Tara Brach - Trance of the Unreal Other

Episode Date: September 5, 2012

2012-09-05 - Trance of the Unreal Other - We are conditioned to perceive people as unreal others- two dimensional characters who lack sentience, vulnerability and goodness. This is often most insidious when we filter people through demeaning culturally driven stereotypes. This talk explores the suffering of living in a trance that separates us from others, and how our practices of mindfulness and compassion enable us to experience what Thoreau calls the "miracle" of seeing through another's eyes, if only for a moment. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

class together we the theme was intimacy with our inner life it was really how suffering arises from the unseen unfelt and what I often call unlive parts of ourselves and that it's not until we become aware of what's there and embrace it and by embrace it genuinely bring presence to what we we've been running from, that we discover a kind of wholeness that really is the equivalent of freedom. So intimacy with ourselves, opening to what we haven't opened to. Tonight, this class, I'd like to take this exploration and bring it outward and explore, you know, what does it really mean to be intimate with the other beings around us? And the same exact principle, and the same exact

principle applies, which is if our heart has shut down to an individual or a group of individuals, if in some way we are discounting or rejecting, not attending to, not including in our hearts others, some part of the world we call other, we are not living from a place of wholeness. It creates suffering. So I'd like to explore that, really how we can't be free if we're shutting anybody out of our hearts. And I find that when we're rejecting others, when in some way we're closed down to others, we're not aware usually that it's creating suffering for us. That's not our awareness, our attention is fixated on something's wrong with you.

So we're not aware that that fixation actually has contracted our hearts. Now, there's a little more likelihood that we're aware of it when we get caught in a very strong kind of cycling resentment. And sometimes we really get a God, I'm really caught in this. And we can feel that it's squeezing us. And you might just reflect for a moment to see if this is true for you. If you're aware of the suffering that comes with resentment, So I'm having you jump right in right at the start, which is by asking you,

if there's someone that you're feeling blamed towards right now in your life, just to check it out for a moment. Somebody that you know very well, or it may be somebody that you don't know personally, but you're feeling hostility towards blame, resentment. Bring that to mind for a moment. And the examination is who we become when we're inside blame. So you might run the storyline of in some way how this person is being hurtful to others

or hurtful to you or in some way letting you down, how this other is not okay, so that you can use that a sense, well, what happens in my body when I'm blaming? What's your body feel like? What does your mind feel like? What's the quality of your mind when you're in blame? And in a deeper way, what's your sense of yourself? What's your sense of your being of who you are when you're in the mode of blaming resentful stories, anger?

Do you like yourself? Do you feel at home in yourself? Sometimes we find it gives us a surge of power. We actually feel good because there's a reason anger is addicting. So that's why you keep on examining. What's it like? Who are you when you're angry? So it's something you can continue to examine on your own,

but what we find is if we're willing to pause, when we're angry and blaming our attention's fixating outward, if we turn the attention around and say, what's this really like for me? It's our heart that's squeezed. It's like we're not, we may be hurting the other person, but we're hurting ourselves. This is not a message that anger is bad.

Anger is an intelligent emotion, and it's got a message for us. And if we're not caught in the storyline, it can actually guide us. But when we're caught in the storyline, we become small. I want to know, how many of you notice that? You could just sense you were living in less than who you know yourself to be. Can I see by hands? How many of you notice it?

Yeah. Okay. It's an interesting examination. Most basically, when we're living in resentment, we've separated ourselves. In that contracting, we've pulled away from our belonging. This is part of what we're going to explore. Now, there's the anger, blaming our resentment that we can feel in our relationships,

but then there's another level of pushing people out of our hearts. And this is the domain that the group White Awake is exploring, where there is in some way who we are is being filtered through stereotypes and who others are as being filtered through stereotypes and we're often not aware of them and what I mean by that is we've in some way clustered a certain group of people as different from me

as either inferior or not so worthwhile or in some way bad or wrong or you know we have some kind of aversive notion, dangerous. Now, to some degree, unless we're free, and by free I mean, unless we've really woken up to all the influences of our culture

on us, we are influenced, and influence is a light word, we're shaped by these presuppositions about who others are. And it's a little scary when you think about it, how very instantly our minds make associations. We clump people. We think we know things that we profile.

