My first intention this morning is that I would like to be
fearless in speaking the truth.
I was with our teacher when he spoke at the World Bank in 2013.
In that giant atrium that many of you know in Washington, D.C.
Our teacher was so fearless in speaking the truth.
If I could have one percent of that this morning,
I would be very happy.
So I will do my best to be fearless in speaking the truth.
I will also do my best to speak from a place of love and care.
As Christiana was saying earlier:
I think some of the issues of our time
bring up an energy of anger and injustice.
And we're all human.
I think I feel that, too.
And I think ...
Part of the deep work that each of us need to do
and that's my work this morning as I speak to you,
is to have my love at least as strong as my anger and my sense of injustice.
So I hope my siblings will support me.
There's a bell master, Brother [name].
If I get a little too passionate,
I'm sure he will help me with a wake-up sound of the bell
to remind me to keep my heart really open as I share today.
I also want to share with joy
sometimes ...
our spiritual practise can seem like a really serious endeavour.
But for me, to understand myself and the world,
to cultivate insight,
to start to see what Right Action could look like,
what a source of joy!
That is a wonderful thing to be doing
and a great use of our time and energy.
So. Even though ethics is a really tough topic,
I hope to bring joy to it this morning.
And finally, I also deeply aspire in this talk to kind of ...
get out of the way myself, to step aside,
and let the dharma speak.
In Buddhism, when we speak about non-self,
it's really a lived practise.
I don't think that I'm a separate self saying these things.
Any sense of me and mine I want to put to the side
so I can just simply share some of the wisdom
of 2500 years that I happen to have been learning
and continue to learn in this community.
So this is also not really my talk.
It's a collective talk.
So, with that spirit, we can listen to three sounds of the bell.
Sometimes we're being a bit efficient.
We're just having one.
But this morning it would be beautiful to enjoy three sounds of the bell
and listening to the bell truly as a practise of systems change
can we find our freedom in the sound of the bell,
can we touch what is most sacred and precious in life.
[sound of the bell]
Thank you, everybody.
There is actually a bodhisattva of crying in the Buddhist tradition.
I was wondering where my tears are coming from.
I realised it was the tears of the earth and then they flowed even stronger.
Okay.
In our dharma sharing yesterday,
someone gave rise to an intention to be a good ancestor.
We had asked our group: What's the most important thing for you?
What is most important in your life?
What do you want to commit your time and energy to?
Thank you.
For every bodhisattva that cries there is a bodhisattva with tissues.
[laughter]
What would it mean to be a good ancestor?
And what would it mean to be a good descendant
of those who have come before us?
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Those that came before us in the recent past,
but also those that came before us a long, long time ago.
The wise ones. The wiser ones, maybe.
Someone also asked in our group:
What's the Buddhist understanding of time?
And for us, as we've picked up,
we say that the present moment contains the past.
And it contains the future.
My tears are the tears of the past and the tears of the future.
Our actions now ...
already contain all of the past conditioning in them.
The way we walk as though we're in a hurry.
They say our sense of urgency and time
came with the invention of the clock in the industrial revolution.
Our speed of walking carries history within it.
And when we can take a step in freedom now,
we're transforming the rushing and running and striving
of our ancestors.
And we're making it a little bit more possible
that future generations will also be able to walk in peace and freedom.
When we imagine the kind of society all of us are working to make possible
for the future: A just society, a more equitable society,
an inclusive society,
whether we're contributing to that as a monastic
or as someone with the B team
or someone with Global Optimism
or Project Everyone.
All the organisations represented here.
We have in mind a kind of society
and those future generations
that we want to make possible with our actions today.
We want to believe such a future is possible.
In Buddhism,
we believe that in the present moment,
we have immense energy and agency,
immense kind of capacity,
to create the preconditions for that future.
and in a way to create that future with this present.
What is it that we think that we do
when we're being alive?
What is it we're talking about
when we talk about life and how we're spending our life?
In some of the settings in which some of us might find ourselves
most of the time,
life might be about productivity
or profit, or innovation,
or agility.
KPIs? Apparently it's a thing.
In Buddhism, we naturally have a different sense
of what we're doing with our time and energy.
[KARMA]
We speak about something called karma.
I know some of you think something when you see that word.
But actually, it's a technical term that simply means 'action'.
The energy of action.
All of us are producing karma in every moment.
And we speak about triple action.
Our way of thinking.
[THINKING]
Our way of speaking.
[SPEAKING]
And our way of acting.
[ACTING]
Our thoughts go out into the world
and kind of ripple out and continue us.
The reason we say that thinking is important
is because we are cultivating those seeds in our mind,
our thinking, all the time.
I think many of you in this room are the kind of people,
if you have a good idea, it's a very quick channel
to then say it and implement it.
Our ideas are really important. Our ideas, our values,
our way of seeing the world.
It gives rise to what we say and to action.
We really do call thinking a kind of action.
Our teacher used to like quoting Jean Paul Sartre.
L'homme est la somme de ses actes.
Man is the sum of his actions.
Each one of us, the imprint we leave on the world,
is primarily, exclusively
the legacy of our thinking, speaking, and acting.
Our way of being.
In our professional life,
we might end up focusing so much on acting,
and it can be a really interesting exercise to ask ourselves:
What do I think my professional legacy is going to be?
And is that what's on our gravestone?
I was contemplating this
when I first became practising in Plum Village.
At that time, I was working in the BBC newsroom
in political news, of all things.
And I had heard this line:
I'm definitely going to get sick
I cannot escape sickness,
I'm definitely going to get old, I cannot escape old age,
I'm definitely gonna die, I can't escape death.
