Transcript for:
Compassion, Environmental Challenges, and Human Responsibility

in the name of God the merciful the compassionate prayers and peace be upon all of our prophets the um little caveat before I start uh I want to thank mayor Fisher who I met him after 9/11 I actually came to Louisville and spoke at and we spent a day together and I'm 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 that they have so it's the second type of envy that I'm talking about um they actually have two different words for the meaning but uh I envy the city of Louisville that it has a mayor like Greg fiser who's committed to compassion and reintroducing compassion as an idea political idea uh 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 uh the Middle East Crimea other places the uh the reason revolutions happen According to Aristotle is that filia breaks down love breaks down in a society and 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 filia it's the City of Brotherly Love and so to reintroduce that into politics I think is is really important it's not SP en enough the uh I want to a little caveat this if anybody's on proac um they might feel better leaving um I don't want to depress anybody but I I want to before you can really talk about healing you have to look at the Diagnostics uh to understand what's going on a very influential author for me is Arnold Toby and he wrote a book over 50 years ago called change uh and habit the challenge of our time and in that book he argues and and he's worth listening to because in 1947 he wrote a essay about uh a civilization when it's up against the wall against another civilization has certain strategies and one of them is is zealotry and fanaticism and he warns about the Muslim world and actually identifies three places where he felt in 1947 that he felt uh 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 what's going to happen but he wrote this book change and habit arguing that that as humans we have certain habits that are very dangerous and they're not instinctual they're they're literally habitual and and and the worst he felt was the habit of going to war that this is 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 um it's the last Refuge of the incompetence violence so uh and but he also felt uh 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 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 so and it's not nature versus nurture uh the two work together so this idea of nature versus nurture is is something uh also that's problematic so I just want to say that uh I'm going to talk about is is it um okay another one of my favorite people is sa kirkgard who was another Visionary somebody who really saw the future if you haven't read kirkgard he's incredibly humorous writer um wonderful with um he he says that um he said things to make people laugh while he was crying inwardly but um he 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 C Cassandra problem because if people know Greek mythology Cassandra warned not in The Iliad but but in a 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 so in terms of this isn't uh switching here maybe we're meant to contemplate this a little [Music] longer yeah technology is such a yeah okay now we're okay thanks so the purpose of human existence I'm going to speak from my tradition this is the Festival of fa so I want to speak from my tradition but I think this could be shared by many people the uh there's a there's a verse uh in the Quran that tells us that one of the reasons why we were created was for the cultivation of the earth that the the verse says that it was God who brought you into the being from the earth and settled you therein to cultivate it so is cultivation and it it's it it indicates a lot of different things that humans do and this is why any 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 uh religious peoples that are working from a provincial tradition and not recognizing that everybody is here for a reason uh the second is the the purpose is actually to worship to adore the Creator and this is obviously from the abrahamic traditions that I only created unseen beings and human beings to worship me 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 that 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 uh in the in the Jewish tradition that David uh we have made you a steward over the land judge fairly between people do not follow your desires is a really important point about this because stewardship is corrupted by following desires and L 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 so just to look maybe at some of the signs um I trained in in the medical profession uh 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 uh who was president was it Bush or Cary so we couldn't really ask them who's president but um you ask a patient who's President you ask them where where are you um who are you so you Orient them to time and place so they you can see do they do they know um one of the verses in the Quran says that corruption and the word is facad 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 when when we do things in the world that are 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 seow Corruption without having the corruption come back at you in what in economic terms is this 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's it just wants to produce whatever it's producing but that's a negative externality you also have positive externalities so one of the signs of uh these the latter times when it's gotten too much the Quran says that men will cry out and say what is happening to the Earth on that day it will tell tell you all because your lord inspired it to do so so the word in Arabic that's used in the Quran which is fad uh in is rottenness spoiledness corruption decayed decomposition putri action depravity wickedness so it has it's used for like when food goes bad the Arabs say F it's gone bad but they also use it for a person when they've gone bad so something is is has gone wrong and ution 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 be defilement and this is also traditionally a religious term that was used now the traditional interpretation which is from the 7th Century of one of the great Quran interpreters abdah abath about this he said the signs of Corruption of facade on land are fires soil degradation the lowering of the water tables and among the signs of corruption in the sea is the DI diminution of the fish so so the fish begin to disappear so this is 7th century and you will actually find in Chinese manuscripts from over uh 2,000 years ago uh the problems of pollution these aren't new problems and and societies have had negative effects on the lands that they were in but in my own I'm coming from the West Coast one of the things that we've seen is a lot of fires and and I don't know if people know about the fires that are happening all over the planet uh Spain Europe has a tremendous problem with with fires but we see a lot of fires and you can see the increase that's happened uh over time uh here just from from 1980 to 1989 to 220 and we lose firefighters uh people go in one of the reasons is because of the climate change that's happening so it's increasing this risk and then uh wildfires are projected to burn more land as temp temperatures continue to rise so you can see the projected increase here on on the west uh coast of uh on the west side of our country uh another aspect is the air pollution and it's extraordinary how many people suffer uh around