In today’s FBA Podcast, “All In This Together – Is It Time For a Buddhist Economics?” Kavyasiddhi delivers beautifully in this first of a series of public talks at Manchester Buddhist Centre entitled ‘Buddhism and the Big Question‘.
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All In This Together – Is It Time For a Buddhist Economics?
(upbeat music) - This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - Okay, good afternoon everybody. (audience chattering) - I'd like to welcome you all to the Manchester Buddhist Center. My name's Surika, I'm just gonna be hosting this talk today. And I'm just interested, is anybody here for the very first time to an event at the Buddhist Center, do you wanna just pop your hand up to get a sense of new people? So I'm particularly welcome you if it's your first time at the Buddhist Center. I really hope that you'll enjoy the talk. I'm just, well enjoy just being in the Buddhist Center. And if you've got mobile phones, you just check that they're turned off before we start, you'll be great. So we've got a series of talks this year the last Saturday of every month on Buddhism and the big questions. I was just thinking this morning that actually Buddhism is just about big questions actually. It's actually about them really big questions about life, death, and what we do in between. So it's pretty big stuff. But these series of talks are really about some of the issues that are facing us in the modern world today. And how's Buddhism got something to, what to offer as a perspective that might be really helpful in the modern world today? So the Buddhist teachings have been around for two and a half thousand years. So I think it's very interesting to think about well, what the Buddha taught all those years ago how did it got relevance for some of the issues that we're facing today? And our speaker is just behind me today is Kabi Siddhi. And she's an ordained Buddhist into what's called the Tree Ratner Buddhist Order. So that's this particular Buddhist Center is part of the Tree Ratner Buddhist Community which was established in the early '60s by an Englishman who wanted to find a way to help people be able to practice Buddhism in the modern world. And Kabi Siddhi lives in Manchester. She's a writer, she's had a radio plays, producer radio for, and she's just completing an MA in TV script writing. So as a friend, I just want you to plug if anybody here today is in the TV industry. She's just finishing her MA. - Oh, no, she's not. - Oh, no, you know, if you've seen, oh, I quite like what she's got to say. Oh, you know, she could be a good person and you have money and resources to put a TV series on. (audience laughs) Just pull out a word if you have a city 'cause she's open to offers. That's true, can we do this? Okay, great. So I'll leave it there. I'm just watching in, well, invites to give Kabi Siddhi a very warm welcome too. Our very first public talk on Buddhism and the contemporary issues. Big question, thank you. (audience applauds) - Okay, so this is being recorded and it'll be on free Buddhist audio, which is a website where you can get Buddhist talks for free. So I'll always hand this to no. It's a bit strange, I was saying to Robin, Dan says it's a bit strange giving a talk because when I agree to speak on something, I've not necessarily spoken on it before. So halfway through researching the talk there's a point where I think what am I talking about and why am I going to stand up and do this? And it's particularly interesting at the moment. We've got the fifth day of demonstrations in Egypt. We've had demonstrations in Tunisia, you've got Ireland, I think, isn't our government go into Islam? You've got major, major problems. You've got demonstrations somewhere in Manchester about students cuts from student funding, increase in student loans. So I find it quite challenging to think that giving a talk, speaking for an hour will have an impact on people. It's also fairly challenging. Somebody said, oh yeah, someone's coming, she wanted to know all about Buddhism, I'm thinking we've got 50 minutes. And also it's just me. But the good news is that there are, this is the first in this series of talks. And another strength of the tree rat and the Buddhist community is that there is quite a platform for people, there are several people in this room. I can see three who are going to be giving talks later in the year. There's a wide platform for people to examine their practice and share their practice and discuss it. And I think that's a particular aspect of the tree rat movement is that we're looking at how we are practicing now. And we're talking about how that works. So why speak on Buddhism and economics? I'll just say also, I'm going to be looking at causes. I'm not going to be looking at solutions, especially at the economic situation. But also another obvious thing is that I am a Buddhist and I quite obviously live in the world. So I have dealings with economics. I'm not a monastic, I handle money. I've worked in professions, running as charity or fundraising where I'm handling other people's money. So it's a live issue for me. But although I'm not monastic, I'm also not lay. I spent several years training, as most of us do, to become ordained. And that training is ongoing. So this talk, this discussion is part of my training to examine, as I said before, my practice and how it's working. So, you know, I can file a tax return. I'm not trying to practice Buddhism. And this talk really is because for more moment last