A Review of The Eightfold Path
Part IV: Right Action
Dharma Talk -- Eric Kolvig -- August 6, 1998 -- Albuquerque, New Mexico

Every couple of months or so, we review together an aspect of our spiritual practice: the practice of ethical conduct -- of undertaking, as a training, speaking and acting in ways that are helpful and not harmful in the world. It's a key part of our practice, and it will actually be part of the talk tonight. I'm going to pass around the five basic precepts that are part of this training. I should say that they are not "commandments" -- it's a training.

These are trainings that we undertake with an understanding that we don't get it perfectly. It's like learning to play a piano -- you start with chords; you don't start by playing a sonata. Undertaking this training is to be very spacious and forgiving with ourselves -- it's not meant to be a moralistic undertaking. But the precepts are very important, and they're important not only for our own development but also as a gift to the world.

We've spent more than a year and a half making our way with great care through the Noble Eightfold Path of the Buddha's teachings, of talking about those eight things about which the Buddha said, in effect, "If you cultivate these, you will free your heart -- free your heart from suffering and the causes of suffering." We've spent a lot of time with all eight of these aspects and we're doing a quick tour back through them, spending one evening on each one. This evening I'd like to talk a little bit about the fourth aspect of the Noble Eightfold Path, of Right Action or True Action, how we act in the world -- becoming conscious about our actions.

I think it's pretty common for people to say about Buddhism that it's not a very practical spiritual tradition -- that it's basically about going off and removing yourself from the world and meditating in a cave, and spending a lot of time going very deeply into the psyche and coming to deep levels of understanding. And indeed that is true -- meditation is an important part of our path. But equally important are these three aspects of the Eightfold Path that have to do with ethical conduct, with how we act and speak in the world: Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood. So if you don't talk, and you don't act, and you don't work, and you never expect to work, then this stuff doesn't apply very much to you. But if you do do those three things, then this is a really crucial part of our path.

These precepts that we've just read -- four of them are about action, and one is about speech. Last time I was here, a few weeks ago, we talked about Right Speech, so tonight I'd like to talk about Right Action. This is such an enormous subject -- I think we spent eight or nine weeks on Right Action in Santa Fe last year. We spent three weeks talking about sexuality alone -- sexuality and the spiritual path. So it's an enormous subject, and I'm just going to touch on it this evening.

We've been doing an evaluation process in Santa Fe, where people have filled out an evaluation form on my teaching to give me some feedback -- about the talks I give, the retreats I lead, the interviews that I do with people. One of the criticisms that I've gotten about my talks is, "Eric talks too much about suffering, and we want to hear more about happiness." I think that's a perfectly valid criticism, so I want to frame tonight's talk in the perspective of happiness.

I'm very moved by a simple statement that the Buddha made. He said, "Protect your happiness." And being conscious about our speech, being conscious about our actions and how we work in the world, what kind of livelihood we have, is a very important way to protect your happiness. The Buddha has this wonderful "chain of happiness" that he describes, which really describes the whole path. He talks about the fact that if we develop ethical conduct to a deep degree -- nonharming conduct in our lives -- then it's possible to develop deep concentration; that is, one-pointedness, or calm; tranquillity. And once we've developed deep concentration, or calm, then it's possible to develop insight, or wisdom -- all of these are interlinked. This is the way he describes this chain of happiness:

So that's the chain of events that happens. So this whole question of action in our lives, of conscious action, is altogether important to that chain. We need to see how all these things are interlinked.

Basically, we do our spiritual practice in all of its aspects to achieve two things: to achieve a clear mind -- that is, to achieve wisdom; and to achieve an open heart -- that is, to achieve love and compassion. I'd like to talk just a little about how we can apply clear-mindedness, or wisdom, to our actions, and also how we can apply love to our actions.

One of my favorite quotations comes from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, toward the end of his life, in a letter, "Anyone who expects to be ignorant and free, expects what never was and never will be." Jefferson was speaking more in the social and the political arena -- that if we're not aware of the social and political issues in our lives, we can't expect to remain a free people. That's why he emphasized education so much. But I think Jefferson's words also can be applied really beautifully to our spiritual practice. We can't expect to be ignorant -- and ignorance is feeling separated or isolated; believing ourselves to be utterly separate beings -- we can't be ignorant and expect to be free: that never was and never will be. We need to learn how utterly interconnected we are, and to act, and to speak, and to work out of that understanding.

