Good morning. Welcome, everyone. So you may have seen the schedule on our website or seen the announcement that this morning the talk would be given by Jerry Mark, who's a young priest at Green Gulch Farm, San Francisco Zen Center. He called me last night to tell me that he'd been very sick and wasn't able to come this morning. So I'm going to talk instead and improvise. So I thought I'd talk about what I did on my winter vacation. So I've been away the last couple of weeks. We visited my stepdaughter in England, which was nice. And then I went for about a week to Amsterdam. So I want to talk about that. I had been there when I was 15 with my family, and I have not been to mainland Europe since.

[01:05]

So it was a wonderful visit. I enjoyed walking around the canals, looking at the buildings. It's a beautiful city, very interesting city. But I specifically want to talk this morning about three museums I went to. museums, many of them, and talk about what this, what it sort of said to me about our practice. So first we went to the, so some of you may have been to Amsterdam. Has anybody been to Amsterdam besides Steve? Oh, a few people, several people. Steve was very helpful in terms of suggesting things. Thank you. We went to the Rijksmuseum. which was closed, but they had a small, wonderful selection available of paintings. So I wanted to talk first about Rembrandt. I'd seen reproductions, and I've seen some originals in other museums, but I was, you know, he's famous for working with light and dark, light and shadow, but I was kind of blown away by

[02:25]

Not just the light, but the kind of illumination, the radiance in some of his portraits, of others and of himself. And the quality that I really appreciated, it just doesn't, it's not even remotely there in the reproductions. But there were several paintings like this where there was just something about the light that was also just radiant. I don't know, I don't have words exactly. So I don't know that this is just a matter of technique, although he certainly was a master. And we stayed on. Rembrandt Square and I got to see Rembrandt's house the next day so I saw some of the context of the culture that he was working in and who his patrons were.

[03:27]

He had this interesting room in his house filled with all kinds of objects, seashells and bones and various things that he acquired, skulls and Relics, archaeological relics from other cultures. Anyway, he worked very hard at his art, but there's something that shines through some of these paintings that is hard to know what to say about it, just total brilliance. powerful. So, you know, I want to talk today about, in part about the brilliance of what humans can do and how we should appreciate and can appreciate in our practice the brilliance and wonder in our world.

[04:32]

So I saw it there and then the last day we were in Amsterdam, you know, we had seeing that the Van Gogh Museum was closed and we're sorry about that because partly we had planned to go to Amsterdam just because I love Vincent van Gogh and his artwork. But it turned out the last day several other plans didn't work out and we happened by the Van Gogh Museum and saw that they too had a small, even though the main museum was closed, they had elsewhere a smaller but actually pretty ample exhibit of some of his paintings. So we went there and I find Van Gogh's landscapes just amazing. Again, luminous and really showing how the world is alive. I mean, just that he could see that way is wonderful. And maybe, you know, sometimes we can all see that way a little bit, but he was able to actually, in 10 short years that he painted, capture that and convey it in this amazing way.

[05:37]

So I think it speaks well for humanity that so many people appreciate his paintings. And, well, I don't know about, that they're so highly valued, but they are valuable. I didn't bring any postcards from Rembrandt, because they just don't capture it, but I did bring a few from Van Gogh's exhibit. Also, Van Gogh's reproductions of Van Gogh don't capture the thickness of his brushstrokes. His landscapes, particularly, I just love. And you can see some good ones. There's a room at the Art Institute, which is just amazing. I always stop there whenever I go to the Art Institute. But there's something in the quality of his brushstrokes that are amazing. You know, so I like to look very close up, just at the paint, and then stand back and see the painting.

[06:43]

And I've heard that my stepdaughter, who's an artist, found out that actually they've discovered that in a lot of those thick brushstrokes in some of Vincent's paintings, there are, that in the brushstrokes, it's still liquid inside. these thick brushstrokes. There's something he did that was amazing. And so, you know, part of what I want to talk today is this brilliance, but also the horror that humans are capable of. So we know that Vincent is famously thought of as very depressed. He certainly had emotional difficulties. You know, when I see his paintings, I don't imagine he was unhappy when he painted. I just can't imagine that. And yet he was certainly troubled in his life. And Rembrandt, who was very famous and wealthy during his lifetime, also died bankrupt.

