I think they're on schedule. Oh, yeah, Zaza instruction is over. The next... Well, the next topic is the next precept is I do not take what is not given. It seems though we entirely finished the first precept. So I'm going to leave room for there to be further discussion with that if you want to do so. I think one general issue about all of this first five is that one can't entirely separate one's own individual behavior from the behavior of the collective.

[01:23]

So, just to say that Our individual climate merges into the climate of everyone and what everyone does. So that decisions about these things are never, are never pure or clear, entirely unambiguous, that there's always some shadowed area in which we are in some way involved in a complicity of some violation of the precepts. So what one has to be conducting is that arena in the world which is most uniquely your

[02:28]

your own responsibility, which is your own thought, your own intention. It's the one corner of the universe which no one else, I think, was saved out of. And that should be the core of one's working piece. Much more so than what you actually do, you This may seem trivial in a way. For instance, years ago at Chassahar there was one of our periodic flaps about killing things in the garden. If you garden, you have to kill things. Because seeing draping the soil disturbs outcomes and kills them.

[03:32]

Much less if you have to get involved in snails and they raise and build things like that. And what I've observed is that otherwise quite gentle and non-violent people who have nothing to do with stealing squirt flowers can suddenly become quite... are violently angry at something which has just uprooted their body of joy. So, gardeners are not immune to the wrath of resentment. But also, if you're going to... So, what do you do in a situation like that? So, years ago, in Baspar, there was a campaign not to kill the Iriks, let the Iriks eat the whole garden, not kill them. And if so, our local priests were consulted, and I believe one of them said that as you kill each Iri, you say to it, please become Buddha, please become Buddha.

[04:48]

And this may seem like an artifice, or it may seem silly, Or it may seem that from the earwigs' point of view, she or he is not much gratified or given much solace by the fact that you are doing it with some different attention. But given the fact that you're going to do something like that anyway, that the thought which you produce around it does make a difference. And this is, in a way, what we mean by the strange word practice. Practice means taking seriously those kinds of differences which, in a sense, no one knows that you... In fact, that might be a good looking definition of practice. That is, practice is making conscious and...

[05:48]

working with those defects or differences which no one knows but hears. Which no one knows when you pinch the ear with whatever you're saying to yourself when you speak up, unless you're whispering it aloud. So this ethics of intentionality that we've been talking about is, it's based not just on the fact that what your intention was determines the tone or quality of the being, again, it's based on the idea that thoughts are real as anything is real. Or as unreal as anything is unreal. Anyway, that thoughts are not less real than anything else. Thoughts are not less real than something that you're taking a life of. So a thought is alive, too.

[06:57]

And you can kill thoughts. You can kill your own or others' thoughts. In fact, again, a living being or a prana being, as we discussed, is, in its strictest sense, an embodied or physicalized thought. And what you're really taking when you take life is you're taking that energy you just got away with, coming to you. So, this is not just legalism or ethics, it's also ontology, it's also a different sense of what is real or what the essence of something is. I think that for us in the West, the part about what is in the colonial culture that's really the hardest to get across or to grasp is that thought about a real consequence.

[08:17]

So I know the practice of the Androids with regard to hunting was that the condition and quality of your thought was the critical thing. Not the technique, but exercise of bringing down the game. That was considered to be, you know, secondary. But the main thing was the purity of your mind. Because it was felt that was the most real thing and the thing that had the most effect on on the outcome of the launch and the outcome of future hunting. I read something interesting recently. The Department of Non-Secretariat of the Ministry of Average Gills has asked And I was reading about the states in which, for some reason, the populace has chosen to pass it.

[09:30]

Why would you? But not only has it had the effect because of the financial incentive of people returning and picking up bottles, But it's also changed people's habits about picking up trash. People have noticed that in those days, there's been more of an effort just to follow the chariot and pick up after yourself, pick up the litter, and talk to others, making them more conscious of it. And, of course, they have a law which... which, when I say through greed, motivates people to pick up after themselves, is a bit strange in a way. I mean, you might also imagine that you could just somehow directly train people of the value of not literally like you do in Japan, where it's just being considered a poor man's boat to drop something on the sea, because it's so low class.

[10:33]

and all of a sudden it's just culturally destructive, that kind of minimal sense of sexuality. And maybe it has to do with... some underlying conceptual basis of our society of freedom or individuality, that our society is based on the idea that the individual, even in a certain sphere, can do whatever he or she likes and it's all right. That's maybe the idea of rights, that we all have rights. The right to be left alone or something. So you have a right to throw a beer can down. As long as you're not throwing it on somebody's head, you can do it. I'm afraid the Buddhist picture of the world rather lacks this idea of rights. Because of the extreme degree in which everything is connected, you actually have no rights at all.

