Louis Richman, Lou Richman. Many of you may know Lou. He was, lived at Green Gulch for many years and was the head of practice for maybe eight years in the 70s and early 80s out of Green Gulch. Lou is a disciple of Suzuki Roshi and for the last several years, maybe the last 10-15 years, Lou has been a musician, a computer, owns a computer software company and has many talents and there'll be a book signing today and he'll be talking, I hope, about his new book Work as Spiritual Practice, Work as Spiritual Practice. So please welcome Lou Richman. Thank you. Happy New Year.

[01:14]

Happy New Year. and perfect karma is rarely met with even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. Having meant to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the detective's words. Well, good morning, everybody. Thank you very much, Linda, for your kind introduction. I haven't sat in this seat for 15 years, but it feels just the same. I used to sit in it a lot, and it's nice to be back. I think there may be some familiar faces from a long time ago that remember me. Hello, wherever you are. How's my voice? I realize I'm mumbling here.

[02:15]

Can you hear me in the back all right now? Thank you. I'll try to remember to speak up. I will talk about my book a little bit, but more generally about work as dharma. I'm pleased to be here because this book is a little bit of a stealth book. It's a stealth Buddhist book, although the Buddhism in it is fairly overt. A lot of the things that are in it I don't talk about in any detail except to audiences like these, so I'm going to take some opportunity to talk a little bit more formally about the dharma behind what I've written. I don't know how many of you are familiar with the phrase genjo koan. Maybe it's been lectured about a lot here and maybe not. It's a technical term in Zen that means the koan or spiritual problem of the moment that you're in. That really is the underlying dharma of what I'm going to talk about.

[03:20]

I left here in 83 and went to work at Smith & Hawken for about 10 years. A lot of people from the Zen Center community worked there at one time or another, so it was a nice place to work. I learned a lot about the business world. I was kind of a Rip Van Winkle because it was really my first job at the age of 35. I don't think very many people in America can say they started working at the age of 35. You'd have to wonder what kind of deep freeze you'd been in. It was fairly cold here in the winter, so I suppose deep freeze is not an inopportune description of where I was. Tassajara was even colder. But I began to realize that seeing that world with the eyes of where I'd been, the pace was very much faster. The mission seemed to be quite different, which was basically making money, I suppose. That was one of the missions. One of the nice things about the workplace is the mission is typically quite clear.

[04:25]

That clarity is one of perhaps the few clear advantages of being in the workplaces. It's pretty obvious what people are doing and why they're doing it, which is not true about most other parts of life. So it had that to recommend it. But I think that I never stopped looking at the situation with the eyes of a monk and the eyes of a contemplative and the eyes of a Buddhist. And the first thing that was very clear, there were two things that were very clear and continue to be clear to me. One is the workplace is where all the energy is in our culture, almost all of it. It's also where all the time is. People spend all their time in the workplace, most people. And if they're not, they're making a conscious decision to opt out of that activity. And the second thing I noticed was that although there is a veneer that defines people in the workplace differently than in the rest of life, for example, when I was there, I had

[05:27]

a title executive vice president, I was the boss of many people, I had power over people, I could hire and fire and make decisions and spend money and make money, lose money, lose my job, which is eventually what happened. Because Smith & Hawkin became sold, you may have read in the paper it's been sold again just yesterday, but it was sold before and to the people that sold it now, that's what happens in business. And all the people that were in Smith & Hawkin, all 260 of us lost our jobs. So the second thing that I noticed is beneath that structure that all of you that have jobs live within, we're all Buddhists. Everyone is a human being, everyone is in some way equal. So that's a kind of contradiction or paradox that we've invented in the modern world, that human beings gather together to perform a common purpose in the workplace, whether it's

[06:30]

medicine or business of some kind, software in my case, I have my own very small software company, or whatever it might be, and everyone organizes themselves along various lines of power and money, and some people get more money, some people get less money, some people keep jobs, some people lose jobs. It's a vast, rather in some cases threatening edifice, but underneath all of that, it's human beings or in the context of this place, Buddhists who are doing all of this. So what I ended up with was a koan for me, which is, how can this situation, which is the dominant activity of 21st century America and the whole world, be a spiritual or dharma type of activity? So to me, the underlying dharma of the situation was the Genjo Koan, and maybe I'll take the opportunity to read what I said about it in the book, and then go from there.

[07:34]

I call it the Koan of Everyday Life, and I'll read it to you. How do you feel about your job? Do you love your work but find that it takes up so much of your time that it really is your whole life? Or is your work dull and drab but you don't mind because you're going to night school to prepare for a different, more satisfying career? Perhaps you work in the helping professions or in education and it is not your boss but your clients or patients or students or parents who drive you to distraction. Regardless of your situation, there are certain characteristics of work that are universal. Unless you work at home, you travel to work. When you get there, you perform some tasks, such as computer programming, carpentry, or management, for which you are financially rewarded. You interact with other people in an environment where power is unequally shared. Your job performance

[08:53]

is measured in some way. You compete with others for rewards. You can quit your job. You can lose your job. And you have, we hope, a life outside your job. Let's contrast this description of life on the job with the life of the Spirit. In our spiritual life, we are not in competition with anyone else for spiritual rewards. How well or badly we do is beside the point. We honor and appreciate all people, including ourselves, for their intrinsic humanity. We care for others. We share and are generous. We forgive. The world of the Spirit is not a matter of bonuses, promotions, or awards. Advancement is not the point. We are already whole and complete, just as we are. So the world is full of spiritual opportunity. The trick is to be alert enough to notice it. That is the real work and the joy of work. And if we catch on to that trick, it doesn't matter in the short run what our day job is. In the end, if we are kind to ourselves, our efforts will be fruitful.

[09:53]

But what kind of fruit will it be? A raise? A better job? A happier work and home life? Perhaps, but not necessarily. Spiritual practice is more about questions than answers, more about searching than finding, more about effort than accomplishment. In one school of Buddhism, our school, those who practice ponder spiritual questions called koans. There are hundreds of memorable stories, usually taken from the lives of ancient Buddhist teachers, that are used as koans. Some of them have even become part of popular culture. For instance, the question, what is the sound of one hand clapping, was featured in an episode of the Simpsons television show. Bart knew about it, tried to explain it to him. And to Homer. Didn't work. In addition to these prefabricated questions, there is another kind of koan called the koan of everyday life, the Genjo Koan. Human life itself, the mystery of being thrust into the

[10:55]

world by birth and swept out of it by death, is an imponderable puzzle, one that we can try to ignore but cannot escape. So much of what passes for, quote, ordinary life is, when seen through different eyes, not ordinary at all, but full of potential for spiritual learning. To practice the koan of everyday life means to confront every situation as though it were a profound spiritual question. In that sense, every koan story is a specific instance of the koan of everyday life. One such koan story goes like this. A monk asked his teacher, what is the Buddha? And the teacher answered, the cypress tree in the garden. What does it mean? What does the cypress tree have to do with Buddha, that is, our awakened self? Let's imagine this cypress tree spreading over the path in the monastery garden. What could be more ordinary or familiar than that aged tree that each monk passed every day for the whole of his life? In that sense, the cypress tree means the most familiar thing. What familiar thing

[11:58]

do you pass? Is it your kitchen table, your car, your good friend, your spouse or children, your co-workers, the copy machine in the office corner? This book is based on the premise that our ordinary routine contains numerous treasures and the details of our workday from the morning commute to the coffee break, the lunch hour, the afternoon meetings, the evening ride home contain within them any number of gifts for our spirit. If only we would allow ourselves to receive them. And then I tell a story, a true story about a woman named Julie who was a customer service manager and who figured out, she had to answer the overflow phone calls and found that the constant ringing of the phone was very annoying to her, interrupted her work and made her tense. And she figured out that if she, just spontaneously, if she controlled the volume of the ringing of the phone in rhythm with the ringing of the phone, kind of pressing the phone as the phone rang, there was some kind of, she began to feel that

