Good morning, everyone. So this Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 's I Have a Dream speech. The event was called March for Jobs and Freedom. And so I want to talk this morning in honor of that 50th anniversary about that speech. It's been considered the, well, it's one of the most important, inspiring, political, and I would say spiritual speeches of the 20th century. So I'm gonna talk about how his dream, how is his dream today, and maybe what would Dr. King say today? Who would he invite to speak? today about that. But mostly I want to talk, also I want to talk about what is our dream now and hear from you about that.

[01:08]

So I want to say a little bit about how that's relevant to our practice here. So Dr. King spoke as a moral and religious leader and I want to comment on this, not from politics in the usual sense of that term, but from our bodhisattva precepts. So the practice we do here of being present and upright, facing the wall, facing ourselves, is about settling on ourselves, about being aware, about finding inner peace ourselves, but also this is in the tradition of the bodhisattva way, the way of universal awakening. And as we settle in ourselves and see ourselves more fully, we realize through this satsang practice how deeply we are interconnected with each other, with the people around us,

[02:23]

with all the people we've ever known and will know, and with all beings. And so our practice is not just about finding inner peace for ourselves, but about peace and awakening for all beings, universal liberation. So there are a lot of things that Dr. King represented that are important in terms of our practice. One is just this value of his dream, the societal values that our society has of liberty and justice for all. It used to be all men, but now we could say all men and women, all beings. In Buddhism, we would say all beings, not just human beings, being created equal. You know, this is actually a great bodhisattva statement.

[03:26]

It's a value in our society that's important for us as Zen practitioners. And actually, all of the great, wonderful Zen and Buddhist teachers from Asia who we talk about and whose teachings we look at, who inspire us, lived in societies where that wasn't even a value or a primary value in their society. You know, they lived in feudal, societies where there was assumed this huge disparity in hierarchy and the idea of equality wasn't even part of the social values. So we know that the value of liberty and justice for all and all being equal under the law and so forth wasn't the reality. When the Declaration of Independence was written, it still wasn't the reality when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued by President Lincoln.

[04:32]

It certainly wasn't the reality when Dr. King gave his I Have a Dream speech. It certainly isn't the reality today, and yet we have that value. And that's important. It means something, that there is that aspiration, that there is that ideal. And Dr. King really kept that, not just kept it alive, but opened it up more, inspired it. So that's important to us and to our practice. And then another thing about Dr. King is that statement of his that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. So, from the Bodhisattva ideal, the ideal of universal liberation, of awakening all, of freeing all beings from suffering, of course, this doesn't look like we're going to accomplish that this year in our country or world or city.

[05:32]

That statement, the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, is a kind of acknowledgment of what I would call bodhisattva time, of the long time frame that is involved in our practice, that we're not just practicing for ourselves and for all the other beings in the world now, we're practicing in a context of a wide view of time. So we have that in our practice by invoking Shakyamuni Buddha, who lived 2,500 years ago, by invoking the great Zen ancestors, the Bodhidharmas on our altar who lived around 600. Dogen, who I talk about a lot, who lived in 1300 Japan. Suzuki Roshi, who lived in the 60s in San Francisco. And going forward, so one idea about what Shakyamuni Buddha did when he founded his order of monks and then his order of nuns was that he was establishing a kind of vehicle in history.

[06:39]

One modern interpretation of that is that he was establishing an order to bring not just personal liberation, so all of us, you know, we can find some measure of personal settling and calming and flexibility and opening through our practice of regular sitting. And all of you, to some extent, have experienced that, even those of you here for the first time. Just the idea of coming to do this meditation practice comes from some sense of this possibility. But Sangha, Sangha Sangha has many meanings. Sangha is this ancient Dragon Zen gate community, but it's also interactive communities. So each of us has a variety of communities we're part of, family, friends, co-workers, many different communities.

[07:41]

But the idea of community as a vehicle for harmony, the idea of Sangha as a vehicle for that what the Buddha established 2,500 years ago was a kind of counterculture force, that all through Asian history, even though there wasn't this value of equality or liberty and justice for all, that there was this other thing called the Buddhist Sangha going on in all those cultures. that showed some other possibility within the Buddhist community, not that it was always perfectly enacted, not that there isn't corruption even in Buddhist communities, because we're human beings, but that there was some ideal, some common intention of working together to live in an intentional aware, kind way.

