Note: This article appeared in the Summer issue of elephant magazine. (Posted by permission.)

In Boulder, Colorado, a group of young American Buddhists called Glimpses of Dawn got together for classes co-taught by senior Buddhist teachers and one of their own, a young Buddhist usually giving her or his first talk. Well, one week, for whatever reason, they invited me to come talk alone. I’m no longer particularly young, and I’m not quite a senior teacher—though, as a Dharma Brat (born into an American Buddhist family) I’m a bit of both. In any case, I asked a senior teacher and young Buddhist to join me—to convene a sort of panel on how, and if, the invaluable Buddhist practices of meditation and compassion were relevant to a world very much in need. One note: what fails, for some reason, to come through is the lynch mob feeling in the air as regards Mr. David Bolduc. His dire warnings and ‘facts-are-facts’ attitude didn’t go over particularly well with our largely untested and perhaps naïve young folk. But his warnings, in light of his continual exertion on behalf of this troubled earth and its civilizations, are as he put it “worth taking in.” –ed.

WAYLON H. LEWIS, for elephant: Thank you so much for coming. The [Spring issue of elephant] came off the press an hour and a half ago. It has an interview with Sakyong Mipham, Shibata Sensei, and Anne Waldman… So my eye was off this ball—and when I realized that I was supposed to be talking alone today, having just come off press, I thought I’d invite a few people to join me—an elder teacher and someone inspiring who’s young. I couldn’t find an elder teacher, but I found the youthful David Bolduc [laughter; David is north of 55]. I thought of David, because—as I talk about in my editor’s letter—my heroes are people who have actually done something. They haven’t just spent their entire lives being good people—but have actually manifested in an outward way to share the wealth.

And I thought of Sera because she has done a lot more than almost anybody in my particular “Dharma Brat generation”—and at the same time she and I had a good long argument at Mountain Sun [a local pub] recently about my bias—that if you don’t actually get off the meditation cushion and do something, all your practice and your retreats are somewhat selfish, on some level. They’re certainly not a bad thing; meditation is obviously the ground. And the other extreme, of course, is that if you just get up and do something without having anything to actually offer the world other than your own righteousness, you are just going to create more trouble, as Trungpa Rinpoche talked about. But Sera’s view is completely off base on that issue, [laughter] so I wanted her to be here to illuminate, by default, my point of view. [laughter]

We’ll start with David. David has been an activist since back in the day, he’s the owner of one of our fine, independent businesses, which in itself is a rock of the Boulder community—the Boulder Book Store—and he went beyond that to co-found the Boulder Independent Business Alliance, which also became the AIBA, the American Independent Business Alliance, which networks with other such business alliances. David.

DAVID BOLDUC: I ran into Waylon on—was it yesterday or the day before?

ele: Day before yesterday, at Tonya [tea house].

BOLDUC: He said, “Do you want to come give this talk?” And I’m like, “Why?” [Laughter] Then tonight I was driving by here after having come back from my dentist, about to go home, thinking “I’ve been up since six and I want to go home,” I was reminded of being in this very room with Trungpa Rinpoche. It was during the time when there was all this concern about nuclear war. And, ah, I still vividly recall him giving a lecture, saying: “If you don’t do it, nobody is going to do it.” Most of us open the door in the morning, but may never truly cross a threshold and go out into the world. And for some reason I’m always doing that—too much.

The reason you are here is that you have already crossed the threshold. You are looking, I’m guessing, for ways to manifest more in the world. What are your experiences? Where are things going? Waylon was just describing as we sat downstairs in the [Shambhala Center Director’s] office trying to figure out what we were going to say—he was talking about the X generation and then the Y generation… and now it’s the Z generation! He had to explain to me what all the terms meant and where it’s going—but, in a nutshell, all these generations are self-absorbed, not really manifesting much in the world. And I described my good fortune of growing up in the mid-60s: the sexual revolution was going on, the drug thing was going on, I was active for three-and-a-half years just doing anti-war work and was good friends with this person, David Harris, who was married to Joan Baez at the time. We were actively involved in nonviolent work. The possibilities actually seemed endless of what we could do.

Seeing what’s happened now—the materialism of the culture has bought off these new generations. When I talk to the much younger people that work for me about what they are involved in—it’s “I’m going to go out and have a drink tonight with my friends.” There seems to be little actual involvement in the suffering of the world. So that’s why I stopped in here. I can’t do this for the rest of my life. At some point, I want to pull back and go into retreat, and hopefully you and your friends can start to do this work in the world. From where I sit, climate change and the end of oil is going to change the world so dramatically that you are going to be forced into living in a different way. We all are. I was just reading the other night that scientists have agreed that the world can support less than 1 billion people. We’re at 6.5 billion people now. What’s going to happen to those other 5.5 billion people? That’s a big question. And it just goes on and on and on. In the first time of owning this bookstore for 33 years, I’m starting to push book son people walking into the door, saying, “You have to read this.” And we’re going out and finding these authors of the best books and doing off-site events so 1,000 people can come, and we’ll have lots of non-profits in the lobby that are interested in these issues, including [the Shambhala Center]. Because ultimately this is a spiritual issue. This is just one of the areas that people could get involved in. We can also talk about a school in Tibet that we’re trying to get going and begin to repay the debt to the Tibetans for what they’ve given us. Actually, the thing I’m most proud of was starting the first Farmer’s Market in Boulder. But that’s just a drop in the bucket—we have to have 100 Farmer’s markets in Boulder alone if a place like Boulder would even survive.

