Establishing Sacred Refuge

This talk from EcoSattva Training, Session Two in September 2015 featured Thanissara, Kristin Barker, Lou Leonard, Joanna Macy and Adam Lobel. This was before we had meeting platforms like Zoom. We all came together on a giant conference call. You can listen to the entire session or read the transcript of the discussion between Joanna Macy and Adam Lobel featured below.

All: OMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM… [Many voices, computer feedback loops in sound, laughter]

Thanissara: That’s amazing! Oh, my God! That’s like the rumble of the Earth. In Africa, the elephants rumble; they can be heard for dozens of miles. It felt like that, and it was amazing. Thank you! So with great, great, great veneration, respect and admiration for all the amazing work that you have done, Joanna, over so long, sounding the notes of support and warning about the Earth, we hand over to you, so we can benefit from your teachings today. Thank you so much for being with us.

Joanna: I’m so glad to be here, Thanissara, and hello, everybody. Already I feel, even before that remarkable sounding, that we’re making community. Having participated silently last week, I come back to this week’s session with a sense of already coming back to something that’s growing familiar and strong and where I belong. So bless you all who are listening in and who are bringing your hearts. And I love it that Thanissara linked our sounding, our love and reverence for Earth with the more than human realm and the elephants indeed. Their sounding I’ve heard is so deep that many of us humans can’t hear it. But they hear each other across vast distances. So may we feel each other’s presence across vast distances and even right next door.

Let us center again as we did last time, with attention to our breath. That’s something every single one of us is doing, breathing, that miracle. Just sit quietly for a second and give our attention to that miracle — sensations, wherever they are in our body. Because we’re, as we do that, held to the Earth. Sweet power of gravity. [Pause]

As we attend to these sensations that accompany that breath, the passage of air through our nasal cavities and throat, the filling of the lungs, the rising and fall of the abdomen, there is nowhere that we can locate in that process [inaudible] on our part. And now I’ll breathe — not making it happen. We have been given this, the moment of our birth. Indeed, the power that is breathing us goes back long before our birth, the same power that beats our hearts and those of our ancestors and all the other beings. The experience – it’s like being breathed, isn’t it? You and I, being breathed by life. That brings us into a living, breathing company, a vast sangha, if you will. It expands as we share beyond the humans, with our kinds of lungs – the trees, who are exhaling oxygen to us; plankton, doing the same. We’re all our brother-sister beings. So we become aware, again, sangha. That sangha – I love the word — we don’t need in our minds to say, oh that’s just a Buddhist thing. It’s that the — our brother-sisters on the Buddhist path pay attention to that, as have our ancestors, as have the teachings that come through to us now from the Native Indigenous Peoples.

It is not the case that the world changes one person at a time but rather vast and complicated networks of relationships and people and hearts and perspectives and worldviews change all the time

Oh boy, is it a good time to realize our deep belonging. It always is useful. It always was even central, as the ancestors and great spiritual teachers taught us. Oh, now, it seems life-saving. Because just at the moment when we need to know our true dimensions, we need to know our true nature and the power that comes from that. We are immersed in a culture built on teaching us to forget that and what the framers of this training have so aptly called the hyper individualism. I’m so glad that’s been named as a hurdle or a vision from which we need to wake up now. We wake each other up from the delusion of separateness on this journey together in the naming how we build.

I’m thinking, maybe, and you’ll remember too, of the wonderful teachings we received last week from Kaira Jewel and from Willa Miller, and how Willa told us about just – sattva, eco-sattva, ecological self, our being, the being itself that’s in some way in love and holds agency and is power. Remember how Kaira Jewel told us that that being, so vast beyond the delusion of our separateness, tends to carry stress that we feel? Remember how she said even our anxiety is a manifestation of Earth’s pain? We cannot reduce pain and fear and panic we feel, or outrage or loneliness or overwhelm to some personal neurosis. It’s vaster than that. Don’t fall for it. Don’t fall for – let anyone indoctrinated by this individualistic, reductionistic culture persuade you that your distress for the Earth and what’s happening to it now, from hunger to poverty to burning forests to floods to dying species, don’t you let them tell you that it’s something that stems from some neurosis. Don’t let them pathologize.

So that is what’s so wonderful and so necessary about the sangha that calls us. I want you to feel that call. We’ve been on our own for so long — obedient, being good achievers, good competers, good holders of comparing mind. Be at a moment in our history as Earthlings when we can come home to each other again and drop all those old defenses [several words inaudible].

