Transcription
Good evening. Can you all hear me? Can you? Is anybody having difficulty hearing? Great. Wonderful.
Well, it's extraordinary for us to meet in this sanctuary. This is an extraordinary place, and I appreciate the church's willingness to have us be here. This is the uh, 19th of 36 evenings around the country, and uh, for me, what they have become are um, an opportunity for us to hang out in our living room together and look at what is together; see how we're all seeing it.
I mean, I know you, in your mind, you got dressed, and you drove, and you came to a lecture, or to Ramdas, or whatever. Some of you drove a long way. But now imagine you didn't drive at all, and you're just sitting in your living room, comfortable, and I drop by, and I'm a really good storyteller, and you say, "Come on in, let's have tea," and we have a cup of tea, and the lights are soft, and the evening is coming, and we just reflect together.
Because this model of lecture and audience is in our minds; that's what we're defining this as. What I experience myself is is a mouthpiece for us. I say it well; that's my business. I'm a a rent-a-mouth. I mean, I assume I know anything you don't know, and yet you paid to hear me. So it's clear that it's not me you're paying to hear; it's us. It's a resonance in ourselves, so that we sort of all trust the feelings we have together.
Because the fact that you came here to hear somebody as weird as somebody called Ramdas says something about who you are, and I can start with that assumption. It says that you and I are hearing the way things are in a certain way.
Recently, I was um, teaching a course last year at uh, St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City. It was uh, co-sponsored by St. John and SAA, the Open Center, and WBAI in New York. The course was focused around homelessness, and there were two or 300 people, just like us, and all of us had to—it went on for uh, seven sessions over about 14 weeks—all of us had to agree, when we took the course, including me, to participate in some kind of service activity around homelessness: either a shelter or a soup kitchen, or a political action about unfair housing practices. And we each had to keep a diary, and then we had an open microphone, and part of each evening we just shared our diary entries so that we could hear how we are.
There's one woman's uh, moment that has really burned into my being very deeply. She said, "I'm working—I don't remember whether she said a soup kitchen or a shelter, one of those two—she said, 'But that isn't what's in my diary that I want to talk about.' She said, 'Every day for the past year I've left my apartment and I go to the bus stop or to the store in the same direction, and at the corner of my street, most days during the past year, there has been this same man begging.' And she said, 'Sometimes I give him a quarter, and sometimes I don't.' And then she said, 'I'm a little embarrassed to admit it, but I sort of have a budget for him, like $250 a week, and I so I give him a little, and then I don't, and then I—it all evens out.' She said, 'But as a result of this course, I realized that I had never acknowledged his existence.' And she said, 'I asked myself why that was.' She said, 'I saw that I was afraid.' She said, 'I thought, "What am I afraid of?" I'm not afraid he's going to rape me; this is light. I'm not afraid he's going to steal my pocketbook; after all, we've been together for a year.' She said, 'No, I was afraid that if I acknowledged him, he'd end up living in my house with me, because how would I be able to set a boundary? If I open my heart to him, then he's like family. Would I say to my uncle, "Well, I'll give you $250 a week; you stand on the corner?"' She was afraid. Interesting. She was afraid of her own heart. Isn't that a bizarre situation?
'Cause the heart has the quality that it would give away the store when you're in love with somebody. "What can I do for you? You want the car? You want the house? You want me? What do you want? Want my bank account? Take it; take it; I love you." The mind, on the other hand, is saying, "Now wait a minute; you have health insurance to pay." It's such a fascinating dialogue between the mind and the heart, because the mind is the instrument that protects you as a separate entity; the heart is that which connects you to the rest of the universe, not through your thinking mind or your senses, but directly.
And what has happened to us, interestingly enough, is we have gotten out of balance; the mind has taken over, and as a result, we don't experience being fed by our lives, because it's through the heart that we feel the feeding. For that woman to close her heart to that man on the corner, she doesn't escape free in doing that. And in the presence of so much suffering in the world, how do you respond? How do you close your mind in order to have fun or be happy? And can you be happy if you close your heart? I mean, just today, 30 to 40,000 women watched their babies die of starvation. Can you experience the pain of that—of even one of them, let alone 35,000 of them? Is it too unbearable? Is it so unbearable that we just—our mind just shutters on it, and we say, "Too bad," or, "Let me give something," or whatever, to make it go away for a moment? And yet tomorrow, 35,000 more women will watch their babies die needlessly of starvation; needlessly in the sense that there's obviously enough resources in the world to feed those babies. How do you and I deal with this stuff? How do we set boundaries? How do we live our lives so that we're not afraid of opening our hearts?
You see the—you see the pathology that arises, like in nurses and doctors who develop what's called professional warmth; their emotions with their patients are in the service of their intellect, because they don't want to open their heart too much for fear it will hurt, because the patient may die, and then they will grieve; and if they open their heart, they won't have anything left for their families. So they're professional. But when you look at the relationship between two human beings, and you say, "What heals?" What heals is that we are together in love; that our hearts are open with one another; in that space of love, all is possible.
I work with people who are dying of cancer or of AIDS, and my work is interesting. I'm not a priest; I'm not a doctor. I have no right to tell another person how to die their death. I have no moral right to do that; they have to do what they have to do. What I am is an environment for them; my mind and heart are an environment. I just have to be here with you, and then you go through what you need to go through, and I'm just here with you, and you will feel my presence here with you. But the interesting thing is that if you want to come up for air, I'll be here too.
Like you take somebody that is in the final stages of um, severe um, AIDS symptomatology. There's a person who was a child like us, who grew up with dreams and hopes, who's young, who's now facing death, who—who feels stigmatized by a large segment of the society just for existing the way they are, who's got an opportunistic illness that keeps striking in different ways, so that the minute you feel better one way, you get hit another way, and who has to struggle to find enough money to keep the game together until a person dies, because we as a state are not yet compassionate enough.
