Summary:
- David Loy: A professor, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism, known for his prolific writing and contributions to journals and Buddhist magazines.
- Spiritual Ecology: Loy discusses his passion for environmental issues and his belief in the importance of addressing ecological concerns within the non-dual community.
- Personal Journey: Loy shares his spiritual journey, including his 20 years in Japan, his Zen practice, and his experiences with significant moments of transformation and integration.
This interview explores themes of spiritual awakening, the role of the self, and the intersection of spirituality and ecology.
Full transcript:
Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done nearly 400 of them now, and if this one is new to you, you might want to go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P and check under the past interviews menu where you’ll find all the previous ones categorized and organized in four or five different ways. This show is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers and so if you appreciate it and feel like supporting it, there are donate buttons on every page of the site. My guest today is David Loy. David Robert Loy is a professor, writer, and Zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism. He’s a prolific author, whose essays and books have been translated into many languages. His articles appear regularly in the pages of major journals and Buddhist magazines. He’s on the editorial or advisory boards of the journals Cultural Dynamics, Worldviews, Contemporary Buddhism, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, and World Fellowship of Buddhist Review. He’s also on the advisory boards of Buddhist Global Relief, The Clear View Project, Zen Peacemakers, and the Ernest Becker Foundation. And as always, I’ll be linking to his website where you can find much more about him after this Interview, as well as extensive library of audio and video to listen or watch, listen to or watch, and various writings. David and I did a little thing together, about four and a half years ago out of the Science and Non-duality Conference in San Rafael that year. I had seen David speak on spiritual ecology along with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, and later on, there was an interesting interchange where David was challenging a non-dual teacher who was up on stage, and kind of probing him about whether the non-dual community has any obligation to address ecological issues and so on. And the teacher up on stage, whom I later learned is very politically conservative, was rather dismissive and at one point he commented that the earth is just like a speck of dust and it hardly matters what happens to it. And David was very persistent and I admired that and I’ve actually, referred to that little interchange in several of my interviews over the years. David feels very passionate about environmental issues, as do I, and has really put his money where his mouth is in terms of speaking and doing things about it. So, I just listened to our thing the other day David, that we did out there with Igor Kufayev and it was good, but we only had an hour and I felt like in this conversation, we can perhaps get into a lot more detail. You can’t necessarily teach old dogs new tricks, so probably you and I both will say some of the same things we said then, but we can get into the meat of it much more thoroughly.
David: The truth is I don’t remember what I said then. So anyway, let me just first of all, thank you for this invitation. I’m delighted to be having another conversation with you Rick.
Rick: Yeah, me too and I refreshed my appreciation for you in listening to about six or seven hours of your talks over the last week and I’m very glad that I have you on today because I really like what you have to say and the way you say it.
David: Thank you, thanks for that encouragement, including this opportunity.
Rick: Sure, so I thought we might start just by getting to know you a little bit better. I understand that you’ve spent like 20 years in Japan and in Zen monasteries, and maybe give us a sense of what you’ve been through on your own spiritual path.
David: Sure, well I’m another child of the 60s. My Zen practice actually started in Hawaii in the very early 70s when a Japanese Zen master Yamada Kōen Roshi visited and I was also living and practicing with Robert Aiken for a while, another well-known American teacher. And after that I spent some time in Singapore, where I was teaching in the university. We started a little Zen group, where that same teacher Yamada Roshi used to visit and lead Sesshin with us, and eventually he invited me back to Japan. So I ended up living in Japan 20 years, not in a monastery. Yamada Roshi was a layman, very successful retired businessman. So those of us, there were a lot of international students, we lived in Kamakura, used to go there to sit, to do Zazenkai and Sesshin with him. But he actually, died quite fairly early and I stayed on, my wife and I both stayed on as professors in different Japanese universities. And in 2006 I was offered a position, a chair at Xavier University in Cincinnati. So, I came back to take that position, which was quite good, but it was a visiting chair so it eventually ended. And after that I moved to Boulder, Colorado, originally to be a kind of research scholar at Naropa, but my wife and I really like this area and we’ve now pretty much settled here. I’m pretty well retired from academia which frees me up to write and to travel around giving retreats and workshops.
Rick: Did you get to know Shinzen Young while you’re over there in Japan?
David: I never met him there, I’ve met him a few times here in the States though, yeah. I can’t say I know him as well as I’d like to, we had a couple brief conversations, and he seemed quite interested in social engagement. So, I hope that’s a theme we’ll be able to pursue sometime.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve done a couple of interviews with him. Did you learn to speak fluent Japanese while you’re over there?
David: Well, 20 years, of course I learned to speak Japanese, whether it’s as fluent as it should be after all that time maybe I’ll evade the question.
Rick: Yeah, okay. So, you seem like a very happy, wise, settled person. I would guess that you’re pretty satisfied with the results of all that Zen practice, would you say?
David: Well, it seems to me like there have been some changes over the years that have certainly made a big difference in my life, some of them fairly dramatic, other words, others maybe more gradual, but it feels like what I’m living now, I turned 70 this year, it feels like a kind of natural development out of all of that practice.
Rick: Yeah, some people report having some kind of dramatic, sudden, final, abiding awakening, but more commonly people say, “Well, you know, it just sort of creeps up on you over the years, and there is definitely something profound that abides, but I couldn’t mark it on a calendar, I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happened, it snuck up.”
David: Well, in my case, there were several moments when things like, there was some transformation. The interesting thing though, the real challenge and the deeper transformation I think occurs in sort of more slowly learning how to integrate that into how we actually live. I think for all of us that’s the greater challenge. So, there have been a couple experiences that for me were very special, but also in the Zen tradition we’re told not to cling to them, but to let them go and if something important has happened it’ll stay with us, it’ll change us.
Rick: Yeah, that’s two interesting points. One is that talk of integration and embodiment is very much in vogue these days among spiritual teachers, I think, which it might not have been so much ten years ago, but I think in their own experience they realize that that’s what needs to be done. And what you just said was significant too I think, because sometimes people speak of realizations and so on, as though they were something you needed to hold on to or make some kind of conscious effort throughout the day to maintain, and what you just said, implies, that if it’s genuine it’s natural and you don’t have to actually do anything. It’ll be like breathing or like ordinary waking state. You don’t have to keep reminding yourself that you’re awake, you just are.
David: That’s right, and it doesn’t mean that because one has an experience that practice, or meditation isn’t important. In the Buddhist traditions we really emphasize that, so one still needs to make that effort to sort of be mindful to meditate. Just because one’s had an experience it doesn’t obviate the need for that sort of thing.
Rick: Sure, I think it might have been in your book that I just read today, some beautiful saying that, or might have been something that somebody sent me, some Sufi saying that there’s an end to realizing God but there’s no end to continued realization in God or some such thing. You know that quote I’m trying to quote?
David: I do but I don’t remember it well enough. Yeah, so I think what that really points to is there’s no final stage, there’s no final awakening here, whatever one’s experienced that can be deepened and needs to be deepened, so it’s not as though the path comes to an end in that sense.
Rick: Yeah, I heard that even the Buddha himself continued to sit for the rest of his life after his realization, sit and meditate for whatever reason. Is that true or as far as we know is that true?
David: Oh yeah, if you read the Pali Canon there’s plenty of places where it’s clear that he would spend a lot of time meditating either with the other monks or by himself, and in Japan there’s this interesting phrase that even the Buddha is only halfway there.
Rick: Interesting, what do they mean by that?
David: Good question, I think it probably goes back to what we said -that there’s no end to this practice, there’s no end to the way that the experiences, there’s always more experiences and there’s always the greater challenge of integrating those into our lives. The way I sometimes put it is I make a distinction between deconstruction of the delusive sense of separate self and reconstruction, which involves transforming our karma by transforming our habitual motivations and patterns of behavior.
Rick: On this point of separate self, I heard you speak about it quite a bit, a lot of different people speak about it, and would you, let me just ask you point-blank, do you feel like you have any sense of a separate self?
David: Well, when people talk about anatta or not-self, I think that’s very easily misunderstood. In the Buddhist tradition. It’s very clear, that the idea isn’t to get rid of the self, because there’s never been such a thing, I mean the sense of self is something different and it’s not even to get rid of the sense of self, I mean we need that in order to practice. Maybe a better way to say it, is to realize that what we thought was the Self, is a kind of vehicle or a container or maybe that the sense of self is hollow and at the very core of the sense of self is this opening to that which is greater than the sense of self, which is also the source of creativity. So does that evade your question?
Rick: It helps, I’ll probe you a little bit more. In my own experience, I can clearly remember being a teenager and having a very locked-in sense of self and wondering if my hair looked cool and things like that, and then over the decades that has changed very much, but still, you know I know where to stick a fork in my mouth and somebody calls my name, I respond, or if I stub my toe it’s my toe, it’s not the tree over there that’s feeling the pain. So, when people say that they’ve utterly lost all sense of a personal self, I just scratch my head and I don’t get it.
