Well, all I can, what I can try to do is give you a feeling for what Buddhism and Zen Buddhism mean by right livelihood. Can you hear me in the back okay? All right. The term is used, of course, all the time now. People use the idea of right livelihood. And it certainly has its practical applications in any context. But I think it's valuable in this kind of situation. I won't be talking about economics so much, actually. The Buddhist economics or the economics you can derive from Buddhism are very interesting to me. But I think all I have time for is to try to give you some idea of the setting of the term right livelihood and where it comes from. It's right at the very beginning of Buddhism. Buddhism, you know, is based on the idea that everything changes. And from that come the four noble truths, which are that there is suffering and there's a cause of suffering.

[01:38]

And so there can be an end of suffering. And there's a path to end suffering. Okay, that's pretty simple. The recognition of the universality of suffering is and the ability to see it is not so easy, but the This recognition of suffering and change is the first step of the eightfold path. The eightfold path is what right livelihood occurs within. And the first one is right views, which means that you understand these four steps. And in that, I should say that where it says there's a cause of suffering, It also means that where there's no cause, there's no suffering. And it gets more complicated when I say that, because it implies a world of simultaneity and of no origin. So already, I don't know quite how much to say. But the second step is right intention.

[03:03]

that if you have seen that suffering exists, and you cannot separate yourself from the responsibility for it, you have right views, and then you have right intentions to do something about it. And you see that your suffering is co-existent with others, and you have to do something about others' suffering, too. So, this is right views and right Intention this part of the eightfold path is wisdom Next part is is morality and it is right speech so you have right views and then you have you decide you have your right intention and then you decide that you're going to How you express yourself you're going to begin begin to consider Now implied in all of this too is That you can make a mistake which is not, I don't think everybody accepts that you can make a mistake. That you have a choice, you have the choice of right views or right action or right speech. The way I express the difference in San Francisco recently, I was talking about this in some similar way, is when you're singing or chanting, if you go along with the singing,

[04:32]

This is belief in a phenomenal world or some substantial world outside you or some system which is going to carry you. But if you are concentrating fully with awareness on your chanting or singing, as if, to make it very explicit, as if you were lecturing or singing directly to everybody and everyone else was lecturing or singing directly to you. So you're chanting or singing as, well, chanting is, I think, clearer. Because in chanting we chant the sutras. You chant the sutras as if you were lecturing everybody and you're not just being carried along. Well, the difference is enormous. If one person chants that way, it affects the chanting of everyone. It's also an analogy I can use. It's like putting a globe on a kerosene lantern. The flame is there, but there's no light, no useful light until you put the globe on it. So this awareness is like putting the globe on the flame. So when, you know, these are very simple things, but the background of it is, you know, a lot of this is pretty easy to accept, but when you carry it out to its conclusions, you come to things like

[05:58]

It's very difficult for, in this worldview, to have contracts. I thought I'd throw a jump in. Anyway, I'll get back to this idea of making mistakes. So, you have right speech, and then from right speech you have right conduct. Right conduct is like the ability to give up smoking. not talking philosophy, it just means you have the ability to give up smoking or to actually take responsibility for your actions. And again, this has, in Sanskrit, I believe there is no word for natural. There's only, the only word they have for behavior is a similar word that we have to ritual. And in this sense, again, you have thinking which has no Outside system you depend on, no natural system. For instance, in this view of right livelihood, there's no such thing as natural selection. Natural selection doesn't say anything anyway. There's selection maybe, but it's not. There's no natural laws. There's no outside reference point for you. So you don't have, well, this is a natural gesture and this is a mudra, or the Pope. I don't know what gesture the Pope uses, but anyway.

[07:22]

Or, you know, okay, or Buddha does this, you know. Those are mudras, you know. This is a mudra. But every, any gesture is equally expressive. And when you become aware of those gestures, when you become aware, it's not a self-consciousness, it's a, an awareness that you yourself are conduct. And there's no natural, and then an added meaning to it. So right conduct follows right speech. And this is personal morality, right speech and right conduct. And third is right livelihood or right survival, you could say sometimes. And next comes right effort and right mindfulness and right concentration. And these last three are kind of another level there. They write that you can sub, you could say they all represent concentration or absorption or trans or or sometimes it's translated as trance but it means more like absorption. Once you've gone through these stages as a kind of practice and you've come to right concentration and right concentration again has the idea of decision in it. You yourself decide

[08:52]

that you're going to have, that you're going to do something, you concentrate your intentions, and then by your meditation practice, you concentrate your energy, you concentrate your consciousness, and you concentrate your penetration or investigative, I don't, that's a little, penetration is a better word, sometimes it's translated as investigation. When you have this concentration, you go back through the whole thing again with right views, But another way of saying is that you actually go through what are called the six paramitas, which means wisdom that's gone beyond wisdom. Anyway, the six paramitas are, again, pretty simple, but in the six paramitas, in the right livelihood, wisdom comes first. In the six paramitas, wisdom comes last, and it's giving, let's see if I remember them all, giving, patience, no, giving, conduct, patience, energy,

