David Loy Interview

Summary

David Loy discusses Zen practice, awakening, and the gradual work of integrating spiritual insight into everyday life. He also explores evolution, consciousness, human purpose, and the need to respond to ecological and social crises.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How does awakening change a person's sense of self?
• Why is spiritual realization not the end of meditation and practice?
• Can evolution be understood as more than random mechanical processes?
• What role might human beings play in the evolution of consciousness?
• How should spiritual insight relate to ecological responsibility?

Key takeaways

• Genuine realization becomes part of life naturally, but it still needs to be integrated.
• Awakening does not require eliminating the practical sense of self.
• Spiritual experiences should not be clung to; their value is shown by lasting transformation.
• The cosmos can be viewed as self-organizing, creative, and increasingly conscious.
• Human beings may be a way for the Earth or cosmos to become self-aware.
• A sense of cosmic purpose can challenge the nihilism of modern culture.

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.

As always, I’ll be linking to his website, where you can find much more about him after this interview, as well as an extensive library of audio and video to listen to or watch, and various writings.

David and I did a little thing together about four and a half years ago at the Science and Nonduality 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 nondual teacher who was up on stage, probing him about whether the nondual community has any obligation to address ecological issues and so on.

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. David was very persistent, and I admired that. 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 conversation the other day, David, that we did out there with Igor Kufayev, and it was good, but we only had an hour. 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. I refreshed my appreciation for you by 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.

🛤️ David’s Zen path

Rick: Sure. So, I thought we might start just by getting to know you a little bit better. I understand that you’ve spent something like 20 years in Japan and in Zen monasteries, and maybe you could 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. I was also living and practicing with Robert Aitken for a while, another well-known American teacher.

After that, I spent some time in Singapore, where I was teaching at the university. We started a little Zen group, where that same teacher, Yamada Roshi, used to visit and lead sesshins with us, and eventually he invited me back to Japan.

So, I ended up living in Japan for 20 years, not in a monastery. Yamada Roshi was a layman, a very successful retired businessman. There were a lot of international students, and we lived in Kamakura and used to go there to sit, to do zazenkai and sesshin with him.

But he actually died fairly early, and my wife and I both stayed on as professors in different Japanese universities. 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.

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 were over there in Japan?

David: I never met him there. I’ve met him a few times here in the States, though. I can’t say I know him as well as I’d like to. We had a couple of 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 were over there?

David: Well, after 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.

✨ Awakening and integration

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 that there have been some changes over the years that have certainly made a big difference in my life, some of them fairly dramatic, others maybe more gradual. But it feels like what I’m living now—I turned 70 this year—is a kind of natural development out of all of that practice.

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 on me.”

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 on me.”

David: Well, in my case, there were several moments when there was some kind of transformation. The interesting thing, though, is that the real challenge and the deeper transformation occur more slowly, in 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 of 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. 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, 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. 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 the 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, practice or meditation isn’t important. In the Buddhist traditions, we really emphasize that, so one still needs to make that effort to be mindful and 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, or it 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 that there’s no final stage, there’s no final awakening here. Whatever one’s experienced 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, sitting and meditating 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 are plenty of places where it’s clear that he would spend a lot of time meditating, either with the other monks or by himself. 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 experiences can unfold. 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 that I make a distinction between deconstruction of the delusive sense of a 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. 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, wondering if my hair looked cool and things like that. Then, over the decades, that has changed very much.

But still, I know where to stick a fork in my mouth, and when 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 that we can understand the cosmos as this three-dimensional, infinite net that extends boundlessly in every direction. 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—the problem usually is that the jewels, us, think of ourselves as separate from the other jewels. The point of the net is realizing that each jewel is reflecting and manifesting all the other jewels, so there’s not that sense of separation. Nonetheless, it’s not as though the jewel that is you and the jewel that is me are 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 not a wave; you’re just not only a wave anymore.

David: Very good. I like that.

