I not only took my vows this year as a lay person, but I also published a book at about the same time this spring, titled Altars in the Street. And my book is about building community, especially across racial lines and across the great chasm that has opened up in our country between poor people, and rich people, and which is ever widening. As we know, publishing a book has brought me a lot of wonderful new opportunities. One of them being able to have this precious time with you this morning. I also was able to go to the Peacemaker Conference, sponsored by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in June. which had the theme, preventing violence, using Buddhist and meditation ways and paths to reduce some of the violence in our country.

[01:13]

I've also gotten to, through going there, I met a lot of people of color who are practicing meditation. And I'm writing an article now about that very significant new synthesis and blending of Buddhist practice with other traditions. And so I've been interviewing people of color who are meditation teachers around the country. And I've decided to share with you some of the learning moments I have been having doing that. I've gotten to know a woman named Rachel Bagby, who's a writer, a lawyer, an African-American meditation teacher in the Vipassana tradition. She lives in New Hampshire. And Rachel shared with me her pilgrimage she made recently to the grave of Harriet Tubman, which is in Auburn, New York.

[02:16]

Rachel Bagby told me that her great joy is to find parallels between the Buddhist teachings and her own traditions she was raised with. And so when she went to this home and the grave of Harriet Tubman, and Rachel was telling me the story of how Harriet Tubman had stolen away, ran away from being a slave. She stole herself. And Rachel was saying, what an amazing concept to steal your own self. But then how Harriet Tubman knew the way to go through Maryland, through Pennsylvania, such a long way because her father had taught her to navigate by stars and had taught her to find moss on the north side of trees. And also she said that sometimes in the dark a kind of glory light would come to her when she was in prayer and would guide her.

[03:30]

But then when she came to freedom, she was alone. She was lonely because she had left her husband, her parents, and siblings, and many friends back where she had come from. And so she made a vow to go back and get those others. And she did that. She went back 19 times and brought hundreds of other people to freedom. And Rachel Bagby said to me, that's a Bodhisattva vow. And I think the part of that story I like the best is that part about how we can't steal ourselves to freedom without going back for everybody else. Now I'm going to tell you another story that is much more contemporary and much more difficult for us to hear.

[04:50]

It's a story that has really stayed with me, although it happened a couple of years ago. It's a story of a friend of mine named Meredith, who is a woman about my age, a Buddhist and a white woman who was riding on a BART train. coming home from work, feeling very tired, and it was a really crowded train. She was sitting so that behind her, in another seat, were two young teenagers, African-American young men. And they began to play their boombox really, really loud. And Meredith was just so tired, she was feeling really exasperated with that. And she turned around and just said, Could you please turn that down? And the music did go lower, but then it went much higher, and Meredith decided to just say nothing.

[05:53]

And then the train came to a stop, and these two young men got up, and one of them took a muffin with whipped cream cream cheese on it and ground it into Meredith's hair as he walked by really quickly and he poured a cup of lukewarm coffee over her head and then they exited the train. And Meredith had several more stops to go and so she just sat there and she began to cry and tears came down her face mixing in with the coffee. And it was such a crowded train with all kinds of people on it, standing up, people of all races. And for the next few stops, no one looked at Meredith and no one said anything to her at all. And when she got up and left, quite a few people got off at her stop and still nobody said, are you all right or anything.

[06:58]

And that was really hard for her. She told me this story and she was really shaken by it, and I think we all have a reaction to that story. I kind of feel it in my body, you know, in my middle someplace. And I think like so many things that happen to us or that we hear about, one way we've learned to work with such a scene is just kind of breathe loving-kindness into it. And we can do that together, just sort of breathing metta and loving-kindness for Meredith, for her humiliation and her fear and her tears and for everyone else on the train, all the spectators in their helplessness and their paralysis

[08:01]

And for these young men in their anger or hatred or whatever made them want to hurt Meredith's old face or pale face, maybe her adult face or her face of authority or even her weak face, And when I talked to Meredith about this whole incident, she kept saying, they, they did this, they did that. And since I have this investigator mind and I, which always focuses on details in incidents, I did say to her, well, there really isn't a they here because there were two youths and and only one actually poured the coffee over her and maybe that was the same one who turned the music up and we don't know about.

