Well, good morning. Morning. Nice to see everybody. I don't get to come very often on Saturdays. I'm usually away. So, when I get the opportunity to speak in this forum, it's a big deal for me. And I find my mind a little bit like a whole litter of puppies, you know, with these ideas rushing around. And if you've ever gone to choose a puppy, it's a little overwhelming to know what to choose or how to choose. So you kind of stand still in the middle of these puppies and they do what they do and then they start playing with each other and then one puppy kind of comes up and sits on your foot and so then you know you've been puppied and you have a puppy and you're ready. So my puppy today came to me not in the happiest way because I'd like to talk a little bit about O.J.

[01:11]

Simpson and the impact that it's been having on all of us and what it has to do with our practice. Karen and I were together when the dramatic events of the white bronco racing around California started, my husband was trying to watch a basketball game. And I found myself both fascinated and repelled in this relationship with this very important event because it symbolizes so much, I think, for so many people. So I thought, I've been thinking about why it is that I'm both fascinated and also have this need to say, oh yeah, but it's not that big a deal. And yet it keeps coming back up and so many people have been thinking about it and so much attention has been given to it.

[02:18]

Well, I mean, the obvious reasons for our fascination appear. I mean, this is a celebrity You know, we're kind of fascinated. We don't have kings in this country, so celebrities will have to do for people that we idealize. But then there's so many unspoken things. I couldn't help but think, when I kept seeing the images of O.J. and his departed wife, of the racial tension that was involved in showing this black man and this white woman this African-American man and this white woman. So it's sort of a shadow side of our culture, this fear of what will happen if we mix races. So I think that has fueled a lot of the intense interest. But more and more I've been thinking about the heroic dimensions of it as well.

[03:26]

about what it is to be a hero and to not be a hero. And what came up for me and my fascination with this, the strongest. I mean, there's also one other political issue, which is the feminist side of it, and the notion of domestic violence. But what came up for me personally was my own fears about wrecking my life. And sometimes I work really hard, as everyone does, in living, to live a life that's meaningful and that accomplishes something. We have this idea, and it's certainly a big part of our practice, you know, Dogen saying, you know, you're born in the morning, you die in the evening, what are you going to do during the day? And every now and then I'll think, but what if, what if I back out of my driveway and run over a child? You know, does that wreck my whole life?

[04:32]

Does it mean everything that I've lived for is thrown away? And so for me, and I think for many, this notion that some action will erupt and turn everything you've lived for away, and you're not the person that you thought you were, who you are, but something happens. So when I think about this fear, I think about, this is a pretty irrational fear I have, but, so it comes from something very deep and primitive, and in psychology it's called the shadow. So today I'd like to talk about our shadow, And it's been interesting for me since this puppy found me, the shadow, to see how much confirmation of that. There's that new movie out, The Shadow, and it says, I'd always wondered where the expression, the shadow knows, comes from.

[05:38]

And then I read the review of the movie and it said, who knows the evil that lurks in the hearts of men The shadow knows. So that's the shadow that I wanted to talk about. Actually we could leave one word out of it, who knows, the evil part. Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows. And I wanted to talk about what the shadow is, but how we form the shadow. And, or everyone has a shadow. How we form our own shadow. and what it's like, what it looks like, how it acts, both inside and how other people perceive it, and how our practice affects our shadow and how we work with it. And I have notes so that my puppies don't get away from me today, get out of place or pee on the floor.

[06:41]

And thinking about, is there really such a thing as a shadow? I was looking around for confirmation of this, and I thought in our own practice, when we make these vows during the Bodhisattva ceremony, all my ancient twisted karma, born of body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow This is a way of acknowledging something in ourselves that we've really turned away from. And also, the other night, I was walking on Telegraph Avenue, rather late for me, and it's about 10 o'clock, and the shadow figures were all out, with heads part shaved and many earrings piercing all parts, and it looks a little bit like Halloween at that hour. but one of the shadow figures saw me and I was his shadow because he looked at me and said, you're normal, which would have been one of his worst fears.

