"The Gift of Awakening: What These Times Are Asking of Us" with Jon Kabat Zinn

[Music] [Laughter] uh hi everybody it's been quite a a day and you've probably been here for days but I I'm have only been here since this morning and uh I feel unbelievably full and uh I wished I had been at all of the presentations but I was at quite a few enough to really be deeply deeply moved and by the the variety of approaches views lives that have been shared in a a very deep and feels to me authentic way and some of it of course I heard but missed has been absolutely terrifying and that's probably closer to an accurate uh diagnosis than all of the happy thoughts so that's important to just keep in mind because it means uh that maybe we can understand the magnitude of our karmic assignments and I don't think anyone's in the room by accident if you reflect for a moment just take a moment and reflect on what brought you here why are you really really really really and I'm not kidding really really here it's probably hard to put into words but maybe it has something to do with a combination of longing and necessity showing up is a major part of living life with integrity and showing up in our fullness not leaving half of ourselves at home or 80% of us uh at home rather than showing up at work 100% or in the family 100% or in whatever we doing 100% And I have a sense that this is a moment in time that's really calling on all of us who care to participate in the love affair as if there were no tomorrow because we're capable of uh having there be no tomorrow or a tomorrow that you wouldn't want to even be part of today's hard enough okay and some people the privilege to be more protected than others but when it comes right down to it even that's an a delusion and we're all in this together and we're going to either I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said you know we're either going to hang together when they went into you know sort of write the Declaration of Independence we're all going to hang together or we're all going to hang separately because the British Empire was no you know small thing to fool around with and resist so I think hanging together in a kind of dharmic way is really really important and that means that rather than privileging some person as the embodiment of wisdom or compassion that it's a Distributive function now in humanity it's like all of us to whatever degree possible and authentically need to embody whatever our inkling however inadequate it may be of wisdom and compassion would be and enact it enact it in real time as a practice and as pemet children likes to say yeah all we'll do is fail and when you fail fail better the next time that's called learning learning fail better fail some more fail better don't give up and I'm guessing that that's your default mode already because otherwise why would you have come to this thing some part of you I'm intuiting is really coming out of kind of a a deep longing to make a difference or to be a part of something larger that is more a Force for good in the world than a force for delusion and separation or othering or blame see where my microphone is so I can clear my throat if I can yep found the button didn't work though I have a chronic condition that's called life and sometimes requires me to clear my throat and it sometimes won't let me so um so as uh I was saying earlier from this stage the real meditation practice is life itself and um although you've all knowah Harari kind of emphasizes that what really distinguishes us as a species is that we're capable of telling stories so we can tell the story of like hey if we all got together we might be able to uh capture some big animal and feed the tribe for a while okay no other animal is capable of that on planet Earth except us actually sharks do it with schools of Fai fish I was thinking so maybe you know the we're akin to the sharks in a certain way but um but the point is that he's saying that what distinguishes US is that we are capable of working together because we can share stories but if you've been practicing meditation for any period of time you also know that those stories have a double edge to them because ultimately the story is never big enough and then the personal pronouns become a real problem especially the singular ones and I know we have a lot of sensitivities nowadays about pronouns but from the Dharma perspective from the wisdom perspective the problematic ones are I me and mine okay and it's not that they're not useful but they're just placeholders and so it's really valuable to ask who am I and then as our teacher San sonim used to say and he would say it just like this don't know you ask what am I and he get a really quizzical look on his face and then he'd say d and then he'd say you keep this D all mind because that's a very big mind if you are a scientist every scientist every great scientist knows that you got to watch out for your thinking because how do you go Beyond the Horizon of what's known to what's still not known and have the potential to actually discover something that no one's ever seen before and what you know can actually you can become a prisoner of it as Krishna merty said you know free we need freedom from the known so we really have to pay attention to how much our thoughts and our Concepts actually valid and beautiful and our stories valid and beautiful as they are are in some sense limiting our capacity to go beyond the story or to inhabit a much bigger story and the favorite story of course is the story of me storing me H my suffering my trauma and I'm not belittling any of this but what I'm saying is for Real healing at a certain point whenever the developmental Arc reaches a certain moment you realize okay I've been here with the story long enough now is there something bigger