Evolution and cosmic creativity

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. 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 were making. 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 was about, 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, kind of refuted the last real argument for God’s existence in the classical sense. With 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 totally mechanistic understanding of what’s going on with the evolutionary process.

But I think from a Buddhist or non-dualist perspective, we can understand it differently. Of course, there are a lot of people trying to do that these days, especially Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. I think they have really opened doors there.

So the question is: Is evolution something that’s directed 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?

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, and more and more aware of itself. So we can understand the evolutionary process in these terms.

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?

There’s that famous story too, where after his awakening, the Buddha was challenged by Mara, the symbolization of evil or death. Mara challenged him: “You say you’re awakened. How do you know? Who authorizes your awakening, or is it just your own delusion?”

It’s interesting that the Buddha, according to this story, didn’t say anything. 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?

I think that’s a serious way to try to integrate what non-dualist traditions like Buddhism have been talking about with 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 aren’t arguing against a straw-man God who really needs to be considered in a subtler way.

David: Yeah, I agree completely. 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. Then you have the critics, 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 are different levels of meaning. Often, the popular understanding misses, to some extent, 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 somehow separate from his creation, like a puppeteer who has 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 in 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.

Evolution isn’t something that’s happening to the universe; evolution is the universe itself.

In fact, the old mechanistic metaphor first came about because the early scientists still thought of God in a kind of deistic fashion—as 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 that the cosmos is an organism, an organism that’s transforming. It also raises a very interesting question: 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 to play. 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’ve sort of lost any sense that we have any meaning or role to play, that we’re part of something greater than ourselves.

I think this is the 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. If so, I think that’s something that needs to be pursued, because it 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 billion years, it turns into rose bushes, giraffes, and us.

If you leave hydrogen alone for 14 billion years, it turns into rose bushes, giraffes, and us.

What’s going on there? The fact that it just turns into these things is—whoa. Is it really just an 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. To me, the notion that random processes could ever result in such beauty, 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 for a mechanistic worldview have a leg to stand on.

David: My way of saying that is, what we can see is that the cosmos is self-organizing, as an organism is. 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?”

Even if you take some of the principles of Darwin, like—what do they call it?

Natural selection and so on. It’s like, why? What’s behind that?

David: Yeah, well, let me just piggyback on that. The idea is that random or natural selection occurs because there are errors: genetic mutations, errors in DNA replication, right? Some of the errors—a few of the errors—are beneficial, and they cause specific individuals to survive better than others in the species.

But what’s interesting, of course, is that, as biologists know, the mutations aren’t just accidental in the sense that they happen once in a while. There’s a rate of mutation that they can observe, and they can use it 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 fundamental creativity of the universe: that it’s wanting to try new things.

It’s always interesting. A lot of the new things don’t work out. Most of those mutations don’t have any benefit; many of them have the opposite effect. But some lead to the development and creation of something new.

Can’t we understand that this is what the cosmos is about? It’s this fundamental creativity. Maybe it’s enjoying itself in this process.

Rick: Yeah, that’s what the Hindus say: Lila, 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 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 billiard balls banging into each other randomly and that it has somehow resulted in all this—there are actually people who argue that.

They get around this conundrum by saying that there are actually an infinite number of parallel universes, and in ours, just because there are 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 we just happen to live in the one where organisms and higher life forms have randomly resulted, but maybe the other ones all fizzled. But that too, I think, is sort of a stretch.

David: Yeah, even though there does seem to be some suggestion, with people looking at the Big Bang and all that, that there are parallel universes, 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, 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 fundamentally far beyond anything we can understand, much more than we can control, this larger cosmic process. 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?”

Recovering the sacred world

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 divine intelligence permeating and orchestrating everything, if there’s no separation ultimately between ourselves and everything else, if, as John Donne said, “No man is an island,” and “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it 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 are a couple of 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.

Secularity and the Loss of the Sacred World

Some people talk about secular Buddhism or secular spirituality, but the point is our understanding of secularity is historically conditioned. If you go back to, say, the Middle Ages, there was what we call science, but it was called natural philosophy. 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 into the modern era, especially with the Reformation, when there was a lot of insecurity and humans became much more concerned about securing themselves, the early scientists—all of whom believed in God—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.