Now there’s an image that comes to me where — it’s coming forward in me now; I wish I could project it to you, but I’ll describe it. Think of us on a path together toward the future, that path, like a road up a hill, because it’s uphill now, kind of hard slogging. Right over the brink of the hill is tomorrow. And there are dark clouds, but there’s also streaks of light and a possibility and the what-can-be. And on either side of the road, a ditch. So, and we hold onto each other so we don’t fall into that ditch, either one. On one of the ditches is paralysis, shutdown. Oh, it’s all too much, I can’t take it on, it’s just me. Oh no, I’ve got so much to do already. I’ve got a job to keep, I have a family to take care of, I have a degree to finish, I have a…whatever. Don’t ask me to look at that, and you — then the shutdown. So that’s the ditch on one side of the road. Can you see it? And we all know what it’s like to feel that. Way too much, way — because, see, we’re a shutdown nation — very hard to rouse us to what’s real and what we can do together. We get distracted like crazy. Shutdown is aided by distraction.

And on the other side to the road, very close to that, is the other ditch I call panic. See, I like alliterations, all those “Ps” — paralysis, panic, on either side of us. Panic is what happens when you try to keep a lid on your deepest apprehensions and feelings and knowing, saying, oh, that’s just private, trying to privatize your grief the way we have been privatizing water and land and health and medicines for so long — privatizing our grief and sorrow as well, and our outrage.

Then the lid comes off, and we fall into panic and social hysteria. And we look around, and we have to find people to blame for the distress that we feel and don’t want to feel, and we find targets. Oh, there’s those Muslims, oh there’re those Jews, those transgenders, those whatever, whatever — your target of choice. You Democrats, you Republicans, you climate deniers, you climate hysterics, you refugees swamping my country, millions of you. Stay out, stay out. Keep it away. That’s our world, isn’t it?

How do we keep from falling? We see so many in our world caught in that now, don’t we? How do we keep from falling into those ditches? We keep it by finding our true home. As Thanissara so beautifully put it, Thanissara, “you wake from the delusion of separateness,” said, quoting Thich Nhat Hanh. Her own beautiful work and ways of being together. That means that we help each other awake from that delusion of separateness. That delusion gives rise to greed, hatred, and delusion, as the Buddha taught. Now we’re facing collective forms of it. What we do is that we give each other the great luxury to speak, really speaking, without defensiveness. What Gandhi called satyagraha, too, begins with being with the truth, telling the truth to each other so you can hear it for yourself, even if it’s not great truth, like, I don’t care, I’m scared shitless, let me outta here. Oh! No, you’re speaking for other people as well.

Whew, it’s such a relief. Walls come down. Realize you’re here; you can speak your love as well as your fear. And holding onto each other, you’re walking together; you’re walking together toward that future, experiencing right away, receiving from each other and the giving to each other, you’re receiving the great reciprocity, part of the universe. How sweet that is in our tradition of the Buddha Dharma to recognize that we’re coming home to the core teaching, radical interdependence, indeed inter-being of all that is. I bet you have experienced that, too, in your work, Adam.

Adam: I have indeed.

Joanna: I’m sort of tossing you the ball because I’ve lost my sense of time here.

Adam: Okay, I caught it. Thanks for passing me the ball, Joanna, and thank you for your beautiful remarks and for everything that you’ve done, not just to launch this conversation today but also over the course of these many, many years of your own leadership and inspiration. And also thank you to One Earth Sangha, to Kristin and Lou, and to Thanissara for envisioning this event and inviting us all to gather.

And just as Joanna has said, we’re already experiencing sangha right here together, as invoked so beautifully by Joanna. We are exchanging our breath; we are exchanging our ideas, and community, sangha, is happening. And this is very practical, very real. Many of us are working in isolation from each other. I’ve had the opportunity to meet many of the teachers who are part of this EcoSattva Training and many of the leaders and then all of you. So we’re being summoned, we’re being gathered together so we know where to join, and this is extremely meaningful and powerful. Rather than just being isolated in our own individual communities or lineages, we are really coming together here — the teachers meeting each other and mixing minds, and then all of us who are on the call. So this is actually happening.

