Tara Brach - 2014-09-17 - Earth's Crisis - On the Edge of the Roof

Episode Date: September 18, 2014

2014-09-18 - Earth’s Crisis - On the Edge of the Roof - This talk views the ecological dis-ease of our planet through the lens of our evolutionary unfolding. We explore the egoic trance that has precipitated the destruction of our environment, and the inner practices of presence that enable us to respond from love and wisdom.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. In this coming week, some of you may be aware that it's probably the greatest mobilization on behalf of the earth that's ever happened in human history. And on Sunday, the 21st, there's going to be a people's climate march in New York City, but it's also happening. There's activity in about 188-plus other countries around. the world. And of course there's the UN Climate Summit. It's a lot going on. And in one way to look at it is humans are actually really waking up to the crisis of our planet. And another view is it's happening really slowly. It's scary how slowly there's a huge amount of indifference and ignorance. What I'd like to do tonight is, is that is through the lens of Dharma,

through the lens of what sometimes described as a spiritual path or the Bodhisattva path. And the word bodhisattva, Bodhi means awakened and satfa as being. Through this path that we're all on really, of waking up. How can we view this? What's our role? How do we pay attention?

And I've been inspired since I was a young girl by the Museum of Natural History in New York. That's the place I used to go with my parents and learn about, I mean, the planetarium was awesome. And it's just an amazing museum. And in recent years, they've done a lot on global warming. And the scientists described there that we're in the sixth extinction, meaning that this is predicted to be the most devastating of all the extinctions, that the, that the scientists, that

there have been a number in the past. Since the asteroids wiped out all living creatures and, you know, the dinosaurs plus, this is supposedly to be the most devastating since then. And I'll give you a little

bit of what they say. They estimate that half of all plants, animals, and bird species will die off in the next 85 years. So I think of that. I think of, well, that would be my grandchildren's lifetime, that half of the creatures we know of won't be here. That 75% of all mammals the next 334 years will be gone.

So one scientist writes this, he says, this should keep you awake at night. And it's interesting that it doesn't, really. I mean, that's probably, that's something we'll explore a little. but most scientists are saying that in contrast to all the other extinctions the cause is human and that we're injuring the earth daily you know we're cutting down trees wide swaths of trees we're affecting how the earth breeze mining overfishing

there's a global ocean commission made up of former heads of states and business leaders and scientists, and they were at the Museum of Natural History in New York and gave a kind of summary of their research and basically concluded that the oceans are dying from climate change and pollution and overfishing, and that the ocean, they said, why should we be concerned?

And this is what they wrote. The ocean provides 50% of our oxygen and fixes 25% of global carbon emissions. Our food chain begins there. They add a healthy ocean as key to our well-being, and they say, no ocean, no us. So there's these devastating consequences to what's happening. And again, there's, you know, we see the mobilization that's happening this week,

and then there's also the contrast. I kind of did informal surveys. as I was traveling around and I was in Italy and Amsterdam and London, just asking, you know, how much activity and how much awareness and things are happening everywhere. And in some way, it's still a kind of crisis that's a mental or conceptual problem. It's not my personal crisis. It's not taken in in a way that really shakes. the nervous system for many people.

I was really struck coming back to the states. There's so many contrasts between being in Europe and being here. The biggest one is like these little cars there and these huge cars here. And the size of our homes here and so many people biking and moving around on their own steam. In Italy, I was amazed these really steep hills and these little towns and these elderly Italian men and women moving up and down those hills.

And it's not all like great there, not great here. One friend of mine told me that in Vienna, they have this arrangement there's a group of apartments that are sold and the arrangement is to elderly people and then when the person

dies it goes back to the building owner. It's a four to six stories tall buildings. and they began in recent years installing elevators. Before that people, these elderly people were walking up and down four to six stories. But they installed the elevators because it served the bottom line more revenue because people started dying younger and they calculated the investment that way

and they actually started making more money than the cost of putting in the elevators. So they put in the elevators. Well, we live in a culture where everything is to make us more and more comfortable, you know, and there's this more and more consuming and more and more obesity, and that's not just in the United States. Europe is catching up with us. So, again, we have this crisis and a kind of lack of response that we see in general. So about four years ago I was at a conference and I was presenting.