[09:53]

mindfulness and wisdom, maybe energy and no Samadhi, which is trance or non dualistic perception and wisdom. So that's the framework which which right livelihood occurs in. And it said that when Buddha as you have in the beginning of your program here says that this pointing out the eightfold path, began the turning of the wheel of the Dharma. Now I'm just jumping around here, but I'm going to try to give you some feeling for what the word Dharma means. Because it's again this worldview which you don't depend on systems. So again, it makes it rather hard to be in the stock market, you know, in the usual sense, because for instance, the decision, the idea from a Buddhist point of view, right livelihood, the decision that you have a marketplace to determine the price of something. I mean, you can't depend on a system like that. It's a moral choice whether what price you get after certain costs are met, how much you charge is how much profit you want to make. It's not, you don't turn it over to a system to decide what's your, or you don't turn your behavior over to astrology or faith. And under the

[11:24]

So there's also a practical side to right livelihood, but it's, you know, and it says, the practical side is like, don't sell alcohol, don't sell firearms. But it also says don't interpret dreams. Don't get involved in spells. And spells are systems. A system is a spell, you know, system that you believe, the natural something. And I think we're finding, I don't think we share any more of the mechanistic view that Newton and Locke and other people had. I don't know if they, I don't like putting labels on people like that. But however, you, whatever, at least we can say that there's been a very, and sometimes much more mechanical view of the world, like it was a watch, you know, that God wound up. But however, we put it, we've had a view of a system you can, to some extent, trust. And Even the idea of evil is a system. It's institutionalized mistakes. And in Buddhism, there's no evil. There's only accumulated mistakes. There's your individual mistakes. And I think that we're finding that we can make mistakes. If we can destroy the atmosphere of the planet by pollution, we can make mistakes. You may say, well, there's some greater balance which rolls, et cetera. But it doesn't mean anything at that scale. We can make mistakes.

[12:53]

And so it comes back again to you, yourself, making a choice. But then, this gets... All right, I'm gonna say a footnote here. I always have some hesitation, as Bill knows very well, to talk about these things outside the context of people who really are interested in it, because... you know, excuse me for saying so my feeling is every way each of you is living is fine. And I don't like to present something which, which, which suggests another way of living, which you know, etc. But Buddhism says that some people should live in this rigorous way. In any society, some people should live this way, not necessarily everybody, but some people should live this way. So The last three, effort and mindfulness and concentration, when you meditate, what you find out is that if you don't depend on systems, and time-space itself is a system, and the time-space framework in Buddhism is also an identity, also a natma, a self.

[14:25]

If you depend, if you try to get out of your perception of systems, of definition, how do you act? How do you make choice? Because I started out this evening saying that this is based on choice, right? Views, right? Speech, et cetera, which you yourself consciously, like as if in chanting or singing, you consciously bring your attention clearly to what you're doing. And you can say in a simple way, Zen practice or Buddhism is merely the explanation of the problems you have when you try to bring your attention to what you're doing on a continual basis without any outside system or explanation or dualistic expression. Now usually we, I don't know if my patchwork way of talking is can follow, but the way if you observe your mind, the way our mind works is usually you reference thought by thought. In other words, if we say a straight line, we think of a straight line as being the shortest distance between two points, but if you actually draw it, it's not, you know, it's wiggly. If you construct it in any way, any actual line,

[15:51]

But we still think that we reference thoughts by ideas, like in a platonic scheme. But in this kind of thinking, you don't reference thoughts by thoughts, you reference the wiggly lines. So, I don't know if you see how that comes in, but if you do meditate, so that's the why the eightfold path ends with concentration. If you do Medicare, you find out so that you look for self. Who is Medicare? Who is making this decision? Who is making this decision? And when you cry, you can't locate everyone. You cannot find a self that represents anything. You can't find a self that has a particular attribute. And you can't find a self that sustains, maintains. Many you can't find. And in fact, it's seen as you pause and observe your concentration breath, your state of consciousness in nine breaths.

[17:06]

You know that if you were to play, in some ways, then it's very much an athletic event or a sport, because you could play tennis or something like that. If you start to build yourself during the ball, you won't hit it as well. And again, just how do you then get to where you can build it in everything you do? It's a very simple story that I think is useful from many of the traditions of the story. The first one is about a man named Yajnavalkya, who is rather young, and he looks into a mirror all the time, and finds himself quite beautiful. He's also rather stupid, because he looks into the back of the mirror, and he thinks he's lost his head, because he can't look in a reflection. So he turns directly there, looking for his head, But it's actually similar to, you know, if somebody comes to the door and says, who is it? And many of us are likely to say, it is me. It's me, like that's the first interest. You have to say, it's I. But it's me is also correct. And the philosophical point of view is, it's me that's correct.

