Good morning. Well, this morning I'm going to give you a little prelude to the content of my talk. I don't know how many of you receive and read the New Yorker magazine but in this latest edition. Is it on? Is that better? Not yet? There. Did you hear what I said? I said the prelude to my talk is a cartoon by Roz Chast from the New Yorker magazine. You may be familiar with her cartoons. And this is Thanksgiving recipes.

[01:06]

Thanksgiving's coming soon. And we can all give thanks in this way for the Thanksgiving recipes from the US Treasury Department. First one is rare treat potatoes. You can't. You can't kind of see, but... Six sweet potatoes, one can of crushed pineapple, and your retirement account. Mix everything together, bake until the account is completely melted. The second one is cranberry surprise. Two pounds of cranberries, one cup of stock certificates torn into teeny bits, cinnamon and sugar to taste.

[02:09]

Cook until everything is softened and then serve. And the main dish is turkey stuffed with 700 billion dollars. Large turkey, 700 billion dollar bills, crumpled. Place the crumpled bills inside the turkey. Roast until all that remains is a pile of ashes. Well, I know it's on everybody's mind and I felt it would be good if we kind of aired out some of what's been going on in our minds and hearts and environment and things that really concern us that are very important to everyone. So I'm going to give a little talk and then give us an opportunity for questions.

[03:14]

and a little discussion. I think there are two sides. One is, what is the problem? And then the other side is, what is the way to deal with it? I don't want to say the way out. I don't know if there's a way out, but how does one deal with this problem? So, As we all know, this can be considered a kind of elephant in the room, no pun intended. So this monetary crisis, of course, we could all see it coming because our country, our treasury, has no money.

[04:33]

This country is entirely broke and we're all living on the The government is living on borrowed money, and all we need to do is keep printing more, but it will become probably less valuable as time goes on. There's no end, of course, to the illusion of prosperity. Our government, I have a picture of it like this. All the government offices is like paper dolls that are all strung together in a circle, which is the facade of government.

[05:38]

And all these little paper dolls have names on them, like the Treasury Department and the, I can't think of all these names, but they're all headed by people who have nothing to do with their contents, simply figureheads. And so there's a facade of government Inside are the corporations, which are mining all the money. So the corporations are the government. There is no government, really, as we used to know it. And this has taken some people by surprise. So the corporations, which are worldwide, interconnected, own the country.

[06:41]

And since they've taken all the money out of the treasury, there's really nothing left. Do you remember the picture, movie, Goldfinger? Goldfinger, was, what was the name of that character? James Bond movie. In that movie, there was these high-tech crooks who wanted to open the treasury, Fort Knox, and take all the gold out. And they had this elaborate plan to do that. But there was, James Bond, of course, saved the country. But we don't have a James Bond saving our country right now. It was a great movie and very characteristic of just what's happening right now. I think these guys saw that movie and said, we can do this a different way.

[07:48]

So how do we deal with this? Nobody knows. Some people think, oh well, you know, this is just a phase we're going through. But it's really a sea change in world economics. I don't know much about economics except what's logical. Yeah, that's right. There's a whole subterfuge of how money works around the world that nobody understands. It's so secretive and dark. And to see through the veil is almost impossible. So, you know, Halliburton Corporation has moved their headquarters to Dubai. Not even in America anymore. And Dubai is the most prosperous country in the world, building huge skyscrapers, bigger than anything in America.

[09:04]

Where do they get all that money? I don't know. Oil, maybe? Halliburton, maybe? So somebody has stolen the money out of the treasury, one way or another. And little by little, maybe we'll understand that. But we don't know very much. What's being reported is almost nothing. Just the tip of the iceberg of our economic system. And then, of course, there are the wars, which have been the excuse for draining the treasury. $10 billion a month. trillions of dollars. We don't know what happened to billions and billions of dollars that the CIA cannot account for. And they're not the only agency that is absconded with money that can't be accounted for.

[10:15]

So, I think right now we're at a point where the world has become so small that there has to be a world council. We can no longer go along as mavericks. The word maverick comes from a guy named Michael Maverick. I'm not sure if Michael's his right name, but 1868 or 86, he was a Texas cattleman, Mr. Maverick, and he didn't brand his cows. Everyone else branded their cattle, but he didn't brand his cattle. And so every calf that wasn't branded, he claimed as his own.

