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Juneteenth: Wisdom, Truth, Relinquishment, Peace

Guided Meditation

So welcome everyone to our Sunday morning here at IMC. Today is Juneteenth Day, which is one of two independence holidays that we have here in the United States, freedom holidays. Perhaps, for those who meditate, while we're meditating, the call to freedom can begin in our own hearts—a movement to be free within ourselves. To be free of ourselves, to be free of the tremendous pull and influence of our attitudes, our ways of thinking, our greed, our clinging, our attachments, and our fears. There is something in our hearts that hears a call, that sends forth a call for that freedom. For that freedom to begin with ourselves, then perhaps we can hear the call for freedom in our society that we can support.

So perhaps in this sitting today, maybe what can guide you, inspire you, and encourage you to really be present here in this experience of the moment is your own heart's impulse to not be limited, to not be defined by thoughts, attachments, clingings, and distractions. Maybe you can be inspired by your capacity to step beyond, through all attachments, all clingings, all inner oppressions that we live by, so the heart can be free here and now.

So, take a meditation posture. There's a history in Buddhism of this meditation posture representing, either directly or symbolically, a certain kind of dignity and nobility. Claiming or establishing in our posture a certain kind of freedom and independence might help enable the greatest freedom of heart. So what would your posture be if your posture expressed that? And if you're comfortable with it, gently close your eyes.

If it's comfortable for you, take a few long, slow, deep breaths, with the exhale settling in to yourself. With the exhale, letting go into your depth. Letting go into your heart or your hara^[1], a place of grounding and stability, here and now. Letting your breathing return to normal.

In the center of all things, there's a welcome, there's a call: "Come here, here." You're being called to freedom in the midst of all things: your breathing, your body, your mind. Here, come and see. Freedom is to be found.

And as we come to the end of this sitting, to practice with the Buddhist bridging of our practice to the welfare of the world around us, we dedicate the merit^[2], we dedicate the benefits of this sitting. May it be that any of the benefits, the welfare, the insights, and the freedoms that we recognize or intuit through this practice—may we consider and think about how we can apply them to benefit others. We can wish and hope that, in fact, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, these minutes of meditation serve for the welfare and happiness of all beings. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we contribute to that possibility.

Introduction

Good morning everyone, and welcome to IMC, here in person and also online. Today is the anniversary of the delayed emancipation of African Americans here in the United States. Some two or two-and-a-half years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, it took that long for some of the enslaved people and slaveholders in this country to finally realize that freedom from slavery in Texas in 1865.

Now that it's become a national holiday, the United States has two independence days. The first one marks a certain kind of independence and also represents, in many ways, an independence that was only partial. It ended up legalizing the enslavement of other people—a freedom that some people attained, but which institutionalized or sanctioned the lack of freedom for others. It took almost another hundred years before legally that freedom became much more complete in that enslaved people were emancipated. As probably many of you know this history, it's been celebrated every year, first in Galveston, Texas, and then it spread to the rest of Texas and to other places over time, until now it's a national holiday.

The people who mostly celebrated it until recently have been Black Americans who were most impacted by this. It was certainly a celebration for them over this freedom from slavery. It was also a remembering of the horrendous oppression and suffering that their ancestors went through, and it's good to remember. But also, many African Americans have used the time as a celebration of their achievements, their perseverance, and how brilliantly some of them have worked through their oppression, including the challenges they've had over the last 160 or 170 years since emancipation.

It's remarkable how much African Americans have contributed to this culture—not just contributed to institutions, but helped make it with phenomenal achievements at the highest levels of government, military, science, literature, and music. It just goes on and on. So this day is also a celebration of the tremendous drive, creativity, and capacity of this population of people who have been so oppressed.

For me personally, I'm very much inspired by this perseverance. I'm inspired by the degree to which so many of them have not given up, have not turned around to reject this country, but really have stepped up in a powerful way to claim their place as proud citizens of this country. They have met with oppression, violence, murder, and all kinds of things by persevering and insisting on the truth, asserting and finding their freedom. But also, many of them—maybe partly from their Christian background—carry a message of forgiveness and love. It's phenomenal to see how this has worked. People with so much stacked against them, with so many horrible things done to them, have kept showing up over and over again and excelled in so many different ways, including in their capacity to love.