[13:03]

it was she who was doing the ringing, that's how she described it. This is a very Buddhist experience, you know, to understand what ordinarily we avert from and I think that most people find the phone, the ringing of the phone a rather annoying intrusion into life. Somehow to join with that sound and to make it part of oneself, to open oneself to it. So for her, the ringing of the phone was like the cypress tree in the garden. It was the thing that was confronting her and it became in that moment her awakened self in that sense. So this is the only time in the book that I actually use a traditional Zen story. I'm reminded of a comment of Stephen Hawking who was told when he wrote the bestselling book, A Brief History of Time, that every formula he put in the book would cut his sales in half. So he put in just one formula, E equals MC squared, and he said, okay, fine, I'm willing

[14:06]

to let the book be, sales be cut in half to have that one formula. So anyway, I have this one story. The fact is that the Zen school which was brought to China by Bodhidharma had existed in India for hundreds of years and probably for six or seven hundred years, if we count the time in India, there were no such thing as koan stories. The first koans as we know them, these kinds of stories like the cypress tree in the garden, really didn't become used as practice or spiritual stories until about the ninth century. So there were many hundreds of years when generations of Zen students and teachers accomplished the Dharma without such stories. In fact, the stories are renditions of spontaneous things that happened. And one of the little secrets about Zen that some of you may not be aware of is that very few awakening stories where people have some breakthrough or opening occur

[15:09]

during meditation. In fact, I can't think of hardly any. Even the ones where people are sitting in meditation, the awakening occurs because somebody's shouting at them or they hear a sound or something is going on. And a great many awakenings occur during work. In fact, this story here probably occurred during work. I can fill out the story. The stories are very terse in the Chinese literature, but I can fill it out a little bit and imagine. Let's put the story here. I don't know if there are cypress trees, but there are plenty of cedar trees here. So you can imagine a student here raking or sweeping or doing something right next to a tree, like a tree right outside here. And the teacher comes along and the student sees a good chance to have an interaction and says, what is the Buddha? And the teacher says, this tree, because that's what the person was doing at that particular time. That was the situation. The situation itself was the opportunity for awakening.

[16:10]

So that's the fundamental spirit of the koan of everyday life. And my guess is that the reason why over time specific stories became memorialized as teaching stories is because it's quite subtle and maybe difficult to really, it's easy to say, let's make every moment of our life a moment of spiritual confrontation or spiritual inquiry, but in practice it's rather difficult. And my own conviction over time is that while this is a wonderful environment to live in, and I really enjoyed my, particularly looking back on it, my 15 years as a Zen contemplative, for most people, most of the time of your life is going to be spent on a job, and the next most important time is going to be spent with your family, and then there's sleep and that's pretty much it. So where are we going to find moments of transformation or awakening? I think that if we rule out the workplace, we're selling ourselves short, and in some

[17:13]

way also failing to honor our own tradition here, where one of the great, one of the great awakenings or great contributions of the Zen school in particular to human spirituality was the notion that work itself was a spiritual practice. I didn't invent this slogan. It was invented by Hyakujo in the 7th century AD. He was the first Buddhist master in over a thousand years to put Buddhist monks to work. For 1,200 years in every Buddhist tradition, monks were prohibited from working, and the deal was that monks meditated and farmers worked, and farmers gave rice to the monks, and the monks hopefully gave something back to the peasants. That was the social contract for Buddhists up until that time, and Hyakujo, maybe because culturally the Chinese are very hardworking, and maybe also because he was uncomfortable having these hardworking peasants bring their hard-earned rice in lacquered

[18:19]

bowls to the monastery and giving it to the monks, his famous phrase was, a day of no work is a day of no eating. Have all of you heard this phrase? This is a very famous phrase. And he basically changed the rules of 1,200 years and said, you know, I think we should work. And it was a good thing that he did because about 50 years later, the Taoists in China became preeminent and converted the emperor and convinced the emperor that Buddhism was bad, and he made an edict that said all Buddhist temples should be closed, all Buddhist monks should be defrocked and go back into the society. And the one Buddhist school that was somewhat protected from this rather harsh suppression were the Zen people because they were widely and deeply respected by the ordinary people because they worked. So, I think that this notion that work and the way that we do livelihood and our spiritual life are connected is very much in the center of the tradition that I was trained in and

[19:22]

all the people that are here and all of you are trained in. I'm very comfortable with it. However, work is very different now than it has been in any time in human history, and Buddhism traditionally has no ready-made tools that are adaptable to, you know, a Dilbert style cubicle farm, you know, or the knowledge economy that we're all working in in America, or the capitalist notion of efficiency and time is money, which basically is the ruling mantra of our society. Time, essentially what employment is, is we sell time. That's what you do when you work, you sell time. Your time is evaluated, you know, by the hour, and then you sell a certain amount of it to your employer and they give you money. Okay, time, money.

[20:22]

One of the things I do in the workshops that I do is I actually have people bring money big money, like $100 bills is the best because it's real money. You know, the old Everett Dirksen was a great senator from the 50s and 60s and he had a famous phrase, 100 million here, 100 million there, pretty soon you're talking about real money. That was before inflation, now we have to add a zero and go to 10 figures. But we actually take out money You see, in the old days, Buddhists used to stare at things. Clay disks was the ancient meditation object for the oldest stratum of Buddhists and they would look at a physical object until they, in a sense, could merge with it, until subject and object disappeared. So I figured, well, why not? You know, it's as good as a clay disk and it's quite interesting to study this physical object. And so we do it, you know, and we look at it and there's

[21:27]

Andrew, this is an old 20s, Andrew Jackson, kind of small compared to the new one. And you realize many things. It's actually, if you should try it sometime, just look at money for 10 or 15 minutes and ask yourself, what is it? What is it? Is it a piece of paper? No. I mean, if it were a piece of paper, I could drop it on the sidewalk and it would stay there, right, like all the other pieces of paper. But if I drop a $100 bill on the sidewalk, I might cause, in the wrong place, I might cause a panic. And, you know, if you drop a $100 bill down a, you know, a sewer grate on the sidewalk, something will happen inside. You'll probably say something bad, you know, your heartbeat will go up. All these physiological reactions will occur, right? Now, if it's a piece of paper, how could that be? It's not a piece of paper. This is partly, the existence of this as money is partly inside of ourselves. You know, this is actually a mental construct, a very, very elaborate one that we all participate in. And I think it's a wonderful study for Buddhists because Buddhists

[22:31]

are experts in how the world is made, is constructed by the mind. This is what we spend a lot of time doing on the meditation cushion, is realizing how much of what we think is real is some kind of, in a sense, imaginative construction that we put together to help, help the world make sense. And this is one of the most embedded of our cultural realities. And you can go to school for a long time and study lots of elaborate economics class and still not really be able to answer the question, what is money? I spent some time talking about it in the book because I don't know if any of you were around when Harry Roberts was alive. Harry, anybody who's lived at Green Gulch and then near Green Gulch for several years, and he was important to the community here. And I want to honor Harry here as I've honored him in the book because he's, aside from Suzuki Roshi, he's really the guru behind a lot of the notions