[11:42]

You only have responsibility. And those are, in a sense, your freedom or your rights. That freedom for Buddhists is the awareness, sufficiently developed awareness to act in accord with your surroundings or the karma with your surroundings to the extent that no or very little ways of karma are producing it. So Buddhist ideas, if you carefully throw a beer can out a car window, it affects the harmony of the world and therefore affects your own harmony. The thought, or the lack of the thought, is real and it has a real effect on the world.

[12:47]

Now, a corollary to this is that meritorious thinking affects the world positively. If unwholesome thinking is real and has an unwholesome tech, that meritorious or wholesome thinking is real and affects the world positively. This is, you might say, the Buddhist's most compelling or root response to, you know, criticizing health. Isn't Zazen just used as a way to escape? If it were the case that acts are more real than thoughts, then Zazen would be definitely speaking voice to Tom. He would not have anything to do with the subject being. Insofar as intended thought is as real as an act or as real as a deer, the activity of purifying the mind or consciousness by sitting still is narratory's action and affects people.

[14:11]

And when I say that, I don't mean that there's some, you know, etheric stratum. that your thoughts go into and walk around the world in some kind. That would be, that's a little bit too Pollyanna-ish. It wouldn't be that way at all. This isn't some kind of, you know, theosophic Pollyannaism, where there's some kind of, you know, you know, at its extreme, as I've mentioned in the lecture, there's this theosophist idea that you have these sages and malyas that are kind of doing meditation. and take care of it. And, you know, I've gotten letters from somebody recently who's involved in some Sufi group. Apparently, many of their friends in the Sufi group are pretty convinced that one needn't do anything about the nuclear issue because the flying saucer people are taking care of it. And that there are people out there, you know, somewhere who are superior beings who won't let it happen

[15:14]

It's all a test. So it's okay for you to be tired to see what flying saucer people think. Well, as I, and Jenny, you're right back to me. If I were a flying saucer first, I would be very leery of this whole planet, and I would be waiting. I would be watching very closely to see whether... people here who were saved, but they didn't even save themselves, you know, and probably are close to quarantine signs all around. Do not enter, you know, dangerous, dangerous people or something. I mean, if foreign society people really are a superior race, I don't think they'd even just not be around, or they'd be waiting to see whether, you know, in a sense at all. So that doesn't wash for me at all, even if such beings exist, which I, you know, I'm not going to deny it. I mean, maybe so.

[16:15]

But, you know, it's a complete rationalization. And again, I think it's still based on the idea that somehow your thoughts aren't real, or that you can't really do anything anyway, and so you might as well just leave it to the flying saucer people. So, in a way, you know, it's probably most of us here are fairly developed ethically. The arena in which we have to encounter these ethical points about not killing, I mean, I don't think anybody is a habitual murderer or anything like that, but there are such people. The level in which we're discussing in the gallery is a rather subtle sort of level.

[17:17]

But there is a quality in the teaching of Derivative Embracing Buddha Go-I that The main reason that most people are good is because they're in good surroundings, or in good conditions for good, and not because they have made a conscious intention in their lives, and that that same person couldn't address those things, it will not be so good. And this is the difference I mentioned earlier in the class, that from the standpoint of liberation, or buddhika, both good karma and bad karma are somewhat suspect. That is to say, as long as your life is not purely awake or surely imbued with intention, so that each thing that you do is by your intention and not by your karma, even good things that you do are not so good because they're based on habitual patterns which may be favorable but still are rather habitual or counter-formed and are not...

[18:34]

They're fresh somehow, they're like frozen, like frozen food, fresh food. Practice is to make your life much more like fresh food. You go shopping every day, rather than your activity comes out of the freezer. And, you know, so in a way, to imagine to yourself, well, I'm not a... I mean, killing somebody is a part... I mean, I could never do that. That's the people who are in jails. Bad people. This may be a little bit unrealistic, because... what you may simply be saying is that the conditions which produce a murder are not that your conditions are to be. But that as long as you... suffer, like everyone, from the prior conception of an inherent being in which you cling to a self, there may be circumstances which arise in which you would find yourself killing even another human being.

[19:43]

And that part of becoming complete in practice is to know that part of yourself, which usually most people only experience in dreams or fantasy or some theory, which again we think doesn't count, that isn't real. Although traditional cultures quite characteristically consider the dream world to be more real than the waking world and less real. And you might say that one of the defining characteristics of our society is that we all share a belief that the dream world is less real than the waking. I think that's a kind of underlying attribute. Not too long ago, I had a dream. A rather strange dream for somebody like myself who took quite a lot of chances and took quite a stand against war.

[20:47]

I was a machine gunner in some sort of combat outfit, knowing people down. I don't quite know why, I suddenly found myself in that role, and I was quite happy to be doing it at that particular time. I wasn't quite myself. And that kind of residue of some other possibility in your life is, you know, what that means is that, I suppose, in these kind of years of practice, I still have some potentiality to find my consciousness in that mode. And that one has to acknowledge that, but that really is the beginning of real compassion for people less fortunate than themselves, is realizing that the thoughts which they have given rise to, which have produced their unfortunate situation, are not thoughts which are separate from other thoughts.