ele: And then we have Sera Thompson. Sera has done a whole lot. She’s served on the Shambhala Institute, and the Shambhala International Board. She’s active in Shambhala Sun Camp Leadership Council, and is doing stuff in Africa with this amazing group called Pioneers of Change, which maybe she can say something about. So, Sera, thank you.

SERA THOMPSON: I’m having a bit of culture shock right now. I just came back in November from living in Johannesburg for about two years. It’s interesting to come back to your own culture and see it from the outside, and realize how bizarre it is. So, I thought that this was going to be a much more informal thing—I’m feeling the intensity of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s mind! I was having coffee with Waylon at Allison’s yesterday and he invited me to come, and I’ve been thinking a bit today about what I would want to share. I think I will just build off of something that David said: what does it mean to cross the threshold? What does it mean to go into the world? I mean, we’re in it all the time. [laughing]

Growing up in the Shambhala community with Waylon, there was this strong sense of being given a tremendous gift—and a sense that I had to do something with it. In my early 20s there was a lot of turmoil: “How do I connect?” I started using the word calling, a Christian term, to refer to this sense of right livelihood. We’ve begun to lose the ability to find that in a natural way. Our society doesn’t always offer a conducive environment for a young person to come into the world and explore who they are. In a way, that’s what my work is about now. I myself started to find my way when I went to work at a place called the Greyston Foundation in Yonkers, New York, an organization started by Bernie Glassman, a Zen monk. Wanting to create livelihood for his community, he started a bakery, then realized that there was so much homelessness and poverty in the area that he needed to create a situation where they could hire people that really would have a hard time getting a job… and it blossomed, flourished into something that’s a model. Greyston is really wonderful.

At the same time, I found It challenging to work there. People didn’t know how to work together. As much as everyone was there with this good heart, wanting to do something positive, there was something I’ve found over and over: everything that people were doing collectively always deteriorated into some lowest common denominator. These brilliant, creative, amazing people all felt frustrated. And right around that time some of my friends at home [Halifax, Nova Scotia] were starting this organization called the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership. I went. They were talking about this very idea: “How do we really work together effectively as organizations?” The question is, in the Dark Ages—when things are falling apart, we are running out of oil, the climate’s changing, the gap between rich and poor is widening, the trade deficit is huge—we don’t really know what’s going to happen next. How do we create people and systems that are resilient, able to change and innovate, and make things happen that need to happen? Through the Shambhala Institute (which I love and encourage anyone who is interested to talk to me about) I met Pioneers of Change, a global network of people in their mid-20s to mid-30s who are practitioners of social change. They’re people who are experimenting: “What’s the next thing that we need to be building?” Because something is crumbling around the world. And connecting someone who is working on creating sustainability in Brazil and somebody who is working with the tensions with immigrant communities in the Netherlands—they are both understanding something about how change happens in social systems. By being in communication, in relationship, both of them are able to do it better and learn faster. I feel privileged to be part of an amazing community of people around the world who are trying to understand how societies are able to be resilient and move through tremendous chaos.

ele: I was just struck by David’s mentioning Trungpa Rinpoche’s saying, “If we don’t do it, who will?” There’s a Margaret Meade quote that many of you know—the only thing that ever has changed anything is small groups of people—something like that? So there’s no sense of a poverty mentality about change. The good news is, we actually have something to offer—our practice.

I’ve been struck several times in the last couple of months about my own tenuous relationship with what I’ve grown up in and practiced. Going through emotional upheaval and depression, whenever any of that comes up, I always think, “Wow. Well if I’m going through all this and I’ve had all these tools, I’ve been able to be tamed a little bit—and on the outside people are probably generally like, he’s probably okay, you know? Maybe is even doing somewhat well, I don’t really know? People aren’t calling me up asking if I’m okay. So, looking at others, I just say, “Well, if I look okay on the outside and I’ve had all this richness—but actually I’m going through all this stuff, what an intense town this must be, everybody is going through so much stuff. Boulder is like me on some macrocosm level—in that it’s a fortunate, easy place to be. And if Boulder is going through all this stuff, imagine… I was just reading The New Yorker about [Liberia] or whatever it is, some country in Africa—my ignorance is obviously on display here. The new president is the first democratic female president in Africa [Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf]. Maron (former ele staffer in the audience, active in world affairs] could speak to this more. One of the most powerful people in [Johnson-Sirleaf’s] government was caught on video—you can buy the video in the streets—having the ex-president’s ears cut off and forcing the president to eat one of his own ears.

