EP 129: The UN's Declaration of Human Rights: A Path Forward | Richard Reoch

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Leith Mall and I'm here today with Richard Reoch, a longtime friend and longtime human rights activist. Formerly he was global media chief at Amnesty International. He's a trustee of the Rainforest foundation and he's been doing amazing peacemaking work and human rights work around the world for decades. He's worked in Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka, Myanmar. He's worked with the Rohingya people in the Bangladesh Myanmar border. He's been right at the center in many post conflict zones working to build the foundations for peace and grounded in human rights and justice. And we talked about how the UN's decades old universal Declaration of Human Rights really gives us a map forward on where we really need to go as humanity to create a more peaceful, more sustainable, more just, more livable world in which we can all envision a future together for our children, their children and so forth. So give this a listen. Richard Riak is a fascinating, dedicated human rights activist. Great to be with you today. Richard, welcome.

Lovely to see you.

Good to see you again. And I'm going to share a little bit about your bio so our audience can know about your amazing work in the world. And just for full transparency, I've known Richard for quite a while and we've been part of a meditation community together and I've always been very inspired by his work. So Richard Reock has really devoted his life to working for peace and humanitarian causes and human rights. He was the global media chief for Amnesty International, a trustee of the Rainforest foundation and active in peacemaking initiatives in Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Raised in a Buddhist family in Canada, he served for 12 years as president of the worldwide Shambhala Meditation community as part of a high level interfaith delegation to the Rohingya refugee camps on the Bangladesh Myanmar border. In 2018, he helped launch the Buddhist Humanitarian Project featured by Lion Zhuor in Meditating on the Buddha in the midst of Buddhist terror.

He's a teacher of Tai Chi and Qigong. He's going to share a little of that with us towards the end of our time here today. He's the author of Dying A Holistic Guide for the Dying and Their Caregivers, which is just being reprinted right re released.

That's right, after 25 years.

And if you'd like more information about Richard's works, you can go to richardreock.info okay, so, again, welcome. Great to be here with you today.

Thank you.

So we had a conversation just about a year ago, and we've been in touch in the interim, but we had a conversation on a similar theme about a year ago, and a lot has happened in that year. We've been going through this incredible COVID 19 pandemic experience as a global community in one way or another, going through it together. And you're in the uk, you've had your unique experience with it. There's. We've also been through all kinds of social upheavals here in the us a major reckoning with race and political upheavals around the world. And, you know, there in the uk, you're going through Brexit and all the rest of it. Right. So it's been just. I mean, sometimes I think we don't realize what we're going through because we so quickly adapt. But if you could step outside of it and look at this past 12 months, you just. I think it would be shocking.

Yeah.

So at any rate, I'm just curious, how are you doing? How's that year been for you? What have you learned from it? I know we kind of knew it was coming at this time last year, we didn't know what was coming, but we knew something was coming. So I wondered if there's been surprises and just kind of what you've learned.

I think that.

It'S been a time of.

Increasing division in the world, I would say.

On many levels. And this divisiveness has.

Led to higher levels of social disintegration and.

Aggression, and also I would say demonization.

And.

I. I have felt that very keenly, partly because of the work I do, but also because I sometimes say to my friends that it's as if there's a. It's as if there's a fire burning, or you could say a forest fire burning. And even if we are not ourselves.

You know, right in the middle of the flames.

It'S like there's a. There's a smoke or a particulate that we are inhaling with every breath. And. And I've noticed that myself that I have had many more moments of sudden aggression.

Anger.

Rage, which flare up. And I, you know, I asked myself, where did that come from? And then when I get into conversations with others, I see others experiencing the same thing or experiencing that coming towards them. So I think that there is almost like a globe encircling smoke or heat, which is creating conditions which emotionally are incendiary for many people. And when you consider that one of the hardest things for human beings to do is to sort of stay put or be in a room on their own, let alone with other people.

It'S not surprising that there has been such a tragic increase in domestic violence and also suicide.

Yeah, yeah. Let alone even with the people we're close to. Because one of the. One of the things we all know about our most familiar relationships, we kind of get very good at pushing each other's buttons. Right. And so, you know, home alone can be a difficult situation. And then, of course, sadly, it can also go into isolationism and depression. And as you've experienced some kind of, you know, aggression and anger arising in yourself, that's kind of going into that hyperarousal. When we get outside of our zone of resilience, or what Siegel called window of tolerance. But we can also shut. Start to dissociate and shut down. And there's a lot of that going on as well. And neither one are particularly contributing to overall collective resilience.

Yeah. When you talk about the closing down, I've noticed that.

I tend to be less generous or less responsive to the appeals that come from charities seeking help. And certainly here in the United Kingdom, the voluntary sector or the.

Charitable sector has been hit really hard by a diminishing in donations. I think that's a sign, you know, people just. And I freely confess to that myself, that just.

Just a little less open to seeing yet more images of suffering.