year, I honestly thought the Buddhist, well, I honestly thought David Cameron sounded like the Buddha. It was quite, I know, I was shocked. Imagine my surprise. It was early morning. It was the today programme. So that starts at, you know, six. So I'm a wee bit fuzzy before about nine o'clock in the morning, but he was on the trade mission to China in November. And David Cameron said, and it was repeated on the hourly bulletins, that we are all connected. He also said that China should spend more money. And I was very struck by a conservative prime minister appealing to a Chinese leader to be less good at capitalism. You know, I'm also a capitalist telling a communist to honour the collective. Just seemed beyond satire, really. And yes, David Cameron, he was trying to save his economy because I'm going to paraphrase quite a lot, but the unregulated market has wrecked itself. That's my paraphrase. And China basically is going from strength to strength. But I think whether it was a slogan or not, and I'm not here to debate the validity of his meaning, but actually what he said pointed to a deeper truth. That we are connected, we are deeply connected. And he was talking about a connection which is economic. So he's talking about, he actually said the phrase a tidal wave of money that China is producing a lot. We're not producing so much. And basically we've been, the money is going that way. We are sending money that way. There's not much money coming back into our economy, into our industries. So although he meant it on that level, there was just something underneath that really struck me. And that he and his speech writers know when times are tough, we need truth. We don't need any more froth, and we don't need any more kind of it'll be all right. It's evidently not going to be all right. And this is the first time, I think, in my lifetime, on 43, that I can remember a politician saying, well, it's not going to be all right. We are in trouble, and we're going to sort it out. And, you know, to his credit at that moment, and I'm sure he said it other times, he didn't say it was somebody else's fault. He just said, we need to get on with this. This is how it is. So I suppose accept his invitation to connect and to get on with it. So we'll see what happens in that political and economic arena. But anyway, for a moment, he sounded like the Buddha. So what did the Buddha say? Well, he said several things, and we'll be covering those later in the year. But for today, we're going to look at three particular things. So the Buddha taught that all life had three hallmarks, so three characteristics that kind of... What does a hallmark do? It demonstrates the validity and the integrity of something. If something has a hallmark, you know it is what it says it is. So these "lactioners", as it is in Pali, are that life is, I'm sorry, unsatisfactory. Break it to your gentleman. It's impermanent and it is insubstantial. These, by the way, are terms that we can look at and argue and debate because you might think, well, I had a really nice time last night. Thank you very much. And my 10-year-old rover is still going. So I'm not so sure, and also I'm fairly solid and I'm going to have some injections. So, "Paha, I'm substantial. I'm not entirely impermanent." And it was quite satisfactory. So on a relative level, yeah, we can talk about that, but fundamentally, and this is the other thing that's going to happen in this talk, we're going to go from specifics of what's happening in my life, in your life, to a much, much bigger picture, which is, as Sirica said, it's looking at life and death. So we're going to be going from one scale to another. But these three "lactioners" or hallmarks are indivisible. And this is, for me, it's the fundamental concept of Buddhism. So listen carefully because it can sound quite obvious, but it can take about 20 years, in my experience, fully to comprehend. And it can take lifetimes to apply. Anyway, this is it. All things arise out of conditions. You could say things need to be in the right place at the right time to happen. So far, so uncontroversial. Secondly, because they are conditions that need to be in the right place at the right time, they keep moving, yeah? So things come into being in them, they go out of being again. It's not static. So because those conditions are moving, they haven't got inherent substance permanently. So for that time, they have inherent substance, yeah? So my, I don't know, my bone density. So I was born. That's not going to, you know, egg formation. But so my being came together on bones arose and with calcium and blah, blah, blah, those bones develop now. All those conditions came into play, so that's to happen. As I age, the molecular construct of those bones changes, particularly, you know, as we get older, and bones become more brittle. So yes, I have bones, I will have bones throughout my life, but the length of them, the density of them, the integrity, are they broken? You know, do they shift to certain bones in the pelvis shift or move with impact? How they are, how they're made up, does not remain the same. Ultimately, and this is where it's a bit odd, isn't it? Because they're my bones. Thank you, they're mine, but they're moving, they're changing. So, and because that movement isn't always in a positive direction, I don't always like it. So because my bones are subjects, I don't know why I'm talking about bones, but I don't know. Because they're subject to change, because they're based entirely upon