The cane is sometimes necessary. I have some balancing difficulties that they are investigating out at Kaiser. And the one good thing that's come out of it is I don't have any arterial blockage. Why I totter, more than somewhat of my age, I don't know. It's in this day connected with speaking. I've known for a lifetime that I could manipulate my physical well-being by putting my mental house in order. This is long before I started to practice, and I had worked up a number of tricks whereby if I felt that I was going down the slide, I would know how to step back, how not to talk when I couldn't, and So that's the physical aspect of it.

[01:03]

Of course, people tell me, look, you're 93 years old. You should expect this. And so I was going to speak tonight on a subject very close to my heart. My first teacher, who was a night watchman at a house being built across the street from us. and how if it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. Yeah. That better? Yeah. Is it? Yes or no? Wow, it's pretty hot.

[02:10]

So I was collecting anecdotes for that presentation. Did I have to sit here all night like this? Bend it over. I got that. How about that? You want to hold it? That's an idea. That came undone now, so we have to make it. Shall we try again? All right.

[03:19]

So as you do when you're stumbling along in something you're not really happy with, you sharpen pencils and look around for other things to look at. And I picked up a magazine. And it said, the end of the world. The end of the world. And it turns out to be Thich Nhat Hanh speaking. And not only is he someone to be listened to on this subject, he knows a lot from his experiences in Vietnam early on when we... Monks were in opposition to the Catholic, the French occupation, and there were all kinds of rebellious activities going on, and the other monks were part and parcel of that.

[04:27]

Then after a certain stage in the Vietnamese War, he had a price on his head, and so he knows something about the end of the world. It's a very short page, and I would like to plead fiability and read it instead of talking about it, and then we'll talk about it. The reason that I had nerve enough to do this would be okay with tanto is how much of this is what I have been thinking. for a long time. Most of you, many of you know, came from radical politics into Zen Center. And it was the example of people like Thich Nhat Hanh who could make the trip over a line that seemed once impossible to cross. So, the end of the world.

[05:33]

The Buddha said that when someone realizes that he or she is going to die, that person will first revolt against the diagnosis. The fear of dying is always deep down in our store consciousness. The Buddha advises us not to run away from fear. Instead, we should bring it up in order to recognize it. This practice helps us to accept old age, sickness, and death as realities, facts that we cannot escape. After that, after we have accepted this, we feel much better. I've known many people who lived for 20, 30, 40 years after a diagnosis of cancer. Many civilizations have died because mankind was not wise enough.

[06:36]

And the same thing will be said of ours. We will continue to consume the way we are doing. If we are going to continue to consume the way we are doing, then we don't care about protecting this wonderful planet. We will allow it to be burned and global warming. Maybe 70% of mankind will die. The ecosystem will be destroyed to a very large extent. And we need millions of years to start a new civilization. Everything is in parliament. Many of us do not accept this. Oh no, God has created this world and God will not allow these things to happen. But the fact is that we are not only our five skandas, we are also our environment, which is in a process of self-destruction. Many of us who see this course of destruction become victims of despair and fear.

[07:42]

Before global warmth brings death and destruction, we will already have died from fear and despair. We will have died of mental illness because we die from the result of climate changes. We have to learn to accept the end of civilization. just as we accept our own death. We know that another civilization will be born later, maybe one, two million years from now. We touch the truth of impermanence, and then we have peace. When we have peace, then there will be hope again. Scientists tell us that we have enough technology to save our planet. But psychologically, we are not capable of it. We are not peaceful, enlightened, or awake enough to do it. That is why, while scientists are trying to discover the ways to improve our technology, we as members of the human race have despair, forgetfulness, and irresponsibility.

[08:57]

A collective change of consciousness will bring a new way of life, a mindful way of living with mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindfulness needed to consume, to run after objects, the craving. With mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindfulness dwelling on the present moment, you don't have to consume to run after objects of or crave attachments. The teaching of the Buddha is very clear, very strong and not at all difficult to understand. We have the power to decide the destiny of our planet. Buddhism is the strongest form of humanism. It is our actions and our way of life that will save us. If we awaken to our true situation,

[10:01]

There will be a collective change in our consciousness and then hope will be possible. There are a few things I don't agree with. Personally, that is not because the posts were he is saying, but that I have talked like that on my own. The revolution was going to do all of this in the days before gold warming. Get enough people together, get them put in a direct way, have brotherhood, have companionship, comrade, that wonderful word, and then when all of the people of the world could come together as one person, then we would no longer have all of the conflicts, all the fighting, all of the wars.

