I have some things in mind to talk to you about this morning, and I decided not to bring notes. I thought that might help me remember to speak from my heart. And I was also thinking that it might help if we Some of us have met together as women and we learned this chant that's homage to Tara, which is a female Buddha, which, I mean, you don't have to know the deeper meaning. And I thought maybe if we just did that for a couple minutes together might help us all. If that's the kind of thing you hate, please bear with the rest of us. So, does anybody feel I think there's enough of us here that know it that we can carry on. I think maybe I'll take this off while we do that. Okay. Oh, is that about right?

[01:05]

Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Svaha Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Svaha Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Svaha Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Isvaha Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Isvaha Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Isvaha Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Saham Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Saham Om Tare Tu Tare Tu Re Saham

[02:27]

Thank you. What I was thinking about talking about today is various kinds of ignoring. Various kinds of ignoring. We have a, I was talking a couple months ago with a, we've made friends with a man who's a, he's from Chicago, but he's been living as a Thai monk in Thailand for a long time, I'm not sure how long, but, and he's also interested in the Enneagram, and I'm not going to give a talk about the Enneagram this morning, but he's working on ways to use the Enneagram from a Buddhist perspective, and he showed me some ways to work with my particular point in the context of practice.

[03:43]

The Enneagram has these nine personality types, and it's not so much personality types as almost like neuroses, you know, your sort of way that you construct yourself, you know, in a defensive way. And my point is five, the observer, and what we like to do is we like to withdraw from what's happening and find a safe, you know, place to observe everything from. And so my assignment was to answer, you know, the sentence, how do I withdraw by? blank and then keep filling it in. you keep doing it and you sort of get into the gunky stuff after a while. But sort of what I got to was the rock bottom, I'm sure, you know, there's probably more, but, you know, sort of like I withdraw by ignoring what's happening outside of me and lying about what's happening inside.

[04:46]

And then, of course, under the lying is actually ignoring too. I'm ignoring what's happening inside and saying whatever I think I should be feeling, you know? So it's really about ignoring what's happening. And... He has... Let's see, I'm trying to figure out all the different things I could say about this. So, like an example of what I began to notice that I would do, and I'm sure some of you who know me have experienced this, I noticed that I would leave in the middle of... I sometimes leave in the middle of a conversation, you know, physically, not just that I go somewhere, but it's like I reach some, you know, critical mass of contact, and then I just leave, I just walk away.

[05:52]

And I'm not so aware that, you know, it's just, it's, you know, so my effort is to just, and because I keep leaving, it's like I can't stay, so what I keep trying to do is keep coming back. So my effort is just to keep coming back into my body, and I think a lot of my practice up till now has been to try to you know, stay with what's happening in my body but I've still been ignoring a lot of what was happening outside and so now I'm trying to move into the aspect of being aware of what's happening. And I think for all of you, for all the different Enneagram points what they say is that your attention is drawn towards certain parts of your experience that substantiate your version of who you are and what you, you know, how you construct yourself.

[06:56]

So it's not so much that you need to know your point even in this point of view, but just, you know we all need to come fully alive to the present moment and deal with it. And we tend to pick up from what's happening, pick up the the things that where we can construct ourself from those. And so just to come and sit and look at what's actually happening, and from the Buddhist perspective, we're always ignoring emptiness, we're always ignoring what they call the three marks of existence, which is not-self, impermanence and unsatisfactoriness.

[08:05]

So we're looking at our experience and we're not seeing what's there. we're seeing what we habitually see. So what the Buddha taught is that if you really look deeply, you'll see emptiness, you'll see impermanence. I would have liked to

[09:17]

find a female ancestor that I could have told some stories about. Fortunately, we had Rebecca here yesterday telling stories about female ancestors. But no one sprang into my arms exactly. But a person that I think about a lot is a great model for a Bodhisattva. is Harriet Tubman. I first started, of course I've always heard about Harriet Tubman from a distance, but when my daughter was very early, like first grade, I think she brought, they would every once in a while bring home a little like reading comprehension exercise which was a paragraph about somebody and one time it was about Harriet Tubman and then I think we also had a picture book about Harriet Tubman and I got really interested in her and I checked out some books from the library and read about her. She was someone who always had freedom on her mind.

