Good evening and welcome.
We've been talking next week, and it will be the end of our two-month practice period,
we've been talking at least a lot of the time about this writing from Dogen, the Mountains
and Water Sutra, or we could call it the Landscape Sutra, Mountains and Water as a Compound, means
Sansui in Japanese means landscape.
So as I've been saying, this intricate, sometimes challenging text is about our deep connection to
the landscape, the landscape of mountains and waters, or here prairies and lakes,
the landscape of trees and rocks and flowers and birds and so forth,
and also the landscape of our lives, our human lives, each of us and collectively.
So this text starts by, well, after the opening, which we all mentioned yet again,
that Dogen says, the mountains and waters of the immediate present are the manifestation of the
path of the way of the ancient Buddhas. Together, abiding in their Dharma positions, these mountains
and waters have consummated the qualities of thorough exhaustiveness, they have realized
completeness. Because they are events, these mountains and waters are this whole landscape.
Ultimately, prior to the empty eon, or as I've been rendering it, prior to the Big Bang,
they are the livelihood of the immediate present. So this background ultimate awareness that we
connect with in Zazen is actually the livelihood of our everyday life, of our immediate present,
of right now. Because they are the self before the emergence of science, before we
start getting caught up in names and stories, because of that, because they pervade that,
and are deeper than that, this landscape is the penetrating liberation of immediate actuality.
And then again, all of this being review, he talks about the Blue Mountains, or
depending on how you translate that, the Green Mountains,
this saying from Master Furong Daokai, they're constantly walking.
And because they're constantly walking, they constantly remain, forever remain settled,
and they constantly walk. So he encourages us to look at the walking of the mountains.
And this has many levels, of course, in geological times,
geological timescale, even longer than the timescale of,
you know, in the 2,500 years, more or less since Shakyamuni, and whatever it is,
700 or some years since Dogen, in this vast stretches of time,
mountains are shifting. But even right now, today, each mountain, each prairie,
each bit of the lakeshore is shifting, as spring arises and everything, and we're approaching
summer now. So there's this constant flow of the mountains, as well as the waters.
And we should, and he says, we should, to know our own walking, we need to study
the walking of the mountains. And this character, walking, also means conduct, or
practice. So actually, we must look at the practice of the mountains. How is it that
the mountains perform their mountainous? To see how it is that we perform our practice
of uprightness, as we sit, as we breathe.
So we are not the mountains and waters, the landscape, the so-called environment,
starting to dislike that word, environment, because that separates us. The environment
is something out there, you know, outside Chicago, or outside this room, in the, you know,
wild lands, or whatever. The mountains and waters, the landscape, is us. We are
particular weeds, or flowers, in the landscape of Chicago,
of this land, whatever we want to call it, before we even call it anything. And how do
we learn to do our walk? How do we learn to walk the walk? How do we learn to practice
and perform ourselves prior to see that we are constantly walking, that we are constantly
shifting, and that we are expressions of the landscape, not something, the landscape is
not something outside of us, aside from us. So that's a little bit of a review, but
part of this, part of the Buddha work that we learn as we express and perform and walk
our own walk, as human-type mountains and waters, is that we have this responsibility,
not to something outside of us, it's not that we're stewards of the environment,
which is one way it's thought of, but in our deep interconnection, we
see that, well, as Dogen says in Genjo Kōan, when we carry ourself forward to experience
myriad things, that's delusion. When we project ourself and our own ideas of things out there
onto the world, that's our usual world of delusion, that's our human world. But also,
there is the reality, the deeper reality, that myriad things come forth and experience themselves.
So together, we express the awakening of the mountains and waters.
So what is our practice of walking the mountains and waters?
Part of this is a kind of radical care for the landscape that includes us.
So part of this, Dogen says, although we say that mountains belong to the country
or the nation, actually, they belong to those who love them.