I'm certainly going to be separated from all and everyone I love.
And the fifth point: Only my actions
of body, speech and mind are the ground on which I stand.
My actions.
I was working in the newsroom and I thought: Gosh.
I thought: If I continue working here,
how will my life be summed up?
Suddenly I realised,
maybe my gravestone would just say my name and something like: BBC Editor.
It was an interesting realisation.
Because if any of you have ever worked with the BBC,
"Editor" is a big thing.
It's kind of the holy grail for everyone working there.
And I wanted my life to be about much more than that.
I realised that when we think about our professional achievements,
it can be so disillusioning.
Maybe the realm of our action is not exactly what we think it is.
We often speak about impact.
I want to have impact.
[name]'s favourite phrase is "scale & speed". Speed and scale.
Speed. Scale. Impact.
How is that going to be on your gravestone?
This policy document. This report. Getting this funding.
In Buddhism we really say that our continuation
and kind of our impact is so much deeper than the ends of what we achieve.
It's also the How of How we get there.
The means.
If we could describe our way of being like a candle,
and our thinking and speaking and acting is radiating out in the world.
The quality of our ...
Loving action.
How we think, speak and act is also ...
If you think of a candle radiating light.
That light is also shining on the candle itself.
When we say something that is not quite true,
that is affecting our consciousness, it's affecting our selves.
When we do an action
that doesn't quite have full integrity and alignment with our own personal values,
that is affecting us.
It is affecting, maybe, how we can sleep at night.
Whether we have anxiety or despair.
But when we can act, speak and think in such a way
that's really in alignment with our values,
we can kind of be coherent to ourselves.
And here's something interesting.
If we get too preoccupied by thinking that our main actions
are our professional actions, we may miss the fact
that perhaps our deepest transmission is maybe in the way we are as a person.
For example to our children, to our family members.
How we are with feelings of anger.
How we are with feelings of anxiety.
How we are with craving and habits.
In fact, all the time, we are imprinting that on the next generation.
Maybe your greatest legacy is not your professional one,
but the family and people that we are with at home.
And maybe you spend more time with your colleagues than with your kids.
And so maybe that patterning and that transmission
is actually happening in the workplace.
And we are participating in increasing the energy of impatience.
The energy of not-enough-ness.
I'll come to that in a moment.
And we are not transmitting what we were learning about on the first day,
which is the power of presence. A quality of presence.
So we may be looking in the wrong place for our legacy.
For our transmission, our continuation.
These are all great Buddhist words.
The way we continue in the world, what we transmit to people around us.
And one reason why this is important,
it comes back to something to do with systems change
and something we heard from Brother Spirit yesterday.
Which is that we can take actions to mitigate the problems of our time.
We can take actions to adapt our economic systems and infrastructure.
But ultimately, that third pillar of transformation,
transforming the system,
are the humans who will be in that system.
In 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, 150 years.
How will those humans be responding to the challenges of their time?
We can't even anticipate all the challenges.
But what if we could establish a way of being that we learn and train in,
and cultivate, and that is what we are transmitting?
As the ultimate kind of toolkit, life-kit, life support system
for the generations to come
so that they will know how to breathe in a crisis.
So they will know how to walk in such a way that they can enjoy a forest.
We may be so busy protecting forests
that we're not able to transmit to our children how to enjoy a forest
and walk in freedom through a forest.
In what I'm trying to share, maybe, actually,
what's more important is to help the children know how to walk in freedom
and enjoy a forest, so that they can protect forests
in 50 years or 100 years or 150 years.
Maybe, maybe, more important than saving one tiny corner
with one campaign now.
It's something about ... We hate using computer metaphors.
But like the operating system of collective consciousness.
That is where we need to insert our program of transformation.
How we're processing, how we're running, how we're creating and responding to life.
That's where it's very important to invest our time and energy.
And that has something to do with ethics.
I'd like to phone a friend and ask Brother Phap Huu to help me.
Sorry, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire reference.
It may come out of the blue there.
Brother Phap Huu will help me draw a little circle.
[laughter]
Thank you, brother, thank you.
We are doing our best to come back to our selves.
Some of us have had the question: What does this actually mean?
It means to listen, for example, what is most important to us.
On that first day we were learning about listening to our breathing
and our body, and what our breathing and body are telling us.
SOS. I'm here.
Please take care of me.
You've completely forgotten about me, your body. I'm here.
Coming back to take care of our body.
Coming back to take care of our feelings,
including the most uncomfortable ones:
Grief, anxiety, despair.
Jealousy, craving.
It's a 101 human life skill. Can we handle these feelings?
And then, can we generate well-being?
Can we know what is being most important to us?
And we may, in the last couple of days, have had some new insights already
about what's important to us.
And then we had the lines coming out.
Brother Phap Huu thinks I can draw some small circles.
Almost.
We are helping our loved ones.
When we leave this retreat,
we're not going out to then fix the people we love.
And tell them that they need to eat in silence for five minutes with us,
or sit in meditation with us every morning,
or walk with us.
What we would like to do is to help them listen to themselves.
And with those practises of deep listening that we've been learning,
simply the way we show up with our presence,
will help our loved ones, our colleagues,
listen to themselves.
We are a kind of witness, a companion, a friend.
We're showing up in such a way ...
It's not showing off. It's simply being there to allow them to feel at ease.
Calm and able to hear what's going on for them.
Thay, our teacher, said ...
We can then imagine that our family,
it can also be our friendship network,
it can be those people we live with.
Our teacher described it as our home base.
He called it the base or the foundation of our operations.
