In the Buddhist tradition, a sutra refers to the meeting of the teacher’s mind and the student’s mind.

October 17, 2010

Knowing what’s enough

Ken: Just in case anybody is confused. I’m not Noah Levine. My name is Ken McLeod. I’ve had a little acquaintance with Buddhism over a few years. So, Mary’s very kind. She asked me to cover for Noah because he wasn’t here this evening and I’m very happy to do that. Basically, what I like to do, if it’s okay with you, is do this as sort of a conversation. We have a microphone right there. So everybody gets recorded for posterity. You know, it’s a gift to everybody. If you’re going to talk about anything you don’t want recorded, that’s fine. We put these up on the internet so that people actually hear the questions and discussions that we have. People find it very beneficial.

So I’m going to start off with a couple of questions. How many of you struggle with feelings of self-worth? Okay. How many of you struggle with money? So I thought we’d talk about money and self-worth this evening. Is that okay? Everybody up for that? Well, why don’t we start with you? Just take the microphone. We’re just going to go around and ask questions. You’re not ready for this? I know, but …

Student: I’m not ready at the moment.

Ken: Well, come up with something. You came here to learn something. So what do you want to learn?

Student: Can you talk about the tension between the need for money and the ideal of not craving?

Ken: Yes, I could talk about that for a very long time.

Student: You asked for it.

Ken: Well, you may have asked for it. Okay, the tension between the need for money and craving. Right? Or not craving. Okay, I’m going to refer you to a person called P.A. Payutto. You may want to write that down. Look it up in Google. He’s a very good Buddhist thinker coming out of Southeast Asia, Thailand, I believe. And he wrote a book called Buddhist Economics. And it’s not a very long book and as far as I know, it’s online. So you can just go and look at it. That’s going to answer all your questions right there. But I think it’s a very good question that you ask. I’m going to start off with some comments about Buddhism and then move into your question. Buddhism is very, very firmly rooted in the Indian renunciate tradition. And this is a tradition in India that goes back many thousands of years. And basically the view of life is that you started off your life and you learned and studied as a young boy or woman and came into your adulthood, and you raised a family and pursued a career and did all of that. And then in the latter part of your life, you retired from the world to pursue spiritual pursuits. You renounce the world. Now, there are always quite a few people who wanted to do that a little earlier in their life. And so the model for spiritual practice in Indian culture was renunciation.

And Buddhism inherited this very, very strongly. Buddha himself did that. He left his family and his kingdom, etc., and went off for spiritual pursuits when he was a young man. And because of that, there has always been a tension to my mind. And maybe it’s just my imagination but I’ve come across this again and again, a tension between living one’s life and one’s spiritual practice. And one of the first things I want to say is that this tension is extremely destructive. Because it prevents you from doing either well, when actually it’s much better to do both well. And it comes down to a very simple question. Do you live to work or do you work to live? Now in American culture basically for the last 30 or 40 years we’ve been subjected to a subtle and very, very far-reaching propaganda campaign, which is to persuade us that we live to work. And that work is the meaning of life. This is nonsense of course but it’s been quite successful, unfortunately. So one of the first things I would like to suggest here is that we don’t live to work, we work in order to live. Now I do a bunch of executive coaching and work with senior executives in various organizations, and I just say to them, look, we have three components to our lives. We have our body, you know, our physical existence. We have our emotional, mental, spiritual component. And then there’s whatever we do in life so that we have a healthy body and a healthy mind.