[08:43]

So, you know, to me that relates to this arc of the moral universe. So that's sort of background about, you know, how we are related to this dream of Dr. King's. So, 50 years later, how is this dream? Well, just to say a little bit about the context, 50 years ago, again, the event that he gave that speech at was a march for jobs and freedom. And what was happening around then, that was in August, August 28th, so Wednesday is the anniversary. In June, Medgar Evers had been killed, a great civil rights worker. A month later, Less than a month later, on September 4th, in September, four young girls were killed in a bomb in a church in Birmingham. So there was a great deal of hatred.

[09:45]

And this march was not popular. Integration was controversial when that march happened. And, but it led towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which is now in jeopardy. But anyway, just a little bit of, so I'm going to say a little bit of what Dr. King said on that day, and I'm going to say a little later some of other things he said in other speeches. But on that day, he said, I have a dream that one day this nation, will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. So he was invoking this old idea that goes back to the Declaration of Independence.

[10:48]

So it's important that that idea was there. And he said, I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, where he was from, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table in brotherhood. So, you know, some things are obviously better now. That dream of sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners and daughters, of course, you know, that's happened in places. There are things that are obviously better than 50 years ago in terms of integration, in terms of mutual communication, in terms of integration. And we have an African-American president, so some things are obviously better. However, The Supreme Court has just recently struck down a key portion of the Voter Rights Act that was passed in 65 that Dr. King and many others fought for.

[11:58]

And voter suppression is active in many states today. So we step back from things that were accomplished by Dr. King. And other things that are going on, we seem to have Endless wars with military bases all over the world. Often these wars don't have clear or reasonable purpose. We invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11. We're still in Afghanistan even though Osama Bin Laden is dead. So maybe the purpose of these wars is to enrich weapons manufacturers, but anyway, we're still caught in that. We have a so-called war on drugs, and we have the highest percentage of Americans in any other country, very disproportionately African-American people in jails, many for non-violent crimes.

[13:04]

So, especially many minority young people have been deprived of education, but the cost of education for everyone is becoming prohibitive, involving higher and higher debts. We have a fossil fuel industry which is unregulated or writing its own regulations, in the middle of massive climate damage, with the so-called Environmental Protection Agency, which seems not to have much power to to protect anything, fracking and drilling on public lands. We have big banks controlling our economy, not held accountable for causing economic collapse. So, you know, in terms of how the dream is today, you know, things are better and in some cases things are worse. So these are just my opinions, this is my looking around and I express my opinions sometimes here and you have to agree with me.

[14:16]

But I think it's important to think this week about this dream of Dr. King's because it's related to what we're doing here. How is it today? What would he say? And there was a gathering yesterday in Washington in commemoration. So I think that the original March on Washington, there were 240,000 people. I think yesterday there were tens of thousands, maybe 100,000. And John Lewis was there, Congressman John Lewis, who was The youngest speaker at the 50 years ago when Dr. King gave that speech and spoke yesterday about the importance of the Voting Rights Act and how we have to fight to restore it. But in terms of what Dr. King, I thought about who would Dr. King invite.

[15:23]

You know, the other part of what Dr. King talked about is not just the dream of equal rights, and that was important, but he also spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War and U.S. government foreign policy a year to the day before he was killed, against militarism. Amongst other things, he said, I must speak clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. A time comes when silence is betrayal. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And I think he might say the same thing today when our own government or corporations that have a great deal to do with what our government does, are amongst the greatest purveyors of violence in the world. Also, Dr. King very much was involved in speaking strongly for economic justice and championing the poor.

[16:33]

He was killed in Memphis leading a strike by sanitation workers. So this is not, again, for Dr. King, these were not political issues. These were moral issues. These were about values. He said, a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. So he said that not 50 years ago, but maybe 45 years ago, and it's gotten worse. So who would he invite to speak? if he had been organizing this commemoration yesterday. Well, I'm happy to say that the parents of Trayvon Martin were there yesterday, and he would have certainly invited them. And I think we have to, whatever the legalities in that particular case, we had a couple lawyers here, I don't know about, I'm not a lawyer, but certainly it must look to

[17:47]

most young black people, most young black men to their mothers, like it's dangerous to walk around. And that there's great discrimination. I think he would have been, Dr. King would have invited other victims of gun violence, like the school shooting in Connecticut. those who are trying to oppose the free, wide access to assault rifles that now seems to be the law. Which reminds me, I went a couple of weeks ago to, just an interesting anecdote, I went to California a couple of weeks ago and visited my old sangha, Mount Sur Sangha, from before I moved here in 2007. in San Rafael and I'm very pleased that that group is still there and meets once a week in San Rafael and San Francisco and also once a month in Bolinas all day.

