I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. But it was very active in the beginnings of the Center, particularly in the acquisition of the House of Art. And she's been on the board for many years. Did I say that? That was before last Tuesday. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[01:24]

Very nice to see you. Nice to see all you people who can cross your legs, which I no longer can do. So I'm sitting on this nice bench. Some days. Some days I can't. It just depends. Well, I take great comfort from Maitreya. seated on a bench. Somebody who doesn't know the iconography of Maitreya said today, is she doing her fingernails? 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 a day.

[02:37]

As some of you know, been blessed with spending time with some of the Tibetan Buddhists here and in India and Nepal. And I've always been very moved and intrigued by what people from that culture and aspect of Buddhism have up their sleeves that they could go through imprisonment and torture and being in prison camps for 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 ThruLine consistently has been their practice of always staying connected to whoever was their jailer or torturer, always looking the person in the eyes.

[04:04]

always keeping in mind the suffering that will follow from their actions. And that practice of staying in connection even with those that we intensely disagree with has come up for me in the last week. particularly as I've experienced within myself and people around me and in our country, the rush to have an enemy who is other. Very early on after the, I keep thinking of them as the bombings in New York and Washington,

[05:07]

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 for us, both as a nation and in our own lives, in the immediacy of our own experience. And 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 being 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 past that would lead to people all over the world

[06:46]

who not only don't like the United States, but actually express themselves as 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 caused them to come to these extreme positions and to be capable of doing the kinds of things that they're doing. A version, perhaps, of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes.

[07:49]

I'm teaching a class in Berkeley this month and next, and we're working with very old visual teaching that you find throughout the Himalayas. depicted as the wheel of existence, a painting that you find just inside the doorway to virtually every Buddhist temple and monastery, a painting with the god of death holding the wheel of existence in his hands with all his long, fangy fingernails and teeth and And, of course, we started in this discussion with considering the hell realms. So when I went to class on, let's see, what was it, on the 13th, I thought, hmm, we're still in the hell realms, particularly this week, the hot and cold hells.

[09:02]

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 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 there in her own life, at work, she had this little microcosm of the situation we have in the world. Give or take the liking.

[10:07]

As she acknowledged, she was blessed with liking this person, but she certainly didn't like what this person believed and liked. 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. I either like the person or I don't like them. What do I do if I like the person and I can't stand their 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?

[11:07]

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 her a few days later, she said, you know, that shift was very helpful for me. I actually discovered capacity I didn't know I had to not be stuck, frozen in my position of antagonism and disagreement. but to begin to be a little bit curious about my colleague's perspective and experience.

[12:16]

As some of you may know, His Holiness the Dalai Lama sent Mayor Giuliani $30,000 last week. not very much money given what New York is going through, but for His Holiness, 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 doing prayers for all of the people involved and was joined by over a thousand people in Durham, Charlotte. 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,

[13:25]

And I decided that for those of us who have had a lot of fear and trepidation about this president, that we might take on referring to him as Your Excellency. 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 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 as a practice to refrain from derogatory references.

[14:45]

So I think this is, again, an occasion for that practice. We need 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 kind of coming in closer and closer, talking to President Bush, making it difficult for us to be isolated and separated. In conflict, whether it's immediately right in our personal lives or conflict on a national or international scale, such as this time we're in now, there are certain patterns and habits that we can get into.

[16:08]

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 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 and having access to our own capacity to become curious about those who see the world differently than we do.

[17:22]

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 if what we are attributing is 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 ones.

[18:29]

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, we'll 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 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

[19:41]

for cultivating curiosity and interest, cultivating a kind of spaciousness and groundedness that is necessary if we are going to stay with what's arising in the world right now that is so difficult to stay 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 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 it. And it will be helpful to practice, not in the most difficult circumstances, but at least initially to start in somewhat less difficult circumstances.

[20:55]

Let's not start with the Taliban or 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 Urey's books, particularly 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.

[21:59]

These two men who wrote Getting to Yes and another book called Getting Together were in charge of the negotiations team during the Cold War between the U.S. and 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 others. very clear analysis about motivation and intention, what happens with blaming.

[23:07]

And in particular, what happens when we attribute intention to another or to a group of people, and we have not in any way checked that out. I recently had the experience of 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 with respect to my relationship with this person, someone I actually don't know very well. who has some fair bit of grief about all the things that I've done to undermine him and his work. To be on the receiving end of assumptions about intention can be very, very informative.

[24:19]

Unchecked 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. We 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 our capacity to stay in relationship with those we differ with, who we see as being in opposition.

[25:39]

My 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. A story told from, I never can remember, four or five different people's, seven, ah, thank you, seven points of view. Hard to believe that each one of them was describing the same situation.

[26:45]

Some years ago, I was teaching a meditation part of a writing and meditation workshop for a week at Omega Institute. I was doing it initially with Natalie Goldberg, and she was bitten by a dog in the calf of her leg. 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 in the middle of the week, we had Allen Ginsberg. Provocateur par excellence. Towards the end of the morning, he made some outrageous description about some situation that was designed to inflame many of the people in the group.

