Welcome to part one of our conversation with renowned Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. This is the first conversation in our What is Greatness? series

What is real Greatness? Sit back and enjoy as we explore the Dharma together with Jack Kornfield. Welcome to Deep Transformation, Self, Society, Spirit. Life enhancing, Paradigm rattling conversations with cutting-edge thinkers, contemplatives and activists with Dr. Roger Walsh and John Dupuy.

I'm Roger Walsh and our co host is John Dupuy. And today we begin a new dialogue series, a series focusing on the topic what is real greatness? There's been a lot of talk lately about making America great again. What there hasn't been a lot of talk about is what real greatness is. And the assumption seems to be among a lot of people that greatness is about getting more money and power for me and my country. So it's from the historical cross cultural perspective. That's a pretty puny view of greatness. It's very small, very egocentric, nationalistic. It doesn't encompass the well being of everyone. It's not doesn't have a base necessarily in compassion. And it's very interesting that there's been a lot of research on what actually makes for a deeply satisfying life. And it's very clear from the research that focusing on external goals like money and power just isn't enough to provide a foundation for a truly satisfying life. The research is crystal clear on that. Rather, what it turns out is that a really satisfying life, a life well lived, requires larger goals, a goal of contribution, of service, of deep relationship of meaning and purpose. Something much larger than just getting more money, grabbing more power. So we want to begin a series of dialogues to kind of up level this question about what is real greatness and what would it really mean to make America great again? And so to do that, we'll be dialoguing with some truly remarkable and great human beings. And we'll also be looking at questions like what are the wisest people of history, people like Socrates or Confucius or the Buddha say is real greatness? And what are the truly great saints like Saint Francis or Pope Francis say is real greatness both in individuals and in countries? And what do the great benefactors like Mother Teresa or Florence Nightingale say is real greatness? These are the kinds of questions we want to explore and the kinds of people we want to consult as we dive into this series on what is real greatness? And to begin the series, we have very fortunate to have with us a wonderful human being, I'd call him A great man, except I don't want to embarrass him. And that person is Jack Cornfield, perhaps the Western world's best known meditation teacher and possibly Western world's best known Buddhist teacher. He played a large role in introducing mindfulness into the West. He has trained literally hundreds of thousands of people and touched millions through both his teaching, his writings, his talks, his dialogues, his. He's also a PhD clinical psychologist and author of many books. Off the Top of My Head, A Path with Heart, Beautiful Description of the Spiritual Path, a book on the Wise Heart, and a book, no Time like the Present. And here we are in the present with Jack. And I should just say that Jack changed my life dramatically. I've. Bobby spent a couple of years in meditation retreat with him and benefited enormously. So, Jack, welcome. And gosh, there's so many topics to explore with you, and you've been prolific in a number of ideas you've generated, a number of people you've touched. But, you know, maybe one place to start is, as I mentioned, I've sat probably two years of silent retreat with you, and you've given a lot of teachings during those times, and a lot of ideas I've taken and used and plagiarized. And one of them that comes to mind right now is you once asked a question, you point out that each of us has what you called a sacred question, a question which is at the center of our lives and purpose and meaning could be, you know, how can I love better? Or what would it mean to really help? So let me ask, I'm going to throw it back to you since you gave it to me quite some years ago. What's been your sacred question?