It’s interesting that 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. So, more and more, they understood the role of God as 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 could call that the spiritual half—was lost. We were left with a kind of devalued, material, lifeless world of matter: meaningless matter.

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 made up of beings that don’t have any spiritual elements—what am I trying to say here? I might say something like what Wendell Berry, the poet, said. He put it really well:

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 spiritual dimension, which kind of frees us to use it and 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. God is some clockmaker who 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—and, of course, I have to say “he” just for convenience’s sake—but if he’s omnipresent, then he’s not separate. 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, in 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 else. I’m not disagreeing with what you said, but I’m 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. In a way, inevitably, to some extent, that ends up devaluing this world, often as 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 infects, as I would say, certain types of Buddhism and lots of spiritual traditions. I see 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.” Here’s a cup, and it seems to be ceramic and orange and so on. But look more closely, and it’s molecules, and they aren’t ceramic, and they aren’t orange. Then look more closely, and it’s atoms, which bear even less resemblance to this cup.

Look more closely, and it’s getting down to nothing material whatsoever—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 of nights ago where I also used a cup to demonstrate what I wanted to say. My point was a little different: I think often we’re not really looking.

What psychologists emphasize is that actual perception isn’t simply that we’re seeing visually. Rather, we’re catching just a little bit of visual signal and then interpreting it.

Rick: Right.

David: We’re identifying it, and this is how language comes in. We identify it as the cup; we identify it, therefore, as a thing to be used to drink water or coffee or whatever out of. We do that with everything. We see everything functionally, and this ties in with our desires and intentions and so forth.

We get so caught up in that that the truth is, we never actually see things as they are. The world, in a deep, preconscious way, as we learn language, as we learn to speak, as we learn to see the world in the way that everyone else does, becomes something we identify with. We 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, referring to us as sort of instruments of the Divine or of the deeper creative intelligence that seems to be governing the universe. If we think of it that way, then instruments usually have a certain range of ability.

A Geiger counter can measure such-and-such, a telescope can see that, and an FM radio can pick up on this. So, we humans have a certain range of perceptual ability. But I think what makes us unique—and this is where all the spiritual traditions ultimately come in—is that we seem to have the capacity, as instruments, to get right down to the ground state, to the fundamental reality, and through this instrument be able to realize itself.

You were saying earlier about who wakes up. Well, that wakes up to itself 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, 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.

I suppose the spiritual danger there is that sometimes the letting go can encourage a kind of sense of separation: this pure spirit that we 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 that 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 that, when we realize that we are part of that same process that everything else is, there can also be a compassionate response to that realization. I remember my teacher saying that genuine kensho, genuine awakening, is spontaneously associated with a sense of compassion.

So, 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.

Healing the Biosphere Through Nonseparation

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.

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.

Our goal now is to heal the whole of the biosphere, based on the realization that we’re not separate from it.

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.

I don’t think—I mean, it’s possible to get stuck in any phase—but there’s a tendency to continue moving on. I think that then, from that phase, one gets into a more embodied, integrated phase.

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. 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 that all the sentient beings in it are worthy of upliftment and enlightenment.

David: I think that’s exactly right. As the 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 sever that relationship. The world, you and I, everything is a way. This is presencing; this is manifesting. To understand the spiritual path as dissociating from it, I think, is a real, serious issue.

But what that points to, of course, is that we talk about awakening or enlightenment, but it’s not all or nothing, right? There are glimpses. In the Zen tradition that I practiced, in my school in particular, now called Sambo Zen, there’s a lot of emphasis on kenshō. But kenshō, this first glimpse, is usually very brief.

Rick: Kenshō means a glimpse?

David: Kenshō literally means seeing into your nature, but it can be shallow or it can be deep. The point is that the distinction is made because something happens, but it’s not a permanent transformation, and it certainly doesn’t automatically transmute 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 kenshō, every genuine experience of awakening, is qualitatively the same, but there’s a huge spectrum of quantitative difference.