[07:50]

Anyway, I just thought I'd share one of the paintings. I appreciated, amongst the Van Gogh paintings, some of his earlier works. from when he was in Holland, and sort of dark, and paintings of peasants, and he really cared about people. But he painted, you know, we sometimes chant the song of the grass hut, and he painted this wonderful cottage, this grass hut, roofed cottage, and this reproduction is too dark and doesn't really, get the painting itself, but I thought I'd pass this along with a couple of copies if Douglas or Dave can, or you can pass it around that way. Just a few more, so I want to have time for discussion today. Again, I'm just sort of improvising here, but you know, one of the qualities of Vincent that I appreciate also is his kind of

[08:56]

You know, Dogen says, to study the way is to study the self. And Vincent was very self-reflective, and that comes across in his wonderful letters to his brother, Theo. But also, there were many, like Rembrandt, Vincent painted many self-portraits. And there were many in this museum, in this exhibit, that I had not seen before. There's a wonderful one in the Art Institute, many of them I had seen. But he obviously had a sense, a playful and deep sense of himself and his presence. So this is a selection of some of the self-portraits that I'll pass along. Again, I, just my own reaction, and some of you may not like and say, go, Rembrandt, and that's okay. But anyway, my own response is just to appreciate the sheer brilliance involved.

[10:01]

And to see in, you know, Dylan has this wonderful line, line inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial. And, you know, we can see maybe humanity going up on trial too. Well, maybe in the Field Museum. the whole world of nature and of infinity goes up on trial. How do we assess the reality of our life and of our world, and how do we appreciate it? Again, I feel this brilliance as part of the reality of our practice and of the world. We had Thanksgiving recently, and to really Be grateful for the brilliance in the world and in our own lives. It's very important, as Joanna Macy said when she was here, it's very subversive to consumerist ideas and materialist ideas of the world.

[11:09]

To actually appreciate what we have and in part to appreciate the possibility of beauty and brilliance. Vincent also saw the dark side of, so I'm also going to pass around this painting he did as part of the campaign against tobacco. This is a painting of a skull smoking a cigarette. And so, again, from his earlier period, this is, yeah, 1886. He painted from 1880 to 1990, basically. Anyway, I'll pass that around too. So, you know, one side is just brilliance, wonder, and not just the brilliance of great, you know, great artists or great composers or great writers. But, you know, I feel this also just appreciating, you know, the talents and wonderful efforts of all the people in our Sangha and in so many different various ways.

[12:19]

in the world around us. But the third museum in Amsterdam that I went to is also the horror of our world. So I went to the Anne Frank Museum. And I read the Anne Frank diary when I was, I don't know, in my early teens, I think. haven't thought about it much, but this museum was deeply moving. It shows, it's where the house that she and eight people all together hid in for two years before they were turned in and captured and ended up all but her father dying in concentration camps. I'll pass around first a picture of just the house as it is today, but probably not so different from as it was then, just along the canal.

[13:29]

The canals are beautiful in Amsterdam, so this is the house where she lived. They hid in an attic in, I don't know, four or five rooms, eight people, for more than two years. the attic was hidden behind a bookcase so that people couldn't, wouldn't find them. So I'll pass along, actually the bookcase pulls away and there's this, you have to stoop to get in through this hidden doorway, which leads up to where they lived hidden for two years. And here's some pictures of Ann herself. This was before she went into hiding. I don't have pictures of her from after that, but this is when she lived there from when she was about 13 to about 15. And these are some pictures of her.

[14:31]

She shared a room with someone else, but she managed to get magazine pictures of a lot of movie stars and other things. This is just a picture of her room as it was at the time that they recreated. She had a picture of Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin up on the wall. So the contrast, you know, to such beauty and brilliance and just the horror of, you know, what the Nazis did and what human beings do to other human beings. Together, total brilliance and just How do we face that?

[15:46]

So while I was in Holland, we heard about the shooting in Connecticut. So maybe in our world, in our society now, the horror is much more evident than the beauty that also is available. What to say about twenty six or seven year olds just gunned down. And then the horror is kind of increased by, well, there've been lots of responses and maybe there will be some newer gun control.