the globe from from air pollution Mexico City has a huge problem with asthma um we have actually High uh mortality rates in in major cities uh because of the pollution we're actually finding also a lot of contamination in our bodies um so this is a major problem um this is China where a lot of people are forced to wear masks because the pollution gets so bad um and then another aspect here is soil degradation which a lot of people are unaware of this I think people here I mean I'm obviously speaking to a lot of people that are aware of these things but a lot of people are not aware of the real crisis that we're seeing in soil degradation soil is a very thin layer uh it takes Millennia to produce top soil and it can be lost very easily and I mean obviously we have Hydroponics we have other ways of growing uh plants plants actually don't need soil to grow and and hydroponics they they began studying hydroponics in the 17th century but it would be an immense loss to uh to our species because we have uh incredible problems with water as well and this is another aspect of the desertification which I saw firsthand in the Sahara I lived in the Sahara Desert and I saw firsthand literally the encroachment of uh of the Sahara Desert is pretty overwhelming to see it to see whole cities engulfed in sand um so overall this is this is what we're seeing and this is what our scientists are telling us we don't need apocalypse IC prophets now to talk about these things we have our scientists um telling these and it's it's a it's an important reminder that the Earth is not just for human beings one of the verses in the Quran is that it's God who spread out the Earth for all living creatures it literally says and the Anam are it literally means all those that sleep uh so it's all sleeping creatures it's a place where you should feel safe and secure it's a place of repose you can't sleep unless you feel safe or secure and many of the animals are suffering and and I've mentioned this before but one of the Intriguing things to me about endangered species is it's 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 they're the animals that embody Noble spirits uh the Eagles the the Lions the Tigers the Wolves uh one of the real tragic aspects I don't know 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 um 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 hypo calamus which is where memory is located in the brain so if something looks like something you if you cut a carrot you can see an eye in the carrot so carrots are considered good for eyes well there's a Asian belief that the rhinocerous I you can use your imagination um is good for uh for people that are uh would otherwise use Viagra and so unfortunately uh the rhinoceros extraordinary animal is literally being wiped out because of this desire for people to use this aphrodesiac um um uh Virginia grey 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 and demand that the human be taken to task for wreaking so much havoc in the natural world um it's worth reading 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 mountain tops in Kentucky and and many many other things but I don't I don't want to I just want to give an overview here but the ocean also uh amazing what we're seeing in the oceans um the Gulf of Mexico the the repercussions of of that are just overwhelming the the people that are suffering to this day there's a lot of uh immune uh diseases that are that have occurred a lot of people really suffering and um and the BP cleanup is far from uh from over I mean the the the effects of that are massive on on the planet so oil is another major problem and then this is obviously again the animals just really suffer uh when it comes to this so and then burning off uh a lot of the oil which is also another real source of solution it's interesting that right now um sorry that um we just this literally is May 13th that a glacial regions melt is past the point of no return according to Nassau so the these things are happening like right now and our scientists are confirming these things and it's 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 I thought that was so it just seemed so crazy and I 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 we kind of took a middle number in there and I said well what do you think about that he said keeps me up at night uh one of the things and this is really important about the acidification so I I I want you to just see um whoops is this it's going to work for me uh okay so I'm not getting the the actual video CU this had video I guess they didn't hook up the video for It Anyway the ocean acidification which is a result of the pollution we have acid rain we have our oceans are becoming more and more acidic which is very interesting and I'm going to get to that why um 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 sea waterer it forms an acid just a small rise in the acidity of sea water 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 them for 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 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 Sy 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 our report tonight from NBC's Miguel aler in the waters off Monterey Bay an urgent Expedition is underway this is the hunt for a killer it's happening so rapidly that some species are just missing marine biologist Pete Randi 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 Cod so later he asked him you know is this the canary in the coal mine he said it very well could be um I want to we'll get back to the jellyfish which are very interesting but here's just some numbers uh people don't know but a Bluefish tuna when it's fully formed is worth literally tens of thousands of dollars on the the sushi Market um and so these these uh fishermen go out looking for they don't find them anymore these giant ones because the over fishing is so uh immense that they're not allowing the fish to actually reach their full maturity so um what's happening what's interesting is that it's creating an ideal environment for jellyfish uh they're the only ones that are thriving right now in the ocean um the Bish the big fish stocks fall 90% since 1950 according to the National Geographic so um 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 they're toxic what I find interesting is the ocean in traditional cosmology is 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 um and we can't 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 uh in cosmology it's Consciousness and and the fact that all these great fish are dying off the the whales and and the Dolphins and but the jellyfish this spineless brainless Predator all it does is consume it's just a spineless brain consumer and and that 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 um and 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 wakeup call a long time ago and it's they literally have shut down uh aircraft carriers cuz there's so many jellyfish pods out there um so now what are the roots of this crisis at at at the heart of it is the modern Doctrine uh 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 and and consumption was a name for the wasting disease in the 19th century it's what killed people slowly and so this this whole idea of I you know I shop therefore I am shop until you drop the one with the most toys at the end wins this idea of of just shopping this comes this was actually done to us and I would recommend people reading William leech the land of Desire because he takes uh a period