Welcome to part two of our conversation with Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, where we explore the mind and the heart of this remarkable man. 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.

There are so many things that also can remind us. They remind us of our belonging to each other, that we're not separate from the rainforest. Our breath, we inter-breathe with the worms, right? And the, you know, and the monkeys, the chimpanzees, we inter-breathe with everything. And the larks and the eagles, we take the same air and breathe. And our neighbors, that's even more terrifying. We're breathing, exchanging breath with them. You know, imagine kissing your neighbors on the mouth and exchanging breath. It's more or less what you're doing all the time and you can't separate it. And it doesn't matter which flag they're flying, the freak flag, the LGBT rainbow flag, the MAGA flag, you're all still breathing together, baby, you know? And the bodhisattva spirit starts to open. You say, it's us. And then you love them all, the weird ones and the, even the ones who are causing pain and destruction. You hold them all in that great heart of compassion and say, yes, because those who are causing pain generally experience a lot of pain. Hurt people, hurt other people. Frightened people can harm because they're scared. And we're wired that way. And then your heart opens, you go, oh yeah, you too. You two, all of them, you know, how can you not love the lioness and the gazelle both? Without the gazelle, there'd be no lioness. Without the lioness, without to cull the herds, I don't know what would happen to the gazelles, but they are somehow interconnected. You know.

They would starve to death. There would be too many.

And they would, yes, just over graze and then they would die. It's all a wild interconnected system. And you think you're separate and you actually think you exist. That's a deeper level. First, you're not separate. That's just a fiction anybody with eyes to see realizes and every breath to take. But then you're not who you think you are. And okay, I could say you have an original nobility, but deeper than that, you are consciousness. Consciousness in drag in the Roger Walsh form, saying, let me see what happens if I make a Roger Walsh? What will that one do, you know? And all coming from the source or the cosmic creativity that Stan Grof calls the creative principle. And the beautiful thing is that we actually can touch this and know it. Not as a philosophy. Philosophy's okay. Gets kind of boring after about 10 or 20 philosophy books, right? Even good ones. But you can actually know this in deep meditation, in shamanic journeys, in psychedelics, in just deep intuition. And you know it. You know, when you sit with someone who's dying, sometimes the gates between the worlds open and you go, wow, we are all just a play of consciousness. You'll find out when you die. You'll see, whoa. You float out of your body. That was quite an incarnation, wasn't it? And then usually they say you do a life review, but it's not judgmental. It's like, wow, in that incarnation. Look at that. Amazing. And there's a sense of wonder and freedom. And that's just the beginning of the opening to the clear light.

Beautiful. Jack. Yeah. So much and so much in what you've said, so. And thank you for the reframing of the. Of ideals in general and the Bodhisattva vow. And actually, I have an allergy to even calling it a vow. I vow to say all sentient things. When I first got into Tibetan Buddhism, I was in a retreat with a Tibetan teacher, and for a month, every sitting began with reciting the Bodhisattva vow. I vow to save all sentient beings. It's like I just mouthed the words, there's no way I can't save this sentient being. And finally, after a few weeks, I stood up and said, you know, I just got married after nine years, and it took me nine years before I was willing to serve one sentient being. He was not impressed in the least, but it's real. I have much more resonance with the idea of an aspiration that, yeah, it would be wonderful if I could serve and help everyone. That would be just beautiful.

Well, your existence does it. I mean, and if you live with a good heart, that's serving. I mean, yes, what you're saying is really important. The difference between the ideal and actually us as human beings. And then there's some, you know, I have to say so. We've had a variety of teacher meetings from teachers around the world, and one of them, we were sitting with the Dalai Lama, who I just so love and admire, and we were talking about teaching about Bodhisattva and said, but, you know, as teachers, we also have to take care of ourself. And the beautiful thing about the Bodhisattva Vow, it doesn't really Complete the circle. If you're not including yourself, the compassion has to include yourself. Anyway, we talk about the role of a teacher and how after time we can get exhausted or burned out even, and we have to do our own retreat and we have to maybe have some time off duty to. And the Dalai Lama looked up and he said in his I'm going to do what I'm not supposed to do. But it's vaguely imitated. But he said, bodhisattva, off duty. Bodhisattva, off duty. And it was like he couldn't conceive of it. It was a really funny moment because for him, it's all the play of Bodhisattva. And I don't think it's like, oh, I'm a Bodhisattva all the time. It's just, our existence is connected with all beings, and we lift them all up, and you don't have to take the damn vow. You just, you know, just live a Bodhisattva life. Something like that.

