Are there chairs for you guys in the back? No, they just don't exist in the building. There's also room here on the rug, if you want to sit here. The closer you are, the better. It doesn't feel conspicuous. I'd like to

[01:45]

this meeting to talk with you about our situation. And as I said this morning in the lecture, it's a thought that can't be avoided to some extent, the situation of our society. And I don't… I think we can only Well, first of all, I think it's good to review where we are right now. Occasionally, once a year or so. And what I want to try to talk about I don't know, maybe our whole time will be taken up talking, or my talking, and we won't get time for much else. I don't know. I'll see what happens. But I do want to think about our situation with you. What I want to talk about is, in talking about our society,

[03:17]

I don't know if... First of all, what we're talking about is hunches, or feelings, guesses. Plus, we can look at what we're doing as a community. It's probably more accurate than our guesses, or our analysis. But what I've found out too, or re-found out again this week, is no one knows what's going on. Certainly you can get various expert opinions, but those people who are at the centre in receiving expert opinion, they don't know what's going on. The state government doesn't know what's going on, and in New York they don't know what's going on. So I think, and they were asking me. You can feel that off. There we go. That was a sign.

[04:41]

You can see how bad off we are. There are three main ways, and it was an introduction, three main ways in which Buddhism will affect things in the West, in the United States. The most important, as far as continuity is concerned, of course, is the few people who will continue and practice and become teachers. There would be no Buddhism without them. Or, let's say we'd have a harder job rediscovering Buddhism every generation without them. Second is, of course, many people will practice zazen or be helped, benefited by Buddhist way of living or practicing. Third, and by far the most numerous, largest way of Buddhism, influential, and what has been going on for a long, long time, is it will influence the ideas.

[06:18]

the way we think. And, in fact, there are none of you who, before you came here, were not influenced by Buddhist ideas. It goes way back. My impression is the Vatican got onto it about 200 or more years ago, and the Vatican has had a program of studying Buddhism for a couple of more centuries, because they could see it appearing the arts and philosophy, Schopenhauer and painting, you see the influence of the Orient in particular Buddhism. And you have people like Thoreau and Emerson influence of Buddhism, and changing the East Coast, which they were like, what is it? Well, Buddhism had something to do with creating Unitarianism, the influence of the Transcendental Movement. And many poets, too, who are part of the tradition of poets, Ezra Pound and before him others, and Simpson, of course, Charles Olson, Gary, Philip, who are trying to figure out how to express things non-dualistically.

[07:49]

So we've been taking care of the first two I mentioned pretty well. The third one is larger communication. We are now, you know, we've defined our relationship to the larger community with the Wheelwright Center and the Neighborhood Foundation, but we're now being asked, as in toto, our existence is a communication. And I don't have much experience and how to communicate about what we're doing, actually, because my effort and all of our efforts go into making the community work. But we're now being asked for answers or suggestions by people. And one of the reasons I went East, I had something specific to do. When people found out I was coming East, The Rockefeller Foundation invited me to come there and to pay my way, etc. If I would talk with them, this is the main Rockefeller Foundation, if I would talk with them about what's happening in the world,

[09:16]

And I considered it an exercise, a necessary exercise, but an exercise in futility. And it wasn't. There may be some lateral effects. Anyway, so there are some core foundations. incredible innocence, a kind of exaggerated, enforced innocence of these people. Pretty dumb, excuse me. The more traditionally status-oriented, conservative, traditional establishment-oriented foundation, the dumber the people are, or at least They're unable to do anything but think in a linear way. More of what we've got is good. And... What happened? Oh, another sign.

[10:46]

Don't be greedy. And the power of something like the Rockwell Foundation is simply enormous. I mean, the innocence of it. The first, we were there all day, Wednesday. from 9 in the morning or 9.30 until 5 in the afternoon. And the president of the Rockefeller Foundation was there. And he spent the first half hour telling us how the Rockefeller Foundation was innocent of everything. He said he even called up Colby to see if he had any employees. C.I.A., Kobe Pellett, C.I.A. He said, I called him up just the other day and said, do you have any employees here? And he spent this much time wrangling us to that point. But when you look at it, the present president is John Knowles. And I don't know how long he's been president.