Now, when I'm with that person, and they're right here in bed, and I'm holding their hand, or rubbing their feet, or massaging their shoulders, or just sitting quietly with them, my human heart, my emotional heart, is breaking, because in the human drama, this person is having a hard round; is suffering deeply psychologically, suffering deeply. But what I watch, what I am privy to be allowed to see, is that often, as all of the defenses dissolve, as the person's sense of somebody starts to disintegrate because they can't control anything anymore—they can't lift their arm by themselves, they can't control their social situation, they can't control their future, even their mind often is starting to move in different directions as it crosses the brain barrier—the virus—so that they're just losing control, and often at that moment, it's like witnessing an egg breaking, and who that person thinks they are dies; they give up. And what you meet in that person is so radiant and so present; it's as if an airplane goes through the clouds and then breaks out into the sunlight. It's just as if this being just came up for air, and you're right there. And if you're too busy being with somebody who's dying of AIDS, you'll miss it.
One nurse said to me—she was in her final stages of cancer—and she said this happened to her, and she said, and she had been making everybody's life miserable with her dying—I mean, with her needs and fears and anger and all that—and then this process happened, and she said, in a very conversational way, "Yes, I know I'm dying of cancer, but look at the beauty of the universe." It was trauma, in this case, that forced this person into an appreciation of a broader context in which human events occur, in which even her own death was just another event instead of my death, and she came up for air; she was right here, and I was right here, and we were together. It was this, "Wow, it's sunny out." And at that moment, she and I are meeting on two levels at once. I am the person sitting with the person dying of cancer or AIDS, as the case may be, and we are also two beings, two awarenesses that are experiencing together the dance of life; the quality of life.
It's interesting that um, that deeper context is something that we understand intuitively, not necessarily intellectually. When I was a professor 30 years ago, I remember I was a social scientist, professor of psychology, and I remember that the word "intuition" was kind of a dirty word; I mean, strong people were rational, weak people intuited. And we were so sexist at the time—God pity us—that we said things like, in our laboratories, we'd say, "Women intuit; men think." Isn't it far out how it's turned out that that the thinking mind and its handmade—in science and technology—have created this situation in the world in which clearly something is required more than the mind. It looks like the mind just keeps digging the hole deeper, doesn't it?
And why you and I come together is because in us there is some change in us that allows us to begin to acknowledge our intuitive heart; our—our wisdom; our wisdom as beings, to listen to the universe in a different way, and to trust our intuitive heart. I had this funny statistic that shows changes in the culture. There is a a poll that shows that in the past 20 or 30 years—20 years, I guess—there's been an increasing curve in the number of widows who report having conversations with their dead husbands. Now, once you have a piece of data—a datum—you interpret it. So I asked myself 20 years ago, "Were dead husbands not speaking to their wives?" I mean, this is just a fact I'm dealing with now; I'm not uh, making this up. Well, I can't see any reason why that would have been the case. There are two other alternatives: one is that the—the husbands were speaking to their wives, but the wives weren't listening; and the third one was that the husbands were speaking to their wives, the wives were listening, but they weren't admitting they were listening. And I'll assume it's the last two. So when I see a cultural shift in which people allow the possibility—in such a materialist society—as people allow the possibility that there is something that transcends materiality, I say, "My goodness, interesting shift in culture."
At different times, in different periods of history, in different cultures, there are moments when it appears as if there is a flowering of a certain quality of intuitive wisdom and compassion in the culture. I know something has certainly happened to me in 30 years; there is a much deeper balance between my intuitive understanding of the universe and my intellectual analysis of it. The woman with the man on the street corner was afraid she'd lose the boundaries because she thought if she opened her heart it would overwhelm her mind. But I don't see why she had to think that. The way I experience it is a deepening; as you quiet down, you hear—you are in a form, and you must honor that, and you are also beyond form, and you must honor that; and the intuitive heart is honored, and the intellect is on it; the intellect is in service of your separateness; the intuitive heart is your connection to all of the rest of it. And to be fully human is to have that beautiful balance of head and heart.
For when Einstein said to Newton—"Ooh, ooh, that must have hurt"—ooh, Einstein said to Newton—I mean, they didn't live at the same time—but Einstein said, "Your physics is right within the boundaries of the reality that is your time-space reality, but whether your laws apply depends on which reality you're in." That's what relativity is about, in its loose form. Relativity says that this physical plane is just one reality, and that there are other realities. And since our senses and our thinking mind connect us to this reality, we have to go into this kind of intuitive place to understand that this is just a relative reality; not only is it relative, but it's changing all the time. And Christ warned us against laying up our treasures where moth and rust doth corrupt.
And what's interesting about this moment in history is that we are in the presence of very accelerated change. I mean, if you liked the 60s, you're going to love the 90s. And the changes are so extraordinary. Did you expect the Berlin Wall not to be here? I mean, didn't that seem like an institution like the mint, or the Pentagon, or the Queen of England, or something? I mean, the changes in world consciousness—from that student standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square—I mean, look at the new role models that are appearing: President Havel of Czechoslovakia, extraordinary being. When he addressed a joint session of Congress, he said, "Without a global revolution in the field of human consciousness, nothing can change for the better." Imagine saying that to Congress, and that—and they all asked him for their—his autograph. And Nelson Mandela, and the Dalai Lama, who won the Nobel Prize this year; Mother Teresa; great set of role models hanging around that are appearing to allow us to consider how we respond to change.
What's happening in Eastern Europe is that after living under very repressive regimes for a long time, these people are examining the issue of what a democracy is about; they are experiments in democracy. We in the United States have always felt we were a leader in the world of democracy, and now these little mirrors all through Eastern Europe are going to mirror for us the concepts of democracy, and we're going to have to examine whether or not a democracy is built only around acknowledging human beings as economic units. Our own democracy is up for reexamination. This can be the healthiest moment for us, or it can be one of the hardest.