There were a number of presenters and Tick Natham was invited to do the keynote. And in the keynote he started talking about this crisis of our earth. And he shared a sutra, which is a spiritual story that was in the Buddhist classics. And it's called the Sutra on the Son's Flesh. And it's about a couple and a young son, cross and a... this vast desert. And they hadn't planned well, so they ran out of food, and they decided to kill and eat their child. And then, of course, after they did, they tore their hair out and beat their chest and carried his remains and grieved and grieved and grieved. And then the

Buddha in a discourse with monks about this, he talked about how horribly they suffered, and he said the teaching was the way we grasp, the way we consume, kills us, and it takes away our happiness. And it's a horrific metaphor, of course, and yet I think Tickna Hahn and many others are feeling like, well, what's it going to take to get us to pay attention to how we're living and that it's not working? 50% of all creatures gone in 85 years. So the teaching here is that by living unmindfully, by overconsuming oil, coal, the earth's resources, by overproducing, we destroy the world for future generations.

So I read you a line from Rumi that gave me the title for this talk. Rumi says, sit, be still, and listen, for you are drunk and we are at the edge of the roof. Sit, be still, and listen. For you are drunk, and we are at the edge of the roof. So if you're looking for this talk, it's called On the Edge of the Roof. I just thought it was such a cool line. But the teaching that Rumi is saying is the same, that we're drunk, we're in a trance of some sort,

and our planet's in great trouble. Okay, so we're going to go back to King Arthur's Times now, and this is a legend from the Holy Grail, and in this legend, Parciful is a young knight on a quest, and he's wandering into, he's going for the Holy Grail, and he wanders into this really parched, devastated land where nothing grows. And when he arrives at the capital of this wasteland,

land, he finds the townspeople are behaving as if everything's normal. They're kind of on automatic. They're not wondering, like, oh, what horror has befallen us? This is terrible. What's going on? They're just dull and McLanical. They're under a spell. So Parciful is invited to the castle, where to a surprise, he finds the king is lying in bed, and he's pale and dying. And like the land around him, the monarch's life is wanning. And Parciful's full of questions, but he's been told by older knights that it's not polite to ask questions. It's improper for one of his stature. And he also figures, well, how can he help?

So the next morning, he leaves the castle to continue on his journey. But soon after leaving, he meets up with the sorcerer, a sorceress, her name's Kundry. And she hears that he didn't even ask the king about himself. He didn't reach out at all. And she goes into a rage and says, you know, how could you be so callous and caring? So he figures she's probably got a good point, turns around, goes back to the castle.

He takes, but he's taking her words to heart. So he goes back to the wasteland, back to the castle. He goes to where the king is, and he kneels before him, and he very gently asks, Oh, my Lord, what aileth thee? And at that moment, the color comes back into the king's cheeks. And he stands up fully healed. And throughout the kingdom, everything comes back to life.

People are newly awakened. They're talking with animation, and they're laughing and singing and moving with vigorous step. Crops begin to grow. You get the idea. The grass is glowing. Everything's springtime and happy. Okay, so what happened there is, you know, we wonder. And I think the point is, and this is,

is really a core teaching on the Bodhisattva path. And the Buddhist core teaching is, if we don't acknowledge suffering, if we don't acknowledge that our heart is hurting, that we're not aligned with ourselves, that we're living in a way that's causing us pain, that we're addicted, that we're not feeling intimate with others, if we don't acknowledge that our earth is dying, that the oceans are dying, if we don't acknowledge, then we can't respond. We are caught in trance. We're living in it. And our habit, our conditioning is to not go where the pain is. So by turning away, by looking away, by denying it, we block our survival response. We get caught in this kind of