Well, hi, Roger, I'm happy to be on the podcast, and hello to folks who are listening. I was just listening with pleasure to your introduction of what is greatness? And I don't want to kind of brush aside money and power so quickly to start with, I'll, I'll answer your question at some point, but I think it's actually interesting because if you look at history books and of course, then that immediately says, who writes history books? And whose benefit are those? You know, they're really about emperors and kings and an occasional queen and people who amassed a great deal of money and power. And they, they set a template for our aspirations, those of us who are educated in that system. So it's just worthy of noting how powerful in a different sense that whole archetype is. You could be a king, you could be a queen, you could have, you know, money, power, dancing girls and dancing boys and everything else you imagine, but particularly you could kind of be the. The monarch or the president, king or whatever you want to be. So that's just interesting to me. And then for those who are listening, one of the great and frequent, or most important and frequent opening lines in Buddhist texts is when the Buddha looks at whoever is there or speaks of them to them, and begins with the line, oh, nobly born, O you who are the sons and daughters of the awakened ones. And so this is a really beautiful turning of that kingship or queenship or emperorness to say you already are this. You were born with an inherent dignity, an inherent capacity to awaken. Sometimes talked about as Buddha nature or sometimes talked about as the timeless spirit. And that. That's actually who you are. And your whole spiritual journey is just to remember it in some way, to embody it, to experience the reality of this. One of the great historical stories that follows your introduction, Roger, is that of Emperor Ashok, or King Ashok, who lived from the historic accounts a couple of centuries after the Buddha in India. And he was a great conqueror and eventually united the lands all the way from Afghanistan on the western side to the borders of Burma on the other, and the entire Indian subcontinent. And as the story is written and told, after the last great battle to conquer the whole southern part of the Indian subcontinent, Ashok was sitting in his tent above the battlefield looking out and saw the bodies of some of his favorite warriors and generals who'd been killed in the battle and of course, the carnage of the war scene. And at the far edge of the field, he saw the sight of a orange robed Buddhist monk or a golden robed Buddhist monk walking slowly and peacefully on a path on the other side. And he reportedly said, I, who am now the king of lands as far as one can travel in every direction, who has everything, don't have the one thing that that monk has, which is a peace of heart, peace of mind after all the grief and the struggles and the battles. So he called the monk over, and that monk became his teacher. And at that point, Emperor Sho changed his tune, so to speak. He reviewed what Roger Walsh had been telling him about the limits of power and money and, you know, fame and those things. Okay, been there, done that. But I don't sleep well, you know, I don't have what that monk has. And we might ask ourselves, you know, in the end, what matters in terms of how we live and, yes, whatever accomplishments are there, and do we have a gracious or peaceful or steady or loving heart or wise heart. So the monk taught Ashok the basic principles of the Buddhist path to inner happiness. Because now we're shifting from the outer forms of happiness to the inner happiness. And those included generosity and care toward oneself as others, loving kindness and compassion, a steadiness of mind and heart, a peaceful practice of turning the busy mind into an abode of peace, respect for all beings, that they might also respect you. And taking these teachings, Ashok then transformed. And now in India, you can go to the far corners of the continent, literally thousand miles apart or thousands, and there will be these huge stone columns called Ashok pillars, on which are written the edicts of Emperor Ashok saying benevolence to all who live in this land. I, Ashok. And then he calls himself blessed of the gods. What a beautiful phrase to call yourself that. And I don't think it was just cause he conquered everything. But now I who are blessed of the gods, command or tell you that in our lands all human beings and all creatures will be retreated respectfully, as I have been blessed. That included the animals at that time. That all the spiritual traditions in India has this enormous cacophony of spiritual traditions, all talking to each other and vying with one another and so forth. It's a fabulous marketplace of the spiritual. All spiritual traditions should be honored. A virtue and integrity, speaking the truth, acting on behalf of beings, should be practiced by all. We should live in harmony. And it goes on and on. So this is kind of the archetypal story in history. And a show reigned for decades after that time that kind of demonstrates or shows us a picture of your introduction, Roger, of what it means to shift from outer greatness and power to the power of respect, integrity, compassion, generosity, and so forth. And beginning with that phrase, oh, nobly born, one of the other things that's a compelling image from the Buddhist teachings is that a prince, given that the Buddha was born into a princely role in a. In a kingdom, in the family, that a prince came to become ordained as a monk with the Buddha. He'd been listening and was inspired. And on that same day came another young man who was a shoemaker or a lower caste person in the Hindu caste system. And the Buddha went through the ritual of ordaining them and bringing them into the monastic order. And he made sure, as the story was told, that the shoemaker, who is the lowest of cast your feet touching the earth with all the excrement of the animals in the mud and so forth. And the prince who came in a chariot with a beautiful royal garments that the shoemaker was ordained first. And the tradition in the monastic order for monks and nuns is that whoever is ordained first becomes the elder or the senior. And those