It's interesting about just politically—one more minute—that when our Constitution and Declaration of Independence were created, of about the 55 people that worked on it—on each one—almost 50 of them were Freemasons. And Freemasonry was not a social order like the Masons today; it was a—it was a spiritual system; it was a system that acknowledged that our human endeavor must be placed in the context of a larger set of laws, what would be called a spiritual context; and that if that didn't—and it was up to the leaders to represent that link—and if that link wasn't living, the institutions weren't healthy. In fact, on the dollar bill, that pyramid that has the broken space and then the eye in the upper part, that's a a Freemason symbol, and that says that the full pyramid requires that one looks into the higher realms of consciousness in order to bring it together with the Earth plane. So all of those documents, which are maps—like the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence—are really only readable by people who have that kind of orientation towards the world. And as you lose that orientation, as you get too caught in the materiality of life, you no longer can read the maps.
So that one of the major—major sources of our myths—we have two major sources of the myths in this culture: one is the um, the Old Bible, the Old and New Testament, and the other is the Republic, the laws of—of uh, through the Greek and English law and so on. Maybe the fact that there is a new respect for an intuitive wisdom in individuals in a society, and the fact that there are all these governments examining what democracy is, and suddenly "democracy" is the word that uh, President Bush and uh, President Gorbachev can agree upon, and the word "democracy" starts to appear, and then you examine it—it means something about the realization of the full potential of each individual in the society—and you hear that, and intuitively it resonates, and you say, "Yeah, that's right; that's what a social system must be about." But then you look at the economic realities: have you noticed lately there are an awful lot of have-nots for the number of haves in the world? Have you noticed that it's increasing, the discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots; that as the multinationals—as it all works—more and more money is concentrated in fewer and fewer people's hands, and more and more use of resources is concentrated in fewer and fewer people's hands? In our culture and around the world, there are more people—people in poverty—than not in poverty, by far. In neither of the texts that come from the Republic or come through the Bible do either of those approve of any kind of social structure in which there is a large discrepancy between the rich and the poor. So in a way, we've cut ourselves off from our mythic sources in order to live in this world of individualism, progress, modernity, in which the individual—overall—I mean, I hate to share with you, but it is true that one of the mythic figures of this culture is Donald Trump. I mean, you may feel uncomfortable about that, but he is still one of the mythic figures somehow. When I watch that, I suspect it's a little like those tribes where they would take a maiden and honor her for a year and then boil her or stab her, something. It's a—we—we sacrifice people into our myths. I mean, poor Donald Trump. I mean, it's not him; he's just caught in a myth which he thinks is real, and that's suffering; that's suffering. I'll tell you, as that polarization gets greater, the stability gets less and less, because the have-nots aren't waiting indefinitely for the altruistic trickle-down effect that President Reagan promised us.
I had an interesting moment um, as part of the board of SAA. I was in Guatemala. We work in uh, 13 villages up in the mountains of Guatemala. These are villages where—in there was great violence; the Army came in and murdered the men and the boys; the middle-aged men and boys; left the old men and the women and babies. And they did that 'cause in that country—I don't know, 5 or 4% of the population controls 80% of the land—so most people are landless and starving, and they are Mayan Indians, and they're very beautiful beings. So these people are building—rebuilding their village life. But when—when you're with them, and I look into the eyes of these Mayan women who are so—such pure hearts, such beautiful, good people, and they are so rooted to the Earth, and they're so strong in the presence of what they've been through, I can feel the fear; the fear that if they get strong, it will be a threat to the wealthy, and the Army, which represents them, will come in and kill them. So they're afraid the rich are going to come and murder them. And I left Guatemala, and because of my schedule, I flew to Hollywood, and I found myself in Brentwood, which is a very posh suburb near Beverly Hills, and I drove down a street in which there were these huge estates, and every estate had a high wall and a big gate, electronically controlled. There were no people on the streets; just these rows of multi-million dollar homes with walls and gates.
On the front lawn of each one, the security company that patrolled the area had put a sign; a red sign with black lettering. The sign just said two words: Armed Response. And I thought, isn't that extraordinary? I was just in a place where the poor are afraid the rich are going to come in and murder them. Isn't that extraordinary? That's what I call unstable, see?
And the thing is, as we're going to get to ecology as we go from politics and economics—I mean, economics is so far out you can play with that indefinitely—here's a wonderful study to give you pause. Uh, people that make $15,000 say that if they made $50,000 they would realize their dreams. A significant percentage of them do. People that make $50,000 say if they made $100,000 they could realize their dreams. The other half of that statistic is in terms of the question, have you realized your dreams? Of the people that make $15,000, 5% say they have realized their dreams. Of the percent that make $100,000, 6% say they have realized their dreams. Does it seem worth it?
Look at the cocaine use in the middle class in America, and what you see is a symptom. Now I'm not talking about crack in the inner cities; I'm talking about cocaine in the middle class. What you see is a symptom of people who played the game to win at the cultural myths, and they win, and then they don't feel good; they are not content, and they are not happy, and they are not fulfilled, and they therefore yearn for something else. They want more; they want to escape from it. That's a frightening thing about the myths of a culture. Crack use in the inner cities—that's that is the the underclass; that's the people that don't have the opportunities of our democracy. There's no way out; there's a ceiling on the top, and then they escape because it is very painful. And this Society isn't yet ready to recognize that its drug problems are symptoms of a malaise in the heart of the people. So they keep dealing, as we do in most of our medical work, repressing symptoms rather than dealing with causes.
So what we're facing in our world at this moment are political waves that are very, very um, liquid. Liquid. How is the United States going to deal with not having an enemy? I mean, we always have an enemy; it's what draws us together. We were never so closely together as in the Second World War, when we all felt righteous and had an enemy. Vietnam was obviously a little more complicated. Korea. Then the economic aspects intruded a lot more. I mean, is a society that measures its health by the gross national product really healthy? Is that a democracy? Is that what you joined? And as our mind and all of its technological advances keep moving on, we realize how little we anticipated all of the stuff that that would create—just the garbage of it. We don't even know what to do with it. And then we, as a world of humans, made an interesting, say, era or interesting turn of events by thinking we could split the atom and get free everything without any cost. And the bill's just coming due, and the bill is an interesting one.