[09:08]

Perhaps the other one was feeling like you shouldn't do that. We don't know. But certainly we all have to live together. And I often think about what Martin Luther King said about the inescapable network of mutuality. And here we are together on our BART train we're on together. Just up our street here, up Martin Luther King Jr. Way, just a few blocks, you might have noticed one of our high schools.

[10:13]

It's just some temporary buildings on a big piece of land a few blocks away. And that school is euphemistically called the Alternative High School. It doesn't really have a proper name, actually. And that is the school where about 300 young people in Berkeley go who have been excluded for one reason or another from the regular high school, which is farther up the street. And I know a number of the kids who go there because I volunteer with this youth group called Strong Roots Gardening Project, Gardening for Survival. And about half of the kids in our project go to the alternative high school. And so I have, I know a number of the kids, and just two weeks ago, a 14-year-old young man at this school stabbed to death a 17-year-old young man at this school.

[11:18]

And I know, the principal who's a wonderful man. I went over to talk to him afterwards. He's an African-American man and there are many good teachers there. When I'm investigating a a crime, say, in my job, I first investigate the violence, and then again, then as I go on into it, I always end up investigating what I call the other violence, or the rest of the violence, which is the causes of why something happened. And I have a feeling that from what I've been able to learn in my struggle, my own personal struggle to be an ally, to act as an ally to this youth group, which I spent some time volunteering with, I've learned about so many other kinds of violence that happen to the kids all the time. Not just going to a school where something like that could happen, a 14-year-old, could kill another child and also the fact that that 14-year-old now with our new ever more draconian laws could actually be tried as an adult.

[12:34]

But also I know that the kids I work with have gone to lots of funerals just this last year. several of the kids they know have been killed in different ways in violent car crashes or by being killed. And so there always is more to the story, you know, more about why a person might react on an impulse to do a violent act and the ways in which we all see each other in these projections on each other. We are sitting here together in order to free ourselves from the suffering of our delusions, our own delusions, and our own hatreds, and our own greed.

[13:39]

And I think that one of the delusions that we can free ourselves, one of our delusions is that we can free ourselves without freeing everyone else. And so our task in realizing the teachings is to realize our connections to everyone else. In the case of our alternative high school, there are so many questions we can ask ourselves Since it's our high school and those are our children, we can ask ourselves, why do we have such a school in which half of the children are on juvenile probation over there? I know they have a hard time with that. They have to strip up the bus fare to take the bus all the way out to Oakland to go to their probation officer and lots of times they're later, they don't get there. And counterintuitively, because they, for whatever reason, haven't been able to adapt to the larger high school, and have been sent to this high school, it only meets half day.

[14:52]

So instead of everything being put there so that they need much more, they just are let out by one o'clock to go and do whatever. And so, you know, this is what I see in my job all the time, that we're sort of loading everything on the wrong end of people's needs. So we have this whole group of our children whose lives are really hanging in the balance just a few blocks away. They either can go on to occupy one of the cells we have been building for them in our prison building program or to go on and join others of our children to have a job and found a family and support their family, become good fathers and good mothers. and so forth. I find in my own practice, it really helps me to always say our school and our children instead of saying them and they and those people.

[16:01]

Because as soon as I say those people, then I'm all alone. Right in that moment, I feel that loneliness. Working with Strong Roots, I have learned so much. I would never have had an opportunity to learn. Since I'm very often the only person of European descent in the group, not always, but very often, and I've spent five years with this, I could tell you so many stories about the unconscious ways in which those youth are treated. by communities of people who, which are communities of a certain consciousness. Since we do this gardening, we are in, by and large, we're in the environmental movement, movement for urban greening, which I think of as a real community and a community of consciousness.

[17:09]

And yet I could tell you stories about, for example, the conference we were invited to where the youth have a wonderful slideshow they've made about how they turn blighted vacant lots into gardens. And we were invited to a conference where they would show the slideshow, but we were not invited to eat lunch at the conference. Just a lot of excuses were made. There wouldn't be time, there wouldn't be anybody who could set aside lunch for the kids because we were showing our slideshow. sort of at lunchtime and then we'd have to eat a little late and these negotiations went on and on and were never really concluded in a satisfactory way. Why the only young people there could not actually be invited to eat lunch with hundreds and hundreds of other people who were at this conference. And the theme of the conference was food for children. And then we have to expend a lot of energy This is one of the things I've learned about how hard it is to decide how much energy to put into talking about something like that with those people.