about from the 1890s till 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 there that's what they do uh when I lived with the bedan they use everything literally they don't throw away anything and now they're starting to get the these uh these throwaway items and so you're seeing garbage everywhere now in the Sahara just Plastics in fact morania and and and I'm proud to say this because I I I'm an honorary console of morania but morania out lawed plastic bags it's a one-year prison sentence um 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 they were getting these intestinal diseases and dying from intestinal obstruction and so the the government outlawed the use of plastics and and again this is this is where a government makes a choice and does something so um you know in the 1530s consumer was one who squanders or wastes so it had a negative connotation the Quran says that people boast I have squandered great wealth and this is the this is conspicuous consumption I'll get back to this but another major problem is the war economy and this is where we as a 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 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 are obscene they are obscene and it's money that could be going to much much uh better things this is the result of the aerial bombing that happened in Germany and this is why we have to end uh War as a species we have to recognize it is an obsolete way uh K Claus Fitz the Great War strategist from Europe said that war was just the extension of politics by other means so war is is is 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 um 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 um some of the Gulf States have budgets Saudi Arabia has a budget that's it'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 they didn't they didn't they the Americans came and and other people so why why are these these obscene budgets being uh used and then we also we we don't want to deal with this but this can't go on either um our Prophet actually predicted that the time would come he said when the liver of the Earth would vomit forth and 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 jurgen's book The Prize the the 20th century was Wars over oil and 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 we cannot if we now if the average Earthling lives like the average American we will need three Earths to supply uh the consumption it's impossible it's untenable it can't go on now just moving to the self what are some of the signs autism in 1970 and people can argue that this is from Diagnostics and things like that but but we know from 2012 to 2013 no there something's happening here we had one in 10,000 diagnosed I mean the first di diagnosis of autism was in the 1950s but now it's 1 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're growing up with this technology repetitive stereotypical practices losing the ability to interact socially another major problem that we have is obesity the Quran and this is in all our traditions because gatan 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 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 uh Africa and a lot of Asia the Asians don't eat a lot of the food we eat they're still on traditional diet so China is is behind other places even though they're becoming rapidly a a serious industrial nation but they still eat uh cosmologically if you look at Chinese food one of the things about Chinese medicine uh which I studied and and and I and my sister's an acupuncturist and one of the things I I always thought that they lacked diet they never talked about diet if you go to an a Chinese doctor they don't focus on diet at a certain point I realize 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 um these are the world's fattest countries um we're number two so Americans are proud of being number one um but Kuwait takes that so there's McDonald's um in Arabic the golden arches as you come into Mecca the first thing you see is the golden arches so it's very troubling site for me but this is the this is the civilization that we're living in where on on the one hand we've got this incredible scarcity and on the other hand we have this overc consumption it's it's it's so uh it's just so imbalanced and there's a there's a a tradition that we have from our Prophet that a Believer will not go to bed satiated knowing his neighbor is hungry and and that's any neighbor of any faith diabetes is a really important problem now that's globally these These are this this 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 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 which is an alkaline State and moving towards an acidic State um and this this is what happens when um by 250 onethird of Americans will have diabetes at current rates and and and if you look there's a relationship between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons there's a relationship chemically so you'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 uh as far as I this is my belief that it's related to the the acidic state of the of the planet another major problem we the UN estimates there're 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 and and one one of the 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 these are sound numbers people these are not exaggerated numbers these are these are taken from at one one of our top universities 12 billion in the US porn revenue is larger than all combined revenues of all professional football baseball and basketball franchises us porn Revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC CBS and NBC if you look at the the websites 4.2 million 12% of total websites now daily internet search is 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 um and then 8 to 16y olds who have viewed porn online in our country9 % gluttony over consumption those who squander are like siblings of of or the Brethren of the Demons one of the things that we don't think about is the relationship to what we do and and 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 they're not you 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 another thing is planned obsolesence I'm I I would recommend I'm not going to go through this I it's it's a very interesting thing but there the story of stuff with Annie Leonard many of you are probably seen how did they get us to jump on board this program so enthus definit worth watching well two of their most effective strategies are planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence planned obsolescence is another word for designed for the dump 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 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 discuss 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 5 years my coworker just got a new computer she has a flat shiny Sleek monitor it matches her computer matches her phone even her pen stand she looks like she's driving in spaceship Central and I I look like I got 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 era 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 US is targeted with 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 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 go when when you look at the shoes you know if you he painted several different but if you look at the famous boots that he painted with the string 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 Locust in their in their consumption every year we have Martyrs to consumption there are people that die on