Yeah. And kind of a natural contraction. Yeah. Which I think we need to be kind to ourselves because it's almost neurobiological that we're going to do that. Right. It's a sense of survival. And it would take a very proactive effort in the face of that to further open, which, of course, is our human task and journey and challenge. So, you know, we're going to be talking about collective societal resilience here, but of course, you know, we can't. It takes individuals to create collective resilience. It takes resilient individuals to create collective resilience. And so I'm curious if, you know, in terms of your background, if you feel that you had a somewhat contemplative background growing up in Canada with Buddhist parents who really honored the contemplative life as well as community service, from my understanding, were quite engaged in that way. And so you grew up in a family atmosphere that kind of honored those things. And I wonder if you feel that set you up for kind of having a greater baseline of resilience and how that maybe has served you and the work you've done, because you've obviously chosen to go into some very challenging areas of work and very challenging places in the world.

I.

It is true that I have, you know, spent a lot of my working life in situations of extreme conflict.

And.

Perhaps you could say I've learned. Learned some tolerance for it on the job. Undoubtedly. My.

Early childhood.

In the Japanese Buddhist community.

I think, motivated me in that direction, because although almost everything that was going on was in Japanese, and at age 6, I really had no idea what was going on. The. These services concluded with a chant that we did in English. And, you know, I think it's haunted me through my life. And it included the phrase that.

When.

We follow in the footsteps of the Buddha, that what we do is we labor. The phrase was labor earnestly for the welfare of all humanity. And I know that sounds like a very, you know, lofty phrase, and indeed it is. But.

I look back sometimes with a little humor and go, you know, I don't know if you had to do all this, Richard, in order to.

Fulfill that.

But I think that something which also stuck with me from being a little boy in this Japanese community, these were Japanese people who had all been arbitrarily and illegally interned in the alien internment camps in Canada, as was true also for the Japanese people in the United States during the Second World War. So they had. Had had the experience of.

You know, suddenly having a welcoming country, to a large extent, turn against them at high speed, and they had lost virtually everything. And.

When I reflect back on my experiences with them, this was not a group of people who seemed to be harboring.

A tremendous resentment.

I don't recall them expressing a hatred or ill will towards the mainstream society which had treated them so.

Harshly.

They seemed to have a method.

Of manifesting tremendous graciousness.

And.

I'm sure this is something I pondered, and it is still something that I admire. And what I find particularly interesting in this time that we're talking about right now of tremendous social division and.

Harshness. And as I said before, demonization, I feel that.

Part of the way forward has to be to find a way to have social discourse.

And indeed, deep disagreement.

Without descending into.

The kind of hatred and hate speech which we see going on right across the world, regardless of political systems. It's almost like a social cancer which is eating at the fabric of society.

Very much so. Very much so. I didn't realize that there were internment camps for Japanese during World War II in Canada as well as in the United States. I was very familiar with that history in the US But I didn't realize that it occurred in Canada. Very interesting that, you know, for people who have befallen such circumstances, you know, whether it's.

Genocide, ethnic cleansing, the internment camps, slavery, all different kinds of oppression and bigotry and where it's really affected groups of people because of their race or their ethnicity or religion and so forth. Very reasonable that there's outrage and anger and that there's all of these things. And yet we have seen some groups of people able to seemingly transform that in a way and find.

Greater access to equanimity and forgiveness and peace around it. I'm thinking of, you know, I had the opportunity to spend a day with part of the day with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and some ex prisoners. And part of that part of the day we spent with three young Tibetans, two Tibetan nuns, women, and a young Tibetan man who was actually Canadian but was back in Tibet doing ethnographic research. Anyway, all three of them were locked up by the Chinese government that occupies Tibet or controls Tibet or whatever your politics are at this point, and put into one of the most infamous prisons there, Drop Chi Prison, and basically been tortured for six years. And they were going around and bearing witness to the truth of what happened in hopes to raise awareness around this and prevent it from happening to more people or even stop what's currently happening still. But their stories and their posture and their way of being was completely free of demonization and anger and bitterness. They weren't demonizing their guards. They're being quite frank about what occurred. But, you know, you could just see they'd grown up from really birthed with these deeply held Buddhist values of.

Not othering, of interconnectedness, of compassion and so forth. And of course, these values, we can find them in all the great world's religious traditions. I think of another incident when I know there was a terrible tragedy that happened, I think somewhere in Pennsylvania, and I believe it was a Quaker group who just so immediately embraced forgiveness. And the general public found it kind of bizarre that how could you be forgiving this terrible act that happened? I think a young woman was killed or something. Something. A terrible tragedy happened and. And people were astounded that they found their way into forgiveness so readily.

So that's an interesting dynamic in terms of what is in many of our religious traditions, that spirit of forgiveness and connectedness to our humanity. But it seems to get lost.

More Often than not.

Well, I think.

There'S some urgency about rediscovering this, if I may say so, because.

Not so much, you know, just from like you might say a religious or a spiritual perspective, but in terms of the complexity and the scale of the challenges we face.

You know, we, I'm sure that many people realize that there's this.

That the level of a fragmentation and a competition and actually hostility among nations has even affected the distribution of vaccine throughout the world to Covid victims. And.

When we look at the situation with climate change.

This is.

A.

A collective challenge on such a scale that affects virtually every aspect of the fabric of human society and all its elements, whether it's commerce, science.