We do automatic profiling. Scary. Scary because we're not aware of it, and when we live inside it, it creates separations that prevent us from opening to something that we've touched that we cherish, which is a sense of being. being at home in a hard and awareness that really are tender and awake.

There's a tightness, a smallness. So we do it on all sorts of levels. And it's usually very unconscious. I know that when I pay attention when I'm reading the newspaper, which I don't do all the time, but when I watch myself as well as read the newspaper, I watch myself and it's appalling as a word that comes to mind this moment, how every moment I'm like, whatever I'm taking in, I'm catterizing as this is good,

this is bad, this is a good person, this is my type of person, this is a bad person. You know, it's like, this is just going on, this blah, blah, blah in my mind that's making these categories and turning people into yeses and knows and rights and wrongs and goods and bads. It happens to us.

It happens to us. Now, politics is a big one. It's one of the reasons I want to do this talk tonight. Don't we think, we're right? I mean, really? Don't we? It's very, there's this unconscious assumption that what we're believing is the truth and others are wrong. Well, we have it very, very strongly with politics, with race, with religion, with sexual orientation, with gender orientation, with socioeconomic criteria, with physical appearance. We have very strong filters between us and

reality. So when we're in reaction to others, and again, I'm using two different domains, one, somebody that's part of our circle, so to speak, but in some way they've violated our idea of how they should be cooperating. Okay, so when we're in conflict that way, or reaction that way, or whether it's because a political candidate or some other category of what we typecast we've gotten into reaction to. We've created in those moments what I call an unreal other. So when you're in reaction, whether it's your partner, your child or a political candidate, are in some more subtle way, somebody of a certain race or socioeconomic, whatever.

When you're in reaction, you've created an unreal other. and by unreal other rather than a living subjectively feeling changing being with longings and fears and so on that's dimensional

that person's become kind of an idea in your mind that's two-dimensional flat just represents something really thin they're just not subjectively alive or real to us

it happens a lot lot. The more we're stressed, the more it's like we're a player on the stage and we're the protagonists and everybody else are these like little puppets or pawns or players that are kind of unreal others. And they're either unreal others that are potentially going to help us or potentially going to hurt us are kind of irrelevant because they won't do either. Now I'm painting an extreme, but the more we're stressed, the more we're in a bubble of self and unreal other. And it becomes particularly fraught with suffering

when it's unconscious due to the filters of stereotypes. I wonder as I talk about this trance of

unreal others, for how many of you does the phrase unreal other in some intuitive way resonate? Does it make sense to you?

Can I see just so it's kind of feedback for me? So there's some confusion, but I'd say most of you. I think that you'll

I'm hoping that those that aren't so sure will find as you explore more comes alive. I love the way Henry David Thoreau put it. He said the real miracle is to see through someone else's eyes for even just a moment. Just for a moment. Because usually we don't pay close enough attention to have others become fully real. to us. So there are degrees. And tonight's inquiry really is how do we create unreal others? Like how does it happen that others become so two-dimensional and often there's an averse of real big distance? And how do we wake up from it? How do we see through each other's eyes? Okay, so

the beginning of the inquiry really is just to look in an existential way and get that all life forms are designed to perceive separation that our brains are designed that way and our nervous systems are. And that's important to know so we don't feel like we're fighting against this tendency to feel separate. It's not a fight. It's just becoming aware, just noticing. Awareness frees us. Okay. So we're born, is this is like we're born into it. It's how we're designed. It's part of the evolutionary story. Einstein put it this way. He said that, uh, you know, that it's kind of an optical delusion of consciousness, this separateness.

