This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. It feels so lovely actually to be up here with everyone. As I was thinking about getting ready for tonight, I was having a lot of very clear memories of being here, living here quite some time ago. My daughter, Elizabeth, was actually born in 340, Paige, right over here in the apartment that Robert and Samantha are in. And when she was about, we moved when she was two, but she used to crawl around here on the tatami and ring the bells. And just having dinner tonight in the dining room, we sat at a table where we often sat with a high chair and she was in that high chair.

[01:03]

So it's interesting at this phase of life to be coming back to this particular community. And I know many people here, although there are many people I don't know. So before I get started, just introduce myself a little bit. My name is Meg Levy and I'm married to Jeremy. He was the secretary. And I started practicing, actually, my first practice place was in Berkeley with Sojun Roshi, just very briefly, in 1991. And then I went to Japan, and I was in Japan and Thailand and exploring practice a little bit. And then in 1994, I discovered Green Gulch and met my teacher, Tenshin, Rev. Anderson Roshi, and have been resident at Zen Center pretty much ever since then. I ordained in 2003 and Oshiso in 2007.

[02:07]

And we were here 2001 and 2002. And then in 2007, after Oshiso, I started being curious about the world outside of Zen Center. after living at Tassajara for about three and a half years and sometime at Green Gulch and sometime here. And partially it was financial because we were a family. And the model at Zen Center has been for families who stay, generally one spouse will stay in and one will go out. And that's kind of how it works. But also more fundamentally for me, in some ways, I was very curious, what was happening? out in the world. And how did Zen Center or Zen practice relate to that? What could it have to offer? Because people would come to Zen Center and sometimes ask me questions like, well, why do you bow to the Buddha?

[03:09]

I knew, like my bones knew, my cells knew, but I didn't really know how to talk about it. So at that point I stepped out and started, trained as a coach, so I worked individually with people. And a friend, actually Pam Weiss, who teaches at Spirit Rock and SF Insight and also was trained deeply at Zen Center, had started a mindfulness program at Genentech, a biotech company, and she taught me how to teach in this other world, how to translate everything that was already in my bones in a different language into a language that other people could understand in a different setting. And then eventually I started teaching a program in called Search Inside Yourself, which is an emotional intelligence program based in mindfulness. It started at Google, so I did that for a while. And I'm happy to, I know some people have questions about what that's like to teach out in the wider world, and I'm happy to talk to people about that if they're interested.

[04:17]

But there's actually something else that I wanted to talk about tonight. Do you have a watch? I do. And I have to say, I hope this goes okay, that in some ways this has been the hardest Dharma talk I've ever prepared, the hardest to prepare. And I kept asking myself, why did I choose this topic? But honestly it felt more like it reached out and chose me. What I've been trying to look at or feeling called to look at is what does it take and how does our practice inform actually looking at what's happening in the world, specifically around what's happening with the environment, with climate, with change.

[05:28]

And it's kind of thrown me for a loop honestly, to really start to look at this. And I feel like I am really very unqualified to talk about this. That I do not know the science any better than anyone else, really. That I haven't done the research. That I haven't done much, really, at all. What I can see, though, is my own consciousness kind of starting to come to awareness at some point. And then like, oh, we should pay attention to this. And then it kind of sinks back down. And then time goes on and life is good. And then something happens and it kind of starts to come into consciousness. And then it comes back down again. So I feel like I'm in a bit of a muddle around this. but I think most people seem to be in a bit of a muddle.

[06:34]

And looking at Dogen, to study the Buddha way is to study the self, to study our own delusions, that perhaps this is the actual project. How do we actually start to turn towards awareness? And what makes it really so hard? because I think it actually is really, really hard. And what is the appropriate response? This has always been his end question in life. What is the appropriate response? How do we know? So on one hand, I'm trying to bring my own consciousness to this, And I'm trying to also ask, is there something particular about our practice, a Buddhist perspective, that can help us individually, collectively, and that also we can offer the world?

[07:49]

And even further, is there something about looking deeply at this issue that helps us understand our practice better, helps us understand Buddhadharma, helps us see more clearly. There's a book that I've been looking at which I'm finding very interesting and I would recommend, which is called Don't Even Think About It. Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change, that as human beings we are particularly unsuited to deal with this. There's a reason that it's so hard for us to wrap our heads and hearts around this, and this came out by George Marshall in 2014. There's something about this problem that makes it hard for us to understand.

[08:54]

We like stories. And we like good guys, and we like bad guys. And we like knowing where to turn our energies. And when there's not something out there for us to blame or deal with or engage with, we don't know what to do. We tend to create our own enemies, like it's the oil companies, or it's the conservatives, or it's the liberals, or it's the environmentalists, trying to find a human face for something that doesn't really have a human face. So it's complex. It's unfamiliar. It's slow moving. It goes over time, over generations. And people feel uncertain. And they don't know what to do. They don't feel in control. we don't feel in control.