David: Yeah, me too. I really appreciate the Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s net, this is a way of answering that question. Is it all one? Is that what we’re talking about? The idea of Indra’s net is we can understand the cosmos as this three-dimensional infinite net that extends boundlessly in every direction, and at every node there’s a jewel that reflects all the other jewels, and I think this is a good way to put it. It’s not that, maybe say it this way, the problem usually is that the jewels, Us, think of ourselves as separate from the other jewels and the point of the net is realizing that each jewel is reflecting, manifesting all the other jewels, so there’s not that sense of separation, but nonetheless it’s not as though the jewel that is you and the jewel that is me is exactly the same.
Rick: Right, I think the wave analogy helps here too, it’s like you think you’re only a wave and then at some point you discover you’re the ocean but you’re still a wave. So, it’s not like you’re, sure you’re a wave, you’re just not only a wave anymore.
David: So, very good, I like that,
Rick: yeah. Okay, so let’s dive into a little bit more. Now you’ve given a talk lately entitled “Cosmos as Transformation” and I’ve listened to it a couple of times, and as I mentioned to you before we started, I was usually listening while cutting the grass or something, so I didn’t actually write down points but I really liked a lot of the points you’re making, so if you could remember what some of those were, maybe we’ll use those to get our conversation rolling even more.
David: To be quite frank I’m trying to remember what that talk wa,s but given the title I think I know what it was about in terms of, how we understand evolution.
Rick: Yeah, and you were talking about Darwin for instance, and how his writings changed our cultural understanding of God and issues like that.
David: Right, right, well Darwin of course was kind of, he refuted the last real argument for God’s existence in the classical sense in that, the old argument from design you needed some super being to design these incredibly complicated creatures, and so that kind of opened the door to a kind of totally mechanistic understanding of what’s going on with the evolutionary Process. But I think from a Buddhist, or a non-dualist perspective, we can understand it differently and of course there’s a lot of people trying to do that these days, especially Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. I think have really opened doors there. So, the question is, is evolution something that’s Directed, or is it something that’s, by some being like a God or is evolution something totally random and sort of meaningless as a lot of biologists would put it, or is there a third alternative? And I think there is a third alternative, the idea that there’s some kind of groping that in a way the cosmos is in a sort of groping way, becoming more and more complex, more and more conscious, more and more self-conscious, more and more aware of itself, so we can understand the evolutionary process in these terms. And of course, I’m far from the only one in the spiritual world who’s talking in that way. It’s quite interesting from a Buddhist perspective because there’s this old question in Buddhism if there’s no self, which is an essential Buddhist teaching, who or what wakes up, right? And there’s that famous story too, where after his awakening, the Buddha was challenged by Mara, the kind of symbolization of evil or death, and Mara challenged him, “You say you’re awakened, how do you know? Who authorizes your awakening or is it just your own delusion?” And it’s interesting that the Buddha, according to this story, didn’t say anything but he just touched the earth, as if the earth was his witness. So, what is that pointing at? Can we understand awakening as the earth or even the cosmos as a whole becoming self-aware in the process? And I think that’s a serious way to try to integrate what non-dualist traditions like Buddhism have been talking about, and these other possible ways of looking at evolution.
Rick: Yeah, let’s dwell on this a little bit. The thing about who or what wakes up, well back to Darwin, if Darwin sort of unseated God, I think the God he unseated, or maybe it was Herbert Spencer who did that, the God he unseated was really not the real God. It’s like if I were to talk to somebody like Sam Harris I think I would say, “ I don’t believe in the God that you don’t believe in,” but that is not to say that those guys are kind of arguing against a straw man God who is really, it needs to be a subtler consideration.
David: Yeah, I agree completely. Yeah, God can be understood in a number of different ways, and a lot of times the problem is that people take myths too literally. I think it was Joseph Campbell who said you have a lot of people who take the stories, say the Christian stories about resurrection and so forth literally and then you have the critics, the Sam Harris and so forth who also take them literally in dismissing them, but they’re both missing some deeper understanding of how myth works, and the fact that there’s different levels of meaning and often the popular Understanding, to some extent misses what’s really going on there.
Rick: Yeah, and if Darwin sort of unseated the conception of a God that had designed all these marvelous complex creatures, that implies that that God is somewhat, somehow separate from his creation, like a puppeteer that’s designed and is manipulating the puppets, but I think the way you would understand it if you Do, is that if we look closely, intelligence permeates and orchestrates every iota of creation, every particle of creation. God is not off someplace running the show, he’s totally imbued into the whole show.
David: Or one way to say it, is evolution isn’t something that’s happening to the universe, evolution is the universe itself and we don’t have to understand that in a mechanistic way. In fact, the old mechanistic metaphor really, the reason that first came about was because the early scientists still thought of God in a kind of a deistic fashion that God was the machine maker. But if you don’t have a machine maker, the idea of the universe as a machine, doesn’t quite work anymore. When you look at the way that it tends to evolve and complexify, I think a much better metaphor is the cosmos is an organism, and an organism that that’s transforming and it also raises a very interesting question then, are we an organ? Is our species a particular organ in that larger organism and if so what is our function? This is really important too because the upshot of the Darwinist revolution was really to say, well we’re just accidents of genetic mutation and we have no function, no role, all we can do is enjoy ourselves if we can, while we can, as long as we can, but the truth is I think that’s not very satisfying and in the long run I think our civilization is showing it, we sort of lost any sense that we have any meaning or role to play that we’re part of something greater than ourselves, and I think this is the kind of cutting-edge question, do we have a role to play in the cosmos? Do human beings really have a role to play? If we are a way in which the earth or even the larger cosmos is becoming self-aware, then it suggests maybe yes, and if so I think that’s something that needs to be pursued, because I think that can help to correct the kind of nihilism of our present culture.
Rick: What was that quote from Brian Swimme that you like to quote about leaving hydrogen alone for 14 billion years?
David: Yeah, if we leave hydrogen, well he says the most important scientific fact ever discovered and I wonder if it’s also maybe one of the most important spiritual truths ever discovered, is that if you leave hydrogen alone for 14 million years it turns into – billion, thanks – turns into rose bushes, giraffes, and us. What’s going on there? Yeah. The fact that it just turns into these things is whoa, is it really just accident of genetic mutation? Do we really have to accept that that’s the final conclusion of science? I have my doubts.
Rick: Yeah, it’s a good Point, and to me the notion that random processes could ever result in such beauty and order and complexity, is absurd. If anything, the second law of thermodynamics would have just kept everything completely disorganized and amorphous, there’s no way we would have gotten all these beautiful expressions of intelligence. So, I don’t see how people who argue a mechanistic worldview, have a leg to stand on.
David: And my way of saying that is, what we can see is that the cosmos is self-organizing, as an organism is. And yeah, as you said, it’s not a chaotic randomness, but something is going on, there’s some tendency here. What does it mean to say the cosmos wants to be self-conscious or intends? That’s a really good question, but the point is that’s what seems to be happening.
Rick: Yeah, and obviously it must be something more profound than that. We kind of anthropomorphize it when we use words like wants and intends, but something’s going on and I think we need to continually ask ourselves “Why, what’s behind all this?” And even if you take some of the principles of Darwin, like what do they call it? Random selection?
Rick: Natural selection and so on. It’s like why, what’s behind that?
David: Yeah, well let me just piggyback on that. The idea that random or natural selection occurs because there’s errors, there’re genetic mutations, there are errors in DNA replication, right? And some of the errors, a few of the errors are beneficial and they cause a species to, specific individuals to survive better than the species. But what’s interesting of course is that as biologists know the mutations aren’t just accidental in the sense that they just happen once in a while. There’s a rate of mutation that they can observe and they can use to detect certain changes. The fact that there’s regular mutation, why do we think of that as erroneous? It seems to me we can understand that as part of this, I think, fundamental creativity of the universe, that it’s wanting to try new things. It’s always and it’s interesting, a lot of the new things don’t work out, a lot of those, most of those mutations they don’t have any benefit, many of them the opposite, but some lead to the development and the creation of something new. Can’t we understand this is what the cosmos is about? It’s this fundamental creativity that maybe it’s enjoying itself in this process.
Rick: Yeah, that’s what the Hindus say, Leela, it’s a play. And how did we get DNA in the first place? Consider what a complex molecule that is and how amazing it is. That didn’t happen randomly.
David: Wow, well said, yeah, why would it, why would all of those very complicated chemicals come together in the way that they did?
Rick: yeah. And not only DNA, I mean they say that a single cell is more complex than, Tokyo in terms of all the stuff that’s going on in it and we have about a hundred trillion of them in our body, all coordinated in various ways. So, maybe we’ve covered this point enough, but just the notion that things are sort of dumb, billion balls banging into each other randomly and that it’s somehow resulted. And actually, there’s people who argue that. They get around this conundrum by saying that they’re actually, an infinite number of parallel universes and in ours just because there’s so many of them it’s like the infinite number of monkeys, on typewriters and one of them manages to type Shakespeare. They say that ours we just happen to live in the one where ordinance and higher evolved life forms have randomly resulted but maybe the other ones all fizzled. But that’s too I think is it sort of is a stretch.
