to a mutual Dharma friend who thought we would like to meet each other, and he did, and he came to Green Elch a while ago, and we had a good meeting here, and invited him to come back, and a year or so later, here he is. He's a Dharma practitioner and a professor at University of, I should say, Ohio State University, is that right? Where he teaches many different things, and As I said, he's also a dharmic practitioner. The general area is going to bring up his study of self-process and racialized space. But he told me earlier that he's also teaching a class of economics. Usually the students are interested in it. But suddenly they're more interested in it than this. So welcome and thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. So good evening.

[01:03]

Good evening. So maybe we could just start by just sitting for a little while and maybe five minutes or so and just, and as you sit, I guess I would ask you to have a sense of different parts of your body and particularly as you sit, if there are patterns around different parts of your body. And then I'll try to bring that into our conversation tonight. So let me start by just telling a little bit about myself, or my interests anyway, and then I'd like to have a conversation with you tonight. I've written a couple of things that... One of them is called Lessons from Suffering, and I may come back to that later.

[02:06]

Another one is called Dreaming of an Isolated Self. And they're related. So the first is called Lessons from Suffering, and the second, Dreaming of an Isolated Self. And let me start with the latter. Sure. So I was teaching a class at the University of Minnesota. And most of the students were white in the class. And I asked them a question. I said, how many of you have ever dreamt of yourself in a non-human form, as another species or an inanimate object? And virtually all of them had. And we talked a little bit about that. And I said, share your experience. And some had dreamt they were a rock, and some had dreamt they were a fox.

[03:10]

Others had dreamt they were rivers. And then I said, how many of you ever dreamt you were a different race? And virtually none of them had. And then I said, I find it very curious. do you find it curious? And most of them did not find it curious. And I asked them why they didn't find it curious, and they said, well, why should I dream I'm a different race? I'm not. I'm not a black woman. I'm not a Latino man. I said, but neither are you a rock or a fox. And over the course of the semester, I encouraged them to explore in their dreams to take on the embodiment of different races, different genders, different sexual orientations. And by the end of the semester, virtually all of them had.

[04:12]

And one student, who was actually a Filipino student, contacted me about five years later and asked if he could take me out to lunch. I said, certainly. And we went out to lunch and he said, Professor Powell, I just want you to know, that recently I dreamt that I was homosexual, but I'm not. And he was sharing something very intimate with me, but also very secret. My guess is he had not shared that with anyone else. And one of the things I explored with the students and explored in this article is we have boundaries. And these boundaries we normally live in without awareness. So we stay within our prescribed boundaries, our racial, gender, sexual orientation, maybe religious boundaries, without even being aware that there are boundaries.

[05:24]

And it reminds me of Muhammad Ali. Muhammad Ali used to say that if he ever had a dream that you were in the ring fighting him, he better wake up. And it occurs to me that in dreams is where we normally think of ourselves as most free. We can fly in our dreams. We're not constrained by our body. We can take on different forms. And yet, for these students, who for the most part were progressive or liberal students, they still had some internal boundaries, some internal censoring along racial lines. And when I push that further, what I want to suggest is that the very way that we construct ourself, the very nature in our society that we construct ourself is already racialized.

[06:31]

And I'm sure many of you have this experience of, in your sitting, having a sense of self that's very fluid, that's very amorphous, maybe not even there, just a sense of awareness. But as self takes on form, it takes on a particularity. Self experiences self through a particularity. but an unconscious particularity. And much of that particularity can be experienced in the form of patterns. So if you think of patterns, there's an order to them. They're not random. And what I want to suggest is that those patterns are both from families, from culture, from... race, from religion, and again, but they're largely unconscious.

[07:38]

And one reason I think this is particularly important in spiritual practices is because in spiritual practice, especially in the West, and I've had the opportunity to do some sitting in Japan and India, but especially in the West, I think... there's a sense that if you're on the spiritual path, you need to transcend the particular. So one thing that happens from my experience around the United States is that there's sometimes an unspoken hierarchy and or tension in Dharma groups around the issue of race. The assumption is that if you're still stuck in the particularities of your race, you must not be very far along the path.

[08:40]

And the converse being, I've transcended my race. I've transcended my particularities, so I don't notice race or gender. And that that space, this oftentimes occupied, is a space of just an individual. But if I'm right, just an individual is a racialized space. And let me just flip this one more time to suggest that the practice, at least as I think of it or experience it, is not to transcend the particularities, but to embrace the particularities. And through the particularities, engage the universal. And so this is some of the things I've been playing with and thinking about in my writing, in my practice.

[09:48]

And then let me just throw out one other set of concepts and then open it up for your thoughts and reflections. Again, in terms of our practice oftentimes, we think about it in very individualistic ways. And yet, certainly in many spiritual practices and certainly in many Buddhist practices, there's a sense of interconnectedness, not the kind of individuality that normally gets discussed in Western society, not the kind of individuality that's in opposition, that's autonomous, that's separate. that's removed from the other. But a kind of recognition that the other actually lives within us, that we are the other. So an interconnectedness. And what I want to suggest is that this interconnectedness is actually influenced by larger cultural and structural patterns.

