but she wanted an apology. She felt like Native Americans had been treated so badly. And now we're ready to go forward. And no one's ever said, I'm sorry. But she's a sophisticated woman, so she's not going to come and say, I'm not going to go forward until someone says I'm sorry. So still she had this very sophisticated, they're liars. I don't trust them. So anyway... I have a question. I think it's possible for us to recognize that pattern in ourselves. Sometimes we can be getting information, even like maybe disagreeing with a group, and then you're seeing the information come in that everything's okay, but inside you're still feeling it's wrong. Right, something's wrong, exactly. How do you work with yourself in that situation? How do you study it, given this understanding?

[61:16]

Well, there's a lot. One is just to acknowledge that Not only, and that's what I said about being pluralism, not only is there conflict with other people, you know, of the nature that I just described, there's conflict with ourselves. Oftentimes we don't know the different parts of ourselves want different things. And one thing may get dominant, but the part that's... It's not being satisfied. It doesn't go away oftentimes. It starts sabotaging us. You know, so I want a job, and I just happen to miss the deadline, or I happen to fill out the form wrong, or, you know, and I just said, what we can notice is patterns. Sometimes the pattern tells us that something's going on. You know, and you've seen all of us have had this experience, right? It's like, you know, a person is like, This is my fourth partner, and all of them have been alcoholics. How did that happen? Do alcoholics know where I live?

[62:18]

And each time, it's like I'm never going to date anyone who even drinks, and here comes another alcoholic. So sometimes we can't see stuff directly, but we can see patterns, and then we can begin to think it. Am I playing a role in this? And what is that? And what is this about? So it gets us to ask different questions. And one thing I think, again, and I'd like to do some more research on this, is sometimes we can notice body things ourselves. We might notice, I'm twitching. Why do I twitch every time so-and-so comes around? I'm breathing hard. I'm sweating. But oftentimes, if we're in a cognitive frame, we don't notice the physiological stuff that's going on. So a lot of the stuff, when they say we only have access to 2% directly, the body has access to more than that if we can listen to the body, if we can learn to relate to the body, and sometimes through friends. But why do I have, why is my stomach always upset when this person comes around?

[63:24]

So there are a lot of other mechanisms that we can use. Oh, sorry. And other things to do. So priming, I gave the example in terms of the women. We can send out counter positive images. And again, I think this is partially in terms of meditation practice. The worst thing you can do is to just try to negate what it is you're actually opposing. Because when you do that, you actually strengthen it. So you say... They want to kill your mother. You say, no, they don't want to kill your mother. You know, so the whole conversation is about killing your mother, right? And instead of, you know, like a little kid when they fall sometime, you could say, you know, pick them up and say, oh, you're not hurt. You know, it may be better to say, here's a flower. Or do you want some ice cream? Oh, yeah. And that's like shift. They shift the weight from focusing on the injury to a total different frame.

[64:28]

So it's actually literally called reframing. So Kerry made a mistake when he was debating Bush. Bush talked about bin Laden's going to kill us. He's a bad person. Kerry's response was, if I'm elected president, I will not rest until I capture or kill bin Laden. Well, he's still in the fear frame. You know, he never flipped the frame. He tried to win within that frame. He got into a factual thing. And there's a book that talks about a lot of these speeches called Political Brain. A master of this was Clinton. You know, flipped the frame. Made people think about something else. So we've already talked about some of this to multiple sites. There's a relationship between the structure and what's going on in the mind, right? So it's not, as Art suggested, that the content of these mental networks is social.

[65:30]

And so it's hard to see something. And this is an interesting thing. I always say experience doesn't come with a subject line. Our experiences, we don't know what they mean until we... The meaning is not obvious, right? The meaning is cultural. But once we have a meaning, so if you see women always serving coffee, it's hard to then think, well, women could be executives. Women could be presidents. It's like, well, but I never see that. And so our experience and our structure actually reinforce, primes us to see certain... things to make certain meanings. And then those meanings re-support those structures. So they're going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And there needs to be somewhere breaking that. So if you see every day on television black men getting arrested, then it's easy to think that black men are dangerous.

