In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind. This is sutra session 8 of 35 held in Los Angeles. In these Ken converses informally with students about life and practice.

Working with Distraction

Ken: Okay, so here we are at April 11th in Los Angeles. We record these and put them up on the internet as podcasts. The first thing I’d like to do is to take up any questions that any of you may have about meditation, or how it applies in your life or whatever. So the floor is open. Now you know everything about meditation, everything about Buddhism. There’s nothing you want.

Student: Regardless of where you’re meditating, either in the middle of a forest or in the city, or in a group of 10 people or one person, there’s always distractions, and I was just wondering how you can deal with that when meditating?

Ken: Okay. I think this is very important. When we say there are distractions, it’s because we have an idea of how things should be and something keeps pulling us away, right? Is that fair? Okay, so what if you drop the idea of how things should be and there’s just how things are? Okay, so here we are and we’ve got cars going by outside, and we could have motorbikes too, just to make it a little juicier or police sirens or what have you. That’s just stuff that’s happening in the environment. Now, have you ever gone on a walk on a fall day when the wind has been up and there’s blowing leaves all around? Yeah, okay, do you find that the leaves distract you from walking?

Student: No.

Ken: Why is that?

Student: Because they’re part of the natural environment. They’re part of the path I guess.

Ken: Yeah and you just walk and the leaves blow around. So we can practice meditation the same way. We’re very used to walking, but have you ever watched a very small child when the leaves start blowing around?

Student: They try to chase them.

Ken: Yeah, it’s the same thing, isn’t it? They’re chasing them all and they get all confused. And, you know, leaves are going around all over the place and they don’t know what to do. But, you know, being the sober, serious adults that we are, we just walk and the leaves blow around.

Practicing to not be pulled around by experience

Ken: And behind this, there’s the whole idea of why we are meditating. Why do you why do you want to practice meditation?

Student: Me personally?

Ken: Yeah, I’m talking to you and nobody else here will have the same reason as you do. So this is your time.

Student: To try to find some quiet and non-attachment.

Ken: Some quiet and non-attachment.

Student: Non-attachment.

Ken: Okay, and so the way I’m understanding that is you meditate so you aren’t being pulled all over the place by everything you experience. Right, isn’t this really like that little child?

I remember when I first came to this area, it was back in the mid 80s. I was invited down to work with a group in Orange County. And so there we were, about eight or ten people, and they wanted to talk about meditation, and they practiced meditation in an apartment, and the door would be closed and they make sure the double sliding door was closed. So there was absolutely no noise whatsoever. It’s like trying to calm the wind down, you know, so the leaves don’t blow. What was great is that they had one of these old telephone answering machines. So when it went on you could hear all of these gears and cogs—this was way before digital or anything like that—just grinding away. But I’ve always thought it’s great to meditate on a street corner because that’s life. And the problem here comes if we try to control things and make them a certain way rather than, “Okay, here is everything, and I’m just going to be here, and I’m going to quietly rest in my experience of breathing.” And it doesn’t matter whether there’s cars going by on the street outside, it doesn’t matter whether there’s planes going overhead, and it doesn’t matter whether there’s some tune running in my head, which is just ordinarily driving me nuts.

That tune can run in my head, and that’s fine. I’m just going to continue to rest in my breath. And every now and then I’m going to trip just like the little kid and I’ll end up in the tune. But sometimes, as I was saying at the beginning of this, there’s that moment of recognition, and then I just come back and I continue to rest with my breath. But I don’t try to get rid of the tune. Do you follow? And maybe there’s an itch in my leg. Okay. So that’s there and I get really obsessed with it. Does this happen to anybody else? Okay, so I keep coming back to the breath. And sometimes really difficult feelings may come up. And it’s really difficult to stay with them. But here’s where meditation is a bit like doing exercise. You know, you build up strength. You can’t do it all perfectly, that’s why we call it practice. Because the nice thing about practice is you get to fail at it over and over again and it doesn’t matter. It’s not like our life depends on it. There’s a thing in old Tibetan texts which says, “Meditate as if someone was holding a sword at your neck.” I don’t find that this is a good way to meditate at all.

