Wednesday Lecture

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ah to tastes the truth of the target as words

you
your room

very
it says

longboard
and
third
our boy
that i say
but i'm doing that was before last tuesday
i thank you for emotions very nice to see you
nice to see l you people who can crush your legs
we're trying no longer can do so i'm sitting on this a nice bench
days sunday as i can't just depends
and other well i take great comfort from my traer
seated on a bench
somebody who doesn't know the iconography of my of my tray said today is she doing her finger nails
actually i probably did say something about talking about power and authority but
that's not what i want to talk about tonight at least not directly
what i want to talk about is of course very informed by what we've all experienced in the last week and the day

as so somebody you know i have
been blessed with spending time with some of the tibetan buddhists care and in india and nepal and i've always been removed and intrigued by what
people from that culture and
aspect of buddhism have up their sleeves that they could go through prisoner imprisonment and torture and being in prison camps her
decades and come out of such experience without any post traumatic stress syndrome
and from talking to some of the people who've gone through such experience the through line consistently has been there practice of always staying connected to whoever was there jail
euler or torture her
always looking the person in the eyes
always keeping in mind the suffering that will follow from their actions
and that practice of saying in connection even with those that we
intensely disagree with has so come up for me in the last week
a particularly as i've experienced within myself and people around me and in our country they rush to have an enemy who is other

now very or early on after the i keep the game room as the bombings
in new york and washington

the need for us to have an enemy
who is other than
and sometime tuesday or maybe on wednesday this question came up from
someone from the middle east
can you americans
be curious about why you are hated by so many people
i think it's a very important question us
both as a nation and in our own lives in the immediacy of our own experience
at of course what happens for most of us is that if we have some sense or direct communication that someone hates us we go to defending
i think we actually have to train the mind
to open ourselves to big curious
about what that hatred is about
to be open to finding out what the causes and conditions have been in the recent and not so recent pass that would lead to people all over the world
who not only don't like the united states but actually express themselves as hating hating us and what we stand for

i don't think we're in this war against terrorism that we have declared as a nation i don't think we're going to get very far until we can begin to be curious about who the terrorists are
and what the ground that has
cause them to come to
these extreme positions and to be capable of doing the kinds of things that they're going

a version perhaps of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes

i'm teaching a class in berkeley
this month and next and we're working with the very old
visual teaching that you find throughout the himalayas
depicted as the will of existence painting that you find just inside the doorway to virtually every buddhist temple and monastery
a painting with the god of death holding the whale of existence in his hands with all his long feng a finger nails and teeth
and of course we started in this discussion with considering the hell realm
so when i went to class on now say what was it on the thirteenth
i thought who were still in the hell realms particularly this week
the hot and cold hell's
and one person in the class
brought up
a relationship she has with a colleague at work she said almost apologetically this is someone i like very much
but she thinks president bush is just terrific
and all of the political views that she has are completely her in opposition to what i hold to be sound and wholesome
and i think she was a little embarrassed when i pointed out to her that they're in her own life at work she had this little microcosm
the situation we have in the world
give or take a liking
as she acknowledged she was blessed with liking this person but she certainly didn't like what this person believed and like
so what happens when we find ourselves in such situations at least in my experience is that we go very quickly very easily to thinking in terms of either or are either like the person or i don't like from what do i do if i like the person and i
can't stand there politics

but in a very real sense i think that's the challenge right now
how can we have some conversation some relationship with individuals and groups of people with whom we disagree in some cases rather intensely

i suggested to this woman that she consider and look into her capacity to stay in relationship with her colleague at the same time that she might hold very different points of view
politically and with respect to confidence or the want of it in our president
so when i saw a few days later she said you know that shift was very helpful for me
i actually discovered capacity i didn't know i have
to not be stuck frozen in my position of antagonism and disagreement
but to begin to be a little bit curious about my colleagues perspective and experience
as some of you may know his holiness the dalai lama sent mayor giuliani thirty thousand dollars last week
not very much money given what new york is going through but for his holiness a quite a large sum of money
since he and his whole situation is supported by donations
and on tuesday when he got word of what had happened in new york and washington he sat down and
began to and prayers for all of the people involved and was joined by over a thousand people in dharamsala
and he then sent this money to mayor giuliani and he sent a letter to president bush
and the salutation has been kind of nibbling at the back of my mind all week
the salutation was your excellency
and i decided that for those of us who are have had a lot of fear and trepidation about this precedent that we might take on referring to him
your excellency
i'm i'm actually quite serious
during the gulf war when i was teaching a class in the same venue and the senior president bush was
in office
i was actually doing a class on right speech and i realized that we were all you know preaching to the choir and speaking of the senior president bush in very derogatory terms
and
i decided and was joined by other people in the class that we would see what happened if we referred to him as president bush and s a practice to refrain from derogatory
references
so i think this is again an occasion for
that practice
we need a this president to step into this situation as fully as he can
and to allow
the support and affirmation that he's getting both from within the country and from world leaders
i've been very interested to see leaders in other countries coming in closer and closer
talking to president bush
making it difficult for us to be isolated
can't separated

