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Meditating for Peace

Introduction

So, the one announcement I want to make before I start the talk is that today is the last day we're going to do the fundraising for Save the Children for their work with the refugees from the war in Ukraine. It's very nice that so far we've raised directly $73,000, which is a lot of money for our community. Some people have been inspired by this and donated directly to Save the Children rather than through us for their own reasons. I think it's kind of powerful when a community comes together and does something like this, and you see the aggregate, the coming together of shared goodwill, intentions, and desires to make a difference. So thank you to all of you who have contributed. I think the treasurer will close everything down tonight and send Save the Children a check.

The topic for today's talk—it can seem like some people roll their eyes maybe when I give the title, but hopefully, by the end, your eyes will have settled down—and that is Meditating for Peace.

So many people for centuries have associated meditation in the Buddhist context with the goal of liberation, often for personal liberation. One of the remarkable things is that there can be other motivations for doing the same practice. In other words, doing the same practice can function for different purposes, even purposes you didn't intend. One of the purposes of meditation is to contribute to a peaceful world. It turns out that if you dedicate your practice to liberation and dedicate your meditation practice to supporting a peaceful world, you pretty much do the same practice. It's not that different, except for the motivation.

But the motivation makes a difference. It's also possible that dedication for liberation can remain and join with the motivation to contribute to a peaceful world. The benefit of that is it might give a wonderful, healthy, and stress-free sense of urgency to the meditation practice. Like the practice is important, it's valuable. Right now, with the war in Ukraine, the wars in Yemen, and different places in the world like Myanmar—all kinds of horrible things the world is doing—for many of us, I think that what's happening in Ukraine is so horrific and dramatic. Seeing it so clearly with images and everything, it really represents for many people a real turning point in human history and our situation here. Things are changing in such a big way; it's going to affect the whole globe in a way that some other wars don't affect it so dramatically.

And so, if we're meditating anyway, meditate for peace. How is it that meditating can contribute to peace in the wider world? That's the topic for today.

One of the things is that how we are transformed and what we learn about ourselves changes us into a person who can then approach the conflicts and suffering of the world in a more useful way. The very things we learn about being present for ourselves and plumbing to the depths of ourselves in meditation transform us so that we can bring some of the same benefits into the world.

There are a number of things that meditation can do, or is about in our tradition. One is to be a witness for what is true. The second is to heal what needs to be healed. The third is to liberate what can be liberated. And the fourth is to cultivate the best in us, the best qualities within us, the best of our character. Those four things are being cultivated when we meditate, and it's powerful to do this.

As we do it for ourselves and learn what it means to do it for ourselves, those very same things can be offered in how we attend to and are present for the world. We can be a witness for the world, a witness of what's true. We can be a healer for what needs to be healed. We can help liberate what needs to be liberated, and we can cultivate the best qualities that are needed for this world. So how does this work in meditation?

Being a Witness for What is True

A huge part of what mindfulness is, is being honest. But I like the expression of "being a witness to what is true" because it has two qualities. First, we're trying to see what's really true here for ourselves, in ourselves. Sometimes what's true about ourselves is not exemplary. Sometimes it's not even things we want to share with other people because we feel embarrassed or worse. Sometimes what's true for ourselves is something we don't even want to admit to ourselves, or we have trouble understanding or seeing the truth of it because we don't know how to be a witness.

The other aspect is witnessing itself. One of the things we're doing in this practice is learning to be a clear, calm, open, available witness to what's there. To be a witness before we're a judger, to be a witness before we're a fixer, to be a witness before we're an escaper getting away from it all. We are cultivating the ability to be present and witness even the most difficult things that humans need to see sometimes, and we're doing that with ourselves.

Now, some of you might be saints, so maybe that's what you get to witness. But for most people, there are parts of ourselves that are not necessarily what we're most proud of, that are difficult and challenging. Part of meditation is to learn to be a witness to what is hard for us to witness: to witness how we're attached, to witness how we're afraid, to witness how we're caught in the grip of desires or preferences, judgments, how we operate with hostility. We're all saints, beautiful, calm, and peaceful until the unexpected happens, and then it triggers all kinds of frustrations and angers.

These poor computers—they've been recipients of so much frustration and anger. Some people are like, "I want to throw them across the room," you know? But to learn to keep calm and work with it. To see what's going on, to be a witness in ourselves means to witness all those things—the anger, the frustration, the desires, the fears, the judgments—and to be able to witness it in a way that we're not automatically approving of it, not automatically participating in it. We're stepping back and being the witness of it. It's a powerful thing to witness.