Technology, home life, doesn't matter what it is, we are all involved in that. And if we are not able to find a way to look very coolly at the issue, see what needs to be done, tease out our differences.

Be prepared to tell uncomfortable truths to each other, but at the same time hold that in a spirit of.

The human family and in this case the planetary family. Well, it doesn't matter how, how many bright minds there are. It doesn't how many matter how many angry people there are. If we don't adopt a mindset which permits deep disagreement but is predicated on something even deeper, which is our common humanity and our common inheritance and, and responsibility to the biosphere, then we will not succeed.

We will not survive.

We will not succeed. We will not survive and we will, in the course of it, continue.

Ravaging planet and extinguishing species with which we cohabit. So this is no longer a question of go, go to the spiritual section in the, in, in the bookstore or self help and see, you know, how can I, how can I deal with stress, how can I calm down, how can I be a nicer person and you know, how can I radiate more joy? We have to draw deeply on something which is at risk of being lost.

To hold the whole family together.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the, the threat of climate change and global warming is becoming not only an existential threat to so many of our fellow species, but to the human race altogether? I mean, the planet's going to survive in the long term, but, you know, will we make this planet uninhabitable for ourselves and for the majority of our fellow species? So I mean, if we don't, if we're not picking up the message of the commonality of our shared interest at some point here, it's becoming more, I don't know what's going to take for it to be. I mean, the pandemic. The interesting thing about this terrible pandemic and, you know, terrible, tragic loss of life, that so many people are losing their loved ones and so many people losing their own lives and, and. But hopefully the one silver lining is we're all going through this experience and maybe in a fractious way and with a lot of disparity in the politics, getting in the way of the distribution of vaccine and all kinds. But we all are going through this. We're going to have this common moment, this common year, this common baseline of a shared experience. So it's interesting to see where that will go. And as you were mentioning, you know, we're talking about the, you know, the anger. We certainly don't want to be dismissive of people's genuine anger and even outrage at types of victimization and oppression and all kinds of terrific things that are happening. And at the same time, how much anger can our human system hold, you know, if we don't find some way to transform the anger into beneficial action and so forth. So I'd like to ask you about, I think from early on in your upbringing with your family and kind of being in that mostly ethnically Japanese Buddhist community and your parents being focused on humanitarianism and this whole notion of humanitarianism and specifically human rights. Human rights is something that actually kind of arose in terms of individual human rights. It really arose in modernity as part of what's often called the Enlightenment and, and especially here in the West. Now I think you can see threads of it in other traditions and even in the Buddhist tradition going back through Ashoka Zedix and even back to the time of the Buddha, beginning to recognize some human rights at an individual level.

But what is the connection? A lot of that comes up. I know some of your works and some of the postures around the international politics and the US Position on that around, you know, calling out human rights violations in various countries and so forth. And then often they turn around and call us out, rightly so, for some of our own history or even present things that are being done.

But the connection between this idea of human rights and what you've been talking about in terms of our shared humanity and our common interest.

As human beings and this human family, any sense of this human family. So there's the. There's the collective notion of this human family with our shared interests that hopefully is becoming more obvious. And then there's the notion of our individual human rights, the dignity of each human life and our, you know, And I'm wondering if you could talk about how that, you know, is kind of in terms of your actual experience, because you've been working with us for a long time.

Yes.

I think that those people who live in what you call, we could call more individualistic cultures.

Have sort of, you may say, economically and politically and in other ways picked up on the individual aspect. And that individual aspect is there.

But if we simply take, for example, what you first referred to.

In our current era, the definition of human rights.

The root document is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted at the.

As one of the earliest activities of the United nations when it was formed out of the ashes of the.

Of the horror of the Second World War. And I was looking at it today, thinking we'd be talking about this. And I'd like to read to you the very first sentence of that Declaration, which, by the way, was adopted by the General assembly of the United nations and the product of a huge international collaboration to draft this document. And what it says is recognition of the inherent dignity.

And of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family.

Is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

That's a remarkable statement, in fact, and what I feel comes through there particularly for me, are two phrases, inherent dignity.

And the human family.

Now, this point about inherent dignity means that it is something that virtually by birth.

By the very nature of our existing, there is this inherent dignity.

And that is something deeper than law or.

Or entitlement.

It's, it's. It's something which is a. Simultaneously.

Fragile and precious.

And.

Which in a way.

We need to see in each other.

In order to have the kind of social discourse and problem solving that we all collectively need at the moment. And that word, collectively, of course, is embodied in this notion of human family.

And there might be some in the sort of professional human rights world who tend to see it largely in terms of treaties and legal interpretations, who would say that this is perhaps a poetic.

Expression used by the framers of the Universal Declaration to sort of open up the subject. But I would say that it actually lies at the heart of the matter.

This sense of a human family.

You know, is echoed as, as you said in many.

Cultures. It's very closely aligned to what many people would, would talk about when they talk about divine creation. The sense that we are all made.

Out of the same fabric or the same.

Spiritual intention of a creator.

You find it in poetry over the centuries and through cultures, and.

Perhaps people are familiar with Maya Angelou's poem Human Family, where she has the refrain, we are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike. And then you see this coming down, as you said, through.

