Healing Self, Healing Society

Healing Self, Healing Society

Opening Remarks

In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate, prayers and peace be upon all of our prophets.

Before I start, I want to thank Mayor Greg Fischer, who I met after 9-11. I actually came to Louisville and spoke, and we spent a day together, and I really envy, in a good way, the Arabs have two types of envy: an envy where you want the person you envy to lose everything, and an envy where you want the same thing that they have. So it's the second type of envy that I'm talking about.

They actually have two different words for the meaning, but I envy the city of Louisville that it has a mayor like Greg Fischer, who's committed to compassion and reintroducing compassion as an idea, a political idea.

The Breakdown of Love in Society

A lot of people might be familiar with Aristotle's theory of stasis and the reason why revolutions happen, and we're living in revolutionary times, places like the Middle East, Crimea, other places. The reason revolutions happen, according to Aristotle, is that philia breaks down, love breaks down in a society, and people lose the compassion for the other.

And this is one of the reasons why Philadelphia, which was the original capital of the United States, is the city of philia. It's the city of brotherly love, and so to reintroduce that into politics I think is really important. It's not spoken enough.

I want a little caveat. If anybody's on Prozac, they might feel better leaving. I don't want to depress anybody, but I want to, before you can really talk about healing, you have to look at the diagnostics to understand what's going on.

Historical Warnings and Human Habits

A very influential author for me is Arnold Toynbee, and he wrote a book over 50 years ago called Change and Habit, the Challenge of Our Time, and in that book he argues, and he's worth listening to because in 1947 he wrote an essay about a civilization when it's up against the wall against another civilization, has certain strategies, and one of them is zealotry and fanaticism, and he warns about the Muslim world and actually identifies three places where he felt, in 1947, that he felt serious problems would emerge in the future: Afghanistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, and that was in 1947.

One of the gifts that historians bring is that they look at the future with hindsight because they know the past so well they can see and prognosticate about what's going to happen, but he wrote this book, Change and Habit, arguing that as humans we have certain habits that are very dangerous, and they're not instinctual. They're

literally habitual, and the worst he felt was the habit of going to war, that it's a choice, that there are other alternatives, and peoples have done other things.

War is not the only solution. It's actually always a failure. It's the last refuge of the incompetence, violence, but he also felt there were other aspects.

One of them was tribalism or nationalism, and this idea of not seeing us as a human family, as seeing us as us and them, and this is a very dangerous habit of the mind, and if we're not trained to change these habits, and this is why virtue theory is based on altering habits. It's adopting new habits, and the human being can change, and it's not nature versus nurture. The two work together, so this idea of nature versus nurture is something also that's problematic.

The Prophet of Our Age

Another one of my favorite people is Soren Kierkegaard, who was another visionary, somebody who really saw the future. If you haven't read Kierkegaard, he's an incredibly humorous writer, wonderful wit. He said things to make people laugh while he was crying inwardly, but one of the things that he said was that one solitary person cannot help or save an age. He can only make it clear that it is on its way to a downfall.

And this is the Cassandra problem, because if people know Greek mythology, Cassandra warned, not in the Iliad, but in a play, warned the Trojans not to bring in the horse, but she had the gift of prophecy, but she was cursed with that nobody would believe her.

The Purpose of Human Existence

The purpose of human existence - I'm going to speak from my tradition. This is the festival of faiths, so I'm going to speak from my tradition, but I think this could be shared by many peoples.

Cultivation of the Earth

"It was God who brought you into being from the earth and settled you therein to cultivate it."

So, Imara is cultivation, and it indicates a lot of different things that humans do, and this is why anybody who's involved in cultivation of the earth in a positive way is fulfilling a divine purpose, whether they believe in the divine or not, that they are fulfilling a divine purpose, and this is often lost on religious peoples that are working from a provincial tradition and not recognizing that everybody is here for a reason.

Worship

The second is, the purpose is actually to worship, to adore the Creator, and this is obviously from the Abrahamic traditions:

"I only created unseen beings and human beings to worship me."

Stewardship

And then, finally, stewardship, the idea of being caretakers of what we've been given. This is called the khalifa, and the khalifa is one who stands in place, and the Quran tells us:

"God said, I'm placing in the earth a steward."

And a steward is one who acts on the behalf of another, and so this is divine stewardship. And then, David, we're told in the Jewish tradition:

"David, we have made you a steward over the land, judge fairly between people, do not follow your desires."

It's a really important point about this, because stewardship is corrupted by following desires, and lest they divert you from this divine plan.

And so, the question is, how are we doing as stewards of the earth, if this is really one of the reasons why we're here.

Taking Vital Signs of Our Planet

So, just to look maybe at some of the signs, I trained in the medical profession, and we always take vital signs, and we also assess orientation. So, you ask somebody, what - I was working at the time when we didn't have a president, there was that little interregnum period, where we didn't know who was president, was it Bush or Kerry, so we couldn't really ask them who's president.

But, you ask a patient, who's president, you ask them, where are you, who are you, so you orient them to time and place, so they, you can see, do they know.

The Appearance of Corruption

One of the verses in the Quran says:

"Corruption, and the word is fasaad, has appeared on land and on sea, because of what people have earned by their acts, to make them taste some of what they have done, that they might turn back."

So, the idea of when we do things in the world that are dangerous and negative, then we get this repercussion, and the reason for that repercussion, it's actually a mercy, because it's letting you know that you need to turn back, that you're doing something wrong, and so you cannot go out and sow corruption without having the corruption come back at you in what, in economic terms, is these externalities, for people that know that term, these are the negative consequences of economic production.

So, if you have a factory, the factory doesn't intend to pollute the river, because it just wants to produce whatever it's producing, but that's a negative externality. You also have positive externalities.

The Earth Will Speak

So, one of the signs of these latter times, when it's gotten too much, the Quran says:

"Man will cry out and say, what is happening to the earth? On that day, it will tell you all, because your Lord inspired it to do so."

Understanding Fasad (Corruption)

So, the word in Arabic that's used in the Quran, which is fasad, is rottenness, spoiledness, corruption, decay, decomposition, putrefaction, depravity, wickedness. So, it has, it's used for, like when food goes bad, the Arabs say, it's gone bad, but they also use it for a person when they've gone bad. So, something has gone wrong.

And pollution is the undesirable state of the natural environment being contaminated with harmful substances as a consequence of human activities. So, the state of being polluted, it's also defilement, and this is also traditionally a religious term that was used.

Classical Interpretation of Environmental Signs

Now, the traditional interpretation, which is from the 7th century of one of the great Quran interpreters, Abdullah ibn Abbas, about this, he said the signs of corruption, of fasad, on land are fires, soil degradation, the lowering of the water tables, and among the signs of corruption in the sea is the diminution of the fish. So, the fish begin to disappear.