[23:33]

in this book. And Harry was a Gruff Fellow. He was enough Native American to be legitimate, but mostly Irish, I think. But he studied Native American spirituality. He grew up in the community of the Yurok in Northern California. And I quote him at the very beginning of the book. He said, to find joy in your work is the greatest thing for a human being. That's what he said. And when he was around here, he was very grumpy because a lot of us came out of college without much physical intelligence, maybe. And the trucks got all dented up and the tools were left out in the rain and various things that Harry thought were just really dumb. So he used to go around grumbling and cursing and telling us that we really weren't all that great, you know. And one of the things he used to say a lot, and he said it here, maybe even said it in this room, was, if you can't, I'll try to do it in his voice, if you can't take your meditation out of the meditation hall, your meditation isn't worth a hill of

[24:37]

beans. And the hill of beans is a euphemism for what he really said. So he was a real proponent that the real test, the real rubber meets the road quality of whether what we were doing here at Green Gulch was really working was, you know, not so much what we thought was going on, but whether the tools got cleaned up properly and put away, whether the pumps worked properly and they were properly maintained, whether the cars were tuned. I mean, those were things that to him were important. And I tell a story in the book which many of you may know because it's been told other places, a very short story. When Harry was a boy, his spiritual mentor was his uncle, Robert. And he was about eight years old and he was watching Robert sew a headdress that was a ceremonial object for a dance that the community

[25:37]

did from time to time. And he watched his uncle sew it quite carefully and then at a certain point tear out the work that he'd done and start over. And Harry, being a little boy, just asked, why did you do that? The dance is at night. No one will see that. No one will know if there was a little mistake. And Robert said, his teacher said, I will know. And that's the story. And then I go on and talk about that. I talk about how that's an example of work where time isn't anything close to money. Time has no relationship with anything quantifiable. It didn't matter to Harry's uncle how long it would take to do that headdress, but it had to be done right. And the reason it had to be done right was because for a culture like that, and also for Buddhist culture, what goes on inside

[26:40]

of you is real. And not only is it real, but it's real to other people. So if Harry's uncle had cut corners to get the headdress done quickly, in other words, if he'd been efficient in modern economic terms and done what many of you are pushed to do in your workplace, which is to do less than a quality job to meet the demands of the organization, then that to Harry's uncle would be a crime. It would be terrible to go to the ceremony where he was an elder and have in his mind the knowledge that he had not done the best that he could with the headdress. And you see the difference? It's very clear that for that kind of culture, which is a pre-modern culture, like the cultures where Buddhism has flourished for most of its existence, the important thing was his own state of mind and his own satisfaction, which was not secret. I mean, for that society and for Buddhist culture, your own sense of

[27:44]

how you do your work is something that is not secret. It's shared. It moves out onto the ether of consciousness and quality and affects everything. The great koan for our society is we don't work that way. For us, time is money, but I think beneath that sense, we all have, particularly if we're spiritually sensitized, we have a sense that there is some other way to do work. Typically, where most people do work the way that Harry's uncle does work is in your hobby, because people will, if you have a craft as a hobby or you're an artist or you're an artisan, artists also will do this. You might spend hours sanding and re-sanding some small piece of a wooden sculpture or a tool or something that you're making and have no sense that the amount of time that it's taking has any

[28:49]

value, that what's important is the quality of the object. So, time is money is how we've created the world currently and it works in a material sense to accomplish certain things, but in a spiritual sense, it's rather corrosive. And so the real challenge is how do you bring a sense of spiritual life into a situation like that? You see, I'm not satisfied to give up and say, well, the workplaces that we've created are too spiritually challenging, so let's not try anything there. That to me is the opposite of the spirit. The spirit should be, for us Buddhists, the more challenging the situation, the more enthusiastically we should jump into it. So, to me, the challenge, and I've tried to develop in my own life and work, is how do you bring a sense of practice into a distracted, difficult, for-profit or

[29:59]

a time-is-money type of situations and work with it? So, I've come up with about thirty-five or forty practices, some of which you'll recognize. For example, walking as a spiritual practice is something that any of you who've come and done meditation here know that that's what we do. Walking is not just walking for us, it's some way to be concentrated and to be aware of ourselves physically and mentally. Other practices, like the thing with the twenty-dollar bill, are things that, essentially, I've worked out with other people I've worked with as ways to elaborate on and extend the Buddhist meditation tradition. A lot of what actually goes on in most workplaces is interpersonal. Most of the problems that people report when you ask them about the workplace have to do with anger, frustration, worry, resentment, and

[31:00]

envy, ambition, power. These are the kinds of things that emerge very strongly in the workplace. The workplace is a tremendous amplifier of negative emotion, and I'll explain why in a minute, but just as an example, how is it that over and over again we pick up the paper and we read that somebody has walked into a workplace with a gun and killed people, because, and you ask them why, if they're still alive, and they say, well, my supervisor gave me a bad review. You kill people because your supervisor gave you a bad review? There's something not right about that picture, but we see it over and over again, workplace rage. The common experience people have of having their boss, for example, stick their head in the window of their office and make some comment, and having it destroy their whole week. It can be a very subtle thing like, oh, you're still here? And suddenly, because

[32:11]

of all that goes on in the power relationship of that person to you, that person has power over your paycheck, power over your livelihood, there's a lot that can go on in that kind of situation. How do you work with that? How do we deal with, and that person's still going to be your boss regardless of what you do. How do we work with that in a more awakened way? Well, how do we, for example, find any way to do traditional meditation in the workplace? A minute here, a minute there. One of the main messages I have for people like yourselves who have some familiarity with Buddhism and some familiarity with traditional meditation is a real shift of expectation and also a redefinition of what constitutes real practice. Let me go into that a little bit. When you come here and sit for 40 minutes on your cushion, you have some experience. Typically, it's some experience of being more calm, or even

[33:17]

if you're not more calm, there's some more aware experience. You have more awareness of your own internal state, the thoughts that you're having, various things like that. Because you're doing it continuously for 40 minutes, there's some real measurable change in your state. They've measured this now. Meditation really does work. Your pulse goes down. Your blood pressure goes down. Lots of different things happen to you. For example, if you sit in front of a computer at work, if you were to take one minute to, in a sense, do a one-minute zazen, I recommend that you reach out with your finger very mindfully and turn off the power to the screen, which you can do without affecting the computer. I don't know if all of you know that, but the screen is a separate machine than the computer. You can turn it off. You reach out and turn it off, and then you have a gray screen, sort of like these walls. Suddenly, you can, for 10 breaths, let's say, probably get away with

[34:17]

a minute's respite from what you're supposed to be doing, unless your boss sticks his or her head in the window and says, oh, what's going on? In the early days of computing, they had these funny screensavers where you could be playing some kind of a game. There was a boss button that you could push a button, and it would put up a spreadsheet or something that looked official. You see how much humor. The tremendous success of Dilbert Comic Strip and all the humor about the workplace is a sign of the tremendous amount of energy and tension and anxiety that this area of our life produces for us. If you were to do that for one minute, probably you wouldn't get a sense that much was going on. It's not long enough to have that feeling of Zazen. A lot of practices that I recommend are ones where you're not going to get a lot of direct measurable feedback

[35:21]

back to you that it made a difference. That's the hardest thing about any kind of practice in the midst of chaotic activity, is that you have to give up the notion that you're going to feel something. This is a very important point, because the actual benefit, true benefit of spiritual practice is not measurable. This is something Suzuki Roshi used to talk about all the time. He said, enlightenment is not an experience. Anything you can experience and describe and compare and say, I felt different or better or newer or more wonderful or whatever it might be, that's still in the realm of things that you can see or hear. It's still in the realm of form, we say, technically. The actual benefit of a practice is in a strict sense invisible. Those of us who can rest in that fact and be comfortable in it can

