We're lucky to have Joanna Macy with us today who have caught her for this occasion in the midst of her busy schedule. It was a very lucky event. Joanna is a long time Buddhist practitioner and activist and teacher and philosopher. and she was one of the founding members of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship 20 years ago. I wish I thought more about how to introduce her because Joanna is a very important person in my life. Her identity for me constitutes the complete And her scholarship and the quality of her vision and helping us all to clarify the groundwork, the Buddhist groundwork of our social activity, our social change activity, how that social change activity rises up.

[01:25]

It is very, very important to me and I think to all of us. So, welcome, Joanna. Thank you, Mary. I loved just now taking part in the self-dedication as bodhisattvas. Coming here with all our ancient twisted karma from eons of greed, hate and delusion. Coming with the knowledge that each moment allows us to self-transform, to awaken. to cleanse, to purify ourselves and our relationships, to take part in the healing of our world. That is the basic miracle of our existence.

[02:30]

That it takes no time at all to transcend, to be there, to choose, to be fully here for the sake of all beings. It feels very good to do that, engage in that practice here with you in these days between August 6th and August 9th as we remember what this country in which we live did 53 years ago these days. And some of us have been taking part in one way or another in remembering what greed, hate and delusion led us and our government to do to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[03:33]

and the crime that has continued to be done in the 53 years since then, as we have spent our wealth, taken it from our schools and from our families, from our social services, from our care for each other, from our land, to put into weapons of ever greater devastation and death than those we had back then. How good it is to be part of a company that is dedicated to remembering. And I sense that in the words that we were saying this morning and the beautiful way in which they were sung. How fine it is to be part of a company that remembers, that remembers and feels part of the great succession of ancestors. and to honor as well Maitreya Buddha of the future the Buddha, that figure, that sacred figure, that presence that is the presence of the future in us that gives us determination and a sense of gratitude for being able to care for our world for the sake of all

[04:58]

who are waiting to be born in the future generations, the Buddha of the future. I'd like to remember with you this morning some of the, think it with you, of some of the various forms of Bodhisattva activity that are going on right now. First of all, on this Saturday, between these two memorable events, there are Dharma brothers and sisters who are meeting across our land and in other countries. Allow yourself to feel not only gladness for our presence here together, but the presence across the miles with brothers and sisters who are offering themselves to awaken and enter the boundless Dharma gates for the sake of all beings.

[06:13]

Then there are many other kinds of Bodhisattva activities. This morning There's Sarah, there's Ed, there's Joanne, there's Tom, and they're going, and they are right now at a national meeting of organic farmers. They say, what is Bodhisattva activity about organic farming? Here are people who are dedicated to creating the institutions and practices and networks for growing healthy food. And this is taking a lot of courage right now because it is hard to buck the tides of the agribusiness and the corporate interests that are adulterating our food, irradiating our food through mass processing, through pesticides.

[07:25]

through hormone additions, through mass marketing, and to keep coming back to learning again how to grow food in reverence for the earth and the earth's natural abundance. That's one kind of bodhisattva activity, that of creating structures and practices for a life-sustaining society. Just like those today, the farmer's market down on Center Avenue is working in the same vein, thanks to the Ecology Center and the community-supported agriculture. This is just one little glimpse of the forms of activity for creating the structures of a life-sustaining society.

[08:33]

And then there's other kinds of Bodhisattva activity. I got a call last night from a young man whom I've never met in Utah, and he is calling to alert people. He's watching. And what he's watching is the movements of what we call the poison fire, that's the radioactive waste. This is military radioactive waste from making weapons and dismantling weapons. And in unannounced convoys, he sees that they're being brought from all the way across the country from New York to Utah to the piles of uranium tailings still uncovered on Native American lands. This is a level of activity which is slowing down the destruction or keeping watch on it so that we can stop it, so that we can increase our awareness and intervene.

[09:45]

This is a form of activity that also takes a lot of courage, a lot of mindfulness, a lot of presence, a lot of dedication to the welfare of other beings, including beings of numberless generations to come as we dump radioactive and other toxins that can cripple, bring disease for countless generations. I mention these three types, sitting in practice as we are here, talking about the Dharma as we are here, the organic farmers creating institutions, and the, what I call, holding actions to slow the destruction of our present political economy.