indifference where we're not looking, we're not seeing, and we're cut off. We're in a wasteland. So what we'll do just to continue this kind of exploration, how do we look through the lens of Dharma or the spiritual path, is to say, well, how do we get drunk? And how do we go into that trance? And what serves our healing? You know, what is it that helps us like with Parciful and the King begin to say, okay, so what's happening and how do we respond? And you can listen with the filter of this both in an individual way, how do each of us go into a transfer where we start living in a very limiting sense of ourselves as separate from each other or separate from the world? And how do we go into a transfer where we end up starting with

enacting behaviors that actually get us more into trouble, ways that we defend ourselves, or ways that we're aggressive or ways that we numb ourselves? So you can ask, how have the lens there or see it on a societal level. I find that one of the most useful ways to understand our development, how we get stuck and how we heal, is to think of evolution in terms of three phases. And you can think of it developmentally as an individual and as a species. And the first phase is where we're fused with the world. I mean, when we're first, when we're in the womb and we're first come out of the womb, there's still a sense. that there's no separation from the natural world. We're just one with it all.

And it's not, this fusion is not an enlightened fusion. There's nothing wrong with it, but there's a process to be aware of awareness so that we're united, but awake to that being united. So this is the primordial fusion. And then we emerge as a self-conscious ego. And that is a process of separation, where awareness takes itself to be the form, where we feel separate, where there's me and there's a world out there. And as I many time use the phrase, the primal mood of that egoic self is fear.

Because whenever there's a sense that I am apart from the beloved, I am part from a sense of belonging, whenever there's a sense of separation, there is a fear that in some way I am in danger, I will be hurt. I am short-term. It's all true. We are short-term if we're identified with a separate cell. And I need more to make it. So then we get stuck in our patterns as a reactive ego that's separate from the world. The third phase is awakening to a true belonging, awakening to realize this web of life, we're part of it. And this awareness that's recognized.

this web of life is our essence. Now most of humankind is in the egoic phase, and much is arrested at the egoic phase. And what that means is that there's a sense of mortality and a lot of clinging and a lot of avoiding that we're drunk. So that's one way of thinking about it. And then you can sense that in a daily way. daily way. I mean, how much during the day do you sense that you're not really living from

your wholeness of being where you're feeling that just natural flow of generosity and receiving and giving and collective concern for others and appreciation of others? It's more, how am I going to get through the day? And what's going to help me and how we're reacting to criticism or feeling obstacles? And we know, if we're honest, that we spend a lot of of time in the egoic trance. And by the way, judging that and thinking that's wrong deepens the egoic trance. So it's just to see that. And we see how much it's defined by judgment. How many moments we're comparing ourselves to others. How many moments we're comparing ourselves to how we think we should be and either putting others up or down.

And this happens even on the spiritual path. You know, different groups were the best, we're the one way. I always love the story of this Taoist master who his habit is to sit in this hut on a mountaintop naked. And he meditates that way. But a group of Confucianists are very upset with the way he's doing that. So they go up, they hike up the mountain to talk to him about the proper conduct that they think should be happening. But when they see him sitting naked, they're kind of shocked. as you know, they knew it, but they're shocked.

They said, what are you doing sitting naked in your hut without any pants on? And here's his response. He says, this whole universe, this whole universe is my hut. This little hut is my pants. What are you fellows doing in my pants? So we see ourselves go through the day and putting some people down and putting ourselves down, putting others up.

that's the egoic trance. And when it's full-blown, it turns into addictive grasping, have to have, wanting to possess. And it goes into a kind of addiction to violence, have to aggress, can't hold that bad. And again, the undercurrent is a sense of separation. So in the egoic trance,

the trance that really leads to the wasteland, in Parcival's myth, there are two big delusions. And one delusion is that sense that I mentioned of this kind of primordial fear, the sense that around the corner something is going to go wrong. And hand in hand with that is, I'm not enough and I don't have enough. So there's a chronic going for something more. I need more. I need more approval.

