>> Thank you.
I had never actually heard
of the Lenz Fellowship
or Scholarship until Judith told me about it
and said "I think you ought to apply for this."
So thank you, Judith.
It's, I owe it to Judith that
I'm standing here right now.
So the Lenz Fellowship, the Lenz
Scholarship, the brief is that one is
to bring together the teachings of
the Buddha and American culture.
The aspect of American culture that
I chose to work with is violence.
Which, at the time that I
applied for the fellowship,
I had no idea how much more relevant
even it would be now than it was then.
I'm approaching it from the perspective that we
need to think about violence in a different way.
The way that we have been thinking
about violence clearly is not working.
It's not effective.
Andrea Dworkin in her 1974
classic "Woman Hating" said
"People are willing to think about many things.
What people refuse to do,
are not permitted to do
or resist doing is to change the way they think."
So this is quite a brief.
The Buddha, as it happens,
introduced a different way to think
about reality altogether nearly 2,500 years ago.
But it's been my observation, in
teaching Dharma and in studying Dharma,
that here in the West at least, we
tend to plug the Buddha's teachings
into certain unquestioned assumptions that
actually work against those teachings.
I recently read for the first time, am
currently reading the wonderful book
"The Chalice and the Blade" by Riane Eisler.
And I was very impressed with her
cultural transformation theory.
Which in a very small nutshell, she
looked at human history from the stone age
until about the fifth millennium
before the Common Era,
and noticed that goddess worship was
prominent during all of those millennia.
And that 19th and 20th century
scholars came to the conclusion that,
even though the goddess was
worshipped in a religious sense,
on the ground, men were still in charge
and women were still subservient.
Either that, if that wasn't the case.
Then, if it wasn't a patriarchy, it
must have been a matriarchy; right?
These are the two conclusions
that guided anthropologists,
archeologists,
sociologists,
scholars of religion and so forth.
What Riane Eisler concluded from
her research is that actually, no.
There were two models of social organization.
The one that we work under
now and that came into being
around the fifth millennium BCE is what she
calls the dominator or domination model,
and the model that was in place
before that time during the millennia
of goddess worship she calls
the partnership model.
So when you look at those two different models,
you see a whole different way of thinking.
Scholars working on this insight have come
up with completely different understandings
of how the world worked back
before then and how it works now.
Since the domination model
came into vogue, shall we say.
So the Buddha's teachings explicitly
challenge dualistic assumptions.
And yet somehow they are largely,
at least here in the West,
plugged into those very dualistic assumptions.
So examples,
there are many examples,
but perhaps the most obvious ones
are the teachings on emptiness
which are typically understood as
meaning some kind of nihilistic voidness.
There's nothing there.
Which, of course, is not what the
teachings on emptiness are about at all.
Or the teachings on karma,
which are frequently interpreted
as being about reward and punishment.
Where, of course, they have absolutely
nothing to do with reward and punishment.
The Buddha did not ask his students to
take on a creed or a set of beliefs.
The Buddha said "Here is
what reality looks like.
Have you noticed it keeps changing?
Have you noticed everything is interrelated?
Don't you think this means something
for the way we conduct ourselves?
Don't you think that we would suffer less if we
aligned ourselves with the nature of reality?
When this is, that is.
This arising, that arises.
When this is not, that is not.
This ceasing, that ceases."
Summary, we could say of the Buddha's teachings.
In other words, reality is a
manifestation of dynamic relationships.
Reality is a manifestation
of dynamic relationships.
So the Buddha's instructions were all about
how to align ourselves as closely as possible
with the nature of reality so
as to reduce our suffering.
And he summarized this path of alignment in a
teaching we know as the Noble Eightfold Path.
And I find it instructive that the first step
on the Noble Eightfold Path is right view.
Context. Getting things in
the right perspective.
So on reading Riane Eisler and contemplating
these things that I'm talking about here.
I ask myself how could I characterize
or encapsulate a world view based
on what the Buddha taught
as neatly and concisely
as Riane Eisler did her dominator
and partnership models?
And in thinking about that, I
realized that it was all right there
in her dominator and partnership models.
The dominator model is an "either or."
Mutually exclusive.
Either you're the dominator
or you're subservient.
You can't be both at the same time.
It's static.
The partnership model is "both and."
It's radically inclusive.
Like reality, which includes everything.
So how to apply this to violence.
The etymological root of the word "violence"
comes from the Middle Latin word "vim."
Which we still use today when
we speak of vim and vigor.
In South Africa there's a
bathroom cleanser called Vim.
And also from the Latin uis,
u-i-s, meaning strength.
And according to Eric Partridge, who
wrote the book on etymology, strength,
especially as exercised against someone.
The word "violence" also has an
Indo-European root meaning force.
And, again, according to
Partridge, especially rape.
So what we're looking at here when we look
at violence is a combination
of aggression and othering.
It's aggression performed on another.
The other could be oneself actually.
The World Health Organization
lists the causes of violent death,
and among them it lists suicide.
From a Buddhist point of view aggression refers
to rejecting the experience of this moment.
So the other could be very, very intimate.
The other on whom we practice aggression.