[11:18]

And so, originally, you know, it was, Maverick meant a kind of sneaky person who did things that were not so honest. It's coming to mean something else now, but that's the basic meaning. So we can no longer be a Maverick country, you know, preempting, if you just have a suspicion that somebody is plotting against you, you can invade their country. I mean, this is like unheard of. My feeling is Guantanamo Bay Prison is a testing ground to see how the government can deal with people they don't like in America. It's already happening.

[12:23]

This stuff is also, little by little, our freedoms are actually being taken away. And the world's, we've caused so much harm in the world that it's gonna take a long time to actually create a harmonious situation. So I really feel that, and I think we all do, that our task is how do we turn this around so that we can create a harmonious world where we're not creating enemies. The thing about creating enemies is that they help, it really helps to create enemies when you want to steal from the government. When everybody's friends, everybody's working together as one total world community, there isn't so much opportunism.

[13:38]

So this is kind of the battle between the opportunists, power-hungry opportunists, and people who want to create a harmonious world community. Thich Nhat Hanh has a wrote an article about creating a world council of all the different disciplines in the world to meet and discuss and listen to each other. and actually to have televised meetings so that people can see what's going on so that we air out our differences and we air out our feelings about each other and we shine light on these problems and unearth the problems and try to make some harmonious connections with people.

[14:45]

I totally agree with that and how we actually go about doing that I think is the next development in our world system. I think we're right at that point right now where if we don't do this, the world will just descend into chaos. Somebody asked me if I would say something about the Israelis and the Palestinians. This is the center of the world, in a sense, where the three religions, three basic Western religions come from. And they're always fighting with each other. And this war keeps escalating.

[15:51]

It's been going on so long between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and nobody's willing to back down. Nobody's willing to say, I'm sorry about something. So it's an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and as Gandhi would say, pretty soon there are no eyes left, no teeth left. We can't keep escalating like this. When I read about the news, the news in the paper about the Palestinians and the Israelis and the way they bombing each other, I can't even bother to read the article. It's just another day in the life of the Middle East. It's just normal procedure. The normal day in the life of the Middle East.

[16:55]

And of course, the arms merchants keep escalating these conflicts in order to make profit. Arms merchants have no conscience at all. They just keep fomenting conflicts in order to sell armaments. How can someone in an African country who has makes a dollar a month or something, have an AK-47. How can he afford that? Somebody's paying for these things. So most wars are actually fomented and encouraged by the armament makers, and you never hear very much about that. Sometimes you hear about arms merchants who are selling airplanes and things like that once in a while, but it goes on every day.

[18:05]

So, I think this is an important election time, and I'm not gonna say anything about who you should vote for. But I will say, please vote. If you don't vote, don't complain. So, I wonder if you have any questions. What I would like is if you have a question, address me. so that I can deal with your question. Yes, Bokshi, you mentioned the way out, which all right away came to my mind, suicide, completely unproductive, doesn't make sense to kill yourself just because you don't like the way the world is going.

[19:10]

On the other side, my mind goes to these highly evolved saints and buddhas that I have read about, and living people that are able to not be bothered by physical pain or mental pain or events. And my question to you is, that seems like about the only other way, quote, out that I can think of. How can one get off of the worldly track, with all the things that are always happening in the world, to this type of Let's look at the word imperturbable, the term imperturbable.

[20:19]

Imperturbable seems to mean like one is not bothered or can be indifferent, but actually imperturbable means to always have your balance in the midst of turbulence. So if you look at Jesus, he chased out the moneylenders from the temple. That's very interesting. It's the moneylenders that have gotten us into all this trouble. So how do we turn them out of the temple? And Buddha was also not exactly, he was a peaceful person. And I don't know about pacifist, but there are stories about Buddha and seeing things as they are.