[10:51]

All of these belong in an interesting way to each other. They all are part of an incredible shift that is going on now. And it is good to speak of it together because it's not featured in the evening news. It's not featured in the headlines of the morning paper. It is what one of my teachers, Lester Brown, of the World Watch Institute calls the ecological revolution, creating a life-sustaining society. He says that this is the third of the great revolutions that we know about, that we as humans on planet Earth have known. There was the agricultural revolution. That took centuries. Then there was the industrial revolution.

[11:58]

That took decades, sometimes generations. And now, as he says, this ecological revolution toward practices that can sustain life. And this has to happen now, it has to happen fast. Just in a matter of a few years, in this time we are sitting, in this time we are living, in this time that we are knowing each other, in this time that we are coming again to Dharma practice. And this revolution has to be even more thorough than the others because it has to involve not only the technologies but the attitudes and the values that organize our lives and our awareness that inform us what our needs are that shape our wants

[13:13]

our desires, our ambitions, our purposes. I imagine that the future generations will look back on this time, these years that we are living and call them the time of the great turning. that they will look back and say, oh, our ancestors then, just in the years surrounding the end of the second millennium, the beginning of the third millennium, right in there, our ancestors had the courage and the strength and the vision, the endurance to bring it off, the great turning from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society. Our ancestors back then could see that the very premise of their society was built on industrial growth, built on accelerating production and consumption of the Earth's resources, of the body of Earth.

[14:36]

and that it can't go on, because that accelerated use of resources and accelerated production of waste and poisons far faster and more than the Earth's body can absorb. And so, in that time, our time, an epical shift must happen, is happening from unsustainable ways to ways that are being and relating and doing and producing and consuming of understanding, of seeing because it's a perceptual revolution to a civilization that can sustain life. I invite you to feel gratitude for being alive at a time when all your courage and everything you've ever learned about connection, compassion, equanimity, loving-kindness,

[16:09]

Clear seeing, endurance in the face of hardship. Everything you ever learned about that can be put to use for the sake of all beings. For the sake, indeed, of the future of life on Earth. There are times we might imagine that we are in Dharma practice for our own purity and enlightenment. but in the depths of our being we know that is something far greater at stake that has brought us to this practice and to these teachings. And we say that not with any kind of inflation but with humility. It matters what we do with our minds

[17:12]

It matters what we do with our bodies, our speech, as well as our mind. It matters that we understand that we are not alone, isolated and in competition with other beings. It matters that we understand and are liberated from that isolation and competition. It matters that we awaken and come home to our vast belonging, mutual belonging. We give thanks that our ancestors have passed on to us alive now teachings and practices in which we can grow strong, strong in ourselves and in our connection with each other. And you know the stories, the examples I gave you just a few minutes ago, I chose them deliberately to illustrate different dimensions of this great turning.

[18:35]

I'm sure there are many ways that we could analyze and create a typology of the forms of action that this great turning involves. I see three, but maybe that's just because I like the number three. The most visible level or dimension in this shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society are the holding actions. to slow the destruction of the industrial growth society. And so I mentioned Clay, the fellow that called me from Utah. And there are countless others we could think of too. Today in San Francisco begins the lawsuit against

[19:44]

by young activists against the sheriff's men in Humboldt County, sprayed pepper spray into their eyes, some of them. The one was featured in the press, you may remember, several years back as they were protecting the Headwaters Grove against the illegal logging of the Pacific Lumber Company. The pepper spray being even held the eyelids held back and sprayed in and so that is that action all that that insistence that we be able to protect the earth without violence being done against us and that protection itself is like the watching of the nuclear waste part of this great turning where more and more people every day are becoming involved in actions to slow the destruction, to call attention to it, so that more and more of us can say, no, we don't want that.

[20:54]

These actions are essential. They buy time. They manage to protect some species, some lives, some ecosystems, Some portions of the gene pool. But by themselves, this dimension is not enough for the great turning. It's essential though. And I know that many of you are in different ways are involved. Many of us are involved in all three of these dimensions I'm talking about. And May Lee Scott of your Zendo has been a great inspiration to many people for years now in her faithful presence, for example, among other things, at the Concord Naval Weapons Base and the shipment and movement of nuclear weapons.

[22:05]

But there's another, and there is another dimension, that second dimension of the Great Turning. which is creating the institutions and structures for a sustainable society. Saying no isn't enough. We have to plant the seeds that will grow the forms, the institutions the behaviors that will shape a life-sustaining civilization. And that's why I mentioned this morning the organic farmers meeting going on right now. And there are countless other examples of that. Walking around the block here I saw the community garden and the tool lending library.