[10:59]

that the way that we relate, the way that we experience our interconnectedness is not random. And if we're going to have the proper kind of interrelatedness, it actually also means we have to reflect it, has to be reflected in our structural, cultural practices. I was talking to Rev, One of the things that I think is both fascinating and disturbing at the same time is that the current meltdown, change, shift in the global economic system really brings home the deep spiritual practice of connectedness. We may not like it. In fact, we complain about it. there's, if you listen to some of the presidential debates, there's one of the themes, and not just in terms of oil, but one of the themes is to reclaim our independence.

[12:08]

You know, we don't want to be dependent on oil from the Middle East. We don't want to be dependent on money from China. We don't want to be dependent on, and my friend David Loy said, we need the Declaration of Interdependence. But there's sort of this nostalgia of going back to where the United States can be separate, where we can be independent. Of course, we never can be that. And it shouldn't even be a goal. But what we're really having people talk about and experience is a disquiet with the connectedness, a disquiet with the relatedness. So even once we start to recognize that we're related, interrelated, the question is, what kind of interrelationships are healthy or unhealthy what kind allows us to grow and experience our life and our fullness and what kinds create fear and what you're saying now is there's a recognition of interrelatedness but with that comes profound fear and so there's this desire to shrink back pull back into ourselves the United States you know standing alone

[13:27]

And I think all of this has profound implications in terms of our spiritual practice and in terms of our world. In fact, I would say there's no difference. There really can't be any difference. And in a way, I think one could say that the current response to our interconnectedness is being driven by fear because we haven't brought the spiritual dimensions to the fore. So people are experiencing interrelatedness without any kind of spiritual grounding. And so it's a source of deep fear and anxiety. So I probably have already said too much. Let me stop and welcome your comments, reflections, and questions. Will that be related to archetypes?

[14:29]

Is that, I don't know if it's anonymous or not exactly? Not exactly. The certain archetypes are one. I mean, you could say that's a very powerful pattern. But there are others that are not as deeply rooted. The interesting thing is also you can measure these. I work closely with a number of neural linguistics and neuroscientists, and there are all kinds of things now that we can actually do or they can do to actually identify patterns at the unconscious level. And of course, if we are very mindful, we can start to see them ourselves. And sometimes it's disturbing, right? I mean, we sort of like, I thought I had... dealt with that, and it's back. And it's back in a slightly different form, but I recognize it. And it keeps coming back, and it keeps coming back, and it keeps coming back.

[15:31]

And it could be a pattern from your family, a pattern, and we've all seen it in some fashion, right? Many of us, if we had arguments with our partner, it's like we have the same argument over and over again. We play the same roles. And what I'm suggesting is that these patterns run throughout, both at an individual level, or what we call individual level, family level, but also at a collective level. And some of them are very deeply ingrained archetypes. Some of them are less ingrained. One thing I'll say about this that I find very interesting also is that these patterns or these, what they call schemas, are in conflict sometimes. So it's like there's diversity, if you will, or plurality. It's not simply an external enterprise. It's an internal enterprise.

[16:32]

We are internally diverse. We internally have plurality inside. And sometimes that plurality is in conflict. And we manage that conflict oftentimes by giving one voice dominance. and therefore you have to quiet or censor all those other voices. Yes? Could you say a little bit more about the specifics of the interlinguists identifying patterns, and you mentioned arguments as an example? Yes. Actually, I'm very much involved in this right now. There's been a lot of discussion in the last several months about race.

[17:35]

And it's actually interesting and disturbing at the same time because how the question is normally put is either people are racist or they're not. So it's this type of dichotomy. this polarity. The reality is that people have the capacity to do a number of different responses. And which one dominates depends on a lot of things. I'll give you a couple of examples. And this is not just true of race. It's true of anything. We are many-sided. There's a school district in Kentucky, Louisville School District. Some of you may know that last year there was an important Supreme Court case dealing with integration down in Louisville. There's a community that's 75% white, and they had been under court order to desegregate.

[18:41]

The court order came to an end, and they went to the parents, and they asked a question. They asked two questions. The first question is, If you were to pick a school district for you and your family, or a school for you and your family, what would you pick? And then they simulated their answers. They did models. The second question. If you were to pick a school or school district for your community, what would you pick? Same people. The first question elicited an individualized response to And they picked a school and a school district that would have been completely racially and economically segregated. The second question elicited a collective response, choosing for your community, not your family. They picked a school district that was racially and economically integrated. Same people. And we're working with them now to try to actually bring that into being.

[19:45]

The thing is, they call it priming. that there's actually another friend of mine who teaches right down here at Stanford, Claude Steele. He's done a number of tests, and one of them is fascinating. He brings a number of Stanford students into a room, and he starts talking to them, priming. And he says, it's great to have so many smart, young, Asian-American women at Stanford. And then he gives them a math test. and they knock it out the park. From the same pool, he brings another group into the room, and he says, it's great to have so many women here at Stanford. He gives them the same test, and they fail it. The first one primed and pulled forward the Asian identity, and they self-identified as being good in math.