[66:34]

If you think black men are dangerous, you want more police to watch black men. They get arrested. And then it's what People call it vicious cycle. And it seems to be true, right? It's like, well, it is true. Black men get arrested more. Why do they get arrested more? Because they're dangerous. And this actually is a good example because if you look at the huge explosion of incarceration in the United States, it's almost, I think, something like 80% of it is drug-related. And every study that's looked at it says blacks and Latinos use drugs in exactly the same proportion as whites. So, factually, it's not that blacks use more drugs. And the police try to explain this, well, maybe, but they use drugs on the streets. You know, and the whites don't use drugs on the street. But all of this really has become just a story to sort of, it becomes self-perpetuating. The next couple of slides are about disparities, and I'm not going to spend much time on those. All I will say is the disparities are uneven.

[67:38]

They are... in a sense, racially coded. And what's maybe important about the disparities is how we explain them. We make sense of them in a certain way. And not only do we make sense of them in a certain way, our unconscious makes sense of them in a certain way. So we have very good data, for example, if you're talking about a marginalized group and you just lead with disparities, it actually reinforces negative stereotypes about that group. So you say Latinos graduate from high school and about half the rate is whites. Well, constantly a person might say, well, that's terrible. But unconsciously, they're more likely to be processing if they have the stereotype, they're stupid. You know, no one's going to say that consciously, right? And where that difference shows up is in social policy to do something about it. Because if I really believe this group is stupid, I'm not going to raise taxes or change the structure to actually support them because I think they're not graduating from high school anyway.

[68:44]

And it's not, again, it's not the person who's lying, it's not the person who's trying to be politically correct. It's that you have this tension between my conscious belief all of us are equal and my unconscious belief Latinos are stupid or blacks are lazy or women can't really do it. So there has to be some way of sort of bringing these two things together. So part of it is to sort of understand what some of these things are. Another one, of course, is when you blame the people for why things don't, why some of these disparities exist. So one of the things to think about is what's our story? And to me, I love this question, and it's a question that all of us should ask. Sometimes when I listen to people, I listen to their story. And most of us have a story. Some of us have a couple of stories. But people actually have a relatively small repertoire of stories, right? And so analyze the structure of the story.

[69:50]

And so one story might be, you know, I'll give you an example. And I haven't written about this, but I plan to. I've been analyzing President Obama's stories on... when you're dealing with marginalized groups. And it's a very interesting, and it's, from my perspective, a disturbing pattern. Part of it is brilliant. It's politically brilliant. It's contextually problematic. The story is something like this. We have a problem. This group did something bad and suffered. The other group did something bad and suffered. I'm part of both groups. But we can't stay in that place. We need to get over it and move beyond. So that's the story he talks about blacks and whites. That's the story he talks about Muslim and Christians. That's the story he talks about African and Europeans. The structure, he's given a speech in Cairo. He's given a speech in Accra, in Ghana. He's given a speech, the Philadelphia speech. The structure of those speeches are exactly the same.

[70:52]

The content changes, but the structure is exactly the same. And so it's not only important to listen to other people's stories, it's important to listen to your story. And most of our stories, we show up as the hero. And so we tell a story and it's like, and then, but I stood up and I challenged the racism or I challenged the whatever. And again, it's like this And it's not that we didn't do that, but we didn't always do it. None of us are always heroes. And part of this, again, it's like the reason it's important to become aware of that is that when we're not heroes, and our unconsciousness being whatever, can we cop to it? Can we relax and say, I'd like to be a hero, but you know, actually I wasn't a hero at that time. You know, I'm kind of ashamed that I didn't step up. But anyway, just listen to your stories and listen to other people's stories and see what the theme is.

[71:54]

Another thing that happens a lot is that in our society, we have what we call, this one writer calls a methodological individualism, where we insist upon focusing on individuals and mass structures. I have a lot more here, but I'm just going to stop and go to the end. This is a nice little click on this. I won't play it all. You can listen to that at your leisure. So what's our practice? What's our story? And what are our structures? They're interactive. If we don't, oftentimes we live in structures that don't reflect our values. Oftentimes we have unconscious processes that are inconsistent with our conscious intent.