I remember one of my teachers, who was just a wonderful Tibetan lama who knew everything under the sun. And whenever you asked him a question, you got a two-hour answer. And one day he was talking to us about meditation. He said, “Here’s how I was trained. We’d come into the main temple hall and we would sit down.” These were all monks, basically in their teenage years. “I’d be sitting down and then a string was strung and we were all positioned so that our nose just touched the string. And every time the string moved, we were all beaten.” And then he leaned forward and he said, “This is not how you learn to meditate, this is how you learn to sit still.” And then he went on and said to us very much what I’m saying to you, you have this experience, rest in the experience. And yes, there’s going to be all kinds of things, but they are only a problem if you regard them as a problem, if they’re just stuff like the leaves blowing in the wind or whatever, then it’s just leaves blowing in the wind and you do what you’re there to do, which is to rest in the breath. And yes, you fall down and then you pick yourself up and do that. And that’s the learning and the building, the muscles and so forth. Does this make sense to you?

Student: Yes, definitely.

Ken: Okay. Yeah, a follow up, a follow up question? Good. Okay. Anybody else. Yes. Up here please.

Finding a path

Student: Could you speak a bit about the process of finding a path and finding a teacher?

Ken: I’m so glad you used the word “a” in there and not “the.” Finding a path and finding a teacher. Well, there’s a lot I could say about that, but, if you don’t mind, where’s this question coming from?

Student: It’s coming from me, and it’s coming from my interest in finding a path and in finding a teacher and also my experience of people close to me who have done that and I guess from the outside seeing their experience. And while their specific choices might not resonate entirely with me, the completeness of their investment does and is something that I feel, a pull towards. And that pull, I think, is particularly in the search to have my own inner center, rather than finding a center in a partner or in the prospect of having a child or in a career.

Ken: Aha, Thank you, that’s very helpful. Okay. I’m reminded a little bit of Alice in Wonderland. At one point Alice comes across the Cheshire Cat and she’s just got away from the madness of the Red Queen. And she says, “Please, sir, which way should I go?”

And the Cheshire Cat looks at her and says, “Well, that all depends, where do you want to go?”

And Alice says, “Well, it doesn’t really matter.”

And the Cheshire Cat said, “Then it doesn’t really matter where you go, does it?”

“Well, as long as I get somewhere.”

“Well, if you go far enough, you will be somewhere.”

And it’s totally unhelpful, of course. But in the way that you worded this— somewhat similar to the person who just asked—you find yourself pulled in all kinds of different directions. There’s an old expression that used to be around in our culture, but has really fallen out of usage, and I’m mounting a one-person campaign to bring it back. It’s called an internal life. And it’s very much about forming a relationship with all of this stuff that we experience as, in some strange way, being inside us. Okay. So a good place to start is with a very simple meditation practice. Ajahn Chah, who is one of the great Theravada teachers and a Thai teacher in Thailand in the 20th century, one of his meditation instructions was: “Put a chair in the center of the room. Sit in the chair and see who comes to visit.” That sounds very simple, and it is very simple, but it’s not particularly easy because we keep getting caught up with the visitors.

So you know what you’re looking for in terms of a path, in terms of where you’re going and that’s really helpful. Basically almost any form of straightforward meditation practice is going to help you with that. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s Zen or Vipassana or Theravadan. The Tibetan schools get a bit crazy because they have really complicated meditations, but there’s also very good stuff in there. And there’s other traditions too. But I think it’s also helpful to consider the questions that motivate us. And I find that in Buddhism in general, the questions that bring people to Buddhism are finding peace or finding a way not to struggle. How do I not struggle with my experience? These are very different from the kind of questions you might find from people working with in Christianity. It’s much more about, how do I find something to believe in? And they have a very definite answer, that you believe in Jesus Christ. But most people who come to Buddhism aren’t trying to find something to believe in. You follow? Okay. So, for where you are now in terms of a practice, that’s probably sufficient.

Finding a teacher

Ken: So let’s talk about finding a teacher. The way you do this is go and listen to various people and hear what they have to say. Does it resonate with you, does it make sense to you or does it strike a chord? In other words, does this person speak to you? That’s one thing that’s important. The second part is a little more difficult. Is this a person you will listen to even when you’re completely crazy? Is this a person to whom you will listen even when you are completely crazy? That’s your teacher.