We have it, but it's an optical delusion of consciousness. He said, this delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures in the whole of nature. in its beauty. So this is a theme that we have this design to perceive separation and just

consider a few people part of us, part of me, but we also have this capacity to recognize that and widen out. Now, what's interesting to me is that many contemporary evolutionary theorists have come to this perspective that the widening of circles is happening and it's also a built-in part of our design. So we're designed to perceive separation, also designed to gradually open and open to have wider and wider sense of who we are. And so I love it when nature, when the those that study nature and science come to the same conclusion as the mystics. I think that's so cool. So Darwin basically argued that tribes with many members who are willing to contribute or sacrifice to the common good

are more successful in terms of evolution than smaller clusters that are not doing that. And Edward Wilson in his new book, a very well-known evolutionary psychologist and theorists described that our evolutionary success is due to the movement towards cooperation. It's our cooperation. It's a widening sense of our identity that's allowed us to be successful. And, you know, allows us to solve problems.

We could never solve. Somebody was just describing recently how nowadays they're putting puzzles that have been unsolved for, like, 85 years on the Internet and between different minds from different places, they're getting solved. medical solutions and all sorts of parts of science, societal problems. It's just this bigger intelligence because we are coming together in these ways. So what Edward Wilson writes is that we have two conflicting forces in us.

And they're competing actually. And we're wired to be tribal in the largest sense, get more and more altruistic. We're wired for it. brains that can have mirror neurons and circuitry that can perceive what's going on for others and can sense the we, the us, it's part of us. And as we all know, we're wired for competition, for individual selection. We're wired to sense it's me against you. I have to prove myself.

There's danger. I have to fight. There's danger. I have to flee. So it's both is going on, the separate self and the more communicative. self. And just to say, the point of this of widening circles is not to extinguish our survival instincts. I mean, we need to survive as bodies. It's part of the way we are to have that fight-flight response, but they're suffering if our lives get organized around it. That's the point.

that if our identity is just exclusively linked to the survivaling self, we will always be a or. We'll always be an oar. So it's also described that, you know, the more we're in that narrow affiliation of self, it's me and it's the world out there, are a very small tribal, because one of the things with tribal is that tribal,

if it's not big, then thinks it's better than another tribe, right? Okay. So when we're in that, when we're in this narrow identity, we don't have access to the parts of our more recently evolved brain that can be mindful, that can be compassionate, that can listen, and they can see through each other's eyes. When we're caught in stress and feeling separate, we can't see through each other's eyes.

I think that's really interesting. One of my favorite illustrations, some of you might remember this. I shared it last year. About a century or two ago, the Pope decided that all the Jews had to leave Rome. Naturally, there was a big uproar from the Jewish community, so the Pope made a deal. He would have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community.

If the Jew won, the Jews could stay. If the Pope won, the Jews would leave. The Jews realized they had no choice. So they picked a middle-aged man named Moisha to represent them. Moisha asked for one addition to the debate to make it more interesting. either side would be allowed to talk. The Pope agreed.

The day of the great debate came. Moisha and the Pope sat opposite each other, and for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand, then he showed three fingers. Moisha looked back at him and raised one finger. The Pope waved his fingers in a circle around his head, and Moisha pointed to the ground where he sat. The Pope pulled out a wafer and a glass of wine.

Moisha pulled out an apple. The Pope stood up and said, I give up. This man's too good. The Jews can stay. An hour later, the Cardinals were all around the Pope asking what had happened. The Pope said, well, first I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity. He responded by holding up one finger to remind me that there was still one God common to both our religions. Then I waved my fingers around to show him that God was all around us. He responded by pointing to the ground and showing that God was also right here with us.

I pulled out the wine and waited for to show that God absolves us from our sins. He pulled out an apple to remind me of original sin. He had an answer for everything. What could I do? Meanwhile, the Jewish community had crowded around Moisha. What happened, they asked. Well, said Moisa, first he said to me that the Jews had three days to get out of here. I told them that not one of us was leaving. And then he told me that the whole city would be cleared of Jews.

Jews and I let them know they were staying right here. Yes, yes. And then asked the crowd, I don't know, said Moisa, he took out his lunch and I took out mine. So it's like this, right? So thus far I've been describing, we have this design to be separate, to feel separate, to out of stress, you know, really focus on something is wrong and not to be able to read each other very well. It is deeply amplified through our culture, this sense of separateness.