When the mountains love their owners or their occupants, wise and virtuous people inevitably
enter the mountains. And when sages and wise people live in the mountains, because the mountains
belong to them, trees and rocks flourish and abound. Birds and beasts take on a supernatural
excellence. This is because sages and wise people have covered them with their virtue.
We should realize that the mountains actually take delight in wise people,
actually take delight in sages. So we usually don't think of
mountains as having, you know, that sounds like we're anthropomorphizing it.
But there is this phrase from Aldo Leopold that Joanna Macy's picked up on of
thinking like a mountain, not just walking like a mountain. What is the awareness of mountains as
they shift through the ages? And each year, the mountains become snow, the mountains become springtime.
So as we occupy this landscape, we are this landscape.
And the landscape loves us and we love the landscape. So what is our practice of that?
How do we walk the landscape? How do we perform our particular, each of us,
our particular expression of the landscape? This is the point of Buddhism.
Or the Buddha way. There's no Buddhism. There's just people who care about awakening, about
how we take care of our lives and everything that is our lives together.
How do we see our piece of this wonderful landscape of prairies and rivers and lakes and petals and
avenues and skyscrapers, all of this landscape is us.
And part of how we do that is to accept the reality of what is. And of course,
in Mountains and Water Sutra, Dogen makes a big point of talking about how we can't see the whole
reality. We each have our own dharma position. So for fish, Lake Michigan is this wonderful
atmosphere. For us, we can see it. We can go to the lake shore and look at it. But if we
try and dive down into Lake Michigan, we would drown. And for other beings,
the water of Lake Michigan and other waters, waterways, looks different in various different
ways. For birds, for fish, for dragons who maybe emerge when they go through the dragon gate that's
the bottom of Lake Michigan. So we see, we are complete expressions, each in our particular way,
of this landscape. And yet we can see it from each from our own dharma position.
So this leads to, I want to talk tonight about the situation of our landscape,
of our world, of the mountains and waters and prairies and lakes. And
I want to refer to an interesting article that was recently sent to me by my friend,
Joanna Macy, who was here a couple of years ago. And this is an article on planetary hospice
and rebirthing planet Earth. And it starts from looking at the reality.
So we all know that there's serious climate damage.
Well, maybe except for the people who've been...
They know, yeah. Despite all of the efforts of the fossil fuel companies and other sponsoring
confusion about it. We know, it's all around us. Fires in California, huge tornadoes in the Midwest,
hurricanes in the East Coast, and worse in many countries around the world,
so I want to talk, I want to read from this article on planetary hospice. This is by a young
Zen hospice worker who was a Tibetan practitioner.
And he comes at looking at this from the point of view of a hospice worker.
And the first part is just to say, you know, that what the situation is,
and he goes into this, you know, in kind of some mathematical detail, but
we're in the midst of the sixth great extinction that we know of on this planet.
The loss of between 17 and 100,000 species every year at the Field Museum where Laurel's Connected
had a little chart of how many, a little ticker of how many species have gone extinct since,
you know, in the last day. And the last time I was there, there were,
I think, 80 species had gone extinct in the previous several hours.
So what's happening now, because of the release of carbon dioxide and methane
into the atmosphere, is the sixth mass extinction. That's already happening.
So I'm quoting some of the things that this fellow cites.
Some scientists fear that the situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing
feedback loops are already in play that we are in the process of causing our own extinction.
Worst yet, some are convinced that it could happen far more quickly than generally believed
possible, even in the course of just the next few decades. So I want to go through a little
bit of this before I get to the, before I talk about how this doesn't need to be something that
makes us feel hopeless, that actually there is a rebirth possible.
But part of that is, part of that requires facing reality.
While rising terrestrial temperatures are largely associated with atmospheric climate impacts of
carbon dioxide, the fact of the matter is the oceans have absorbed between one-third and one-half of
all CO2 released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial age.
The cumulative impact of this input, together with the unconscionable destruction of the ocean
floor ecosystems from centuries of trawling, dramatic changes in ocean water chemistry,
increasing the acidity of the waters by 26 percent, huge losses in biodiversity.
