This morning, I want to talk about, we haven't had a chance, or I haven't had a chance to discuss with you, Little Town and Columbine High. And I think it's worth talking about. So, I wanted to make a presentation and then we can have a discussion. Come on in. According to one of the most important fundamental points of understanding, in Buddha Dharma is that everything, nothing happens without a cause.

[01:08]

There's no such thing as something appearing without a cause. And related to that is that in order for something to happen, there has to be more than one cause. In other words, two things have to happen. Two or more things have to get together before something happens. Things don't arise monolithically or spontaneously. They do arise spontaneously with more than one cause, but not singly. So we have primary cause and contributing causes. The example is a seed, a mustard seed.

[02:11]

Mustard seed is primary cause for a mustard plant to arise. And then the ground is a contributing cause. And then when the rain comes, is a contributing cause. And then when the sun comes out, the plant sprouts. And we have all these contributing causes. and there's a hierarchy of contributing causes. Some contributing causes are very obvious and some are subtle, but all of them are necessary for something, some specific event to happen.

[03:19]

So in this case, people say, why did this happen? It's like senseless, right? Two boys arm themselves like an army, create their own army, become their own heroes, in their own drama, in their own fantasy, and in their own lives as the culmination. So what does it all mean? How did this happen? People say it's senseless. How could it happen? But if you trace the causes back to their source, it's not so mysterious.

[04:29]

As a matter of fact, it's pretty obvious, I think, how all this could happen. This event is the result of many causes. People say, well, it happened because for this reason or it happened for that reason, but there's so many different reasons why this happened, and all of these obvious and subtle reasons contributed to this event. So we have to look at the society, the parents, the peers, the attitudes of the boys themselves, and the manipulation of the media, the manipulation of governments, the manipulation of

[05:51]

advertising, the manipulation through greed, the manipulation through ill will, the manipulation through delusion. At the bottom are the three roots, greed, ill will, and delusion. And all of these contributing factors stem from these roots. Until these roots are uprooted, this kind of activity will continue. And if you're old enough, I've talked about this before, you may be tired of my talking about this, but if you're old enough you can see how this whole thing has escalated in the last 50 years.

[07:00]

There were times when, it wasn't too long ago, when people, it was taboo to do certain things. I think there are certain cycles in which cycles of escalation from 1900 up to World War I is a cycle, from World War I to World War II is a cycle, from World War II to Vietnam is a cycle. The wars seem to really escalate this kind of activity. It wasn't too long ago that four-letter words were taboo.

[08:04]

You could not enter, you only used four-letter words to your friends or people, you know, who you were intimate with. to use a four-letter word in public, it was taboo and it was shocking. And little by little, the four-letter words have become part of our vocabulary and the children use them as their normal speech. shit, fuck you, you know. It's part of normal speech, whereas it was not very long ago in the cycle between the Second World War and Vietnam, it was still taboo. And then after Vietnam, it became more general public use.

[09:11]

It was taboo to think of indiscriminate murder, like drive-by shootings and stabbings, things like that. That was, it was unspoken kind of law that you didn't, that didn't come to the surface. And I remember a movie. I didn't see the movie, but I saw the preview. It was in the 70s, where it was a busy street in New York, and people were crossing this busy intersection, and somebody turned around and stabbed somebody walking the other direction and kept going. And that was like releasing something

[10:19]

into the public view that was taboo because people didn't do that. It was a kind of unwritten law that you didn't indiscriminately kill somebody because that would totally tear apart the fabric of society. There's a certain kind of trust that everybody adhered to. And he just didn't think in those terms. But little by little, this kind of activity became possible. By demonstrating it in a public way, it became possible. So little by little, there's this escalation of violence, the possibility, escalation of the possibility of violence, which was unthinkable before.

[11:29]

And it just keeps getting, you know, stronger and stronger and creating, creates an influence which actually becomes a kind of norm. There are also fads, you know, fads of different ways of killing people. that our society has totally changed in the last 20 years. The cycle between Vietnam and now has really escalated. We used to have just wars.

[12:35]

I don't mean only wars, I mean wars where we felt some justification. World War II was a war of justification. We were fighting evil. So when I was a kid, we used to play cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians, cowboy movies. Cowboy movies ended at a certain point around Vietnam. But the cowboy movie, thousands and thousands of cowboy movies, and they were all guns, bang, bang, bang. And we had guns and we, you know, caps and bang, bang. But we were always the good guys. fighting evil. Now, kids don't play with toy guns anymore. Toy guns, they play with real guns, and now they're on the side of evil. That shift, it's really shifted.