He explained it this way, and I’ve often cited it: when we start to practice, it’s as if the teacher is telling us to polish a wall. We don’t understand what that means or why we should polish a wall—what’s the point? But the teacher gives us instructions on how to meditate, and so, in a way, we polish away.

Kenshō, according to our tradition, is usually something very much like an “aha.” Kenshō is the moment when we realize that it’s not a wall, that it’s a piece of glass and that there’s something on the other side. But that’s not going to be very clear, is it? You’re polishing, and then suddenly there’s this: “Oh, there’s something on the other 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, and the paint end up covering it again. Then 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 is that one needs to keep polishing, keep going, so that one can see more and more clearly what’s on the other side, and that it is a piece of glass.

Then my teacher said that great awakening, Daigo Tettei in Japanese, is when the glass shatters and there’s no longer a 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. A lot of the problems that happen, I think, are because we don’t understand or acknowledge that there are these stages. 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 SAND conference this year, just that whole issue. 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. 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 one is 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 clearer and also much more abiding. 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. 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.

Karma, motivation, and conduct

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’s contribution was to emphasize motivation: how karma is created not just by what we do, but by the motivations or intentions behind what we do.

And I think there’s an essential insight here: 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, and delusion, I’m going to be relating to and perceiving a person or a situation in a very different way 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 world. I think that’s the key to understanding this enigmatic thing that Spinoza said in 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 we transform our motivations, how 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: 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: 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 did it come from? What is it? “Plant a thought and reap a deed, plant a deed and reap a habit, plant a habit and reap a character, plant a character and reap a destiny.”

The idea is that habits are changed by intentionally saying, “Okay, I’m not going to act on that; I’m going to do this.” And then, if I keep doing this, it becomes a part of what I am. I think that’s usually what it 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.

✨ Individual awakening and social change

Rick: Yeah. So, I think something that we’d both be interested in, and that 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, suffering, and difficulty millions and millions of people went through. 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 is that 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 and the health 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.

Transforming the Three Poisons Before Activism

David: Right, right, for sure. Buddhism, like a lot of spiritual traditions, starts there. If we’re not working to transform our own greed, ill will, and delusion, and we’re out there as activists, then I think, from a Buddhist perspective at least, we’re sort of playing games. 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 institutional side.

Buddhism traditionally, like many spiritual traditions, focuses 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, and so on, 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’s something—a direction in which Buddhism and other spiritual traditions really need to think.

As sociologists like to say, “People create society, but society creates people.” So, we start with the idea that 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.

🛤️ The ecological crisis and the bodhisattva path

Rick: Yeah, I’ve heard you say in a number of your talks, and others have certainly said similar things. I was talking to Charles Eisenstein a few weeks ago, and he was saying similar things: You can 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. You can go on and on—the possibility of major epidemics.

People obviously get overwhelmed. They get discouraged, and they begin to feel that they are too small, the problems are too big, and what can be done? Particularly with the way the political situation seems to be going, it didn’t quite work out the way a lot of us hoped it would.

So I guess I come back to this: What is all that symptomatic of? 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’s 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. We have to bring in these other things that you just mentioned, but also species extinction. We seem now to be well into the sixth great species extinction, caused in this case by one particular species: us.

When you put that together with all these other phenomena, we can add nuclear waste. Thirteen thousand tons a year are produced by the world, and no one really knows how to get a grip on what Fukushima is doing, and so forth.

Rick: Yeah, that alone.

David: And if we look upon all that as kind of an iceberg, I see that as the visible part of the iceberg. What I think that really points to is a global civilization that has lost its way and is therefore self-destructing.

It goes back to what we were saying earlier about how we understand the Earth as a kind of convenient store of resources to be exploited with indifference to the effects on ecosystems. The fundamental problem, it seems to me—and this is where it ties in with what we were saying about evolution—is that 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 understandings of evolution, 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, I think the implication feeds what I think is really the main meaning, role, and value of our civilization, which is ever-increasing production and consumption.