And it talks about while the Great Dying, so here's the largest mass extinction
that killed off the dinosaurs, resulted from a rise of only six degrees centigrade under current
unenforceable emission targets, we are on track for about a four centigrade rise in temperature
before the end of this century, according to the World Bank, a conservative organization.
This is on the low end of the probable rise. A 2011 paper published in Science found that
carbon dioxide may have at least twice the effect on global temperatures than currently projected
by computer models. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, worst case scenario,
of six centigrade higher temperatures by 2100 would result in a virtually uninhabitable planet.
They discretionally conclude that at current rates we may actually see an unimaginable
16 centigrade rise by the end of the century. So the news is, you know, it's serious folks.
From a planetary perspective, this is tantamount to less than six months to live diagnosis
that triggers hospice care for an individual. In effect, we are a species now on life support,
teetering on the threshold of our very own Great Dying.
So again, the author of this is an environmental attorney who studied
environmental engineering and is also a lifelong activist.
He says, while humans are actually hardwired to focus on threats, we also have always been
able to minimize them and adapt to changed environment. And the idea that we might not
be able to do that at this time is hard to fathom. It's actually, we can't really,
it's not, we can't get our head around it. What does this mean? That in, you know, a matter of
decades, this planet may be uninhabitable to human beings. Reality continues to outstrip our
ability to model worst case scenarios. And it's all happening much faster than anticipated.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy science team in the U.S. Navy, by the summer of 2015,
that's next year, the Arctic Ocean could be bereft of ice, a phenomenon that will engender
devastating consequences for the Earth's environment and every living creature on the planet.
And the methane released from that, from the permafrost dissolving at staggering rates is,
well, it's even worse. If we have, this is from another study, if we have triggered a
self-reinforcing methane feedback and there is growing evidence that we have,
then there is little point in talking about solutions. What is needed is a strategy for
the maximizing the quality of life for those of our species who will survive the coming
catastrophe. There will be fewer of us, we will consume far less, and the world will be a far
harsher place. We'll be inhabiting an alien environment. So we should, we do well to prepare
ourselves for the softest possible landing on this hostile new world.
So, okay, this is the situation we're in. Okay, how do we respond? So he'd spent some time
talking about eco-psychology and encouraging mental health professions. Actually, we have
many therapists in our sangha, none of them are here tonight, so this won't be the last time I
talk about this, I think. He talks about eco-therapy and encourages the mental health
profession to actively advocate for a more sane response to the stages of dying. He talks about,
if we don't, so, you know, part of, Joanna Macy, my friend, has talked about
the underlying psychology, you know, of this knowledge, even going back to Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and knowing that, you know, my whole lifetime, all, most of us, I think,
our whole lifetime, yes, knowing that that was possible starting after World War II, that
such devastation could happen, and yet there's a new level of that with climate. So how do we face
that? What do we do with that? And so he talks about this as a hospice professional,
zen hospice person, and looking at, first of all, facing,
talking about the Kugler-Roth stages of grief, but facing what's happening. If we don't,
well, there's a place where he talks about the quality of death and
the long paper, and I think I've forwarded it to some of you, and I will forward it to anyone else
who asks, but it's, if we, not facing it leads to all this denial and anger and
a kind of pathological response, because everyone knows, as you said, everyone knows that this is
going on, and yet there's a kind of, some people think we can fix it with technology,
some people say, well, it's not that bad, it's just part of the natural cycles of, and so forth.
So he talks, says, because of the incomprehensibility of the prospects,
it seems inevitable that a large part of the population
will progress to yet another type of denial and repression.
So there's a kind of underlying anxiety that, from talking to people here and elsewhere,
I think a lot of people feel, it's a kind of underlying depression. We don't know what to
do about this, and we're all aware that more or less some of the people here have studied this
a lot and are very concerned about it, and, you know, I think efforts to try and minimize
the effects by, through political action or whatever, you know, they may help,
but we're in for a tough time.