these these buying sprees every year this happens in this country people literally die because they're you know they're trampled to death in in because of these things but another aspect that we don't think about is is just garbage production and and the fact one of one of the professors that was at 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 to to a great extent but everything is packaged totally unnecessary packaging and this leads to these landfills um it's beyond belief what's happening and again who suffers the animals there you know they eat this stuff when you you know everybody lets off those helium balloons those helium balloons go to the ocean they eventually uh go down and turtles swallow them they get uh the 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 tides and and currents it all tends to go to this one area now there's a verse in the Quran that Angels ask God and obviously this is shouldn't be taken like a literal type conversation but the Angels asked God when when when God created man in in our chur 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 and there's a reason why the commentary is given I'm not going to go into that and and you can certainly see that the incredible amount we over almost 200 million people were killed at the hands of other people in in the last century the 20th century and we came into the 21st century with a lot of Hope but it begins with 9/11 and 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 and this is what we have to keep in mind I put these pictures up because these are my personal teachers these are people that I studied with and there's there's a verse in the Quran that says that we Elevate those who do not want to seow corruption in the Earth or to be elevated and and 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 is 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 cuz 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 that's what we're here to do and to remind people and that's why as far as I'm concerned as religious people the religious leadership we have f failed so dramatically we have failed our young people we have the halo effect and then we have the clay feet syndrome they 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 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 are forgetful species when the elephants came to honor the man who had 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 the the the fish in the ocean pray for the righteous our Prophet said the one who has Repose and the one others have Repose from them they said who are they oh messenger of God and he said those who live righteously when they die they have Repose and those who live corrupting when they die People Trees rivers and animals have Repose from them that's the choice and I I really want to drive this point home because I think this is one of the most important verses for for me in the New Testament and I'm in a great Christian city of Louisville traditionally um it's it's it's it's you see churches everywhere you know there was a love of of Christianity which is a is a great faith and there's incredible amount of of uh Beauty and Truth uh despite the history we tend to forget that the history of religions is the history of their ego not of their [Music] soul but 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 people that that created planned obsolescence this is from spiritual wickedness in high places and 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 and that's why one of the things that we have to remember the the Catholics divided the sins into the hot sins and the cold sins and we tend to forget you know the hot sins are easy to recognize gluttony wrath and and lust and and Dorothy sers has reminded us that when a when a society loses its spiritual center sex is always the spiritual Outlet so 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 and this is much more a male problem than a female problem pornography is largely a male problem but not entirely but we we 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 right the sins of Envy the sin of Pride the Great sin which is a sin against one's excellence and and then the sin of sloth which sloth is not laziness aidia in in the traditional understanding sloth was spiritual laziness you a CEO could be out there working a 120 hour work week and he's still slothful because he's forgotten his soul or she's forgotten her soul and this is what we have to remember Robert Frost said some say the world will end in fire some say in ice from what what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire but if it had to perish twice I think I know enough of hate to say that for Destruction ice is also great and would suffice it's the hot sins and the cold sins that are going to kill us and we have to really take this seriously and it's our spiritual Traditions that address this root problem it's not complicated the problem is not complicated thank you very much [Applause] [Applause] that was really remarkable thank you it it opened a lot of eyes both educationally and um particularly your ending in in our recognition of the the spiritual that Lies Beneath that uh just to remind everyone as we come out of the sort of the highness of that uh encounter uh the plan from here uh is that we have about an hour to spend together and um I was asked to do just a very brief kind of response myself um which is basically really just wending some time for you to be thinking about questions that you'd like to ask because what we'd like to do with most of this time is just have a an open uh dialogue uh with hamsa um on some of the things that he's presented today and maybe some questions that you've had in your hearts and things that you wanted or things that you wanted to share so um I'll do about three or four minutes here of my own kind of response uh to these challenges from a specifically Jewish perspective and um I I have questions I could ask I was scribbling notes um but um we'd really rather uh listen to yours so be thinking about the uh questions you might POS okay all right there's an illusion it's a Grand Illusion go out here I go down it's been perpetrated upon us see it down there 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 nourish nishes 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 shik hamu yusf 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 ad 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 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 like 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 isn't illusion which we have GA we we who have gathered here today can often fall prey to ourselves we gather as a people of faith in common cause and 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 Sedaka in Arabic it's called Saka in English we call it charity from the Latin word karatas which means caring in our prayers as Jews we seek Rim in Arabic Rim 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 in the mishna a collection of ethical writings now some 18800 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 and a press each coin is identical but when the ruler of all the Holy One Blessed Be creates Humanity in the form of a dam not one is similar to the other the lesson of this mishna 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 I'm not sure how much that balanced but I thought that it it said a lot of the things thank you for the one person who was clapping but we're not clapping we're not clapping what I was hoping would come of that though um was