Here's what one person wrote, the names drop lightly from my lips on and on, soft and steady as the snow. With each name there is a life, whole and complete, and beautifully different from the others, like the snowflakes that each fall in their own place. Now she got that very well-known Zen expression, no snowflake ever falls in an inappropriate place. Everything is just as it is, everything is perfect and complete, just as it is. This is the ground of our teaching. Years ago I used that wonderful Zen phrase in a memorial tribute to my late wife, and here in the snow, chanting the names, I am able to grieve at last for my son and grandson. The grief flows out into the grief of the whole earth, like the cycle of rain returning by way of cloud and river to the sea. I feel the seven-month burden of it lifting from my heart as my head at last breaks the surface of a long darkness. Extraordinarily,

[01:03]

among these barbed wire fences, I feel blessed. Nor am I the only one. All feel it, and with a great love for one another and all humanity, which gradually replaces the strange guilt we have felt here at being willing to laugh and dance and sing and even indulge in black humor. It was remarkable. I had a little more immediate cause, perhaps, for this healing than some of the others, but everybody felt this. Now, what was it? It wasn't just this is a good group of people, a good bunch out on an outing or something like that. It wasn't just because it was intelligent and tough-minded and people were really looking at something very, very hard. It wasn't just that we felt that if those people who died and been humiliated there could have seen this group which had come to pay homage to them and to bear witness

[02:03]

to what they suffered, of course they would have, we hope, would have been elated. There was something else. There was something very positive in this place, so much so that Texigan said this is a place of healing. This has become a holy place. He really feels that. These Auschwitz retreats are now, there was one last November, that was the year after ours and there's going to be another one this year, I think. They probably will be yearly and I really recommend to you, any of you, any of you, no matter what your tradition lets you go, it may be one of the great experiences of a lifetime. It was for me. When I got home, I was still kind of racking my brain. How did that happen? What was that? And I had a card, I had about six letters from friends in Europe that I made on this

[03:07]

retreat, and one card, this one is typical. My voice is still vibrating with the names. My heart is echoing with love. And I still couldn't figure it out and I couldn't write about it, and I haven't yet. Fifteen months later, my editor, my publishers, they wanted me to write, and so far I couldn't do it. The New Yorker, I'm sorry to say, asked me to do a talk of the town piece on this. Here is what I tentatively am coming to, to account for this strange exhilaration. All those things, those causes I mentioned are true. They're all valid, but they don't amount to enough. I know from my own experience of the death of my wife, and that there was a kind of a, I've talked to other people about that

[04:13]

and they all feel guilty about it, but I don't now, although I did, because I think some way it taps into this exhilaration I'm talking about. Some of you who have lost somebody very close to you, there's a kind of a week or ten days after the funeral where there's an extraordinary exhilaration, an extraordinary clarity, where you move, you know exactly what to do, what to take care of, you haven't really, perhaps you're on a kind of a high because there's so much to take care of. But whatever it is, there's an opening out of clarity, the fact is there, the fact is inescapable, and there's some sort of liberation that takes place. And I started putting these things together. After I got home, I went to see one of my students, and she's a lady who in the very middle of her life, almost within three months, she lost her husband and then she lost her ability to walk. She was struck down with a paraplegic, what's the name of that disease? Doesn't matter. She's in a wheelchair,

[05:15]

she cannot take care of herself. And before I left, she said, I'm just terrified, because my last dignity is I think I'm going to lose, I won't be able to take myself to the bathroom, somebody's going to have to help me do that. And she really dreaded this, and I said, you mustn't dread that. Why you dread that? You're going to have somebody living with you in the house who knows how to take care of that, and there's no, you know, that's her, you know, don't. It's fine. And I also told her, I said, you'll be amazed when it happens, it'll be all right, you'll see. Well, when I came home from Auschwitz, the timing was perfect. I came in and immediately I felt this house was lighter. And I said, it happened, didn't it? And she just grinned, and she said, it did. I was so afraid, and now it's there, there's no getting away from it, and I'm free. Do you remember Maurice Herzog, who climbed Annapurna, and he lost his legs in an accident, he had to be carried down, he very nearly lost his life.