than this story maybe it's another story but a story for this moment for this critical moment on planet Earth and I like to say and if you heard me say it a million times if you were on the mitigation retreat with us uh back at the first three months of the co pandemic that you know quoting from uh Buckminster Fuller you know this is an all hands moment on spaceship earth all hands on deck and that means you it means me that means all of us no matter how young no matter how old and no matter how much of the mind says well you got a lot more practicing to do before you can contribute or you're you know don't really understand or you know or you're feeling wounded or or othered or less than and the dharmic message as far as I understand it of what it means to be human that goes goes back way before the Buddha and is not associated with any particular one lineage is that you're already the Buddha the nature of your humanity is sensient we're called sensient beings and when we learn how to live our way into that it's embod wisdom right here right now not after 30 years of being good or sitting a million Retreats or anything not that you shouldn't be good and sit a million Retreats or two million even but as I said when the house is on fire you know you also need to contribute to getting everybody out of the house or putting out the fire or whatever is called for so that's a Distributive karmic assignment it's like all hands on deck that means you and me and that we do what it is that we can and I'm not a big fan of branding a certain thing and saying that's the answer including mbsr one of the things about mbsr that I love the most is that I've never tried to control it or tell anybody how to even do it just put out the curriculum and and you can do it if you have enough this is a technical Buddhist term but I'll throw it out hutzpah and you'll probably screw it up especially if you're coming from thought or from fear but that the people that you're who will be your victims will teach you if you're patient enough and open open enough and compassionate enough they'll teach you what it's really about and over the years you will learn that you're not copying someone else's teaching you become a vehicle of Dharma yourself and you can't do that through thinking so you have to live your way into this moment and then teach out of your understanding at this moment in collaboration with a curriculum that's big enough to make room for you but also is rigorous enough so that you better follow the curriculum or just call it something else but don't call it mbsr because that would be in a sense a form of violence you know so when we name things inappropriately it's kind of like dangerous so the stakes are very very high and I use mbsr just as like one little tiny example I'm not into and what I was trying to say is that I've personally LED mbsr just be what it is and I've tried to articulate what I feel it is and how it should be and tried to live that in my teaching but I don't go around policing the Waterfront or telling other people what to do because I feel like oh the world will take care of that really fast if you're like living in delusion you're going to get slapped on the decide to face soon enough by your own delusion and what comes back at you so I don't need to control that that gives degrees of freedom of creativity that if you too tight around and that's why mbsr is not a therapy it's not a protocol it's a way of being it's a Dharma vehicle or at least it's been meant to be from the very get-go a Dharma vehicle and if you don't know what Dharma means then you know pretty obvious you better find out if you're going to engage in you know delivering a Dharma vehicle and I use Dharma usually with a small D because I want to differentiate it from ways in which we articulate that very same Dharma that look a little uh like it's uh culturally fixed or historically fixed it is and it isn't so and it's it's non-u and I'll just throw that out because when we fall into dualisms well the best one of all favorite one of All Is Us and Them right me and everybody else can you feel the toxicity of that it's it's okay in a certain way I mean you know if you wound up thinking my hotel room was your hotel room there would be a problem okay hey John you said we're all one and you know it's like you know no it speaks for itself doesn't it so it's like yes we understand one but we also understand not one and Zen Masters love to talk like this you know sort of but what we're really cultivating is a sense of possibility when we respect each other in the deepest of ways which means also appropriate social boundaries appropriate uh somatic boundaries the amount of transgression in this world is huge sexual transgression traumatic transgressions of all kind you know mindfulness that kind of clarity it's like a mjus sword of discrimination I mean it's sharp it cuts through that kind of stuff and it reminds you that you are uh not just valuable but that you are uh Sovereign and your body space and your body and the way you look and what you love it's Sovereign and should never be uh assaulted or threatened in any way and of course that's a nice fairy tale because it's constantly being threatened but a lot of the time it's being threatened by us ourselves and then we project it out into the world but what if we actually lived our way into our sovereignty lived our way into our Beauty lived our way into our autonomy and lived our way into our interconnectedness so that it wasn't some kind of figment of our imagination or a mere cognitive modeling or story but it was like underneath the story altogether it was like in your DNA and you could tap it in that that way it's like it's just what I am who I am however you want to put it and it's so underneath thinking that uh it's not