And the society we live in through its standards and its stories and its attitudes. It's like we're like fish in water. We are not aware of the imprint of how much it shapes our reality. The ideas and standards of our culture, we're so accustomed to the judgments. creates huge suffering. And I'm going to do some of an emphasis on the suffering of race because it is so deep and so injurious. And I thought what I do is share with you,

because we're really not talking about the imprint on us of our culture when we might not even see it. And I want to share with you a blog posting. And this was offered by an African-American, man who's been now part of our community for a few years and his name is Travis and he shared this with me after he posted he had just come to one class here and the next day this is what he wrote I want you to hear it when I arrived it was a little early so I sat down at the end of the second row and began to read a book I had purchased and awaited the meditation to begin the building

slowly filled the capacity it seemed by the time the meditation began every seat in the house was filled except one the one next to me I was a little set off by this until the ghost of racist past sat down next to me. I became very distracted by the ghost sitting next to me. He said, empty seats are devoured in this hall. So why am I sitting next to you? As meditation began, the ghost in the empty seat continued to whisper in my ear. His rap filled my mind with anger and frustration.

Trust me, reader, you don't want a ghost in your ear during meditation. He will throw off your sense of consternation. concentration. I ignored the ghost and turned my focus to the meditation. And for a short period, I was able to rid myself of this ghost and the feelings he invoked. The feelings and mental preoccupation returned within a few minutes. Why am I the only person to sit next to you? Do they think you would rob them? he asked. No, that's absurd, I replied. I don't think they felt that way. The ghost responds, maybe you have an awful smell. No, I was clean. You look intimidating?

I don't believe a 41-year-old black man in dress pants and buttoned down creates fear and intimidation. Is it because you're new? I don't know. The situation bothered me for the rest of the evening to the point that I did not and could not follow the rest of the Dharma teachings. And I remember the teacher announcing that volunteers were needed with the tea and snack table. It was my intention to help out, but I thought to myself, they don't want a black man to help. So right after the service was over, the ghost of race's pass escorted me out. He wrote some more.

I'm just going to read a few bits because I want to share it with you. He said last night surprised me because of the atmosphere and environment. Why? In a sanctuary of community and meditation, would these fears, fear-based beliefs exist? Then he says, most people would agree that stereotypes are unfounded. nevertheless race-based stereotypes and human attributes are found in all races. It's the elephant in the room. And he says, when we do not bring issues of race and racism and prejudice into mindfulness,

we give way to or deep in the trance that holds us in fear of one another and our differences. This blog is not in any way intended to offend or alienate white people. Rather, this blog comes from the perspective of a black man who loves deeply and with a divine passion. Namaste. And he ends. I'll see you next week. So thank you, Travis. I didn't expect to feel this, but it really, you know, I feel just the way that I did when he first sent it to me right after class.

It's just very raw and sad. It's like we each have the condition. If psychologists know that if something's repeated over and over again, it doesn't matter what it is, something in us once it gets familiar assumes there's some truth to it. And of course, politicians, political campaigns take that and run with it, right? Just repeat something, just pick something to make somebody else look bad or to make a point. And just say it again and again. It doesn't matter if it's, has any...

ground. Well, that's a stereotypes are built. It just doesn't even hit our consciousness that we're believing that some people are, they look a certain way, they're weak-willed. If they have certain orientation or preferences, they're perverted. They look a certain way and they're dangerous or unintelligent or greedy or immoral, you know. Now, there's a lot of victims of stereotypes. I I focused on Trevor's story, but so many of us in different ways probably have felt marginalized that we don't meet the mainstream standards. I'll bet you if I did a hand raise. Most of us, at least at some part of our lives, found ourselves in a situation where we were an outsider and were a victim of how others were looking through a filter that was not true. I think of one friend who shares to me what it was like to grow up as a gay man