[06:20]

And through that accident, losing both legs, a man whose whole life was mountain climbing and action, he was set free. It's one of the most moving accounts, that liberation into death and then life. If you ever read that book, if you're interested in mountaineering books, it's called Annapurna, Maurice Herzog. It's an incredible freedom. I knew an Indian friend of mine, Bob Robidoux, he was one of the people indicted with Leonard Peltier in the famous shootout in Wounded Ridge in 1975 on Pine Ridge. And he told me that the day of the shootout, when two agents were killed and a young Indian guy were killed, that they were absolutely surrounded, helicopters, state police, National Guard, every road buzzing with armed men who wanted to really wipe them out. And he said, we knew we were going to die. There wasn't any ifs, ands, or buts. There was no way out of this predicament. And the minute we really knew this, he said, I went about what I had to do, get the children

[07:22]

out of there, get things packed up, write a note. He said, really quite a light heart. He said, death, when you know it's coming, when it's incontrovertible, you're set free. You've always dreaded this thing, and here it is. This is what Henry James said on his deathbed. His last words were, oh, here it is, that distinguished thing. Here it is. Kind of a surprise. So all of these things began to tell me, could it be that what was exhilarating us was the truth? And the truth is this. And I think in this lies hope. We talk about becoming more and more civilized, and then we have Auschwitz, and then we have Bosnia, and then we have Rwanda, one horrifying genocide after another. Not to speak of what

[08:29]

we do in our streets and stuff here at home. How can we pretend that we are making progress? How can we pretend that our species is perfectible? I had an expedition among New Guinea people, stone age people. Presumably their culture was very much as it was 40,000 years ago when Homo sapiens is supposed to have evolved. The children in that culture, stone age, literally stone age, stone tools, no metal. And not only that, but they were cut off. All the very things you would say, well, this is going to stunt these people. They were cut off from all other, they could only go about a three mile diameter because if they went over that line they'd be killed by the next tribe over. They went to war once a week. More civilized war than ours. One death was enough. That was a victory. They went home. They didn't go in for this mass, biomass slaughter that we do. But they also were extremely nice to

[09:32]

their little kids and old people. They're better than we are. Much nicer in many ways. These were stone age people. These kids were so humorous and so bright and so quick. They picked up on things like that. We all had the feeling we could take these stone age kids back to our school system and they'd make it up in three weeks. They'd be okay. They were just amazing. And so when you think of that at one end, 40,000 years ago, primitive man so-called, and then you think of Auschwitz at this end, what does that tell us? What it tells me is that the species is the species. This is who we are. We are capable of this extraordinary kindness and compassion, this extraordinary beauty and insight. Cathedrals, great music, great mathematical, this and that. But underneath that we are still the same old, big, dangerous mammal. We haven't changed a bit. And I think it's this notion

[10:41]

because we have all of this progress, all this so-called progress. We're doing the same thing the stone age people did. Probably the first thing a modern man did was commit genocide against the Neanderthals. That was probably the first big one. They really went in there and wiped them out. And they've been doing it ever since and they're still doing it. They're doing it today, tonight, people are being slaughtered. And they'll do it tomorrow and they'll do it for the rest of our lives because that is who we are. And I think that Auschwitz, even though it's a very dark and painful truth, it slams you up against that truth. It slams you up. There's no escaping it. There it is. If we are not the murderers ourselves, we turn our heads away if it's either dangerous or economically unsound to interfere. And we'll do it by the thousands. And of course, there are those exceptions but they prove the rule. There are exceptional human beings who really, through some sort of discipline, but most of us, if you press the right buttons, that's what we