And this could even be your team at work that you spend quite some time with.
The wellness of this body,
this collection of human beings,
is the base of our operations to then influence our society.
And you can imagine: Society is here somewhere.
We've spoken a lot about collaboration.
I know that's essential to all the organisations represented here.
The quality of collaboration, we could even say harmony,
will determine the quality of our impact on the collective.
So here, we have practises of listening, and loving speech
and conflict resolution.
Also the practise at a collective level of embracing pain and suffering.
There can be pain and suffering at the level of a family.
When a family member is not well, or dying, or passing away.
There can be pain and suffering in a team when a project falls through.
Or when a project is undermined.
Think of the challenge of the ESG framework.
That brings up a lot of emotions in lots of people.
And we need to be able to take care of these emotions at the level of our teams.
To share our despair, to share our grief,
to help each other handle the strong emotions
in order to be able to arrive at collective insight for a new way out.
And, as been shared already, there's no shortage of intelligence in this room.
In our teams, in our organisations.
And no shortage of good will, of good intention.
I spoke about what we would like for the future,
and how we can live it in our own life now to make it more possible in the future.
We have the example of being able to walk in freedom
or enjoy a forest,
or see an apple for the miracle that an apple is.
My deepest wish would be
that people can enjoy an apple deeply in 100 years' time
and know it for the miracle it is.
And for that I need to eat an apple in that way now
and share with others how to eat an apple like that.
When we speak about actions and projects,
that are ethical projects for more ethical business practises,
that we want to happen by others or in the future,
in our way of operating as a team,
to get those good social outcomes,
the kind of values that we're aiming for in our project
need to be there in the way that we're approaching the project.
Inclusiveness, for example.
Or equity.
Do we have inclusiveness and equity in our teams?
Transparency, accountability.
Thay sometimes described this as transforming our team or our organisation
into a community.
Into a community that is embodying the values we want to see in the world.
I'm sure you have wonderful mission statements already.
But as a kind of reality check,
are the values in our organisation in full alignment
with the impact we're trying to have in the world?
The values of how we work together, how we listen to each other,
how we include each others' ideas.
To ensure that as a team, as an organisation,
we are already embodying the values we want to bring.
and not falling into the trap the kind of toxic systems of the world
that we're trying to change.
So how can our way of working for change already resist
some of the pernicious practises out in the world?
This relates even to things like ...
Communications.
I say this as someone who used to be a journalist.
Are we honest in our communications?
Are we telling the whole truth about the impact of our company on the world?
And if we have that kind of integrity of speech within our own company,
then we can inspire other organisations who are struggling much more
to see that we really embody these values of deep honesty.
I want to speak about something that Christiana mentioned to me
a few days ago when I was asking:
What is keeping this particular constellation of people awake at night?
Christiana was silent for a long time.
And one of the threads that Christiana offered
was perhaps a feeling of deep frustration.
That we are good people here.
And you are doing good work.
And you are even doing your best.
But somehow, it's just not moving the needle.
It's just not having the kind of change that we know is possible.
And we can't quite get our head around all the obstacles
and why this is just so hard.
So one thing that we as Buddhist practitioners can offer
to this feeling of frustration is:
Be ready for indirect consequences to your work.
Maybe the success of that project, campaign, initiative or partnership,
maybe measuring the work that you're doing on a daily basis
by the outcome of that one project is not the right place to look
for your impact in the world.
The fact that you are already bringing a good intention
to the way you live your own life,
the fact that you are already collaborating in our teams
with generosity, inclusiveness, presence, listening, values,
that is already action that is fully radiating into the world
and into the people around you at home, and at work.
That is already saying: It is worth trying.
Your daily actions can already be embodying the message:
What we are doing now is not OK.
And each one of us can do our part to change it.
That is a patterning, a legacy, that we're leaving in society.
And I'd like to invite Brother Phap Huu again.
We're gonna recall our circle of the first day on seeds.
Thank you so much, brother.
We were understanding there's this thing called store consciousness.
[STORE C.]
This is a model of our mind and we have the seeds ...
And all of us have all the seeds in the depths of our consciousness.
Our actions, every day, the way we speak,
the way we listen, the way we walk,
the ideals we give rise to, the value,
we are watering good seeds in our consciousness.
And Sister Hero also said,
this is both collective and individual.
In Buddhism we say that we trust --
it's been all about trust this morning --
that all seeds will ripen in time.
In their own time.
Some seeds ripen right away.
Others need longer.
We may now be in the process of cultivating seeds
that don't just take one season around the sun to bloom
not just 17 years like some cicadas that, I think, have a 17-year lifecycle.
Maybe there are some seeds that will take more than a generation to ripen.
What if now, the fact that we can be here,
is the ripening of seeds from one generation ago?
Maybe two generations ago?
My grandfather was the first person in my family to buy a book on meditation
in the 1970s.
I feel like I'm a ripening across two generations.
That even I just can be here.
And my grandfather didn't, in his whole life,
have a chance to go on one retreat.
It still wasn't available in his time.
I think he started getting sick in 1991.
Before the internet.
He didn't know there were places where he could go to learn meditation.
The wonderful thing about the ripening of seeds is:
Our life now, our actions and careers are already the ripening from the past.
And we can trust that we may not see all the fruits in our own lifetime.
But the good seeds we water now
will continue to ripen over time.
So the question is:
What seeds are we watering?
When we were learning about mind,
and Sister Hero explained
that there's a part of our mind called 'manas'
which is the grasping part of our mind.
Which always wants to take care of me and mine.
Me and mine, it's to have, to hold.