conditions, things can change and they can break. And I won't necessarily like that. So that's where the unsatisfactory nature comes in. You've got impermanence, things are impermanent because they are based on conditions. And because they're based on conditions, they're impermanent. So they, you can't unpit one without the other. And then our response to that, unless we say, yeah, that's fine, actually. Okay, good, I'll have it for a bit in a little game. Some things, you know, like that, colds, we're quite happy when they go. Pain, quite happy when that goes. Exhaust, not so happy when they go. I'll say the best specifics. Okay. So this is known, this phenomenon of things being dependent upon conditions is known as co-dependent arising or conditioned co-production. They're not really snappy, are they? They also sounded very socialist to me when I first heard them back to China. And in a way, they do recognise the collective, but they recognise it as an ideal. And they recognise it as reality. So it's not, someone was talking about mission statements and saying they really hate mission statements. I know who would. Because we can have a mission centre of slogan and then you have to live up to it. But you're not actually changing things to align yourself with that intention. You're just trying to tick the box which you have said you were going to tick, yeah. So it's not in that sense of, well, I'm starting to do this so we're doing it. But actually, it doesn't really matter what's happening underneath. It's the opposite of that. It's actually saying this is how things really are. And I need to bring my view into alignment with how things really are. Instead of bringing how things really are into alignment with how I want them to be. That's fundamentally what's going on. Okay. With me, so far? Yes. Tick. (audience laughing) Okay. So we've got a common flow of causes. I mean, this is the other level of interconnectedness. If the cause is that flowing to me will also flow into you. So in a way, we are vassals for events. Mental events, emotional events, physical events. And again, this is where the teaching of non-attachment, the Buddhist teaching of non-attachment arises. And again, more non-attachment. Doesn't really sound very, sounds a bit like a corrective. Doesn't it? It doesn't sound like, oh, lovely. But actually, it's not an instrument. I mean, part of the problem is that we're translating from Indian, we're translating from, frankly, a verbal culture. So you've got a verbal culture, which then was written down 500 years later. And now I'm standing here, telling you something that may have been translated from the Indian to the Chinese back to the English. So yeah, we're going to have phrases like non-attachment, possibly when the Buddhist talking and there are loads of renderings, poetic and not. The phrases, and basically the examples he would be giving would be more open-hearted, more vital, more appealing. Chantism. But basically, the thing to look at is that it's not an instruction. Again, it's not the to-do list of a must-be-non-attached in a tight way. But just to say, look, love, this is how it is. How it is is that you're not in control. No one is control. And if you can see that and work with that, you will be happy. Often in the middle of talks, I think that's incredibly obvious. It's really such an obvious thing to say. But it's very, very hard to live. I find it very, very hard to live. There's a lovely phrase, I mean, talking about different versions and different translations. There's a guy called Stephen Batchelor. He's a very eminent and perceptive Buddhist writer. And in a book called Versus from the Centre, he says this. Recognising mental and physical processes as empty of self was for the Buddha, the way to dispel the confusion that lies at the origin of anguish. So, recognising mental and physical processes as empty of self was for the Buddha, the way to dispel the confusion that lies at the origin of anguish. So, I'll come back to this later, but basically, rather than something to understand, emptiness is a condition, it's a way of living. That's what we're aiming for. And he says emptiness is a cipher of freedom. It's beginning to sound a bit more attractive, isn't it, freedom? Ah, yes. Yeah. So, that's really what we're trying to look at. The nature of ourselves as empty. And frankly, everyday life contradicts that because I get letters addressed to me. And, you know, that must mean that I exist because they know where I live. So, it's trying to, again, hold that immediate, very specific perspective of, well, I feel extremely real and this sensation feels extremely real and this money I'm putting into the chant tickets, machine feels extremely real. And also, actually, it's kind of not. It's real on one level, but it's not all that I am. I suppose that's what we're looking at. It's not to deny anything, but so there is more. Maybe that's the key phrase that I'm looking for. There is more, it's not just this. Okay. So, the third, so we've looked at impermanence, we've looked at inter-sanptiality, emptiness. And the third one is unsatisfactoriness, the third election or a hallmark. So, unsatisfactoriness. Literally, it comes from a word dukkah, which means an ill-fitting chariot and bumpy, fastening of seatbelts. We are in for a bumpy round, yeah. Also, jolting, jarring, those things when, you know, in your slippery, just most of the step, and there's something very jarring inside you. And it's inevitable, really, I suppose, on, you know, if