Innumerable phases in history. And then it emerges out of, as I said before, the ashes of the Second World War. And.

If you look, I think it's fair to say, at virtually all the conflicts that we see and indeed the global environmental crisis, all these, including all forms of racial and economic prejudice, exploitation and subjugation, are all intimately connected.

With this failure to perceive and respect the inherent dignity of others and a failure to understand that we are part of one family.

I think that connection you're drawing between.

The inherent dignity of any individual life or the sanctity of life and that notion of an individual's rights and dignity in that way, and then connecting that with.

That, it has a symbiotic relationship or complete interdependent relationship with the inherent dignity of the human family. When we think one of the earliest civilized civilizing, civilizing factors for us as human beings is being part of a family, right? And at some point being willing to adjust our locus of decision making to the needs of the family, like every now and then being willing to just go along with what the rest of our small family unit rights rather than what we want, right? That early civilizing and then that extrapolates out to our. Our tribe, our clan, our people. And of course then that can become ethnocentrism, which has its values, but then can also lead to conflict. And, you know, and some people posit, you know, in terms of our evolutionary stages, at some point we get to world centric thinking where we are thinking much more in terms of the global family, right? Or even including the planet, echocentric thinking. And.

So when I think about this one thing that comes up when you get down into the nitty gritty of it. So.

It seems that as human beings, when we feel confident that our needs are being met and that we can likely get our basic needs met, we tend to relax and we're pretty well behaved, pretty naturally partnering and collaborative, you know, I mean, the world would be in pretty rough shape if that weren't true because the vast majority of us get up every day and we're, you know, we queue up at the well, we drive on the right side of the road. We, you know, we're fairly well behaved and collaborative and partnering unless fear sets in, right? But when fear sets in that I won't be able to get my needs met or my family won't be able to get their needs met or my people are not going to get their needs met, then of course we see all kinds of other things. So it would seem that the more we can distribute a sense of security and confidence in getting needs met, we can lower.

The stripe and the conflict and the anger and. But how do you do that? Is then the question. And that connects up with this notion of rights. Because individual rights is often talked about in terms of political rights, civil rights, legal kind of individual rights. But then do we have economic rights, health care rights? Often some men, progressive politics, we want to say healthcare should be a right, basic health care should be a right.

People are talking about.

Having everyone having some kind of minimum income. Like there would be some kind of. Some level of financial security, right? Not just a good thing for society to do, but that it actually should be a right, a human right or something like that. So this extension of rights, and I'm not even sure if rights is the right term because that often starts to get very legalistic and gets away from the fact that, no, this is just. We do this because this is our family, right? So there's a kind of are we coming from this place of really, this is my family, or do we have to get legalistic about to make it happen? I mean, it's probably somewhere in between. But I'm wondering if you could talk about that landscape a bit. And you know, most attempts. I don't know where I am these days, but I think I aspire to envision some kind of much more highly regulated, very conscious capitalism of some kind, simply because I haven't seen any evidence that where you, in an attempt to try to distribute security as widely as possible, you take out all the incentives that it's worked very well.

So, you know, we're still trying to figure that out. But I'm wondering if you could talk about it in terms of. Within this context of human family and notions about rights and you know, because this could happen for individuals in a country. But even how are we distribute? Like the perfect. You brought up the vaccine. Should the United nations have somehow stepped in and distributed the vaccine equitably instead of letting the nation states do it and have them being driven by politics.

Sorry, big question, I guess.

Yeah, well, not just a big question, but, you know, several.

I think. First, I just wanted to say something from my experience, which is. Which I. Which often comes up and is quite poignant to me when you were talking about how, you know, if people have their basic needs met, then, you know, there's a certain relaxation. And.

Then many people argue and believe quite passionately that this is that sort of pyramid that you have to go up in order to have a sense of, you know, personal dignity and fulfillment in life.

Yeah. Now, I've come across many.

Situations that really.

Challenge that in two ways. First.

I was part of a. Of a delegation that was.

Examining the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross in.

A war zone. And we had entered a city in that area which large parts of which had been bombed to smithereens.

And.

The people who had been living in that city had been.

Advised or warned or ordered by.

You know, the leaders of their ethnic group to leave the city and go out into the jungle. And this is how hundreds of thousands of them survived. And they spent.

I think it was close to three years living in extraordinarily primitive conditions because they. They fled with nothing as the bombardment was underway.

And I remember speaking to.

A person who had been a judge.

In that area and in that city.

Before the bombardment took place and before the evacuation into the jungle.

And.

This question of what's most important came up in our conversation.

And he said to me.

I know what matters most to me.

And what matters to my people.

It is not.

The deprivation of our homes.

The lack of food.

The illnesses.

And the hardship.

Of living in the jungle.

It is the fact that we are a people.

Who are completely denied.

Our dignity.

And I could cite numerous other examples. And I think that while there can be an argument in certain cases for this hierarchy of needs, one of the other things which I have witnessed my.

Life in this work is that.

Often at the end of a conflict or, say, a military defeat or.

An interval in fighting.

There is a school of thought which is held by many countries around the world, by many financial institutions.

