Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 290: Jack Kornfield

Episode Date: June 11, 2018

Jack Kornfield is a bestselling American author and teacher in the vipassana movement in American Theravada Buddhism. This episode is a wonderful palate cleanser if you've been drinking too much news.

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I give you an award for the smartest award decision, 2018, if you gave me an award. Man, it feels so good to have all these awards, but you know what feels better? The fact that I've got an incredible podcast to offer you with Jack Cornfield. We're going to jump right into that, but first, some quick business. He did not have a website, and so a gargoyle carried him away. She did not have a website, she was arrested by the king. They did not have a website, now they burn in hell. Demons ripping them apart and reconstructing them forever.

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Holy shit, man. I don't know if I thanked you or if you got the letter of thanks, but if not, thank you so much. That's an incredible gift and thank you to all of you who have been sending me stuff. God bless you. It's going to decorate many special rooms in my home. Friends, I just took a bit of a meditation class taught by David Nickturn this weekend and I met a lot of you at the meditation class. One of the things that kept coming up again and again is what do you get from a spiritual practice? What kind of stuff do you get? You do get stuff out of it.

You get more focused, but more than that, you become aware of something that maybe you're not aware of now, which is impossible to even talk about because you have to do the practice, but it's very psychedelic and trippy and incredible. But what do you really get out of this stuff? Maybe you don't get anything that's as important as the fact that at some point, if you work on yourself long enough, you're going to get around somebody who is feeling bad, nervous, neurotic, freaked out, scared, unhappy, or is in a phase in their life where they really just need somebody to be a loving rock near them and to help them through whatever difficulties they happen to be going through.

And for me, that person or one of those people is Jack Cornfield. This man is like a tuning fork and whenever I get around him, he does an incredible job of helping me remember something that is so easy to forget, which is that there are a lot of wonderful things happening on the planet right now, no matter what the howling dogs of destruction are telling you on the news or on the internet. So I really hope that if you're feeling rough, this conversation with Jack Cornfield helps you feel a little better. Jack is a meditation teacher. He is an author who's written many wonderful books on meditation.

One of my favorite books on meditation called A Path with Heart. You can get that on Audible. I like the one on Audible because I like listening to Jack's voice. He also teaches meditation classes all around the planet. You can find out more about him by going to his website, jackcornfield.com. All right, everybody, unseal the locked iron coffin of your heart and open it up so that Jack Cornfield can spray great rainbow beams of sweet, compassionate and love all over your soul. Welcome to the Dunker Trussell Family Hour Podcast, Jack Cornfield.

Welcome, welcome on you, that you are with us. Shake hands, no need to be blue. Welcome to you. It's the Dunker Trussell Family Hour Podcast. Ha! Jack, thank you so much for letting me invade your home here and interview. How are you these days? I'm terrific. Thank you, Duncan. The world's a mess, but I'm still good anyway. Do you think the world is more of a mess or less of a mess? Then, like before you were born, what? What's the time frame, baby?

Let's say before the 1900s, more of a mess or less of a mess? It's a mess in a different way. Infant mortality was off the charts if you want to think about the blessings of modern life or how good it was back in the old days. Just think about dentistry, for example, and you go, oh, I'm glad we have a little modern life. But then again, we're melting the global glaciers and ice caps. You know, it's a wash. I do remember this, though. My daughter, who is an asylum human rights lawyer who works for people whose lives are in danger on the world,

she called me after the last election and she was weeping because she was afraid for all the vulnerable people that she works with and other things. And it went over and I talked to her and I said, you know, this is not a new thing. My mom lived through, her dad came back from World War I. She lived through the Great Depression. She lived through World War II. So when things were bad, she said, yeah, I know what it's like to live through really bad times in the whole world. And I said, Caroline, back a couple of generations ago, you know, in the late 60s, when Martin Luther King was assassinated and Kennedy, Robert Kennedy was assassinated

and there were all the riots at the Democratic Convention and the war in Vietnam and it felt like the government was lying to us about so many things and so forth and we were out on the streets. I said, every couple of generations it comes around again and I took off this red protection cord that I'd gotten, blessing cord from the diorama that I wear and I wrapped it around her wrist and I said, now it's your generation's turn and you know how to do this and this is what you've learned for your whole life is how to stand up for what matters and I give this to you and we have to do this every generation or two

and this is part of what's asked of us as human beings in some honorable and dignified way. I want to talk to you about this phenomenon and I want to talk about young monk Jack Cornfield studying under Ajahn Chah. Did it occur to you that at some point that would be passed to you and that you would have to, in some ways, not to put it in that too dramatic terms but shoulder the burden of going from student to teacher and if so, how did that make you feel? Well, I need to read you a poem first because you're talking about passing it on through generations and it connects where we started in that conversation about the world