David: Yeah, even though there does seem to be some suggestion, people looking at the Big Bang and all that, there does seem to some suggestion that there are parallel Universes, but it’s still a big stretch I think from that to the kind of rationalization that you were just talking about. And what’s amazing of course, is that whatever we said is just like, it’s not as though we’ve explained something or are understanding something, it’s more like just an opening up to an appreciation of the mystery. It’s just fundamental, fundamentally far beyond anything we can understand, much more control this larger cosmic process, and so a lot of what we’re talking about is an opening to appreciation and gratitude and again this fundamental question, “Well okay if so what’s our role, what’s my role within it?”
Rick: And I think that what we’ve just been talking about kind of segues us into what we’re going to be talking about in terms of environmental and social issues and so on, because it’s sort of a philosophical or cosmological underpinning to those issues. If the world is just a thing, if it’s just a mechanism and if life is meaningless and so on and so forth, then that kind of provides justification for doing whatever the hell we please with the environment and other species and so on and so forth. Make hay while the sun shines, I’m going to get mine, you worry about getting yours. But if in fact there’s a sort of a divine intelligence permeating and orchestrating everything, if there’s no separation ultimately between ourselves and everything else, if as John Dunn said, “No man is an island and ask not for whom the bell tolls for thee,” then a lot of our economic and environmental policies are a serious violation of that deeper principle.
David: Right, yeah. Well, there’s a couple ways to follow up on that. One of them is to look at how the secular world evolved, or how we came to understand the world as secular, and it’s quite interesting, some people talk about secular Buddhism or secular spirituality, but the point is our understanding of secularity is historically conditioned, and if you go back to say the Middle Ages, there was what we call science, it was called natural philosophy. But they understood that as our attempt to find the signature of God in the natural world. That is to say, what did the natural world reveal about the nature of God? But once you came in with the modern era, especially with the Reformation where there was a lot of insecurity and humans became very more concerned about kind of securing themselves, the early scientists all of whom believed in God, but they tended to think of God as somebody way upstairs, high up in the clouds who had created the world, but then it was running according to certain physical laws or mathematical laws. And it’s interesting we use the same word for physical laws as we do for legal laws, because the original idea was that the physical laws, the laws of Newton, had been created by God. And so more and more they understood the role of God as sort of creating the process, starting it off, but then Historically, as God sort of disappeared up in the heavens, the spiritual, the sacred dimension, I guess we call that the spiritual half, was lost and we were left with a kind of devalued material lifeless world of matter, meaningless matter, and in a way that’s what we’ve been, trying to cope with. I think that has opened the doors to the kind of exploitation that we’re now experiencing the consequences of, if the world is basically these beings who don’t have any spiritual elements. What am I trying to say here? I might say something like Wendell Berry, the poet, said. He put it really well. He said, there are no unsacred places, there are only sacred places and desecrated places. So, we’ve lost the sacredness of the world, and the problem is we’ve desecrated it because we understand it as not having a sacred or a spiritual dimension, which kind of frees us to use it, to exploit it for our own ends.
Rick: Yeah, that notion of God that you just described, is often used, the clock analogy has often been used to illustrate that, like God is some clockmaker that makes the clock, winds it up and then takes off and the clock just runs on its own, this mechanical thing. But that contrasts with what you and I have been alluding to, which is that the Divine permeates everything, it is in no way separate from everything. They should have known that, because it does say in the Bible, doesn’t it- that God is omnipresent and omniscient? And so, if he’s omnipresent then he’s not, and of course I have to say he just for convenience sake, but it permeates everything, is everything. That’s where some people take it, Vedantists and so on, that it’s not like there’s God on the subtle level and gross matter on the gross level, this is God.
David: Right.
Rick: That which appears material is actually, the Divine interacting with itself.
David: I would agree with that, however the Bible also says, the first few verses, that God created the world, and the kind of implication that seems to be built into that, is that the world is separate from him, that the world isn’t God’s body, but it’s something. I’m not disagreeing with what you said, but talking about the way that I think that’s been misunderstood.
Rick: Yeah.
David: Yeah, and of course it’s not only in the Bible, I think many spiritual traditions have this legacy of what might be called cosmological dualism, the idea that there’s this higher reality in addition to ours, and in a way, inevitably to some extent that ends up devaluing this world often as a simply a means to the End. If we behave ourselves here, we’ll go up to that higher world and spend eternity with God, but that cosmological dualism, it infects as I would say certain types of Buddhism and lots of spiritual traditions and I see a tension, an ongoing tension between that understanding and the kind of non- dualism that you and I were talking about.
Rick: Yeah, one little thought experiment I always like to do is what I might call look more closely. Like here’s a cup, and it seems to be ceramic and it’s orange and so on, but look more closely, and its molecules and that they aren’t ceramic, and they aren’t orange, and then look more closely and it’s atoms, which bear even less resemblance to this cup, and look more closely and it’s getting down to nothing material whatsoever and probabilities and whatnot and Ultimately, some sort of unified field or vacuum state, which is actually what this is, we’re just not able to look closely enough given our perceptual apparatus.
David: It’s interesting, because I just gave a talk a couple nights ago, where I also used a cup to demonstrate what I wanted to say. My point was a little different in that, I think often we’re not really looking. What psychologists emphasize is that the actual perception, it’s not simply that we’re seeing visually, but rather we’re catching just a little bit of visual signal and then we’re interpreting it.
Rick: Right.
David: We’re identifying it and this is how language comes in, where we identify it as the cup, we identify it therefore as as a thing to be used to drink water or coffee or whatever out of, and we do that with everything. We see everything functionally and this ties in with our desires and intentions and so forth, and we get so caught up in that, the truth is we never actually see things as they are, because the world in a deep kind of pre-conscious way as we learn language, as we learn to speak, as we learn to see the world in the way that everyone else does, we identify, we kind of plug into this consensus reality, and in the process there’s something really profound about what’s here and now that we’re constantly overlooking.
Rick: Yeah, like you used the word instrument a while back to, referring to us as sort of instruments of the Divine or of the deeper creative intelligence that seems to be governing the universe, and if we think of it that way then- instruments usually have a certain range of ability. A Geiger counter can measure such-and-such and a telescope can see that and an FM radio can pick up on this, and so we humans have a certain range of perceptual ability. But I think what makes us unique, is that we seem, and this is where all the spiritual traditions ultimately come in, is that we have the capacity to, as Instruments, get right down to the ground state, to the fundamental reality, and through this instrument that is able to realize itself. You were saying earlier about who wakes up, well that wakes up, to itself but by virtue of this instrument.
David: Right, yeah. So that does seem to be what’s unique about us as far as we can see that we have this potentiality to, as happens when we meditate, to kind of let go of everything that we’ve been identifying with, let go of this physical mental complex of habitual ways of thinking, feeling and so forth, let that go in order to open up to this deeper dimension. And I suppose the spiritual danger there is sometimes the letting go, can encourage a kind of sense of separation, this pure spirit that we’re sort of now think we are, but a pure spirit that’s therefore disengaged from everything else that we’ve let go. Whereas the point it seems to me is the real letting go is a kind of opening up, letting go of ourselves where we realize that we are manifestations, or we are the way something, no-thing, whatever you want to call it, is presencing in the way that everything else is, but we have this ability to realize that, and to act on It. Because one implication of that that I think is really important is, when we realize that we are part of that same process that everything else is, there can also be responding compassionately to that realization. I remember my teacher saying genuine Kensho, genuine awaken is spontaneously associated with a sense of compassion. So, we have, what am I trying to say, in the process of disidentifying from everything as happens when we meditate, the ultimate goal if you want to talk in those terms, is to realize our oneness or our non-duality with everything and therefore transform how it is that we live in the world to acknowledge that. In a way you could say maybe our goal now is to heal the whole of the biosphere, based on the realization that we’re not separate from it, and its well-being is not separate from our well-being and vice versa.
Rick: Yeah, I think the disidentification thing you just described, may be a phase for some people, but like we were saying earlier, evolution is relentless, you never get to rest on your laurels, and I don’t think, I mean it’s possible as opposed to get stuck in any phase, but there’s a tendency to continue moving on and I think that then from that phase, one gets into a more embodied phase, integrated phase, and perhaps that teacher whom you challenged at the SAND Conference was speaking from that perspective, from a detached aloof perspective, “Well you know I dwell in the self, I dwell in pure awareness and the world is a speck of dust.” But it seemed to me that the great spiritual teachers throughout history haven’t, even if they’ve sometimes spoken that way, they’ve usually acted with great compassion and they’ve acted as though the world isn’t a meaningless speck of dust, that it’s something which needs our care and attention and all the sentient beings in It, are worthy of upliftment and enlightenment.
David: I think that’s exactly right, as that Heart Sutra famously says, form is empty, everything is empty in the sense that it doesn’t have any substantiality or essence of its own, but nonetheless the emptiness, there’s something that’s taking form as all these things and it’s important not to sort of sever that relationship, the world, you and I, everything is a way. This is presencing, this is manifesting, and to sort of understand the spiritual path as sort of dissociating from it I think is a real serious issue. But what that points too of course is, we talk about awakening or enlightenment but it’s not all or nothing, right? There’s glimpses like in the Zen tradition that I practiced in my school in particular, now called Sambo Zen, there’s a lot of emphasis on Kensho, but Kensho, this first glimpse is usually, very brief.
Rick: Kensho means a glimpse?