I need more food. I need more possessions. I need more attention, I need, I want. Saw a little cartoon with two goldfish swimming in the ocean. And one saying to the other, so what is it that your heart really desires? And the response is, I'd love to have, you know, the fishbowl and the colored gravel and the plastic plants

and the little castle, you know, the whole deal. So it's kind of like that. that, you know, here we are and we're alive. And we have this capacity to love without holding back and the sense is, you know, just the mystery and the wonder that's here. And we grasp onto much smaller things. So one delusion is not enough. I need something more.

On a societal level, it's described that we're at a phase two peak society, which means that we're hooked on continual growth. It's the common consensus. And this isn't just conservatives that are... This isn't just people that politically think that, you know, the rich should be as rich as they want to be. This is across the board belief that it's a good thing for our society to keep on growing economically.

It's a good thing to keep producing more. and consuming more. And I have a friend that works in a liberal think tank. And this is an assumption in the liberal agenda. This is not, again, a conservative thing. That it is good for us to keep growing. And it's not questioned. It's like, why is it good to keep on having more consumption

and more productivity? I mean, if you're obese, why is it good to eat more? If you're rich, why is it good to own more? If you're a warming planet, why is it good to have more oil-based production? You know, why? It's that same thing. It's this goodness as I need more. It's feeding more.

So that's one delusion. Never enough. Have to be more. The other delusion is that the objects out there are the source of what we want. So whether it's another person and we want to get their money or their affection, or it's the earth and we want its resources, there's an objectifying of the world outside of us. This is part of unreal other, that we're real, we're the center of the universe, and everything else is a player on the stage.

And this is really part of our historic, egoic narrative. It's really part of manifest destiny, if you think about it. that, you know, there's this driven entitlement to vanquish and destroy that which was indigenous, the rights of settlers, taking the wealth to make more for empire. I mean, this is we're going back hundreds of years, but it was like, yeah, this is our right. We can go somewhere and take from whoever's native in that area and expand the empire. It was a papal decree. It's the same thing with global business.

It's this attitude towards the natural world. that it's ours for the taking, and that humans are at the center, and we're above all the other species, and we can do what we want. Does this make sense? What I'm saying? It's really dangerous for the earth that one species thinks it's entitled to consume and produce and ravage more and more. Now, what exacerbates this way of being,

a feeling separate from the earth and entitled, is the more we are mental. The more we think and are mental, the more we perceive ourselves as apart from the rest of the world. And that's even more exacerbated by how much we live in a virtual and cyber reality. You know, in the United States, it said that we spend about 90% of our time indoors.

And a lot of that's the United States. looking at a screen. And that's really scary what the implications are for our relatedness with the earth. Children are even more removed from the natural

world than ever before in history. You know, they live in a cyber field. And so there's this question, will they grow up to care enough about the earth? To feel a belonging to the earth. Story, I heard that I really liked. This is

a writer in the New Yorker describes how when his son turned 12, they weren't having good communications, but he found that if he texted his son, he heard back from him. Otherwise, he just got kind of grunts. So they began a texting relationship. And he describes how, you know, his son would text and sometimes write L-O-L, and it really made him feel good that his son was saying lots of love. and he thought it was a really cool thing that it's kind of a way in the 20th century it's like a little arrow of love you can send out to anybody you know you send them an email or text and go LOL

and it just was a really sweet thing so he describes his infatuation over the next six months with emailing and texting and and LOLing so a sister's getting divorced and he writes to a we're all behind you and beside you LOL your brother

his father gets L and he sends him L-O-L in Canada person loses his job it's really sad that this happened L-O-L he just everywhere people with financial troubles teenager with drugs you know you get the idea so at one point he's texting with his son

he's at the airport saying you know I'm sorry I have to be away I really hate being away so much but I kind of need to because we're tight money right in or something. And he signs it LOL. And his son responds, Dad, what exactly do you think LOL means? Anyway, he gets that straight and he has to, of course, write millions of emails of apology.