That’s really what it has come down to. If you ask, “What’s the preoccupation of every government? What’s the preoccupation that we are molded into, to do individually and as a culture as a whole?” It’s GDP growth and so forth. It’s a kind of greed that’s encouraged here, that is never fulfilled and can never be enough, because it can never really secure us and it can never make us happy.

That’s really what it has come down to. If you ask, “What’s the preoccupation of every government? What’s the preoccupation that we are molded into, to do individually and as a culture as a whole?” It’s GDP growth and so forth. It’s a kind of greed that’s encouraged here, that is never fulfilled and can never be enough, because it can never really secure us and 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. 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—that wouldn’t really address the deeper, fundamental issue, I think.

Number one, the problem, I think, is much, much worse than most of us have been thinking it is. What’s needed is what Joanna Macy and others have called a kind of 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.

The Bodhisattva Path and Activist Burnout

As you pointed out, activism in the present world seems to foster burnout, anger, and despair. 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 a two-sided practice.

As you pointed out, activism in the present world seems to foster burnout, anger, and despair. 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 a two-sided practice.

On the one hand, they continue their own meditation practice, or whatever it is that helps them develop on the spiritual path—the traditional spiritual path to experience equanimity, serenity, and 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.

But the bodhisattva knows, especially today, that it’s not enough just to sit on one’s cushion and cling to that peace of mind, as it were. We also need to be engaged in the world and understand that not as a distraction from our spiritual practice, but as an essential part of it.

When one engages from that perspective, it gives a kind of power that otherwise isn’t there. It’s not simply that we have a kind of equanimity in our practice, and it’s not simply that there’s an equanimity that we can bring into our engagement. It’s more profound 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.

There’s a sense, for the bodhisattva, that 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. Our job is to do the right thing. Our job is to do the best thing.

That makes us able to address the truly overwhelming, otherwise overwhelming, challenges that we face. If one comes in with that attitude, and also with the realization that it’s not just this ego that’s acting in the world but that 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. Somehow, we have to understand and 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, including people I’ve interviewed—in a sort of adolescent phase.

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. Animals are completely in tune with the laws of nature and their own instincts and everything. They can’t really mess things up that badly.

At a certain point, though, a child grows old enough that, in its maturation, it needs to be able to have freedom, choice, volition, and so on. That can go really wrong when you’re a teenager.

I know in my own case, by the time I was eighteen years old, I’d gotten arrested a couple of times, I’d dropped out of school, and I was getting kicked out of the house by my father all the time. Things weren’t going so well.

Then, when I learned to meditate, within a month or two I’d gotten back into school, I’d made amends with my father, things were starting to go well, and I’d gotten a job. My life just took this really constructive turn.

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 afterward, throughout the day.

If you can think of humanity that way, we’ve been in this reckless, crazy, destructive phase where we’re killing ourselves. But perhaps if we can tap into 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.

Without doing that, I don’t see how the problems can be solved. But by doing that, whether 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, you’re beginning to infuse the world.

Everybody who gets on your bus is influenced by you. You’re beginning to infuse the world with greater life, greater intelligence, and greater divinity. That kind of thing has a ripple effect.

David: Well said.

Rick: I said this in our last interview, four and a half years ago, but I tend to feel optimistic despite everything. It’s not necessarily going to be an easy transition. There are so many entrenched, powerful things that really have no place in a world that we might envision as being the way it should be.

Somehow or other, if we’re going to reach such a world, those things are going to have to come down. 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 Tao 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 and pessimism—certainly depending on how they’re understood—can take the pressure off, right? If you’re an optimist, you think, “Oh, things are getting better.” That kind of seems to reduce my responsibility, right? Or, if you think things aren’t going to get better and they’re going to get worse, why should I bother?

I think, like hope and despair, for the bodhisattva it’s something beyond that. In a way, it doesn’t make any difference. That’s not where you identify with one or the other. It’s a matter of, again, my job is to do the best I can, in the belief that it’s connecting with something greater than myself, however you want to articulate that.

