This time, because we're just chatting. So what to question? Any questions? Yes, hand up there. Ted. Yes, Ted. Professor Slovene. My old friend. How do you maintain your moment-to-moment awareness of the infinite network of the soul? Well, I mean, I personally don't manage to maintain much awareness at all. But I think theoretically, let us say, or, you know, sort of methodologically, the richer your sense of the infinite common sense, you know, of the infinite future and infinite past, sort of the vast panorama of life, that you can get by reading the Flower Ornament Sutra, you know, bit by bit. It's like a huge thing to try to swallow an ocean to read it, but sort of reading that

[01:06]

sort of thing in many other Mahayana sutras and sort of the vast literatures of the vast imagination of the Mahayana. And the more that one reads of that and sort of opens up one's sense of the infinite interconnectedness and critically uses the critical insight on shunyata, on voidness, to dismantle the sense of being shut up in this moment, in other words, the more one dissolves the sort of reification of the now as this is the thing that I'm in, you see, because, you know, if you look for the now, you can't actually find it, you know. There is no now, you know. Is it the beginning of the snap or the later one, you know? There is no now. It's like there's no point on a graph. The actual point, x-y point, has no size, you know. There isn't anything there when you really look for whatever it is in the relative world. And the more you do that, then the more rich the moment is, actually, when you're not trying to grasp the moment in a certain way, you see. Whereas, when you—I come to feel, and maybe I have a little experience of that, just introspectively,

[02:12]

that if you have a picture of yourself as having arisen from a nothing and of becoming a nothing upon the brain ceasing at death, that what that means is that subliminally you're carrying around inside a sense of the irreducible element of yourself as kind of a black nothingness. You know, like you fall asleep, you fall into darkness. When you sleep, you lose consciousness. So, you're sort of having an image that the basic ground of life is this darkness. It fits with the sense of outer space, you know, the astronaut, you know, walks out there in this dark, cold void that is outer space. We sort of have a real strong—modern civilization has a very strong reification of nothingness as the ground of being, you could say. Many cultural critics and scholars, philosophers like K. G. Nishitani and others have discerned this. Many of the existentialists have tried to promote that into a positive, wonderful thing, even. But from the Mahayana philosophical point of view, that's a very nihilist—that's

[03:14]

called nihilism, uche devada. And it is very paralyzing, and it makes—it impoverishes the experience of this moment. It makes you live in a framework of meaninglessness, and purposelessness, and hopelessness, actually, and not in a creative way. So, my answer would be, the less you reify the moment, and the more you open to the infinite horizon of things, the richer is your actual experience of a moment. Okay? Yes? Well, as I said, I said, Tibetan Buddhism is the unification of those three vehicles, as they call. But because of the nature of the society, the apocalyptic dimension is very analytically

[04:15]

set forth, so that, etc., that's one sentence. Zen Buddhism is the same unification of three vehicles, semicolon, bodhidharma being a siddha, what is called a great, a mahasiddha, a great adept, semicolon. The Chinese culture, much more resistant to the immediacy, sort of apocalypticism, royal imagery, liberated imagination of the Vajrayana, had to remain hidden. Both at their core have the idea that Buddhas live, that it is possible to be Buddha. Alive. Do not dismiss the living presence of Buddha to a historical past or a cosmic other world. That's their real connection there.

[05:18]

Two and a half sentences. Yes? Yes, ma'am? My question has something to do with authority. With what? With authority, yes. Yes. And the idea like teachers. Yes. And the whole, there's a lot of questions in that conversation. From day two and on, the guys would come on, dependent on other people to take care of them. Right. Right. And so, you know, and I was thinking about that scenario, and it seems to me that superiority, inferiority, suppression, all these things are very connected and that somehow we have a very difficult time changing the shape of our lives nowadays. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. I mean, just you sitting there today, I know you're out trying to break the bubble, but

[06:25]

I mean, you know, we are sending you messages of support and lots of things. Really? Are you sure? Are you? Really? That's nice. How do we, you know, how do we do that? I feel that what I've observed, really, is that most of us have a really, really difficult job that we have without really putting ourselves in a real position. And if we can just engage some of these things, and just the homosexuality issue around the world, and the role of women, and so forth, and all this power stuff.

