An unsurpassed, penetrating, and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good day, dear ones. Larry Ward here. I am pronouns he, him, and his. I'm speaking to you today from the land of the Kumeyaay people, most recently known as San Diego.

[01:05]

Celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday, I wrote a short paper based on some comments about him by Thich Nhat Hanh. And I want to begin by reading those to you. The title of the article in which this appeared in the mindfulness bell of Plum Village is They Call You a Bodhisattva. And Thich Nhat Hanh was so happy to be able and grateful to be able to say this to Martin before he was assassinated face to face in New York. In Thich Nhat Hanh's words, from the first moment I knew I was in the presence of a holy person, not just his good work, but his very being was a source of inspiration for me.

[02:18]

When those who embody the essence of their tradition, just the way they walk, sit and speak and smile, speaks volumes. How you and I presence ourselves in the world really matters. In Martin's words, an individual has not started living until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. I received a gift four or five years ago from some friends and students. It is three volumes of Martin Luther King's papers from 1929 to 1956. I have the honor of having those here in my library, which I continue to look at and study.

[03:23]

And some of them are papers from his academic and study and religious studies. He has a beautiful little summary of Mahayana Buddhism, which he was very affirmative of and appreciate and understood probably more than some of us may know. When asked, in the late 60s about Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh's response was, well, it deals with suffering, doesn't it? And so any spiritual tradition that deals with suffering has authenticity. One of the verses in the third volume, the third volume as a whole is called The Birth of a New Age. And this is just a sentence in it written in 1956. Preparing for challenges and responsibilities of a new world order that is replacing the old world order of colonialism and segregation and racism is at hand.

[04:39]

We have to rise up in protests. in prayer so that we can be healed and transformed when i think of a bodhisattva i've heard some great descriptions of bodhisattvas from many teachers the the one i appreciate the most a bodhisattva is an ordinary person who has grown up inside. A true adult, capable of being mindful of their own bodies and minds, capable of nurturing the mind of love, and embodying the mind of love in ways that spills out into history. I wrote, the practice of equanimity is extremely important right now, as one of the Brahma Veras, the practice of love, but the practice of love includes equanimity, this quality of evenness of mind.

[06:08]

description of equanimity is letting go. Another description of equanimity, which I'm sure you're familiar, is to look over. And looking over where we are now, and by we, I mean in the USA, which I know is a small part of the world. But where we are now in the USA, We are once again challenged, our souls challenged by the slivering snake of white supremacy in action. Do not be confused. What happened last week was not about people who didn't make enough money to live. It was about power, raw, primitive power.

[07:11]

And that tendency, as we know as practitioners, that seed, that craving, that clinging, that grasping, and that attachment lives in all of us as seeds and impressions. So it's not like I'm trying to describe someone who has a problem that I don't have. But as practitioners, we have a great opportunity to learn how to recognize our seeds of unwholesomeness, care for our seeds of unwholesomeness, heal and transform our seeds of unwholesomeness. And for me, nothing is more important than that right now. The story of America is collapsing. I'm talking about the underground story as well as the upper ground story. Upper ground, the shining city on the hill.

[08:13]

Below the ground, a history of suffering and pain and privilege and advantage. And genocide and enslavement and incarceration. And then transporting that around the world. to our own advantage as a nation, often disregarding completely the lives of others. So as I've been meditating on this, I've found the teachings in Wa Yen Buddhism to help me understand, help me see. helped me practice in the Flower Garden Sutra, which you may be familiar also, but that the nature of reality is as interpenetrating, all-encompassing, unescapable. And we are now witnessing what happens in a society that has built itself on manas, on conceit.

[09:27]

on the three poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance. This can never stand for long, wherever it occurs, because it is not the true nature of reality. So inside, I know all Buddhist groups around the world, especially in the West, in Europe and in the US and Canada, have been dealing with issues of inclusivity which is extremely important. It's important also as we, I'll come back to this at the end, what the issues are we have to contend with here, but please understand that the issues you're dealing with in your sangha, however small, from the YN perspective, in the small is the very large. That's the first part.

[10:30]

in the issues in our sanghas of culture and inclusivity and diversity writ large is the colonial mind embodied and embedded and that has conditioned our nervous systems has created our language it's like a window a box has been created the last 500 years and whatever we see and whatever we think and whatever we feel is mediated through that lens, mediated through the walls of that box. The power of our practice is we can recognize boxes. We can recognize frameworks and make conscious choices as to where to stand in terms of right view and the whole path so that we are not caught in our conditioning, in our perceptions of one another. in the structural design for us not to be together, which played itself out again last week.