[16:54]

You know, I don't like guns myself. I had an uncle who hunted, and I once went hunting with him, but a long time ago. But, you know, for people who hunt game and hopefully eat it, and who, or who like to, you know, do target practice as a sport, you know, there should be guns, I guess. But to insist that assault rifles and magazine clips with, you know, hundreds of bullets, so it'd be available readily, easily. And that we don't have mental health programs for people who need them. It's just, it's horror. And then the horror of the NRA representatives saying, well, we need, you know, to have armed police, you know, in every school, in every school hallway, just to me is another

[18:01]

enhances the horror of the world we live in. I think there are NRA members who are actually speaking responsibly about, well, we need to control assault rifles and the weapons that are only useful for killing people. And people in other countries The people who we talked to in Holland were polite. It's amazing what our country does. So, you know, our practice, there's so many other examples of horror evident in our society, in our world. politicians arguing over whether we can tax people with millions of dollars at all, and how much we need to cut the programs for those in need.

[19:13]

To me, it's more horror and what's happening to our climate and the way that the entitlement of fossil fuel companies and nuclear power our air and water and our environment. Anyway, there's so many horrors, and I think our practice is not to balance the brilliance and beauty with the horror, but to find a balanced response to both. On our cushions, how do we appreciate? It's important to appreciate and feel grateful and respond with generosity to the beauty and the brilliance and the kindness and the caring in our world. And there's so much of that. Just all the people who practice meditation here and elsewhere, trying to be more present and more aware and develop that awareness and uncover the brilliance that is available to all of us actually.

[20:22]

This to me is an important aspect of Zazen. And then how do we respond to the horrors of our world, of our society, and the damage that is being done? And there's not one right way to respond, but to say, well, we need to have more assault rifles in schools is just insanity. How do we respond positively and constructively to what's going on? This is our challenge. You know, and I think it's not just out there in the world. In our sitting practice, we have this opportunity to be present and settle and witness to, as Dogon says, to study the self, to uncover and nourish our own capacities for kindness and for beauty and for

[21:26]

bringing that into the world, each in our own way. Each of us has particular gifts and interests and talents. Everybody I know in this room has many talents, capacities. We offer this to the world and it makes a difference. So how do we develop that? How do we allow ourselves then to enhance and respond to our creative capacities and vice versa? We're informed, our creative capacities inform our practice. And at the same time, how do we not turn away from the horrors? And I think within, well, I won't categorically speak for all of us, but within many of us, we have impulses towards greed and grasping and meanness and nastiness.

[22:31]

These are human impulses to aversion and confusion. And, you know, some people practice and are horrified to see themselves. Our practice though, is about finding a balanced way to appreciate both sides. Or maybe there's many sides, I don't know. So what, you know, the fossil fuel corporations, CEOs are capable of, you know, their business plan, which is willfully destroying the human habitat for generations to come. Those, the impulses of greed and needing to have more and more and the ignorance of thinking that there's no karmic result of this and so forth. We each have our own capacity for greed and grasping and craving.

[23:42]

We each have our own capacity for anger and frustration and lashing out. We each have our own capacity for ignorance and to ignore the beauty of others, to ignore the good points of people we have difficulty with, to ignore the fear and pain of others that leads to harmful activity, to ignore the fear and sadness of ourself when these impulses arise. So how do we respond to that within ourself and within our world? You know, there's structural ways in which the systems of our societies in the world maybe support and enhance some of the horrors, but also there's this impulsive quality that we have. And then also there's the beauty, so very few human beings can

[24:48]

create what Rembrandt or Van Gogh or Bob or Beethoven or Mozart or, I don't know, Shakespeare or, you know, anyway. There is such in the world. And yet we all have our capacity to be creative, to be responsive, to be caring. And we all have impulses of greed and craving and grasping and frustration. So this is not the response to the shooting in Connecticut has been very powerful and that's encouraging. And of course there were stories of brilliance in there. The young school teacher who died protecting many of her students. And yet there are Uh, children, I don't know how many, you know, 20 children were killed in that school in Connecticut. I don't know if it's 20 a week or 20 a month, uh, children that age are killed in Chicago with guns.

[25:56]

I don't know the exact statistics, but many. So, um, I really had a wonderful vacation. Amsterdam is a beautiful city and they have wonderful teas and wonderful chocolates, some of which will be available for tea today after temple cleaning. For those of you who like beer, Heineken on tap is just way above what you can get here. So I wasn't planning to speak this morning until last night. But that's what sort of has been on my mind.

[27:01]

So I want to open this up and hear what you all have to say about beauty or horror or anything else. So comments, questions, responses, please. You're welcome. I don't know if they have them, but it used to, if you had the full museum, you could I know when I was there, I remember there were exhibits by Kunio Ishii. They actually showed him trying to paint it, Van Gogh trying to paint it in Japanese style.