So first find someone that speaks to you and then see, “Do I listen to them?” Does that help? Yeah. Okay. And the other thing is pay attention to the students. Because however they are is likely how you will become. So if they’re all in competition with each other, which often happens, or if there’s kind of an in-group and an out-group, these are things to pay attention to. Are there gradually escalating requirements in terms of either financial contributions or service? You know, that’s how a lot of people are involved and build institutions. Very often they have this scale. Is this a person you can actually have access to and have a real conversation with, these kinds of things?

In the old manuals, the advice to young monks, it says: “Do not go to very old monasteries or very new monasteries.” You know why? Because in very old monasteries and very new monasteries, there is so much to do you’ll never get a chance to practice. You’ve either got to be building them or you’ve got to be repairing them. So don’t go to very old monasteries or very new ones. So very practical things like that. Okay.

Student: Thank you.

Ken: Okay. Other questions? Yes. Over here.

Comparing traditions: different intentions, different approaches

Student: Hi. I was just curious if you could spend a moment and sort of define the differences between the various meditation techniques you mentioned, Vipassana, Theravada and Zen.

Ken: Why are you interested in that?

Student: I just am.

Ken: Well no, you’ve got to go further than that. I always want to know the question behind the question. I’m very annoying that way.

Student: I’m wondering what the values are. If there are different techniques, there must be different values.

Ken: Good. Okay. I’m going to change that word slightly, if I may, different practices have different intentions. Now there are two pieces here. Different practices have different intentions and different traditions have different approaches.

The Tibetan tradition: richness and complexity

Ken: Now my own training is in the Tibetan tradition, so I feel fairly confident speaking about that. Well, moderately confident, not even fairly and I know a number of people who practice Zen and I’ve hung out there, so I’ll probably put my foot in my mouth. Around the Theravada tradition I’ll definitely put my foot in my mouth. So I’m just giving you that warning. The Tibetan tradition inherited the full blown or fully developed medieval Indian Buddhism. Buddhism didn’t come to Tibet until, 800 or 900 AD. The ninth, 10th centuries. I think there may have been a little bit in the eighth century but it’s really late. So this is 1,200 years after Buddha lived, and by this time, you know, there were huge monastic universities and extraordinarily deep philosophy being done in these places and very, very developed systems of practice. And it was rich. It was baroque, and so in the Tibetan Buddhism tradition you have very, very strong academic or scholastic or intellectual components. You have some very, very sophisticated ranges of techniques because they not only got the stuff from India, all of the academic stuff from the Indian universities, but they also got it from all the yogic traditions too.

And these were really weird guys who lived on the fringes of society and really went deeply into the stuff, you know, and meditated on glaciers and just all kinds of weird stuff. So the Tibetan tradition is very, very rich this way. And there’s a Zen friend of mine who says to me, “Gee, Ken, you got an awful lot of arrows in your quiver.” And it’s true. I mean, I’ve never counted, but I’ve been trained in probably somewhere between 150 to 200 different meditation methods. So, you have a problem. I’ve got a meditation method for that. And there’s more that I haven’t been trained in, in the Tibetan tradition. There are significant areas of the Tibetan tradition I know very little about.

Now, that’s one way. and so there’s a lot to learn, and really it’s very rich, and you can learn a lot of stuff, and sometimes you can get lost in all of that, and a lot of people do.

Zen: direct practice and stopping the mind

Ken: At the other end of the spectrum, you might say, there’s Zen. Now, you have to appreciate the origin of Zen, which goes back to China, the Chan school in China. And the Chan tradition develops in the, I think, around ninth or 10th centuries. And Buddhism had been in China for like three or four hundred years already and had carried on this Indian tradition of intellectual pursuit and philosophy and was really heavily into the moral stuff.

And when combined with this, with the Confucian formality, everything had really got stuck and almost couldn’t move because there were so many things you were meant to be doing. And so the Chan school developed as a reaction to all of this.

Now, the word Chan, which became Zen in Japan, is actually the Sanskrit word dhyana, which means meditation or meditation state. So when you say the Zen school, you’re really saying it’s the meditation school of Buddhism. And you go, “Well, isn’t Buddhism about meditation?” Well, by this point in China, it wasn’t about meditation, it was about study, and it was about morals, and it was about all this stuff. And very few people were doing any meditation. And so you had this radical school, who are going to call themselves the Meditation School. And they took as their inspiration a figure called Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma was an Indian master who came to Tibet, came to China, and was presented to the Emperor as this great master. And the Emperor said, “I have funded monasteries and supported monks in many monasteries. What merit, what goodness does this become? What does this give me?”