[07:30]

I'd love for you to speak more about how to, what your thoughts are on that. Okay. Now the story I read about Huang Bo, the little snippet from the Huang Bo story, which is case 11 of the Blue Cliff Record, Cleary's translation. You note that he said that if he succeeded to his master, he would diminish his teacher's merit by half. Only one who exceeds the teacher's merit can be fit to carry on the succession. So there's a lot of paradox in that, you see. In other words, he said, wouldn't you want to succeed to the master? He says, no, I wouldn't because I would diminish his merit if I just succeeded to him. And this is in the context of the highly authoritarian Chinese family structure and culture, where the father and the patriarch is like everything, right? The filial piety is everything. Here that Huang Bo is showing that in the main line of Zen, that the father-son relationship is actually transmuted to be a non-authoritarian one. Meaning that the authoritarian should be defined, I think, as meaning that,

[08:34]

in a teaching relationship, as meaning that it is assumed that the teacher knows better than the student. And that the student never will know what the teacher does, and therefore the teacher will just recite, you know, you can see in classrooms, they stand up on a big dais, like in a place like India culture, like modern India at the moment. They give like a recital of this and that, and the student notes it down and then just feeds it back on an exam. And that's the model that, you know, if things are getting worse, there's sort of a declining cosmos and that the later generation is always less than the previous generation, you know, harking back to a golden era and all this. That's the authoritarian model. So you want to keep it like it was in the past and reproduce the older generation because it was better than the new one, right? The Buddha, that was the case in Indian culture. The father was very strong. The guru meant heavy. Originally guru means heavy in Sanskrit. The Brahmin, patriarch, you know, the warrior king, Buddha's father. Buddha rebelled against his father, refused to take his father's occupation.

[09:34]

Buddha, even there's a myth of his conception, he was conceived without his father. And actually if you look at the biography of Buddha, the father's statements are actually very similar to Mara's statements, the devil. And he's always fighting against the father, you know. Buddha is, he's like, you know, he's like the Oedipal story in Indian culture, he's the Buddha story, actually. And the Buddha himself achieved enlightenment, supposedly, which made him the authority of the universe even for the gods. But then he said, don't accept authority to everybody. He said, don't believe in what I say unless it makes sense to you. And just because you heard it or it's traditional or whatever, don't believe it. He was totally into reason. Famous verse, you know, a bhikshu, a wise person, accepts what another teacher says by burning, by examining, testing, experimenting in their own experience about it, examining with their critical reason. As a goldsmith only buys what is offered as gold by the merchant after burning, cutting and rubbing on a touchstone

[10:38]

and then biting the coin. And then they accept it as gold. So that's how you should accept teaching, not just because so and so said it. It's a cardinal principle in Buddhism. And that's why I often argue that Buddhism is not fit, the definition of a world religion that we use in modern religious studies scholarship where, you know, Jesus goes out and God invests him with a mission and then he brings the truth and people must believe and must obey. Buddha goes out, doesn't meet God, or he does kind of meet God who comes to study with him instead of telling him, this is it and be my prophet. And then Buddha says, don't believe in the gods, don't believe in all of this, don't even believe in what I say unless it fits with you. So, but now the interesting thing is, so therefore the essential line in Buddhism from its beginning was it was a kind of educational institution in the true sense of teaching where you're trying to see the student as more capable than you are and you try to offer them reasons and get them to be critical of inherited ideas and get them to think about it and develop their critical intellect