Speaking of ecology, because while our political system works on two-to-six-year terms, nuclear waste stays deadly toxic for 250,000 years. It's hard to have a political policy about it. Well, what we're going to do is we're digging a hole. We've dug a hole—you've you've paid for it—we've dug a hole two miles long and two miles wide in the in the Carlsbad salt caverns in New Mexico. And all the waste will put in double cans and put it under there, and then the salt will keep growing and compress it all, and it'll all be safe for 250,000 years. Well, our research suggests—have you studied it for 250,000 years? Years? Well, we have these double barrels. 250,000 years is a hundred times longer than recorded human history. That's good research. And when push came to shove, out of the Department of Energy leaked a memo that described that part of New Mexico, which was very poor and and low population; it it described that part of New Mexico as quote, a sacrifice zone, because the Department of Energy already knew there were that the tests had not shown that the salt was leak-proof, but they didn't know what else to do, which didn't sit well with the New Mexicans, as you can imagine.
You and I have been eating into our rainforests; we have been polluting the Earth with fossil fuels. It happens so gradually, you know. There's a—I'll give you a fact that's just seem so appropriate in view of Earth Day. When you drop a frog into boiling water, it jumps out. That's only half of the fact. The other half of the fact is, if you put the bo the frog in cold water and heat it, the frog boils to death. I mean, I go to Los Angeles, where my eyes sting from this yellow ACD stuff that sits in that area—that's Los Angeles—and I look around, and everybody's living there like nothing's happening. Can you believe that? See how gently it happens. Oh well, that's life, until what—what's life? What happened to the quality of life? When I was a child, I used to be able to—we lived on a farm in New Hampshire—and I used to be able to go to the streams nearby and and cup water and drink it. Then I went to India, and people said in India, don't drink the water from the rivers and streams because the cows are tuberculin and they urinate in the streams, and you would get tuberculosis. And so I thought, well, there's India, but in the United States—but now I come back, and I would think twice about drinking water out of a river. I would think twice about it.
Some of the ecological changes that are occurring in the world today have such implications that they are going to change the lifestyle of everybody. I mean, recently I drove down that same street that has the sign, Armed Response, and I wanted to give you a gratifying image. Next to the sign that said Armed Response, or at the curb, were paper bags full of plastic bottles, glass bottles, and newspapers. In the night, they must have opened the gates and come out to play a collective game to reduce the garbage problem and to recycle. Isn't that extraordinary? You see what's required of us is kind of interesting. What is required is, because what happened with our myths of separateness, we pushed away everything we could use everything because our mind takes things as objects we could manipulate—the nature and people and everything—to get ahead so that we would be the top; we would be the most special somebody. And then we rewarded them, and we say, Yay, you made it, good going. But in the process, what we sacrificed was that that feeling of at-homeness in the family, if you will—the family of the immediate family, the family of the community, the family of the species, the family of all species, the family that inhabit the Earth, that live, dwell on the surface of the Earth. We cut ourselves off from that interdependence, if you will, because we were busy with being somebody, a separate entity.
I recall—and I've talked about this in many lectures—um, I recall the point at which my father became old and so feeble and my stepmother was ill that I felt that it was appropriate for me to live in their house, in the basement or base camp there anyway. There was funds for help, but to oversee the whole thing, and I did that for about 10 years till my father died about a year ago. And I remember people saying to me, Isn't that good of you? Isn't that kind of you? Isn't he wonderful, taking care of his father? And I remember realizing that that was being said from a place where people saw that I was sacrificing my independence in order to be part of my family. Can you hear the issue that they were feeling that I—what I experienced was that I went through that one of, Oh my God, I've got to take care of my father, and then I started to do that, and then I started to see what I had cut myself off from, and I started to open it, and Dad and I grew immensely, like uh, corn in the night together through those 10 years. And when he died, there was just such a great peace between us and a love, and I felt so graced to have honored my my form, my life form, my family in that way. I didn't feel—feel like—I felt I had come into a deeper harmony in my being by being part of it.
See, I've gone through these funny stages, because as I was born, I went into to somebody training, just like you did. I mean, your parents thought they were somebody, and they were obviously training you to be somebody—trained me—and I became somebody, and I cultivated it, and I was really somebody, and I had degrees, and I had a lot of literature about my somebody. And then at some point, I realized, as I broke out of that, that I was only within that reality I was somebody, and that was only a certain reality, and that I was really short-shifting myself, 'cause I was much more than that. That somebody was just a personality and a body. I was much more than that. So at that point, what I experienced is I felt trapped in my somebodiness, my ego structures, the structures of the world that I saw as reality, and I wanted to get out of that trap. And because I felt that, I thought I have a problem; I have pathology, 'cause I'm not happy being who I am, 'cause I feel like I'm living in a prison cell. So I went to a therapist who helped me rearrange the furniture in the cell, because the therapist, of course, thinks they're a therapist. And if you're somebody, how can somebody help you become nobody?
I have a wonderful friend who's a very wise being; his name is Wavy Gravy, and he's a clown, and he's on the board of the SAA foundation, and he spends a lot of his time in children's leukemia wards as a clown, just bringing humor into that situation. And for the last two elections, Wavy ran a campaign with a big bus; he ran Nobody for president, and it had great slogans like, Nobody can solve our economic problems. I mean, you can make them up yourself; there are dozens of them. Nobody makes apple pie like Mother, you know. One of his best ones was, Nobody cares [Applause]. And as he pointed out, Nobody received more votes than all the other candidates combined in the last election. So when you begin to realize you aren't who you thought you were, and most of the relationships you're in are these wonderful conspiracies of make-believe—you are who you think you are, if you will, make-believe I am who I think I am—so I decided that I better renounce life, my humanity, in order to get into this freer space. So I pushed against it, and in the course of all the practices I did in many, many traditions, I cultivated qualities of mind and heart that were very beautiful, but I also became—in the pardon the crudity of it—I became a horny celibate. It's like a non-smoker, you know. I haven't smoked in two years, three months, twenty-two days, and fourteen minutes. Yeah, person's going to die of non-smoking, you know. And there was a point that I realized that if I that if I pushed away my humanity, something was amiss; that maybe my humanity wasn't an error; maybe the fact that I took an incarnation wasn't an error; that I was on Earth. One of my friends said to me, You're in school; why don't you try taking the curriculum? Try being human. I'd never thought of that. I was busy becoming holy. And then I began to see the form that you become free through your humanity, not in spite of it, and that there was an art form of being impeccable—impeccable in your humanity. I mean, I am my father's son; he was sick; I take care of him; I am part of the ecosystem, thus da da da da; I am part of a nation-state, thus da da da da. And I realize that in the fulfilling the forms, whichever way I uniquely had to fulfill them—which might be like in politics, it might be voting, writing to Congress people, or sitting on railroad tracks or civil disobedience; I don't know what it might be—whatever it would be, it would be have to be with my heart open. But I saw that if I could fulfill each part of my humanity without the clinging that comes from attraction or aversion, but just do it, that I would be—that's the meaning of becoming free through form, so that you don't feel that form is imprisoning you, because the way you're in it is that you are form and yet you're formless. The statement, I am in the world but not of the world.
