How Change Happens

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so today i want to talk about how change happens
and also about what matters
i have a really ambitious talk plan and a which was gonna be called self emptiness and neural plasticity
but then the last couple weeks it just it feels like the world is just begging to be talked about
and i don't know exactly how to talk about it but i i want to try
so i thought i would compress my ambitious taught into fifteen minutes and then i can say something about the world and then i want to hear your thoughts about the world also
oh so then
i'm gonna put this out for us to look at while were sitting this is three women who happen to be open to women at which something i learned recently and they are wearing the black lives matter t shirts and it also says yes and it also says make it right
was hoping that i can step position
ah
and last night we cooked we serve dinner at the men's shelter and for a long time i've been wanting to serve a vegetarian meal there which we haven't typically we don't typically do and i
i finally got my nerve a her pepper to you know because i feel like we're a pigeon we serve vegetarian food for ourselves and even though when we were not necessarily vegetarians are we don't hold tibet battle we don't force the guys at the shelter to be vegetarians but still like
every at the beginning of every meal i say hello were from berkeley san center and we made your dinner china we cut up your rotisserie chicken tonight and there's just like there's some cognitive dissonance there for me so and i don't know what i'm going to do i haven't committed to anything but anyway i i try to vegetarian meal last night and we have chili and cornbread
and salad and
the chino chilly when you make chili sauce it needs time to cook and for the flavors to meld and married so we didn't really quite have enough time and that kind of wonder if this talk is can become a things have happened commitment
maybe not quite there yet
but anyway here goes
after
so we just finished a practice period and in the practice period zojirushi was teaching us this teaching about the eight consciousnesses so called the yoga charm and teaching are the manifestation only school which is it's difficult and d
deep and i think we just may be started to scratch the surface perhaps and one thing i struggled with myself was like how to how does that up so how do we apply those teachings in our practice and what does it it when does it have to do with what we are doing here
and you know i think one of the most
anyway it's a teaching about
how how things change you could say would be one one aspect of it and you know especially how our minds and our hearts and our behaviors change
and i think one of them are user friendly aspects of of that teaching is this thing about watering the seeds many people have heard
so the ideas that we have a thing called the storehouse consciousness which is i think somewhat analogous to our idea of the unconscious storehouse consciousness has seeds seeds of every experience and depending on what seemed to get watered they come into our conscious our consciousness or conscious
mind and every time as seed is watered
it comes in on sort of surfaces it goes back stronger so
and we water see it seeds are in there from you know dna our ancestors and from our experiences as children in the low maven and and the experiences up to the present
and we water our own our own seeds are watered by our experienced and our behaviors and we water each other seeds to sow
if i speak sharply if i get my my seat of anger watered and i speak sharply i can i can happen that i can water depending on what kind of sees you have i could water seeds of hurt or anger and new
and so it's all very very dynamic

and so and we can't really control this process but it's if we can influence it and it's being influenced all the time if it's kind of is the way everything is always influencing everything
see so and so you can or pratt in you know zazen is a kind of way of watering certain seeds seeds of non reactivity seeds of open mindedness open heartedness
seeds of strength and flexibility and now let me sit with our back straight and that you know on our own not leaning against anything and water seeds of of sort of core strength and also flexibility we try to be open to what's happening in the present open our
minds open our hearts
so and many things in our practice are actually even though we don't talk about it that way they are efforts to water wholesome seeds beneficial seeds
and tick not answer so if you if the difficult guest comes you invite a skillful guests to take care of him so
if you have something that happens that provokes pain painful feelings you train we train ourselves to have another thing we and southers seeds we water when that happens so that we stay close to our suffering our pain or thing that we want to be reactive about
so i think city of you know that i was looking for a job as last year
and didn't find one and i've found that that process for me are really watered seeds of self doubt about my worth and i think that's probably something that other people experience in that process to so i did you know i applied for many jobs i wrote many cover letter
the cover letters and i
tailored my resume for each job in our did everything you're supposed to do and i hardly ever got called back you know i got i got an interview for a terrible job than i do get