[20:47]

The second one and they self-identified that women are not good at math. Now, the group had no experience that they were being primed. And if you asked them, why didn't you do well in math? They would say, I'm not good at math. Ask them, why'd you do well in math? I'm good at math. They're both. And he's written a lot about this, but you can do things to actually pull a particular voice forward. And so in the context of the election, what we're saying is that what some politicians are doing and pundits are doing is they're calling forth the most negative aspect of our racial resentment. And then they turn around and say the person is racist. That same person you could, in many cases, call forward the most positive part.

[21:49]

of racial identity, and the person would act completely different. And the thing that's interesting, the person is completely unaware of what's going on. And you can do this. You can measure people's heart rate and their brain waves. So we all have this conflict inside of us. And so part of what's become aware of it is that we're at this multiplicity. And how do we call forward? are better angels. Were the students at Stanford in those groups of mixed races or was it Asian women? They were Asian American women in both cases. It's actually fascinating stuff. The physical environment. They did another experiment where I'll give you two more examples that Claude has done. He shows, in business school, he shows women of people doing things successful in business.

[22:53]

Again, all men, one or two women. And then he asks for their response. Women say it doesn't matter. But their heart rate, their blood pressure, all says it does matter. But they don't register it. Similarly, he shows the same cohort. a picture or video that's even, men and women, and the blood pressure goes down, the heart rate goes down, they never realize it. Even where you put the bathroom affects people. And all of this is, in a sense, pre-conscious or below-conscious or implicit. And there's actually a test you can take online called Harvard Implicit Association test. And about, I think, two million people have taken it, and my students have taken it.

[23:56]

They warn you before you take the test, though, because sometimes people see things, people say that they feel like they're in a movie or something, or where they want to do something and they can't do it. I'll just give you one example, and I've actually used this with large groups. So you can have colors, just a series of letters, and you tell people to identify the color as fast as you can. You know, 500 people in the audience, and I show them. And so the first line is red, the second line is blue, the second line is yellow. The letters are nonsensical. You're not concerned about the letters. You're just trying to identify the colors. People yell them out. And then... One of the theories, you have a color red and the word blue. You have the color blue and the word yellow, and the mind sees this up.

[25:01]

They're not supposed to be reading them at all, but the mind is just like, wait a minute, what's that yellow doing with that blue? And then the last one, of course, you do the same, but you have yellow and the word yellow. blue and the word blue and people fly through it so then we take this and we do this in terms of race you have a explicitly or implicitly you can have a picture of a black man for example and a bunch of positive words and the mind sees us up you can't identify the words fast If you have implicit bias, because you're saying smart, industrious, hardworking, the mind is saying, wait a minute, that's a black man. What do you mean? So they call them speed tests. It's just how fast you can do something. You don't have to even think about it. They have all these kind of tests. So there are ways of actually, but then you can prime. You can actually prime someone.

[26:02]

When you take this test, you go online and take it. it doesn't matter that you know this happens. You can't consciously make it not happen. You can't constantly say, no, I'm going to associate a black man with being industrious and being smart. I know this is coming. I'm going to be prepared for it. And this is a social phenomenon. It's not the individual. But if you give someone a script to read about... Dr. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, and then you give them the tests that fly through it when they say you prime them, you pull forward a positive association from the unconscious that actually operates in terms of how they behave. Is it cross-races that the first description of the positive words in the black man, how a mind seizes up, is that all the... Is the test for any races? Yes, it's more pronounced for white men than white women, and at least pronounced for blacks.

[27:09]

But yes, and it's not just race. They do it on gender. They do it on old age. They do it on, I mean, you can do all these tests. But the point that I'm making is that these are social phenomenons. These are that we live in. And then they could reflect it. and they reflect our institutions. And you can move people a tremendous amount because you can only move people if they're internally conflicted. If someone's not internally conflicted, none of this stuff works. But because most of us are internally conflicted or multiple, we're susceptible to it. And... So I think, to me, it's sort of fascinating. It's sort of like neuro-linguistics and spirituality and systems theory all coming together and really trying to... But I think that the patterns of this and the social patterns of this really have something to sort of teach us about how the mind works.

[28:27]

at the implicit level, at a social and individual level. Yes? Well, you know, I don't know how they did it, because I wasn't there. I mean, I didn't let them sleep in class. But I think really what happened is that When I pointed it out to them, first of all, they were completely unamazed by it, right? So I was like, you know, we had to sort of talk through why they should be amazed. And once they were amazed, and they had the challenge, once they were amazed, there was probably a little, you know, it wasn't my intent, but it probably was a little embarrassing, you know, to realize that, oh, God, you know, my whole life I've been dreaming only in white. You know, so there was some motivation. And I think it was actually liberating.