[11:46]

will do. We're afraid, whatever. You remember Millai. And speaking of that, that's why I sort of appreciated those Germans. I would hate to have to go to a thing like this at Millai or maybe Hiroshima or something. It would be very painful and hard to handle. But I derailed myself from my most important point. What could it have been? Where was I going before I got off on Millai? Oh yeah, Millai. When you think about that guy, there was one guy prosecuted, despite the fact that all of his superior officers were all corrupt, stupid, untrained, whatever, all the way up from Colonel Captain Medina to General Westmoreland. A bunch of dimwits. And the guy who took the heat and the rap in the fall was Rusty, remember? William Rusty Calley. Now, Calley is the guy that led the slaughter. He was a lieutenant. Rusty Calley, as far as we know, before this happened, had been not very bright and not

[12:51]

very ambitious young kid working the gas pumps in Miami. He didn't have a criminal record or a violent record or anything. He was a kid who was badly trained and got scared and cheerfully slaughtered women and children. Cheerfully. I mean, not cheerfully, I mean, you know, whatever. But he didn't hesitate. And nor did the men in his squad once he cranked up. Suddenly, all these good American boys turned into women and children slaughterers. And how fast that could happen with fear. And who can we say, Goethe, the great German poet, he said, I know of no crime or violence so evil that I am incapable of committing it. That is the truth. That is who we are. So, this may not seem like good news to you, but it's good news to me. And I really do. Because, no, because I speak a lot about the environment. I'm always representing the environment. I always will. And I'll always, you know, I'm always representing Indian people

[13:57]

or Chicano people. I worked for years with Cesar Chavez. You know, that's what I do. But people, somebody always, at the end of one of my talks, we have a Q&A and they always say, well, do you have any hope? Why do you laugh so much if things are as you say? Well, you know, if we go on like this and we keep electing third rate people to lead us, and not just in this country, but everywhere in the world, the politicians are the scum that come to the top. You have to be. Do you want that job? Well, I'm sure there's some good ones. You have a very good one in this state who retired, unfortunately, Don Edwards. He was fantastic. But that is neither here nor there. As long as we, you know, we whine and moan about Clinton or Reagan or whoever it may be, you know, we're the ones who put him there. We're the ones who settle for these people. And as long as our leadership is like that, we're not going to change the situation. We're always going to have genocide. We are

[14:58]

shipping guns, AK-47s, by the millions out to all the third world. Every time you see the TV, you see 13-year-olds with these very dangerous weapons. To make money, we do it. Look at our tobacco companies. They're willing cheerfully to kill us. Chemical companies the same. Where are the ethics? So we are, in other words, I'm just saying I don't want to hammer the corporations and stuff, although I'd cheerfully do that for about 10 hours. I don't want to do that. I just want to point out or suggest that we are not making much progress. And the only way we can make progress is to understand and accept and even embrace who we really are, to remind ourselves that we are animals. We are beautiful animals, capable, again, of extraordinary spiritual beauty and cultural beauty and so forth. But we are these creatures. And if we accept that, then we can start placing safeguards that

[16:00]

as we do against dangerous criminals. We're all potentially dangerous criminals. I guess that's what I'm really saying. That's the good news. You see, Primo Levi said something that I'm very much aware of. I'm walking a very dangerous line here. I don't want to say that we are all, I'm equating all of us with the Nazis who perpetrated this thing in Auschwitz. You know, Hannah Arendt did that book about Eichmann in Jerusalem, and many people have made this point. Commander Huss of the Kommandante to Auschwitz, a normal man by everything. His journals, which he wrote, he's the first guy to bear witness to Auschwitz, really. Extremely sensible, level-headed stuff. Ordinary bureaucrat talking there. Eichmann was psychoanalyzed in Jerusalem before he was tried. The psychiatrist said, I've never met a man so normal. This was Arendt's point, the banality of evil. She said the

[17:05]

real evil comes from people who don't think, who don't have to think. They'll go along with anything. So, that's scary. But Primo Levi said, and he was, I do not know of any and it does not much interest me to know whether in my depths there lurks a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, and not only in Germany, and they still exist. And that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation. I very much do not want to confuse the average person with Nazi murderers. I just want to submit that we have this potential, along with the potential for this great beauty. I'm going to read you a quote and then if you believe it, I'm going to stop forever. This comes