who've been ordained or become members of the order then must offer a bow to those who are senior to them. And here is the Buddha setting up, turning on its head the Hindu human cartography of the Brahmins at the top and the warriors, the Kshatra, the Shudras, and the, you know, all the way down to the untouchables, if you will, and saying, oh, nobly born, you are born with a nobility. Come and join us. And setting that up as the primary field of respect that's kept the order of monks and nuns and their teachings alive for 2,600 years, which is pretty long time for a company to kind of carry its mission and sell its products and things like that. So I have now taken the thread that you pulled in the cosmic weave and pulled us into a little bit of history from the Buddhist perspective. And I want to speak to the people who are listening, because this really raises a question for you. Not so much about money and power. I actually have come to like money. It's kind of sweet to have a bit of it anyway and not have to worry about it. Not so much that I need to be grand about it, but not to worry about it. And then I can give it away and do cool things with it or whatever. But there's something that I want to kind of ask as you listen, and that is, do you hold yourself with this quality of nobility and respect, of dignity? And I think of Nelson Mandela coming out of 27 years in Robben Island Prison with such magnanimity and graciousness and depth of compassion for all around him, as if to say, they can put your body in prison, but no one can imprison your spirit. And here you are in your life, both the outer freedoms and the outer prisons that you may, or the conditions you live in, but underneath that, can you remember your own beauty and dignity? And then can you see it in others? And that's what transforms you and a society is to remember, remember in this way. So then, Roger, you asked about Sacred Question. It changes, honestly, you know, it's very hard to fix a moment in my life and say, this is my great question. Who am I? How do I become free? I've had those moments, you know, I mean, when I was much younger and practicing my spiritual first interest after also taking some fine psychedelics in the Summer of Love in Haight Ashbury, I had a spiritual opening and was interested in that, but I was equally interested in getting girls to like me and, you know, having a fun time. And I'm not sure at that time if you asked that. My best intention, whether it was enlightenment or girls, they were vying in my consciousness for both. And I tell it because it's honest and also because we have lots of motivations. And that idea of a sacred question came from a series of teachings I gave on the shaman's journey. That something will happen to us in our life. And maybe it's a car accident where you survived but almost died, or, you know, someone around you died, or maybe it's that you did get something that you really wanted. In my case, I got the girl I thought I wanted and it turned out not to be quite as much fun as I imagined. There was conflict and difficulty and, oh, it's not what I thought. And then you start to say, well, what matters? And that question comes arise, and it does for everybody in their way. You know, whether it's a near death experience, you know, or walking in the high mountains, or making love, or taking psychedelics, or sitting at the bedside of someone as they die, which will happen to you, by the way, in case you haven't reviewed that this morning. And there's this mysterious moment when the spirit leaves the body silent as a falling star, and that human being, the body turns into a corpse, cold, getting cold, and you know, just like going into any butcher shop, basically it becomes meat, the meat body. And the spirit leaves the body, consciousness, whatever you want to call it. And if you've had that experience or you've been there for a childbirth, the gates to mystery open and you go, wow, how did I get into this incarnation? What is this? This is your Ashok moment, actually. And again, it can happen in all kinds of ways. You know, making love or taking LSD the first time, or being there when someone dies. And then the question arises in its own form for me, you know, what is this? How do I live knowing this and more deeply knowing that there's something sacred, something bigger than the advertising world offers us? And that becomes a kind of a calling for me. It was also just, you know, you want people to get personal on your podcast. Once I had started to hear Eastern Buddhist teachings in college, Dartmouth College, from this professor. I'd had so much suffering in my childhood because my father was a brilliant scientist who taught in medical school and designed some of the first artificial hearts and lungs and worked in space medicine, but he was also mentally ill. And violent and abusive. And this wise teacher came and said, Dr. Wing Sichan came up from Harvard and talked about Lao Tzu and Confucius. And then he began to teach about the Buddha. And he said, the main thing the Buddha taught was, there's suffering in life, not that life is suffering, but that it has it. My ears perked up. That was something I knew well. And then he taught a path to the release from suffering. And I leaned forward and I said, whoa, you know, this is. I just come from organic chemistry. This is the chemistry I need. And I began to read and study. And then, of course, the psychedelic hippie zeitgeist turned me inside out and somewhere was, oh, you can really have these experiences. I want to go to a Buddhist monastery. And so I graduated and joined the Peace Corps and said, then, please send me to a Buddhist country. Which they did. And I said, send me to a really remote area. Being an adventurer, you know, as young men are. Is there anything dangerous to do around here? Cool. Show me. And I found this great teacher and a kind of, at that time, somewhat remote forest monastery of ascetic, intense, hard practice. And I thought, oh, perfect. So now I'm sort of dancing around to your question, Roger, but, you know, you did it, too. You held the world high dive record jumping off a bridge, I believe, in Australia, flying through the air as if you were born aloft like some kind of bird until you hit the water.

