According to Robert Thurman, PhD, professor emeritus at Columbia University and the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, wisdom is bliss because understanding reality reveals that the world is made of blissful energy, and any perception of misery is a misperception. The Four Noble Truths, which he calls 'four friendly fun facts,' explain that: (1) suffering exists because we are self-centered beings confronting potentially infinite others; (2) the cause of suffering is our misperception of reality; (3) freedom from suffering is possible through understanding our true nature; (4) the path involves both learning and unlearning false convictions about ourselves and the world. This wisdom transforms ordinary life into an opportunity for enlightenment, where even small actions become of absolute importance when we recognize our interconnectedness with all beings.
Wisdom is Bliss with Robert Thurman (1941-2026) (4K Reboot)
Added:If we really understand the world well according to the Buddha, we will realize that the world is made of an energy that is basically blissful and we ourselves are made of that and and any kind of perception that we have of misery or pain is our misperception of what we are perceiving. And um and therefore we have a saying in English, ignorance is bliss.
meaning that we're sort of scared of the nature of what reality might be. It might be bad. So, it's better not to know what it is and sort of get in a zone where it seems not too bad around us. And the statement wisdom is bliss is directly contradicting that and saying that the more reality we know, the happier we will be.
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>> [music] >> Hello and welcome. I'm Emmy Vades, co-host with Jeffrey Michionlo. My guest today is Robert Thurman, who is a professor emmeritus at Colombia University, where he taught Indo-Tibetan Buddhist studies for 50 years. He is a leading worldwide lecturer on Tibetan Buddhism, a skilled translator of Tibetan Sanskrit Buddhist literature and passionate activist for the plight of the Tibetan people. He was a Tibetan Buddhist monk for a short time and then became a Tibetan Buddhist lay teacher.
He is a Padma Shri honore from the president of India for bringing back Indian Buddhist literature that had gotten lost since the 12th century.
He is a close friend of his holiness the Daly Lama and has been for the past 50 years.
He is co-founder and president of Tibet House US Menla, a cultural center in service of his holiness the Daly Lama and the Tibetan people. He is host of the Bob Thurman podcast Buddhas Have More Fun. He is father of five and grandfather of six children. He is the father of the actress Uma Thurman and grandfather of the actress Maya Hawk. He is greatgrandfather to secret and Gaia who are not yet famous. He is author of many books including why the Daly Lama matters his act of truth as a solution for China, Tibet and the whole world and infinite life awakening to bliss within.
He is co-author of Man of Peace, the illustrated life story of the Daly Lama of Tibet and Love Your Enemies: How to Break the Anger Habit and Be a Whole Lot Happier.
His most recent book is Wisdom is Bliss, Four Friendly Fun Facts That Can Change Your Life, which is a topic of our conversation today. Bob is located in the New York City area. Now I'll switch over to the internet video.
Welcome Bob. It is such a joy to have you with me today.
>> Thank you Emma. I'm very happy to meet you too.
>> With your latest book, you describe that wisdom is bliss. How does Buddhism help us access wisdom?
Well, it kind of a it's a learning process, but which involves also an unlearning process.
So, the thing is wisdom is the opposite of delusion or what I like to call misnowledge.
That is to say, a kind of we think we know something and it's for sure, you know, but we're actually wrong. And I love the word misnowledge which actually exists in the English dictionary but it's not a very it's a sort of a little bit archaic word. We we use misunderstanding and misperception.
We have those terms are fairly common but misnowledge is not common and to misnow. I really like that because it means we we really think we know it but it's it's a mistake actually. And uh so a lot of our culture and our sort of perceptual habits and thinking habits from Buddhist psychological point of view are mistaken.
For example, we think that um and even western science would agree with that.
For example, I think this tabletop is solid wood and my hand is solid hand and there would be no way my hand would ever fall through the tabletop. But uh scientists will tell me the tabletop is made of atoms and the atoms are mostly empty space and there's a nucleus and electron that runs around it and it looks like a it looks like a they say the nucleus is like a is like a golf ball on home plate and the electron is running around in the bleachers of a big football stadium.
So it's mostly empty space. And so science tells me the way I perceive the wood is incorrect actually according to their higher instrumentation. But that's just the way my senses are programmed to perceive it. And um so that's kind of where I misnow.
It's like sort of absolutely the tabletop. There's no question. And I think well science is in some other zone and they say that's more real than this.
uh and I don't really and we leave it at that you know so to speak but Buddhism doesn't leave it at that Buddha as a scientist as an explorer of reality of the mind and of and of matter for that matter like a physicist he pursued the nature of things and he discovered the relationality he discovered relativity you could say and [snorts] he discovered that the the only absolute is the relativity which sounds kind of contradictory but if we if you think about People who believe in an omnipotent God who's absolute and yet relates to the world by creating it.
They're sort of using the word absolute and relative which are opposites in a confusing way. Not exactly strictly logical way. So the point is if you pursue with scientific and philosophic logic you come up with the idea that there is no such thing as an absolute that could be relative to any relational thing or relevant to any relational thing. [snorts] So therefore the absolute thing is the relativity of everything and um and that sort of understanding of the world and the with the preposterous claim that the human being is capable of understanding that that's called wisdom you know and um and then if we what we if we really understand the world well according to the Buddha we will realize that the world is made of an energy that is basically blissful and we ourselves are made of that and and any kind of perception that we have of misery or pain is our misperception of what we are perceiving and um and therefore we have a saying in English ignorance is bliss meaning that we're sort of scared of the nature of what reality might be it might be bad so it's better not to know what it is and sort of get in a zone where it seems not too bad around us. And the statement wisdom is bliss is directly contradicting that and saying that the more reality we know the happier we will be because that was what Buddha taught his students and the the huge tradition which is thought of as a religious tradition. It's kind of more an educational scientific tradition that wants people to know what their own reality really is because then they'll be happy.
>> Then what would you describe or how would you define what wisdom is?
>> Well, wisdom is a knowing of what you really are, of what reality really is.
For example, uh I'm alive supposedly and um also I don't feel particularly bad right now.
And so I have a feeling of well-being within me and I have a life force within me. And in a way you could call it a health force.
One reason I have that is that the cells in my body kind of like each other.
They're happy to connect to one another.
You know, they transmit fluids. They transmit nerve impulses. They they send impulses. So I can wiggle my fingers or whatever I can do. And so so in other words, the whole reality of me functions well in in a reasonable environment. And if I knew the deeper reality, the actual force of life itself is this infinite energy that is ready to um fulfill any need actually. But if I don't think that and I run down and I say, "Oh, well maybe I won't get food tomorrow. I better eat a lot of food today. Then I could make myself sick by putting my body into imbalance by paranoidly eating everything thinking that I'll only get to eat today or something. In other words, if I get mistaken ideas about what I am, I would end up harming myself while trying to somehow prevent the negative thing. Now, now Buddha's argument was or Buddha's discovery was that if you deeply know what you really are, you would sort of realize you are God really. But and everybody else also is really. And the time when you sort of most know it is when you're not completely convinced to think of whatever you see with your five senses is the real thing, but you are just completely open like an open space.
And the time when that normally happens to people is when they sleep fold into deep sleep unconsciously and then they fit into something called what what is called clear light. the kind of that's the infinite love energy of the universe and um and but you can in a way you can't really experience it as an object because you're made of it. So if you're God, you can't see God as a separate thing. In other words, so some sort of rigid dualistic theologians of monotheism like some Protestant theologians for example or some Muslim ones, they would say that's a heresy of a pantheistic heresy thinking that God is everything.
You know, rather than God is something outside the universe, completely absolute and not relative and yet somehow relate creates it out of nothing. All a bunch of completely common sensewise meaningless things because they're using words in the opposite sense of what they mean because absolute means not relative. So an absolute thing if there were such a thing couldn't relate to any relative thing. So it would be irrelevant to the relative thing or if once it related it would be a relative thing if you follow me. So that's that's a famous Buddhist concept of emptiness or discovery you could say of emptiness which some people only think is a discovery like what reality is is open space but that's not the case because emptiness only means that all the relative things are empty of anything separate from their interconnection.
So that means in a way the discovery of emptiness is that we are completely relational beings. So the other thing that wisdom is we go back to your question on wisdom is if you really know wisdom what you know is that how you relate to relative things is kind of the most amazing thing you can possibly do.
And when you're relating to other sensitive beings then you never want to cause them any pain or harm. You only want them to feel good. So that's called love to wash the beloved to feel good to be happy. And it's called compassion which means the unwillingness to the unbear feeling that others suffering is unbearable to you equal to your own suffering or you never want anybody else to suffer. You know that's compassion.
So love and compassion are like two sides of the same coin. Yeah.
And so wisdom becomes love and compassion when it's complete. Which means to say that you completely settle in, if you will, with all of that kind of energy that people save for sort of absolute life and death things. You know what we could we would say life and death thing. They settle in for the next motion I will make with my hand could be worse. I could jerk it in some unpleasant way or I could move it smoothly and that's like an absolute accomplishment to move it nicely and smoothly to say something nice in a good tone of voice to say something understandable so that another person is happy that they can understand it you know etc. In other words those little things become of absolute importance even though they're relative things.