He talks about the most critical issue from an eco-psychological perspective of planetary
hospice care, facilitating a collective process of grieving that ferries society to the acceptance
stage as fully and harmoniously as possible. He compares this to the Black Death of the 14th
century, what's coming. And, unfortunately, it seems all too predictable, and it's not
predictable that a freedom-loving, gun-toting, substance-abusing, individualist country like
America will approach the end of life as we know it with a fair amount of antisocial pathology,
transposing a breakdown of our life support system into a breakdown in social order.
Anyway, there are many ways that this can happen, but if this was all that there was here,
I wouldn't talk about this, because I don't want to, you know, wipe everybody down.
But he talks about, it would seem that the most critical aspect of acceptance may be promoting
peace by redefining hope, which is a common component of the whole hospice model.
This involves fostering hope through spiritual meaning. Again, I'm just, you know, reading
somewhat randomly here, but I think it's so important that, and it's so much a part of,
so much a kind of
implication of what Dogen is talking about in the Mountains and Waters Sutra,
when we talk about, you know, the damage to the mountains and waters.
Of course, there's the mountaintop removal, and there's the fracking that's poisoning the water,
and so forth, but what's going on is even deeper than that. It becomes imperative,
though, to hold out hope for the survival of the species. The end of life as we know it is
not equivalent to humanity's end, and that message needs to be clear. So a lot of what we take for
granted, the air conditioning, the electric lights, who knows what things will be like in
50 or 100 years. Some people we know, young people, will be there for that, and yet
this doesn't mean that there will not be any people, you know, still doing something on this
planet. He says, this certainly should mean the end of the industrial age and its relentless
exploitation of nature and human spirit. It most definitely means the end of the population boom,
which has been more than doubled in the relatively short lifetime of baby boomers.
That's me. It is easy to attribute climate change to the simple idea of endless economic growth
through exploitation of natural resources in combination with exponential population growth.
And yet, some people will survive. How do we see this? How does our practice of expressing
the mountains and waters, how will that contribute to the people who are still around 50 years from
now, or 100 years from now, or 150 years from now? So he advocates a planetary hospice movement,
which he says we need sooner rather than later.
And so, you know, I'm putting this out there because I think it's something that
is helpful to think about. He talks about quality of death, and he talks about this
in the context of individual hospice, but also now in terms of this great die-in.
The quality of death as we enter into this period.
It's the hope for the end of life as we know it on planet Earth, the survival of the human race.
And the key will be to confront and discredit the idea of survival of the fittest,
which was never actually asserted by Darwin, certainly never intended to lead to social
Darwinism, in favor instead of survival of the most cooperative. So this is something I've been
talking about for a long time. We have to stop thinking in terms of competing and defeating
other people and beings out there. How do we see our life to see a sustainable life? We have to
see it in cooperation, collaboration. He says to challenge the human race to transform itself
through the great dying into a species that deserves to survive, one that has learned from
its tragic fate and is ready to inhabit the planet with symbiotic grace and organic wisdom.
So there's a possibility here, even in the midst of very serious destruction.
How will this, what will this be like?
So an overall strategy will be needed to bring some kind of renewed social order out of psycho
spiritual chaos, to be very sensitive to opportunities for continually facilitating
spiritual emergence from what may appear to be psychological emergencies.
So we have to see how this, you know, what applies to individual hospice applies
now to all of us. And then he, as he gets ready to close this, he talks about spiritual midwifery.
And it's a really, I think, a hopeful and realistic and positive way of thinking about
who we are and our practice as practitioners of the way in this context.
He says we need an expansive net of effectively qualified spiritually motivated healers
from diverse backgrounds without much regard for the varied forms of their expertise.
So we have some midwives in our Sangha. I'm sorry that Joanne's not here, but he refers to
Ina May Gaskin, who's an important person in terms of developing modern midwifery.