So, this is 7th century, and you will actually find in Chinese manuscripts from over 2,000 years ago, the problems of pollution. These aren't new problems, and societies have had negative effects on the lands that they were in.

Endangered Species

And many of the animals are suffering. And I've mentioned this before, but one of the intriguing things to me about endangered species is it's not the cockroaches that are going extinct. It's not the rats or the mice. They're actually thriving. But what's going extinct are these animals that historically in many traditional cultures, they use them as names for their children. They're the animals that embody noble spirits, the eagles, the lions, the tigers, the wolves.

One of the real tragic aspects, I don't know if people might know about the doctrine of signatures, but there's a traditional belief in medicine that things that look like things are good for them. For instance, in the Arab tradition, cashews are very good for memory, according to the Arabs. If you look at a cashew, it looks almost like a hypocalamus, which is where memory is located in the brain.

So if something looks like, if you cut a carrot, you can see an eye in the carrot. So carrots are considered good for eyes. Well, there's an Asian belief that the rhinoceros, you can use your imagination, is good for people that would otherwise use Viagra. Unfortunately, the rhinoceros, an extraordinary animal, is literally being wiped out because of this desire for people to use this aphrodisiac.

Virginia Gray Henry published a wonderful book, which was written in the 10th century, about the animals having a lawsuit against humanity. So they actually come to court and demand that the human be taken to task for wreaking so much havoc in the natural world. It's worth reading.

The Crisis in Our Oceans

But then we move from the land to the sea. And I could talk, there's a lot of other things happening, and many of you are aware of that. You know about the mountaintops in Kentucky and many, many other things. But I don't want to, I just want to give an overview here. But the ocean's also amazing, what we're seeing in the oceans.

The Gulf of Mexico, the repercussions of that are just overwhelming. The people that are suffering to this day, there's a lot of immune diseases that have occurred. A lot of people really suffering. And the BP cleanup is far from over. I mean the effects of that are massive on the planet. So oil is another major problem.

And then this is obviously again, the animals just really suffer when it comes to this. So and then burning off a lot of the oil, which is also another real source of pollution.

Glacial Melting and Fish Depletion

It's interesting that right now that we just, this literally is May 13th, that a glacial region's melt is past the point of no return, according to NASA. So these things are happening right now. And our scientists are confirming these things. And it's overwhelming for people. People, it's very difficult to process these things.

When I first read that 90% of the fish were gone, I thought that was so, it just seemed so crazy. And I sat next to a man on an airplane who happened to be a marine biologist. And we started talking. I asked him about that. I said, listen, I read this in the Guardian. Is this true? He said, well, it's between 85 and 95%. So we kind of took a middle number in there. I said, what do you think about that? He said, keeps me up at night.

Ocean Acidification

One of the things, and this is really important about the acidification. So I want you to just see, the ocean acidification, which is a result of the pollution. We have acid rain. Our oceans are becoming more and more acidic, which is very interesting. And I'm going to get to that, why.

Our emissions of carbon dioxide are causing our climate to change. And too much CO2 in the atmosphere will also alter the very chemistry of our oceans. When carbon dioxide dissolves into seawater, it forms an acid. Just a small rise in the acidity of seawater, combined with climate change, may leave coral reefs, the most biodiverse habitats in the ocean, struggling to survive. But that's just touching the surface.

By the end of the century, acidification could leave some types of plankton unable to form their shells. And plankton is at the foundation of nearly all marine ecosystems. If key species of these tiny organisms are lost, everything else that depends on food could also start to disappear. Carbon dioxide pollution threatens to change life in our oceans out of all recognition within the span of a single human lifetime.

The Starfish Crisis

Environmental officials in California say there's been another highly troubling report about what's going on in the Pacific. The scientists call it the sea star wasting syndrome. That's the technical name. But something is killing the starfish, and they don't know why. They've been dying in record numbers on the west coast, including parts of Washington state all along the coast down to California.

In the waters off Monterey Bay, an urgent expedition is underway. This is the hunt for a killer. It's happened so rapidly that some species are just missing. Marine biologist Pete Ramondi is searching for clues to an epidemic named starfish wasting disease, infecting waters from Alaska to southern California, causing millions of starfish like this one to fall apart and melt away.

Our group is looking to try to map the timing of the onset of the disease and locations of the disease up and down the coast so it will help us point to causes. The die-off has decimated the starfish population in this cove. So later he asked him, you know, is this the canary in the coal mine? He said it very well could be.

The Rise of Jellyfish

We'll get back to the jellyfish, which are very interesting, but here's just some numbers. People don't know, but a bluefish tuna, when it's fully formed, is worth literally tens of thousands of dollars on the sushi market. And so these fishermen go out looking for it. They don't find them anymore, these giant ones, because the overfishing is so immense that they're not allowing the fish to actually reach their full maturity.

So what's happening, what's interesting is that it's creating an ideal environment for jellyfish. They're the only ones that are thriving right now in the ocean. The big fish stocks fall 90 percent since 1950, according to the National Geographic.

So, you know, the jellyfish are thriving, which is really fascinating. I just, I read this book, Stung, and it was just, it was a really devastating book written by, she's the foremost expert on jellyfish, and jellyfish are fascinating. They're toxic.

What I find interesting is the ocean in traditional cosmology is consciousness, which is why we, Robert Frost has a wonderful poem about why we look out at the ocean. The land varies more, but we still want to look out at the ocean. And we can't look out far, and we can't look in deep, but that doesn't prevent us from looking at the ocean.

The ocean is, in cosmology, it's consciousness. And the fact that all these great fish are dying off, the whales and the dolphins, but the jellyfish, this spineless, brainless predator, all it does is consume. It's just a spineless, brainless consumer.

And that, to me, is just such an amazing statement about human consciousness. And are the jellyfish taking over our minds, our consciousness? Are we becoming human jellyfish?

And believe it or not, all over, they're having jellyfish warnings because they're really thriving. And the woman who wrote that book, Stung, says it's way past. This was a wake-up call a long time ago. And they literally have shut down aircraft carriers because there's so many jellyfish pods out there.

The Modern Doctrine of the Consumer

So now, what are the roots of this crisis? At the heart of it is the modern doctrine of the consumer.

Now, what's interesting to me is that the consumer, in Old English, meant the devil. He was called the consumer because he consumed the souls of people. And consumption was a name for the wasting disease in the 19th century. It's what killed people slowly.

And so this whole idea of, I shop, therefore I am, shop until you drop, the one with the most toys at the end wins. This idea of just shopping, this was actually done to us. And I would recommend people reading William Leach, The Land of Desire, because he takes a period from the 1890s until the 1930s and shows how our society

was turned into a consumer society. It was conscious. It was done because they could produce a large number of goods and they wanted people to buy those goods.

So we have to understand that this was something that was done to us. That people were not always consumers. That I've lived in cultures where they recycle everything because it's just simply, that's what they do. When I lived with the Bedouin, they use everything. Literally, they don't throw away anything. And now they're starting to get these throwaway items. And so you're seeing garbage everywhere now in the Sahara, just plastics.