And Bodhidharma said, “None whatsoever.” Well, this didn’t go over too well. You don’t speak to emperors this way.

So the Emperor looked at him and said. “What do you teach?”

“Nothing,” said Bodhidharma. This was not doing himself any favors.

So the Emperor said, “Well, who stands before me?”

Bodhidharma said, “I have no idea.”

Well, the Emperor had had it at this point; he threw him into jail. So there was Bodhidharma sitting in jail and what do you do in jail? He sat, he practiced, and he kept falling asleep. So he actually tore off his eyelids so he couldn’t go to sleep, you know, people are really extreme about some of these things. And he just sat there for 12 years looking at this wall. I presume he was fed occasionally.

And then the emperor relented and let him out and he became a great teacher in China. So you have the school of Buddhism, which sits looking at a wall, that’s Soto Zen. That’s what you do. And you learn a lot from just looking at this wall. You learn everything about yourself. It’s very similar to Ajahn Chah’s instruction: sit in the center of the room and see who comes to visit. You can look at the wall and see who comes to visit. It’s a very simple, very direct practice.

Then the other stream of Zen is Rinzai. They found great inspiration in their early teachers. And you have this very famous question, “What was your face before you were born?” Well. Now, when you entertain that question, what happens?

Student: You feel overwhelmed. You get a little overwhelmed with the possibilities of what the answer might be.

Ken: Just before you get overwhelmed, what happened? Yes. Right there. What? What’s that?

Student: Puzzled, I suppose.

Ken: Yeah. Everything stops, doesn’t it? And you don’t know how to relate to it. Are you with me? Yeah, yeah. Okay. That’s what the Rinzai school is about. They ask you these questions and you go, everything stops, and you don’t know how to relate to that. And so the practice consists of learning how to relate to that. Different approach, and so you think you’re so smart, you come up with an answer to the one that the teacher gave you and you know what you get? You get another question: “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”

“Huh?”

And there are many, there’s whole records of these. One of the most famous ones is—and for this you have to know a little bit about Buddhism to appreciate—but in the Chinese tradition, the notion of buddha nature has a potential to awaken. One of the very deeply held ideas about it was that it was present in every form of life, animals and people and everything like that. So, this one masters asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Now, normally this would be a no-brainer. It would be “Yes.”

You know what this guy answered? “I have no idea.” He didn’t actually say all of that. That’s my take on what he said. He just said, “No idea.” And that’s been the subject of meditation for people for the last thousand years. What did he mean by this? So there are all kinds of things like that.

And that’s another approach where everything stops or you find a way to make everything stop, and then you learn how to relate to that. And if you don’t like any of those questions, I’ve got a few more. I have my own too.

The Theravada tradition: simplicity

Ken: The Theravada tradition is very different in flavor because, it split off from the Indian tradition long before all of this huge evolution took place, and spread to Sri Lanka and Thailand and Laos and other countries in Southeast Asia. And the practices tend to be very, very simple. Not like the complex meditations or intricate questions you get in the Tibetan or Zen traditions, and very much concerned with learning how to live simply without struggling with experience. And of course, over time, all kinds of things developed. And except for very few people, the Sri Lankan tradition became very intellectual, very conceptual. And in the 19th century, the Thai Forest tradition developed as a reaction against things becoming stultified in Thailand and has become a very rich tradition of practice. And many of the Western teachers like Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg were all trained in that tradition. They’re coming from that tradition as well as Ajahn Pasanno, who is up in Northern California. And, so it’s a very vibrant, but it’s only one tradition within the Theravada, the Vipassana approach. So, does that give you some? Probably more than you wanted to know.

Student: No, it was a great deal. Thanks.

Ken: Okay. Other questions. Please.

When practice feels confusing or overwhelming

Student: Hi. I’m not really sure. It’s a little bit about that question, which was really well articulated. I dropped into the middle of the Tibetan tradition about seven years ago …

Ken: And you found your way here. Amazing.

Student: Well. I drowned and somehow got pulled out.

Ken: You were fortunate.