[18:12]

from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, not known as a very cheerful man. But he did write, he had a lot of experience for those camps and stuff, the Soviet camps. And by the way, Hitler and Stalin were both very ordinary men, you know. They weren't evil geniuses. Somebody's pointed out they made a very good point. Evil is never profound. It is only extreme. Goodness can be profound. Evil is never profound, just extreme. And that's why it virtually always is perpetrated, not by the mad geniuses we see on TV or something. It's perpetrated by ordinary bureaucratic minds, very ordinary, unimaginative. They are the very awful ones. Hitler and Stalin, from all we can tell, were extremely ordinary men, without much imagination. Here's what Solzhenitsyn said. If only it were so simple. If only there were evil people

[19:14]

somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? Thank you very much. I'll be back with another funny evening next year.

[20:18]

A few, sure. Yeah. Well, they're going to show it somewhere. I've seen the film, too, and I was very pleased by it and relieved. In the beginning, I thought maybe it wasn't such a great idea. In fact, I told him that I didn't really want to be interviewed for it, because I felt I was rather piecey about that, I guess. But actually, the result, once it was edited and cut down, is very good. It's great. So don't turn against it. I've forgotten the title. Do you remember

[21:29]

the other writer that I can suggest might shake a light on what we discussed tonight? It's Viktor Frankl. He wrote a book, A Man's Search for Meaning. He was in Yugoslavia for a few years, survived. He mentioned that he saw, he watched, and lived through this, that there were some of the prisoners who had been sort of raised in small demagogues in Yugoslavia. Some of them were crueler and worse than some of the other guards in the Nazis. He sorts through this a bit, but he put that confluence, that mixture of people who were in... This is a very good point. Viktor Frankl's... Oh, yes. I shall paraphrase it. Thanks. The question is that, the point was, Viktor Frankl wrote a book called The Something of Meaning, The Man's Search for Meaning, and he'd been in Auschwitz. And he made the point that there were

[22:34]

people in there, in charge of the barracks and so forth, who were even more brutal and cruel than the regular guards. The reason for that was that when Hoss was setting up this camp, he sent a man named Gerhard Palitsch. He was one of his SS people, who had an absolutely angelic face. His face is in this book also, absolutely young, angelic face. This guy had a taste for killing, which is almost unparalleled. He just wanted to do it all himself. He couldn't get enough of it. And Hoss sent him to Sachsenhausen, and he picked out 30 brutal criminals and brought them to Auschwitz to whip the prisoners into line. Those guys, of course, did very well indeed in the prison. That's why they were chosen for that reason. Another question? Question? Karma and genocide. No.

[23:39]

I don't mean there's not a relation. I just simply mean that, and there probably is, and I'd like to think about it. I don't mean to be flippant. But that's a big question, and I'm a little punchy, so I'm not going to take it on. Thank you. I don't want to speak superficially about it. I want to talk about the experience that I went through in Washington, D.C. When I was thinking back to the genocide of African Americans in this country, and I guess thinking about myself and my childhood life in the South,

[24:49]

and being a secretary of the South, I guess I think what I'd like to do is point to one way that we all, each of us, now have a right continuously to look and evaluate where we are and to make a rule in relationship to the world we live in. And isn't it part of a sort of legislative... I'm not... Yeah. I'm not sure, because I'm being senile, I'm a little bit hard of hearing, but are you more or less asking, just to abbreviate that a little bit, that in each moment we have a choice, you mean, to move according to... Yeah.

[25:53]

Yeah. Right. Yeah. I think that's true, and some people, as you know, made extraordinary decisions, extraordinarily courageous ones, so they are so moving that they could do that. And I think it's true, moment by moment, we each make our own decision for better or for worse. That's part of our Zen practice, too. Each moment is fresh. Each moment is beginning in his mind. And I guess there are those among us, of course, we don't know until it happens. It's just like, you know, you read about these accounts of the battlefield, and people are constantly surprised about who has, who finds courage and who doesn't. Sometimes the least likely person has that courage when it's needed, and the person you think is going to be brave folds up. I know I'm not doing your question justice, because I didn't quite hear it. Is there somebody who can paraphrase it in the first row here, who heard it better than I did? Did you? Anybody who can give me a...