a recognition of a lot that we share and a lot of the wisdom that we've learned that frankly we would not have learned if it were not for for an Islamic scholar sharing us The Wonder of his particular tradition's View and I hope that you like I were listening and saying you know there's wisdom there and sometimes the wisdom is wisdom that I don't find in my own sacred scripture and sometimes it parallels so much that it's almost difficult to believe that we didn't have the same hands writing them but that the key here is that there's a wisdom beneath all of this and that when we listen to each other and learn from one another we can see perspectives we would not have seen otherwise and sometimes learn lessons that that were waiting to be taught to us now I have a nice list of questions I'm going to ask one and then you're on okay so you're thinking and Mustafa has uh some people who are going to be around uh with microphones will uh uh give you the opportunity there's someone waving back there for an opportunity for for you to uh get in line for um the place I thought I'd start just to give them a chance to consider is um with a wisdom of the Jewish tradition a midash a legend it's from goal Raba it says that God created Adam as the last of all the creations and then toured Adam throughout all creations so that we would truly appreciate the Wonder of the gift that was being given us and then God said this is given to you as a gift care for it for if you do not there will be no other to be received right and there's sense there I think that we've lost perhaps of the the religious and spiritual obligation to the earth I feel like we get caught up in the scientific conversation of you know global warming you know or or climate change and arguing back and forth about how fast and human deliverance and it just occurs to me that polluting the Earth is a bad thing you know and that if we if if we just recognize it's not complicated right that beneath that that there's a spiritual thing and that's what I really got I think mostly from well for me one one of the things that you know every time you go into these places where they give you these throwaways and then you throw them away you you just have to you know this kind of conten thing where think if everybody did that and and it became a universal fact because not everybody's doing it like there's places where it's amazing how little garbage they produce yeah right and Aboriginal I lived with bed uh spent a lot of time with bedin and Aboriginal people and it's a nice word because it means you know in La Latin it's the idea from the original people you know AB origin you know it's out of the the the first people and the word bedu which is what they call themselves in Arabic means the first people and this is why in you know some TR they call them the First Nations the first peoples that that we there's great things that come I mean I'm glad Shakespeare's in the world mhm I'm I'm glad um m is in the world roomi uh I think a lot of people you know feel like the world would be less than it is without Bach or without and some people without you know Lady Gaga you know or I mean there's whole slle of people that just get something out of of the artist you know so but all of the things that we we love about civilization the question we have to ask ourselves now is it all worth it right in terms of what civilization is doing to us as a species and and that is that's I think that's a real question because we have to somehow learn what Aboriginal peoples have known how to live sustainably on on the planet and and and they have great things to teach us but they're messed up too so it's not because I I know in firsthand just living they have their problems they're grappling they they a lot of Aboriginal peoples do not have a way of dealing with modernity when it's introduced and an example of that for people that know uh the work of Jerry Mander not the political word but the writer um he he wrote a book called the four Arguments for the elimination of television and in that book one of the studies they did in Canada they had the the for Good Fortune of being able to watch a uh Inu Native American village as electricity was introduced and they studied it to see what would happen so they basically determined it took 5 years to destroy their their traditional culture once television five years and I saw that firsthand in morania because I lived with bedwin I was in a town that had no electricity every night it was literally chanting the whole village was chanting the Quran it was like bees buzzing and it was one of the most extraordinary thing and then you had the sky see I think one of the reasons why we've lost our spirituality is because of artificial light and it's interesting we call it artificial light because if you look up at the sky in the Sahara Desert and I've been reduced to tears on many nights just look the the heavens declare your glory I've been in the Sinai I it's it's breathtak it's breatht and there's a reason why those guys fled to the desert you know because if you want to be close to the heavens that's as close as you're going to get we don't see the Stars anymore you know 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 fiser 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've built places where you can see the stars because we project them but at least then and they do it geocentric 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 it's the ultim they have to do a talic planetar please visit us at the planetarium so you'll know what to look for in the sky okay do we have some uh uh questions waiting my question is about uh spirituality in food um and uh the Quran talks a lot about eating what's Halal but that's usually coupled with the word Hal being what's legal and maybe can you comment on what you feel would sort of mean in our current sort of um culture and then also what do you feel is the spiritual effect of consuming artificial foods like high fructose corn syrup and you know all these sort of processed things that are added to foods and um packaged you know what's the spiritual effect of eating artificial food and how you know can you sort of comment on the idea of well just to use another tradition in in Tradition in some traditional Buddhism the the the chef in the monastery had to be enlightened like they didn't let just anybody into the kitchen and in in in in in in the Islamic tradition there's a whole tradition about prep food preparation and the intention of the cook and so that you I I my teachers the people that cooked always made the intention that the food was a healing one of the things is really interesting in our culture you know they when you go to uh when you go to uh they don't teach grammar anymore so people use transitive verbs as intransitive verbs but when you go to a restaurant they say Enjoy right enjoy is you know I I guess you could make it a Transit intransitive but you usually enjoy something um but here it means the food so uh but they just say Enjoy you know in in traditional cultures they never would say something like that they would say like salude you know with health in 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 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 but somebody who's serious about maintaining their health they eat for health and and you know we we're we're literally digging our Graves with our teeth I mean in our culture we are literally killing ourselves with the food we eat and so so you know I would say that all traditional