That peace can be bought.

By economic investment.

And this is where you see.

I mean, we saw this recently, you know, with the previous US Government's.

Attempt to map out a peace plan in the Middle east.

Fundamentally based on.

A set of economic.

Arrangements.

And that people who have a grievance are willing to give up that grievance if they see it would be worth it to them to give it up. And I'm not singling that out because of that situation.

This is a very widespread view. And I have to say that in my experience, such as it is, not only doesn't it. Not only does it not work.

But it is so deeply insulting to people.

That it actually fuels.

Resistance.

Rather than opens a path to accommodation and peace. So this is why I Realize I'm only speaking to your first question, but why? On reflection on, you know, what I've.

You know, largely failed at, if I could put it that way.

There is a. There is a fundamental understanding about the nature of the human being.

And human society.

Which, if it is not understood and preserved.

Will mean that all our other efforts, laudable and amazing as they are, for example, in the field of technology.

Will not save us.

Yeah, I think you're pointing to something really critical there. And I'd like to go down this thread for just a moment still, because, yeah, I mean, I still think there's something to this notion that for any of us as individuals or even groups, our current competence, or lack thereof, about meeting basic needs and of course, need for dignity could be another need in that area, need for recognition of our basic dignity that that will in many ways determine. And I'm thinking of like, even when civil society starts to break down, and civil society and the status quo of a civil society may still contain injustices and inequities, various things, but at least there's enough stability to move forward, right? And we're in a situation now where we need to find enough social cohesion to make the right decision to do things, to really ward off existential threats on the planet. And while we're also trying to create a. Continually create a more just and fair and equitable world and so forth. So, you know, it is probably important to maintain some kind of civil society or, you know, somebody could have a theory, we'll just let it all blow up and go into chaos and see what comes up out of that. But that's a rather risky theory, I would think, with a lot of suffering.

But you know, for example, in Europe, the difference the approach of the Marshall Plan after World War II versus what happened after World War I, where Europe was just left in ruins and in the ashes arose, out of all that anger arose the National Socialist movement, the Nazi movement, and very intentionally with the Marshall Plan, they rebuilt Europe, at least Western Europe, and we're able to create, you know, what have been some of the more prosperous social democratic societies over the last 50 years or so. So.

You know, I just. But I think the key thing you're saying when it's done, especially when it's, when it's, it seems like when it's coming from the more developed world to less developed world and it's delivered without honoring dignity, is where the real problem is. And it can actually be demeaning.

Yes, and, and I think the point is that prosperity is not a guarantee of respect.

No, not at all.

For human dignity. And.

I don't know, I, I, I, I. There are two words that come to my mind, George Floyd.

You know, that.

I mean, people, I've heard people say, how about, how could that happen in such a, you know, wealthy, prosperous, advanced country? Well, what are the indicators that are being used.

To measure prosperity and advanced and developed?

You know, I'm sure I'm not the first person to point out that, that.

We could, we could use a wrong set of indicators.

To disastrous effects. Let me, let me just give you another example of this.

As you mentioned, I had quite a lot to do with peace efforts on the island of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean.

A country which has gone through 30 years of horrifying civil war and is by no means out of the conflicts that affect.

Its whole society. At the end of the imperial period, when the British Empire was essentially overthrown and India and the other parts of the empire in that area gained independence, Sri Lanka was a country that had one of the highest literacy rates in the whole of Asia and one of the best functioning educational systems.

And when I became involved in meetings with.

Killers on both sides of the war.

I was talking to among the most highly educated people you could want to meet.

And I began to ask myself about, well, what kind of education.

Are we offering?

And this has come up very recently because, as you may know, one of the tremendous challenges with the millions of refugees that we have in the world is a huge number of them, our children.

And tremendous efforts are being put into providing them with an education, because from a conventional point of view, it's education as a stepping stone to a better life.

At the same time, many of these young people.

Have witnessed.

A level of human violence and cruelty.

That is almost unimaginable.

To those who have not lived through that.

And it is possible to see each of those children either.

As someone who is able to learn deeply from that experience.

And become, you might say, a future Nelson Mandela or any other human giant in the work of peace precisely because of their background.

Or many of these children could be seen as.

Time bombs.

Just waiting to be manipulated into perpetuating.

The bloodshed that they and their families have been subjected to.

Now.

I haven't been terribly successful in this argument, but tried to plead with people who are involved in the educational activities that.

All the traditional skills that are associated with education are well and good. That's not the point.

But there is this aspect of.

Shaping, we're dealing with.

This legacy.

That in a way holds the key for whether the chain of hate and the chain of violence is going to be cut.

Or whether these camps and.

Settlements become.

Well educated training grounds.

For the perpetuation.

Of human warfare.