the interviewed for a job i wanted and the interview went really badly and i didn't get the job and i got interviewed for a job when the interview went really well and i didn't get the job
and i even got a really awful job and got fired
so this has been a it sort of like it felt like you know kind of like an amusement park of scary rides about my work and you know and each time you you'd have to get on the ride you'd get on the ride and then there's a process you get disappointed and one of the most disappointing sad things when you don't go
get a job is that you have to keep looking for a johanna
that is actually one of the main you know one of the strongest disappointment because most of the time
anyway you made up be dying to do in a certain job that you're applying for but
so a but i also so you know you're getting it on the right you get to and then you just at some point you're thinking what does this say about me and there's no answer to that question so you can just keep going there you just keep churning with that what does this say about me and
what is my value and i'm very lucky that i have
lots of systems and structures in my life to water other seeds so that i criticize in and i get back into the present moment and in our chance sutures and we have one sutra that says
each of the myriad things has merit expressed according to function in place so that way i keep retry i can keep returning to what's what's really true because there's no answer to the question about your self worth
this person didn't give you a job but then your friends love you when you know it just it's going to go back and forth all the time
and another structure we have here that i think is one of the great thanks unsung processes is it's called the check-in
i'm so like i'm in several groups where we do a check-in so like for example the residents which each map at each resident meeting one of us checks in and that and the check-in means you talk a little bit about what's going on for you right in that time
and the parent dharma group we go around and everybody checks in about their life right then and it you know it's really a great thing to do because we get to know each other we understand each other and we hear about how each other's practicing with something but i also think it's like a ceremony of finding your place in the world finding your place in the group
because it's sort of life oh i'm important and and your important to and i care about you and what happens to you and and oh you care about what happens to me
and so it's like it's a return to the truth of our interconnectedness and and enacting it very viscerally
so i recommend to anybody who doesn't have that opportunity to to let us know and when we can find it when these groups that you can plug into it's really a great thing
so you know so then at some point you're off of the right right you you you're on the scary ride and then it comes to an and either used or to see through it or you work through it or you get bored with it or whatever and then you're just sort of back in basic okay this and i
think that's another thing that
we minimize or we we miss right because it's so nothing happened
it's like you just kind of basically feel okay you feel friendly towards yourself and everybody else in a kind of temporary way but i think that is actually the every day big mind
we're not the highfalutin big mind that we get when we meditate or we have some kind of been like for something but just the everyday moment when you kind of lapse into a sense of general o'kane us and that's a thing to water to water those moments when you just basically
we feel friendly towards yourself and towards you towards others
ah
and so tick non hand says
content
continue to care for the seeds and an intelligent way he can store consciousness will offer flowers of love understanding and liberation
so one other aspect of as yoga charge teaching that i wanted to try to talk about which is maybe not so user friendly when i first heard this teaching i found it very upsetting and frightening
which is the idea that everything that we experience everything that we know perceive cognates understand is being mediated through our cognitive apparatus
and so we're not really in it and you know it when you first hear this it feels like they're saying there's nothing out there everything's in your head but that's not what we're saying what we're saying is what there is both out there and over here because there's no difference is is inconceivable and we and we
when we package it into our cognitive apparatus it changes it it's just a version it's just a photograph it's just a facsimile and so
then you can have you know a more or less accurate photograph or facsimile and it's good to work on having an accurate one but also it's really it can be really powerful just to remember that what's happening is happening here it's happening in here
because that's because it it's so appears to be happening out there
that it can be really powerful to remember when you know you see someone they have maybe it's just they didn't make eye contact maybe they just have a look in their eye but you go to a whole place with it to remember like oh i just did that in my head that just happened here
so
just a quick word so there's this term that is that neuroscience has come up with called neuroplasticity probably most of you heard it i think that it corresponds really well with these teachings from the yoga chara chara neuroplasticity means that every thing that happens to