[11:43]

What we're doing in sanghas is instrumental in terms of learning how we can be together as people who are unique, which is absolutely wonderful. One of my professors when I was finishing my doctorate work, opened a class by asking each student to respond to, how many different types of Buddhism are there? And he said, well, just so you know, he was responsible for digitizing the entire Korean canon of Buddhism in Korea. Dr. Lancaster is no lightweight. He says, well, you know, I've been to New York and the Buddhism in Brooklyn is not quite the same as the Buddhism in L.A. And then Korea is not quite the same as Japan. And Japan is now, if you understand, not quite the same as the Buddhism in Kenya, which you should know is there, or in Botswana, which you should know the practice is there.

[12:54]

And Each one of us is our own Buddhism. What I mean is each one of us has the opportunity and the charge to practice our own awakening. But that awakening is not for our own comfort. That awakening is so we can love ourselves and extend that love. to everyone, to all beings. And that love includes witnessing to the truth. That love includes ensuring that justice is a part of that truth. That love includes watering and creating and planting seeds of harmony and connection without emotional bypass, meaning pretending something Didn't happen. Last week, the insurrection, I found myself re-traumatized, triggered, activated.

[14:06]

So pay attention to what happened in your body when this happened. So in a part of my book, I mentioned a story of being shot at by the police when I was quite young, along with some other young people. And yes, I was shot at. That's one level. The next level of practice is what happened to me because that happened to me? What happened to you because of what happened last Thursday? What happened to your nervous system? What happened to your mental formations? What happened to your feelings, your body, your perceptions, your consciousness? Understand the five skandhas are living realities that interact with and are interpenetrating constantly with the whole world, with the whole planet. The good news in this is also because the very large is in the very small, anything we do, if it's done with mindful, compassionate, wise attention, can impact the very large.

[15:19]

I had a moment on Thursday last week when I felt the energy of powerlessness come over in my body. I could feel myself go limp. I could feel my turtle ancestors calling me back into the shell for my high hyperactivation, my constant scanning where I live and where I walk and where I drive. which I've been doing my whole life, consciously. So part of the issue in healing our sanghas, for me, is understanding that America is in a crisis of meaning. And there's a beautiful TED talk by a young woman who's a PhD also, that grew up in the Sufi tradition.

[16:23]

But anyway, her talk is just beautiful, and it's on... What she discovered was that being happy wasn't enough. She did everything she could in her life professionally and personally to be happy and discovered it wasn't sustaining enough. And that led her into going to deeper practice and study, et cetera. And... Her outline of meaning includes four things. And each one of these areas I think is a key point of practice for each of us individually and collectively. The first criteria, the first human experience of having meaning is belonging. And boy, do we have a crisis in belonging in this country. And we always have had. a crisis of belonging. And I'm talking about everybody except the people who were here for five and 10,000 years before any of us arrived.

[17:30]

Who do we belong to? Where do we belong to? On the most superficial but still tragic level, we talk about this as identity politics in a political context. But don't get caught in that box. That's still the colonial box. We are so conditioned to think we know how to think about things. And the very way we have been trained to think about things is how we got this mess. Some people have said that you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. I don't think that's quite correct. I think you can't dismantle the master's house at the same level of consciousness. as the master. A quote attributed to Einstein in this way, you can't solve a problem at the same level of energy that created it. And this is why hate cannot conquer hate.

[18:38]

Only love can. You know this somewhere. All of us know this in our bones, from the tears and pains and joys and teachings of our ancestors. Belonging. So we are in a spiritual crisis in this country of who is we? My grandmother used to tell me that we are not included in that we. And we are still dealing with that now. Do not be confused about what's going on here. The election that just happened was not about COVID. Even though it should have been, it was about race. The second crisis in our meaning right now is purpose. Individually and collectively and as different groups, what is our purpose?

[19:42]

And for many caught in the paradigm, and poisons of white supremacy, their purpose is to not to be replaced by non-white people. And it's called the replication theory. So I researched just about everything. And when I read it, I started chuckling. And my chuckle was, we are born to be replaced. We're going to all get replaced. It's like, get over yourself. What makes you think you're not supposed to die? Pass away. Vanish into no coming and no going. What arrogance is that? What conceit is that? And now when you recognize that level of conceit, you can see how people are totally confused about what is real and what is true, but also confused about what is beautiful and wholesome.

[20:52]

The third area is storytelling of meaning. Our stories create meaning for us. the images and the sounds. And so as practitioners, we must start telling our stories with the eyes and heart of a bodhisattva. Instead of getting the mind of colonial conditioning constantly broadcast to us, we need to do some of our own broadcasting. I think what you're doing now in my previous opportunities to be with Zen center practitioners has been really healing and nourishing and encouraging for me. But I've been saying for people, the story of Buddhism also has to change. As it has for centuries over and over again, there are so many kinds of Buddhism.