It's a force exerted by a
subject upon an object.
Mystics from all traditions over the millennia
have hinted at a way of seeing the world
where the separation between
subject and object falls away.
So we have a clue.
We have a hint.
There is another way to think.
There is another way to see the world.
But, of course, I don't know about
you, but I don't expect to attain
that level of realization in this lifetime.
We work with what we've got.
And happily for us, the Buddha gave us some
extraordinary tools for working with aggression.
The one that comes to mind
most often as I'm working
with these notions is the teaching
on the Five Wisdom Families.
In which the energy of aggression is
understood to be fundamentally neutral.
It can be expressed neurotically as
manipulative force exerted on another.
Or it can be expressed in the
clarity of a sharp intellect.
For most of us at any given moment it's
somewhere on the continuum between those two.
It is not static.
It's dynamic.
By contrast, violence, as
we most often encounter it,
is a forceful attempt to exclude the other.
The five wisdom families teaching is inclusive.
It's the same energy on a continuum.
When we attempt to exclude the other,
we work against the radically
inclusive nature of reality.
Furthermore, exclusion precludes relationship.
We cannot relate to that
which has been excluded.
So there again we fly in the
face of the nature of reality.
Traditionally it is said that the
very first teaching the Buddha gave is
that of the First Noble Truth,
the existence of suffering.
Here's another example of a Buddhist teaching
that is frequently miscontextualized.
I quote Pope John Paul the Second who said
"The enlightenment experienced by Buddha comes
down to the conviction that the world is bad.
That it is the source of evil
and of suffering for man.
To liberate oneself one must
break with the ties that join us
to our human nature, our psyches, our bodies.
The more we are liberated from these ties,
the more we become indifferent
to what is in the world.
And the more we are freed some suffering."
And sadly, this is not an uncommon
understanding of what the Buddha taught.
But what the Buddha was actually
saying, as I understand it,
when he pronounced the first noble truth.
Is that any attempt to exclude
suffering from the range
of our experience is doomed to failure.
Why? Because it exists.
It's there.
There it is.
It will not be excluded.
And, furthermore, the Buddha taught that our
attempts to exclude suffering from our range
of experience lead to what are known as
the kleshas, or the emotional afflictions.
Traditionally, passion, aggression
and ignorance.
Or, as I prefer to call them:
Grasping, aversion and denial.
Which, of course, would lead to more suffering.
The remedy that the Buddha
offered us is the practice
of making a relationship with our experience.
Whatever that experience
might be in any given moment.
Whether it is the suffering
we're trying to escape.
Or the strategies that we're
using in our attempts to escape.
So from this perspective the cultivation of
maitri or unconditional friendliness to oneself,
as Trungpa Rinpoche translated that term.
The cultivation of compassion, of confidence, of
wisdom and so forth are not moral imperatives.
They are practical tools.
They are practical tools because we need these
qualities in order to not abandon ourselves
in making relationship with our suffering.
Morality is often proposed as a
religious response to violence.
Basically, you shouldn't do
it because it's bad and wrong.
There are two problems with that.
At least two problems with that.
One is that morality itself is
constructed on shifting sands.
Riane Eisler observed, what is right and
wrong in a dominator society is not the same
as what is right and wrong
in a partnership society.
And, of course, what is right and wrong to
Pope Francis is not the same as what is right
and wrong to the leaders of ISIS, for example.
But the larger problem, I believe, with
morality is that it is exclusionary,
and therefore, ineffective.
So talking about right and wrong, good
and bad, it doesn't get us very far.
There are too many ways to argue
about what is in fact right.
What is in fact wrong, et cetera.
But the attempt to exclude
that which we consider bad.
That which we consider wrong.
That is radically opposed to the nature of
reality, which is unconditionally inclusive.
Am I making sense here?
So in the flyer that you might
have seen promoting this talk,
I make mention of right violence.
I've gotten into trouble about that.
It was intended partly as a
playful play on the teachings.
But I actually prefer Joseph Goldstein's
use of the word "wise" rather than "right."
So we're talking here about
the Noble Eightfold Path.
Wise view or context.
Wise intention.
Wise speech, action and so forth.
When I'm asked for an example of wise violence.
Is there such a thing?
I frequently give the example of
the Tibetan Buddhist chöd practice,
in which one visualizes the
dismemberment of one's body
and the feeding of it to
the demon of ego fixation.
Which could be called a pretty
violent visualization.
Although some scholars have
disagreed with me on that.
But chöd is not the only example.
We have the wrathful or wrathful protectors
whom we praise for drinking the blood of ego.
And for cutting the aortas of
the perverters of the teachings.
This wrathful, this fierce, this
ferocious activity, as I understand it,
is directly proportional
to the depth of our sleep.
The depth of our denial.
That's what it takes to wake us up.
So then can there be right or wise torture?
Right or wise genocide?
Of course not.
Not in our conventional way of thinking.
But there is wisdom to be applied
to even torture and genocide.
And that wisdom I argue is that it exists.
It exists.
That does not make it right or wise.
But it does mean that we have
no choice but to relate to it.
It exists, we must relate to it.