in conflict whether it's immediately right in our personal lives or conflict on a national or international scale such as this time where and now
there are certain patterns and habits that we can get into one of the most common being that we find someone or some group of people to blame
and to be in opposition to
and these times call for something quite different
for us to discover how to stay in relationship in connection with those with whom we feel great
difference and the opposition
that instead of falling into what is so easy for us to fall into which is what i call either or mind it's either this or that
and hold in our minds the possibility of both and

that capacity to think in terms of both and
is a way of holding on having access to our own capacity to become curious about those who see the world differently than we do
whose experience and the ground from which their actions arise may be quite different from ours
in conflict resolution one of the most important factors is to develop our capacity to put ourselves in the other person's shoes
to begin to notice what our own reactive patterns are
how quickly and easily we can attribute intention to the other without really knowing what we are attributing his in fact so
and in particular to understand how did this person this group of people come to see us as the enemy as the hated once
this is where knowing a little history can be very helpful
but even if one doesn't know history
if we can generate if we can attend our capacity for curiosity and interest will start asking questions that will lead us to discover
some of the causes and conditions that have led to someone doing something like the hijackers did on tuesday a week ago

i think is as meditation practitioners we have some capacity or potential for capacity that will be very important during these days and weeks and months
and longer
we actually have the
mind training path
for cultivating curiosity and interest
cultivating a kind of spaciousness and groundedness that is necessary if we are going to stay with
that is so difficult to say with
including our own fear and in many cases anger
if we can't stay connected with ourselves we're not so likely to be able to stay very connected to
the am the so called enemy
and to do what i'm suggesting about staying in relationship with those that we find ourselves in opposition to
to do that we have to practice doing
and it will be helpful to practice not in the most difficult circumstances but at least initially to start in somewhat less difficult circumstances
what's not start with the taliban are bin laden
or whoever

i want to recommend a dharma text for this topic
i don't know how many of you know roger fisher and bob yuri's books that you get like the book called getting to yes
i think it's essential reading for every one of us and is absolutely a dharma text
very much about the difference between an outcome orientation and a process orientation
and i think the buddhist path is so clearly about process
even though we may say well secretly it's about the outcome of enlightenment
i actually think it's a path about process
these two men who were getting to yes and another book called getting together
were in charge of the negotiations team during the cold war between the u s when the ussr
and subsequently developed the harvard school of negotiations which is still going
and it is their students who wrote this three of them who wrote this book called difficult conversations
and it's a very practical
workbook
for looking at those conversations we don't want to have
those conversations where we see the person we need to have the conversation with as other
very clear analysis about motivation and intention what happens with blaming
and in particular what happens when we attribute intention to another or to a group of people and we have not in any way check that out
i recently had the experience and having someone send me a letter
that was filled with
how can i put this the author of the letter is convinced that he knows about my intention
i was respect to my relationship with this person someone i actually don't know very well
but
who has
some fair bit of grief about all the things that i've done to undermine him in his work
to be on the receiving end of
assumptions about intention
can be very very informative
i'm checked out assumptions about what someone else is up to
that in combination with taking everything personally
can sink us regularly and often

so we know some things hopefully about the cultivation of spacious mind
what happens when we bring attention to the exhalation on the end of the exhalation a kind of
we don't constrict on the exhalation would constrict on the inhalation
and the more capacity we have for spaciousness of mind the more likely it is that we will be able to begin to discover capacity to stay in relationship with those we
differ with
who we see as being in opposition
by own experience is that the more spacious the mind the more likely there will be some possibility for curiosity and interest
the more likely it is that i will begin to discover how to put myself in the other person's shoes and look at the situation from their point of view
i actually think that we should all about once a year rent kurosawa's film rashomon
very informative
the story told from i never can remember four or five different peoples seven ah thank you seven point of view
hard to believe that each one of them was describing the same situation
some years ago i was teaching meditation part of a writing in meditation where workshop for a week at omega institute and was doing it initially with natalie goldberg and she was bitten by dogs in my calf of her
blake and it got very infected so she ended up not being able to teach the course and omega got worried that nobody would come so they pulled in some big famous writer to do the writing part every day we had a different star
and the middle of the week we had allen ginsberg
provocative your
par excellence
towards the end of the morning he made some outrageous assumption a description about
some situation that was designed to inflame many of the equal in the group
so by the time we reconvened after lunch we had you know there are one hundred people in this workshop and we had a kind of firestorm and the girl
and of course the most heat was from the people who hadn't been at the morning teaching
but who'd heard about what had happened
so
i decided that what we needed to do was to sit and listen to each other which we did for the next the rest of the week
listen to each person describe what their experience with what they'd heard
and what had arisen for them so we practiced for three days sitting and listening to each other
in the end it was very clear that we had one hundred different stories
a hundred different experiences