This is a Dark Age. There are the statistics about AIDS in Africa. It’s easy to points to lots of stuff. Generation X was so named because it didn’t really have anything to be known for. It wasn’t Lost, it wasn’t Beat, it wasn’t anything, really. It was just the X generation. And then, even more comically—or tragically—two generations followed that didn’t really earn any title—Y and Z. Our eye seems to be completely off the ball. I probably thought more about my relationships and whether it’s moral or immoral to buy a $190 pair of jeans in the last week or two than I’ve thought about doing good for other people. [Recites Buddhist aspiration]

By this merit may all attain [enlightenment]
May it defeat the enemy, wrongdoing
From the stormy waves of birth, aging, sickness and death,
From the ocean of ‘samsara’ [the cyclic nature of confusion], may I free all beings.

For the benefit of others. That supposedly, is the reason we do everything we do, whether it’s eating or buying a $190 pair of jeans or going to save the world. There’s the quote that Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche refers to all the time: If you want to be unhappy, think about yourself; if you want to be happy, think about others. So on some selfish level, we can dedicate our lives to doing some good—and actually enjoy our lives a little bit more as we do that. Trungpa Rinpoche talked about how it it’s okay to fake it at first, if your motivation isn’t pure. Just start doing good things, start meditating a little bit in the morning and the evening and eventually your karma might switch train tracks. There’s the bodhisattva vow, which I’ve taken—I’ve taken a lot of vows that I haven’t followed up on. The bodhisattva vow is actually dedicating ourselves to the good of others. So what are we doing to fulfill that?

Maron recently wrote a little comment about one of my blogs [newest.net], criticizing it quite sharply [laughter]. She said that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. I completely agree. So what are we doing? This is a wonderful way to join Christians and non-religious people of all stripes, all ages, all generations—everyone wants to help the world. Obviously, we all have our somewhat troublesome, righteous ways of wanting to help the world that are in conflict with other people. We aren’t the only people who want to help others. I would love to hear more from Sera and David, and if anyone has questions or thoughts that would be great. If not, we could just go. [Laughter]

AUDIENCE: This is a question to any one of these wonderful people. Despite this evidence of this crashing-down world, I sense that it’s no worse than it has been. The problems come from the same source they always have: an internal source. Would anyone like to speak to the role these problems take in the larger sense of things? Why might these world problems be getting more intense? And what is the best internal state to come toward it with?

KARUNA [audience]: Along the same lines, it struck me as you three were talking: “hell in a handbasket,” and “chaos,” and “Dark Ages”—these words starting clicking together in my mind. And I thought of Trungpa Rinpoche’s phrase, “Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news!” In our three speakers’ voices I’ve heard this urgency and this push—so I feel like the harder things get, the more we’ll want to wake up. The more we suffer, the more we want to cease suffering. That’s why chaos should be regarded as extremely good news: it’s the driving force.

THOMPSON: Well, there’s a bundle of things there, and one of them is deeper than I can speak to—who creates problems, how do they arise. I agree with Karuna. That’s why Shambhala has so much to offer to the world. The practices that we have give us a tremendous ability to work with our own minds—and chaotic situations. Things are becoming increasingly complex, increasingly speedy—and to be able to stay grounded and be clear in the middle of that takes a real depth of mind, a strong practice of warriorship. This is a Dark Age. At the same time talking about how fucked up things are isn’t actually that helpful. I’m more interested in building solutions and experimenting with things that work.

BOLDUC: Up until maybe last summer I thought we just had normal kinds of problems that you always hear of: wars… And I look forward to retiring someday. “Everything is going to be fine. All these predictions of the Dark Age will happen after I’m dead.” Trungpa Rinpoche gave explicit descriptions of the Dark Ages, and many of the other [Tibetan Buddhist] teachers talked about these things. But as I started to read these books that some people might think are more extreme than they should be… after my fourth book, after maybe my fourth video and after my 100^th email or internet research, I started to see something different going on. Has anybody read Guns, Germs, and Steel? The same author wrote Collapse, about how civilizations of the past have collapsed. Romans, Egyptians, the Greeks—they all thought they were going to go on. It seems to be that situation again. From my view what’s going on is more like what happened when Buddhism moved [from India] into Tibet. So what I’m trying to figure is how we preserve what we’ve been given. How do we protect the seeds? This may sound dark, but there doesn’t seem to be any way out of the situation we’ve got ourselves into. You read the books, and at the end they talk about what has to happen to change things—and it’s so dramatic, so extreme, the authors always say, “It’s not going to happen.” We’re so invested in the way things are. It’s not about driving a more efficient car, or recycling more. We all would hope it would just be those small things. It’s about the level of consumption that’s going on. We’re all addicted to it. It’s led us to a point where there’s going to be nothing left. So what needs to happen now is to build self-reliant communities that will survive.