[21:49]

They're simply thoughts which recently, that is to say this life or the last few years or whatever, the last few lifetimes, you haven't been in a situation in which they're too conducive to that, so it tends to be nuts. So, when you put a group of people under stress, it was an emergency, who people are becomes rather different than when they're just an ordinary peep, somebody that you don't think is not A particularly beguiled person may shine, and someone else who you're really counting on may fall apart. So when conditions change, we learn a lot about what our real intentions are, our real attitudes may be. So, I'm kind of swinging around to the question that came up last week, and I'd like to stop and let you talk.

[22:55]

What is the Buddhist social responsibility for the world we live in, which is riddled with murderous intent at every turn? Not just in distant lands where People are desperate and poor, but right on our own streets. I'm consistently amazed the more I spend time with quite deranged people, the more I'm grateful how few people of murderous intent actually act up. I say probably 1%, or half of 1%. There's an extraordinarily large number of people going around, nerding on their minds all the time, virtually all the time. And we somehow are restrained from asking God. It's just great.

[23:58]

And all I can say is that I think the seeds of Buddhahood are very powerful in people. They restrain all but the most desperate. Even a person who's quite firmly entrenched, you know, in a murderous fantasy is restrained from acting on it by some lingering sense of trespass or, you know, I suppose it's a bit of a conflict called moral imperative, that there is within each person an equipment for, you know, Buddha nature or Buddha nature or acting in accord, which is not that it's hard to arouse, to experience, very hard to suppress. You really have to work at it for a long, long period of time, but thoroughly suppress it so that it has no manifestation at all. Even people who do commit murder, they only usually commit one. There are lots.

[25:01]

Even the ones that aren't caught, and there's quite a few that aren't caught, like the four college fellows who killed Chris Persig are Remember, on the streets here, you know, you know where they live. You just sit there and you tell them you won't kill anybody. They can't be evicted because you don't have the networks. There's lots of people out there, you know, very quickly. A few such incidents are solved. So it is extraordinary that in spite of the... impressingly deeply thinking of, you know, a large percentage of people, things go as well as they do. The more I know people from the inside, the more I'm impressed at how well things work, and seeing how badly people... So, one way to look at the world is not how bad the world is, Now, terrible people are, and they're suffering with it, but how little there is compared to what you might expect, you know, in the way people are with each other.

[26:07]

So that's the positive stuff. You should be grateful that there isn't much more than there is. But at the same time, I would say the main issue for most of us who actually have already traveled for a long time and been working explicitly and implicitly on refining our ethical life, that what is our ethical responsibility toward accepting others, both the close at the end and the far away. And the Buddhist answer really is that you should do what you can when you can, but you should recognize that the root of suffering is rather intractable.

[27:15]

Very, very hard to get to in one individual, much less to some. And that even if it looks like there's some movement of foot to change the society or to improve things, inevitably, in this case, proven it over and over again, the same basic dynamics of corruption and exploitation reappear over and over again because the fundamental root cause of suffering is self-condemn. The self-condemn is... a universal vision by rich and poor, bright and stupid, revolutionaries and dictators, all facetious in fairly equal measure. And so that's part of the reason why up until now Buddhists have been fairly pessimistic about the chances for any kind of structural change in society's large scale human structure because the problem is so clearly seen as fundamentally psychological.

[28:38]

And rooted in the structure of consciousness. And so, historically, Buddhists have felt that the basic way to deal with it is to, first of all, understand it thoroughly in your own body and mind. Until you understand this structure of ignorance in your own body and mind, you have very little chance of accurately acting on the situation about it. and that as the more that you are able to thoroughly comprehend the corruptibility of human beings through, you know, the subjective awareness of your own corruptibility through meditation practice, through yoga, the more you are able to seize, first of all, notice, and then to seize the opportunities that occur to you to do something, and then to be able to act appropriately

[30:00]

So, I don't think Buddhism in any way, you know, quietistic or... and can act energetically in a way which actually helps. So, I think that the possibilities Of doing that, Kali Padre is the only patek on that page. It's something that Buddhism really hasn't tried yet. And I think, in a way, it's the great teacher of Buddhism in the West to somehow combine traditional yoga practice in a more active mode in this society. I would think the preponderance of effort needs to be on the yoga and not on the activity because it's very easy to be very active and very difficult to be thorough in your yogic practice.

[31:16]

And not so many people have the perseverance and patience to do that. And you need, in order to do it, First of all, enough sensitivity to the sufferings of others to want to do it very, very bad and feel that you have to do it, feel compelled to do it for the sake of yourself and others. At the same time that you have that extreme sensitivity, you have to have the ability to accept it and realize that, ah, what was there to even do about it. Now that combination is tough. It's easy to accept it if you're inured to it. And it's also easy to be sensitive to it and want to fight it. Those two things are rather common.