Yes. So there's a wonderful I want I just put in the in the class I was doing recently a famous work by someone called Shanti Deva. He said whenever anybody in any time in the infinite future even in other lives ever asked him where's the road where could I where where could I where's the bathroom where's the kitchen where's the whatever I will never point with one finger it's over there.
I will only use my whole hand like when you invite an honored guest to enter, you know, or to sit down somewhere or something, you know, like welcome them.
I will only direct them in the direction they need to go by by using my whole hand like you would invite a guest in a very courteous way. So, I love that because it's a show it's a shows of mindfulness or conscientiousness that when you point with one finger, the body language is saying to the person, "Well, you don't know where to go, but I do." And you're kind of bossing them.
You know, the the one the raising the digit finger, the the index finger is like that's the story, you know, like when speakers are trying to be authoritative, they go, "This is it."
You know, this is the point. You know, they'll do like that. It's kind of like a symbolic stick, kind of a domination thing. But when you use your hand like this and you invite someone, you're being their servant and you're being hospitable to them and you should smile at the same time. Oh, go over there. And even he says he doesn't say that there but in his commentary he says and I will think well now I'm offering them uh guiding them toward the road they want to go on or the kitchen or wherever they want to go and I'm thinking someday in the future I will guide them toward wisdom and bliss and freedom and enlightenment you know and awakening you know so they they will they it's I think it's I love that you know personally it's such a small thing you know instead of just pointing you kind of offer and you invite someone that's the type of thing that comes from wisdom >> being very aware of all of your overt and even subtle actions >> something like that well that that's part of it yes being mindful of the smallest thing as being could be worse or could be better and and you know one Zen master famous one in San Francisco who started a big center there uh passed away years ago decades ago. But um he made a statement I always loved. He said, "Oh, well, of course everything is perfect." He said, "If you really know, and there's always a little room for improvement."
[laughter] But that's sort of the everything is perfect is the wisdom. And then there's a little room for improvement. That's the compassion, you know, that's the love, you know, make it just a little better if possible, you know, like just tweak the temperature just a little to make it more comfortable. for the other person sort of thing. So that I just love that you know because you know the thing about absolute right you know absolutely we say you know absolute and when we lose our temper then we're absolutely going to going to get that enemy and when we which can be fatal you know can be lethal [snorts] and like Mr. Putin, he wants absolutely to be have a big empire in the name of the zor. He wants to be the new zor. He thinks some kind of weird empire is good. And u uh which is crazy. You know, my wife was just saying as we were seeing the news, uh she was watching after lunch a little CNN and they were talking about the one year c this is the one year of the invasion of the Ukraine. [clears throat] And one man with his absolutist delusion has caused the death of maybe hundreds of thousands of people already for no good reason at all. They there's Ukrainians married to Russians all over both Russia and Ukraine and there are a different people. They've been trying to assert their cultural difference and language difference and so on and territorial difference since the time of the Zars actually for a really long time. And um so he's just KGB guy you know he wants to just insist that and he's crazy and the structure of the society is such that this one person's delusion that that he has absolute need to do something at the cost of others life and death u can cause such destruction it's really you know he should really have a council of grandmothers like the old along Indians did who would say no no no Vlad you go learn to play hockey or something or get in the ring and do some boxing, you know, and you can try to defeat your enemy that way, but you are not allowed to kill all these people for no reason.
Really silly, you know.
So, so that this this sort of squeezing the absolutes out of the relative makes for good relationships. Put it that way.
Mhm. You mentioned that wisdom is essentially knowing that we are God.
Yet in Buddhism there are many gods. So what is your understanding then? If we are God, are we then gods or how would you describe that? Well, you know, I I want I wanted to say that the idea of the sort of ultimate goodness of the universe, you know, for example, in the gospel of John, he says God is love. You know, God is love, God's Christ. But then he also says God is just simply love like a giant love force. So Buddha's discovery of Nirvana is that the universe is one giant ocean of love energy because meaning that the energy is infinite. The universe is infinite and the energy it's made of energy. Doesn't even need atoms, right? It doesn't need mass. It's just energy. And that energy is there to be drawn on inexhaustibly by any entity within made of which it may have formed itself into which feels it's depleted in some way. So in other words, it's like everybody is loved. Everything they need is around them. When they feel that that's not the case, then they might try to hoard things or take them away from other people or etc. And then they'll create stress and conflict. So this idea that the default reality is a planitude is a blissfulness is a is a is a good thing then leads people to flourish basically. So if you take God as love, okay, then love is God.
Then you don't think of it as a person who has a who's related to a particular tribe and who has spoken in a certain language which is a scripture of some kind and which is therefore the authority for everything. And those who don't speak that language, they're doomed. You know, you get into all these terrible situations that the human beings have have done. Do you follow? So that's why if you say you know when Christian or Muslim or less so Judeaic but Abrahamic mystics and even to some extent Hindu mystics have said oh I am the loving force of all the gods myself too and so are you but then people don't like that and they they in the in the west they would like burn them at the stake or something you know they would think that they were deluded by a demon or something you know because they want to say that God is only this one place over here and he stands behind the high priest and the church or the synagogue or the temple or whatever it is and and he he and in for for much of our history he as a male and has also expressed himself through the king and the king wants us to be scared of the of the neighbor so that we then pay the king to protect us and even he with his police force but the word for a policeman in ancient Sanskrit is raja purusha that means a king's person. He's there he's hired to protect us from each other even. So his livelihood and his authority and power comes from convincing us that reality is bad and dangerous and we need protection and then we s and so they basically frighten us you know and we grow up in cultures like that eastern cultures also in Buddhas Indian culture was like that too the gods were frightening the vic gods you know in Buddha's time you know from the what are called the vdas and you had to do rituals you offer sacrifices to them to keep them off your neck you and and he said no they are just very fortunate beings who at one time in the infinite past they've been human humans have been them and they've been animals also they've also been in hellish type of situations very negative types currently they're very powerful and whatever but no one of them is the absolute boss they're still relational beings and um and it's good to have them on your side but on the other hand they cannot help you too well to understand what you are and what the world is and the only person who can do that is you yourself and however teachers who have themselves understood what it is can help you with like with a course. It's very but you don't take a course in in some language or some topic and the just by going and signing up with the teacher the teacher implants their full knowledge of the course in you. No, you have to learn it yourself. But teacher can help you with the method, you know. So, so that's the nature of the Buddha's teaching. The Buddha doesn't expect even himself to be just believed and repeated and then he doesn't think he should be indoctrinating people because they have to learn themselves how to see accurately and he can help them do that but ultimately they have to do it. So, you know, have you ever had a moment where whatever it was, a sensual pleasure perhaps or a um intellectual one or an artistic one like a musical thing or something where you just felt all was right with yourself and the world for a short time perhaps?
>> Absolutely. [laughter] >> I hope so.
>> Yes. Well, the idea is that it is our birthright as sensitive human beings to be like that all the time.
And actually once we are like that all the time, we can be so much more effectively helpful to others to help them find their way of doing that.
[snorts] And um you know and then and actually even animals can be because we are lucky to have become human. We were animals in the past. We were also kind of angels and gods in the past. We've all been everything because we've have an infinite past. To say that we first came from nothing or there was some time when things didn't exist is not sensible. They say everything in in the universe is is a is infinite universe is a continuity. So the chicken and egg problem is really well solved. It just went on forever.
An egg. On the other hand, it's not that much fun to be either an egg or a chicken. much more fun to be human and to understand what is a chicken and an egg, you know, and how not to have to be again a chicken and an egg and even to help chickens be reborn someday after their chicken time as a being that can understand the world and go can go to Harvard and [snorts] can then learn how to understand and be a scientist or go study with Buddha and understand the mind as well as reality, you know.
>> Yeah, I love what you're saying. So why do we even come here on earth?
>> Well, there's two answers to that. One of them is that it's our the real reason is that we come as a being that feels alienated from the world.
It has to do with our misnowing the world. We we're ignorant. We think we're in a world that isn't the real world and we don't know what the real world is. So that's the that's the easiest way of explaining it. And the ultimate way of explaining it is is that it's not really happening at all anyway. So we're not actually even here in the way we think we are. And so there's sort of two ways of answering that depending on what we're look if we're looking for the ultimate reality, the deepest or you could say the deepest reality of us being here. And we really look for ourselves, we will fail to find ourselves.
And uh you know when we don't look for ourselves, we'll experience ourselves as being here. But when we really look to pin down what exactly are we are, we will we will have the experience like the quantum physicists did when they in the 1920s when they really got more and more magnification and sharper ways of of viewing things using mathematics and machinery and they realized that you can't pin down even one tiny little particle and that when you get down to a certain level of of magnification, you interfere with what you're looking at so you don't you can never find a particle actually you know with the uncertainty principle that also there's no absolutely objective anything okay so and that's the deepest level and but when we but on the other hand that's not we're not that doesn't mean we're nothing that doesn't mean we found nothing just mean we didn't find what we were looking for but in that space of not finding a particular thing we want to pick out we're still there and that still being there is this sort of fact of our being one with the love force of the universe with and which which I mentioned as God because some westerners think God is love you know but really it's not a particular person but all the more powerful people are the or beings are beings that are sort of more open to being more of that energy that's all than than a human or less of that energy than less than human you know like a like you know an animal that has a doesn't have like um the brain that we do with all of its complicated ability to mirror and to domesticate the world um but just knows enough to chase its food and to run away from its consumers you know with a dog eat dog vision of the animal kingdom you know one eating another they say is what it's called [snorts] the misery of the less than human kingdom and um the human is like can live like that many of them do. But we also can stop and think about what we're doing and we can do something that the animal mammals do more than other animals.