And whatever we do in life, that’s what we do. That’s our work, that provides us with the resources to live. So when you ask about the need for money, well, we do need money in order to live and we work. Now, I started practicing Buddhism, I guess, 1970, a long time ago. And it was the end of the 60s, the hippie movement was still going very strongly. I was in Vancouver helping to start a center in the early 70s. And we invited Garchen Rinpoche, who was a wonderful teacher who lived in Seattle, to come and talk with us. And somebody asked him a very similar question, and his reply was, “oh, you have to work.” He said, “well, yes, you see, no job, no money, no money, no food, no food, no body, no body, no practice.” Everybody went “uh.” So if we take the attitude that we work in order to live, then that allows us to approach this with some kind of balance and the question is, how much do we need to live? And there is a word is quite important in Tibetan tradition. I don’t know what the Sanskrit or the Pali is. The Tibetan is chokshi, and it’s usually translated as contentment. The structure of Tibetan is that it’s all one-syllable things. And you pile these syllables and you get these complex words. Chok is the word for enough. And Shi is the word to know. So from the Tibetan point of view, contentment means knowing what’s enough.

And this is very, very much what Payutto is talking about in Buddhist Economics. To move from an economy based on craving, which is what our economy is based on, to an economy that is based on intention. And what do I want to do with my life? What do I want it to look like? And part of that is knowing what’s enough. And then we pour our energy into our profession, our work or whatever, providing for our family and ourselves and so forth. But we know what’s enough. And it isn’t a case of there always has to be more, which is where craving comes in, craving is never satisfied. So the way that we work with this in practice is, I would suggest two things: Asking yourself, What’s enough for me? And very few people answer that. And if your world is defined by money then the answer to that is it’s never enough. It’s like you can never be rich enough and you can never be thin enough, right? But if you ask: What do I want my life to look like? How do I want to live? Then there is an answer to that. I need x or I need y, or that would be good. And now you’ve stopped craving and you started to live with intention. And that makes a huge difference in your life, auge difference. Does this help? Okay. You’re very welcome. So your turn. No, then we’ll come back to you. So it’s very interesting. Whenever I ask for questions, everybody looks at me like dead fish. And I really, really don’t like that. But when I just hand the microphone around, everybody asks these great questions. So your turn.

Self-worth is learned

Student: I really don’t have a question.

Ken: You’re sure? You came here to learn something? Okay. I’m going to put a little pressure on you. This is the last time you’re ever going to be able to ask a question in your life about anything. What do you ask?

Student: Where does the the feeling of lack of self-worth come from?

Ken: That wasn’t so hard, was it? That’s great. I think it’s always learned. We feel that we aren’t worth anything or that we aren’t worth very much because somebody who is fairly important in our lives treated us if we didn’t matter. I don’t think it’s a natural feeling. I think it’s always learned from our interaction with the world and as such it’s not a fact. It’s a story. And it may be a story we have deeply, deeply internalized and it may seem like a fact to us but it really is a story. And one of the ways that I’ve come to that conclusion is from my experience of working with people in meditation. I’ve consistently found that after about three or four months of meditation, regular meditation, people’s relationship with themselves starts to change and they start developing a quiet confidence. It’s not arrogant or pushy or anything like that, it’s just a quiet confidence. And I’ve seen that over and over again.

And the reason I think it develops is that when we sit in meditation … Well, let me back up a second. For most of our lives our relationship with ourselves is mediated by somebody else. Initially, it’s our mother, and then our father gets into the picture and then our siblings, and then the education system and so on and so on, and relatives, etc. But we know who we are by the interaction. And so we absorb all these other ideas. The ideas that people have about us, that becomes our story, you follow? When we sit in meditation, well, those stories play. Anybody have that problem in their meditation? Yeah. Okay. But you know, so we just keep letting them go over and over again. And just coming back to our experience, and what’s happening is we’re beginning to form a relationship with ourselves that is unmediated by anybody else. And it’s like, “Oh, well, there’s actually nothing wrong with me.” And that may not be a conscious idea, that may not arise consciously but the act of meditation and we’re just there. I think that’s the genesis of the quiet confidence that I was talking about. So to answer your question, just to take all of that and summarize it, I think a sense of self-worth, low self-regard, or however you want to put it is something that we’ve learned. And because it’s something that we’ve learned, it’s something we can unlearn. It isn’t a fact about who or what we are. You want to follow that up? Okay. Thank you for your question. Why don’t you hand the microphone straight back? You’re going to be a good sport.