To protect.
To appropriate.
To extract.
And we had some characteristics,
which I will just remind us of.
Appropriating,
surviving,
survival instinct,
avoiding pain,
seeking pleasure,
ignoring the danger of seeking pleasure,
ignoring the goodness of suffering,
and ignoring the law of moderation.
This is a couple of thousand years' worth of Buddhist insight --
one and a half thousand years. It came from a later phase of Buddhism --
about how our mind works.
And when we saw this on the board the other day,
I don't know how many of you saw that this doesn't only apply
only at the individual level.
Is this not quite an accurate description
of how humanity is living as a species
on this Earth?
We're appropriating the Earth.
We're exploiting it.
We think of our survival as being separate
of the survival of other species and the Earth.
As a species, we like to avoid pain and we definitely seek pleasure.
And we ignore the danger of seeking pleasure.
And we ignore the goodness of suffering.
So these ones, number 3 to 7,
is our culture of consumerism.
Right there.
We consume because we can't bear the feeling of pain inside.
We consume to cover up our suffering.
We think we need more things because we think that we're not enough.
What we have is not enough.
And there's an economic system that reminds us, that tells us
that we don't have enough, all the time.
I was doing my anger check.
I'm going to speak from love.
[sound of the bell]
I'm also going to tell the truth.
In pursuit of profit,
marketing departments all over the world
tell us that we don't have enough.
According to the insights of Buddhism,
we do have enough.
The present moment is enough.
Each one of us is enough.
Our presence, the presence of our loved ones,
to be able to walk deeply on the Earth,
listen to the birds and trees, is enough to be happy.
We can live very simply and be happy.
I've heard quite a few of you say this week:
It's been so powerful to touch simplicity in these days.
To not be needing these devices so much.
To not having to buy things online while we're here.
Our level of consumerism has gone right down.
And yet, our level of happiness has gone right up.
We are touching the truth
that we have more than enough conditions to be happy.
Our teacher once said something, I find it very deep,
and quite brave.
He said: It's because as a species we don't know what true happiness is.
That is why we are destroying our planet.
It's quite deep.
We don't know and haven't learned
how to touch true happiness in our daily life.
We consume to cover up our pain.
We're seeking pleasure to cover up our pain
because we don't know how to find happiness in simplicity.
So we consume.
And that culture of consumerism is destroying our planet.
This means it's really important
to be able to touch the wonder of the present moment
in order to touch happiness in a really simple way.
And it's really important that each one of us
learns how to handle a painful feeling.
So that the first response to our painful feeling
is not consuming.
Mindfulness can be our first response to a painful feeling.
Being present. Meeting our self, this is us, coming back:
The way out is in.
Meeting our self and our painful feelings
with tenderness, with kindness,
with curiosity.
In terms of ethics, it means that
an ethical corporation is one that is not participating
in enhancing this mechanism.
But is helping people realise that we have enough.
Helping people nourish true happiness.
Helping people handle painful feelings.
And we might say: Oh, that's the role of education.
That is the role of society.
The role of ... something else.
But if our corporations are truly in the service
of something more than profit,
ideally in the service of humanity,
and even bigger, in the service of the planet,
we would need to be aware of this ethical dimension to our operations
as an enterprise.
It's also really interesting,
we also have agency and sovereignty as individuals
to free ourselves from the systems of our own creation.
According to the insights of Buddhism, we don't make the system,
or other corporations, or some culture of consumerism outside of us,
responsible for this.
With the energy of mindfulness, we expand our zone of free will.
We get to choose what to consume,
how to live.
We can set our self free from these machines,
systems, mechanisms of our own creation.
And that is why for us,
mindfulness has to do with awakening and freedom.
It gives us so much more agency.
When we can transform this for ourselves,
because of this, the impact we're having with our presence,
we are forming it for our children.
For our friends.
I remember our teacher saying:
One of the greatest skills we can develop in our time in Plum Village is to learn
how to generate a moment of happiness.
Because learning to generate a moment of happiness
has something to do with handling a painful feeling.
The two kind of go together.
We need a moment of happiness when we're feeling low or down.
Or when we're feeling neutral.
Numb. A bit 'meh'.
The skill of generating a moment of happiness
is one of the best skills we can learn here.
Because when we know how to create a moment of happiness,
we can create such a moment for our family.
We can create such a moment for the teams we work with.
Or for our organisation as a whole.
It doesn't take much to create a moment of happiness.
Thay even said we can create a moment of happiness
whenever we want.
It's a tough one.
But I'm working on it.
It is possible to really ask myself this question.
If I'm feeling neutral, if I'm feeling low,
if I'm feeling not happy, not well,
I ask myself: What can I do in this moment?
On this retreat we've been learning many ways that we can do that.
Relaxing the body when the discomfort we find is a physical discomfort.
Anxiety, restlessness, tension.
That's when we can practise deep relaxation.
And on our app there are lots of recordings you can use
as you go home from this retreat.
Sharing a meal with friends. In person.
Not eating alone is a source of joy and happiness.
But also, learning, when we're eating alone,
to not feel that we're alone.
But to really see the whole planet and cosmos and Mother Earth,
the miracle of life, in our sandwich, in our lunchbox, in our food.
And to say: I will use my eye of insight
that even in this moment, a part of me feels so alone to eat alone.
But I know that is not the whole truth.
I know that the whole cosmos is supporting my lunch.
The whole cosmos is supporting my apple.
And using the eye of insight, we can flip a moment of loneliness
into a moment of happiness and connection with the whole planet, the whole cosmos.