Reptiles do less and all animals do to some extent. They do they are able to identify with their own young for example but their range of identifying with otherness is very limited. Whereas we can identify with the universe you know by broadening our perspective and by seeing through some narrow selfidentity we can learn to identify you know like people in love identify with one another parents identify with the child identifies with the parents up to a point people identify on teams with each other even in war based on anger they all identify with their platoon and so on you know people identify their nation their religion their gender All these these these levels of identification we are capable of because we are beings who imagine our way through life, you know, and we've imagined up these amazing cultures and symbolic systems and all these things, but then we've kind of trapped our imagination particular ones and we think ours is the only realistic one and the others are no good. We have fights then and so on. So but a but what what a Buddha is defined as is a being that has come to be able to expand to be equally aware of all this stuff which is a little bit inconceivable to us you know but on the other hand when you're not in love it's inconceivable to you that you could be so in love with someone that you're practically willing to give your life to that being that seem like could not win I'm not going to do that we see somebody else's baby or we see some we're not going to But then when we really fall in love, we could be capable of that, right? But that's because of our flexibility of imagination. That's that's our good fortune as humans, you know, from the Buddhist biological science point of view. You know, the karma theory, famous karma theory in Buddhism is actually a Darwinian type theory explaining biology. It's not a mystical thing at all but explains it explains that how our mind and body works together how how we shape ourselves and of course it's predicated on the principle of continuity that we our mind is something more subtle than our physical body and therefore the mind or could be at the very subtle level we could call the mind our spirit and then that spirit would have a continuity beyond death is logical like and that it had a continuity from before birth also is logical. So the soul has come from somewhere goes somewhere and to via different embodiment tends to like embodiment in a [snorts] way. Why do we like embodiment even? Because we are social and because we realize there are other beings in the world. And if it was just mind to mind with no bodies, you couldn't shake hands. You couldn't connect. You wouldn't even perceive the other person.
You wouldn't have senses and an inside and an outside and thing. So in a way this the human body is like a miracle.
of potentially positive interaction compared to other animals. They they're big, you know, like a crocodile. How can they relate? Well, they can eat [laughter] you or be eaten by you, you know, but they can't really dance with you very well effectively.
Mhm.
You mentioned karma and in your book you talk about how karma can be related to what kind of deeds you have done in previous lifetimes that come with you in other subsequent lifetimes.
>> Right? And like my favorite example of how we got to be human from having been animals. Although some people come from having been gods or angels from better than human in some respects. The human is considered very advantaged not only than animals but even than deities because deities are smarter than us and more powerful and they have access to more energy richch uh levels of of the environ of environment. But they then become very complacent and they sort of even think they might stay eternally like that you know like we can become complacent think I'll live to 90 so I can relax you know and whereas we are much more vulnerable and we're aware of the danger of dying and so on. So this gives us a motive to use our life meaningfully in a certain very valuable way. If we if we if we get begin to open up our imagination to the opportunity of of positive development that we're capable of of achieving and deities also know that they're smarter than us but and they they can interact with us if they feel like it or if we're but but um they tend to be complacent about developing themselves and they begin to become kind of proud and arrogant.
Actually there's a wonderful verse about some god who has an amazing tiara like jewels crown and it says bless you by the joy that the gods experience when they bow to the foot of the Buddha and see the reflection of their own jewel ornaments in his toenails [gasps] they you know because in other words they feel a little humble at someone who's not just of a certain size like they are and different from things around them and they're huge of course compared to humans but a Buddha is a being who although they might seem to be located in a particular body their real mind is in all bodies do you know what I mean there so like if there if you were a Buddha you would feel you're me talking to you at the same time as you're you listening to me or vice versa if I was a Buddha so and besides all the other people who might be listening to us or even in the future the people who might listen to us. So it's this kind of amazing thing that that you know sometimes people have a vision like that you know that different cultures allow more or less uh that easily you know like there was there's a famous story about Japanese people that they were barred from international crew competition rowing you know where you have eightman crew and a and a cockman you know who tells them when to pull you know and steers Well, they almost defeated the British crew in a sort of 1930s competition as they know they wanted to do all the western things before the war, but then and they just lost to sort of I guess the best Oxford or Cambridge team by like a you know like a head like this much. But then after that, two of their crew members died of brain hemorrhages because they were so gung-ho in the group that they sort of disregarded the limits of their physiology and the pressure was too much and they and two died on an eight-man team. So then these guys are too gung-ho. We can't have them. We don't want people dying and thing. And I I I I was told that story.
I like the story though and I think it's correct in the sense that their culture you know is much more what you might call the social ego is stronger than the sort of individual ego although they very much have an individual ego as well but but the social ego is very very strong what you might call the social self you know social eye >> we're not advocating that people push themselves beyond their their limits necessarily what you're saying though is that if we were fully the awakened Buddhas, we had recognized that we are all one and we're not separate.
>> That's right. Actually, they're even so preposterous in their worldview from our materialistic point of view. I'm saying preposterous a little bit reflexively, but they're so preposterous that they think we would actually be capable of being multiply embodied according to the need of others. That is to say, what they call the body of emanation. They they sort of have an analysis of what a Buddha is a strange being which is neither human nor god only but can manifest in many embodiment and some of the gods can do that too they believe but a Buddha is unlimited in their ability to respond to the needs of beings by manifesting infinite would sort of be like if you had the idea okay say Christ is God son of God but if since God is omnipotent then he could be a thousand Christs or a million Christs if people needed them would is the hood of a Buddhist idea like that because by being everything and being aware of all the need of all beings anywhere anybody is suffering then you could embody out of the pure energy you could like like Neo remember that's why I love the matrix movie remember Neo in the matrix he can become many Neos to when it's necessary and then actually even the bad guy got the ability to do that and thought he could overwhelm Neo remember the end of the third one and then he put his fist into Neo in their matrix battle that they had and then Neo started turning into him and all the multiple Neos. So that then he was h laughing away Agent Smith. Everybody was going to become an evil Agent Smith and then to his horror all the agent Smith turned into Neos remember so they were all one but then the good one became stronger than the bad one. So I I love that but but generally the idea that someone could be multiple bodies already that that sci-fi kind of idea you know gives a little jolt to the imagination imagine you I mean for example a juggler can move juggle different things with the two hands which I couldn't do right so they're sort of aware of the indiv the independent operating of the hands you know so the idea is that there's a form of a being who could operate different bodies like a juggler operates at hands in a different way, you know, they because they've developed this sort of vast much more vast awareness and um and that as I say is preposterous to a materialist although I never use the word supernatural I only use the word supernormal for whatever is a reigning normality you know which in materialism is there the mind has no such power in fact even materialism says the mind has no the mind is nothing actually it's just it's an illusion that the brain creates that we are some sort of we have some sort of subtle energy level of awareness that is a continuum that that constitutes our personality or something or our subjectivity and that that's that's an illusion and we're just really biological robots and our sense of having a mind or a spirit is a epipenomenon.
It's a secondary an incidental phenomenon of having a brain, you know, right? That's that's what we we're taught is reality. We're supposed to believe in because we're supposed to believe that actually we're nothing.
And in unfortunately there are people who consider themselves Buddhists who have misunderstood emptiness to mean that they think it's the same as nothingness and therefore we are we're nothing. The Buddha predisvered that.
That's all they think. So materialism wins in their mind as they sit there meditating. Do you know and they and they of course they're quite wrong.
absolutely wrong. Even you could even say and I you know I use something I can say one thing to try to I know I'm maybe some people are think I'm being complicated. I'm trying not to be. But there's one simple thing. For example, every night we fall asleep, right?
When we fall asleep, we're in the dark and we want to we put ear muffs on if there's noise and we want to so we don't want any sensory input and and it's dark and then we lose consciousness. We feel safe enough in wherever our room is, whatever usually and we and we lose consciousness. So we might be thinking that somehow in a way that when I fall asleep I'm having an experience of nothing and that's what we would say being unconscious is you're not conscious of anything. So anyway, you could call that conscious of nothing.
And I think people feel that because they lose consciousness at night when they sleep, that's what's going to happen when they die. They're going to do that, but they're going to stay without a dream and without waking. They think, but then they have the awkward problem that so far every night I did have a dream, which I remember some some and some I do and some I don't. And then I do wake up again. So obviously I didn't become nothing or there's no place of nothing that possessed me. You could say well I was unconscious and not only that I had no sense of time of being unconscious. So that's really annoying when you're especially tired because you're falling asleep and then the alarm rings or something you have to get up you know and there was no sense of being long time restfully asleep.