Yeah. I was once in a retreat with the same. With the same. Same teacher. And it was a retreat in which there are a lot of Vipassana Insight Meditation teachers. President and the Tibetan teacher got older. All us, the pastor teaches together and wanted to quiz us about what we're doing. And so we went around this circle and said, well, I'm doing this. I teach here. Blah, blah. Came to Joseph Goldstein. Joseph said, well, I teach at the Insight Meditation center, but I think I'm going to retire and take up this practice. And the teacher stopped and he said, I've never known a teacher to retire.

Oh, really? Yeah.

I thought that was really good because, like, what would you do that would be more fulfilling than share this? So that was a. That was a good teaching.

Yeah, yeah.

But. But, Jack, there's a theme I'd love to get into here with you. You've been beautifully talking about the Bodhisattva. Let's call it aspiration. Bodhisattva, aspiration. And one of the interesting things about Buddhism is that perhaps more than any other tradition, it has evolved. It's evolved through what are called the three, or sometimes four turnings. And each of those turnings has had its own view of what a great person is. Starting with the arahat, which was less emphasis on awakening. Everyone was more. The most important value was one's own awakening. And then, yes, one would serve and teach, but. So there was an evolution there over time to an increasing grandeur of the vision and possibility of what A human can be towards a deeper understanding and a fundamental nature of reality and towards a more encompassing understanding of what way we could as humans, aspire to. So that was really beautiful to see that evolution. But then with the third turning, the so called Vajrayana, or the most exemplified in Tibetan Buddhism, there was the idea of the Siddha, the person who embodies the quality of the arahat, in that they aspire to awakening for themselves and the bodhisattva that they aspire for, the awakening of all, but also brought in an element of emphasizing what you've been talking to, the fundamental nature being consciousness and this being the play of consciousness. And so now there was this introduction of this perspective one could play in this world, not reject it in any way, but just play in it and awaken and serve and awaken. And it seemed like a beautiful addition.

Well, I'm listening to you, Roger, and you've been brainwashed a little bit, I'm sorry to say, you know, because that's a historical perspective. You know, the history books are written by the, you know, the people have their views about history and things like that. And each of those traditions would have a different story about what you're saying. So it's a nice story. In fact, as best as I can tell, having studied somewhat in each of those traditions, both living traditions and scholarly, is all of the things that evolved in these different cultures. And in Tibet, it was a combination of the Buddhist and some Hindu teachings, the traditional shamanic understandings that were woven into that culture. And Japan, Zen also met the martial arts traditions. And you feel that. So, yes, there's those visionary things you're talking about, but there's also the cultural representations and everybody thinking, my dharma is bigger than your dharma. Right.

Anyway, that's a trap. Yep.