and the shame of a secret of always feeling different. Another woman who's a very dear friend struggled with weight all her life. And she says that wherever she goes, people are seeing her fat body. That's her experience and it's actually got a lot of truth to it. A son of friends who feels ostracized because he's not at all athletic. or others that are diagnosed with cancer and this is getting less so but the C word and then I think of my mom

who's 86 now and she describes being in a group or talking to somebody and the intention it's as if she's invisible in some way she's just old and people aren't thinking she is as important anymore it's heartbreaking and not all of

we have a lot of assumptions about people and they're not all the unconscious ones are not always harmful I mean we might have certain correlations we make in our mind like you know most if we think to ourselves professional dancers are thin or lawyers or logical thinkers

or people who entertain regularly or extroverts. I mean we might have things like that that are just you know not always true but they're not harmful I think of this story I heard a blonde woman speaking down the road in her sports car, she's pulled over by a woman police officer who happens to also be a blonde. So a blonde cop asked to see the blonde driver's license and she's digging through her purse and getting progressively more agitated.

What does it look like? She finally asked. The police woman replied, it's square and it has your picture in it. The driver finally found a square mirror in her purse, looked at and handed it to the police woman. Here it is. The blonde officer looked at the mirror and then handed it a picture. back saying, okay, you can go. I didn't realize you were a cop. So in a way, what I'm getting it doesn't cause suffering. We have these ideas, okay, blonde cops, whatever. But they still limit us when we have these ideas because we don't really look as deeply to see who's here. We just make these correlations and a person becomes a certain type. And another

store, there's two sisters of a very strict religious order. They're shopping at a local convenience store. And as they passed by the beer cooler, one says the other, you know, wouldn't a nice cool beer or two taste wonderful on a hot summer evening? Second answer is, indeed it would, sister, but I would not feel comfortable buying the beer since I'm certain it would cause a scene at the checkout stand. So the first sister said, well, I can handle this without a problem. And she picks up the six-pack and heads for the checkout counter. The cashier has, a surprise look on his face when the two sisters arrive with a six-pack of beer. We use the beer for washing our hair, the sister said.

Back at our facility, we call it special shampoo. Without blinking an eye, the cashier reaches under the counter, pulls out a package of pretzel sticks and places them in the bag with the beer. He then looks at the sister wings and says, the curlers are on the house. So in a way, you know, I'm being playful, But uniforms and dress are powerful symbols, and it's easy to lock into ideas about who's here.

We see a policeman, and it's either for us, depending on our history or whatever, this is a pig, or this is a hero, you know? I mean, it's like it can swing. And, you know, there's, I think of for myself that I spent 10 years in an American Sea Gashram. And for those of you that don't know, The Sikhs, the American Sikhs wear a white garb, all white, and turbans.

So I spent 10 years, you know, and they don't cut their hair. That's one thing I haven't gotten over yet. But the rest of it I have, you know, with the garb. But that's a long time, Dave, moving in the world and always being dressed in a way that makes you look different. And you know everybody's got a filter on how they're looking at you. And at times it was really difficult. And we had people calling us towel heads or cone heads. And, you know, it was, we got, you know, ridiculed a bit.

I remember going to graduate school in my garb and being the only one. And how much I had to work to have people, you know, kind of on some way say, hey, you know, I'm real. I'm not that different from you, you know. I'm into this particular spiritual practice. But, you know, hey, here we are. I had to work really hard to have them see past my whites and my turban. It was painful.

I felt like other. I felt the unreal other. Even more painful that after not, I left 25 years ago. So it was a long time ago. Ever since 9-11, my Sikh friends, especially the males, you know, Osama bin Laden, you know, they get taunted. And then the horror that happened just last month had a Sikh. Godwara, we see people look a certain way and make associations that are often painfully derogatory. You're not only different, you're bad, you're not okay.

So the point really is that we're not free if we feel excluded, if the ghost in our ears whispering, you don't belong here, you're different, you're not welcome. And we're not free if there's some ghost whispering in our ear, that other person is not okay or not worth paying attention to or less than you. What comes to mind when you say to yourself, oh, very poor person in third world country, you know, in the city begging. What comes to mind? It's like, is that a real person to you?