And as Joanna shared, and as Thanissara evoked, the time is now, indeed. We really do need to be together. So this theme of sangha and community is extremely exciting because for me, community represents this shift from the individualism that, Joanna, you were just talking about, on the one hand, and it’s a pivot to something collective, something much more powerful than what we can do on our own. So again, to underline this point that has been made already today by Lou and by Joanna: It is not the case, despite the current ads and the slogans and what we hear, it is not the case that the world changes one person at a time —

Joanna: Hooray!

Adam: — but rather vast and complicated networks of relationships and people and hearts and perspectives and worldviews change all the time. And I know, Joanna, you’ve been teaching that from a systems perspective and from a Buddhist perspective of interdependence for so long. And so, and I think it’s helpful to really recognize that sangha, community, resonates with the truth. It resonates with a deeper sense of the interconnection and interdependence of all of us. So the sangha in the sense of community is central to being able to respond to climate change, and it has always been central to the Buddhist path. During the Buddha’s time, we know there were many different communities, but also many yogis who were practicing in isolation. And he gathered sangha together, and felt the importance of being in a community. And I know Joanna you’re going to share a little bit more about the inspiration of the early sangha.

We need communities that are coming together to speak the truth and to be able to see clearly, to look out and see climate change for what it is, to see the injustice of our current economy and political structures, and to be able to confirm each other in that vision and in that insight.

And in our day and age, the sense of isolation and alienation from each other and from society and from the planet is so extreme that there’s a political potency to our individualism and our alienation. And those two ditches really spell it out, on either side of this stream. Another example is the kind of society of the spectacle, this sense of a world of constant entertainment and distraction that keeps us in isolation from each other. And so there’s a political potency of coming together as sangha, coming together as a community that actually counters that sense of alienation and society of the spectacle. The sangha is deep nourishment, which is in part why the Buddha wanted the sangha to be one of the refuges, that we take refuge and find nourishment and support in community.

And Joanna, you just evoked the sense of truth-telling that’s so important to a genuine sangha. In the Tibetan translation of the word sangha, we have the Tibetan word dge ‘dun which means “those who aspire or yearn for virtue.” So we come together to tell the truth, we come together to be a virtuous, powerful, ethical force in the world, and this leads to a sense of joy and resiliency, and it also is a force multiplier. I think that all of us know this, that we can do a lot on our own, but, boy, when you’re willing to come together in a collective, there’s this opportunity to really multiply and enhance the impact that you can have in the very short life that we have on this good Earth.

So there’s wisdom in the sense of the collective, and there’s a lot of skill sets to learn how to work in collectives. So it’s not just a sense of coming together, but it’s also this – the quality of our relationships. And I think this comes out so much in your work, Joanna, in terms of the work that helps us to reconnect and to be together. It’s not just coming together, but it’s how we come together, how and who we’re going to be when we gather. So there’s I think a sense here that all of us are marinating in our culture, in our globalized society of consumerism and growth and speed and distraction. So it’s like each of us is a beautiful block of free-range tofu — shade-grown, organic, free-range tofu. And we are marinating in the marinade of our society, and we are soaking up and picking up all of these narratives and stories and images and practices. And it takes a lot to help shift our own experience, and so we might need to place our tofu in a slightly different marinade. And sangha provides us the opportunity to marinate in something different, to marinate in something deeply nourishing of our Buddha nature and of our commitment to this planet. And that’s part of the truth-telling.

There’s also a quality of being able to see clearly in this truth-telling that Joanna evoked. So even from a kind of phenomenological perspective of how we work as human beings, if I’m with a friend, and I look out on the horizon, and I see some kind of really odd, pink creature, I’m not going to know for sure whether I’m seeing clearly or not until I turn to my friend. And if my friend, if she also sees – if Joanna and I are sitting there, and we look out and see this odd pink creature, if Joanna and I look at each other and we confirm, hey, did you see that weird pink creature, there’s immediately a sense of, okay, we’re probably seeing something that is true. But if I turn to Joanna, and she says, uh, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Adam, then I’ll question; I’ll question my perception. In other words, perception is shared, it’s communal, it’s collective. So we need communities that are coming together to speak the truth and to be able to see clearly, to look out and see climate change for what it is, to see the injustice of our current economy and political structures, and to be able to confirm each other in that vision and in that insight. So in all these ways community is nourishing and supportive. And I just want to briefly mention the other side of the story now and talk a little bit about how community can be destabilizing as well. How does that sound, Joanna?