David: Kensho means literally seeing into your nature, but it can be shallow, it can be deep, but the point is the distinction is made, because something happens, but it’s not a permanent transformation and it certainly doesn’t automatically transmutate those habitual self-centered habits that I have. So, the point of the Zen tradition is to keep with that. There’s a lovely metaphor here, that my teacher used to explain the fact that every Kensho, every genuine experience here or awakening, is qualitatively the same, but there’s a huge spectrum of sort of quantitative difference. He explained it this way and I’ve often cited, when we start to practice it’s as if teacher is telling us to polish a wall, and we don’t understand what that means or why polish a wall, what’s the point, but the teacher gives us the instructions how to meditate and so in a way we polish away. Kensho and according to our tradition it’s usually something very sort of aha, Kensho is the moment when we realize that it’s not a wall, that it’s a piece of glass and that there’s something in the other side. But that’s going to be pretty, it’s not going to be clear is it, you’re polishing and then suddenly there’s this, oh, there’s something at the side but that doesn’t mean you can see it clearly, you’ve got to keep polishing.
Rick: Yeah.
David: If some people think, oh now I’ve got it, okay, now I understand the dust, the crud, the paint sort of ends up covering it again and it’s just a happy memory that doesn’t really transform one’s life very much except maybe one’s spiritual ego gets better, but the idea one needs to keep polishing, keeping so that one can see more and more clearly what’s on the other side, that it is a piece of glass. And then he said, my teacher, that great awakening, Daigo Tete in Japanese, is when the glass shatters and there’s not the sense of separation between what’s inside, on this side of the glass and what’s on the other side. So, I think that’s a really good metaphor and a lot of the problems that happen, I think are because we don’t understand or acknowledge that there are these stages, and just because one has a glimpse, it doesn’t mean that one is transformed. This links very much with, something you’re concerned about, the misbehavior of so many spiritual teachers. You can have some glimpse, but it doesn’t necessarily make you a good person.
Rick: Yeah, you can even have a very profound realization and be radiating a thousand suns, and yet still have some screws loose in terms of, certain behavioral or other ethical values.
David: We certainly see that, yeah. As much in the Buddhist world or the Zen world as anywhere else, I’m sorry to say.
Rick: Yeah, I’m going to be talking about that at the SANDS conference this year, just that whole issue. Yeah, the whole thing you just said, just to reiterate, you can be walking down a road, let’s say, in the fog and you see a tree and you know it’s a tree, you know it’s not a horse, but you can’t pick out the details. Now you come down that same road on a sunny day and there is the tree in much greater clarity, you can see the color, you can see the acorns and so on. So, even on day one, I think, of meditating one can have a glimpse of the same thing that you’re going to be experiencing 40 years later, but through those 40 years a great deal of purification and clarification has taken place, so that the experience will be much more clear and also much more abiding, because we’re not really that excited about something that we’re just going to experience when we sit for half an hour or an hour. If it’s worth its salt, then it should be 24/7, I would say.
David: Right, and that’s why I sometimes distinguish between what I call deconstruction and reconstruction, right? The deconstruction is the meditative letting go and the reconstruction is really transforming our motivations and our ways of relating to other people and Indeed, to the world. And I think this is really important too, because it has important implications for how we understand karma, whether or not karma is some cosmological law of the universe, whether or not there’s physical rebirth, I don’t know. But what I can see is that the Buddha, his contribution was to emphasize motivation, how karma is created not just by what we do but the motivations or intentions behind what we do. And I think there’s an essential insight here that according to our motivations we literally experience the world in a different way. We don’t have to understand karma as something that’s going to come back and kick us or bite us in a cosmological way, although that may be true, but we can also just see that if I’m motivated by greed, ill-will, delusion, I’m going to be relating and perceiving a person in a very different way, the situations, than if I’m motivated by generosity, loving kindness and wisdom. And I think this is huge. The point is just by transforming our motivations, we actually come to live in a different kind of a world, which I think is the key to understanding this enigmatic thing that Spinoza said, the very last verse of his great ethics. He said, happiness is not the reward for virtue, happiness is virtue itself.
Rick: Yeah, so I guess that begs the question of how do we transform our motivations, how do we make sure those are aligned properly, and I think we could take a step back even from that to the point we were making earlier about, if we are in essence the Divine, sort of functioning through an instrument, through a human nervous system, then how do we get out of the way? How do we make sure that it’s really the Divine functioning and that we’re not distorting that profound Divine intelligence and corrupting it, and then obviously having a deleterious influence through our behavior?
David: I think that’s right. To a large extent all we can do is do the very best that we can, and if there’s ego or delusion involved, what usually happens is something comes back to bite us. I mean the law of karma tends to work in that way, I think, that there will be feedback. If I’m motivated by ego, there will be some kind of feedback that comes back to me. Regarding changing our motivations, I think the Buddhist understanding is consistent with a lot of others. There’s this famous four-line verse that you may be aware of, anonymous as far as I know, where it came from, what is it, plant a thought and reap a deed, plant a deed and reap a habit, plant a habit, reap a character, plant a character, reap a destiny. The idea is, habits are changed by intentionally, okay, I’m not going to act on that, I’m going to do this, and then if I keep doing this then it becomes a part of what I am, and I think that’s usually what involves.
Rick: That to which you give your attention grows stronger in your life.
David: Great, and also not only our attention but our actions, our actual way of relating to people.
Rick: Yeah, so, I think something that we’d both be interested in and it relates to what we’ve been saying is, what we’re doing to the world, what we’ve been doing to the world for quite some time, and how that is a reflection of our motivations and our deeper tendencies, and how we might change things. I watched an Oliver Stone documentary on World War II a couple of weeks ago, and it was unbelievable how much horror and suffering and difficulty, millions and death, millions and millions and millions of people went through, and that’s just one example in the long bloody history of the world. So, I said at the end, sorry, go ahead.
David: Was that the untold history of the United States?
Rick: I think it was, yeah, I watched the first episode of that.
David: I watched the second episode last night and all I can tell you there’s more of the same.
Rick: Yeah, and if these huge, monumental global events and catastrophes and so on are reflective of collective consciousness, and if collective consciousness is sort of the sum total of all the individual consciousnesses making it up, then just as the color of a forest, if you flew over it, would be indicative of the color of each of the trees, the healthiness of each of the trees in that forest, then we could perhaps suggest a solution to such problems in the transformation of sufficient numbers of individuals. Otherwise, where are those solutions going to come from? You can’t spray-paint the forest.
David: Right, right, for sure. Buddhism, like a lot of spiritual traditions, that’s where we start. If we’re not working to transform our own greedy will delusion, and we’re out there as an activist, where I think from a Buddhist perspective at least we’re sort of playing games, that we have to start with ourselves. But what you also get sometimes is people who say, “Well, that’s all I have to do. If I just transform myself, then that’s going to sort of radiate and have an effect on the people around me, and that’s what it means to be spiritual.” And frankly, I don’t think that’s sufficient anymore, if it ever was. I think given the kind of situation we’re in today, number one, that’s quite slow, but number two, although I see that as the foundation, I think that we also need to find ways to address the structural or the institutional side. Buddhism traditionally, like many spiritual traditions, focus on individual transformation. I think we’re in a situation now where we can understand that dukkha suffering isn’t simply due to my own karma, my own ways of thinking, etc., but that there are social situations. There are social situations like World War II, where you can be a really great guy, but you’re caught up in a world that’s going to cause you a lot of suffering. You think of Jewish people or Polish people in World War II. It may not have mattered how great a guy or person you were, there were social forces, structural forces, and I think that that’s something, that’s a direction in which Buddhism and other spiritual traditions really need to think about. As sociologists like to say, “People create society, but society creates people.” So, we start with the people create society, but we also have to look at the very strong institutional forces, things like the way advertising wants to make sure we understand ourselves as primarily consumers. I think that’s a really good example. So, I think we need to work on both sides at the same time, and I think that’s the kind of new understanding of the Bodhisattva path that I’ve been trying to articulate.
Rick: Yeah, I’ve heard you say in a number of your talks, and others have certainly said similar things, that I was talking at Charles Eisenstein a few weeks ago and he was saying similar things, that you pick any number of problems in the world today and that problem alone is overwhelming. Global warming is one of the biggest, and then what we’re doing to the topsoil, what we’re doing to the food supply, what we’re doing to the fish in the ocean, and all sorts of things, and you can go on and on, the possibility of major epidemics. And so people obviously get overwhelmed, they get discouraged, they begin to feel that they are too small, and the problems are too big, and what can be done, and particularly the way the political situation seems to be going, it didn’t quite work out the way a lot of us hoped it would. And so, I guess I come back to what is all that symptomatic of? What are- obviously it’s we humans who have been having such a serious impact on the world, on the environment and so on. What is it in the mass psychology that is having that kind of impact, and what is the most effective antidote? For instance, we more or less wiped out polio by, Jonas Salk coming up with a vaccine. What would be the spiritual vaccine that could make a significant enough difference in human mentality to actually change the course of our collective behavior and begin to reverse some of these dire problems?
David: Well, starting with the problem first, the big problem, I would agree with Eisenstein and you, the way that I put it is climate change, urgent as it is, is just the tip of the ecological iceberg. That we have to bring in these other things that you just mentioned, but also species extinction that we seem now to be well into the sixth great species extinction, caused in this case by one particular species, us, and when you put that together with all these other phenomena, we can add, what about nuclear waste?
