I think you have turned all the way up. It is now. Okay. Good morning. Good morning. Well, I have a number of things I'm going to talk about today. Waking up. As you know, the world, the first world, has been living in a dream for many years. We've all been living in a dream for many years called economic security, which is just a dream. because it has not been based on anything real.

[01:30]

And so we find ourselves free-falling, as the term goes. And where do we land? So the purpose of, the goal of Buddhism, of Zen, is to wake up. If someone asks you, what is the purpose of your practice? It's to wake up. Wake up to what? The third ancestor says, just be awake. So just be awake means to realize what is dream and what is awake. Sometimes when we're dreaming we think we're awake, and sometimes when we think we're awake we're really dreaming.

[02:41]

So we have developed a way of life which is based on a standard of living, what we call, we draw a line and say, this is the standard of living. And then every year, the bar gets higher, and then it gets higher and higher, and then we have to jump over this bar. So everybody's jumping over this bar to reach the standard of living. and the way the economy, the eco-money works. Eco, I'm trying to discern what that word means, just trying to figure it out. Eco is like eco, eco-logy, the way things work together. And economy is the way goods and money and property and all those things work together to create a harmony.

[03:59]

So, this is the dream world. How do we make that work for everybody, or how do I make it work for myself? because we all want a certain kind of freedom in our societies based on personal freedom, which sounds good. That's a dream. It's like the dream of happiness, the pursuit of happiness, the dream of the pursuit of happiness, floppiness. But in order to have freedom, the problem with freedom is that it doesn't work unless you have restriction. So freedom has to be balanced with restriction, otherwise it goes crazy. So because we have developed this dream of freedom to do whatever we want, we've been

[05:11]

pushing away restriction. So, this has led, of course, to the bubble. And bubble is a kind of dream. In the Diamond Sutra it says, at the end of the Diamond Sutra it says, life is like a bubble, or what we think of as our life is just like a bubble. So we keep pumping up the bubble, which is our dream, dream life, like a balloon. And then pretty soon, poof, no, all fall down. So what do we do about that? Good question. Nobody knows what to do about it. Unless, um, you are always making an effort to be awake.

[06:17]

If you've always been making an effort to be awake, you know how to adjust, because you're always adjusting. But if you depend on the bubble, when it breaks, then you lose everything. So what do we have, and what do we lose? This is the next question. Well, before that question, what is wealth and what is poverty? That's also comparative. What is wealth and what is poverty? If we think that having is wealth and that not having is poverty, that's just another delusion. Because the wealthy could be the one who we think is in poverty, And the one who is in poverty may be the one who is wealthy. So, my experience is that the wealthiest people suffer the most because there's never enough.

[07:28]

There's never enough. And so, trying to satisfy this appetite is never ending. So, this is the cause of suffering. And because of this appetite for wealth, everybody's suffering. The cause of our suffering, major cause of our suffering, is this desire for wealth. I mean, it's just Buddhist understanding, second noble truth. So, like a Buddhist monk, for a Buddhist monk, poverty is the desirable place to be. It's called spiritual poverty, which doesn't mean ... It's a kind of funny play on words, actually. But it means, what do we really depend on?

[08:31]

What is really satisfying in our life? How do we satisfy our life? So we've chosen, of course, material wealth as satisfaction, as the goal of satisfaction, but it doesn't work. It never works, because as soon as we have so much, we lose it. That's the cycle. Winning and losing is the gamble and the cycle. If you go to Las Vegas, you win some, but you also lose it. It's very rare that you get to keep your winnings if they amount to anything. So you're given just enough. The odds are that if you play the machine enough, you will start winning. And then that keeps you playing some more. And then you start losing. And then you keep playing some more so you can start winning again.

[09:32]

So the cycle just keeps going on and on. Pretty soon you wear yourself out. So where do we land? And what is our real goal? What is the purpose of our existence? These are all connected to this problem. So what is best, having or not having? We're conditioned to have. But when we wake up, we realize that what we have can be a big burden. We're hauling all this stuff around, two or three TVs, four or five cars. That's an exaggeration for some. But oh, I have to have that. And so we're coerced into having. The problem is if we don't do that, then the economy falls apart.

