We are very happy to have Margarita Lana today. And Margarita was born in the Dominican Republic and has been here for 29 years. She's a physician. And she works, she's the Director of Physicians. I work with Healthcare for the Homeless in San Francisco. She works with Healthcare for the Homeless. And she is a practitioner at Spirit Rock and on the diversity committee there and in the teacher training program there. And so it's wonderful to have her today as part of our follow-up from the diversity workshop that we had here six months ago to help us keep this important issue alive. Thank you. Thank you. It's an honor to be asked to come and speak about this subject today.

[01:03]

Let me just turn this one on too. And every time I'm asked to speak about this, this morning I had that same incredible shakiness. It's because when I think about, when I look around in the world, our inability to get along and the resulting pain of that. Often I feel like I'm not really up to the task of addressing this issue. And yet, you know, I continue to do this. I called my friend Ellen who's here this morning. I said, you know, I'm scared. Come and hold my hand from a distance. So what I'd like to try to do this morning is to talk about the relationship of diversity work and Buddhist practice. And I would like to spend a little bit of time talking about my own personal experience and kind of looking back at events in my life that point to a certain drive or certain interest to cross some gap.

[02:17]

And now recognizing that that's the thread that I've been following because I never thought I would be involved in diversity work. something that I foresaw, and yet here I am. But maybe before I start, I wanted to read a poem of Pablo Neruda, who I'm sure most of you know who he is, but if some of you don't, he's probably one of the most famous poets of South America. And he was alive at the time of the Allende regime in Chile, where there was a terrific amount of hope and the subsequent assassination of him. And this poem, which is the English translation, is called, Now We Will Count to Twelve and We Will All Keep Still. For once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language. Let's stop for one second and then move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines. We would all be together in a sudden strangeness.

[03:21]

Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales. and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands. Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade doing nothing. What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about. I want no truck with death. If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt the sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Now I will count to 12 and you keep quiet and I will go. So as I was saying, I didn't think I'd be involved in this.

[04:34]

And currently, some of the areas that I find myself involved in diversity work include a national project with the Fetzer Institute where a program has been developed called Healing the Heart of Diversity. And it's really looking at a different approach to diversity work that attempt to really look at the layer below blame and guilt and the separation that results from that but to really feel that place where we are all really hurting from the separation and really looking at this work as a way of healing ourselves and at social healing. I'm also part of the Diversity Committee at Spirit Rock recently was asked to begin a diversity task force at my job, which is a whole other dimension. And Marlene Schoonover, Joan Schoonover and I have been running a meditation group for women of color in Marin City that just this past end of January had a year's anniversary.

[05:46]

When I think back to when was the first time that I remember consciously wanting to walk across a very big gap? And I think it was a time when I was very, very young, maybe about seven. And the field behind the house that I lived in was a sugar cane field. And Dominicans didn't want to cut cane. And the Dominican government had an arrangement with the Haitian government for the Haitians to come and cut the cane. And the relationships between the two countries have always been quite adversarial. with the Dominicans hating the Haitians because at some point Haiti dominated the Dominican Republic and there's a lot of animosity. We speak different languages. They speak French dialect and in the Dominican Republic we speak Spanish. So there was a lot of fear and all kinds of stories about the Haitians and they had to carry a burlap bag with their machetes and other belongings and people would say, you know, they carry little kids in there and they eat people.

[06:52]

stories like this, all based on an incredible amount of fear and alienation. And I found that as a kid when I watched the people, mostly the men, cutting the cane, I was just very curious. And after a while I figured out I had a little tin and I would go over to the barbed wire fence and stand there with my tin and we couldn't really speak with each other because we didn't speak the same language. with one particular guy kind of figure out what I wanted and he would cut a cane and bring it over and over the fence would squeeze it on both sides and this little trickle of canes would come and I'd hold my tin and we had this little routine that we would do throughout the whole harvest and no one in my family knew I was doing this. I was secretly doing this but it was my way of connecting and feeling supported by that connection. When I was about 14, I started volunteering in a rural hospital and things were very bad and continued to be very bad.