I've met a number of African Americans who have been practitioners, and some of them have become Buddhist teachers. I've learned a little bit about their personal stories, how challenging it's been growing up in this country, and what they've had to face. But they came to Buddhist practice in order to deal with the tremendous pain that they carried with them, and their tremendous rage and anger. It was difficult to sit in a room full of mostly white people on retreats and just sit there. But they used this practice in order to somehow resolve that, work with it, and heal it. They came out the other side with a dignity, a confidence, and a capacity, because they had healed their rage and woundedness. They developed a capacity to still be in the fire of racism in this country, but to be able to look it in the face with strength and confidence, and with a certain kind of love—sometimes a fierce love. Sometimes I've met these African American practitioners and have been in awe of them. I'm inspired by them, and I've wondered, "Would I be able to do that? Would I have been able to manage with that level of challenge?" You would hope so, but I don't know.

So it is a day to celebrate the amazing accomplishment of what a free people can do, and to recognize there are plenty of people who are not yet free enough. There is still oppression in this country. There are still limitations and things that undermine lots of people, not just African Americans, but that's what we're celebrating today. There are lots of things that keep them from excelling, keep them from living a free life, and keep them from fulfilling their capacity in beautiful ways.

What I'd like to do today is teach what the teachings of the Buddha call the four great resolves. The Pali word for resolve here is adhiṭṭhāna^[3], which etymologically means something like a "higher stand" or where you take your stand. So it's not just a resolve, which can feel like where you're headed to get someplace, but this is where we take our stand. This is what we're committed to, and how we're going to find our way. These four resolves, or four stands, are wisdom, truth, relinquishment, and peace.

I'll say a little bit about them, but mostly what I want to do is use this as a structure to read some quotations from African American writers and activists. I've chosen different quotes that fit into these categories and that might give a different application or orientation to consider these four stands. I think in the context of this Buddhist meditation practice, these four resolves are often understood in terms of our own inner practice. It's turned inward toward ourselves, focusing on how to practice them. That's actually very significant to do, and that's what these African American practitioners in some ways did in order to find their freedom, so they were able to go out afterward and become activists. So there's a place for that. But we tend to limit our freedom by being internally focused too much sometimes in this Buddhist practice. To hear these quotations in the context of these four resolves might be interesting for reflection, and also a way of honoring this holiday.

Wisdom

The first resolve is wisdom. There are a number of definitions of wisdom in Buddhism, but the one that I find most inspiring is not the definition of wisdom itself, but of a wise person. How a wise person thinks is their wisdom. The Buddha says a wise person is someone who considers their own welfare, considers the welfare of others, the welfare of both self and others, and the welfare of the whole world. This is different from what most people think wisdom is in Buddhism. Sometimes people point to emptiness, the Four Noble Truths^[4], or dependent arising^[5]. But to put wisdom front and center and have it be connected to welfare is profound.

For that, we have to know what welfare is, what well-being is. And to be concerned for the welfare of others, we have to know them. We have to know something about them. We have to be able to meet them with a lot of respect and understanding. According to the Buddha, part of the context for Buddhist practice is this mutual welfare. When the Buddha mentions "self and other and the whole world," I understand "self and other" to be the relationship we have, what happens when we come together, the interrelatedness that gets created in our mutual contact with each other. And then "the whole world," I take it to be the scope or the care of a wise person. It is 360 degrees. Nothing is left out. Nothing is outside the purview of our care.

One of the really great African American historians in this country was W.E.B. Du Bois^[6], an amazing man. There was about a century from the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation to the Civil Rights Act. In that hundred years, he lived 95 of them. He was born in 1868 and died in 1963, a year before the Civil Rights Act, which he championed and worked for. What a lifetime to live through: Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, World War I, World War II, and the civil rights movement. There were so many powerful things that happened, and he studied it, wrote about it, and commented on it. He was a prolific writer and one of the founders of the NAACP.

He wrote: "Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked—who is good? Not that men are ignorant—what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men." It's a little hard to read when we don't use gender-inclusive language these days, but this was the language of the time. The tragedy is that we don't know each other. This was one of his summations of all the suffering that he was seeing in this country in his time, and this quote zeroes in on it: we don't know each other well enough.

What happens when we really know people? There was an African American jazz player^[7] who made it his mission to convert or disarm members of the Ku Klux Klan. He would go around to Ku Klux Klan rallies, befriend the people there, become their friends, invite them out for lunch, and invite them to his house for dinner. These Klan members had never had a friendship with a Black person. They got to know him and realized that their beliefs, their vision of what a Black person is, were wrong, and they left the Klan. Some of the High Wizards left the Klan. He has a whole collection of Klan robes that they gave to him to mark their leaving. He collects them; he has a big closet full of them. What a remarkable thing to do. That sounds a little crazy in principle to me, but you can read about him. There are lots of articles about him.