[22:00]

And I spent time practicing in Japan and teaching in Japan and Korea and India and Botswana and France and all over the US and in Mexico, et cetera. And what is so amazing about the tradition is it holds together at the bottom of this understanding of practice. And then there's many ways of practice. But as one of my other professors said, The question is, does it have the taste of freedom? Does it have the taste of liberation? I would say, does it have the fragrance of healing and the energy of transformation? This is how I know anywhere in the world I go that I've touched into the Dharma, the Buddha Dharma in practice. Actually, I had an experience two days ago with one of your Zen centers and one of the people on the board is a Baptist minister.

[23:13]

And he started in his questions by saying he didn't think he was very Buddhist. After he's finished talking, I was like, Reverend, you're plenty Buddhist. You just haven't known it. So we have to somehow communicate what we mean And this is to me under the ground of inclusivity is teaching ourselves to understand what Buddha nature really means. And then we begin to understand equality at a real, real deep level. Because we begin to understand, embody our contemplative life every day in every condition. So I've been practicing what the old teachers used to call the causal ground practice. Every condition is an opportunity for practice. Whether I'm up, whether I'm down, whether I'm afraid, whether I'm happy, whether I'm disappointed, all are opportunities for practice.

[24:24]

But not just that. A hummingbird came in our house this morning. They're surrounding us, and we've been trying to get it back outside. And so also, all beings, every encounter is an opportunity to behold the wonder of life, not just the suffering, but its beauty, its miraculous nature. And the fourth quality of meaning, is transcendence. This is probably the thing I appreciate the most about the Buddhist tradition captured in the Heart Sutra. As I summarize, understanding the difference between the vehicle and the destination. Understand when you have arrived. Understand clinging to the teachings instead of practicing the teachings. This is the only tradition I know that

[25:25]

that understands itself and what it's asking us to do in our bodies and with our minds. This is the great challenge before us, how to transcend our legacy of 500 years. For me, that cannot be transcended unless we view it with the eyes of a bodhisattva, with the eyes of wisdom, which for me means the eyes of emptiness, interdependence and connectedness, not just socially, but we are, our nervous systems are connected. And it's not about whether we like each other or not. This is not high school, which I think American society is fundamentally a large version of.

[26:31]

But anyway, that's another talk. But we cannot escape each other's energy communications. Our ancestors knew all this. And so one of the issues with the conversations, and I've had many with people who want to start people of color sanghas or sanghas focused on different groups. My first response is any vehicle of practicing was wonderful. The more people we could get to practice, the better off we are if the practice goes deep and not superficial and doesn't bypass our emotional life, doesn't bypass the spiritual reality of the teachings itself. I think the last thing I want to mention is the work I am doing now, the study and practice I'm doing now, besides what I'm always doing, is I've been focusing on, since my doctoral work was on neuroplasticity and meditation, how meditation changes the structure and functionality of our brains.

[27:46]

Since then, I've been focusing in on, at a deeper level, how our nervous systems respond to the practice and to society. So what I've been learning recently is that to understand mindfulness of the body, and you know, we have a tradition in Buddhism, mindfulness of the body. We have many practices and sutras from the breath, the core foundational practice, mindfulness of breathing, but then there's mindfulness of walking and sitting and lying down. There's mindfulness of our organs, our whole body. There's mindfulness of our skeletons. There's some great meditations on your bones. The charnel ground meditations on death. I think it's very important that we go deeper in terms of our nervous system and learn to meditate. on our autonomic nervous system, which is where our reactivity lies.

[28:52]

This system is before the brain gets involved. This is the system of reactivity that kills and harms without even knowing that's what it's doing because this nervous system has been conditioned to behave that way. And in this land, we live in fear. No question about it. And so when non-white people, for example, or white people come to the door, because I've lived around the world and worked with many cultures and places, when somebody who is not identified with you comes to your door, the first and lasting issue is cues of welcome. I've had friends. I was trying to think of where in the world I want to tell a story from. I have so many choices.

[29:54]

But one of the things I've learned in working with indigenous people around the world is to be invited and to invite. To get to reach out. And if you're uncomfortable reaching out, make that a part of your consciousness in your reaching out. not in a frivolous way, in a sincere. But we've been conditioned in this society not to even learn each other's cues of welcome, except at work. We all know what to do when we go to our jobs. You know how to say good morning. We know how to be polite. Performance, which is a great thing we can do as people, we can do our jobs, we can create. Performance is wonderful. But performance, Martin Luther King would remind us, it's not the same thing as beloved community. Not the same thing as the noble Sangha, and I just don't mean a monastic framework for the noble Sangha.

[30:58]

I mean the Sangha of Bodhisattvas. In your presence, around your presence, in this world, most of whom don't know their Bodhisattvas. That's okay. They don't have to. They just have to continue to not burn out, not give up. They just have to continue to be nourished and loved. And so our practice with our own nerves, learning how to love your nervous system. Last week, the first thing I thought on Thursday, an immediate list came into my mind of all the other places in the world I could be living right now. I was like, oh, no, why didn't I go to Mexico when I thought so? Why did I move to Kyoto when my friends found me a place there? Now I'm here with all these crazy people. I said that to my wife.