Student: I guess that would be a question for you. Why should one be a good sport in this exercise?

Ken: Because any question that you ask is probably on the minds of four or five other people in this room. And by asking it you’re exercising generosity or practicing generosity.

Student: Unless you have a blank mind.

Ken: I think this is most interesting. Everybody’s all uptight about this. But you all came here to learn something. So what do you want to learn?

Student: I have a question.

Ken: No. That’s fine. We’ll stay with her. See, as I said, these recordings go up on the internet and I regularly get emails saying, “I’m so glad that person asked that question because it’s something that’s been on my mind for a long time. It was really good to hear that interaction and that answer.” It happens again and again so not to put you on the spot …

Student: That’s okay. I’m having a blank mind situation.

Meeting disappointment

Ken: Well, what would you like to learn?

Student: I would like to learn how one faces disappointment gracefully.

Ken: I see we have two people now who thought they didn’t have any questions, and they’ve asked two really great questions. Thank you. How to face disappointment gracefully. May I ask a couple of questions here?

Student: Yes.

Ken: Why do you want to face it gracefully?

Student: Why?

Ken: Why not scream and yell, you know? Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go …

Student: Oh, just because I’ve done that for a long time, it doesn’t seem to be working. It doesn’t …

Ken: It doesn’t work for you.

Student: Not so much.

Ken: Okay. And doing it gracefully. How do you think that’s going to work for you?

Student: I’m hoping better.

Ken: Yeah, but what does better mean here?

Student: That in exercising something gracefully, you learn that disappointment isn’t a negative thing, maybe?

Ken: Okay. Thank you. That’s really helpful. Now I know where to go.

Student: Okay.

Ken: Let’s start with a kind of big disappointment. How many of you have experienced being betrayed? Okay, that’s kind of a big disappointment. So I’m going to come at this in two ways. First, I’m going to talk about betrayal and then I’m going to talk a bit more generally. Betrayals are very, very interesting experiences. Because we experience betrayal when somebody acts differently from our understanding of them. Okay. That’s what it means, they betrayed us. We thought we had this agreement or this relationship or this understanding or something. And, you know, there’s the knife in our back, or there’s nobody to catch us when we fall or something like that. And it is acutely disappointing, at least my experience of betrayal has been that. And it’s often a shock. It’s a shock because our story about the world has been shown to be incorrect. And it’s like, “Agh,” so it’s a big shock. Now there’s something actually quite wonderful in that, but it usually takes a little while for us to get around to appreciating it. It means when we experience betrayal, it means the end of an illusion. We’re now living more in how things are. We may not want to be in that world, but we’re probably going to function better because we’re in that world. So betrayal marks the end of illusion. That’s the wonderful thing in it. The painful thing in it is that it really, really hurts. And then there’s the question of how do we meet that experience of hurt and pain and disappointment, to use your word, gracefully. Because, as you say, raging and ranting and screaming and yelling and things like that you found didn’t work for you, I imagine it left residues that you didn’t like, that fair?

The five-step practice for meeting difficulties

Okay, here’s the hard part. If you don’t want to have any residues left, you have to experience it completely. And that can be very, very hard and very painful. But there’s a meditation practice which comes from Thich Nhat Hanh, who’s a Vietnamese Zen teacher. He’s very good. It’s a very simple practice and it’s based on one of the sutras. But rather than this rather elaborate, complex 16 points, he reduced it down to five. I’ve taught it here a couple of times, but I’ll just go over it very quickly for you. And it’s up on my website and I can give you the link to it. And this is not only about disappointment. This is about any really difficult feeling or problem in your life. You can use the same practice.

The first thing is, you are going to use your breath. Breathing in. Let’s use disappointment. Breathing in, I experience this disappointment. Breathing out, I experience this disappointment. And you just do that. You breathe in and you breathe out, experiencing it. You don’t have to do it right now. I’m just going to talk through it quickly.