Joanna: Sure! Let’s see. Okay, go ahead.

Adam: So just to briefly mention this, I think it’s important – we’re going to dive into this more in future sessions, but –

Joanna: Yeah.

Adam: – many of us have this sense of real hope and fantasy that a sangha’s always going to be supportive, and that really doesn’t turn out to be the case. There’s often a feeling of aloneness and sometimes isolation, even when we’re with like minded people. So even in the etymology of the word “community”, there’s this strange paradox where community refers to what is common or what is shared between us. And yet that often leaves out what’s different between us. And so sometimes even though we share, let’s say, a commitment to climate change or a commitment to helping this planet or a commitment to life or a commitment to the Dharma, we also find there are things that are not included or that are pushed out, and that can sometimes lead to a sense of alienation. And even with each other, we can sometimes feel a sense of not being heard, not being listened to, not being able to listen and a sense of being exposed to our own fragility.

And I want to acknowledge this because being part of community is a path. Taking refuge in the sangha, just like in taking refuge in the Buddha and the Dharma, taking refuge in the sangha means being willing to enter into a journey of learning how to be with each other, and that takes time, patience and humility. It’s like being a piece of glass thrown into the ocean, and over time you get churned and smoothed and humbled and softened and become more pliable. So I want to acknowledge the deep, beautiful, journey of awakening through sangha.

I know in our last few minutes together, Joanna, we wanted to talk about communities of practice and some of the inspiration that you’ve shared from early sangha and my experience with Shambhala –

Joanna: Yeah.

Adam: – and then also to talk about the political implications. So maybe you can take us forward, Joanna.

Joanna: Right north of here are places that many of us in the Bay Area in California – my neighbors and myself – have close connections with. And just a couple hours north in South Lake County there’re the greatest forest fires in history in California. They’re – the worst has happened, the worst is past, but the toll has been huge. It’s been terrifying to see how fast in a drought-stricken area the fires can literally explode — flames reaching far into the sky, beyond the tops of the trees, galloping across and swallowing up acres and acres and thousands of acres, destroying towns and farms. And what strikes me along with the heartache, along with how terrifying it is, is what it has – how moved I am to see how it has awakened people. As they drive out, as they take refuge with their – often with their farm animals, their goats, their chickens, their places burned, it wakens people up to their mutual belonging.

I hear this mainly on the local radios, how my own tears are awakened by the tears I hear from people I’ve never met. And I am moved by the immediate response on the part of the larger community in nearby towns and counties to help. It’s as if fires were a call to action, a call to waking up, to how we need each other, and makes me think of that wonderful book by Rebecca Solnit about a paradise made in hell. When there is –

Adam: Um.

Joanna: – common danger, how we can snap out of the delusion of our separateness. So we find again that we need each other. How precious that is. And I love the way you say, Adam, that we need each other just to know what’s happening, to take it in, that shared perception. Yeah. And that has been the case in my own life. I think that the most significant milestones and turning points in my long life – but it’s not so long, you know — to be 86 is nothing compared to all the people who are going to be affected by what – I’m kind of new-born to this world, thinking new all the time. And I’ve been awakened anew time and time again by the study-action groups that have punctuated my life, helped me to see and learn things that I wouldn’t have been able to face by myself. Make a commitment to each other. Make a commitment – and it’s not always people on the Dharma path, but people who care, and they’re all over.

We need to break the shell, break the cocoon on a collective level and unleash humanity, to take the lid off of our longing for a beautiful, celebratory human expression on this planet.

We commit to each other. Just said, don’t make it open time, just a few months. Let’s try meeting for three months. Let’s just try just looking at hunger in the Bay Area. Let’s try looking at nuclear waste. Let’s just see what we can teach each other. And we become resources for each other, and you really learn something about what you’re looking at, of this shared perception when you become – take it on yourself to help others understand, to become – and again, as I said, in that teaching and learning together we join in that great reciprocity.

It’s very exciting to me, and I remember telling Adam about this, and I wanted to share it with you all, is that, looking back through the millennia, to those centuries two-and a-half-thousand year ago when the Buddha lived in northern India, Gangetic Plain. And in the immediately following centuries – and his teachings weren’t written down for two, three hundred years, you know — these communities established — he called them sanghas. You know where he got the name? He got the name from the tribal republics along the southern flank of Nepal. One of them was the Sakyas, and that was where he was from. And before the monarchies arose in his lifetime, big centralized power, increasingly potent and armed monarchies, he lived and taught – he borrowed from his experience, the sangha, the tribal republic.