[07:55]

So the shadow is different to each of us because I was looking at this person as my shadow and he was seeing me as his. And the shadow is something that we don't, see so directly, because there's an absence of light where there's shadows. But we see where it's been, you know, and we see it as it passes over things. There's a Zen folk saying, which is, in the dark, I've lost sight of my shadow. I've found it again by the fire I've lit. So, This talk is a little bit about how we lose sight of our shadow and the practice, the fire, the practice that we light to find it again. So in talking about how the shadow comes to be, I don't want to get too psychological about it, but Joko Beck has this to say, as young children we discovered that life wasn't always the way we wanted it to be.

[09:08]

And things often went wrong from our personal point of view. We didn't want anyone to oppose us. We didn't want to experience unpleasantness. And so we created a defensive reaction. We made a decision that ordinary life, life as it actually is, is unacceptable to us. And we try to counter what's happening. So maybe we felt like we were too talkative, or maybe we felt like we were too shy, or maybe we noticed that when we did something in particular it made our mothers crazy. But she goes on to say that all of this is inevitable. Our parents were not totally enlightened beings or Buddhists, but other beings and events contributed too. As young children, we were not mature enough to handle difficulties wisely, so we freaked out or we withdrew. From that time on, life was not lived for the sake of living life, but for the sake of this defensive system, and she calls the defensive system the baseboard.

[10:16]

And the shadow was only one part of our defensive system, but it's a pretty substantial anchor for our defenses. It's guarded very fiercely, because it's important to understand that our very survival as children depended on being able to get rid of this scary material. We were convinced that if we didn't, we wouldn't be loved, and love to us as children was very much what our survival depended on. And so we banished some things from ourselves. And not only did we banish some of ourselves, but we banished the memory of the banishment, so it's really forgotten. It's a real blind spot, and it's funny because others can often see it, but we can't so easily.

[11:17]

And I'm a psychologist, and I can tell in that moment of therapy when I'm working with someone's shadow, I'm right on the blind spot, and I know Margaret knows the blind spot from testing vision, you know, there's a point when you're watching the dot and all of a sudden it disappears, it's gone into some zone that's very dark. And in therapy when that happens, I'll say something quite directly to a person and they'll look at me and say, I know you just said something, but I didn't hear it. or, I didn't understand it, or I can't remember what you just said, but somehow, something just went by. And, if any, I'm sure some of you have been in therapy, I've been in therapy, and you know what that experience is like. You see your therapist's mouth moving, and you know some sound is coming out, but it just went into your blind spot, and that also is evidence of the shadow. So, that's kind of how it was formed, and

[12:19]

I'd like to talk about how it works for us or how it might have worked for O.J. It's something about the hidden side of ourself, but it's also the relationship of this hidden side of ourself to us and how we use it. I read an interesting quote about the self recently in a book review. What we call I The self that we have spent a lifetime making and remembering is really a story that we tell ourselves and that is reflected back to us by the world. When both versions of the narrative are in the sink, you have sanity. When they aren't, you have madness. And now I'm sort of getting into another level of complexity with the shadow and the relationship to others in how we're perceived because we're protecting or carrying this pouch or we have this shadow behind us that's maybe like a dragon's tail that does these things that we can't see but sometimes affect others quite noticeably.

[13:31]

And for most of us other people see our shadow and we're a little bit perturbed by this. For example, when I come up to speak The reason my heart starts to beat and my mouth gets a little dry is because I'm afraid you're going to see my shadow. And if I would be perfectly comfortable in being up here with all my puppies and everything else hanging out, that wouldn't happen. So I think it explains one of the reasons why public speaking is up there with some of the three top fears that we have, you know, dying and so on and so on. There's a real... So on and so on. Almost those biggies. So, the idea that others can sometimes see our shadow is very disconcerting to us. We all go for job interviews or we'll have interactions with people and we think we're being so perfectly pleasant.

[14:37]

And they don't like us. And we're not sure what showed or what came out. Um, for most of us, we get a lot of feedback about our shadow. Um, I sure do from, uh, having raised kids. And, um, from my husband and, um, from everyone I work with about, you know, being pushy or bossy or, uh, all these things that, but I was just, you know, and, and the interesting thing is that to the extent that you're aware of your shadow, um, and you let it be part of who you are, people are comfortable with you. And to the extent that you push it down and are not aware of it, it comes out your pores like an odor. And people react to it and, you know, have a really bad reaction to it. They really, because in a sense they're right, because you don't know what you're doing. And there's a sense that they don't, you know, want to get close to you with this bad odor.