There's something healing about witnessing it, honestly making space and room for the thought, "This is what's happening." For some people, what we are witnessing are inner wars. Some people live with all kinds of conflict within themselves. People live with sides of themselves, parts of themselves that they don't want to admit, don't want to accept, they want to push away, they want to deny. They're angry or hostile even towards parts of who they are and don't even want to talk to those parts or relate to them.

Maybe because we grew up thinking we're always supposed to be strong, so we don't like the parts of us that are weak. Maybe it's because parts of ourselves are afraid, and we don't want to accept the part that's tender and vulnerable. Maybe there are parts of ourselves that we want to deny or we feel are wrong. Or maybe there are parts of ourselves from which we've been hurt in the past, and we don't want to ever look at that again, we don't want to admit that we're hurt. So sometimes there are these inner wars, or two sides of a person.

Sometimes it's not so much like we're split, but sometimes we're horrified, upset, or embarrassed by parts of who we are. In this mindfulness practice, we're trying to show up to be a witness and be honest: "Oh, this is a truth. There's inner conflict, there's an inner challenge of who I am. I'm not kind and calm and reflective about what's happening for me; I'm actually trying to avoid it, push it away, repress it, or deny it." And it's certainly not something I would admit to other people.

So we sit in meditation to be a witness—the good, the bad, and the ugly—to really see. It can be hard to accept the possibility of just witnessing because we think we're supposed to fix it, we're supposed to be different. We feel we can't just witness it, because if we just witness it, that means I have to admit it, or I'm making room for what shouldn't be. But slowly, we're learning to discover, to trust that it's actually quite powerful and useful to be a witness, to see the truth. To witness to the truth that this is what's happening, and learn to recognize all the ways in which we avoid the truth so that those things don't get in the way of becoming a witness.

Healing What Needs to be Healed

And then there's healing what needs to be healed. Sometimes when there are divides within us, it's not so much a matter of making what we don't like about ourselves go away, but when there's a war, divide, or split within us, to heal that. To bring into our hearts in a deep way the things about ourselves that are difficult and challenging, to hold them kindly, to open to them.

The heart knows what to do; the inner life knows how to unfold and heal itself if we create the conditions for it to heal. Or we break the conditions that keep it from healing. We bring kindness, compassion, and love. We bring honesty—honesty is powerful, just more truth and really saying it. We bring making amends. Sometimes we have to do something, not just meditate. Sometimes by doing, something has a chance to be healed. Maybe we have to apologize to people. Maybe we need to engage in the world in a way that informs the heart that we're under new management, so something can begin to relax and just heal. Sometimes there have to be expressions of gratitude for what was.

There's a beautiful, powerful story for me. I've told this many times, but I'd like to tell it again. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, we would get the Los Angeles Times, and periodically in the 1960s, there would be this little article in the newspaper about Japanese soldiers from World War II who were still fighting the war. They had been sent into the jungles in the Philippines by their commanders to be guerrilla fighters, and they were told to stay in there and fight until we come and get you. The war ended, but no one came to get them, so they continued living there dutifully. They were stealing chickens from local farmers; somehow they managed to make do. I think the last one was found like 25 years later, and then brought back to Japan.

The story I've been told about how they were brought back to Japan is what's so significant. The Japanese would bring out a very senior military officer still alive from World War II, who would put on his best uniform and maybe a samurai sword as symbolic, and would walk into the jungle calling out in Japanese for the soldier to come out. When the soldier came out, the first thing that the officer would do was to give that deep bow they do in Japan and offer gratitude: "Thank you for your service to the mother country, I'm here to bring you back." They'd go together on a boat to go back to Japan. Just before the soldier was going to get off the boat to step onto Japanese soil, the officer would say again, "Thank you so much for your great service to the country." And then, maybe with a lower voice, he would say, "And by the way, the war is over."

For some of us, the wars we're fighting are long over. They've continued from childhood. What's significant about this story is the gratitude. Sometimes the wars we've been fighting, the struggles we're up against, and the ways we're fighting against ourselves, were ways to try to manage to survive in horrific situations growing up. We survived, we're here, and maybe that was needed—that's how we managed. Maybe there would have been better ways to do it, but as a child, you didn't know, and this kept you alive.