which is woven together unbearable beauty and an ocean of tears and that's human incarnation and this is where we are. I see her on TV. This poem is written about Emma Gonzalez by one of my favorite poets and friend in Oakland, Allison Luterman, who writes all kinds of great poetry. I see her on TV screaming into a microphone. Her head is shaved and she's beautiful and 17 and her high school was just shot up. She had to walk by friends lying in their own blood, her teacher bleeding out and she's my daughter, the one I never had and she's your daughter and everyone's daughter

and she's her own woman in the fullness of her young fire calling bullshit on the politicians who take money from the gun makers. Tears rain down her face but she doesn't stop shouting. She doesn't apologize. She keeps calling them out. All of them, all of us who didn't do enough to stop this thing and you can see the gray faces of those who have always held power contort utterly baffled to face this new breed of young woman, not silky, not compliant, not caring if they call her a ten or a troll.

And she cries but she doesn't stop speaking truth into the microphone though her voice is raw and shaking under the molten sun. I'm nearly 3,000 miles away thinking how Neruda said the blood of the children ran through the streets without fuss. Only now she is, they are raising a fuss, shouting down the walls of Jericho and it's not that we road weary elders have been given the all clear exactly. But our shoulders do let down a little. We breathe from a deeper place, we say to each other, well it looks like the baton may be passing to these next runners

and they are fleet as thought, fire as stars and we take another breath and say to each other, the baton has been passed and we set off then running hard behind them. That's cool. And I love the way she ends it because it's not that we desert what we care about, we run behind them too, but somehow we support them as well. And this was somehow the transmission to my daughter. So you're asking, did I have any idea when I was a young monk

that I'd be carrying some little piece of this tradition? And it occurred to me actually, I said, well, I'm learning this stuff and it's not the kind of thing that I got in an Ivy League education. I'm going to tell you that. Nobody taught me about forgiveness or compassion or how to deal with my own anger and rage and outrage and how to have a mindful and respectful conversation with another person. I learned organic chemistry and medieval philosophy

and I learned all kinds of good Ivy League etiquette but nothing really about the interior life of the heart, which is how we guide our lives. And this is the education that not only I needed, but humanity needs because right now if you look, no matter how space technology and nanotechnology and biotechnology and all this, your cell phone that has the Great Library of Alexandria in your pocket, we still have continuing warfare, continuing racism,

continuing environmental destruction, tribalism. A change of consciousness is desperately needed. Humanity has to learn to see that who we are is not this separate, encapsulated cowboy separate from the rest of the world, but that we are interwoven in every breath with the winds that come across the Pacific and dust Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa and before that dust the Fukushima nuclear reactor that we're interwoven in every drop of water that we drink

with the dolphins of the sea and the melting ice caps and that somehow we're in this together, we are family and that consciousness, which was central to the awakenings in the monasteries, is about to see this and know it and live differently. I thought, yeah, this is good stuff. Maybe I'll pass it on to somebody else someday. That's a long answer, Duncan. It's a beautiful answer.

I think it naturally leads to a question I had as you were reading that poem and that phenomena is just incredible and it's amazing to watch the, you know, geriatric, angry politicians freak out when they realize that they're being exposed as bribe takers, sophisticated bribe takers, but bribe takers. But still in that poem, you have not this girl shrieking, yelling, angrily, blasting out. We are all one.

But you have more anger, justified anger, righteous anger. How could you not be angry? School's bad enough. But now you have to go there and worry about getting shot. This is, I can't even imagine. Oh, that's getting put out of your misery when you're in high school. In a way it is, and it truly is. You have to have a little, little kind of dark, darkish nighttime humor

about all of this shadow humor. Yeah, but listen, yeah, when I was there at that march for our lives in Washington, part of what struck me was there was like three quarters of a million people out on Pennsylvania Avenue, and part of what struck me actually was how civil it was. There were kids and balloons and bicycles and families, and there were people speaking from their guts and their hearts about how we have to stand up, and anger in it, of course, a kind of righteous anger. But that was not the main vibe.

The main vibe actually was such that the security guards and the cops and everybody was smiling. There was some way, this is the world that we want to live in, a new world where people care about things, they can speak the truth, but also they're tender and respectful with one another. And so that's the change that will happen. Yes, it needs a certain passion. Yes, it needs a power, but you could also feel it was the power of love. She's saying, you know, not one more, not one more.