[12:15]

The previous president was Kissinger, I'm told. And the president previous to that was Dean Rusk. And the president previous to that was Dulles. And I think Dillon was president at one time. He was Undersecretary of State and Secretary of Treasury. And yet they say, well, we don't have any influence. But they also have their assets are something like a billion dollars or more. hedged with many more billions of dollars. Anyway, huge sections of our economy. Altogether, the Rockefeller group, which controls the Chase Manhattan Bank, First National City Bank, Chemical Bank, First National Bank of Chicago, that group there controls something like, I don't know, 30% of all the bank assets in the United States. So they have their... Plus, you know, insurance companies. The only point I'm making is, they're asking us, what's going on? So, even if we don't know, almost anything we say is probably as good as what anybody else says.

[13:43]

And everyone is scared, and it may just be psychological, you know, sort of something that's passing, but all the large corporations... There was just a rumor a few years ago that there was going to be a big something or other, and now they're all scared, and the limits to growth point is where Dr. Schumacher... You know, Dr. Schumacher... I spent a week with Dr. Schumacher last month, and then he was here for a couple of days, if anyone in Texas was living at the growth conference square, Herman Kahn and all those guys met. And I guess more people attended Schumacher's sessions than all the other sessions combined. Schumacher wrote smaller groups. And they were all very pessimistic. But, you know, with a working kind of mode, positive, in their speeches, I guess, I'm told. But in the halls, among themselves, they were talking about how bad it's going to get, you know, and how terrible, and how there doesn't seem to be a way out. So what I'd like to do is talk to you a little bit about money.

[15:14]

And because our values, our way of doing things, and our way of life here in the center involves money. We have a financial problem right now, as we do this time of year, always. And we met, the board met, what, three weeks ago? And we, the board, finally, every year we get a little better at figuring out how to take care of situations. And in the past when we've had these meetings, people said, well, why don't we cut back on expenses? Well, actually, what to do about it depends on having a feeling for it, understanding it. And I think we're, Every year we're getting much better, this year much better, and we did, the board was able to do a fairly surgical analysis of our situation and make decisions about what we can cut back on, etc. which both Arnie and Red can explain.

[16:35]

In the past, we weren't quite able to do it so well, and we should discuss it here. But, okay, so what I want to ask ourselves is, first of all, economics... I'm not so interested in economics. It's more a value system than anything else. But money is interesting. I don't know, it's very, very difficult to say what money is, but I finally thought of something that isn't money, which is a golden Californian property. It's not money. If you pick it, it will wilt immediately. You can't store it, you can't exchange it, you can't use it, you can't leverage it. Almost everything else you can store, use, exchange, or leverage. But I can't figure out, not only you can place it in plastic, but then you're selling plastic. So, money then is anything we can do those things with.

[18:08]

I thought I was talking about it now, is that we can leverage or exchange or store. And it seems... Now, this is... I'm not an economist. This is my own sort of shorthand way of trying to look at it. But it seems that the slower the instrument... You won't understand what I'm talking about in the first place. The slower the instrument, the more you can leverage it. In other words, a dollar bill is fairly rapid. But a savings account you can leverage. You can have a savings account and borrow money on savings. When you have a savings account, in a sense, two people have use of your money. Hank has use of your money and you have use of your money. And then there's also a float involved. A float is something like... But if you have $10,000 coming in, if you have thousands of people putting money in, say, on Monday, and thousands of people are taking the money out on Tuesday, there's some money floating in there for a while, and only a certain percentage is going to be taken in and taken out. So they can calculate that percentage very carefully, and they can then spend that money.