Student: Well, you know, I think what happened is I was really attracted to the energy of the teachers. I saw the Dalai Lama on a new show on TV and so I was attracted to the energy that I felt they had. And so, you get there andthe first thing you do is do 100,000 of these mantras. It’s like saying the Pledge of Allegiance or writing,” I’ve been a really bad girl and I don’t know why” on the blackboard.

Ken: I’m sorry to hear that. Have you been …?

Student: Yeah. And then I made 100,000 and they went, “Oh, sorry. we meant 110,000.”

Ken: Which mantra was that? The Vajrasattva?

Student: No, no no, no, that was the one that was going to be with the prostrations. Next it was Lama Tsongkhapa.

Ken: Oh, okay.

Student: Oh, Tibetan. Yeah.

Ken: Okay. I know where we are.

Student: Not just the one paragraph, but like, the whole thing. Actually, the first one was to memorize this three-page poem in Tibetan that you don’t know what it is. So then I got the mantras and then I got the prostrations and I kind of liked Vajrasattva and then you go to the rituals and it’s all like, not just visualize this, but here’s the mantra, and there’s all these things at the door and then you go inside and it’s like, “Excuse me, you lost me at the place where here’s the mantra, or here’s the mandala.” So, I like that energy and I tend to … like I’m looking I’m trying to find little bits of everything I think, the thing that I really liked about it was that you always dedicated the practice, so it was making it larger and …

Ken: But what are you looking for?

Student: I don’t know. I think you know what? I’d really like to be able to help other people.

Ken: What prevents you?

Student: I get in my own way.

Ken: So what are you looking for in your practice? And this is important for everybody. It’s really important to know what you are looking for in your practice because different practices do different things. And if practice doesn’t make sense to you, then it’s going to be difficult. So what are you looking for?

Student: I think you know what I think maybe, maybe at the bottom of it all is just wanting to be okay with myself, whoever I am. And also kind of, the thing that I really liked about His Holiness was that if you walk into a room, just the fact that he’s in it, you feel safe or I feel safe, I feel okay. And I would like to walk into a room and have that effect, not in an egotistical way, but just that thing where people that are all upset go, “Ah,” and actually to feel that way myself when I take myself into a room or at home.

Ken: It’s generally more fruitful to focus not on the effect we’re going to have on others, but getting clear within ourselves. And whatever comes of that comes of that.

Creating a Path Rather Than Finding One

Ken: Okay, so now I understand where you are. What’s your question?

Student: Well, the question was about a path and a teacher.

Ken: Yes. But what’s your question?

Student: My question, I guess, is, when you go kind of eclectic, when one person doesn’t seem to be doing it for you and one meditation doesn’t seem to be doing it for you, then where do I go?

Ken: Let me go a little further into the subject then. Finding a spiritual practice for me is about finding a path or finding a way to live so that we don’t struggle with our experience. Okay. And there are some general principles, but it’s going to look a little different for each and every person, you follow? In many respects a spiritual practice and learning, following or developing a spiritual practice or path is rather like becoming an artist. It can be a writer, a musician, a painter, it doesn’t matter. There are a few people who are just naturally talented and then the rest of us.

For instance, if you take music. Most of us are going to learn much better how to play a musical instrument if we study with somebody. And the same is true for painting, writing, sculpture and so forth. And for each of those things something is being created. Maybe many things are being created, but there’s a creative process. And even though we’ve used the phrase, find a path, I think we’re really talking about finding in the sense of creating a path. I think we’re really talking about finding in the sense of creating a path. It’s not like, “Oh, that’s my path.” It’s like working it out in the same way that a sculpture works it out.

Three things we need on the path

Ken: And it probably is the case that most of us could use some help in the process. And there are three things that we need. We need to be shown what is possible. A lot of the time we have no idea what is possible. I mean, I could just see someone who’s able to be at peace in a difficult situation and go, “Oh, I didn’t know that was possible.” So one thing a teacher does is show us possibilities, either by telling us about them or by their example, by modeling it. And in the Zen tradition an awful lot of instruction takes place just by watching how the teacher does things. It’s also how sushi chefs are trained. You go and sit in the kitchen and you just watch the person doing it for three years before you pick up a knife. So being shown possibilities is one. The second thing is there are skills and abilities that we need to develop. And I want to distinguish between skills and abilities. Skill is learning how to do something such as learning how to rest. And we can be taught that and we can practice it and develop a skill. And abilities are more like doing push ups, we get certain strengths.