[18:24]

Writing them a very nice letter explaining how hurt the children were when they arrived and found out they couldn't eat there. How they definitely immediately took it as because of the color of their skin. although that was denied over and over and so on. And then even how when we wrote the letter explaining and talking about it, that it was not accepted as criticism. No one ever said they were sorry. We got a letter back saying, they are sorry, we are still upset. And how we have to live with that when the children are getting there and saying, why can't we eat here? You know, we had brought bag lunches because we hadn't been invited after even asking to be invited, and so on and so forth. But what I'm really talking about is the energy that's wasted. And Rachel Bagby told me about this. She said that when she began to meditate, her inner voice that she mostly heard was her voice going over past hurts and anticipating future hurts

[19:40]

from the people she was meditating with and so forth, even though it was in silence. And she became so aware of what a waste of energy that is. I will tell you a story about... I wrote an article about our youth group and our gardens and so on, and it was to appear, and it did ultimately appear in a major environmental magazine one of the big ten, you know, these big, huge environmental organizations. We were very proud to be invited and so forth. But then when they sent the photographer, the photographer only had black and white film. And we said, why is that? It's a color magazine. And after these photos, the kids were so proud, posing for these nice photographs of our garden and of themselves and their vegetables and everything. And then we called and we said, why can't we have color pictures?

[20:43]

We looked through all the back issues. There are no black and white photos in this magazine. Well, they said, it's going to be very, very good. It's going to be really avant garde. It's going to be really interesting, black and white. Finally, they started admitting they wanted it to be urban looking. They wanted it to be gritty and urban. And I said to them, why can't we have green vegetables, blue sky, brown skin kids? Why do we have to have it looking so other? I personally like black and white photography. I own black and white photos. But these are teenagers who really want to look good. And it's a garden. No, no. This is a young, young person. art people of European descent could not hear this request, could not change their minds, could not do it differently. And when the magazine came out, they had not only printed black and white, they had distorted the children's bodies so that it was all kind of crooked looking.

[21:54]

And they had cut up the children, they had made like a foot on a shovel or a hand digging And then they printed, the biggest, nicest picture was of some seven and eight year old kids who are our friends, but they're not in the project. They didn't want to really have pictures of African American teenagers. And these are youth who a lot of people don't want to look at. And they robbed the kids of the joy they had in the pictures. When the magazine came, they just said, commented one of the girls that she looked like she'd been beaten up. Their immediate first comment was about violence had been done. And this was violence. And still we could not be heard. Everybody minimized it. The people at the magazine said, no, but they're great. We really like it. It's so unusual. It's about guard So once again, we vowed we would go over there on BART and have a meeting and sit down and everything.

[22:57]

And actually, we never did it because so much of our life just rolled along, you know. Things happen, we have to take care of. We don't have a lot of time to help people to be less delusional. I'm telling you these stories just so that we don't think we're talking about something historical and long ago, but also to try to share in some of the weight or the burden on such youth. Those are just the least of the small ways that instead of the joy and the pride in their gardens, then they had just a little bit of a kind of bitterness. And when one young man said, it looks like she's been beaten up, she said, just don't even talk to me, and ran out of the room. Really, we are all finding parallels in our Buddhist traditions to our own tradition.

[24:13]

And what has this been for me? Well, for me, in my case, I am Irish, and I'm part Native American, and I have African ancestry also, like so many Americans. But all of this has gotten over time in history dumped into something called whiteness. And what is that? Whiteness is a made-up construct. It's a kind of historical lie because there's no such thing as white people. It's made up in opposition to non-whiteness. It's made up in order to not be. an oppressed person of color. White is nothing. White is a negation. And what we lose in whiteness is our Irishness, our Jewishness, our Russianness, our Scandinavianness, or whatever our tradition might have been, and our mixed togetherness.

[25:26]

And I always think someday we'll have a real family reunion in this country. I am forever talking to people who are African-American, for example, who confide to me, well, I have a white somebody, grandmother, great-grandmother. But they don't talk about her very much. Of course, it's the same in my family. When the people came over to go as white, then we lost. everything including I think I'm a very typical person actually as a western person coming out here kind of landing here on this edge of the continent and coming on top of the whole legacy of stolen land and broken people so much taken away, people enslaved and slaughtered and so forth, sort of put on top of all of that. I'm the kind of, I'm a person like so many, I didn't even know my own great, my own grandfather's first names until I was much older.