[09:56]

And when people feel this way, they feel threatened. And when people feel threatened, all of our ancient systems come into play, us and them. There's a, I read about a study and having to do with, in Britain, talking about showing people want to identify with their group. So if the other group believes something, you will actually believe the opposite. Not because of the facts, but because you want to be different from the other group. So this was a group in Britain, and when shown that Scandinavians were shown as greener, they actually started to conserve less because they wanted to be different. But when compared to Americans, who they saw as wasteful, then suddenly they became the greenest people around because they're different from the Americans. So how do we understand this? How do we start to notice how to take in these very deep tendencies, these very deep systems, especially when we're faced with threat?

[11:05]

And we're all implicated in this, to the extent that we fly, that we drive cars, that we're dependent on so many things that have a detrimental effect. So to look at this, to find someone out there, we actually find ourselves. And this is very uncomfortable. And also all the things that we think of as good and warm and caring for our families are somehow also all tied up in this. This is really hard to get a hang of. And there is a cultural silence. People don't know how to talk about this. And there have been cases of scientists who usually are the people who are the most valued in our society across the board, just being attacked and vilified for bringing this up. And you may find also that if you try to bring this up, suddenly the conversation dies.

[12:08]

There's untalked about agreement that we don't talk about it. This sentence really jumped out at me. It said, when something cannot be assimilated, it is repressed. When something cannot be assimilated, it is repressed. This is really hard for us to assimilate. And so it's really hard to put it into our conscious and moral framework. I'm almost reluctant to start bringing out facts. And this is happening, and this is happening, and this is happening, because we've heard most of it before, except actually there is new stuff that it's even harder to assimilate.

[13:11]

But actually I would like to bring out just a few things to help us. What are we talking about here? And my invitation is, as I bring these things out, use your training and practice to notice what happens in your own body-mind as I bring these things up. And if you can do so without judging, if it's in your body you feel it, If it's your mind, if it's your, like, I wish she would just be quiet, I don't want to hear this, or thank goodness she's talking about it, or what do I do, I don't know. If you feel anything in your body, if you feel anything in your mind, notice your own systems of opening or closing. So I won't say very much, but just a little bit. So one is...

[14:16]

This came out just in March, and this is from the New York Times, but it's talking about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. So it says, for half a century, climate scientists have seen the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a remnant of that last ice age, as a sword of Damocles hanging over human civilization. The great ice sheet, larger than Mexico, is thought to be potentially vulnerable to disintegration from a relatively small amount of global warming and capable of raising the sea level by 12 feet or more should it break up. But researchers long assumed the worst effects would take hundreds if not thousands of years to come, to occur. Now, new research suggests the disaster scenario could play out much sooner. Continued high emissions of heat-trapping gases could launch a disintegration of the ice sheet within decades. Decades.

[15:17]

According to a study published Wednesday, heaving enough water into the ocean to raise the sea level as much as three feet by the end of this century. With ice melting in other regions too, the total rise of the sea could reach five or six feet by 2100, the researchers found. This is roughly twice the increase reported as a plausible worst case scenario by United Nations panel just three years ago. And so high it would likely provoke a profound crisis within the lifetime of children being born today. Can we hear that? What does that mean? We hear it, it's from a reliable source, but do we believe it? Can we integrate our intellectual and our emotional systems enough to actually work with this? A similar paper called Scientists Warn of Perilous Climate Shifts Within Decades, Not Centuries, talking about a similar sea rise.

[16:23]

That would mean the loss of all coastal cities. the loss of all coastal cities. Where are we? In a coastal city. Most of the world's large cities and all their history, Dr. Hansen said. This is hard to get. When I hear all major coastal cities, my mind kind of glazes over. Although I found this interactive map, maybe you've seen things like this, where you can toggle back and forth and it shows On one hand, immediate cuts, drastic immediate cuts, and the other business as usual. You can go back and forth. And it shows levels of flooding. So I was checking out San Francisco. It's by 2100. And I was able to zoom in, not just on San Francisco, but zoom in a little bit up the coast and zoom in to this beautiful valley called Green Gulch. And in the business as usual, worst case scenario, that little valley is blue.

[17:29]

And then I moved the toggle over, and in the drastic cuts, best case scenario, that little valley is blue. So what? Green Gulch is going to be flooded by the year 2100? Almost certainly? You've got to be kidding. You know, there's a part that's like, this is crazy. It is crazy. It is crazy. And this seems to be what's happening. This seems to be what's happening. So take just a moment and check in with yourself, what you're feeling, which might not be so great, and that's okay. But you might notice your breathing. You might notice your heart. You might notice any tension in your body. You might notice if you're able to be relaxed and equanimous with this. You might notice if you're kind of numbing out.