[29:29]

And that's why I was even saying the student who came to me five years later, it was like he had this real breakthrough. I don't know if he lived in Minneapolis anymore. But he wanted to share this with me. And from my sense, I think if we have a really healthy society and a really healthy spiritual practice, we actually will be aware of of different aspects of ourselves, that we won't, and I'm not saying we'll all become gay, or we'll all become white, or we'll all become, but I think that there will be some fluidity in those patterns in ourselves, and we won't censor. And to me, this is an amazing thing. It's censoring when you sleep. It's one thing to say, I'm not going to say this because I'm in a mixed crowd, but in your sleep, it's like Muhammad Ali, that I'm waking up because I know I can't be in the ring. Even in my sleep, And so it gives some space. So I think that once the possibility, because I think possibilities oftentimes are social phenomena.

[30:35]

And so you will see now many more women running for president because Hillary created a possibility. It just... It wasn't possible not only in women's mind, although, you know, she was the first woman, but she went further than any other woman. It wasn't possible in society's mind either. So it was a relationship. It wasn't just that I can do anything. If no one believes me, I can't. But she made it believable both for herself and for society. The same with Barak. So I think that part of what we can do is invite a new set of possibilities. Um... And in some places we haven't done that. And let me just give you one example. I'm disturbed. And one of the things that disturbed me in the discussion on the election is this uncritical assumption that the United States should be, has to be, need to be the number one top dog in the world.

[31:45]

Barack says it. McCain says it. Palin says it. Biden says it. No one even says, like, why? I was asked to advise a foundation. I don't think it's a big secret. It's the Kellogg Foundation. They spend $40 million a year. And they said they want to have a long-term project of creating an environment where all children thrive. And so they said, how do we do that? Tell us how to do that. So I think, you know, I just wrote something and handed it in to them. I don't know what they think of it, but I didn't, you know, I thought, I think they were thinking I was going to say health care and early childhood education and safe, all those things are important, safe neighborhoods, but that's not what I said. I said, if you say all, let's start with the word all, that you can't get there under our present paradigm.

[32:47]

Our present paradigm does not make that possible. Because our present paradigm is a competitive paradigm where either one person wins and everybody else loses, or at best 50% win and 50% lose. If you have a paradigm where 50% of people lose, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you have 50% of the people losing. You know, you may shuffle the deck, so it's a different 50%, but 50% of the people have to lose. I teach at Ohio State University. For the last two years, Ohio State was the number two football team in the country. Exactly. And I'm going to the airport, and someone noticed that I'm from Ohio State, and they say, oh, it's too bad. And I say, yeah, isn't it a shame? We're the second best team in the country. How good is your team? But it's like, you know...

[33:50]

But it's not like, God, you guys are really good. You guys are second best. You guys are losers. So there are 370 top-rated football teams in the country. We're number two. And we're screwed. We're number two. which means everybody else is screwed too, except that one team. And so what I was saying to Kellogg is the paradigm really has to shift because it's a competitive paradigm. It's a paradigm where one person wins or one group wins and everybody else has to lose. And I felt like that's the paradigm we are in the world right now. And so we're in this stiff competition with everybody else, whether it's Russia or China or Europe. And, and, and, the politicians and pundits can use that to rip up anxiety and fear in America. And we need to reassert ourselves so we can once again be number one. It's like, why? You know, and anyway, so that's just sort of an example of the possibility of having a different relationship has not been introduced into our public consciousness yet.

[35:00]

We're still in this consciousness sphere. So I think in terms of the role what one can do in terms of spiritual practice and other practices is create new possibilities. Once those possibilities are there, I think people will learn to bring reality to them themselves. Yes? Excuse me? How does everybody win? Well, I think, first of all, that there's mutuality. That, you know, we start with In Dreaming of an Isolated Self, I talk about what I describe as white space. And I describe white space as, and I go back to Hobbes, and I'm sure all of you have heard of Hobbes and probably none of you have read Hobbes. How many people here have read Hobbes? Good for you. And you'll be pleased to know my cat is named Hobbes.

[36:06]

But if you think about Hobbes, who is considered sort of the father of Anglo-American political philosophy, and Hobbes was the one who said, in a state of nature, it's all against all. That we're constantly at war with each other. And the reason we enter into civil society is only so that the government can protect us from each other. That we are completely separate entities who would steal each other's stuff. And so when I look at you, I see that you want to steal my stuff. And he says that people will cooperate only at a contractual level, only at a utilitarian level. And then some of the Neo Hobbsians basically said, but the problem then is you give all this power to government to police itself from all of these egoistic people who want to take each other's stuff. But now you have to be worried about the government. And so you want to arm people against the government.

[37:07]

And you need private property to protect not only against each other, but also against the government. It's a philosophy that's deeply embedded in fear. The other is a cause for complete anxiety. And so you manage that fear by domination. You manage that fear. And it's a similar fear that we have toward nature. It's unruly. It's dangerous. So how do we deal with it? We control it. There's another way, which is to say we're somehow related. We're interrelated. And my well-being and your well-being is mutually constitutive. Ruth Benedict, who's the mother of modern anthropology. She talks about synergistic societies, societies which are arranged so that your well-being and my well-being are mutually supportive. And so you structure institutions to actually support that outcome.