In fact, Mauritania, and I'm proud to say this because I'm an honorary consul of Mauritania, but Mauritania outlawed plastic bags. It's a one-year prison sentence to use plastic bags. And the reason that they did that is because so many of the goats, the livestock that they depend on, were dying. And they didn't know why until they found out they were eating the plastic bags out in the desert. And they were getting these intestinal diseases and dying from intestinal obstruction.

And so the government outlawed the use of plastics. And again, this is where a government makes a choice and does something.

The Historical View of Consumption

So in the 1530s, consumer was one who squanders or wastes. So it had a negative connotation. The Quran says:

"People boast, I have squandered great wealth."

And this is conspicuous consumption.

The War Economy

Another major problem is the war economy. And this is where we, especially in the United States, where we have, you know, we talk about budgets and making cuts and welfare mothers. And nobody wants to talk seriously about this obscene armaments.

We were warned by Eisenhower as he was departing after spending his life serving the military and working with the military industry. He warned us about this new phenomenon, the military-industrial complex. And we have to recognize that the type of budgets that this country has for military spending are obscene. They are obscene. And it's money that could be going to much, much better things.

This is the result of the aerial bombing that happened in Germany. And this is why we have to end war as a species. We have to recognize it is an obsolete way.

Clausewitz, the great war strategist from Europe, said that war was just the extension of politics by other means. So war is a political act. Because in politics, you try to get things done. When things aren't getting done through

the traditional means of politics, then you use violence to get them done. It doesn't work anymore. If it ever worked, it's arguable. But it does not work.

This is a scene from Syria. So it's going on now. It's still happening. And these are the budgets. If you look at education compared to military spending, it's insane. I mean, Pakistan spends so much on the military. Some of the Gulf states have budgets. Saudi Arabia has a budget that's the seventh largest military budget after India, a country of 19 million people. Why? Because they're subsidizing Western industry. It's as simple as that.

They don't use it. When the Gulf War came, the Americans came and other people. So why are these obscene budgets being used?

The Prophecy About Oil

And then we also don't want to deal with this, but this can't go on either. Our prophet actually predicted that the time would come, he said, when the liver of the earth would vomit forth. And he said that it would be like pillars of gold and silver. And the one who kills on the day of judgment, he will come and say, this is the reason I killed for. And then the one being killed will say, this is the reason I was killed.

And the wars, if you read Daniel Yergin's book, The Prize, the 20th century was wars over oil. And oil is the blood of our technological society. It is the blood. And it's more precious than human blood for a lot of people.

If the average earthling lives like the average American, we will need three earths to supply the consumption. It's impossible. It's untenable. It can't go on.

Signs in the Self: Health Crises

Now, just moving to the self, what are some of the signs?

Autism Epidemic

Autism in 1970, and people can argue that this is from diagnostics and things like that, but we know from 2012 to 2013, no, something's happening here. We had one in 10,000 diagnosed. I mean, the first diagnosis of autism was in the 1950s, but now it's one in 50 in the United States. I mean, we have to really think seriously about what's happening.

Now, if you look at the definition of autism, a pervasive developmental disorder characterized by severe deficits in social interaction and communication, by an extremely limited range of activities and interests, and often by the presence of repetitive stereotype behavior. This about defines everybody under 30. I mean, we have to really think about what's happening to our young people that are growing up with this technology, repetitive stereotypical practices, losing the ability to interact socially.

The Obesity Crisis

Another major problem that we have is obesity. The Quran, and this is in all our traditions because gluttony is

one of the deadly sins, but it reminds people:

"Eat and drink, but not to excess. God loves not the extravagant wasters."

And one of the signs of the latter days, according to our tradition, is that obesity would become manifest.

These are the average BMIs around the globe. You can see Africa and a lot of Asia. The Asians don't eat a lot of the food we eat. They're still on traditional diets. So China is behind other places, even though they're becoming rapidly a serious industrial nation, but they still eat cosmologically.

If you look at Chinese food, the things about Chinese medicine, which I studied, and my sister's an acupuncturist, and one of the things I always thought that they lacked diet. They never talk about diet. If you go to a Chinese doctor, they don't focus on diet. At a certain point, I realized it's because in their culture, they didn't need to. People just simply ate well by the very nature of the food they consumed.

These are the world's fattest countries. We're number two. So Americans are proud of being number one, but Kuwait takes that. So there's McDonald's in Arabic, the golden arches. As you come into Mecca, the first thing you see is the golden arches. It's a very troubling sight for me.

But this is the civilization that we're living in, where on the one hand, we've got this incredible scarcity, and on the other hand, we have this overconsumption. It's so it's just so imbalanced.

And there's a tradition that we have from our prophet that a believer will not go to bed satiated knowing his neighbor is hungry. And that's any neighbor of any faith.

The Diabetes Crisis and Acidosis

Diabetes is a really important problem now that's globally. This is extraordinary, what's happening. But I want to point out, in traditional cosmology, what happens inside of us happens outside of us.

If you want to know why the oceans are acidic, it's because we're becoming acidic. Literally, we are becoming acidic. The world manifests our states, and that's why knowing our states is so important. Because how we are, how we behave, what we do, all of this is going to be reflected in the world. The macrocosm can only reflect the microcosm.

And so, the acidosis of the oceans is related to the acidic levels that are happening. People are moving away from the natural state, which is an alkaline state, and moving towards an acidic state. And this is what happens when, by 2050, one-third of Americans will have diabetes at current rates.

And if you look, there's a relationship between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. There's a relationship, chemically. So you'll find a chakra, a type of chakra understanding in certain Indian Sufi parikhas and things

like this. So there's always been that kind of eclecticism, but I come out of a spiritual tradition that really says that it's good to take a serious tradition and to practice it.

And for me personally, there are certain things that I have to do every day. I think the only thing that I really incorporate outside of my own tradition is I've been practicing qigong for some time now and derived a lot of benefit from it just physically because I was having a lot of energy problems.

But I think we really, we need to have time with ourselves alone where we can just disengage and turn off all these things. I have a friend of mine, he's an imam in Washington, DC, who has a box in the front of his house. And when everybody comes in, they have to put the cell phones in the box, and they're not allowed to use any cell phones inside the house. And he's a Sudanese man. And I thought that was really an excellent practice.

I think a lot of us need to disengage from the madness of these constantly being, you know, texting and getting called. We don't have to answer the phone every time it rings. You know, you really don't.

Question on Entitlement

Question: I have a question regarding, I think, a challenge that we face in the U.S. and it's very pervasive in that we have a sense of entitlement that is much stronger than a lot of places you find in the world. And what would be your response in sort of a spiritual sense to that sense of entitlement that I really don't have to do anything to change because I have earned what I have earned and I've worked hard for that.