[18:55]

And Rick Sloan is a priest in the San Francisco Zen Center, a lineage like myself. is leading it now, and so we were sitting there in San Rafael, and a fellow came in a little bit late, in a blue uniform, sat down, and he had this big, I don't know what kind of gun it was, but it was sort of strapped to him, anyway, and he's a regular, turns out he's a regular sitter there, he's also San Rafael police on the SWAT team, and very nice guy, talked to him later. So, we haven't had occasion to, you know, check firearms at the door here. Anyway, it was interesting to me. He's a very nice guy and he's supposed to carry his weapon at all times. I don't know if we'll have that occasion, but it was interesting to see a big deal. Anyway, who else would Dr. King have invited to speak yesterday?

[20:04]

Certainly, in terms of economic justice, he would have invited some of the fast food workers who have been striking for living wages. There are people now who have two jobs and can't support their families. And this is not something that should be happening. there's liberty and justice for all. Dr. King would have invited probably teachers and parents from Chicago public schools that are being shut down to speak about that. And public education is under attack in many places in this country. What does that say about the equal opportunity and Dr. King's dream? Excuse me, but in my opinion, I think Dr. King would have invited to speak Bradley Manning, who's now Chelsea Manning.

[21:06]

She's decided to take on her new gender identity, but as Bradley Manning, Chelsea Manning took great personal risk to be a whistleblower and exposed documented evidence of war crimes and murder of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. She's now been sentenced to 35 years in prison. While those who committed, you know, who documented murder of innocents, innocent victims, women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan, who ordered torture, committed torture, were sentenced to, in some cases, the people who were following orders and did that were sentenced to relatively minor sentences. And many of the people who ordered these things have not been even charged. And I also, in my opinion, I think Dr. King might have invited Edward Snowden to speak.

[22:10]

although maybe he couldn't have gotten a country to do so, who also at great personal risk, Edward Snowden, exposed vast surveillance of ordinary citizens by the United States government in this country and abroad, as a result of which Jimmy Carter said, we no longer have a democracy. and journalists have been threatened for, you know, talking about this. So, you know, I think Dr. King would have, you know, wanted to talk about these things based on the kinds of things he was willing to talk about, you know, 50 years ago and after. So that's my opinion of how Dr. King would have seen where we're at now and what has happened with his dream.

[23:12]

And again, this is not to negate that there have been many positive things that have happened in the last 50 years. As someone responsible for representing Bodhisattva Valleys, I feel responsible to say some of these things. As Dr. King said, time comes when silence is betrayal. We must speak with all the humility appropriate to our limited vision. And our vision is limited. Sometimes we must speak. But beyond all that, I wanted to talk today about what is our dream? And for all of us to, you know, so we'll have some discussion and I want to invite you all to comment or respond. But also, what is our dream? So I'm going to start with some things. Here, today, what is our dream for our world, for our lives?

[24:21]

So the first thing I'll start with, as a Zen teacher, is I have a dream that everyone, all people in all the world, take time, a little bit of time every day, even if they're in extreme situations, to stop and sit down and just be present, whether it's Zazen or whatever mode, you know, It doesn't matter if it's Buddhist or formally Zazen, but just take time to stop and be present and breathe. And so part of our personal practice is to just face ourselves, face our patterns of greed and anger and confusion, and gradually acknowledge that. face our karma, to face ourselves, to get to know them, to befriend ourselves, to forgive ourselves for who we are, to be willing to forgive ourselves for being human beings.

[25:26]

And as the more we can admit who we are, so I'm now talking personally as individuals, the more we admit who we are, the more we can and the more we become familiar with our own patterns of grasping and anger and fear and confusion, we can stop causing harm based on those. So this is a big part of our practice. How do we admit? Oh yeah, and then part of sitting is that we see that stuff coming up again and again and again, and some of it never goes away. Some aspects of it never go away. Some of it, maybe it goes away. We see through things and they just fall away. And that's great. But, you know, even if it doesn't go away, we can become friendly enough with it that we don't have to cause harm to ourselves or others. And I have a dream that we can do that on a societal level, too.

[26:36]

That we can that our society can, and this is part of what Dr. King did, to show us who we were as a society and the more we can be honest with ourselves about our history and how we are divided and how we are caught up in confusion and hatred and And the whole world is, and that's where we are. So this is a big project. It's going to take a long time, a long time. We're not talking about our lifetimes even. But who knows? Things change. We don't know how things change. But in connection with this, I Instead of saving this for the announcements after the talk, I'm going to mention the talk tomorrow evening because it's so connected with this.