Yeah. So all of the developments are there from the very beginning. The Buddha himself was the Bodhisattva. And in the Theravada, there's like, I think 500 volumes of stories of the Buddha as Bodhisattva. So it's not like Bodhisattva was invented later. It. It was elaborated in other cultures in different ways and so forth. And in fact, all of it pretty much happened in India as well as when it moved to China and Japan and Tibet and so forth. But all these were together in some way at Nalanda, all these different traditions coexisting. And here's a different way of thinking about it, because I'm watching, you know, the Buddhist tradition, the cultural container evolve in the west and we have a sort of proto Western Buddhism that's a little different than the other forms. And I'll talk about it, but let me speak to the core first, and then I'll come back to that. When you have a beautiful crystal, a clear glass or diamond crystal, and you shine white light through. Through it, the light gets refracted in different directions depending on its wavelength. And so you can see out of different facets, blue or green or red or magenta or whatever those colors. And we know how that light can get diffracted in that way. We have some explanation. Consciousness, which is everything. There's the void and then there's being arising. We'll call it consciousness. That's a word to use. It turns out when we think about enlightenment or awakening and so forth, that people who meditate or do some form of spiritual practice or have some spontaneous awakening, they usually return to an experience that is both. It could be the experience of the oneness of all things or the emptiness of all things, but usually it's flavored in a particular way so that that experience of awakening can be felt as universal love. That everything actually is love, because consciousness is everything. It's one thing you don't say, oh, my poor. You love your hand. You don't have to say it to it. It's part of who you are. You love it because it's you. And you have that experience that everything is love. Or you have the experience of emptiness that like a star, a dawn, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, an echo or rainbow in a dream. These descriptions are both there in the Dhammapada and in the Diamond Sutra. And it is a dream, but you really experience it. I mean, what happened to 2024? It is gone. It's back with the pyramids and the dinosaurs. What happened to Y2K? Back into the void. What happened to yesterday? It's gone. Things come trooping out of emptiness, is Rumi's phrase. They do their dance in the eternal present on stage, and then they troop off. And you start to see that it is really. It is a dream. It's empty. It comes and nothing lasts. So that facet, there's love, there's emptiness, then there's a facet of perfection. And you actually have the experience that everything is perfect, just as is, even with all the suffering and the horrors in the world alone with its unbearable beauty, it actually makes a perfection, and you see it from that. And so, depending how you practice and then what revelation comes to you, you can make a Whole spiritual tradition out of it. My tradition says that the fundamental truth is love. Well, I've got a deeper understanding. The fundamental truth is emptiness. And then. No, no, the fundamental truth is the perfection. And then another one. No, it's freedom. It's the freedom to inhabit this world as a dance, as a, you know, a joyful, which you described. And then people make their little spiritual houses out of that and so forth, as if that's really the last word. So that, you know, kind of brainwashing I described comes from one of many houses that are all kind of touting their wares or whatever. But it's also, in truth, it's just a play of consciousness in its different flavors. And enlightenment then has these flavors for people, and there isn't one better than another. There are all the awakening to the way that consciousness itself can differentiate the play in the universe. And again, I'm not trying to sell this as a philosophy. This is the experience of mystics and sages and shamans and llamas and swamis and mamas. It's actually available to us as a human experience to know this.

Yeah. And you're doing something very important, Jack, which is you're emphasizing that there is not one realization, as has so often assumed, but there are multiple realizations, multiple possibilities, and that. That the range of possible openings, awakenings, experiences, enlightenments, is multiple. And as you say, you know, people, most of the great traditions are founded on a particular version of awakening, which has been idolized, set up as, in many cases, not necessarily by the mystics themselves, by the realizers themselves, as the great truth. And one of the beauties of our time is that there are people like you. And we've been extraordinarily privileged to have a series of dialogues with Hamid Ali AH Almas, who has just beautifully laid out a map of the varieties of awakenings that are possible for human beings. And not said one is greater, let alone the only true, true, only truth. But rather, these are possibilities. And what a gift to be able to open to. So thank. Yeah, thank you very much.