doubtable and how many of your parents so can you see the Buddha nature in your children you know sometimes it's hard I know I know is the Buddha but man you know but the harder it is the more important it is and that doesn't mean that you're always a certain way there's no script here for parenting with Compassion or mindfulness and sometimes it's infinitely painful because family is a reflection of a larger world and you heard from Joan about her experience with her mother and you know it's always that way I mean at a certain point differentiation is important and also the world is different Generation by generation and nowadays the generations are happening about every 3 years and you can tell because uh they listen to different music and even children separate by 3 years uh in a family and it may be listening to very different music so what is our karmic assignment here why do we even have wisdom 2.0 and what was wrong with wisdom 1.0 and a lot of it's really skillful to call it wisdom 2.0 is really an act of Genius because it needs to be adequate for the moment and at the moment you know I mean I was at the first anti-war demonstration in 1964 in May of 1964 uh in New York City the first anti- Vietnam War if any of you ever even remember or heard of the Vietnam War okay and it was organized by a sophomore at my College haford college who actually wrote the berch and r coralled him to come and then they developed this uh anti-war you know March against the war before the Gulf of Tong King and I was there in New York City I was like and then of course some of you may be old enough to remember what happened on the campuses during the Vietnam war Columbia Harvard MIT we shut down MIT for an entire day to talk about mit's role in sort of nuclear arms and missile development and all of the smart weapons I know the people who designed the first couple of generations of them they were what was called the instrumentation lab which was at that time part of MIT they spun it off but you know that smart meaning you could put the atom bomb or any bomb you want right down the chimney in Iraq or anywhere else that you want to put it okay those bombs are falling on Gaza right now only multiple Generations later smarter than ever they're so smart they're killing people by the thousands who just happen to have the misfortune of living in Gaza and being at the mercy of mercenaries of one kind or another who who don't care about that because there's some other agenda that comes out of the deep deep deep deep wounding that was not there doing and at the same time you know you got the Israelis with their world you've got the ukrainians and the Russians and they're like families they're they're all the same they're families I have friends in Ukraine and they have Russian relatives you know it's like speak the same language and all of a sudden you know a few Minds get together that have lots of money and have figured out how to take millions of people and keep them in a certain kind of servitude and I use that word you know advisedly given that is Russia and uh they can do whatever the hell they want and just take 20s somethings and when you run out of 20s somethings you take prisoners and you throw them into Canon's father for what World War II was the war to end all wars till Korea I met with I I mean there was a time that I worked with the military that got very interested in mindfulness and I visited the front lines and the generals in Korea on you know and 30 40 years 50 years after you know the Korean War they're still there with all the armaments facing each other down and you know it's scary on the other side so I'm not saying they shouldn't be there but what a waste the poor people of North Korea this is The Human Condition I mean you know it's like we could go on you know whether whether it's you know mosan Beek or whether it's you know I mean we need to govern ourselves in a new way we need to learn how to govern ourselves on spaceship earth because you know space the spaceship has only one oxygen supply if you take an apple and you let's say the apple is the Earth the skin of the apple is in proportion the size of the atmosphere to the Earth so the the atmosphere is as thin as the skin of the Apple in relationship to the size of the Earth it's a membrane so take a a notice because I don't have to invite you to take a breath but notice The Next Breath You Take and it's free right and we're only one breath away in any moment from being out of here and we have this thin membrane that not only gives us life and all life on Earth life but it also um protects us from you know radiation until until we create ozone holes and stuff like that but still we haven't completely damaged the atmosphere and they they call Mars uh uh they call the earth a blue planet astronomers do and and then space engineers and they call uh Mars uh a red planet and they call Venus a dead planet so we're right in between I know Elon Musk is dying to get to Mars but we need to take care of the home planet uh because only the billionaires would get the Mars and it wouldn't be too Pleasant anyway let's take care of of this planet because we can turn it into Venus if the you know sort of global warming reaches a certain point you it it's irreversible it goes chaotic and then you know uh it's very hard to pull it back and uh the CO2 level could just kind of gallop away and Venus has I mean is 800 degrees at the surface of Venus as far as we know and now we've found planets every everywhere in the universe I mean it turns out that almost every Star has a solar system this is all recent stuff and some of the planets are like big Saturn type Jupiter type gases planets but some of them are small rocky planets and the technology is good enough so that they can actually detect these rocky planets and