[11:40]

where they can then come to deeper insights and judgments than you. And there's a kind of progressive notion about the progress of knowledge, something like that. That's the non-authoritarian ideal. And for example, we have classrooms where seminar style, you're around a table and people are forced to dialogue and talk and debate and wield their ideas, not just listen to you type of thing, right? And that's a different model of teaching. But in both Zen and in the Tibetan tradition and in psychiatry, for example, you acknowledge in your attempt to find wholeness in yourself that you have already internalized authority figures of mother and father at least. If not, I find I internalized Walter Conkite as a child. You know, he's my voice of authority. That's the way it is. But anyway, you have these kind of voices that you have. And then the transference is the thing where you play out these things and you gain some freedom and integrity. You don't just be bossed around because sometimes these voices are oppressive,

[12:43]

as you say, and so on. So in a way, although there is this issue of trying to finally become an individual who is free and rational and able to be enlightened and able to be unafraid of things, in order to do that, it's not as easy as just sort of rebelling against this policeman or that person. It's some internal policemen that are in there that have to be dealt with. And so the Zen tradition or the Tibetan tradition with the highly technical way of the mentor relationship is structured. It's like a transference thing where the archetypes can be brought out and then you can become the Buddha type of thing, if you follow me. But first you have to sort of replace father and mother authority by like enlightened authority, which is authority that says your own reason is the authority. But you use the archetypes. You don't just try to supplant that, ignoring that you do have voices of father and mother inside you, which are your cultural traditional voices, which are linked with your normal reactive wiring

[13:48]

about this makes me mad and that's the other and the other thing. In order to attain, you were reborn in a new family called the Buddha family, if you follow me. Binky! Is that Binky? Is that my little Pekingese? Oh, is she alright? Her name is Binky Tara and I brought her from Jaipur and she's very cute. So anyway, so in other words, it is the goal in Buddhism as always is to overcome authoritarianism. And in fact, I feel I'm very fond of a work by Philip Slater called A Dream Deferred. A recent book he wrote, he's a sociologist, a dropout sociologist, but very brilliant one, who lives in Santa Cruz actually without a normal academic job. But he wrote a brilliant book and in that book he describes the authoritarian personality and then he describes the democratic personality, which he associates with the re-emerging of the megaculture shift of the goddess culture.

[14:52]

You know, that's why he moved to California from MIT. But then if you would take the points that he talks about, openness, ability to exist in a situation without feeling totally in control of it, etc., all kinds of things like that, versus the militaristic authoritarian personality structure, you can see that the Buddhist training in all of its dimensions essentially is working in the line of developing the democratic personality structure. But to do that, you have to know the other personality, you have to recognize that you have authoritarian personality structure in yourself. You have these archetypes and there's a famous saying in Theravada Buddhism, monastic Buddhism, that says, he who kills father and mother and destroys, you know, all these like a very shattering kind of statement, then becomes an arhat, becomes enlightened. Meaning that you get rid of these inner mundane authority voices in your mind that are implanted in there from a very young age. To really find freedom, you have to get rid of those. Which is a pretty heavy idea, actually.

[15:52]

Yes, yes, that lady there, yes. What about who? Oh, lithium? I don't know much about lithium, except it's sort of a tranquilizer if you have a certain type of mental disorder, and you're sort of getting hyper and you're flipping out, right? If you are... What? Mania. Well, but mania, what does mania mean? Well, actually from the Buddhist point of view, the world, as this world that we live in, this social world that we live in, is insane. And people who are living to get rich, and to conquer territory, and to control people, and own people, and strengthen their body, and pump up, and all this kind of thing, they are insane, actually.

[16:56]

They're going to be so much dog food within a short time, relatively speaking. And the bank account, the checks will be signed by somebody else, and the territory will be owned by somebody else, and they'll be reborn in the enemy camp. And I mean, they're just insane, they just are completely deluded. And being harsh and mean to people, that's insanity. And living as if you were not connected to everybody else, and living oriented to your own sort of absolute realm. And even being religious, let's say, and reifying some absolute realm of nirvana, either as a Buddhist, or heaven, or salvation as a theist, that's also insane. Like in Sankhya Yoga, getting your purusha, your spirit, and extracting it from embeddedness in relativity and matter, that's all insane. Insane, self-absolutizing behavior. Therefore, when people don't adapt well to that, they somehow don't have that kind of a personality that wants to go out and beat everybody up, or they see other things than the sort of concretized thing that the culture wants them to see,