So for me, the channel and the inspiration is more than anything, one of love. And when I was. I had the privilege of spending quite a bit of time with our dear friend Ram Dass in the last decades of his life. And after his major stroke 20 years ago, he was in the wheelchair, couldn't move half of his body. A lot of pain. He just became more and more loving. The end, he said, I love everything. I love the clouds going by and the people who visit he had this huge altar in his room that had every kind of bodhisattva. There's Mother Teresa and there's, you know, Swami Muktananda and there is, you know, the Buddha and there's Hanuman and there's, you know, some Hasidic great Jewish mystic and whatever, and there's Dick Cheney and Donald Trump among them all. He said, I love them all. And there was, he said, and I love the dirty carpet on the floor too, equally, because it's all sacred, you know. And when we were at the memorial for Ram Dass, his close friend and the great kirtan singer, Krishna Das was speaking about Ram Dass because he'd met him very early, I think in the late 60s, and went to see Ram Dass, Guru Neem Karoli Bhavik became his guru. And he said, you know, when Ramdas came back to the US to teach, his guru sent him back to teach. He was there in his white robes, with his beads in his beard, and Baba Ram Dass, and he'd written Be Here now, which was a really important seminal work that era. And Krishna Das said in the memorial, he said, Ram Dass became the person we thought he was when we first met him. And I thought it was actually a very moving tribute, speaking about ideals and so forth. And what I learned being with him was yet another level of loving everything. I mean, just being in that kind of loving presence. And. And he would look at people in India, they call it the, the glance of mercy. When you go to see some great sage or guru and she looks you in the eye and she looks right through you, she says, all your history, all your, the messiness, all the good and bad of your life, and loves you completely just as you are. And it rewires your DNA somehow. Oh, oh, I am lovable. We are. We're in this. So when I practice these days and I'm walking down the street or I'm going into an office to meet people, you know, or I'm being part of some community that I might work in or something, my practice is to love people. And then if there's some difficulty that happens, should such a thing happen, or I myself get lost or kind of into what I'm doing or something, I take a pause or I see the people that are in difficulty or struggling, and I picture them all in kindergarten as 5 year olds and they all have their character like me. We're all such characters, but there is an original innocence that was born into every one of them. And you can see it, you know, and you can see that little girl, that little boy, and you go, oh, yeah, that's really who's in there, right? They grew up and they doing this or that, and they may be doing something bad, but underneath it, I let myself see who they are, who they were originally pure and innocent and beautiful. And that becomes a lot of my practice these days. And it's, of course, one of those lenses there could be the lens of emptiness. It's all a dream or a perfection or compassion. Another lens, really, to not avert my gaze, but to be willing to turn toward the suffering and hold it in the great heart of compassion. And we each sort of find the practices that help open our hearts. I mean, some people would say open their minds, but the word in Sanskrit is the same word, it turns out your heart, mind.

And Jack, one of the ways you've been opening your heart mind is by teaching an organization I really hadn't heard much about until you mention it. That's the Oslo Freedom Forum, where whose motto is Challenging power and really seems to bring together some remarkable human beings. Nobel Prize Peace Prize winners, prisoners of consciousness. Many more love to hear you talk about that and what you've. Any observations, reflections.