[21:23]

To see the various levels, on one level, everything is happening just as it happens. the transcendent level, but on the human level, we can't allow these things to happen. So we're living on the human level, even though a person living on the human level has imperturbability, that's sort of like the transcendent level. So both are necessary. Alan and I were talking about Buddhism and monastic life. in religious life. There's the monastic life, which is like a world apart from the world. The Jews always wanted to live in a world, orthodoxy is a world apart from the world, in a sense. And the Christians also, Christian monastics, living a life in a world apart from the world.

[22:28]

And the Buddhists too. But we have to live in both worlds. We can't just live in one side. So the imperturbable, the world that's separate from what we call the world, gives us the space to deal with the world of chaos. So imperturbability is within the world of chaos to deal with the problems that you confront and still maintain your equanimity. the poison out or something?

[23:32]

And what is that paradigm of where you somehow try to, the demons, you allow the demons to come out and then you try to nourish them. That's the issue. Instead of being afraid of, like how brave is that to not only not run away from the demons but actually to try to invite them and find a way to nourish them? to shine the light on them. But also to feed them, I think that's a big part of it. Feed them? Yeah, I mean, in other words, you try to feed their actual hunger instead of the hunger that's driving the whole thing, which is never going to be satisfied. Oh, you mean like feeding the hungry ghosts? Exactly. Well, some things, you know, some ghosts are worthwhile feeding, and some ghosts you want to starve to death.

[24:40]

That's my opinion. And look at the other half of your duo, Alan. unfed, hungry ghosts in ourselves. Because we are hungry ghosts, or if a ghost emerges in ourselves, we give permission, we allow other hungry ghosts to run amok. Well, yeah, we become the community of hungry ghosts, and birds of a feather flock together.

[25:46]

Well, this is a kind of problem. This is the perennial problem because violence and need for power is always present. It's always present. So how does that get channeled in ways that it's like, you know, we have all these possibilities within us. We have the possibility for violence and craziness, and we also have the possibility of peace and joy and love, right? So we have the full range. And which of those dharmas do we encourage? And how do we deal with our need for power and violence so that we don't ruin the world? You know, like we have football, right?

[26:58]

It's all about power and violence and dominance and winning. So most civilizations have games. And Magister Ludwig was the bead game. which Hermann Hesse wrote this, Magister Ludi, the bead game, which became the activity that almost everybody participated in, or at least on a high level. And it took the place of wars and so forth. So we have to have some kind of game that's interesting enough and vital enough that it takes all of our attention and our interest and our energy rather than killing each other.

[27:59]

Some way of focusing the world's attention on a course that makes everybody want to cooperate instead of making everybody want to compete. Some competition is necessary at a certain level. But what is that goal? that will make everyone naturally want to cooperate on various goals that are, yeah. One thing you haven't mentioned yet, but I think is really kind of critical in terms of what's going on right now, is greed. And not just greed, but from the perspective of we as Buddhist practitioners, what is sufficient? running after, you know, okay, to get more, to kind of speed things up, all this stuff around with the dot-com boom, you know, almost 10 years ago, or, you know, the housing boom that's been going on.

[29:16]

You know, greed and sufficiency and actual basic in this Buddhist community, I think a lot of people tend to get swept away sometimes. It was a site of just what is a basic fundamental need. Right, well this, you know, our particular country at this time is based on materialistic supply, and we're really good at it. And it's hard to avoid. I've always said, if you have an empty table, you have a table, and take everything off of it, in one day, it'll be full again.

[30:20]

You know, we have to, most people in the world are trying to, you know, get something. Our problem is, how to avoid getting so much. That's really, that's our problem. How do we avoid getting so much stuff? It just keeps coming and coming and coming and we can't help buying into it and then we're seduced. We seduce each other like crazy with material goods. You have to have this and you have to have that. The standard of living. is not a standard of living at all. It's just simply a standard of greed. What we actually need and how to be satisfied, well this is of course Buddhism, how to be satisfied. That's the first of the eight aspects of an enlightened person, not giving in to greed and knowing how to be satisfied.

[31:32]

How do you know? First you have to know how can I be satisfied? What satisfies me? And if you think about it, I'm never satisfied. Rarely are we satisfied. We're always seeking for something. But seeking for something is part of our life as human beings. We're always seeking for something. But how can you be satisfied within the seeking? You say, well, I'm no longer seeking. Well, that's pretty good. You're just not doing anything. But we're always seeking something. But how much, knowing how much is enough is actually the key. you can also bring up this term fear. And one of the things that you did a while ago was to sort of abstract of them, the corporations, and when you abstract of them is when fear arises.