we have the metaphor, if we're on a journey in life or moving through life, there will be slips and trips and potholes and, you know, so that's what he means, is just the everyday distant that occurs in our lives. So, all these hallmarks were things that the Buddha saw when he became enlightened, he characterized human life, conditioned life, like this. And the ultimate question really is, well, how do I live with that, yeah? So, you could say, and this is my take, it's not the orthodoxy, although I'm fairly sure, in two and a half thousand years, across several continents, somebody has come up with it, that Buddhism is the answer to a problem. And if you don't have the problem, you're not going to be interested in the answer. So, if everything's going quite well, hurrah. Why would you want to come to a Buddha something? Why would you want to examine the processes in your mind, in your heart, if they're all just tickety-boo? Maybe you're extremely curious, that could be it. But in my experience, I came to a Buddhist, well, I came to meditation, because there was a poster that said, "Do you want to be happy?" Could make you quip, but I won't, excellent. Basically, it's looking at how to live with life, how to live with suffering, basically how to get over it, how to say, "Okay, all right, I've read the small print, it looks pretty grim, old age, death, interconnectedness." I'm going to need some help working with these, and this looks like a good place. So, the dharma, dharma means truth and it also means path. I'm reliably informed. Let's hope so, by the way, because I'm not fluent in Pali, but me. So far, that's the general consensus, dharma is truth, dharma is path. So, it's offering a new perspective, a new way of seeing. And just to go back to this point about suffering, I think it's a really interesting time. I'm just going to move a bit around in my talk. But basically, okay, come back to that later. Who was born between 1963 and 1978, '60s, '70s roughly? Okay, so that's half of us. I've got a theory, which is that I think our generation thought it dodged the bullet. I think we were born after the Second World War, after rationing, after the Cold War, after Suez, and we kind of thought we've got peace, prosperity, and the pill. We've got a rise of technology. Well, not for now, but it has made a massive difference. Well, not always good, it's made a big difference. There was a rise of technology, there was the end of a path science. We had live age. It was all looking very, very good. But the cycle didn't stop. And this building in particular, it's a very useful teaching resource for this building, because it charts the economic history of this area. So, 250 years ago, 1750, this was a field. Quite a lot of England at that point was, in fact, field. Some harvested some not. Then it became a boarding house for labors, which fell down. Then it became a cotton warehouse, it was expanded. Then it became a storehouse for electronic equipment. Then it was empty, apart from some pigeons, probably. And now it's a Buddhist center, there's a cafe on the ground floor, there's a health center upstairs. You can come and learn meditation, you can buy your rupees. There has been a change from agriculture, to mass production, to import and export, to a recession, to service industry. And that's happened in four lifetimes. So, there's just been a huge change in what's happened. And why I'm saying this, apart from to give you a bit of local history, is that conditions changed, use changed, we changed. This is what happens, and because I'm sort of born, I mean, I was born the same year that the order was founded, 67. So, I can't, as I'm getting older, I can see more the perspective of things changing. I can, you know, things are coming around again. Your revision. But, you know, things that seem new, read mostly, can serve as your government. Things that seemed new, I can now see happening again. And I think if you have the ability to take that perspective, while you are living and really learn from it, you can see things much better. And essentially, we talk, well, so the Buddha is described as being enlightened. He had insight. There's an educational resource upstairs called Clear Vision. A lot of the language that we use is about seeing things accurately. So, we don't, generally we don't say the Buddha was a god. We stress, especially in this movement, others are different. But we stress that he was born human, exceptional, but still human. And that through trying to resolve the difficulty of living with impermanence, living with old age sickness and death, he then chained and trained until he got to a point where he could see how things really were. And at that point, he was free because at that point, he wasn't going to make the same mistakes again. And then, that scene is what he's communicating. So on one level, the Buddhist message is incredibly simple, really, really simple. But as a human being, it's very, very hard to apply. Anyway, this is a bit of a way from economics. So maybe we'll have a look at that, okay? Yes, okay. Coming back to perspective. I mean, I said some of the things I say sound quite flippant, but actually they're not always. I actually mean them. So when I said if things are going well, why would you come to a Buddhist center? There is a germ of truth in that. I mean, you might come because your mate said, oh, let's just pop in. I need some yoga blocks or wheat grass juice. It's amazing. But also, you might come because you're at a particular