[19:32]

So you see that that's creating money. Do you understand that? That's the same amount of money. It's not X dollars going in one end and X coming out the other end. In the duration of the time, that can be used by someone else. If the float is big enough, you can get more and more people using the float, and you can count to a percentage. Now, when you get to stocks, stocks are very... For instance, if you have... Say you have $500,000 worth of stocks in a company. It means the company is using your money, but then you have the stocks. And you can borrow, even though the company has the money, you then can borrow the 80% of the $500,000 and buy $300,000 worth of stocks. Then you can take the $300,000 worth of stocks, which at some point is supposed to be And you can borrow $200,000 in the stock and buy $200,000 worth of stock. You can borrow $120,000 in that and buy $120,000 worth of stock and you can buy a pyramid. So every one of those steps creates money. You see that? That money isn't there, it's created.

[20:59]

It's created because in God we trust. It says so right on the dollar bill. And that's really what it's all about. It's a big trust system. And so do you know what commercial paper is? Commercial paper is if a company, say like Vons I guess, I don't know myself. If a company, say that you're a pension fund company. or a company with a salary, payroll. So you've got the payroll, and you're going to pay everybody on Wednesday, and you've got the money on Monday. Well, if your payroll is $2 million, the interest on $2 million for two days is a lot of money.

[22:12]

So you want to do something with that. You buy commercial paper, which you can only buy in big lots, $10,000 lot, $500,000 lot, sometimes a million dollar unit. So you buy commercial paper and sell it on Wednesday. So everybody buys commercial paper. And let me say further about the stock market that I've been talking about. Is that when you buy stocks, generally you buy them on margin, which means you don't actually pay for, say you buy $50,000 worth of stock, you may only put down $5,000, $10,000, I don't know what the percentage is. There's some percentage of cash you have to come up with. So you've got all these stock transactions with only a small portion of money actually leveraging these larger amounts of money. So, what I'm getting at is that, well, there's all this capital in commercial paper, and I don't think there's a danger from a run on the banks.

[23:39]

Because, see, when you make all this money, when you create all this fabricated money from a float, and from leveraging, and buying on a margin, and several people using the same money, you know, by borrowing on it, borrowing on it, buying other things, etc., or several people in access, borrowing the same money their own, And there's other ways that money is borrowed, because the government backs loans and carries the loans with banks in some way, and this process creates money too. So, what you have is, you have a great deal of money created, but there's no way to liquidate it. There's no base to get it down to. The base is too small for it all. Well, that's fine as long as everybody is happy and trusting each other. But if they're not, you will find the limits of the financial system pretty rapidly. And in the 30s, you know, of course, I think half the banks in the United States fail. Now that means, I mean, that's a tremendous amount.

[25:03]

If half the banks in the United States today, say the banks have what? I don't know, $500 billion. I think it's roughly that. Maybe it's $890 billion now. But say they have $800 billion in them now. If half the banks fail, that means $400 billion disappeared. It's no longer there. It was there. people's savings accounts, people's this, people's that. It didn't exist. Actually, the money didn't exist. When people came to get it, it wasn't there. As long as they all trusted it there and they all agreed, it's okay if I'm a cello. So, people got a real scare, I'm told, in 1970, because Penn Central failed. And Penn Central had a lot of commercial paper out. And Walt Disney lost $4.5 million, Disneyland. And a lot of big corporate IT&T lost $8 million. Just gone. Zero. Suddenly. Not there.

[26:25]

It was the biggest failure in U.S. history. And W.T. Grant failed a few weeks ago, a month ago or two. The second biggest failure in U.S. history, the biggest mercantile failure in U.S. history. And New York City looks like it's going to go. New York City's pretty big. So if it causes, if any of this, what people are scared of, you see, You can't have a run on banks anymore, because they're all insured, $10,000. So most people don't have more than $10,000 in the bank. There's not going to be a run on them. Maybe people will try to pick their money out of the bank, but the little guy isn't going to run on the bank. But there could easily be a run on commercial paper. And if there is, as they were quite afraid, and one almost started, I believe, in the 70s, there isn't the money there to cover it. So the limits of our financial system are the borders, the tip of the borders, right? So then what do you do? Well, what happens is a great deal of capital disappears. Now, we have one of the things that I may have talked to some of you about this already,

[27:54]

I've heard people talk about it here on the West Coast, and talked to people on the East Coast about it, too. But one of the big problems now is that we have highly capital-intensive industry. Not labor-intensive, but capital-intensive. I believe agriculture is the second most capital-intensive industry in the United States. It's got $60,000 per person. The petroleum industry is $66,000 per person. As they've said in Illinois, if you can afford to farm, you can afford to retire, because you can just put the same amount of money in the bank and live off the interest, as long as the system works.