[15:40]

we get a lot of feedback when we're in this situation of not being aware of our shadow. And it reminds me of the fact that this is just one universe. I mean, we have laws, physical laws, laws of physics that also apply very nicely to psychology. And I think that it's really just one science, of course. One of them is that matter is neither created nor destroyed, and that's the truth about psychological matter too. So it all is there. So we need to, in some way, find a way of shining this light, to find our shadow, and how we do that. And it's very interesting how we do that, because we often shine the light outside of ourselves, looking for the problem that created this discomfort, and don't shine it back on ourselves.

[16:47]

There's a really wonderful Sufi story about this. I don't know if you're aware of these Sufi tales about Nasruddin, but I've always loved them. And one of them is about somebody comes upon him looking under a lamppost for some keys. What are you doing? Well, I'm looking for my keys." And he said, well, did you lose them here? And he said, no, but this is the only place that the light is. So that's where I'm looking. And so it's so much easier for us to look outside of ourselves for the source of problems. And it's so interesting whenever we get into a bind with someone to look back into ourselves. The problem with someone like O.J., and this is, I think, the part of this story that makes me so sad, is that so many people have to take responsibility for not giving him feedback about his temper.

[17:54]

I don't know, you know, none of us know what really happened with the incident that's at hand now, but clearly there were some problems in controlling temper earlier on. And it becomes so important to us to have heroes. And if there's such a thing as a hero, it means that there's such a thing as a person who doesn't have a shadow. I mean, in a sense, that's who they are. You know, they're bathed in light and good fortune. And there is no shadow. So for us to have heroes helps us to distance ourselves from our own shadow. I mean, it's the very same process So there were so many people who could have in some way helped him to integrate parts of himself. But fortunately for most of us ordinary heroes and heroines, we get a lot of feedback about our shadows. And it's not so dramatic.

[18:56]

But we continue to ponder why others have hurt our feelings. We become angry, cynical, falsely nice. and that's how our shadow trips us up. Let's see if I have some more about it. I can't understand why somebody said that. I can't believe he did that. I don't understand where he's coming from. I hate that person, or I hate that kind of person. These are all quotations that come straight from the shadow side. So, That's how the shadow works for us and with others. And now I want to talk a little bit about the other side of that quotation, in the dark I've lost sight of my shadow, but I found it again by the fire I've lit. And I've talked some about the banishment of the shadow.

[19:58]

And our practice is the light that we light to see this shadow. It isn't why we practice, it's just something that happens as a result. And I think if we consider our practice as not having a particular purpose, but an exploration or a coming to our fundamental nature, part of the terrain we travel in understanding our fundamental nature and fundamental meaning goes through this terrain of the parts of ourselves that we've disposed of because we are coming to terms with reality as it is in understanding our fundamental nature. So I wanted to talk about the ways that we practice and our Zazen and how that affects our relationship to our own shadow. Such a wonderful folk expression shadow that's been adopted by psychology. It was such a taunt during childhood to be afraid of your own shadow and it's such a true statement.

[21:04]

So one of the things that we practice with is composure and acceptance. So as we sit or as we practice here together we are a physical manifestation of composure and groundedness. And as we sit in our Zazen, breathing in and breathing out, this is a manifestation of a calm, composed mind. And in this calm, composed mind, for those of you who sit Zazen, we have many puppies, and worse, lurking, that emerge during the course of our practice. and during the course of our Zazen. And the way that we manifest acceptance and composure as we sit changes our relationship to what we're afraid of.

[22:06]

I remember sitting Zazen early on. It wasn't my first Zazen and I had done some cooking and I came back to the Zendo and I sat down on the cushion and as I began to sit A fear emerged, oh my God, I left the stove on. And then the fear really took off. Oh my God, the stove is on. It's going to burn up what's on it. Nevermind lunch, but it's going to burn up everything. It's going to burn up the entire kitchen. It's going to burn down the entire Zen Center and everybody's going to hate me. And I sat there in this composed state. hallucinating that, you know, there was this fire starting behind me and everybody would hate me on account of it. So I got to really contact maybe one of my fears about being hated or not being loved and to just sit with it. And I guess lunch has arrived because I'm still here and haven't been driven out.