[10:20]

She was a slave and from a very early age she was really oriented towards freedom. She thought about freedom, she thought about escaping, she wondered if people escaped. And when she was pretty young, I think around eleven or twelve, she Of course, I don't remember exactly the story, but my image is she was in a shed with one of the overseers, and she looked out, and she saw that someone was escaping, a slave was running away. And she started out by just trying to stand in the doorway and hope that he wouldn't notice, but then the overseer did look and notice, and so she tried to block the doorway physically and prevent the person from chasing this person. He hit her over the head with some tool or something, and she was in a coma for several months, I think. She almost died, and she was, I guess, lucky enough to be with her parents there, so she was nursed back to health eventually.

[11:22]

And then it took a long time before she finally was able to escape. I think she was in her late 20s. Until the time that she did what she did, people didn't really know exactly what happened when you escaped. They knew what happened to people who were caught and brought back, but the people who successfully left, they didn't really know. So it was, you know, even scarier, you know, really scary to leave because you didn't really have any idea what was going to happen. So, but I guess there was a word about, you know, each step of the path was, you'd hear about the next step. So at some point someone, a white person, came and saw her in the field and gave her a note about a place she could go as like the first stop.

[12:25]

I think it was quite a while, several years, before she finally saw. And she was someone who really trusted her inner voice. And at some point the inner voice said, you know, yeah, this is the time. And she did, she left, she escaped, she successfully went through, you know, all the stages. And I think somewhere like Philadelphia or somewhere was place where when you got to that point you knew you were really taken care of by the system then. And they took down your narrative of your story and helped you find a place. And I think a lot of people went to Canada. But she immediately thought, wow, if I went and helped people, it would be so much easier because I know the way. I've done it. So she immediately began to think about going back secretly and contacting slaves.

[13:39]

I think she was thinking initially about her family members and friends, but also she had to think about who could do it, you know, who could have the physical and mental stamina to succeed. You know, I'm ashamed to say I can't remember how many trips she did, but it was a lot. It was like twice a year for 20 years or, you know, something like that. It was 20 to 40 to 50 times that she went back pretty much to her area and took a group of five or six slaves out and, you know, she never, I think she had, you know, she had said something like, I never had a train, I never had my train leave the track. You know, she never had anybody caught And I think that, you know, as bodhisattvas, we shouldn't skip that step of saving ourselves.

[14:39]

We don't have to... turn towards ourselves enough to know that the practice is going to save us and to know that we have something to offer others. But, and I also think, you know, if you think about the slaves, anybody that went on to Canada, we feel great about them. That's great. We don't feel bad. We don't feel like, oh, they should have turned around like Harriet and saved people. I mean, we're just totally happy for them. And I think we should also be happy for, this sort of goes against the Bodhisattva ideal, but if we, you know, we could be totally happy just that someone, makes it, you know, but also what a great model she was because she immediately started thinking, wow, and I think actually in practice this is what we do, like even if we have one insight about ourselves, we immediately think, wow, this really helped that this person that I read this book, it really helped and we want to share it with each other.

[15:50]

And she I just liked the way she was balanced between herself and others, you know, saving herself. She was married and her husband was a free man and he thought, this isn't so bad, let's not rock the boat, you know. And she left him and just said, you know, this is not okay, I'm getting out. And she took care of herself, but then she immediately thought about others and how she had the information that could help others. And I also like the way she was balanced between sort of the ending slavery, of course, I'm sure she worked to end slavery, but also let's get some people out too, you know, let's end slavery and let's help anybody we can find right now. So, you know, to whatever extent we are enslaved by our false perception of self,

[16:55]

She's a great, I think she's a great, I think she was a great Bodhisattva and I think about her a lot and feel, get courage from thinking about her. Let's see. I think as women we know what it feels like to be ignored and that part of social oppression is that a certain group has some... part of privilege is that you have the privilege to ignore some other group. And I don't think one is always so aware that that's... the privilege is so completely granted that you're not even aware that you're ignoring anything. You're completely ignoring it. And I think most of us as women, no matter what social level we're at have experienced that in really nitty-gritty ways.

[18:04]

You know, I think either parents, relatives, teachers, bosses, partners we've all experienced that dynamic that wow, you know you didn't quite get that what I said, you know, or you're not really hearing me, you know And I think that we can use that knowledge and also look at the other sides, the places where we have been granted the privilege to ignore others. I was in this group called the Interracial Buddhist Council and it was right at a time when I was particularly frustrated with a man in my life and I remember thinking

[19:08]

almost like we were in the same room together, saying, I can't believe he can't see what he's doing right now. I mean, this is unbelievable. It's like, it's just like he can't see it at all, you know? And then I thought, this thought entered my mind, wow, I wonder if there's anything like that that I'm doing. And my friends in this group were able to, you know, help me see that there were a lot of things like that that I was doing. And I think it's good for us to play that edge as women. Instead of just trying to get people to hear us, we need to look at that other side always, like, wow, how did that feel? I wonder if I'm doing that to anybody. That felt really interesting, having that person totally just shine me on, you know. And, you know, we get these little hints from people too, they talk to us.