Response: Yeah, well. The, you know, when you go to other places, like I was just in West Africa. I was in Senegal and Mauritania. And, you know, I think it's really important for us to get our kids over to places to do work in other communities and places to see the reality.

I'll give you an example. I had a friend of mine, I teach a course at a junior college nearby with a friend. And she was having trouble controlling this class because they were just, you know, they're college kids behaving like high school kids. So I suggested that she bring in a friend of mine who was a leading member of one of the dominant African-American gangs in L.A., went to prison for murder, spent several years in prison. And he converted, transformed his life in prison. He came out. He's actually a teacher now.

So I suggested that she bring him into the class. And she did. And she just said the transformation in these students was amazing with him telling his story. And, you know, I just, I tell them, this junior college, if you were in Kabul in Afghanistan, this would be the Harvard of Afghanistan, you know. And we have people in a lot of countries that literally commit suicide because their scores are too low to get into the colleges, you know.

So we just, it's amazing the opportunities. If you look at when people come here from places like African countries, the first thing they do is enroll in junior colleges. You know, it's just so amazing for them to be able to get an education that doesn't cost very much.

And so I think part of it is really trying to inculcate this early on. Narcissism was, you know, it was, I think it was designated in the 1970s in that famous book, The Culture of Narcissism. You know, he saw something that nobody was seeing at the time, how narcissistic our culture was coming.

I think the selfie is just such an indicative aspect of our civilization. This idea of just taking your own picture. You know, I've never, I've never carried a camera. I've never taken pictures. I don't have any pictures of myself. I've been all over the world. I've been in the, you know, I'm at the Pope, you know, and had a picture with the Pope. And, you know, I've just never had that urge to have these pictures.

You know, my wife, because some people send us things and she wants to put them up, but I said, I don't want them on the wall. You know, I don't want to do that. And, and I know, I don't get that thing about pictures. You know, like I, for me, this is where I take my pictures. I, and I try to be present with people and remember them as best I can.

And I learned this from the Bedouin, because what really struck me about the Bedouin that I lived with is they were so present. And I would meet a Bedouin that I'd met 10 years before. He would remember what we talked about, the conversation we had. And, and they don't take pictures because they know.

And so this whole obsession with images, the New York Times recently reported that the average American sees more images in one day than a 19th century English person saw in his entire lifetime. And these images are flooding our hearts. We're losing that, just that space. You know, the imageless space.

You know, one of the things when Trajan went into the holiest of holies, the thing that really disturbed him was there was nothing in there. You know, and he wanted the Jews to explain like, where's your idols? Where's your images? It's an empty place. And, and, and so that emptiness, we have to have that emptiness to, to, to be able to, to contemplate.

And I would recommend reading Neil Postman's incredible book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, and that second chapter about why the Decalogue would have prohibited images. Because he argues that if you want people to understand abstractions, you have to watch out for the images that you give them. And, and God wants us to know something, a concept that is so abstract.

And, and this is why image-based cultures become debased very quickly. So I really think the images are, are harming us immensely. The, the pornographic images that are going into the minds of these young kids, it's really terrifying because they can't get these things out. You know, they won't be able to get those images out of their mind.

And I know this from, I, I have people that have converted to Islam or have these problems, and they've told me when they, just when they open their prayer, images start flooding their, their, and, and they want to get rid of them. So it's really difficult. Spiritually, it can be done with a lot of work, but you have to be careful what you put into your heart.

And I once, I was with a Bedouin, we'd gone from the, the, the desert to Nouakchott, and there was a TV in the room, and it was on, and he was looking the other way. And he was a man in his thirties, and he was a student of knowledge. And he was looking the other way, and I was with a Libyan, Abdelrazak Mokhtar, he's the ambassador in Turkey now for Libya, but he asked him, have you ever seen television?

He said, no. He said, don't you want to look at it? And he said, I heard that it has foul things on it, and I don't want to let it into my heart. And, and, you know, that level of being is just, where are those people?

Just very briefly, in the Jewish community, I would echo this part about how important travel can be, and meeting people from other cultures and places. We have the commitment, it's called birthright, to send all of our children to the land of Israel. And we really press this, and we make it literally affordable to the point of practically free to get every, every one of our kids to go to Israel.

They meet Israeli kids, you know, who also have cell phones and text. They text in Hebrew, they think that's really cool. But what they also find out is that these kids go into the army after high school, all of them, okay, and they serve their country. And these kids have an expectation that they probably aren't going to be able to go to college, necessarily, because not everybody gets to go to college, because there's just not enough slots. So you have to work hard if you want to do that.

And they'll grow up in a world where they're not going to be able to afford a home. And they'll be very lucky, but probably not to have a car. And, you know, and their, their, their sense of commitment to their country is, is something that's very different. And when these kids come and visit ours, you know, there's this recognition of, you know, you're not entitled. You earn things every day, you know, and, and that the things that you choose to earn are the things that really matter. And they maybe are not those material things. Maybe they're things like respect. Maybe they're things like, you know, a future and a family and things like that.

Closing Reflections

The Gift of Stars

We don't see the stars anymore. Plato said God put the stars there to show us the order of the heavens that we would desire to bring the order down into ourselves. So what happens when we don't see the heavens anymore?

And I would really like to see a city, you might think of this, Mayor Fischer might think of just having an hour, you know, once a month, where all the lights in the city are turned off on a clear night so that people can actually go out and see the heavens. Just see the heavens. It's amazing. Stars are amazing.

I'm the chair of the planetarium, which if you think about it for a second, is a sad reality, which is that in cities, we built places where you can see the stars because we project them. And they do it geocentrically. Nobody points that out, that when you're in a planetarium, they don't have you revolving around the heavens. They have the heavens revolving around you. It's the ultimate experience. So they have to do a Ptolemaic planetarium.

Please visit us at the planetarium so you'll know what to look for in the sky.

Poetry of the Sacred: What Worship Is

This is a poetry of the sacred contest that the center put forward as part of this year's festival. The poetry of the sacred context is run annually through the Center for Interfaith Relations Institute for Contemplative Practice. Poetry can be thought as the language of the soul, and this contest encourages poets to awaken their reader to the meaningfulness and beauty of life.

People entered this contest from 34 different states and four different countries. From these entries, a winning poem and three honorable mentions were chosen, and received both monetary prizes and was to be published in Parabola Magazine in the winter issue of 2014.

The poems were then judged by Hamza, which he hated having to do, and we've selected one which you will now read. So, you know, just to preface this, I really, they were all very interesting poems. This one was the one that hit me the most, just in terms of my talk and, and, and what I think the festival of faith is, is about.

What Worship Is by Red Hawk from Arizona:

At dusk, Cousin John is driving home when a rabbit darts in front of his car and is thrown, tumbling and spinning into the tall grass beyond the shoulder. Now here is where John emerges from the pack of ordinary brutish humans and assumes a form we barely know.