[07:59]

When people were in the hospital, you had to bring your own sheets, you had to buy your own medicines. I mean, basically it was just like a place to be. And so I would go and at first I worked in labor and delivery and mostly saw dead babies being born because people wouldn't come into the hospital unless something was terribly wrong. And then I moved over to pediatrics and there was this little kid in particular that I remember who maybe was about 10 who was dying of now what I recognize as hepatitis just by the way he looked. And he got so sick that he couldn't speak and I would just come and visit him and sit with him and I would bring him pictures that I cut out of magazines and paste them on cardboard just to bring something and watch his face light up. And we would just sit and hang out. And I remember he eventually died and all the while that he was in the hospital he was lying on newspaper because his family didn't have enough money to even have sheets.

[09:01]

But I remember that even though it was an extremely painful experience being with that, that there was a comfort in the wanting to be there. being in the States when I began medical training, which is kind of later, much later in my life, I spent the majority of the time at San Francisco General, and there was a refugee clinic. And back then, the refugees were the big Laotian and Cambodian wave. And I realized that going to the refugee clinic was probably the most, one of my favorite things to do. I loved being there. And yet, what was going on was, first of all, again, we were speaking through translators. Many of the people were from hill tribes, Hmong and Nian. And some of the stories, the depth of pain was something that was beyond anything I had ever heard of.

[10:11]

And sometimes it would be the story, the details of how much how many members of their family had been killed, what it took for them to get out of Cambodia into Thailand, what happened then. And then other times it was just getting almost the physical experience of people who have suffered so much that there's a level of desolation that is boundless. And despite that, I found that I loved being there. And for the past eight years or so I've been working with Healthcare for the Homeless in San Francisco, and often people ask me, well, isn't it hard? Why would you want to work there? And I sometimes felt it was difficult to answer, and now I realize, and this is why I'm telling you all these little stories, that what I have found is that by walking across a big gulf, by being willing to be with pain,

[11:15]

by being willing to witness the experience of other people. If I'm trying to really have a meaningful relationship with another human being that's very different from me, in order to do that, I have to drop all the culture, class, specific ways of being. I really have to appeal at something else in myself that is universal. And in so doing, I am finding an amazing degree of freedom. freedom from my own limited point of view. And so paradoxically I'm telling you this long story because I think that the opportunity of walking across a big difference is that we grow tremendously as human beings. And that is the opportunity that exists there. It's for us to see and to begin to have a sense of a real wholeness and our capacity to hold so much more than we thought was possible. And that has a very healing effect.

[12:15]

And when healing is happening, it's not, you know, as a physician, I think about healing all the time. What does it take and what's possible and what's necessary in order to heal? And when healing is happening, it's not unidirectional. It's not like the practitioner is healing the person, but healing is happening and we are all being healed in the process. I am being healed in the process of administering or serving other people. Thinking back now to our Buddhist practice, at the core of the Buddha's teaching is, first of all, our intention when we undertake the practice to acknowledge that life as we experience it involves a terrific amount of suffering. And I think for many of us, just acknowledging that, coming to grips with that, accepting that, is a big hurdle. And once we see that, then is that our whole practice, our whole endeavor is about trying to see how that suffering can be alleviated and finding a way out of that suffering.

[13:22]

And when I think about health care and where we're sort of attempting to do something similar in a different way, and I thought, you know, how does human suffering happen? And aside from, you know, the traditional scriptures what we will be talking down the line in terms of our Buddhist practice, I realize that the majority of human suffering happens in the context of relationship with other beings, with other human beings. If you really think about it, most of our suffering is related to what we do to each other, don't do, our interactions with each other. So if our practice is the realization that life as we know it involves so much suffering, and that this practice is about finding a way out of suffering, then how we're relating to each other is at the core of our practice, because that's what most of our suffering is happening. So, no, I mean, I can't think of anything more important and more central to our practice than our relationships with each other.

[14:30]

One of the things that I realized as well, and psychology has helped us with that, is to really understand how vulnerable we are as human beings. That we get a sense of who we are by how we are reflected on as we grow up. From the time we're very little, we get a sense of worth by how the world reflects back on us. And for some of us, that reflection is extremely painful. For many of us, when we walk out the door, if we look very different from the mainstream, from the minute you walk out the door, there's some kind of weird reflection. You know, there's a feeling of alienation. Your own experience is not being mirrored anywhere. You look at TV and there's nobody that looks like you on TV. If there is somebody that looks like you on TV, it's some kind of criminal or it's really being portrayed in some negative light.