Now, when you do that, what happens with most people is they go to their heads and there are all these stories about the disappointment. “How could he do this? How could that person have done this? Why didn’t they know I was counting on that?” All of these different stories and thoughts come up. You know what I mean? Okay. Those stories are not particularly helpful at this point. So the first thing we have to do is go to our body. How do we experience that disappointment in the body?

Now this is why we’re hanging out with the stories, so we don’t experience what’s going on in the body. So how do you experience disappointment? “Oh, it’s like I’ve just been slammed in the stomach by a locomotive.” I had that. I had a very good friend. I unknowingly did something to offend him. And I called him up to talk about something and he said, “We have a problem. And he sketched it out, and I literally felt like a locomotive had plowed into my stomach.”

It may be that you feel like your heart’s breaking. There may be actual physical pain at various points in your body. Okay, now comes the hard part. Breathing in, I experience this physical reaction. Breathing out, I experience this physical reaction. You’ll stay with it for one, two, three seconds, and then you go back into the stories. But as I was doing at the beginning, there comes that moment of recognition. And you come back to your body. And you do this over and over again. And as you do this, you’re going to start coming up with all the feelings, the hurt, the anger, shame, guilt, disappointment—you name it—all the different complex of feelings that happens when we experience a disappointment. And little by little you develop the capacity to experience this.

Now you can start to include the stories because the stories will just be stories. They won’t distract you in the same way because you are grounded and connected in your body. It makes a huge difference.

Now this is not easy. If it’s a big thing—there’s another situation I had many years ago where somebody did something that was really not nice, and I couldn’t sleep for three days. I was so upset about this. I didn’t sleep for three days. And then I had some friends come over and we did something like this practice together for a two or three hours. After that I could sleep.

So as we develop the ability to actually be in the experience, something very interesting starts to happen. We find that we can actually rest in the experience. We don’t have to push that disappointment away. That’s interesting. And so there’s a certain calm. It still bothers us, but there’s a certain calm in it. We can actually be there in the experience. And if we keep going and all the time we’re breathing, and like:

Breathing in, I feel the physical reaction, breathing out I feel the physical reaction.

Breathing in. I feel the emotional reaction, breathing out. I feel the emotional reaction.

Breathing in. I experience all the stories, breathing out I experience all the stories.

Keep doing this. And then finally we’re able to say,

Breathing in. I experience calm in this disappointment. Breathing out, I experience calm in this disappointment.

Now as we experience that calm we actually experience the disappointment even more because now we’re not pushing it away. But if we keep going down this road we begin to find that we can actually relax in it, which seems from where we started like a completely crazy possibility, but it actually becomes possible: “Oh, I can just experience this disappointment.” And now something really important has happened. When we get to the point where we’re actually able to relax in that really, really intense feeling, then we know experientially that it’s only a feeling. It’s a very powerful feeling. It’s a very deep feeling. But it’s a feeling. It’s not a fact. And usually not too long after that we come to understand and see things from a different point of view. And if you’ve done all that, then you’ve handled or met the disappointment gracefully.

Now, I’m not giving you any tricks here. You know the kind of thing you’re talking about. It’s tough. Disappointment is really, really hard. Betrayal is really hard. But within the experience of that there’s a kind of awakening because we’re going to see things more clearly. Do you follow?

Now, it can be very, very difficult. I’ve worked with some very, very deep disappointments in my life, and some of them were sufficiently deep it took me literally decades to work through them. I never thought I would, actually. There’s a poem by Stephen Crane which I really connected to in that time. It’s a short poem. Would you like it?

In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

It is bitter—bitter, he answered;

“But I like it

“Because it is bitter

And because it is my heart.”

The Black Raiders and other Lines, Stephen Crane, 1895

So that’s a really concrete practice. And as I say, those five steps are up on my website. And actually I’ve got a set of guided meditations to take you all through that if you’re interested.