So this idea that we have these so-called unfortunate, unhealthy sides of ourselves that we don't like, or that are difficult or embarrassing—who knows why they're there? Maybe they were an attempt to try to take care of ourselves at some point; probably they were. So maybe before they can be let go or put to rest, we express gratitude: "Thank you." Once the thank you has happened, imagine thanking your fear, thanking your greed, or thanking your anger. What a different relationship. Appreciating that this was an attempt to try to take care of yourself, and then reminding yourself, "Oh, by the way, the war is over. It's okay." That's an example of healing.

The connection between truth and healing is quite important. In California right now, the state has created a council called the Truth and Healing Council. It started in the last few months and is going to go for two or three years. It's similar, I think, to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did in South Africa, but with the Indigenous people of California, the Native Americans. There has never been a time when the state, with its important role, has really taken in the truth of what happened to the Native Americans in the state, which was horrific—it was a kind of genocide. To really hear it, take it in, and then heal. It's interesting that the word is not reconciliation, but healing. I'm not sure why they chose that, but maybe it does something different. So there's now a meeting you can go to—those meetings are online—as a state, gathering information, hearing the truth in preparation for some kind of healing.

So as we learn to be a witness for the truth in ourselves, then there can be healing in ourselves. As we learn to be a witness for ourselves, we can learn to be a witness for what goes on in the world. If we can be a witness to what goes on in the world, we can maybe contribute to the healing of the world. We need people to be witnesses of it.

As some of us are figuring out how much to learn about what goes on in Ukraine, what to look at, and what to take in, part of what we're doing is being a witness for it. It's important that the world has witnesses for this, that we don't deny it, don't overlook it, don't go to sleep. It's very important for people to know the truth of it, to bear witness. Because without that, there isn't going to be any healing. There won't be any movement in a good direction.

At some point, how much can we bear being a witness? How do we bear witness? The best qualities of who we are are summoned in that witnessing. We don't despair, we don't get angry, we don't get caught in all these other things that might get in the way of a deeper, fuller, or productive healing witnessing. I'd like to suggest that that's one of the things we're learning through meditation. As we witness ourselves, how do we witness the truth of ourselves so that we don't succumb to more anger, more conflict, more fear, more hostility, so we aren't overwhelmed?

We are developing this muscle of being a witness in ourselves. We're learning about what goes on inside of us and what gets in the way. So we're ready when those things happen in the world, so that we can be a witness. I think it's so important.

Liberating What Needs to be Liberated

And then, to liberate what needs to be liberated. We learn how to do it in ourselves. We learn where we're holding on tight, where we're attached, where we cling, where we resist in some deep way, where the heart is contracted or made dense and small. We learn to open it. We learn to free it. We learn to let go in some deep, full way, so there's breathing room for this heart of ours, breathing room for the mind, so there's space for the good qualities inside of us to flow.

Part of the paradox is that the more we are attached, the less space there is for the best qualities in us to grow and develop. The more we've let go of attachment, the more space there is, more breathing room for the best qualities we have inside to grow. So to liberate is to learn to be truthful, to recognize not just what wants to be healed, but in a deeper place, to recognize where liberation is, to recognize where we're stuck.

Some of these deeper places are difficult things to see, because some of the most deep-seated attachments we have are not seen on the surface mind, the surface of our life. One of the functions of meditation is to get quiet enough to see the depth of what's happening that's overshadowed by discursive thoughts, ideas, and reactivity.

As we learn this in ourselves more and more, then we can appreciate that other people have that capacity too. In some ways, it will break your heart even more than seeing war, to see how this wonderful, profound capacity of the human heart gets squashed by war. It gets lost in the pain and the fear, and the effect of war can go on for generations. There can be some healing, but for people to truly discover the best possible form of happiness and well-being, that can only happen when we're free of our attachments. War can really make that hard and difficult.

To be a witness not only for what's difficult in the world but to be a witness for the possibility for people to be happy, the possibility for what's beautiful and best in them to come forth. To be a witness for the capacity of people to start becoming free, both politically and societally, but also free in their hearts. I think something in people's hearts, maybe by osmosis or subconsciously, resonates when there are people who know something about liberation and who can be a witness to that possibility and capacity in our world.

To liberate what needs to be liberated in a place like Ukraine, there is not going to be any deep—or very little deep—liberation of the heart without supporting this country to become liberated from the oppression of Russia. They're losing their freedom there. I think the dedication coming out of meditation is to appreciate that yes, we have to support these people to become free.