[73:03]

And unless we... basically find a way to engage those, we will constantly be tripping ourselves up and we won't understand why. So that's the challenge in a way. And I do think, and again, the literature on this is somewhat mixed right now and still kind of sketchy, but I do think there's a special role for those engaged in mindful practice. But I want to make sure I leave some time to have some back and forth. So I'm going to open it up now and entertain any questions or comments you have. Yes. I'm reading Blink right now, actually, which is interesting, by Malcolm Gladwell. And one thing that struck me that was interesting, which is kind of a conclusion, is if you want, if one wants to see people of different races as equals, he suggests, or in a better, from the unconscious, from a better way, to change the unconscious's point of view, he suggests familiarizing ourselves with the best of their culture as opposed to

[74:06]

seeing the news and seeing what is shown as the worst of their culture instead of familiarizing ourselves with people so we get a good thing in our brain. Yeah, there's a lot that can be done. And part of the thing is, as suggested earlier, we're primed a million times a day. You know, television, radio, newspaper, songs, our physical environment. You know, who do we see in authority? Who do we see with power? Who do we see that are nice? That's constantly happening. There's a woman named Mazarin Banaji, who's one of the primary scientists that have developed the IT association test. She actually, she's at Harvard. She did two things which are interesting. She was teaching at Yale, and she got invited to come to Harvard. She designed a test to see what her unconscious wanted to do. You know, did her unconscious want to stay at Harvard or Yale?

[75:07]

And then, but also what she does, she actually has images, some of them subliminal, going on all day to prime good stuff. Now, so, and I actually want to talk, I mean, there's some other things that can be done. But also the way we live, the structures we live in, we need to make sure they actually start to, in some way, support... the values that we say we have. So I think what Gladwell suggests actually is very helpful. It has some limitations, though, because we can't do it just at an individual level. And that's the point I want to keep making, that the content of these schemas are social. And the structures we live in are social. And our inclination as a society is to focus on the individual. And while you can't avoid the individual, we don't want to stop there. It's not nearly enough to actually start to disrupt these social structures and these social schemas. Yes? This is my area of study.

[76:10]

I imagine I'd be constantly performing all sorts of bizarre experiments on myself, with my own priming. I was just kind of curious if you tried anything like that on yourself and had interesting results. Uh, certainly, certainly. I, you know, I mean, the dreaming, you know, and I, you know, play around with a lot of, you know, the lucid dreaming, dreaming, and at a minimum, I try to, and, and, you know, I, I, I do have a practice as well, and I really try to be open to whatever, you know, so, um, uh, the, uh, and, and yes, um, um, Brett talked about, I guess, at one place you have the, the, the, um, um, the senior teachers clean out the toilets. That's, that's a practice, right? It's a practice of humility. Uh, it really is hard if, if you never are in a humbling situation to be in touch with that. And it's even worse than that. I mean, there's, um, uh, there's some indication that literally, uh, some people are not seen as human, um,

[77:17]

the parts of the brain lights up when we recognize another human. And for homeless people or low-income African-Americans, most Americans, when they see them, they don't even see them as human. If you ask them, what vegetable does that person like, they actually start to think of the person. Not even thinking in a conscious way, but in a subconscious way, they start to see that person as human. So I'm very aware of the images. of the structures, and really trying to hear others. I mean, that's another way to sort of get at it. But, yeah, I think that we're learning a lot, and I think, you know, we should use it. Yeah. I was thinking back of the example you gave in that political situation where the person was ahead and then the whole limit. Yeah. Which I think, whether we're here or there or in politics, we're being bombarded all the time, right? Sure. So people aren't even aware of what shifted. So how do we... even if you want to be aware, it's kind of like it's slipping in.

[78:17]

Well, the first thing is just to be aware that you're not aware. Right? I mean, and it's sort of humbling. But then, right now in our society, unfortunately, when we talk about race, we talk about it in a very unskillful way. So the poles are this. We don't deal with race at all. We're colorblind. We're all equal. We're all individuals. That's one extreme. The other is, you know... the only person who really thinks about race anymore are the races. They're the old school people and they're stuck in terms of looking for... So what I talk about, and actually I went through my slides because it still gets in, but this underlying anxiety that most of us are susceptible to, then to start to become aware of it, to get in touch with it, and learn to then figure out What kind of environment primes us in a positive way? How can we inoculate ourselves?

[79:19]

We're never going to be completely free of it, but we can do things. We can be, and given ourselves permission, and given others permission. And then sometimes actually engaging in practices to actually expose ourselves. This is my hero story, and I apologize for giving a hero story. But I'm at a thing with some friends, and we're having dinner or whatever, and we're at a friend's house, and we're watching, I don't know, something, a Super Bowl or something, and the host is a man and a woman, husband and wife, and the wife is serving us. And at some point, I noticed all the guys are sitting around the TV and the women are serving. And I get up, like I said, this is my hero story. I get up and I say, go to the kitchen and ask the women, do they need any help?