[18:33]

Can we tolerate this? Can we use our practice to get beyond our defensive systems? And there are plenty of reasons to be in denial because it's really hard to open to this. It's actually been compared to people in World War II who saw what was happening with the Jews. And they knew, but the world couldn't believe it, couldn't open to it. So the ones who let themselves open and see this, it was really hard. It's really hard. Just one more. Well, one more about the Sierras. It's a lethal combination. This is June 22, 2016 in the Los Angeles Times. A lethal combination of drought, heat, and voracious bark beetles has killed 26 million trees in the Sierra Nevada over the last eight months.

[19:42]

An alarming finding for a state already raging with wildfires fueled by desiccated landscapes. The dire estimate offered Wednesday by federal officials brings the loss of trees since 2010 to at least 66 million, a number that is expected to increase considerably throughout the year, despite an average winter of rain and snow that brought some relief to urban Californians. And then it goes on to say, the rapid escalation of tree deaths should be considered a grave issue threatening the collapse of of an ecosystem that has made California the sixth largest economy in the world. We tend to think of trees as decoration," this person said. Unfortunately, we've forgotten that trees are the actual pillar of our life support system, critical for our food, water, habitat, for our air, and for temperature stability. Finally, for a while people have identified the two degrees Celsius mark as what might be more or less tolerable and really encouraged not going beyond that.

[21:07]

So we seem to be at that right now, two degrees. And on track for four degrees. Four degrees is a real problem. And the word that keeps coming up even from conservative institutions like the World Bank, is catastrophic. Catastrophic. Massive heat waves, far beyond anything we've experienced. 40% of plant and animal life in danger. Most of the Amazon forest in danger of burning up. Reduced food yields in the U.S., corn, soybeans, and cotton down 63 to 82%. flooding of the world cities, and massive dislocation of people. And no guarantee it would stop at four degrees. And John Schellnubauer, one of the world's leading climate scientists, speaking at a 2013 conference on the risk posed by four-degree climate to Australia, said that the difference between two and four degrees is human civilization.

[22:10]

When? When is this going to happen? A British research team concluded that we could reach the four-degree point by the 2070s, although the 2060s are also possible. This is in 50 years. So again, what do we do with this? Does this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? That's how I hear it often. What do we do with this? We don't really know what to do sometimes. And closer to home for me, this is a college professor who works in climate change and she says, as a college professor who lectures on climate change, I will have to find a way to look into those 70 sets of eyes that have learned all semester long to trust me and somehow explain to those students, my students, who still believe in their young minds that success mostly depends on good grades and hard work

[23:20]

who believe in fairness, even-handedness and opportunity, how much we as people have altered our environment, and that they will end up facing the consequences of our inability to act. So I have a 15-year-old who's working very hard and is very wholehearted about her future and is getting good grades. And I have to ask, what do I tell her? How much do I say, I don't know? I know what I grew up with, I know what worked for me and my parents, what the rules were, and we seem to be following those rules, but I don't know if those rules are gonna hold. I just don't know. I took her to see a documentary that was just down at Embarcadero Landmark Theater called Time to Choose, which was quite wonderful.

[24:27]

I thought good. But there were only four of us in the theater. So how do we start to open to this? And what can we offer? There's all the stuff we can do, whether it's individual, reducing, whether it's working on a bigger policy level, trying to elect the right people, et cetera, writing. But what seems to be most pressing in some ways is to find new stories, to find new narratives, to find ways to communicate beyond this polarization. Because people will listen to the stories way beyond the science. In some ways, it doesn't matter what the science says. If people have certain stories, certain identifications, affiliations, emotions, that's what they go with.

[25:28]

And we see this happening in our world on a big scale right now. And how can we stay we, right, to realize this is the natural human response on some level? There actually seem to be two responses. One is to close. and one is to open up even further. So instead of good versus evil, it's almost more like fear and love. What are these responses? And I will say that in my work teaching really thousands of people who have this deep hunger for these practices, a deep hunger for learning to be present, for getting off autopilot, for not being spun around, international interest. I don't know what's going on. I don't know where this is coming from. But something's there. There's some deep asking, some deep engagement.

[26:31]

And there are things that we work with as practitioners, as students of the Buddha Dharma, that may be useful. One is impermanence, the basic teaching of impermanence. You know, if you look at the Avatamsaka Sutra, there are multiple world systems. Even from a scientific basis, there's this really, for me, kind of freaky article called, this is serious. Yes, there have been aliens. And it's basically saying, given probabilities of the number of planets in the solar system, or beyond the solar system, which is now more than 3,000, and various calculations they do, that we now have enough information to conclude that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations almost certainly existed at some point in cosmic history. So also knowing that no matter other civilizations or not, no matter what we do, eventually, long enough, all this is going to be gone.