[18:34]

Because what you're presenting is your objective self, which they know as you, for that, or him. So the question here is how do you, if I say internalize, that's no better than externalize. Let me say non-externalization. How do you not externalize? You know, we say, the eye can't see the eye. If you haven't built it, you have less than the head. So how do you apprehend everyone from the non-extremalized group?

[19:49]

So you do find that what you're supposed to do is you turn your, the first stage of retreat, you begin to turn yourself over to your concentration, over to your concentration. That's your center for meditation. And you can break it up into concentration and intention, concentration and energy, consciousness, et cetera. Now, if you do COVID, to its conclusion, and say, well, then, how do we proceed? How do we proceed from this? And this, again, has the idea of the damage. And the idea that livelihood, even ethnology, English isn't rather than something like court, and I'd say like hood. There's two derivations for the hood part. And it means something like, like means to extend, to extend a hand out, something like that, or to ask. The like part means it's something that means to ask, something that's good.

[21:25]

But it isn't the facts. It's sometimes it's something stupid. It's sometimes it really is. I don't know if it's a real ethnology, but that's the big difference. It's interesting. And the last part, the curse, is to delay or arrest. But to think of it, it's something like life's load. That's something that we bring from moment to moment. And we have in here the sense of how we suggest anything. And again, I gave you last time I was here, the sense, which would be if you said, you know, these are your graphics. But you know about my carotid eyes. And after you left me, I had this problem. So in Buddhism, we have to have that sense of possession. The second precept, which relates to that library, is do not take what is not given. Do not take what is not given. But we always accept things in terms of their independence. And the first precept is do not throw, but do not throw in Buddhism means literally, like, do not move normally with the weaker.

[22:46]

So do not use something which you can't replace. So, you know, I don't think I've spoken enough to tell you entirely about livelihoods, but in a good sense. But some people try. And there's also, as I again said here, that there's a strong learning instance, instance in Buddhism, as I said last time I was here, that if everyone's doing a little bit good, you go with the flow. The dollop's not stand-a-side, but it is huge, you know. But if the buddha sits in there and says, I love you today, he might be going, hang up! But, you know, because it's brand-new buddha, you know. So, we, uh, you know, end that one. And, uh, so, if anything, uh, you're exceptionally glad that's even better. About the Dharma, which is the last thing I'm going to talk about. And I was talking about many things, in the sense of life, marriage, or something that many carry responsibility. Lighterhood means light-lighterhood in the religious sense, and I'm talking about it now in the classical sense, the religious sense, and the background.

[24:17]

that's required of a certain mode system that you depend on. No extenuation. Diamonds are said to be monetary and market-based, interesting and non-deleted. And Dharma is one of them. Buddhism can be called Dharmaism. It's a new practice of Dharmaism. Dharmaism is, if we try to analyze what's going on, what's happening. From my 10 years of experience with Buddhists and through the practice of meditation, the only thing you can come to is with many, many practices. which are actually one-fifth of the smallest unit of time. That's not good. It means that a diamond is the length of 12 o'clock. I'll use this example here. We can go through this in depth. It's up to you. This time, I asked my father, how long is 12 o'clock?

[25:39]

and he wasn't going to be caught. Because if the killer caught the gunman again, then it's the second before he got in the car, or second after he got in the car. So if that's true, the killer caught the gunman again. So if you're standing here, the killer's probably going to be able to step back underneath over there and stab a gunman. But if the gunman actually runs back, So what is self-advocacy? I know there is a family under the sun, but my father's answer to my question was, if something is but first, and then past, we can say this. I got a pretty good answer. I was about, I don't know, seven or eight years old, and I was asking this kind of question, and I was quite sure of it at the time. But, in this case, there's no duration to try to talk. And, in bitumen, the drama has no duration at any time. But, there is this, uh... I don't know. It's not happening. But, anyway, uh, Blake says that, uh,

[27:08]

the life of two unfavourites to separate, knows they are to be herded. And there's this relationship always in a process. In other words, I'm talking about, again, a non-node world. This is a non-node system. But our whole world is non-node in a sense. However, stuff generates it. Each thing generates itself. Normally, if you see something, just your seeing and hear it and talk about it, and as you pretend, you don't actually hear something. In other words, you see something, you just see it. You don't say, what did I hear? If you hear it, you just hear it. You don't pretend to hear it. And if you, in your senses, it's a little different to describe in front of your abdomen, which is, which is your blue hair, right? All you see is blue. You don't feel it at all. [...] You don

[28:32]

So you begin to have the ability to not distribute your protection into assault. And if you don't distribute your protection, this is the answer. There's non-distributed protection in this dialogue. In that sense, they're multiple, momentary, impersonal, and modulated. Modulated in the sense that they are affected, and yes, they are affected by the herd, and they include the herd. So that's what generates in people who dare to suppress a kind of faith, who dare to suppress, you are some kind of stuff, and who can take care of your stuff, who can control your stuff, you know? You yourself are the stuff, you know?