Cultivating Our Best Qualities

And then the fourth part of meditation is to let the best qualities of who we are come forth, to grow, cultivate, and expand. It's remarkable what our hearts are capable of. Love in all forms. What a great world it would be if we let all the different flavors of love grow in us: kindness, goodwill, care, compassion, friendliness, appreciation, taking delight in other people, respect. There are all these words that I associate with love. To let those grow and develop: generosity, wisdom, peace, non-reactivity.

As we learn this for ourselves, let this grow in ourselves, then we become a carrier of that into the world. It becomes kind of contagious—whether you have a mask on or not, it's contagious! And so, to be able to come into the world oriented around these good qualities. If we don't do that, then there's very little hope for the world. We need people who are demonstrating the possibility of meeting even the most horrific things free of hostility, free of the greed of self-protection ("I'll just take care of myself and not other people"), but instead to come with this beautiful capacity for love, care, and support for others.

To appreciate that we live in this world in mutuality, cooperatively. The world is a cooperative place; earth, nature, societies are cooperative enterprises. How do we live cooperatively? How do we let the whole cooperative function well and completely? What do we contribute? How do those of us who can, support the welfare and happiness of others?

This is my attempt to say that maybe it's healthy to have a sense of appropriate urgency. If you're meditating anyway, please continue. But maybe you can add an important, rich, valuable motivation and understanding that the meditation is not just for yourself. At the same time as you're doing this deep practice for your own liberation, maybe you can also do it for the welfare and happiness of the world, to support this world that's also challenged. There's an urgency to do that. Not for you to hurry through your meditation, but rather to give a wonderful ballast, a wonderful seriousness, a wonderful weight to the practice so that you feel, "I'm going to do this; this is important."

So you don't so easily wander off into daydreams or doing Sudoku problems in your head, maybe. But you're really there with some gravitas, some sense of this is important, to meditate for the world. In this way, we can meditate for peace.

We have a wonderful practice. I hope that it will serve all of us to be able to contribute to the welfare of this world that needs a lot of help. Let's be the helpers for it all. Let's help, not hinder what this world needs. So thank you very much.

Q&A

The usual format has been to end at 10:45 in the old days, and the YouTube time ended right around now, so 10:30. But if some of you here would like to ask any questions or make any comments, you're welcome to do it. It's kind of nice to hear from the community now that we're together. If you could say your name when you start, then we could also get a richer sense of ourselves. Your voice will go on YouTube unless you... yeah.

Yolanna: Yeah, I didn't know it was going to be on YouTube. Anyway, my question is, I'm Yolanna. When you witness the fear or the worry, what happens to the emotions? I mean, I have a lot of emotions. Do you just shut them down while witnessing the fear?

Gil Fronsdal: You witness them. You make room for them. You don't act on them. You don't pick them up and think about them and reinforce them, but that's where learning to be a witness is. You want to see it all. It's almost like you can step back and not live in the emotions, not live in the thoughts, but you almost step back and see, "Oh, these are emotions. Look at this, this is chaotic." You learn the art of stepping back, so the seeing, the witnessing, is not entangled in what we see.

Yolanna: So what you're saying is witness the emotions too? Okay, yes, thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: One of the ways of understanding it with fear is that when we witness fear, we're helping the fear feel safe. Because if we're attacking fear, trying to get rid of it and having some idea it shouldn't be there—"I should be better, I've been meditating for years, I'm not supposed to have fear, this is an embarrassment to the Buddhist world"—then the poor fear is going to feel terrible! What we're trying to do is just to witness it, "Oh, it's fear," in a way that the fear finally feels safe. Okay, it can just be there. Fear doesn't have to be afraid.

Yolanna: Okay, great. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Hi. I have a question exactly about witnessing. Certain experiences have created a fear-ridden brain, a fear-dominated brain. In witnessing, sometimes a fear-dominated brain will continue to bring up really fearful experiences again and again. I have a concern that ultimately the neurology of witnessing and experiencing something that's coming up so quickly and frequently will amplify it. I just wonder about mindfulness in that kind of context.

Gil Fronsdal: One of the core principles of the dharma^[1] is to be mindful of the effect, the consequence of what we do. If the consequence of bringing mindfulness or bringing witnessing to our fear continually produces more fear, that is not helpful. But it's useful to know that! Part of the benefit of mindfulness is seeing, "Oh, this is what happens when I am present for fear. I get more afraid, I shut down." Once you see that's happening, you have the information you need, which tells you, "I need to find a different way."