Rick: Yeah, that alone.
David: 13,000 tons a year produced by the world’s one really knows how to get a grip on what Fukushima is doing, etc.
Rick: Right, and if there were some kind of huge meltdown of the power grid due to solar flares or something, we could end up with 400 Fukushima’s, because the power stations wouldn’t be able to continue cooling themselves.
David: That’s exactly right, that’s exactly right, and what I see all of that as pointing to looking upon all that is kind of an iceberg, I see that as the visual part of the iceberg, what I think that really points to, I tend to see all of the ecological problems as kind of symptoms of a now global civilization that has lost its way and therefore, is self-destructing, and it goes back to what we were saying earlier, about how we understand the earth as a kind of a convenient store of resources to be exploited with indifference to the effects on ecosystems, and the fundamental problem, it seems to me, is we, and this is where it ties in with the evolutions, what we were saying about evolution, the fundamental problem is I think we don’t know, we don’t have any real sense that we have a role to play, given that we’re just kind of here by accident according to a lot of biological understanding of evolution, then the idea is just to enjoy ourselves, as I said, and enjoy ourselves until we die, well, that’s kind of a demon on our shoulder, but in addition to that, the implication, I think that feeds what I think is really the main meaning, role, value of our civilization, which is ever-increasing production and consumption. That’s really what it’s come down to. If you ask what’s the preoccupation of every Government? What’s the preoccupation that we are molded into, to sort of do it individually and the culture as a whole, GDP grow and so forth? A kind of a greed that’s encouraged here, that is never fulfilled, that can never be enough, because it can never really secure us, it can never make us happy. So, we’re really caught, I think, on this kind of self-destructive treadmill that is at the very heart of our civilization, and it’s not simply a matter of shifting from fossil fuels to solar sources of energy, even if we solve that problem, which doesn’t look terribly good at the moment, but even if we were, that wouldn’t really address the deeper fundamental issue, I think. And so number one, guess what, the problem I think is much, much worse than most of us have been thinking of it as being, and that what’s needed is what Joanna Macy and others have called a kind of a great turning. Now, how does one help that happen? The short answer is, I don’t know, we don’t know, nobody knows. We know certain things that are important to do, and this is where for me the idea of the Bodhisattva path comes in, because as you pointed out, activism in the present world seems to foster burnout, anger, despair, and that’s why we have to understand our activism as part of our spiritual path. The point of the Bodhisattva or the Ecosattva is that he or she has a double practice or two-sided practice. On the one hand, they continue their own meditation practice or whatever it does that helps them develop on the spiritual path, this traditional spiritual path to experience, equanimity, serenity, emptiness, as we talk about it in Zen, to sort of transcend the ego, however you want to conceptualize that. That remains the kind of foundation, a fundament, but the Bodhisattva knows, especially today that it’s not enough just to sit in one’s cushion and sort of cling to that peace of mind as it were, but we also need to be engaged in the world and understand that not as a distraction from our spiritual practice but now an essential part of it. And when one does engagement from that perspective, it gives a kind of a power that otherwise isn’t there. And it’s not simply that we have a kind of equanimity in our practice. It’s not simply that there’s an equanimity that we can bring into our engagement, but it’s profounder than that in the sense that we know our job is to do the best we can- not knowing if anything we do makes any difference whatsoever. And there’s a sense for the Bodhisattva, you’re plugging into something deeper than ourselves, we don’t know what’s going to come out of it. Wendell Berry put it very well, we don’t have the right to know whether what we’re doing is going to have the consequences that we hope. We don’t have the right to do that. Our job is to do the right thing, our job is to do the best thing and kind of open up in that way, sort of able to address the truly overwhelming, otherwise overwhelming challenges that we face. But if one comes in with that attitude and also, I think the kind of realization that it’s not just this ego that’s acting in the world but something deeper is flowing through me. There’s something else going on here, there’s something deeper, the earth wants to heal itself through us, something like that.
Rick: Yeah, that’s great.
David: I think that’s really important and somehow, we have to understand, we have to integrate the older understanding of spiritual practice with this new responsibility.
Rick: Yeah, I can really relate to that, in fact I can relate to it in terms of my own experience. I sometimes think of humanity as being, and others have said this, I think even people I’ve interviewed, as humanity as being in a sort of an adolescent phase. And it’s like animals you could think of as little children in the sense that they are completely under the control and protection of their parents, they don’t have a lot of choice or anything like that. So, animals are completely in tune with the laws of nature and their own instincts and everything, they can’t really mess things up that bad. Now at a certain point though, a child grows old enough that in its maturation it needs to be able to have freedom and choice and volition and so on, and that can go really wrong when you’re a teenager. And I know in my own case, by the time I was 18 years old I’d gotten arrested a couple times, I’d dropped out of school and getting kicked out of the house by my father all the time, and things weren’t going so well. And then when I learned to meditate, it’s like within a month or two I’d gotten back into school, I’d made amends with my father, things were starting to go, I’d gotten a job, and my life just took this really constructive turn. And what it has always felt like is that each time I meditate, I’m kind of like a sponge soaking up creativity, soaking up intelligence and then applying that in the world afterwards, throughout the day. And if you can sort of think of humanity that way, we’ve been in this kind of reckless, crazy, destructive phase where we’re killing ourselves, but perhaps if we can tap into the sort of the source of intelligence and creativity that drives the universe, we can be conduits for that, and bring that into the world more and more and more and more. And without doing that I don’t see how the problems can be solved, but doing that, either if you’re somebody like Elon Musk, who happens to meditate by the way, and comes up with all sorts of ingenious inventions that could have a huge impact, or whether you’re a bus driver, living a simple life, nonetheless you’re beginning to infuse the world, everybody who gets on your bus, you have some influence on them, you’re beginning to infuse the world with greater life, greater intelligence, greater divinity, and that kind of thing has a ripple effect.
David: Well said. So anyway,
Rick: I said this in our last interview, four and a half years ago, but I tend to feel optimistic despite the… it’s not necessarily going to be an easy transition, I mean there’s so many entrenched, powerful things that really have no place in a world that we might envision as being the way it should be, and somehow or other if we’re going to reach such a world, those things are going to have to come down, and perhaps those who are really attached to them or invested in them aren’t going to enjoy that, so it won’t necessarily be smooth, but I think the potential is there for, a world in which everyone is attuned to their deeper nature and thereby, like the Dao Te Ching says, a real ideal society because everyone is so attuned.
David: I wouldn’t call myself an optimist, but neither would I call myself a pessimist.
Rick: Yeah.
David: My favorite definition of a pessimist is somebody who has had to live with an optimist. There’s a sense in which optimism, pessimism, well certainly depending on how they’re understood, but that can sort of, what do I say, take the pressure off, right? If you’re an optimist, “Oh things are getting better,” that kind of seems to reduce my responsibility, right? Or things aren’t going to get better, they’re going to get worse, in which case why should I bother? And I think like hope and despair, for the bodhisattva, it’s something beyond that, it’s like in a way it doesn’t make any difference, that’s not where you identify with one or the other, but it’s a matter of, again, my job is to do the best way, the best I can, in the belief that it’s connecting with something greater than myself, however you want to articulate that, and what comes out of that I don’t know, I can’t know, but my job is to just to do it. So, I really don’t know what’s going to happen. People who, if things fall apart in the ways that they can, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be better afterwards, right? We might end up with a kind of a warlord situation where there’s a lot more violence and, when things go bad people get afraid and people who are afraid don’t necessarily make the best decisions. So, who knows how it’s going to unfold, we don’t know.
Rick: Yeah, no, you’re right, but if Joanna Macy is right about that great turning, I wonder if we’re seeing such a turning taking place with this seeming proliferation of interest in meditation and spirituality and so on? It’s really becoming more and more and more mainstream, or at least it seems like it from my perspective in this seat. Obviously, you don’t see it much on the six o’clock news, but if that is true, if there’s sort of a groundswell of that kind of interest around the world through its many, many different forms, then perhaps all these millions of people who are so engaged will be, infusing more of that, divine nature into the world and that will change things. And it is a fundamental thing. We talked in our last interview about leverage, how if you can work from a more fundamental level you can have a greater impact, do more with less effort, so to speak.
David: I’m very struck by Paul Hawkins book, Blessed Unrest, is that one you’re familiar with?
Rick: I haven’t read it, what does he say?