[26:35]

And that's a common story. And so now I have the good fortune to study, because I'm in the West in some ways, to study this Asian way and teaching that is helping me so much. It's helping me to open my heart to people who we are taught to think of as other, but also to constantly practice and work on the delusion of not seeing the system of dominance I'm living in. To not see the system of dominance where part of every one of us is to be just as blind and deluded as to not see our connection to people who seem different from us.

[27:46]

When I think about finding parallels between the teachings and all of our other traditions, One place I don't find a good fit is in this Western idea and largely European idea of individualism. And that is another big lie because nobody ever did anything all by themselves. Nobody ever did. But this is very strong in our society of dominance because it makes it easy for us to say, you people should just Get along on your own. You people should just make it anyway, even if you have a very bad school. Why don't you people just get it together? And so we're all sitting here, and I think we very often tell ourselves, I'm just here by myself, on my cushion.

[28:56]

I am trying kind of to steal myself away by myself to freedom. Freedom from my delusions, freedom from my hatred, my self-hatred, maybe my greed and so forth. But luckily for us, we are not by ourselves. This is a communal practice and we are all here together going along together. Thank you. Would someone like to comment or ask a question? We have about 10 minutes. Robin. I just want to thank you for that. That was wonderful. I like every aspect of what you covered. I think we need to hear it. It's so seldom said and with such understanding.

[29:57]

I really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. Yes? Yeah. This has sort of been a pet peeve of mine for a long time. It's so ingrained in the culture, the whole idea of first, second, and third worlds. It just constantly blows my mind. And now that it's considered even a fourth world, it's from the aboriginal communist nations are ever going to put themselves as second to anybody. And with Cuba and the Soviet Union no longer existing, the Eastern Bloc, Korea, all those sort of second world countries falling apart, what's going to happen when there's no second world countries? Third world can become second world? I mean, it's just such a bizarre concept.

[30:58]

And it's so set up from you know, and European, Western European sort of mindset. And it's just, I mean, you can say, well, everybody knows what you're talking about, but it's so ingrained in the culture and in the world. There's also, you know, I just want to comment on this bit of news yesterday, this thing that Ted Turner just did, that it's, and it really impressed me because Ted Turner's got, you know, What did he do? He's donating a billion dollars over the next 10 years to the United Nations. A third of his property, a third of what he owns. And granted, he's going to make a billion dollars in the next 10 years, no problem. But it just reminds me that just because somebody is way, way above monetarily

[32:03]

last night in the news, he's not doing this to bail out the UN, he's doing this for poverty relief. And so it just, you know, this whole culture is so based on money that I just found that real impressive from a somewhat unlikely source. Well, first of all, as to these worlds, you know, I don't go by that. Myself. I think there are a lot of ways of carving up people or, you know, making groups and so on. I've had the good fortune to do this unlearning racism training, which I did with some other people here. It's always available. And one of the great exercises in that is that everybody goes on one side of the room and then the leader will say everyone who and then say a category like everybody who had alcohol in their family walk to the other side of the room turn around and then look and look at who is with you and who is not with you and then walk back and now everybody who has incest in the family say come and talk stand together and look and see who is there and who isn't there everybody who has

[33:34]

had stories told them by their grandmother do that, and so on. Many, many categories. That instantly breaks down is that it's never race that these categories are in, or even our age, or money, or anything like that. And so it's kind of a koan to work with that our commonalities are not really visible to us, And so that what we have in common, say, with someone who is in an aboriginal culture in Australia might not be so visible to us. And that's part of it. We have all these commonalities. But then the other part of it, the reason it's a koan, is that there are also distinctions, cultures, traditions that are precious to hold on to and be in and save. And so it's both, you know, numbering these worlds or something is not going to help us to be together. I also think we can't wait for the really, really rich people to do this for us.