Today this is how to navigate this time. At this time, people are losing the sense of who they were in their village as they rush to the cities into anonymity and competition. He said, let us be there for each other. Practice, train our mind and in our heart and in our body with our breath and our will and our senses. We will become present to each other.

I love looking back at the earliest references — it’s in the Vinaya Pitaka, and some of the Indian historians – at the characteristics of these sanghas. Characteristic is that they talked things over. There is only orthopraxis, not orthodoxy. There isn’t one dogmatic absolute truth. How you interpret and guide your life is always situational, because everything is impermanent, as in all living systems. So you find – there was even a rule of if you don’t agree, the rule sangha veda of how you can separate. Okay, you don’t agree on this point? Okay, see you later. And they’d go down to the river or up in the hill, or down to the valley, and there’s another sangha. A mutual respect. No-one has to carry the burden of having all the answers, of being the only one who’s right – the poison of top-down power, the delusion of top-down power.

There was also in those early sanghas [several words inaudible] – so right for our time –https://oneearthsangha.org/articles/the-shambala-warrior-prophecy/ radical social inclusion. Anybody could join, and everyone was welcome, no matter where they stood in the caste system, no matter what color was their skin. And that was already – matters of discrimination back then, yes sir. Even if they were runaway slaves, or soldiers going AWOL from the army, lowest caste, or whatever, everyone was welcome. They scorned the Buddha Siddhartha, the Buddha, for that. They said, oh, that guy can’t be serious — look at who he lets into the sangha. Any old riff-raff can come. He didn’t bat an eye; he was firm in that. Our humanity, the life that is in us, is not to be restricted by our notions of privilege or superiority or exclusion.

The third thing that stirs me about those early sanghas, Adam – so I’ve mentioned how decentralized they were, sort of below the radar, you know – you can’t say, you can’t quite find, who’s the head here, let’s get rid of the head of this upstart movement. You can’t, because you can’t decapitate something that has a thousand people doing – following their deepest heart-wishes. So the decentralized, and then the social inclusion, and the third was economic, the sharing. Stepping aside from the comparing and struggling for wealth and competing for wealth by just saying, your wealth is in what you can give. Private property was indeed just forgotten in the early sangha. The very word for bhikkhu and bhikkhuni, bhikshu and bhikshuni, that we call monks, actually from the beginning meant “someone who gets a share.” We share.

So Adam, when I see what grows in my own heart, the kind of heartbeat that’s probably audible in my voice, the falling in love that happens when I look into, with honesty, into another being’s eyes, and we link our arms, that is so – what awaits us now, what calls us now, has deep roots, deep roots, in the tradition which draws us together. Also it’s like, and it makes me think of something so much more recent, the Industrial Workers of the World, remember they were called the Wobblies? It’s called us to — “we’re going to build the new within the shell of the old.” See, the system that we’re suffering under now is already self destructing. One of my teachers, David Korten, says it’s a suicide economy, the industrial-growth economy, the corporate globalization, it’s eat – it’s devouring itself in the — what it feeds on.

So if we don’t put our attention on what we can grow — and we can grow it between each other. We can grow it in what we share. We can grow it out of our grief and out of our wisdom, which, both when they’re shared. And I just find myself thinking of that old – they’re old teachings that come to us as we see what happens when we speak – even our pain, when we share – thinking of Khalil Gibran, whom I quote in my last book, “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding”. See, our pain for the world – oh, you hear the sirens? Somebody’s going to help somebody else there. Their pain, our pain for the world is the breaking of the shell that encloses our understanding. And “as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so we must know pain,” pain for the world, a pain for which there is no pill, no tablet, no tranquilizer. That’s that breaking open of – into our vaster true nature. Thanks. Adam?

Adam: Well, hearing you speak Joanna, and your sense of connection and inspiration from the early sanghas, these little anarchist communities that you’ve described, and the capacity to hold this pain, we certainly cannot hold it in isolation. And the idea of sangha as a refuge, and sangha allows us our hearts fill and let the shell break open because we can share that pain with each other and cry and get in touch with our heart and open up.