peoples ate with with just a knowledge of what food was about and this is why the Kat tradition you know the the Halal tradition that you have to there's a whole you know Native Americans took permission uh in many of the their Traditions they took permission from the animal in in the Islamic tradition the Jewish tradition there is actual you have to do it in a way you know 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 be to meet to eat meat today unless you're on a farm where you're you're you know and there was an interesting article about a man who decided for one year I I didn't see the film but he did a documentary where he only ate what he killed mhm for one year and when he would buy the the the Sheep one of the sheep Farmers told him you know he said I think I'm going to call that you know Z and and he said no no don't name them because you'll get you'll get attached to them and 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 a a being with Free Will and it and the animal hates to be used for for foulness or for misdeeds and so that whole cosmology which might sound romantic but it was it was real people 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 um I have a friend of mine who's a coniss of tea and he'll only drink certain teas and in England PG tips is like the worst tea and um and and and he went to a friend of mine's house and I know both of them and it was tea time and English take this very seriously and so uh he 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 he said oh God make this delightful for my friend and he went in 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 you know there's a reality to these things we don't realize just the power of intention you know Nia in Arabic which means intention also means seed it's the seed of the thing why you do so 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 to check Our intention i i i i disavow that we're not going to clap thing I I I want to U that applause was also for the question um that was a good question because at least I I I don't want to deflect too much but uh from a Jewish tradition this is something we struggle with a great deal uh because the laws of kashu were written you know a thousand years ago and more um and they were designed to be more Humane and to make the exact connections that you're talking about and the world in which we live has advanced to the point that one needs a you know uh a a uh variance from the USDA because it's not as advanced and we lost something in that there was a speaker who came just a couple years ago his name was Rabbi Arthur wascow um and uh he's sort of the uh the front of something we call the echo kroot movement um and Arthur's perspective is if you're saying a blessing over wine that was made with grapes that was sprayed with pesticides that made the people who made them ill it's not holy and if you take organic wine that's been you know that's been made in the purest way and pour it into a styrofoam cup it's not Kosher um and what he means by that is that the word used to mean something it meant fit and and and the purpose of of of the sharing of food the enjoyment wasn't in the consumption and how much can we pump into it with you know uh uh uh uh corn syrup but rather the meal and and the story of your friend praying over his teeth you know that's what that was what it was intended to be yeah okay our next question over that way where are we here okay yes uh shik Hamza when you spoke of the purpose of human 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 well the stewardship would be more about sustainability whereas the cultivation is more about how we're using it for for our needs so the stewardship is is is more about making sure that what we're doing in our cult cultivation is not harmful question over here I think here's a lady up here okay but we need a microphone next to that person right here here we go hi um 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 could harvest the goat and show gratitude to the goat after I kill it and eat it and all that I I don't know who to buy a goat from and I don't know know and I wasn't suggesting that I I know and I don't know where to buy affordable organic food from cuz I went to the Whole Food store the other day and spent $30 on nothing yeah and no and this is one of the big part and finally get you know throughout the community a real challenge so I I want you're bringing up a really excellent point do is it yeah I I want to know how yeah yeah this is a really excellent point it's it's the incredible uh discrepancy we have between much of of of like the fair trade movement which I'm I feel is very a lot of it is is upper middle class luxury the ability to assuage our own personal guilt and things like that but I that's not why I would promote it because I think there it's important to take positions about these things in terms of uh disenfranchise communities underprivileged communities you know the the disparity which I was highlighting in that picture of us 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 learn 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 in at the in in in in World War II they learned how to to do this stuff to a degree scientifically that they'd never achieved before and and they could keep long life shelf life and they realize you know because this military-industrial complex the same people that are doing supplying that during war time are the people that are selling you know the food during peace time they realize that this is a great way we don't have to worry about perishables because it's it's they nothing will perish they lose a lot of money 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 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 in their on their rooftops African-American communities in Detroit are beginning to do this and it's really interesting movement where they're bringing fresh food to to uh 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 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 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 it's a really good heel uh a soul for the for the uh the shoe and and so the these are the things where we need to get creative in our communities and not um 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 and it's much easier get you can't get vegetables in a lot of these inner city uh stores it's all processed food they get corn out of the can and and so that movement I think is a really important uh movement that's starting to take place uh in certain this ad brought to you by the sener for Interfaith relations here which has a program for building uh uh Box Gardens Urban Gardens uh throughout Louisville and we need to expand that and children love to do it they love to plant you can get the kids involved in it they get connected to the Earth you know he mentioned earlier we're called benu Adam you know in in in in the Jewish and the Muslim tradition and Adam is AD you know or udma in Arabic is is the top soil and 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 was was the human being you know which was and and but the the reason it's called top Sol is because we're told that Prophet Muhammad sallu alaihi wasallam said that God took white soil Black soil Brown soil all the different colors of the top soil 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 the Propet mad 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 you're not an innovator from the message you're being the same message so much of it is in Jewish