If we're ignorant, if we believe ourselves to be separate, and we act out of that ignorance, we will do harm. If we really believe ourselves to be separate, then it's easy to kill people, for example, or to commit violence toward people. If we believe that we're separate, it's easy to steal. If we believe that we're separate, it's easy to rape and to commit sexual harassment. If we believe that we're separate, it's easy to lie, and it's also easy to utterly confuse and distort our minds through intoxicants.

So the only way that we can come to act more consciously and with less harm is to come to understand, more and more, that we are not separate, that we are indeed very connected. If it's our habit to harm living beings, then it's impossible to calm our minds. Our minds become too agitated -- they're full of remorse; they're full of the fear of being caught, the fear of reprisal. If we learn to act in ways that aren't harmful by following these trainings -- these precepts -- then it's possible to come, as the Buddha said, to a state of being free from remorse, of having gladness, to be able to stand by our words and stand by our actions.

So how can we apply a clear mind, or wisdom, to our actions? One of the things that we can come to understand more and more deeply in this tradition is the law of karma. I should say, I think I've mentioned it, that the Buddha said there are four things that if you think about them too much, they'll drive you crazy, and one of them is the law of karma, because it's so subtle and so complex. But basically all we have to do is to understand that our words and our actions have consequences -- that there's no such thing as an inconsequential speech or inconsequential action, that they all have consequences. If we speak in a way that hurts ourselves or hurts others, there will be a karmic consequence that comes. The Buddha said that no one, including buddhas, is exempt from the law of karma. It's like a law of nature -- there will always be consequences. And I think it's so important to remember that -- to know that if the thought, "Oh, nobody will ever know ..." should ever come into our minds, we will know, even if nobody else knows. So we need to take care with our actions.

Something quite moving happened to me, quite suddenly, this afternoon. I arrived here about 4:15 to do interviews, and I went into the day-care center to use the bathroom before I started seeing people in interviews. I met a little child in the hallway who was maybe three years old. He smiled at me and said, "Hi!" and I smiled at him and said, "Hi!" back, and then he asked me a question that I didn't understand, so I asked him to repeat it. And he said, "Are you a stranger?" And I said, "Yes, I'm a stranger," and he pulled back and sort of hid behind a door. And I think it's important to teach young children to be careful of strangers, because so much harm is done in the world, but it touched me very deeply. It touched me very deeply that it's necessary to train our children to be careful, but it also hurts to suddenly be seen as a danger, because it's not my intention to hurt children. But of course he couldn't know that.

So this is the world that we live in. We live in a world that we experience as dangerous, because, indeed, it is dangerous, because people are killed, people are kidnapped, people are raped, people steal. We can't entirely trust what people say, because people lie so often. What a gift to the world to make this commitment: you are safe with me because I will not harm you. I won't kill you, I won't hurt you physically, I won't rape you, I won't lie to you -- it's an extraordinary gift to give, to give that kind of safety in a world that feels so dangerous.

The Buddha says about karma -- and you don't have to believe in rebirth, actually you don't have to believe anything; please don't believe what I say tonight -- all you have to do is practice and see for yourself. The Buddha encouraged people not to believe what he taught, but to really try it out and see for yourself. So you don't have to believe about rebirth, but it is part of our Buddhist world view. So the Buddha said about the law of karma:

So he said that this is the only possession that we take with us. And you don't have to believe in rebirth to see the power of the law of karma -- you can see it in this lifetime, and see the value of taking care with actions, of understanding the law of karma.

Really understanding the law of karma can free us from all kinds of stuff. I think I may have mentioned last year, when we were talking about Right Action, that years ago I read a fascinating article in the Harvard University School of Medicine quarterly magazine. There was a psychiatrist at Harvard who searched all over the world to try to find people who had had very severe destructive experiences, but didn't have post-traumatic stress disorder, because he wanted to come to understand how people might, not only be able to recover from trauma, but actually not to experience post-traumatic stress disorder at all. And the psychiatrist found someone, a Tibetan, who had been the chief physician to the Dalai Lama, who was captured in 1959 by the Chinese and went through nineteen years of severe torture -- physical torture and also mental torture -- nineteen years! And when he was released and free to go to India, he came out of that experience without post-traumatic stress disorder. It seems almost unimaginable to most of us. The only results were that he had physical disabilities from the torture that he went through, he sometimes had bad dreams, and sometimes he was nervous around Chinese officials. He wasn't nervous around Chinese people, but he was nervous around Chinese officials. That was it. I think it's extraordinary.