[18:01]

or whatever it may be, they actually have a little opportunity to try to see through the agreed-on conventional insanity of the world. And therefore, psychologies that say, oh, that's terribly dangerous, come back and join us in our nuclear-armed, military, commercial, consumer-oriented madness. Environment-polluting, population-exploding madness, come back to join us in that, in our happy family life, the battleground of domestic violence and so forth. And the destroyed food chain of cancer and neurological disorders, and let's get back and be all nice and happy in that. Maybe you'll become a millionaire if we could just get rid of those weird visions that there's like a diamond dragon lurking outside the door. So, there is a tendency that the conventional psychologies are destructive to a wish to emerge into a different kind of consciousness that people may have. That certainly is true.

[19:03]

But, on the other hand, there are ways of becoming disconnected from conventional in a premature manner, in a crippling manner, in a dysfunctional manner, in the sense of like then becoming, losing your life, let's say, or falling off a cliff, whatever. And one shouldn't be too casual about that, and then thereby dismiss all sorts of medicines that may be used. So, in some cases, something like lithium may be very good as a temporary measure to prevent someone from hurting themselves or others or whatever. So, there's no way of making such a blanket statement, although I think that psychology, I like the transpersonal psychology movement out here, for example, that tries to incorporate some kind of altered transpersonal personality states as being healthy and youthful and growth-oriented, but without going all the way to saying that sort of everything goes and getting too radical. So, that's sort of some general thoughts about it. I do feel personally that Buddhism, Buddhist civilization, Buddhist intellectual culture,

[20:04]

you could say Buddhist science of mind, coming from the various Asian cultures where it has been useful for many centuries, one of its main points of interaction with modern culture will be through psychology, and that it will have a lot to contribute and it will improve like modern Western psychology, and the future will be a great way in which Buddhism can serve people in these countries probably a bit more widely than it's going to be able to serve them through a religious mode. That's my personal belief. I don't think Buddhism as a sort of religious set of structures and institutions and rituals as existed in different Asian things can spread that widely in America and probably shouldn't try very hard because it will bring down huge reactions and institutional competitions and fanaticism and it wouldn't be good. Whereas in the mode of psychology, I think there can be a lot of help and a lot of correspondence. Okay, those are just some general thoughts. Yes? Which guess?

[21:10]

No. No, what guess genes was there? There was this whole spread, this really wild sort of risk-based spread in psychedelic colors which you didn't see. Oh, well, you mean where I did the thing on death with the guy? They printed the interview I did on death? And then in between was a bunch of big ads? And in between, you were sandwiched. Oh, yeah, yeah, I noticed that, yeah. Well, that's America, what can you do? That's like saying, you know, make sure you have your jeans on when you die, you know. Or half off, you know, who knows? That's our American culture, you know, what can you do? Our American culture is like that at the moment. I wasn't too irate, you know. Yes? Mm-hmm.

[22:12]

Right. Extremely bad, yes. It is, Buddhism is definitely anthropocentric. But maybe we can find a middle ground here between your feeling about that. It doesn't mean that, it's not anthropocentric in the way that there's no question, Buddhism doesn't teach that animals don't have souls, that they're just food, that they're supposed to be there for humans to use as their custodian, all this kind of thing, like in some forms of theism. There is no question about that in Buddhism. There's a chain of being which humans and animals are in the same chain of being. And also deities, and also demons, and other kinds of life forms are in this one chain. And therefore, a human has to think of a dog as having a soul and has to be as compassionate as possible to any dog, and so forth. However, in the way of understanding