[27:48]

So by the time we reconvened after lunch, we had, you know, there were 100 people in this workshop, and we had a kind of firestorm in the group. And of course, the most heat was from the people who hadn't been at the morning teaching, but who had 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 rest of the week. listen to each person describe what their experience was, what they'd heard, and what had arisen for them. So we practiced for three days, sitting and listening to each other. And in the end, it was very clear that we had a hundred different stories, a hundred different experiences.

[28:54]

We didn't come to a shared view about the skill or lack of it on Alan'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. What we had was 100 stories. So I would say that as meditators, we also hopefully 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.

[30:06]

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 other's intention begins to dissolve. And we begin to have a much more accurate picture, not only of what the 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.

[31:15]

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 in the way 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. It 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 11th, I heard a lot of people talk about we need to be patient.

[32:42]

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. It 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 don't know. Difficult conversations, how to discuss what matters most.

[33:52]

I made some notes about some things I wanted to include, and of course I probably... Nope, I think that was it. It's always surprising to discover that one's notes bear some resemblance to what one ended up saying. Let me close and then I'd like to have a chance for us to 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 stay in relationship with ourselves when certain emotions arise that we experience as quite challenging.

[35:11]

And the ones that I know about the most in the last week are fear and anger. and in many cases a 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 expressing, but the possibility of being present with without either suppressing or 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 and talking with people I practice with is to give ourselves permission to stay with what is arising

[36:31]

Briefly, for a breath or two. Particularly helpful with fear and anger. And maybe skillful to stay with those emotions 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 with what we didn't know how to be with, we can then do the same thing in sitting down. If we are not able to stay in connection with ourselves with difficult stuff arising, whether it's mental or the mental stories and all the stuff that we can terrify ourselves with about what could happen.

[37:38]

or strong emotions like fear and anger and overwhelm. 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 develop that capacity within ourselves, we will begin then to be able to have that capacity when we're in a situation of conflict with another person. I haven't watched television for a number of years, but last week my husband and I were glued to the television, especially Nightline. and also with Peter Jennings. And what struck both of us was that both of them had the capacity to stay

[38:49]

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 points of view and were, I think, very helpful. in giving us a much wider picture of what's happening and how could such events come to be. So I think we can take maybe 15 minutes for some questions or some points that you'd like to bring up. I hope that's not irregular, but what I'd like to do. Yes?

[40:09]

Well, one thing that comes up for me, the big way to get around this, is that so many years seem to be based in the assumption of amnesis. Of your own innocence? Mm-hmm. So, oh, it's just kind of, you know, they haven't even known. You know, they've been working on the least for, you know, how many centuries, decades, whatever, and just feel so violated after, you know, every, I mean, I can't even find me this kind of person, you know, just working. So I wonder about that. It's a conflict. it's so conflict-based in our spiritual instance. And then, you know, not being able to say, oh, well, that person is acting and saying that, because I actually am sitting there pretending that I need to do anything to accept that. And so, I mean, I think I do that before, and I don't feel good about it, but, you know, watching those kind of relationships do, it makes me more comfortable then about, oh, you see,

[41:22]

sort of prescribing. Yeah. And I think you alluded to that. Now, could you say a little bit more about prescribing a demeanor? What do you mean? I mean that there's a particular way that I can eat or someone else can eat. Now, for me, that they're practicing the difficulty. But that some person is, you know, it's really a Divining it by what appears. Yeah. Well, that's a specific instance of what I mean when I talk about either or. And we're 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. But that's a very good example of the kind of difficulty we get into when we assign good guys and bad guys.

[42:31]

And I think for a lot of people in this country, and I sense this among Buddhist practitioners, kind of, how do I stand in this world I just want to meditate. I have two study groups up in Juneau, Alaska. We meet on the phone once a month and then I go up there a couple times a year and some of them come down here. And in one of the 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 in me about this is the time if we cherish democracy for us to find our voices.

[43:50]

And 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 about what's led to this, to try to begin to be educated about the world that I live in. The Internet is seething with things people are sharing with each other. The first wave was pretty terrific. It's now beginning to be a little more mixed. But one of the sharings that was sent my way was a statement by a rabbi about the Sukkah of Shalom.

[45:02]

The Sukkah is... holes in it so that you can see the stars and so that the wind and rain can come through the roof made of straw and branches and very flimsy as a way of coming back to the experience of our vulnerability and this 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.

[46:05]

Watch out for that either-or thinking. And, you know, the minute you notice it, then bring up, how would I look at this situation, this moment, from the perspective of both and? 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 again. Thank you. Yes? You spoke a little bit about receiving a difficult conversation. Mm-hmm. Well, the perpetrator of one of my favorite practices is actually here.

[47:17]

To listen from the perspective that what the person is saying to me is mostly telling me about their mindstream. that 98% of what the person is saying is a 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 Bette Midler line about, enough about me, let's talk about you. What do you think about me? And you know, in the Buddha's teachings, the deep core of suffering is identified as self-cherishing or self-clinging, either negatively or positively.