She talks about it and quotes Ina May Gaskin from the farm in Tennessee saying,
in the Zen tradition, a line of succession of Zen masters is supposed to be linked
together by transmission of mind, pure thought transferred from mind to mind with no words.
I think that with midwives, there's a similar kind of transmission that can take place
and link them together. And there's transmission of touch. So the importance of touch,
which Joanne was talking about the other day here.
And he talks about including indigenous spiritual leaders. So this is something that
each person in this room can actually do with the time remaining in our life,
to actually be spiritual hospice workers and healers, to promote whatever it is that will
contribute to the new way of for humans being in this new time. And the people I know in this room
are each doing that already in some way, taking care of particular people or beings,
taking care of dogs and other animals as part of this.
Each of you is doing work in this direction.
He says, just as the hospice movement has helped change attitudes towards individual death,
the planetary hospice movement must have a cohesive strategy for fostering a general
attitude that from a larger perspective, the difficult contractions and painful pangs
of the great dying, which is happening, are cleansing and purification rituals on a grand
scale necessary to usher in the golden age spoken of in so many different mythologies and religions.
And then he invokes this wonderful Hopi kind of prediction, prophecy.
Within the Hopi tradition is the teaching of purification. Throughout Earth's history,
they believe there have been four worlds, three of which have perished.
From their perspective, this one is on an even more dramatic trajectory of self-destruction.
According to this Hopi tradition, there must be a purification at the end of one world
before another can begin. You might say that the Hopi have held in their psyches a profound
sense of collapse and near-term extinction for millennia. It's an integral aspect of their
tradition, as is dancing, singing, and a wicked sense of humor. A useful practice with many
indigenous people is this, live as if every act, every task performed in daily life, every
kindness expressed to another being and to oneself might be the last. This is one way I
stay connected with the light in dark times, walking in reverence, living contemplatively
with gratitude, generosity, compassion, and an open heart that's willing to be broken over and
over again. That's one definition of the bodhisattva,
this open-heartedness that is willing to allow our hearts to break.
He talks about, as the great dying will be accompanied by mass migrations and evacuations
of areas no longer inhabitable, such as heavily populated coastal communities, one thought is to
recast these migrations themselves as rites of passage at every scale, communal, family,
individual. So there's more in here, and I want to have some time for response.
Oh, the other thing that he talks about that is also in this
dark mountain manifesto, which I talked about a little while ago, is telling stories,
that we need to have a new story about what's happening, or many stories, that part of what we
get stuck in is having old stories about, you know, the story of progress and technology.
And progress and technology may be helpful in some of this. We don't know, we don't know,
we don't know how this will go. We don't know what will happen.
And it's important to remember that. We can only see, you know, how we see water is different if
we're humans or fish. We can only see part of the picture. But we can tell stories,
and that's how we talk, and Zen is about telling stories. And so, you know, the way I express this
is not, it's what we're doing here, even though we wear robes and do bows and do all these rituals,
is not about Zen Buddhism. It's about encouraging everyone who comes here to
find their own way to express this. So we need lots of new stories.
The kinds of stories we most definitely do not need, and that will only add to suffering,
are the stories he talks about, the ones that, all the various Armageddon myths and so forth.
Okay, there's more here that is, I guess we can skip to the end, and I'm going to mention
this Dark Mountain Manifesto. It has the principles of uncivilization,
which are, you know, related to this. We live in a time of social, economic, ecological unraveling.
All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history.
We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.
And they talk about stories too. We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the
stories we've been telling ourselves. We tend to challenge the stories which underpin our
civilization. The myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, like it's our job to have
dominion over the rest of the landscape. The myth of our separation from so-called
nature or the environment out there. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that
we've forgotten that they are myths. And so they encourage more creative storytelling that includes
the whole landscape, and then saying the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world,
full stop. Together we will find the hope beyond hope, the path which leads to
the unknown world ahead of us. So I would suggest that this is what, you know,
the Mountains and Waters Landscape Sutra is encouraging us to do, to look at these realities
and then find our own ways. Each of us has different ways of telling stories,
and how do we do that in a way that will support the change that will come in a way that will be
hopeful and will include this immediate actuality of the mountains and waters.