[27:02]

Tracy? All right. Sorry. Anything else? Mm-hmm. Are you hearing this? I'm going to have to ask you to... I wish we had a microphone. I'm glad I could support this. Your recognition of your faith is packed. And then it comes to the point you say, you know, we're all Zen, and we need to, you know, we're all Zen, and we need to have that right now. Please, you can do this. I just need you to make this clear to everybody that you're a Zen. And I think that's what I'm trying to say. I think that's what I'm trying to say. I think that's what I'm trying to say. I don't want to confuse you.

[28:06]

I don't want to confuse you at all. I'm sorry. This question is based on... This lady did not feel... There was no resonance in my suggestion that possibly this recognition that we have not advanced very much in our, how shall you say, civilized impulses from the 40,000 years ago, that we are like other animals. We are more or less as we are. Animals really don't change much, you know. As soon as an animal evolves, it's another animal. And we have been a very successful animal, like sharks and mosquitoes and rats and a few other highly successful species. So we have not had to change very much

[29:07]

because we've been so flexible and so efficient and so bright. But I think we're not attracted by the idea that we've made no progress and furthermore may not be perfectible. That we are simply going up against a kind of a Darwinian law. That we're kind of, in that sense, we're technologically getting smarter and smarter, but we are fixed in place. And our mores and our ethics and our heart have not grown with our technical progress. And I think I suggested in my talk that facing up to that, Auschwitz kind of makes you face up to that. Why Auschwitz is more horrible to me than Bosnia or Rwanda. At least in Bosnia and Rwanda you had a long simmering feud. You had people who were taking each other's lands,

[30:10]

tribal wars, whatever. You had people who hated each other for 800 years, actually, in Bosnia, in that part of the world. And those people are constantly scared if the other side gets the upper hand, they're going to come in and slaughter them, so we'd better get them first. Now, to then go out and rape and slit people's throats on that scale is horrifying. But at least we can recognize that as human behavior. There is some impulse, and especially when, as we were told, most of the young soldiers were given all they could drink in the way of very strong plum brandy before they went out on these binges of slaughter. That is horrible, but it's human. I think we'd all agree with that. But is it really the same as a bureaucratic, cold-blooded decision toward the final solution to simply, systematically ship people and murder them on that scale, made by sensible, civilized,

[31:13]

Christian people in some office in Berlin? You know, I think that is what's so scary about this thing. And that is what you see there. And you see the blind deficiency of it. You see the technological progress of man gone awry, gone all wrong, used in this horrifying purpose in this direction. And that's what I felt we were slammed up against there.

[32:17]

You have to see it, to feel it. There was no getting away from it. There was no way you could talk your way around it. You couldn't say, well, we've got to get the churches busy here, or do gooder groups, or even our Zen practice, or all these things together. They're all wonderful, but they're not doing the job. And furthermore, even if perhaps there was a time when the churches together and all the groups could do this, but they can't do it now because there's too many of us. It's just too unwieldy, and it's not happening. Yeah? But I'm trying that a big noisy, or a big organized, or a big cold people is somehow more equal than a little unknown, unnoticed people that takes place. And I, a little evil deliberately done is evil.

[33:19]

Of course. Well, actually, I'm implying something quite the opposite, I'm afraid. I sort of agree with Hannah Arendt. This evil, the intentional inflicting of pain, that's what we generally mean when we say evil, I guess. But this was, it's that ordinariness of it, that fact is there all the time. It's not something that some evil person thought up. It is, I mean, that decision in Berlin is certainly that. But what we're up against here is, you know, we're up against maybe, say, 100,000 SS men, but also up against 100 million people who let it happen. And they never did anything wrong. They didn't commit murder themselves, but they permitted it to happen because it was too uncomfortable or too dangerous or too costly to protest.