[36:23]

practice anywhere. Some of the most important and transformative practices that you can do in the workplace are instantaneous. For example, the act of apology, which is a traditional venerable practice not just in Buddhism but in all spiritual traditions, just to be able to sincerely and wholeheartedly transform the tension of a situation through apology. Or alternatively, if it's somebody who has harmed you, through forgiveness, forgiveness and apology. These are practices that typically take only a snap of a finger to have an effect. Those are practices you can feel. If you have a chronic problem with somebody at work, it's somehow, there's some way to forgive and apologize. There's a tremendous amount of transformation of energy that can happen right in that moment. We don't need to be Buddhist experts to do

[37:29]

those kinds of practices. We simply need to have two things. These are the two prerequisites for all spiritual practice that I know of. One is attention and the other is intention. Attention and intention. If you're not paying attention to what's going on, you can't figure out what to do. Without attention, there's no practice. Attention is the main thing. In a sense, the kind of formal practice that we do in places like Green Gulch are ways to cultivate the skill of attention. There's a great story, my ultimate favorite Zen story practically, about Ikkyu. Ikkyu was a very eccentric Buddhist master of 16th century Japan. One day, he was the abbot of it. Late in his life, he became an establishment and took on the abbotship of a big temple. A wealthy patron, aristocrat, came to him one day and

[38:35]

said, would you please, master, do a scroll for me? Ikkyu had pen and ink brought. Now, keep in mind, the typical thing when a wealthy patron who's given a lot of money to the temple goes to the master and asks for a scroll, the typical thing they get is some kind of poem about cherry blossoms or ducks flying or something like that. Something Zen. That's what he's expecting. Really, what he wants is he wants to hang it in his mansion when he goes home so when his guests come for parties and things, they can say, oh, the great Ikkyu. It's very impressive. It's sort of like getting a Picasso to put in your foyer. Anyway, he goes and Ikkyu gets out his brush and he gets the whole thing laid out. Then, he writes one character. It's the character for attention. There's a pregnant pause. Then, the aristocrat says, perhaps the master is not quite finished with his poem. Ikkyu

[39:42]

picks up the brush and he writes the same character again, attention. The patron cannot insult the great master, but he's not very happy. He says again, it will be marvelous when I can see the full completion of the master's poem. Ikkyu, of course, is just as annoyed as the patron. He picks up the brush and, of course, what do you think he does? He writes attention, attention, attention. What the guy got was a scroll with five characters. They're all the same. They say attention, [...] attention. He gets to take that home and hang that in his foyer if he dares. Now, this is a great story because Ikkyu was a no-nonsense person, not interested in the games of society. The guy asked him for a scroll that meant something, so he gave him one. You see, that's a scroll that actually has real meaning for somebody practicing because attention is the key to everything. Paying attention, noticing things, being aware of

[40:43]

what's going on is, in a sense, getting back to what I started with, the koan of everyday life. The koan of everyday life emerges the minute we pay attention. It doesn't matter where we are, what we're doing, whether you have any experience of formal meditation. The minute you pay attention, the genjo koan is before you. It rises up like a Buddha out of smoke, and it's there. That leads to the second requirement, which is intention. Intention is one of the spokes of the Eightfold Path, right intention. Intention is, in a sense, tells us what to do with that attention. It tells us where to go with what we see, with what we're aware of. That intention is, in the sense of Buddhism, to awaken all beings, to awaken ourselves and everyone. That's our fundamental intention. May all beings be awake. May all beings be at peace. May all beings be happy. May all beings be awake. This is the fundamental vow that turns

[41:48]

a human being into a bodhisattva and a Buddha. That intention, applied to the situations that we're in, creates the situation of spiritual practice immediately. It doesn't matter what's going on or whether anybody else in the room, you could be in a management meeting at IBM and not say a word, but if you're paying attention in that spirit, the Buddha has entered that situation. The Buddha is there. Already, something is different. Something is going on. It's just like Harry's uncle saying, I will know. I will know. He didn't really care whether anybody else ever knew how many times he had to sew that stretch of feathers. It was enough and in his culture, everybody understood that it was enough that he knew. Because he knew, everybody knew. So, in a sense, the most important practice of the workplace, if we're going

[42:49]

to say that's our theme for today, the underlying practice is to be awake with the intention of the Dharma. From there, there's lots of possibilities. Apology then emerges immediately as a possible strategy for transforming energy. If we're angry at work, and one of the things I discovered in the workshops that I do is when you ask people if anger is a problem for them sometimes at work, there is 100% response. Every single person raises their hand. There's a lot of anger in the workplace and a lot of it, again, is amplified by this structure of people having power over other people and consequential power, power to destroy your life, to change your life, to make your life very difficult. As a particular, very personal example, for me, back a long time ago, I was

[43:54]

seriously ill. This was before the rules that have provided some degree of a safety net for people with health insurance. Are any of you familiar with the phrase job lock? I had job lock because were I to have left my job, I would lose my health insurance and would not be able to get any more, and I would run the risk that if I got sick again of losing everything I had. Now that's not a situation that's very easy to deal with, and it's a situation that is entirely the creation of the way the workplace works. You would think in a sane society, someone like myself would not have to feel that way, but I had no choice. I was simply stuck with it, and so I had to keep working at that job whether I liked it or not because it was life-threatening, and in a sense, not to. There are situations that come up where even the smallest irritations become quite major

[44:56]

issues. The other thing about anger and negative emotion in the workplace is that for that reason it's often rather justified, the emotion that you have. We have a kind of stereotype in Buddhism that somehow negative emotion is a sign of spiritual weakness, and I certainly felt that going out into the workplace. One of the things I discovered when I went out there is that all these years of expensive meditation had not ceased to make me a hot-tempered person. I didn't have as many opportunities out here at Green Gulch to blow up at people, and it also wasn't very socially acceptable, so I didn't do it, but out there in the workplace, if you pound on the table and yell and act like an idiot, if you're paid highly enough and you're of high enough rank, nobody will say anything. You can get away with a lot. It was very sobering for me to realize that the only person who was going to stop me once I attained some power was me because everybody else would just put their head down and walk out and talk about me later. This is the way it works.

[45:59]

So there is, I think, some real opportunity to really confront the real stuff in the workplace because that's where the negative emotions that we have are really hot, and that heat, that energy, that consequentialness of the feelings that we have mean that the Genjo Koan has suddenly become a much bigger opportunity. Suddenly this isn't small stuff. It's big stuff, and if we can somehow penetrate those things in the situation, then we actually have a chance to make some real transformation. So the kind of practice that I recommend and that I have tried with respect to emotions like anger have to do really with two parts. The first part is more traditional mindfulness practice to put some space or container around that feeling so that we can actually hold it and experience it. Sometimes inner speech, true speech, right speech, helps a great deal.