us everything we experience everything we think say or do makes actual physical changes in our brain
and it's like you know are you can
i am an analogy would be like our our thoughts and or feelings of behaviors kind of run on these tracks and the more they run on a track the more that tracks gets built up and popular like it's like the the cruise come around and fix up those tracks the ones that your thoughts are running on as
and the other tracks that they're not running on get sort of be overgrown with weeds and fall into disrepair and so you can actually i mean are you getting that process working for you were against you you know it to paraphrases and slogan
is your neural plasticity are you turning your neural plasticity earlier neuroplasticity to
because you can use that to inhibit the tracks that you actually don't want your mind to you can interrupt the tracks that you don't want your mind to run on and you can bolster and why you know water the seeds and bolster the tracks that you do want your mind to run on and it it's so it's changing all the time
and it just is changing all the time in one way or another and we can't control that process but it can be influenced or influencing all the time we can influence each other we can support each other to be influenced and in beneficial ways
so
so the world come to the world when i first was thinking this i am
was responding to really painful tragic things that happened like the shootings in charleston and in a warm always more news about global warming and about you know multinational corporations that have appear to have no ethical conscience and
but then this week it felt like well there was some good news to you know the yeah really amazingly times supreme court decision about marriage equality and you know i think
we can use that as an example that things do change weekend and we can feel empowered to change other things that we want to change because we see if things change things change all the time and sometimes they change in the way that we want them to
sometimes they've done
some hobby
i went to see my friend kate jorgensen yesterday who she is a unit she was a unitarian minister and she is one of the founders of
faithful fools which is a street ministry for homeless people in san francisco is really amazing organisation they do the street retreats where you live like a homeless person and find out that you really aren't in these different there's no really no real difference
i'm and but she's moved over here now she lives at chaparral house and
ah just a really wonderful person and i and i went i told her about my dilemma i want to talk about the world and and what can i say what should i say and she said
something about how you have to connect with people who share your concerns
and
i what i heard part of a two things you know don't fixate on what so terrible
but don't turn your back on and either but connect with other people who are concerned about the things you're concerned about and then she said and put your anchor down there
which i just thought was really wonderful put your anchor down there
so
you know it's sort of like watering you know we we respond to awful things we don't ignore them but we put our anchor down in our connection with each other and how we have access to change all the time at any time
and i believe that buddhism is actually really well suited to the work of change in the world
it's about liberation
it's about non harming
it's about the relationship understanding the real relationship between self and other
it's about studying cause and effect to really understand how change happens
and you could say to borrow a phrase from liberation politics it's about d colonizing our minds because you can say that our minds in buddhist terms have been colonized by greed hatred and delusion and so if we if we free if we did colonize our minds from them what's left is based our basic buddha nature
or basic buddha mind
so however you know when we talk about buddhism it always seems to start with and return to the individual like what you're doing with your own mind that's where we always returned to so i think it's up to us in this generation to figure out the ways to make these teachings re
really
work in the world working groups work for each other you know how we more maybe more about how we water seeds in each other as well as in ourselves
one of the ways that we have here of watering seeds is we make that we stayed intentions publicly
so like we take vows like at the end of the champ were going to take some thousand is like saying publicly and that's a very in powerful way to water seeds say something public philly and other people see you do it and you see that they see you do it so i went to say some things myself and
if you want to say some things later i welcome that
i would like to dismantle racism i would like that to have i would like racism to end and i would like to be part of that and it will end because as we know all conditioned phenomena are impermanent it will am so what can we do every day to
hasen that day
see and wanted to cross from
it's the same
this is a quote from wendell berry
racism involved in emotional dynamic that is disordered the heart both of the society as a whole and the very person in the society i want to know as fully and exactly as i can what the wound is and how much i'm suffering from it and i want to be cured i want to be
free of the wound myself and i do not want to pass it on to my children
so i could talk a little bit more about