[28:03]

Yeah, there was a little bit of that in the exhibit I saw. There was a Hiroshige and then a whole room of pictures in Japanese style and Van Gogh quoted as saying that Japanese art is, I forget exactly how he said it, but that that was the background of all of his art. So the impressionists in Van Gogh and the artists that were very much influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. So there were a few of these wonderful paintings by Van Gogh, which are very clearly, more than a few, actually very clearly influenced. There was a large painting of almond blossoms talking about the blossoming and coming to life, which were an imitation of a Japanese painting. And so much of Our Zen rhetoric and discourse is about liveliness and vitality arising in the middle of stillness and the blossoming in the spring, which will come, hopefully, soon, as the days are starting to get longer now.

[29:15]

Anyway, so yeah, Van Gogh was very much influenced by Japanese art, also by Buddhism. There was not very much of Buddhism available then. There was some translation of the Lotus Sutra available in Europe, and I know Thoreau who was actually earlier and talked about that, but there's a painting by Van Gogh, one of the self-portraits, I don't know where it is, it's not the one that's in, it wasn't in the exhibit that I saw anyway, of where Van Gogh painted himself as the Dharmakaya Buddha. He said as the cosmic Buddha, and it's this self-portrait that's just very radiant. So he was aware of some of this stuff, and yeah, so that's another, that's a tie to what we're doing. Thank you for mentioning that, Steve. First I'll say, actually Europe at that time was completely subsumed in an obsession with Japan, so it wasn't, it was new, but it was really influential for all, many of the artists, like Audemars Piguet.

[30:25]

Yes. It was the first European supposed to paint a mini brush in the 1860s, 1870s. And I started commenting to my wife how terrible I was feeling. I thought I was getting the flu. I felt depressed. I felt kind of manic. I had weird physical symptoms. And she's like, you're working with oil paint, right? And I'm like, yeah, I'm working with oil paint. She's like, well, that's it. Because she's a painter as well. And she works with oil paint, and she works with it And the fact that he killed himself, he shot himself in the stomach, which he was known to stick his brushes in his mouth and ingest paint.

[31:44]

So, I don't know, I just often think about that, that he wouldn't be the first artist Not that that diminishes or enhances in any way his work. And on that same note, that he was one of the first artists to have access to toothpaint. And before that, artists had to mix their own pigments and stuff. So, one of the first artists, that was a big technological development, that artists suddenly could buy these pre-made oil paints and have access to them. I don't know, those were my cherished thoughts. Yeah, well, maybe I should give a whole Dharma talk Tanon Van Gogh, who I love. Yeah, I've heard various, you know, the usual rap is that he was this tortured artist and that whole stereotype and that he was depressed and so forth, and maybe so, but yeah, I had heard that too, that he may have been affected by

[32:55]

by the materials. In fact, there was a few different films as part of this museum exhibit. One woman talking about how he had been, when he was committed to an asylum, part of it was because he had been eating paint and drinking turpentine. And so for his own protection, they didn't allow him to paint for Maybe it was a month or two. And yet I think of the lusciousness is the best word I can think of of some of his paintings of wheat fields and cypress trees and just of the natural world where I want to eat it, you know, just luscious and delicious looking. So one book I've looked at about Vincent also says that perhaps he killed himself because he was concerned that he was going to be a burden on his brother.

[34:02]

His sister-in-law had a new child and Teo had been totally supporting him and he felt like he was a burden and was concerned about the child. Anyway, there are various, we don't know. But his painting is just, his paintings are just amazing. So thank you for that, Keizo. Other comments? Comments about guns or anything else? Yes? I was wondering about many of the Buddhist books and so forth that I've read refer to basic goodness, and yet I think If I'm hearing you correctly, and this is what I've been thinking too, is that the tendency to do bad things is just as basic to who we are as human beings as our capacity for doing good. And I wondered if you would comment on what I do. You know, I could comment on it from some theoretical perspective and talk about Buddha nature as a quality of not just human beings, but reality itself, the potential for, the reality of awareness and caring and kindness on the one side.