we didn't come to a shared view about the skill or lack of it on allen's part
but what became very clear to everyone was that
there was no real truth
much as we all tried to argue each other into accepting that there was one story that was the true one
but we had was a hundred stories

so i would say that as
meditators we also hopefully have and are have and are continuing to cultivate our capacity to sit still with what's difficult and to listen
to listen within ourselves and to listen to the other
i don't know if any of you have been in a situation where you've actually done that with someone with whom you had really fierce opposing views
if we are willing to take enough time
to really deeply listen to the other and to also have the experience of being listened to
all of those assumptions about the others intention
begins to dissolve and we begin to have a much more accurate picture not only of what the for other person's intention has been but to also have some sense of what
my reaction how it has impacted on them and for them to begin to have some sense about their impact on me
because there may be quite a big difference between intention and impact

in in resolving conflict in coming to some place where we can stand which may not be resolution exactly but to not be hitting each other like this
we have to expand our capacity to understand how the other person could think and feel and act and why they do
and hopefully to have the experience of being heard and to some degree anyway understood by the other person
and that process often takes time
doesn't happen quickly
the very pace at which we engage with the enemy if you will can make a big difference

in the
days following the events of september eleventh
i heard a lot of people talk about we need to be patient
so when the pakistani government agreed to talk to the taliban
and then the united states put forth a demand from the taliban
i felt my heart sink
seemed like we were not giving the pakistanis a chance to do what they might do somewhat discreetly and behind the scenes
who knows
everybody might have hardened into positions anyway
but we will we don't know

difficult conversations how to discuss what matters most
i made some notes about some things i wanted to include and of course i'd probably

no i think that person
joy surprising to discover that
once notes
bear some resemblance to work on ended up ups

let me close and then i'd like to have a transverse have some questions and discussion

but let me close with
the challenge that i think must be present for probably all of us
which is how to say and relationship with ourselves when certain emotions arise that we experience it's quite challenging
and the ones that i know about the most and last week our fear and anger
and in many cases sense of helplessness

we often talk in zen practice and in meditation throughout the buddhist tradition about the opening up of some third possibility not being stuck with suppressing or expressive but the possibility of being present with without
to either suppressing are expressing
but i think that for all of us we will come to some emotional state that we don't yet know how to be with
and what i find myself coming back to a lot in the last week as i've been listening to i'm talking with people i practice with
is to give ourselves permission to stay with what is arising
i briefly
for breath or two
particularly helpful with fear and anger
and maybe skillful to stay with those emotions but with walking rather than with sitting still
we can often stay with what is difficult to stay with if we're moving and then out of that experience of capacity to be present which what we didn't know how to be with we can then do the same thing in sitting now

if we are not able to say in connection with ourselves with difficult stuff arising whether it's mental or know the mental stories and all the stuff that we can terrifies ourselves with about
what's could happen
or a strong emotions like fear and anger and overwhelmed
but every one of us will discover our capacity to be with what is difficult if we are willing to do it briefly and on the breath
and when we did develop their capacity within ourselves we will begin than to be able to have that capacity when were in a situation of conflict with another person
i haven't watched a television for a number of years but last week
my husband and i were glued
to the television
especially
nightline
and also with
dave jennings
with peter jennings excuse me shows you what i know
and what struck go both of us was that
both of them
had the capacity to stay relationally with the people they were interviewing even when they were interviewing people they really strongly disagreed with
i was quite struck by that
and so the interviews had quite a range of point of view and were i think a very helpful
in giving us a much wider picture of what's what's happening and how could such events come to be

so i think we can take maybe fifteen minutes for some questions or some points that you'd like to bring up
i hope that's not an irregular
i'd like to do