So the psychiatrist really interviewed this guy and said, "How could you do that? How could you go through severe torture and survive that many years and come out fine, come out healthy?" And the Tibetan physician described a number of things, and one of the things he described was his understanding of the law of karma. He knew that the torturers who were harming him were creating their own pain. The Buddha said, what you do, you do to yourself, because of the law of karma. And so, understanding that these people were creating pain for themselves by torturing him, he extended compassion to them. He saw the suffering that they were creating for themselves, and instead of generating hatred and resentment and anger toward them, he generated compassion. And because of that, he came out well. It's extraordinary -- I think it's amazing.

It reminds me also of a story that I heard in my own spiritual tradition, the Burmese vipassana tradition. You probably know that for well over thirty-six years, Burma has been under the control of a very savage military dictatorship. It's very common for the Burmese military to torture people. A number of years ago, a high military officer in the Burmese army retired and decided to take up meditation -- Burma is a Buddhist country. And so he went to the center in Rangoon that was founded by Mahasi Sayadaw, in my tradition of Buddhism, and he began to practice. Very soon after he began meditation practice, he had incredible pain on the top of his head -- extraordinary pain. For years, he had used the Chinese water torture on people: dropping water on the tops of their heads. And he was getting the karmic result, very quickly, when he started sitting. He went to U Pandita Sayadaw, one of the great teachers in the Burmese tradition, and Sayadaw said to him, "If you can just experience this, if you can experience this pain without reactivity, you will work through this karma -- you will work through this harm that you have done to others."

Sometimes it's not so obvious -- the karmic result, the karmic return -- but it's very interesting when you see an experience like that. The Buddha said that if you understand that every action has results, that everyone who does harm is creating pain for themselves, then there no longer has to be an impulse toward revenge. If somebody hurts us, we want revenge. But you don't have to do that -- they're creating their own revenge; the karma's doing it for them. The Buddha said that anyone who seeks happiness by harming others who seek happiness will never find happiness.

Another way that we can apply wisdom and understanding about this area of Right Action is to understand the distinction between the Western idea of morality and the Buddhist idea of ethics. I've talked so much about this that I'm not going to go into detail about it, because those of you who've been listening to me for the last year and a half have heard it ad nauseam, but I keep repeating it until we all get it: from the perspective of the Buddhist teachings, there is no right or wrong; there is no good and evil; there is no good and bad. These moral judgments do not exist in the Buddha's teachings. The Buddha said that he was interested in one thing and one thing only: suffering, and the end of suffering. And so from the point of view of his teachings, the Buddha said, basically, "If you do these things, it will cause pain to yourself and to others. If you do these other things, it will cause happiness to yourself and to others, and you're free to choose." There's no judgment. If you do harm to yourself or to others, you've done harm -- that's all. You've caused pain; you've caused suffering. But there's no judgment -- you're not an evil person, or a bad person, or a wrong person. That's a moral judgment, a moral concept that is overlaid the actual experience of happiness and suffering.

It's really important, because you and I, we have all grown up in the Western tradition, my guess is, and we've been taught about guilt and shame, and wrong and evil, and these judgments have gotten very deeply into our minds. And from the perspective of the Buddha's teachings, there's never an occasion for shame, there's never an occasion for guilt -- there just aren't those moral judgments. It's very important to be able to see that, because then it's possible to cause harm, as we all do -- in our speech, or in our actions, or through our work -- and to say, "I'm sorry I did that. I resolve not to do that again, and I forgive myself." It's easy when there isn't a big guilt trip or a big shame trip on ourselves. This seems almost inconceivable to the Western mind, and often people say to me, "Well, if there's no sense of good and evil, then it becomes a chaotic system." And that's not true. When we really see the kind of happiness we can create for ourselves and for others, and when we choose not to cause suffering to ourselves and to others, this ethical system works really well.