[10:34]

So, we keep inventing new ways to keep the economy going by coercing us to buy more and more, go shopping. Well, but if I keep doing that, I have to keep making more money in order to go shopping, to have more stuff. And it just goes on and on, and the standard of living goes higher and higher, because I have to have this, and I have to have that, and I have to have this, and the bar keeps going up and up and up. And then in other countries, people are looking at us and saying, wow, look at that. And then they want it too. And so we destroy all these wonderful cultures. that have their own independent ecosystems, economies, that we just run over them. We get their oil, we pollute all their streams, and we buy their water.

[11:46]

I mean, we take their water, and they can't drink it. That's one of the biggest thefts in the world right now, is stealing water. Coca-Cola goes in and they, to any country south of the border, and they claim the water, and as they're right, and the indigenous people just have a trickle. That's enormous. The bottled water is, we're coerced into drinking bottled water. All we have to do is turn on the tap. Of course, there's not much there now, but ordinarily, you turn on the tap and the water comes out, and we can drink it. Why do we have to buy bottled water? Because it's sold to us as pure. But tap water is just as pure.

[12:46]

As a matter of fact, the water that goes into those bottles is tap water. And we just buy it. How stupid we are. And then we throw the plastic bottles away. We're killing ourselves with materialism. choking ourselves off with materialism and killing the earth. So is it better to have or not have? Not having, how can we find satisfaction without having so much? So we become dependent on the need to have and we sell ourselves. So in the old days, a country would conquer, a society would conquer another society and they would enslave all the people and put them in chains, you know, to do their work for them.

[13:57]

And now slavery is voluntary. We have psychological slavery. We dream that we're affluent, but the actuality is that we're chained to our dream. And then we wake up, we find that we're chained to the dream. So this is modern slavery. And we have agents, there are agents who go into another country a small country that's not very wealthy, and sell a bill of goods to that country that building roads, building cities, we're gonna do all this work for you, all you have to do is, and they inflate the price.

[15:00]

So the World Bank gives these people inflated money And then the work sometimes gets done, but usually not, and then they have all this debt that they have to pay back, and that's how we own the countries, because they're indentured to us through that coercion and that trickery, and they don't even realize it. Some do, some don't. There's a book you can read called The Life of a Economic Hitman. Yes. Told you the story. So, we keep building more and more dependencies.

[16:05]

and we become more and more enslaved. So, you know, sometimes we complain that our lives are too busy. Our lives are becoming busier and busier because there's more information. and we have to know all these things. We have to communicate, as the world gets smaller, we have to communicate with more and more people, and we have to have more machines to do that. I swore that I would never use a computer. But I succumbed, you know, and it's very convenient. And it eliminates a lot of mailing and stuff like that. And it's very convenient, you can talk to people, but the more people you talk to, the more people you have to talk to.

[17:10]

And the more messages you send, the more messages you receive. And then you find yourself dealing with a computer all the time. And then there are all these people looking into all these computers, all the time. We thought that television was slavery. It is. It's looking at this thing all the time. So, information has become really important. That's because we're brain-oriented. So, we keep developing our brains and people keep enormous amounts of information in their brains, which is useful, but it's also So, it's easy to become dominated by our needs.

[18:13]

And then, time becomes a precious factor, because we never have enough time to do everything that we want to do, or everything that we think we should do, or everything we think we have to do. and then we start taking tranquilizers to keep us calm. I remember back in 1969, when we first started Pasahara, Well, Paso Haro, we started 1967, but it was very ... 1969, we had the winter practice period, we have two a year, three months practice period, and we weren't prepared because we didn't know what we were doing exactly, we were just starting out.

[19:20]

And it snowed that winter. I probably told you this before, it snowed five feet of snow, not exactly in Tazar, but on the road, on the surroundings of the mountains. And we couldn't get in, we couldn't get out. And we only had brown rice and wheat berries and a few other little things. So we were kind of reduced to a very subsistence kind of living. So we had some smart people, and our head gardener said, well, we can go into the flats and collect wild vegetables. So every day you would go out and collect wild vegetables, which you don't ordinarily pay any attention to at all.