[29:53]

So what this generates is a trust of your own self, without any burden. So a trust that when you do just one thing, it's connected to the whole. And when you, you know, like, it's maybe, like, damage a lot of particles or something, but one time you're iron, another time you're oxygen, another time something else. But when you get the ability to When you get the data, the first thing in a non-distributed world, there is nothing that you can say before. Now, it's time to execute. Distribute until it is null, or it is odd. Distribute until anything is useful. So, if we went back to effective white livelihood in the biggest context, it would mean that we would try to live without interpreting sounds, without interpreting dreams, without interpreting the phenomenal world. Probably that's what we've been taught from Sunday morning, Mr. Johnson, Sunday morning, Mr. Johnson.

[31:20]

And some of the people, you know, some of the people in this, we have to really suggest, Some of the people in his company now do vaccine analysis and marketing. But he himself, as far as I can tell, always just does it by how he feels, or how people feel, or how he thinks he views this situation, like a Christian. When I explain to people in the Buddhist community and Buddhist context, the practice of life salvation would be we don't interpret learning, we don't interpret systems, or styles. We don't start out with that. That just means we don't do things which intoxicate other people. We don't do things to influence other people. We do things to enhance other people, but not to influence other people.

[32:32]

But also, when you treat your customers, you don't quantify your customers. You don't quantify people as customers, because that's again a sort of friction. You treat literally the rear-end business. You treat everybody as if they were your mother or father or your family member. So you sell the product to them as if they were your best friend or your mother or father. Because it's much harder to sell a product. You know, but you're a family man. Somebody's trying to sell you a car. You go down the road here, you know, you get the message that you came for, you take a personal list of everything that's wrong with it. Anyway, you end up selling them the same. So, just don't sell them positive things. You don't sell your insurance to people. You just try to enhance people. And you don't feel anything to get hit. You don't feel like. I'm.

[33:49]

But if you do one thing at a time, putting together and doing it completely, you don't have to have plans that are based on friction. Really, naturally, you have to think about what's going to happen the next day. But you're not working it out in terms of friction. And I hope that's the biggest lesson. All right, that is a review. That's the idea we can make in a bit. I think maybe we can, we can still have some discussion, some aspects of it that are confusing. That is fine. It's been really fun to be here, and I'm just so happy that you're here. Without you here, none of us would be able to do what we're doing today, and I'm just so happy that you're here. Thank you so much.

[35:40]

Yeah, there will always be rights. There will always be rights. Yeah. I mean, there will always be rights and people do that. I think my own feeling about that is, uh, I want that to seem like a, uh, that he did with the company he started with me, he sort of helped shape, where you have state executives running at seven times, I believe, at the last state executive. And I don't know, seven times, at 10 times, at 20 times, at whatever. But there needs to be, I think, some spirit of relationship between the police and the military. And there needs to be some area of feedback. If there isn't, then you're so rich that you can do anything you want. Think of Howard Hughes. He did the best. He did the best in everything. He was the greatest man in the world. He set the world record on the round the world. He started to make the first gay movie. He's the outlaw, isn't he? He, I don't know what to do, he started

[37:06]

He gave me a little hug, and I said, hey. He gave me a big big big hug, and I, uh, uh, I think I gave him a big hug, I think, at some point. Anyway, he gave me a big hug, and I gave him a little hug. Anyway, he did all of the things to get everyone to approve it, and he handed it off. If he responded with, so what, then I would say, can you observe here now, can you realize an action and observe an environment at the crossing place without any idea of sacred or holy or sacred or profane or better or worse. If you can't, then listen to this story. All I'm saying is the sense of something occurring in an environment occurs. Let me give you an example. We say that sometimes, if you express it simply, we say that an apple falls according to the laws of gravity.

[38:30]

So, from Bruce's point of view, you don't say that there's some laws of gravity that the apple is following. The apple itself is gravity. The apple itself is gravity. Without that apple, there's no gravity. And so, in that sense, falling is the dharma. Or the apple is the dharma. There's no law system outside making the apple fall. If you took away the apple, you take it away. The apple itself is generating A context is there, and we go back to responsibility. What this does, this whole thing I'm talking about does come to, is you're recognizing, you know, that there's no end to your responsibility. No end to your responsibility. That's what the... That is white libelism, and that is also the idea of suffering, which we recognize that there's no empty responsibility. And there's no joy. This is quite a complex system, but there's the six parameters, there's also the ten boomers, and there's the... I love the boomers. You know, it's kind of like going through the sound barrier. Ten boomers, and there's the...