If we can free ourselves from judging ourselves and judging others in this moralistic kind of way, we save a lot of suffering for ourselves and for others. Just let go of the judging mind when it comes up -- befriend it and then show it to the door. A very practical way of practicing Right Action is just to ask two questions: what am I doing, and why am I doing it? It's really simple to use our vipassana practice, our awareness practice, and just ask that question, because we are so conditioned to act automatically with a knee-jerk action -- there's an action and a reaction. Somebody's angry at us -- we get angry back. To be able to have the clarity of mind to stop and say, "What am I about to do, and why am I about to do it?" is really wonderful. Then we can have a choice, so that we're not acting in an automatic way.

Once we're able to ask that question, when we ask ourselves, "Why am I about to do this?" or "Why have I done this?" or "Why am I doing this?", then we can get at the mind states or the qualities of consciousness that are impelling the action. So if we're acting out of love, we ought to know that. If we're acting out of generosity, we ought to know it, and celebrate it in ourselves. If we're acting out of anger, if we're acting out of hatred, if we're acting out of grief, we ought to know that, too.

Probably the most famous quotation of all from the Buddha's teachings is this quote from the Dhammapada:

If we really know we're going to die, why do we bother with fighting with each other? It's really quite wonderful, quite simple.

Just to have some sense of applying love to our actions -- of not having to get self-righteous and rigid around this whole question of action, which is so easy to do -- to stay open and spacious, to say to yourself, "I allow myself to be a beginner; I allow myself to be a learner; I allow myself to make mistakes." Because we are all beginners; we are all learners; we all make mistakes. So be able to forgive yourself, instead of feeling guilt, and be able to forgive others. Just as I allow myself to be a learner, and a beginner, and one who makes mistakes, so I allow you to be a learner, to be a beginner, to make mistakes. We need to be able to extend that sense of spaciousness to us all, as we're trying to learn, as we're practicing Right Action, Right Speech.

The Buddha recommends a wonderful practice that we Westerners find very difficult. It's really simple: he said to reflect on your good deeds, on the deeds that you've done that are helpful. We resist it -- we are so much into guilt-tripping ourselves and judging ourselves that we would much rather focus on what we've done wrong, rather than on what we've done right. It's not egotistical just to reflect and to celebrate what we've done that's actually helpful in the world.

It's especially useful when we die. The Buddha recommends it, actually, if you're with a dying person -- just remind them of the good things they've done in their lives, so that their minds can be full of light and joy and appreciation, rather than fear, as they approach death. He recommends doing that for ourselves, and he recommends doing it for others. It's really wonderful; it's just a wonderful practice. I try to do it every day -- to remind myself: yes, I've made mistakes; and yes, I'm really trying to help people in my life, and that's a great thing.

I once led a ten-day retreat and there was someone who was just absolutely full of self-hatred, and I said to him, "Please go and reflect on the good things that you've done in your life." And he came back to me the next day and said, "I can't think of a single [good] thing that I've said or done in my whole life." And I said, "Well, you came to this retreat. At least that." But it's just heartbreaking. I'm sure that every one of us in this room has done many more wholesome things in our lives than we've done harmful things. But do we really focus on the wholesome things? Or do we obsess about the harmful ones? It's really useful to change that conditioning.

And forgiving ourselves for harmful deeds is a form of love. It's really wonderful -- it's making the choice, in this long, endless cycle of victims and perpetrators, to say, "I resolve not to be a perpetrator anymore." And even though we may harm others, we can really make that resolution: "I don't want to continue this cycle of perpetration and victimhood. I resolve no longer to be a perpetrator."

We just need to give ourselves a lot of space. It's impossible to keep these precepts perfectly. Not long ago, I was vacuuming and I killed a spider -- I vacuumed up a spider because I wasn't conscious, otherwise I would have caught the spider and put it out. It's very simple. We tell these little lies unconsciously, and we notice it afterward. We might objectify someone sexually, just looking at a body and seeing it as a body instead of seeing it as a person. Has anyone ever done that? Are we ever conditioned to do that in this culture? We need to just give ourselves a lot of space and forgiveness around it.