So when we speak about what seeds we've been watering,
the name of these seeds, for those, who have missed the presentation,
it could be fear. It could be anxiety.
It could be despair.
But it also could be happiness.
Gratitude, mindfulness.
Generosity.
A question for all of us is:
What seeds are we watering in our daily life?
And what has that got to do with transforming the system,
transforming our society?
Many of us, on this retreat,
we've had a feeling of fear, or anger, or panic,
things aren't moving fast enough.
Scale and speed!
These may be seeds in our organisation.
The collective consciousness of our organisation and teams.
Maybe it can be a really good exercise.
How are we all feeling?
Could you go home with your teams
and have a whiteboard and name the compost, name the mud?
Maybe everyone has to write it privately on a post-it note
and then you collect it up.
Maybe you need an equal number of positive ones to negative ones.
What seeds are we watering?
I'm going to write 'culture of consumerism' here.
[CULTURE OF CONSUMERISM]
Maybe our culture of consumerism is watering the seed of craving in us.
So one question is:
When we talk about having free will to live differently on our planet,
how can we guard our mind
from the collective consciousness watering our seed of craving all the time?
Every time we see an advertisement, it's watering the seed of craving.
"If you have this product, you will feel happier."
"If you have this product, you will be cool and acceptable."
"You will have status."
"Having this product is a mark of power or influence."
These seeds are being watered in us all the time.
The power of mindfulness is that it gives us the freedom
to choose to be different
and to operate outside of this culture of consumerism.
In Buddhism we speak about fuel.
What is driving us?
Our deepest intention or volition.
We can also speak about that as a seed in our consciousness.
For example ... Some of us might have been this:
I'm going to have that kind of car and my own house by the time I'm 30.
That is a volition and intention that we set at a certain point
and it drives us.
We may have a volition and intention to get a certain amount of money,
a certain paygrade, maybe a certain status.
In Buddhism we have a practise of deep inquiry
around what our volitions are.
It's kind of a technical term.
Volition.
What is our deepest concern?
Actually, according to the wise ones in Buddhism,
Money, status, power, and even, kind of, sensual pleasures,
they don't cut it.
It might be what you crave or think you crave,
or society tells you you should crave,
but it might not be what's most important to you.
What you really want.
What you really want to offer.
And I have the feeling that for many of you,
one of the flavours of your volition is you want to be of service.
Of service to society, to support inclusiveness,
non-discrimination,
for your life to help people fall in love with the Earth,
and protect the planet.
To have a more equitable economic system.
That is a fantastic volition.
We say that our volition is like a fire in our, kind of, belly.
And we have to feed it and keep it alive every day.
And we have to really know what is most important to us.
And maybe the How of how we're doing our deepest dreams --
sometimes we also call volition our deepest desire --
[DEEPEST DESIRE]
The How of realising is as important as the What.
If we sacrifice our friends and family and health
in order to take care of the planet,
maybe we haven't taken care of the planet
in the way that future generations need us to.
Maybe that isn't the way to be a good ancestor
for the future of the planet, because we're patterning in
not taking care of our health, sacrificing friends and family,
we're patterning that in to society.
A really deep insight that Thay had about volition and desire
is that it is a way to transform manas.
He used a technical term: We sublimate manas
in the service of our good intention, our deepest desire.
He had the image that manas had kind of appropriated --
if you remember this energy of appropriating --
a part of store consciousness in saying: "This is me."
"This is me, here."
And he said that we can transform manas
into a lotus.
And that it can be a lotus of serving society,
serving the world.
And we take our survival instinct,
which Sister Hero described as the energy of vitality.
We have a life force
that becomes our deepest desire.
That, then, is self-reinforcing.
We take care of our pain.
We take care of generating moments of happiness.
We understand the goodness of embracing the compost.
We understand that we don't want to waste time
on streaming and screens.
We understand the law of moderation
because we have got something much more important to do
with our waking days and hours.
I would like to read a part of ...
We have an ethical code in Plum Village.
We will now go into the applied ethics part of everything I've been saying.
We have a particular ethical principle
which we can describe as having the right kind of fuel.
[RIGHT FUEL]
And this is what it says:
Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption,
I'm committed to cultivating good health,
both physical and mental,
for myself, my family and my society
by practising mindful eating, drinking and consuming.
Consuming edible foods, sensory impressions,
consuming volition -- because we say it's a kind of food,
it gets us out of bed in the morning, just like the coffee.
And consuming consciousness.
What's really interesting in Buddhism is that we say we consume our environment.
The consciousness of our environment.
That's why, if our team is struggling and having a lot of fear and anxiety,
we will feel fear and anxiety.
If there is a lot of despair and loneliness in the world,
say after the pandemic, if we say that it increased,
as some of the research seems to show.
That collective consciousness is going to affect our individual consciousness.
We're feeling not only our own pain,
but the pain of our society.
It's as though we're eating collective consciousness.
Here's another line from this principle of right fuel.
I am determined -- so, aware of the suffering
caused by unmindful consumption --
I am determined not to try to cover up loneliness,
anxiety, or other suffering, by losing myself in consumption
I will contemplate interbeing
and consume in a way that preserves peace,
joy and wellbeing in my body and consciousness
and in the collective body and consciousness
of my family, my society, and the Earth.
When we speak about individual transformation
and systems transformation,
our systems are an expression
of individuals, of humanity.
When we transform our own way of consuming,
we have the right to ask of the organisations we're in
as a business: Are we helping people
consume in a way that preserves peace, joy, and wellbeing?
These ethics start with ourselves,
but apply to our livelihoods, too.
We have another ethical principle.
It's about simplicity.