the next generation of technology is going to be able to uh discern whether there are conditions on those planets that might be conducive to Life Like Water for instance or oxygen or but for all that the gazillions of planets and Sol systems in the universe we're the only one that we can be certain of has life and you could say that uh the universe after 13.8 billion years of evolution um has resulted in us on planet Earth and it's like a karmic experiment I won't even say a karmic assignment but it's a karmic experiment let's see if they can make it to 10,000 years since the cultural since the Industrial Revolution native cultures have been on planet Earth for stretches of time close to tens of thousands of years or five or 6 thousand years you know in South America Asia in all sorts of places in North America native cultures knew how to be in Wise relationship with nature we feel like we are separate from nature and we are going to dominate nature huis and it's got a cost it's got a cost so what would the answer to this be more corporate capitalism I mean really what is the story we need to tell ourselves now or do we need to actually transcend story and discover some even more powerful than story and one of the questions that I want to ask you Al knowah Harari if I ever get enough opportunity is okay youve all you have a fairly intensive meditation practice and you've had it for at least 20 years you know in the goenka vasana tradition why how come that's all about transcending story understanding I'm me in mine and Liber in all the Buddhist Traditions I mean the vocabulary is a liberative vocabulary it's about Liberation from greed hatred delusion suffering it's all out there the whole prescription and the sort of diagnosis ideology uh prognosis and treatment plan the four noble truths it's all out there it's been out there for 2600 years in counting and this we're in a Renaissance I think we have the potential to catalyze a global Renaissance on planet Earth and it's not going to happen by building more smart bombs or missiles or Warheads or amphibious battalions with clever uh new tactics it may require us to uh give up certain elements of security that we feel like we strongly identify with I don't know what they are but you know sometimes I think well what would be called for you know uh God Gandhi took down the British Empire or at least liberated their biggest grab and they did it by uh non-violently I mean that that didn't mean there wasn't a huge amount of violence but but they took an orthogonal approach to that kind of power and they won and then of course that wasn't the end of the story and they bifurcated and the you know and they're still dealing with the sort of you know Hindus versus Muslims and you know just tremendous othering of all kinds and yet it's a democracy and you know everything's in process and we don't know how the whole thing will go but um maybe just maybe we need to either come up with a new story that we can all agree yes this is the way we need to move on planet Earth and maybe it's to really tax billionaires at the level that they used to tax them in the 1950s 1950s I think it was at 90% okay and then get rid of all the loopholes that allow them to sort of scoot out from under the table and not pay taxes I mean if we're one family or one organism then we need to redistribute the blood supply enough so that every cell is metabolically whole and can do its work and what is that work D all but we'll find out by living our way into it by practicing by cultivating moments to moment non-reactive non-judgmental awareness that's not mine or I me or mine the Buddhist famous for having said uh that his entire 40 Years of teaching could be collapsed into one sentence and I'm I like to say on the off chance that he wasn't kidding around maybe we should memorize that sentence and the sentence is nothing is to be clung to as I me or mine easy to say until you get my wife you say it again until you get in my [Laughter] way okay nothing is to be clung to the operative verb is to cling okay and this is you know in that uh uh Four Noble Truths the source of the suffering the origin of suffering cling in self identification I me and mine nothing is to be clung to as iy and M so of course that's an ideal but maybe mindfulness of how much we cling to iy and mind how much we those and then it's a a short jump to US versus them very short jump and then we better get them before they get us and we dehumanize them because they're Muslims or because they're Hindus or because they're Jews or because they're Palestinians or whatever you trumpet Y and you know We're Off to the Races racing to Armageddon or just and that may not be the end of the story we can turn the world into a radioactive world uh we can kill a 100 million people somebody's going to survive and they will rebuild and they may have six arms or I don't know what but if we have any caring for our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren maybe we should wake up now and if I knew anything other than mindfulness and when I use the word mindfulness by the way if you're not hearing the word heartfulness you're not understanding what I'm saying okay so in my words and in the Buddhist tradition often say two Wings one bird so mindfulness compassion but it's the one bird part that I want to emphasize okay and in the Chinese it's like the calligraphy for now looks like a hat over the four chambers of the heart now heart mindfulness Yen so I I would just venture to throw out that maybe this is our karmic assignment for for Humanity on spaceship earth and none of us know how to thread this needle and there may be not one way to thread the needle in fact what I was saying about mbsr and the kind of way I hoped it would unfold so that it re it's a participatory kind of