[23:11]

One of countless, some of countless examples of the alternative institutions necessary to a life-sustaining society. And they're sprouting up now like weeds. Cooperatives, alternative housing, co-housing, eco-villages, land trusts, alternative currencies, Sometimes I think that if I could just, I can almost see them, you just turn the lens a little bit and you look out and see all these new ways of doing sprouting up like green shoots through the rubble of a dysfunctional civilization, deepening here and there into green pockets of grass and clover and cress.

[24:16]

Sometimes they can appear to us to be rather marginal. They have to struggle for money. They don't get the publicity and the attention. They don't make the news. But these, I am more and more convinced, are the seeds of the future. in this dimension of the Great Turning, we are looking at what are the forces at work in the industrial growth society that cause so much destruction. And this effort to understand is spreading very fast, their workshops, their teach-ins, their conferences, their books. And looking at Alan Sanaki back there, I think of a think-sangha that he is part of, bringing keen analytical and economic minds to understand the economic forces that underlie, the dynamics that underlie the Industrial Growth Society and where interventions can be made.

[25:51]

painlessly, maybe not so painlessly, but certainly non-violently. Just shift to change the system. But these institutions in this second dimension of the Great Turning are not enough, it seems, for the Great Turning. Because they must, in and of themselves, they're not sufficient. because they cannot survive and they cannot endure unless they are rooted in understandings and insights, deeply held values about who we are and how we are related to each other and to our Earth. These fundamental understandings of the way reality is structured And this fundamental dimension of the Great Turning is moving very fast too, at extraordinary rate.

[27:05]

This you could call the shift in consciousness or you could call it a spiritual revolution or a perceptual revolution is changing the ways we see. And that is why I mentioned our practice, your practice here at Berkeley Zen Do and our Dharma brothers and sisters throughout the world and not only those who follow overtly the Buddha Dharma path but an awakening to our mutual belonging that is in our interdependence that is happening in every major religion. and in the resurgence of the indigenous traditions of earth wisdom, in the reawakening of God's spirituality, in creation spirituality, in Christianity, in the Jewish renewal movement.

[28:16]

Almost everywhere you look, you can see a coming to life of our perceptions of the sacredness of life right here. A radical sense of the imminence of the sacred and how it is expressed in the way we relate to each other and in the way we use the body of Earth. I agree with another one of my teachers, Gregory Bateson, who said that the understanding of the system's nature of reality, that is our interrelatedness, which as you know is the core teaching of the Buddha.

[29:21]

Dependent co-arising. Gregory Basin said that this understanding of our interdependence is the greatest revolution that has had, cognitive revolution, that has happened in the last two or three thousand years. I would make the time longer, but at any rate, Another phrase he used, by the way, he says, the biggest bite out of the tree of knowledge in the last several millennia. So there is a very rapid awakening or shift of our mind. And that too isn't reported on the front pages And what is occupying the front pages now makes us think that we're getting ever tackier as our civilization. I think a very good Bodhisattva practice is to tune the focal length of your vision to see the tremendous changes that are happening right now.

[30:44]

and to speak of them to each other as we become alive again to the living body of Earth and the sacredness of our relations to it and to each other. This is the basis of a life-sustaining society and it is happening. I love the Buddha Dharma for its summons to our gratitude. I know in the Tibetan tradition in which I have, my main practice is Vipassana, but I have spent a lot of my years with my Tibetan brothers and sisters and learned from them.

[31:50]

And they stress how you begin with gratitude. meditation session, every practice session, every day actually, for being given a human life. And that's not because Buddhists think humans are superior to other life forms, but because they realize that the human mind possesses the capacity to change its karma. in systems terms that can be understood as the capacity for self-reflexive consciousness, which is created by decision-making. Making decisions, making choices involves a lifting up onto the next halonic level of neural activity, gives you distance,

[32:55]

that generates self-reflexive consciousness. So we give thanks for being born at a time when we can help change the karma, the ancient twisted karma born of innumerable acts of greed, hate and delusion. and they can be undone. What is made by the human mind can be unmade by the human mind. So I close now with gratitude gratitude for this exquisite center for the beauty of it When I first came to Berkeley in 1982, I met Will, who had worked on this.

