https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NxfgnFTd-UaayPV9drbC2awrDL6EodEp/view?usp=sharing

Transcript

As some of you have mentioned, the path of monastic training, in my case, the path of ordination, is a path of spirituality, a path of letting go, of peace, of happiness. This path is rarely taken. Giving up the way of the world, which is to say the way of accumulation. Giving that up and choosing, as said, the path of relinquishment, the path of letting go, this is unusual. And so it's natural that people sometimes ask me, would you join a monastery? Why would you give up these excellent offerings of modern society and live a very different life. What is your purpose? What is your goal in doing that? What is the meaning of wearing this robe, living this life, cultivating in this way? What is the significance of that? Why did you become a monk? People will ask.

At one point, I was in Japan, somebody asked me this question, and I answered in a way that surprised me. Surprised me because so often I'd answered it in honest ways, but didn't seem correct. It wasn't incorrect, it just didn't express my deepest intention. But at one point, a young woman, girlfriend of a friend I had made, I live near the temple. She asked me, why did you do this? Why do you live this way? And I said something that I resonated with. That was, did this in... be trustworthy. The job of a monk is to be trustworthy. The meaning of this robe is that it's an advertisement. It's a claim. I am trustworthy. And that claim has to be taken seriously by at least one person or else it has no meaning. That one person, of course, being ourselves. If we're going to walk this path, then we must be trustworthy. We must be worthy of trust.

Our goal as we walk this path, cultivate our minds in certain ways, purify our minds in other ways, cultivate our lives in certain ways, purify our lives in other ways, our goal must be, at the very least, to become trustworthy. And this mattered to me very much because I was brought up in an unusual way also. I was brought up by parents who were clear with me that you are a person who has power and you need to wield it responsibly. And if you don't, then you will suffer. It was interesting. This is what they told me from my whole childhood and I want to tell you that. It's extremely important that we realize that we're people who have power and we must wield it responsibly. If we don't, we will suffer. If we do, we will be happy.

And so we're here. I am teaching you now with the goal of myself becoming more trustworthy and the goal of offering you methods to become more trustworthy. I understand, I know, that this word may not resonate with you. I've said this to many people and it doesn't seem to resonate with very many people. Ah, trustworthy feels like a weak word. So you're trustworthy, so what? But I'd suggest that a lack of legitimate trust is the largest problem in the world. We don't trust our leaders. We have found them to be consistently untrustworthy. We don't trust our institutions. We've found them as well to be untrustworthy. Even those institutions, which many of us consider trustworthy, others don't. There's vast disagreement about what is trustworthy. And beyond all of that, we don't even trust ourselves. We don't even trust our own minds. So there's a trust crisis in our society, our institutions, our beliefs, our views, and ourselves. We are people, however, who have power. And it is, at the very least, our job to become worthy of trust.

And... if you don't feel a sense of urgency around this, if you don't feel that it's important to become trustworthy, if you're not working on this every day, if it isn't a constant struggle for you, well then, you're a bad person. So there you are. Now you know how I see it. You can agree with that or not, but I have made my position clear. You're failing in your life.

And I realized, when I was quite young, because of the way I was brought up, that if I was a person with power, and I didn't cultivate those tools that would allow me to wield it responsibly, then there was a good chance that the world would be better off without me in it. That it might be better for me to have never been born. And so early on, it became, I had a very simple goal. Very simple. I will strive. I will dedicate my life to simply doing more good than harm before I die. That's it. And I'm aware that I'm going to drive and in that way kill many living things. That's terrible. It would have been better if I hadn't driven. But does that drive really result in more good than harm? I'm going to eat. I'm going to engage in the economy, in these financial institutions, that make up a machine that's destroying life on earth. There's harm done every day, constant, prayed, dedicated myself, striving to do more good than harm before I died.

And it's very important, as we consider this, that we look closely at the harm and the good that we do. Because the easiest way to conclude that we're doing more good than harm is denial. And I suggest that humanity is in a vast net of denial. When we face this denial, then we realize that we must find that which is trustworthy so that we can live by it. We must find it. We must find it so clearly that we can live by it.

And so I'll just tell you right now what it is that is trustworthy. I'll tell you at the beginning of this talk right now so that you know. What is trustworthy is no craving, no resistance, no conflict, no clinging. That is trustworthy. We already have power. The question is, can we cultivate the wisdom and the love required to overcome craving? The wisdom and the love and the power that we hold, integrate, and serve the world. So when is it that wisdom, love, and power are integrated so that power is no longer harmful and becomes helpful? When is that? When are wisdom, love, and power integrated? The answer is no craving. When there is no craving, they are already integrated. When there is craving, they are not integrated. Therefore, we should strive to come to the point of total relinquishment, total letting go, overcoming craving, overcoming resistance, overcoming conflict, overcoming selfishness.