extreme time. I used to teach introductory classes here. And I teach on weekends at a Women's Retreat Center at Taraloka. And those events are a bit different because, well, evening events here generally people are a bit more guarded because you kind of come in and you say hello to a couple of hours and you go away again. When you're on a retreat, when you're, basically when you see someone in your pajamas. Yeah. When you see someone's first thing, when you're queuing up for the bathroom, some of those boundaries fall away a bit. And you hear the most extraordinary stories. I hear the most extraordinary stories about why people have come. What's going on for them? And they probably wouldn't say it to me downstairs in the middle of a tea break with, you know, 50 of the people hanging around. But if you've just been standing a few days in the country and you're doing a lot of meditation and you're just sitting on the sofa next to somebody, they might say, do you want to go for a walk? And then they might tell you something extraordinary. And the really extraordinary thing is that it happens to everybody. So those people are not extraordinary in themselves. Everybody has an extraordinary story. There are some, yeah, surprising things that happen. And often it's to do with life and death. Often it's to do with somebody we love being in hospital or somebody we love being ill or we're in hospital or we're ill. And at that moment, there's things just fall away, don't they? They just don't matter because you have that stark and almost beautiful vision of life and death. It's not about what's on eBay anymore. It's not about your Facebook page. Things fall away and life is stripped to its essentials. And in that moment, we can see really clearly and I suppose what we're doing by coming together in a Buddhist centre is trying to, A, find a place to discuss that with other people who are willing to talk about it or able to talk about it or who have made a time to talk about it because you can't generally talk about it in the QA test code. You need space and time and you need someone who can listen. And also you need to have a bit of break from the trivia from the bills and the things that come in. Because as that trivia, as the day-to-day stuff, you know, getting your teeth checked, whatever, comes back into life and the big things fall away. It can be quite hard to hold the utter simplicity of being a breathing body and remember to get your house contents renewed. So that suffering is very important, it is basically a dual to reality. And trying to keep our eyes open to that is a practice. Especially, and this comes back to, I mean, for me, I work with this quite a lot. And in an order that's neither monastic nor lay. So, you know, this isn't about you, just about me. That dichotomy, yeah, I sometimes don't quite know how to be. So sometimes I can think, so I read Steve and Bachelor and think, I will, he should be giving this talk, not me, you know? And then I think, well, but I'm here and I can. So it's getting the balance between our potential and our reality. I'm slightly going off topic, but I think it's important to understand what the choices are that we're making. And I think we are making choices when we come here. I mean, physically, you've made a choice not to be in prime art, or not to be on that demonstration, or not to be up a hill having a walk with your dog. But Buddhism is about, it's about choosing what to do. And in that sense, it is a discipline. Naturally, I will fall asleep. Naturally, I will tend to go back under the duvet because it's warm and it's comfortable. And in this difficult time, warmth and comfort are really important. I mean, they're always, I'm always quite a fan of duvet. But at the moment, something which is comfortable is really important, which is why I think we do need to wake up. We've had a glimpse, we have a chance to see something. And we need to choose whether to follow that or whether to acknowledge. We're going to skip that bit. There's a whole section about wants and desires, but we can do that another day. So we've got these conditions, this kind of rolling conveyor belt, the conditions that are coming into our life and going out of our life. It's probably not a belt, that's too linear. It's more like a net. It's three-dimension. It's multi-dimension. So sometimes endings are happy and sometimes they're not. And I want security and a human being, and basically I like to know where I am and what I'm doing. And life, I can sometimes arrange my life so that I do know that, but more often than not, I don't. This weekend is a really good example. I have three deadlines on Monday, all for different things. I have another one on Wednesday, I have this one today, Saturday, that's fine. When I set them up in November, there was two weeks between each thing. It was balanced, it was structured. Things changed, they all came on the same day. But ultimately, that's how it is. So ultimately instead of me ranting railings, it shouldn't be on the same day it is. So I just have to get on with it and then a much bigger, I mean you'll all know that, you'll all have things land on the same day. It's just a macro version of that, it's just a bigger version of accepting that we don't have control. So that need for security, the Buddha, suggested we transfer that need to things that won't let me down. So basically there's something called going for refuge. So refuge is the ultimate security, it's a place of shelter, it's probably quite a simple thing, a