[39:56]

and precepts and the eightfold path that are... Well, the first boon is giving, and also the first paramita is giving, and... well, I should make more clarifications, but it's not that important, but the first sense of giving, which means that you recognize your responsibility, and that as long as you say, okay, I'll be happy, but I won't take responsibility for that one person over there, there's no joy. As soon as you recognize that your responsibility extends to everyone, is when there's joy. And the first booner is joy. But the first one is joy, and joy depends on recognizing that there's no possession in the sense that your responsibility extends everywhere. And as long as you go along and say, well, I'll take care of this person, I'll take care of myself and my wife and my kids or my friends. You know, there's no end.

[41:18]

Yes, there's lots of contradictions. Well, let me, can I stop at the difference? Because I think you won't have a chance to take them down at once. Yeah, well, let me respond first about contradictions. First of all, when you practice, one of the very first things you have to... I'm going too much into Buddhism. I'm not... I really want to kind of stay right back at it. One of the first things you find out in practice is that you've got to stop your mind having a system which excludes that which doesn't put into it. So one of the first things you find out is that you have... that your mind is able to have simultaneous contradictory realities, you know, without any problem. you begin to be able to have perceptions that don't fit together. This is getting close to a non-distributed perception that I'm talking about. So, we practice, if we practice, we have to practice without any idea of a goal. But at the same time, there's no effort without a goal to have no idea of a goal. There's always those problems in it. And you just learn to at the same time be acting as through form or self or with a goal, at the same time dropping it.

[42:41]

But these simultaneous contradictory things are existing all the time. So the red is the first part of what you said. Did I cover it? No, that's true. That's not my awareness, but I think maybe that's a too far away. Awareness and you've been using what? Oh, question. Yeah, that's what I wanted to come back to that. The question in that, in that particular question was absolutely fundamental part of the question. There's almost no practice without testing. And when I said there's concentration of energy, concentration of intention, energy, consciousness, and investigation or penetration, this is where the point at which it becomes not man-made in a sense, in a certain sense. And penetration is you start out with, what is it? You're always asking yourself the question of, what is it? What's going on here? What's outside of me, or it is I, or blue, etc.? And that sense of always saying, how do we live here?

[43:59]

She does tell me we have a head month, and people ask me questions. And he says, someone said to him, because he said something with an allusion, and I don't want to go into why we say things with an allusion, but anyway, he said something with an allusion. He said, well, what are you sitting on? And he said, zappos. The pillow we sit on is zappos. He said, zappos. This is a wonderful person. And then he said, well, what's your Zafu on? And we're getting into an internet regression here. He said, what is your Zafu on? And he said, it's a bowing cloth called, he said, Zagu. And he said, what is your Zabuton on? I mean, your Zagu on? And it's on a big pillow called Zabu-shit. So he was in a big pillow called Zabuton. And you know, where was he going to stop, you know? So he said, before he could get to answer his next question, this man said,

[45:02]

He sort of said, what is it? He said, zah. He said, what is it? Zahgut. Zahgutan. Like, zah, zah, zah, zah! And that's, you can do it. Is that a pun? The Japanese pun? You could say, but no, it's just like, somebody says, where does it come from? You say, where? It comes from where? He says, you can't. It comes from where? Well, what's what is life. What is what. And that means photographer. What means, actually when you look at the derivation of the word, it means touchness. And photographer means touchness. So it's the touchness of everything moving through there. All right, yeah. So photographer is a wide word for touchness of everything, which is what he meant by saying what. It's been going on for a long time. I'll hold on to this. I'm hoping you know what to do. I don't want you to be talking about excruciating. I'm hoping for some other things. There's a process. Once you've heard the calling of that messenger from the universe, that's going to do all sorts of bad things to us when we get older.

[46:29]

I'm going to start doing that and I'm going to be able to make you aware of what's happening here. So if you want to ask me questions, you can get in touch with me. I'm going to be coming up and doing what I'm going to be coming up. If you hear what she's saying, I'm going to have to repeat it. I guess, if I paraphrase what you're saying, you're saying, how do we do it in a realism perspective or something like that? Well, as you can tell me right now, you're saying there's some type of responsibility. How do you do it in a corrupt world? Yeah, there's no... Well, we all live in a corrupt world. You know, it's how do you survive under the prevailing society? It's always an imperfect line. The answer is, though, is you don't make comparisons of your society with other people. You just start. You just do it to your own heart's content. And that's enough. But actually, the first stages of that, of the choice of right to use right

[47:57]

peace, good conduct, etc. You are choosing wholesome states and harmonious states, but they're only to give you, develop the confidence in you when you're not so ambivalent all the time. In other words, doing to your heart's content, to where you can get free of making discriminations of good and bad. But you start out by building up some kind of confidence, you know, choosing things, but wider scale things, which are harmonious. Yeah, I don't Myself, I don't – if I carry what you said to an extreme, I don't think so. I think that as long as our own life is compromised, we shouldn't be – you know, we should be making the full effort there. And then if you – if you're forced into it, you do something else. But you don't – I'm talking –

[49:31]