Alice Walker^[8] wrote: "Healing begins where the wound was made." Here is this wisdom of knowing, being concerned for the welfare of others. Can you know about the welfare of others without knowing the wound they have, the suffering and the challenges they have? One of the principles of wisdom in Buddhism is the importance of being attuned to suffering, being attuned to the pain, the wounds, and the challenges of ourselves and others. This is not so that we are oppressed by it or suffer even more, but without understanding our suffering or societal suffering, there's no hope to move through it and find freedom on the other end. Healing begins where the wound was made.

James Baldwin^[9] wrote: "For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness." We have to have the wisdom to face this, to be able to tell the story, or to recognize how we suffer, how we're delighted, and how we triumph. That's what this holiday is about. Not only freedom, but the triumph of those African Americans who have really pushed through their oppression and excelled in so many different ways.

Malcolm X^[10], a man who is perhaps a little controversial for some people, but many people have come to appreciate him more and more with the distance of time, wrote: "We are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as human beings... In fact, we are actually fighting for rights that are even greater than civil rights and that is human rights." Fighting for recognition: "Hey, we're here. We count. We're important." This is a wonderful rallying cry and a teaching in its own right. Regarding the slogan "Black Lives Matter"—because there's been so much resistance to this slogan in this country, surprisingly that anybody would resist it—I wonder sometimes whether if we added one word to it, whether that would help: "Black Lives Matter Also." Who could argue against that?

So wisdom is recognition. Seeing the wound, recognizing other people, and recognizing the humanity of others is part of this whole wisdom tradition. Here, it is not just looking into ourselves, but now looking outwards into this world.

Truth

The second resolve is truth. This is central to Buddhist practice. We practice mindfulness to be able to be present for what is most true, the truth that's liberating. For personal liberation, it's a real deep look inside and through the depths of our hearts. For societal liberation, there has to be some study and recognition of what's true out there and to avoid lies. It is a complicated issue in some ways, but certainly we have examples in contemporary society where it's not a question of what is true and what are lies, because it's freely admitted that people are lying, but they're doing it anyway at a tremendous cost to our society.

Nikole Hannah-Jones^[11], who is one of the main originators of the 1619 Project to study racism in this country, wrote: "If we are truly a great nation, the truth cannot destroy us." This is a powerful statement in my mind. They're trying to bring out the truth of the wound of what's happening here, which so many people are resisting, thinking somehow it's going to do something terrible. But the truth can never destroy us.

Du Bois said, "The cure isn't simply telling people the truth; it is inducing them to act on the truth." To live the truth, to act on what's true. Part of the danger in Buddhism—where we have insights, understanding, and wisdom—is that it's powerful for us to see the truth in our practice, but then we don't take the next step. The next step is to understand how that influences or inspires living in a different way. We let go of attachments not so that we can watch more Netflix and not have to worry about anything because we did our own spiritual work, but to discover how to let go of our attachments so that we can step into the world in a free way, dedicated to freedom.

Relinquishment

Then there comes relinquishment. Relinquishment is a fascinating word because the Pali word cāga^[12] for relinquishment also means generosity. The fact that relinquishment—letting go in some deep way—can mean generosity gives it a different twist. Some people think relinquishment is just giving something up, but the word "giving up" originally suggested offering something up on the altar. Though sometimes in colloquial English "giving up" feels like a hopeless surrender, what if giving up is a powerful act of independence and freedom? It's not surrendering something, but rather letting go to step forward in a free way.

Du Bois again: "There is in this world no such force as the force of a man determined to rise. The human soul cannot be permanently chained." I translate "soul" here as "heart." Our heart does not want to be held in check. It doesn't want to be repressed or held down. There is in us a call to freedom, a yearning to be set free. I believe that once we do mindfulness practice or meditation practice that lets the mind quiet down enough from all its distractions and preoccupations, we can feel and hear ourselves more deeply. We will hear that call for freedom.

The way that's expressed in early Buddhism is the word ehipassiko^[13], which means "come and see." There's a call to come and see, come and look here. Freedom is found here, come and look for it. A Chinese Buddhist saying is that freedom beckons us in everything. There's a call to freedom. The heart wants to be free; the heart doesn't want to suffer. One of the simplest, most rational, maybe even mechanical ways of understanding this call to freedom is that it's a call to let go of all the ways in which the heart is contracted or tight-fisted.

It's a lot of work to do that. It's a lot of effort. If you really feel into a fist, which is all contracted and tight, you feel a call in the fist to relax. It doesn't want to be that way; you have to assert the mind over and over again to keep the hand fisted up. There is a call in the heart for freedom, for release. The human soul cannot be permanently chained.

Du Bois again: "The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression." That's a powerful statement. If you want to do the economic analysis of this practice, the cost of freedom is less than the price of attachment, the price of craving and clinging. It clearly comes out in favor of us doing the work to become free.