How was that?

There was that moment. Water isn't quite so soft when you're moving at, you know, a relatively high speed.

And Jack, Roger being Roger, this is the first I've heard of that. So thank you for sharing that bit.

You're very welcome. But is there anything interesting and dangerous to do around here? Roger was looking for it in his own troubled way. But it's there in us now. Some of us have to look for trouble. Others of us just have so damn much trouble that we have to just look for the way out. But this is just part of being human. So if those of you who are listening, if you reflect back to yourself, what were the seeds of your own spiritual journey? That's more than the sacred question. What were those seeds? What were you called to understand what suffering or what imagination, this huge vision, really started you on a path. And then, of course, I do have to say this even now at the beginning, because we think there's a long path, and then we'll get enlightened. And then after that, we can live with 401k and in enlightened retirement. But in fact, it turns out that the path doesn't go from here to there, it goes from there to here. That where you're going in the end, as the poet T.S. eliot says, and the end of all of my striving or wandering, whatever that phrase was, was to arrive where I started and know the place for the first time. And that's the saying of Suzuki Roshi, in another poetic language, that the aim of Zen practice in the end is to keep, always keep a beginner's mind to see the mystery, because it's here. I mean, the fact that I can wag my tongue, that I even have a tongue and a hole in this body into which I stuff dead plants and animals regularly and grind them up with the bones that hang down, and then I wag my tongue and it vibrates the air around and vibrates that little tympanic drum and eardrum, and then it goes to the auditory center in your brain and you translate pink elephant into an image coming right out of the Disney movie of your childhood. No one knows how the hell that happens. Actually, it's completely weird that we exist and the consciousness has made us all out of nothing. So now we're taking the conversation to a different dimension. And the thing is that there isn't the right dimension. There are these many beautiful dimensions. So now I'm going to pause because I've been blabbing for a while, which is kind of, you know, it's what I get paid to do.

And.

Roger, you haven't told me how much I'm making for this podcast, but I'm assuming it. It's a lot of good karma, at.

Least lots of gratitude, and I will.

Give you my bank account number for the direct deposit as well.

But you raised so many beautiful topics and we could go down so many different roads with this. And just to mention some of them, you. Your story of King Ashoka or Emperor Ashoka is. It's beautiful. And it raises a whole new possibility for our dialogue series on what is real greatness that is really interesting to look at the truly great figures of history, Ashoka being one another being Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor of Rome, whose book Meditations has come down to us over these 2000 years as this wonderful, deeply reflective exploration of life and meaning and purpose and what really counts. And someone who, by sheer dint of will and effort and good heart, worked on himself when he could have just luxurated in sybaritic pleasures.

Don't say that lightly. Those are also quite fun.

Keep going oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Money, sex and power. All good. All good in moderation, I think, or middle way to coin a phrase.

I think that you have to remember everything in moderation, including moderation. But keep going.

There you go. Yeah, so. So there's that theme. There's a question. How do we live? Yeah, how do we live? I mean, that's a question we're. That's a question we're asking ourselves every day, every hour, every choice.

I don't think so. I would suggest that that's not true. I think we mostly live to be slightly critical a lot of the time as automatons.

I would agree.

And I mean, I make my to do list and I. Very satisfactory. Cross things off that list or check them off. And so I don't think I asked that question like that except once in a while. And I'm not sure it's our purpose to ask it actually in that way. I think that there is, or at least for me, there's a substrate of consciousness you could, you know, in, I think, inaccurate ways. You could talk about the subconscious and the unconscious, but I think it's actually the deeper consciousness that knows that this is a dance and that we can live it in a way that expresses beauty, respect, care, and so forth. And then, you know, go to Trader Joe's and take my wife's shopping list, and I don't think about, like, what's my meaning at Trader Joe's? Trader Jones. I just looked for the Fuji apples that I know that she likes, you know, and. And please her in that way. Sorry, I stopped your riff and I interrupted and disagreed.

Yes. How dare you, Jack?

But I think, you know, because the danger I'm gonna keep my critique going for a moment just because it makes more interesting airtime, is that I don't want people, and I know you don't either, to become idealistic. Okay, now I'm going to get enlightened. And enlightened retirement means that I'm living in mystery and, you know, the great wonder of all things all the time, and all the rest of it becomes trivial because, in fact, the trivial is as sacred as anything else, since it's all born out of the field of consciousness itself, of who we really are, blah, blah, blah. I interrupted. You keep going, Roger.