I gave the, what my wife Virginia says, I gave the most abstract talk she's ever heard me give. And I guess the reason, I apologize for that. I guess the reason I did it is that if I'm not abstract, I'm asking you to do it. And I don't feel it's polite to me. So, uh, uh, uh, Dean Jim Morton. You guys are called Dean, right? Yeah. Jim Morton, right? Hi, Jim. Hi. Hi. Dean Jim Morton. He said something interesting to me. Did I mean scale or system? He said something like that. And that's like... When I'm talking about systems, I'm talking about self... What's the word I used? Self-correcting system. A scale of measuring. Like you said, scale of notes, scale of this, that stuff. I guess what I'm talking about is cargo cult science. You know what cargo cults are? Cargo cult science, cargo cult progress,

[51:01]

or a cargo cult natural selection, or a cargo cult. In contrast, I brought up, and I wanted to say something about that, is that by contrast, from the point of view of the Eightfold Path, you would not do what Locke and Mills and others did. try to conceive of a society based on a contract. And I feel that some of the difficulty we're into is we have a society based on a contract that needs professionals to interpret lawyers, and you create another society based on tradition or class. It's rather different than a society based on profession. And frankly, if you do have that problem in Japan, American businessmen have a devilish time getting Japanese people to sign contracts. and to pay any attention to them. Because it's very difficult for a Japanese person, and this is very much, I think, an influential reason, to imagine finding something which held them to do something which was based on the past. A Japanese person, or a Buddhist, will vow to do the best they can in every circumstance, but will not vow to do always this thing, no matter what the circumstance.

[52:21]

So Japanese businessmen tend to find new contracts, and they're disturbing the wastebasket. And they will honor the spirit of it. They'll always be trying to say, well, that was the beginning. But if you try to hold them, well, two years ago, you signed this, and now the situation has changed, so we get 80% of the profits. And Japanese will tell you, sorry. They will not be hard to it easily. And they're not. It was a funny example in Japan, where the Hilton Hotel had a hotel there, and they came to work one day, and all of the seats were taken by Japanese. And the secretaries were there, and they spoke English to their secretaries, and the secretaries gave them a song. And they had to leave, because the Japanese just took it over. They felt that it had been violated. Actually, it was completed through some various methods. Anyway, that's enough on context. I'd like to try an idea, if you wish, because I think we're both historians, that it seems to me if one looks at the rise of a market system, as opposed to every culture has a means of production and exchange, and has an economy, you can have an exchange of freedom, but a market system and a compatible relationship among the means of production, if one looks at that,

[53:49]

that is defended by the religion of Protestantism and the whole sense of, you know, the tunneling of the culture down, and the whole growth economy, that now that we've reached the climax of the world system, and that we've reached the limit of growth, and we've reached the end of the Protestant ethicist spirit of capitalism, and we've reached the limit of industrial society, it seems to me that the production of businessmen in America, and perhaps many of the other religions that come out of climax cultures, whether it comes down to you, whether it comes down to India, or it comes down to India as a whole. These are doctrines greater than we've seen in America, where there's a profound historical significance, and indicates now, perhaps, that we're shifting from the heroism and heroism of production and consumption to a kind of non-extermination of the self and non-extermination of the body, where There's this kind of one-pointedness that is studied at a cognitive point, and studies that kind of remind you that you're moving away from that. And if you're moving away from this, then the whole capacity definition, the whole sense of capacity and ego identification and assimilation, and all the other things that we take for granted in the industrial society, and that there's a resonance in the beginning, at the time of that culture, the time before it,

[55:14]

is that we really think this form of conscious information and culture are really not historical assets. You know, the investments into America have a really fine significance in that, in effect, they might serve as a market system on a moral order of opposite. But a poet in the country, in the place of the country being literally helpful, Um, like, largely, there's a gap between now and then, and that's what happened in the Western Revolution, because the moral of it was left behind, and that we must remember that, apart from the old theater, as Elizabeth Christie did, and now, it seems like any project that you see beginning, any project that you see in finance, will seem to have a different set of objectives, and that, therefore, the intent of the Western Center, The population in America, in the fact that Paso Palo is one of the largest lagoons in the city, even though it's the largest lagoon in Japan, it's still a lagoon and there's something going on here. Yeah, something's going on here.

[56:40]

Talking about the market system, it's not that in my mind, it's the point of view of the people. In other words, if you have a market system working with people of a certain philosophy, and this is where it is a tremendous revelation to have Buddhist thought and right livelihood come in as a thought, a whole new set of circumstances exist without the market system being ethical or necessarily malfunctioning. There's a very good example in a case which is very dramatic, which is the General Electric Company putting out, I can't even name them, PCBs, are they, a chemical, PCBs, PCBs, which is, which has,

[58:00]

destroyed the fist of the Hudson River. I mean, this is just a company, this poison now makes a fist of the Hudson River and a wonderful sad road with love still coming from the Hudson. No longer available to man. The The sense, and this is as I say, I don't think the boardrooms, I don't think the establishment have it, but the people are seeing it. And the amount of pressure coming on the General Electric Company to light that has caused a complete research project. They have maybe not killed it, but they've reduced it to something like a thousandth of what it was, to the point where they think it is no longer harmful. And this change has been brought about by an intense feeling on the part of the people in general that things are so wrong, there's something else to be done about it. And that influence is going into the boardroom. I think they know they're making a great deal more progress. And if you can imagine a society with white livelihoods being something that people believe in, that discipline would then be impressed upon the economics.