What do we have to offer from our [meditation] practice? [The Boulder Book Store] is having these authors come in and hundreds of people come. And Shambhala Mountain Center is actually talking about doing events about self-sufficiency. So we’re trying to go farther and make a bigger mandala [sphere] and within that mandala these conversations can start to happen. I encourage you all to research. Find out for yourself what you believe and what you don’t believe. Talk to people. In Boulder, we have world-class climatologists—we have all these federal labs here. These people come in the bookstore, they are doing the research. Scientists are conservative people, they don’t want to publish findings until they are sure of them because they are peer-reviewed, they don’t want someone poking holes in their theories. But in private conversations, they all say, “It’s much , much worse than the current information that’s coming out.” It gets sobering after your eighth conversation with people that don’t have a particular reason to say this—it’s not like they make money off it.

So, I was actually with my dentist trying to push a book on him this afternoon. [Laughing; laughter] I advise you to look into a group called Boulder Valley Relocalization. They are part of an international group called the Post Carbon Institute out of Vancouver. Groups are starting to form. One of the concerns is what spiritual basis is important for the future. So, this is my thing right now, you can see. It’s going to be the main thing in our world.

ele: I was saying to David before, when we were talking about what we would be talking about, that I took some online eco-sustainability test on my role as a human being. I have a car that I drive twice a month, max…

AUDIENCE: I’d like to verify that—you can always see him on his bike!

ele: Yeah, my own friends are often like, “Oh, you have a car?” And I try to eat organic, even when I go out to eat. And I try to shop locally at the Boulder Co-op—Sid [Friedman] is back there, he’s the de facto king of the Co-op. And I try to recycle every little torn envelope. Particularly when I’m in a relationship, I drive people batty. It’s a little extreme.

So I took this online test and I came out as consuming six times the amount that’s sustainable for a human being. On some level, it’s always been the Dark Ages—there’s always been stuff to be concerned about—expressions like kids these days reflect that, or the good old days. Things always seem worse than they were. As recently as the 1930s, before WWII, pretty much all farming was organic, for example. Things are really changing quickly. But at the same time, if you’ve been reading the New Yorker series on global warming, [it] is a process that, once started, is self-speeding. As ice shrinks, its reflective ability decreases and the ocean absorbs more heat… the whole system goes batty. So on a concrete level, things actually are urgent. On the other hand, I had the honor of talking with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, and I gave him every complaint that I could think of about the state of the world. I had just flown to the East Coast and was overcome by the amount of development I saw looking out the window. He is someone on the cutting edge, like David, thinking about all these issues. And he basically said, “No problem, no problem, no problem—”

BOLDUC: Yeah, yeah—but John is the owner of a multi-billion dollar company. I know John too. It’s his view because he’s made money selling to millions of people. His chain is now the largest… in Manhattan, their markets are four or five blocks apart. I’ve been to them: you line up like cattle in a chute. They have 34 cash registers lined up with lights, as soon as the light goes on a person at the end sends you in. It’s unbelievable! So he’s got a different perspective of the world than most people. [Laughter] He’s a great guy, but he comes from a different place.

You want to talk about livelihood? It’s critical to consider what you are going to go into. Alternative energy is going to be popular, a growth industry—and you can do good work there. But if I was younger, looking at my career, I would look at issues of energy and food production in terms of where I want to live. The Rocky Mountains are going to be a place of drought. You are not going to grow much food here. As it is, our food comes from 1,500 miles away—it takes 10 calories of energy to produce one calorie of food. And when the calories aren’t there to grow the food, it ain’t coming anymore. We might be looking at years, rather than decades.

CHRIS [audience]: One of my professors is 73 years old—he’s been around. We did a semester-long study of Latin America, and found some shocking things. I asked him at the end, “What about now? Is this the worst you’ve seen?” And he said, “By far.” David, you are the elder of the group. Is this the worst you’ve seen? I think you’ve said “Yes.” Is this a culmination of generations past, that’s been building and building and building? Do you think that the ultimate—this is a strong word to use, but—failure of your 60s movement to accomplish what it wanted took the wind out of the sails of further generations? I know some people who were part of that movement are sad. They talk about how it never came to fruition. Did that contribute to the X generation?

BOLDUC: David Harris was extremely active, out in the world. He was married to Joan Baez, student body president at Stanford, an articulate spokesman for the anti-war movement, author of heavily-researched books on the logging industry or the government or things about Iran/Contras. But he’s withdrawn. It’s hard to pin down what happens.