[11:04]

And now some people will get in the way of that, and you have to take care of them, and there will be revolutions, and terrible things will happen. But the argument went, in the end, you will have established birthright honors. So when I hear and read of Thich Nhat Hanh, looking... for Buddhism to be that unifier in the present state of the world, I'm lost. I would like to believe it. But I have not ever learned and have not been taught, I guess, to think in millions of years, to think of it doesn't matter if it doesn't come now or next week or next year or when your children are grown or anything like that. Millions of years that took to create this present situation.

[12:09]

It'll take millions of years to undo it. So I guess what I've been working with this last few days is to say, all right, I agree with Thich Nhat Hanh and his analysis of what is happening to the world. He's far more drastic and gives estimates of time and intensity to 70% of the world to be burned up. I've been trying to work on what to do with the rest of my life, which is very short, even in the best anticipation. I cannot wait. I have to know what I'm going to do now. And so I guess what I would like to raise is a question for all of us. What do we do with the condition that Thich Nhat Hanh presents us now?

[13:21]

Not too many years from now. You can't get all the people in this room walking mindfully at one time. I said I tried. One of the things in my little talk I was going to give before Thich Nhat Hanh was how I came in the beginning to be concerned with this very question that he's raising as a child. That's a story that some of you have heard, and probably wish I had never gotten onto, the story of the three pear trees. When we moved into our house in Flushing, New York from the city of Brooklyn,

[14:27]

We inherited a large piece of property and three hair trees by our back friends. They were old, they hadn't been taken care of, they were not at all tasty, but each year they got harvested and put up in jars and stuck in the cellar and nobody ate them. Now there had been in this neighborhood a night watchman, playing his concertina by a fire, drinking his red wine, singing his Italian songs just across the street from our house. And it was one of those summer nights we had sent to bed too early, the light still in the sky. So I looked out and saw him and smelled the wood smoke and ran away from home, no further away than

[15:28]

but I ran away from home. And I sat with him and he fed me dried cherries and played music. And I looked back and saw my grandfather at his chair with his lamp and my mother at her chair with her lamp and my grandmother at her chair with her lamp and my father on a chair with no lamp. And I looked at that collection of people And I said, you don't have to live like that. And at that point, I began to move away into what turned out to be the revolution because it was exactly the thinking and the feeling of people like my grandfather who would take a gun to the people in the pantry. So a few years after that, he came back with a car. The land had been surveyed, and those three pear trees were not our pear trees anymore.

[16:32]

They were out in the parking. So he asked me to ask my grandmother, could he have the pears that were falling down there beginning to rot? He said, I think I can save some of them. So I told her, and she said, you tell him, no, those are our pears. And as he turned away with his empty car, I took an oath that I would do something to save him, that people like him, so that he could pick hairs up off the ground if they were necessary. So here's someone who started out vowing, in the true sense of vowing as we know, to do something about that man. And I'm told I did not harm if that'll take too many years. There seem to be two languages spoken at our house.

[17:41]

The real language, the practical language, the get it done language, the business language. And then not too often, expressions of a little different nature, what we call more spiritual perhaps. You have to be careful who you were talking to when you're speaking their language, because if you weren't speaking their language it was a dangerous thing, because then you would be one of them who asked you from the parish to. So the one thing led to another and all of a sudden, in the course of Han's time, all of a sudden fast forward to me being in Zen Center. And there was an accommodation made here also between the two languages. The language of Zen Center as a modern business social organization and the teaching of the Buddha as the

[18:46]

intimate language and I must have worked out some sort of balance between the two of them because I didn't feel too much strain but there was still the class nature people still go on trips to foreign countries they still enjoy vacations we're going to take a vacation on a train We seem to have the best of both possible worlds. And now even that is put up for crap. So if I had gotten hold of this before just a few days, I might have begun to wiggle out something that would enable me to move on in my project of what to do with the rest of my life.

[19:56]

Obviously, there's not much left to be done, and I don't have the intelligence even to prepare a problem so I'm not going to be able to do very much there. Politics is no longer something that represents a occupation for somewhat of my meditation. And on top of that all, I'm getting senile dementia. I've had it for a long time. I had it when I was a child, I'm sure. All of a sudden, everything goes. So I can't rely on what I used to do, think and talk and write. And yet I agree with what Thich Nhat Hanh describes.