He stops the car, pulls off to see what harm he has done. I don't know anyone else who would have stopped. He finds the rabbit broken and thrashing, not yet dead in the tall grass, goes to his trunk for a hammer, returns, and finishes what chance started.

Then with the claw part, he digs a shallow hole and puts the body in, returns, drives home. Heavy with sorrow, feeling remorse, having performed his humble sacrament to make right what has gone wrong in us, we have forgotten who we are and what we must do.

Thanks a lot.

Final Words

So just a few other sort of follow-up things. We'll be concluding now, but Hamza Yusuf will be in the foyer. We had a long conversation about the pronunciation of that word. There'll be a book signing there, as well as a reception with light food and drink, and we want to invite all of you to join us there.

Again, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Jack Shoemaker this evening at 7 and 9. It's really a program I'm not going to miss, and you really shouldn't. It's going to be fantastic.

And we will conclude, as we are in all of these sessions, with a moment of silence, and I encourage you in this silence to try to take in some of what Hamza has shared with us and think in the ways that many of your

questions did about how we can take these ideas and make them into spirit in ourselves and in practice in our lives.

Thank you for joining us. Thanks a lot.'re dealing, what we're using oil is like sugar. We're giving the earth diabetes. It's becoming acidic. Our soil is becoming acidic, and our oceans are becoming acidic, because we're using cheap energy.

Sugar is a very quick energy for our bodies. Oil is a very quick, easily digested energy for our machines, and for heating our homes. And so, this results in this acidic state. And this is what diabetic acidosis is related, as far as I, this is my belief, that it's related to the acidic state of the planet.

The Crisis of Human Trafficking

Another major problem, the UN estimates, there are more slaves today than any other time in human history. And most of it, 80% is sexual slavery. And this is another really serious problem, the problem of lust, that we're really not dealing with in our society. I really think we're in a deep denial about the serious problem of lust in this culture.

The Pornography Industry

And one of the most important thermometers for it is pornography. The size of the industry now is 57 billion worldwide. It's a massive industry. These are sound numbers, people. These are not exaggerated numbers. These are taken from one of our top universities, 12 billion in the U.S.

Porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises. U.S. porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.

If you look at the websites, 4.2 million, 12% of total websites now. Daily internet searches, 68 million, 25% of total searches. Monthly porn downloads, 1.5 billion. Websites offering illegal child pornography, over 100,000 websites.

And for those of you who don't know, there's a deep web where there's just the darkness that goes on on the deep web. And then 8 to 16-year-olds who have viewed porn online in our country, 90%.

The Connection to Exploitation

Gluttony, overconsumption. The Quran says:

"Those who squander are like siblings or the brethren of the demons."

One of the things that we don't think about is the relationship to what we do and this darkness. People that are watching pornography are supporting human trafficking because many of the women in these films that are

done here in the United States and outside the United States are women in sexual bondage.

They're not, you know, you have these girls that appear on CNN getting their degree at Duke and saying how much they love being a porn star. Those represent a very, very, very tiny percentage of the actual women engaged in the porn industry, which degrades both men and women.

Planned Obsolescence

Another thing is planned obsolescence. I would recommend, I'm not going to go through this, it's a very interesting thing, but the story of Stuff with Annie Leonard, many of you have probably seen it. How did they get us to jump on board this program? It's definitely worth watching.

Well, two of their most effective strategies are planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. Planned obsolescence is another word for designed for the dumb. It means they actually make stuff to be useless as quickly as possible, so we'll chuck it and buy a new one. It's obvious with things like plastic bags and coffee cups, but now it's even big stuff, mops, DVDs, cameras, barbecues, even everything, even computers.

Have you noticed that when you buy a computer now, the technology is changing so fast that in just a couple of years, it's actually an impediment to communication? I was curious about this, so I opened up a big desktop computer to see what was inside, and I found out that the piece that changes each year is just a tiny little piece in the corner. But you can't just change that one piece because each new version is a different shape, so you've got to chuck the whole thing and buy a new one.

So I was reading industrial design journals from the 1950s when planned obsolescence was really catching on. See, this is the point, that this was done consciously. How fast can they make stuff break that still leaves the consumer having enough faith in the product to go out and buy another one? It was so intentional.

But stuff cannot break fast enough to keep this arrow afloat, so there's also perceived obsolescence. Now, perceived obsolescence convinces us to throw away stuff that is still perfectly useful. How do they do that?

Well, they change the way the stuff looks. So if you bought your stuff a couple of years ago, everyone can tell that you haven't contributed to this arrow recently, and since the way we demonstrate our value is contributing to this arrow, it can be embarrassing.

Like, I've had the same fat white computer monitor on my desk for five years. My co-worker just got a new computer. She has a flat, shiny, sleek monitor. It matches her computer. It matches her phone, even her pen stand. She looks like she's driving in Spaceship Central, and I, I look like I'm at a washing machine on my desk.

Fashion is another prime example of this. Have you ever wondered why women's shoe heels go from fat one year to skinny the next to fat to skinny? It's not because there's some debate about which heel structure is the most healthy for women's feet. It's because wearing fat heels in a skinny heel year shows everybody that you haven't contributed to that arrow as recently, so you're not as valuable as that person in skinny heels next to you, or more likely in some ad. It's to keep us buying new shoes.

Advertisements and media in general plays a big role in this. Each of us in the U.S. is targeted with over 3,000 advertisements a day. We see more advertisements in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime, and if you think about it, what's the point of an ad except to make us unhappy with what we have? So 3,000 times a day, we're told our hair is wrong, our skin is wrong, our clothes are wrong, our furniture is wrong, our car is wrong. We are wrong, but it can all be made right if we just go shopping.

Media also helps by hiding all of this and all of this, so the only part of the materials economy we see is the shopping. The extraction, production, and disposal all happens outside of our field of vision.

Bringing the Background to the Foreground

It's important to bring backgrounds into the foreground so people understand, because when we look, this is one of the things that painters do so effectively. Van Gogh, when you look at the shoes, he painted several different, but if you look at the famous boots that he painted, you'll never look at a pair of shoes the same way if you really contemplate what he did, because he was taking something that's in the background and bringing it to the foreground, and it's very important for religious leaders, for artists, for others to do that, to let people know what's in the background, those things that we're not seeing, the things that are hidden.

One of the things that our prophet told us is that there would be people towards the end of time like locusts in their consumption.

Martyrs to Consumption

Every year we have martyrs to consumption. There are people that die on these buying sprees. Every year this happens in this country. People literally die because they're trampled to death because of these things, but another aspect that we don't think about is just garbage production.

One of the professors that was at my university, he taught environmental studies. He had zero garbage production in his home, and he used to take his students to his home to show what he did. In other words, people can actually live reducing their garbage to a great extent, but everything is packaged, totally unnecessary packaging, and this leads to these landfills. It's beyond belief what's happening, and again, who suffers? The animals.