[32:02]

And after I said, I remembered, oh, yeah, you made the commitment to causal ground practice. Whatever the conditions are, they are conditions of practice. My fear is a condition of practice. My discomfort with what's happening right now. The uncertainty that's going on and will be going on. And your nervous system is on hypervigilance, whether you know it or not. And so learning how to make and create safety inside of ourselves is a practice of skillfulness. because we cannot create safety for others without creating safety inside of ourselves. It's like what we are told when we get on an airplane. If there's a problem, put your mask on first before you try to help somebody else.

[33:05]

So many of us have feelings of unsafety in ourselves we don't even know we carry. It's not personal in that sense. And so through our mindfulness practice, we can learn to be skilled to recognize when our nervous systems are triggered, the energy of fight, the energy of running away, or the energy of collapse, becoming immobilized in the face of what's going on in our own lives and in our situation right now. What I've been practicing with is resting and digesting. that part of my nervous system. Spending enough time to take care of myself, to walk outside, to sit with birds, to be in touch with my friends and beloveds, to find joy in the midst of this chaos is how we will be sustained.

[34:14]

And joy, too, you know, is one of the Brahmaveras, along with equanimity, compassion, and loving kindness. There's a quote from Martin Luther King I want to end with. It's simple, kind of. Our life begins to end when we are silent about what matters. And that means for each of us, we have to decide what matters to us. Bodhisattvas meditate with purpose, practice with purpose, engage with purpose without becoming entangled. And this is why a contemplative life At the same time, you might be engaged in social and institutional and historic change.

[35:17]

The contemplative practice and ground is fundamental. Otherwise, what I've seen occur around the world is we will end up repeating the colonial pattern predictably. We're on the verge of imagining something that people have been praying for, writing about. hundreds and thousands of years. But we took a big detour through the colonial enterprise. I heard a quote from a professor recently that said, well, you know, the enlightenment period of Europe was great, but it only benefited about 3,000 people. And that That is how we keep repeating unwholesome patterns in society. We don't really have a way to measure how we benefit being together, not just in economics or in politics or in culture, but in well-being, in nourishment, in care, and in love.

[36:36]

What a time to practice. What a time to be alive. I think this is our moment. When I was studying theology, which I did and taught for many years, the founder of my religious community at the time said, you know, think of what's going on now as a wave. And at the... There's the crest of the wave that is rising and the trough of the wave that is going down. I would suggest to you to focus your precious mindfulness energy on the crest, on what is emerging. What is this collapse hiding underneath it that is true and good and beautiful? how communities are learning to care for each other when care is not coming.

[37:41]

To hold each other up, to raise each other up in whatever small ways we can. Maybe when I grew up in Cleveland, smiling wasn't a practice. And the hardest thing for me in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition was learning to smile. Everything else was easy. I've been meditating for 30 years, 40 years before I met him. So, but this smiling thing, it's extremely, I try to get my thirst. I was in the bathroom the other day, and I have this picture that I used to do business consulting in. I was at a, my client took me to an Orlando basketball game with Shaq. And I ended up with this photo of my head somehow in Shaq's body. And my wife kept it. I thought I'd thrown it out. And she put it in our bathroom. And I says, I don't like that picture.

[38:46]

Why is it here? And she said, it's one of the few pictures I have of you smiling. And I remember, oh, welcome cues. Cues of openness, of receptivity. but also boundaries. So we must learn in ourselves and amongst ourselves as a sangha, sit down and talk about your welcoming cues to people who are not familiar. And I know that's already begun. And that's wonderful. And talk about what might be the next step. And then what might be cues? Because cues that welcome me may not welcome you. So to really understand what cues of safety we've been conditioned with from our childhood on. And then ask yourself as a sangha, what are the cues of welcoming and at ease we have in our sangha?

[39:51]

All of our bells, all of our turns, knowing what to do when, our bowing. Those may be wonderful cues, which I like and enjoy. But are those cues transmissible to generations to come? And the challenge in spiritual and religious life is always how you transmit what is true and beautiful and wholesome and healing and transformational without getting caught in the vehicle of transmission. This is part of what we're dealing with in Clearly in Buddhism in the West, we used to call it in academia, it's Buddhism all over the world. It's changing in the sense of how it communicates the transmission of the Buddha Dharma without being confused about the transmission itself.

[40:56]

And that's why our practice must continue and go deeper into both our spiritual ancestry in Buddhism spiritual teachers of many traditions that we may have, our ancestral traditions. I've had the good fortune of learning a lot and continue to learn a lot from people around the world who are gracious enough to teach me. And shamans in Africa, Sweat lodges in North America. Events in the mountains in Mexico. Pujas in India. Last story, I was working in villages. I lived in India a couple of years.