thing that everybody's going to in some sense keep the form but at the same time bring the formless into it so that you know it's a transmission of love and wisdom and it's embodied in the form of you but if you think you're wise then you're really screwed and I don't know how else to put it but uh maybe just maybe it's possible for us to uh instantiate some kind of orthogonal rotation in Consciousness and by that what I mean I mean that's a $10 word that I used originally when I was a student at MIT uh because they like those kind of $10 words uh it it orthogonal means that it's at right angles to the phase space that you're talking about so it's like a hidden Dimensions that we rotate in Consciousness and everything is the same as it was before except nothing's the same because we've undergone the rotation okay it's like so seeing what hasn't been seen before everything's exactly the same only you're not that's Liberation okay but that may be a momentary Liberation now we have to like you know sometimes we like to joke and ask people well under treat well did you wake up on an in breath or did you wake up on an out breath don't know but it would be at that high level of resolution in a certain way that you know you know what toxic thoughts are in your mind you know how much othering you do you much you know how much you benefit from certain kind of injustices and then that knowing in some way or other gets healed it is enacted in some way or other where we find levels of generosity or levels of participation or levels of non-control or stepping back rather than stepping forward and always being the one Center Stage especially if you're look like me uh and the grayer the hair the better um and just find out give space for everybody's genius and everybody's be seen and met and actually uh resourced to the point where we say all right this just has to stop has to stop it was supposed to stop at World War II then it was supposed to be the Korean War then it was the Vietnam War then it was the Iraq or the Persian the Gulf War then it was the Iraq and who's making out like Bandits with all of this hey if you really you know do you remember that movie that Dustin Hoffman was in called The Graduate and where some corporate type says to him takes him aside at a pool party and says Plastics Plastics just go into Plastics now we're all suffering from microplastic poisoning in the body the guy had a ride Plastics you make a fortune in Plastics and now Downstream there's like Seas Islands gigantic islands of plastic floating around in the Pacific Ocean and they're in all of our cells all of our bodies and those pabs and everything else that's in all sorts of products including even dental floss you know you're flossing your teeth and you're poisoning yourself unless you're paying attention or you like that kind of dental Fluss because it's the only one that works in your teeth so you have to so it's all kind of uh titrating how much you can you know change but I'm optimistic I have to tell you it says here I this the first time we've even looked at this thing it says Please wrap up thank you oh it's you should put it up on the big screen can you do that and show please can you give us the Please wrap up on the big screen there I want everybody to see it cuz this is really wonderful come on so uh and I sympathize okay so so let's take a moment and drop in and let go of everything that's been said okay that doesn't mean it won't resonate with you it won't continue to resonate you but don't feed it okay just drop into the breath into the body sitting here into this moment which is the end of a very long day and a very long conference most of which I was not here for wrap it up man so and just remember or feel your way into your wholeness right right now w h o l e n SS underneath all your ideas about how inadequate you may be or how much you have to grow or learn or meditate or go on a retreat just drop all of that and drop into your wholeness now and let it be good enough for now and rest in awareness and feel feeling what whatever is here to be found sensing whatever is here to be sensed knowing whatever is here to be known and dropping underneath and inside and in between all of my words to a silence that's never not been here and now let's affirm that we will go up out with this okay that we will carry this with us so that this is not a oneshot deal or just a nice week of uh wisdom 2.0 but that we become the wisdom we live our way into it and we don't idealize it or make it about me and my wisdom I want to say that I feel really understood by all of you I can't believe I'm saying that but I feel like I need to give you a certain kind of feedback about either my level of delusion or how sensitive I am but I feel like you're understanding me and I I feel like that's really important that and every one of you may be hearing and sure will be hearing what I'm saying differently and that's perfect because we're in this together and your karmic assignment has to be your karmic assignment your unique karmic assignment due to all the causes and conditions that led you to the seat that you're sitting in right now so I feel I want to just say that I feel tremendously honored by you're according me your attention and that I hope you understand that everything that I've said has been a meditation and that we've been meditating together underneath thinking but using Concepts and emotion to actually understand the non-dual nature of things and the huge potential of wisdom and compassion to enact healing and transformation in the world and I'll see you around [Applause]

Channel: Wisdom 2.0 with Soren Gordhamer

Views: 4,480

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Id: gnudE1cDwCc

Length: 45min 47sec (2747 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024