[47:05]

So any of you who have studied the mindfulness literature know that when you're angry, to simply have an internal verbalization, this is anger. To name what is going on, to give it a definition, helps a great deal. Not to make the anger go away exactly, but to really allow us to actually hold the anger without necessarily acting on it right away. This is what I call building a space or container around the emotion. And there are other ways we can do it too. Breathing will allow us to do it. Sometimes there is a practice that Thich Nhat Hanh likes a great deal, the practice of the half smile. He teaches it in his retreats where we make a conscious effort to change our expression so that our expression manifests our intention to find some sense of kindness or acceptance

[48:06]

in the midst of our anger. A lot of us Americans don't like that practice because it seems insincere. If we're angry, we want to be angry, we want to look angry, we want to act angry. To somehow be smiling while we're angry feels smarmy or something, but give it a try. They've done scientific research and they've asked people to do this. It's amazing what psychologists can get grants for. I know some of you are psychologists that get grants, so please, I'm not belittling your work. And I thought this was very interesting work because they actually got people to artificially do various facial expressions so they have people smile. Then they measured them with galvanometers and stuff and lo and behold, physiological changes occur. If you frown like this, it actually raises your blood pressure. If you smile and relax your face, it changes you. So these are manifestations of intention and

[49:06]

that's step number one, to bring our intention into the situation. Attention, intention, and then really the third step is transformation. Transformation is some action that takes the energy into another place. When we're angry, we can say to ourselves, I'm angry. We can breathe our anger. We can smile. We can visualize kindness. We can visualize a Buddha. We can do all of these things as you might say symptomatic relief. But ultimately, we have some responsibility to take it further and to actually transform, to follow that energy and figure out if there's some strategic way that we can move that energy. Maybe forgiveness. Maybe apology. Maybe a truthful interaction with the person that's causing the problem. Let me just read you a quote that I took from a recent book by the Dalai Lama in case you don't believe me on this point. He says here in a very good book which I highly recommend

[50:13]

called Healing Anger. He says the following, if one has been treated very unfairly and if the situation is left unaddressed, it may have extremely negative consequences. Such a situation calls for a strong counteraction. Now we probably can guess what kind of situation the Dalai Lama is talking about for his own culture and people. Under such circumstances, it is possible that one can, out of compassion for the perpetrator of the crime and without generating anger or hatred, actually take a strong stand and take strong countermeasures. In fact, one of the precepts of the Buddhist vows is to take strong countermeasures when the situation calls for it. If a Buddhist doesn't take strong countermeasures when the situation requires, then that constitutes an infraction of one of the vows. This is interesting news from one of the great Buddhists of our time. I think Suzuki Roshi would have said something quite similar. That it isn't enough if we're sincere about our

[51:17]

vows to work internally with what is going on. When the situation calls for it, when there's a situation of injustice, in a practical sense, where most of us on a day-to-day basis encounter injustice to the extent we do, it's in the workplace, we actually have a responsibility to do something. So let me just read you a true story about somebody who did. This is a story called Confronting the Boss. David had a boss who seemed to take pleasure in demeaning people. It was not uncommon to see the boss in his office dressing down a subordinate over some supposed mistake. This made David quite angry. He felt bad for the people his boss mistreated. David, the boss's personal friend as well as an employee, was usually exempt from these outbursts but didn't know what he could do about it. One day he glanced into his boss's office as he was walking by and saw the familiar scene. The firm's sales director was being blamed

[52:21]

for what was really the boss's own mistake. Immediately, David stepped into the office and physically placed himself between the boss and the sales director. That's enough, he said to the boss. The boss stared coldly at David. David, just as coldly, stared back. The sales director, sensing a chance to escape, excused himself and left. That was his strategy. That was smart. That was smart. Don't ever do that again, the boss sputtered. That's what I was just going to say to you, David replied. That was David's story. This is a true story. I've changed the names in some of the circumstances, but David is actually a practitioner of the Dharma, as all of you are, and there's more to this story than what I write here, but I'll finish the story out. Woo! I exclaimed when David recounted the story to me. That was a risky thing to do. Were there any repercussions? No, David explained. I was lucky. My boss and I go way back. I had some immunity. Besides, I think at some level he really wanted someone to call him on that stuff. I just finally

[53:23]

got clear enough in my own mind to do it. Were you angry? I asked. Not when I was in there. Afterward, I was a little shaky, though. I would have been shaky, too. In talking with David more, I realized that his ability to act that decisively was the result of a lot of prior work and processing of his anger, a lot of raising the question, what can I do here? It became a kind of koan for him, you see. He was watching this situation over a long period of time, feeling angry about it, working internally with his anger because he was an experienced meditator, but also in the back of his mind, his intention wasn't letting this situation just be the way it was. There was some question that eventually became articulated as, what can I do? What should I do? What needs to be done? And then at the right moment, he was able to do something that actually was transformative. My recollections of Suzuki Roshi were that that's the way that he taught people. When

[54:23]

he taught all of us, you always felt that he was kind of wandering around not noticing things. He'd be puttering around with the flowers and the plants and things. And then suddenly, if there was a situation that he saw an opportunity, he would suddenly be there and he would say something. And 20 years later, people who knew him would remember that thing that he said because he was paying close attention. His intention was continuous, of course, but he was very patient and very clear in his own mind that it was when the moment emerged when his intention could become explicit that he would interact with the situation. And after all this time, when I think back, I think that quality of him is the part that was most vivid to me, that I remember. He was a great strategist of spiritual transformation. And people who talk about him, like in David Chadwick's new book, which is his biography, there are some stories in there about this. But I think it was his defining characteristic

[55:24]

as a teacher. And really, for those who noticed, and I must confess, I didn't notice what he was doing until long after he was gone. He was manifesting, I think, for us an example of how we can practice in all of our activities as 21st century Americans. We don't need to rely just on the way Dharma was done a thousand years ago or five hundred years ago. We can create circumstances for practice out of whatever situation we're in, whether it's the workplace or family life, by paying attention, by making our intention deep and continuous, and by being alert for those moments when we can do what the Dalai Lama says and activate our intention in consideration with others. And if I want to leave you with any message, it's really that, that each of you do have that potential. Each of us do. And I think that it really is the next frontier for the Dharma in America. Now the Dharma is well

[56:28]

established. When I go out and talk to people in the business world, everybody knows about meditation. It's a socially acceptable thing to do. It's not weird anymore the way it used to be. We are now really a part of the mainstream of the culture, and I think the next step really will be not just to implement the tradition in the culture, but to create the tradition in the culture. And I think for our culture, a big part of that tradition will be how to activate the Dharma spontaneously in all the situations that we're in. And the parting secret that I'll leave you with is that the bigger and hotter and more consequential the energy, the bigger the opportunity. I have a quote in my book from Willie Sutton, the great bank robber. And people asked him once, you've probably all heard this story, it's for any of you who haven't, it'd be a fresh story. They asked him once why he robbed banks.

[57:32]

He said, it's where the money is. So I think as Buddhists in our society, we need to look for where the energy is. Follow the energy. You know, in the Watergate days, they said, follow the money. My message is follow the energy. Where the energy is, that will be where the Dharma is. So thank you all very much. I've talked longer probably than I should have or expected to, but it's great to be here and great to see all of you. And I'll see you, I guess, out in the dining room? We have a question and answer here. Now? There'll be a book signing in the dining room. Now? Yes. So I leave now, right? And then we come back. See, I have to learn all these things over again. All right. Thank you very much. Attention. If I can hear me. Yes, hi.

[58:36]

Can you tell us again where and what time your meditation group is? Oh, it's Tuesday evenings at 7.30 in Mill Valley, and we meet in the Almonte Club, which is off of Almonte Boulevard slightly, behind the Tam High football field. And if you want to get detailed instructions, because it's not an easy place to find unless you know, call the, there's an answering machine that tells you, 389-8707, and it'll give you detailed directions to get there. But it's 7.30 every Tuesday, except for this coming Tuesday where I'm reading at Book Passage, so we're going to not do it, because all the people in the group want to go to the readings, so. Yes? First, I want to thank you for your talk. Thank you. It was very timely for me, because I'm struggling with that same situation. Right. I have a type of job that's very stressful, and it's in sales, buying and selling things,

[59:40]

wholesale, and I have to do things constantly, and I'm constantly torn from my inside feelings and with the feelings I have up here, as far as doing a good job, and also making money. I mean, that's what I'm doing it for. And I just don't, I'm constantly torn on which way to go. The type of job I have, I have to push people a lot, and I'm actually good at it outside, but inside, I'm not real happy with it a lot of times. And I just have a time with these two conflicting, you know, with my practice and all of that. Well, I think just for you to articulate that as clearly as you have is a great step forward. There's a kind of clarity in that. Realistically, and I'm speaking really from my own experience, too, I don't think that conflict's ever going to go away. I mean, there's no resolution to it. It's just something that we have a responsibility to keep working with creatively.