Well, you're addressing some of the real, you know, I think deep questions there. And even a situation like Sri Lanka, you have these basic groups, the Buddhist majority and you have the Tamil minority. I think that's basically the grounds. And of course within those groups you probably have more prosperity among the majority Buddhists, but you probably have people on both sides with a level of education and prosperity. So prosperity is no guarantee of good behavior at all, obviously. But there is some still notion that some shared perception among those groups that they threaten each other's collective needs being met, that somehow they're a threat to each other over of scarcity, thinking around available land, available resources, available water, available wealth and that over time it builds up with hate that gets driven around religious ideologies and antipathies and then the experience of all the horror and that they, you know, the historical incidents. Well, they killed my grandfather and they killed my cousin and they killed my, you know, we've been, you know, and it's very hard to kind of untangle this, but it would seem like, and I'm curious about in your work whether if there is any possible solution to that or any of these other kind of.

You know, religious and ethnic and political conflicts, deep seated conflicts around the world, which could really blow up much worse when we start seeing the disruptive results of climate change. If we don't really deal with this really soon.

What is going to allow those, you know, I really could be part of the education process. And of course they've been doing that in the Middle east for a long time. Wonderful program trying to get to the youth and educate them in such a ways and get them involved with each other across the lines of that Arab Israeli conflict. And then it just blows up again. Right. And then you got the young people involved in the intipada and you know, and so education clearly a process, but it seems to be there has to be some way of.

Finding ways to distribute resources of various kinds that like for example, those two groups could @ some point decide we can actually live together and share this land together and have some confidence that we're not going to annihilate each other or threaten each other.

And then you can extrapolate that out to the global scale.

How do we not continually see the next ethno, either the family next door or the other ethnic group or the Other nation state, group, group as a.

Threat.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think there are, there are two issues that are, are mixed in here together. First of all.

I just, I just don't want, I know that you don't think this and I don't think this, but I think it's very important to state it that, you know, my reference to the work in, that I have done in, in Sri Lanka was because I could give you that example from first hand.

Experience. But.

You know, I, I, I, I'm residing here in the, in the United Kingdom.

Which arguably.

Unleash the largest.

Exercise in global domination.

Essentially a view that, that other people.

Exist.

To serve us.

Now it's true that that had an economic.

Element to it, of course, starting with it was called the British East India Company and so on and so forth. It's true that the vast network of enslavement.

You know, in, in part fueled, you know, the.

The sugar trade and all those things.

But.

When I witness the modern versions of that.

I.

I have lost for myself the safety net.

Of believing that this was somehow.

Just about greed.

Or material goods or space or land.

There is a level of utterance, disregard.

For the humanity of people who don't look like us, don't speak like us, don't dress like us, aren't us. And ultimately we see as them.

Rather than us and the.

The human told that.

Is incalculable.

And.

When someone suggests to people who have experienced that.

That their problem.

Can be solved.

In material terms.

It is hard to find the words to, to express the depth of that insult and how that insult is resonates.

In you might say, their, their bloodline.

Now I think.

That that is intensifying in this era that we're living in.

And I think the challenge we face, which is why what you're talking about.

Is to how do we somehow get ourselves to a point where we can have this discourse.

In a way that you could say harnesses the best of us.

While at the same time time acknowledging that we're all coming to this point in history.

You know, with what Buddhists would say, the inherited karma.

Of a family that has behaved very badly towards.

Itself.

I think we have to choose though, where are we going to put our, you know, I mean, we do have this existential threat of climate change. We have other existential threats really, when you think of the scale of things today, because there's so many of us on the planet. So not only are we putting these huge pressures on the planet which really could make the planet largely uninhabitable in several generations.

And also just because of the numbers, the potential for constant conflict and strife and further wars and all the rest of it, it's really potentially catastrophic just all the time. And I mean, there is something that keeps the worst of it.

Even with all the horror that happened in the 20th century, you know, and all the horror that still happens, it could be a lot worse if there wasn't something underlying cohesive thing that has kept us going. And so, you know, I'm thinking, you know, what you were describing on one end is just this basic tendency we have as human beings to other each other on all kinds of lines. You know, we're just more comfortable with people that look and talk like us and, you know, except a few of us are more adventurous and we actually like being around people who are less like us. But in general, people are pretty clannish. And, you know, racism, which we're, you know, is so front and center in our lives today and trying to figure out how to deal with it and transform it is really fundamentally a form of this kind of othering, right? It's always been that that other group over there, beyond the boundaries, those are the barbarians. That's the other. Those are not good people. They're not us. Right? So I don't know if we have time to fundamentally solve that before we find some way to create enough cohesion not to burn down the planet and have things devolve in the chaos. So not to say that we shouldn't be aspiring, but, you know, there's so many examples where even in the Middle east where.

Christians and Jews and Muslims live side by side in peace for generations, and then a generation later, they're killing each other. So what is it that can create enough social cohesion? How do we contribute to enough social cohesion to give us enough stability to work on the problems that we need to work on and find the solutions we need to solve to face the existential threats we're building. In the face of that, we're probably not going to eradicate that basic human tendency to other each.

Other.

Well, I think if you, if you look at, you know, discussions that take place among, among folks that disagree or want to solve a problem.

There are underlying attitudes. I guess you've noticed that underlying attitudes are sort of what I'm bringing up here, which hugely shape.

The outcome of discussions.

And.

Part of and, and, and precisely because it is possible, as you pointed out, for people to, to at the very least coexist.

Despite their differences.

That you could say, is a gift that human beings have because our, our family is a diverse family.

And.