[27:48]

So tomorrow evening at our gathering here, there's a talk by Joe Joyos, a Sangha member, who's written a book called The Guitar and The New World, and the book is about a lot of things, the history of the guitar, but also a lot of it, and what he's going to talk about, is the blues, which is one of the great gifts of American culture to the world. And as we know, the blues was largely developed by African-Americans, and a lot of it here in Chicago, in Muddy Waters, and Howling Wolf, and Buddy Guy, and so forth. But Joe's research has showed that the roots of the blues, before it started developing in the Mississippi Delta, actually don't, probably don't go back to Africa, but actually come from Native Americans. another very harshly oppressed people in Ireland.

[28:53]

And he goes into the history of the interaction between Native Americans and African Americans in the 18th century and early 19th century, and it's fascinating stuff, goes into the history of slavery and how horrible that was, but a lot of what was going on. So anyway, a lot of the blues idioms, both vocally and musically, the roots of that goes back to Native American sources and then, as I said, were developed. by Native Americans and African Americans, of course. But, you know, like Howling Wolf talks about his Choctaw ancestors. Anyways, so Joe's going to be here tomorrow evening talking about that. But part of what, part of the healing that this country needs, I think, is acknowledging its karma, to see the history of slavery. I mean, of course, there's been a lot of work on that, but not enough. and to see the history of the almost genocide of Native Americans.

[30:02]

So that's kind of the first aspect of my dream about what we need to do. I also have a dream just of mutual respect between all beings. Between all people and peoples, between all individuals, even people who don't get along so well sometimes. And between, you know, human beings and other beings. Between human beings and forests, between human beings and, I don't know, natural habitat. Anyway, mutual respect. That's part of my dream. And I have a dream that we can support values of cooperation and collaboration rather than competition and that all people can do that. And then we actually look at how it is to live together in cooperation and collaboration and mutual support and respect rather than trying to do better than the other.

[31:12]

surpass others or whatever, competition values. And I have a dream that education would be available for everyone who wants it. This used to be part of the American values. It was actually sort of happening. Education was available more or less for everyone. Not so much for some minorities, but anyway, we were working towards that. And now there's this privatization of education. And I have a dream that, you know, we support all of our energy needs with renewable, sustainable energy sources. And, you know, I think it's actually physically possible, given, you know, what this planet is. How we get from the world of fossil fuel and nuclear power to there, I don't know. But I have a dream. And I have a dream that we don't have any more wars. We don't really need to have wars, that we figure out a way to talk to each other and, you know, all the differences between, you know, Islamic cultures that are very feudal and treat women horribly and modern secular cultures that we somehow, how do we, you know, it seems really difficult.

[32:33]

How do we talk to each other without, and work things out without wars? I have a dream there's no more hunger in the world. There are people who are working on that. Jeff Bridges is working on a hunger project to get rid of hunger in the world. Anyway, so those are some of my dreams. Some of them seem very idealistic or something. But anyway, I think we have to have such dreams. I'll open this up now for discussion, comments, responses about Dr. King or just any of you who have dreams. Here, 50 years after, what is your dream for our world or for, I don't know, for any aspect of how we are as people today?

[33:42]

Comments, please feel free. Joanne, hi. Some people know here that I've been involved in supporting my niece going through a really unfortunate divorce, and I would like to say my gratitude for peace in the home and an end to domestic violence, which seems random these days. And I also want to express my appreciation for this Congress supporting her and her children during this tough time. And me. Wow, I'm helping her out. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for doing Difficult work now. And very courageous.

[34:52]

So your efforts, even for people who don't know anything about it, your efforts are helpful to us. Yes, an end to domestic violence. I think that a lot of us can have different views on those ideals. I think that at the Martin Luther King's ideals were pretty radical, obviously. They created a lot of tension in our society. I think that sometimes the best way to undercut an ideal is to sort of adopt it, but then ignore reality. And I think that's something that we as Buddhists can bring to it, that no matter what one's that were willing to sit and face and accept reality.

[36:00]

And I think about this in the context of Mitt Romney making a quote that he wasn't lucky enough to be born Latino, in which case he'd have much more advantages politically. And it's sort of like that kind of blindness. And I have friends that I grew up with who will talk about how there's such advantages for minorities in this country. And I think that that kind of comes from a place where there's a willful blindness, or maybe not even willful, they're just so in a cocoon. that they don't see that, and I think we can get in our own cocoons. It's very easy to be in that sort of cocoon where, like for me, middle class, white, male, it's very easy to forget that not everybody has the advantages that I was born with. They talk about one of our former Presidents being born on third base and acting like he hit a triple.