But do you want to talk about why we are here? Karmic evolution. What I got from this video called PowerDown (which I recommend)… we humans are in the desire realm [a Buddhist term] so everything is amped up. Desire is endless. There’s more and more put out there to grab. And you are never actually satisfied. That’s the root of the whole thing. We are consuming co much of what’s available. That’s how those other [civilizations] have collapsed—the Greeks, the Romans and all the rest—but there’s no other place to go anymore. In the past, Egypt collapsed and then the Romans could have their time. But there’s no other place in the world left to go to. It’s all one big thing. It’s all been gathered up and spit out. It’s not a nice thing to talk about, but what I’m thinking about is where’s a safe place you would go to build a sustainable community that’s not too big, the weather is going to work, the people are friendly, [laughter] the government is reasonable. Maybe Nova Scotia, maybe the Northwest. Rocky Mountains? Too dry. [Laughter] Ashland, Oregon, is a nice place. Been there? Lots of Shakespeare. Most of you are at an age that you can start to consider how to piece things together so you become the seeds for whatever is going to keep going. It is much like what happened when the Dharma [Buddhist teachings] moved to Tibet and got destroyed in India. I wasn’t planning to think this way, but [laughing] it’s been the conclusion I’ve come to over the past six months. I talk to people. I’d like to have some other point of view presented. But nothing comes up. The government is going to tell you everything is up. The government is going to tell you everything is fine because that’s their job. The politicians’ job is to tell you everything is fine. “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of things.” If they don’t tell you that, you are not going to vote for them. You are responsible for making the most of this short life. So what to do?

KELLY [audience]: I’ve been doing a lot of tonglen [the Buddhist practice of exchanging self for other—sending out well-wishes and taking in suffering, which untrains the knee-jerk reaction of our egos to protect against ‘bad’ and covet ‘good’]. When I do the part where I breathe in the suffering of all beings, it’s so intense, it hurts so badly sometimes I have to stop. I want to go out and help people in an authentic way—but still I find myself creating the me versus them attitude. I was asked to join the Green Team at work—and most of the team doesn’t believe that global warming exists! So I found myself bringing in National Geographic articles, The Future of Food… I was obsessed with letting them know. So for all of you activists up here, how do you maintain the view as you are trying to help others? Because I found myself angry with the people on my team—I was creating another war. [Long silence]

THOMPSON: It’s a path. One of the social change aphorisms is a quote by Gandhi: you must be the change you want to see in the world. We run this program called the Hypocrite’s Club. Nobody is separate from the system that we are criticizing. We have to have a sense of humor. I drive my car three times a week and I’m really worried about global warming, and I do a lot of work on sustainability. I’m a hypocrite. I get pissed off. I think of somebody else as separate from me all the time. It’s the central question: is there a sense of integrity and authenticity at every level? If all my ideas about changing the world are conceptual, out-there, and I’m not checking in with what’s going on at home, something’s off. So for me it’s a path, something I really work on.

Living in Johannesburg is intense. All the time, everywhere, there’s trauma, dehumanization, people being robbed of their dignity. Every time you stop at a traffic light, somebody is trying to sell you a magazine or fruit. And you can’t always give someone money. If I say “No,” can I see that person as a human being, look at them and say, “I’m sorry, have a wonderful day”? There’s something about acknowledging people, really seeing them and meeting them, working with my projection of what I think they are… and then just letting them be who they are.

ele: Well, it’s silly but it came to mind. In the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? There’s this old-timey politician who is not doing too well, and he’s talking about this new thing called “mass-communicatin,” “talking into a can” [radio], getting the word out to millions of constitch-ents. And that’s my personal advice. My basic gameplan is to try to meditate for two minutes every morning and every evening. And in between, try and get the word out to as many people as possible. From some point of view I can’t really do that much in my own life—I can shop at good local businesses and ride my bicycle, but if millions of people are inspired by that flash of lightning in the night vision [Trungpa’s enlightened society] that was communicated to my parents, and somewhat to myself, and is available to all of us—if I can get the word out on all the amazing things that so many of us are doing, if elephant can be national, international. I want to be the Jon Stewart of our generation. I want to run for every office that will take me. And that all sounds great, but if you put yourself out there all the time your life sucks, you know. You give up a lot on the personal level. For years I loved going out and having a good time and… sitting around talking with friends or going for hikes… and I don’t do a lot of that right now. I am a hypocrite—consuming six times what I should—and I’m completely neurotic and not an example of anything to anyone. The more that I have dedicated my life to Trungpa Rinpoche’s vision—though he doesn’t own it by any means, again it’s simply a human vision for taking care of the world and each other that we’ve been given—I now have reasons to meet amazing people, and life is incredibly fulfilling. Just not personally fulfilling. It’s an interesting twist. There’s a legend in Tibetan Buddhism about how the Vajrayana teachings, which are the highest teachings, were presented just for the Dark Ages. It’s an exciting, dynamic time to live if you engage in the chaos. We can just live our little materialistic lives. We can have a good time. But we’ll still all be going to hell in a handbasket.