Du Bois again: "I believe in liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls, the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, and working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love." Don't we want to live in a kingdom like that, a world like that? Do we want to contribute to that? Do we want to be someone who contributes to beauty, love, and freedom? I think that if you learn how to do it, it's actually less work than the alternative.

A colleague of Du Bois was a man named Carter G. Woodson^[14]. He was actually a main founder of the NAACP and lived around the same time. He wrote: "History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning."

This is where Buddhist practice comes into play, because this is a kind of specialty of Buddhism that has to contribute to all this. Buddhist practice is leading us to become independent. The Buddha was explicit using this phrase: to live a life not dependent on anything, and not dependent on others. Psychologically, in a certain way, it is possible. To the degree to which the heart can become independent, without that, Woodson doesn't believe it's possible to have any other freedom.

In terms of this freedom—living a life of beauty, living a life of love—Toni Morrison^[15] has this beautiful quote: "If you can't imagine it, you can't have it." So some of you maybe don't feel like you have full freedom yet, or don't live a life of full love in all the contexts that you'd like to live it. But imagine that it's possible. Have a vision for it. The first experience of liberation in Buddhism is often called a vision. When we have a vision of what's possible, the first experience of liberation is not the end, but the beginning, because now we can imagine it.

Peace

The four resolves are wisdom, truth, relinquishment, and now the fourth one is peace. For the Buddha, in terms of the emotional experience of liberation and what it actually feels like, he presents two concepts: one is peace and the other is happiness. Peaceful happiness or happy peace, if you put them together. Peace is one of the goals of Buddhist practice.

Malcolm X said: "You can't separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom." We don't want to live in a world where people are denied their freedom.

Du Bois: "What a world this will be when human possibilities are freed, when we discover each other, when the stranger is no longer the potential criminal and the certain inferior." It doesn't really mention peace, but this is the world of human possibilities.

Toni Morrison: "Don't let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be." This is an unusual quote for Buddhists in our scene, that things "ought" to be different. We keep emphasizing, "You have to see the world as it is." Yes, we see the world as it is so that the social world can become what it ought to be. We see the truth of what's happening, things as they are in our hearts, so that our lived life in this world can be as it's possible, as we can imagine it. If we only accept things as they are, and ourselves as we are, nothing is really going to change. Is there really freedom to be found by simply accepting things as they are? I'd say no; things have to change.

To the degree to which Buddhists practice acceptance, it's only so that we get to know things better, more deeply. It's only so that our reactivity and our attachments don't get the upper hand. We don't accept so that we permanently accept; we learn how to be present to see things as they are so that we can let this growth into freedom happen. That's what our heart wants, that's the "ought" of our hearts. There is a possibility for a different life. There is a possibility for a different society.

Whether or not we attain it in this lifetime, in this century, or in this millennium, one of the most powerful ways freedom gets enacted and lived is that we don't limit our enactment by the short-term possibilities or even by the results. What's important is we act in free ways. We act for freedom. We become someone who wants to live expressing our love, our care, maybe a certain beauty, and freedom. We do this so we can be free, and the love in our hearts can be set free so that we can be attuned to and supportive of the possibility of freedom and love between self and others, and to contribute to a world where freedom and love are recognized, appreciated, valued, and celebrated.

May it be that on this day of Juneteenth, we appreciate, value, and start to live more fully, dedicating ourselves to the advancement, freedom, and happiness of everyone, including—and maybe with some priority—the African Americans in this country who have been forgotten, ignored, and oppressed for centuries. There's a little bit of a reckoning that we should care for, and we should support a real change, to continue the change that's happening in a good direction on this Juneteenth day.

So thank you. Wisdom, truth, relinquishment, and peace.

Announcements

We will stop here, and then for those of you who would like, we'll take some folding chairs outside to the parking lot and we can sit there and have a little discussion and check in. Whatever happens, we can take our masks off if you like, or you can keep them on if you like out there. You're all welcome to come. It's nice to chat.

One of the things I'd like to do at the beginning of that gathering is to talk a little bit about some of the thinking regarding what kind of changes we might enact for the COVID protocol for coming here on Sunday mornings in July. It's maybe not a big change, but a little bit of a change. One of them is maybe to stop using this whole registration system we have and to have it be an honor system that people are vaccinated, still wear masks, but maybe not limit the numbers and see what happens with that. We haven't decided what to do, but I thought at least to give those of you who'd like to stay and have some discussion about it a heads-up, we could begin our conversation out there with that.

Thank you very much. This holiday continues tomorrow, so it's really a two-day holiday. I suggest you keep this whole idea of Juneteenth in the forefront of your mind, read about it, study about it, and learn a little bit more about African American history. Thank you.