[35:19]

And then we're karmic beings. We live in particular cultures, particular place and time. And we also, we're all subject to greed, hate, and delusion. Now, whether this is... I didn't mention that I also, while I was in Holland, gave a talk, a day-long seminar about Dong Shan, who I'm working on now, who wrote the Jewel Mary Samadhi. He's the Chinese founder of Soto Zen. I had a Zen temple, Zen monastery in the north end of Holland, so I did that for a day. one of the people there asked, is it really possible for humans to live in kindly and in peace and harmony? Because I've been talking about Sangha as the field of harmony and harmonious activity. And I found myself saying, yes, absolutely. It's possible. We don't need to, you know,

[36:22]

I mean, given the current situation of the world and the way that things are run politically and so forth and economically, this isn't going to happen anytime in the near future. But to me, it's very clear given the capacity for caring and kindness, it's possible for us all to, for humans to see the qualities of grasping and anger and so forth, and not be caught by them and not cause harm by them, and find a way to live in harmony. That seems very clear to me. It's possible. And yet, it's also very basic to the karmic world that we live in, that we have things we want, we have things we don't want. partly it's maybe human, the function of human consciousness which separates subject and object and makes distinctions and says some things are bad and some kinds of people are bad and all of that is part of human

[37:39]

capacity, but it's also encouraged, of course, by various particular societies. Dutch society seems very enlightened compared to ours in some ways, but there's also, they have problems as well, of course. So yeah, we have to face both sides. The beauty that's possible in our world still, even in this world, and in our lives, and also the horror that's created by saying, you know, in Anne Frank's case, well, the Jews, we have to kill them off or, you know, there was also a monument nearby to all of the homosexuals who were killed by the Nazis in World War II. And, you know, other people who are different, you know, we think, oh, we have to get rid of them. This is something that happens. And so it's possible to overcome that, you know. Dr. King said the arc of human history is towards justice, and I believe that.

[38:44]

But that's not the situation here, obviously. How do we respond to all that? guns in the world. My dharma sister Galen leads the Houston Zen Center where you visited Roy, and I don't know if you saw any evidence of that, but she mentioned that people are supposed to leave their guns along with their shoes and coats out in the hall and not bring them into the Zen center, because that's just a culture where people carry guns. I don't know if you saw it either. had raised the issue, initially, of whether the concealed carry law, if they would be allowed to bring guns into the dens. They made a nice decision not to allow that. Oh, good. Mostly, they required you to leave them in their cars. I see. I see. Well, we haven't made any rules about that here. But, you know, I hope any of you who do carry guns will leave them at home and when you come to this end, yeah.

[39:49]

Yes, Laurel. I had, so for me, the most intense moment of this whole episode with the children. Killed in Connecticut was, standing in my kitchen, a three-year-old reporter was saying, and now we have the names of all the 20 children, because there had been a time period when they hadn't announced the names. And then the very next news story, he said, and we'll never know the names of the 10 children who were killed in Afghanistan in an explosion. Yes. Punched me in the gut that they announced 10 children being killed in Afghanistan all the time, and we never stopped our lives to notice it the way we stopped our lives to notice this horrible thing that happened here.

[40:55]

And I was really proud of that reporter because he was probably schooled in territorializing, but it seemed like You never want to think about good coming out of something horrible like that, but at least for me it helped me to pay attention to all those other people. And I thought the President was going to mention the gun violence industry as well. Yes. And this morning I noticed that Senior George Bush resigned from the NRA today. Oh, good for him. Not that all people in the NRA are bad, but that that spokesperson for the NRA said what he said is horrible. That was his point, that that was not acceptable and that he didn't want to be in that organization, so that was helpful. Good for him. He's a role model for a lot of people, I think.

[41:57]

Yeah, and in addition to all the children who were killed in drive-by shootings and gang violence in Chicago, yes, all of the children in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were killed by drones are part of the Connecticut story. Thank you. Roy? My personal view, and I'm not creative enough to have made it up, but it's that evil, generally, evil does not come as just simply the opposite I think that what happens is people try to reach the good, but then it gets twisted. And sometimes it gets twisted by mental illness. Sometimes it gets twisted by wrong thinking or anger. And so in thinking about what the chief law officer of the NRA was saying, Locke here,

[43:06]

been trying to figure out, okay, you know, where is this coming from? Because it can't really just be that stupid or that narrow-minded or that tone deaf. And I think a lot of where it comes from is a very real and maybe even good instinct that came with our forefathers, which is a basic fear of the state. And I think a lot of the Second Amendment was around that. fear of the federal government imposing its will, and so the Second Amendment said, you know, we need to have state militias as that counterbalance. And I think that there are many traditions that speak to that. I heard on the radio this morning parallels between the NRA and the Black Panthers, in that, you know, early on in the Black Panther movement there was concern that, you know, if we I fear the intrusion of the government in our daily lives.