You could say it's a quality. You could also say it's a skill.

And actually knowing how to conduct the very discussions that you're talking about here.

Is not only a question of, you know, the content.

And finding the solutions. It's also a question of the, it's almost like.

The personal.

Energetic imprint of the people who are involved in these discussions. I'm hopeful that elements of the new wave of.

Concern for the environment.

May show that people are looking at ways of addressing highly conflictual issues.

But conscious of the need to do it in a way so that we don't repeat the bad habits that have brought us to this situation. And I realize that sounds perhaps a little vague, but often these intangible qualities are vague.

And yet when you look at what we might regard as great.

Leaders.

Who have brought about.

Constructive changes in society and peace, it's not just that they were good negotiators and that there was.

A clearly definable goal in sight, but that they, they actually had as human beings.

Equality. That magnetized people. And I think that we need to, to nurture more of that magnetizing quality we have so that our discourse with each other becomes.

Friends who disagree.

Rather than people who disagree and don't care whether someone else is a friend or.

Not. Right. Well, I think you're, you know, for me, I'm going to come hearing and envisioning several kind of tracks here. One is this kind of value system you're talking about and really getting to the place through education, through shared experience or experience of the pandemic, experience of the growing threat of human extinction from climate change or whatever. It's going to contribute to it. But I think it should be intentionally part of our education of connecting with this level of mutual respect across all lines and doing the best we can with that. But you mentioned something else where I felt like we're really getting somewhere and sadly, we're kind of at the end of our time here. But this has been incredibly rich and valuable. But you mentioned when I was pointing out our capacity to coexist and that there's a lot of historical evidence that we can coexist, coexist around across a lot of differences and a lot of diversity. And you mentioned it almost as a skill. So in my thing, if we can identify that skill and teach that skill, that's a skill that could really be a resilience building skill that could enhance social cohesion, enhance social capital by Training really throughout our whole education system, training human beings. That the skill of.

Coexistence.

Yes. Which of course you don't want to disconnect from the value of why, but still it is a skill. Right. I think it's definitely just like we're now understanding from neurobiology that wellbeing is actually a skill we can train ourselves in. Well.

Being. Yes. I think there are two really practical examples of that. Number one is the extraordinary work that has been done in the field of emotional intelligence. Know the people who are doing training in, in, in schools, often in areas where there's a gang violence and, and all that sort of thing and really working on. It's not like it's not education in the sense of injecting emotional intelligence into people. Right. It's. It's education told me there was a pill of, of bringing out, you know, leading out of actually connecting and reawakening this emotional intelligence. That's absolutely essential work. And we've seen in all kinds of districts and school systems the benefit of that. The other example that comes to mind is the work which Martin Luther King Jr. And those who work closely with him did in training.

The activists in the civil rights movement in how to conduct themselves in the face of the fire hoses and the dogs and the clubs and how to love thine enemy.

Right there, you know, on the streets and the bridges where they were being attacked. Now, I think perhaps to some this, this might seem sort of fanciful or it could even seem weak, like. But the point is that there was a real understanding there that these qualities and these strengths in people, in the same way as with physical training.

Can be cultivated.

Can actually lead people to overcome, you know, their physical discomfort and their emotional discomfort and express a power which in effect is disarming.

And when that disarmament occurs.

Then those doors start to open.

And.

That opening can lead. It doesn't always, but it can lead to social change in a way that might otherwise never be.

Possible.

Yeah, I think what I'm hearing, we've talked about a lot of examples today and I think, I know that you and I share a value that one of the reasons this is all possible and it's not completely hopeless is that as human beings we have an innate capacity for everything we're talking about here. And you know, you spoke about examples of the, of the Japanese Canadian community you were part of in that Buddhist community and how they were handling their legacy of having been in the internment camps. And you know, instead of looking at either the leaders that spring up or the groups of people that seem to be almost outliers in terms of resilience and in terms of being able to respond in ways that are more building towards our shared humanity and not falling into very understandable strife and conflict and fear and conflict, but somehow rise above that. Do we actually need to start studying these individuals in these groups and understand how they got there? Because they did get there in some way. And we can learn to train and train that culture and educate ourselves into that culture. I mean, these are skills, and this is all trainable and educatable, I think. And I think that would be a really worthwhile study to really look at the examples of resilient leaders and resilient communities who, across tremendous adversity, have risen above that and figure out, okay, what's the DNA of that and how do we train ourselves up in.

That?

Definitely. Well, speaking of that, I wonder if before we close here, you could share.

Maybe a simple practice of skill with us. But I know you have been practicing and teaching tai chi and qigong for a long time and talk about resilience building at the individual level. Those are ancient sciences that are really very, very effective in building resilience. So I wonder if you could share something with us that we could all take with us.

Here. Yes, I could. Fleet. And actually, you know, I feel quite agitated at this moment because this conversation has brought up, you know, experiences that I have lived through, things that I've witnessed. And.

So I feel quite on edge. So I'm quite happy.

To do this. Unfortunately, we don't have any electrodes to. It does. But what I think last. Last year I demonstrated this practice from the Chinese qigong tradition, which means internal energy work of standing like a tree.