[80:20]

My friends, literally, and these are friends I've known forever and I love them to death, they start laughing at me. You know, it's like I stepped on a roll. And then everything breaks down. This one woman calls us on it, you know. And she calls us chauvinists. And it's like the first thing, I'm not a chauvinist. I'm just watching the game. But we have a discussion. And part of it is to recognize what's going on. It's not that you intend to be disrespectful, which when you say chauvinist, when you say racist, we immediately go to, what was I thinking consciously? Not, hmm, let me count to 10, take a breath. Whatever. Red? I was in France one time, had a dinner party, and the women went to the kitchen to wash the dishes, and my wife was in the kitchen, and she said, she gestured to me. So I went in the kitchen and started helping clean up, and the French man stood up and said,

[81:27]

you're sapping our privilege. Well, at least they were aware of it. That's a start. Yes. You talked a few times about sort of communicating with your unconscious or being maybe receptive to that. Also, I was wondering if you have some suggestions on how to cook the cat and listen. Yeah, I guess I would say a couple of things. One, you know, dreams actually are really great because dreams are pretty much coming from the unconscious. So you can keep a journal or anything like that. Freud had all these techniques in terms of free association, a bunch of things, which are all really just designed to break down the sort of policing that the consciousness does to make sure that things don't get in.

[82:31]

People do all kinds of things. In Japan, sometimes that's why people get drunk, literally to give the unconscious a chance to come out in a structured way. And I also think when you play with what makes you uncomfortable, sort of don't leave there as quickly as you might. you know, to actually expose yourself to... I'll give you an example. My dad's turning 90 in a couple of weeks, and we're having this surprise birthday party. And growing up, you know, as we've gotten closer to the party, I've gotten more anxious, and I'm not a very anxious person. And so... And there were a lot of reasons for me to be anxious. I mean, you know, we're running a shortfall at work. I've got to raise $1.3 million by the end of the month, I mean, at the end of the year, and I got stuff going on.

[83:35]

So there's all these storylines that are very nice about, you know, why I should be anxious, right, or might be anxious. But I didn't go quite there. And then this morning, literally, My sister called me at six o'clock, and she said, we're talking about the party, and I could feel my body doing something. And what I think is going on is that when my mom was 75, turning 75, I decided to surprise her. And I went to Detroit, and my parents had very set routines. I always knew where they were. So I get to Detroit, where they lived, and I call, and they're not there. I start calling my siblings, and they're not there. And it's like, hmm, this is strange. And I call and call, and I can't find them. Finally, I go check into a hotel. The long and short of it is that my mom died that day. She was in the hospital. And I think that's what was going on, is that, okay, now my dad is getting ready to have a surprise party.

[84:36]

And so every time I talk to my sister about this, and even as I was describing it to you, I could feel myself starting to tear up a little bit. It's like, And dad still doesn't know. But it took me a while. And it took me not going to, you know, whatever, all these other things that made sense. But my body kept not being comfortable. And sort of spending time with that. And anyway, so I think that body intelligence, staying with discomfort. And I think, you know, you have a great tool just in terms of practicing. but there are some other things as well. I want to say something, and I hesitate to do so because it's a little bit putting out a theory, but I just wanted to say this anyway. In relationship to the story you told about the Native American woman, she had a story about what would make things go well with her and her group.

[85:38]

That story, and also what Maggie brought up about Malcolm Gladwell was saying, maybe you should start trying to think of what's positive about a group of people. I thought that in those two cases, they relate to normal practice in a sense. And then the woman said that she realized that she really wants people to apologize. And that sort of her unconscious was unhappy in the situation. She was trying to find some way, some story in her conscious mind that would address your unconscious problem. And I think the apology was what would have talked to the unconscious. And also to tell the story of people's virtues. Because I think the unconscious does give us lots of negative stuff about people. If we consciously tell positive stories about people, I think that's true.