[41:56]

Working in rural development. Village development. I was at a tiny remote village. The head of the village, the community organizing, invited me to a puja, a worship event in the village. And so we were in this little, little tiny room in this house and chanting and the organs and in the Hindu tradition. And at the end, you know, we all got sweets and which is wonderful. And at the end, he asked me, had you ever had an experience like this? And I said, well, actually what, what, What came up for me was when I grew up, my adoptive grandparents attended a Baptist church in Cleveland, Ohio. And every Sunday morning, there was four o'clock prayer meeting at four in the morning. And whenever I stayed with my grandparents, I had to go.

[43:00]

And that was what that reminded the energy of that. The sounds of Jack penetrated me. beyond language, which is the whole point of Zen. My pleasure to be with you. I understand we are going to some kind of Q&A. Thank you. Briefly, the closing chant before we move into question and answer. attention equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of buddha's way beings are numberless i vow to save them delusions are inexhaustible i vow to end them

[44:06]

Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to be coming. As the questions are bubbling up, I would love to say thank you very much, Dr. Ward, and also to place in the chat a link. Dr. Ward mentioned the Brahma Viharas several times in the talk, and we happen to have a three-day sitting coming up a month from now on that topic. So please have a look if you would like to learn more. So I can see a number of folks already have put their hands up. And if you would like a reminder, open the participants window, hit the raise hand button, and we'll go from there. Miguel. Good morning, Dr. Ward.

[45:08]

First of all, I'd like to say thank you, sir, for this incredibly wonderful, beautiful, dense talk. I have copious notes here in front of me. This is one thing I've enjoyed that I've been able to do with Dharma talks since we've been doing them over Zoom is able to jot these things down. It enables me to pass this stuff on to family members who may not follow my spiritual tradition, but this helps them a lot. I appreciate what you said about these cues of welcoming. I think this is something I struggle with in terms of reading them, in terms of interpreting them, in terms of applying them to everyday life. It's something that I'd like to learn to do within my sangha, within my temples, to just pretty much encourage more people into practice, or at least let them come in and experience it. So I think my question is, and I was also inspired by you speaking about practicing, about the Buddhism in New York, just to use an example, is different from Brooklyn to Queens, because it's been my experience that the Buddhism in San Francisco is different from Hart Street, the Zen Center, the Dragons League, to all the various little temples.

[46:31]

Please excuse my excitement, it's just very invigorating to hear this. I was particularly moved by your speaking about the experience of practicing in Mexico. So I guess, okay, okay. So what I want to ask is these cues of welcoming, as you've seen them in these different sanghas, what can I do to encourage this in my temple, in my life? How do I encourage these cues of welcome? Thank you. It's a wonderful question. And I'm on a journey of learning to be more conscious of this. And one of the resources I would recommend is there's also a free YouTube presentation and a book by a clinical practitioner by the name of Deb Dana, D-A-N-A, Dana. And she has a wonderful summary

[47:36]

of understanding human neuroceptivity, the part of our nervous system that reads, that broadcasts and receives messages that our brains never get. And this is where safety is determined. This is before the brain is involved, before our story about safety. It is our sense of safety. This is very primitive in this sense. This is the oldest part. of our nervous system we are having to learn how to deal with. And part of what, for me, I saw last Thursday is evidence of what happens if we don't learn how to be with the deepest levels of our humanity with skillfulness. So I'd recommend her book and her, if you're not a book person or a reader, there's a free YouTube. Again, her name is Deb Donna. And she, and it, does the research.

[48:37]

It's research based. She has practices included, but her basic understanding of safety helped me understand how unsafe we feel in this country, which is why people bought 17 million guns last year. So I would have a workshop first with myself to get more and more familiar with my own cues of safety. And if you're married or have a partner or have kids or parents you're dealing with, learn to pay attention to that with them. Start in the house. And so more and more I can recognize movements or gestures that actually don't make my wife feel safe. We've been married 25 years. And we're fine and happy and all that, but I'm just talking about my deepening consciousness and my impact on others and how I impact other people's nervous systems, which, you know, I already have a problem because people think they know who I am from a distance.

[49:43]

I understand. Just to share something with you, I also appreciate what you said about the stories and I'm Mexican. And unfortunately, my family, although we acknowledge our indigenous roots, we don't know our tribes. We don't know our lands. We just know that's where we came from. But there is a story about when you mentioned the hummingbirds, especially in San Diego, that the voice of God is a hummingbird buzzing in your left ear. Oh, thank you. I think it's a beautiful analogy that you're being bombarded by hummingbirds. Yeah, that's right. One comment about Mexico. Every year for the last three years, until the pandemic, we have held a Bodhisattva Wisdom School in Mexico. And each school is devoted to one particular Bodhisattva. We look at the teachings of that Bodhisattva and the practices of that Bodhisattva and we ask ourselves, how do we transform that in ways that we can embody it in our daily life where we live?