What comes out of that, I don’t know. I can’t know. My job is just to do it. So I really don’t know what’s going to happen.

If things fall apart in the ways that they can, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be better afterward, right? We might end up with a kind of warlord situation where there’s a lot more violence. 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.

🕊️ A groundswell of engaged spirituality

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 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 Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest. Is that one you’re familiar with?

Rick: I haven’t read it. What does he say?

David: Well, basically, he’s a lecturer who talks about greening capitalism and goes around the world speaking here and there, collecting business cards. 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. We have what he originally estimated, I think, to be between a million and a million and a half—and 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.

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, with different ideologies and different leaders, working in different ways, but there’s something very powerful going on. 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 it. 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 U.S. 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 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. This is really, in a way, bringing together the opposition, or lots of people, and it’s actually having some good consequences in that regard. So, how is all this going to play out? Who knows, but there are some really interesting things going on.

Rick: Yeah, interesting. On that Paul Hawken 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 Hawken 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 reflect 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 allow the new to arise.”

I was thinking that was a bit like saying, “Oh boy, the pilot is intoxicated. Maybe he’ll crash the plane, and we’ll get a better one.” 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 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, in order for something new to arise before it totally collapses and something new takes its place.

David: Some old Marxists used to argue that way too. 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.

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 shaken us out of our complacency 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.

The three poisons in modern institutions

Rick: Okay, so there was something you brought up in several of your talks that I think might be worth discussing. 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 more delusion versus wisdom, or ignorance versus awakening.

What the Buddha did talk about is the three roots of evil, or the three poisons, sometimes called the three fires. These can be translated as greed, ill will, and delusion. The basic idea of karma is that when what we do is motivated by those three, the results tend to be problematic, 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 delusion, especially delusions of separation, wisdom that recognizes our interdependence—that my well-being isn’t separate from yours, for example.

Institutionalized Greed, Ill Will, and Delusion

This is 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 to see is how, in the contemporary world, we’ve institutionalized them. By institutionalizing them, I mean that in a way they’ve taken on a life of their own, given the way that the institution is structured.

What I’ve been talking about is that 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 or GNP is never big enough.

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 and 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 and using things up if it’s not going to collapse, and then we have the biological system known as planet Earth.

One system has to keep growing, but the other system can’t. In a way, we can see the ecological crisis as a kind of clash between those two systems.

Also, on the second poison, ill will, there are 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 U.S., 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 fourteen or fifteen 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 twelve or thirteen nations.

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, keep finding wars, 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. 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.” Of course ISIS does what they do 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, institutionalize 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 are lots of people spending lots of money manipulating Facebook and things like that, social media.

But there’s also the more fundamental problem that, given that most of the media are megacorporations that make their money not from educating or informing us, but from selling us stuff and grabbing our attention, their fundamental presupposition is that 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? To keep us thinking of ourselves, understanding ourselves, as people who make money in order that we can buy stuff.

More and more, I think that whole mentality—and they’ve been largely successful at it—is that the media have institutionalized delusion in that sense.

Of course, these three poisons, these three institutionalized poisons, all work together, don’t they? There’s a lot of money to be made making bombs for the military, especially if the military uses 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, and 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. 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:

There’s something happening here, but 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 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 that one of the things going on here, I think, is a completely new understanding of spirituality, a different kind of engaged spirituality.

On 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. It’s not simply, in the old sense of the way Buddhism would talk about it, working on the individual level to help other people awaken. 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 that’s okay. That’s okay. 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 that 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. They look on Google, and they start looking at this and that: “Oh, maybe this is a spiritual thing.” 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, to me, indicates that perhaps the ground is rising, or the forest floor is becoming more fertile, and plants are beginning to sprout that 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 something deeper is going on than just the individual.

Rick: Yeah, another person made a nice analogy. He said that back in the day of the Buddha, there was a sort of heaviness and thickness in collective consciousness, and it took someone like the Buddha—a kind of Superman—to break through the membrane of that density and awaken.