We could call it Deep Simplicity.
[DEEP SIMPLICITY]
The last few days, we've touched simplicity in so many ways.
We've done all sorts of normal things.
I hope you noticed everything we did is quite normal.
We walked. We ate.
We had conversations.
We listened to presentations.
We sat. We laid down.
But we did it in a way that was restful and healing.
One question coming away from this retreat is:
How can I have more of this restful simplicity in my daily life?
If we have the advantage of working from home,
maybe you, after having lunch,
you can follow a ten or twenty minute relaxation on the Plum Village app.
That's a great joy of working from home.
In the newsroom, I had to use the toilet cubicle
for my body scan relaxations.
Luckily, the toilets were very fancy.
That's where I did my deep relaxation
in moments of crisis.
This is another thing: Relaxation can be applied in moments of real panic.
I used to work on a live TV show and we lost our guest at 9 am.
And we broadcast at 2 pm.
My boss just said: "Find a replacement!"
And I was like ... (gulps).
I realised I wasn't breathing and thought: I know what to do.
So I went to sit on the toilet and do my deep relaxation.
And it's amazing because the mind that exited that body scan
after 10 or 15 minutes was so much clearer and calmer.
It had so much more resources to solve the problem.
So, deep relaxation
a bit of a tip here.
You can use it in moments of crisis.
So: Deep Simplicity. We've had rest and deep relaxation.
We've also had time in nature.
It's very important to spend time in the world we want to save.
That's what we want to transmit to future generations.
A love and an intimacy with the world we want to protect.
So, coming back home from this retreat,
how will you make sure --
maybe it needs to be a scheduled item in your calendar
called: Time in nature.
Whether it is one tree near your office,
this one park, one corner of garden.
The plants on your window sill.
And you sit and enjoy being with the plants while having a cup of tea.
How will you spend time, in silence, with nature,
and enjoy that simple happiness
that feeling of enough-ness.
Another element of this retreat
that has made the simplicity so delicious
has been that we've enjoyed this retreat in person.
With other people.
We are social beings.
How, as teams, with family, with friends,
can we make an effort, or organise our life differently,
so that we truly have in-person quality time together?
I would say that is an ethical principle.
To show up.
In Buddhism, community is so important.
One of our principles of being in community
is to gather under one roof.
So we have to gather in person, in real life,
under one roof, with those we love.
This life is very short.
Life is very short.
It is truly nourishing and fulfilling to be with people we care about.
I spoke about enough-ness.
In Buddhism, we say:
this is partly because of something I said at the beginning
about the present moment containing the past and the future,
that is why we can say
that this moment is enough.
It is enough.
In this moment, each one of us is enough.
I am enough.
You are enough.
As Brother Spirit shared, there was that line:
You already are what you want to become.
This insight belongs to the ultimate dimension.
The insight of enough-ness.
In our daily life, each one of us
needs to find a way to kind of cycle into
that beautiful ultimate dimension and spend some time
in a moment of enough-ness.
Maybe five minutes in the morning, while you enjoy a cup of tea.
It may be the ten minutes of relaxation after a really difficult work morning.
It might be sitting down for a meal with family and friends
and just saying silently to yourself:
This is enough.
This IS enough.
We are enough.
And that sense of living in the present moment
is ultimately the only moment that is available.
It's a truism, but it's still so true!
That future is not there and will never be there.
There will only be present moments.
And if we can't enjoy this present moment,
how will future generations ever know how to enjoy a present moment?
So we cycle in to this insight of enough-ness.
This is enough. I am enough.
And we make it a training and a practise.
In Buddhism we speak about koans.
Write it on a piece of paper.
Maybe Brother Phap Huu can do some calligraphies.
Put it somewhere where you might like to sit and enjoy a cup of tea.
And you breathe and touch that insight that you are enough.
Because if we spend 24 hours a day
feeling that we're not enough.
We are corroding our humanity
and corroding our access to the wonders of life.
It's a real training.
There was something a journalist once asked our teacher.
"Are you an optimist or a pessimist when it comes to environmental issues?
It was a journalist from The Independent in the UK.
And I thought: How will Thay handle this?
Thay was very tired during the whole interview.
Thay was quiet for a very long time and suddenly he went:
An optimist!
And I thought: OK! What is he going to say now?
And he said:
We can be at peace because we know we've done our best.
We are doing our best and we know we have done our best.
In his optimism
was also the seed of trust in the ripening of his seeds.
We do our best and that is why we can have peace.
And that is why you can guard for yourself
five minutes of saying "I am enough."
"We are enough." "My team is enough."
"My organisation is enough."
Because we are doing our best.
And that is why we can have peace.
And at the same time,
we can cycle out of the ultimate
and always challenge ourselves: "Am I doing my best?"
And our friends can also challenge us.
So we spend time in the ultimate.
It's very nice, every day, a few minutes.
And we come back out and really keep challenging
in that pragmatic, historical realm
"What else could we do?"
But not with a feeling of scarcity,
but one of possibility.
What else could we do?
And we can ask ourselves:
Are we asking the right questions?
about our culture of consumerism?
Are we asking the right questions about economic systems?
That is quite a challenge.
And I think in the B Team as an organisation,
this is something you're concerned with.
I think, with Global Optimism, this is what you're concerned with.
Are we asking the right questions of the problem?
Have we defined the problem?
If we want to challenge or transform
our individualistic, consumerist, capitalist culture,
we can ask questions I heard this morning: Is there enough love in it?
What is the role of love there?
Is there love in our organisations? Is there love in our teams?
How can we bring compassion into this?