Making relationship with painful
experiences skillfully requires training.
Happily, the Buddha told us how to do that too.
We call it meditation.
In meditation practice we train
to accommodate more and more
of an unconditionally inclusive reality.
Specifically those parts of it
that we would rather not include.
Part of that range of human experience
that we train to include is that of violence.
Carl Jung famously said "When an
individual does not become conscious
of their inner contradictions, the world acts
out the conflict and is torn in opposite halves."
And a related quote from
his holiness the Dalai Lama:
"If every eight-year-old in the world is
taught meditation, we will eliminate violence
from the world in one generation."
In meditation we train to loosen our fixation
on the content of our thoughts and experiences.
And cultivate interest in the
dynamics of that experience.
I've often said in giving meditation
instruction, watch what moves.
Watch what moves.
It's so much more interesting than what doesn't.
Our either-or/good-bad model that
governs the conventional approach
to violence is a static model,
it does not move,
and it excludes.
It attempts to exclude.
But violence will not be
strategized by our ideas about it.
So for this reason I'm not seeking a solution.
I'm not seeking a conclusion.
Solutions and conclusions are static.
Riane Eisler's cultural transformation
theory has led to new
and exciting thinking in many fields
including economics,
politics, psychology,
human rights.
That's what I'm hoping to encourage with a
different way of thinking about violence.
And what I want to offer you is
what I called a fruitful hypothesis.
This is borrowed somewhat from the
teacher and author B. Alan Wallace.
Who in his book "Buddhism With an Attitude"
about the Lojong teachings refers
frequently to the Buddhist hypothesis.
Which he calls coherent, rational,
radical and intuitively sound.
I discovered the value of a fruitful
hypothesis after many years of therapy
around my standard-issue tragic childhood
and my standard-issue lunatic parents.
When one day I decided to
believe that I chose my parents.
I have no idea whether it's true or not.
There's no way to prove it.
There's no way to disprove it.
But, boy, was that helpful.
That was a fruitful hypothesis.
It changed everything.
Suddenly I was no longer a helpless victim.
Now I was a curious grown-up.
So that's where I learned to
value the fruitful hypothesis.
And, of course, I have a fruitful
hypothesis about violence.
Why we have it.
And, therefore, how we might relate to it.
And my fruitful hypothesis
draws on a number of sources.
One is, again, Carl Jung,
who said "Conflict exists strictly as an
opportunity to raise our consciousness."
It draws on our own Ani Pema Chodron who
said "You will find your wisdom in the heart
of your neurosis and nowhere else."
It draws on Sakyong Miphan Rinpoche,
who tells us that individuals
and society are basically
good, wise, strong and kind.
Most of all it draws on the nature of reality.
Which, as I've said, is unconditionally
inclusive.
Unconditional inclusion must include exclusion.
From this perspective an approach to nonviolence
that excludes violence, does
violence to violence.
Still with me?
And so, my fruitful hypothesis:
Violence occurs as a natural and
instinctive effort to reengage.
That is my argument.
The them of our us-them binary,
having been driven to the limits
of an unconditionally inclusive reality,
arises as a variety of wrathful protector.
Because we can't make it go away.
We can't make it go away.
Our only real choice is to wake up.
And it is the protector's job to wake us up.
The reason I'm calling this hypothesis
fruitful is because it insists on relationship.
And relationship is the nature of reality.
So how would we practice based
on this fruitful hypothesis,
assuming we wish to take it on?
First of all, we have to recognize that there
is no escaping our relationship with violence.
Sometimes when I'm teaching Dharma, I
see the light goes on in someone's eyes.
And they'll say, oh, I get it.
I have to accept reality.
And my response is, and you're choices are?
So I am suggesting that we not only recognize
that there is no escaping our relationship
with violence, but that we embrace it.
It's there.
It's not going away.
Secondly, that we take responsibility
for the nature of that relationship.
A little over 20 years ago I
was living here in Boulder,
and I went down to spend the last month
of my father's life with him in Cape Town.
And before I left I spoke to Vicky Howard,
who used to teach gerontology here at Naropa,
and asked her for some advice.
And she said, if your relationship with your
parents is going to change, you're going to have
to be the one to change because
they're not going to.
And I would say the same is true for violence.
We keep wanting violence to change
into something that we would prefer.
To something that causes less suffering.
But it's not going to.
We're the ones who are going to have to change.
And that's what I mean by taking
responsibility for the nature
of our relationship with violence.
And, finally, committing to the work of
transforming that relationship with violence.
Both Carl Jung and the Buddha agree
that the work starts right here.
Right here.
And for this reason the culminating project of
my Lenz scholarship is to be a performance piece
in which the performers convey their
experience of the violence in themselves
and their relationship with that experience.
In the hope of inspiring audience
members to look at that same situation
in their own lives, in their own hearts.
So that performance piece has been scheduled for
Tuesday, May 9th at 7:30 p.m. right here.
Be here. I'm working with a bunch
of extraordinarily brilliant,
creative and surprising students.
I can't wait to see what we come up with.
But it's going to be interesting.
So right now I welcome any
questions, comments, complaints.
Thank you.