But he said that, by virtue of the Buddha 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 thinner, and more easily broken through. So a little bit of practice, or a little bit of something, can yield fruits much more readily than might have been the case a long, long time ago.

David: Part of that, I think—what I’ve noticed, because I spent a lot of time recently talking about eco-Dharma—is that activists who, in the past, might have been very resistant to spiritual concerns are now changing. A lot of activists, if you think about the history of activism and the left, and the sort of antireligious rhetoric of Marxism and that sort of thing, have often looked upon religion as sort of part of the people.

But it’s interesting to notice that part of what is happening more and more is that more and more people who have been deeply engaged are now feeling the pull, feeling the need to connect their activism with spiritual practice.

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. 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 that 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, and lodge. 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 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 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 and hiked up those mountains around there, so it’s a beautiful area. 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 that they don’t know what to do with, 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.

⛰️ Buddhism in a civilization in crisis

David: Yeah, well, in a way, just a little bit of the backstory. I think the ecological crisis, for example, or even this larger civilizational crisis, as I see it, is 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. Within certain types of Buddhist teachings, what we are calling cosmological dualism is quite strong: the idea that the goal of samsara—the world of craving, delusion, ill will, and so forth—is something that we need to transcend. If you take the Pali Canon literally, it seems to be saying that the goal is not to be reborn back into this horrible world of suffering.

So, there is a kind of cosmological dualism built into certain types of Buddhism. But on the other side, you get Nagarjuna, who talks about there being 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.

What I see unfolding, if you look at the whole history of Buddhism, is the tension between these two. In a way, I think we’re in a situation where Buddhism, for example, really needs to clarify what the goal is.

I think Buddhism is in a good situation because every time it’s spread to a new culture, it’s interacted. 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.

It’s really exciting now that Buddhism, for example—as an example of a spiritual, nondualistic tradition—comes into the modern world. It’s not just coming into a secular world; it’s not just coming into a civilization that is totally different from anything it has found before. It’s coming into a civilization in crisis, a civilization that, it seems to me, is self-destructing.

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. 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 those organizations that Paul Hawken was talking about. I think the transformation is also starting to happen 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 whoever. Living traditions are living because they engage; they find new ways of expression, new ways of understanding, and 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. Everything you just said about Buddhism, since you just mentioned Shankara, 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 also been influenced by the cultures in which they landed.

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 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.

I don’t mean that literally. I mean that, as I was saying earlier, it infuses you with greater liveliness, energy, intelligence, and so on, which you can then apply in your active life, hopefully in beneficial ways.

Hopefully—and this is an issue we touched upon at the very beginning of our conversation—that alignment, attunement, or establishment in the transcendent also begins to rearrange your motivations, so that you don’t just become a better bank robber or a better scoundrel in some way, a 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: coming to experience this world in a different way, so that what we transcend is not this world in total, but the old way of understanding it—the old way of understanding who we are and how we should live in it.

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 and 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, the well from which we draw in order to live our lives.

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 who 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.

If they could somehow learn—and there are various ways of doing this—to make contact with that and maintain it throughout the day, then they wouldn’t ever feel that burnout. There would always be a sense of joy and enthusiasm, a sense of, “Life is great.” 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, or 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 something we were talking about before: the sort of transformation we’re talking about involves realizing and experiencing the world not as a collection of separate, lifeless things that just happen to be there, but as a manifestation or a presencing of that which in and of itself has no form, no color, and no attributes.

It’s beyond all that, and yet it takes form as all these things. There’s a tension within the Buddhist tradition, and my sympathies are very much with the second.

The way that I have sometimes expressed that in my own writing is this: As long as we have this sense of a separate self, that sense of separate self is haunted by a sense of lack, by the feeling that something is wrong with me, something is missing, or I’m not good enough.

One way to symbolize that is as if, at the very core of our being, there’s a kind of black hole—almost a 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 somehow. If only I were rich enough, famous enough, or beautiful enough, whatever it might be, 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 parāvṛtti that Buddhism, for example, talks about—is that the black hole transforms and becomes the source of creativity.

