I must be careful I don't gesture too much today. This plant may be on the floor. Two months ago, about, I sat in this seat and I brought up the subject of right speech. Right speech is a fairly uncomplicated subject to talk about since it's something we all use in our day-to-day social intercourse with one another. And how we speak to people and the tone of voice we use and so forth made it a fairly easy subject for us to investigate together. And I think, if I recall correctly, I talked about that word right from a Buddhist perspective.

[01:11]

This right speech is the third fold or turn in the eightfold path that Shakyamuni Buddha had recommended as a path taken to liberation from our usual egoic clinging to a sense of freedom in the world, freedom from our habitual unease and self-defensiveness. Right, in the Buddhist sense, it's not something that's contrary to wrong. It's more like it's all-inclusive. So rather than being based simply on a duality of this versus that, it takes into account the multiplicity of conditions that arise from moment to moment in our life in a world

[02:21]

of manifest change. And so right, rather than having a very dogmatic standpoint on the one hand or totally indifferent attitude on the other, postulates a sense of finding a middle path between those positions, an open-hearted path. Now today, I bring this up because today I would like to touch on another one of the folds in the eightfold path toward liberation, which is right livelihood. And right livelihood in this day and age is a particularly complex issue. And so just how to address it is a little bit of a problem. But I'm going to try. You know, in Shakyamuni Buddha's time, 2,500 years ago, life in that particular system,

[03:37]

which was based on a kind of universal moral imperative that resulted in a class system, one was born into a particular caste and class, and one's whole life was dominated thereby. If you were the son of an artisan, you would grow up to be an artisan and so on. So that the choices about how we make our living in the world, how we sustain ourselves, were in some sense quite a bit more simple in a very real sense. I think we can appreciate it was much simpler than the complexity of our so-called or would-be post-industrial world. The question of how we make our living and how we work is a question ultimately of how do we express a noble heart in our life. In fact, all of these steps are how to do that, to express the nobility of the heart

[04:46]

which is the human birthright. In my view, that was what Shakyamuni's teaching is about. I may be wrong, but I think when we talk about right in this sense, it is the expression of that, I could say, innate gift that we can develop with practice in our life, and toward which we, whether we are so aware of it or not, we have a profound thirst and desire to express and realize. Even when I was growing up, and that was when my childhood was during the Depression, times are so much simpler and just to have a job, just to be able to earn some money to put

[05:46]

food on the table and shoes on your children's feet was a gift. There wasn't the crisis of choice yet that would come, but the options were relatively simple. It wasn't that in Shakyamuni Buddha's time or before or since, there hasn't always been moral dilemmas arising in our day-to-day life. In a job situation, if there had been no moral questions or ethical questions about how we live our life and how we express the nobility of non-clinging, non-exploitation, then there would have been no need for these particular teachings. So obviously, it's a complicated question because from this point of view, there is no

[06:49]

hard or fast answer, you see. It is a willingness to open up to the situation as it is and develop our ethical and moral standpoint from a completely open disposition rather than a closed one. When I was a kid, it only cost a dime to go to a movie, and sometimes that was a lot. Nowadays, of course, I don't have to tell you, we're more or less all of us in this cyber age all on the fast track. All of the technology that was to have freed us from some of the limitations and constraints placed upon us by the need to earn sustenance in life, to be yoked to a plow, so to speak, one way or another. We've been freed from some of that so that we can have a choice, a number of choices

[07:54]

that we can make in how to not only sustain our life and our obligations, but how to fulfill ourselves in the midst of doing so. That's the kind of privilege that we find is also troublesome. This fast track is meaning that we can hardly get away from our beepers, our faxes, the information, almost the information overload that is pouring in, so that the benefits of technology, while they have alleviated problems on the one hand and have brought enormous benefits to us, and they're producing a whole new world on the other hand, is producing a huge amount of anxiety and stress in our culture. I think we all know that. It's a secret. We only have to get on the highway in the morning to see that going 55 miles an hour is being a real slowpoke, and that going about 90 to get to the place so that you can go 90 miles an hour there seems to be the order of the day.

[08:56]

Somebody has recently quoted a statistic to me. Now, I don't know if this is true or not. I don't know how to verify this, but it's interesting. It said, the leading indicator of sudden death is job dissatisfaction. The leading indicator of sudden death is job dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction, incidentally, is one of the Buddhist, one of our translations for the Sanskrit word suffering or dukkha, dissatisfaction. It seems that in the midst of all this plenty, where the billionaires or common or multi-billionaires playing a big poker game of venture capital investments, playing for big stakes, that the game itself of making something, fulfilling ourselves by getting larger and larger, the game itself becomes the drive, not just taking care of our necessities. And I'm not putting any moral judgment on this.