BOLDUC: The reality of the suffering of our people and our planet due to our own actions should feel overwhelming, because it is. But that anger becomes sadness. It’s not a problem to get angry—it’s just how you react to it. If you can stay with anger for a while, you become sad. I was in Tibet a couple years ago: you drive around with the monks and see all the ruined monasteries… everything makes you sad. And the more sad you get, the more open you become to the world—then you see the opportunities.

I have many friends I’ve known a long time that have done what is described as well in the world, making lots of money. I talk to them about these things and they have no interest in hearing it, because they see it threatening to their wealth. And I get angry at them, and I feel sad, too—because they could be doing so much to help. People get attached to their security—we all do—and it holds us back. The wonderful thing about [young people] is you don’t have a lot of security yet [laughing]—you can do anything. The older you get, you get a family, kids, house, and all the other things… your options aren’t as open. So make the most of it.

MELINA [audience]: Something I’ve noticed since I’ve moved to Boulder from a pretty poor part of San Francisco is that there’s a lot of wealth here—and a lot of willingness to give. So I’m curious: in starting a non-profit, what are the steps to take? I’m in school and I work a lot—I don’t have means to help on a larger scale. But being in a wealthy area, one thing that I can do is raise money and give it to somebody who can use it.

I went to the Auschwitz retreat last year. I met this amazing Peacemaker who lives in Bosnia. In 1992, he lost pretty much everyone in his family, all of his friends. He has a school that facilitates dialogue between the Muslims and the Serbs, to bridge that gap. Dialogue. He needs space. He needs to hire people, he needs basic things. I felt inspired to help support his cause.

THOMPSON: You have everything you need to do that. I’m lazy, so I wouldn’t start a new non-profit. I’d probably find an ally that already had their 501-C3 infrastructure, and see if that could be a program within theirs. I’ve done a lot of fundraising, and I’d be happy to talk later.

NATE [audience]: I have a greenbuilding and handyman service. In terms of peak oil: after Katrina, the $1 rise in gas, suddenly everyone wanted their homes to be efficient. You think, “Okay, in a large vehicle, it costs an extra $10 or $15 to fill up.” People who aren’t activists, who are driven just by the dollar, are going to think twice. I mean, I wish we had $5 gas—people would make their leaky homes more efficient, and live in smaller homes that accommodate their needs rather than some childhood dream they had about how big it needed to be.

But I do see a light at the end of the tunnel. It could be a train [laughter] but hopefully it’s daylight. Just one example is someone who built your “average” house up on Linden [suburban mountains], about 10,000-square-feet, $700/month electric bill. He had a biodiesel car next to his Porsche 911 next to the Landcruiser… I guess depending on which party he was going to… [Laughter] He wasn’t really driving the biodiesel car. I think he drives that to the Center for ReSource Conservation auction. I was telling him ab out options in making his home more efficient. Someone with a house that big saying, “I want to go totally off the grid, how many solar panels do I need?” I told him he should shut off half of his house, block it off, then cover his whole yard in solar panels—then he could support himself. So he got the idea. I said it as a joke, but it was the tr4uth. So I don’t know: I do see a light at the end of the tunnel. I don’t know. Are book sales up in this area? [Laughter]

BOLDUC: I wish I was reading [an optimistic] book, but I haven’t seen any. Read The Long Emergency, [laughter] read The Coming Economic Collapse. We have a whole long bookcase of them. I wish the problem was as simple as having green buildings. Do some research, look at how complex and deep the problem is. I’m not saying the work you are doing is not valuable—but from my point of view, in the future, we’ll be forced to live in a much more modified way. Like Waylon says, even with his simple level of living, he’s still way up there [laughing].

I’m on a panel the City Council put together that has been charged with coming up with a carbon tax—taxing use of electricity or gasoline—to raise a million dollars a year to educate and develop programs within the city to deal with these issues. Scientists from the federal labs are in this group. And they are all saying what we’re going, even within Boulder, is just a drop in the bucket. Even if Boulder was the only place in the whole world, what we’re beginning to do here is still so tiny compared with what needs to change. I read that if we reduce energy consumption in the U.S. by 80%, we’ll still be consuming five times the energy of the Asian countries. And it’s not going to happen. People are not going to do change. We’re too invested in the status quo. Look at all the cars, they are all gasoline driven, they can’t be retrofitted. We’ve backed ourselves into this. I wish it wasn’t the story. I’d like to have my little happy dream and go off in the sunset, but it’s not going to happen that way. [Laughter]

When you read the books, if you take in the message, then you start… you find yourself talking to people. And friends I’ve talked to, they call me up: “I can’t sleep at night now, why did you tell me to read this book?!” It’s almost like hearing that you have a fatal illness: you go through all those stages. I found the same for myself. Of trying to negotiate with it, “It’s not going to happen,” back and forth, and eventually you say, “This is what the reality seems to be.” I’m sorry to be such a killjoy tonight.