David: Well, basically, okay, he’s a lecturer, talks about greening capitalism, goes around the world talking here and there, collecting business cards, and one day he started to collect them and do a little bit of research online and basically, what he concluded is that something is happening right now, that’s never happened before in human history, right? We have what he originally estimated, I think, to be like between a million and a million and a half, now maybe, I think his YouTube video might have said over two million, but a very large number of groups of people, mostly small, working for social justice and sustainability, and I think he speaks in there as if this is kind of the immune system of the earth responding to what’s happening, and I think he’s right there. These are not all part of a communist conspiracy or anything else, they tend to be self-organized, different ideologies, different leaders, work in different ways, but there’s something very powerful going on, and I think of, say, Buddhist social engagement and indeed other types of spiritual engagement as a part of this larger movement. Certainly not all the people involved in that would identify as spiritual, but nonetheless, I think there’s something really powerful going on here that we often don’t realize deeply enough because the mainstream media have no interest in, right? For the most part, they make their money advertising, they’re not concerned about helping the shift, they’re concerned about finding ways to grab our eyeballs and sell them to the highest bidder, right? So, there’s definitely something happening here. The other side of it, though, frankly, when we look at what’s happened in the US and in the world in the last year or so, we do seem to be moving backwards, and it’s this interesting question- is this a kind of temporary retrenchment, the old guard kind of, resisting the transformation or, is it going to be successful? Because it’s quite fascinating to see, just within the Buddhist community, say, how this has galvanized a lot of Buddhists who otherwise may not have been so socially engaged, and this is really, in a way, bringing together the opposition or lots of people in a way, it’s actually having some good consequences in that regard. So, how is all this going to play out? Who knows, but there’s some really interesting things going on.
Rick: Yeah, interesting. On that Paul Hawkins point, it prompted me to say that I was kind of making it sound like people who are explicitly doing spiritual practice, are single-handedly changing the world or something. I don’t mean to be saying that. I think that what Paul Hawkins said about all those organizations indicates that there’s some kind of a groundswell in collective consciousness and that there are many, many, many different expressions of it, most of which wouldn’t be explicitly spiritual, but which nonetheless sort of reflects something really hopeful and positive. So, there’s that. The woman I interviewed last week made the comment that when Trump won the presidency instead of Hillary, although she had been a Bernie supporter originally, she kind of rejoiced because she felt like, “Okay, if Hillary had won it would have been kind of same old, same old, but now things will really get changed and topsy-turvy and that will sort of bring down the old way of doing things and that’ll allow the new to arise.” I kind of was thinking that that was a bit like saying, “Oh boy, the pilot is intoxicated, maybe he’ll crash the plane, we’ll get a better one,” you know? I wasn’t as quick-witted to think of that on the spot, but there are a lot of people who say that sort of thing, that they’re sort of glad that we kind of have this demolition derby going on in the White House because it’s really going to, even Charles Eisenstein, he didn’t say that, but he said something about how when the old story has really run its course it may sort of amplify or exaggerate when it’s in its death throes and in order for some, before it totally collapses and something new takes its place.
David: Some old Marxists used to argue that way too, that they would do things, sometimes acts of terror, that would bring about severe repression, in the belief that the repression then would lead to the Revolution. People would respond to that way of thinking.
David: Yeah, for sure, that’s not something I find persuasive, but it is true that had Hillary been elected, I think it wouldn’t have sort of shaken us out of our sort of complacency quite quite as much as the election of Trump has. How we’re going to balance the positive and the negative there, remains to be seen, but definitely something has changed, something has quickened, for better and worse.
Rick: Okay, so there was something you brought up in several of your talks that I think might be worth discussing, which is that you can refresh my memory, but there were like three main things in Buddhism, what is it, greed and two other things, and how the economic system and the media and one other thing are sort of reflective of those.
David: Right, right.
Rick: How does that go?
David: Sure, yeah the Buddha didn’t talk about what we think of as evil. I mean, good versus evil, that’s a very Abrahamic way of thinking or way of dividing up the world. For Buddhism it’s much more delusion wisdom or ignorance, awakening, but what the Buddha did talk about is the three roots of evil or the three poisons, sometimes called the three fires, and these can be translated greed, ill-will and delusion, and the basic idea of karma is that when what we do is motivated by those three, the results tend to be problematical and how important it is to transform those into their more positive counterparts, instead of greed being motivated by generosity; instead of ill-will, loving-kindness; instead of delusions, especially delusions of separation, wisdom that recognizes our interdependence, that my well-being isn’t separate from yours, for example. And so this is the traditional, a very important traditional Buddhist teaching, which you find in many different Asian Buddhist traditions. But what I think we’re now in a situation, I think we can see how in the contemporary world we’ve institutionalized them, and by institutionalizing them means in a way they’ve kind of taken on a life of their own given the way that the institution is structured. So, what I’ve been talking about is, I think our economic system institutionalizes greed. If we understand greed as you never have enough, well, not only do consumers never consume enough, but corporations are never profitable enough, their market share is never big enough, their share value is never big enough, or we can even generalize it on the national level, our GDP, GNP is never big enough, and at that level the distinction between the economic and the political is not very strong, because the people at the top are both equally preoccupied, as if the solution to all problems is economic growth. In the short run maybe it’ll get you elected, it’ll make money, but in the long run of course we’re facing the problem that we have two incompatible systems, an economic system that has to keep growing, keep exploiting, using things up if it’s not going to collapse, and then we have the biological system known as the planet earth, and the one system has to keep growing but the other system can’t, and in a way we can see the ecological crisis as the kind of clash between those two systems. Also, on the second poison, ill will, there’s a lot of things you can look at today, our attitude toward undocumented immigrants, our incredible criminal justice system, justice in parentheses there, but maybe most of all our militarism, especially in the US, we are, if you measure it in terms of the resources that we give the military, we are by far the most militarized country in human history. What did I read recently- that if we added to the ostensible military budget, the budget of the NSA and another 14 or 15 intelligence agencies that we don’t normally think about, the total we spend is about a trillion dollars a year on our military, which is like the equivalent of the next 12 or 13 nations. And the problem there too is, of course, if you spend this much money on the military, you’ve got to keep using it, right? You’ve got to justify it, so, you’ve got to keep finding enemies, you’ve got to keep finding wars, you’ve got to keep finding people to bomb. The end of the Cold War was a real problem for the Pentagon, but fortunately the war on terror has come along and sort of supplied what was needed. And I’m serious here. There’s this, we focus on what’s happening in the Middle East and so forth or Afghanistan, but how much of that is our need for our military to justify itself? So, we have a serious problem there as well. We talk about terrorism, there’s this really lovely equation, terrorism is the war of the poor, war is the terrorism of the rich. Yeah, of course ISIS, they do what they do, that’s because they don’t have those huge bombs or jet airplanes or nuclear bombs that we do, but there’s some of the same mentality going on, I think. And then finally, delusion. I think our media, in particular the corporate media, institutionalized delusion. Recently we’ve heard a lot about fake news and it’s fascinating the way that that’s become a very covert industry. There’s lots of people spending lots of money manipulating Facebook and things like that, social media, but there’s also the more fundamental problem of, given that most of the media are mega corporations that make their money not from educating or informing us, but they make their money from selling us stuff, grabbing our attention. So, their fundamental presupposition, they’re not going to challenge the direction of our civilization in the way that I think we need to do, they’re in it to keep selling us stuff, right? Keep us thinking of ourselves, understanding ourselves as people who make money in order that we can buy stuff. And more and more, I think that that whole mentality, and they’ve been largely successful at it, but that whole mentality is, so the media as well, I think, have our institutionalized delusion in that sense. And of course, these three poisons, these three institutionalized poisons, they all work together, don’t they? There’s a lot of money to be made making bombs for the military, especially if the military use them and they have to be replaced. And of course, the media, the delusion is very much connected with greed. So just as on the personal level, my greed, ill will, delusion tend to work together and cause problems, I think we’re in a situation now where we’re kind of trapped in the way that these institutionalized fires are actually working. And it’s kind of Scary. If the Buddha is saying, as he is, that these are the fundamental problems and if we’ve institutionalized them and they have this incredible power, it’s a Buddhist analysis, but it’s a pretty severe critique of where we’re at now.
Rick: Yeah, and I guess, again when you hear that sort of thing, it can leave one feeling a little crestfallen, like, what can we possibly do? These things are so massive and so powerful and what can little old me do? Am I really having an effect, going out and putting on a pussy hat and marching in some rally holding a sign? But I don’t know, I keep coming back to the thing that, something is happening and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones? There’s something afoot, some kind of turning, some kind of awakening, some kind of shift. And I may be naive, but I think that there may end up being a kind of a David and Goliath quality to the way this plays out, in terms of these seemingly invincible, major powerful things falling under their own weight or somehow having the rug pulled out from under them by this awakening that is taking place without their even really knowing that it’s taking place.
David: And another way to say that too is, one of the things going on here I think is a completely new understanding of spirituality, a different kind of engaged spirituality. So yeah, on the one level we think about these things and we get discouraged, but the real point here, is that in our spiritual practice, something is happening to us and it starts to flow through us and it’s just and it’s not simply in the old sense of well like the way Buddhism would talk about it before, it would be working on the individual level to help other people awakening, that’s definitely a part of it of course, but what’s flowing through us now is also urging us, making us more engaged, even though we don’t know what that’s going to lead to, even though we don’t know at all what’s going to come out of that. But the point of someone who’s a real spiritual practitioner is that’s okay, that’s okay, that’s not, we do the best we can, I do the best I can, that’s okay, and what’s going to come out of it, who knows, who knows.
Rick: Yeah, there’s some beautiful little thing from Mother Teresa, I couldn’t repeat it verbatim, but she kept saying, people will do this and this and this, love them anyway, people will do that, do it anyway, she goes on about how despite the apparent futility of this and that, you just do it anyway, you persist.