[10:03]

I'm simply trying to state the situation as it seems to be and as it is creating difficulties and stress in our life. There are endless, you know, workshops on stress management and crisis control and so on, books written, you can't turn on the television, which is some panel discussing these problems in the workplace, the ethical problems that have come up, and that we're addressing sexual abuses and so on. So it's a widespread concern that this technological revolution that we're enjoying is also a two-edged sword that is producing a lot of neuroses, a feeling of separation, of disconnectedness, of unease. It's no wonder that we have to come to places like Green Gulch, some of us for longer terms,

[11:03]

some of us for a few hours to touch the earth a bit, to slow down a little bit and feel ourselves, take a breath. That's what meditation is for. Take a breath. The moral dilemma is, you see, the path is always a question of how we fulfill some ethical responsibility, but this ethics is not based on the will of some god in Buddhism, from the Buddhist perspective, or some moral imperative handed down as it was in Upanishads in India. Or even as Kant produced a categorical imperative based on humanity. But how does the individual and the social entity work together harmoniously in which the potential for both aspects can be fulfilled without producing so much suffering?

[12:08]

Big question. Big problem in all of our lives. Because we're faced day to day in our jobs with the dilemma of what do we do when we know that something we are doing to make our living is not quite right. But we have mouths to feed and responsibilities to take care of. What do we do? How do we handle that? And then there's the other side of work, too, which is worth mentioning as a kind of workaholic addiction, in which, in order to keep the problems away, the deep-seated fears that we have about ourselves and our world, we keep busy. You know, busy, busy all the time. If we keep rushes and busy and busyness coming, tasks, activities, and meetings, amusements, set up more and more playgrounds, more and more diversions by which we can

[13:16]

not face the kind of emptiness we face when a loved one suddenly dies on us. When the doctor tells us we've mislaid our future and we've got six months to live. Suddenly something opens up our life. All at once we feel the futility, the kind of treadmill to nowhere, treadmill to oblivion that our day-to-day rush has been about, and we stop. We feel a sudden, you know, we've had a couple of deaths here recently right here, and what I've noticed about those situations is suddenly we feel vulnerable. Our life comes down and collapses around us, and there's a certain vulnerability, this nobility of the heart opens up to other people. We feel our basic humanity in questions of birth and death. It's hard in the workplace. Work is not just about that. Work is about getting something done in cooperation. Now, I can think of an interesting story.

[14:19]

I've been trying to think of an interesting story to bring this into some focus, because rather than talk about this case and that case, there's any number of books that address the cases concerning ethical questions in the workplace, or what our motivation is, what does this mean to fulfill ourselves and our work and so forth. And I think of my own father. You see, when I was thinking of all the different people I've known in my own life, I was looking for a story, but it just occurred to me that my father, who's now been dead 40 years, much longer than I even knew him, his story about work, about right livelihood, and as I've already told you, that generation, you know, was the generation born before the Depression, around the turn of the century, so that they got married and began to have families just when the stock market crashed in 29 and everything went to pieces here.

[15:22]

So what it was to have a job, as he said later, to put shoes on your feet, food on the table, was the all-consuming question. A terrifying raw edge of existence, not to see your kids fed and thousands and millions of people out of work and so forth. As I remember, of course, for the youngsters it was a wonderful time because everybody lived together, had to cooperate, had to relate. It wasn't a lot of entertainment, no money for it anyway. But then, you know, he got the job with a corporation that was to become fairly successful in the post-war years. They were successful before, I'm not going to bother telling you which corporation. And it began to go up in the world a little bit. Of course, it was the war that made it, you see. Suddenly the war opened up all the opportunities. You weren't just yoked to the desk anymore, great as that was,

[16:24]

but now there's an opportunity to broaden out. The war made this country rich, deep in debt as we went for it. At least for the broad, white, middle class and working class. Women went into the revolutionized positions of women to some extent. Raised them from the home to go out into the world and so on. Anyway, it was a kind of catalyst out of which grew this prosperous time. And my father saw an opportunity for the bluebird, for going for one of the big shots. He was an ambitious man, hired at work all the time, always busy. When he wasn't at work, he was painting the house, he was fixing something, always calling my brother to help him. So he began to make a name for himself in the company and began to rise. And he was only a man of high school education, but he was smart and he had intelligence and he was very personable.