But there will be. There will be. There will be next week. There will be until the not one more becomes so loud and so compelling that something changes, but even so human incarnation isn't going to change because the world's awash in weapons. That's right. And we, as the United States of America, are the largest weapons supplier to the entire world. We have sold hundreds of billions of dollars of killing machines.

Even our foreign aid, half of our foreign aid is let's send weapons. And then we were, we're not safe. And when we're arming the world, so. Can I just interject what something my Uber driver on the way over here just told me regarding that? Because I was saying, you know, look, this is so many people. We are just very attached to hating Trump, very attached to hating him. It's fashionable to hate him. You're supposed to hate him.

We don't like him. If you talk about Trump, you have to start it off by saying, you know, I don't like him. Yeah. But so here we are looking at the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, peace in the Korean Peninsula. One of the, one of the just powder kegs. And the Uber driver Korean is like, this is the greatest thing ever. This is so great. And he said, you know, it's family in South Korea.

Of course. And he says, and he says, I don't like Trump, but that happened because of him. That happened because of him. And we all have to, we all have to deal with that. But then he said something because then I was like, yes. Can you imagine if we all, if by some awful, insane, terrible stroke of weird catastrophic luck, Trump is the one who brings global peace. If somehow peace breaks out in the Middle East somehow.

And he said, no, that's not going to happen. Because like you said, the United States is one of the number one weapons manufacturers. He literally said what you just said. This is the sinister thing he said. He said, if you're selling umbrellas, you need it to rain. And in the same way, if you're selling weapons, you need war. And that, that is where we're at right now, which is we have a massive industry located in Los Angeles, by the way. You know, I didn't know that right in your neighborhood, right in our neighborhood.

What about, what about that? What about that, Jack? What do we do about, what do we do about that? And I'm sorry to go on this rant. I'm sorry about that. This is my question. Grant Duncan, I'm shocked. I'm shocked that you're ranting.

No, because what we see is like, you see this, you know, piece, piece, piece, piece. And yet on Twitter, it's hate, hate, hate, hate. I hate Trump. Take a breath, Duncan. Take a breath. Let me, let's change the elements of this conversation. Because you're talking in your rant with a lot of passion and some, some real intelligence, although it's partial intelligence, but it's still, it's important. Well, and you're laughing about it, not because you're a partially intelligent guy or anything like that, but because, of course, words and views are always one sided.

There's another perspective. And if Donald Trump can bring peace and denuclearize the Korean Peninsula or the world, hallelujah. Thank you. I, you know, I bow to that. Yes. But you ask a much deeper question. You know, we are a wash in arms. And it is the weapons in the heart that have to be denuclearized.

It is the landmines in the heart. It's the AK-47s. It's the cruise missiles in the heart. Yeah. These things come from humanity. And when you have kids in a kindergarten or preschool and they start whacking each other with blocks, you separate them. You say, use your words. You teach them small elements of civilized behavior when their aggression comes.

Couldn't we learn as a species to say to our leaders, use your words? How about that? How about solving? There will be conflict. There's always conflict. Conflict is that we have different desires, different needs and so forth. We have to figure out how to share the earth and share what we have. There are different ways to solve conflict and there is a better game than war.

There has to be some other way to do it. I mean, the Olympics were supposed to be that, but now we have Olympics and war. Hallelujah. We have them all at the same time. Here's two short little things to say about the spirit in which we make the change. Because we're on a kind of a cusp and everybody can feel it. Are we headed toward yet more conflict? Are we headed toward just continuing the denigration of certain people?

You know, the growing gap between ultra-rich and the enormous number of poor people in the world. Right. So, two little stories. One, my friend and colleague Wes Nisker, who was, or Scoop Nisker, who was a great radio person in the Bay Area for a long time, but also a Buddhist teacher, went to interview Gary Snyder. Gary Snyder is in his mid-80s.

He's one of the founders of the modern environmental movement. Pulitzer Prize winner for Earth household and other things that he wrote 50 years ago about bioregionalism and how we care for the Earth. And he said, Gary, he said, you look out. There's global warming, climate change, loss of species, ocean rising. What advice do you have for us at this time? And Gary looked back and said, don't feel guilty. If you feel guilty or angry or, you know, frightened, you add that same destructive energy to the

energy that's already caused the mess that we're in. So, if we're going to save it, it's not going to be out of guilt or anger or fear. It's going to be saved because we love it, because it's us. And the only power that can meet the power of weaponry and the power of those who aren't afraid to kill is those who aren't afraid to die, those who aren't afraid to love no matter what. And you see Martin Luther King standing up and his, after the church was bombed and children were killed.