[23:19]

these different evolutionary life forms, understanding the purpose of an individual life being to achieve happiness, the Buddha's view is that other life forms than the human are less happier than the human. They are more helpless than a human. They are subjected to more negative relations to the environment. They have less ability to look into their own programming and achieve... They don't have the ability, actually, to look into their own programming, to criticize their reactions and instincts and develop enlightenment, which is freedom from the instincts, finally. And therefore, while we would respect, while Buddhists would respect every dog and tiger and whatever it would be, and see them for whatever they are that is good, they would be wanting for the individual that was in that life form as a tiger to actually become a human and then become a Buddha. So they would see it in the advantage of the tiger to become a human and a Buddha, which could not be used to rationalize, say, killing the tiger, because there's no guarantee it would become a human by any means, especially if a human had just killed it. So it's a question of the judgment about the nature of life forms,

[24:21]

that the lower forms are lower not just because they're food or something, because they shouldn't be food. Their life is sacred also, and they have souls. They're going to be Buddhas, but they are less capable, they're less free in that life form to pursue their own liberation than a human is. So it's better for them to become a human and become enlightened. That's the point. The human life form, we have been animals, we have been dogs, we have been tigers, whales, and we've been that for billions of lifetimes as well. And now we have managed to become human, and this form that we have is a fantastic opportunity. It is this close to Buddhahood, evolutionarily speaking. And because why? We can question, we have language, we have the ability to share our minds with other members of our species, beyond the sort of squeaking frequency of the dolphin, much more elaborately, we have complex concepts, we have notions of nirvana, the absolute,

[25:23]

we have Beethoven, we have all kinds of things, much more complicated, we can question, we can reprogram our entire instinctual makeup. We can become self-destructive, we can be lemmings, we can be survival-oriented, we're not rigidly programmed. And we can deeply, even they say we can become where we don't need to inhale again. We can unwire the autonomic nervous system as well. And that is our great evolutionary advantage. Of course, we can use that advantage and that intelligence to be more destructive than any other animal, that's certainly true. But that's because we have more power. If we use that power towards evolutionary fulfillment and towards even like teaching the tigers, then they'll be reborn as human, then they'll become Buddhas, this is ideal, you see. So the anthropocentrism has to do with a different level than just sort of one is just better than the other intrinsically and therefore can use the other. The anthropocentrism has to do with what is the final purpose of life and how do you get happy. Now we do in our Western romantic thing have a way of a little bit romanticizing the animal life and thinking that tiger is so happy out there

[26:25]

in his jungle if only we weren't running around with our 30-odd sixes. But actually if you take a good look at the tiger and his fleas and his scratching and his whole thing, you know, they're not that turned on, terribly turned on. And a big disillusionment for me, I used to like think elephants were very cool and my wife is not here, she doesn't like this. I saw a movie about them making love. No way. No way. Did you ever see that film? Oh, no. It's like, you know, human life form, you know, I mean, elephants don't know much about foreplay. Let me tell you. They don't know how to bask in the glow. No way. That guy goes charging after her. She runs away knocking over trees, you know. And he's got it up, man, and he steps on it, man. It's like a log there. It bounces on the ground. Bam, bam. He's stepping on it, tripping on it. And then I said, oh, I'm glad I'm human. Woo! So the thing is,

[27:31]

it is a judgment about how happy they can be, you know. How much fun can they have? And ultimately, can they achieve the super fun of Buddhahood? That's the issue. So it's compassion for an animal that wants to help an animal to become human, to become self-aware, to practice Zen or Tantra and become a Buddha. You follow me? So I hope that reconciles a little bit. But that doesn't mean that, for example, the Tibetan culture, which is a very, very spiritual culture in its way and very Buddhistic, the most devoted, most mainstream Buddhist culture that history has seen, but one of the big flaws was the diet of the country and the lack of vegetables and technology about that, and therefore the eating of the yak and the meat. And so there is an inhumanity about animals in any culture where you have to kill them and so forth. You have to get tough enough to do it. And so I've heard Tibetans tell me, oh, but the yak is happy to be eaten by us lamas. That's just BS.

[28:32]

That's still bad. Not correct. Dalai Lama would never argue that. But some will. So, I mean, no one's perfect. No human. But the attitude, I hope, has clarified. Okay. Yes? Let's talk together about time. You were mentioning that really there is no time. Ultimately. And I can see someone putting that insight at the service of a concretization of their experience, where there's no time, that seems a little narrow at this point. But if ultimately there's no time, what is this talking about? That's all relative. Okay. Is it a teaching tool? Or is it, I think what the Western is hearing, we ascribe a way of our reality to it. And then there's the stuff about that's going on now.