andre them but i had a couple other vous or wanted to make in front of you here
i would like to and climate change
and i wouldn't like to help us return to a really healthy relationship with the earth
i was talking to her friend of mine a couple days ago who was very concerned and i want to do something about climate change i am i really want to do something and she propose that we have cost some people at another table at the restaurant we around and asked them if they were concerned about climate change and i didn't get the point of
eh i'm sheila extra extrovert i'm an introvert so like that you out was that we had a different idea right there but i said why did you get a beehive because i just read in this magazine the
a third of our food crops are pollinated by bees like that think about that that is really important a third of our food and pollinated by bees and also that urban environments are very good for beach there's actually less pesticides unless you
use pesticides are your neighbors do there's fewer pesticides in an urban environment and there isn't an agricultural area where they're using pesticides you know in big ways and she was like and my neighbors would freak out i don't i am already you know she was really hesitant about that so then i said well you know you could get the grey wow
water from your washing machine to go to to guard to water your garden you know like and i'm not i'm not doing these things myself right so i don't have much ground to stand on here but still i proposed a thing she could do and
you know
a step further and you know i feel that way about plastic like i am so i am so much more aware of plastic when i'm throwing things away than i am in the grocery store do you notice that i i've trained myself now i feel really bad when i throw away when i put a piece of plastic in the garbage i feel really bad
but i don't feel that way when i'm shopping i you know what it is i need you know what do you know keep track it back in time until i get up to the point where i'm doing the shopping you know because you're supposed to bring your own metal container and by things in bulk you know i'm just saying so
many things we could do that and that's just you know the tip of the iceberg
i also want to correct in income inequality and inhibit the power of multinational corporations with to like i mentioned appear to have no conscience you know some people have a job of making other people's lives miserable like that is just really not good
i popped them of you have that job
i'm not joking it's you know that like you know the people who work at amazon warehouses have to run from one you know one thing that they buy all through the shelves of the whole warehouse and they get like seven minutes for a break and there isn't time to go to the break room in that i mean it's released kind of
scary and that's just one example i you know not even mentioning internationally
hum so i went to read you a little factoid
about income inequality
the percent of wealth wealth the average american believes to be owned by the top twenty percent of us households is fifty nine percent
the percentage of wealth actually owned by the top twenty percent of us households eighty four percent
the percent of wealth the average american believes to be owned by the bottom twenty percent of households nine percent
the percentage of wealth actually owned by the bottom twenty percent of us households point one percent
the percentage of americans who side income inequality as a major problem in the u s five percent
so i mean we kind of have to keep well the privilege is is kind of like a sleeping sickness right it's like you hear about it but then you
i mean i spend a lot of time just trying to get through my day every day know it's hard to be aware of this stuff
but we can you know help remind each other to and not just get discouraged not get despair but like this is that was just about what we believe we can change what we believe we can our minds can change information changes what we think right
ah i've made a strange how are we done in time with plenty to talk about said it's about of about seven of oh he asked
okay
i made a strange segway which again maybe because i'm an well-trained buddhist i went again to the mind you know instead of the world and i've just been tried to remember there's a call on which i cannot remember they meant to look up on it and get a chance is like but the punchline is what do you call the world member what the beginning
partners
no you remember it wrong just use on don't john but what's the question the question is are these august is kind of trousers and coming through howard powers producer in the south a sale
lots of discussion
then her
he then he says what he figured up the up your just taking care of my rice fields
and they say well what about the world
he says what you call the world
that's pretty good although i thought about imagine it being something more like your mind you know the world is the world countries a very good things that he was he answers yeah that the world
so anyway i started thinking about raising kids my experience raising kids and one of the hardest things for mean raising kids was dealing with my kids in our kids are are bundles of pure naked desire right am i right
when you have a tiny tiny baby you just want to give them everything they want their needs and their wallets are exactly the same if they're hungry you feed them if they are called you meet them warm if they want to cuddle you cuddle with them if they want to watch things you'd give them interesting things to watch you just do what they want and what they want and need