So I'd love to talk about life. Thank you for bringing it up. And you by accident made a little malaprope or something. But I want to point it out just because there's something cool about it. You said prisoners of consciousness. Okay, and you, you meant. You meant to say prisoners of conscience. And I know deeply your bodhisattva nature, because I remember 40, 50 years ago when you were going around giving, among other things, lecturing about the dangers of the nuclear weapons that are being developed around the world and how insanely powerful and destructive they are. And then you had this incredible moment in your lecture which you had two tin pails, one of which was filled with some thousands of little BBs, and the other was empty. And he said, I want you to know how many of these nuclear weapons are being stored in the US and in Russia and in, you know, now, North Korea and so forth. And you would begin to pour it, and there'd be this loud sound of these metal, little metal bbs, by the hundreds and thousands pouring into one bucket. So I really respect you as a bodhisattva activist or something, even if you don't. Better you don't call yourself that. But anyway. But I love the phrase prisoners of consciousness as well, because that's most of us, right? Anyway, the Oslo Freedom Forum Trudi and I were invited to go there, and it takes place in the same venue that the Nobel Peace Prize has given. But instead of one person being lauded with that honor, they bring together 40 or 50 people, all of whom would be eligible and many of whom, as you noted, have been imprisoned or tortured. A lot of them in places standing up for justice or standing up for the downtrodden. Working in Venezuela against the dictatorship, supporting the Rohingya who were thrown out of Burma in terrible ways, working in Sudan for the women who been raped or tortured across the world. Amazing people. And getting them together does two things. First, they support each other, so you're not alone in this very, very difficult work. And also, it raises the public visibility, goes out on all kinds of news channels. This is who's doing what. So we were invited to go there because these activists know how to do outer compassion, but they don't include themselves in the circle of compassion, and they burn out. You know, they lose their way. And there I'm thinking of one person who I admire tremendously, who we started to work with, and she's one of the most celebrated environmental activists in Latin America. And in her 20s, as a student, she organized a million students to march from the capital of one of these countries to protest the burning of the rainforests, you know, and to try to change the national policy to not burn and cut it down, to grow cattle for the Chinese market, but to preserve it. What happened to her is that every time a big new area of the rainforest would begin to burn, immediately she would get sick. And I remember saying to her, you know, the fire belongs out there, and the forest, it doesn't belong in your body. And here are some practices you can use to drain the suffering out of your body, to sweep through, to bring in the water element, to create a field of compassion, to care for yourself as you would care for the least of the animals in the forest that are fleeing the fire. We did a whole series of practices, and here's an altar that you can make with all the bodhisattvas that inspire you in each day, make a little bow and say, would you help me? So that it's not because you need backup and it's not you alone. I'm going to save the rainforest. There are a thousand generations of ancestors who are cheering you on. Close your eyes, feel this. You are actually the product of that, so you don't have to take it on personally. We did a whole series of practices, and this is an example, really, of working. I'm about to teach a day long retreat at Spirit Rock next month called Inner Technology for Outer Technologists. And it's bringing together leaders in the Silicon Valley area, especially of AI development and media development and all the other kinds of things that technology is doing, robotic development. And just like the Oslo Freedom Forum, which I invite anyone who's listening to look up, to join, you can actually watch the main gathering, which happens every year at the very beginning of June, and learn so much. And in this day long of inner technology, for outer technologists, it's very much the same thing. The technology that we develop is a reflection of our psyches, of our minds, right? And we see it in social media and we see it in the way AI reflects us, because it gobbled up and took in all the weird stuff on the electronic field of humanity at this time, and it ain't all pretty. And then the question is, how do you maintain your own sanity, like those rainforest people working in the rainforest, of developing these huge powerful technologies? And then how do you let that guide the principles? How does it raise the question of what really matters? How can we guide the technology for the benefit and the benevolence, not just of humanity, but of life, you know, in all its forms? So in a way, we're talking about the Bodhisattva again. How do you embody the Bodhisattva who wants all beings to thrive, the Bodhisattva of compassion, all beings to be relieved from suffering and find a joy and graciousness. And it's a really weird thing because people somehow mix up spiritual practice with grim duty. I go to the gym, I do therapy, I have a really good diet and I make myself meditate, right? And it's not that it's actually joyful. The point of it is human happiness and inner freedom that then gets expressed in, you know, your activism for the climate or in your. But you want to have joy in it. If you go to a refugee camp, they don't want you coming in depressed. They have enough of that. They want somebody who has the beauty of the sacred, you know, and love. And there's that wonderful book by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu called the Book of Joy. They've both suffered immensely too. Tutu in the middle of apartheid and people getting killed in horrible ways. And his whole movement, people thrown to prison and tortured. And the Dalai Lama, who lost his country on his watch, you know, and the temples have been torn down, the sacred scriptures burned, people in prison, he said, they've taken so much, why should I Let them take my happiness, my joy. And so it turns out, as Andre Gide says, that joy becomes a moral obligation in this world for us to actually live in joy amidst difficulties and say the human heart is bigger than that. The human heart is big enough to love amidst all of this, to bring sweetness and joy even among those who are suffering, and to show that there's another way of being. And we know this. I go back to Ramdas sitting in his wheelchair with a lot of illness at different times. Infections and things that happen when you're. When you've had such a major stroke and often in pain. And a friend was walking next his wheelchair as Ram Dassa was moving and said, Ram Dass, are you in pain? And he said, yeah. And he said, how is that? And Ram Dass looked up and he said, I love my pain. That was like a remarkable thing to say. I love everything. I love this sacred world.