Or do we have an idea? Can we begin to imagine seeing through that person's eyes? We very quickly flip to very narrow stereotypes. So often it takes our own painful experience of being other, or else being very close, with people who have been really subjected to the big suffering of being outside the mainstream and have their lives in many, many ways, feeling the shame and humiliation that comes from a culture with ideas that put certain groups down. If our close friends, somebody close and our family goes through it, then we start waking up to the suffering and caring enough to begin to really deepen our attention.

If it's our sister who comes out as a lesbian, or if it's our child, male child, who wants to wear a dress, you know. Woman very, very dear to me. She's in our community here. Remember her coming to, she very rarely comes to Wednesday night, doesn't feel comfortable. African-American woman, single mom.

Remember her coming once. We had a question-answer period, and she was sitting here. We've been talking about teaching our children to trust their goodness, to trust their belonging, okay? Which is something we teach a lot. And she raised her hand and she said this. She said, in my neighborhood, jug dealers line the streets

and our black boys are often on a straight track to prison. Maybe teaching my boys mistrust. Being afraid of themselves in the world might keep them safer. Broke my heart because she has boys, beautiful boys. And I started thinking, well, what if that was me? And what if it was my son living in a culture where he was people looked at him through the filter of, oh, this is a dangerous young man who's potentially a criminal. If that was one of the first things somebody might think,

or if he was the one that was going to get pulled over much, much more frequently if he was driving. Does this make sense? But it took her, somebody that I knew personally, to sense the mom and me going, wow, that hurts. You know, there's more African-American men in prison now, then there were slaves in the 1850s. It's right here in our country, you know. So the inquiry, both personally in our lives with our own friends, where we're resentments and so on, keep us distant, and with the people around us that we, without even knowing it,

are distancing. How do we widen in the circle of compassion? How do we do it? And what I've found for myself and working with people a lot on this is that it always starts with the kind of practices we were doing last week where we sense inside us

how we've turned on ourselves. Because if we're not able to open to the places of shame and fear and hurt and guilt inside our own bodies and hearts, we do not have that courage and presence to be with the suffering. suffering of others. So that's the starting place.

Then the next step is we begin to explore looking through the eyes of those that are closest to us. We don't have to make a big jump. We don't have to go to those that are in the streets right away who are having to beg for money.

We need to go to our partner who keeps on not doing what she says she'll do. Our child who is acting in a way that feels rude and disrespectful. You get the idea. We have to go to what's right there, where our daily way of being with people is in some way

annoyed or irritated or feeling ashamed or insecure or whatever it is. So we begin there, and our neural circuitry can do it, but takes attention. This is Pama Chodron. She says, we don't set out to save the world. We set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts. We pay deeper attention. How are you doing? When we're together and I say this, what's that like for you?

What's it like looking through your eyes? Okay. So we're going to do two meditation. before we end tonight. And the first one, we're going to just widen the circles. The rest of the night's kind of set up to just experiment with this stuff.

So find a way of sitting that you can kind of bring your attention right here. And as you come into stillness, the same way we did earlier during the meditation, just start listening to sounds around you, listening inwardly, kind of receptive presence. And listen into your life, sense where there's a relationship that's important to you,

where you have some tension, some distance, not where there's a major deep conflict or wound, just something that's kind of a daily tension. Somebody might be somebody at work that you care about, but you just, you know, there's an edginess. You might bring your attention to a situation where you can really feel that. that tension, that distance. Something's going on between you that brings it up. So there's conflict, but nothing too big. So go to the place where you get stuck in reactivity with this person,

something they're saying that sets you off, something they're doing, something you're doing sets them off, whatever it is. Begin by just sensing how in these moments it's stress and you probably are in more of your fight-flight mode than in your let's cooperate mode. And just sense of this person's become unreal, that they're kind of in some way causing trouble,

but they're not a real being to you right now. So you can just get a sense. There's a bit of a two-dimensionality going on. You're fixated on what's wrong. Your attention's narrowed. The heart is closed. So you just noticed that. judging it. Okay, this is a moment that I'm stuck in that trance of unreal other. It's a valuable

naming, one of the signs of trance of unreal others. There's not a flexibility or spontaneity or an engagement with the person. You're not so resourceful. So you might check inside and notice what's going on. What's happening inside me? Just go right into where the reaction's coming from. you know, maybe what you're believing at this time. The person's not being respectful of you. You're not liked. You're not mattering. You're not cooperating.