But I thought what might be interesting for. Well, I'd like to do it. And what might be interesting for others is that there is a method of a hand massage.

Which is.

Extremely helpful.

In terms of lowering one's internal agitation.

Stress, promoting better circulation in the body, and simultaneously sort of revitalizing us as well as relaxing us. And I thought for a few minutes I could just take you through this exercise, a little sequence also on my website, where if people want to do it with me, they. They can do it perfect. So the first thing we want to do is we want to energize our hands by rubbing the palms together. You can just see it's just a very straightforward. And the friction of rubbing them together will normally make them feel a little warmer. So we want to. Sometimes people like to do it quite quickly with a lot of pressure. Doesn't matter. The point is to warm our hands up this way. Then we interlink our fingers so that they're rubbing against each other. And then we rub so, so that we are massaging the insides of our fingers and we're. We're rubbing these side portions of our fingers against each other. Then we can change the link so that it's the other way around. And we do that. And for those who are familiar with the Chinese medical model, you'll know that there are these energy pathways that run through the whole body, all the major organs, and have endings in the hands. Now let's take our right hand and let's take, for example, our thumb. And squeeze the thumb.

Just like that so that we're just really squeezing that hand and then move to the next finger. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. Next finger, squeeze. It's a firm, strong squeeze. But of course, we're not trying to hurt ourselves. We're just really squeezing up from the base of each finger to the tip of each finger.

And then we're going to change hands. So I'm going to use my left hand to squeeze this thumb. And sometimes, as I'm doing right now, you may notice that different fingers have different temperatures and that sometimes there are parts of the fingers that are a little colder than the others. And I'm noticing that the tips of my fingers are a little colder than the rest. And that is.

Definitely a sign that I have had some.

Internal tension over the course of talking to you. Not because I was talking to you, of course. Now let's re energize our hands like this.

Now we're going to squeeze the right hand and squeeze up the fingers. Now there are these bones. Squeeze in the middle of the bone, not on the joint. And this squeezing can be quite strong. The next finger, squeeze in the middle of the bone. Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. That's the way. And not, I'm saying squeezes. You really want to.

Really promote the sensation in each finger.

Now we're going to switch hands. We're squeezing on the thumb, squeeze and then squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. You can, even if you want, just like rotate or just move the finger, finger and thumb back and forwards a little bit.

People who would be familiar with the fact that there are an incredible number of nerve endings in our hands and fingers. These are among the most sensitive parts of our body. So the messages that are.

Nerves in our fingers. Let's go back to massaging again, are getting from this massage is being communicated throughout the entire Nervous system. Now we're going to work on the palms. Use your thumb and just press into the flesh here. There's muscles here, and that's painful. Now, this is a very powerful area to work on. Often. Very, very helpful in releasing headaches. Come over to the pad of the hand. Really press in. Just like, you know, it's like.

Just an area that you want to soften up. Other hand, press in the thumb. Ooh, that was painful. It's not that I'm hurting myself. It's that there's subtle tension stored here. I often helped people release headaches just by getting them to do this massage to these areas. This muscle right here. Press in there. All right, now we're getting close to the end. Make your hand into a little sort of a tapping beak like this. And just tap firmly all over your palm. It could be like a. Like a bird. Just really tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. The other way. Other one. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Okay, now we put our two hands together.

Clasp the hands like that, and then squeeze them together. Like you're using each hand to hug the other, or that your hands are just giving themselves the biggest ever bear hug.

Imaginable. And.

Then.

Relax.

And then just feel the.

Sensations in your hands.

And.

I guess that's wonderful. I'm feeling it throughout the body.

It's. Look, I look a.

Lot. I.

Look. I look a lot.

Happier.

Yes. Than I was. And it's not. And I think the key point here is that it's not that we're doing this to.

Get rid of our troubles, as it were, or make everything all right. It's that if people like you, Fleet, and everyone else who's concerned about these issues is really going to stick with this and do our best.

We have to be able to take care of ourselves so that we can hold what we're experiencing, what we're working with, and not be crushed by it. And the secret is in all these ways, wonderful nerve endings and energy pathways in our hands, and it's accessible to all of.

Us. Well, thank you so much. And that is precisely the theme of this conference, really. We know we're facing incredible challenges as a human race on this planet. And our intention is not necessarily to figure out the solutions here, but we need a lot of resilience to even be able to begin to try to find a solution, to begin to hold this and address this. And at the individual and collective and societal level, how do we create the resilience and the strength. And at the individual level, it's so important that we take care of ourselves. And just having a ready, immediate tool like our hands, they're right there. We can use them anytime, give ourselves that hand massage and yeah, it's absolutely beautiful. And it's these kind of tools that I think they may seem simple, but they're critical to everything we're talking about that we've got to find a way to take care of ourselves and take care of each other at scale so that we can have the resilience to face the challenges we're facing. Absolutely. Thank.

You. Amen.

Brother.

Okay, well, thank you so much, Richard. It's been delightful to be with you and I apologize if our line of questioning got you a little stressed out there. But I'm glad you had a readily available resilience tool to. To bring yourself back into a good place. And you got me there too. So thank you very.

Much.

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