[20:16]

Oh, I forgot one of the main things I wanted to say about this thing about the Enneagram. The way this whole thing started, the way this came out was that this monk friend, Santicaro, we were talking about something, someone who meditated and he was like saying something about, it wasn't anybody we knew, but Anyway, I ended up saying something like, God, I can't, you know, and this person's meditated for so long. And he said, Santicaro said, you can meditate for your whole life and not ever get to your core issue, which like really grabbed my attention. And I'm actually not totally sure that's true. But what he said was, you need your peers and your teachers to help you look at these things. And that's why we have Sangha. That's why we try to listen to what each other says. And I was reading this article in the Current Turning Wheel about civil disobedience and civil disobedience is what you have to do when you're being ignored because

[21:27]

because you can't have a dialogue with someone until you can get their attention. And if they've been granted the societal permission to ignore you, it doesn't matter how eloquent you are, how many things you say, you've got to get their attention. And there was a, you know, I think Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail was about this. He received this criticism from people, you know, you should try to do it with dialogue, you should try to talk to people. And he said, that's the whole point, you know. The whole point of civil disobedience is to talk to people. But, you know, if they're ignoring you, you've got to give them some reason to listen. then you can talk. And the whole point with nonviolent civil disobedience is to somehow find some thing you can do that is not harming the other, but yet is getting their attention.

[22:29]

It has to be pretty big, usually. Things kind of have to freeze to a halt. Like, you know, with the bus strike and with Gandhi in India, when someone's operating from this ignoring place, you've got to do something that pretty much ends life as it is known at that time, you know. And then suddenly, oh, wow, yeah, there's somebody there. There's a whole bunch of people who are supporting the system and now that they're not paying for the bus anymore, there's no money for the bus. So I don't know how far I can stretch this analogy, but I think it's good for us to look in our lives and see whether is someone trying to dialogue with us first. Hopefully, if someone's trying to dialogue with us, we'll listen then and they won't be driven towards civil disobedience. Or, you know, parts of our own psyches perhaps.

[23:32]

Parts of your own psyche may be trying to dialogue with you. So, be good to knowing what it's like to be ignored. Be good to Listen to that. And I think that I was thinking suddenly this morning, I thought, oh God, I'm lecturing to these women. It's sort of like beating them up about how they're ignoring things and like, there's something about that didn't quite feel right, you know, like, oh, we got to be really worried about what we're ignoring now, you know, or something. And so let's not do that. But I think, Zazen helps in two ways. One is you slow yourself down enough so that things that you're able to ignore are more likely to enter your consciousness. And also, I believe and I've found that Zazen really gives you something to do with the pain, which is really what's going on

[24:42]

at least in this Enneagram version of how we're ignoring this, we're avoiding pain. There's some pain in the present moment. If we enter the present moment, we're going to have to deal with that pain. And I think that Zazen, I don't understand how this works, but it's something like it makes like each cell able to absorb more pain or something so that you can actually sit and feel something really painful and it won't push you around, even though it's not like you're unmoved by it, it's more like you can take in more. So if you see people sitting, especially for the new people, you might be thinking, God, they're not feeling the pain in their legs that I'm feeling. Or you might be thinking, they're so good at ignoring the pain in their legs, which I can't do, you know, but hopefully it's not that, but that we're learning how to, you know, absorb this pain.

[25:47]

And one quote that I was thinking of, that kept coming into my mind as I was thinking about this talk is, I think it's from some Tibetan text, I'm afraid again, my referencing is... Not the best this morning, but just a suspicion that objects are empty wrecks the seeds of cyclic existence. So I mean translated into, you know, just an inkling that what you're seeing is not the whole story. Just an inkling that you cannot totally believe what you're seeing and hearing because you're filtering it. will undermine the whole project. So you don't have to beat yourself up and try to dig out what it is that you're ignoring.