[28:59]

So what it looks like is happening is that these capital-intensive industries, and in some ways, for the nuclear power thing, it's fortunate, because most people who are informed about this are generally convinced now that nuclear power plants, partly because of the safety equipment, are too capital-intensive and cannot sufficiently If they stop, there will be less capital. All the foundations will be less capital. All the individuals will be less capital. Because all of this depends on what you perform in growth. You can jiggle it, as long as next year you're big. If you're not jiggling next year, you're not [...] big.

[30:42]

There's a man in the boat. He's got a gun in his hand. I think it's worth it to say that the United States of America is a great country. It's a great nation. [...] I'm

[32:11]

I don't know if you can see it, but there's a lot of smoke coming out of the chimney. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it's one of the most interesting things I've ever heard. It's [...]

[33:25]

That's a good one. So keep it coming. That's a good one. I don't know. Okay. Okay.

[35:06]

Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[36:37]

Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

[37:43]

Thank you. There's quite a lot of them.

[39:03]

... [...] I'm going to take a picture of you. This is a test. This is a test. This is a test.

[40:26]

... [...] I don't know if you can hear me, but I want to keep going. [...] I want to ... ... [...]

[41:58]

... [...] I can't believe it. I can't believe it.

[43:10]

uh What's the breed? Concentrate on your family, your family's race and your insurance, or some combination At least we don't know. But we did make a decision to acknowledge the community as the medium of our practice. Not just, well, it's here at the Tagalong, let's take care of it, but as the vital field of our practice. All right. So now I met the decision of capital again. Capital is a car for running your paper route.

[44:33]

What we seem to be doing this year is we seem to be trying to get the facilities for families to live in and the facilities for us to earn a living in. That seems to be what we're doing. In other words, the resources available to us now... First of all, we have a... there's an assumption built into what we've been doing for some few years now the resources are going to run out, the dollar resources are going to run out. So we have to direct the money that we get not into ongoing support of ourselves so much as trying to get sufficient facilities for when we don't have money, there isn't any capital, money capital, we'll have capital in structures and structures to live in and structures to earn a living in. So, what we're looking at doing, which we can't do in the present, is we should buy the building next door, the apartment building where Lou and Amy live and various people live. And we should do it soon, actually, because there's a big gaping hole. How big is that hole? One or two holes. A couple of rooms down.

[46:00]

A couple rooms are filled with water. Anyway, and the water is running down into the inner structure of the building, which will rot it out. But someone should repair it, and we can't. They don't repair it. We're looking into getting a lease on the building with some agreement to buy it in the future, because we don't... The down payment the building is worth, because it's an income-producing building, which this is not, the sale price of the building is probably the same as this. This building was 300 and something thousand dollars, and that would be about $300,000. And that's what they paid inheritance tax on it when they inherited it from their father who built it. They paid taxes as if it was a $300,000 building, I think, or $250,000 building. So it would require a down payment of $60,000 or $70,000, I believe. We haven't got it, that's all. I mean, a building of $5,000 or $6,000 we could do. 50 or 60 we can't do. So that's something we should try to do. I'm not saying we're going to, unless something, a miracle happens, close to a miracle, we won't be doing it. We also should look into getting a bakery, because by having a bakery we could probably nearly support ourselves. We're about 80 or 85% self-supporting, and I think we could go over the hump there if we had it. Our financial problem is

[47:26]