refuge wouldn't be very complicated. But within that refuge you are safe, you can be held, you have a solid base. So the central act of becoming a Buddhist and the act at the heart of our particular order, the true rattle order, is to go for refuge to the three jewels. And on the cases of myself and other people are in the room, you will see an emblem which has three jewels on them. The Buddha is represented by the yellow one, which is the Buddha himself, but also the act and the possibility of enlightenment. The second one is a blue one, and that's the dharma which I mentioned before, which is his path, the truth and his teachings. And the third one is a red jewel, the sanga jewel, and that's for all the people who through following the teachings became enlightened. So it's showing that it's possible to become enlightened. So they're on my case set to remind me of them. This is what I'm aiming for, this is literally what I'm trying to do. And it's quite hard not to go for refuge to other things. It's quite hard not to go, for me not to go for refuge to a job. Sorry I can mention, it's been interesting doing this training in screenwriting because there's quite clearly an aim. There's me at this process, I'm a writer, I want to retrain. There's the goal, writing for television. Lots of different television series, coronation street, shameless, the king's speech. Little side note to distract us all, king's speech started when David Schneider who wrote it was diagnosed with cancer. Wake up cool, incentive, deadline, a better art in this plan. He'd always wanted to write it, he wrote it, he gave it to his wife and said, "Oh really, you should do it as a stage play, tighten up the story, did it as a stage play?" So I said, "Oh it's a screenplay." Luckily the cancer was benign because you know seven years later it was made into a film. But again that kick of get on with it, shoved him into action. Now there's nothing wrong, I'd love to write the king's speech, I'd love to write a movie that people are inspired by, if you're connected when they go to, but I don't want to go for refuge to it because it will let me down because if David Schneider had made that his only criterion for being happy then every time one producer said yes and then, "Oh there's been a global economic crash, I've lost your funding," he would have been devastated. So there's a need to balance, I mean yes I need to, you know, I need to play the round. But just to be careful about what I'm putting as my refuge, what I'm holding dearest to my heart, if I'm, if things that I'm holding dearest to my heart are things which will let me down, it's going to be quite painful, quite a lot of the time. So we're looking at kind of re-chaining, sort of just gently bringing that refuge, which is going to let me down back a little bit, don't trip it away completely because you'll react and it'll all be horrible, but just gently bring that back and gently push that one forward. I mean some people do, I had a friend who lived in London, he completely off-topic my bow, um, friend who lived in London and we were actors together and I put on a show, I was being a producer, I'd produced some short plays, he'd written one of them and at the end of this time I went off and retreated and I came back and he went, "Oh wow!" Because the last time he'd seen me was at midnight in a London theatre with lots and lots of people, very, very excited and bit tired and then the next time he saw me I smelled a fresh air and incense and I think my vocabulary had slowed down, my voice had much relaxed and he was quite stunned in the transformation, anyway he was so stunned, he booked himself on a retreat, two months later left his flat, gave all his possessions away, moved to Nottingham to work in a shop, not surprisingly his friend said, "What did you do to him?" He's now living in Dublin with a family but, um, and I said, "I didn't do anything to him," that was just his path, I mean my path was always a bit slower to like just bring this refuge back, just put that one in, you know, and he was, "No, I'm checking all that away and I'm going for that." So there are different ways to try both, try either, good luck, um, but really, it doesn't matter, I mean he's kind of gone on a sort of more extreme way than, than some of us, but what, but we both try to do the same thing, he's trying to do that thing of trying to live in a way that makes sense that's quite reliable and so am I but we will all do it in different ways. Um, hmm, 12 minutes to go. Refugees, refugees and things changing. Let's go back to, um, economics, why not? Why not? Well, why not? Because it's scary, frankly, and there's not so much we can do about it, so, you know, why talk about it. Um, but here's just an interesting, a few interesting facts which might encourage us to slightly relax or hold on our houses and on our income and to slightly open up to things changing. 