Meeting any situation

Now I’m going to give you a more general framework. And this applies very much to disappointment. This applies really to virtually any situation in our lives. The first step is to meet the situation. Don’t ignore it. Don’t deny it. You actually meet it. Or, as my friend likes to say, you show up. And there are lots of ways we don’t do that, you know, in all kinds of little things like that. We show up and meet what arises. Then the second step is to open to it. You can use that five-step practice to do that. You open to it. You just experience it for what it is in all its ramifications, everything you experience, everything associated with it. And, in that opening showing up and opening to it as completely as you’re able to. You will get a sense of what needs to be done, if anything. So you serve what is true in your experience to the limit of your perception. You serve what is true as far as you can see. Okay? And you act, you do whatever needs to be done, and then you receive the result. And it may be disappointment. It may be betrayal. It may be everything goes smoothly.

Now, a woman who worked with me many years ago is an expert in midwifery. And in addition to working at a hospital here in Los Angeles, she also was asked by the World Health Organization to do a training for midwives in Eastern Europe and other countries. And she always had to negotiate time off from her hospital responsibilities to do this. And the World Health Organization asked her to do this big project, and she really wanted to. I can’t remember the name of the country. And so she brought this up in one of our meetings. And she really didn’t know how to present this to her boss at the hospital. So I talked about it with her. And, you know, her credentials were impeccable. Her experience was considerable, etc., etc. I said, “Make the best case. Why it’s good for the world, why it’s good for the hospital, why it’s good for you, etc., etc. Just make your best case.’ So she met the situation. She opened to it. She served what was true for her.

And she came to see me the morning she was going to make this presentation to her boss. I said, “How are you feeling about this?”

And she said something very interesting. She said, “It doesn’t matter what she says now. I know I’ve given it my best shot.”

So she had reached the point by serving what was true for her as completely as possible that she could receive any result that came. So I said, “Give me a call later in the day. Let me know how it goes.” And she did.

I said, “How’d it go?

“I got through three minutes and she said, ‘Yes.'”

It doesn’t always work out that way. But the big thing was because she’d met the situation completely, she could receive any result. So that may also be useful to you.

Student: I feel like when I meet the situation completely, I’m going to receive one result, the one I want. Does that make sense? I’m sure it’s because I have not met it completely, but how do you get honest about that?

Ken: Sit down with a friend. Yes, I understand what you mean. On our own, we may only be able to see things, and we think it’s all going to work out this way. And then we go into the situation and something completely different happens that we didn’t think of. Okay, this is exactly the work I do with people, actually. They come in situations and we brainstorm together, tracking down every conceivable possibility that could arise. So that when they go into the situation, there aren’t any surprises and it’s really helpful. If you’re stuck in your own story, sit down with somebody else or two or three other people and ask them, “In this situation, what do you think is going to happen?” And you often get responses which are not what you want to hear. But actually from the perspective that I’m talking about, it is what you want to hear, because these are things you couldn’t see or imagine yourself. And I found that very, very useful. We fool ourselves very, very easily. In fact, there’s growing evidence that the ability to fool ourselves is a good survival trait, but it causes us other kinds of problems. Does that help?

Okay. Now there is somebody back here with a question, I think. So we’ve had two questions. We’re going to have time for about one more because there’s a couple of things I want to talk about.

Intention without expectation

Student: Okay. Actually I was just actually going to ask for clarification on your response to the first question. So you mentioned something along the lines of and I’m paraphrasing, basically, living with intent, living with intention, rather than constant craving, setting a goal X, Y. I’ll be happy when I get X, Y. But it seems to me that you don’t know that you’ll be happy when you get X or Y because you haven’t gotten those yet. And also, once you get X, Y, you’ll probably want Z. You know, like the whole you give a mouse a cookie thing. It’s going to want a glass of milk and then it goes on. And so, I’m not an idealist by any means, I agree with setting goals and everything, but it seems to me that in regards to spiritual health, it may be more important to, through observation of society and self-analysis, become appreciative and grateful for what you already have. And those two things, they may not be mutually exclusive.