And he says, we will meet your physical force with soul force. Wow. And that soul force will, that is the only thing that's a match. That's Gandhi's power. That's the power, actually, in every generation. And even as we speak, and we have this one hour or whatever that we talk together, the news is all about the unusual, you know. Dog bites man doesn't get into the news, you know.

Right. All these people got home during the commute safely, does not get into the news. Today, you know, 334,000 airplanes landed safely in the world, doesn't get into news. The fact during this hour that we're speaking that there are 7 billion times maybe 10, 70 billion small acts of kindness on this earth that people actually stopped at a red light so you could go through the green like those kindergartners. Okay, you hold your, you know, that doesn't make the news. All that makes the news is what will grab your attention like it's going to grab some

part of your anatomy. Yes. Is the stuff and the lowest part of the brainstem. And when that gets activated, we don't follow the dignity and the truth that we actually know. Story number two. Great. So I met a demonstration at the San Francisco International Airport a year ago or so after

the executive order was passed to prevent people from the seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country and all these people were stuck in airports. And my daughter and a whole group of young immigration lawyers and human rights lawyers went down there. There were more lawyers there than there were people behind, you know, being caught and they put up signs free legal advice to anyone who needed immigration help and so. But there was a couple of thousand people down there, all chanting and demonstrating no ban, no fear, all of that.

My favorite part, we went to one of the exit gates. There were 400 people chanting. And in the middle of this crowd by the gate was a New Orleans jazz band. So the crowd would be chanting no ban, no fear, refugees are welcome here. The drummer would kick in behind them with a nice beat. Then the trumpet would come on top and lay this really cool riff on top. The sax player cut in. Pretty soon everyone is no ban, no fear, refugees, welcome.

It turned into music. All the airport security personnel, everybody's smiling. It's a work of art. We're there. We're protesting. They know that it matters to us, but we're doing it with art and beauty and you almost can't deny something happening. And so there's something about bringing a different consciousness than just, oh, I'm

against this and these are bad and these are good guys. Molly Ivins, who was a great, she was a best selling author in New York Times, columnist, Texas, you know, fire brand. And before she died, she says, she said, beloveds, as you go out there and raise hell and kick ass and fight for the good. She said, be sure to have a good time doing it. Really make sure that you're having a good time and let everyone know that this is the fight that you can have and that you can enlist other people and that it was a lot of fun

to do this, to actually do this and say, we're on the train, the bandwagon, for the transformation that the world needs. Wow. To do it, you need two things. In Zen, they say there are only two things. You sit and you sweep the garden and it doesn't matter how big the garden is, which is to say you quiet the mind and tend the heart. Sit is sort of Zen shorthand for get your inner shit together in some way, right?

You come into yourself, you quiet yourself enough, so you're not acting out of fear and reactivity and kind of adding to the chaos and the tangle. And then like Gandhi, who took one day a week in silence. And it didn't matter that he was taking part in the entire British Empire. And they'd say, Gandhiji, Gandhiji, there are hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets and people being killed and shot and so forth. We have to do something instead. I'm sorry, Thursday is my silent day.

I have to get quiet and listen to what is the deepest and truest and most honest and honorable move I can make that we all can make. Maybe it's just to go and pull some salt from the sea, the salt march. Yeah. I have to do that. And then I get up, you sit and then you go out into the garden of the world and it's not your job to change the world. That would be hubris.

Okay. You, Duncan Trussell, through your show are going to redeem this world, this human world. But it's your job to bring your gift and to mend the part that you can touch. And you will be depressed and unhappy with yourself and sort of swept over by the low brainstem, you know, stuff that comes through the news. If you don't do it because they want you to feel helpless. They want you to feel that there's nothing that can be done. It's too big.

It's too much. That's part of the psychological form of the misuse of news and communication and politics. And you're not fucking helpless. And you're not someone who can't make a difference. And therefore, when you reach out and you say, I will do my part, I can mend this part that my hand can touch, I can see this. And whatever it is, raising conscious children, making conscious business, standing up for justice, looking at economic disparity, you know, looking at who's been targeted, what

communities are vulnerable, and helping or standing up for that. When you do it, all of a sudden, you become a participant in creating a different world. Wow. That is so beautiful. What? It's like this is one massive garden. We've been assigned these little patches, these little patches. So this is beautiful.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. This is beautiful because you are, to me, this is a formula for a practice. For a pragmatic formula for a potential world peace. If we all start tending to our gardens in the way that you're talking about, if we all figure out a way to become more conscious, more compassionate, to denuclearize our internal Korean

peninsula, so to speak, and then tend to the garden around us, who knows what could happen. But it has to start here. Has to start here. This is the origin of it. Mind and heart is the origin of how our world works. I love it, but this is what I want. You are such an incredible fireman. People call you people Buddhist.