How can we question things that we're not yet questioning?
In this principle of Deep Simplicity, we say:
Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice,
stealing and oppression,
Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice,
stealing and oppression,
i am committed to practising generosity
in my thinking, speaking and acting.
I am determined not to steal
and not to possess anything that should belong to others.
And I will share my time,
energy and material resources
with those who are in need.
There's a bit more, and then another line is:
I am committed to practising Right Livelihood.
so that I can help reduce the suffering of living beings on Earth
and stop contributing to climate change.
This second ethical principle, we can practise and embody
as an individual, but we can also apply it at an organisational level.
I was very happy to discover that the B Team
has some responsible tax principles.
I don't know if there's anyone here who's involved in that particular project.
OK! Thank you so much!
So, it's a wonderful way of applying this ethical principle
to organisations.
How can organisations be transparent and have transparent tax practises?
That it's not all about avoiding and obfuscating
and calibrating, but there's genuine ethical integrity
at the organisational level about the need to contribute back to society.
This is applying the line "I'm determined not to steal
and not to possess anything that should belong to others."
We can say that the principle of taxation applied by a democratic system
is about equity. It's about inclusion.
We can't say that that profit belongs only to that company.
Just like the whole cosmos is in the flower, or the apple,
the whole cosmos is in that profit.
So we share back that profit with the spirit of reciprocity.
We could also apply that principle of reciprocity maybe to
I'm just going to throw out some ideas, they may be controversial,
but I'll be brave,
salary ratios in organisations.
Between the top of the organisation and the bottom.
Maybe there can be some ethical principles.
We're taking the work on the tax framework
Can we also have another ethical framework about salaries?
And with this ethical principle --
I will hand you all out a copy of this sheet, don't worry.
With this ethical principle, we can say
that fossil fuel subsidies are not ethically OK.
It is a simple moral truth.
This gives us the language to describe that.
It is not possible to use shared resources
to subsidise something that is destroying the planet.
That is ethically not acceptable.
And as Buddhists,
we can feel fearless just to name it.
And we can support others to also name it in the language of ethics.
I know that being bold and brave
is part of the B Team's mission.
I'm just kind of going there.
There has been some interesting research.
I recently saw a paper published last year.
about how our economic system is still globally inequitable.
There was some very powerful research
revealing the drain from the Global South
through the unequal exchange of resources.
There was a very powerful way
of measuring labour, land, resources, investment,
that is being done in the Global South to make it possible
to have the economies of the Global North.
And this paper concluded
that colonialism is still operating
at the economic level
however much we tell ourselves stories otherwise.
We could apply this ethical principle
to a commentary on that.
With this ethical principle also about not taking,
not stealing, not taking, being generous,
we can recognise that we live on a finite planet.
And that must mean: Finite growth of a certain kind.
We cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet.
I also remember a journalist ... I can't remember if it was you, Jo.
I don't know if Jo is sitting here somewhere.
I wasn't hearing his loud laughter. So maybe that's why.
I think it might have been Jo who asked Thay once
when Thay was teaching at Nottingham University in the UK,
and he asked him: "But Thay ...
you do like growth as a principle.
You want to grow your monastery.
You want to grow your reach and impact.
You want lots of people to hear your dharma.
So you can't be anti-growth."
And Thay, he smiled. He quite likes people being cheeky.
He smiled and said:
"That is true. But we know what we want to grow.
We want to grow compassion. We want to grow wisdom.
We want to grow community spirit, a sense of community.
And yes, we might need to grow in terms of resources.
But in the service of that.
We're not seeking growth for growth's sake or for profit itself."
(whispers) OK, I know.
We have a couple of other principles.
One is reverence for life.
[REVERENCE FOR LIFE]
Reverence for life also involves the spirit of non-violence
and not killing.
Not extracting. Not exploiting.
Aware of the suffering caysed by the destruction of life,
I'm committed to cultivating the insight of interbeing and compassion
and learning ways to protect the lives of people,
animals, plants and minerals.
I'm determined not to kill,
not to let others kill,
and not to support any active killing in the world
in my thinking, or in my way of life.
Seeing that harmful actions
arise from anger,
fear, greed, and intolerance,
which in turn come from dualistic and discriminative thinking,
I commit to cultivating
openness, non-discrimination,
and non-attachment to views
in order to help transform violence,
fanaticism and dogmatism in myself and in the world.
This is how we as Buddhists
apply the principle of Reverence for Life.
So caring for the world can be an intellectual idea,
or it can be a practise that we express with our body.
So we invite you to ask yourself this question.
I care for society, I care for the Earth,
how are my bodily actions showing that?
As you have realised, we do believe
that a plant-based diet is one very
possible and yet radical step that each one of us can go towards.
We're not judging or being dogmatic about it,
which is also a principle of this training.
In ethics, we're saying:
That is a direction we can all go in.
And it's an easy way to practise non-violence
in our daily life.
When we speak about
non-violence here,
sometimes we might think that this just relates to physical violence.
But we would also say that our thinking can be violent and extractive.
Our speaking can be violent.
As well as our behaviour.
Here, it could be our way of consuming.
We're also not absolutist.
This is a very interesting principle about Buddhist ethics.
If I had three hours today,
I could share with you some more of the criteria
about how we apply our principles in different situations.
One of them is that we never apply them in an absolutist, puritanical way.
And I know that in the B Team
and in many corporations who would like to go good things,
the danger is that you end up in the center of a circular firing squad.
Others are always pointing the finger
and we may have a fear of ethical principles
because we don't want them to become a stick
that we beat other people with.
So in the Buddhist principles of ethics,
they are not a stick.