[23:12]

But another time I sat and I became completely convinced from the time I sat down on my cushion that I had cancer. I don't know why I mean my stomach gurgled in a certain way and the fear just leapt up and I was sure that I had cancer. I had to get up off my cushion immediately and go to the doctor and this is another one of my fears that my body in some way is going to attack me and I do me in, which of course it is anyway, but that's another story. It's another, that's another Zen talk. But somehow I have this idea, and I think it came from very early on, the shame, the part, you know, the way parents enforce shame in their children, you know, about their bodies, that, you know, my body is going to do something very bad at some point. So I have to deal with that, and it comes up, and maintaining the composure and acceptance as these fears emerge,

[24:13]

is a very important part of our practice. So we manifest composure and acceptance in our physical body. And that brings me to the next point about our practice, which is the body-mind awareness which comes up. My body was sending me some signals which came up as this fear of cancer, but I'll tell you another story about how it works. It's a little related actually, a good thing. When I was beginning to practice as a psychologist, my first choice of internships was presented to me on a piece of paper such as this, and there were many columns of names of agencies, maybe five, maybe ten names in each. And so I started reading these names and I got to one of them, battered women's alternatives, and it was sort of right in the middle of the list, and my stomach dropped from about here to about here as if I were in an elevator.

[25:28]

That's weird. I mean, it wasn't like there were pictures, you know, gory pictures, I mean, but that was the response that I had. I go, I guess I would never want to work there. So I'm no dummy. I said, well, I'm going to try reading this list again. So I started from the other side of the paper, and I read back, and I sneaked up on that row. And sure enough, when I read battered women's alternatives, my stomach went from about here to here again. And I thought, this is pretty interesting. I better go there and interview. So I did. And they hired me as an intern. And it was kind of a long drive, and I was kind of curious about why I was doing it, but this was pretty interesting, this body-mind response. So I started the training and I was in the middle of the training and one of the trainings, most of it is women working together, but one of the trainings was given by a man who went around and gave speeches on the subject. And during the training, he went into role and he became the batterer in the training.

[26:36]

And he started, his body language changed and he looked out and he said, And I started to cry. And I was totally shocked because I knew I was in a training. And I said to the instructor, my supervisor, you know, what was that? And she said, well, you know, women are afraid of men. There's this and there's that in our society, in the patriarchy. And I said, OK. So about a month later, because I said to her, you know, why would I have such a strong reaction? My husband doesn't hit me. My father didn't hit my mother. I don't know anybody who does this, but this is intensely personal. She said, so she gave me the spiel. But when my mother came to see me about a month or two later, I was talking about the possibility of our home becoming a safe house. so that women who were fearful could come and stay with their children.

[27:41]

And she looked at me and she said, why would you want to do that? Now, my mother was widowed when she was about 30 and I was six. She says, why would you want to do that? These women could take care of themselves. I took care of myself. And I said, well, yeah, I mean, you were widowed and you supported yourself, but had you been beaten? I mean, you hadn't been beaten, is what I said. And she just hung her head. And that, you know, since I had been in this training, I knew that meant something. So I waited until my husband and kids were gone, and I took her in the kitchen, and I said, are you telling me that, you know, my father hit you? And her reaction was such a classic reaction of an abused woman, because I take things my mother says, you know, it's not always true, but her reaction was so true. She said, never with a fist. which is so, you know, well never so he broke a bowl or never so he drew blood, never with a fist, he never hit me with a fist.

[28:45]

So that means she wasn't abused in her mind. She said, but he would kick me, he would push me out of bed with his feet, he would do this, he would do that. And apparently by the time I was four, He had told her over and over again that she could never leave him because he would never let her have the children. But when I was four, she came to him and said, I'm leaving. He said, but you can't have the children. She said, no, but you can. And she left. And she was gone for a while and off on an adventure with a girlfriend in Las Vegas. And he came and found her and, you know, they reconciled and he never touched her again. So by the time he died when I was six, I had forgotten everything. And only reading on that piece of paper and feeling my stomach drop put me in touch with a very important part of myself.