[20:26]

They're just dusty by the side of the road, you know. But he knew what things to eat. So every day we'd harvest them and we'd have salads and so forth with these wild vegetables. And so we kind of learned how to subsist on this very limited kind of diet, and without coming or going, nothing was coming in. And that was the most vital kind of life that I've experienced. Because every day, you know, we had to look for our subsistence, we had to think about it and use what was available instead of just going to the market and getting what we take all this stuff for granted. What do you want? Oh, I'll go to the market. We live in the cornucopia of the world, called the Berkeley Bowl, and so forth.

[21:30]

Anything we want, we can buy. It's just amazing. It's great, but it also is dangerous. It's very dangerous for us. And so it keeps us in the dream. Because we have so much prosperity, it keeps us in the dream. My favorite meals, although I can eat whatever I want, my favorite meals are Oreoki meals, Nisendo. I pay attention to what I'm eating and it's very simple and satisfying. Because it's so convenient to eat out and to eat TV dinners and so forth, a lot of people don't even cook anymore. Just throw it in the microwave or something. So cooking, for a lot of people, has become a lost art. But it's by doing this kind of activity, doing this simple activity, growing your own food, eating simple things, cooking, you can exist basically on beans, rice, and potatoes, things like that, you know?

[22:46]

and also creates variety. So you have the enjoyment of creating variety out of simple things. So reducing our life to a much more simple way, so people are saying, well, you know, we're losing our jobs, we don't have as much money, the value of money is going down, my retirement is gone, blah, blah, blah, you know. Those are important things for people, and there's a lot of suffering going on. So how do we deal with that? The big question, how do we deal with that? Like, no longer working and food is getting more expensive, really. Money's going down and food is becoming more expensive. Oil, that's another question. It's very interesting. As soon as the gas started going down, people start buying SUVs again, as if everything's okay now, folks. it's really hard for us to adjust to life.

[23:56]

So returning to our fundamentals is really important. And as Buddhist practice, I think it's really important. It's a way of practicing, practicing how you, conservation, real conservation is, I think that's our practice. especially right now, conservation of energy, conservation of goods and raw materials and learning how to deal with all that. Of course, we're living in California and Berkeley and so forth, so we all know this, right? I'm speaking to the converted, but still. So then, you know, In 1995, I was at Tassajara leading practice period, and there was a lot of rain that year.

[25:00]

And we had nine landslides on the road, the 14-mile dirt road, and nobody could go in and come out. And I was so happy because we were going to start a program of conservation. eating less and eating more thoughtfully and so forth. And one day, just after thinking about that, somebody came in and said, the bulldozer is at the gate. I was so disappointed. It was awful. I had to go back to affluence again. So, then there's the idea of security. What is security? There's personal security, and then there's national security.

[26:04]

National security is little understood. People think that national security means drawing a barrier and having guns, you know, a castle where you have guns out of the portals and people are going to shoot arrows at you, you know, and you have to protect yourself and then you have to preempt what people are thinking. That's the dirtiest thing I ever heard of. We think that they might want to attack us, so let's attack them. That's the excuse for starting a Yeah, but we all know that. But what is security? How do we make security? We think that by beating people and making them afraid of us, that that will make us secure, which is totally the opposite of what security is. Security is making friends with people.

[27:07]

If you make friends with people, you're secure. If you have enemies, if you make enemies, you're insecure. I mean, duh. So it's so frustrating, so frustrating, you know. But anyway, it's a joke, but it's a terrible joke that brings a lot of ruin to everybody. So the question is, oh yeah, before I just finish, I'll finish with the parable that I always read to the kids about the sun and the wind.

[28:10]

Aesop's fable, one of my favorite Aesop's fables. is the sun and the wind were saying, we're looking down on this field, and there was a shepherd with his flock, and they were joking with each other, and one of them said to the other, you know, let's see who can make the shepherd take off his coat. And I think it was the wind that said that, and the sun said, okay, you go first. So the wind went, and the more it blew, the more the shepherd tried to keep his coat on. couldn't close the coat off because the shepherd was trying to keep it on. So then the sun came, and the sun came out, so to speak, as we say, and warmed up the space, and the shepherd took off his coat.