[34:22]

And that's all of us. That's all of us, I think. And is that a little evil? We didn't do anything. It's a big evil. But it's general, so how can you call it evil? It's a general condition. It's a human condition. Yeah, right. Yeah, but we're quarreling over words here a little bit. It's true. In other words, it's part, I'm suggesting or submitting, it's part of our makeup. And it's part of our makeup for very, very good evolutionary reasons. If you have a male langur, and it goes into a tribe or a band of other langurs, and it's the strongest one, and it wants this female over here, it will go to that female, and it will kill every single one of her offspring. And to the degree it can control other females, it will kill all of their offspring. Because it wants its, it doesn't want. It's instinctively promoting its own genes, because it's the strongest one. That is good for langur health.

[35:24]

But we are not animals anymore. We think we're not. We have to do something extraordinary here. No, we have to do, we always read about the natural way, we should obey our own nature and so on. We have to go against nature now. We have to go against tooth and claw. But it's tooth and claw that actually advances among nations, among people, whatever. If you're going for pure survival of the strong, which is good for the species, but we cannot do that anymore. This is what we're still doing. This is what our corporations are doing. This is what our nations are doing. And this is what we have to turn around. Any of you who have not got the story, or the term, that you would say that the species are here, there's a transcendence. It's a transcendence because you see the truth,

[36:32]

and that's clear, and then you can go on from there. And then you can go on. And until you accept the truth, until you can accept the fact that you're going to die, you can't really transcend your own death. We all say, oh yes, we're going to die. We know that. But part of us doesn't really know that. We haven't really transcended that. We're not quite free of it. We're still afraid of it. We haven't really made it part of ourselves. And so that facing a clarity, no matter how terrible. My favorite novel is Dostoevsky's The Idiot, which I think is the most heartbreaking novel I think I've ever read. Absolutely extraordinary. And it is. It breaks your heart all the way through. But at the end, I was absolutely exhilarated, and I was exhilarated by the truth. Just because this is true is thrilling. The truth is freeing. It's liberating. And Auschwitz is a terrible, terrible truth. And it's implacable.

[37:34]

And you can't dodge around it. And I think this has something to do with who I'm talking about. When Hannah Arendt was writing about Eichmann in Jerusalem, she was corresponding with Mary McCarthy. And she said, you're the first person to understand the exultation I have in this material. Because she thought she was really onto it. The banality of evil. That it was ordinary people like us who do the evil. And she thought this was absolutely brilliant in her own contribution. And she had this exultation. I feel that's related to the exhilaration I'm talking about. My students' discovery that it was okay that somebody had to take her to the bathroom. It was okay. That's the truth. And once it's there, you can deal with it. Once it's a fuzzy thing being covered up by do-gooderism and all kinds of things, then we can't do anything about it.

[38:34]

And we'll limp on year after year. We'll do exactly the same things. We'll have the same genocides. What progress have we made? I mean, I really ask you. None. If anything, if somebody says it's gotten worse. So, this seemed to me, hey, if we can grasp this and embrace this, and embrace ourselves and say this, for better or for worse, is who we are. And we also are beautiful. We are great animals, and we are terrible animals. We don't like to think of ourselves that way, but if we can embrace it, then we can move forward. And that, I think, is the seed of the exhilaration. I don't know, but that's my instinct, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks a lot for coming, everybody.

[39:38]

And there are tapes of tonight's presentation out in the lobby, and other tapes and books. See you next weekend for Jon Kabat-Zinn. Bye. I think you said an awful lot last night. Too much, yeah. I'm still digesting it. What I heard is you spoke about facing the shadow. That we're all capable, in our own way, of doing such violence. The violence that you went to do healing around in Auschwitz. And it really strikes me, that's at the core of the salvation of our species, to look at our shadow. Yeah, I think so. I think so. And don't people say,

[40:40]

oh, well, I know there's evil in us. I'm not talking about evil. I wasn't last night talking about evil. I'm talking about the potential of this animal, a behavioral trait of this animal. We don't want to regard ourselves as animals, but we are. And in every technical way, we've gone so far ahead, but we're still capable of this extraordinary violence. Very quickly, people can turn around. But it's not evil. It's just something we have to take care of.

[41:08]

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