[60:42]

And I think that's, to me, because I've had to work my way through this in my own work, that's, in a sense, when the Dharma really comes alive. I think that when we first, the first 25 or 30 years of Buddhism coming into our society, we really have been rediscovering the value of sitting still and being quiet. That's a great gift that Buddhism's brought to the West. And that's really the first stage. But it's a mistake to think that Buddhism is just about being quiet. I mean, being quiet is the ground experience that allows us to be true. But being true is, or being awake, is really the key. And being awake isn't the same as being quiet, or being calm, or feeling good, or feeling that everything is okay. In some sense, and this is really straight from Suzuki Roshi, when things are most difficult is when the Dharma's most alive. So, in a sense, difficult situations are the ones where we really grow.

[61:46]

But it was part of your job, and it's expected you to do that, but inside you had a problem with it, but you didn't do it, then you'd be letting that part of your life down. What did you do in a situation like that? You felt confronted with that. Well, those are really hard. I remember one time I was compelled to fire somebody whom I didn't think deserved to be fired, but they reported to me it was my job to do it. That was really bad, and I did it. I tried to do it in a way that made that person understand the complexity of what was going on, and she told me later that I did a pretty good job, all things considered, and that was really as much of a payoff as I think I could get. I did not go so far as to sacrifice myself on the altar and say, I'm not going to do it. Do with me what you will. There are a lot of compromises that you have to make in the workplace,

[62:59]

moral compromises, ethical compromises. As I say in my book, not every battle is worth fighting to the death. You have to pick and choose your battles, and sometimes be very skillful and strategic to see the battle as something that you work on over a long period of time rather than draw a line in the sand and be a hero. Sometimes that ends up not being terribly effective, particularly if it sidelines you. It sounds like you're in a management position, so you have some authority and some... No, I'm a wholesaler, so I do this wholesaling with wholesalers. I see. But I think that basically you have to use your own judgment and be skillful, and that there is no purity. I gave that up a long time ago, the notion that you can find purity. If you want to have purity, the only way to get it is to start your own business and don't have any employees. That's what I did. And then even then, you have your clients. I still have the same thing.

[64:00]

You're still involved, but that's as close as you can probably get. It's like being an artist. Just a comment on that. First gentleman's point. I ran into a similar situation. Lord knows I haven't really arrived at any place other than I addressed the same issue where I went from one field to another field. I went from, let's say, real estate or sales to career management, where when I'm working with people, I'm helping them identify what it is they should be doing, and I'm feeling good about it, so that may be a source you can consider. Yes. First of all, I want to say hear, hear for your thoughts about trying to work with your practice in the workplace. I think that's right on in terms of that's where we spend most of our time and most of our energy. It feels very good that you're trying to do that. Also, I liked your comments about intention and the need for trying to find ways for right action in that circumstance.

[65:11]

In both your talk and in leafing through your book just now, I noticed that a great amount of the focus was really on a more personal level of issues in the workplace. I tend to be much more interested in the social level of issues in the workplace. For example, the economic justice level of issues. We have such a two-tier economy. Some people are being left out by the structure of the economy and don't have a chance to participate and what the consequences of that are. I'm curious whether that's something that you've tried to work with as a practice also, and if so, you've started a business yourself. How are you trying to work with that in the context of your own business? what that does to us from a spiritual standpoint.

[66:28]

I think it's a different topic. It's more theoretical, more speculative at this point. My theory is that all change in society really begins at the individual level and emanates out. I really wanted to start from there, but I'm not at all oblivious to the fact that if enough people in the society begin to visualize how we should work and conduct commerce together differently, then we will eventually. But how that process is going to occur is clear to no one at this point. It's an adventure that we are in the early stages of. My own instinct is that we're further along on that path than you might expect. There are, for example, quite a few people at the very top of the corporate edifice in America who are seriously studying Buddhist texts, going to meditation retreats, looking for alternatives,

[67:30]

but they're quite secret about it because they have shareholders who might look askance at such interests. At least they're secret for now, but there's a lot going on under the surface. There's a lot of percolation happening. I think that the larger question of how human beings should organize their economic life, essentially, you might say, the playing out of the right livelihood doctrine of Buddhism, is the next great social issue. I really see that within our lifetime. We'll see that as emerging as a key issue for all sorts of reasons. It has to do, I think, in a certain sense with scale, that we are at a planetary scale now, and we need to take responsibility for this or all of us will suffer. As far as you asked me about my own business, I have a very small business. It's a niche software company that provides software to catalog companies. I have made a conscious effort in my own business not to mandate as the boss the details of how we should be,

[68:40]

because people that I've hired are of differing sentiments and differing outlooks. For example, we, for a while, had a fundamentalist Christian who was our receptionist and really was rather uncomfortable when she found out I was a Buddhist. That's okay with me. I reassured her by saying, look, it's fine with me for you to be who you are. You don't have to have any sympathies for how I am for you to feel welcome here. She was very appreciative about that. We talked about it. Part of it is that she doesn't know a whole lot about Buddhism, and what she does know from her background makes her uncomfortable. I think that lesson taught me what I instinctively understood. Also, this is also my conviction, is that someone in a position of authority and power who wants to move the business in a certain direction had best do it mostly by example and not by explicit kind of, this is how we're going to do things.

[69:46]

My example there is the Herman Miller Company, whose CEO is a very devout Christian, and it's just a very good company. It's always ranked as one of the best companies in the country to work for, but he never kind of touts it as a sort of spiritual company. He just tries to run the company well and take very good care of the people that work there, and that's as far as he goes. That's kind of my attitude at this point. My attitude may evolve over time as this issue becomes more articulate in the business world, but I don't think we're at the point yet where the... You know, Buddhism is fairly radical, and if you really take it seriously, it challenges very directly some of the main assumptions of capitalist economies. I don't think we're at the point yet where that articulation has really happened. When it does, you're going to find Buddhism attacked, and when that happens, you'll know we're getting serious and we're having some real impact.

[70:47]

Can you give an example of how it's radical? Well, for Buddhism, Buddhism sees the cosmos as one thing, in which everything is connected, in which there's no outside. So, for example, there's no such thing as waste in the Buddhist notion of the material world, and waste or discarding things or having garbage dumps or landfills is really essential to at least capitalism as it's been exercised up to this point. And if you really take seriously the notion that there's no outside, then fundamentally you have to start including the costs of the ozone layer in everybody's P&L, which nobody's even remotely close to. Paul Hawken has proposed this, and it's great that he's put it out there, but it's going to be a long time. The phrase that comes to mind is when hell freezes over. But at the same time, I think that in other ways it is already starting to happen. And there are, in fact, very large corporations, ones that are in the manufacturing sector,

[71:49]

primary materials manufacturer, who are, from a business point of view, already thinking about, you know, in the next 50 years, if this is going to be a healthy company, we have to figure out ways of producing non-polluting, sustainable-type products, otherwise we won't do well as a business. The one thing I'm really hopeful for is that people who are good at business are very realistic and very, in a sense, tuned in to what's actually there. That's what makes business a kind of a wisdom in its own way. And I have a certain appreciation for that. It can be extremely misguided in its goals, but there's a certain realistic bend. And Buddhism is like that too. Buddhism really begins with what's actually going on here, you know. So in that sense, I actually see, unlike most people, I actually see the business world as at some point in the future becoming in the vanguard of change, because the business world can change the world in a way that no other set of institutions can, I think more effectively than government.