tradition we know that and and and the Jewish tradition is part of our tradition so and there are many I mean my all my tough sear are filled with midrash and and you know the gomorah story it's it's all in the Islamic J they never shied away from that I mean we had rabbis that became Muslim there was interactions between rabbis and and and Muslim Scholars and and so these are these are all this is wisdom it's just hik you know H yeah so this is this is this belongs to everybody thank you again for putting it this a very practical uh thing and if anyone's interested a great organization called lth youth build Louisville will help you build that Garden yes they help build that garden and if there's a community center that there's possib it's amazing how much food you can get out of a very small yeah over here I want to thank you for what you said about human trafficking as a 21st century uh outrage um an estimated 20 million billion uh people are affected by it uh I want to say the good news about it just as uh a little bit of a commercial there's an organization called soap s oap save our adolescence from prostitution headquartered in Columbus Ohio I am part of the group and we go before large sporting events like the Super Bowl uh NCAA Kentucky Derby World equestrians and we we meet in hotels all over the place to provide literature photos and soap with an 800 number to go in every hotel room and in Louisville in Columbus in New York in La wherever we did it I participated twice in Louisville we did it before the truck show in Louisville and 90% of the hotels accepted the material the good news is that it's working in lots of places before the Super during the Super Bowl in New Jersey 16 teenage girls were rescued because of soap and 400 volunteers covered New York and New Jersey and 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 it's there are groups working we need more people involved there's a worldwide war against girls and women around the world and also the reason why these are all events that involve large numbers of men that that's where they literally bring them in and in cars and and these These are the places and this something that the Romans for people that are familiar with the Coliseum the prostitutes were always brought at the coliseums and and uh people would get very excited and go down and and uh abuse them but we're I think we're doing such a poor job at educating our young men into honoring women um and that's something I have five boys and it's I constantly bring that home to them never dishonor a woman that that women uh that they're they're gentle beings they're easily seduced and Men know this about women because women are trusting and and and and and when a man tells her uh certain things he has the keys to her heart very often and too many wolves out there really pray on on on that that knowledge I mean there's books out there of how to seduce women um that are now best sellers thank you very much it's a little hard for me to see but we over here over here 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 you know I own a farm and I am trying to help that part of the world but in my um 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 want that well I first of all you know I we have to honor our small farmers um because you know I'm fortunate to be in Northern California where the slow movement uh slow food movement started that we have uh 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 you know even though you know Whole Foods has some pretty enlightened uh leadership there but I would still rather support the local Growers as much as possible and I think that's something really important important so you know and people you were talking earlier downstairs just about you know 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 urious debts and we had people remember the 80s crisis the highest rates of suicide were among small farmers we're losing our small farmers and aggro business is taking over and this is what I'm talking about you know these these uh you know the rulers of Darkness of this world you know a lot of these people and there's good people in that I'm not a m I'm I'm not in any way manakan I don't you know there's there's good CEOs there's decent people working but these are soul destroying institutions that we've set up and and so I'm not in any way I don't I'm not a revolutionary in that I don't believe in you know if we just can kill the evil ruler suddenly everything's going to you know be fine it's not like that and and there's good people in in in Washington DC there's good people in in in government there's really amazing police and then there's people that abuse these Powers you know and some of them you know and there there there are really dark demonic people that 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 comp I mean this is 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 they're sociopaths that are CEOs and they really don't they don't think like other people they just don't feel remorse about uh harming uh others or harming the Earth or whatever so in terms of a practice I can't I I wouldn't even want to advise you on that um I think people you know we're living in an age that enables us to experiment uh with religions uh this is in some ways unprecedented in other ways we've always had eclecticism and interaction of traditions Muslims and Jews liveed together for centuries in places like Morocco and Saro and so there's always been these and we know that different Traditions adopted method St Francis was influenced by the sufis when he got back he adopted some of those practices um and certainly uh you know the Muslims uh of India found the Hindus doing certain things that they thought were interesting um so you'll find a chakra a type of chakra understanding in certain Indian Sufi Tas and things like this so there's always been that kind of eclecticism but I I come out of a spiritual tradition that really says that it's good to take a serious tradition and and to practice it um and and 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 um of my own tradition is I I I I've been practicing chiong uh for uh some time now and derived a lot of benefit from it just physically um because I was having a lot of energy problems but I think we really we need to have time with ourselves Alone um 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 in the in the 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 uh cell phones inside the house um and he's a Sudanese man and and I thought that was really an excellent practice I think a lot of us need to disengage um from from The Madness of of these constantly being you know texting and getting call we don't have to answer the phone every time it rings you know you you really don't now you're really sounding revolutionary H it's true um we have another question okay before you do that though I was going to do this as an ad anyway um my best suggestion would be to come tonight at 7 o'clock um because from 7 to 9: Wendell Barry is going to be here with Gary Snyder and Jack Shoemaker and Wendell is a phenomenal community resource for those of you who have had the opportunity to know exactly what I'm saying for those of you who may not come tonight it's 7 Wendell did uh uh I'd say the kind of intention that you're speaking of for my entire congregation when he came to speak um and we established a farmworks a uh Farmers Market uh that meets on comes to Temple Mondays and Thursdays they're local farmers and what he was saying was that