[26:49]

But more and more, you're gonna have these inklings in your life. I mean, we are gonna have to say goodbye to everybody we love. We don't know when, we don't know how. And how can we ignore that? We ignore that all the time. So, hopefully, the idea behind practice, we turn towards our life and we get these inklings. Oh, maybe it's not quite that way, that way I think it is. And that undermines the whole project. That's it right there. Just, you know, keep letting those in. I hope that there's, yeah, plenty of time. We can have a little discussion here this morning. Does anybody have any questions or want to make any comment? Mary? You touched on something. It's useful to me to remember about women having the experience of being ignored.

[27:54]

For me, that includes my own ignoring of what's happening. So I could be in a meeting and not be listened to. And I wouldn't notice it until maybe much later. Because it hurts. So I just sometimes shove it aside. I was thinking about that. Actually, I'm going to bring that up. What I first was going to say was how much harder it is to ignore it when it's happening to you. And then I thought, I wonder if that's true or not. Because there is this funny dynamic where when you're being ignored, you're seeing all these things that the other people are not seeing at all. But then there is this also aspect where you can tune in enough to that ignoring project to sort of buy in and then not even notice that You're doing it another, yeah, I mean one thing, it's sort of like, Giving what is not given almost, you know, I mean, I think as women we have to learn not to give it away.

[29:10]

And you try dialogue first and then you do civil disobedience. Those are your only two choices. I mean, you know, you shouldn't let this go on because this isn't good for the other person either to be doing. I mean, you know, of course that's really hard. But, you know, I think we need to be thinking that way. It's not good for any of us when this ignoring thing is the thing that's happening. Yes. But couldn't you do civil disobedience the way Martin Luther King did civil disobedience and kind of warped people's lives? Couldn't you do civil disobedience in such a way that the dominant culture would say that's completely inappropriate? They did. That's what they said. I mean, they thought he was inappropriate. They shot him, you know. You do it. It is completely inappropriate to the dominant culture. That's the only way to do it. I think. I don't know, am I wrong? Somebody else want to weigh in here? I think it was inappropriate, don't you think?

[30:10]

What he did? Well, according to the dominant culture. By definition it is, yeah. You said that civil disobedience was a way of getting the attention without doing harm. And I think in that case the dominant culture really felt that Martin Luther King was doing harm. Whose harm? Well, I guess what they mean is, I mean, physical harm to another human being. There's somewhat of a continuum, too, I mean, because I've been in meetings with people that are sort of like-minded, Zen-centered kind of meeting, where that can happen, you know, where a woman will say something and nobody will respond, and a man says the exact same thing five minutes later, and everybody says, oh, what a great idea, and then they're referring to it ten minutes later, and they said what Sammy said, you know, Sammy's idea, da-da-da-da-da. But in that context, you probably don't need to... Practice civil disobedience.

[31:15]

Well, a bomb is not, now, a bomb is not what we're talking about here. No, but even a verbal bomb. Uh-huh. But what you say about not ignoring it seems really important. but that there's some in that context. I think you have to. It's not just, yeah, I mean, you've got to do something. that stops, that the ignorer cannot proceed. That's the only way to do it. I remember once when I was having, really disagreeing with Alan over how much each of us was taking care of our little tiny baby. May Lee said, just hand him the baby and leave for five hours. And I could not do that. But that would have been the civil disobedience that would have stopped what was happening. But it's got to be, you know, that's the thing. I mean, that's what I think Martin Luther was saying, is like, well, we want you to say what you have to say, but don't make us, don't disturb us, you know. And that's, you know, you've got to disturb.

[32:17]

And if your own psyche is working on you, it's going to have to disturb you to get your attention, possibly. Yeah? Helen and then Stephanie. I'm glad I did not come. I've heard you talk before. This is wonderful. It's really great. Thank you. And it's something, you know, you and I and our young group talked about. You know, there are some of us who I'm sure are different numbers on the Enneagram who sort of making waves and confronting and acting out is more natural than not. And maybe that isn't in all situations, and it's very complicated. So I always, when these issues come up, I'm always left thinking how my path has been defined, not to be simply defined.

[33:21]

Because there's somehow It doesn't use the most, it doesn't use the best part of me. My way of doing that has been too simple in some way. So I don't know what else, I'm just sort of thinking about that, but that's always what comes up. that there are other ways that... I mean, and I think about certain situations in my life where it... Again, we're talking politically versus personally, but if I look at the personal example, for me, refusing to tolerate something, which I have never had much trouble telling people, you know, has not really been successful. And it may be that I don't have the full understanding of how you really master using civil disobedience.