[13:37]

The whole outlook has shifted to where one was doing something for the, the violence was in the support of something good and it shifted whereas the violence is violence for its own sake. So I don't say that cops and robbers and cowboys and Indians was good for us. It does relieve something for boys. They need that kind of thing. And violence will always be with us. Our origin came from violence. If you believe in the Big Bang Theory, right away, the first thing was a violent explosion.

[14:44]

And we keep enacting that over and over again. I think somewhere in our deep psyche, we keep enacting that first explosion over and over again. There's something about it that fascinates us. Animals run from it, but we human beings are attracted to it. But so our society through greed, the greed comes from profit, from advertising violence. All day long is violence on the TV, all night long. You know, every once in a while I'll sit down and turn on the TV to see if there's anything on there. There are some very good things actually on TV, and I watch them sometimes, but it's just one violent drama after another.

[15:51]

And the movies have gotten so explicit. I'm sure you've probably seen those movies. I've seen a couple of them where it's just blood and gore. It's just, I mean, it's really unbelievable. And when the kids see that, you know, it just revs them up. And all this stuff is seething under the surface. It's like society is like a body, like one body with many parts. And the body is either healthy or it's sick. And obviously the body looks healthy in some ways, but it's actually very sick underneath. And every once in a while something explodes in the body, under the surface, and this happens. The actions of the children are a direct barometer for what's happening with the adults.

[17:05]

If you watch the children, you can see what's happening with the adults. It all comes from the top. As the Taoists say, Lao Tzu says, when the emperor is benevolent and takes care of all the people, then society works. But when that doesn't happen, society falls apart and our values have been undermined by materialism. All the wonderful facets of society have been used as fronts for materialistic gain.

[18:12]

everything has its price and is easily bought off. We just see how everything is being bought off and used as a front for making money, for profit. So, what are the children to expect? The acts that they perpetrate are just a direct reflection of what's been fed to them. And the gun advocates who continually feed this kind of stuff to people, even the people, they're naive ones. who just want to keep their guns and hunt and stuff like that are not willing to give that up to save those lives.

[19:20]

That's really tragic. So, society gives the kids the guns Society gives the okay to do this stuff, even though it doesn't sound like it. They continually feed free advertising. A corporation will pay $100,000 for three minutes of advertising on TV, and it's worth it, because so many people see that little blip on the screen. But think of all the free advertising, hours and hours and hours of free advertising for violence. If those three minutes are effective, think of how effective all that mayhem is.

[20:26]

So, when you eliminate the causes, This is Buddha's understanding. Everything arises through causes, and when you eliminate the causes, the events don't happen. But it's hard to eliminate the causes, because people depend on those causes for their livelihood. People depend on advertising for their livelihood. They depend on armaments for their livelihood. The armament industry is so big and so many people depend on it that it's impossible to reduce it. And so we have to keep creating more wars in order to justify our armament buildup.

[21:34]

So anyway, it's a vicious cycle. And then there is just the vulnerable attitude of the kids, the susceptibility of the kids. So who do you blame? That's a big koan. Who do you blame? And why are we surprised when this happens? If you're surprised, you're naive. Anyway, do you have any questions? Yeah, that's the question.

[22:49]

What is our responsibility? I was talking to somebody about that. I think responsibility is things will not change unless people take personal responsibility. Because, see, what we want to do is change everybody else. We want to change society, you know, and change the way everybody, you guys, do things. But you can't change people. I mean, I don't say you can't change people, I take that back. You can influence people. You can't change people, but you can influence them.

[23:51]

But the change has to come, or the influence, the change has to be within each person. We try to change people and they won't change, so then we start hitting them. We want people to do what we want, so we start hitting them, and it ends up in war. We can blame the government, but we are the government, right? We are the government. But everybody's very busy. We're all so busy, so it's easy to control us. If we weren't so busy, it wouldn't be so easy to control us. But the two major political parties in America, one has been very unified, and their main

[25:04]

maybe their main object in life is to be political and the other one is made up of people who are more individualistic and liberal and so forth and so they're not so strong as a group and are easier to control. And that's unfortunate because there's not enough time to address all these events, to address all this stuff. It's very difficult. So we get, it just goes on and we watch and we do a little bit, you know, maybe we protest, maybe we vote in a certain way, maybe we write a letter to the editor or whatever.

[26:16]

But you just watch these events go by. And it's really hard to know what to do. And you support certain organizations that make an effort to do something. I think it's really important to support those organizations. That helps you to, your voice can be heard through that bigger voice. Well, I think that there's personal optimism and general optimism.