80% of the banks in the city of London are international. Before the crash in 2008, the Royal Bank of Scotland was worth more than the entire country, the entire country, one bank. There was basically a massive change, I mean I talked about the changes in this, this building, the economic changes from, you know, agriculture basically to the industrial revolution and then the service industry, as we learned to call it. But, um, there was an even more massive change in banking, and I suppose the first point that that change started, again, comes back to, um, well, the time of the industrial revolution, 1840s. So 1840s, building societies, and on, did anyone use the member of a building society or have a building society currently? We still got it. Halifax, hmm. Yes, this would be my point. Things changing, like, yeah, I like to luster, santander, not based in luster anymore. Anyway, 1840s, great grandparents time, roughly, um, building societies arose. So again, it's people coming together for a very simple purpose, housing, literally, a society for building, building, society. Um, I mean, you know what I mean, it just means, sometimes the obvious needs to be stated. They were literally about housing, and the members were originally savers and borrowers who will put your money in, and then one house got built, and then the next house got built, and you're working on it at the same time. But it's speeded things up to have more capital, the more money you have, the more houses you could build, right? So then people say, yes, okay, we'll, we'll take your money. Uh, what would you like in return for that? No, you don't want to house your profit, okay? So you're moving away from a cooperative. You know, we're in, we're in, that we're in the city of the cooperative movement, but we're moving away from it being a co-op towards being a business. Now, my economics, basically, I did a level on the past, but that was about 1985. So I think things have changed a bit since then. Um, and what seems to happen with a current banking crisis is that people say it's very, very complicated. It's very, very complicated. It's not just about coming together and building a house that's incredibly simplistic. It's not just about money in, money out, making things, selling things, you're being far too literal. And I think, well, yeah, I'm literal, but I'm not in debt. But again, you know, maybe I've kind of missed the point. But basically what happened in banking was that from that very concrete specific things, in the 80s, two things happened. One, British banking laws were changed to allow building societies to become banks, Bradford and Mingen, all of those. Northern Iraq, oops. All of those are changed. And the other thing that happened was, um, instead of dealing with concretes like coffee, rubber, gold, we got into banking, got into derivatives, which are basically making bets. Enormously profitable, enormously risky, enormously unregulated. People tried to regulate it, said, should we not know what you're doing? And basically, um, they said no, because the temptation to make a lot of money. Well, there were two things that were very clever, they were very tempted. Temptation was cleverness, did not equal simplicity, equal to big fat mass. Again, I'm paraphrasing. But what do we do with that problem? We cannot undo that. I mean, a lot of the anger is because we now face with a problem, which seems to be if somebody else is making, probably it was if somebody else is making, but it's very hard, and I know there are some exceptions, um, to identify that person who made the mistake because it wasn't just one person. The most constructive thing I can do at this moment, and yes, I'm part of, you know, the Robin Hood taxing, yes, I'm writing to my MP, but is also to look at my mental states and what I'm doing about it. I cannot change the mind of Fred Cooper, but I can change the mind of Carvy's city movie, although sometimes it's a bit hard. Um, and I suppose that's what I'm standing in a Buddhist center talking about this, rather than standing out in the street. Although I think democratic protest is a fantastic right, and more of us should take it up, and I think it's quite important that we give them talks, which recognize what's happening in the world. I don't think religion should be a denial of what's going on, but also I don't think we should deny what's going on in ourselves. There has to be a balance. What the Buddha taught was a middle way between an extreme of nihilism, that doesn't matter, it's all rubbish, and eternalism will be finding end. So it's just, and they're both denying what's going on and holding, holding that balance, holding that balance of having to pay bills and understanding that I'm provisional, I'm a provisional and conditioned being. It's very hard. One thing that helps, can help, is being part of a collective or a community, which is where this place comes in again, to have somewhere to discuss things, to have somewhere to think about things, to have somewhere to come and practice the disciplines of meditation, the disciplines of ethics, the discipline of seeing clearly, accurately. I'm going to end with a quotation from the Dharma Pada, which is one of the earliest Buddhist teaching. Hada is like a step foot, so it's like the steps of the Dharma, the steps of the truth, or the path. So before I did, I'll just try and recap. So we're looking at, we've looked at the three latches of interconnectedness, and we're internet connected because we are made of conditions, and because we're made of conditions and not self-substance, we are impermanent. Secondly, we're looking at the difference between understanding that as a principal and actually living a life day-to-day with parking tickets and fillings, and all of that. We're also looking at the perspective of life changing, of function changing in this world. Even this building, one building in one town, in one country, enormous changes in 250 years. That's really what's going on. I mean, that's a tenth of the time that Buddhism has been happening during the half-thousand years, and God knows it's less than, I