In meditation, some people switch their practice to do loving-kindness or compassion meditation. Some people find it useful to emphasize body meditation, just resting in their body rather than in the emotion, to find a neutral place in the body where they can stay and be with it. Sometimes we need to do something very different. We have a wealth of what's called trauma therapy now, which works with this very issue—that it's too hard for some people to just be present for their own fear, hurt, and pain.

There are all these techniques or ways of working with it wisely. Historically, Buddhism helps a lot of people work through trauma, but sometimes we need extra help, extra support from specialists who know how to work through it. Nowadays, there are a lot of things to try besides meditation when repeated contact with fear produces panic, more fear, or shutting down. Also, sometimes one-on-one conversations with a meditation teacher can show how to practice mindfulness differently, so it can be helpful.

Speaker 2: Yes, my intention was to bring this to light in today's talk. Thank you.

Molly: Hi, my name is Molly. I have found that people are so vocal about their opinions in the media and so strong-willed that they almost make it sound like it's factual. Sometimes I feel that it's a struggle not to be judgmental.

Gil Fronsdal: It might help for today to distinguish being judgmental from being evaluative. Or judgmental versus recognition. It's possible to recognize what someone's doing, or suspect what someone's doing, and it might be evaluative where you say, "Well, I don't think this is a healthy thing for that person or for all of us." That doesn't have to be hostile or devalue the person or push someone away.

One of the reasons why the word "judgment" is so powerful is that it's not a simple evaluation of the situation. It often comes with hostility itself, or this pushing away or shutting down, or creating a strong sense of "other"—"they're wrong as a person." If you want to stop being judgmental, some people think that means they're not supposed to be evaluative anymore, and that just makes the whole thing harder. You might see if you can relax a little bit and switch the orientation of what you're doing to being evaluative—to recognize and evaluate what's going on—and see if that takes the sting out of it.

Grace: Hi, my name is Grace. I just want to say that I really appreciate how you pointed out it all starts with trying to work on internal healing, and that's how we can relate to things differently. So that's really eye-opening and profound for me. Thank you.

Gil Fronsdal: Wonderful. Thank you, I appreciate that. One of the motivations I have for being a Buddhist teacher is to contribute to a better world, and I have a strong belief that this practice does that.

Gaurav: Hi, I'm Gaurav. Thanks for the talk and meditation. One of the things that came up in my mind about witnessing was like, I have this mistrust of the media, and that's how I witness what's going on in the world. So there was a conflict there: how do I witness when media has an incentive to manipulate my emotions?

Gil Fronsdal: This is a really important question. How do we become wise consumers of the news? I think one of them is to ask yourself about the news that you are listening to: can you figure out what their bias is? Recognize sometimes it's very clear. When you're reading it, you remember that and say, "Well, I should be careful here about how they're doing it." The other is to look for sources that maybe don't express as obvious a bias, that are more neutral.

There's a website called AllSides. They will have lined up three columns: one newspaper that has news from the political right, another column on the other side has political left, and then the middle is news that they evaluate as more middle. Sometimes it's fascinating to read news from all three because then you get a sense of the range, and it's clear how people are biased if you see it that way.

Another thing that I like to do—I learned this many years ago when I was living at the monastery in the 1980s. We were deep in the mountains, and the newspaper would come in maybe once a week or something. So the news was almost always old. I learned it was really eye-opening to see when I was reading news that was two, three, four days old, that my body, my mind, my heart would not get excited, would not get alarmed the way it did when I thought the news was fresh. So you might try reading the news late! Or reading weekly magazines or monthly magazines that talk about the same thing. You don't have to be right on top, current by the day. Maybe just read the headlines currently, but to go deeper, do it with something a little bit older. Then you yourself will not be as reactive to the bias or what goes on.

A neutral source that I've enjoyed sometimes is going on Wikipedia and reading about a particular news event. It's kind of like an encyclopedic entry. I'm sure it's biased there too, but it doesn't have the charge. It's not written with the charge of popular news where they're trying to capture your attention and keep you there. The writing is a different style; it's a matter of fact, and it tends to be broader and simpler. I find that sometimes very helpful for me to go check there.

It's a really important topic you bring up. Becoming wise in how we relate to the news is an important part of this. One of the things to do in terms of being a witness is to be a witness of how your reaction is to the news. That's really important. Can the best of you come out rather than the worst of you when you read the news?

Okay, well thank you very much, and may you be a peacemaker within and without.