And mostly since the feeling is going on in your heart, your emotional self. So the first part of this is really just to feel where your own suffering or confusion or fear or hurt is, just wherever you feel vulnerable, sense what you might need in these moments. So you can just imagine just offering yourself the kindness or attention. This is if you've really taken a pause, you've stepped out of the situation,

you offer yourself whatever you need, and if it helps you put your hand on your heart, if it helps to send a message inward, you know, you're okay, trust your goodness, your intention here is good, the intention is to connect, just offer yourself something, that helps you to find some balance, some presence, some healing. And notice that if you can be kindly towards yourself for a moment, what happens? What's it like when you start to bring the other person into your lens, into your view again? If you've been kind to yourself, then what happens when you start paying attention to the other person?

Can you begin to sense of what's happening for this person? What is he or she needing or wanting, fearing? Can you just look through the other's eyes for a moment? In some way, in your heart, offer what you think that person needs. Notice now who, even if you've only been able to go through this in a partial level, just sense, who are you? When you're in some way opening that lens and trying to look through another's eyes, what is that miracle that Thoreau is talking about?

Can you sense a softening of the boundaries? Can you sense the realness, a subjectivity of another person, their consciousness, their sentience? Can you sense that the deepest truth is we, this awareness that we share, coming back, just opening your eyes, breathing? This is the domain of our practice, that if we can again and again

notice when we're in that trance of separation when somebody else has become unreal and usually we can't do more in their middle of engagement because you can't say, women, I'm pausing, I'm meditating on me, now I'm meditating on you. It doesn't work that way. You have to do it on the sidelines.

But this contemplation will begin to train you to do what in psychodrama they call role reversing. And in compassion teachings from the Buddhist tradition, it's taking and sending that you're actually experiencing, being another person, feeling their feelings, and sending them care. It turns the eye, the separateness, into a collectivity, a shared consciousness. Once we've done that, we can begin to more, in a more effective and a live way, begin to look at those that we may have stereotyped

and in some way not tuned into in their realness. A story that I thought was really powerful was at a meeting that the Dalai Lama was hosting in Darmasa, where Western Asian teachers gathered. They were discussing Buddhist practice. And I thought this was really incredibly telling

because at one point, one of the Buddhist teachers that was a woman started talking to the gathering about how hard it was for women and feminine wisdom to be included in the Buddhist community. There was primarily males and monks in the hierarchy through history in the different traditions has been male, male, male. So she was saying it's not so easy to be a woman in here. And she said they're excluded from opportunities to receive many teachings, they're poorly supported financially.

This is the nuns, badly respected and often used, more to support the monks than practice their own. Most significantly, men are seen as higher than women. So here's what she did to try to get the monks to understand. Okay? Now, to me, this is really important because it's just like, how do we look through someone else's eyes? How do we really look through Travis's eyes

what it would be like to be here and have that empty seat. How do we look through the eyes of the woman I described whose child's growing up in the streets of Anacostia? How do we do that? Well, this is how she tried to pull it off. She said, to try to get the monks to understand, she pointed to the many golden Buddhas

and exquisite Tibetan paintings surrounding the room that they were all in at this teacher's meeting, and she noted every one of them was a male. Okay, so here she was a woman teacher, and all the symbols were all males. Then she instructed the Dalai Lama and the other Lama and the masters to close her eyes and meditate with her. And she instructed them to imagine that they were entering the room

and that it had been transformed so that they bowed to the 14th female incarnation of the Dalai Lama. With her were many advisors who had always been female. And surrounding them were images of Buddhists and saints all naturally in women's bodies because it was the best form for becoming liberated. Of course, it's never taught that there's anything lesser about being a man. Despite that, these men were asked to sit in the back, be silent, and after the meeting to help with the cooking.