[32:52]

And a lot of what drives conflict And even speaking of economics being itself an abstraction, fear and competence is largely what it's about. But the thing I wanted to mention was this notion of how from an individual standpoint, for example, in my work and experience, I have to work really hard not to be fearful in business or work situations because when I get fearful is when I get weird and can't see situations in what they view as normal. Right now, it's really important not to be fearful,

[33:54]

Because the reason why everything's happening, right? Fear. People are overwhelmed with fear and making basically irrational decisions based on fear. So, it has to do with this abstraction of a them somewhere, which I would think we should resist. What's us? Yeah. It's true. Yes. So, us and them. careful about not generalizing us. There are vast portions of the society who are desperate, who have nothing. The strategy that you said about Guantanamo, Well, it seems like one way to be satisfied is if our body and mind, if our mind is unifiable

[35:21]

Well, I think, yeah, I think that there's a lot that keeps us sedentary. We don't use our bodies as much as people used to. I don't know if that's what you're talking about. Well, that's certainly related. Like Zazen. I guess for me there's also, I see this also as a, in some way we can describe a sequence of events and this happens. But fundamentally, it was all an illusion to begin with. We can forget that things are empty and that they have no self, and then something like this happens.

[36:56]

It could be something big like this that's affecting everybody, or it could be something very personal like the sudden death of somebody you care about. Fundamentally, what's happening is that things are showing us their true nature. But I think that's how I see it. Of course, there's a sequence, and perhaps we could have diverted that sequence, but we can't change the ultimate nature of everything that surrounds us. Well, we can't change, I don't know, but we have an influence on our circumstances. Yes, yes, we do, but I mean, I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm not saying, oh, now we can all understand emptiness. But at the same time, I think getting back to the question where this imperturbability comes from, it comes from seeing the true nature of things. And this is an opportunity to see the true nature of things. And if we see the true nature of things, then the mind is no hindrance. Without any hindrance, no fears exist.

[37:56]

Well, one way to describe it is the only way, one way to create war is to create an other. Yeah. In order to create a war with the rocks, you have to see, I think you have to see those people as other. And the more relationships we have in which we don't see the other, that's basically then seeing the emptiness. I think, yeah. That's right. Well, I think that's the new paradigm, is to really work to create those relationships. And listen to people who we feel are our enemies. because we just keep alienating and alienating. If you hit a hornet's nest, you're gonna get stung.

[39:11]

And this is exactly what we've been doing, is making people so angry, like angry bees, and then exploiting that anger. Really terrible. So I agree with you totally. And I was thinking that I so do not understand economics, and I so have a miniscule grasp on world political situations. But my feeling from what's been happening in society recently is that the delusion of prosperity has been exposed. And people in power seem to be freaking out because the delusion

[40:17]

And when I'm in a state like this where I'm feeling like surrounded by chaos and fear, it seems like the perfect time to rededicate myself to my practice, because that's really the only place I'm going to get any answers. There's no question there, I'm sorry. That's okay, I understand. It's like, this is the time when wayward Zen students. I remember the first Gulf War, when we declared war, the first Gulf War, Zendo was packed with people. I was just going to say that mixed in with my own of our false pedestal.

[41:30]

And I can't help but think that when we get through the trauma of that, that that's gonna be a good thing. Well, that's right. The death of this is the birth of something else. So that's, we should be able to appreciate what's happening. I totally appreciate what's happening. I mean, it's about time, you know? And so the phoenix has to rise out of these ashes. So I think we should take this opportunity to go with that and take it on the upswing. Yes, so that brings everybody down to, what is it that we really rely on?

[42:38]

That's the great question. What is it that we really rely on? Pricer needs ratios. Colleen actually recalled that this came up during a recent show sign. they rely on, and I think your answer was, you know, you can't rely on anything. There's nothing to rely on. And then I think their response was, can I rely on that? And I said, no. Well, good luck.

[43:27]

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