yes
the gateway server
yes is that something here as he must be base
one of my instance of your own innocence for him
as type of and happen you know
why live on the least for you know how many centuries decades forever
to feel so right after you know every american could find have cursor you know if your worker
i wonder about that of conflict
it's no cause for the base in are
you know that lead up to saying oh that person is a saying that because i asked me sitting and
let's hope can i still i mean and i think i'd be that he thought i was out that and watch those and of message to a restaurant out for them now
well this way
yeah
if you alluded to that
now could you say a little bit more about prescribing a demeanor what what do you mean all i need that that there's a way that i can be else
he's now mean that their friends to do cooking
but then servers and is if he knows where the dividing it by what appears counts well it's a that's a specific instance of what i mean when i talk about either or
and
where it innocent if we think we are out of ignorance about our own history
and our own conduct in the middle east in the last decades
and
but that's a very good example of a kind of difficulty we get into when we assign in a good guys and bad guys and
i think for a lot of people in this country and i think it's accents this among buddhist practitioners
i'm kind of
how do i how do i stand in this world
i'm just want to meditate
i am i have a steady a to study groups up in juneau alaska we meet on the phone once month
and then i go up there couple times a year of come down here
and in one of of study groups i had a phone meeting with on sunday
and there were several people in the group feeling
completely helpless hopeless overwhelmed
and i was
somewhat struck by the kind of fierceness that came up and me about this is the time if we cherish democracy for us to find our voices
and i keep i kept hearing from members of this study group
a sense of well but my voice won't count nobody will listen but
that's an outcome orientation
and of course to use my voice i can't stand in that position of innocence i have to take on the process of informing myself for that what led to this to try to begin to be educated about the
worlds that i live in
of the internet is
seething when things people are sharing with each other
the first wave was pretty terrific it's now beginning to be little more mixed
but one of the
sharing us that was sent my way was a statement by a rabbi about the suka of shalom
the suka it
holes in it so that you can see the stars and so that the wind and rain can come through the roof made of strong branches and very flimsy
as a way of
coming back to the experience of our vulnerability
and there's rabbi said you know we may build big towers of concrete and steel
we may make big defenses around us
but it's all an illusion
because we are all every one of us in the entire world living in asuka
so sometimes our innocence can keep us from knowing that i thought what a great practice
watch out for that either either or thinking
and you know the minute you notice it then bring up i would i look at this situation this moment from the perspective of both am
and then we begin to move into our capacity to hold seemingly conflicting realities because that's the world we live in
apparently conflicting realities over and over him
thank you
yes he spoke little that are seeking a difficult
yeah
he talked all about do about doing
going percent
well
the perpetrator of one of my favorite practice this is actually here
to listen
from the perspective that what the person is saying to me is mostly telling me about their mind stream
that ninety eight percent of what the person is saying is saying about themselves
it's a tremendous antidote to habitual defensiveness
and in my experience turns out to be quite accurate
you know the great bet midler line about enough about me let's talk about you what do you think about me
the and you know in the buddhist teachings
the
the deep core of suffering is identified as self cherishing or self clinging
either negatively or positively
how often we take something personally and in fact what the person is expressing is really about them
a more elegant description might be this is from some do you remember the philosopher from
the sixteenth century you said what the self described describes the stuff
ah
but i like the ninety eight percent are all myself same same i rarely
and
as somebody who was
thoroughly suffused with the habit of defensiveness
taking on as a practice listening from that perspective i suddenly really as though someone had just turned on a light switch had the experience of standing in a completely different world than i had ever stood in before
and when i listened to another person with that ear
i can respond in terms of what the person is telling me about what is difficult for them or what is important for them or with they're afraid of
and there's some connection that can happen
you know there's some there's a category of
use of pronouns friend of mine cost pronoun disorder
you statements and way statements
and when we're on the receiving end of you always and you've never what a me
to hear even those statements as this person is telling me what is hard for them or what they get upset about or
once experience of such a conversation is drastically different from what we're used to when were sunk in our own conditioning and habituation
and
we stop working so hard
we can begin to relax a little bit because we don't have to always try to figure out what's going on if we listen we all know
so you know the bodhisattva
i have a look at chess where the regarder the cries of the world
who hears who listens and sees without reaction and without judgment
is hopefully our inspiration but you know the the actuality has to come out of how we bring that inspiration into the specifics of how we talk and listen to each other you know this evening
it's gotta come back into the specifics of what we actually do and say and listened to
brenda you and has i can't even remember now the name of her book but there's one chapter in at on listening and she describes
her relationship with a relative who never asked her any questions never asked her about herself just would talk endlessly about himself so she decided i'm going to just listen to him for as long as it takes for him to feel listened to and to be
interested in finding out what's up with me
so she listened to him for three and a half days