[38:12]

Then everybody wins. Then I do well when you do well, as opposed to I only do well if you lose. And I'm not saying it will be easy, but There's a way of celebrating and experiencing. And to me, the sort of really wonderful opportunity, the wonderful precipice that we're on as a world right now is that the concept of interconnectedness, while for many years it was only something that was talked about or experienced in quiet corners of Zendos, now everybody's talking about it. They're not talking about it quietly. They're talking about it with anxiety. But they recognize that somehow what goes on in China affects the United States. They don't like it. But we can flip that and sort of have a world where we're not in competition with China.

[39:16]

We're not trying to beat the Chinese down. We're not trying to beat the Russians down. We're not trying to beat the Europeans down. That we share the planet together. That's a very different paradigm. But it seems to me that that, and that paradigm is not based on fear. It's not based on that I have to harden myself off from you in a gated community because I don't know who you are. Does that require us to give up ideas of having my stuff and your stuff? I mean, does the idea of stuff itself have to be recreated? I think it certainly has to be changed. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fundamental paradigm shift that has deep implications in terms of spirituality and the world. Of course, I don't separate them, but I think that's right. And I've...

[40:16]

I think we have internal conflict. I think we have, and I don't know how deep it is, but we have conflict of self-assertion and we have conflict of wanting to belong. We want both. So I'm not saying it's a simple thing, but I think from my perspective, that's what part of our journey here is really about, coming to terms with that in an individual and collective way. Yes? Isn't there a problem with the Lord being in it? Sure. I mean, some people say a win-win situation. But, yeah, I mean, instead of play, you know, you can... There was an article. I don't know if any of you saw it. There was this... They call them a tribe. This tribe, I think, in Brazil. And it's had contact with the West for a long time, like 125 years. It's one of the... And yet it's still... They had this...

[41:17]

because this missionary was sent down there to try to convert them. And they had sent a number, and they had this incredibly interesting language. Their language was basically present. And so, and he was, in the story, I was trying to send it to Brad, if you're interested. The missionary was down there, and he's saying, he's talking about Jesus, and he said, where is this Jesus? And I said, well, he lived a long time ago. Not interested. I mean, I mean, And so there's one scene where they're trying to get these people to compete, and they simply won't do it. They simply will not, I mean, they're trying to, all these incentives, you know, and they simply won't do it. And the upshot of the article, this missionary finally breaks the language, because the language doesn't follow the rules of language as we understand it. And this is all a true story.

[42:18]

And of course... Now he's at best agnostic. It's like, I'm not interested in Jesus either. But you're right, it's a real paradigm shift. And what's interesting about this particular tribe is unlike other tribes that maintain their, in a sense, cultural integrity by being isolated, this tribe has had a long contact with the West, but it's not buying some of our stuff. It's just not going there. I think I've found that when there are disasters, like natural disasters or something else, that correlates the paradigm to that people suddenly have different values and think, oh, we need to help each other, we have to do something about this. So I've seen that many times, but I think that... I think that's right. I think that what happens, though, and this is what I come back to, you know, whether you talk about Katrina or whether you talk about the earthquake here in the Bay Area.

[43:22]

I mean, I was here, and it was actually amazing. I mean, people were talking to each other, people were picking each other, but we didn't change our institutions. And our institutions is what patterns our behavior. And so if we don't create institutions to support our values, then it's going to be very hard to maintain. We sort of believe we can just do it at a personal level. And, you know, you're sort of driving. Most of us drive on the road. We stay where the road is. Some of us may veer off, but most of us stay on the road. It's just a pattern. It's a pattern that directs our behavior and directs our interaction. So what I think this means, and this is what I talk about in Lessons from Suffering, I talk about what I call existential ontological suffering, the suffering that we all are going to lose our family, we're all going to die, and no one can do anything about that.

[44:25]

But there's surplus suffering. There's the suffering from competition. There's the suffering of homelessness. We don't have to have homelessness. There's the suffering of what we're doing in the environment. There's the social suffering that we organize ourselves to actually create suffering. And we could do something about that. So, and I think they're related, that both of those sufferings are related, that in a sense, when we really belong, when we really belong to each other and belong to the earth, and this is, you know, Carl Jung, when he says the unconscious is not afraid of death because the unconscious is not differentiated. Or Ernest Becker, who writes the fear of death, when he says that the birth of the ego is the birth of the fear of death, that separation is where fear of death comes from.

[45:37]

And that doesn't mean, from my perspective, it doesn't mean we go back into an undifferentiated law. But it means that we go forward and we integrate. And integration in and of itself means differentiation. You don't integrate unless there's difference. And sometimes we forget that. In our fear, when we come to realize how badly we deal with difference, one move is to then transcend difference, and I call it a false transcendence, because we transcend it by denying it, rather than integrating it, which is not denying it, but neither is it in opposition anymore. Yes? You spoke earlier about using the particular to recognize the universal, and speaking about that in the context of Zen practice in the US and how there, I think, has been an effort across the past couple of years to really begin to address racism, classes, sexism, homophobia, oppression within our community, right, within the Buddhist community, and recognizing how power works.