[29:35]

Well, he's the successor. No, no. We don't think that. It's that little guy. We think it's that little guy. Whose poem was framed about the reincarnation? That stuff seems to be also at the service of grosser human motive. Yeah. I want to look at this, because it's really interesting. When you talk about past lives, future lives, what you're doing is opening the vast panorama for us. It's just marvelous. All good. I'm glad you like it. What? Well, fundamentally it's relative. Any teaching in Buddhism about the relative is useful, or not useful. It's only relatively true. There's no absolute relative truth. Except that. But all those things, there's no time, and none of this have to do with our falsely absolutizing them. But, then again, you can't selectively pick and choose the relative

[30:37]

and say, well, this is symbolic, and that's not symbolic. Someone came up to me the other day in Santa Cruz, and they said, oh, it's all symbolic, it's all symbolic. And I said, it's all right to feel it's all symbolic if you're aware that right now it's all symbolic. Your body there, the floor is all symbolic. This whole world, planet, is being imagined. Our life is symbolic. Those are all relative things. They're all imagined things. If you're capable, and someone hits you on the head with a hammer, that's just symbolic. That pain is symbolic. If knowing that it's symbolic makes you able to sort of flow with it and see through it and have an experience in a transparent and opened way, then you can say that hell is symbolic, heaven is symbolic, form of future life is symbolic, no problem. But if you want to say, this me here is real, this matter is real, and you just injured me and that's real, my emotion is real, but of course form of future life is symbolic, then no, that doesn't work in Buddhist thought.

[31:38]

And it is shocking for us because we are materialists and because we're not really aware of how much fear we are controlling behind our craving for anesthesia, our assumption of oblivion. But that assumption of oblivion is a very deep obstacle to us from a Buddhist ethical point of view, and a Buddhist philosophical point of view. I don't know if you've ever read Nishitani Keiji, his book called Religion and Nothingness, in English. And you should read just the first few chapters of that book about the nihilism and what it has meant in Western civilization. It's an amazing indictment. In a sense, in ancient Buddhist thought, the nihilist, the person who believed that they personally had no future life and therefore no involvement in the causality, the things that they did ultimately had no reverberation upon themselves in any other, even though they might be in another form. That they were therefore disconnected from the causes and the effects of their actions, which is what nihilism means. They predicted in ancient India that if ever such people

[32:43]

with such ideologies controlled whole societies, they would be unprecedentedly destructive because they would all be affre moi la deluge, you know. Just what I want, my impulse to gratify. A little more electricity, a little more motor power. Never mind pollute the universe, destroy the planet, bomb the enemies, nuke the place. A little more power for me, you know. Because now finally I'll just click off. And I won't be there if it's a mess later, you see. Like the nuclear power industry, one of our unique inventions, right? 250,000 years half-life of like deadly poison stuff all lying all over the place, you know. And that may be because we're all a bunch of people who think that the worst thing that can happen to us is become obliterated. And we even, like Carl Sagan wrote a very interesting article in a couple of Sundays ago in Your Chronicle

[33:44]

about his own death. And he thinks he's terrified of nothingness and it's a big thing he's staring in the eye and he's Mr. Brave Sagan and all this. And he thinks that it would be childish to think that he might continue. Because naturally he's erroneously assuming that if he continued being Carl, he would naturally continue to have tenure at Cornell and be a human being and get out and make TV shows. But what he doesn't realize is people who are unfortunately open to the common sense possibility of endless continuity are terrified that it might be a negative continuity if they don't put the right inputs into the world, they don't develop the right openness of soul, the right friendliness, lovingness, generosity, non-paranoidness. They've been sure that there's no unconscious imagery that would attract them to some dark holes. They're frightened of that. They don't think that nothingness is frightening. Nothingness is anesthesia and it's like, Novocain, Mr. Dentist, I want it. So this is a key point actually.