[17:28]

He was difficult to live with around the house at that time. He was gone a lot and when he came home he was very, very tired and much sterner than he used to be. And then one night during the party he fell over the heart attack. He was 44 years old. Almost killed him. Interesting about a heart attack, I've thought about that. Of course there are all the genetic, all the scientific reasons for it, but one wonders if there was in all of this constricting of the heart, a congestiveness, some holding back of the natural propensity to be a loving, compassionate, kind, not so driven human being that he bottled up in order to fulfill himself in a world of change and opportunity. But now suddenly overnight it had become a world of limitations. And his life about fulfilling himself by making money and by being somebody, by gaining great status and so on or bigger status,

[18:33]

by being as his mother, my grandmother would say, imposing. My grandmother thought a lawyer was imposing, which is an interesting word for a lawyer. But she meant it, you see, had a real presence. And my father was one she could show off. She was a German immigrant. And then he had this heart attack and his life collapsed like a house of cards. Around him. Suddenly none of those things were going to happen for him. And what was there? Well, in the midst of his examining his life, he suddenly got God or religion for the first time. Or we were not, well, the family is divided between a Catholic mother and a Lutheran father. The Lutheran father, along with the collusion with his sons, would take off on Sundays while the women went to church and do other things. The things guys do together. Like work. But now that didn't mean much to him and he found a teacher.

[19:38]

Somebody who had actually buried our grandmother a little time before that. He was impressed by this man and he began to talk about the fact that, you know, the lilies in the field and so on, not striving and your father feeds them. And what have I striven so hard for when the things that really matter are the things of the heart. The small and simple things of life, you know, that story. But then he began to recover from his heart attack. He still had a job, you know. He knew he wasn't going to become one of the senior VPs of this organization, which was now becoming really big. But he would have a nice position in it. And in fact, there was still room for growth and some of ambition could be fulfilled. And so little by little, he stopped going to church on Sundays and the Bible was no longer read to us as a sudden revelation that he had found it to be. And that my brother and I didn't find so revealing. And he became kind of the old dad again, you know, the one that would get up and was always busy.

[20:44]

And then another heart attack came along. And he was devastated. I think if he hadn't had the kind of heart that he did, which was essentially, as they say, a Leo heart, one that was filled with the need to shine in the world and the need to shine his light and to feel the light of others on him. If it hadn't been for that, he probably might have given up. But how his values changed in that time, from a kind of clinging to an image that he had of himself in the workplace as being imposing, as being somebody and something. Because my mother always said, I don't care, we have enough to live on, a modest house, a little garden, da-da-da, that's all we need. We don't need to be something in the world. But he always claimed he was doing it for us. Until, of course, he had a heart attack and he admitted that it was to fulfill himself. So, you see, we're all, in some sense, and bringing up the story,

[21:47]

because in some sense, particularly in this modern world where we have opportunities, we all have this kind of double need to not only sustain ourselves on a very ordinary level, which is difficult enough now, but to be somebody in the midst of that. And now we have this crisis of choice. We have consulars and priests talk to people about which choice can they make and what did Leonard Cohen say in one of his poems or songs? Where do all the highways go now that freedom's mine? Which one do I take? Big crisis about what to do next. Particularly in this society where loyalty to a particular company, to a particular organization and so forth, all of those values, all those ethical, yesterday's ethical values have shifted. We're in a very slippery landscape now. What is right livelihood in the midst of all of this?

[22:51]

Even if we're not making arms, selling munitions, slaughtering animals and so forth, even if we're careful with the environment, take care of all of our little garbage in our life, pay more attention, nevertheless, we're confronted with this problem. What is right, complete, open, non-exploitive livelihood and is it possible? Is it possible to have this, express this nobility of heart in the workplace? Of course, there are books written that there is. We're trying to find ways to do that. How do we find nobility of heart with ourselves in the midst of our ambition? I don't think there's anything wrong with getting up at 4 in the morning to get to the gym by 5 in order to do 10 miles on the machine before I get to the office and make millions all day. And get home and watch television and be on the net and something all evening,

[23:54]

keep busy, busy, busy, fulfilling myself. But is it fulfilling? Is it right livelihood in that sense? Not in some phenomenal sense about the stuff with which we are working, but what it is doing to our heart. How we're relating that back into the world. Big question. I don't pretend to be able to answer it. I do know that in the eightfold path called noble, the noble path, because it has at its basis this question of what is ethical. Right speech, right view, right livelihood, right effort, right action, complete, open, non-exploitive action. What is right livelihood for a priest and for a monk in this day and age?

[24:58]

In the old days, right livelihood for a monk in many parts of the world is what you get in your begging bowl. That's it. You've got your begging bowl and you eat. Now we have with the churches and religious organizations, fundraising offices and so on. That's our begging bowl. I can remember a job I had, one of the first jobs I had in a hamburger joint. You know, kind of car hop. I think it was 35 cents an hour paid. They hired this other kid. He was from a minority. I remember mentioning to my friend about 35 cents an hour and the boss came over and went from my mouth because he was paying this other kid 15 cents. The kid was a better worker by far than I was. But this guy knew my father. Right then, you see, I understand. What is this deceit?