[34:32]

Yeah, we don't want to stretch, right. But I mean, I think that also dialogue, maybe in your case, you didn't give dialogue enough of a chance, whereas in the case of the people in the South, they really tried passing law. I mean, they tried an incredible amount of legal, you know, passing laws, talking to people, trying to get... So, I mean, maybe that's the piece that maybe, you know, we shouldn't talk so much about the civil disobedience and more learn how to how to do the dialogue piece. I think, Stephanie? I really appreciated your insight into looking at how you ignore the things that are going on within you. And really thinking about what you said, I think that's where the dialogue really starts. It comes from, for myself, what I happen to be ignoring. Because if I can see someone

[35:35]

some level understand that ignoring to be able to recognize that it exists. So I think that's where the dialogue opens. And I think the distinction around civil disobedience, I don't think it's possible to have that kind of inner dialogue that will move forward. When I'm ignoring that, it appears that I'm fighting people. And I think that flexible disobedience can go that way. And if I'm not ignoring, there is that dialogue that occurs. I don't know if that helps with the distinction around what actually is going to move things forward. It's good to go back to the intention, you know, which as he said, as Martin Luther King said in the letter, the intention is the dialogue.

[36:47]

All right. Teresa, and then Nancy? I'm working a lot with ignoring. I was calling it not wanting to see what was going on. And one of the things that I've noticed Also the way women, the other side of ignoring being ignored is the way women are also hyper-visible. And it's the flip side, but I think it's also a way to be ignored. And the more I, not something I've noticed, but sort of politically noticed, but then the way I notice it more internally has been a hard practice to see how I do it, as well as it being bad to me. I think that we can focus on... our pattern might tend us to focus on ourselves more, or might tend to have us ignore ourselves and focus on the other.

[37:50]

But again, as long as it's based on the distinction between self and other, there's a big thing we're ignoring, which is, that's not real. Well, I think hyper-visibility, the way I'm thinking about it, is also objectification. by nature making it a separate separation. Nancy? I really appreciate your raising this issue. It began with being in a meeting with three men and three women, and the men were not listening to the women, and being really, really angry. And then kind of a series of incidents like that, and feeling just kind of this pre-floating anger And I was talking about it with one of my teachers, and I was talking about anger, and he said, anger isn't what I'm sensing from you. He said, is there another word? We kind of worked around it, we came to the word ferocity, which I really liked, because that had in it an element of strength that anger really didn't, and an ability to kind of listen to my own strength.

[39:02]

is part of what I ignore as my own anger. And then I get into, well, what is it appropriate to do here and now? And I'm trying to figure out what to do and how not to make the situation worse. And so I don't do anything in the moment. I'm like that meeting with other people. I spoke to the man who was, I thought, the most offensive and a good friend of mine afterwards. And he said, why didn't you say something to him? I was so angry during the meeting that I was afraid that it would just come across as anger. But ferocity, I've been working with that word and I think it's very helpful. The thing that with the civil rights workers, I mean, they had to really hold, I mean, we're talking men in a meeting, we don't have to hold them in our hearts if we don't, I mean, you know, it sort of doesn't seem like the stakes are that high if we don't hold them in our hearts, you know, but these, they really had to hold the enemy in their hearts strongly and keep going to that because otherwise it would have moved into the other thing of, because anger, I mean, one of the things you could say about anger is that

[40:13]

there carries the thought of harm, you know. When you're angry at someone, most of the time if you look at it and admit it, there's the thought that you want that person to suffer somehow. Whereas that's not going to work. I mean, it's fine to be in touch with that feeling and recognize that feeling, but it's not going to help anything, you know. Yeah, and then Jerry? I just wanted to mention that there's a book called I think there's also another side about being ignored, which is that it's very comfortable. It's sort of a victim situation and it's easy to get righteous and get a lot of energy and emotion about it and go to a place where you want to attack people with power. And I think it's also somewhat discomforting

[41:15]

when you are no longer ignored, and you have to come to grips with having more responsibility, more visibility, and that has its own set of issues. So in many ways, all those states are equal in that whether you're visible or invisible, whether you're ignored or not ignored, each of those have a complex behavior associated with it. Jerry, did you want to? For raising this, I think what I struggle with about it is the distinction between how much of being ignored is kind of ego-losing versus that there's something that I might have to say that would be useful. There is something that I think needs to change, that needs to change, whether it be a policy or some kind of social change.

[42:18]

And for me the struggle is between kind of not putting me in the way of that idea being heard or that change happening so that once I can forget about me and how people think about me and more think about kind of what's the best way to communicate something. And that to me is kind of a challenge, just that tension between my getting caught in the ego part of it versus the end result that I'm trying to do. And I've had to, especially in the work that I do, have to think about ways of having the idea get out there, whether it be through someone else's mouth. And recognize, being able to see the dynamics and then use those dynamics And I'm not sure, you know, but that's really kind of where the tension is for me.