[27:31]

General optimism or pessimism is, or general outlook is that tragedies will continue to happen. and that the spiral goes up and the spiral comes down and that's inevitable. What's up never stays up and what's down never stays down. So in the objective view we're in a certain place in the spiral or in the cycle and one part of the society is spiraling down and makes us very pessimistic about how things will turn out and another spiral is going up and you can see that there's actually some

[28:48]

optimistic outlook for things. So this happens, these are happening at the same time. It's spiraling up and spiraling down, and so when you look at it spiraling down, you say, God, how will that ever turn out? But when you see that there are things that are happening that make you optimistic, then you feel okay. So you have to be able to see both sides And the personal optimism is that as long as you are doing something that you feel is right, you can feel optimistic because things will always be destroyed. Destruction is part of creation. Yes. They seem to be based more on spirituality.

[30:05]

Well, I think we're making an effort. I think we always have to keep it in mind, like how can we do that? And as long as you keep in mind how can we do that and work with that, then that's happening. Paul? Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

[32:34]

We're all good guys and we're all bad guys. Even when you're playing Cowboys and Indians, sometimes you're the Indian. near the good guy against the bad white man. And sometimes you're the cowboy and you're defending yourself against the Indian and you play both sides and it's all equal. I think both sides were presented as, it went back and forth. I really think that these Goths and Marilyn Manson people, these kids, they are the good guys. And they see how effed up everything is. And they're hurting.

[33:37]

I have a friend who told me, she thought, well, I can see one good thing coming out of this tragedy. Maybe the next jock won't be so quick to kick around the next geek outcast. And this is like 20 years later for her, after high school. She's still, she's like, hmm, yeah. And that's something. Yeah. But it's an interesting point. people get insulted and pushed around. There was an interesting cartoon in the Chronicle a few days ago, I don't know if you remember this, but when I was a kid, what was that guy's name, who was the bodybuilder, the original bodybuilder

[34:48]

Charles Atlas. And Charles Atlas, you know, was big, and then there was the skinny guy, right? And so the big muscle man would come up and ridicule the skinny little guy in front of his girlfriend on the beach. And so the little guy would say, I'm going to take the Charles Atlas course, and he'd build himself up and build up all his body and these big, bulgy muscles. Then he'd go on and stand up to the, you know, bully, right? But in the cartoon, the end is the little guy goes and gets a machine gun and mows down the bully, right?

[36:00]

This is present day retaliation. So escalation, you know, how do you, we don't want people to bully us, right? And maybe they won't, you know, but they will. Unfortunately, it keeps going on. And how do you deal with that? How do you deal with it? That's really what our problem is, is how to deal with being bullied, how to deal with aggression, without creating more. that has no obvious purpose, that has no acquisitive purpose, and that's a model that we can carry into our lives and into our relations with others.

[37:21]

But I also think that part of the practice to me is being extremely aware of how I am creating evil, and how by allowing things to happen. You know, at San Quentin the other night, there was, where a bunch of us were sitting, there was a big banner that said, Not In My Name. Now, on the one hand, that's like pushing away something, but there's a truth there, you know, that to the extent that we don't do a lot of things, including coming here and doing something that has no purpose, we allow things to happen in our name.

[38:24]

And I also think the extent to which we are not willing, to the extent to which we don't really examine the myths that condition our society, we allow, and Cowboys and Indians is one of them, Cowboys and Indians, white, black, good, bad, you know, we allow these myths to grow up in our midst that are that create great suffering for ourselves, and that we then replicate. And to the extent that we don't look at those myths, then they're visited, you know, if you want to look at, it's like, if you want to look at the children, look at the parents, and if you want to look at the parents, if you want to understand about the parents, look at the children. And so these things, the extent to which our life is unexamined,

[39:28]

that's not taking responsibility, to the extent to which we're too busy. What are we busy doing? You know, mostly we're busy making money, you know, which we have to have to survive. We're busy participating in a whole social and economic system that is about I remember when I was a child, there was a snake that was staying under a large stone that I saw when I went home from school almost every day. And I decided that I wanted to catch the snake at one point.

[40:32]

ended up one day turning over this large stone to root this little snake out. And something hit the snake and crushed a part of its body until it was extremely wounded. But I did capture it. That snake took and hooked its neck around and bit its own self in the neck and tried to kill itself. because it was so, I assume that, it was so deeply wounded, gravely wounded, that what was the point for it and its life? And then it wanted to take its own life. And I had always heard that animals were not suicidal, but I knew that I had seen that as a child, and so it kind of just leaked into this conversation in my thought at this time. to just point to the pain of those children and the stifling, suffocating way that this system can get going sometimes that can make the child feel that stifle that they just are going to just lash like that.