sandwiches around it in a day and night
and she said eventually
he turned and said and how are you
and she talked about
for somewhat suspicious motives but perhaps
becoming a life of the party by practicing listening to everybody at the party
she said everybody always wanted to hang out with me
the practice of listening is can make an enormous difference in how we experience
conflict and the kind of detail of it
and is crucial i think in putting ourselves or the other person's shoes
thank you
cow
look up
the people who was present invention good girl
the the
cars
one or if your therapies to the south park and first and you
implications in the future events can be used is just guns
if it that's not the tone of what i hear from people in those situations at all but more there
ready prayers for the suffering that is inevitable from this kind of action from the ignorance and not knowing what the effects are
i've never had any sense of any with a vengeance in the description and i've ran and the descriptions that i've heard
in remarkably from talking for example to some of the young nuns who have been imprisoned in prison in lhasa and in some cases gone through really horrific torture
and
their ability to stay connected with themselves and with their torturers and guards and as one of the most remarkable
instances of the human capacity that i've ever encountered
one time when i was in dharamsala a group of nuns who had been released from prison in lhasa and were told that they couldn't be known as they had to go back to their families and take off their robes etc
so they walked to india they walked to dharamsala across the himalayas no small feat in itself and his holiness the dalai lama mates with in a of the tibetans who come out
and there was a kind of newspaper wall in in center of the upper mcleod ganj where you have a you know statements pasted on the wall and these nuns hand-drawn pictures of the
different kinds of torture that they'd gone through
extraordinary may really hard to imagine
so i took picture i took photographs of drawings
brought them home and
made copies and send them to everyone in congress i didn't even look at them a pretty hard to look at
but to actually see what these women had gone through and to then listened to them
and to see the studies that have been done with so many of these people in terms of this
in most cases
not what we would expect in terms of post traumatic stress syndrome i find remarkable
really really remarkable
a drawn avid on wrote a book called in exile from the land of the snows and in that book there's a chapter about dr troadec who was a the dalai lama's doctor who isn't a prison camp for eighteen years
and he talks in that piece about
his practices and how he did them and some of what i'm talking about
you know he said every morning i had no idea who he would sleep on a big wooden platform with nine other men and they said i never knew
who would still be alive the next morning
extraordinary circumstances and he
through his term our practice was able to keep his heart open
hard for me to imagine myself being able to do that but what's clear to me is that that capacity for relationship in the face of such obstacles is not something that just drops onto us it's it's something we can train for
we can actually train for
hersh
issue of shit
how first stop i think what's interesting is the pocket
whatever to people on
i and they talk about it
hey
is it and the reactions to fix it themselves eat your rational to yeah
so
in my assumption that i share with them is that even though it's not
hi such as is there's some reason
it's just a matter
how it gives accurate would feel that crap
and so given what you're talking with that
i was thinking about what right a lot like right
strike me as i do feel
savor as a listening
asked how they don't understand the realization
he's passed at
how are they holding company soon invited thinking about cow
there's a piece that town a friend of mine sent a few days ago and and since i've gotten at six or seven more times but an afghani who lives here in california lived in the united states for thirty five years so remarkable pace his name is i'm sorry
and he is responding to this statement let's bomb afghanistan back to the stone age
and it's a pace which is a kind of assumption buster
in one were open to learning about what we don't understand
things began to come up
i played the things that matter how hard with in my work i can still
how to states doubles be happy
these i understand
it
when there's a meditation that i've been doing for a number of years on commonly presented as a meditation for the transformation of anger but it's actually a five part meditation for working with any strong negative emotion
and
the basis in the practice really the whole practices in step one in the other steps are kind of a refining articulation of what if you're patient happens in step one which is to be present with what's arising with the tenderness of a mother with her only
newborn child on the inhalation and on the exhalation
and the insights about causes and conditions that kind of blew up when you do that are very different from the insights about causes and conditions when you go when you try to find them intellectually
and i think that that stamps of being dumb in a way is very much in service of if i'm president who knows what will emerge
and i think initially people get scared of that kind of free fall around being present with what's hard to be with
okay you know i've heard rumor that you are going to get up at some hideously early our and baby one more one more question yeah yeah i'm a very christmas if you talk about history
flourish
when i grew up of coffee
i will up when i was a shock camp
am i in the way still looking better shape camp am and was cats are working on for years you know like i said five thousand was born there was just
he was he like you know what cool mechanical person that you know i remember rocks all this
and
sorry pushing very much talking about history
i'm talking about history because i think that we are right now i'm experiencing the consequences of not knowing history very well they says and i think it puts us in a very difficult positioning and know the kind of innocence that you were talking about is much easier to
rest in when you don't now history so thank you for brianna
thank you all very much take care of yourselves and practice staying in relationship when you can't imagine how you would do it you might be surprised
thank you