[59:20]

structure, and you don't have to fall back and revolutionize it. It would be revolutionized automatically by the different point of view. My own feeling about it is it may be, and it is certainly so in many examples, that the marketplace does right things, or eventually there's prejudice. But my own feeling is it deserves slow, delayed, and perpetual process. And General Electric should have been stopped years ago. In fact, General Electric should have been stopped before it even got to be General Electric. I say that with my brothers and one of the heads of General Electric, sort of. So I have a, I mean, I have to say that with some reservation, in other words. I don't, my own feeling is, I don't, instead of talking in such large terms of generalizing effects, in the case of, so that we do, we have a little store called the BeanGels, BeanGels, which sells the produce from the farm, BeanGels, that we have. And the intent we make is to think about the price in terms of

[60:46]

what a lease keeps the store going, and then from then on, what's best for the customer. And I think if you think that way, you don't think in terms of a marketplace corrective. You have a much more cooperative model. And you can have shared marketplaces. You can have what lease would consider unfair price fixing. I think you're coming from the point of view what's best for the customer and what, you know, it includes every one of your family members. That's more that kind of model. I don't think we get into, I mean, I have had businessmen tell me, and I'm not in business in general, but I have had businessmen in complicated moral situations where they say, geez, I wouldn't want my kid to use this product. that there is manufacturing. I wouldn't want something else, but you sort of have to do it, et cetera. So white livelihood means also the courage to not have to do, to go along with situations if you find compromising, and to trust that if you don't, something will work out. And I've been in that situation myself. I mean, I know when I worked at the university, there was a project of a big multi, you know, $250,000 a year project to

[62:10]

to teach architects and engineers how to build bomb shelters in the early 60s. And I felt, and I know in other countries it had happened, it was a kind of war preparation. It's really not so effectual, but it's to cut people's minds towards... And I just simply, in my office, as I could have been fired, I refused to touch any piece of paper connected with it. But I did all the other projects. I was sort of a different head of the office, so it made quite a little bollocks that every single piece of data had to go around me. I said, look, you can reconfile them if you want, but they didn't. And the project was defeated. Money was returned to the government. It was for the whole state of California, and money was returned to the government within about six months after I refused to touch any of these papers. But actually, David Peskin has defeated the the plant that was overhead, and it was on a fault, and he just set out to establish it. Anyway, nothing like that. Anything else? I have a very specific question I was looking to you, and it's probably about the original

[63:34]

One of the things you've spoken of, and it's interesting to me, is that an advantage that I used to have, is that I don't have to become a kid to do anything. Yeah, it says, you've done the perfect dream. I mean, you could have told me all about that, honey. Yeah, you could have told me all about that. I mean, you could also just say, oh, I don't know, you know, that's funny, but it's true. And it says, I know. I know. Well, I've got a bit of a few dreams in my own life. And I got very good at it, actually, for a while. But in practice, you don't. I would express everything, don't interpret dreams and spells, et cetera, to suggest the larger scale of what it means. But don't interpret dreams as to be more specific to how you practice. But I can say that you're not concerned with your personal history. You're not concerned with figuring out what you did in the past, et cetera. Because actually, you have thousands of histories. You have billions of moments in your life.

[64:54]

And at one point you will interpret significant events as leading to such and such a person. But we say in Buddhism that you all have in you also the history of a Buddha, the history of the sage, the history of everyone on the planet. But it's not of emphasis. And so you, by the particular conditions of your life, have been chosen to interpret certain things. But if you, for instance, if you meditate, you find there are extremely clear events that come into view, which you had not noticed, which produced a person which was a kind of ghost in you. Are you following me? So that actually, we are an accumulation of persons, one that we know the known history of, and numerous that the history is hidden. And the point of practice is to bring all those things together. But you see what I mean? There are so many millions of moments in our life, and many, many things happen, and we choose to interpret or know just some of them and not others of them. So that if you're doing psychoanalysis, you're picking out certain ones that are significant or were troublesome. And that's useful up to a point, but it's dealing with the dead, in a sense.