So by that fact that I haven't disappeared and by the secondary fact that also usually in the morning I feel better. I'm ready to tackle something I was really sick of the night before.
Uh some energy has come to me from somewhere. So I've been in some place accessible to energy.
Okay? And you can't say it's just the food because I already ate the food when I was awake but I was still tired. I was digesting lots of food. I was still tired. I was breathing. I was still tired. I keep breathing. Okay. So, I could take in oxygen. Well, even though I'm unconscious. So, that's even a proof I I didn't I didn't enter nothing. But I'm somewhere where I'm in some sort of environment that has energy which my body absorbs.
And that's an indirect proof of what we call the clear light which is the or the love or the the transparency infinite energy nature of life the life force surrounding us all you know and that's why I said earlier we were we are just God just to be shocking and daring because you know that means we were in the bra we were in the embrace of God which is inexhaustible love meaning some energy that wanted to replenish wherever we were depleted, whatever cell, whatever thought, whatever, you know, brain plaque or whatever we had, you know, it's like refresh us, you know. So that's really interesting. So in that light then when we do actually die, then you connect that with all the near-death experiences, you know, what they call even some of them are clinically post death. There's a few of those people who were actually zipped up in a bag and then they sort of trying to punch their way out, you know, and revived [snorts] which they shouldn't have been able to do. They should have had damage and they didn't. And u you connect that and then you begin to realize that life is more complicated than materialism and that it might be beginningless and endless which Buddha says it is. He claimed to have awoken to that and therefore in a way there's no death because there's only change of costume you know change of embodiment. Mhm. Mhm.
When people hear you mention the term God, from a Buddhist perspective, there isn't really an omnisient God or a human type figure who is the creator or the one who is pulling all the strings, but yet at a deeper level, I suspect you might have more to share about that.
>> Yeah. Well, that's a really interesting thing. You know a lot of people who are Buddhists who are trying to get away from God as what they understand from Christianity more more from because the God in Christianity seems to be a bit more punitive maybe but the Judeo and Islamic so the Abrahamic God is portrayed as pretty rough and tough.
So they're trying to get away from that.
And of course, philosophically and scientifically, it is perfectly sensible for them to reject that there's any such thing as an absolute being that is relevant to relative beings if they're going to really fit the definition of absolute. So, so Buddha didn't believe there's an omnipotent being in the world, but omniscience is possible depending on how we understand omniscience. Like we use the word omnivore, right? There was a popular book called The Omnivore's Dilemma. And the omnivore didn't mean someone had already eaten everything in the universe. It just mean they were ready to eat whatever. So you can understand omniscient as capable of knowing anything that they turn their attention to. And they consider one definition of Buddha Buddhahood is that you do become omnisient. But nobody becomes omnipotent because every kind because the energy is this vastly distributed over everything else. So there's you know the the if the universe deepest level is an infinite energy a bed of infinite energy which is transparent and therefore invisible but infinitely present. sort of like dark matter and energy which the physicists nowadays to save their standard model they are positing but of course they didn't see it but they posit so they haven't actually discovered it but they just posit it theorize it meaning and they say 97% of the volume of the universe is dark is something they haven't seen yet which pretty discouraging after all this centuries of work [laughter] and the Buddha would say it's 100% but it's transparent it's not arc and still transparent means invisible and especially if you're also made of this transparent energy. You it's not an object to you. You know, you're you're seeing mechanism and the objects that you might see are all equally transparent. So you there's no there's no grabbing it outside yourself as an object. So, so that u that reality is of in has infinite power and it is in a way why things can be created even out of confusion.
But but it doesn't do once it's infinite it doesn't have any desire of its own to manifest anything because everything's already fully done as far as it goes.
And you know we we don't want to assign therefore a separated consciousness to it because it is everything right. So it's all embracing. So if you think of God as really everything you know like they say God made the universe as montheist says God made it out of nothing because they want to say God is great but nothing else is really even relevant. So therefore somehow the goal for a sentient human the blessing for a sentient human they and in Abrahamics they restrict animals from having that but in Hindu monotheisms they allow the animals to be a part of it but anyway and abitzer wouldn't accept Christianity's theorem that there's the animals have no soul they all do however um uh everyone is equally of that same energy in other words is the idea and so the many gods and the and the different gods are are some beings that have gotten more and more open to it and therefore can channel more of it and that gives them greater strength and power you know but no but omnipotence you can't have omnip if you are a manifestation of universal power which at the level of its deepest level everything is already perfectly perfect there's nothing to do and therefore you wouldn't do anything as in you wouldn't you wouldn't need to do a thing except kept your sensitivity feeling any being or any being in there who was totally part of it too same as you but doesn't know it and therefore is stressing out you would feel that's unbearable because you'll be feeling that as they feel it.
So then you would manifest whatever it takes to help them relax basically and be part of this infinite goodness and love and luminosity and so on. you know, crystalline uh bliss. And so then then therefore wisdom is bliss sort of comes comes around to that and ignorance is suffering and ignorance causes suffering.
Then they then of course there becomes a question uh because it may be and this is why Buddhism then can say it is scientific and anti-dogmatic and the question is well if this is the case how come there ever did originate any sort of ignorance and suffering where did that come from and the answer to that is it never did originate from anything else it's beginningless as also it's a way of configuring in in in an illusory way. This absolutely fabulous situation of infinite bliss and uh and it sort of endlessly individual beings caught in that can manifest to become can escape from it. And but that's a kind and since they're infinite, they are infinite and the Buddhas are infinite. It's just an endless process something like that. And when you're a Buddha, you don't mind even the process at the deepest level, but you do mind that others mind. That's all. and you and you're endlessly shoveling them like there's for example there's a wonderful vision in a particular sutra called karand via the jewel case array scripture where the bodhicattvaeshwara who's sort of like the Buddhist Jesus but of many bodies though not just one body and one culture many many bodies otherwise he's like a savior figure messiah messianic figure and he comes to visit the Buddha in the historical time and every and his audience you know Buddha's teaching some people and suddenly he shows up in a golden light aura and they say well where why is there a golden light oh because the compassion bodhisattva comes oh and where have you been Buddha asks him and he says oh I was just down in hell emptying a few diabolical cauldrons of the soul bodies the hell bodies of like myriad beings beings, millions of beings, and I tractor beamed them. I I wept tears from my thousand eyes, which then cooled down the fires of the of the flaming iron land of hell, the molten iron land of hell. And then I protractor beamed all these souls out of out of the cauldrons they were boiling in and without go passing out, but just endlessly feeling that pain. and I sold them in the in in the in lotuses in the pure land. And then and then he mentioned that the the cooks who were the little demonic goblins who were doing the work of boiling them were mad and they went to the Yama, the king of the dead and Yama and they said, "Yama, some weirdo has come down here and shut off our furnaces." And he said, "Oh, that's just going to be have a look at Deshwara." Yes, he will empty hell of a certain number of zillion trillion beings, but there'll be a whole new supply. Don't worry. [laughter] And it's quite a sweet kind of idea. And uh and uh it uh it means I was just saying earlier to my group when because the the hell thing is something that Buddhists would agree with Christians about but they would never agree that any powerful deity dooms people there because of some sort of deficiency of worldview or something. They would never do that. It's just that if you go the dark side you become more and more paranoid. You make a bigger and bigger boundary between yourself and others to defend yourself or you become preemptively more and more aggressive like a demon and then you get more and more compressed and you basically create a situation of extreme deprivation, loneliness and compression for yourself which is like a hellish state. I mean not just a human being with psychological help but I mean really you just become that bad mood an incarnation of that bad of that super bad mood and that's very important because they actually folklorists you know there's kind of literary people who look at folklore folklorists which source by the way thousand1 nights and esops fables they source that in India actually and a lot of Chinese fables India was because India was like the most populated ated most wealthy agricultural place in Eurasia in the old days and we don't know what happened in the Americas but in those times but really we really don't know but but we know Eurasia right and so India was it was that so a lot of the ocean of stories what they called a lot of them come from Indian works but anyway around the time that the Buddha and Confucious and the the Hebrew uh rabbis who collected the pentatuk you know the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament around 500 BCE before the common era.
All the same thing happens in all the Eurasian cultures. And um that was kind of a time when they it became the idea that that the individual could relate directly to a god in the monotheistic version or in the non-monotheistic version in the in the sort of universe positive love universe version beyond personality. the individual could come to a full awareness of that and unite with that mystically you know like which Indian which was more prominent in India although they had several monotheisms there also uh all happened around the same time. So in other words, it sort of happened that the indivi that this feeling of individualism which before that was pretty much resided in the kings, you know, the the chief warriors, the Hector's, the Achilles, you know, of the world of all the world, tribal city state at maximum or tribal cultures. And they were the they could be individual, but everybody else had to obey orders, you know, we're just subordinates, you know. Uh so then suddenly every individual could reach God you know in the monotheist version or and be blessed by God. Every individual could could find nirana.