[34:48]

And I always run into it. I've debated it as I'm getting older. I'm more and more clear about it in my own feelings that what is the most helpful to me always in trying to be more committed to the good quality of this moment is to be aware of the infinite repercussions of everything that takes place in this moment. So that it's like in a way, well I mean, it's like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. If you're philosophy oriented, which is kind of the aestheticization of Kant's notion of the categorical imperative. Never do anything that you wouldn't be willing to have repeated eternally. That means nice. Nice. If you're going to keep doing that forever, make sure it's nice. Makes you and the other happy. You know? So anyway, that's a little bit of that. Yes? Unfortunately I can talk a great deal more about that sort of thing.

[36:03]

But that's sort of kind of too open ended and we're almost over here. But basically, from the Buddhist point of view, the Buddhist ethic is based on the idea that you and other beings are on some level the same being. You are not on every level. You are individual beings, relatively speaking. But on a deeper level, you're all one being. Like for example, this finger and this finger are different fingers. But yet it's in one hand. So therefore, one has to acknowledge that just as oneself wants oneself to be happy, other beings also equally want themselves to be happy. There's many more of them. Therefore, one should try to help them achieve their wish to be happy as much as possible. And not to harm them, which makes them unhappy. Just as you don't want to be harmed and be unhappy and you want happiness, so everyone else does. So therefore, the Buddhist ethic is basically based on that. You don't kill other beings because then that makes them unhappy. It hurts them. They are reborn anyway.

[37:09]

They come back. Killing them doesn't eliminate them from the universe. But it's just a whole painful, difficult process of requiring a new body and getting back into action. You don't steal from them. You don't abuse them sexually. You don't lie to them. You don't create discord among them. You don't speak harshly to them. You don't speak frivolously to them. You don't speak too much to them. That's one I have to remember. You don't have a greedy mind. You don't have a malicious mind. And you don't become adherent of fanatical and irrational views or ideas. So those are Buddhist ethics. And each one has a positive thing. Instead of killing, you save lives and prolong lives. Instead of stealing, you give gifts and you're generous and so forth. So each one has a positive and negative way of being formulated. But the nice thing about them is that they are not something that you do and then some great authority outside of the whole process awards you a peasant or punishes you. It's just a natural evolutionary process. It's like if you pump iron, you get a strong arm. If you leave it in a cast, it becomes weak and shriveled.

[38:12]

If you give gifts, you become very open and generous and you actually attract wealth. If you stingily keep hoarding things, you become narrow and paranoid and you actually feel poor no matter how much you have. And then you do become poor in future lives, if not in the future of this life. So it's like an action-reaction sort of nice picture. It's only relative, of course. Any description of relativity, you can always see another side to it. There should be no dogmatic thing about relativity. The only dogmatic thing is the dogma of no dogma. But that is a dogma and a relative dogma. So that's a little bit. I said a little bit, okay? Yes, there's a hand that's way up back there. It's like waving. What is it? It's hard to say much about it. It's only that we have like two minutes. There was a debate between some people,

[39:13]

but basically having to do with someone, according to most reports, using the absolute sort of nature of emptiness and enlightenment to over-relativize ethical actions and say that they're all meaningless and sort of misinterpreting the ultimate beyondness about good and evil that there's no discrimination about relative good and evil. And this was considered incorrect, as it is generally in Buddhism considered irrational and incorrect. The ultimate emptiness of all things, including concepts of good and evil, is what supports the fact that you do something that makes you happy and me happy, it is good. You do something that makes me miserable and you miserable, it is bad. And that is supported by the absolute lack of absolute good and evil. Relative good and evil is supported by that. And so to use it to try to annihilate relative distinctions is considered a bad thing. Last question. Yes. Two hands. He gets it. What? Well, I want to say that I think the most useful thing Buddhism could do in our society