are the same but very soon
by the time you know they're old enough to grab your glasses or whatever you have to inhibit that and you have to and and means we have to learn how to deal with our desire from such an early age
and it's intense as a parent you know especially in our society where you know people get paid the big bucks to play on our desires all the time to figure out how to play on our desires so it's really and that's a really powerful force if you are around children you it's intense be
because they don't stop and they don't take a break and you most of us don't have that much
g
me here to me that all the time
and i also was thinking about another really powerful force is you know parents have a lot of energy tied up and anxiety about their kids a huge amount of anxiety
oh i used my kids went through the berkeley schools and you know people in berkeley are very progressive and they really care they really want everybody to get a good education but they also what their kids to get the best and they don't have a problem with that like you can hold those two contradictory thought
in your brain because that's how our brains are
and
i mean and i'm sure i was doing the same thing i mean i would notice it when it was something that i didn't need or need need for my kids or something but you know you just if does a best teacher you do every you use every power you have every privilege and power you have no matter whether you know what kind of what level of privilege
you're using it all to get the best for your kids and that's normal but i still feel like these two experiences these two forces are m are behind a lot of the problems in the world
at the body can keep going to them what's at the bottom part of our practice is to look at once at the bottom
and these are normal things these are natural right
how do we learn how to manage
our anxiety his parents like how do we learn that it's safer for us if everybody gets a good education it's safer for our kids if everyone gets a good education or even and not fantastic but reasonably good better for everyone to get a reasonably good than for some
people to get a crappy one and for some people to get a fantastic one at least i think so maybe you don't agree
who
so
i don't know whether you think that has bearing on the world where they call the world or not but i just want to read you a few to close with a few little factoids
one is about how much the wealth of the north was fueled by the slave trade and by cotton cotton cotton industry seventy percent of the british textile
cotton in the british textile industry was came from the u s
and forty percent up
and new york had forty percent of the share of all the cotton revenue
the u s he went to new york
forty percent of the total wealth in the south was was slaves was was was the value of slaves mean the the financial value of slaves
after work after the civil war there was this we hear this idea of forty acres and a mule what that was repealed president i didn't know that president andrew johnson overturned general sherman's famous promise which would have distributed roughly four hundred thousand acres to newly for the free black families
however the owners got three hundred dollars per slaves
ah african americans have barely any of the nation's wealth and therefore little to pass down to future generations economists as estimate that up to eighty percent of lifetime wealth accumulation depends upon intergenerational transfers
martin luther king jr calculated that making good on the promise of forty acres and a mule when total eight hundred billion dollars that was back then when he said this and here's a great doctor king quote the i bet you haven't heard they
oh us a lot of money
that i don't think that one's ever been on a calendar
and yet i just wanted to say a little bit because that was a hard painful stuff
and want to read you a little tip from this alicia garza who was actually the originator of
the black lives matter slogans in oakland three years ago i didn't know that it was around the
when george zimmerman was acquitted of the murder charges of killing trayvon martin
she turned to facebook to express her anger and sadness and she came up with that has changed black lives matters in oakland
and
spits embarked a nationwide discussion of the way black legs are consistently undervalued in america and what people can do to change that
access to that national network helped their message spread quickly and soon activist organizations that across the country were using hash time black lives matter to shine light on underreported incidents of black people being attacked or killed by police but here's what she says i'm to close with best because it's
a positive watering of seeds
love is what sustains us through all the hardships that come with this work even love for people who disagree love is what will ultimately get us to a place where we can change the world we live in
so that those are my thoughts this morning and
i'd like to hear what your thoughts on especially if you have any intentions you want to share
so
thank you lori
tell me what does your house again i would like to dismantle racism i wanted to end and i want to be part of it you change that fares to i vow to andrew system i think it would be very powerful
it didn't seem powerful enough the way i said it's now
i found i vowed to end racism
theater than stephen on board