[72:49]

So I'm actually kind of looking at different sides of it and trying to keep my opinions flexible and not fall into some black-and-white notion that, you know, business is bad or something. So we'll see. I mean, I think these issues are very complex, and it's part of the reason, getting back to your question, that I wanted to... There is a section here on right livelihood, and I do bring it up and talk about it, and I basically define it as conscious livelihood rather than to be judgmental about right and wrong. I also point out that the ability to choose your job is a privilege of affluence and education. A lot of people don't have a choice about right, wrong, and different. It's my job. I haven't got any choice. We have to be very careful not to be elitist about our notions of right livelihood and critical of people who work as a warehouse person for a petrochemical firm that pollutes the planet. I mean, if that's the only job they have, and they have medical bills and so forth,

[73:51]

you can't sort of, say, find a different job. Precisely. Also, I don't think it should... I notice that you seem to need to limit this to capitalist economic structures. You know, it would be hard to explain to this guy, for instance, I bought the book, as you suggested, that he would be hard-pressed not to explain at that juncture that there are other systems that have been equally, if not more so, disruptive to... Yeah, what we have... And everything else. I quote Winston Churchill, the great wit, mordant wit. He made this statement about democracy, but I think it can equally be made about free market capitalism. He said, free market capitalism is the worst system there is, except for all the other ones. That's kind of as far as we are now. And I think we should be patient with ourselves and realize that human beings are trying to figure out how to be on this planet. It's taking a long time. And we have to understand that the good and the bad are mixed up together.

[74:57]

And some of these efforts... You know, a hundred years ago, communism was seen by the working person as the Shangri-La, the golden place. And it took a hundred years for its contradictions and limitations to become manifest with great suffering on all sides. But there was one time when people thought, let's try this. This might be it. The best and the brightest. You know, the best and the brightest, exactly. And I think we can forgive ourselves for that effort. It was a noble effort. It was flawed. I think that part of what Marx was missing was an accurate understanding of how the mind works and how the psyche can be corrupted. Fundamentally, how power corrupts. That's really what he missed. And I think if he'd been a Buddhist and had studied the Abhidharma, he would have been a little bit less certain about the rightness of his positions because we've seen all of this. So these start to tail off into sort of big-picture issues, which I think are very important for us to keep in mind.

[75:58]

But I still think that true planetary change begins with individual change. And individual change begins with your own mind and body. And that really is – it's more of a Gandhian approach to transformation, which is that if you want to transform the universe, transform yourself because you and the universe are on intimate terms. Yes? What happened that 250 people lost their jobs at Smith & Hawkins? And is Paul Hawkins still alive and well? I haven't seen him in quite a while. He is, although I think that he's primarily making his way in the world as an author and speaker. He doesn't have a business anymore. And Smith & Hawkins, if you've been following the press, corporations are immortal. They keep going. And they fell into bankruptcy and were recently sold to a Wisconsin investment consortium. So life goes on. Yeah. Yeah. Yes? Well, I just wanted to, I guess, comment on what you – and it's funny that it would come up for me.

[77:02]

But when you talked about communism and how it kind of failed as a failure, a failed experiment, if you will. But if you would look at how it existed in the United States in terms of the belief system of the people, I would say it's not unlike Buddhism in a way. I mean, I think there was a certain purity. And the capitalist powers that were in the 50s actually smashed it. And they smashed the workers' hopes and aspirations. And it just seems to me that what we have is sort of a martyrdom of that movement. And it wasn't really a social experiment, really, in the United States. In the Soviet Union it was, though. Oh, we're not even talking about that. I mean, it seems to me you could talk about, well, economic systems in different countries. But I mean, in the United States, what happened? I mean, I think it's important to note, McCarthy-era, what it did to people. And how it really, I think, was a martyrdom of a lot of people. It ruined, destroyed lives. The kind of people that were in charge of it weren't what I would call, you know, the greatest leaders of capitalism.

[78:08]

If you will. I mean, I don't think it was, I don't know. I just, I bring it up because I think communism, in a sense, has a certain theoretical sense. It's not, for example, the Soviet Union wasn't, I wouldn't say, a purely communistic state. I mean, sort of, on some level, the belief system isn't, in fact, I think, so far from Buddhism. So, for example, when he asked you what's radical about it, I think the radicalness of it, on a certain level, is giving all beings, even if we just limit ourselves to people, equality and equal value. And so, in a sense, they're not even that far removed from each other in actual practice. Well, that's a complicated topic, and you'd have to clearly define what you mean by communism and Buddhism and all that. But I think, in general, you're right. And also, it speaks to what I said earlier, that when the society begins to take these ideas seriously, then it will be perceived as a threat, and then things will get interesting. I think they're part of the reason why.

[79:11]

Now, keep in mind, also, many of communism and socialism's best ideas are now part of standard government issue. And many of the ideas which the Republican Party, at the moment, is trying to do were, 50 or 60 years ago, radical socialist ideas. So these things do, it's not as though these things failed. In many cases, they succeeded. But they succeeded by being co-opted and brought into, in a sense, capitalism has survived as the leading system by incorporating some of these ideas and trying to take care of people a bit better and all of that. And we certainly have better working conditions than we had 100 years ago. But the fundamental worldview of capitalism still has this inside-outside notion. The notion of profit implies that there's some residuum that you can push things into that you don't have to notice. And Buddhism fundamentally sees that as a flawed view of the world.

[80:14]

It's not how things really are. Once you begin to see that, then it starts to foment a radical re-examination. But we have to remember about the law of unintended consequences. Anytime you change anything as embedded as the things we're talking about, a lot can go wrong that you don't anticipate. In particular, human beings are flawed, corruptible beings and don't necessarily behave or react the way that you might expect. And that's important to keep in mind. That's true whether you're trying to change a five-person company or a 260-million-person society or a six-billion-person planet. There was a hand or two back. Yes? I really want to encourage you to write that second book. Because I don't think they're separate issues. I think that they are separate, but they're not unrelated issues. How individual workplaces look like in the workplace in which they work. Because if we were to infuse consciousness into the workplace, I think it would be very revolutionary in terms of the perversion of work and livelihood.

[81:23]

And I think in order to encourage people to continue to work in that system, I think you need to give them a vision of what else can be offered. And cooperative working on environments being among a really noble goal. I'm curious in terms of your own vision. You said no one can predict what will happen if it isn't infused throughout the workplace. But do you see it as something that transforms the existing system, or do you see alternative systems being created? I think we'll have great bottom lines for a long time to come as the people in China start to get lung cancer and emphysema.

[82:25]

Unfortunately, there'll be a lot of human suffering as people all over the world are seduced by our model of how to live. The reality is big change. Let's just speak about an individual. An individual changes when they have to change, for the most part. Only a few of us change because we want to change. People stop drinking when the alternative is worse than stopping, for the most part. So I think that as long as the world at large finds more benefit in the things the way they are, things the way they are will stay fairly much the way they are. I think that the two things that might change it would be an environmental catastrophe of some kind that kind of wakes up the whole world. For example, if global warming goes another degree, we're going to start to get the glaciers melting and icebergs hitting San Francisco and all sorts of things. It's already—last year was the warmest year in human history since the last ice age.