And so, we develop abilities by practicing certain exercises in the same way we develop agility and flexibility in our fingers on piano by practicing scales and intervals and things like that. So we need someone who can teach us those skills and teach us the exercises through which we’re going to develop abilities. So that’s the second thing. And the third thing is, we need a person who can show us where our own stuff is getting in the way, point it out to us. They’re often a very difficult person to have around because they say inconvenient things. And that’s where we have to listen to them, even when we’re completely crazy. So, those three qualities may be in the same person. They may be in three different people, or there may be two people or one, there are all sorts of possibilities. But those are the three things that we need. We need a connection with the person who shows us possibilities. Another one, we need a way of learning the skills and developing the abilities that are necessary, and then to show us where our own stuff is getting in the way and what we can do about it. So maybe that’s some help to you.

Faith vs belief

Student: One more question. Does having faith in what you’re doing play any part of that? Like are you going to look for a feeling of confidence or feeling that you maybe are on the right track, or placing more reliance on that third thing where the person who’s going to tell you that you’re crazy, you know?

Ken: This is very difficult. It’s very deep. Well, the first thing. We need to distinguish between two different approaches. One approach is, confidence can come from a feeling that we have the answer, that we know the way, so this explains everything and now we know what to do in every situation, etc. And in some ways this is a huge relief because now this takes all the mystery and all all the guesswork away, but it also makes it very difficult if we run into situations in which our answers don’t work, then we have a lot of difficulty. In fact, we tend to avoid those situations or just lock them out. And what I’m talking about in this approach I call a belief, and we develop a belief system. And the belief system supplies all the answers. Do you follow? The other approach is being willing to open to whatever arises in our experience. This is very, very different because it’s like something happens and we just say yes to it. Not in the sense of saying, “That’s okay,” but just like, yes, we receive the experience and we don’t try to explain it and we don’t try to understand it or fit it into a certain pigeonhole.

The question is, “How do I relate to this?” not “What does this mean?”—if you see what I mean. It’s just how do I relate to it. So there’s a constant opening. And that approach I call faith.

Now, it may be that in the beginning stages believing something helps a bit, but I really encourage people to move towards the faith approach.

Repositories of Faith Across Traditions

Ken: And every system of practice that I know has what I call a repository of faith. In the Zen tradition, for instance, particularly in the Soto Zen tradition, sitting and staring at walls. What you place faith in is the posture, so you sit in this posture and everything comes down to just sitting in that posture and whatever comes down, somehow you learn to sit with it in that posture. That’s where you put your faith. That’s what gives you the basis in which to relate to whatever’s arising in your experience. And in the Tibetan tradition, the repository of faith is very different. It’s your teacher, and out of your devotion and relationship with your teacher, that gives you the ability to open to everything that arises in your experience.

I’m not really clear what the repository of faith is in the Theravadan tradition. But it’s different. It’s not the same as the other two traditions. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition I’d like to say the repository of faith is the bell, the bell of mindfulness. In Christianity and Catholic Christianity, anyway, the repository of faith is God.

There’s a 17th century monk who wrote this extraordinary book called The Joy of Complete Surrender. And that’s his path. And it’s an extraordinary book because it’s all about just opening to whatever arises in experience, and in Christianity, you say, “That’s God’s will,” but it’s not. It’s not like something that’s being made to happen to you. It’s just like, by having that relationship with God, you can open to whatever arises. So everything is a mystery. So it’s very similar to perspectives I know from my training in Tibetan Buddhism. I’m just using that as an example. In the Jewish tradition, it’s the Torah and sometimes your relationship with your rabbi and so forth. So every tradition has a repository of faith, and that repository of faith is the basis of confidence. Okay, so that’s a very long-winded reply, but I hope you got something out of it.

Student: Yeah I did, thank you.

Closing

Ken: Well, you’ve now completely wasted another hour. So, in conclusion, let’s just sit for a few moments and I’ll say a few words. And just let these ideas resonate in you to the extent that they do.

Goodness comes from this work we have done.
Let me not hold it just in me.
Let it spread to all that is known
And awaken good throughout the world.

Thanks very much for coming.