David: So I think that’s what we’re being challenged to do.
Rick: Yeah, you know one thing that I experience is people get in touch, who hadn’t had any interest in spirituality, hadn’t done any kind of practice, they just wanted to enjoy the football game and have a beer, and all of a sudden something happens to them, they end up having this spiritual awakening and they don’t know what in the heck happened or why it happened, but then they start researching and they look on Google and they start looking this and “oh maybe this is a spiritual thing” and they start watching my interviews or other videos and stuff and then they get in touch saying my life is just changing and I don’t know why. So that kind of to me indicates that perhaps the ground is rising or the forest floor is becoming more fertile and plants are beginning to sprout which would have withered or couldn’t have sprouted in the past.
David: I think that’s happening more and more. Yeah. I don’t have any way of calculating that, but I have the same sense as you, that it’s happening more and more, which is, it’s something deeper going on than just individual.
Rick: Yeah, another person made a nice analogy. He said, back in the day of the Buddha there was a sort of a heaviness and a thickness we could say, in collective consciousness and it took a kind of a Superman like the Buddha to break through the membrane, of that density and awaken but he said, by virtue of him and by virtue of all the thousands and millions of people who have been poking away at that membrane ever since, it’s become much more porous, much more thin and more easily broken through and so, a little bit of practice or a little bit of something, can yield fruits much more readily than might have been the case long, long time ago.
David: Part of that I think, what I noticed, because I spent a lot of time recently talking about eco-dharma, what I’m noticing is that activists who, in the past might have been, very resistant to sort of spiritual concerns. I mean a lot of, and if you think about the history of activism and the left and the sort of anti-religious rhetoric of Marxism, that sort of thing, activists have often looked upon religion as sort of part of the people.
Rick: Yeah, exactly.
David: But it’s interesting to notice that part of this more and more that’s Happening, is more and more people who have been deeply engaged, are now feeling the pull, feeling the need to connect their activism with the spiritual practice. So, one thing that I’ve been doing the last few years, is co-leading some wilderness retreats with a good friend here in Boulder, Johan Robbins, and I also went to an eco-dharma center in Spain, and it’s just amazing to see the thirst of these people. And if I can just add to that, a kind of plug, one of the main things that’s going on in my life right now, is I’m one of the Dharma teachers involved in setting up this new eco-dharma center near Boulder. We have a Rocky Mountain eco-dharma retreat center just about half an hour from North Boulder, 180 pristine acres with a river, meadow, forest, lodge, and we’re going to be meditating in nature, but we’re also going to be exploring the ecological implications of Buddhism and other spiritual traditions and also working together to consider the implications of all this for how we actually engage. How we do go out, and what kind of eco-activism that we feel drawn to do.
Rick: That’s great, yeah I watched that video. I’ve hiked and camped up there in the Indian Peaks, hiked up those mountains around there, so it’s a beautiful area and I’ll link to that video from your page on Batgap so people can watch it.
David: Thank you. It’s going extremely well but I have to say raising money isn’t easy, so if any of your listeners have a pile of cash lying around they don’t know what to do with it, let me know.
Rick: Yeah, I’m sure that many of them have closets full of it. Okay, so we’ve covered quite a few things. I have a lot of notes here which I haven’t carefully gone through while we were talking because we’ve just been talking, but is there anything that you can think of that we haven’t touched upon that you want to discuss before we wrap it up?
David: Throwing it back on me.
Rick: I might come up with something else here.
David: Yeah, well in a way just a little bit of the back story, I think the ecological crisis for example or even this larger civilizational crisis as I see it; I think it’s also a real crisis for our spiritual traditions, certainly for Buddhism because they are really being called upon to clarify their essential message. So, as we kind of pointed out before, well let me say it this way, the Buddhist tradition is actually a cluster of traditions and they don’t always completely agree, but within certain types of Buddhist teachings what we are calling cosmological dualism is quite strong, the idea that the goal samsara, samsara the world of this world of craving, delusion, ill will and so forth that we need to transcend it and if you take the Pali Canon Literally, it seems to be saying that the goal is not to be reborn back in this horrible world of suffering. So, there is a kind of cosmological dualism built in there in certain types of Buddhism, but at the other side you get Nagarjuna, who talks about there’s literally no difference between samsara and nirvana, they’re not two different places, but it comes down to the fact that there are different ways of experiencing and living in this world. And so, what I see unfolding if you look at the whole history of Buddhism is the tension between these two and in a way I think we’re in a situation where Buddhism, for example really needs to clarify what the goal is and I think Buddhism is in a good situation, because every time it’s spread to a new culture it’s interacting. It doesn’t just impose itself, it’s able to embody its own emphasis on impermanence and insubstantiality and actually transform according to a new situation. And so, it’s really exciting now that as Buddhism, for example as an example of a spiritual non-dualist tradition, as Buddhism comes into the modern world and it’s not just coming into a secular world, it’s not just coming into a civilization that is totally different than anything it’s found before, it’s coming into a civilization in crisis, a civilization that it seems to me is self-destructing. And the coming together of these two things is going to transform both, I hope. I see it to some degree. Buddhism itself needs to clarify its message and transform and I tend to see socially engaged Buddhism and eco-dharma as beginnings of this, that something is happening to the traditions as well, I guess that’s what I’m saying. It’s not just the individuals we were talking about, it’s not just that those organizations that Paul Hawken was talking about, but I think the transformation is also going to be, is starting to be in the way that we understand our traditions. It’s not simply a matter of accepting what Shankara said or even Ramana Maharshi or Nisargadatta or whatever, but living traditions are living because they engage, they find new ways of expression, new ways of understanding, new ways of articulating what our problem is and what we need to do to respond to it. So even in spiritual terms, simply in spiritual terms, I think we’re in a really exciting and transformative time.
Rick: I think so too and everything you just said about Buddhism, since you just mentioned Shankara and Nisargadatta and Ramana, could also be said of the Vedic or Hindu tradition. Phil Goldberg wrote that great book American Veda about the influx of Eastern, Vedic teachings into the West over the last couple hundred years and how they have not only influenced but been influenced by, the cultures in which they landed. And I just want to comment on one other thing you said which is that, transcendence I think can be and has been thought of as a kind of an escape or, taking refuge in something that’s beyond this world and not of it and so on, but I tend to think of it more, at least in my own experience, it has always been more like, you go to the bank and you can withdraw some money and then you can come to the market and buy things, so to speak, and I don’t mean that literally, I mean that, what I was saying earlier, it infuses you with greater liveliness and energy and intelligence and so on, which you can then apply in your active life, hopefully in beneficial ways, and hopefully, and this is an issue we touched upon at the very beginning of our conversation, hopefully that alignment or attunement or establishment in the transcendent also begins to rearrange your motivations, so that you’re not only becoming, so you don’t just become like a better bank robber or a better, scoundrel in some way, more effective, rip-off artist, but that you actually change your motivations and become more altruistic and more, beneficial in the ways you express yourself in life.
David: That’s well said, and I would agree with it Wholly. Transcendence can be understood in this dualistic way, but it can also be understood more metaphorically, that coming to experience this world in a different way, so that what we transcend is not this world in total, but what we transcend is the old way of understanding it, the old way of understanding who we are and how we should live in it, and that kind of transcendence opens up to, these other possibilities.
Rick: Yeah, just to come back at you much more on that point, I think whatever intelligence we express, whatever creativity, whatever energy we express in life has its ultimate source in that transcendent field. There are all sorts of Vedic scriptures I could quote to, reinforce that point, but it’s sort of the resource, it’s the well from which we draw in order to live our lives, and people who feel overwhelmed, who feel they just don’t have the energy to get out of bed in the morning or, make it through the day and they can’t wait for the weekend and so on and so forth. I sort of feel like perhaps they are not sufficiently in tune with that inner reservoir of energy and intelligence, and that if they could somehow learn, and there are various ways of doing that, to make contact with that and maintain that throughout the day, then they wouldn’t ever feel that burnout thing. There would always be a sense of joy and enthusiasm and life is great kind of thing. That’s been my experience anyway.
David: Yeah, well I agree completely and I think that’s really important in two ways. It’s interesting in the Buddhist Tradition, how the word shunyā, shunyatā, emptiness is the usual translation. It’s very interesting how that’s been understood in different ways. Sometimes it simply refers to the fact that things don’t have any substantial nature, but there’s also this side in Buddhism that emphasizes kind of something we were talking about before, that the sort of transformation we’re talking about involves realizing, experiencing the world not as a collection of separate lifeless things that just happen to be there, but everything is a manifestation or a presencing of that which in and of itself has no form, no color, no attributes. It’s beyond all that and yet it takes form as all these things. And there’s a tension within the Buddhist tradition and my sympathies are very much with the second. And the way that I sometimes have expressed that in my own Writing, is as long as we have this sense of a separate self, well this sense of separate self is haunted by a sense of lack, by the feeling that something is wrong with me, something missing, I’m not good enough. And one way to symbolize that, it’s as if at the very core of our being there’s like a black hole, almost a kind of cosmological black hole sucking everything in, and we feel there’s a kind of nihilism to that. We want to cling to stuff, we want to fill it in in some way. If only I were rich enough or famous enough or beautiful enough, whatever, I could somehow fill that up but it’s a bottomless pit.