we've begun to look at Food he'll say this better tonight I hope U but in a sentence we come to look at food as a commodity and we lose the nature of the relationship your your feeding people okay that that is gift okay and when you receive the food from the people who grew it you you create something different than going to a market and buying it you you're you're you're recognizing that the people who you feed and we're recognizing who feeds us and we create in that Community um and I think what you're doing is that intention honestly but come tonight it'll be wonderful okay now a question where are we um here thank you I have a a question regarding I think as a a a challenge that we face in the US and it's it's very pervasive in that we are we have a sense of entitlement that is 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 yeah wow that was one of mine too yeah the um you know when when you when you go to other like I was just in West Africa um I was in Sagal and in murania and um you know I think it's really important for us to to get our kids over to places to do work um in in other communities and places to see the reality I'll give you an example I had I had a a friend of mine uh I teach a course at a Jun near College nearby with a friend and and um and she was having trouble controlling this class cuz they were just you know they 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 um African-American gangs in La went to prison for a murder spent several years in prison um and uh 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 uh and you know I I just I tell them this junior college if you were in Kabul and Afghanistan this would be the Harvard of Afghanistan you know and we have people in in a lot of countries that literally commit suicide because they're 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 just 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 def it was uh I think it was designated in the 1970s in that famous book the culture of narcissism um 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 of our civilization um this idea of just taking your own picture you know I've never I've never carried a camera I've never taken I don't have any pictures um of myself in I've been all over the world I've been in the you know I met the pope you know and 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 cuz some people send us things and she wants to put them I said I don't want them on the wall you know I I don't want to do that and and I don't I don't get that thing about pictures I 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 bedin because what really struck me about the bedin that I lived with is they were so present and I would meet a ban 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 uh the New York Times recently reported that the average of 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 traan went into the holiest of holies the thing that really Disturbed him was there was nothing in there you know and and he wanted the Jews to explain like where's your Idol where's your images it's an empty place and and and and so that emptiness we have to have that emptiness to to to be able to uh to contemplate um and I would recommend reading Neil postman's Incredible Book uh amusing ourselves to death and that second chapter about why the decalog 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 uh and and God wants us to know something a concept that is so abstract and and this is why image-based cultures uh become debased very quickly um so I I really think the images are are harming us immensely um the the pornographic images that are going into the minds of these young kids um it's really terrifying because they can't get these things out you they won't be able to get those images out of their mouth 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 uh 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 bedin uh we had gone from the the uh the desert to the shop and there was a TV in the room and it was on and he was looking the other way and he man in his 30s and he was a student of knowledge and he was looking the other way and I was with a Libyan ABD Rak MTAR 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 I don't want to let it into my heart and and you know that level of being is just where are those people yeah um just very briefly uh in the Jewish Community I would Echo this part about how important travel can be um and and meeting people from other cultures uh and places we have the commitment uh it's called birth right uh to send all of our children to the land of Israel and um 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 um 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 really 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 uh 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 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 in a family and things like that okay I would like to continue with questions but we we need uh to stop stop now because we have some um uh other things to finish the first of which is the poetry and do you have that yeah I do okay um and you can perhaps explain this was uh there were several poems and then they they narrowed them down to eight and then I was given the unfortunate task of determining which one should be given let me read the up uh the introduction to this and then uh we can explain um this is a poetry uh of the Sacred contest that the the center um put forward as part of this year's Festival The Poetry of the S 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 uh from these entries a winning poem and three honorable manions were chosen and received both monetary prices and will soon be published in Parabola magazine in the winter issue of 2014 the poems were then judged by hamsa um which he hated having to do and 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 um this one was the one that hit me the most just in terms of my talk and and and and what I think the festival face is is about so it's called what worship is it's by Red Hawk from Arizona um I don't think that he apparently he he doesn't have um internet access which I thought was great um but um uh the other poems I mean the pilgrimage to Mont St Victor was really uh I I really like that Prairie hours and hymn to morning were the the runners up and and they were all good and the other ones were good too they they were more depressing um uh so but this one I thought really captured something for me 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 bear 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 so just a few um other uh sort of follow-up things um we'll be um concluding now um but uh hamu yusf will be uh in the foyer um we had a long conversation about the pronunciation of that word um uh there'll be a book signing there as well as a reception with uh light food and drink and we uh want to invite all of you to join us uh uh there again wendle bberry Gary Snider and Jack Shoemaker uh this evening at 7 and 9 uh is really a program I'm not going to miss and you really shouldn't it's going to be fantastic um and we will conclude as we are in all of these sessions uh with a moment of silence and I encourage you in this silence to try to uh to take in some of what uh hamsa has shared with us um and think in in the ways that many of your questions did about how we can U take these ideas and make them into uh spirit in oursel and in practice in in our [Music] lives for e e e [Music] thank you for joining us thanks a l oh [Music] [Music]