But he crumbled with that one. How much are we really communicating online? It's clear that cyber communications here to stay, whatever that means, it's not going to go away, and that there's many riches to it. I mean, there's an amazing flow of information. But it also seems clear to me that, and I'm not alone,

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, and those that are sensing the impact of the virtual realm on our brains and the way we think. And it's also clear that we get disembodied and that the amount of information and the way we move towards it and with it keeps us from being able to really learn to concentrate and sink in and have any real depth in our thinking.

In other words, it's taking away depth. It's taking away a kind of ascendedness and a depth of kind of concentrating and attending that we can't go with when we're going like this with this much information. And if we're disembodied and our attention can't really sink into what's here, we can't activate the compassion networks in our brain.

So we can hear about terrible things happening on the earth. We can get more information than we've ever gotten about what's going on. But if we're not embodied, and if the mirror neurons aren't activated, the compassion will be mental, not heartfelt. We won't respond. It's still possible to be indifferent on some level. So this is, I'm just spending a little time with this,

that we've got some forces at work that keep us in a trance. Joanna Macy writes this about our relationship with the Earth. And I'm going to mention her a few times. Joanna Macy, I think of as one of the real leaders in the spiritual and ecological movements, bringing together the depth of spiritual awakening with we belong to this earth and it's ours to save. She says, we've been treating Earth as if it is a supply source and sewer, extracting resources and then pouring waste into it over and over. How we're violating is not sustainable. It destroys first those that are most vulnerable.

A lot of those listening perhaps right now might not be as personally affected right away. And unless you live in southern Florida or right on a coastline where you know that it's happening, that water levels are rising, the most vulnerable countries where the economy is vulnerable, relying on just one product, really susceptible to the impact of storms and so on, that's where it's felt the most.

And yet the responsibility is the developed world that's consuming and producing the effect of global warming. So our basic ignorance is that we forget we belong to the earth, that we're of the earth and that whatever happens affects all of us, that it's collective. And I like it best the way Chief Seattle puts it. This earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth

befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.

We did not weave the web of life. We're merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. So this is the basic bodhisattva teaching. We're connected. We belong. And yet when we forget that, we act in ways that destroy our larger body that we all share. And if we look at, well, what is it that really keeps us

from facing this? In one way, it's kind of like, lobsters in the pot. It's happening in a way that's gradual enough that we don't register in our everyday life. In another way to some of us with a more sensitive nervous system it might be that it feels uncomfortable or awkward to speak up or stand up and really engage in activity. And I think for many it's really upsetting to think about and there's a sense of powerlessness like who am I to make a difference? I mean, maybe if I was a congressman or a scientist or this or that, but I can't

really do anything. Again, I want to just share the words of Joanna Macy that addresses this last one that, you know, I don't want to look, it's too painful and what can I do? She says, there's so much going on in our world today that makes us want to close down and not see and not here. It's easy to shut down in the face of suffering. But I think that's the greatest danger of our time. The greatest peril is not nuclear war weapons, not climate change, not impoverishment of more than half the world's population. The greatest danger is the deadening of our hearts and minds.

It arises not from indifference but from fear. The fear we might be shattered by pain are stuck in despair forever. So, given that, given that the greatest suffering is that we avoid the suffering, how do we begin to wake up? So describe the developmental phases that we're kind of caught in the egoic phase of grasping and aversion. And what facilitates is moving into this collective consciousness and what allows us to move into a sense of not I or me but we is deepening our attention.

Is on purpose deepening our attention? Short story for you. So I'm moving back and forth between individual addiction and struggle and societal on purpose because we can see it, the dynamic in our personal lives. So one man was with his psychologist and he's struggling with anxiety

and addiction, working on overeating and weight, and also a sense of not having real intimacy in his life, loneliness. So his therapist encouraged him to take some meditation classes, and he told him, you'll feel better. So he took some classes, and then he came to a retreat. And the following week, he went back to his therapist, and he said, I know you said, I'd feel better, but it was really difficult.