[15:38]

So for many people of color in this country, there's a huge debt of invalidation, of just not being seen, of having their experience not being reflected by anything in the society that is held in a way that has value. So there's this feeling of invalidation. And then on top of that, there's the oppression. Not only is our experience not being validated, but we are being oppressed because of the difference. So, if we are on the side where we have a great deal of privilege, where we walk out the door, we get in the car, we go into the store, and we don't have to worry about somebody following us, thinking that we're going to steal something, When we come to the table, our tasks are very different. Our lessons are very different depending on where we are in this continuum of privilege to oppression. And there's gradation of this in between.

[16:40]

But we don't all have the same job. And we cannot ask each other to sort of do the same thing that we ourselves would do. Because again, really coming to grips with the diversity requires that we understand that the other person's experience may be completely different from ours, but to be able to hold the fact that that experience is just as valid as ours, and to allow them to coexist, so that when we're going to communicate, there needs to be a willingness to acknowledge the validity and also the fact that they are very different experiences. If we have a life of ease, ease of movement and freedom to move about and buy what we want and move into whatever neighborhood, then in looking at the people who suffer a lot of oppression, then our job is to be willing to, first of all, open and hear what that experience is, to be able to validate, yes, I see you and it makes sense to me that you would feel rage, that you would feel whatever, given what you are telling me.

[17:53]

And on the other side, and I can say that that point of validation, a lot of times in political work, we get stuck in that place of feeling, unless, until we are really validated, it's very difficult to move from our position. You know, it's like this debt that you're carrying. And until somebody sees you and says, I see you and it makes sense to me, it's very difficult to then move on. You know, there's been a lot of talk in the Buddhist community about, you know, you need to have a self before you can give up the self and so on. And there is some truth to that. It may not be as simplistic as that. But as human beings, we are vulnerable and there's certain almost developmental steps that we need to go through in order to find freedom. And so a lot of times in the discussion around this, people have said, you know, they aren't using right speech. And because they're not using right speech, you know, I just, I can't listen to that. And we can use that as a weapon and as an excuse not to open up. And to remember that if we are going to do that for another, to validate another's experience, that it's not that we are just doing that for them.

[19:07]

In the process of doing that, we are doing our own healing. It is not separate. So if we are on the side of oppression, And we have all this stuff that we're carrying, and there's all the anger and all the frustration and all the desire to condemn, which comes with that much suffering. Then the big challenge is to be able to see the person of privilege, to see the vulnerability of that person still, and to see that person's need for acceptance from us. And that's always often very challenging for people who are in that place of oppression, to see that the person we see as the oppressor has their own vulnerability and their own need. So hopefully what we attempt to do

[20:09]

is to get below that layer where we're just sort of throwing blame around and feeling guilty and paralyzed by guilt. Because both things paralyze us and we don't get very far. And the fact of the matter is that we are all hurting if we look deeply. And some of us don't have to look if we don't want to. And then there are others of us where there's no choice. Every day when we walk out the door we're facing this issue. Whether we have the choice to look at it or not, we are hurting from the separation. And if we're willing to look deeply, we can find that place and recognize it. So, thinking along the lines of healing, Pema Chodron's latest book is a wonderful book. I would recommend it to anyone. And she was quoting this little part about widening our circle of compassion.

[21:12]

She was quoting Rashi Bernard Glassman from New York, who I'm sure most of you know about. He works with the homeless. He was saying, he doesn't really do this work to help others. He does it because he feels that moving into the areas of society that he had rejected is the same as working with the parts of himself that he had rejected. And then she goes on to say, it's even difficult to hear that what we reject out there is what we reject in ourselves. And what we reject in ourselves is what we are going to reject out there. But that in a nutshell is how it works. If we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves, then we will find others unworkable and give up on them. I have, being involved with the Fetzer group, there are three groups and we're about 24 each and we're a very mixed group, ethnically primarily, and class, there's a little bit less variation but there's some.

[22:22]

And it's been an amazing experience for me to have gone through a whole year of retreats and now we're entering a second phase, we're going deeper. And I had one experience that that I wanted to tell you about just to give you an inkling of what's possible. At the end of the first year, we had like a little ceremony we were going to do where we dressed. Part of being able to be with Differences is also really get to know what our own background is. And so we were to dress in clothing that said something about where we came from. I had a dress and a shawl from my grandmother or something. I was walking up in front of the group to talk about the dress and as I stood there all of a sudden I started sobbing and I had no idea why I was crying. And all of a sudden I realized that what I was crying about was the grief that I was carrying about all the indigenous people of the island that I came from that had been annihilated.