[37:02]

I think those of us born on third base have to be willing to say, yeah, I was born on third base. We can talk about what the ideals are, but it's really hard when you've dealt with reality not to end up at sort of the same result, which is connection, which is community, which is caring for all beings. And that can happen, I think, in a conservative political world. I think that can come in a liberal. I think we can let go of some of those labels and just accept who people are and deal with that. Thank you. Other comments? Yes, Renee. So my dream is even more idealistic because it's sort of encompassing, but it's all kind of our Buddhist way, which would be that, my dream would be that people would awaken to our interdependency. However that happens, because, you know, it doesn't always happen sitting on cushions.

[38:05]

Some people have those awakenings. In tragedy, usually tragedy happens to them, and suddenly they wake up and they go, oh, wow. So that would be my dream, that people would awaken to their interdependency, and interdependency involving environment, and all of that. Hey, Jerry. I have two pieces of open correspondence. Recently, we had a discussion about why People in their 20s aren't as active as older people. Because of hopeless, we're already at the end. It's not going to make a difference what we do. I was a little taken aback by that. But I guess my dream would be that somehow we could revive that sense of hope, or that sense of possibility, and not just

[39:13]

Yeah, well, I have a whole, okay, I'm going to say some things about that, because I think, I don't know about hope, I go back and forth about that word, but I think what we do definitely makes a difference. So, in terms of things like the climate and the nuclear radiation that's been leaking from Fukushima that nobody knows what to do with, and all the things that are terrible, and there certainly is going to be, I don't know how it's going to happen, but things are going to probably according to science, for those who still believe in that, things are going to get worse in some ways. However, it's not a matter of hope, that something is going to survive and what we do will make a difference in that.

[40:23]

In addition to all the things that are negative, we could say doom, but what survives is still at stake, and communities like this can make a difference, and paying attention to your own life can make a difference. There are people all over the world We're paying attention to what's happening on all these different levels in terms of climate, in terms of political damage, in terms of corruption. There are people all over the world who are aware and working on this. I think there's lots of young people too in the environmental movement. But it's just true that there are people all over the world who are working really hard on lots of this. That doesn't mean there's not going to be damage, but what we do makes a difference. Maybe hope is too strong a word, but there are possibilities.

[41:28]

We don't understand what's happening. I was talking last week about different dimensions and stuff like this. We don't know all of reality. But I like Joanna Macy's way of talking about this. There's the Global Technological Society that figures that technology is going to fix everything somehow. Well, maybe so, but I think some of us don't believe that. scientists and people who see that everything is falling apart, or is going to fall apart, and that can lead to hopelessness. And I don't think that's actually realistic, because there's also what Joanna calls, I saw her again when I was on the West Coast, and she's very inspiring, she was here a year ago, she talks about the great turning, and this is about all the people working in different ways to make a difference.

[42:30]

And she talks about it in three realms. So this is a way of looking at it tangibly. So I think it's encouraging and helpful that one mode of the three is what she calls holding actions. And that includes all of the ways in which people are working, including political action, to try and mitigate the damage, to make it less. And it's important. So some of us here are political activists, but there are other ways also of trying to make the damage that happens as a result of intelligence agencies spying on all of us and climate damage from fossil fuel and so forth. All of the things that are going wrong. There are people working to make that less. That's one aspect. The second is alternative systems. Underneath the radar of the mass corporate media, lots of places all around the world, there are people who are developing alternative

[43:36]

local structures, bioregional structures for agriculture and economic structures. And that's happening. Local farmers' markets is an example that we can see around Chicago. Those are other structures that are developing in lots of places in the world to try and, outside of the control of mass corporations, And these are structures that have the potential to survive in whatever else happens. So that's the second. And there are lots of those. That's the second mode. And the third mode is about what we're doing here, although some of us are doing various of the three. But that's to develop awareness and to see things, to see reality in a new way. That has to do with seeing cooperation rather than competition, as I was saying. But to have new visions and new paradigms of reality and to actually work on that.

[44:39]

And so meditators are, that's part of the work of meditation, to actually see our reality in a more open way. So that's the third aspect, that aspect of awareness. And she sees all that as part of the great turning that is a response to all of this going on. Something is happening here. We don't know what it is. But there's a change that's happening. And it's happening like grass growing out of the concrete of all the corporate control. And we're part of that. Just by virtue of your being here, you're part of that. So I don't know if that is enough of an occasion for hope, but it certainly means that what we do can make a difference. So, I offer that. So, any other last comments, dreams, questions, responses? Alicia.

[45:44]

I have a dream that people, individuals will feel comfortable in places they cannot claim as their own. Good. Please feel comfortable here. You're welcome here. I mean, you know, the sangha has, just to speak honestly, is probably predominantly middle class white, but we have a number of people who are not middle class and who are not white. And we encourage diversity. So please feel welcome. Please come again.

[46:34]

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