[46:49]

But I also feel like, while there's no recognition, nothing has really changed. There's still, the power is still resting in the same general categories of people. And so I'm wondering, is recognition enough? I don't think that condition is enough. And I'm wondering then, what's the solutions, not just you, but other people in the wrong way, how it's actually shifted that power. This seems challenging to me, given the spiritual structure and high activity that I really value for institutional change. I think you're right. I guess I would add a couple of things. racism, sexism, homophobic, classism, all of those things, I think, are deeply embedded in our society, structural world, and they show up in our institutions, and then they show up in our lives. So recognizing them, certainly at the intellectual level, is not enough.

[47:51]

But even recognizing them at a deeper level, I guess I would say this. There's a way, I mean, we actually, we've done some work on this. How do you get people to We talk about creating empathetic space, which is different than retribution space. So if I invite you into a space and I say, the deal is, you know, you've screwed me and we can get along. If you give me what you get and, you know, you've got to make retribution, you know, you might go there, you might not. If I say, you know, we have a shared space, it feels different. And so part of the thing, I think, And there's serious problems. I don't want to make light of them at all. But the way that we actually talk about racism and classism and sexism oftentimes invites conflict. It invites division. And the division may already be there. So I'm not saying it causes the division. I don't want to blame the people who... But in a sense...

[48:59]

If you think about the particular and the universal, there's both a problem, but there's also a sense of joy. There's a sense of celebration that when you really engage with something, when you really do belong, it's not just, you know, I need to feel bad. It's that you, and I don't know much about you, but let's say you as a white person and you as a male get to claim the rest of your humanity. that you now have to cut off and be fearful of. And so when Minister Farrakhan had the Million Man March in D.C., actually I wrote an article about this in a book, and I didn't, you know, I was engaged in a lot of this stuff. Anyway, I didn't go. And my friend said, why aren't you going? And I said, well, you know, I have some issues. And, you know, the way he... He talked about women, the way he talked about Jews, the way he talked about homosexuals.

[50:07]

And so people said, so you're not going out of solidarity with your Jewish brother and your women sisters and your gay brothers and sisters? And I said, no, that's not the reason I'm not going. I'm not going because he offends my sensibilities. This is part of me. It's not just I'm not going because of them. This is me. And it feels just very different. So part of what I was doing with these students, actually, was ask them to begin, not to appropriate other people's identity, but to begin to open up to their own spaces inside themselves. And I think if you do this... then there's a joy in it also. There's a joy of wholeness. There's a joy of belonging. And one person plays with the word belonging.

[51:09]

Belonging is a play on longing to be. And we all long to be. And when we get to belong, the longing to be can rest. The anxiety, the sense of lack, which I think a lot of the stuff really is a way of filling up the sense of lack. I'm not real, so at least I can have an iPod. My iPod is real. But it'd be much better if I could have an authentic, real, not just expression of myself, but with you, with us. And so one of the things about natural disasters, as you mentioned, as bad as they are, if there's not devastation of life and limb, there's something quite wonderful about them. I remember being out here in San Francisco earthquake years ago, and I said, it was really, it was scary, it was beautiful, it was amazing, it was terrifying, and I felt like

[52:11]

The earth was just turning over, like, you know, it's like, you know, I'm not comfortable, let me turn over. And it's like all the buildings and everybody, you know, and there was this collective sense of awe. And we were all in together, and everybody looked beautiful. You know, and it was just a we. You know, it wasn't like, you know... this is your earthquake, this is my earthquake. There was a sense of we. And so for the next week or two weeks, it was like, I mean, literally, and I don't know how many of you were here to experience that, but it was like the sun was shining a little brighter and you were happy to see people. It's like, oh. And then everybody, where were you? Everybody, strangers were talking. And it felt incredibly good. And then it went away. And we went back to our lives. So I think if we do it right, and you see that, right? I mean, mostly you're probably too young to remember this, but when Dr. King was alive and people were really trying to do something, there was something special about it.

[53:15]

It wasn't simply overcoming injustices. People were living together. People were excited to be able not to be afraid of each other. And again, it wasn't deeply... grounded in our personal lives, in our institutions, so it started to go away again. Yes? You mentioned Dr. Payne, and often it seems there's sort of a movement or something happened, and there's an individual who sort of is the organizing force behind it, from the spearhead, or whatever you want to call it, I guess. And then in the absence of the individual things, certainly with Dr. Kane's example. But I'm wondering, is that sort of just a phenomenon that is humans that we need to work with?

[54:21]

Are there alternate ways of creating this change? I'm asking, how do we, you know, do we, do we want to be especially leaderful? Are there other ways of creating change that were? Well, yeah, certainly there are other ways. How can we be hopeful, I guess, during the absence of anyone that's necessarily being in that role? And then the reality that if there is someone in that role, that, you know, people end up. Yeah, yeah. But there's one guy who writes, hope is nostalgia for the future. So I'll take a detour and ask you a question. If you ever come to Columbus, and if you come, call me up, and I'll share a meal with you. In my house, someone gave me a painting, a photograph they did for me.