[50:49]

in our communities, in our schools, in our businesses, in our home life, et cetera. And so we have quite a few students in Mexico. Actually, I finished writing my book in Oaxaca earlier this year before the pandemic. Thank you for the question. Thank you. I believe Terry is next in the queue. Oh, as Terry is getting prepared, I'm also going to add a link in the chat to both Dr. Ward's recent book and then a link to the Lotus Institute so you can see more about the Bodhisattva Wisdom School. Thank you so much for your very wide-ranging and deep talk. I have been thinking...

[51:52]

very recently about loving practices towards the people that I'm most afraid of saying, may Trump be peaceful. And I feel that I've been thinking and thinking, gosh, how can I approach all these people who I don't understand. And I'm wondering if maybe I can use just really simple well-being practices to think about them or meditate on them. Because I really have a lot of fear about them. I mean, what do you think about that? How can I change my feelings towards them? So there's a couple of levels to this.

[53:02]

One of these in terms of our framework in the five aggregates on feelings is aversion. And so let's stay on that a moment. So for me, the practice is to... recognize when my experience of aversion comes up. And it did last week for me. I actually turned to my wife and said, we should have moved to Kyoto when we had a chance. I don't want to live here anymore, these crazy white people. But see, I knew what was happening. I know that was my aversion, also my aversion to being afraid. You know, I have an aversion. I don't want to be afraid. And having lived a lot of my life when I'm in this country, being afraid doesn't help. I'm talking about my nervous system.

[54:03]

So first is your narrative. Recognize when that thought comes up. The second thing I've been doing is after resting with that, kind of letting that thought calm down. take a look and ask yourself what triggered it. What was the root of that thought? Where did it come from? And how does that thought settle in your body? How is it landing in your actual physical experience of yourself? And then to take your loving kindness practice, your well-being practices, and first send those to yourself. and then send those to others. And the wonderful thing about what you are describing is I think many people who see themselves as social activists do not understand the power of meditation, contemplation, and prayer as energies, transformational energies from which there is no defense.

[55:20]

keep praying for people. And I'll pray for you, you pray for me, and we pray together. And if that creates enough disturbance in the field of energy, and I'm kind of getting into another level of physics here, but we really need to understand ourselves as more than matter. One of the great crimes of the colonial system of thought is the fact that we are more than matter got stolen, even though it's contrary to the two laws of physics. So I think it's wonderful. And then if you can have any other people who are interested in joining in the practice, with you on a day or a time.

[56:20]

That would be wonderful. The other thing I want to say in this response to both questions, depending on the state of a person's nervous system, that state depends on what they can hear. You know this in your own experience. When you're in the fright stage or when you're in the fear stage, or when you're in the runaway stage, or when you're in the I'm hunkering down, I'm scared, I'm immobilized stage, it is very difficult to hear outside of that state. And so our practice to elevate our hearts, elevate our minds of well-being, whenever I find myself in one of those states, I practice with my... skills of well-being and nourishing my mind and body. And then I bring that energy to where I am suffering, to where I'm afraid, to where I am stuck, to where I am caught.

[57:27]

And then I just, I saw a great video this morning of seals jumping off the coast of Santa Barbara. in and above the waves. It was absolutely, they had no fear. I thought, oh my God, that's how we have to practice now, like seals and giant waves and understand we are home. Not to be intimidated out of our human sovereignty by the craziness of our human structures. Thank you. Thank you so much. Zach, please. Thank you so much, Dr. Ward. That was a really, really great talk. It was marvelous to hear. So without going into too much detail, I want to ask a question that relates to an experience I just recently had in the last couple of days.

[58:36]

I had the colossal good fortune to discover that a neighbor that I know lives across the street, I've been interacting with him for decades, actually. It turns out to be a Q conspiracy guy, right? Totally out of the blue. He just walked up one day and, you know, Wednesday when I was trying to get out and go on a bike ride. And he started talking about this stuff. And I just listened and... encouraged him and prompted him and so on and it was in some way and at the end i i i thanked him and you know it said i gotta get in the car now and go off and ride my bike and you know it was it was a in some ways it was a lovely exchange and at the same time the the underlying feeling tone for me was not i wasn't afraid i wasn't you know it it was more like this imagine yourself

[59:41]

and swimming somewhere and feeling a little tired and wanting to get out of the water and seeing an object floating and thinking, oh, maybe I can climb up on that. And you arrive and it's a sphere. And to try and climb out of the water by holding onto a sphere, it's like it's so slippery and airtight that there's not a single place to get a handle on it. It's like the narrative. The narrative that this guy I know has constructed and built out of the things that he's heard, it has all these features. It's explanatory. It privileges him in this way that feels... good. It has an end game that looks attractive. It has all these things. It's really pretty tight.