[44:22]

I fear that right now the government has taken a position that they can come, take any of us assistance, throw us in prison and not give us a lawyer. You know, there are some real fears there. And so I think the NRA is speaking to those fears. And so I think it's very easy to just simply say, okay, they're out of touch. those basic fears in a meaningful way so that hopefully they can come to a place where those folks who are that extreme within the NRI can see, okay, I don't have to be this fearful, I don't have to be this grasping. But we've had to provide some counterweight to Thank you, Roy. I really appreciate everything you said. I have just a few responses, which I'll try and keep brief. Yeah. The second amendment historically was partly not just fear of the federal government, but just the recent experience of British colonial rule.

[45:29]

And it was about militias. So I do sympathize with that fear. As a Buddhist though, you know, I just, in terms of, you know, protecting ourselves from abuses of the federal government or of big corporations who, you know, through lobbyists control our government now. You know, I just, I think of nonviolence as more effective. Not that, not that I believe in non, this is just me. This is, I'm not speaking for Buddhism now, but I don't, I can imagine. I'm glad we have a professional army, for example. I'm glad we have professional police. We need that in cases where it's appropriate. But in terms of opposing out-of-control government or corporations, people having handguns or even assault rifles is just nothing compared to the military power that

[46:41]

our government has, and our government has showed willingness to use nuclear weapons, not just in the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anyway, so I think that nonviolence, practically speaking, is the most effective way for us to respond, for people to respond to those fears. That's one point. The other thing is, though, and this is maybe more I don't know, he used the word evil. And some part of me, from the Buddhist perspective, I don't, you know, there are evil, we could say evil, harmful activities, certainly what happened to the schoolchildren. But when we use that word, I think it has these Western overtones of some force of evil as opposed to some force of good, up there in the sky or out there somewhere. I think that's giving it too much power.

[47:44]

I think people do, as you said, I think quite rightly, nobody sets out to be evil, I don't think. People have twisted ideas of what might be helpful. So we don't know what this gunman in Connecticut was thinking and people get mentally imbalanced. I just, so it's a footnote, but I just to enforce some idea of some evil force out there, I think is not so helpful. How do we see that the, as you were describing the fears of people can lead them to, and the sadness and frustration and anger can lead people to do what we might call evil activities. So maybe that's a, a theoretical point. But thank you for what you said. Deborah, you had your hand up a while back. And it's helpful to me in that when I look at my own ways of thinking, what do I cultivate, what do I encourage within myself that would lead in the direction of greater good or harm to others?

[49:11]

It's a helpful language to me. Yeah, that goes back to the ancient Buddhist Yogacara psychological tradition of seeing potentialities. that we all have in our consciousness. This goes back to your question, Joan, the possibilities and capacities we have that, as Thich Nhat Hanh has expressed from this Yogacara tradition, the technical term is perfuming. We have positive and negative tendencies. And a big part of our practice is to see those and then to encourage the positive and to kind of discourage the negative, harmful, tendencies and habits and dispositions that we have. So again, this is all part of studying the self. And I would say it's also important to encourage, as I was saying before, in terms of both the brilliance and the horror, to encourage the caring and artistic and creative and insightful and kind seeds.

[50:19]

Yes, thank you. This goes back to ancient Buddhist psychology, which I think modern psychologists are working with in terms of Western psychology a lot. Part of what I really like about our Sangha is just that we can have discussions like this. And I think we need, especially when something like Connecticut happens, that we need a place where people can talk together about it, and we can, you know, we will have tea later if people can continue talking. But maybe one or two more comments if anyone has. Yes, Steve. Yeah, I've always been, my father was actually a socialist when he was younger. He was in Spain. Oh, good for him. I had, of course, a teenage rebellion. I tend to be a little more anarchic. And that's never completely left me. So when I was younger, I kind of flirted a little bit with libertarianism.