[55:30]

And because I say this and they've memorialized it, when I say I'm not a pessimist and I'm not an optimist, I'm a possiblist. And that's what the picture says in there. And then I read recently that an optimist and a pessimist are both people who are basically fortune tellers. They're trying to tell you, you know, how things are going to turn out as opposed to engaging. And my daughter, my oldest daughter, when she was very young and I was doing a lot of this work, and she would say to me, you know, how can you do all this work? You know, you work with, you know, people who are basically having a hard time and homeless people and Native Americans, and a lot of people you work with seem like just having a hard time. You don't seem to get depressed very often. And actually I wrote something in response to her, but I said, you know, you know, Depression really is a loss of hope and a loss of engagement.

[56:31]

That when you're really engaged, you're engaged. And that's partially why I wrote the piece also, Lessons from Suffering. I don't know, but it seems to me, why are we here? Not... A green ghost. Well, why are we here on the planet? And it seems to me that it would be a cruel joke if we come here and come here in a life that's full of suffering and the goal is to get back to not suffering. That's it, right? I mean, it's then why were we born? I mean, that was sort of a bad joke. You know, we sort of come into the world suffering and we spend a whole time trying to get out of suffering. Then, you know, just leave me alone. I don't want to come. You know, uh... So part of the way I think about it is that suffering is a teacher. It's a motivator. It's actually trying to help us get someplace. And people have different theories like get back to God or become enlightened or reconnect.

[57:37]

So... And to me, I guess for my practice, the essence of it is engagement. That when you're fully engaged, it doesn't mean, and some of my friends, they say, so I know you don't say you're happy. I used to say when my kids were growing up, if I could wish them one thing, it would not be wealth, it would not be happiness, it would not be money, it would be engagement. It's that they'd be just fully engaged. Now what I do believe is that if we're engaged, those other things come from it. the happiness. The health, that leaves anyway. So I do think that there's a different type of engagement and leadership, if you call it that, a responsibility that we all... I just did a thing on Talk of the Nation last week, and they were saying, so if Barack Obama is like the president, does that mean we've dealt with the issue of race? And I said, one person can't do it. You know what they can do is one person can open up the possibility, but then we collectively have to make it a reality, and we have to

[58:48]

embedded in our practice and our lives and in our institutions. Otherwise, we'll be back to a situation where we'll be back to what you're just describing, whether it's Dr. King or whether it's Mahatma Gandhi. One person will show us something and we'll say, isn't that great? But we don't own it. It's not us. And it's not reflected in our daily practice and institutions. So I think, obviously, Dr. King was wonderful. Nelson Mandela. I have a picture in my house that I took with Rosa Parker. They open up the door, but then if it doesn't happen, it's because we didn't make it happen. Yes. A couple of things. First, I've got to confess that when I saw your name on the card there, said John Powell, I actually didn't... didn't occur to me that you might be a black man. So that's something that just kind of popped up in my head right now.

[59:49]

When you're talking about dreams and stuff, I was like, oh, no, I'm not biased at all, you know? But I didn't even think about it, because I'm a white man. And so, and we've never, since in six months, we've never had anyone else really come to speak to us. So I just kind of assumed that it wouldn't change. And the other thing is kind of more about pop culture. and the race issue. And like, you know, I guess at first there was like, I don't know, when blues and jazz kind of started coming in and I wasn't alive then, so I don't know. But then I do know about like rap and hip hop kind of coming in and people having all these, you know, white people listening and all this stuff. And it's mostly like black artists and then people releasing stuff too. But for me, it's a lot centered around like island culture Jamaican culture reggae culture and and how that's actually like been was Biblical teachings filtered through like an African discipline and this what comes up for me is like yeah like part of me is like judging myself like and has that fear and also like Mostly I don't really believe in that.

[61:00]

It's That it belongs to any race, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about pop culture and and the race issues there um What you said was just a couple of things. One, race basically, I mean, it's sort of interesting, right? Race is a continuum. And so we sort of talk about it as if it's a thing instead of it being a practice, a set of practices. So one of the things I think we fail to do, and I try to suggest this, is that I think we have to create a space where an alternative to what I would call white space and have people be in that space. And there's already a continuum. And so, for example, the Willie Horton is very different than Barack Obama. There's a continuum. There are many different types of ways of...

[62:02]

showing up in the world, in the United States, as a black person. So Ophiorempic shows up as a black person very different than most other black people, right, most other people, period. And we don't sort of... encourage people to sort of play on that continuum. So they're not just white people. They're not just black people. There's this continuum. And this continuum is getting broader. And that's a good thing. But we still don't talk about it as if it's broad. And we don't celebrate it as if it's broad. So you still have, I don't mean this in a negative sense, but in a parody, but you still have the bubbles in the South, you know. who the idea of having a black president is like, kill him. And you have people who have gone and done a lot of the work. And yet, when the press talks about it, when we talk about it, they're white people. Think about the Rodney King beating. The first trial was in Sumi Valley, and the police were acquitted.

[63:07]

The second trial was in L.A., and the police were found guilty. Basically the same trial. And one of the differences was it was different types of white people. The white people in Sydney Valley could not conceive of, you know, a sort of... sympathetic black man, if you will, and bad police. It's like, you know, of course the police didn't beat him, and if they did beat him, he probably deserved it. In L.A., it's like, oh yeah, man, I know the police, the white people. I know the police can be bad, you know. They had no trouble with that. They're different type of white people. So part of what I'm, I guess, trying to even talk about is sort of opening up a space in a very deliberate way where People who don't want to stay in that... When I talk about white space, I'm not talking about white people. Anybody could be in that space of fear, separation, anxiety, hostility, domination.