So what I've experienced over the past 10 years or so is figuring out or listening or tuning or intuitively feeling my way into that balance between form and formlessness, between my humanity and whatever the transcendent quality of my being is, learning how to balance that in the way I live my life. In 1979, I joined with a group of people, and we each said what we would like to do is to relieve suffering in the world. Now you and I—what's happened interestingly enough is that as as we have had—as our social ecology has been dealt violence by our myths—so that our family structures are having a hard time as well. Many of us enter into what are called family surrogates; we join groups that will give us the sustenance that our family would have given us had we not rejected them in our zeal to be independent. Oh, oh, thank you for that, being—being here. Look at how little that one is. Oo. Now it's interesting because what many people do is they join a family surrogate based on their pathology. I mean, overeaters—now I'm an overeater—I could join a club, and we could come together, and we would feel better because we would realize that we were all stuck in this same boat of overeating, and we'd each give testimonials. But what I chose to do was to see what qualities I wanted to cultivate, and one of the qualities was compassion. And so what I did was I joined a group of other people who we wanted to express compassion. It was an intentional choice to be with this group of people around dealing with suffering, because I saw that I had to learn how to deal with suffering and keep my heart open, because most of us are so frightened of the immensity of suffering, we close our hearts. And I realized that as I started to live in Nepal with the blind who we were working with, in Guatemala with the women whose families had been ripped from them, with AIDS patients, with cancer patients, with homeless, and let them into my heart, my heart was breaking again and again and again and again, and I began to understand the term unbearable compassion—that you just can't bear it; there's just so much of it—and yet you do, and you bear it because you have a deeper context in which you can understand the suffering. You have another context. You may get that context from your religion; you may get it from your philosophy; you get it, but you get it from experiences that are so deep that you understand that there is a broader meaning to life than what is immediately accessible to your senses and your thinking mind. And that context makes suffering bearable. It means that you keep your heart open, and you look at what is in the universe, and your presence—the way you live your life—is not through denial. You live your life replete with grief and joy and hope and hopelessness, and all of the feelings of life are all present in every moment, and in that there is a deep joy, a joy about the awesome way in which manifestation works, and you live with a paradox—the paradox that your deepest intuition gives you a sense of the the wisdom of the universe, of the lawfulness of the universe, including the suffering, and your human heart finds the suffering unbearable, and you do the best you can to to take it away. You live with that paradox. It's perfect and it's horrible. There's nothing to do, and I must do everything I can. That's part of when we stretch ourselves to the fullness of what we are.
So we joined together, but what we found out was interesting. I mean, the first thing you always get to get when you get together to say, Let's relieve suffering, then everybody says, Well, what's the worst kind of—relieve—well, how do you assess which suffering is worst? People sit around saying, Well, I don't want to just deal with a minor suffering; I want to deal with a major suffering. Then you realize suffering is suffering. And if you if somebody is uh in the supermarket and they spill their groceries and they're having trouble and you—turn down and help them—that person was suffering at that moment. Well, one of the women in our organization who was a Swiss physician who had been the head of the World Health Organization Southeast Asia smallpox eradication program—a lot of our members on the board were epidemiologists or doctors who had been part of the smallpox eradication program—she said, I'd like to work with blindness. So we said, Well, I had no brief about blindness; why not? Let's work with blindness. What we found out was that it's easy to do good, but it's hard to do good—well, that in your zeal to solve problems, you often create problems; you're often unwittingly like Typhoid Mary. She was just cooking for everybody. Isn't that horrible thought—thought, you know? I mean, you're facing—when you start to do helping people, you've got to examine very thoughtfully just who's doing it and how you're doing it—that you process of doing it isn't increasing suffering.
There are some obvious ones that we've had to face, for example, in the refugee camps in Mexico that are made up of Guatemalans. Most of them want to go back to Guatemala when conditions are right, because they feel kinship to their villages and so on. And in order to help them survive in Mexico, we help them get strong and build organization and be able to feed their children and get rid of vitamin deficiencies and help them get strong. But in just our doing that, so they can survive from day to day in very harsh conditions in Mexico, we are reducing the likelihood that they can ever go back to Guatemala without getting murdered, because if they get stronger and go back, they will be more of a threat to the government. You hear that? Isn't that an interesting predicament? Or I'll give you another one. In the blindness work, when people get cataracts—which is why they go blind often—the lens inside the cornea goes opaque, and the operation usually is to cut the cornea, reach in with a little suction thing, pull out the lens, which is just floating in the fluid—this which is this opaque thing you can't see through—then sew it up, and then you give a person these big, thick Coke-bottle-like glasses, and they can see sort of. However, along through wonderful technology has come intraocular lenses; that is, little plastic lenses that when you cut it open and take out the lens, you can slip in a little plastic lens, and then sew it up, and then the person has 20/20 vision. That operation costs between $1,500 and $3,000 in the United States; in Nepal it costs about—well, the operation with the Coke-bottle lenses costs now about 25 bucks. And an—the intraocular lenses cost more because they are expensive, and we've got to bring them to Nepal and India. Okay, now this is a little complicated, but there's 100,000—say there's 100,000 people waiting for cataract operations, and they're blind in a country where there aren't many roads, so you're walking over things like this all the time. It's not easy to be blind—no seeing-eye dogs and stuff like that. Now we're doing so many thousands of operations a year. Along comes intraocular lenses. The rich people in the community all can pay for the intraocular lenses; the poor people can't pay for those. So, but most of the doctors still do the Coke-bottle operation, but the doctor sees that if they can do the intraocular lens operation, they can get more money, and they can get better patients, and they can do—and they—and the people that are poor say, We want lenses too. So we say, Okay, why don't we help you build a factory in your country that will make lenses so you can have the lens for six bucks a piece? Seems like a reasonable, good, compassionate thing to do, doesn't it? We'll get the—we're with—all and the structure and the financing and the tools you need to do a quality uh intraocular lens. The predicament.