[27:43]

we'll all be gone, all the animals will be gone, all the plants will be gone, the earth will be gone. This is basic teaching. This is basic science. So can we grok that enough, along with our own deaths, that bigger picture that allows us to start to take care of what's here, that takes away some of the fear that lets us look at this? In a way, our specialty is is this balance between nihilism and reification, that we're able to hold both. We're able to be present in this amazing what that's happening now, knowing it's intangible, that it's not going to stay. There's a poem I came across by a great poet, W.S. Merwin, about gratitude.

[28:46]

It's called Thanks. He says, listen, with the night falling, we are saying thank you. We are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings. We are running out of the glass rooms with our mouths full of food to look at the sky and say thank you. We are standing by the water thanking it, standing by the windows looking out in our directions, back from a series of hospitals, back from a mugging. After funerals, we are saying thank you. After the news of the dead, Whether or not we knew them, we are saying thank you. Over telephones, we are saying thank you. In doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators, remembering wars and the police at the door and the beatings on stairs, we are saying thank you. In the banks, we are saying thank you. In the faces of the officials and the rich and of all who will never change, we go on saying thank you, thank you. With the animals dying around us, taking our feelings, we are saying thank you.

[29:49]

With the forest falling faster than the minutes of our lives, we are saying thank you. With the words going out like cells of a brain, with the cities growing over us, we are saying thank you faster and faster. With nobody listening, we are saying thank you, thank you. We are saying and waving, dark though it is. My very first practice at Tassajara Tia Strozer was Shiso for the second time in 1994. And she said something that, at least as I remember it, she said, no one talks about the courage it takes to walk in this bottomlessness. That we're always walking in bottomlessness.

[30:54]

actually doesn't change what's happening, doesn't really change anything in some ways. How do we open to this? And then we have the Heart Sutra. Avalokiteshara Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing Prajnaparamita, clearly saw that all five aggregates in their own being are empty and thus relieved all suffering. And thus relieved all suffering. Practice is Buddha Dharma, is taking refuge, is vow. How do these come to play here? And it's emptiness, but it's Avalokitesvara, the one of compassion, the one who cares, who's being relieved of suffering by looking at emptiness. It may be that there's a whole shift, not just in how we live and what we do, perhaps a simpler way, perhaps more of a Zen way for everyone, but a whole different way of understanding our inner connection, a whole different way of understanding this moment.

[32:23]

When my mother was dying, Three years ago, I was there with her in the nursing home in Texas, and I was kind of the only one there. My other family members weren't there. But I couldn't catch up. My mind couldn't catch up with what was happening, how fast she was dying. And so I missed a moment of her death. I went home that night. I couldn't see it. It was too emotionally overwhelming. And so I was at home and I got the call. And when I got there, she had gone. Some part of me knew. And I just couldn't assimilate it. What can't be assimilated is repressed. The author of this book says one kind of funny thing, which I like, about Pollyanna, being Pollyanna.

[33:42]

We should all be glad to be a Pollyanna. She has become synonymous with dim-witted optimism, but in the original book by Eleanor H. Porter, the character is clearly shown to be coping with immense grief and suffering through her gratitude for what she does have, her friends, community, and the joy of being alive. What is clear is that this is a fast-moving issue, and everything will change. At present, climate change exists largely as a narrative of anticipation shaped by familiar experience and existing frames. But momentous shifts are underway in the world's climate systems and carbon cycles, which will, within a single lifetime, make climate change entirely real, salient, and unavoidable. This will be a new world in which past certainties will disappear and our inbuilt social and psychological biases will become increasingly influential on our judgment, including self-protection in-group and out-group.

[34:47]

This is why current responses are so important. Remember that how we respond now will provide the template for future responses. Acceptance, kindness, compassion, cooperation, and empathy will produce very different outcomes than aggression, competition, blame, and denial. We hold both futures within ourselves. And as we choose whether and how to think about climate change, we are choosing how we will think about ourselves and the new world we are creating. And also learning from religions. I think that's us. We can present climate change as a journey of conviction which will contain periods of doubt and certainty as well as moments of personal revelation and sudden awareness. What is this adventure that we're potentially on? Too many pieces of paper.

[36:27]

Here we go. So this is a poem that I know that many of you know very well and have heard many times. But I invite you to listen to it freshly and in this context. The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the door sill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. All right, I'd like to just sit for a couple of minutes before we finish.

[37:33]

Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[39:54]

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