A better word is you extinguish these blazes. But for me, my current blazes, I am so frustrated and pissed off, I guess you could say, annoyed. Not with the world, but people who are pissed off at the world and are blasting all this. And I recognize the deep hypocrisy in that statement. But these people blasting so much hate, infinite hate. It feels to me that a great many people are deeply invested in the world being rotten because it gives them a chance to fire off infinite tweets or Facebook posts about how rotten the world is. They're spraying out so much fear and so much, there's no forgiveness there.

Anytime anyone does anything, these people who do these monstrous things, the ferocity with which they're attacked, it is so, in its own way, abhorrent that it makes me feel like, oh, great. Well, like now you guys are just another version of that thing. So what I'm saying, I guess what I would ask is how what do people to do if they start realizing they're actually attached not to the idea of there being world peace or to being beautiful gardeners of consciousness, but they're more addicted to just being angry all the time. And they're pretending that they're gardeners. So James Baldwin put it this way.

He said, I believe that one of the reasons people cling to their hate and prejudice so stubbornly is that they sense that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain. So when there's hate there, I become really curious. And it's not to say I can't get triggered because I can when people are acting in a horrible way and increasing the suffering and the polarization of the world or increasing the suffering of those who are vulnerable. I can get triggered and, you know, really upset. So I'm not just like Mr. Calm over here. But from a deeper place, one has to become I have to become interested in what is it under there that makes people be hateful.

And almost always in my experience, it's their level of pain, despair, insecurity and fears. The fact that they haven't been respected in some way, that they've lost their own sense of dignity and agency. And, you know, I see that over and over again. And, you know, when I was in Palestine and Israel doing some peace work, you know, I could feel from the most kind of vehement, hateful side in that that underneath it was I've been first of all, I'm terrified these other people are going to take everything, kill my family, whatever. But also under it was so much trauma. And a lot of it's unconscious and then it just gets retraumatized.

So in that regard, you know, when I think about all these people who are hateful and so forth, I would rather look at, well, what is the fear you carry? What is the depression you carry? And how is the society not helping you? We live in a society with so much loss of jobs, economic injustice, lack of respect, you know, in the way that it's being organized now. There are a lot of people who feel there's nothing better to do than that. That's the only move. And then we project it out because we can't bear our insecurity.

We can't bear that that pain is actually ours. So we blame it on the Mexicans, or we blame it on the Muslims, or we blame it on the communists, or we blame it on the blacks or the yellow or the brown or somebody who looks different than us in some way or other. And we project it all out because we can't bear the insecurity of being a human being. I got you. And the truth is that we are vulnerable and no one teaches us that that's okay. The poet Rilke writes, ultimately, it's upon your vulnerability that you depend. And what that line means is that every time you go through a traffic light or drive on the right-hand side of the street,

your life depends on the fact that somebody's going to drive on the correct side of the street coming toward you. That every time you buy food in the market, or even the farmer's market, because you're like this hip person, goes to the farmer's market and you can afford it, whatever, you know, you trust that that person didn't put some lethal amount of pesticide on that food. That we are at the vulnerable to one another every day in every stage of our life. And to recognize this means that we're in it together. But people who don't know this, who don't understand our human lot, that we're these beautiful, and maybe sometimes like the ugly flowers that are planted in this garden of life,

that we are life and so forth, that we're in it together, get swept away by this. And of course, it's easy to judge the people who are judgmental, right? Yes! As you say, the hypocrisy, and to hate those who are hate-mongers. Yes! And then you say, hmm, now that's interesting, what is that? Well, that energy washes in through your nervous system. It activates you.

Yeah, let's get on the hate train. Right. We can match them. And then you say, you know, that's not actually the place I want to live. And that's not the place of consciousness that we need. There's a beautiful book. I was recently in Darm Salah for the Mind, Life, Science meetings with the Dalai Lama and all these neuroscientists. There's recently a book called The Book of Joy that was published.