[23:28]

As a kid, I sort of knew about it and wanted to hang out with the people in the country. I mean, there's no one left there who has, who's a full-blooded indigenous person. I mean, there are features in people's faces that you can tell they have some indigenous blood, but the culture is basically gone. But somehow I had been carrying this grief. And I think that because I was in a mixed community where people talked about experiences from so many different places, that grief was then able to be known. And I could not have known that in some other homogeneous community or even where I normally hang around in. So when I thought to myself, and there were some indigenous people in our group, the potential for healing of a mixed community is amazing. It's like we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what may be possible here. And then I, this same person who's an indigenous man from Minnesota, At one point, just recently, we were having one of our sessions and at the end, kind of out of the side of his mouth, almost when you ask for something that you know of course is never going to happen and no one will be able to give it to you, he sort of slips out of the side of his mouth, Oh, I was hoping that maybe you guys would help us get our land back.

[24:53]

And everybody in the room kind of chuckled, you know, this discomfort. Oh yeah, we thought you'd say that, and they're kind of, you know, kidding him. And I just stood there with the enormity of that wish, and I thought, and I found myself immediately thinking it's impossible, it's hopeless, all the why not reasons coming up, and I thought, what would it take for my heart to really open to that wish, even if it seems impossible, even if I feel incompetent, even if it brings up all this despair and hopelessness, can I open my heart to that wish?" And wondering, you know, what are all the different ways in which we close and cannot hear each other because we feel inadequate, because of all these negations that come up. So when we look at the practice and try and see, well, what do we have in the practice that helps us address this dilemma?

[25:59]

One very important piece is the piece about inclusivity. We really, we sit so that we can develop the capacity to be with the whole of our experience. from the most ecstatic, wonderful, high experience to the most awful, embarrassing, ugly, disgusting experience we may have. And can we develop the substance to be with that whole range? And that's what one of the major pieces of the practice is, is to develop that capacity of inclusivity, to really include all of life so that we are not leaving pieces of our experience and therefore pieces of ourselves by the wayside. And the other part of our practice that is important is the opportunity of insight. And you know, we have insight all the time. You know, we put this and this together and, oh yeah, because of this and therefore that.

[27:03]

But it's not that kind of insight. It's the insight where we really get it, where the understanding is so profound that is really married to change or to transformation. And through that insight, one of the things that we become aware of is that the experience kind of goes on along, in some ways, two lines that I see. On the one hand is the particular, our individual conditioning, the individual filter that develops from where we grew up and what our family was like and what the conditions were like. And the other one is more kind of the generic predicament of being a human being with a human mind and the whole experience of self and the separation that comes up just by the mere fact that we solidify a sense of self. The minute that is present, inherent in that experience of self, the separation, because then there's self and everything else that isn't self.

[28:09]

And in the particular, with the conditioning, you know, our personality, you know, it's always trying to sort of shore itself up and protect itself and anything that contradicts it or feels threatening, you know, we nix and nix and nix, and so we're walking around editing experience all the time. So, in looking at the particular, and I can speak for myself, just watching, you know, when somebody makes a comment that seems bizarre to me, I can't relate to it, it seems weird, If I really pick apart the pieces of the movement of mind, first there's, I don't like this. Then pretty soon it's wrong. And then it extends to, well that person's, some judgment about the person, that person is weird. And pretty soon if I really don't want to deal with it, then it's sort of like, they're not only weird, they're just kind of useless and I write them off. And I think that if you really, I mean, I don't know if you've had that experience, but... that movement from, I don't like this, to giving up and writing the person off is done in a millisecond sometimes.

[29:17]

And we walk around doing this to each other all the time, and we feel it. I mean, the other person feels it. So, Pat Harbour, who's the director of the Setser Program, and I were talking, And she was saying, you know, if we could just even stop at that level of, I don't like this, and just be able to tolerate that and just stay there without giving up on the person who believes ahead. And then I had a call from one of the men in my group, and he said, you know, I want to talk to you some more about something you said. And I had talked about this piece about judgment, but then the other thing I had said was, You know, is it possible, could we perceive beyond our personal history? Is it possible that we could actually see beyond our story? And he was saying, you know, there was a man in our group who remained in the periphery throughout the whole year and it was unclear still to this day what was happening.