LIZ [audience]: Having the economic fortune to educate ourselves in terms of creating a sustainable community would be like creating a lifeboat for ourselves—and watching the rest of the world sink. What you brought up earlier, David, in terms of creating a sustainable community for a small group of people, that feels morally hard to stomach. It is necessary to look into how to create sustainable communities—but who gets to go? Is it educated, predominantly white American people? Part of me doesn’t want to be part of that. [Long pause] Look around the room. Look around the Shambhala Center. [Laughing] It’s hard to stomach this image of “Buh-buy”—being on the lifeboat as the Titanic sinks.

AUDIENCE: I also see a light at the end of the tunnel. This status quo we’re living in has to fall apart at some point—that feels natural. There are many places in the world where people aren’t far removed from traditional ways of living. Returning to sustainable, local farming isn’t going to be that big a deal. It’s going to be easier for them than us. This relocalization is not about leaving somebody else behind—it’s just about taking care of yourself, and your community.

BOLDUC: But what [Liz] says is actually true. They say 90% of the world’s population could die. That’s reality. [Laughter] In Africa it’s already happening. The droughts, people dying. On Kilimanjaro, the snow will not exist anymore in five years—and the tribes at the base who have lived there for thousands of years depend on the run-off. It goes on and on and on, these stories of the suffering of the species. It’s a global crash. You have this fatal illness, and the world has this fatal illness. What is the remedy?

It’s important to look at where the seeds can be best transplanted and become the fruit for future generations. If I knew of some way to save everyone, that would be great. But the earth can’t do it anymore. It’s extremely sad. I’ve traveled in Africa and seen the droughts and suffering. And in Tibet. It’s heartbreaking. But what are you going to do?

You can only work with situations that you have a connection with. We’re building a school in Tibet. It’s not like I’m giving up—I’m becoming more concentrated on what can be the most effective. It’s actually what Trungpa Rinpoche talked to us about: what are these seeds for an enlightened society in the future, and where can they best survive?

ele: David reminds me of one of my other heroes, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. He’s the guy who pioneered organic cotton. He tries to run his entire company sustainably. It’s a real model. What’s amazing is that he is incredibly grim and negative about the state of the world, and at the same time he’ll say, “So what do we do? We work harder.” It’s this combination: “We have cancer, so what do we do, are we going to hang out in our basement and be depressed?” What’s that? [Nate yells out, “We’re going to let our people go surfing!] Yeah.

A recommended viewing is Future of Food, a documentary I just saw about the companies who are creating these weird genetically modified superfoods. A century ago we had hundreds of kinds of tomatoes, and now there are four. The same thing’s happening with animals—the number of species we are losing every year is unreal. Asian elephants are supposed to go extinct in the wild in 10-20 years. There are real causes for concern.

THOMPSON: It’s arrogant to think that we know what the lifeboat is. All kinds of solutions are rising in local communities, everywhere.

ALEX [audience]: Woooo! Yeah! I’m so inspired to be here. I spend a lot of time huddling in my room, thinking about how everything is falling down and being, like: “Shit, somebody has got to do something. Who is going to do it?” {Laughing; laughter] I see my parents’ generation and their parents as being slackers toward the end of their life—not rising to the occasion. It’s our time. It’s now or never. A friend of mine, Zach, was telling me about Indian cosmology. There’s the Stone Age, then the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, then the Golden Age. We’re in the Iron Age, now. And he said, “Maybe there’s another Golden Age, maybe not.” We’re the ones who get to figure that out, and make it happen—or not. What I’d like to do is found a contemplative scouts organization. Everybody here has something to say that is valuable to me. So if I could get your contact info later, and if anybody wants to talk to me about that, I’d be super-hyped. Give me a word up on that. Thank you all.

STEPHANIE [audience]: Everywhere you look, it’s all going to hell. I get angry, and paralyzed, and then what can I do? There’s that Buddhist saying: to shine one corner. It’s a book by Shunryu Suzuki. And that’s all we can do. Green building in the Boulder area is part of it, communication in Bosnia is part of it, a magazine that’s read on a tiny scale or a large scale, that’s part of it. Whatever we have to offer the world, whatever cause we’re drawn to, wherever our skills lie. The other saying: it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. When I focus on the big picture too much, I have nothing to offer. [But if] everyone lights candles, and more candles, eventually the darkness gets lighter. A moment of generosity, a brief two-person interaction—that does ripple out.

ele: We could conclude with a brief reiteration of despair or hope, or whatever we want. Sound good?