Ken: Well, I agree with you. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive. I talked about living with intention. I’m not sure that I talked about goal setting. But I did talk about working to live, not living to work. And in what you offered here, I have very little quarrel with what you said. And when you’re successful up to X, then other possibilities open up. You can see more. And so you use the framework of goal setting. Then you may set new goals. What I was encouraging this person to do was to be clear about their intention in life. And it goes back to what I was responding to this woman, opening to your life, opening to everything that you experience. Then you are going to start appreciating what you have. And you think, okay, how much more than this do I actually need? What’s necessary? When we function from the perspective of “We aren’t enough,” what we tend to do is try to compensate for that by getting more of anything. So when we sit and practice and we come to a different sense of ourselves, unmediated by others, then we are more likely to be able to say, “Oh, this is enough. This is what I want,” and move into appreciating what we have, just as you described.

Now in the spiritual thing, it gets worse. From the spiritual perspective we set an intention, we set a direction, and we do so in the knowledge we may never be around to experience the result. And we do it because it is the appropriate thing to do now.

And so there’s a wonderful passage in a book that I love. The book’s called How to Cook Your Life. There’s two by that title. The one I’m talking about is by Uchiyama, and it’s really, I think, a kick-ass book. It’s a commentary on instructions to the monastery cook. And the instructions say, “When all of this is done, then the head cook can start preparing tomorrow’s soup.” This is in the evening. And Uchiyama makes it very, very clear. You prepare tomorrow’s soup as today’s work. But you have no idea whether you will actually serve or eat tomorrow’s soup, because you may die in the night. There may be an earthquake. We know that here in Los Angeles. And so this is living in the central paradox of human experience, which is things have an order to some extent, and that order can be disrupted at any moment by something else. And the only way to live in that is to live completely in each moment, without expectation that you’re going to ever experience the results of your efforts. And when you live this way, then each activity has to be meaningful in and of itself, and it’s a very different way to live. Does this make sense to you?

Okay. Now I just want to say we’ve got time for one more question if anybody has. Yes.

How do you keep going?

Student: This is my first time here, but I want to make sure I word this correctly. I’ve like practiced other forms of Buddhism. I’ve read books about The Secret, the power, and my life still seems like it’s not where I want it to be. And mentally, I still go to a position where I feel like I’m deteriorating in the moment. So with that, I think I’m doing all the right stuff, I’m getting in the right feeling and then stuff happens and then I want to flip out, so to say, not outwardly, but inside. Like my mind starts going and I have a hard time quieting it, and I don’t have time to sit down and do the five exercises and the five breathing exercises. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, like when you when I feel like I’m doing everything I possibly can to live in, like, reach the life I want to live, and it still doesn’t get there, and I get disappointed or I get rejection, and then you’re in the point where you want to lash out at yourself or someone else. How do you feel like you’re going the right way? How do you keep going?

Ken: Ah, okay. No, that’s all right. You got to the point right at the end. And that’s very helpful. How do you keep going? One failure after another. How do you keep going? Right. It feels like that. Well, if I were to answer you in a single word, the word would be faith. But I want to elaborate on that a little bit. There are two ways we can approach the world. One is, we can interpret what arises in our experience and try to fit it in with ideas that we have inside. Make everything fit. That approach to the world I call belief because we have these beliefs about the world, and we’re trying to make our experience fit to them. My own experience is that’s a relatively closed way and a very problematic way. And if it’s not problematic for ourselves, then it becomes problematic for other people. The other way is to be willing to meet whatever arises in our experience, because we cannot control what arises. I mean, we could be sitting here and there could be an earthquake. We could all be dead in the next minute.