[30:20]

He felt himself very separate. But to what degree do we continue to perpetuate that is still unclear. So this man that had called me was saying, you know, when so-and-so says something, and he would sometimes throw things in that were quite provocative, and everybody was sort of reacting, and he said, when so-and-so says something, and I really try to open to what he's saying, and really leave my judgments aside and just really open to it. He said, what I feel is this kind of disorientation, And we talked about, you know, how uncomfortable that disorientation is. You know, there's sort of the fear like, I'm going to forget what's right and wrong. I'm going to lose a hold of, you know, my sense of life. I know how everything should be or is. Somehow I'm going to lose a handle on reality. And so we talked about what does it take to hang out there and how necessary hanging out there is to really begin to understand

[31:24]

in others' experience. And Pema, you know, she keeps talking about how all this machination that we go through life, all this striving has so much to do with not being able to feel that groundlessness, the fact that at the bottom there's nothing really solid to stand on. And we're always grasping to try and find something solid or some sense of certainty. So I wanted to read you a little bit about that. So she was saying, you know, Buddhist words such as compassion and emptiness don't mean much until we start cultivating our innate ability simply to be there with pain, with an open heart and the willingness not to instantly try and get ground under our feet. And she goes on to talk about how we're always striving to make everything right or wrong. And this is all in the service of trying to get some sort of certainty.

[32:28]

And then she says, instead of making others right or wrong or bottling up right or wrong in ourselves, there's a middle way, a very powerful middle way. This middle way involves not hanging on to aversion so tightly. It involves keeping our hearts and minds open long enough to entertain the idea that when we make things wrong, We do it out of a desire to obtain some kind of ground or security. Equally, though, when we make things right, we're still trying to obtain some kind of ground or security. Could our minds and our hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we're not entirely certain about who's right and who's wrong? Could we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? It is a powerful practice this way because we'll find ourselves continually rushing around to try and feel secure again, to make ourselves or them either right or wrong.

[33:32]

But true communication can happen only in that open space. So to the degree that we can hang out in this groundlessness, then there's an experience of spaciousness. And with that experience of spaciousness, true compassion comes. It just comes. And Joseph Goldstein, there was a little, he's one of the head teachers at the Barry Center, at the Insight Meditation Center in Barry, Massachusetts, and he had been away on sabbatical, and when he returned, people were asking him, you know, is there something new that you sort of got during this time of deepening of some insight? And he says, you know, I really understand how compassion comes out of emptiness. And that it is when the I is not so busy and not so present, when that isn't there, then there's no separation.

[34:40]

And the heart just moves. The heart is moved by somebody else's experience. It's not an effort. It's not something that we have to try. It just happens. So our capacity to be with others and our capacity to really be compassionate is in direct measure to our effort to not be so identified and not so defensive about that identity. And there are certain traps that I want to talk about in the practice. Oh boy, going to run out of time here. One of the things that happens with the meditation practice, and especially if you've been sitting for a long time, is that, and you start to have experiences of ecstasy, or you start to have wonderful insight, is that there can, there develops a very subtle form of aversion.

[35:49]

where we are so preferring transcendence that we then have this ongoing low-grade war with our humanness. And in many ways, really walking fully into our humanness while at the same time having had the experience of emptiness can be one of the most amazing challenges because the experience, you know, as we develop in the practice, what's offered, you know, that pristine realm of transcendence is so attractive. You know, when we see it, ah, that's it, that's where I want to be. But the other side is that we are both empty and full. And when we are caught still in this delusion, we're caught in duality and freedom comes when we are no longer perceiving in this way. And then the other trap sometimes is the identification, the attachment of what it means to be a spiritual person.

[36:57]

You know, if I'm a spiritual person, I don't have those hateful feelings or, you know, that rage that I see in so-and-so, you know, that's just outside of the realm of experience. Perhaps one of the hardest things for many people is really opening to the part of ourselves that is really hateful. And we all have it. We all have it. And for me, it was amazingly hard and it was amazingly freeing to see that I had really hateful feelings sometimes. That given certain conditions, hate arises. And it arises for the people that I love the most, my daughter. I can't think of anybody I love more than my daughter. And given certain conditions, you know, I, hate can arise in me. And if I don't admit that to myself, I will act from that motivation and hurt other people. If I can admit that to myself, then I have a choice whether to act or not to act.