[43:25]

How much does it matter whether they listen to me versus... Yeah. Right, that's why we need our peers and our teachers and we need to keep looking, we need to keep the, you know, transparency of the ego project on the forefront there. Anybody else? Miriam? I find comfort in being ignored. It's part of being a victim. You must not get used to it and withdraw. I think there's a political movement, you just withdraw. And in Zen practice, it's great because you're not totally ignored. Largely, you're ignored. And that's the comfort level I found. And lately I've been thinking about intimacy and that kind of withdrawal and being ignored, it's keeping me away from being intimate.

[44:39]

But it's a very nice place to be, to think about and Yeah, I mean, I think it's both. I mean, I feel like with my, you know, sort of like with one hand you're building it up to protect yourself and with the other hand you're sort of tearing it down so you can get some fresh air in there, you know. It's like neither one is totally comfortable or something. I don't know if that answers. That's about the same thing you were talking about. But I'm also very comfortable in, you know, my little place I can go. And, but then I also am really lonely there, you know, I mean, like, so there's this tension. Yeah. Sounds right. Sounds like Buddhism. The middle way, perhaps. when those two don't seem to be appropriate or getting anywhere, which would be walking away and recreating or finding another place, you know, for that expression of what I'm trying to do or who I'm trying to be and finding a more nurturing environment perhaps for it, at least temporarily.

[46:07]

I don't know what you think about that. I think it's sort of like Harriet, you've got to do the short term and the long term, have both those things operating at the same time, I think, to the extent that you can. I mean, some people are in situations where there's no way to make the short term better. Sometimes I find when that nurturing environment exists more, it's more stable, and then it's easier to go back, you know, to the dialogue. Right, that's why, yeah, that's why we need to support each other. Right. Are we, how's our time? Anybody, it's okay, I have a watch, I just don't know what time it's supposed to stop. It's 11-5, 5 after 11. Yeah, I guess we should stop. One more, perhaps? Oh, Andrea? then how do you express it? Like if you, if I feel ignored by certain people, I should be reading this.

[47:14]

I did well on that too. Then how do I express it? Well I have this little, my little tape running right now is that I really want to increase the number of women in a category of their own, they're all kind of interspersed with all the other books, so they're lost and ignored. So, you know, we had a meeting that we want to have more books in the library, and then, and I had this, I tend to think excessively, but I had this idea that we were just going to get a huge list of books, and we had this book list of 75 books, and we picked out maybe 10, maybe 10, and I was so Boy, why in Berkeley, the Berkeley Zen Center, why? It seems like this is the place to have just an enormous collection of women who use the books. You mean people went through the list and they sort of censored themselves in some way?

[48:19]

Like partly, why don't we just get all the books on the list? No, I feel like, you know, when I feel ignored, I kind of censor myself because I know it's inappropriate or I know inappropriate, so-called inappropriate, upset people or I know I'm going to get ignored again. So I'm kind of, with Mary and I, just withdrawing. So I wonder, so, I mean, withdrawing is one extreme and, you know, having a fight is another. Right. I just kind of wonder, what is that? I mean, civil disobedience. I could just go to the store and buy a huge number But are they, have they? Or, I mean, part of it is their squeamishness about it. Yeah, right. You could ask someone else to take it up, maybe, and pass it on like a relay or something.

[49:23]

I did all I can, had all I can take of this. Yeah. I don't know, I wish I had an answer. I think just feeling your way. We have time for one more question that's direct, I think it's directly related to that. Please. I have a hard time translating the no division between self and other in a situation just like this. Can you give an example of that? How do you go from, I have this problem with this other person, yet there's no difference, there's nothing that separates us. Right, because well, you're picking out the facts that support that you're two separate people and ignoring all the facts that are about how you're the same. So, I mean, there's a million different things you can try, like from putting yourself in the other person's moccasins, as they say, to, you know, well, that would be the first thing is just

[50:30]

realize that under those exact conditions you would be doing that exact same thing, and let go of the idea that you, as a woman, if you were a man in that meeting, you wouldn't have done that to Nancy. You would have, because under those exact same conditions, you would have done the exact same thing, and therefore you're the same. all the fees and say that they have to buy books for the library for this one. And everyone agreed that that's what they wanted to do.

[51:07]

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