Also, if it's possible, to extend a certain amount of forgiveness and space to others -- to bring love to the deeds of others, for example, if we're dealing with a difficult person. Metta, or lovingkindness, is to see the goodness in a being. And it's really helpful, not to be in denial about the harm that's happening -- to see that harm is happening if someone is angry at you, or has told a lie about you -- but also to be able to reach through and see the goodness in others; to forgive them. But it's also very important, as we forgive others, to be very clear that we don't want to be victims anymore, either. We're not perpetrators anymore -- if someone has harmed us, to say, "I forgive you, and you can't do it again"; to be very clear about that -- to end both perpetration and victimhood. The Buddha said about forgiveness:

I think it's also really important, as we deal with this form of love, of forgiveness, of clearing the slate, as it were, to realize that there's no shortcut. A friend of mine calls it the "spiritual bypass" -- that is, trying to get to forgiveness without feeling the painful feelings that come up when we've been harmed. In order truly to forgive, we have to fully feel the hatred, the anger, the violence in our hearts that come from being harmed. That's part of our practice -- it's to welcome, actually, the afflictive emotions, and say, "OK." Instead of repressing them, to say, "It's all right, I'm willing to feel you," but not necessarily to act them out -- to keep a boundary around our speech and our actions, but to actually feel them. If it's possible to feel all of those feelings and feel them fully, there's a kind of purification that happens. And with that purification, these afflictive emotions are cleansed out of the heart, and love and forgiveness move into the vacuum automatically. That is true forgiveness. And it's a process; it's like peeling an onion -- it's going deeper and deeper, until we get to some level of forgiveness, if we've been deeply hurt by someone, and feel OK with it, and suddenly we hit another level of anger and fear and hatred and grief, and we experience those and come to some deeper level. We have to allow it to be a gradual and organic process.

I would like to say very briefly -- I've talked about the way that Right Action can be about taking responsibility for ourselves individually. It's also possible for us to extend beyond that, and to be willing to take some kind of responsibility for the society around us, for the people around us -- to extend this idea of Right Action or right conduct. I'd like to read from the precepts of the Order of Interbeing, which was founded by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh during the Vietnam War. I'd like to read two of these precepts: the twelfth one, about killing (and notice it goes from the personal and also takes on the social dimension):

And then the ninth precept, about Right Speech:

So it's possible to see that we take responsibility for the collective, as well. If we are not separate, then whatever happens to anyone happens to us, and on some level we can take responsibility for that.

I'd like to give a little example. You've maybe heard in the news about the murder of Herman Rodriguez in Santa Fe, and you probably know that his brother, Noah Rodriguez, was murdered two years ago. Noah Rodriguez was stabbed fifty times, and his naked body was thrown out on the roadside. His murderer is now in prison for life plus sixty-six years, and he was accused last week of stabbing someone in prison. Herman Rodriguez was shot in the head, and his naked body was dumped on the roadside.

It feels to me that there's some way in which we can take responsibility for these acts. To give a couple of examples: in Montana a few years ago, there was a small town with a very small Jewish minority. There were acts of anti-Semitic violence that were isolating the Jewish families in that town, and people in that little town got together and said, "Not in our town, and not in our name." Many, many Christian families put Jewish Menorahs in their windows at Hanukkah time, basically showing solidarity with the Jewish families, so they were not isolated by this violence. And in my old hometown of Amherst, Massachusetts, there was a Black man who had a shop on the main street of town that was vandalized in a racial incident, and the same thing happened in Amherst. The people got together and said, "Not in our town," and they got posters that said "Not in our town" and they were put up in the windows of every shop in Amherst. People got together and collected money and fixed the window, and paid for the vandalism that happened -- not allowing people to be isolated by the racial violence that happened.

Just one other example, involving another town in Massachusetts, where five women were killed within a short time by their boyfriends or their husbands in domestic violence. That town also got together and said, "Not in our town." A friend of mine who is the outreach person for the local Traprock Peace Center in western Massachusetts decided to go to the bars in Turners Falls -- this little town where the women had been killed -- because men in the bars in that town would brag about what they were going to go home and do to their wives or their girlfriends. And David would walk up to them and say, "It's not OK. It's not OK to speak that way." Very courageous.