No, I'm agreeing completely. And yes, I was actually thinking much less generously about continuously asking guiding questions. I'm assuming most of the time those questions are entirely automatic, just as you suggested, so. But at every moment, there are choices made. And yes, I completely Agree. And the whole, one could say the whole teaching of Buddhism, to put in contemporary language, is that, whoops, you're hypnotized, you're running on automatic. There's another way, and I want to just ask you to expand more on what you said about the ideals because you're raising a very important fact, which is probably one of the things we need to address, a trap associated to real greatness. And that is ideals can be wonderful, but they can also be traps, kind of golden traps. So say more about the good use of ideals.

Okay, I'm going to turn the conversation a little bit with that prompt from you. And in the Buddhist tradition, the highest of ideals, if you will, and also one of the most beautiful and common is the ideal of the Bodhisattva. And Bodhisattva is a compound word. Bodhi means awakened and Sattva means being. And so it has a number of meanings. It means someone who lives in an awakened way that is in a way that's not separate from other beings, not selfish. But the Bodhisattva is a being who's committed to living for the benefit of all, basically. And there are all these examples of great bodhisattvas and the sort of the old time religion examples of the Buddhist time. But you know, you could say, because you named her Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King or, you know, so many other kind of modern sage, saint people. But the beautiful thing about the Bodhisattva ideal, if you will, is that you don't become, becomes an intention. And it's very, very different than if you say, well, I'm a Bodhisattva. I mean, I could say that I'm, you know, in the sense of it being inspired by or intending. There are the Bodhisattva vows that are taken in Zen. There are four Bodhisattva vows. And you sit at the beginning of your sitting in the Zendo, everyone sitting in upright, fine Zen posture and then chanting, sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them all. You know, and it goes on with the other vows about mastering all the desires and things like that. But it's kind of a weird thing actually to chant because if you think about saving all beings and you go home, turns out that your family doesn't want to be saved by you. They don't. And so it has to have some other meaning than I'm going to go around and save all my friends. You know, Buddha spare them or God spare them or whatever, and you become sort of this Missionary Bodhisattva. So what does sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them all mean? Well, first of all, my beloved Trudi chants it differently. I vow to free them all. And then she goes on to say, and what does it mean to free beings? To free them in all the ways that I limit the way I hold them and to offer them that kind of freedom in whatever way I can. That's different. It's still a wee bit idealistic, given that there are innumerable sentient beings and you're just one. So what it actually functionally comes down to is a setting of the compass of your heart. You could set the compass toward money or power or, you know, all kinds of other things, domination or greed, whatever. But here you set the compass and you say, may I be of a force for the compassion and the freedom for beings everywhere. And then it becomes kind of the compass that as you go through the day and you go to Trader Joe's and, you know, some people are jostling to get in line and push their carts in front of you. And you could be. I could be annoyed by that, or I could remember when the annoyance arises, oh, Bodhisattva vow intention. And I see them with the eyes of beings who are struggling to get through the day. And I don't know, maybe they're in a hurry because their kid is very sick, or maybe they're in the hurry because they had a accident on the way there and they still have to finish their errands and get back. Who knows what's going on for them. And then you see with the eyes of compassion that we're all just in it together, both suffering and also free to awaken, free to love. The Dalai Lama wakes up early in the morning and I'm about to go to India next week to see him as part of the Mind and Life Institute that he helped to start 30 some years ago to use bring together science and meditation, science and contemplation for the those meetings. And he wakes up in the dark, begins his practice with the vows from the Bodhisattva, vows from Shantideva, and makes a prayer which is a dedication of his life energy. May I be food for the hungry. May I be a resting place for the weary. May I be lamp for those who are lost in darkness. May I be a source of peace for those who are experiencing struggle. And he goes on with a series of these really beautiful vows. And may I do so. May I offer myself for as long as space and Time exists and beings exist. May I be the force to bring blessings to all I encounter and to all that radiates out from there. It's a gorgeous Bodhisattva vow, right? And it doesn't say, I'm the great Bodhisattva, which she happens to be in some ways, but this is my intention. May I use the day and the gifts and the mystery of having a human life and spread well being and compassion and care so that we all become awakened and free and blessed and each in our own way. It's a really beautiful, beautiful ideal. And wending our way back to your question of ideal, ideals are not something you become. They're really the archetypal image of possibility for us, in this case, the positive ideals that illuminate how we might live and how we might act. And the cool thing about Shanti Davis vows is that they make you happy. It's not like you have to go do this, you know, you lazy son of a. Whatever, get out there and save everybody or liberate them all. But when you get quiet and listen, it is the very offering. It's sort of. You can't separate it, becoming that peace or generosity or love or compassion, and then shining it where you go turns out to really make you happy. And there you are. There I am in line at Trader Joe's with somebody misbehaving in my mind, you know, And I could either go down the rabbit hole of judgment and people are. Don't know, kind anymore, whatever, or I could go to the place of the Bodhisattva compassion and bless everybody. So poet Diane Ackerman writes a modern Bodhisattva vow. See if I can remember the beginning in the name of daybreak and the eyelids of morning and the wayfaring moon, and the night when it departs, I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, a healer of misery, a messenger of wonder, and an architect of peace. That's a modern translation of Shanti Devi, you could say. But then when I teach, I have people, especially when we meditated. And so the kind of COVID of busy mind, they drop below that to a quieter place to tune into more of the mystery. And then I'll say, if you were to write your own Bodhisattva vow, set the compass of your heart to the highest or most beautiful capacity. Take a little time, reflect and write it down. And it doesn't have to be a great poem. It could be simply, I vow to be kind. That'll get you really far, it turns out, you know, or something simple. And then the next thing that I do is I have them write it down, right? I have them turn to another person. And they each read it, read to one another their vow, which is a very intimate thing. But it's one thing to have the idea. It's another to write it, which all of a sudden it becomes something that you can return to. And then to speak it. It's in. The Sufis speak about so bad, about a communion of the heart. And when someone reads their bodhisattva vow. That they just pulled out of nothing. Because everything comes out of nothing, by the way. And this thing comes out, and then they read it. There's something so intimate and beautiful about it. So when we talk about greatness, you know, there are some really great rock and roll bands.