And so when that happened that there was a individual opportunity in life to be very very fulfilled broadly speaking the danger of the individual become very very worse condition than even a human or even an animal condition became sort of a possibility. In other words sort of once you get a more infinite broader worldview anything is possible sort of thing if you follow me. So then they locate the development of the concept of hell from that time before that you know the death of there was maybe a happy hunting ground for the elite a kind of happy hunting ground the warrior or the king but there was the the sort of regular people got recycled through the soil and they became food you know for the next generation sort of thing so it wasn't the idea of individual reincarnation or recycling if you follow me but once the individual can become huge divine or beyond divine even enlightened in the deeper in the most radical form of that then the danger of the individual becoming deeply self-destroyed is very or even someone else telling you know dooming them to that then the then the lesser versions become uh emerges you know but it's very but it is a very important thing in other words to develop a spiritual discipline not only the lure of the positive opportunity of nirvana and bliss but also the awareness of danger is very very critical like that's why remember I mentioned to you the other day about my fondness for your fellow citizen of Minneapolis of the prairie home companion guy and the thing in Lake Oiggon where they say it could be worse and I consider that a very very important thing for a person to be aware of ethically.
in being able to control their seemingly irresistible impulses toward hatred or toward loss or toward toward various kinds of stupidities. Uh is that there's never a point where well it can't get any worse than this so I can just go crazy you know in other words it can always be worse. So that's a very helpful thing to develop a strong self-restraint about negative spiritual habits is is that so so both the both the opportunity the [snorts] fabulous opportunity of what we can evolve to become in our life therefore the meaningfulness of our life and the little bit the danger of how bad it can become and that badness not ending in mere death going on in further more worse worse off situations in life.
That's really very important. I think it helps give us a strong energy and helps us get free of what of the materialist circuit breaker spiritual circuit breaker which I call where you know you've had many temper tantrums. It always turns out to have bad results maybe a little superficial victory but then by screaming at somebody but then long-term negative and very bad for your personal health. Even our doctors will tell us um you know the 45 year old male heart attack coming from having a really violent temper and um circulatory arterosclerosis and so on and [snorts] uh so um uh but there's that point the circuit breaker is where well I'm restraining my temper and trying to deal with this difficult situation in a more practical effective way but then at a certain point click the circle circuit breaker goes off and I can't resist my powerful impulse and I say and what do we say we say oh what the heck and we use hell or heck in a light way as if you know it was meaningless because the materialist has a has this security of feeling that even if I die I just am anesthetized in nothingness because they haven't understood there is no nothing there's no such place to go you my favorite argument against materialism.
>> What do you think?
>> Well, I think some of those materialists wish that were the case because then they would have to and maybe can justify taking less responsibility for themselves and others in some levels.
>> Well, yes, they we do do that. And materialists will say, I can still be good. I don't have to believe in God or somebody saying something will happen to me because I know that everybody will be equally nothing and there's no real meaning to anything. But as a good existentialist, I can nevertheless choose in the face of meaninglessness and nothingness. I can just choose to be good just for the heck of it.
You know, there's no purpose to it ultimately, but I can choose to do it.
you know, and of guess they can, but clearly the culture is not capable of sacrificing some immediate pleasure and gratification for the long-term survival of even our great grandchildren as a whole. We are not able to do that.
It's because we're not doing it and we're letting the How many people are really involved in ruining the planet to make money?
Is it 10,000 people who really making billions out of oil and gas? There couldn't be 100,000. There's not 100,000 billionaires. There's not even 10,000 billionaires. There's might or something. I don't think there no. Now I think there's something like 1500 billionaires worldwide maybe 1,800 or something like that. There used to be 30 or 40 years ago there used to be two or three actually other than governments but now there might be 1,500 or so forth. the the inequality has become so huge. But there's very few people really who are making money out of the current structure and who have lobbied and bribed governments and you know lobbied and done dark money all over the place.
And so they are crippling the future of billions of people and the way the structure is so wrong that they they're capable of doing that. And uh and they're not really enjoying it. I think they the minute they get a few billion they want to go to Mars.
in their in their rocket ship to get away from the people, you know, who they do feel they could do more for, you know, but the minute they do it, they get because it's actually really a stress to have a billion dollars. You realize if you get a billion dollars, then you have to employ like hundreds of people to manage it. You can't manage it all yourself. You don't need it all. You can't possibly even spend it if you spend like a million a minute. and uh and uh because of the structure of interest and payments and things and uh it's it's a burden actually. You know, it's great to have a decent salary, maybe a hundred thousand, a couple hundred thousand or something and you can drive a car and have a house and bring up some children, pay tuition, but uh and taxes, but billions is just a huge problem actually. And then also you're in a culture where you're supposed to just get more.
>> Mhm. which you have no use for.
>> So in addition to the plight we're all facing now with our planet earth and each individual who experiences suffering, is there any purpose to it? Do we need to have suffering in order to grow into more love or is it really not necessary?
>> Well, Buddha would say we do. It's not a matter whether we need or don't need. We do have it. And uh therefore his first uh friendly fun fact was that if we are in the position of being self-centered as a boundared being confronting potentially infinite others where they will sooner or later overwhelm us in spaceime. You know time will overwhelm us with death sickness old age and death. And uh because we're impermanent beings and our bodies are impermanent and um and others will overwhelm us with their needs etc. And there are so many more of them. So as long as we think that's the real reality of things, it's going to not be satisfactory and actually what we have is what we call pleasure or relief or release is always temporary and so therefore we will always be dissatisfied by it. It's called the suffering of change. Pleasure is called the suffering of change. So that is his first friendly fun fact and that's [snorts] a fun fact because it doesn't have to stay that way. If we if we can gather the understanding that we are not radically different from other people and that in some sense we are the same as them and yet we are responsibly responsibly have our own contribution in our relationships to them. So it's not like we're just all mushed together like a soup or something, but we kind of have a sameness and also a lighter kind of difference. Then we can begin to not actually be in an hopeless situation.
And then we can eventually uh really develop a because of the power of the mind we can develop an inner awareness of our own health force, life force, love energy that will enable us to overweigh our empathetic feeling of the suffering of others and even some minor suffering we might bodily have and be pretty cheered up all the time. You know like there's an early sutra of the Buddhas that I love because in it he he is leading a guided meditation through the four friendly fun facts and he mentions about how worldly pleasures are suffering. So he makes when he talks about the first one the truth of suffering what they call and he fact of suffering and he gives a long list of of course he doesn't have to bother with things that are painful because they are suffering everybody knows that but he goes a long list of all the pleasant things pleasant and agreeable things of every five senses and mental sense six sense and shows how they are all temporary so therefore they become unsatisfying and in a way you need more and more of them because you get more used to them and so on. So he shows that then he talks about the cause of that is the misnowing and the lust and hatred and jealousy and pride that arise from the misnowing and um and then he comes to the truth of freedom from suffering of nirvana of of bliss and then he says and um and that's possible if you understand and really remove the cause which is the misunderstanding of you of your own reality and the reality of people and the reality of the rest of the world and you are capable of that understanding.
You have the ability to understand it.
So you can be a Buddha in other words.
And then he says well now the question might arise where is that nirvana?
You know is it somewhere beyond heaven or is it heaven or what is it? And uh he then instead of saying it's heaven or anything he say he gives the same long list that he gave in the truth of suffering of all the pleasant and agreeable things in life. And then he says well what's the difference of the of the the fact of bliss versus the fact of stress. What's the difference? And he says the difference is you no longer have selfish craving in that particular thing. He makes that the root thing rather than the misnowing.
And what why what does the selfish craving do? When you have a pleasure, what what prevents the pleasure? Your mind evaluates it and doesn't think it's as good as it could be.
That doesn't think it's going to last as long as it should. You know, thinks of some other way it would be better. So the craving for more even when you're experiencing something positive strangles your enjoyment of the positive. Whereas if you are an openhearted open-minded being when something pleasant happen it just takes you away and you just give yourself to it. You just let it happen and it's nirvana you know and life basically is that pleasant thing. That's what the life force is. That's what the health force is. It's our inner awareness of the of the of the rightness and the joyfulness of of life.
>> Yeah.
>> Actually, >> and that's the bliss. I was just suggesting that myself having worked in healthcare for many years, I've seen a lot of people suffer. And I've also seen that sometimes when people see others suffering, it seems that they can learn more about how to be more loving >> and compassionate and wise.
>> Right? Well, the great enlightened the great Buddha teacher, the great enlightened teacher known as Jesus of Nazareth, he said a wonderful thing. He said that the meek were going to inherit the earth.
And you know what does that mean?
Actually, what is so fascinating that one discovers is that people who consider themselves elite and powerful tend to feel more helpless than people who are really right up against it and who they don't have time to sit and feel powerless because they've got to get the next meal, they've got to feed the baby, they've got to they've got to stave off the flood or whatever it is. So although they may be in some degree suffering because of want they're not around sitting around feeling powerless. They're powerful to do something about the situation. And whereas the more seemingly powerful people feel the more helpless they feel.