So, we're almost at the time, but with this small group I feel like we can have some discussion.
Comments, responses, please feel free. I know some of you have lots of comments and responses.
Yes, I just have to, I have a little bit of, you know, as I spoke of when you
read this Dark Mountain stuff before, I have a little difficulty with some of this. I do believe
absolutely, of course, that, you know, what our spiritual practices are and, you know, sort of how
we sort of prepare for those, whoever they may be, who will sort of inhabit the next era, the next
part of human history is all very important. I'm a little bit uneasy with these kinds of articles
because they seem to direct our attention a bit away from actual sort of material responses,
actually changing what, not just the way we think, not just the way we act, but what we're actually
doing. I like that, I believe it was the Hopi story where they were saying, you know, every,
you know, every moment is a opportunity for kindness and generosity.
But I think it, and this really resonates with Zen practice, but, you know, Zen practice,
as I understand it, also doesn't make this sort of big distinction between that sort of realm
of things and how we're actually picking up our cups and folding our papers and putting them away
and all those kinds of things. And so that part of it makes me, I worry that we're kind of losing
sight of that a bit. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I do. Yes, I do. Totally. So I'm putting,
I'm, you know, putting this stuff out there because I think it's important background for
how we appreciate our life today. And yeah, so attention to and mindfulness of how we are taking
care of the landscape of our individual worlds, as well as our Sangha and our combinations of
Sanghas. Yeah. So this isn't about, this is, you know, there's only so much to say in one talk.
This is not to recommend that we forget about taking care of what's in front, right in front
of us right now. So thank you for adding that. And part of how we face this reality is exactly
taking care of that. And this is not to say that we should discard, you know, that environmental
activism, so-called, is hopeless and that, you know, every effort we make can make a difference
in what the total situation, but yeah. I mean, just to sort of follow up on that a little bit.
I mean, it seems like taking care of that, you know, we say taking care of what's right in front
of us. I think part of what we also know is that that means that it can't be continuing to
to do things the way we've always done them, that we've really got to actually, you know,
change how we do things. And yeah, that leads back to the question of activism, all that. And I,
you know, I know you're aware of that, but there is just that side of these articles that just
makes me a little uneasy. Well, there's a lot to be uneasy about. Yes. Thank you. Other comments?
Anyone? Yes. What is an hospice approach of hope? You mentioned that in the doc. Yeah. So hospice is
about facing, and some of us have been, all of us, you know, know of people, all of us have lost
people. But in hospice, maybe somebody else here can speak more to that. We have hospice
professionals in our sangha too. But anyway, and you have some experience of that. So maybe I'll
just say briefly that to face the fullness, to face our death can be, can be, to face the fullness
of our life and to include our regrets and our memories and the worthiness of our life and the
love in our life and the loved ones in our life and to be accepting of our death as part of our
life. Niazan, you've done hospice work, would you? Well, actually, I've done fairly little hospice
work. I did chop and see and included occasional bits of hospice work. But I think one of the main
sort of components of it is simply treating individual death as a continued opportunity
for growth and awareness and appreciation and not, you know, simply as a matter of
diminishment and loss. And to acknowledge that lineage that continues with every person we
can think of who we have lost in our own lives, that person is alive in your heart.
And there are many lineages of
beings who continue through others. So that sense of
ongoing life of that. Other comments? Or did you have something else you wanted to say?
Okay. Bill? I was listening to, on All Things Considered today, some
reviews of apparently 95 or so movies that are going to come out this summer.