In fact, I felt a whole lot of fear. My anxiety turned into like real fear. I felt a lot of shame and a lot of self-aversion. So you said I'd feel better. And the response was, yes, you are feeling better. You're feeling your feelings better. You're feeling your shame better. You're feeling your fear better.

But he went on to say, the only way to really feeling your wholeness of being, feeling the mystery, feeling beauty, feeling love is to feel. We have to feel. Which means if we're not feeling our own feelings or if we're not feeling the pain of the earth, if we're cut off, we're not going to be open to feeling the joy and the beauty and the mystery.

The only way is through actually, contacting what's here, feeling it. And this is no different than the teachings in any system, whether it's in Western psychology or 12-step or Buddhist psychology, that what is locked in our nervous system until we touch it and contact it fully with awareness stays locked in. So Rumi puts it in a simple way for us in this. talk, sit, be still, listen. For you're drunk and we're at the edge of the roof. So we begin

by acknowledging what's going on, the realness that we're poisoning our earth, our sorrow about it, our anger about it, our feeling of no power about it, despair, whatever it is, we acknowledge it. And again, Joanna Macy says, you can be really present. You don't have to be optimistic. In fact, trying to be hopeful can wear you out. Okay, just be willing to be present. Sit, be still, listen.

In that presence, just as this man did find out, because I didn't give you the rest of the story, which is he continued to practice. and became intimate with both the suffering in him and also more with his aliveness and with the nature around him and others. In that presence with the suffering of this earth we feel others being present, we feel our tenderness and we start coming home to a feeling of really belonging. This is a reading I love. we're part of a great mystery.

The Big Bang started the universe pouring matter through space. Some of this matter formed stars. Residue form the planets. Everything on Earth, including our living bodies, is formed out of the same material that form the stars and planets. Your bones are made of calcium and magnesium,

and there is seawater in your blood. You are the living Earth in this particular form. As cosmologist Brian Swim said, four and a half billion years ago the earth was a flaming molten ball of rock and now it can sing opera. It's an amazing universe. And presence brings that awareness and wonder alive in us. And I share that because ultimately the decision to act on behalf of this enlarge body of ours, this earth, has to come out of our hearts.

That's why we begin by sit and be still and listen, because then we start getting in touch, both with the pain and the beauty, and we want to respond, and it becomes, we want to respond because we love life. That's where it comes from. Joanna has a poem called Beasty, and it goes like this. She says, these are just parts of it. She says, tears aren't enough anymore.

Give me a song, a song for a sadness too vast for my heart, for a rage too wild for my throat. And then she begins to list some of the endangered species and says this list is getting longer every year. Giant sable antelope, Wyoming toad, grizzly bear, brown bear, bacteria and camel, nile, crocodile, Chinese alligator, Where are you? Musk deer, cheetah, chinchella, Asian elephant, African elephant, desert tortoise, crested ibis, mountain zebra, Mexican bobcat, ivory-billed woodpecker, Indus river dolphin.

We reenact Noah's ancient drama, but in reverse like a film running backwards, the animals exiting, ferret, gorilla, jaguar, your tracks are growing fainter. Wait, wait, this is a hard time. Don't leave us alone in a world we have wrecked. So it's from the sadness and the love that we begin to try to sense, okay, how do we make a step? And there's something that I feel is really, I'm just kind of to add in here, which is we want to feel like, well, I can see that it's possible that we can save our earth. We want to feel more certain of it to make a step. It's like it's very easy to kind of feel like resigning. And the truth is we don't know. We just don't know. And I like the way Wendell Berry puts it. He says, we don't have a right to ask whether

whether we're going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is, what's the right thing to do? What does this earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it? So we can only make a step. Thomas Merton puts it this way. He says, do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work may be apparently worthless

and even achieve no results at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you. you expect as you get used to this idea you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value the rightness the truth of the work itself all we can do is care and take a step and then we're being true to our hearts because we really don't know we just don't know so we start reflecting on it and I think probably most everyone listening has reflected in some ways. So what is the earth asking for me in my own life? And there's many different ways that we can try to sense our own carbon footprint. And there's