They eat this stuff. Everybody lets off those helium balloons. Those helium balloons go to the ocean. They eventually go down, and turtles swallow them. They get the obstruction. So these simple things that people are doing without thinking, and now we have the great Pacific garbage patch, which is bigger than the size of Texas. It's a huge, massive swell of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that because of the tides and currents, it all tends to go to this one area.

The Angels' Question About Humanity

Now, there's a verse in the Quran:

"The angels ask God, and obviously this shouldn't be taken like a literal type conversation, but the angels ask God, when God created man in our tradition, the human being, how can you put someone therein who will cause damage and bloodshed when we celebrate your praise and proclaim your holiness?"

So the angels were asking this question, and there's a reason why the commentaries give. I'm not going to go into that, and you can certainly see that the incredible amount, over almost 200 million people were killed in the 20th century, and we came into the 21st century with a lot of hope, but it begins with 9-11, and then these terrible wars that have affected us.

But the response that God made was, I know what you don't know about the human being, and this is what we have to keep in mind.

Remembering Human Excellence

I put these pictures up because these are my personal teachers. These are people that I studied with, and there's a verse in the Quran that says:

"We elevate those who do not want to sow corruption in the earth or to be elevated."

And this is what we have to remember as a species, that we have people in this world that remind us of who we really are. We're not jellyfish. We're not mindless, spineless consumers. We have human hearts. We have the ability to know infinity. We can conceptualize it. No other species can do that. We are something amazing, and we have to remind our young people of that.

Lost in this world of false idols, of images of women that are so degrading. They are so degrading, and I don't need to name names because you know them. You see them on the television. You see them on the covers of magazines. This is not who we want our young girls to grow up emulating.

We don't want our young men to grow up emulating the lowest forms of life on this earth, the cockroaches, the rats, the jellyfish. We want them to soar with the eagles and to remind people, and that's why as far as I'm concerned, as religious people, the religious leadership, we have failed so dramatically. We have failed our young people.

We have the halo effect, and then we have the clay feet syndrome. They don't see people walking their talk. They don't see people living it. They don't see the gift of sanctity in their beings, in their presence, and that's what we need to remind ourselves that we have to become these people. We have to be these people that have graced this earth reminding us this is not what it's about.

We're here for a short temporal time, and we have work to do, and our work is in discovering ourselves and in serving others. This is the work. We're not here to consume. We're not here to indulge ourselves. We're here for something much greater, and we constantly need to be reminded because we're a forgetful species.

Signs From the Animal Kingdom

When the elephants came to honor the man who had looked after them, and some of you may have seen this, but they walked for over a day even before he died and then held vigil in front of his house. These are signs for people that reflect.

The animals pray for us. According to our tradition, the fish in the ocean pray for the righteous. Our prophet said, the one who has reposed and the one others have reposed from them. They said, who are they, oh messenger of God? And he said, those who live righteously, when they die they have reposed, and those who live corrupting, when they die, people, trees, rivers, and animals have reposed from them.

That's the choice, and I really want to drive this point home because I think this is one of the most important verses for me in the New Testament. I'm in a great Christian city of Louisville. Traditionally, you see churches everywhere. There was a love of Christianity, which is a great faith, and there's an incredible amount of beauty and truth. Despite the history, we tend to forget that the history of religions is the history of their ego, not of their soul.

Wrestling Against Spiritual Wickedness

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." (Ephesians 6:12)

People that created planned obsolescence, this is from spiritual wickedness in high places, and we have to recognize that we cannot support these people, that there are people out there that are actively engaged in harming this world. They're doing it because they're complete slaves of their own desires, and you cannot be a steward if you're filled with your own egoistic desires. You can't.

That's why one of the things that we have to remember, the Catholics divided the sins into the hot sins and the cold sins. We tend to forget the hot sins are easy to recognize, gluttony, wrath, and lust.

Dorothy Sayers reminded us that when a society loses its spiritual center, sex is always the spiritual outlet. This obsession with sex, which is also related to the rape of the earth, to the way we treat Mother Earth, because of our degradation of our objectification of women. This is much more a male problem than a female problem. Pornography is largely a male problem, but not entirely.

We have to remember there are hot sins and cold sins, but the cold sins are often praised in our society. The sins of avarice, the sins of envy, the sin of pride, the great sin, which is a sin against one's excellence, and then the sin of sloth, which sloth is not laziness.

Dialogue and Questions

Rabbi's Response: The Illusion of Separation

There's an illusion. It's a grand illusion that's been perpetrated upon us that we have perpetrated upon ourselves. It's an illusion that we are somehow separate from the earth, that we are somehow separate from ourselves. We are all Adam, one human family, and we are all part of Adama. We're all part of the earth.

What makes us think that there's a barrier somewhere between my feet and the wooden floor upon which they sit, between the floor and the foundation upon which it sits, between the earth and the stone which holds it all and us firmly here in place? Where does a tree end and the roots begin? Where do the roots merely become tendrils, and the tendrils become one with the earth, which nourishes and sustains the tree, which nourishes and sustains us?

What makes us think that there's a difference between the air we breathe and the one who breathes it? Breathe in. Breathe out. The air enters us. It fills our lungs. It enriches our blood, and it gives us life. We breathe it forth, and we return it to its source as trees and plants breathe in our breath, enriched and sustained by our souls, which have been added to this breath of life.

What makes us think that there's a difference between Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and myself and yourself, a difference between all the children of Adam, all the children of God, all of us precious parts of this earth, Adama, which we must all share? We are one, you and I. We are one, all of us here in this room. We are all the children of one creator who has placed us here to help build a world that is one, as God is one.

The Illusion of Sameness

And there's an illusion that stands side by side with the first, that in order to be one, we must all be the same, that to be different from one another makes us somehow other. We've been taught this truth, as if it were truth, for so long that we've come to accept it, and to feel that those who are like ourselves are alike, and we've come to fear those who upon the surface of their likeness seem unlike us.

It's as if we see in the mirror only a reflection of ourselves in order to be comfortable, and that is an illusion. What we must seek instead is a sameness, not in reflection, but in the soul. This is an illusion which we who have gathered here today can often fall prey to, ourselves.

We gather as a people of faith, in common cause, in common action, with common hopes and dreams through which we seek to find common elements and common paths. This is a well-meaning illusion, that we are all the same beneath the surface, that we strip away the differences of language and culture, and we find that we are all the same beneath the skin, and we worship the same God in essentially the same ways.

And since there is much that we share in common, this is a particularly useful illusion, and one which we become very adept at maintaining. In Hebrew, we're commanded to seek shalom. In Arabic, it's called salam. In English, we strive for peace.

As Jews, we seek to heal the brokenness of our world through acts of tzedakah. In Arabic, it's called tzaka. In English, we call it charity, from the Latin word caritas, which means charity. In our prayers as Jews, we seek rahamim. In Arabic, rahim. In English, we strive for compassion.