[86:40]

that feeds back into the unconscious in a beneficial way. And if we say, if we practice confession of our own shortcomings, that talks to our unconscious. Because I think a lot of people, when they practice confession in this tradition, they kind of think, you know, what are we doing this for? Especially when we just say, oh, my ancient twisted karma. But when you specifically or generally confess, I think part of what's going on here, maybe, is that we're We're actually not, the story isn't really what's going on. It's that we're talking to someplace else beyond what we know about. And that's how the practice, I think, can change the unconscious structures. Well, I think, I mean, I think that you may be on to something. Well, the two sides. Yeah. Thinking about other people's benefits and talking about our own shortcomings. They both talk to the unconscious. Right. Well, to God, a couple things I want to share with you and invite... ongoing conversation and practice.

[87:41]

I mean, as you can tell, I study this stuff, and I'm inviting Reb and all of you to help study with me. Especially, because I'm particularly interested in how this relates to, you know, the contemplative practices. So these are the two stories. The other day I'm going for a walk, and there's a two-and-a-half-year-old being held by her mom crying in salivie, you know, and just screaming, and she's saying... I want my mom. And the mother says, but honey, I'm right here. I'm holding you. So to me, it's like a metaphor for life. That we're crying that we want our mom. Now, is it that we think the person holding us is really not our mom? Or is it that there's some deep, longing, ontological, what I call surplus, ontological suffering, and nothing quite seems to satisfy it? And so we're just crying out. So this is my other piece of it, is that I think allowing ourselves to suffer is really important.

[88:47]

And I wrote a piece called Lessons from Suffering. And actually I go in that piece and I talk about how in almost all the great religions, they were motivated both by their own suffering, but also by the suffering of humanity. In our society, we want to do as much as we can to just... Get rid of it so we don't learn from suffering. And so I do think there's something there. And I think that a lot of the stuff is really at this deep ontological spiritual level and just be with it. And not to wallow in it in terms of woe unto me, but I think there's really something there. My father, I love my father, talk about him a lot. He has... Arthritis everywhere. He has arthritis in his stomach, in his back, in his neck, in his knees. He's in constant pain. I have arthritis in my hip. You know, I see, you know, I'm heading in that direction as my dad.

[89:50]

But also, it's like, you know, I don't like to take a lot of pills anyway, but I actually allow myself to be with the pain. One thing, it reminds me of life. It reminds me that life, and it reminds me of my dad. And so in a way, I don't want to be excruciating. I'm not a whatever. But I think there's a lesson in that, which is, in our culture, that thing with being a doctor when I go see him, it's like, you still haven't taken your pills. You could be pain-free. And I think, not really. I can maybe shift it for a while. But pain or suffering in some level is going to be there. And so I think one of the ways we relax is not to be so freaked out because there's pain and allow us to relax in the pain, but not to wallow in it, but just to see. And that little kid to me was just so beautiful in some ways.

[90:52]

Like, I want my mother. And I feel like saying, we all do. Yes. Can we trust our conscious mind? Can we trust it to what? Well, it's not that it's bad or even wrong. It's just not what we think it is. And I think that's the problem, right? A hammer is not a bad tool unless you're trying to brush your teeth. I mean, a hammer is a terrible thing to brush your teeth, but it's great for nails. Our conscious mind could be totally missing the point then. Right. We try to use it for everything. We try to use it for, if you have an emotional problem, well, let's sit down and talk about it. Let me talk to you about facts. You're feeling anxious? Well, let me tell you why you shouldn't be anxious.

[91:55]

You're feeling scared? Or you're elated? And let me tell you why you shouldn't be elated. So it's not that the conscious mind can't do things. It's the latest, it's not up there now, but it's the latest evolution in terms of the human brain. And it allows us to be reflective. It allows us to think about the future. It allows us to get away from the present. Now, thinking about the future is not a bad thing. But when we are only thinking about the future and we can't be in the present, then it's... Yeah, it could be no future. But also, if we're living in the future, it means at some point we're not here now. Because we're not... The future is... You know, it hasn't happened. So I want to suggest that the conscious mind is bad. No, I didn't say bad. Can we trust it? No, but I want to say trust it to do what? If we use it for what it's there for. And then obviously the question is, who is the we?

[92:58]

You know? And so part of the thing I think is that And I think that the conscious mind, and I'm not the only one who thinks it's the conscious mind, is much more closely associated with ego, and therefore much more closely associated with I and me. And so it's almost like the conscious mind doesn't want to trust the conscious mind. And what's the solution? Instead of... It has a role, and its role... As long as everybody stays in their role and communicates with all the other pieces, I think we're probably okay. And the conscious mind, and I don't want to spend too much time on this, but the conscious mind is scared. There's a lot of literature that suggests that the more developed... the separate ego is, the more fearful we are.