We like to describe them as a North Star.
A direction of travel.
The applying of which
has a lot of space in it, a lot of compassion and patience.
A lot of openness.
And that first of all these principles are something that we ourselves do
as individuals, as teams, and as organisations.
So we kind of walk the talk.
The ethical principles are something we can have a conversation around.
But we don't use them to blame, to judge, or to punish.
That's something about Buddhist ethics.
Very briefly.
We've learnt a lot about another one
which is about compassionate communication.
[COMPASSIONATE COMMUNICATION]
I won't say much more about that.
But for us,
our way of communicating in integrity and honesty
while also being skillful
and patient, and aware of the impact of our words,
and we've learnt a lot about that this week.
The final principle is about True Love.
[TRUE LOVE]
What's really interesting about Buddhist ethics
is that we include our intimate relationships
in the orbit of our ethical action.
How we are with those we love.
Are we able to respect our partner?
Can we allow them to be different?
Can we embrace their shortcomings?
Can we help them transform their suffering?
How can we see them as a wonder of life?
How can we not take them for granted?
When we say what can Buddhists contribute to a global ethic,
we might say that maybe the B Team
could develop some kind of compassionate ethics
to bring -- and I will now pass around --
For some of the home team,
You don't need to see them.
I only printed 40 copies to save paper.
Those are the five mindfulness trainings, the Plum Village vision
of ethics and what we could call global spirituality.
Wouldn't it be an interesting challenge
to see if there could be a written code just like the tax principles?
If there could be a written code to express the kind of ethics
we would like to see in our corporate world.
So this text that you see,
our teacher has been evolving over time
and he was very passionate about renewing it in 2009,
and the latest update was last year.
It's something we're continuing to evolve.
It's a living document.
We should not be afraid to define our values.
I think sometimes, because we're here in Europe
oh, I don't want to say that, what do I want to say?
In the Judeo-Christian north, is that what I want to say?
We're in a slightly post-religious era.
And we get very afraid about defining ethics
and a moral compass.
Our teacher has taught our community that we don't need to be afraid
about saying what is right and what is wrong
in the light of suffering.
So as you see each of those principles,
it's framed by awareness of the suffering caused by certain actions.
Based on our insight into suffering,
we can come up with behaviours
to reduce suffering in ourselves, our family and the world.
And it's OK to define harmful behaviours.
Sometimes we can feel that we don't want to shame others.
Something I've learnt here in this community
is that we can say: "That behaviour is not OK"
while still loving the person.
We love the person for who they are
and we recognise that all humans have shortcomings.
And yet we can still
point out that this or that action is not correct
and it's not ethical.
And as a society, we have to have that courage
to have an open conversation.
And to trust in ourselves.
And to trust in the wisdom of our ancestors.
I want to finish with something that our teacher said.
It came up in our group the other day.
In the realm of ethics and spirituality,
we cannot allow "others"
to monopolise God and spirituality.
And to use it in the service of intolerance,
hatred, discrimination, dogmatism, even craving and greed.
We cannot allow others to monopolise, he even used the word "hijack",
to hijack God and spirituality
in the service of those things.
I may be thinking that the others here ...
I don't know if I need to spell it out.
If we think of the conservative Christian right,
we can ask: Have they hijacked God
in the service of intolerance, hatred, discrimination, dogmatism
and even craving or greed?
To take care of themselves, their own survival,
the survival of the few.
The few who have the same beliefs.
The same values. The same ethnicity.
And our teacher was asked
after John Kerry lost the election in 2005,
a very narrow margin,
by some counts,
he was asked:
How is it possible?
Why did ... why did the goodness of the country fail in that moment?
That was 2005. We've all lived through 2016.
It was traumatic for people in the US and traumatic for people in the UK.
This is what Thay said:
"I think if the Democratic Party didn't succeed this time,
it is because they lacked a spiritual dimension.
They allowed the other side to monopolise God,
to hijack God, in the direction of division,
hate, discrimination, non-tolerance.
And they want to suggest the other side is condoning
all sorts of things that they claim go against the will of God."
And Thay said: "This is fundamentalist thinking.
It's dangerous thinking."
And then he said:
"We need a God of compassion.
We need a God of non-discrimination.
A God of tolerance. We need a God of love.
And if we don't come together and practise together,
in order to bring the spiritual dimension into our daily life,
I guess that we will not be able to succeed
in our future attempts.
To be spiritual is not something very far from our daily life."
So if you've never heard our teacher speak,
he used God as a way to describe the ultimate dimension.
His God is very inclusive.
Of the gods that many of us might recognise in our upbringing
and that many of us still hold dear.
So, to be spiritual is something not far from our daily life.
"We are spiritual in the way we drink our tea," he said.
In the way we walk.
In the way, when people say something with hatred and anger,
our response can carry spirituality in it.
That's the compassionate communication.
"That is spirituality.
That is a training. That is life."
And then he said: "This is why peace
social justice and equality should always begin with ourselves.
We have to learn to deal with ourselves,
to handle ourselves with compassion,
so that we can be with our families with compassion
and help other families do the same.
And that is the spirit of community-building.
Even ... "
This is a really amazing line.
"Even if you have a perfect analysis of the situation.
Even if you have a plan of action that is perfect.
Without this kind of spiritual training or practise,
without a spiritual dimension to your way of being and doing,
I don't think that you can succeed."
And then he said:
(laughs) "Thank you."
[laughter]
I would also like to thank you.
Thank you for your patience. For listening to me.
I have done my best. And that is why I can be at peace.
[sound of the bell]
[chime]