And because we share many of these essential traits, which make us human, it's easy for us to imagine that we are all the same, and to dream of a world of peace and charity and compassion, when we will all sing with one voice in a single chorus, instead of inspiring the harmony of our many voices, or a symphony of the many instruments creating together a song of oneness that we can all share.

Celebrating Diversity

In the Mishnah, a collection of ethical writings now some 1,800 years old, we are taught that humanity was created with a single adam, the descendant of one human being, to demonstrate God's greatness. When a human being mints a coin in a press, each coin is identical. But when the ruler of all, the Holy One, blessed be, creates humanity in the form of adam, not one is similar to the other.

The lesson of this Mishnah comes to teach us that diversity is intended, and an intended part of the divine plan. And this is the wondrous part. Our many faces, our many languages, our many faiths, this too is part of God's plan for us here on earth.

We are children of one human family. We cannot be other from our brother. We need not be the same to feel a kinship with our sisters. We are all the children of one creator of us all.

The path towards a compassionate society requires of us the courage, I think, to tear the veil of these twin illusions from before our eyes, to see one another both as we are and as together we might be. We are one human family, many minds, many voices, many hands to heal the world, and we can work together as one and build a compassionate community and a world of peace.

Question on Spirituality and Food

Question: Sheikh Hamza, my question is about spirituality and food. And the Quran talks a lot about eating what's halal, but that's usually coupled with the word tayyib. Halal being what's legal. And maybe, can you comment on what you feel tayyib would mean in our current culture? And then also, what do you feel is the spiritual effect of consuming artificial foods like high fructose corn syrup, and all these processed things that are added to foods and packaged? What's the spiritual effect of eating artificial food?

Response: Well, just to use another tradition, in some traditional Buddhism, the chef in the monastery had to be enlightened. They didn't let just anybody into the kitchen. And in the Islamic tradition, there's a whole tradition about food preparation and the intention of the cook.

My teachers, the people that cooked always made the intention that the food was a healing. One of the things that's really interesting in our culture, they don't teach grammar anymore, so people use transitive verbs as intransitive verbs. But when you go to a restaurant, they say enjoy. I guess you could make it intransitive, but you usually enjoy something. But here, it means the food. But they just say enjoy.

In traditional cultures, they never would say something like that. They would say, like, salud, with health. In the Arabic culture, they say, with health and well-being, which reminds us of the purpose of the food. It's not to enjoy. Enjoyment is part of it. I mean, it's wonderful that food is so enjoyable, but that's not the reason why you're actually eating it. That's why the glutton eats.

But somebody who's serious about maintaining their health, they eat for health. We're literally digging our graves with our teeth. I mean, in our culture, we are literally killing ourselves with the food we eat.

I would say that all traditional peoples ate with just a knowledge of what food was about. And this is why the kisharat tradition, the halal tradition, that you have to - there's a whole - Native Americans took permission in many of their traditions. They took permission from the animal in the Islamic tradition, the Jewish tradition.

There is actual - you have to do it in a way - in our tradition, you're not allowed to kill an animal in front of another animal. And if you look - I mean, it's arguable that it's unethical to eat meat today, unless you're on a farm where you're - and there was an interesting article about a man who decided for one year - I didn't see the film, but he did a documentary where he only ate what he killed for one year.

And when he would buy the sheep, one of the sheep farmers told him, he said, I think I'm going to call that Zeke. And he said, no, no, don't name them, because you'll get attached to them. But he chose to name them. What he said was the thing that struck him most was the gratitude he felt to the animal when he ate it.

And in our tradition, there's a belief that the animal wants to be - it wants to be energy for good deeds. Because by becoming part of a righteous person, it's elevated in its state from an animal that doesn't have free will, that only behaves according to its nature, to part of a being with free will. And the animal hates to be used for foulness or for misdeeds.

And so that whole cosmology, which might sound romantic, but it was real. And I met people that still live like this. And my wife does this. She cooks with that intention. If I cook, I cook with that intention. When I serve food, I cook with that intention.

I'll just tell you one quick story. I have a friend of mine who's a connoisseur of tea, and he'll only drink certain teas. And in England, PG Tips is like the worst tea. And he went to a friend of mine's house, and I know both of them. And it was tea time, and the English take this very seriously. And he only had PG Tips in the house.

And so he said, God, he's going to know this is horrible tea. So he goes in, and he told me that he made a prayer over the tea. And he said, oh God, make this delightful for my friend. And he went in, and he poured the tea, and he told me that he drank, and he said, you know, that's the best cup of tea I think I've ever had.

And there's a reality to these things. We don't realize just the power of intention. Nia in Arabic, which means intention, also means seed. It's the seed of the thing, why you do something. And so many of us do things without intention. There's no intentionality. And intention, I know in your tradition, in our tradition, intention is everything, why you're doing something. And constantly asking yourself, why am I doing this? To check our intention.

Question on Cultivation vs. Stewardship

Question: When you spoke of the purposes of human existence, I realized I've kind of mushed together two of those three, meaning the cultivation of the earth and stewardship. And I wonder if you could distinguish for us a little bit, develop that idea of what are the ways in which we cultivate the earth, and how do we steward it?

Response: Well, the stewardship would be more about sustainability, whereas the cultivation is more about how we're using it for our needs. So the stewardship is more about making sure that what we're doing in our cultivation is not harmful.

Question on Practical Reality

Question: What you guys are talking about is beautiful stuff, but it's not very realistic. Like, I can't see myself finding a person to buy a goat from so that I can harvest the goat and show gratitude to the goat after I kill it and eat it. I don't know who to buy a goat from, and I don't know where to buy affordable organic food from, because I went to the whole food store the other day and spent $30 on nothing. And finding it, you know, throughout the community is a real challenge. So I want to know how -

Response: I think you're bringing up a really excellent point. It's the incredible discrepancy we have between much of, like, the fair trade movement, which I feel a lot of it is upper-middle-class luxury, the ability to assuage our own personal guilt and things like that. But that's not why I would promote it, because I think it's important to take positions about these things.

In terms of disenfranchised communities, underprivileged communities, you know, the disparity, which I was highlighting in that picture of starving kids with these completely overweight kids. I mean, one of the problems that we have in this country is that processed food is incredibly cheap to buy.

And the reason that - See, all processed food came out of war. The Americans in World War II - I mean, margarine came from Napoleon. They needed butter for these troops. So we tend to forget that processed food is actually a direct result of war, because they needed to feed these armies as they were moving.

And so in World War II, they learned how to do this stuff to a degree, scientifically, that they'd never achieved before. And they could keep long shelf life. And they realized, you know, because this military-industrial complex, the same people that are supplying that during wartime are the people that are selling, you know, the food during peacetime.