I think if we made a commitment, when we hear anti-Semitic jokes, or racist jokes, or homophobic jokes, or jokes about disabled people, and all the rest of it -- if we are willing to stand up, as it were, to take risks as this precept says, even to risk our own safety by saying, in a very polite and friendly way, and not in an antagonistic way, "You know, when you say that, it hurts people"; to be willing to interrupt -- that feels to me like Right Action. It feels like we're taking responsibility for each other and for the collective, as well as taking responsibility for our own speech and actions in the world. Well, it's a gigantic subject, and I guess that's enough for tonight to talk about Right Action.

* * * * * Questions * * * * *

Q: I wanted to ask you about that article you talked about with the psychiatrist. Do you interpret that the Tibetan who was receiving this abuse was cleansing his karma? When one feels that they are suffering, are they suffering because they themselves have done something?

Eric: I think maybe one way to put it is that generally, our Western feeling is that if something horrible is happening to us, we say, "Oh, why me? Why am I being picked out for this kind of treatment?" With the understanding of the law of karma, his understanding that his torturers were actually creating pain for themselves ...

Q: I understand that. I'm talking about interpreting one's own suffering -- the opposite perspective.

Eric: That is actually a wonderful kind of understanding to have, and it's something I've experienced in my life. I've had a lot of suffering in my own life ...

Q: And you feel that you caused it?

Eric: Yes. Somewhere back there, I did things that caused pain, and this is the karmic consequence. For us Westerners, that sounds really suspect, because it sounds like we're blaming ourselves. But there's no moral judgment involved -- it's just seeing that yes, there were actions that caused suffering -- without judgment, without blame. And for me, it's wonderful, because I can bear the suffering if I can bear it without reactivity -- I am working out the karma. And I know that right now, in my life, I'm doing a whole lot more good than doing harm. The whole karmic stream has changed, and it's moving toward greater and greater happiness.

Q: So that's a carte blanche "It's just always that way"? There are no exceptions to it? Even when a baby is murdered, the baby is [responsible]?

Eric: It's very hard for us as Westerners to understand, because basically we have the perspective of one lifetime. The Buddha said that if you really want to start to understand the law of karma, you have to see over a span of three lifetimes. And if you don't believe in multiple lives, then all of this is junk. But if you can take his perspective, the Buddha said that we have all lived an infinite number of lives. He said there's no beginning to this process. So we have all been everything, and we have all done everything -- everything, all of us. So we're trailing an infinite karmic trail. And so, simply at one point to say, "OK, if I'm willing now to change, and to really make an effort not to harm anymore, and to bring happiness to myself and to others," then you're shifting the whole karmic chain. That's what I feel in my lifetime. I've had enormous suffering in my lifetime -- severe trauma as a child, and mental illness as an adult, and all the rest of it -- and I can feel it. I know there's a lot more happiness now than there used to be, because of a great many wholesome actions. And I know the future is going to bring even more happiness. Again, it feels hard to understand it from our Western point of view. It takes shifting around and seeing it from a whole different perspective. I can see in your eyes -- would you like to say more? [Laughter]

Q: I was just thinking about a friend, for example, who might be handicapped, and thinking about her asking a question like, "So I'm handicapped because I've done something?" I don't think I would really respond, "Yeah, you did," because she would probably have a tendency to go into a tailspin and blame herself.

Eric: Right. And I think we Westerners -- the word "karma" is all over these days; it's a perfume [laughter] -- and so we take this notion and we plop it into our Western world view and we turn it into blame and guilt. It's not appropriate. It's not about blame; it's not about judgment at all. It's as clean as a mathematical equation: this kind of action leads to this kind of result; that kind of action leads to that kind of result; no judgment. So you're right; I think your friend probably would turn it into guilt and blame. This is a very controversial kind of thing -- people say, "What about the children at Auschwitz?" It's hard; it's very hard. But if you could see over many lifetimes, which is what the Buddha claimed -- just before his enlightenment, his first opening on the evening before his enlightenment -- he claimed that he could see all the way back, and he could see how it all unfolded for him; the entire process. And once you see that, there doesn't have to be judgment.

I got a channeled reading a number of years ago where I was told that way back there I was a brutal conqueror, and I caused enormous suffering. And I can blame myself for that, or I can say, "Well, it's time to clean up my act."