[32:18]

What's rather uncommon is that one can be extremely sensitive to it and also have a broad sense of acceptance that there's a whole variety of what one can do in the short term. And that most of your work has to be for the long run. That you create, try to create favorable conditions for future generations to move in the direction of liberation. And that there's not a lot you can do to change things on a large scale, and that when something appears to you in the small scale, you're with it. So, to the best of my understanding, that's supposed to be the Buddhist attitude about, we might say, indirect, collective, conceptual karma, which all of us participate in, without being able to affect it all that much. And, again, that the most fundamental way to affect it is the way that appears to us to be the least effective, which is simply to think differently in your own privacy, in your own consciousness.

[33:30]

Well, we'd have to make a rando. I was expecting, I'm hoping you all would have something to talk about with yourself. To share a roof. Yes. Well, I would count on it. Maybe so, but yeah, go ahead. Well, some studies are not... I know you look in detail, but I know that they're thinking how to get data across with that. For instance, when we're about many patients, friends are in a neighborhood, and if people mess with them, the client goes down with you. She has 50% of two-year-old people, and they were like that.

[34:48]

You know what I mean? [...] Our crime, I guess, has some. But of course, we're one block from the major center of the Bay Area. So we have our rules cut out for us. Maybe it wouldn't be much higher, except for us. That's a problem. We may have actually, you know, cut it in half, given what might have been. Also, the fact that we chased them down the street may have had more effect than we meditated. Well, but we wouldn't be chasing down the street if we weren't. You know, I think that creates some collective privilege. But it's true, you know, it's definitely safer on our block, because we've lost our block pretty quickly. Well, I don't discount it completely, and in fact, I thought you were going to refer to this, please, it's about more efficient than I do. You were thinking about that, too. That I do think it is observable in history and in our own age that ideas do tend to crop up simultaneously in widely different places among people who are not connectable.

[36:04]

like the idea of practicing Buddhism. You know, very frequently I'll talk to some guests and I'll say, well, where are you from? They say, Myanmar or Texas. And I'll say, well, how did you find out about this? Or what did you start thinking? Well, I'm a teenager. I didn't kind of go along with what everybody else was doing. I sort of had this thought that maybe you should meditate. I mean, just, you know, people when you actually get their stories, you find out that they sort of come up with it on their own, and many people do that kind of at the same time. You could think that's a kind of, you know, field of awareness which permeates the society at a different level than speech or media or talking. And But I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't make too much of it, like, you know, find sausage people, and that's all.

[37:05]

I think it's very easy to use that as a kind of use for rationalizations for your own, uh, lineage of your own images. Let's put it this way. The existence of such an effect, of such a reality, it does not excuse you from acting in conventional ways when the opportunity arises. That's all. So, you know, someone needs help. There's a car accident. You don't drive by thinking, well, you meditated, well, I could take care of it. You know, you have to drop all that and act like an ordinary person and get out and help. You know, that... That certainly may exist, but if it does, knowing about it, it's not necessarily going to be all that helpful. In fact, maybe better just to do it and not know about it. And let whatever effect of that happen without our being too aware of it.

[38:10]

Maybe I'm saying it. You should approach such an idea with an underlying attitude of humility rather than excited pride. Does that make sense? Yeah. Can you get involved with counseling? Yeah, you want to fix ourselves, but you're surprised. And it's not so much that, you know, why shouldn't my body get all this cold? That's not quite so literal, but there is a fact that I'm not just taking care of myself. You know, I'm not, you know, let myself be included in that. It's another side of it for me. Well, that's what I meant by thoughts are real. And your intention, your formed intention to drop everything instead has an effect. It definitely has an effect. But it's not an effect that it helps you particularly to know about. It just has an effect, I thought. Because everything has an effect. So... The only realm that is helpful for you to know about it is if it gives you enough faith or confidence to keep doing it.

[39:23]

Other than that, it's probably not enough to... Because one of the main problems with spiritual practice, one of the most intractable problems, is pride. Pride is a really difficult problem because it... It redefines itself at every level of the path. In other words, the more you advance on the path, the more speed there is for you to be rather self-satisfied about how well you're doing. So pride is the flip side of any kind of transformational change that you go through. And I would say, probably, if I were to make a sweeping generalization at the moment, that the differences between the various spiritual traditions and how well they work for people does not have so much to do with, you know, the effectiveness of the technique, but how well the tradition that that comes from has worked out the pride problem. I would say that my understanding of Buddhism has paid a lot of attention to the pride problem, and been very careful to work out the dynamic, the psychodynamic of pride.