In 1994 there was the big Northridge quake. So it hit it like 4:32 in the morning. Okay, so Zen Center of Los Angeles started a sesshin intensive retreat at 4.30 that morning. There they all were and suddenly everything started to quake. Well, they just went on sitting. Zen is kind of hard-ass about that kind of thing. But there’s a bit of a shock. I talked to several people afterwards, it was a very powerful quake. So you referred to The Secret. The Secret is one of the biggest corporate snow jobs that has been perpetrated recently. It was brilliant, brilliant marketing and got people to think that they were actually buying something. And they sold tons and tons of copies of this thing by promising that it was the secret, and it was a way around the corporate thing. It was brilliant, but it was very exploitive. It sounds like you’ve been through some difficult times. What is one thing you know about yourself because you’ve been through some difficult times?

Student: I know I haven’t given up yet. Yeah. Sort of hope.

Ken: That’s exactly right. You know you will survive. That’s extraordinarily important. You know you will survive. And because you know that you don’t have to flip out. And yes, in life we get knocked around six ways to Sunday. Some people have an easier time. Some people have a harder time. There is no explanation for that. That’s a mystery. What I found most important in my own life in this regard is to be willing to learn from everything that arises. Sometimes, as I was explaining to this woman over here, that’s been very, very difficult for me. But being willing to learn from whatever arises, and knowing that I’m actually going to handle it one way or another, more or less gracefully. And being willing to learn from it. Then I find a way to go on. So that’s what I offer to you, and it’s helpful.

Supporting the conditions for practice

There’s just a few minutes that we have remaining. I want to say a word, concrete word, about money and so forth. Centers such as this, the vast majority find their funding in two ways. To set up something like this takes a fair amount of capital, and usually there’s a patron or people who make donations so that a space such as this can be rented or bought, as the case may be. And it’s wonderful that people have donated large sums of money to make things like this possible. And I don’t know whether you know, the Garrison Institute in New York is a huge facility that was bought and developed and where lots of Buddhist events take place. I heard recently of someone who used to have a hedge fund and cashed out and has set up this magnificent facility in Thailand, in Phuket. In the course of Buddhist history it has always been the case that some people who have a lot of money use what they’ve had the good fortune to either receive or accumulate, or have in their lives, to provide the facilities for other people to be able to learn and practice.

But then there’s the other side of it. It’s the operating costs. And I know from my own experience working in non-profits that major donors hate funding operating costs. They want to be able to provide the facility and have the people who use it provide the operating costs, and that’s us here. We’re the ones who use this. And we know it takes money, it’s electricity, air conditioning, sometimes all of that stuff, you know, rent, etc., and so the purpose of the donations that you make here is for you to have this space, and so that you can come. And so that people like me can come and either bore you, as I did for the few people tonight, and maybe help one or two, which always makes me feel good. When I come here, people very kindly give me a portion of the money that comes because I’m giving this little talk about making donations. I’m not going to be taking anything this evening, so I’m not talking to fill my own pockets this evening. And I’ve been very fortunate with a number of things. I don’t actually have to depend on this for my own income any more. And so I’m very, very happy to be here and just offer some of my experience. But it is very, very important that when you make use of a space such as this, you actually contribute to making the space possible. And so I would encourage you to do that. And if you have the resources not only to make it possible for yourself, but also to make it possible for another person, that way you ensure the longevity of a center such as this, and you also ensure its availability for other people. And in the same way that I do these recordings and I put them up on the internet, they’re all available completely free because they create opportunities for other people.

And it’s it’s really lovely to receive an email from someone who says, “Oh, that question that that person asked and the response that you gave in the interaction, that totally changed my practice. I can go on now.” That’s a nice email to get. And I’ve got many of those just from these kinds of conversations that we’ve had this evening. The ethic here is that anybody can come and benefit from this space and nobody has to make a donation. That’s part of the ethic of Dharma Punks and Against the Stream. At the same time, there’s the very real fact that it costs money. And so, in making donations, you’re making them really to your own practice because it’s through this that you provide the space and the opportunities for yourselves. So I just wanted to end on that note.

Okay. So, 9 pm on the dot. We should close here. So if you could just sit for a few minutes, I’ll just say a few lines.

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