[29:45]

And this is something that happens in very quiet moments when we allow ourselves the space to let our memories unfold. And I've always wondered about that side of myself because I freak out very easily if I'm physically restrained. If my husband is sort of playing, you know, play fighting or holding me in some way, it's like this. And we never can understand why. So there's a way that that gets encoded in your body that you forget. You know, you banish it and then banish the banishment. And yet, it's neither created nor destroyed, it's there somewhere. And you find it in these quiet moments, in having the courage or in having given up the protection, this reality which we've denied our self-access to re-emerges.

[30:49]

So it's a very important part of our practice. The other part of our practice, that I think is very important is the fact that we are in a Sangha and that we practice with others and that they see us. And there's another wonderful Zen quotation which I tormented Ron Nestor with during the Shuso ceremony which is, the mind of the person before you is a mirror. What is the reflection of your mind in it? So we have all these mirrors around us and interestingly enough the cloudy parts that are reflected in this mirror by the way people interact with us help us to see this shadow side. Another thing that helps us is in the letting down of these boundaries between ourselves and others that happens inevitably

[31:52]

during Sesshin because we're so exhausted and we're in so much pain we don't have the energy to keep the defensive system up, to keep those boundaries up. And so what comes out needs to come out. What we say and how we act and how we speak is right in front of us. And we don't have the same restrictions or the same barriers in place to hold it back. So, I want to go back to how all this might relate to O.J. and our relationship to him and his difficulties. First of all, because it's so dark, we can't see this shadow, and our attention becomes focused on something outside of ourselves. Unless we understand this confusion, we tend to repeat the pattern. Discomfort leads to an angry response. This sequence becomes so well-practiced that it's confusing.

[32:57]

In other words, someone outside of ourself touches us in this very wounded, hidden area, and rather than feel the pain and then watch the anger come to defend the pain, what we feel is immediately angry. And I wonder, you know, in discussing this, what the shadow is that O.J. may carry. And I think about his vulnerability and his fear of abandonment, somehow a loss of power, which is so well hidden by such a strong persona, and how that can be evoked only by those that we love so much and that we count on for affirmation. So, when that shadow somehow is touched or emerges of this fear, the covering of it is so instantaneous, we don't feel the fear or the pain, we feel the anger or the withdrawal by which we pull away from it.

[34:08]

The second thing I wanted to say is that any painful goobered up mess that we have, any wreck that we have inside of ourselves, or outside, needs our attention to heal. This calm, accepting attitude by which we accept these dissonant parts of ourselves is like the balm that heals these wounds. It's the same acceptance that we have of O.J. and ourselves in the same light. And finally it's quite obvious that Zazen does have some relationship to exploration of the shadow. And it's certainly not the purpose, but it is a terrain that we need to pass through to settle the self upon the self. So I have a poem, actually it's kind of a long poem that I wanted to read that I thought about as I was preparing for this talk.

[35:15]

But the poem is so powerful that I want to talk about it first and read it and end with it. And the poem is called Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich. And it's a poem about diving, scuba diving. But it's a wonderful metaphor for our own exploration of our pain as well as our exploration of the dark And our process in Zazen, for example, in the poem, she talks about the black wetsuits that we put on to go diving in. And she talks about the rungs of the ladder which we descend, and I think about the tan that we sit on. And she talks about darkness that we encounter as we descend And I think about that process in ourselves as we descend in our zazen.

[36:19]

And she talks about all those beings that we encounter underneath, you know, which is disowned parts of ourselves, Buddhas and ancestors and all those that are joining us in this journey. And she talks about the wounds and the wrecked ship that's down there. that needs to be explored and emerging. So I'll read it. First, having read the Book of Myths and loaded the camera and checked the edge of the knife blade, I put on the body armor of black rubber, the absurd flippers, the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner, but here alone. There is a ladder.

[37:22]

The ladder is always there, hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise, it's a piece of maritime floss, some sundry equipment. I go down, rung after rung, and still the oxygen immerses me, the blue light, the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me. I crawl like an insect down the ladder, and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue, and then it is bluer, and then green, and then black. I am blacking out, and yet my mask is powerful. It pumps my blood with power. The sea is another story. The sea is not a question of power. I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now it is easy to forget what I came for.

[38:27]

Among so many who have always lived here, swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides, You breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the plank of something more permanent than fish or weed. The thing I came for, the wreck, and not the story of the wreck. The thing itself and not the myth. The drowned face always staring toward the sun, the evidence of damage, worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty. The ribs of this disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place and I am here.