Beautiful. That's quite a test. To loved one's pain and to love those who cause pain too. Yes, yes, very beautiful. Jack, being with these amazing people, what stands out?

I'm getting quiet and reflecting, you know, that's what I get paid to do.

And you're good at it.

Oh, anyway, I've done it. They're good hearts that. I mean, it's not that complicated. And I've been with teachers who had a lot of spiritual power, and they're Shakti and their energy, and they could kind of do things that would resonate my nervous system, you know. And I've been with other lots of leaders with a lot of power as well. The CEOs of the top, most amazing companies or the most powerful companies in the world, and politicians and people of different kind of power. Power is really different, and it has its place. But the kind of greatness of the Bodhisattva, and it can be actually in modest ways, but it's a greatness that's really a greatness of heart. It's a greatness of love and care and connection. And you feel it. You can actually feel that this is a being who lives in the consciousness of love, in the field of benevolence and care. And that is a great power. The rest of it, you know, I've had a lot of experiences. I'm sure there are much bigger, more powerful ones. You know, power is just power. Hitler had it right. It's power. You can choose what you do with it. But love, Love is something entirely different.

And love, in these cases, it's the people, the Nobel Prize winners, the People at the Oslo Freedom Forum. It sounds like a culmination of lives guided by great heart, but also just some intensity or dedication and apparently competence in. In manifesting that heart in beneficial ways.

Yeah, and when I work with some folks, you know, because in that field, also of activists, there's grief, there's outrage, there's anger and so forth. And I'll get them to quiet and I'll say, do you know why you're so angry? Do you know why there's so much outrage? Because you care so deeply and now tune into that care, and all of a sudden the power that seems to be there in the anger or the outrage goes to a deeper chord, a deeper channel. You do this because you care, and that's the bodhisattva. And it changes how they work and how they treat themselves. And it's not a loss of power. It's actually the deep power.

Beautiful and particularly needed at this time. As you have said, we're. We're holding hospice for the world, as said in some very beautiful and touching ways, that we're sitting at the bedside of a dying world, and these qualities are needed.

Well, I'm not sure the world's dying. It's just the human constructed part of it. I think the world is totally fine, baby. I mean, I forget which movie I was watching, but there was a great video I saw of New York City when all the humans were disappeared out. Maybe it was a faux rapture or something like that, but they were gone, those human beings. And it was a sort of future time lapse, you know, and in five or ten years on the. You'd see the buildings started to crack a little on the streets. You know, there were the raccoons and the coyotes that came in first, and then later the bears returned. And then 10 more years in the vines and the tendrils, and 20 years, and you could see the building starting to crack. And it was all returning to a natural world with animals and plants and everything. The only pesky little thing missing was the human beings. The Earth is fine, and it's gone through lots of cycles, some of which many, many species die. You know, a huge asteroid or some giant viral plague or something. Earth knows how to do it. We humans, however, that's the question. And we have a certain kind of consciousness, and will we be able to do something beneficial with it now that we're all aware that we're connected? Before, we were connected, but in much more unconscious ways. We could feel it. But there wasn't media and there Wasn't electronics and somebody born in the Indian subcontinent or South America or something. They didn't know about the other continents and people. They just knew what they could see or walk to or ride a horse to. But now we know this, right? Here we are. I forget why I started talking about that, actually, but there was something about the fact that not only can the Earth take care of itself, but we're, as you say we're being called. The hospice is really for humanity and not the Earth. And we messed it up pretty far. But we also are incredibly creative, incredibly creative. And so we'll also do some creative things with the disaster time and all of it yet to be seen. And the question for you and me and the people who are listening is, what's the spirit that we lead with? What is that, Bodhisattva, Intention? Or what's your best intention? What's the dance you want to do, you know? And what will truly allow you to live from the best of your heart?