Is that if we do that, most of the doctors will then go to get retrained to do that operation, which takes longer than the other operation does and takes more equipment? It takes a microscope, on the lens that the doctor uses to do this operation, and it takes some follow-up as well. The result is there will be fewer operations performed in the next 10 years. The result is that there are many people at the low end of the continuum who will live out the rest of their life blind because we built that eye laboratory, that factory. And the ones that will end up blind for the rest of their lives is a category we have researched: the village, uneducated women. They are the ones that are lowest on the totem pole, and they are the ones that will stay blind for the rest of their lives because we built this factory, which reduced the number of lenses, the number of operations, and 10 years from now it’ll all be fine, it’ll all work out. But in 10 years, it won’t, do you see the moral dilemma? Did I present that right? Can you hear it? I can’t hear. Can you hear it? Yeah. But the way in which you do service is even more interesting than that, and that’s why SAA has been such an incredible experience. Because that’s why I did the book a couple of years ago called How Can I Help, with Paul Gorman. Because how you help another human being can, in the very act of doing it, disempower them. You can do service out of your need to be righteous. You can do good to another person and make them feel helpless by the way you do it. Was I, when I was a therapist, I really thought I was a therapist. So when I was sitting in a room with somebody, they were the patient. It reinforced their patient-hood because I was busy being a therapist. Are the Guatemalan women us or them? Are the Nepali blind us or them? Are the Native American who are dealing with alcohol fetal syndrome, the ones that are left after our attempted genocide, are they us or them?
In SAA, we have to keep asking that question. So when we have our board meetings, the Nepali come and the Guatemalans come, and we’re all a family, and we figure out what to do together. See, what you and I are experiencing is that we understand things intuitively that the social institutions of which we are a part do not reflect. Like in my heart of hearts, I know that it is good for human beings to speak as close to truth as they are capable to one another. I just know that, don’t you know that? And yet Oliver North can lie to Congress and say I did it in the best interest. That’s a social institution that no longer represents my heart. I know that. I know that my country’s political position in Central America, it does not represent the compassion in my heart. And I have lived with the dissonance between how I understand the world could be and how it is. And each of us attempts, in the social institution we are part of, to bring those institutions into harmony with our inner being, because there is a yearning for integrity across those domains of the inner with the outer. You and I both know we are part of an ecosystem. We are part of the Earth’s surface. We are part of a social and physical structure, that we are part of nature. We are not just separate from it. We know that in our intuitive heart, but we are so attached to our separateness, we just don’t quite know what to do about what we know, because we’re not living like we know it. Well, it’s just one more plastic paper cup, what difference it make? Well, I’m just driving over to see Darus, what difference it make? We are in a like a massive denial. The Greek Livie once said about the Greek Empire as it was starting to fall apart, he said we can’t stand our vices and we can’t stand the cure. Yeah, right. I think it’s funny, too. Wavy Gravy, my revered wise friend who deals with so much suffering all the time, he said another wise thing, which I find a really great spiritual teaching. He said, “If you don’t have a sense of humor, it just isn’t funny.” The compassionate sense of humor comes out of having a context where you see life within its relative reality, and you can delight in it as the play, as the dance, as the Leela, as the delight, the form, the manifestation of the spirit made for. We realized in Savor that if we were going… what I’ve learned is we had to deal with truth with each other because it was so easy… See what you do when you get together with another group of people, a group… finally, when you really want to awaken, when you want to get free of the melodrama you’ve been feeding so hard, you join with another group of people and you say, “Let’s help each other escape.” So in SA, we say, “Let’s help each other get straight,” so that we don’t get caught in righteousness. We don’t get caught in milking our doing good for the feeling of “I’m doing good,” which makes somebody else the person for whom good is done. If you notice that lurks in most of us, by the way. Righteousness is one of the last ones to go. I mean, notice how hard it is for most of you to accept help from other people, how much more your ego is gratified by giving help. Oh, I, I’m doing so much. But what I appreciate is when I’m working with somebody as they’re dying with AIDS is the gift that that person is giving me, because they have opened and our hearts are meeting, and I am being fed as if I’m drinking at the well, and they are being fed, and we are all just together in this quality of presence together and the deep love, and they are giving me an incredible gift. If I were in my mind just doing good, I would have closed my heart, and then I wouldn’t get fed, and then sooner or later I would burn out. And that’s why people burn out in the presence of suffering, because they close their hearts because they think they can’t keep their heart open. And I’d say to you, you can’t afford not to keep your heart open because you’re starving to death, and your heart will break, absolutely, and it will break again, and it will break again and again and again and again, and it’s okay because you’re stronger than you thought you were, because there is a deeper wisdom, a deeper truth in all of us, a deeper form of our being that isn’t… what with the heart breaks in a situation where things are changing so rapidly politically, economically, ecologically, and social ecology, how do you respond to those situations?
