There seems to be a question of, like, notes, whether you're meant to take notes or not, but I would say no, but I didn't write anything down, but if anybody really wanted me to, I could, although it doesn't seem likely, but anyway, don't write anything down, it doesn't matter that much. I was trying to be all composed for this talk, because I'm usually not very composed, and I was listening to Vijay Mala's talk, and I put my hand in my head, and I, it was kind of sticky, and I realized that I left the shampoo in my head, the only possible explanation. But that is not what I'm here to talk about. So the name of this talk is violence and emptiness, which I came up with some time ago, but I think maybe a more accurate one would be violence, nonviolence and emptiness, possibly. So I was sort of focusing more on the last part of the verses, which are, like, water in the water wheel, helplessly, we circle, I bow down to the compassion that arises for all beings, which you could say covers quite a lot of territory in terms of what it's talking about. It felt very big to me, so on the water wheel part, which is quite interesting, I'm going to say something about violence, which I'm sort of interested in. And then I've sort of been into writing definitions lately for some reason, I'll probably get really attached to them later, but at the moment I find it kind of fun, and I wrote some things about compassion. But I'm going to start off with a poem that was written by a guy called Jimmy Santiago Baca, who's an American who was sent to prison, I don't know for what, but I know that he couldn't read and write when he got to prison, and he's a fairly well-known poet now. So I thought I would read a poem by him to start off. The elegance with which, in the sweetest humility, the lilac senses the time to show itself, fights adversity all winter, coldest nights, blowing storms, clinging to fence posts, tossed and heaved, trampled, pecked by crows almost eaten by insects, pummeled by brute heat, yet the whole time, still as a stone-carved Buddha meditating, silently greets the world in its vow of silence, birth to death alone in the rain, weaving its being into a nameless red blossom opening at dawn. And its body we preserve in pages of books that have kept our belief in love. Next to poetry lines we love so much, where we place our dreams for safekeeping, from the harmful world that hurts us so much sometimes, I place this flower, so where we place our dreams. So as I said, I think that I didn't realize this for probably almost my whole life, but I'm sort of interested in violence, and as this person in the mirror, thank you, mentions I'm occasionally meditating with violent people who are in jail, but I think I'm primarily interested in violence in myself, and I'll say in a second what I mean by that, but I was just recollecting a time when I was about five, and I had learned to read, and I guess I knew that's how old it was, and I noticed a newspaper on a table somewhere, and I went and said, "Oh, this is no longer a mystery of jumbles of symbols, I can read it." I was very excited, and I picked up the newspaper, and this would have been around in 1968, so I have no recollection of what I read, it might have been to do with Vietnam, it might have been to do with the civil rights movement, I don't know, but I know that I was so shocked by the violence that was in this newspaper that I just started bawling, like sitting on this couch, and I remember thinking, "God, I can't, like, how am I going to live?" Everything's so horrible, and I still feel like that occasionally, so I think that, so I said I was interested in violence, but probably interest isn't really the right word, but I think that I was born with an intense sensitivity to all sort of levels of violence. I feel like that is my almost like a karmic inheritance, and I suspect that other people have this sensitivity also, but I don't know about that actually, and so I'll just say what I mean by violence, I mean the obvious things, bombs exploding in underground trains, domestic violence, which is what about half of the people that meditate within the jail have engaged in racism, sexism, which are like a violent pre-characterization of someone, and then also harsh speech, criticism, irritation, annoyance, addiction, being self-deprecating, being bossy, the list is endless. So there are many ways to talk about it, it's like I was thinking of it earlier as a kind of immaturity violence, but I think the violence that I've been the most interested in or that I've been very interested in lately is maybe a lot more subtler than all these ones that I've just named, which is basically like experiencing my own subtle resistance in meditation and having a very strong experience of just resisting really basic experiences, and I don't think that that is fundamentally different from any of the other kinds of violence that I named, I suspect that it's all the same thing, and this is the wheel that we hopelessly circle in or the wheel that the water circles in, and what I said about this kind of sensitivity to all these different kinds of violence, I mean actually I also might mention that I've also shocked myself with all these things like harsh speech and stuff, I remember when I first started going on retreat, I used to get off retreat and I'd be all mellow and calm and nice and everything, and then I'd just say something and it would be shocking because it was just the way I was used to speaking, but it was really violent, and that still happens every once in a while, it's not that often, and I just wanted to make a general comment about, this has been my experience of myself and also with people in the jail, is that people who are really seeing really tough and scary are actually like the little kittens on the inside, and the reason that they got so tough and scary was because they're so sensitive, and that's been my experience over and over and over again, with like big mean looking bikers, I've had many people tell me they were afraid of me in fact, which always really upset me, I'd be like why, what the hell's wrong with you, and that didn't