I remember I have a friend who was a powerful media person and who likes who had didn't didn't enjoy his own childhood and you know as a wealthy person could lobby the government and years and years ago tried to lobby the government when they award bandwidth to media companies they he wanted the government the the senators and congressmen and so on to demand that they do such and so much public channels you know and you know n you know per you know local free information things, you know what I mean? In in towns and regions and so forth, like a free PBS sort of things, make them do more of that rather than their own commercial programming only. And enough to make money, but still do more proono things, educational, TV.
And he said when he first started with staffers in the house, they were going, "Oh yeah, that's a great idea. We'll get into that." And then he would talk to actual representative. Well, I don't know. I can try a little but it's not I'm not sure it'll go through and this and that. Then he got to the senators and they were less powerful. And then he got to the cabinet member they were le finally got to the Lincoln bedroom [snorts] you know and then the president why couldn't possibly do that you know that was more helpless than the staffer or you know and unenthusiastic and because of you know needing the media company to not blackmouth them and bring down their poll numbers. You know what I'm saying? the more and more powerful, the more and more helpless you get. So, so, so the meek still inherit the earth means that those who stay simple and have to deal with the immediate issues of life tend to actually not give up and be less depressed and so forth. I mean, they can be fatally depressed in the sense that they can starve to death or be run over by a truck falling asleep in the middle of the street or something because they're so weak, weakened or addicted to alcohol or whatever. So of course they they can it's not like they're lucky [laughter] but actually they they're going to finally make stuff happen you know and the people who get sort of above they get very very weakened and isolated and paranoid about other people and they become less effective you know >> and they can be fearful of losing their power.
>> I mean really like who is the weakest person in the whole Russian Ukraine thing? It's Putin.
It's a hopeless case and he's lashing more and more and making it worse and worse for himself. He's hiding in the cellar of the Kremlin. When his own people come to talk to him, he has them like 40 ft away down the end of a table.
He's completely freaked out and he's the weakest person in the whole setup, you know, and he's causing other people to die. And he feels that. He knows that he's doing that. And he and and he just keeps telling himself, "Yeah, I'm a Marxist. I'm a materialist." and I can always shoot myself and there's no consequence to what I'm doing, so I can kill as much as I like. Oh, yeah. Well, the the patriarch of Christianity talks to me, but I don't really believe that.
And he doesn't even believe it himself because he blesses the war effort. So, he doesn't mind killing all these people. Many of them are Christians. You know what? There's no excuse at all. So, [snorts] so you know that's my, you know, that's put as great gift it could be to the planet now is a scientific one, not religious. It is really helping the scientists and the religious people to realize there's no nothing. There's no way to get out of it. You [snorts] know, we can tell the Christians, for example, who want to be dominionists and own America and have this army be a Christian army and go act like Putin, which is what Putin thinks he's doing. I don't know if you know that Putin hates Lenin and Stalin. He thinks communism prevented Russia from being the empire of the universe. So he pretending he's a big Orthodox guy now and is blessed by the patriarch there which which the patriarch superior is a guy in Istanbul who's the eastern pope you know the arch patriarch what they call his old holiness but that patriarch in Russia pays no attention to what that guy in Istanbul Greek guy who tells him stop it you know you know the Orthodox Eastern Orthodox church has a certain structure but the Russian guy has seceded from that and been making war on everybody so I'm saying you So it's really the the meek are going to inherit meaning the people who get their pleasure from sharing their buns, you know, sharing their loaf of bread with the next person, you know, because they are living in that simple way. And actually women are more into that with their oxytocin and they are you know the men are out there killing each other and doing all the stupid things and what does Mrs. Putin have to say about it or the beautiful Putin daughters I'm sure they're absolutely horrified and maybe the mistresses can't help since he broke up with Mrs. Putin, but they're really upset. Of course, you know, because the name, family name is really going up there with Hitler sooner or later. There's no way he's going to win that. And there's no way, you know, he's all the smart people in this whole country have left other than be killed by this insanity, you know. So, the point is that that nothing doesn't exist. There's always a consequence of everything and we don't want to contribute to negative consequences because we will bear the negative results. And it's not that God is going to vengeance his mind and say it's the Lord. That's kind of good if people believe in that. But it's karma. You you you yourself have the power to destroy yourself. But that destruction will last many lifetimes. So really that gives you a much stronger impetus. Therefore that gives you a meaning to life. The meaning of life is to be happy yourself and to help others be happy and not to harm them at least. And that is the meaning of life. And if you go against that meaning, you're destroying yourself, you know. And and but materialism gives people a false way out that just by killing themselves, they will be anesthetized and there'll be no consequence of what they've done. And I our whole generation, the elder generation now, uh not you, you're younger, but my generation who are the ones who have the capital, they have the offices or they close to the people who are the politicians that have the office and the corporation CEOs or retired CEOs. They sit on boards, the chairmans of boards and things and they are foolishly thinking that they can cause harm to the whole future generation by burning up this creating this monster in the air above us. And you know what does Allegor say? It's like 600,000 Hiroshima size nuclear explosions a day are pumped into the sewer treating the atmosphere like a sewer of of carbon waste are pumped in there every day. The the the distortion of our military consumer lifestyle and that can be changed easily. just stop doing it and find other ways of making livingings, better ways, but they don't do it because they think that they're going to just be nothing as a consequence. So, it's not that serious a danger that they're courting.
So, that would be that would that's Buddhism's greatest gift that nothing is nothing. So, you're not going to get out of the consequence. So therefore, Judeaic ethics, Christian ethics, Muslim ethics, Hindu ethics, confusion ethics, all of those ethics are going to are correct. They're biologically and evolutionarily correct for you as an individual, not even just as a species, but you as an individual. So therefore, you can now take the self-discipline to stop behaving the way you do. There's a wonderful Hindu thing. It's not a Buddhist thing that I love. It's from the from one of the opanads, same axial age time. And it's like a little boy is asking his grandfather.
He says, "Grandpa, what is God saying, the God of thunder saying when he makes thunder and lightning?" And it goes, "Da da da," he says.
And so then the grandpa says, "Well, little Ravi or whatever his name is, I forgot." He says he's saying damata, data, and dada.
I think I've got some of the endings wrong on these three words that begin with da because the sound of the thunder is put as da da da. So damata first means self-restraint means generosity and diadeam means compassion.
So the god of thunder, the lord with his lightning you know is saying da da da nature itself is saying be self-restrained be generous and be compassionate.
Isn't that sweet?
>> Very sweet.
>> Oh that's nice. Grandpa the little kid says [laughter] even the thunder is telling us what to do. And it's so nice you know in Russian as you know the know I am so in love with the Russian people. I went for for years I went there for a decade giving lectures on Buddhism and on general things too just general happiness to uh to Russians and they are wonderfully spiritual and wonderful people. They really are very nice people. Their language is also very difficult grammar and very requires a lot of intellectual intelligence to do it. that they had this unfortunate thing from the zar previously and from surfom and then from the communist dictatorship of the dictatorship.
You know they have this thing of allowing a structure where the one small tiny elite or just even one committee or even just one person can cause so much damage you know and then and but luckily now by now the smart ones immediately leave you know millions left instantly they knew what would happen you know but you know what's nice is when they say yes they say da da da da they go what are they doing da da they go like that you know when they when they toast with their vodka which they do all too often they go well here's just Buddha or something you know they'll make a toast and then everyone else will go so they love that tale from the upanishad but that's not it's not Buddhist the whole thing is not a religious denomination it is common sense and it is high physics and biology science that is really the gift you know empowering our own wonderful biologies and getting them free again from the dogma of no mind, no spirit, no meaning, which they got too much into and trying to escape from fire and brimstone preachers, you know, in the in the western enlightenment, you know. Yes, that was enlightened, but it was a little bit then they got too unenlightened about making a god out of nothingness, you know, and nothingness. the the the great disappointment in nothingness is that it isn't there to make it right.
Simply not there. It just it's it doesn't it's not there. There's no such thing. That's what it means.
>> And even in Christianity, there's a history that reincarnation was known to be accurate.
>> Oh yes. Oh, absolutely. Pythagoras and this metmosis they called it. And um it was definitely mainstream sort of default reality in uh in early Christianity. The the petristic author and sort of saintly writer called Oregon uh was up to in the late 3rd century and early fourth century. He was a big articulator of reincarnation and it was sort of normal because in fact it is normal in the in most of the world because why? Because people somehow on common sense realize there is no such thing as nothing. So [snorts] therefore they expect continuity. That's the the burden of proof would be on anybody who would say well there can something can become nothing or there's such a thing nothing's over here or over there or nothing was before this or before that.
That's completely obstru because all anybody has ever empirically experienced is continuities.
Even though sometimes it looks like your log became nothing but actually it was ashes and heat which you didn't see the heat but the heat dissipated in the air.
So it didn't become nothing. You know there's no everything. Everybody knows that. And uh it's a it's a sort of rare uh theory that life is meaningless and purposeless and blah blah blah. And it's also very related, I think, to the massive outbreak of depression in our culture is this lack of spirituality.