At history, we see lots of people, lots of things that seem to have... Once again, I'd recommend that you take what I'm saying with urgency. Because you matter. You're important. So please be urgent about this. As I've said to some of you, the disagreement that you and I have... basic disagreement that you and I have is how important your life is. I think your life is much more important than you do, as far as I can tell. You all seem to think your lives are worthless. I think that they're extremely valuable, and so you should act that way. So please act that way. Please take this very seriously. There is nothing more important than that you find the wisdom and the love to use your power responsibly. Use your power for the good of the world, which will result in your own happiness. So please look at this.

Please understand this. Because you yourself are a part of history. If we look back at history, we see lots of people, lots of institutions that seem to have power. They seem to have all kinds of power. Someone who didn't do nearly as much harm as we are doing, but is famous as a person who changed the world is Hitler. And of Hitler is taken to be a very bad person. And he's taken to be a person with great power. And naturally, if you know the history of it, you're aware that, okay, let's say he wasn't born when things have turned out differently. Yes, probably. But I don't know how differently. They would have turned out somewhat differently, of course. But he, as an individual, was used by something. And those of you who know about this time in history, I'm just bringing up something in European history, although there are plenty of other examples that I find more interesting myself, but this one probably you're aware of. Forces of history used this individual. They also used other individuals, Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, etc.

So these are leaders, and they had a certain amount of power, but they were following something else. They had to follow something else. If we look at that conflict, for example, it seems that different nations were fighting. If we look at that particular conflict, conflict of World War II, as we call it, in the European sphere, we'll just look at that part of it. If we look at that, we see that, of course, there are these individuals and there are these countries, these alliances that seem to be fighting with each other. But who is really fighting? What is it that's actually fighting? What is the actual conflict? The conflict is one of mind. People could collaborate to fight those wars because they agreed on things. They saw things the same way. The mind that people held caused them to behave in certain ways, the way they saw things changed, how they could interact with each other and take action.

Please concentrate on this. I know it's difficult. I understand that. I know that it's unusual for us to look at things in these ways. It's unusual for us to be in a retreat like this. It's unusual for us to hear a talk like this. But as far as I can tell, you're not paying attention. You're not listening and you're not carefully investigating. You're just sitting there. That isn't good enough anymore. That may have been good enough for you in the past, but you should grow up now. You've made it to this point in the retreat. It's time for you to expand beyond your current horizons and actually pay attention to something. So please, try to attend to what is being discussed. I understand it's unusual. I understand it's... to follow. But if there isn't a sense of urgency in your body right now, if you're not horrified right now at yourself, then you're not listening to this talk.

So we hear about Hitler and FDR and such, and they do this and that. But they had the power they had because of the ways that vast numbers of people saw things. So it's important for us to see. Unlike World War I, which was basically about agreements and ideas about who owned what, the Second World War was a war over ideology. I would say that these are the same conflict, actually. They're two parts of the same conflict. And it was a question about how will we see the world? If you see the world from a certain perspective, then any one of these sides is right, is making good choices. If you see the world the way they see it, then obviously you'll agree with what they're doing. This is basically the issue that we have. We tell each other, you know, if you would just look at things the way I look at them, well, then you would see them the way I see them. So look at it the way I look at it. And as people convince each other to look at things the way they look at them, they can collaborate. They can work together. Which is to say that mind has power. Perspectives, views, that is what has power. Humans are just slaves to ideas, to ways of looking at things. And those ideas have a great deal of power, but they're very dangerous as well.

Why? Because these ideas are delusional. Cognition, conceiving, is delusional. Whatever model we may hold, it isn't true. Whatever model that is, however we think things are, those things invariably turn out to be otherwise. And yet we continue to think that they are this way. Why? Because it's true? No. Because it gives us power. Humans have power because humans think. And humans think together. Humans think collectively. And we think collectively because each of us clings to a certain way of seeing things that other people are clinging to as well. Because of that, we can work together. But it's important for us to see that exactly the thing that empowers us deludes us. Precisely the thing that deludes us empowers us.

And so when you look at something like World War II, you see a war over humanism, over this idea that humanity had come to the conclusion that humans are the center of the world, the only important thing in the universe, which many people in this room probably believe. And because of that worldview, they had to have a big fight. So this... the secular humanism, which is what all three major forces in that conflict in Europe held on to, some kind of secular humanism. They, holding on to that view, created, devised, participated in, and executed the most horrifying conflict in all of world history, which resulted, in the end, in the use, not in Europe, of the atomic bomb, which is itself a horrifying development. People under those circumstances, individuals, didn't have a lot of power. What had power was the mind, this shared collective mind. And that mind, in order to survive, was very happy to kill millions of people. That's not a problem. Very happy, in fact, to use any sort of destruction, that could be firebombing or atomic bombing or whatever else was available, in order to sustain itself, this mind.