New York Times bestseller for anyone that still reads books. By the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu from South Africa. Both Nobel Prize winners and good friends. And Tutu came up to Darm Salah. And they spent a week answering the question, how can you two men who've seen so much suffering, how can you be happy and joyful and laugh? And Tutu has this kind of giggle that's just totally wonderful. But he lived through apartheid and saw his friends and colleagues be shot down or necklace,

you know, with a tire around their neck set on fire. And the Dalai Lama, every week, talks to people who are walking over the Himalayas, sometimes almost barefoot to escape being tortured in Chinese army prisons because they say the word Dalai Lama or their temples are being, you know, closed down or burned or the nuns put in prison. And yet people go to hear the Dalai Lama partly, yes, he's a world figure Nobel Laureate or he has these beautiful Tibetan teachings that none of us really quite completely understand but it seems really cool, you know.

But I think people go to hear the Dalai Lama by the tens of thousands because they would love to hear him laugh. And the fact that somebody who can carry that weight of suffering and still have a joyful heart gives us hope. And when he's asked about it in this book, he said, they've taken so much from me. You know, they've taken our temples, they've taken our sacred texts, they've taken our religious freedom, they're taking our land and culture. Why should I let them take my happiness?

So we become the, I use different languages, we become the pollen, you know, what kind of fragrance are we going to spread through the world, you know. And if you go and work in a refugee camp or places where people are, you know, imprisoned and so forth and you go and you're really depressed, that doesn't help them. They don't want a depressed person coming in. It doesn't. You're, you know, there's some way in which actually you have a dignity of spirit and you have a freedom to choose your spirit no matter the circumstances. And that's your deep and fundamental freedom.

This is, it's so beautiful and it's so true. It seems like so many people are more interested in producing a reaction of horror or grief or guilt or whatever it is. There's, it seems like the height of selfishness to go into a refugee camp. Make sure you fill me weeping to go into the room of someone dying. What am I going to do without you to do all these things? It seems to be a, you know, actually I'll tell you, they, Mitzy Shore, who was the owner of the comedy store and one of my teachers died recently and we had a memorial and man, it's the most amazing thing to watch comedians die. Not die. Hold on a second.

We don't have a wishful thinking. Don't do it yet. We still have 30 minutes. No, the, the, uh, no, to, to see comedians talk about, you know, someone who has just passed away. And many of them, it's so beautiful and poignant and hilarious and, and offensive. It would be to a civilian. It would just be the most offensive thing you ever heard. What's really funny is a few of them managed to not even talk about Mitzy,

but to just sort of give themselves accolades for all their great success, because the memorial was actually just an excuse for them to be on stage and to like, to like talk about themselves. And so in the same way, I think that these, the, the world and the catastrophes and the disasters and the perceived disasters and the real disasters for many people have not, the people aren't even drawn to truly wanting to like help this garden, but they want to be on stage screaming about how rotten things are. That, that seems the, to me, what's going down is that people have become attached to the horror. And they wouldn't want, this is what I was thinking.

I wonder how many of these people who just despise Trump with all of their heart, if they secretly could choose between Trump being bringing world peace and there being war, how many of them would pick war? Because they would rather there be a cataclysm than they'd be wrong about somebody. That's what I was thinking. That, you know, to me, this seems like on both sides, people have become attached to being miserable. Not me though. Not you? You're not?

I'm being a little sarcastic. I think there is an attachment there. There is an attachment to the living in the world of like, well, what are we going to ran? Jack, if we have a beautiful garden where we've all tended to it and it's beautiful and it's peaceful, what are we ran, what are you going to run about? So I have, you know, when I look inside and listen to you and try to get quiet, there's a couple of things. In terms of Trump, you know, if he can make peace and denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and guts a Nobel Prize for it,

I would be very happy about that. And I also realize that many of the other policies and statements that he's been making, fuel hatred elsewhere in the world, create dissension, target and really harm vulnerable people in all kinds of circumstances, often the people who are already the most vulnerable in the society, put all the power and money flowing more directly to a very small elite and so forth. So while I would celebrate that, the thing is I'm more interested in seeing, honestly and clearly, than being attached to my opinions, which I certainly have. So I would celebrate that.

See, you're sort of talking about black and white, you love them or hate them. That's also a very, how do you say it, early, undeveloped, developmentally speaking, children either see their parents as all good when they give them ice cream or all bad when they say they have to go to sleep. There's a developmental stage that happens at some point where you realize that your parents are both good and bad. Yes. You know, and that the world is both good and bad. Now, part of what you're talking about is in the human heart. Part of it is also the current technology because we get fed or we choose,

we go to the buffet of news online very often and so forth. And the algorithms, the main goal of Facebook, Google is to capture your attention. And the easiest way to capture the attention of a human being is to scare them. Right. It's also true for politicians. You know, the whole aim of politics is to frighten the populace, to say, oh, we need a strong leader. That's a lot of how it works.