[48:20]

Okay. 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 16th century who said, what the self describes, describes the self? But I like the 98% rule myself. Same statement, really. 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.

[49:26]

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 what they're afraid of. And there's some connection that can happen. You know, there's a category of use of pronouns. A friend of mine calls it pronoun disorder. you statements and we statements. And when we're on the receiving end of you always and you never, what do you mean? But to hear even those statements as this person is telling me what is hard for them or what they get upset about or, you know,

[50:29]

one's experience of such a conversation is drastically different from what we're used to when we're 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'll know. So, you know, the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the regardor of the cries of the world, who hears, who listens and sees without reaction and without judgment. is hopefully our inspiration. But the actuality has to come out of how we bring that inspiration into the specifics of how we talk and listen to each other this evening.

[51:38]

It's got to come back into the specifics of what we actually do and say and listen to. Brenda Uland has, I can't even remember now the name of her book, but there's one chapter in it 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 the day and night. And she said, eventually, he turned and said, and how are you?

[52:39]

And she talked about, for somewhat suspicious motives, perhaps, becoming the 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 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 in the other person's shoes. So, thank you. about the people who are in prison and you mentioned that they look at their credit cards or they look at chronic effects of what their workers' actions were.

[53:47]

I would wonder, I feel that that is, to look at someone's chronic effects and their negative implications in the future, that to me is just bendin'. That's not the tone of what I hear from people in those situations at all, but more their 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... whiff of vengeance in the description that I've read and the descriptions that I've heard. And remarkably, from talking, for example, to some of the young nuns who've been imprisoned in the prison in Lhasa, and in some cases gone through really horrific torture. Their ability to stay connected with themselves and with their torturers and guards is one of the most remarkable instances of the human capacity that I've ever encountered.

[55:08]

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 nuns. 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 meets with any of the Tibetans who come out. And there was a kind of newspaper wall in the center of the upper McLeod Gange where you'd have statements pasted on the wall. And these nuns had drawn pictures of the different kinds of torture that they'd gone through. Extraordinary. I mean, really hard to imagine. So I took photographs of the drawings, brought them home and made copies and sent them to everyone in Congress.

[56:19]

Probably didn't even look at them. They're pretty hard to look at. But to actually see what these women had gone through and to then listen to them and to see the studies that had 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. John Avedon wrote a book called In Exile from the Land of the Snows. And in that book, there's a chapter about Dr. Chodak, who was the Dalai Lama's doctor, who was in a prison camp for 18 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.

[57:27]

And he said, I never knew who would still be alive the next morning. extraordinary circumstances and he, through his Dharma 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 something we can train for. We can actually train for. Marcia? I was just thinking about this issue of assumption and how, for myself, I think what's been interesting as we've been talking, thinking about how, when I work with people and I, and they talk about the pain or suffering that they're in, and their reactions to things that for themselves seem irrational to them.

[58:41]

Yeah. And they're troubled by that and feel no bliss and all kinds of things. And my assumption that I share with them is that even though it's not right now, my assumption is that there's some good reason to feel that way and it's just a matter of finding out how it is accurate that it would feel that way. Right. And so given what you're talking about, that approach, I was thinking about what to write to mark their life, what to write with all this struggle, because I do feel it's important. I'm sitting here, but as I'm listening to you, I'm going to ask them how they understand the motivation of these acts. How are they holding them?

[59:42]

Yeah. And is anybody thinking about that at all? There's a piece that a friend of mine sent a few days ago, and then since then I've gotten it six or seven more times, by an Afghani who lives here in California, has lived in the United States for 35 years. It's a remarkable piece. His name is Answari. And he is responding to this statement, let's bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age. And it's a piece which is a kind of assumption buster. And when we're open to learning about what we don't understand, things begin to come up. part of my work, I can't, I still try to do some work, but I have to stay as done as I can be.

[60:45]

And I think I understand what's happening. You know, there's a meditation that I've been doing for a number of years, 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 practice, is in step one. And 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 bloop up when you do that are very different from the insights about causes and conditions when you try to find them intellectually.

[61:57]

And I think that that stance of being dumb, in a way, is very much in service of, if I'm present, 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. I know I've heard rumor that you are going to get up at some hideously early hour in the morning. Maybe one more question. Yeah. Yeah. When I heard about the bombing, I was sad, but I was in shock. And I, in a way, felt a little bit out of sync because I had been shot.

[63:02]

And what came up with me is, You know, I remember all this stuff came up to me. So I appreciate very much your talk about history. I'm talking about history because I think that we are right now experiencing the consequences of not knowing history very well these days. And I think it puts us in a very difficult position. You know, the kind of innocence that you were talking about is much easier to rest in when you don't no history. So thank you for bringing it up. Thank you all very much. Take good care of yourselves and practice staying in relationship when you can't imagine how you would do it.

[64:08]

You might be surprised. Thank you.

[64:13]

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