don't want to calculate the percentage of Buddhist population to the people in this room, but it's timing. So again, just bearing in mind to that perspective, and ultimately trying to see, trying to see with that perspective, but being gentle with ourselves, accepting that human beings need security, we need to know, even provisionally, even just for today, where we're sleeping, roughly, you know, where we're going to sleep. That's a good start. So trying to keep this, trying to change our view from where I want it to be to where it is, and always remembering to move to where things are. Don't move where things are to where you want me to be. It takes a very long time, and they will keep slipping. They will keep slipping back. Just trying to see things as they are, and this being a fantastic opportunity. This is a great moment, because it is inescapable. The it we are in is a big fat mess. So this is a great chance to actually see, we can't ignore it, but comfortable duvet existence has been pulled away. It's all relative, I'm sure it's a lot worse in other places. So that's what we're doing, just trying to learn. This is one of my favourite teachings. So this is an early teaching, which is for monks, and for laypeople, householders, and for those of us who are somewhere in between, or both, or neither. Love yourself and watch today, tomorrow, always. Establish yourself in the way, and so defeat, sorry. To straighten the crooked, you must first do a harder thing, straighten yourself. Thank you very much. [Applause] [Applause] And can't these cities have to use to take a couple of questions? If anybody would like to ask us something about her talk, I think it's a question of responsibility. Personally, I think we should be responsible and aware. But I think it's very hard then not to make it your career. And I think it's very hard not to get angry. I was getting really reactive, unhelpfully reactive, because I was going to be caught up, because I find it quite intoxicating and exciting. But I think we live in the world. I'm a citizen of the world. This term, and I need to be, I'm personally, I want to be part of it, and I want to be responsible. But there are loads of Buddhist in the world, and they've got different views. Also, just one thing to say, I've never been discriminated against, or threatened with violence, or imprisoned, the demonstrating. And I know in other Buddhist countries that would have happened. In other countries that would have happened. So, I'm not going to tell anybody to risk themselves in that way. I'm really enjoying the very thing that I'm doing, engaging. I wanted to know if, what you see, if you say I'm just checking out the book, is that the recession is given us a great opportunity, because it's going to bring us lots of Docker. And then we can... So, it offers us the opportunity to be creative. What happens when you've got, I mean, quite a fought juxtaposition of that job. What about people who are in a state of say, like, permanent recession, why it never works, living with poor immunities, and things like that. I mean, how does it really think that Nordic is, you know, what is the important? The 1 million young people who are not in education, employment, or training. And also, sorry, how important is Nordic? What if you're, what if you're in a permanent recession? What if your circumstances are extremely reduced? I would refer you to Mato's hierarchy of needs, which basically says, make sure you're safe, make sure you're fed, make sure you're part of a group. But basically, don't try and teach somebody if they're starving. Don't, don't, you know, I wouldn't, yeah, don't try and teach them if they're starving. We need to attend to the practical needs before we can attend to the educational needs. Although it has got, I mean, I think this country has got very, I think it's very strange. Something weird has happened and I don't understand it in terms of education. Anyone really understands why we've got 1 million young people who aren't working. So, yeah, looking forward to that talk. It's an interesting paradox that I want to take care of the practical needs, because I think that's the very thing that, on last, is the identifying problem. You know, the last mark, the last consumption, the last waves. And yeah, I agree with you. I think that's the, the paradox, when you were saying that it's a little bit as by the may lay or monastic, that actually that's the position we're in. It's neither this nor that is both and we live in and we have. Yeah. And it's, I mean, that's the discipline. I think it's easier to go to the extreme. It's hard to stay balanced. Yeah. Okay. So thank you very much, Kargy City for launching this new series of talks and hope people have found it interesting and stimulating. And just want to say that these talks are put on freely, but if you would like to make a donation to the buddy center, there are various bowls around the place, there's donations and that will help us to continue to be able to put them in there for free. We've got to come to it. And our next talk is on Saturday, the 26th of February. And that's right in the gooners giving that talk, which is the title is how to avert climate change, stop buying stuff and learn how to be happy instead. So, in fact, it's an interest to you challenging you challenging us, then do come along. But I mean, thank you very much for coming and thanks again. We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. 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