Creating the new world: Constructive Program

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Recorded March 13, 2009

His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama made a historic visit to the University of California (UC), Berkeley on April 25, 2009.

He gave a lecture entitled “Peace Through Compassion”, and well, His Holiness embodied his teachings, walking the talk, in a supreme way. How? By befriending, years ago, the chair of the Board of the UC Regents, Richard Blum (recently featured, with his wife Senator Diane Feinstein, in the Washington Times: “Senator’s husband cashes in on crisis”).

How compassionate one has to be in order to accept a public invitation from a human being who wants to become a philanthropist but who has been struggling for 3 decades with double standards as the latest news headline shows?  I have the feeling that the compassion of the Dalai Lama has to be way larger than the moral conflicts of the UC. Perhaps, only peace through compassion can help our brother Richard and our beloved universities. If I were the Dalai Lama (or Barack Obama!), I also would befriend the Blum-Feinstein couple (and even George W. Bush!). They clearly need lots of love to see the interconectedness of life. Perhaps the couple needs to find a nitche other than politics to truly serve our movement, the Great Turning.

Yet, we, the Earth Community represented by the presence and the spirit of critical thinking/feeling Berkeley students, have some questions for His Holiness. Here is some brain/heart storming of the first 10 questions (if you were the Dalai Lama, what were your responses? We would  love to hear your compassionate responses!):

1. Your Holiness, if you were the Chair of the Board of the University of California Regents, what would you do to use the money of tax payers for eradicating poverty and violence in our communities and environment instead of using it for fabricating “safer nuclear weapons”?
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“Thou shalt not…” A spat about interrupting people leads to a reflection on the difficulties of codifying values. Only at Hope Tank.

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Recorded March 13, 2009

Conference or convergence? Metta brainstorms on the ideal conference.

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Recorded March 6, 2009

Last month, 57 people have lost their lives in eight mass shootings across America. “The killing grounds,” Timothy Egan wrote in the New York Times last week, “include a nursing home, a center for new immigrants, a child’s bedroom. Before that it was a church, a college, a daycare center.”  It is hard to argue when he calls this epidemic “the cancer at the core of our democracy.”

The only difference is, we don’t know what causes cancer.  It’s not that hard to understand why we’re experiencing an upsurge in “senseless violence” (I predicted it, for example, and I’m no expert).  More to the point, it isn’t all that hard to see what we can do about it.

This rash of killings was an uptick on a very general trend. That’s important, because we don’t want to just level out the trend that is already higher than any country calling itself civilized should put up with: we want it drastically lower.  We want the killing to stop.  It’s not particularly easy to face why we’ve been inflicted with all this violence, but we must, because how else will we find a solution.  And in the end, the solution may not be as unpleasant as we think.

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