[39:31]

The mermaid whose dark hair streams black The merman in his armored body, we circle silently about the wreck. We dive into the hold. I am she. I am he. Whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes. Whose breasts still bear the stress. Whose silver, copper, vermal cargo lies obscurely inside barrels, half wedged and left to rot. We are the half-destroyed instruments. that once held to a course. The water-eaten log, the fouled compass. We are, I am, you are, by cowardice or courage, the one who find our way back to this scene. Carrying a knife, a camera, a book of myths in which our names do not appear. I'd like to offer that poem to all of us who have made the journey diving into the wreck, and especially to O.J.

[40:42]

and the family at this time. And I invite you to ask some questions. Thank you for that talk. There's a lot to think about after you went to seven. I hope I can remember a whole lot. But I'm glad that you said something about OJ because I think it's affected a lot of us in a lot of different ways. And I don't follow football or sports or heroes, that kind of thing, but I agree. toss a heart for six days and was just driving back up and turned on the radio and heard that during the chase.

[41:43]

And my first reaction, of course, was to go get my husband back because it was quite a shock to come back to that. Second reaction was to just turn it off and not have anything to do with it. And that became impossible. I noticed that I started thinking about the things that you brought up, which was how your life can, how a person's life can change in an instant, in an absolute instant, and what happens and what does it become. I know I look in the papers and I look at his face on television and try to imagine what must be going on inside there and how can someone look like they looked last month, and their path is happening. And I also saw some people who used to be great fans of the Jews and think that he was a wonderful person, turning now and cheering what something was against him.

[42:52]

I'm not sure I understand what that's about, but probably has a lot to do with the shadow Yeah, I think so. I think it becomes, if we get a hint of it outside of ourselves, it's like stomping it down, you know, destroying it in the evidence, you know, that there is such a possibility. Anything else? Yeah. I was trying to say what you said about how psychological material is neither created nor destroyed. And I understand how it's not destroyed, but what does it mean that it's not created? Well, we don't make it. It's just reality. We make up a story about it, but it occurs. I mean, some circumstances occur. So there's, that's all. Does that make sense? It sounds like a Zen answer.

[43:54]

Am I at the Zen center or what? Am I allowed? You can't snivel off that way. I can't get away with it. Well, I guess what I mean, I don't like to be too psychological since I am a psychologist, but what I think is that life occurs, you know, there's all these series of circumstances that intersect and in a sense it's a Zen story about the empty boat the boat that's going down the stream and it's coming right at you and you're swearing and carrying on, and then you see that the boat is empty, that's what I mean about not being creative. Does that make any sense? Good. Yeah. Well, I think what was said about enjoying or watching the destruction of a hero is so prevalent in this culture in particular with our politicians and with love to raise them up and tear them down. Yeah, it's a kind of a protection, this cynicism and this destruction.

[45:00]

It's like we've been disappointed, you know, our wanting to have goodness, you know, has been disappointed over and over again. Like our parents. Yeah. And so we have this need to say there is no goodness, see, and so we struggle with it. Well, it was interesting. Yesterday I saw, maybe some other people have seen this, a man was wearing a shirt that said, OJ is still my hero. And I thought, you know, it's fascinating how bumper stickers and t-shirts and things come out so quickly after an event. But I thought that was a very strong statement he was making, obviously, to all this bashing that's been going on. So, I mean, there's people who will immediately tear him down, and there's other people who Right. Yeah, there's two parts of that. I was talking to a friend of mine, who's a psychologist, last night, who happens to be African-American, and she was saying that she has no objectivity in this, because, as we discussed it, the wound that's been inflicted on the African-American man is so touchy, and it's so prevalent,

[46:18]

comes up so quickly for her in this instance. She can't relate. Well, I also think about how if there is so many different sides to this whole event, and the racial part is, of course, very sticky and messy for us in this country. If a white man had killed his girlfriend or his ex-wife, even being a celebrity, he would not be having to represent all white men. No way would he carry that burden. And an African-American man is somehow having to represent it. Yeah, that's what's been so fascinating because there hasn't really been a word said about the fact that this was an interracial marriage. They keep showing the pictures and there's so much heat around it. But nobody ever says it. And that's what brought up for me this whole existence of our own cultural shadow and fears of you know, interracial marriage and fears of the African-American rage destroying us in some way, you know.