[40:37]

And my observation, official observation, of other spiritual traditions is they do not have quite the same degree of sophistication or awareness of how to deal with that. And so one can slip pretty easily. And the problem with pride is that, and it's one of the later precepts, the problem with pride is it cancels out all of your projects and leaves you off worse than you were before. So it's sort of like one of these... you know, one of these pinball machine kickballs, you know, if your ball falls into it, you lose points or like a sand trap. And it's a big black hole you can fall into. So anyway, that's the issue. Such ideas... can become food for prideful feelings and sense of self-righteousness.

[41:54]

Yes. You were saying that self-clinging is the cause of suffering. Maybe it's my own... I sort of look at it like ignorance is the cause of suffering. and that self-clinging is suffering only if we're ignorant of the broader aspect of self, and that if we're really aware of the self, of the interconnectedness of everything, of the order of oneness that self's a part of, then clinging to self is improper. It's the ignorance that's the cause of the suffering. But if we recognize self as being very broad, then we can help each other. Well, I don't know whether there's any difference. I mean, self-cleaning, the cause is suffering, as far as I can see. Practically speaking. And ignorance is the same thing.

[42:56]

Ignorance of that is also a very spoken definition. You know, it's just using very different words, but self-cleaning is a cause. Even if you have a very big sense of self, if you're clinging to it, it's a problem. One has to, you know, rig oneself to that basic dynamic of dualistic clinging, which is not even accessible to most people. As I say to people sometimes, the most that the average person encounters it is if you step off a curb, you even see it. self plenty goes off all over your body and you can actually feel it with life because you know your whole body just reacts you know it can take you hours to calm down because you have a very primal uh mechanism uh about falling and uh you know you're your heart beats faster, and your blood pops, and all these things happen.

[44:00]

That's self-cleaning. You shouldn't walk down the street for years and never experience that, unless the condition pointed out to you. The only other way that you can get access to it is, that I know of, is to sit still. And... stop following the surface track of your kind of ideas, and then you'll begin to actually see it function. So in that sense, the units of that is the genesis of it, but the dynamics of a fixed cell to which we claim is not the cause of something, but the root cause. There are many, many causes of suffering. That one just happens to be the underlying cause of all the other causes. I think Buddhism and Marxism actually have a kind of kindred spirit.

[45:01]

Buddhism is dialectic. It understands the human process as a dialectic process, but it does not understand it as materialistic. You know, I think Marx understood the causes of suffering as fundamentally economic, or the allocation of material needs of human beings. That's true. I don't think we're in a dispute with that. We simply say that that is not the root cause. The root cause of that is something deeper, which will reappear in any kind of society, whether it's Marx, you know, or capitalist, or whatever. And I think that history is proving that to be the case. that I don't think communism has solved the problem of self-punishment in our society. It's just simply a different form. And if there are any Marxists in the audience here or elsewhere, I suppose you could have a nice argument about it, but... What I hear is even the Marxists in the Soviet Union are quite disillusioned and not really thinking of Marxism as a basis of their society anymore because in a sense it's failed.

[46:12]

But I think it was definitely a major insight in human history to realize that suffering is not the will of God. It's not the will of God, exactly, but it's It's the way people greedily, you know, address things for themselves. Somebody's a loser at the other end. And that's the basic dynamics of taking what is not given. And I would say it's simply that it didn't go deep enough to understand the depth of psychology or the psychodynamics of why that is so, why human beings inevitably Do that, even though in the aggregate it turns out to be against their self-interest. Because it brings it all down. You have to see me in another example instead of talking about the third question.

[47:15]

I said that people may have ever been told to find out if they really want to live. And if they're not kept in the camp, they're not quite able to answer to that question. And I thought, it's unusual. I've never heard anybody talking to someone who jumps off the bridge. They haven't asked me if they've got an answer. Oh, there's been some research, because there are about 15 people. And one of them came to Zen Center, a young fellow. If you're in good physical shape when you're young, and your musculature is low to go, apparently you can survive. There was a young boy who was a teenage film star who jumped off for very trivial reasons. He said, He survived without much interest because he was in very good shape. And they have done some research, and I've seen reference to it, to the research and other articles, but I've never actually tracked down the research. But they have interviewed people, and I know one thing I remember is that none of them have ever tried to commit suicide again. that it seems to have solved something quite plentiful.

[48:24]

And, you know, several of them discuss it as the greatest thing that ever, I mean, the greatest thing they've done in their life. Obviously, because it's an idea that for some deft people, you need to go that far to connect with yourself. That's true. That's true. You know, a lot of people do things that you might say are deftly fine, but the same reason can be said. That is to say, fine... somehow find the ground of their being and where they are, then it's fairly effective. The problem is that it doesn't, it's rather dependent on the technique.