[94:00]

It's almost like it knows, right? The United States is the most egoistic, independent country in the world, by far. It's also the country where guns, everybody, you know, it's like, if you don't have a gun, it's hard to be an American. It's like, people are so afraid. And there's actually interesting data in terms of like even in terms of race and stuff. People who live furthest from the city are the most afraid. Living in the inner city, there's all this crime. But the people who live in the suburbs are actually more afraid than people who live next door to all the crime that's actually happening. So again, it's not a rational thing. It's not like... I don't know if you saw that thing that's special about... What's his name? The guy who did... Moses... It's like a guy sleeps with a loaded gun under his pillow. It's like, have you ever been broken into?

[95:02]

No, but if I am, I want to be ready. You're 80 years old, you haven't been broken into yet. So all I'm really saying is that I don't want to make the conscious mind a problem, but when it tries to be the total, it is a problem, and it's a scary problem. Like at the example you were saying, I can understand that if I have lots of fear in interacting with people, I'm very egoistic kind of way of thinking. No, I said it again, the flip. Flip. The flip of evil. That when we have, when we're very egoistic and separate, because I don't know if you, in American, Anglo-American philosophy, there's a very famous philosopher named Thomas Hobbes. He's sometimes considered the father of Anglo-American thought, political thought. He wrote a book called Leviticus, and in this book he talks about the state of nature. In the state of nature, he says, we're all in a constant state of war.

[96:04]

Everyone's fighting everyone else. Everyone's trying to steal everybody else's stuff. And because in that state of nature it's so ravaging, we enter into society, and the purpose of society is to protect us from each other. But the problem is we then have to give power over to the government. And now who's going to protect us from the government? So we hired the police, but now we don't trust the police. And this is the father of modern American thought. He had no sense that people could be together and be supportive of each other, could be loving of each other. To him... when we are all together we're all you're trying to steal my stuff and i'm trying to steal your stuff and and you're trying to steal my wife and i'm trying to steal your wife and uh and the government's trying to kill both of us that's that's the the the fountainhead of modern american thought my last question is that if you said that open to and all

[97:07]

attached to the unconsciousness, but if it's unconscious, how I know I'm touching my opening unconsciousness? What I said is that we only, we don't have direct access, but we have indirect access. Do we know if I'm indirectly accessing that unconsciousness? Yeah, you can, I mean, you can even do these tests online, but I think there are a lot of ways. I think we're just finding, first of all, is to acknowledge that there's certain things there may be certain sensations, feelings, that never take on a cognitive form. A thought is actually a very, and this comes from many different parts of the brain. Like even if you see a black box, color actually is in one part of the brain, shape is in another part of the brain, language is in a third part of the brain. So when you say black box, you actually take in these three different processes and we see it as one. And my guess is, and again, I don't know enough about your practice, but as we practice, it softens up.

[98:16]

That it may be possible for some of the stuff to start filtering in. Now remember I said some stuff don't filter in because it just may so far release the surface. But some stuff doesn't filter in because it would destroy my sense of self. In other words, if I don't want to be dependent on anyone, and I am dependent on someone, in the United States, and I don't know, I can tell by your accent, I don't think you were necessarily born here, but maybe that's not true. But in the United States, for example, there's a scandal every two weeks, and the scandal is always about someone who is preaching against homosexuality turns out to be gay. You know? And it's like this weird thing. You know, when someone is saying, we hate gay people. They should be locked up. They're against Christ. They're evil. And then he goes to sleep with a little boy. I mean, so it's like... And it happens so often. It's not just one.

[99:18]

It happens a lot. It happens a lot to powerful people. So what I'm saying is that the person is repressing, okay, I have homosexual tendencies. But I can't admit that because that's inconsistent with my sense of self. The sense of self is like this pristine person who never cries, who never depends on anyone, who never, you know. So I guess part of it is relaxing that. And I don't know if I'm really answering your question, but I think there's a lot that we can do individually, collectively. And then also we can notice patterns. Remember I said when the conscious and unconscious and the structures start to be in alignment, it's what we might call harmony. There's not as much tension. When there's a lot of tension between the conscious and unconscious, it takes a lot of energy. You can notice it in people's body. You can notice it in their speech. You can notice it in their demeanor.