[47:25]

It's part of our cultural shadow, things that we've tried to push underneath and that we won't even name now in this. But I think this notion of wearing this shirt with O.J. 's name on it also brings up for me this whole process of destroying him or removing him in some way is the same process by which his own shadow could loom and become so destructive. It's the denial and the lack of integration. I was thinking back to when I was in college, in undergraduate school, because he was my hero. And over the years, the stories about what he did, how he acted, and the loss of other heroes.

[48:36]

And a woman with whom I used to be friends brought up the word disillusion. And she was quite intent on tearing down I was quite intent on tearing down anyone in the public eye who might have been admired. And it really bothered me a lot. And then I thought, well, there is something to be said for disillusion, that the other side of that, and she pointed that out, is illumination, is seeing clearly. And that it's not about just tearing down and destroying shoving something aside that is about to include it. Somehow, I haven't been as affected by what went on with OJ. But somehow, I guess I lost some feeders or maybe some of the need for them. But there's still that pain about society turning on anybody.

[49:42]

Yeah, the disillusion It's an interesting, I mean, it also sounds like dissolution. Yes. I mean, it's a breaking down, and it's the ability to tolerate, you know, some of these undesirable traits that we've called undesirable, and these heroic qualities in the same person. You know, it's the ability to do that, and psychologists talk about this. It's, you know, we reach a stage, you know, where we can do this, where the child, you know, it's all good and bad. And to the extent that we mature as a culture, we allow this. And clearly, with Clinton, we're going through the same process right now, too. You know, how it's possible for someone to be a leader and still be a schmuck in other ways. And we're getting a lot of examples of that. Well, I think, for me, it goes back, I can see very clearly, to the pedestal that my father was on.

[50:44]

And it's still to some extent, and it's so It was so painful to realize, to acknowledge the things he did that weren't good. Yeah. And still love him. And still love him. Yeah. Yeah. So far, we've talked about Ho Jang and the individual, but the LAP, the Los Angeles police, with their overindulgence of the situation, not arresting him right away, and so on. They had a shadow, too, because of the reason. The bright light of the celebrity. institutions can also have shadows and how that impinges on individual systems. Yes, well that's our cultural shadow and the awe, first of all, could this be about this person? But also some people would say their handling of this whole matter has also had another shadow side in that it's, you know, tried to incriminate him and so on and so on. There's one more person in the back. Well, there's O.J.

[51:45]

Simpson right now. and there was, I don't know, Bobbitt, and Jean Fisher, and there was Tonya Harding, and it seems to me that part of what's happening is that there are events that happen in our society, some of which are trivial, some of which are horrifying, some of which are who knows what to make of them. But they're ceased upon and they become the event of the moment. And everything in the media is directed towards it. And I look at these events and I don't understand why this is. I don't understand why they've taken on such a tremendous importance in everybody's life. And it seems to me that out of all the things that are happening around us, certain events are ceased upon And they become a distraction, they're the distraction of the moment, and they're what people read about and talk about and obsess about and whatnot about, and all they are are distractions.

[53:00]

And it's not necessarily anything that has anything to do with most of our lives. There are a lot of things a lot closer to our own selves that we could be looking at, I don't also understand the concept of trying to draw these grand symbolic lessons out of events which are unique and in some instances pretty trivial, but somehow or other they're held up to us as a mirror of what is wrong with our society. I think that The media, at the very least, is overblowing a lot of particular events that they select out of the mass of available events. And people who either don't have a life or don't want to look at their life get all captivated by these things.

[54:02]

I mean, they have whole forums on the internet where people talk electronically about these things. And I just see us getting more and more and more removed from the reality of our own lives that ought to be where we're supposed to be. Yes, I think that you raise the shadow maybe of this very talk, which is maybe, you know, as Freud says, maybe a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, you know, doesn't stand for anything. But, I agree completely with you on the notion that these events are a distraction from ourself. And it's interesting, the ones you've raised, you know, with the Hanya Harding and Lorena Bobbitt and now O.J., they do represent an emergence of the shadow in a very dramatic way. And we love to, as I said in my talk, look out there for something we need to look inside for. So I agree with you completely.

[55:04]

Thanks.

[55:09]

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