[60:43]

I can relate totally to that as a human being because I like being in that situation too. I'd love to be in a situation where my narrative was that watertight. The question this is a follow-on to Terry's question, how to approach that, right? How to approach a narrative that's so slippery and tightly constructed that it almost seems like there's no gap anywhere, right? Anyway. Okay, thank you. Thank you. The first thing for me is important to pay attention to is that America has a long history of things like Yuan. In various forms, we have a strong anti-intellectual, anti-scientific piece of American history.

[61:58]

So first thing is, again, to get the big view and understand. But from a practitioner point of view, ah, is what the Buddha taught about the mind right or what? You know, I mean, that's kind of how I see it. The other thing is to remember America is a culture of sales. Everything here is about what I can sell. Water, a story, a car. I mean, we are conditioned to consume. And with what's happened, my wife is from Wisconsin, and these are chains from the Underground Railroad her family found in a house that they bought. And so for me, The person with that tight, remember the cube I talked about at the beginning, this how we can get caught inside of spaces?

[63:04]

That's what happens when you don't have equanimity enough to have your own space. That is so sad. And, you know, there's several versions. We've seen this tragedy, whether it's the Jim Jones thing or other things, but... What I want to say about that in particular, because I know it also has a racist piece to it, whether that's spoken out loud or not, but my own research has revealed that. The lie about humanity in the ground of America's foundation is already the very heart of a deception of reality. And so we've had 500, 400 years of believing lies about who we are with one another. First, you know, we were heathens before we got here. No, not quite human.

[64:07]

And then three-fifths of a boat. And then the mass incarcerations and genocides of indigenous people. So for me, America is a soil seeded with misperception. And so it can become quite easy and quite legitimate to raise another misperception as if it's reality itself. And for me, that's part of this meaning issue, to go back to the other thing. People are looking for meaning, for understanding. And as humans, we will cling on to anything. It doesn't have to be the truth, which we know, which we have seen played out. It is, can I hang on to this? It isn't whether it's true or not.

[65:08]

It's the hope it will get me across the sea of suffering, which we all know from our practice and study, it will not. And so the backlash of the collapse of people who are caught in these things will be a huge wave of depression, which I'm already seeing with people who are talking to me who came from this orientation or have been touched, because you're not dealing with your internal life. You're stuck in your cognitive world. Your body is not grounded on the earth. You don't realize these are real. We are earthbound, happily so. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Ward, I see we have about nine minutes left and a few more questions.

[66:15]

Okay. Just to give an update on the timeframe. I'll keep making the way down the queue. Hello, Dr. Ward. I found many aspects of your conversation very dynamic and important to me. I wanted to initially have a personal aside with you that my tribe of birth is near yours, actually. I was raised and have a lot of my being still in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I'm happy for people from Cleveland because you folks really took a large step forward by defeating your big rival, my Steelers, last week. My Steelers mug has gotten a big chip ripped off me. But I say that because I know how much that football team meant in Western Pennsylvania in a very depressed area back in the 70s.

[67:22]

When that football team brought together people, we didn't matter if we were black, white, Chinese. We didn't matter if we were union stewards or white collar. And since then, there's been a spirit of people from my beloved community of Pittsburgh. And I'm happy for Cleveland. I can feel the energy. In Buffalo, also, I can feel that. Let me ask you about this beloved community and my relationship with the Skandas and all of our relationships with our Skandas, our form and feelings and sensations. Doesn't my beloved community perhaps arise from from my relationship with how I view the world. Can't I find that place of deep rest, of liberation, if I see, if I draw that analogy to the interdependence of my life with the skandhas and supposedly this exterior world, which of course is not separate from me.

[68:32]

There's my beloved community as I arise and wake each morning. with each breath, if I'm awake, I can live with that beloved community. What about that? Correct. Is that it? Yep, that's it. The Skandas are not our enemies. They are vehicles of practice and contemplation. Well, that's our existence, Dr. Ward. Yeah, and beloved community is, when I use the word, I mean it as an experience. A lived experience. Right. Right. But can I bring that open heart? My heart can be more open if I have that intimate relationship. Correct. Beloved community. It's the only way it can. We are. This is a part again of our nervous system. We are. Evolutionarily designed. to cooperate in spite of the industrial Western teaching that competition is how we've evolved.

[69:38]

It's not. And we've evolved through cooperation. We're designed for cooperation. Our very nervous system starts to break down when we're in isolation, which is one of the reasons it's a weapon. and used on people to imprison or torture. So we're already in a very difficult moment here, especially if we don't have a partner or a mammal that we can co-regulate with. And part of the safety issue, to go back to the Sangha piece, is learning how we can co-regulate our nervous systems together when we have been trained not to and i really appreciate your insight into beloved community as a lived reality i think that's the only meaning it has of any significance in terms of my understanding and what martin taught and put his life and death into thank you so much one more important thing go browns okay thank you

[70:54]

Peter. Good morning, Dr. Ward. Good morning. And thank you for your talk this morning. I have a question, and I'd like to preface it by saying that the events last week at the Capitol were not just an expression or an attempted expression of power and a power play, rather amateurish one actually, but scary and significant nonetheless. But listening to some of the people being interviewed, the rioters, the protesters, because there were up to 50,000 people there, maybe 15,000 of whom were the rioters. What I heard was fear.