I’m also struck by the inspiration of a radical and enlightened community. And in the Shambhala tradition there is this beautiful prophecy of the Shambhala warrior, which, Joanna, you’ve spoken of so beautifully, and I urge everyone to go online and look up Joanna teaching on and sharing this story, this prophecy of Shambhala warriorship, the sense of a community of warriors arriving at a moment in human history when the crisis in our society and in our planet is so extreme that we need deep skillful means to respond.

And part of this vision of Shambhala is not just individual warriors, but this idea, this longing of an enlightened society. And I want to bring these two words together in my concluding remarks here, because we often think of enlightenment and awakening on an individual level having to do with the mind stream, the consciousness, the karmic patterning of an individual. But we are at a moment in human history when we are being asked by our teachers to explore collective enlightenment. And as Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote in a calligraphy, he said, “The next Buddha will be a society.” And Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche said, “The coming Buddha Maitreya will be a sangha.” So this challenges us to step beyond even thinking of our own awaken-ment, even that is so profound and vast. But to imagine, to contemplate and to long for an enlightened society on this Earth, where the very structures that support humanity reflect the compassion and wisdom and ethics of the Dharma, of the way this universe flows.

We need to delve deep into the Buddhist teachings in our sanghas and human wisdom around the world … to be fearless and brave in summoning the deep wisdom in our human ancestry …

And in the Shambhala teachings there is actually a diagnosis of our current situation which is quite beautiful. It begins with the sense that humanity, as individuals and as collectives, that humanity is basically good, that there is a fundamental goodness and longing to care for each other, to be in harmony with our biosphere. And that deep in our hearts, each of us has that longing for, as Charles Eisenstein says, “a beautiful world that our hearts know is possible.” And this longing for an enlightened or awakened civilization has been with us throughout all of humanity, this archetypical journey and longing to be together in a way that is celebratory and full of life and joy. We want this for our children, for each other — it’s there, within humanity.

And at our moment it’s easy to lose touch with that and to feel that humanity is a cancer on this Earth, that humanity is something that needs to be destroyed in order for life to flourish. And part of the Buddha-nature teachings is actually to at least make us question that and inquire in our own experience whether we can find the softness, the sadness, the sensitivity and the love in humanity, on a collective level. And what blocks that goodness, that longing, is fear, a closing down into our little cocoons of fear and isolation, on a personal level and on a social and economic level. So as Joanna evoked this beautiful sense of breaking the shell, we need to break the shell, break the cocoon on a collective level and unleash humanity, to take the lid off of humanity, to take the lid off of our longing for a beautiful, celebratory human expression on this planet.

So the key is working with fear, and as the Shambhala teachings say, learning to follow and delight in the confidence which is primordially free. And when we do so, I think we come to the political implications of sangha. And I really want to just conclude here by saying that even though all of the Dharma teaches interdependence, teaches loving-kindness, teaches meditation and teaches the value of good and virtuous actions, even though that is the case, it is not the case that all Buddhist communities have been politically engaged, radical, or even aware. In fact if we look at the history, many Buddhist communities have been completely subservient and in support of the basic paradigms of their nations, of their world, even if they were non-virtuous. So I’m sharing this to challenge us and to really look deeply at our own sanghas and our own Dharmic manifestations and our own communities and look, and ask, are we responding to the reality of climate chaos and destruction with the skillful means, the compassion and the open-heartedness that’s needed?

And from my experience in Shambhala and other Buddhist and non-Buddhist communities, we also need to be fearless in rousing magic. And I know this is important to you, Joanna, that we will not be able to respond to the world through logic and through, kind of, planning alone. We need to delve deep into the Buddhist teachings in our sanghas and human wisdom around the world to rouse the magical connection with the world, with each other, and to be fearless and brave in summoning the deep wisdom in our human ancestry to face the challenges of the present.

Joanna: Amen!

Adam: – lead us into the contemplation, it would be beautiful.

Joanna: Yes. I’m a little unclear, as a matter of fact, just how much longer we have.

Adam: I believe that we need to shift to our contemplation now, with these beautiful questions that you have for us.

Joanna: Oh, good. Yes. Well I just have to thank you, Adam, for speaking so openly about the spiritual trap that Buddhism, and like all spiritual paths, we can fall into, and that is the thinking we can escape from suffering to some beautiful place, that we can find a tranquility that doesn’t change, aloof from change, that we can go to a place where what really matters is – keeps us safe. That’s a – so I [inaudible] and the fearlessness — well, fearlessness is right there, Adam.