[51:30]

And there's still a lot of it. Half of me really would be a libertarian. But I'm very cynical about no government. And I do think there are needs and things, which I think most of us have. tend to vote more democratically than not. But what I do think is that when I think of me, my father was also a gun owner, and I have family members that are gun owners. I've done target practice before, and really, it doesn't interest me. I don't own a gun. I would not want to own a gun. But at the same time, I don't have problems with people. It's the level when they go to, as you were saying, And I do think there is a relationship to something else. If you want to find someone who's protective of people, it's from the safety box and how to use a gun.

[53:01]

I remember one time I got in trouble when I was a kid. My dad had a rifle. I picked it up and kind of moved it around. He said, don't do that unless you know that there's nothing in there. And even though I knew that there was nothing in there, that's just an attitude that people that the NRA does encourage. You know, it's as strange as they've gotten politically. And it's kind of a shame. I heard Gary Hart say something about maybe having an alternative, a more moderate alternative out there. Because they do do good. Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate what you just said, all of it. And as Roy was saying, yeah, there is a valid reason for people to appreciate the Second Amendment. It's just my opinion. And there are valid reasons for people to have guns, but these assault rifles and having clips with hundreds of rounds of bullets, that's for killing humans.

[54:03]

We don't need that, in my opinion. Any last comments on any of this art or guns or whatever? Hi, Alex. One of the things I was thinking more people in schools with guns than, well, there aren't enough people that are willing to speak up and offer another vision that is perhaps quite fit for the situation. And that, you know, concerns me that there's

[55:09]

The more I thought about it, I said, no, I don't think that's really the right answer. The right answer is, I'm a part of this country as well. I might have what people consider the vote to use or whatever, but I'm a part of this country as well, and I need to get my vision out there and share my vision of what I think is right for the society. I think it'd be great if more people did that. Thank you very much. I think that's a really, really, really, really important point. Part of what Buddhist practice can afford us is a wider view of the possible, of different options, of creative expression, of different alternatives, ways to respond. There's not one right way to respond to any of these situations, difficult situations. Yeah, it's very important to express that.

[56:41]

So, you know, I did not mention my usual disclaimer today, for those of you who are new, that, you know, as a 501c3, we're not supposed to advocate for, or at least I'm not supposed to, or anybody speaking for Ancient Dragon is not supposed to advocate for particular candidates or legislation. But we sure as hell can talk about the issues involved, and we should, and we actually need to. And for us to talk together as Sangha doesn't mean that we all have to agree. So I express opinion sometimes, and please don't feel like you have to agree with what I say. And we need to talk together, and that's exactly what you're getting at, Alex, that to express, to speak truth to power, to speak truth to the usual view of what's going on, to try and think of alternative ways of speaking, is something that we need to do as Buddhists. And that in Sangha, part of how we find harmony is to express different perspectives and listen to each other.

[57:45]

And so this is a very important function of practice, and practice in this world with all of its problems. Joanne, last. OK. A thought just came to me. When my son was in high school at Evanston, a gun was discovered by a student in the cafeteria. sent home letters to all the parents, you know, that sorry this happened, blah, blah, blah. And I asked him how he felt about it, and his reaction was, well, at least nobody got hurt. And I thought, well, he's so blasé, you know. That was, I felt very sad because he was so blasé about that. Like, it was just like, just another thing in life, you know. that, I don't know, he just didn't seem very affected by it. I was concerned with that attitude, that he was so accepting of it, you know, it was just like, well, whatever.

[58:50]

Yeah, well, you know, how do we pay attention and care about what's going on around us and respond in a way that's respectful to everyone involved? So I, you know, Mr. LePierre, who Alex mentioned, you know, talked about we need good people carrying guns, not bad people carrying guns. And I'm not sure who the good people are and who the bad people are. I don't know. And anyway, how do we live in a protective world? Can I make one last? One last. The last, last, last. Well, I think you notice that the people that often do these horrendous things, there's a similarity to them in that they're often young, white men. And just thinking about this discussion we're having, if I'm a woman in the United States, I'm very frustrated with the nature of the discussion and the way that this plays out day after day.

[59:57]

It's really hard for me to, because I think what you were talking about is a limited masculinity life or what it means to be male and the options that are there or not there. And that I don't think it's just coincidence that in this country, the most violent in the world, that what it means to be male and what we interpret it to be male and that how limited it is, I think there's a huge amount to be talked about there, and I just wanted to add that. Yeah, thank you very much for bringing that in, and you know, when we have politicians talking about legitimate rape, obviously there's a problem. Okay, well, we've gone way over time, but I think it's good that we have a chance to talk about all of this.

[60:52]

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