On a yearly basis, we're in pretty good shape. But we do have the problem that if you don't look at the year, but of our experience of the year, most of the income from the guest season comes in because the students who take care of the guest season don't take a salary. That income goes to support the previous fall, winter, spring, instead of being set aside for the next fall, winter, spring. So although we look on a year basis, we come out pretty good, our experience is which is exactly right, we have no money from October, November, December, January, February, March, April. And then money comes in and we immediately pay everything we put off. And then comes next September or November. The original estimate, we were going to be $25,000 a month short from now till April. And by trying to analyze it and reduce everything, look like if we're willing to reduce the things we're willing to do, so we can cut it down to being $15,000 a month short. Anyway, the effort in this is to use the resources we have. We have to, while we can, keep directing a portion of it into creating the facilities for supporting ourselves in the future and to live in the future, because we won't be able to do it so easily in the future.

[48:55]

No, that's right. Well, it depends how bad it gets. Somehow, most people will still... things will go on. Gregory Bateson told a story about a Japanese family he met in... no, a Burmese family, I guess, he met there with the third generation patriarch of the family. was still alive, very old, and there were something like 400 members of the family. And some of the members of the family were fighting for the Japanese during the war, and some of them were fighting against the Japanese, and some of them were collaborating with the Japanese, and some of them, etc. And he said, but never mind, family will go on. And actually, somehow, things do go on. People will earn a living, and etc.

[50:25]

And there should be... it's... there's no clear-cut thing. Either way, it's bad, right? So... and there should be a strong lemming instinct in us as Buddhists. You know what lemmings are, those little guys? And they all get... go in the wrong direction, they go over the cliff, you know? I think Bodhisattvas have a strong lemming instinct in them. And if everyone's gonna go over the cliff, we go over the cliff, you know? So that's all right. But... So the bank... Will the bank foreclose on us? Can the bank take it away from us? I don't know. Maybe we shouldn't buy it, but then where would... It would be much harder to... It may be easier to hold on to a building than it is to buy it at that time, or to get the use of it. But it might not be true. All we can do is we may find out that we never buy it and it's abandoned two years from now and we move in. I don't know if things are going to get that bad. Anyway, I think that's about enough of what I wanted to talk about. We had hoped that the Lilly Foundation,

[51:50]

One of the reasons many of the people who wanted to help us have sort of been putting it off is because they expected the Lilly Foundation to help us. The Lilly Foundation was ordered to give away a lot of its money some years ago, two or three years ago, is that right? Because it hadn't been doing the proper thing with its money or something. under the leadership of people who wanted to do a number of innovative things, and they wanted to give money to us as one of their innovative things. But the man who was ahead of that is now in the outs, and anything that he supported is automatically sort of nixed. And it's becoming more Presbyterian, and a lot of political infighting. They were going to give us about $75,000. the first money we ever got from a foundation. And they decided, it looks like every month they put us off the agenda. It looks like this month we're off the agenda again. But the people who are trying to help us say that if we're on the agenda we'll be voted. So all they can do is put it off.

[53:03]

What people were asking us about is, just I'll throw one thing out, is, again, it's related to some of the things I've been talking about, is, what is a sangha, is basically what they were asking. You know, we have the three jewels, Buddha, Dharma, sangha. And sangha is a part of our practice that we have the most difficulty understanding. And sangha means something. Dharma means something like how we are identified by all things, and sangha means something like how we are identified by all beings. And in more particular, it means the critical mass of people who hang together at an identity level, somewhere in between the individual and all critters. It's sort of like migrating birds. Um, if you have one, say, I don't know what birds migrate, sparrows, some migrating birds, right? Oh, that's not sparrows. Starlings.