Right. So we are actually the best paid psychologists in America are working on algorithms to grab the attention from your brain, and particularly the best way to do it is the lower part of your brain through greed and hatred and fear and so forth. So when you see it go, oh, okay, that's what's happening out there. I'm not that interested in that game. Actually, who I am is so much bigger than that. Right. And I'm going to cut my news down to 10 minutes a day.

Basically, you know the plot. There'll be some new thing that happens. There's an earthquake that day. There's a law that's passed that harms people or helps people. Right. 10 minutes will get you the gist of it and why run the rest of that through your nervous system. And then instead of running it through your nervous system, say, now I'm a free agent. I'm a human being and I'm going to do what is really true to my own heart.

Beautiful. So, and then, you know, when we talk about what you do, how you respond to this world, again, you sit, you quiet the mind, you kind of listen inside, and then you see what your gift is. And my friend, Maladoma Somay, who's a wonderful West African shaman and medicine man with a couple of PhDs, you know, in his back pocket, kind of extraordinary. If anyone's interested, I think it's Man in the Water of Life might be the title of his first book on his initiation in Africa. But anyway, he said that among the Dagora people in West Africa, it's believed that every child who is born

carries a certain cargo. And I like this metaphor. It's like the cargo ships that ply the rivers in West Africa. And that your job in this human incarnation is to deliver your cargo. Wow. That you have a particular, you know, gift or something to bring. And then I'm going to read you a story that kind of helps to illustrate it. That's so beautiful.

I've heard a different version of that, which is a baby comes with a sandwich under his arm. Have you heard that one? I haven't. It's less beautiful. Pastrami or what? What is this? It depends on. Or grilled cheese.

It depends on what deli you went to before he was born. Right, of course, or when you got pregnant. So here's the story, if I can find it for you. What is the baby supposed to do with the sandwich while I'm looking? The baby, I guess the baby, you know, gives you the, that's part of what happens when children are coming to the world. Is this light? They come with a sandwich, right? I guess whoever came up with that saying was clearly hungry.

The sandwich trailing, trailing clouds of glory and mustard and ketchup or whatever it is mayonnaise. Okay. So here's the story. This Hawaiian educator named Poo Anani Burgess. She says one of the processes she uses to help in schools and communities to get people talk together is called building the beloved community. And the exercise of it requires people to tell three stories. The first is the story of all your names. The second is the story of your community.

And the third is the story of your gift. So one time she says, I did this process in our local high school. We went around a circle and we got to this young man and he told the story of his names well and the story of his community. But when it came to tell the story of his gift, he said, hey, what mess, what kind of gift do you think I get? I mean, I'm in this special ed class. I have a hard time reading. I can't do math. Why should you shame me like this?

Make me ask what my gift is. If I had a gift, you think I'd be in the special ed class. You know, here we are. And so the boy just shut down and shut up and she says, I felt really shamed. I've never wanted to shame anyone, but it can happen. You know how we are. So a couple of weeks later, she writes, I'm in a local grocery store and I see him going down one of those aisles and I decide, nope, I don't think I'm going to go that direction. And I start to turn around.

But somehow he sees me and he runs toward me, Auntie, Auntie, I've been thinking about you, thinking, you know, what two weeks I've been thinking, what my gift? What's my gift? I say, okay, brother, what's your gift? He says, you know, I've been thinking, I can't do that math stuff and I can't read so good. But Auntie, when I stay in the ocean, I can call the fish and the fishy come every time. And every time my family not have very much, I can put food on my family table. Every time. And sometime when I stay in the ocean and the shark, he come and he look at me and I look at him and I tell him, Uncle, I'm not going to take plenty fish.

I just take one, two fish just for my family, all the rest I leave for you. And so the shark, he say, oh, you cool, brother. And I tell the shark, Uncle, you cool. And the shark, he go his way and I go my way. And I look at this boy and I know what a genius he is. But in our society, the way the schools are set up or the values we have, he's rubbish. He's not appreciated. So when I talk to his teacher and principal, I ask, what would his life have been if this curriculum were gift-based?

What if we were able to see the gift in each of our children and taught around their uniqueness and gifts? What would happen to our community if we were gift-based, if we could really understand that each of us has a gift and our communities could draw on that and support that? So, you know, I'm thinking about or I'm picturing those who are listening. Because again, our society limits what we see as valuable to certain, you know, you have to have money or you have to have this kind of degree or you have, you know, to make a difference, you have to be this or that kind of person. And it's simply untrue that who you are as a human being already carries gifts. And who you are as a human being has an innate dignity, you could call it Buddha nature or true nature. Who you are as a human being knows things, knows you're connected with the world, knows it underneath no matter how depressed or cynical or even angry you are. There's some way in which you also want to be loved and you want to offer love.