It’s as if it’s a spring springing up from a bottomless source. We don’t know where it comes from, we can’t identify the source, and we can’t grasp it, but that’s not our job. Our job is to live that spring, to manifest that creativity.

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. I think we have little tastes 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 deep down inside us, like some kind of little power-generating station that’s exclusive to us.

We’re talking about the ground state of the universe, which is, as physics tells us, unlimited and infinitely energetic, and, as some would say, intelligent. 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 your own body and the mountain over here are really just expressions of the same thing. 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 ecological crisis and how it is that we’re relating to the Earth.

Yeah, so the parāvṛtti we’re talking about isn’t just something that happens on an individual level, which is the traditional way of thinking. What we’re really in a situation where we need is a kind of collective parāvṛtti, 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 talking about what these problems are symptomatic of and how we can solve them and so on.

But if we really perceive the world as ourself, there’s a Sanskrit saying, “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam,” which means something like, “The world is my family.” I don’t think it just means the people in the world; it means the world—the whole thing—is our intimate relation.

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, 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.”

That’s something that I’ve talked a lot about: the parallels between our traditional, individual predicament according to Buddhism and our collective predicament today. It really does seem to be microcosm and 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.

Because it’s a delusion, this sense of self can never secure itself. It’s always uncomfortable; it’s always insecure. We experience that as a sense of lack that often, usually, we misunderstand. 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 nonduality.

Isn’t it the same now, in the 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. They built on that, which enabled them to create democracy of a sort.

But the problem in the modern world is that this has aggravated the sense of separation more and more over time, and I think we, as a species, suffer from that. We alluded to that earlier: Why are we here? What role do we have 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 thought you had to keep sacrificing people to keep the sun going. But they felt they were embedded in a way, that they had a role.

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. 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 president 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 them 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.

That 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 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 is going to be enough, we’re missing the fundamental point. We’re still just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as it were.

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. If anything is a spiritual challenge or a spiritual crisis, that’s it.

This is also a spiritual challenge to our spiritual traditions: to wake up and respond to that. As I sometimes say, for example, if Buddhists aren’t interested in 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 look at the Buddhist tradition, for example, and other nondualistic traditions, and I see so much that is relevant here. So we live in interesting times.

Rick: We do. I imagine there are crusty old Buddhists who want to do it the old way and don’t want change, just as there are in the other traditions. 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 freshness and originality in the expression of that ancient tradition.

David: Yeah. 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.

You’re right: within Buddhism, as you would expect, there’s quite a spectrum—from more traditional types who just want to do things the way they were done in Asia, to 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, 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.

Closing thoughts and resources

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 several of his books. 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 thing, or anything like that, or do you mainly just go places in person too?

David: Yes. So far, there’s no—I do have a couple of online students, but in general, it’s mostly—well, it’s interesting. I don’t have a sangha or a home of my own, so I’ve been waiting to be invited.

But one exciting new thing about this new EcoDharma Center is that it will provide a home for me and many other local teachers here. So I can actually arrange my own retreat or my own workshop and then invite people if they want to come and join me.

If people are interested in that, they should keep in touch with my website and this new EcoDharma Center. Those opportunities should be opening up within the next year.

Rick: Great. I also want to mention that we have a thing on BatGap under the Resources menu, which is a geographic guest index. If you type in a location there—let’s say Denver—you’ll see events that people I’ve interviewed have scheduled in that vicinity, and it actually lists them in ever-increasing distances.

You might see something in Santa Fe, for instance, somewhere down the list. We’ll send you information on how to register for that, David, and 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 about 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 sign up to be notified by email of upcoming interviews. Actually, you get notified as soon as I post them 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.

There’s a bunch of other stuff, so go to www.BatGap.com, look under the At a Glance menu, and it’ll list all the things we have available on the site, with more to come. Thanks again, David.

David: Thank you, Rick.