different ways we can watch how we're living and educate ourselves and speak aloud our with each other, our experience of what's happening to this earth, the feelings of loss, the feelings of love. There's a lot in, we can do individually. and we need to focus on systemic change. It's bigger. It's a collective process where we need our institutions to shift their policies away from this perpetual growth economy,

this idea that we're always supposed to be consuming and producing more, and move it towards what's the real meaning of well-being. How do we impact the policies that really govern the production and consumption of fossil fuel? How do we affect the dissemination of information that informs an awaken so people really know? So these are larger questions.

But I think the thing I want to most emphasize is that the only real energy that will get us going is responding collectively. I've been fortunate to work over these last months with a group of Buddhist teachers that are getting more and more involved with. How do you really engage in these last months with a group of Buddhist teachers that are getting more and more involved with? really engage this practice of ours, of deepening attention and have it serve the healing of our world, and engage communities in it. And it's really my relationships with some of these other teachers and our conversations that has kept my attention and my heart kind of engaged in a certain way.

And there's more and more going on locally and at all different kind of levels that we can plug into. One thing you might consider is there's a series of online conversations that are available. And you can find out about these on the IMCW website, IMCW.org, or also my website, tarabrock.com, both on the homepage, are at One Earth Shunga. And these conversations will be dialogues led by some Buddhist teachers, and the first one will be Jack Cornfield and Ruth King and myself, and then there's groups of three leading the rest of them over the next couple of months. But that's just one thing.

The hope is that if people from different communities listen to these conversations and then get together in their own small collectives, that can create a sense of support and energy. I think really when I was speaking, of the cyber world, the danger is disconnecting from the earth and the hope for each of us is to keep reconnecting and feeling the sense of the preciousness of this living world. You might want to close your eyes for a moment. I'm going to read you from Paul Hawkins. And this is part of the closing for this evening. You might sense both in our personal lives

and as a society, that it's part of our evolutionary predicament to go into trance, the egoic trance where we spent a lot of our time worried about moi, about what I need, I want, where there's defending and aggression, and the societal trance that is creating a kind of wasteland that's really destroying our earth. and that the waking up out of the trance, as we saw with Percival, is just beginning to go back and just take a step and say, what's really happening, and bring our presence to it. This is the Bodhisattva path.

Path of an awakening being is the sense, I belong to this. This is part of my heart and my being, and it's part of my life to take whatever step I can to move towards healing. And we begin to reflect on this incredible mystery of our aliveness. And these are the words of Paul Hawkins. He says, in each of you are one quadrillion cells, 90% of which are not human cells. Your body is a community, and without those other microorganisms, you would perish in ours. Each human cell has 400 billion molecules conducting millions of processes between trillions of atoms.

In a millisecond, our body has undergone ten times more processes than there are stars in the universe. Exactly what Charles Darwin foretold when he said science would discover that each living creature was a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars of heaven. So I have two questions for you. First, can you feel your body? Stop for a moment. Feel your body. One septillion activities going on simultaneously.

And your body does this so well, you are free to ignore it and wonder instead when this talk will end. Second question, who is in charge of your body? body. Who's managing those molecules? Hopefully not a political party. Life is creating the conditions that are conducive to life inside you just as in all of nature. What I want you to imagine is that collectively humanity is evincing a deep innate wisdom in coming together to heal the wounds and insults of the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson once

asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead, the stars come out every night and we watch television. Argo online, I add. This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threatened civilization

has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in 10,000 years. So we begin our response as we sit, be still, and listen. When the animals come to us asking for our help, writes poet Gary Lawless Will we know what they are saying When the plants speak to us in their delicate, beautiful language

Will we be able to answer them? When the planet herself sings to us in our dreams Will we be able to wake ourselves and act? In these final moments, please feel within yourself whatever prayer you have for this living earth, for all beings. Namaste. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or programs offered by

the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.