[49:30]

In other words, you only get there when you're at that point. So it requires you to go again and again into this, you know, climbing mountains or driving fast cars or taking drugs or something. And it tends to wear you out fairly fast physically. You know, you don't maintain a body and mind which is able to sustain the effort for very long. So you might say Zazen is kind of slowed down, more healthy version of driving a racing car. It had some of the same effect on you, but it's much more manageable, and it doesn't require some effect to be put upon you from the outside. In other words, you're doing it from the inside, and so you can, the effects are lasting. As Zipir actually once said to somebody who asked him what the difference was between Zazen and some other changes, he said, Zazen you only have to do once.

[50:31]

When you do this practice, you only have to do once. Where the other things, I think his feeling was, you have to keep coming back, again and again. Because it's not something you're totally creating for yourself, it's something that you remain dependent on. He kept claiming when, in my lifetime, somebody had brought a fork or a baton for something, but it's a difficult one. Give yourself permission for people to join you who appear to be more universal than you. An example would be, it becomes a collective thought that they have found after they did their cross somewhere and they will write a letter and clear a thought And at the end of the week, people would come up and talk about, um, my husband must be really attached to me for, like, for quite a third of the day, just, how did I get there today?

[51:40]

Or, you know, was I ill very much? What? The other day, my aunt sat down, and we would sit down, and then I would, you know, we'd talk about what, what works for you, usually, and she mentioned, you know, she jumped in there, and said, uh, what about this medication? And I was giving him a tip, and he was running the cage, and he jumped up, and he said, he made her kiss. And I said, well, what do you want? I said, well, I want to meet her. What do you want? And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, [...] no. So there's, there's, there's tolerance on the shore. So, so in my life, I've seen people wanting people who are critically inconvenient to stop doing something that they may not have existed. It's a very high percentage, which makes them very afraid to, to encounter somebody, to abuse them.

[52:43]

It doesn't want all of it. It's a very subtle thing. You know, You know, people, I think what you're experiencing, people are just not quite sure how to respond, and they respond in the best they can. But something you're perceiving, maybe they don't, something limited in the way that they're responding. I think they may not know that they don't understand. How can you have the knowledge of it if that part isn't there? Well, people who are ill or dying often have that kind of experience, that the people that are trying to relate to them and help them really are just mostly related to their own anxiety and nothing... you know, that what they needed in the situation is something quite simple and direct and not such as, which is, you know, so fancy a cognitive idea.

[53:55]

And it's, maybe it's partly because we have lost the naturalness or knack of that kind of persuasion to something like that. It's interesting that in most cultures where Buddhism had coexisted with some other religious tradition, for Buddhists they were responsible for the death. The death of dying people and the death of things, that sort of thing. And the, you know, the folk culture took care of the happy way. Puberty and all that. And Buddhists were left with the area, the area in which self-clinging comes to the surface and is quite a mess. So that's typically true in Japan where Shinto and Buddhism are infused. And Shinto takes care of the...

[54:57]

purity of life, and Buddhism takes care of the dark side. I saw a movie once, a classical Japanese movie. Japanese movies, to our taste, traditional style, are very static. They have a tendency to just put the camera in the room, just leave it there for an hour while people talk. And the whole drama of it has to do with the way someone picks up the teapot. And so they moved his title to Western Taste. And in this one movie, this young boy's grandmother died. He was a young adult, maybe 19. And they were doing a service for him. And Channing, the heart seeker, would chant the day. And Channing would hit the hall with bells and stuff. And I thought to myself, I'll do it for that sort of thing. And just as I thought that, the boy in the middle, he said, I hate that sound.

[56:02]

He ran out of the temple and sat on the steps and he opened his face and his hand, covered his ears. To him, that sound, that Buddhist sound, was the emotional resonance with his grief. He hated that, or the Buddha's name. Kind of a wake-up for me, because I realized that traditional Japanese attitude about these things. It's rather, you know, less romantic or idealized, and for them, it's primarily, you know, a funeral, death, and connected with grief. Yes? The whole thing of stepping off of the original, I don't know, pretty well aligned between basic survival and self-cleaning, so that you don't... I guess there is really a desire to survive. I'm wondering if that's equated with self-seeing.

[57:02]

If it is, then why don't we sort of slip into sort of a flow that's in the way? Well, obviously it's not, because if you meet someone who's practiced a lot, and I think what ought to anyway, you'd be struck by if they're like, In fact, they seem all there, quite a lot. So somehow, in some odd way, the more you can be free of self-clinging, the more you survive, and the more you thrive, the more you have a life to do it. And I would say that the difference is not between those who want to survive and those who don't, but those who... Well, I think almost every action is distorted or limited by a clinic to those putting that topic in. I think the question goes on, too.

[58:04]

I think politically, we're fairly privileged so that we can make the distinction between self-cleaning, it's Bible and what have you, and we... really have the quite good fortune to be able to try to work on the whole self-cleaning problem for people for whom a system is bare and mineral, and it's more a matter of survival than self-cleaning. In viewing the whole problem of what do we do, what do we, who are privileged, do about the whole idea of Thinking as meritorious thinking versus activity becomes hard for me. I can't do that without feeling that I'm once again exercising my privilege. Well, the Mexicans went up to Oaxaca and talked about it.