[64:08]

I could be in that space. In fact, I would say most Americans are in that space. And I have defined that space as spiritually dead, a space where you're afraid of everyone and everything, everything that's alive. is a threat to you. And you have to dominate it. That's the only way to be comfortable with it. To me, that's a spiritually dead space. And so we need to offer another space without appropriating, without avoiding the hard work. So yes, I agree with you that culture doesn't belong to any of us. But it's also important for us to recognize, especially those of us who are doing this work, that we do it from different locations. I live in Ohio. As you know, a third of Ohio is really Appalachia. I'm a tenured professor with one of the highest chairs of Ohio State University.

[65:11]

I have all kinds of social, I walk into a room in Ohio State and everybody you know, respects me. That's very different than, you know, most students. It's certainly important. I don't worry about health care for myself. I worry about it for the country. So what I'm saying is that I have many forms of privilege that are bestowed on me, not because I'm a bad person, but because of locations that I occupy in our society. How do I use those to open up a space for other people? Um... I'll just tell you one quick story, and I'll see where we are. I was at the University of Minnesota, and there was a guy who defined me as his nemesis. He was not happy I was there. I think he thought I was... He heard I was some kind of radical. I think he thought I was Bill Ayers or somebody.

[66:14]

And... He didn't like the way I taught. And I used to say to my students, you know, I say, a really just society would mean that no one would have to spend their whole life as a white person. And he said, you know, you're racist. You know, why don't you say that? Anyway, I write a lot. It's something, it's a facility I have. I do it, you know, more than most people, even at universities. He didn't write very much. So the university was going to change the rules, and he was tenured, but he hadn't written in ten years. And they basically were going to push him out. And they had the momentum all going in that direction. And I stood up to defend him. And I had a status to defend him because I was one of the most highly published people at the University of Minnesota. And the measure was defeated. And he came in my office after that, and literally he was in tears.

[67:18]

He said, why would you defend me? I said, because what they were trying to do to you was wrong. And, I mean, it changed our relationship. I mean, after that, we really became friends. He was dealing with a caricature. He had a whole way. And I refused to play in that caricature. And it wasn't just refused. I mean, I wasn't consciously thinking of it. I was in a privileged position. But just that opening, at least between the two of us, shifted things. So, and that's again what I'm talking about, this sort of, this multiplicity. He obviously was operating partially out of fear. He had some caricature of me that I was, I don't know, going to do something to him. So, I mean, I don't know if I have any real answers except to say that I think what we see are possibilities. and the world is offering us new possibilities. And the meaning and the practice associated with those possibilities are being, right now, driven by people who are defining those possibilities as negative.

[68:28]

We can't go back to a world. We never were in a world where we were not connected. The world has gotten smaller. Some people think it's flat again. But the reality is we can now talk about connections in a much more serious way, but we're not talking about it collectively from our perspective in a deeply spiritual way. And if we do that, it seems to me that not only do our cultures change, would we change, what it means to be black, what it means to be white, change. Someone said, and I'll stop after this, someone said to me, so again, if Obama's elected president, it means that we really are beyond race. I said, well, I don't think it means that. And I said, well, how would you know we're really beyond race? How would you tell? And I said, well, one indication is that Obama would not be black anymore. I said, what do you mean? I said, why is it that in the United States, A black woman biologically can only give, a white woman can biologically give birth to a black child, but a black woman biologically cannot give birth to a white child.

[69:35]

So maybe we could have a few minutes of silence and then I don't know if you have any other thoughts, sir. Before or after the same? Well, before. I think that the main thing that I thought you were trying to stress is that there have been moments of opening in our society. And, for example, if we have a a new president who's white, and his name's Obama, that won't be enough. And even if somebody else is president, that won't be enough. It seems like the thing that in order to really change, the institutions have to change. And I thought that the main thing that you're telling us is we must engage.

[70:51]

And if we engage, then the institutions, if we keep engaging with the institutions, they will change because it sounds like that's what we're not doing. We're not engaging with the communities. We're trying to, with the institutions, we're trying to be happy. We're trying to get what we want rather than just engage. And yeah, I think we have, that will realize the interdependence and So we understand that now, but if we don't engage, then it'll get lost again. And so it seems like we're at this potentially great point in history when people seem to be aware of it, somewhat. So, you know, I feel... And in Zen Center, too, people may feel like we have... There's something about Zen Center that's maybe not interdependent enough. But if we engage Zen Center, Zen Center may become more the way we want the rest of the country to be.

[72:02]

And then we can go from there. And I feel like this election, I know more people who are engaged with this election in this community than they were in past ones. But now, after the election is over, can we continue somehow to engage all these different dimensions? So I'm feeling you've encouraged us a lot that way. Thank you. Thank you. So before we break, if we could just have like a few minutes of assignments.

[72:41]

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