BOLDUC: There’s really not time to despair—and you only despair if you don’t do anything. And I find I’m going all day long everyday and still there’s plenty to do. Although I maybe brought this message, it wasn’t meant to be depressing. I don’t feel depressed, actually. I’ve been at some meetings and some people say, “End of oil? That’s great.” I mean, oil has allowed us to live in this separate world—individual big houses and SUVs… and so kind—bring it on. So there’s a whole group of people who are looking forward to this happening. But there’s going to be a tremendous, tremendous amount of suffering. You better get ready.

THOMPSON: I was feeling a bit depressed in the middle of this conversation. A woman, Joanna Macy, does this work called deep ecology—apparently she’s coming [to Boulder]. A part of that journey is that you have to go through some sense of real despair, actually touch in with the sadness that we feel about what’s happening. And then it’s “I have something to contribute.” There’s Peter Senge, who has been involved in the Shambhala Institute. One time he said to me, “It’s like the Internet bubble. It comes, it goes, it pops. The Industrial Age is a bubble—and it’s going to pop.” A friend of mine was with him last weekend, and she said that Peter said, “The thing we need to cultivate right now is our ability to stay cheerful and not get bogged down by some sense of ‘it’s too much,’ and becoming apathetic.” We have this life. And we can just do something, whatever it is, in a joyful, light-hearted way. Just contribute. So, I really resonate with that.

ele: I can’t believe I just heard the word resonate in the Shambhala Center, of all places. [Laughter] I know we only have… no time left. So I’m going to read a page and a half [laughter]—it’s the Kalapa Assembly Talks from 1981 by the Dorje Dradul. His opening talk to the Assembly participants. He says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we…” ah… I’ll skip over that. [Laughter] “We need further effort. We cannot expect that because what we are doing is right, therefore we [will= have a red carpet unfolded for us. In fact, if we study the histories, we find that the great warriors suffered enormously because of their diligence, because of their righteousness and virtue. They suffered because they were wonderful. The more profound their understanding, the more profound the attacks against them were, the more sharp and precise. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we will be annihilated, but rather than the more we realize and the more we develop, the more sensitive we begin to become. Therefore, we become more susceptible to all sorts of problems…

All kinds of obstacles will arise: economic, physiological, and social. If we look at them in such a way that they become fuel to raise greater virtuous windhorse [enlightened energy], if we look at them as further fuel that we can use to set the forests of the setting sun [degraged way of life[ on fire, it will be fine. But if we begin to panic? Panic is like an echo, which becomes gigantic gossip. Somebody says, “Did you hear so and so?” Then the next-door neighbor will say, did you hear so and so and so? Each person begins to add extra things so that by the time the gossip gets to the next city it has become enormous, gigantic.

Ladies and gentlemen, we hold the future of the world in our hands, on our path. We are not dreaming; we are not tripping; we are not exaggerating. We hold a tremendous hope. Maybe we are the only hope for the future Dark Age. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a lot of responsibilities, and they are not easy to fulfill. They won’t come along easily, like an ordinary success story. They have to be stitched, painted, carved step-by-step, inch-by-inch, minute-by-minute. It will be manual work. There will be no automatic big sweep…”

Hmmmm. It’s just saying how nothing external will save us [laughter].

Okay: “Particularly when something good is done in the world, it is usually difficult. It is manual rather than automatic. When something bad is done, usually that is automatic. That is a big sweep. Evil things are easy but good ones are difficult—they go against the grain of ordinary, habitual tendencies. In spite of the modern conveniences of automation and fast-moving communication systems, we have to build a brand-new world. That hasn’t happened yet anywhere at all, except maybe in fractions. We have to assemble the fractions step-by-step. Maybe some people have built part of such a world. Maybe some people have built the beginning of it. Maybe some of them have built the middle of it. And maybe some have built one-fifth of it, but they haven’t accomplished the whole thing. They haven’t put the parts together. Maybe we are setting ourselves a task that is almost impossible. Maybe that is true. Quite so. But on the other hand, the more we look at the possibilities of impossibilities, we find out that it is always possible. The things that have happened in the past so far have destroyed themselves, which created possibilities. They created a greater ground for us to work with, work on. We could use such destruction as creativity for us.”

I think that touches on what we talked about. Jolly good show. Thank you.

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David Bolduc, founder of one of America’s greatest indie bookstores, is a 30-year student of Buddhism and a serious yogi whose home studio is Richard Freeman’s Yoga Workshop. He lives in an elegant, feng-shuied house in the mountains just above Boulder, from which he drives to and fro in a big SUV. For more: boulderbookstore.com

Sera Thompson is a consultant, conversation host and social entrepreneur who has worked in Southern Africa, the UK, Canada and the United States. She supports leaders and brings new practices and approaches into organizations to awaken collective clarity and wise action. She teaches meditation in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition. Though Sera lives in the 7^th most bikeable small city in the US, she only rarely rides her bike: sera@pioneersofchange.net.

Waylon H. Lewis, a lifelong Buddhist, waited ‘til the jeans were on sale, then bought them—for $120. He didn’t think about benefiting others when he did so.

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