[59:07]

But there has to be, I guess, some activity. They weren't eating very well, so we tried to give them some different knowledge that it's great. Well, maybe you are exercising your privilege, but what else you don't do it? I guess there's more than one way to do it. And I suppose it depends on what we were saying this morning about the great problems all over. Realizing that I can't... I'm not going to be able to change that problem. But that, in some respects, provides a very nice app so that I can always sort of focus on my... my love and my thinking. And when I'm moving, when as a result of thought, then perhaps a decision comes up as to maybe a band I would take.

[60:11]

By saying this, whatever I do, it's nothing to have much effect. It gives me sort of a way to flip out of taking a band. Maybe I'm not a particular zoologist, but But it seems like it's very easy to play well. If I do this, nobody's doing that. That's not going to make much difference. Yeah, because I personally can't change anything. What's the specific example? I'm kind of being lost in the generality of it. I guess for myself, I could relate it mostly to my looking pattern. You know, where I consist. I do a lot of that. But I can go to work. And I can make, for example, a decision without a loan to a company or to a government that will loan to a person. I could also make the decision not to do it or to quit doing that job because I believe what the bank is doing is unethical and they will.

[61:22]

And directly or indirectly, take them like, The answer, I've noticed, is it's not going to make any difference. There's going to be some interception right behind things. And I'm not really going to have any effect as a matter of fact. The general reaction is you poorly need the beans. You know, you're usually perceived as some sort of a radical, stingy type person who they really don't want around anyway. So I suppose that You know, every fact that's true, that we can't make that much of a difference, and we've just provided ourselves with very good excuses for not really going out on a limb to couple. Well, yeah, we may not be able to make much difference at the other end. You know, starting out to get a loan to South Africa and somebody else does instead. Maybe you haven't affected South Africa at all, but you do affect yourself. and the people that are around you.

[62:25]

And if you do it skillfully, you may not be perceived as a, you know, a great deal of the causes of those kinds of material sufferings that the world is experiencing are the root causes right here in our country. And we have a lot to say about that. Even affecting the opinions of one or two of your close friends is not an insignificant thing. You know, during the Vietnam War, there was a real effort to make a few women who happened to be the wives of one of Cabot Lodge, you know, and all the other people in the early days who were running the war. They actually tried to improve their husband's opinion. And, uh, that's a, you know, big example. There's a small example in this industry. And I think that every, uh, every little bit does help. Uh... But to go back to your earlier point about privilege, I think if Buddhists want to do a privilege, you should accept it.

[63:32]

You should use it. And not somehow be guilty about it, and that you're not, or only... If you have the privilege and time and space to do dharma, then I think you should do it. I think that's what... there's some poor person in the world, that's what they'd like to do, and so that's what they'd like you to do, too. I mean, it's a choice between doing it or not doing it. I think that you should do it, but keeping in mind that there are many people, I mean, hundreds of people, maybe, who don't have that kind of time. Fair practice is survival, and one would hope that by changing our lives a little bit, and in a small way, not in a long time, we will have a thing or a bit effect on the course of things in such a way that, you know, so many do-good projects of the so-called privileged world and the developed world have totally back-bottomed.

[64:44]

just don't work at all. They become very self-congratulatory. I mean, it becomes sort of an ego thing. Well, it just don't work. And I think the so-called agriculture revolution, all that data, and it's had tremendous difficulty in the 90K because it doesn't do like the agriculture that it's managed in. It's very difficult to actually talk about it because... It's very hard to get your motive clear and figure out exactly what you're doing. So, maybe once in a while in a lecture here, somebody tricks up and says, you know, you lecture as me, or they do, and we aren't giving enough, we aren't reminding us of how privileged we are here in the county, and we should have more awareness of the masses of the world. To me, that's a little bit like what she was saying, you know. What about the medication? I mean, I don't think there's any reason to take some special attitude about it.

[65:50]

I think we should just be ourself. And that's probably the most honest attitude, and probably the attitude that if that poor person went in the womb with us, we'd feel the most comfortable with in a way. that they don't want you to be somebody different just for them, and they spend less on you. They want you to be yourself and to do something useful with it. So, I think... I think my point was that I said it will be, but I think you just answered it, which is to be yourself and then do something useful with it. I don't think I was operating on a specific field, but I was just saying there's something that has to accompany a meritorious thought and what accompanies it is doing something useful. Well, meritorious thought will lead to meritorious activity, quite naturally, if you persist in it, because that's the first of all that activity is. You can envision an Italian inspector that would start at the top to, let's say, martyrdom, and move down to being a revolutionary.