Well, I’ll tell you, if you have laid up your treasures where moth and rust do corrupt, you are frightened. You’re really frightened if you’re identified with your body, with your personality, and with your possessions, and you see all those have knots at the door, and you feel as the United States loses its economic hegemony in the world, and it just becomes part of the family, as all these changes go down, as we have to change our lifestyle because of the implications, ecological implications of the way we live, people for whom their body and the material possessions are who they are are going to feel life-threatening. And when you get threatened like that, interesting things happen to the human personality. You get defensive, you use denial, you get repressive, ultimately you get violent, especially when the changes are so vast that they are inevitable, and you try to push against them. You keep pushing and pushing, but these forces are very great, and if you push hard enough and just resist as hard as you can and get tighter and tighter in your resistance, and that’s what happens to many people when they’re dying. When they’re dying, this vast thing is happening to them, like giving birth, they are going through this incredible transformation, and when they push against it because their model of who they are is “I am my body and I am dying and this is terrible,” and they’re pushing against it, they end up they die anyway, by the way, but they die in a paroxysm of rejection. And there is a large segment of this society that as the myths that we, the dysfunctional cosmology, gives way to a new cosmology in which you and I are part of systems, we are a part of Earth, we are part of families, we are part of structures, and with the individuality that we have been worshipping and nurturing and cultivating, finds its balance back in the harmony of things. And these are big changes in the culture, and as that goes down, there are going to be a lot of people that are going to be frightened, but there will be some that are not, and that’s what you and I are doing together tonight. Because to the extent that you and I have touched something in our beings that gives us a doorway into the bigger context in which we exist, you and I can handle the changes that go on in the physical plane with equanimity, perhaps with curiosity, with creativity, with a gentling quality that allows the processes to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Because the interesting question is, is change seen as the enemy or not? Look at your own life, was change the enemy or not? You imagine the point at puberty when dolls and baseball cards started to lose their power over you, was change the enemy? It seemed like it, and you’d push against it, and then it overwhelms you, and it takes you into new domains. When enough people in a society are starving because their hearts are closed because they’re afraid of the pain of the suffering to open their hearts, the suffering they are part of creating, then the whole system gives way to something else. And that’s a moment in which it’s as if the society rights itself, it corrects a mechanism, it’s a healing quality that comes in at this point in our ecological awareness. Since we don’t even know how to begin to be aware of what we have done ecologically, we are a little like people on the deck of the Titanic reorganizing the deck chairs. I really invite you to have the delight to examine change and to examine how you respond to change, and examine how you grow through change, and examine how to facilitate change. Say you’re going to go from where your primary system was an ego system to your primary system being an ecosystem, let’s say that were going to be the change, how would you do it? See, in primitive tribes, what would happen is you go through a right of passage, an initiation right, you’d be pulled out of the ego system structure, taken off to the mountains, you’d go through some ritual, and then you’d come back and you’d be the new person. Or you can wait to change until there’s enough trauma, because there will be. Don’t worry, the SNL is just the beginning. I mean, we’ve taken all the seven vices and made six of them into virtues thus far. I don’t think we’ve got sloth yet covered. So, rights of passage, trauma forces change, having a bigger context allows change to go easily. That’s part of what we are about here, you and I, is recognizing our intuitive hearts together. Because many of us have been what you’d call closet compassións, especially during President Reagan’s years, compassion wasn’t very much in vogue, and it hurt our hearts. And it’s why President Bush said, “I want a gentler and kinder nation,” and we respond to that two ways. We understand that he was head of the CIA, and we understand all that, yes, and that he’s married to Barbara, all that stuff, and his grandchildren, and he’s a good… and he’s upper class, and all of it, and he’s got a very conservative constituency, and all that stuff, and we say, “Well, do we hear that statement as just the ultimate in hypocrisy, or do we hear it as truth?” And how do we hear it? I would like to help him make it that way. That’s what I’d like to do. I think it’s like, I’d like to take him at his word and then call him on it continually and help him be that person. The person can’t be in that role without wanting to grow into it. I mean, why do you assume people can’t grow? See how we trap each other? Well, he’s always been a… that’s what we do to each other in marriages. “I know who you are, you’ve always been that way.”
Can we have a board meeting at the SA F Foundation? We spend the first two days just being quiet and meditating, and then circle sharing, like a gestalt group encounter. Will we go around the circle until we’re straight with each other so that we can work out of truth? It’s hard, it’s painful, it’s embarrassing, it’s everything. It’s not like the usual Board of Trustees works. It’s an experiment in forming a social institution that represents the truth of our inner hearts, and that involves our overhead and how we use our money and how we publicly describe it and how we honor the failings we have and when we make mistakes, how we do each part of it as impeccably as we know how. Twelve years I’m in that experiment, and it seems to me that it’s one of the parts of my life that is staying living truth. And that’s hard to say about social institutions; their half-life is very brief. They start out so living, and then when they get successful, particularly, they start to get encrusted. You no longer can have the truth of the moment because we’ve got something to protect. To keep an institution, like a marriage or any social organization, living truth, to have it represent your leading edge of growth, the part where you are maturing, where you’re opening, where you’re awakening, where you’re escaping, where you’re… whatever that process is… I yearn to be in love with the universe. I really do yearn, and it is scary. It’s scary because it has the dealing with the suffering and it has the dealing with the pleasure, and I have to honor all of it. And that’s the way… I’ll tell you just one little story, and then we’re going to take an intermission. When my father died, I then could dissolve the household that had been there to support him, and then I was free to move to Bay Area somewhere else. And a group of us in SA said, “Let’s live more closely together so we can work from a deeper part of our beings in doing service.” So the vote was that we would move to California, so I moved to California. And somebody, one of the board members has a family, and he bought a house, and it had a carriage house on it, and he called me, he said, “Would you like to rent it?” I said, “I’d love to.” So I suddenly found myself about to live in a carriage house in Marin. Those of you that don’t know Marin, it is a gentle, liberal, easy lifestyle. It’s kind of the land