help, but it doesn't happen very often anymore, which I'm grateful for, so what does all this have to do with compassion? I guess I was thinking about compassion as something that comes from a response or an action that arises from that kind of basis of not resisting that I was talking about, or of not opposing or oppressing, or whichever orgy would like. So my little definition that I wrote was freedom of response, an unburdened response that happens when resistance or oppression or violence, whichever you want to use on all levels and in all its forms and stories is abandoned. I also have action rooted in a lack of resistance, and I also have action rooted in awareness of one's own and other people's nakedness or tenderness. In the jail they have, there's this very special program that helps people try to actually stop being violent, and they look at their past a lot as one must, and I went to one of these sessions where I heard a man who had been violent as an adult, and he was talking about his childhood, and he also had been a victim, so they have this thing where victims come in and talk about their experience. And he said a lot of stuff, he was very emotional, his voice was shaking, he was this huge guy in this orange thing, and everybody wears in the jail, and he just, there are a couple of things that stood out for me that he said, he said that his mother had told him his entire life, that it was his fault that his twin had died when they were born, that was one thing, and then the other thing was about being handed a crack pipe when he was not very old. And I was very upset by this guy's story for a few weeks I think after that, and thinking about how sensitive people are, and especially children, and what a huge effect we have on children. And just that sense of, even though he was like this big mean looking guy who probably like beat up his wife or something, I don't know why he was in jail, well in a way he was just sort of carrying on the wheel. And I guess it just struck me in a very personal way, how important it is to not perpetuate or well basically to cut off the violence that we are heir to. Which this guy had at least had done to some extent, or he wouldn't have been there talking. As Sankapas says, the human form is easy to lose, so what else was I going to say? So the other thing is, like the strange thing was, I mean this may be slightly similar to what Virginia Mala was saying, but this whole thing about compassion it seems so huge, and the thing of saving all beings, and there aren't any beings, and I just find that a bit frightening sometimes. And so I was trying to figure out what is my experience of it, and it was difficult because I do things that you might say would be called compassionate activity, like going to the jail, or just I work for the center, give blood, whatever, and I've completely structured my life, I go and retreat, completely structured my life around being able to do these things, but I don't really, I don't think of them as being compassionate, because it makes it so that I can have a life that means something to me that's deeply satisfying. And I suppose sometimes I think of myself as a servant in a very positive way, I suppose sometimes I feel like one and it's not so positive, but anyway, it's something of it. Because I'm what I'm asked to do, really. So, and I was thinking of all these sort of grand ideas that we have, because we, and they're very, I mean, grand is lame word to describe them, Shinjita, compassion. And I mean, I don't really know what it is, and I also think since there is this element, I think we all probably realize of, you know, having the self, not so there, having the self kind of receding or not there at all, it just makes things extremely difficult to talk about. But we talk about them rather a lot, don't we? Which annoys me, and then I have to work with that. I mean, we have to talk about it because otherwise, we'll just be talking about things that are irrelevant. So, we might as well talk about something that is worth something, even if you can't really describe it in words, which I don't think you can. I don't know if you can say what compassion is, you can probably write a really good poem or something, or someone good. It's awfully hot in here, so I think I'm just going to maybe wrap it up as we say. I was on retreat, I've been on a lot of retreats lately, but about four retreats ago, which wasn't that long ago. I was in a room near where we go in San Francisco, meditating with about six people, and it was in the afternoon, and there were a lot of mosquitoes in the room, and it was warm, so we pretty much had to keep the doors open, and there were no screens or anything. So, this room was about six people, and this particular group of people, they're not what you call people who like meditating. They were sort of moving around, and I was sitting there meditating. And I was really getting to listening to it, and it sounded great. And I was thinking, "No, no, these mosquitoes are really bothering these people, and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to summon them all to me, because they're not bothering me at all." So I did that, and I could have sworn that it worked, because they stopped doing that for a little while, and then I looked around, and I was like, "Wow, God, that worked! There's nobody." And then I thought, "God, that was really great of me to think that, wasn't it?" And then I thought, "Oh, I'm not enlightened." But the point of that story being just how important it is, I guess for us to find ways to loosen up the grip on how we think of ourselves, and how we're evaluating our experience, because it's so violent sometimes, or if not violent, then at least inappropriate, I think, speaking for myself anyway. So that's something that I indirectly, you try to work with in meditation, which I think the non-resistance thing for me is kind of, it feels like it's kind of going in that direction. So maybe I'll just end it there. I'll just end with a sentence by something that Shunri U Suzuki said. When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself. [BLANK_AUDIO]