And my dear friend Lisa Miller is totally on the case of that with from a neuroscientific and and a philosophical point of view about how how depression comes from this lack of connectedness to anything spiritual in the universe. And she has a beautiful concept of spiritual wellness that is we most definitely all need which comes from being feeling connected to something greater. Could be a monotheistic deity fine if that's what they want to believe in. Could be Jesus, could be Buddha, could be oh you know Isaac Lura if you're a mystical Jewish could be Moses. could be Confucious whoever but it's not going to be you know the communist party unfortunately and nor you know nor you know then of course the religions can develop a thing where you can be exempt from the consequences and and and from by a savior but actually Jesus does say I'm not going to save people who have done evil in my name they will tell me they demanded because they did it in my name but I'm not saving them if they do that they're I don't know who they behave like that. So he he insisted you know there is that theme in the even in the monotheistic traditions that those who do good themselves then God will favor them by their own doing good because it all comes out of the axial age you know 2500 years ago we're all trying to live up to that and this meaninglessness thing is just a surface of the last century or so and it's very dangerous and it's destroying the planet we have to stop doing it we're going to we are >> we will your program. Your program is going to let people know and your your colleague >> Jeffrey Michionlo >> he will with his you know his parasychological wisdom he will let people know this and um it's wonderful I think a YouTube TV station is really good to spread the word and to to these these cable ones some of them are out of control but again there's no control over lying there's no penalty for lying up the storm. Even then you say in court, "Yeah, I was lying. I didn't expect anybody to believe me as a defense against having lied and misled people into behaving and inciting violence and getting doing bad things." I mean really, we really have to try to for you know like our Supreme Court justices should really be rational. They have to pass a logic test. It's not just a matter of they were nice lawyers who went to law school. I I don't think lawyers studied enough logic some of them and they have to or they shouldn't be allowed to practice. There should be you know our education system is letting our society down. Absolutely.
You know I can now say so freely being retiree you know but uh but it really is it's not proper. The great George Soros knows that he gave a billion dollars to I think Bard College to try to create a new kind of university that would deal with human beings character and their sense of meaning. Not religious school but really however getting into making h people decent making that as part of your curriculum is cultivating decency in people.
>> And how is that college doing?
>> I don't know. I think they do creative things. Bard College does. They teach in some of their faculty teach in prisons to really make it rehabilitation rather than just punishment and warehousing, you know, at huge expense to taxpayers.
Uh they try to rehabilitate by educating and some of their faculty do whereas all of our university faculty I never did.
I'm [snorts] embarrassed but uh because I just was always publishing and perishing and also had my double job of trying to save Tibet. But uh you know people should all faculty should have certain quota of teaching in the local prison. Every junior faculty should do that or senior faculty like at least one of their effort should go toward rehabilitating people instead of making hells out of these prisons you know and that's really wrong because then it creates a bad vibration in the society it's terrible it harms everybody that people are kept in misery like that and u I actually saw some on one talk show one politician who I won't name. But I once saw in a talk show where that politician was selling the interviewer that they were going to if they got elected in a certain state, they were going to stop the educational programs in prisons because even though it was the one um foolproof way to stop recidivism, that means constantly coming back to the prison because it gave people a means of livelihood and contributing to society when they would get out from whatever they were paying for with time but he was going to stop it because he was afraid otherwise that poor people would commit petty crime to get to prison so they could get free education that is so demented I thought that is but the actual person not afraid to say that publicly it's really not right you know you know and uh that people are that that we've become so confused in our things that people would dare to behave so completely callously and even speak that way publicly really wrong that there's no consequence know for what people do. There's no accountability >> except for each other.
>> Yes. [laughter] >> Yes.
>> You mentioned the friendly fun facts which are often referred to as the four noble truths. Why did you name them that? Well, the reason I called that is that in the Buddha's time, the the concept of noble was uh a term, a class term, and there was still a fairly positive and intact Indian society, a generous society because he was able to form a monastic order where people got free food and free lodging and exemption from taxes and military service and things like had females as well as males. Um when they had a genuine calling to try to become highly educated and enlightened and to real realize and bring out their their full potential as human beings as much as you can in one life. And um um so uh so therefore the people who were sort of the elite were considered by the masses to be concerned for the masses to have a kind of no bless oblige you know and so therefore the noble part meant someone who cared for you and this were this was something that was a fact or truth for a noble person that is someone who cared for others. So it basically is a shorthand form in his cultural time for someone altruistic who's expected to be because they're responsible for other people, right? Like a noble person, like a noble. Whereas in our time, we think of a noble as a snooty type of person who's just, you know, living it up themselves, you know, and and they're somehow supposed to be worshiped and honored by other people because they're born in some way, which was totally contradicted by the Buddha uh actually and by and by our democ democratic norms that we're that are very fragile still present with us. Okay. So noble I I thought would be better to call it friendly.
So when you have a friend you think that person my one definition of your friend is someone who likes you better be.
[laughter] Now there may be fake friends who are there to manipulate you or do something to you but and that you hopefully will have a wisdom not to have the good knowledge and good sense not to try to keep such friend because [snorts] a friends would be someone who actually likes us and we feel at ease and comfortable with them therefore and when we're friends of someone we like that person we're friends of right so I thought friendly was better because it gives the it gives the idea of altruism the friend cares for you right then truth Truth can be both a reality and a proposition about reality and um the word for truth even in English and the satya word is the same thing in in Sanskrit and it's spoken Indian languages of Buddhist day and um so sat what is real what is there you know sat is the verb to be so satya what you have to cope with as reality so therefore it could be called the four realities even but I think a fact is a good thing so it's like it takes the weight off of it's like not a dogma. It's not something you're just supposed to believe in. It's something you're supposed to cope with rather you know the for friendly. So so friendly facts and then I threw in fun because the dominant one is the third one the Buddha himself said because the the fact of suffer the the friendly fun fact of suffering is just the symptom of the unenlightened life. It's sort of like Socrates. Nothing more drastic than what Socrates said. It's even less drastic.
Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. But Buddha never said that this that the unenlightened life is not worth living. Especially it's very worth living. But it's it's a if you don't um if [snorts and clears throat] you don't use it to try to become enlightened, then you're kind of wasting it. So, you know, because it will not be satisfactory to you. So it's like you know be face that fact sort of thing.
You got to face it and then you look then the second friendly fun fact is actually there's a cause which you can understand and you can interfere with the cause. That's one of his revelations and that causes them not correctly understanding the world and uh and yourself and being even brainwashed by cultures that you can't even understand anything and you just have to take somebody else's the authorities's word for it by frightening you about thinking of yourself as unable. And then the third one is the loyal one. And the reality of things is everything is fine already in the deepest way of teaching it because life is good and we are fine and we have the ability to do that. So that's that's the third one. That's the fun one. So life is fun actually.
[snorts] If we know what it is, we will realize it's fun and fun is worthwhile and fun is the aim actually. Everyone should be having fun, you know. And then the fourth one is then the way of both learning and unlearning. Unlearning the false convictions and false worldviews and misunderstandings about the world and about ourselves and learning more about the real ones. And then taking that learning and making it visceral to even go in and change our unconscious and change our get rid of our being driven by all kinds of wild impulses in the unconscious which is one of the main virtues of Buddhist psychology. They don't believe that you have to a human being can can discover how their unconscious works become conscious of their unconscious impulses and the roots and way how how the mechanisms are in the mind and can control them. It's sort of like in other words cognitive therapy really can work if it's thoroughgoing and goes deep enough rather than the Freudian thing that is somehow the unconscious is a kind of you know like almost like a material mechanism because he was trying to be a scientist be accepted by scientists which you can't do anything about which still dominates western psychology actually and you have you know thinking fast and slow some books you know bestsellers about her you're helpless and have no free will because your unconscious does everything before you know they're doing it and it's [snorts] doing it and that's only the unenlightened state. Enlightened state has no such unconscious. They can they they can take all their life energies at the at the highest level of attainment and they can make them all positive and not no lust, no greed, no hate, no gen jealousy and all this all those energies can be transformed into creative artistic things that make life good for self and other. So, so this so that seventh one is the education. But the first, second and fourth are all in this world of relative illusion which has this illusory quality that we can we can learn to rewrite the script of life of our life and of as many as we can influence positively. We can help them do it once we've done our own and we can really find joy in life and we can find an a kind of extreme almost infinite joy maybe in a few lives [laughter] might take a while but we've already done a lot of work to get to be human from the Buddhist Darwinian theory that the individual has evolved and we've done tremend it's tremendously difficult to become a human being you know if we if we've overshot the human form from the animal kingdom and gone to be some level of low level of deity like or angel or something. It's very unlikely to come back down to the vulnerability of a human. It's only it's a rare one who would really see that being worthwhile. And from the lower one where you're really driven by impulse and no question, you don't have language, you can't learn from others, you know, except by your mother maybe and your little clan of monkeys or whatever it is. And your so your ability to transform and to master your own evolutionary trajectory is very very limited. And yet human we can completely we can the good person can become a horrible person. A horrible person can become a good person. And and both good and horrible can become enlightened person beyond such dangers. And uh and that's the that's the that's by within the illusory thing because it's a you know we we're writing our own script in interaction with others writing their scripts and between all of us should we get it all together we can create like what they call a Buddha verse or a Buddha land instead of a universe one that turns all just around us each of us it turns around everyone's enlightened bliss okay so that's the that's the idea that's why I call them fun facts Those do sound very fun and loving.