Q: About twelve years ago I got facilitated to see my own past life with my son, and they didn't tell me -- I saw it, and it was amazing for me to see all the things we had done to each other to create the anger and guilt. It was clear at the time, and I knew something was very powerful. And it humbled me, because I had been through a lot of things -- been killed, killed, been abandoned and abandoned people. It creates a different perspective on our lives.

Eric: So you feel that that understanding was liberating in some way? That it gives you a broader perspective?

Q: Oh yes, totally.

Eric: And did that give you a clear intention about, "I don't want to continue doing those harmful things -- I'd really like, now, to be doing helpful things?"

Q: I just know that what goes around, comes around.

Q: It gives me a feeling of relief to think that if things aren't going well, instead of finding something to blame or blaming myself, it changes to taking responsibility. It's almost like I can breathe a sigh of relief. I feel less like a victim -- even if I know in a sense that I brought it on myself, I can somehow take responsibility for it.

Eric: Yes, it's actually empowering. In this centuries-long debate over free will and determination in the Western world -- are we born pre-determined, or do we have free will? -- from the Buddhist perspective, we do create our own fate, and that's enormously empowering. It's just the opposite of victimhood. OK, so we're suffering now, but from this moment on, we can create our own future. For me, it's an enormously empowering and de-victimizing kind of stance to see that, actually, it's all lawful -- it's a lawful system; it's not random. It's quite wonderful. Thank you.

Q: Can you say a little more about bearing suffering without reactivity?

Eric: Right. I was using the example of the ex-military person who was experiencing tremendous pain on their head. If it's possible to experience either physical discomfort, or mental or emotional discomfort, without reactivity -- that is, our deep conditioning is to grasp at and to try and hold onto what is pleasant, and to push away and try to keep away what is unpleasant -- if it's possible to open up with something that's very unpleasant, a form of suffering, and say, "This is unpleasant -- yes, this is very unpleasant," without reacting to it, then it's possible to allow unpleasant experience to happen without suffering. It's quite extraordinary. The suffering doesn't come from, say, the physical pain, the pain on the top of the head -- the suffering doesn't come from the pain, the suffering actually comes from the way we respond to the pain, by pushing away, by reactivity, by resistance. If you can let go of the resistance, you actually let go of the suffering.

That doesn't mean that we necessarily have a cancerous tumor and don't do anything about it, and say, "Oh, that's unpleasant." We do whatever we can. That's why I sit in a chair, now -- I sat unskillfully for many years with knee pain that got greater and greater. I learned not to be reactive, and I tore cartilage in both of my knees. Very stupid! So I've gotten really great at accommodating unpleasant experience, but that wasn't smart.

Q: You talked about the two brothers in Santa Fe. Is there something happening in Santa Fe that is the kind of thing you're talking about: "We're not going to have that in our town"?

Eric: I wish Gloria from Santa Fe was here with us -- she just went out to get some fresh air. Both of these men were gay, and we know that the first murder was a hate crime -- because he was gay, he was killed. We don't know the circumstances yet of why the second brother was killed. One of the things that's going to happen is that next month, at the Sweeney Center in Santa Fe, people who are lesbian and gay are going to share with the community: "This is what our lives are really like -- this is the danger that we're in. These are people who've been murdered and beaten." I think that's one useful thing. As Gloria said on Tuesday in Santa Fe, "If Christian people can put Menorahs in their windows, maybe straight people could put rainbow stickers on their cars." It's a very courageous act, because it's actually dangerous to do that. So that's one thing that's going to happen.

As a gay man, I can tell you that it's very dangerous. Another thing that I'd like to see get going -- there's a group called The Communities of Faith Against Hate Crimes that was formed when Noah Rodriguez was killed two years ago. I would like to be able to see some kind of "not in our town" done by the faith communities in Santa Fe -- just getting right out there in public and saying, "We don't want this in our town anymore." Again, it doesn't have to be angry, it doesn't have to be hateful -- we can see that the people who cause great harm are suffering, actually. It's possible to extend compassion, but it's also very important to say, "Not anymore." So I'm hoping that that will happen. I don't know whether we'll actually be able to organize it.

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