[66:57]

They have reformers, they have part-time reformers over at the other end, they're cleaners. And why everybody has to make a person to where they fit into that. I think maybe some of the questions they're asking are whether there's any top-out tendency involved in Buddhism. Any what? Top-out tendency. Yeah, right. Because it is true that development projects and that kind of thing. But the signing of that, it ought to be a counter. Because there is this interrelatedness to this. Not only in spiritual sense, but very much in economic and political sense. And I'd like to be said that everybody is signing it for themselves. What worries me a little bit is whether the tonality of that is something of a tonality of dis-involvement in the interim period while the yogic religions are... If you're asking if there are cop-out tendencies in Buddhism, I think the answer is yes, tendencies there.

[68:07]

Not even evidence of it, because... It's the card problem that I'm talking about. Any time you start to change yourself, it takes time. You're not doing enough in the office. You're going to waste your time. So you have to compensate for that by an even more developed awareness of what it is that you're about and what it is that you're supposed to be doing. And I'd say that that tendency is endemic to all spiritual life and has to be, you have to be aware of it all the time. You can stage it for your practice. And Buddhism actually doesn't have a great track record as far as, you know, up to now, as far as widespread social change or social action. I have much more of a tendency to being influenced with the society by inner obsolescence and by affecting the thoughts and the feelings of the readers of the society.

[69:17]

So, the fact that the tendency is there doesn't mean that Buddhism is somehow fatally flawed, but simply that every effort to do anything has weaknesses that one has to counteract and adapt in very short time. But I think there will always be people practicing Buddhism who are capers. And I don't think that's necessarily wrong. Some people are capers. Some people are martyrs. Some people are television editors. But some people are not martyrs. They're just not cut out for it. And they should have tried it. Some people need some period of time of escape in order to mobilize their resources enough to be turned to somebody else. So you can't without sticking with that, because otherwise they'll be done. They won't be able to develop themselves at all.

[70:19]

So the last thing I would say is that I don't think you can judge the effectiveness or the long-term effect of the movement by Buddhism in a very short space of time, if you need to observe it the way you'd observe a forest or something like that, if you watch it grow over a long period of time, and you see how it's fitting in to the ecology of society as a whole. And it remains to be seen whether Buddhism and these other Eastern religions will remain a kind of fringe fad and fashionable alternative to Christianity, which presently it tends to be, or whether it will hook into the mainstream. Like Kusumatel, who is Kusumatel at present, Buddhism is not the mainstream at all. It's on the edge, but it's edging toward the mainstream.

[71:24]

I think the... The very serious interest being paid to Buddhist meditation by Catholic and non-Catholic priests is significant in this case. I just talked to a Ksitigalian priest who was a Ksitigalian priest who was trying to be Zazen and so forth. conversation you gave to me that the fact that there are such people like him who are looking to Buddhism to provide some experiential basis to spiritual efforts within the Christian tradition is something that is meaningful.

[72:26]

Christianity has maybe gone more the other direction, emphasizing the effect of the, the moral effect of the social action, but having lost the basis for it. And so, one doesn't have any government on, on the difficulty comes an end in itself. And, uh, the discriminating wisdom of how to exercise it in a way which actually works, it's difficult. So, I didn't mean to imply that the failure of the development project is an argument for not doing that. It simply points out that those who are in charge of them are inadequately guided or inadequately informed about what's actually going to work. That seems to me to be the main contribution that Buddhist ethics and meditation practice can make is by providing

[73:27]

a deeper understanding of how people function in their deep life, we might have a somewhat better chance of tuning our efforts to help in ways that are actually going to be effective rather than just a projection that our own frontiers want to talk about. Jim, you have something to say? The bell's starting to ring. Yes. So, um, what does transpiring from yoga practice, you know, from yoga and stuff like that, What's a compass? I take it it means sitting, but... Yeah, well I kind of use the term to include things not more than just sitting. And I use it for lack of a better language because I think it's a whack term. And the experience of the... I don't know what yoga means to me at all.

[74:38]

I do yoga. I do yoga. I do yoga. And... What does the template document mean? The effort to develop consciousness intention, treating your own consciousness as

[75:55]

something that's legally changed rather than something that just happened to you. Any practice which treats your consciousness practically without any effort or that treats thought for real, I think, could be included in yoga. So, mantras. Mantras are probably the most universal form of of yoga, and I think even in the humanities we pronounce it prayer. Mantra is, you know, an efficacious sound, a sound which is made into something palpable. He was painting a game together on the topic of yoga at that time. That was all three of the root of that. Still, there's that quality to it.

[76:58]

There are many different kinds of yoga, and in my other classes, I sometimes delineate it from five or six different main uses in which yoga practice can be put. feeling power is not to be looked at. So that's generally speaking what I mean. I don't mean just feeling, but the underlying attitude that allows sitting to be thoughtful or the reality that could be detected is the yogic reality. And It's just not such an artist that you know so much about, and you don't know so much about it. Shall we end?

[78:00]

Okay, any last questions? Maybe we've seen everything throughout the video.

[78:05]

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