I was going to mention that, actually.

Yes, right. I mean, there's the Grateful Dead, who happen to be great as well as grateful. There are all kinds of forms of. There's artistic greatness and athletic greatness. And the Bodhisattva is the greatness in compassion. And the greatness and blessing. And the beautiful thing is we can each do it in some difficult situation. Or even just get lost a bit. All you have to do is take a breath and pause and say, now, what was that pesky little vow I took? Oh, yeah. I made that vow. And everything becomes clear. It doesn't take it, really. 30 seconds and you're back. Now, the Dalai Lama in drag, right there. Nobody knows. But you remember.

It seems that a lot of us. And there may be old souls that come into this body that have already been there and done that. They just grow up, you know, just are born enlightened or in touch with ground of being. But for many of us, there has to grow a divine or sacred dissatisfaction with what we're doing. I heard a story. I don't know if that's true or not, but the Buddha said, if. If you're happy with your life and money and sex and being alive in the world and everything, don't talk to me. But if it's not working for you so much, then we have something to talk about. And I think it's dissatisfaction of maybe the values we've been given or we're trying to do it or rebelling against it, that it's just not working for us anymore. And we begin to make that turn to live in a better way. Something that will satisfy us, that'll make us Happier.

So I have to say I really love your modern translation of the Buddha. I just think it's great. He said, listen, dude, is it working for you or not? You know, if it's working, you come back sometime later. I'll amplify that because I appreciate what you say. A lot of people are drawn to find a deeper meaning because of their suffering. It's true, there are some people. And you sort of started with where you say some unusual people are born, maybe more enlightened. I would kind of turn it slightly and say some people come to the spiritual journey, if you will, because they've had some beautiful awakening. They've had something that touched them, they remembered something, they saw something. And my beloved Trudy Goodman, wife and, you know, teaching partner and so forth, she was 21 years old and got married very young and got pregnant right away. And by dint of what was happening in that time, she was in hospital in labor. And she mostly was in there alone. A nurse would come visit once in a while, her husband went out and whatever, she was there alone for some hours. And she said the only thing that she really had as a map, no one to talk to her about what was going to happen was like that plastic bottle of the uterus and the birth canal on the wall of the physician's office, the gynecologist's office. So she said, but my body, it just started to do this thing, these contractions, and it wasn't me it was doing it. And it got incredibly painful as it can. She said, And I heard down the hall some, some young woman who was crying out for her daddy, you know, help me, help me, she said. And here I was alone. And it was enormously powerful and painful. And then I was catapulted out of being my ordinary 21 year old self, struggling with the pain. And I could feel myself opening, dissolving into a stream. Of all the women in human history going back millions of years, who had given birth, who were giving birth to life, and I was part of that timeless stream. And it all came through women's bodies, by the way, in case anybody happens to forget, you know, yo mama, right? She said, you walk down the street in New York, I would. Afterward, I was like, God, all these people came out of a woman's body. Wow. Usually her vagina too. Hey, how about that? She said, And I felt myself part of some huge mystery that was giving birth to itself. And that was another way that the spiritual journey could awaken. One of many that we have a taste of Something so much larger than our ordinary reality. And now I think about it, because we're talking in this particular week, although this podcast will be broadcasted another time later and so forth, but we're talking when Jane Goodall just died at 91, and you could say she was a bodhisattva for interspecies respect, you know, she learned how to listen. That was beyond. She had that beginner's mind, let me actually learn. And then she taught generations how to listen across species. And my dear and beloved friend Joanna Macy, another great elder, died