[25:59]

How are we treating each other this way? Am I using somebody else to climb in the world? We're all faced with this. Get up in the morning, you know, and then get on the bus, go to work. It's hard. Even if we love the work, it's hard. Always to do it over and over and over and wondering if it's worth it. Working within the limitations that conditions in a world of manifest change impose upon us. Is it possible in that world, by or through any one of those conditions, to find something called permanent happiness? It seems to me, and what I have heard and understood, is that the only thing that's going to bring us personal happiness is in some traditions called the love of God. In the Buddhist tradition it's called liberation.

[27:03]

And that liberation is found in our tradition by helping all beings to be liberated from the anxieties produced by clinging to egocentric notions of what we think is right and wrong, good and bad. And so forth. Dualities. Hard practice. Because there's no answer for it. There's no easy answer. From moment to moment we're reinventing it. The final thing about all Buddhist ethics and teachings is that these Buddhist ethics and teachings about right livelihood are all the eight full steps in the path to liberation. All of them are also linguistic conventions that we have made up among ourselves and we have to see the emptiness, the impermanence of those conventions that they too are not written in stone. That leaves us with nothing to grab onto. And that by leaving us with nothing at that moment to grab onto

[28:05]

is the moment in which we can seize the freedom of our life. The freedom of sacrifice and surrender to things as they are within a world of that limitation. I think that's what the Buddha was talking about in this Eightfold Path. And it's not a question we can solve except from moment to moment. As I've said. As it seems to me. As it seemed to be in my father's life. That happiness, that bluebird that he was looking for was always just out of reach. Except for maybe that moment when he found out he was still alive. The sun still shone on him. It was still warm. The water tasted good when he was thirsty. His kids were alive. His wife was reasonably happy. There was a life in the world. And it was pretty good. And then it changed again. Because there's so many inducements to do something else but look at that. Well, that's why we come here.

[29:07]

To look at that a little bit together. One of the practices, you see, we take what's called Bodhisattva precepts or vows. And you can look at those too. You know, they're things we already know. No killing. But we kill to live. Don't take what's not given. What's that about in our workplace? But we do. Even if it's not outright stealing. Don't misuse sexuality. Big issues around that, huh? How about not lying? That's another one. Disciple of the Bodhisattva doesn't lie. Sometimes you have to lie. To save somebody else. Very complex, isn't it? Don't slander.

[30:11]

Don't praise yourself at the expense of others. Where would business be without that? Don't harbor ill will. We can have ill will but do we harbor it? You bet. We'll get those sons of bitches yet. And as it isn't out there, it all starts in our own heart, doesn't it? Or where we blocked our heart. Don't abuse the three treasures. Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. In the widest sense of the word, Buddha, your own free nature. Dharma, the way toward that, the way to know that. Sangha though, everybody in the world. Don't abuse that. Don't intoxicate mind or body or self or other. Mind or body. Well, we can impose little disciplines on ourselves not to drink coffee or booze or something or whatever.

[31:15]

And then there's a lot to be said about all of that addiction talk. And it's true, it releases the miseries, it can. But what about the addictions of the mind? Much harder to give up the golden chain of having some certainty about our existence. Easier to give up the gross things. Harder to give up the spiritual ones. Become fundamentalist in some way. Now, those are easy to see. But as we take them into our life, as I say, from moment to moment, we can't run away and just hide in some other task. We don't know how to solve them. All we can do is be open to it and listen to our heart. Don't you think? Trust there. That is the key.

[32:16]

That nobility. Already abandoned, already free of clinging. The child, the two children. Two babies here now. Two deaths and two babies. Look at those little babies. I think they're not programmed yet. You know, they're just... Well, we're not babies. You know, if we act that way now, they'd put us in some kind of hospital. But to have that kind of heart, open for things to come without any preconceived condition or idea about how to handle it. Beyond the functional ones, I'm saying. Beyond the functional conditions. I can tell you, I haven't solved the problem myself. It's not solvable, frankly. It can only be livable. And then life is not a problem to be solved, but life just becomes an experience to be lived. I've got to see if I'm rambling too much here.

[33:18]

That's pretty good. She told me ahead of time, make it longer than ten minutes. We're going to have some discussion later on this, so rather than ask for questions now, we'll get into this very, very important and complex question of how we make our living in the world, make our way in the world, and support ourselves and others. Anyway, I think the key word, and one of the key words is non-exploitation. Of yourself to begin with. Of human resources beginning with yourself, and of course of all the resources. And then what does exploitation mean? What does exploitation mean? Please be open to your noble heart.

[34:38]

Thank you.

[34:39]

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