At the end of the meditation, the eyes of every man in the room reopened, slightly astonished, maybe even more slightly enlightened. For the Dalai Lama, he had tears in his eyes. And since then, has done a lot to, just a lot. lot more looking through the eyes of the female. Just one example. Okay. One more example at a camp where they were bringing together Palestinian teens with Israeli teens and I've talked about this group. It's building bridges and they live together and they, they, for a week or two and get to know each other. And it's an incredible experience. And the first of these camps, the Palestinian girl shared how Israeli soldiers

had barged into her family's house, beaten up everybody, and then after finding out they were at the wrong place, left without apology. The group facilitator, doing compassionate listening, asked the Israeli teen

to repeat the story in first person, including the feelings, the rage, the terror that she might have felt. After listening to the Israeli tell her story, the Palestinian began to weep. My enemy heard

me she said. The two girls cried together and then through the rest remainder of their time they became really close friends. My enemy heard me. So we'll close with the meditation that just to give you a taste on how we can take some place in our life where we might have not really investigated but we've created other and be a little. little more awake. So we'll just close with that, if you will, just for the last time come sitting in a way that allows you to deepen your attention. And we begin with intention because it's very difficult to undo, to unpack the layers of belief and prejudice and bias. And it takes commitment. So you might feel in your

yourself where that intention lives, the intention to widen the circles to be part of the healing of our planet, the attention in your own life to stretch some, to perhaps for right now just sense someone you know who maybe belongs to a group or category you might in some way judge or reject. And it may be for you that it has to do with race. It might be religion and may well be politics because how many of us really are in that sense of right and wrong with very strong feelings that might hitch on to certain individuals that belong to certain categories. Maybe it's a category of sensing what it means to be ultra-right-wing or what it means to be ultra-left-wing. Maybe the category has to do socioeconomic or assumptions.

around that, how much a person's gone through formal education. So just sense someone you know. It may be someone you know personally or somebody you're thinking of that's well-known, famous, you don't know personally, or if there's a group that you know that you kind of have a reflex that's aversive, but you don't know an individual, just imagine and begin to sense, you know, what are my assumptions about that person's character, whoever you're thinking about, ethics, intelligence, worthiness. What are some of the assumptions that you might be making? What happens if you explore much like the guided meditation that the Dalai Lama was

put through what it would be like to be that person? Imagine you're that person and you're entering a situation where you were viewed as less than. You're entering a situation or you don't fit where you're different. You might be a person of color and a predominantly white class or church, a transgender child going to school, a poor person without a college degree in a setting with college grads

or a known political figure maybe who landed in the wrong convention. That could be one that's pretty hairy. Whoever your person is in this situation, imagine what it's like to feel that others are looking down on you. the pain of feeling misunderstood, that you're not welcome, that you're not seen or that you're seen as different and not okay. Imagine what your feelings would be, your feeling of shame or fear.

What's this person's fears like? Just try to see through that person's eyes. What might they be the fears of this person? If this person's in some way clearly disadvantaged, imagine the roadblocks not having full access to jobs or proper health care higher education that your children are at a disadvantage imagine the shame to not good enough take a moment to imagine this person as a parent loving their children as a friend delighted by something humorous

just as a human in a beautiful natural setting taking in the wonder. What happens as this person moves from unreal other in your mind to a living, feeling, sentient being? What happens to your own heart? We close in a simple way tonight with a prayer that we in our own practice may embrace the unseen, unfilled parts of our own being.

that we not push any part of ourselves out of our hearts. Just to sense that as an aspiration to truly hold with tenderness every part of our own being and that these open tender hearts include all living beings. All living beings. May our lives be dedicated to understanding and compassion. May all beings realize the truth of their belonging. belonging. May all beings be free. Namaste.

The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.