[83:28]

So that's one thing. And the other would be some kind of similar disruption of whatever that will really start people to look. Otherwise, I see this kind of change being on the order of the Industrial Revolution, which took about 100, 150 years to fully work itself out. I think that we are now in the very beginning stages of the biggest transformation of human beings and how they live together since probably the Middle Ages in Europe. And I don't think even though we're in a much faster world that that process can be rushed. I think that it's a vast change of consciousness in which Buddhism will be a player but not the only player. I think that Buddhism will probably always be as a religion, if you want to call it that, a minority religion. But nevertheless, already, just what I said in the lecture, the fact that you can say the word meditation anywhere in the country and people say, oh, yeah, meditation, yeah.

[84:30]

Whereas 30 years ago, the story I tell in my book is a true story. I had a friend of mine and I who were meditating secretly at college. This was in 1963, 64. We'd meet in his room. And he got caught. And he was called on the carpet by the dean of the residential house. His name was Jacob. And the guy said, Jacob, it's come to our attention that you meditate in which you have candles in your room. And these were sort of equally equivalent crimes for some reason. And incense, too, incense. Incense was hard to get in the early 60s. This is before the 60s. I mean, the 63 was not the 60s. It was still the 50s, at least where we were. And that's not the way it is now. I mean, now you can go into any institution or whatever, even the most conservative business environment in the country and talk about meditation and all that sort of thing. And people at least have a passing understanding. That's a tremendous penetration for 30 years, you know, to have Buddhism and Hinduism and other Asian traditions come in and put all of that on the map.

[85:40]

The notion that you could sit still and be quiet and observe what goes on is now part of the culture. And that's a tremendous accomplishment in 30 years, I think. And the next step is the implications of what you find out when you do that. That's not on the map. That's just starting to come onto the map. That's the radical part. That's the radical part. The part of just doing it isn't actually so radical because it's something that, you know, it's fairly natural to sit still and not do anything. But the next part, which is all that's implied by that, that's a much bigger issue. And there will be a lot more resistance to that. Yes? Yeah, I just want to echo what you're talking about with starting with the individual because I think that the second book is going to be wonderful. But, you know, I just see even in myself, it's too easy for me to point fingers and say, you know, the CEO is this way. He should be more this way. He should be less of a micromanager. And yet, in fact, there are times that I am a micromanager. And there are times where, you know, you talk about pollution, you know, that's what gossip is.

[86:45]

And so I really think that it does start with the individual. And, you know, also, like you were saying, it's very hard to change. And so I think it's too easy to point to, well, society needs to change. And, you know, it's really on a level of it's out there. And yet what are we doing, you know, from an individual point of view? I know for myself I've been trying to change for quite a few years. And, you know, being respectful of others. Just some of the simple things which are very difficult on a daily basis when there's a job to be done and objectives to be met. And, you know, my anger level goes up and that kind of thing. So I think that this is a really good book for that. And I think also to the courses that you're teaching and getting some dialogue about what are the very simple, you know, one, two, threes on a daily basis before we can kind of take that huge leap of, well, you know, we need to change the world. Well, let's talk for a minute about the Jewel Net of Indra because this is how Buddhism actually sees the world. And I talk about it in the book.

[87:46]

The Jewel Net of Indra is a picture of the universe of consciousness. And the image, it's a visualization practice, but it's also a teaching. And it's in the Avatamsaka Sutra. And you see yourself as a jewel, first of all, a shining jewel that's reflective. And then you realize that you're a node in a net, like a fisherman's net, which is vast. And every node is a jewel, like you. And each jewel is like a diamond. And every diamond, if you peer into one diamond, you see the reflected image of all the other diamonds. And anything that happens in one diamond is reflected out in all the diamonds. Now, this is how Buddhism actually sees the working of the cosmos. It's not that different from the way physicists are starting to see the working of the cosmos. So there's a kind of meeting of, you know, particle physics and meditation yoga. But that image, which is sort of a yogic vision of how the world works, means that literally there isn't any such thing as an individual, you see.

[88:50]

An individual is simply a location on the net. It's interesting this word net has now become such an important word. When we say net, we mean the Internet. But Buddhism already has developed the Internet from the standpoint of consciousness. And it's not that different than sending an e-mail to somebody on the Internet. It can go anywhere. And it's sort of like, to really use the image of the Internet, if you have a thought, it's like an e-mail to everybody in the universe, you see. You know, and if somebody, someone else has a thought, you get their e-mail, you know. It's that kind of, it's that basic. So in that very profound sense, the transformation of the individual is on the wire the minute it starts. You see, this is why the Bodhisattva vow that we chant in the lecture, to save all beings, is not as unrealistic as it sounds. It's not like you have to go around one by one and say, Oh you, I haven't saved you yet, okay, got you. Six billion and forty-three, I'm going to get you. It isn't like that. I mean, actually what it literally means is that, you know, when you practice for yourself,

[89:54]

you're putting it, it's on the wire. That effort is on the wire. And that's how you save all beings by, you know, doing, because people criticize Buddhism and say, Oh, it's all just for the self. You know, it's very selfish and inward looking and all of that. And there is some truth to that. But also, if you're really serious about what you're doing and very clear about what's going on, the activity that you do, even the simplest things, even a single thought of generosity towards your abusive boss or whatever it might be, those things are on the wire and they're on the net and they're out there. And that's where I can say with some confidence that the transformation is already well underway, even though I don't have direct personal knowledge of it. Yeah. You know, I love your point about just leaving by example. Yeah. The other reality, just to be very, again, this is, you know, this book is published by a publisher who has to exist in the capitalist world and make a profit.

[90:56]

This book is a book they would buy. The second book, I knew in advance, they wouldn't buy until they bought this book. So this book, if this book is successful, I'll have the credibility to write the second book. And the second book, I feel much more responsible to have to take a couple of years at least to do a lot of research, do a lot of reading, find out what else is out there, educate myself about economics, about which I know very little. When I was in college, I concluded in my arrogant way that economics was a branch of psychopathology and therefore was beneath contempt. And now I understand that economics is a branch of spiritual study. And so now it interests me a lot. It interests me a lot, the details of how people understand that you and I could trade with each other. You have something I want. I have something you want. And, you know, we trade and all of that. That's what economics is fundamentally. So it then becomes very fascinating. But I think that writing a book that's about concrete, specific things that each of us can do is really the first step.

[91:58]

And I'm frankly not prepared to even do much more than just chat with you about the bigger issues because I don't feel like I know much yet. I don't think there's a contradiction. Who do you choose to hire? What product do you choose to put out yourself? What's the implication? I don't think it's dichotomy. I had a guy, just to follow up on a thing that you said, at a reading recently who was in the back kind of glowering at me, and then when the questions came he said, Don't you realize that all the CEOs in the world are criminals and they deserve to be strung up and shot and they're the people that are destroying the planet? And, you know, he did a harangue and then he got up and stormed out, you know. Was he armed? Pardon? Was he armed? No. This was up in an area where a lot of people with ideas like that live. And I understand. I understand that feeling. I'm sympathetic to it. But that's not a terribly productive way to go forward, you know.

[93:01]

In fact, he's making the same mistake that the CEO is. He's treating something as outside. It's them. The minute you say it's them, you're lost, because that's the same attitude that got us into this trouble in the first place. That's what starts a war. Oh, it's them. As soon as we understand there is no them, but then we have to work together with all of our conflicts and be who we are with each other. It's very, very difficult. I advise a lot of CEOs. These are the most misunderstood. I advise a lot of CEOs.

[93:33]

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