[54:27]

Well, anyway, my example is accurate, I think. My bird is not. Anyway, so the one bird, and some migrating birds, the bird knows where to go. But in other cases, I think the majority of cases, the individual bird doesn't know where to go. So they do a kind of what looks like a mating dance. And the mating dance gets the birds to join with each other. And it's another form, it's actually... I'm talking about this more highly tuned intimacy, which doesn't have to do, necessarily, with sexuality. This way we relate to each other, which is to create a kind of relationship, which isn't necessarily a marriage. Anyway, the birds do this, what looks very similar to a mating performance, And at a certain point, when the critical mass of the bird is right, birds are right, they, in a sense, have their internal biological compass, and then they can go off. Roger? Yeah? Some of us witnessed that the red-winged blackbird had dreamed of that it could go, and there was also an aura that surrounded the flock that made the change of color in the bird. If you have too many birds, that confuses it.

[55:56]

There's just sort of a right number of birds which begins to know the direction. And that's exactly what the Ford Rockefeller Foundation is asking. How many birds will hang together and make society work? What is voluntary social order? Because you can't force order on people with police. So the real question is, is, you know, what we've tended to do is to make companies which are very efficient, but have forgotten what makes people hang together. And so the question is, how big do you have to be to survive, but how small do you have to be to have the human beings work? And no one seems to know. We've lost touch with the human environment of companies, etc. You know, in the store over here, what we've been trying to do is, first of all, to create a grocery store, a produce store, which works for the people who come in it, to walk and bump into each other and talk to each other, and secondarily work to sell produce.

[57:13]

It's quite different when you try to make a place, when you take the things that seem to work and you fish and you produce something like, as I mentioned, the International Pancake House. That's going the other direction, right? It worked, you know, but it's not international and it's... It looks like something out of England, but it's on the corner of Van Ness and, you know, it has no relationship at all, much of anything except somebody's idea of what they can project into wealth. And it's also true that wealth is produced by speed. Do you understand that? Is that, since money is an exchange trip, right? The more you can exchange it, the more wealth you can make. So Rockefeller's genius was not oil, but transportation. He figured out how to transport barrels of oils and make the railroads do it. And it's railroads and automobiles and things which have produced the tremendous wealth we have. But they're destroying the human condition. They're making it impossible for us to live. If you have one automobile and a lot of bicycles, the automobile goes faster.

[58:36]

at the price of everybody else, you know, if you get out of the way. But when you have all automobiles, bicycles go faster. You can get around the city, you can get around New York faster by bicycle than you can by automobile. So there's that kind of balance, like, what do you buy, what do the few buy at the price of everyone else until everyone wants it and then the system can no longer manage it? So again, how do the people hang together geographically comes back to, because there needs to be a geographical base to get people to hang together because they have to see each other, which means a reduction in wealth, because there's less travel, less transportation. But that's going to happen anyway. So these factors of speed, time, and number of people are all crucial to what makes a group of people hang together. And this is what makes us also unique in all of the lifeboats these people are looking at. Most of them start out with, okay, let's have a fish farm, or let's have wind power, or let's have something else. Somebody has mailed around a huge brochure called Genesis. I don't know, it's been mailed from a select list of people.

[60:04]

And this guy in England that made some money off a restaurant, he's planned an entire community out of his head with what the rules are going to be and how people do things, but he doesn't have any community yet, just the ideas. Well, most people start out this way, and we're about the only place starting out differently. We start out with, what makes a group of people hang together? And then out of that, do we have a store, or do we have a bakery, or do we have a windmill, or do we farm, or do we not farm, or, you know, etc.? And those questions are coming out of our seniority, seniority in that, I don't know, a hundred and fifty of us or more have been together a lot of years. I calculated the other day we have about a thousand years of experience with us. It means you have three hundred people, say, I mean, a hundred and fifty people together, say, six years. that's six times 150, etc. But I figured we have about a thousand years of experience in this community, which there isn't any other community of this duration trying to figure out these same problems, as it's necessary for us to do, of survival, because we're not pretending we're patriots, we're trying to support ourselves.

[61:26]

I just wanted to give us that background of what we're trying to work with, and then you can maybe see better how the figures, the numbers we're working with, plug into this attempt. Is it useful to look at some of the figures and the charts, or should we just talk about it? Please.

[61:59]

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