[34:04]

For you who have come, who are alive, there's nobody in this room who isn't alive now. And for what your presence and practice here means, not just for yourselves, but for this planet time. and especially for the succession of ancestors for the beauty of the Dharma for the noble ones may we ever feel them around us like a cloud of witnesses and I see that we have a few more minutes before our closing time And I wonder if you have, since you're all taking part in this Planet Time I'm talking about, have some comments or some questions you'd like to share. Well, it's... could keep you awake nights because it is very disquieting.

[35:45]

There was a... been recent reports of how As your question suggests, you know that the scientists and the operators, both at the reactors, power generating stations, and the weapons facilities, have been unpaid, go sometimes months without pay. so that there's a great temptation, we assume there's a great temptation to engage in marketing of the plutonium. There is also, it's also costly to maintain the buildings and the equipment, the reactors themselves and the storage pools

[36:55]

the military facilities. They're very close to where nobody knows when another Chernobyl can happen. Or a similar accident such as that that happened in the military establishment at Chelyabinsk back in the late 50s. There have been many accidents since then. My husband spends a lot of time in the Ukraine as well, working to bring them information and technologies for solar and wind generation of energy as an alternative to nuclear. But there's a strong commitment

[38:02]

in Ukraine as well as in Russia to construction of nuclear reactors. I feel that there is a very strong link between the quality of attention that we develop in Buddhist practice and what is required for the care of the poison fire or the radioactive waste. Waste, you know, is a misnomer or not an adequate word because in the generation of nuclear power and weapons every part of the equipment from trucks to plastic booties at every stage of the fuel cycle becomes not only contaminated but contaminating. It's almost mythic in character. And yet this can be contained with attention, attention.

[39:07]

And this is what this practice, I'm so grateful for the Buddha Dharma for teaching us the value of attention and how to train it and how to sustain it. The capacity for mindfulness. for looking at keeping our attention on something even when we don't like it and we learn to do that as we sit. A lot of stuff comes up in our mind that we don't like and yet we stay with it. This practice will be essential for our people, for our society in containing over the long term the poison fire. because there's not a solution to try to hide it, which is what that call last night I was mentioning to you from Utah, trying to dump it in the still uncovered uranium mill tailings.

[40:12]

But if we can admit it, if we can be open, if we can say, here we must guard this, then we have the technology for it. It's simply to keep it out of the biosphere, we know what needs to be done. The technical requirements are minimal, but it does require a capacity to admit that we did a boo-boo. The capacity to admit that we created something that is a crime against nature in that it can cripple and kill for 10,000 generations. And that capacity, just as in the very first part of our Bodhisattva ceremony this morning, that admission

[41:20]

Every new beginning requires that admission of what has come to be through our ancient twisted karma. And only with that admission can we step into liberation and responsibility. So I'm grateful for, I've wandered a bit from your question, but thank you for letting me make that point. Thank you for telling us about that.

[44:16]

Do you have any written information about it that you could bring? Thank you for alerting us to that. This is a beautiful example of the great turning. We don't know whether the great turning will succeed or not, but we do know that it's happening. What I mean by succeed is whether it will happen in time to save life, complex life forms on earth, but it is happening.

[45:21]

The tree of knowledge is also the tree of duality. And the tree of life is the tree of non-duality. The other side of this change is this triumphant capitalism. private property and supposedly to protect it, but it's not contributing in any way to the development of the people there who are very poor in the South of Chile. So the question is how the people in underdeveloped countries, in the third world, can have sustained development without going through the same eras of industrialization of industrial society, which is what gave the developed world its wealth.

[46:46]

So, in a way, we've already had our industrial revolution in the developed world, and at a certain price and cost. So the question is, for the underdeveloped world, for the third world, how to have sustainable development without having to go through the same industrial revolution. And how to have this development serve the people and not foreign corporations. capitalistic ecology. So there's plenty of... I'm heartened by the attention given to that now throughout the world in alternative economic summit, in the alternative I write here in Berkeley, the Society, International Society for Ecology and Culture, coming out of this, are you aware of that, the Ladakh Project?

[48:04]

And that also is using some of what's called Buddhist economics to see how economic development, or really economic health, since development is a loaded term, can preserve human life and then more than human life, non-human life in these cultures. I'm aware that we're gone past our time limit, so I want to ask you to intervene or should we continue?

[48:36]

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