[40:38]

is interact with our education system. Even more than with the sort of clan or guild of psychologists or psychotherapists. I think that Buddhism is an age-old education system that considers the Bachelor of Arts degree to be awardable to someone with some degree of enlightenment, not just with some body of knowledge, but really some body of moral decency, having seen the erroneousness of behaving badly, some degree of aesthetic openness, having critiqued some sort of closed thing, fear of beauty, some sort of critical intelligence or wisdom, being able to see through confusions and irrationalities and things like that. That is what Buddhism excels at and then adds the meditative laboratory within which your intellectual knowledge can really be brought into strong tension with your prejudices and really turn your prejudices around and transform your being and your understanding and your life. And that's what Buddhism's real forte is. That's what all this monastic and sitting and everything is,

[41:40]

not just to go and sit somewhere and then disappear, poof, into the air. It is because you need to meditate. Once you have an understanding, you need to meditate to bring that understanding into connection with your misunderstanding. Meditating before you've dislodged your misunderstanding by having learned something is totally useless. I'm sorry to say it will only reinforce your misunderstanding. And I believe that. I'm ready to argue that one. But that's a very important one from the Buddhist point of view. Therefore, I really feel that that's why I am a professor, trying to be. It is that I believe Buddhism's great role can be reinforcing our education tradition because the Western education tradition has the two roots in theism and theistic monasticism which doesn't necessarily encourage that much intellectual because you're not supposed to be able to understand the final nature of the universe. That would be Lucifer's pride that only God understands. We can't really. We just have to be faithful. So that's one root. Then the other is the materialist idea of explore everything and find everything. But sadly, there's still a presupposition there

[42:42]

that you won't be able to understand it. If you become crazy, you should have lithium if you think you really understand it. So that's a sort of a closure of the human potential from the materialist side and a definite closure from the theist side. Whereas the Buddhist tradition has this idea that you can become a Buddha which means you can fully understand everything in the universe which is the foundation of an educational system par excellence. So that's the main point. I want to say I feel that's the main purpose rather than religion is through education at every level. And something like Dan Goldman's emotional intelligence is just really Buddhist mindfulness applied to the child's way of learning to deal with their impulses. In a way, basically, it's sort of an infiltration of that type without any notion of Buddhism which is what's so great about it. So that's first. And then second, within psychology which is trying to understand how the mind works in the process of being an educational tradition for many centuries they naturally were concerned with how the mind works

[43:42]

because they're seeking to change the mind to change its worst states into better states. And so, if our psychology comes more into the fore and becomes more of a transformational psychology totally connected with education rather than just some sort of mechanistic psychology that wants to re-tinker with people who are not fitting into the mechanism which is the sad fate of most of it then Buddhism will naturally work with that but only as under the larger rubric of that the main purpose of people in life in the world, the main purpose of a society is the education of its members. Under that new philosophy which is essentially Buddhism's philosophy, I will argue our country has a chance to be a democracy and to be a functioning society where people all understand why they might do this better rather than do that and how things work and what their responsibility is and what they can enjoy and contribute and how much better they will be by sharing rather than hoarding and depriving. And if we have a society that makes education

[44:44]

not just a preparation for some production but makes it the purpose of the production education is, then we will all be much happier. And that's where I think Buddhism can encourage our educational institution and revive its spiritual mission, really. Educators are scared of having a spiritual mission because they associate that with inserting a dogma and forcing an orthodoxy of belief or opinion on people and then that's not true liberal education. But in the case of Buddhism, that isn't the problem because there is no orthodoxy of belief because everything is shunyata, it's open, it's void it's there for people but there's also no orthodoxy that people cannot understand everything. Therefore, lifelong education is the purpose of life. And without lifelong education in our society and education that teaches us how to deal with the inner energies as well as external energies to engineer the inner being as well as the outer world

[45:44]

because of the mechanical power technologically that we have if we go on being a bunch of lunatic emotional basket cases, as we are we will destroy ourselves. I don't think there's any question. So that's what I feel Buddhism makes its contribution. But it can't do that by saying we're a new religion, convert to Buddhism and you'll all be saved. That will just...

[46:08]

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