of… I don’t know… I don’t want to put it down; it’s not the land of the Lotus Eaters exactly, but it’s… it’s very sweet living. And um, at the same time when I got this place, I was teaching this course in homelessness in New York for 3 months. So when I went out to look at the place, I saw that it was really lovely; the deer went by outside, and it was beautiful, it was in the woods, it was just so sweet. But it needed some things; it needed some of the windows leaked, and I said, “Well, we’ll fix those.” Then I really felt it needed a fireplace, and I also felt it needed a hot tub. Now in Oklahoma City you don’t maybe feel that need for a hot tub, but in Marin it’s almost like a toilet. I mean, it’s just… see Marin has drought, and so you got to keep using the same water over and over again, so that’s called a hot tub instead of a bathtub. So I found a hot tub, I friend from a friend, wholesale for $3,200. So there I was, teaching a course on homelessness in New York with homeless people in it, and at the same moment I was installing this hot tub for $3,200 in my house in Marin. The question was, was I going to tell the people in the homelessness course? See the problem? And then I realized I couldn’t afford not to. See, if I didn’t tell them… it was like, “Can’t tell them,” but if you’re us, I got to… you know… like let’s deal with the truth of it. So I said, “Hey everybody, I got to let you know, while I’m busy helping with sleeping bags and going on political actions about homelessness and you know all that, at the moment I’m just putting in a $3,200 hot tub in my house in California.” And they handled it in their own way. They said, “Sounds therapeutic,” and I let them have it. I mean, if they want to do it that way, that’s fun. And they all nodded, ‘cause they like me. For me not to have the hot tub, probably I would have spent the rest of my life being somebody without a hot tub, who knows what cost. Now I’m not saying everybody needs a hot tub to get free. See, all I’m saying is I have to hear the integrity of my being and all the different parts of who I am and my background and my needs and all of it, and the awakening intuition, and then I’ve got to do what I do and stand and say, “Yes, this is what I am.” And each of us has a unique way we have to hear that and respond, and I can’t tell you how to respond, and you can’t tell me. It’s easy to hide in doing good to escape from your fear of pleasure because you’re afraid it’ll get you. And the hot tub represents pleasure to me, but I really want to be free, and I don’t want to be afraid of suffering, and I don’t want to be afraid of pleasure. I want to be able to honor my humanity and be alive and be full and be present and be a being of compassion and cultivate the quality of spaciousness behind all the forms so that I’m quiet in the presence of all of it. I speak at so many benefits for peace groups, and I’m amazed at how angry they are. How can that be? We’ve got to have peace. Does that sound good? Doesn’t sound quite right in my heart. Part of the way we are able to change: rights of passage, trauma, the reducing the dissonance between the inner and the outer, new metaphors that exist and paradigms in the culture that we just kind of fall into that change who we are in a moment. I mean, suddenly it’s all okay to be different, like the widows talking to their dead husbands, that kind of thing. Part of it is our ability to grieve because ways of life that we have invested in die, and they give way to new ways of being in the world. And it’s extraordinary how unless you can grieve for what you have lost, it’s hard to go on to what is next. And I’m not just talking about grieving of the loss of a loved one, I’m talking about grieving of the loss of dreams, the whole dream that underlay the myths of this culture that got solidified in the industrial revolution and in the whole idea of… that was an extraordinary myth, and it is dying. And when it dies, there has to be grieving for it, the misjudgments about how technology would solve everything and that our minds would always win, and the having to face the fact that we have done very great violence to the Earth on which we live. That recognition, to deal with that, you must grieve. And that’s as much part of being able to change as seeing where you’re going next. It’s working through what you’re just leaving. I’m working on a book, which I’m putting off for a while till I’m older. It’s called The Wisdom of Aging, because it’s so extraordinary how we deal with aging. I mean, we always… as you get older you begin to think it’s an error, isn’t that far out? I mean, the Porcelana ads, you know, “I have these aging spots,” you know, they call these aging spots… I call them ugly, says the Porcelana ad. Is that extraordinary? They call them ugly, I call them aging spots. Me. It’s interesting, as you get older you get deaf, you get blind, you can’t move around as much. It’s the absolute optimum conditions for meditating. It’s not the best time for shuffleboard, and yet there we are, because we didn’t grieve for the loss of youth. And yet that which would allow us to open to the depth and beauty of the aging process… all of it, each to its season. I don’t know what you do. What I do in my life is I cultivate a quiet mind so I can hear more clearly, more deeply, what is at every level: physical, psychological, spiritual, all of it. And then I practice opening.
My heart goes out as deeply as I can to everybody in each situation. I practice substituting appreciation for judgment; that's a good one. You know, when I go out in the woods, I look at Elms and Oaks and Pines. I don't sit around saying that a Pine should be an Oak. I appreciate them—gnarled ones, straight ones. But the minute I'm dealing with humans, it's really funny. You want to be more like, you know, till you finally appreciate, appreciate you. Appreciate the courage and the beauty of each human soul as it takes birth and it has its work to do and how it's doing it. And you feel such love for your fellow being, and that's part of the environment you offer to the human beings around you.
Mahatma Gandhi was on a train, and people rushed up. They said, "Mahatma, give us a message to take back to our people." And he wrote in a bag, "My life is my message." How I live my life—how I am in the supermarket, how I am at the Filling Station, how I am with the groups I'm in, who I hang out with, why I do it—that's the statement of what I am; that's what I'm offering you. I'm not offering you what I say; I'm offering you what I am. So you—what I do is I quiet my mind, I open my heart, I honor all of the social forms I'm part of as best I can, as cleanly as I can, as much listening to the deeper wisdom as I can, and I keep my sense of humor on the table.
At our board meetings in SAA, we have these Groucho Marx glasses, and if anybody uses the word "serious," we have to put them on, so we don't take ourselves too seriously. Such a fine art to deal with suffering; keep the lightness here. Hear the Perfection, feel the horror, the horrible beauty of it all. Oh, oh, it is so bittersweet. What grace that you and I can have the slightest appreciation of all of this, that we can, as R.K.A., the poet, said, sometimes see just beyond the billboard at the edge of town, can just get a little view of what's behind the façade.
Part of why we come together these evenings, as far as I'm concerned, is to recognize each other. So I said, "I'm a mouth for process; you're here, too." The Dalai Lama said a very beautiful thing. He said—I think he cleaned it up for Western consumption—he said, "Act as if everybody you meet you already know." I think the way he says it in Tibet is, "Act as if everybody you meet is your mother," but I don't think he thought it would sell in the West. Hi, I haven't seen you this entire Incarnation. Where have you been keeping yourself? See the flick of consciousness—how playful it gets.