[71:58]

And those people were nominally my brothers and sisters, at least from an obvious perspective. And it just strikes me that that element of fear is what has been mobilized by the ones who... seek and want to retain power. And it's, that's kind of the history of the United, of America is a small group, you know, seeking to gain or retain uses fear to, and so part of that fear is the fear of loss. And so, and loss is scary if it's a free fall. But if there is something, if there's a safety net, if there's something underneath to which a change in status will not mean annihilation, that fear can be lessened and can open the ground and path for true brotherhood.

[73:15]

And... woke last night and I couldn't get to sleep, and this idea of how do we unify this greatly divided country, and it seems to me that one idea that would be acceptable and work practical would be a form of universal service. I know 60 years ago we had the draft, you know, that was specifically for a military function, and I've regretted the all-volunteer military ever after. Thank goodness that wasn't activated with the events last week, but it could be, you know, with an elite cadre of military class. And so to broaden that, I would like to see a form of universal service. Now, it could be three months, it could be 12 months, it could be two years.

[74:18]

How I see it is involving all young people, male, female, and trans, in some form of universal service in which all would be thrown together and uplifted. And, you know, I really feel like it doesn't have to just be marching back and forth, you know, and on a playground. It can be learning, new skills. It can be It can be like the CCC or the Peace Corps, but having a common, being thrown together with a common cohort, you know, as the volunteer army now is based on platoons or brigades rather than divisions or armies. And those people become like family. And I think that's what we need to unify the larger country is

[75:20]

So I'm wondering if you've had any thoughts about universal service and how that might or might not be a benefit to America and to the cause of peace and justice. Well, thank you for your comments and question. I think it's a beautiful idea. As you were talking, my thought was you should write that up as a proposal, as an op-ed. The question for me is how such a thing could get started. But I think it's a beautiful idea because we have experienced that this can be successful. And certainly there are plenty of needs. So it's not make-believe work. It is a genuine vehicle for me for people to experience their, without knowing it, their bodhisattva vow. In my old organization, we worked with doctors and lawyers and school teachers in different parts of the world who would come from different parts of the world to other parts of the world to help for a month.

[76:34]

Dentists, carpenters, all kinds of skill sets. And what we found was a remarkable experience. healing of humanity. So, yes, I agree. I think it would be wonderful. But please write it up, audio it, put it out. I can support that in my own life. Thank you. Thank you. This is what we need, imagination people, not woe is me. We need visions like this. Thank you, Peter. Dr. Ward, The assembly, it looks like we've come to the end of our time. Dr. Moore, would you like to offer a closing comment? I think seriously and practice in order to, and invite you to be aware of what great thing is emerging.

[77:38]

My language for it, I'm stealing from language from others, Before me, like Jonas Salk and others. But what's emerging is a new, never before, anima mundi. World soul. You can find it in both Greek and Latin. And what I mean by that is not some separate entity. I'm talking about our capacity to love one another in spite of our institutions. in spite of our structures and in spite of our history. For me, I can see this emerging around the world everywhere I go. Of course, this is not what's covered. And so the seeds of it, it seems like there's some friend. This is not a friend. This is the planet. Asking us to stand up and evolve as our children.

[78:42]

Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Ward. Thank you, everyone. And if you would like, you should be able to unmute now. Thanks so much. Thank you, Dr. Ward. Thank you, everyone. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Ward. Thank you, Dr. Ward. Thank you. This is fabulous. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Ward. Thank you for your words and inspiration. Take care of yourselves. Be safe and be well. Thank you. Much love to everyone. Much love to you too, dear. That was wonderful. Thank you. I did too. This is how we do it, people. I'm serious. We rely on one another. We meditate for each other. We pray for each other. We learn how to love one another, even from afar.

[79:50]

So when we meet face to face, we will know how. Take good care. Muchas gracias. Oh, wonderful. Thanks so much. Where are you in Mexico? Where are you at? Chiapas in San Cristobal. Oh, Chiapas. I've been to Chiapas many times. Thank you. We're going to open a center over here. Yes. OK. Yes. What a wonderful idea. I almost moved there. I've been to Tulum many times. And I have friends in Puerto Vallarta and students. So who knows, Maria? Who knows what might happen? We will. OK. You take care. So you can check me out on the Lotus Institute and write to me and we can communicate further if you would like. Be safe.

[80:52]

Be well. Love yourself. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your uplifting talk. Great.

[81:01]

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