[66:17]

So, in practice, your emphasis is always looking at the merging of all those histories in this moment with greater and greater clarity because they all exist right now, too. They all live through this particular moment. You just keep doing this particular moment. You don't worry about dreams. You have a dream and you're doing it too much like where the shoe fits, you know? You dream it, yes, and then you add something, and you give it a good taste, and then you sort of add that to your future. You say, well, now that's characteristic of my future. It doesn't have to be. So it's much more, it's like you look, you don't throw the big dream. You look, you throw your own self. More of that kind of feeling. So if you look at the dream, it's wonderful. You have a dream. You have some extraordinary experience, satori. You don't appreciate it. Now I have satori, or enlightenment. If you had time to think about it, you didn't have to add anything to it. You didn't have to add anything to the dream. The dream itself was, there was always that emphasis in practice, which is quite different from psychoanalysis. Although, in stages of meditation, everything, like in a psychoanalytic experience or therapy, everything slows down. And what happens is you get the ability to sit there through it without being disturbed by it.

[67:40]

But then much, much more floats up than ever in that second analysis, because none of this is filled up. All right? Yes? He was concerned with the development of the individual and the integration of the individual to a regional context. You have them to be attached to either way of thinking, it's like, I don't know, I don't know if we've got the time to sit in this together, we've got to get out of it. He's very good at handling this. You know, and, you know, he's been through some of that stuff. And it doesn't seem to me that he's trying to come back and get to me. I don't know if he's trying to come back and get to me. I don't think union is in many ways very close to Buddhism. And I don't think that... Well, first of all, there are schools of Buddhism which do do green manifestation. And then again, because it emphasizes meditation so much, and is the most kind of confronting form of Buddhism, when you meditate regularly, you finally lose... you lose the distinction between green and white.

[69:09]

And so your dream experience is no different from a waking experience. And you also, you can change your dreams. You know, you can just see it. And you also, during the day, there's a whole study that we did, where during the day, all of the material that's normally stored up for sleep is going on in your activity. And your effort is because you have these various things, associations that normally occur only in dreams, going on all the time. So you're faced with a situation where all you have to do is make choices. So you just keep doing what's in front of you, and you bring all of those possibilities into that thing. And so that's, it is a kind of integration, but it's no longer something that just happens in sleep. It's happening all the time. Yeah, you don't worry about interpretation analysis. You act. You just keep acting. And the dream is in the act. And that could lead to them to, uh, uh, for certain stuff to be the wrong place to be in the house. In other words, people can take it as a personal problem rather than having a general problem. That's right. And having a great deal more happiness. Yes, that's right. And really that's the kind of joy that has to be exchanged with the kind of power and the conscience of each individual.

[70:33]

It's a personal economic discount. I don't know if Joe was saying that. similar to what I've been talking about, but I don't really know much about whether I'd say steady state economy. I don't know anything about that. All I know, I don't know whether it's steady state or unsteady state. But you do things just in terms of what works and what feels all right if it's not steady economy. Yeah, you could. That's one of these magnetics that's complicated. Because a lot of people, and close friends of mine, could have, I could say, manly about even the idea of hope, right? They don't really know what they're talking about.

[71:47]

I'm going to give you an example of personal economics. I don't know if it's an exact example, but some of it, like Bill was saying, Who, what did you say, who's minding the show, or who's the? Oh, they told me who's minding the show. Yeah, if no one told me who's minding the show, that's the most fundamental question you have to be asking. Who the hell is minding this story? But you come up with problems all the time that I think are moral questions. It could be economic. Simple one is when your insurance agent on your car says, look, I can save you some money by saying you only drive a, you know, 300 to 1,000 miles a month instead of whatever people drive. I don't know what people drive instead of. You're actually commuting and you're driving 2,000 miles a month. I found that's a very common experience for shrimp. They used to do that. Well, what you do is you say, no, no, I drive 25,000 miles a month, 10,000 miles a month. So you put that down. Then you're criticizing him. And you're putting him down.

[73:08]

But if you go along with him, you're being dishonest. So you have to sort of be somewhere in between. In my own experience, you have to say, well, because we're not again talking about systems of right and wrong either. And people, this is just what people do. So you say, well, I don't, fine, that's all right. But then the next year you say, oh, just put in what I've actually got there, actually drive. And we've tried some folks like that. And we've also had situations where somebody, quite often we buy something. And someone asks us, particularly when you buy a statue or something, someone gives you some money to buy a statue or an art object or something. And they say, would you please pay us in a cashier's check? And you know they're doing it to avoid income tax. So what do you do? It's a little complicated. So what we've done in each instance is we've had Especially if the person is quite involved with the idea. Some people are so interested in conning everyone else because they think they're going to be conned first. They don't con first. You have to go along with their con. You have to join their con with them.

[74:22]

And in those cases, we've said, all right, we've sent them the check. And then we've expressed our concern about it over time. And in the end, we've sent them a check in addition, paying the tax for it. So we've said to them, you don't want to pay the tax, but we feel better about it, so we'll send them a $1,300 check or something for the tax on it, which they should have paid. And the result has been quite an interesting experience for the person doing it.

[74:54]

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