[34:41]

It's not going to work for us to save our world. It really will take all of us. We have a government that won't sign the landmine thing. We have a government that won't pay its UN dues. That's our government. We have our work to do ourselves, never mind the rich people and what they're doing. Yes? You know, when I heard this mentoring thing too, I thought, that's wonderful. And then I thought, oh, gee, well, I'm not too behind on how to get a little money. I wouldn't trust, I wouldn't expect a rich person to turn around and have a good heart real quickly because they're so involved in their their ego, their empire, and all that stuff. So that's the hard way to turn around. And if we can wait for these rich people to turn around, we're missing the point that there's a lot of groups that can do a lot more if they're connected.

[35:42]

You know, what really needs to be done is to live with it. If he was just distributed amongst different groups, that would be helping out Morissette. That's one idea. You know what I'm saying? So, I'm glad he does that. He did that, but I don't know how well it's going to work. What I wanted to say about the, okay, about the, you know, I don't feel Always talk to companies. And when you keep telling people something, pretty soon they start thinking, yeah, there is something going on here. There is some racist thing going on. It's like it's a conspiracy to keep people divided so they don't really work on the issues that are really important.

[36:44]

We're divided, and we don't really go after all the things that the government are doing. We make it a problem. It's their problem. It's their fault. They're the problem. And we don't deal with it. We don't work with it. So I think the media is a really big, really bad factor. It really is perpetuating this situation. And America has a hold on that. And it's advantageous. I mean, it's a moneymaker. Well, I'm going to comment on... Because the prison industry is making a lot of money. And if you have uneducated people, and you pass them along, and you don't help them, and if you have a child and you don't call his parents in and find out why, and you just give them his diploma, then you have a potential slave, or a potential person you can warehouse and put away.

[37:51]

You can make a living off that. It's pretty sick. What would you like to say? I can't remember your name. Will you say it? Yes. Yes, here. For Han. I'm writing my own pictures, trying to get people to come to the art class. However, the tradition is whoever gives the speech, well, they get to be invited to lunch. And I was not invited to lunch. And I knew why. It sort of nudged me, but I let it go.

[38:52]

And I didn't know what to do with that. I think I never told my teacher, I wasn't invited to lunch. And these little subtle things happen all the time. A little boy there called me the N-word. I told the teacher. I work with children. So I told the little boy, it's a very unkind thing to say to someone. And so I told his teacher, and then they minimized it. He said, you're a nigger. Well, I was painting. So I said, OK. So I didn't go for a long time. And then I'm going to change the story now. When my African-American students friends, or some of them, they're always into this consciousness. And some say, and these people, and these white people, I say, don't call people that. You need to take that word out of your psyche for one year, and out of your vocabulary, and you're going to see that people are people, and that they belong to the Earth. Maybe they're Irish.

[39:52]

Maybe they're English. Maybe they're German. And then they'll say something about, oh, Mexican people. I say, look. No. Even on the phone. And I taught my children. It occurs to me how we come in here with so many images from celebrity and the media in our minds all the time. I just like to say, you know, I'm always so amazed by the images of young black men in the media. I meet many young black men in jail. and my neighbors and then my friends' kids and these young people I work with.

[40:55]

And I have never, and many of the young black men I meet are in big trouble, you know. And even so, I have never met, ever, a young black man who spoke or acted like in this really, really mean and crazy way that they are depicted in the media. And I think we're not even aware of how that is affecting us all the time and also how we feel like we're in community because we all know that something someone like Ted Turner did or something and that's not community. We are sharing it in a funny way but Our community is here, and our own school, and our own kids, and so forth, and so it's very hard to even keep that in our minds, that this is where we are with each other now. Yes? Thank you so much for your witness, for performing this amazing function that you're seeing so clearly and you're reporting it.

[42:03]

so important. And I feel like I need to call on you at times as the expert in witnessing violence, that kind of verbal violence that we do in our own families or within our own lives to be able to respond appropriately. across those unkind thoughts that are happening so often, how can we speak out about it? How can we be empowered to help relieve the suffering from our delusions and from those in our lives? Anyway, that's one idea. And the other thing is, I just want to say that I'm I'm going to go to a town hall meeting with Senator Boxer pretty soon, and I hope that I and the other people in the anti-poverty lobby results have an opportunity to speak to her about the way our taxes are spent.

[43:33]

Well, I think speaking up is wonderful. You're going to speak up. And speaking up is what it's all about. And Phulani just gave us her example of how she speaks up. And so our teachers are here among us. Thank you. I think it's 11. Yes, it is 11. We can talk more at the tea time. Thank you so much.

[44:01]

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