Because it's innate to us and the fact is that we are loved, the consciousness and lover are the same thing. I think we were all together in the Big Bang and we miss each other, you know, or something like that. But when you get quiet, you know things much more deeply in your heart. And if there's a tremendous amount of hatred and fear and so forth, it's only because underneath that there's a tremendous amount of pain and anguish. And can you hold that with compassion? When you can, it starts to ferment and get transformed and like fertilizer. When you can hold your measure of tears and sorrow with some deep compassion say, this is the human life I've been born into and I can hold it in this way. And things start to change.

Man, this is so perfect. I am so grateful to you, Jack. You have such a gift and it's something that I wish I could stay in that place all the time. But you can't. Well, no, it's so easy to forget all this. And you're not supposed to, Duncan. That would be another ideal. And then you could judge yourself, I'm really a crappy spiritual person and I can't stay there.

I want to be, you know, Mother Teresa or something like that. You just don't look like her. And you never will. And it's just not going to happen. Plus, when Mother Teresa went into San Quentin to visit and came up to Marin to the Bay Area, before she left, she said to the prisoner, she said, no, I need to ask a really big favor, something important. She said, I want you to pray for me because I got a big job in this world and I really need help. And there's something about the kind of, you could call it humility, but really just understanding that we're all in this together.

And the idea that you get into some state and keep it that way. Mother Teresa also could get annoyed, by the way, you know. Right. And okay, now I'm going to get into this big expanded wonderful state of consciousness. I'm going to hold it and I'll just keep it there. And you can't breathe. But the thing is that the heart pumps and the lungs open and close and the body breathes and the lunar cycles change. And the tide comes and goes and the menstrual cycles and the stock market cycles.

And consciousness, the mind and heart also open and close and the eye doesn't have it open all the time. I love everything all the time. I just love it. No, sometimes you need to be quiet. Sometimes you need to tend the garden in a very simple place. Sometimes you need to wait till the sun goes down and just get interior. Sometimes you need to renew yourself and then you open up again. And sometimes you lose it and say, oh, wow, boy, I really lost it this morning.

That's what consciousness does with some amusement. And then you kind of pick yourself back up again and say, well, that was interesting. And because the ideals and the notion of perfecting yourself is folly. I mean, you're going to perfect your body. Forget it. Just look closely at it. You're going to perfect your personality. That's even more hopeless, right?

You're going to perfect your mind. Look at your thoughts. It has no pride. Right. The point, I mean, yes, you can do your therapy and do your meditation and, you know, jog and have a good day and all these things and you get a little better. But the point, I mean, you can say, OK, how's that going? But the point is not to perfect yourself, to perfect your love.

And to perfect your love means to see yourself and other beings, flawed beings that we are with the eyes of love and understand that that's it's the truth. It's the healing balm. It's the thing that makes not only the heart sing, but actually makes what we care about come alive on the earth. Jack, thank you so much. As always, this is a beautiful moment for me. I'm so grateful that I get to spend any amount of time with you at all.

Me too, Duncan. What about everyone else who wants to spend time with you? How can they find you? They can go to JackCornfield.com and there are a few things that might be interesting to the people who are listening. If they go to JackCornfield.com or to SoundStru.com, JackCornfield, I have a program called Bindfulness Daily together with Tarbrach that's 15 minutes a day of teachings and meditations for 40 days and it's really cheap.

It's like $29 or something and you can listen to this and it's your way or it's one good way of tending your own heart and then learning how to express it. Now you've got all kinds of books and other podcasts and various things like that or they can come to Spirit Rock which is the beautiful meditation center in the Bay Area. Or Paris. You're flying to Paris. Paris in London, right? Or we could go and all meet at the Dialama's house in D'Armsala or things like that.

That's also fine. But you are teaching in Paris. I am teaching Paris in London this summer as well. Yes. Great. Duncan, thank you. Thank you, Jack. It's always an honor to talk.

We have to do this again sometime. I hope so. I'm so grateful. Thank you, Jack. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for listening, everybody. If you like Jack, why not go to his website, JackCornfield.com.

Take one of his classes, read one of his books, go deeper. Much thanks to Squarespace.com for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. And much thanks to you for listening. I'm so lucky that I have this job and it couldn't happen without you. Keep up the good work. You're going to be fine. I love you. I will see you real soon.

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