They realized that this is a great way - We don't have to worry about perishables, because it's - Nothing will perish. They lose a lot of money. Except for us. Because when you take - You know, it's amazing how many - The reason it's so expensive at Whole Foods is because they lose a lot of that food. And this is the problem. And farmers know this.

So one of the really important movements is urban homesteading, where people are beginning to put gardens on their rooftops. African-American communities in Detroit are beginning to do this. And it's a really interesting movement, where they're bringing fresh food to disenfranchised communities and having - Some of the schools are doing it. This is really important.

So I think Louisville, it would be really useful to bring some of these people in to show them how to do it. We can grow our own food, and it actually is realistic. People can have gardens. In World War II, they had what were called victory gardens, where unlike these recent wars, where they encourage you to go out and spend, they used to encourage you actually to save and recycle.

World War II was a great era of recycling. People were recycling everything. And, you know, if you go to third world countries, people wear sandals made out of used tires because it's a really good heel, a sole, for the shoe. And so these are the things where we need to get creative in our communities and not - You know, so many of our communities in the inner cities, they can go and get - It's easier to get liquor than it is to get food.

And it's much easier to get - You can't get vegetables in a lot of these inner city stores. It's all processed food. They get corn out of the can. And so that movement, I think, is a really important movement that's starting to take place.

Connection to the Earth

You mentioned earlier, we're called Benu Adam, you know, in the Jewish and the Muslim tradition. And Adam is Adama, you know, or Udma in Arabic is the topsoil. And in our tradition, the reason he was called Adam -

And really, it's the first Adam had the male, female, and then it splits into the two of Adam and Eve. So the first Adam, the first creation was the human being, you know, which was -

But the reason it's called topsoil is because we're told that Prophet Muhammad said that God took white soil, black soil, brown soil, all the different colors of the topsoil in the world and put them into Adam so that all these colors would be reflected in his creation from all the soils of the earth.

We have the same story. We probably borrowed from you. Well, you know, look, the Prophet Muhammad, you know, people say that Islam, a lot of it's just from Judaism. But the Prophet Muhammad, the Quran says, you didn't make this stuff up. You're not an innovator from the message. You're bringing the same message.

So much of it is in Jewish tradition. We know that. And the Jewish tradition is part of our tradition. And there are many - I mean, all my tafseers are filled with midrash and the Gomorrah story. It's all in the Islamic tradition. They never shied away from that. I mean, we had rabbis that became Muslim. There was interaction between rabbis and Muslim scholars. And so these are all - This is just hikmah, you know, hokmah. So this belongs to everybody.

Question on Human Trafficking

Statement: I want to thank you for what you said about human trafficking as a 21st century outrage. An estimated 20 million people are affected by it. I want to say the good news about it. There's an organization called SOAP, S-O-A-P, Save Our Adolescents From Prostitution, headquartered in Columbus, Ohio.

I am part of the group. And we go before large sporting events like the Super Bowl, NCAA, Kentucky Derby, World Equestrians. And we meet in hotels all over the place to provide literature, photos, and soap with an 800 number to go in every hotel room in Louisville, in Columbus, in New York, in L.A., wherever.

We did it. I participated twice in Louisville. We did it before the truck show in Louisville. And 90 percent of the hotels accepted the material. The good news is that it's working in lots of places. During the Super Bowl in New Jersey, 16 teenage girls were rescued because of SOAP. And 400 volunteers covered New York and New Jersey.

In Indianapolis, Super Bowl, two teenage girls were rescued. Multiply that over. In Detroit, the auto show girls rescued. In Columbus, Ohio, the Arnold Schwarzenegger bodybuilding girls were rescued. The point is there are groups working. We need more people involved. There's a worldwide war against girls and women around the world.

Response: And also, the reason why these are all events that involve large numbers of men, that's where they literally bring them in, in cars. And these are the places. And this is something that the Romans, for people that

are familiar with the Colosseum, the prostitutes were always brought at the Colosseum. And people would get very excited and go down and abuse them.

But I think we're doing such a poor job at educating our young men into honoring women. And that's something I have five boys. And I constantly bring that home to them. Never dishonor a woman. That women, that they're gentle beings. They're easily seduced. And men know this about women. Because women are trusting. And when a man tells her certain things, he has the keys to her heart very often. And too many wolves out there really prey on that knowledge.

I mean, there's books out there of how to seduce women that are now best sellers. Thank you very much.

Question on Daily Practice

Question: So I see these slides and I hear these facts and they're very disturbing, of course, and they should be to my soul. And so my question is, what kind of daily practice can I do? I do things with my deeds. I own a farm and I am trying to help that part of the world. But in my, a daily practice that you would suggest that could help, because I do believe in intentions, being able to actually help these problems. But I'm up for suggestions.

Response: Well, first of all, we have to honor our small farmers. Because I'm fortunate to be in Northern California where the slow movement, slow food movement started, that we have local farmers markets that we can go to on a regular basis. So we get all our food from local growers.

I would much rather support them than support, even though Whole Foods has some pretty enlightened leadership there, but I would still rather support the local growers as much as possible. And I think that's something really important.

And people, you were talking earlier downstairs just about this loopy feeling about being connected to the land. But the truth is, farmers suffer immensely. The highest suicide rates in India are from the small farmers. They get them into these usurious debts. And we had, people remember the 80s crises, the highest rates of suicide were among small farmers.

We're losing our small farmers, and agribusiness is taking over. And this is what I'm talking about, the rulers of darkness of this world. A lot of these people, and there's good people in that. I'm not in any way Manichaean. There's good CEOs, there's decent people working, but these are soul-destroying institutions that we've set up.

And so I'm not in any way, I'm not a revolutionary in that I don't believe in, if we just can kill the evil ruler, suddenly everything's going to be fine. It's not like that. And there's good people in Washington, DC. There's good people in government. There's really amazing police. And then there's people that abuse these powers.

And some of them, and there are really dark, demonic people that we have termed psychopaths, and about one out of 22 Americans is considered to be psychopathic, and there are functional psychopathic people, often in CEO positions that don't have moral compassion. This is social science in our culture.

I would recommend, there's several books on this, one of them is The Sociopath Next Door. A lot of people think sociopath, the serial killer. No, there are sociopaths that are surgeons, there are sociopaths that are CEOs, and they really don't they don't think like other people. They just don't feel remorse about harming others or harming the earth or whatever.

So in terms of a practice, I can't, I wouldn't even want to advise you on that. I think people, you know, we're living in an age that enables us to experiment with religions. This is in some ways unprecedented. In other ways, we've always had eclecticism and interaction of traditions.

Muslims and Jews lived together for centuries in places like Morocco and Sarajevo, and so there's always been these, and we know that different traditions adopted methods. St. Francis was influenced by the Sufis when he got back. He adopted some of those practices, and certainly, you know, the Muslims of India found the Hindus doing certain things that they thought were interesting.

So you