Rick: Instead, we need a quasar at the core of our being, not a black hole.
David: Okay, that’s exactly it. Maybe I should use that metaphor because the one I have been using is the idea that the transformation at the base, the Parivrtti that Buddhism for example talks about, that black hole transforms, it becomes the source of Creativity. It’s as if it’s a spring springing up from bottomless source. We don’t know where, we can’t identify the source, we can’t grasp it, but that’s not our job. Our job is to live that spring, to manifest that creativity. But the point is, it’s still, what am I trying to say, the emphasis is that it’s beyond the sense of self, it’s really opening up to that which is greater than our usual sense of self and I think we have little taste of this with creativity. True creativity springs from something deeper, doesn’t it?
Rick: Yeah, I think this essential nature we’re alluding to is, I think probably everyone listening understands that we’re not talking about some little individuated essential nature that’s kind of deep down inside us like some kind of little power generating station that’s exclusive to us. We’re talking about the sort of the ground state of the universe which is, as physics tells us, unlimited, it’s infinitely energetic and as some would say intelligent and that we’re kind of like conduits for that to whatever extent we can be. Yeah, that’s the point. And also, if that begins to be your experience then you are, then your own body is, and the mountain over here, are really just expressions of the same thing and so there’s this kinship or brotherhood or unity with the mountain and you’re not going to be so in favor of mountaintop removal, if that’s the way you perceive the world.
David: Well said, and how important that is generally for the whole of the ecological crisis and how it is that we’re relating to the earth. Yeah, so the Parivrtti we’re talking about isn’t just something that happens on our individual level which is the traditional way of thinking, but what we’re really in a situation now, is it’s as if we need a kind of collective Parivrtti, so that we as a species start to relate to the biosphere in a very different way.
Rick: Yeah, and that’s bringing us full circle here, because we started out like talking about what are these problems symptomatic of and how can we solve them and so on, but if we really perceive the world as ourself, there’s a Sanskrit saying which goes, ” Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam which means something like the world is my family, and I don’t think it just means the people in the world, it means the world, the whole thing is our intimate relation, and if that were actually one’s perspective, then we would be so unsupportive as a species of so many of the things that we now do, to our own detriment.
David: There are equivalents in the Buddhist traditions of course. The great Japanese Zen master Dogen, after his awakening he quoted somebody, “I came to realize clearly mind is nothing other than rivers and mountains and the great white earth, the Sun and the Moon and the stars,” and that’s something that I’ve talked a lot about, is the parallels between our traditional, individual predicament according to Buddhism and our collective predicament today, it really does seem to be microcosm, macrocosm, because as I understand the Buddhist path, the fundamental problem is the sense of separation, the delusion of a separate self inside, separate from other people and the rest of the world outside, and because it’s a delusion this sense of self can never secure itself, it’s always uncomfortable, it’s always insecure, and we experience that as a sense of lack that often, that usually we misunderstand and so, we look outside ourselves, “If only I had enough money, if only I was powerful enough, if only I was famous enough.” We think that what we lack is outside ourselves and of course the Buddhist path is to realize we can let go of ourselves and realize our non-duality. Isn’t it the same now, within relationship of our species, we have this sense of separation, especially in the modern world, but it really goes back I think to the Greeks, to the realization that human civilization isn’t natural in the way that say rivers or mountains are. It’s a social construct that can be reconstructed and we built on that, that enabled them to create democracy of the sort, but the problem in the modern world is this has aggravated more and more over time the sense of separation and I think we as a species, we suffer from that. We alluded to that earlier, “why are we here? What do we have a role to play?” Earlier civilizations, when you look at them, pre- Greek, pre-axial, they all felt that they were a part of the cosmos and had a role to play, not always a very nice one, the Aztecs think you got to keep sacrificing people to keep the Sun, but they felt they were embedded in a way that they had a role and I think a lot of our problem now goes back to the fact that no, we don’t have a role, we’re just here and guess what, you’re going to die, and it’s like whoa, as a species that’s not a very nice situation to be in, I think.
Rick: Yeah, he who has the most toys when he dies wins, right? It’s interesting after 9/11, George Bush famously said go shopping, when he probably should have said whoa, something serious has happened, we should all be introspective.
David: Carter tried to say something like that, you remember he gave a talk as a president and about something really being wrong with our society.
Rick: He got lambasted for it.
David: Yeah, he probably lost the election, Reagan comes along, it’s morning in America, what are you talking about?
Rick: Right, Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House, Reagan took him down. Well, you and I could go on all day, but I think we’ve given people a sense here of what we’re talking about. I guess maybe if I were to make a concluding point on this whole discussion it would be that we have all sorts of crises in the world but they all boil down ultimately to a spiritual crisis and therefore their solution boils down to a spiritual solution, which doesn’t imply that we should all just sit in our butts and meditate and everything’s going to solve itself, because as we’ve discussed actually that would be part of it, but actually doing something in the world is not incompatible with spirituality and is really very much in tune with it. Lord Krishna didn’t say to Arjuna just sort of sit in your chariot seat and meditate, he said Well unfortunately there’s a battle you’ve got to fight but first get established in being then perform action. Yogastha Kuru Karmani.
David: So I’d agree completely, that doesn’t deny of course that economic changes are necessary, political changes, technological changes, but if we think that that is going to be enough we’re missing the fundamental point, we’re still just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic as it were, that the crisis we’re facing is civilizational in terms of the whole meaning of what it means to be human and what our role on this earth is and if anything is a spiritual challenge or a spiritual crisis that’s it. And this is also a spiritual challenge to our spiritual traditions- to wake up and respond to that because, as I sometimes say for example, if Buddhists aren’t interested or can’t respond to these kinds of challenges then Buddhism isn’t what we need. But of course, I don’t believe that, because I sort of look at the Buddhist tradition for example and other non-dualist traditions and I just see so much that is relevant here. So we live in interesting times.
Rick: We do. I imagine there’s kind of crusty old Buddhists who want to do it the old way and don’t want change just as there are in the other traditions and then there are people who appreciate what the ancient traditions have given them and feel like only a new seed can yield a new crop and there needs to be a sort of a freshness and an originality in the expression of that ancient tradition.
David: Yeah, so what I do is, I really spend most of my time now, talking to mostly Buddhist groups I guess. I’m very open but it’s mostly Buddhist groups that invite me to talk about this sort of thing and you’re right, within Buddhism as you would expect, there’s quite a spectrum of more traditional types who just want to do things the way they were done in Asia, and the people who really want to transform Buddhism quite radically sometimes.
Rick: Yeah, but I imagine even those old-timers if they have a serious dental problem they don’t want it treated the way it would have been treated 2,400 years ago.
David: Very good point, reminding us that there’s a lot to appreciate in modernity, that’s for sure.
Rick: Yeah, and we can take the best of both worlds.
David: Yeah, yeah.
Rick: Well, thanks David, this has been a joy. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you.
David: I’ve enjoyed this conversation.
Rick: Yeah, let me get a few general wrap-up points like I always make. So, everyone listening knows by now that I’ve been speaking with David Loy and as always I’ll be linking to his website and anything else he wants me to link to, including I’ll provide links to several of his books and you can get in touch with David if you want to get involved with what he’s doing. And you have some kind of online satsang type of thing or anything or mainly you just go places in person too?
David: Yes, so far there’s no, I do have a couple sort of online students but in general it’s mostly, well it’s interesting I don’t have a sangha or a like home of my own, so I’ve been waiting to be invited but one exciting new thing about this new Ecodharma Center, is that this will provide a home for me and many other local teachers here, so I can actually arrange my own retreat, my own workshop and then invite people if they want to come and join me. So if people are interested in that they should, keep in touch with my website and this new Ecodharma Center and those opportunities should be opening up within the next year.
Rick: Great, I also want to mention that we have a thing on Bat Gap under the resources menu, which is like a geographic guest index and if you type in a location there, let’s say Denver you type in, then you see events that people I’ve interviewed have scheduled in that vicinity and actually it lists them in ever-increasing distances. So, you might see something in Santa Fe for instance, somewhere down the list and so we’ll send you information on how to register for that David, you can register any events you’re offering.
David: Okay, thank you. Yeah and there’s also a schedule page on my website that gives details where to register.
Rick: Yeah, all right. [Music] Next week for some reason I can’t change …oh there I am, I wasn’t able to look. Next week I’ll be interviewing a Guru from India named Shiva Rudra Balayogi and I think that’ll be very interesting. Some good old friends of mine have become close followers of his and are very enthusiastic about the fact that we’re going to be doing this. So, stay tuned for that and for everything else that we’ve got coming up, I hope to be doing this for many more years to come. Go to www.BatGap.com to be notified, to sign up to be notified by email of upcoming interviews. Actually you get notified as soon as I posted it on YouTube. You can also subscribe to the audio podcast, you can subscribe on YouTube for that matter if you’re just watching this on YouTube and YouTube will notify you when a new one goes up and there’s a bunch of other stuff. So go there www.BatGap.com, look under the at a glance menu and it’ll list in all the things we have available on the site and more to come. Thanks again David.
David: Thank you Rick.