[41:51]

Another problem that I've seen also is I have seen learning situations operate where there's a teacher there, and there are students there, and the teacher is looking this way, and the student is looking that way, but they're interacting with each other verbally, but they never really engage. And I think that there are a lot of people in the world at this time that are operating like that, and they're like, they're really not engaging, they're not, in the black culture, it's like, can you feel me? Is an expression, do you feel me? You know, not, do you hear what I'm saying? Can you feel me? Can you, you know, and gestures that indicate, are we establishing something, some rhythm between us here? And I think that some little fragments or elements of the culture just get bloodless you know that they're just off there so far and mothers don't bless their children with that proximity of their kindness and their eye and their rapport and they're giving things and they're exchanging matter and material and it really gets hyped up to be all about that but oh it's just anguish you know like in that and I think that if we just

[43:12]

see each other, you know, and just bless each other with the kindness of our open rapport that that just goes farther than we could, you know, ever hope or know that it would go, that it would just go to put some organic flow back into a life that's become so you know dismally right of loving and knowing. live by using that word?

[44:18]

Blame also, we tend to stop short. Blame tends to stop short and not go any further. When we attach And I think it would be very helpful if instead of just focusing on one aspect of a cause, that without ignoring that aspect of the cause or that one cause, that we look at all the other causes, all the small and all the contributing causes for an event, to see what really happened or how something actually came about. And one example is the death penalty.

[45:24]

We tend to stop at that cause, you killed so-and-so, but we tend to disregard to a great extent all the contributing causes that made this event happen. And if everybody actually made an effort to look at all the contributing causes of what makes things happen, people would wake up to what's actually going on in the world and taking a bigger view for how things happen. And I think that would help people to understand. If we don't understand we tend to put forth our emotional response before our understanding.

[46:28]

Our emotional response becomes primary instead of our understanding. And, you know, reasonably so. because we're emotional beings but we're also understanding beings and understanding should come first even though emotion is so strong. So we tend to go for the emotional response but really to try to understand how things happen and why they happen and to put ourselves That's, I think, the most important thing we can do. Well, I don't want to sound nightly, but, you know, I think everything is escalating.

[47:32]

Everything is. And the speakers were encouraging people to, if you want to go meditate, encouraging others or influencing others. And I think there's more people aware and influencing others. That's not naive. It's the law of physics. For every action, there's an equal opposite reaction. It's the only thing I remember from... except the Bonelli theory of flight. Aerodynamics. Yes. And here we are, spending six, eight, ten billion dollars solving a huge problem.

[50:57]

And I just think these two events are connected. Well, we teach violence. The pressures are so great. I think that Clinton doesn't really want to do this. In his heart, he doesn't want to do this. But the pressures are so great that he's just carried along with it. That's the problem. Blake? Robert? Okay, one more.

[54:15]

Just a thought about responsibility that came up while you were speaking. Rishi, we talked about no gaps, no. Zen practice, my daily practice, we be responsive. And one thing I remember the name of the series. Goosebumps. Goosebumps. They're all kind of creepy, you know. And somehow there's this hunger. to be a part of a village, so to speak, for these children who so often are not finding out and moved a lot, are not near their grandmas, are not getting the kind of face-to-face, eye-to-eye nurturing that we all need so much in order to do so well.

[55:41]

It's just to take some of my time Well, I think that if we keep thinking, how can we deal with it, that we can deal with it. It's when you stop dealing with it, or think you can't, that it's a problem. things are not fixed. I think the optimism in life is that things are not fixed. Even though they go downhill and uphill, they are not fixed. And we always have the possibility of turning things around. And that's what creates optimism. Barbara's the last one.

[56:42]

How can you raise a child and not touch a child? Well, you can touch your own child. I'm saying even at the school, you know, a lot of times, you know, children need to be tempoed physically by adults, a hand on their shoulder, or to be under your arm, or to have a little hug, or something like that. It could, by the infractions of a very few, ban that totally. I heard that they had made trench coats illegal in Colorado. to circumvent it. Well, it's not that, although trench coats are illegal, since they can't make aggression illegal, they have to say trench coats are illegal. It's a kind of symbol, right? They'll come back. Trench coats will come back.

[57:51]

It's all violence.

[57:54]

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