just recently at age 96. And she was like Jane. She was a powerful advocate for the well being of all species. She was an environmentalist and an activist and also a systems theorist and a fine meditation teacher and a Buddhist in all these ways. And I went to sit with her body after she died. And they turned the whole house into a kind of a temple. It's a sort of modest house in the flat part of Berkeley. And people were gathered outside. And before you even could go up the steps, which had a candle on every step, you were greeted in a kind of sacred way. Welcome to, you know, the field of Joanna Macy. And they said some beautiful things and you got to the porch and then they smudged you and did some other blessings. And then you went up the stairs all lit by candles. And there was a guide there who said, here's the meditation room, here's the room where people are telling Joanna stories, and here's a sacred prayer for her. And then when you're ready, you can go sit with her body. So I went in the bedroom after I did all of those things, and she was lying there and there was a huge bowl of flower petals, and her body was covered. Everyone who passed by sprinkled flower petals. And there were a few of us in the room. And I read, or I chanted, actually, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Oh, nobly born, remember who you are. Go into the pure light of your true nature, said Joanna. You know this stuff. I'm just reminding you, you know? And I talked to her for a bit, chanted, and then I waited. She looked at me and she said, 80. That's nothing. I just turned 80. She said, that's nothing. You got to keep going. I was thinking of like, okay, I'm gonna kind of step back a bunch after 50 years of teaching or more, 60 practicing and teaching, said, no, no, no, 80s, nothing. Keep going. And it was like this big jolt of, okay, okay, Joanna. I got my marching orders and then I Went down the back steps into the yard, and there was a big barbecue. People were cooking and people making music and singing. And it was like any good Irish Buddhist, whatever wake that you would want. There was a bit of something. People gathered to celebrate her life, and two people really close to her talked to me, and they said, you know, Joanna, I mean, she went to Chernobyl after the meltdown of the nuclear plant to work with all the people who'd been just were getting pulled out and displaced to bring compassion. And they said, what are you doing? You kind of white American woman coming like, you're going to help us? And she sat with him, and she said, it's not that we need you to help us. I want to hear your story because I don't want what's happened to you and your family and your children to happen to other people's children. So if I hear your story, I can go and I can tell people that you are speaking to their families and their children not to let this happen. So she was this bodhisattva.

Yeah, Jack. I hadn't heard that she had passed, and. And I got to know her, and she was a big influence on me. She was a real role model when I was searching for that at that time in my life. And very, very good woman, very precious soul.

She's quite remarkable. So they said to me, you know, Joanna loved everything. You know, she loved the natural world, and she would lead expeditions to places to help speak to and with the species that were there and her counsel for all beings. She loved food. We'd go out to great restaurants. She loved cooking. She loved to make, you know, nourishing things. She loved sex. That was a big thing for her. She loved music. She loved, you know, community and on. So the next day, I was at Whole Foods doing my shopping, and there was this big chocolate thing. And I thought, God, I'd like to get that, but it's not good for my diet. And then I heard Joanna say, 80, buy the damn chocolate. You know, get it and enjoy it. Right? Just go for it. And then a day or two later, I got asked, would I be on somebody's damn podcast or do some little retreat or something? And I thought, God, that's a kind of time. I was going to just kick back a little. Joanna says, do it. Get out there. Keep going. And now I have Joanna as sort of my muse. And it's great because it's like a living bodhisattva in Joanna's voice. So, yes, we can be lost in some way and forget. But there are so many things that also can remind us.

Stay tuned for part two of this extraordinary conversation with Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield.

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