And it seems like a lot of them have apocalyptic themes of one kind or another,
including a couple that have already come out, like Godzilla. And I was thinking, again,
with something that the philosopher Slavoj Zizek from Slovenia has said in recent years, that
somehow we seem extremely absorbed and even in a certain sense comfortable with the idea of the end
of the world. And yet, we don't think about the end of capitalism. You know, it's kind of a funny
thing. In my opinion, capitalism is the root of the problem, maybe not the only root, or maybe
there's a deeper root even. But I think the dimension that's missing from some of this,
and this is also why I find the hospice and the soft landing metaphors a little troubling, is that
that somehow we can imagine that too.
You know, people who do hospice work are saints in my book, of course, but
we can somehow imagine that, but not imagine,
and I realize it's an enormous question, but the structural and systemic changes that are needed
in the world. And I'm not saying I have in my own mind or see necessarily right now in anyone else's
mind what systemic change means in our time, but in a certain sense, I wonder if sometimes our
orientation toward more apocalyptic scenarios or even a kind of hospice scenario, you know,
how do we take the best ride down, so to speak, can be a little distracting in front of,
this is probably just repeating what, in a way, what Nina's saying, but
so as much as I take a lot from what, from these pieces you were citing,
I feel that that dimension is not being developed in the way that it should.
And just one last thing, I guess more of a question, that
I wonder in a way, thinking about the concept of the future Buddha might even be very helpful here,
and on the principle of impermanence, thinking that the future Buddha,
just like if, you know, if Jesus came back, he might be, you know, a black woman from
sub-Saharan Africa, and nobody would recognize it in that guise. In the future, Buddha may
may look somewhat different, you know, I think would absolutely look different from what we know
or what we think we know. One element would be, I think, that there would be a certain
substantial and significant and multiplicitous break with
the way things are, which is a big part of what I understand by
letting go and inviting those sorts of things.
Yeah, just to thank you for all that, I'd like to comment very briefly.
Yeah, so the call for new stories certainly includes, and I think basic to all this is that
we encourage and, you know, however that happens, and it has to happen on a systemic level too, but
absolutely on a societal level, as well as on a personal level. But cooperation, collaboration
has values of decent humanity as opposed to consumerism and competition and aggression.
So yeah, and that, so all of that speaks to, you know, your concerns about capitalism,
but I think we're going to have to lose all the isms, you know, it's,
so yeah, there's lots of, we have to tell lots of new stories and part of, and I think central to,
you know, being a little storefront sangha in the big city of Chicago, offering, you know,
Dogenzen and Sozen and Tsukuroshi's way is that we're creating new stories about what it means
to be a human being and that, and each of us expressing that in our own lives, in our own way,
that's part of this, the project that you're talking about too.
It is past time to stop, but Laurel, I wanted to just see if you had any quick responses. I know
you're very involved in all of this work and have been for a long time in a way that I deeply
respect. Well, the first of a long, the first part of a long response, and we'll have tea and
cookies after, and we can talk more for anyone who can stay. I'm struggling with the concept
of hospice in this context because I'm personally involved in a hospice situation right now on a
day-to-day basis, and it's a demanding, intimate, transformative experience,
and so I've been thinking about that, and then this, so taking all of that and applying it
on a sort of scale is not easy. There's not any understanding of what that would actually
mean for all of us, so that's what's going on in my head right now.
No, thank you. That's actually a good note to end on, that the depth and seriousness of any
individual personal work with loved ones who are dying is quite imposing, and
on some level, collectively,
in all the ways we can tell stories about it, that's what all of us human-type
beings is going to be happening with for a while. So thank you all for listening to this,
just to consider, and I don't have any answers. I don't think that that article has all the
answers at all, but we need to consider this deeply. So we'll close with the four bodhisattvas
Beings are numberless. I vow to free them. Deletions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them.
Dharma, these are boundless. I vow to render them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to realize it.
Beings are numberless. I vow to free them. Deletions are inexhaustible. I vow to render them.
Dharma, these are boundless. I vow to render them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to realize it.
Beings are numberless. I vow to free them. Deletions are inexhaustible. I vow to render them.
Dharma, these are boundless. I vow to render them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to realize it.