[38:03]

So this, Even though it's scary, even though it's ugly, even though we don't want to look at that part of ourselves, really opening to that part of ourselves that is in the shadow is one of the most freeing experiences. And then we know that other people's actions are not out of the realm of our own experience. And true empathy is possible because we know that somewhere, even if we haven't acted on it, we are capable of doing some very terrible thing. And if we don't ever admit that to ourselves, we will kind of do it under the table. trying to choose what to leave out. I'll tell you a quick story that speaks to that seeing beyond that dualistic view.

[39:11]

And I make a point of talking about this because in the spiritual practice, if we don't really understand this, we are unwilling to move into this messy part of our humanness that involves dealing with each other and dealing with each other when we're very different from each other. So seeing and understanding that this is our practice. This is our practice. So I was, it was the opening retreat at Spirit Rock and it was, I think, maybe the first day. And when we sat, it was an amazingly exciting thing, you know, and we were sitting in the hall and Outside there were tons of men, you know, still planting little bushes. It was like this big push to finish the place on time. And the retreat got started and things weren't quite finished. So there was a lot of work being done outside. And there were many of the teachers at Spirit Rock.

[40:14]

There was a lot of noise and some of these guys, later I realized, were Mexican and they were talking in Spanish, they were talking very loud. And somebody, one of the teachers said, oh, why don't you see, maybe Sylvia speaks Spanish and she can talk to them. And I started just sitting there having this very uncomfortable feeling of us and them and this sort of otherness. And also just, I had started feeling just such a sense of gratitude for all the effort and the energy that it took to build that place. all the luxury of the place itself, and then feeling these men outside. And so I was caught in a conflict of the separation, and so at one point when we were doing walking meditation, two guys were outside of the walking meditation room, again talking really loudly, and I went outside and I said to them, Hey guys, you know, this is a silent meditation. And even in Catholicism, you know, there's silent retreats. And they got it immediately. And the minute they knew what was happening, they started talking really softly.

[41:16]

And then I could sort of let go of all the stuff that I was having. So I went back into the meditation hall and I sat. And Julie Wester, who's a wonderful teacher in that she provides a very soft, very kind way of holding experience, was doing the introduction to the meditation. And I sat there. And soon I began to have that experience that I had had at other times, a real openness, you know, beyond concepts, just an incredible spaciousness. And the I was not present, the self wasn't busy, it was just, you know, open space. The guys would use the pick and it would hit a rock and I'd hear the sound, clink, hitting the rock. And in that moment of hearing the sound, I knew that I was hearing. And then feeling, becoming, and the appearance of self. And then it would be silent again. And it would dissolve into spaciousness and the experience of not being identified, just space.

[42:18]

And the sound would come again, clink. And I was present. And it went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And for the first time in my life, I really had no preference. Absolutely. And I could see. I remember Kalu Rinpoche from the Tibetan tradition had this quote that I've sort of always kept in my mind. We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is one reality. We are that reality. When we understand this, we realize that we are nothing. And being nothing, we are everything. That is all. And in your tradition, in the Zen tradition, in the verses of the Faith Mind, it's all about this. And I just wanted to mention one little piece at the beginning and at the end. The Great Way is not difficult. for those who have no preference.

[43:20]

When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart." And there's a jumping to the end. Emptiness here, emptiness there, but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes, infinitely large and infinitely small. No difference, for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen. So too with being and non-being. Don't waste time in doubts and arguments that have nothing to do with this. One thing, all things, move among and intermingle without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. To live in this faith is the road to non-duality because the non-dual is one with a trusting mind.

[44:23]

And in a... We can spend our whole life just reading this. I guess to finish, I want to say that this work of diversity, we cannot do it in theory or by reading about it. We have to be relating to each other to do it. And unlike in many parts of the world where you have homogeneous populations, you know, that can hate another homogeneous population somewhere else, in the Bay Area we have an incredible opportunity because we're such a mixed group, ethnically, culturally, class-wise. It's an amazing opportunity if we know how to use it. It's kind of unprecedented in the world. And when we even think about what's happening with Buddhism in this country, we look at Buddhism in other countries, and I look at, for example, Thailand, such a deeply Buddhist country, and the nuns in Thailand are not fed by the populace, because they're not considered worthy of enlightenment, or, you know, just not worthy substrate.

[45:43]

And I keep thinking, you know, the incongruence of a Buddhist practice and a cultural attitude that pervades the practice to that degree that that can go on. And so one of the questions is, do we have an opportunity in this country

[46:02]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