[21:10]

Just the other day, big front page story in the New York Times. The warming has already done its damage to the seas. They have warmed up beyond expectation and they are changing the way the things that live in them grow. And so we are losing all kinds of species there. Jellyfish are everywhere proliferating because we've eaten all of their predators like tuna. And then there was a time when the American Communist Party was coming apart in probably the last meeting that I had gone to. And the decision was made to disband, in other words, put a formal end to it. And I got up and said something.

[22:13]

I unfortunately cannot remember what it was that I said. And a very wise and knowledgeable person in such things. Certainly, who are you to save the world? Gotcha. So when I could believe that I had something I could do, I did it. And when I came to a place where I couldn't do it anymore, I figured somebody else would do it. And now, nobody there but it's chickens. I hope that this little article in the Buddha Dharma Magazine will expand into a discussion by people who have some heft to them and can

[23:16]

clear up some of what I think are excesses, both on the side of Buddhist theory and technological things. I don't think that the scientists can save the world. They messed it up to begin with. Watching his mother's tea kettle goes up and down is where it all started. It's been going on for hundreds of years. We have certain abilities to modify certain of these things There's no doubt about that. But I can no longer... I won't say kid myself because I never deliberately tried to do that. To convince myself that things were different than me really. And maybe what I have to do is... as much as is possible for my misunderstandings to drop away so that I will be able to look on these things face to face with Thich Nhat Hanh's two million years.

[24:42]

He hasn't convinced me about this. But because I'm looking at it with one eye. The eye that I used politically and philosophically at a time when I was passionately concerned with the very things that are being taking us down now. But not to be able to talk about it is the best indicator that I have But you know that I'm not going to be able to do it. Because that's all I've ever done about anything. Some of the poems were okay. Now we know a lot of things and we try not to know a lot of things. And people come to me in the morning when I'm reading a paper and they say, any good news today?

[25:47]

Well, I saved up stories. I taught myself to read by reading the Bible and reading a number of newspapers every day as a child. I was too good to play with the local kids, so I was kept at home, and I always wanted to know what was going on out there. And then I discovered that my father and my grandfather would bring home newspapers that told me what was going on out there in the world. And so I read the Bible for... God sing, and the newspapers for knowing what was going on in the world. I used to say a story. I remember three of them. These little fillers that they have at the bottom of the column. Mother is preparing a birthday cake for her little boy, and she wants it to be a surprise. So she sends him out to play, and when the cake is done, she calls him, and he runs under a truck. I saved that one. Because I was always told what to do and what not to do.

[26:54]

A couple was living in and fighting in the high apartment in Rome, I think it was. And finally the guy said, look, I have had it. We've been going through this routine again and again. Goodbye. And stalks out of the apartment. And meets a friend of his out in the street, and the friend convinces him to cool it. Let's go, they'll go have a drink. So they go to a bar, and they have a couple of drinks, and the man thinks, well, maybe he was too rough about it. So he goes back to the apartment house. Meanwhile, the woman, realizing that she just finally lost it, throws herself out of the apartment. And when she falls, she hits a passerby and is saved. The passerby dies. It's the man. And I saved that one. And so I was always interested to know what was going on in the world.

[27:57]

And that was a very easy transition from the newspapers into philosophy. And now I still do it. People in the morning don't... like me looking at the newspaper to them, but I'll say, hey, listen to this one. I'll find another one of those little stories that became a reporter for many years, and it was just sort of bread and a bone. So these things that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about, I have been aware of since I was this high. So I'm not surprised. I'm just worn out by the realization that All that I did did not do any good. I don't know what you expected tonight, but I'm sure it wasn't this. Oh, sorry. But it's there.

[28:58]

Can anyone say anything? about Thich Nhat Hanh's presentation? Of course not. Maybe. The only thing I've been able to work up for myself is that would it be possible at this late date to begin to practice in such a way that I could have the experience that... Who's my favorite Nobel Prize winner?

[30:24]

Oh, it begins with a P. Pavlov. Pavlov, who actually should be one of our ancestors. Did you ever start to think about that? He discovered the conditioned reflex. The Buddha had figured out how to undo it long before him, but it fits. So, he was dying, and he was... say, a Nobel Prize winner. And the charismatic person and his students were more like disciples, and they were sitting with him in the wintertime, February, I think. And he was not getting on with his business. He was rustling around. And one of them went out in the backyard and rolled a big snowball, put it in a bowl by his bed, and they noticed that he began to perk up and look at it.

[31:28]

and very carefully examined this melting snowball. And then they heard him say in a strong voice, oh, so that's how it is. He chased his question to the last breath. So this question could be my such question without the snowball. They are an intention equally extended to every...

[32:04]

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