[100:18]

They're out of harmony. They're at war with themselves. Not just at war with their neighbor. They're at war with themselves. And at least part of the way I understand meditation practice, physical and otherwise, is to stop being at war with ourselves, is to let stuff come up. And everything will come up, but more stuff will come up than is coming up now. Yes, I think you have the last question. Do you have anything that you've seen as results to kind of soften up the line between consciousness and consciousness and raise that percent? from 2% to 4%, et cetera? Yeah, we've actually done some films that... We've done a number of things. For example, we actually went out to Hollywood and talked to some of the screenwriters for movies like 24. And part of what is... The nice thing is that if you believe, and Jung believes this, if Jung believes, if you want to see the collective unconscious, look at our structures. He believes that our structures are a reflection of our collective unconscious.

[101:22]

So if we don't like our structures or whatever, it's not that they're, you know, how'd they get there? No one necessarily, you know, why do we have all these highways and cutting up neighborhoods and these giant buildings? And he would say that's like, we're working on our collective unconscious. David Lloyd would say that we're dealing with our ontological lack, that we're fixing the wrong problem, right? It's like, I feel scared, so I want a big SUV and a gun. I'm still scared, so I want a bigger SUV in a gun, and I want a country that has a bunch of missiles. I'm still scared, so maybe put nuclear warheads on the missiles. Now I'm still scared. And what David would say is, what we're afraid of is not the other. Remember when I started off by saying the other is already inside of us? We're afraid that the self is a fraud. We're afraid that the self, from a Freudian perspective, is going to die. We're afraid of death from... David's perspective, and he calls it a Buddhist perspective, we're afraid that the self is not what it purports to be.

[102:28]

It's not substantial. And if we can deal with that in a more real way, then fear starts to dissipate. I don't try to protect, I don't project my fear. I want to do a piece, and there was a nice piece on the Tea Party, when I said, we've got to take back our country. Right? Take back our country. And what is really, for me, it's really a tremendous fear. It's not the economy. It's not simply that we're in a recession. It's that people's sense of self, and I'll stop with this, and this may be a strange thing to say, but I believe the way we constructed society white identity in this country, which is not the same as white people, but white identity, is the power to dominate and exclude. And the power to dominate and exclude, why would you need the power to dominate and exclude?

[103:31]

Because we're afraid. So nature's scary. So how do I deal with nature being scary? I dominate nature. And I make nature behave. And And so if you think of, and again, it comes strongly in our tradition. God gave man dominion over the earth to sort of control it, because it's scary. It's unpredictable. It surprises us. It does things that we don't understand. Man, literally, the idea of dominating woman. And again, reading early 20th century literature, there's this thing that we don't understand women. And then there's the inscrutable Chinese. We don't understand them either. We have to dominate them. And so everything we don't understand, we have to dominate. And most things we don't understand, including ourselves. But the need to dominate, the need to control, which is, and it's not just obviously in Western society, but Western society took it to a new level, is a mark of extreme fear.

[104:45]

The world is out of control. I have to control it. That's kind of a big job. You know, instead of being in harmony with it, instead of being able to relax into it, instead of... My father, who's a Christian minister, years ago I said something like, you know, we're doing all this work in the world and blah, blah, blah. And I said, you know, it's just... It's too much. I feel like, sometimes I feel like I can't do it all. He said, you don't have to. You know, he said, this is, and they would have used the word, I would use the word universe, he would use the word God. He said, this is God's work. You're doing God's work. And you'll do part of it, and part of it you'll never understand. But when I thought I had to do it, when I had, you know, then it's like, man, this real anxiety, this real pressure, I have to fix everything. It's all on me. That's a huge ego, too, right?

[105:46]

And it doesn't mean I don't do my part. And that's the beauty when you think of both Dr. King and Jesus, right? And we said, not my will, but thy will be done. I'm doing something that's associated larger than I am. And when we think of ourselves being interconnected, and we all play a role in our interconnection, then that becomes the strength and the beauty and the love. But when we think of it's all me, I get overwhelmed, I get scared, and you become the enemy. So let me stop there and let you have the rest of your night. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support.

[106:49]

For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[107:00]

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