You're bringing us back to our original question, Jack, of what you know, what is greatness? Sounds now in the context of this discussion, a little too grandiose, but it points to. Points to the general theme of the discussion of what is it to live as. To live as fully and wisely as we can as these fallible creatures, and to help reduce the suffering in both ourselves and others.

Yeah, those are the questions at the end. Did I love well, Did I live fully? Maybe did I learn to let go? Because otherwise you get a crash course.

Yeah, that's for sure. Beautiful. Beautiful. Jack, there's so much more we could dialogue about, but I'm wondering, is there anything you'd like to add?

Oh, let me contemplate for a moment and reflect. My friend Maladoma Somme, who was a West African shaman and medicine man who had a couple of PhDs from the Sorbonne and I think Michigan, whatever. He said that every child that was born among the Doggera people, his people, and Burkina, was believed to be born carrying a certain cargo. And I like his metaphor because the rivers of West Africa go from the ocean inland all along that coast. And they used to. I mean, they still do boat supply, carrying, you know, everything from fruits and food to fabrics and things like that, whether it was a dugout canoe or a little. Or a motorboat or something. And his image is those cargo boats. He said that your purpose here is to deliver your cargo, that you have gifts. And in this time, people are sort of stymied. Wow, what do we do? Or us? Is Shifting toward autocracy, you know, dictatorship, something like that, and climate change. And then what about AI, which is going to change everything in ways we can't imagine. You need to get quiet and kind of listen for your particular gift. What is it that you have to deliver? And sometimes it will be a smile in a really tough circumstance for humans. Sometimes it'll be politically organizing or being out on the street. Sometimes it might be writing, and sometimes it might be making music or raising a beautiful child and making a healthy garden for everybody that walks by to see. Yeah, listen, what is the cargo you have? Because there's something beautiful you have to deliver. And it doesn't have to be grandiose. No. It's who you are.

Yeah.

And if you don't give your gifts that can cause great unhappiness.

Yes.

Like ungiven. It just kind of sits there and rots in your heart. And it has to be. There has to be that gift.

Yes.

Yeah. And there's that beautiful line from the Gospel of Thomas, which I'm sure you know better than I do, John, but the saying of Jesus, if you give what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will kill you. That's a very, very powerful statement.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, human beings, it's tough. My Zen teacher, Seung Sahn Sanim used to say, oh, human beings, number one, bad animal, that's for sure. And that's true. That's us, too. We have been that. We are immensely destructive and immensely creative. And. So what do you want to bring to the game?

That's a beautiful question. And one of the themes you've been emphasizing, Jack, is that the integration of these wonderful ideals of the aspiration for true greatness in the. In the best sense of that word. Not the grandiose sense, but the best sense of the higher of the best and the fair and the integration with the everyday life. And there's a beautiful final Image in the 10 Ox Hurting Pictures which portray Zen's portrayal of the spiritual path. And the final picture is of this person just wandering through the streets. And this line, even the wisest people cannot find them. They're so Living just so humbly without any specialness that they just seem like ordinary people.

As Ram Dass would say, remember your sacred nature or your Buddha nature or your divine. Remember your sacred nature and your Social Security number. So here we are. Okay, thank you. Roger.

Well, thank you so much, Jack. This has been beautiful. And I want to doubly thank you first to just the sheer joy of dialoguing with you and having this conversation, having you share so beautifully from the heart about profound and wonderfully ordinary questions, and also for initiating our series on what is real greatness at a time when, you know, make America great again is used, being used in not so skillful ways to really come back to the question, what is real greatness is a real gift. And it's been just wonderful to play in this way with you and have this kind of dialogue and have you share as beautifully as you've done. Yes.

Thank you, Jack. I feel very grateful and blessed to have been here.

Thank you both. Pleasure.

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