[29:22]

He said, phew, it's getting warm around here. So if you want to keep enemies, keep blowing, and if you want to make friends, you warm them up. So, we just have the wrong tactics, because it's more profitable to have enemies than to have friends. That's the problem. It's more profitable to have enemies than to have friends, more profitable for some people. So, you know, We think, or we thought, and maybe we still think so, that our president is going to be like the sun rather than the wind, because we've been experiencing the wind for a long time. Now we think the sun is out. So maybe it's a hard row, it's a hard row to hoe, but we should keep hoping that that will happen.

[30:28]

So do you have any questions? Go ahead. Thank you for your talk. As far as our economy goes, I've often heard kind of a paradigm that that is a symbol of our wealth and that is something that we Why do we need to have growth? Why can't we just grow what we need? And why is growth so important? It's an assumption that I think is faulty, but yet it continues. Well, yes, the momentum of it is so strong that it's hard to turn around. Remember Schumacher said, small is beautiful.

[31:34]

So that got lost somewhere in the last 20 years. People were thinking about that 20 years ago. It's just another dream. Laurie? I sort of feel like, well, I could either ask this question or I could just make a cry of anguish. Part of what you're saying to me is that human nature might actually get us in the end, destroy us in the end. There's a part of what you're saying that would seem to lead to that. Whether we're going to wake up faster than we go to sleep, or dream, or something, or which is going to prevail or something. Well, if you look at the history of the world, of what we know about the history of the world.

[32:37]

It's always going from one side to the other. The balance is always shifting, because everything is moving. If everything was not moving, there would only be one solid state, but it's just inevitable that the balance is always shifting. As soon as it gets too high, too weighty over here, it swings back. Yes, yes, that's right. You know, there's a koan, when the great cataclysm comes, which means the earth will be destroyed, will it be destroyed? That's a great koan, which I won't answer for you. But everything goes in cycles. That's the nature of things, is that everything goes in cycles.

[33:41]

It's called revolution. The revolutionaries take over, and then they're the bad guys. And then the good guys come and take over, and then the revolution, and they're the bad guys. We're all good and bad. If we were all one way, that would be one thing, but we're all good and we're all bad. and good and bad are relative. And within our society, there's good stuff and there's bad stuff, but the problem is the balance. It's really how things get balanced. You were talking about socialism. Well, as soon as you say socialism, everybody goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not socialism, it's how we create a really social society that includes everybody. We should have socialized medicine.

[34:45]

I mean, that's stupid to not have that. Everybody, if we really had concern for each other, we would do that. But we don't. So selfishness is on one side and selflessness is on the other side. And they're always balancing each other. So, you know, no socialism doesn't work, but social values work. And so selfishness has to be balanced with selflessness. And we never find that, it's always teetering, it's always, you know. And then we find out, how do we, this comes down to how do we live our own life, is where it comes down to. And given our surroundings, and do what we will to keep. Is that Naomi? Yes, and this is an article. treatment center in New York called Havens, where people who were 40 million millionaires and reduced to 20 million millionaires who were being diagnosed with illusions of poverty.

[36:02]

And my other thought, I thought a lot about the state system, but a friend of mine who is a Buddhist and a very knowledgeable economist told me that one of the reasons And he said, it's jubilee. I said, well, what is jubilee? He said, jubilee is when all deaths are erased, and you start over. And I thought a lot about that for some reason, thinking what a wonderful idea it would be. I mean, it's totally probably a joke, but this radical notion. Yes, this radical notion is called Buddhist practice. It's like giving up every moment, it's like letting go every moment, not holding on to anything, that's the goal of practice.

[37:10]

That's the true goal of practice, letting go every moment so you're not caught by anything, by yourself. And then you wake up to each moment fresh. You let go of this, and you wake up fresh on each moment, so you're present on each moment, and that's how you control time, instead of time controlling you. Nancy? If there is an ultimate economic collapse, then all debts will be... Forgiven? Yeah. Level playing. Well, you know, there has to be a lot of forgiveness anyway, whether it's monetary or otherwise, in order for things to work. There has to be a lot of forgiveness all the way around in order to start over.

[38:21]

But, you can do that personally, moment by moment. That's our practice, moment by moment, to forgive and let go. I mean, if that's necessary, not holding a grudge, not holding on to anything, while engaged with everything. So it's very difficult, simple but difficult, probably the most difficult thing, because it challenges our ego.

[38:56]

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