what this and also be around from cydia ios user majorities simulating me is how physically impossible examples how are are fantasy our way in rural form
on how the you're you doing a great question how rewarding season themselves and others as
series of actions he constantly would like to see how it manifests and i was just thinking is you were talking about how we just stay in the world and how
when we opened our now we want to be watering those seeds and yet we don't control
what are words mean to other people yeah you haven't tested out again and again find out where we are with it i can i think that's really important
something it's important that i think a really great thing we could learn i don't know if we can do this or not but to really be willing to tell people how what they're saying is landing on us and also to really inquire to really try to find out like not just say it but find out how it landed
i got stephanie and then only is that it's okay let's to stephanie in the oven thank you so much more on the system on the level of a foul or say but it just so happened that in the last month i will
reading cover to cover newspaper
day
like it was such an amazing experience about especially in the chronicle where there's the international news and then
what's in your fault of those examples everything that they you know that the world with little numbers everything is negative everything and so on i'm just sitting with that and trying to figure out how to change that it's just another are
are so many positive things happening world and he's just not right and that's why so that's what this magazine is all about it's about positive futures it's about all the positive thing so if in it connects to have often things that are happening but only in the sense of what people are doing particular stories of particular
our people and how they're changing and so i really recommend especially this issue i've barely scratched the surface with it so awesome
make it right and ali or thank you very much will you talk i have a numerical as four years he came
the lockup a notice that really has come a long way must recognize genocide against down the native american
and then the humanization of allergies emissions is acknowledging that just as true all to two point on the
sign
and dash
recently i yeah lesbian bisexual and transgender now i feel really the most important fish
instead will change to be easier with their own neck is my largest images from the to terrorize humans new year evil right now a warmish
which human at the street is rest of the war now the exploitation going it not to say inside inside a pattern by multinational the ones
creating a volunteer army which i think a real name should be a nurse and we are
arising the war and terrorizing us
really right now this very clear
the humanizing the thing
so this is still this slot machines sauce and then all resources are spent in that duration focus in january we have a long way to go now climate change out of things will change in in july as we said
yeah came along the way maybe we'll resolve the issue side and concentrate on smoking
you know
not brings with
everything could performance i know i was having we it would be great if we could see it as a house of cards that we just need to find the card we might have a different idea what the card is to pull out but they're all connected to all connected and i'm afraid that and i have one quest oh
the
the power
an hour of of yeah
i was very encouraged by her talk in the sense that one of the things that happens is we can get depressed and overwhelmed by it all that terrible very quickly and then i usually comes you feel so overwhelmed what can i do so even suggestions you gave about what can i do today
know what if what if everybody did one thing today you know what if two people in the room got beehives or something and the other thing that the other thing that was encouraging was reminding us about change and and our brains change because in the last two years if you look at public opinion
on gay marriage now i mean it's it's completely changed mean from five years ago it's amazing so i know if i sometimes i feel if that i can even feel bad about that because why why are some things why but then if you think i started trying to think today we could see that the gate
people have been oppressed longer that they've been on the and that way he took long you know like it took a long time and we just happened to be here now when it's shifting but added we could be there for these other things yeah but i mean it's just if we can at least encourage each other that that week and it's not as horrible
yes that it's always been a difficult role that that banana changes happening every day all around us so why really seems of encouragement i really appreciate your your and there was a great i quote i've looked everywhere for a suzuki roshi quote in our something to pin this whole thing on and i did
didn't find one but there was why i love where he talked about how we should be thinking about our inmost request incessantly he used that worried incessantly and i just thought you know we should be thinking about the earth or black lives matter we should be thinking about it incessantly but not in a in a overwhelmed discourage way but like what can i
do today right now right now read a novel written by a person of color you know just inform yourself you know in so many things that there's there's no end to things i'm afraid we're stopping i'll talk you out there