Since I know you're so passionate about world affairs and and the environment that is impacting all of us, what would you say or what would Buddha say to people in power or people such as Putin?
Well, what Buddha would say and what Dal Lama would say if he didn't have a certain responsibility within the current corporate and nation state system is he would say to members of the elite not only he he has said verbally and written to the youth you have to challenge the old people who are just stuck in their ways and they're wrecking your future like you know he listens to Greta Tunberg and all of the youth who are like her from Africa from all over the world you know and you know Vanessa Nhate and various indigenous people in the Americas and all over the place and he he says yes make a nonviolent revolution you need it you need a revolution he says that and um and Buddha said it too I I wrote my first book on popular book on Buddha was called inner revolution you know and uh but a cool and I had to use the expression a cool revolution not hot one of just change the government but leave the same negative structure. So he would say that but the one thing that nobody does say is to the elite themselves we expect them to step up from not just from the street and from the people who are deprived by the inequality for example and by the and the youth who are future is deprived by us creating a situation where by the 2050s California will be a desert you know there'll be these terrible floods and tornadoes like all the time, you know, I mean really terrible. It will be really terrible.
Sea level will rise by many many yards and like Sandy will become normal, you know, in the for the east coast people and uh Florida, forget about Miami and uh we can't go on like that. And so yes, people will march, they will protest, they will try to vote, there will be people like Al Gore trying to educate people. And so this is sort of bottomup pressure. Yes. But we see that the dark money elite as I would call them, what I call the petroaths, the petroleum sociopaths, the coal mine sociopaths who don't mind harming all those people in the future because they think it's all just matter anyway and they just want to arrange themselves to have more money. They even though they have more than they can use already and they're condemning their heirs to being unable to spend whatever they inherit because of the spending it all on emergency measures in a destroyed environment.
And um so some of this elite themselves should pull it together and should give the bill some billions to a bright money's plan to actually go back and unbribe the government and outbid the dark money people and bring them to account and uh and uh have a pack for the mother earth and have a political party to elect candidates who are in service of mother earth from the beginning and by time on all media like Al Gore tried to start a TV show but he couldn't get the money because the elite somehow oh well we don't want to like this and that they were acting like they didn't have a responsibility the liberal elite I'm saying obviously the illiberal elite has used that money effectively and controlled the governments and and uh duval Harrari. I'm going to quote the wonderful writer Yuval Harrari from Jerusalem who wrote Homo sapiens and homodus and other works. And he has some YouTube things you can see free or TED talks that you can see online and from YouTube where he says that we are subsidizing the petroleum extractors in and carbon extractors coal included very prominently not only oil and gas and so on but but coal and and the bad agriculture of and so on and we are subsidizing them $500 billion a year meaning not just our US government. I think US is around 40 billion, but there's like hundreds of billions if you add all the world governments subsidize the petroleum industries because they get money into the budget of their governments that way and they have to stop doing that and they have to spend that on mitigation immediately and transformation and then I just reading today in the paper how even the green people are not allowing windmills to be built and there's then nobody's building the backbone so that all the distributed energy thing. And that surely is the utility people and the petroleum people blocking all those things and using PR permitting and regulation to block, you know, decentralized energy production to block its development so they can keep selling more oil and coal and and have their monopolies. And we that has to just simply be stopped. And these things just have people have to get together.
And if you if you get it on the media all the time, instead of selling people more cars, more pharmaceuticals for diseases that they're getting from the bad polluting air in the bad neighborhoods, from the lousy refineries and the horrible coal burning power plants and so forth. In other words, the elite people have to step up. The bankers, the billionaires, the hedge fund people, they have to put together a GIA fund. and not just something to the NRDC or the Green Peace to go out and protest. They have to do it from a governing level, not just from a protesting level. The from the governing level, from the power level. stop acting like they're powerless and to use their power, the money power that they have stumbled on by good fortune and by prudence and by inheritance and by whatever other reasons, cleverness and use that to save the situation with the same cleverness that we have to pay tribute to the proaths, petroleum sociopaths that they have cleverly put people in office who do their bidding, who subsidize their industries, who don't pass regulations to control their industries who are the real treasury is of course in all the governments and are not spending that money on what they need to spend it on. And so this is the next this is what the Buddha would say what the Dalam would say is people with power have to go work for the good. They have to actually activate themselves and do it not and they do they have you know you have the gates fund you have this thing then they don't do it really fully then people blame them they say they have doing space lasers and god knows what. Never mind. They're going to say that. Then you should have a you should have your own broadcast uh platform where people tell the truth. Since you have since Murdoch's who who are the negative illiberal billionaire types are funding lying things and since the government seems unable to control them, then you have to make another thing that tells the truth all the time. Go neck and neck. It has to do it attractively. has to get great celebrities and artists to do it, have to pay them to do it and have to out compete them from the top down as well as just bottom up in the streets. That's the one element that we haven't done. Yuva Harrari says global GDP is something like 85 trillion a year.
That's all the countries and 1.5 trillion a year spent mitigating and changing over to the way of the changing the energy system with radical speed where we get it not just 50% we get it finished in 10 years we can do that and you know there'll be a little candle light and a little this and that maybe in between inconvenience we have to to make a decent backbone to get solar from the desert areas where you have no rain and total sunshine all the time stored in batteries and pumped into cities in in the cloud areas, you know, and in more cold areas to warm people or cool people, whatever it needs, you know, then if there's some time when the electricity doesn't work for a while because it has to be repaired in a new one place, people will have to go through that and they will if it's explained to them instead of brainwashing them that everything's fine and it's nobody know like the the petrol petrols spent 50 years preventing people from understanding the climate danger that they knew from their scientists.
They knew that and those people should be punished. Of course, they should be removed from power who have purposely deceived people like the cigarette pushers about cancer, the petroleum people about climate. They should be removed from their power.
It should be a crime. There should be the pope mentioned climate criminals in his laato sea crime. Pope Francis he mentioned that. But the no government has said there's such a thing as climate criminality. But there is it harms people much more than somebody robbing a bag of apples from a store where they'll get thrown in jail for shoplifting.
These people harming people by the millions and there's no no accountability because nobody in power really everywhere somewhere everybody has this feeling that nobody can do anything even if they have billions of dollars at their command. They just kind of they'll give it away to this and that small effort because it somehow the good is always in opposition and the evil is always more powerful. And we have to get rid of that idea.
That's not true. It's that and that meek shall inherit the earth means the good is more powerful. Jesus said so and he showed that he let the the evil kill him. Then he rose from the dead to show that his loving nature was more powerful than their evil punishment regime, terrorism regime, state terrorism, governmental terrorism which they which they were doing killing a perfectly innocent person just because he could talk up a storm and people would follow him and they would sh they wanted they would want to be free from imperial domination.
All right. All right.
>> That's that's that's what Buddha would say. In other words, the whole monastic thing of the Christians and the Buddhists is the whole, you know, people being monks and nuns has to do with trying to remove people from the militarized societies that we've suffered under in the patriarchal maledominated history of the last 3,000 years on this planet.
And [snorts] and now we've reached a point where that's intolerable. And nature herself is telling us that it's intolerable. She can't she can't keep sustaining us and feeding us and sheltering us and comforting us if we keep polluting her and destroying her like this the elements, you know, the air, the water, the the temperature and the and the very soil. She can't do it. So she's she's rebelling against it. and and and our elite has to join that intensity of change, not just people in the streets and stop trying to run away to New Zealand and run away to British Columbia and and and Labrador, whatever, wherever they think they're going, Norway. Okay.
So, that's what Buddha would say and that's what Dal Lama would say more forcefully. He does say it, but he but he has to get along with politicians and he can't he's not yet he's not really in a position because of his responsibility for his people who are who are genocidally oppressed under like a Putin-like dictatorship of China and a country that is like a Ukraine to China.
Ukraine to Russia, Tibet to China is like that. Mongolia to China is like Ukraine to Russia. Ugor Turkystan to China is like Ukraine to Russia. These are supposed nation states masquerading but supposed actual empires imperialist entities masquerading as nation states but they're not really nation states because they are completely genociding.
They are minority nations rather than let each one being self-determined. And that has to change.
And it is changing thanks to our comedian, wonderful Jewish comedian, President Zalinski and his followers and his brave, brave followers. Bob, thank you so much for advocating for the Tibetan people, for you and your beautiful friendship with his holiness, the Daly Lama, and for advocating for really our whole planet and world and every soul.
Thank you so much for being with me today.
>> My pleasure. Because after all advocating for the planet and seeing it as happening is like each individual's goodwill can happen that means and so don't ever be discouraged in your own smallest good impulse. It has tremendous power and aggregated by everyone. All right. Okay. Thank you so much and best to new thinking. All right. That's my my little bit of contribution.
>> And for those of you listening or watching, thank you for being with us.
[music] [music] >> [music] >> You can now download all nine copies of the New Thinking Aloud magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingaloud.org.
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