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One of my favorite stories that I'd like to open with--and some of you I
suspect will remember this--took place in India a number of decades ago,
when the English had colonized India and they wanted to set up a golf course.
Which was for many reasons probably not a very good idea. But
one of the big reasons was because as, it turned out, golf in Calcutta had
this obstacle of these monkeys that would go into the course and take the balls
that the golfers were golfing around, and toss them everywhere. And it really,
really upset the probably mostly guys that were playing golf, so they tried to
control the monkeys. And their first way of trying to control the monkeys was to
build these high fences around the fairway. Now, monkeys climb, you know?
[LAUGH] So they would climb up the fences and it was, it just did not work. So
the next thing they tried was to lure them away from the course. You know, whatever,
I don't know how they lured them, kind of waving bananas or something. But you know,
for every monkey that would step away, you know, all their relatives would come and
join them in the fun. So, in desperation they started trapping and
relocating them, and that didn't work either. It just,
they, the monkeys had too many relatives that were into this. So, finally,
they established a novel rule for this particular golf course,
which is that golfers in Calcutta had to play the ball
wherever the monkey dropped it. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] Now,
they were on to something. This is what they
might call Dharma 101. You know, this is basic teachings that,
as we all know, we want life to be a certain way, right?
We want the conditions to be just so. And life never cooperates. Or
it does, maybe for a while, which makes us want to hold on tight. But then,
things change. And so, what happens is that we, the monkeys are dropping
the ball where we don't want them to be dropped. And if we're to find any peace,
if we're to find any freedom, our job is to learn to pause and say,
Okay, this is where the monkeys dropped the ball. So we can see,
you know, all the ways in our personal life it doesn't cooperate.
You know, we have losses... Whether it's our bodies getting sick... Or
people we love having trouble... Whether we run into an addictive relapse...
Whether we have a divorce... Whether we lose our job... You know,
it's the ball's dropped and we just don't like where it is. And
we can see it globally, how this life doesn't cooperate. This year,
just the tsunami in Japan, and the horror with what happened with
the nuclear proliferation there, just really, really scary.
And what's happening in so many places right now. I'm so
struck with the prediction of 12 million people starving in Somalia,
and I'm seeing nodding heads. Unless we really pay attention,
we might not be aware of children, families, just at a massive scale,
suffering. So it's global, the way, it just, this life isn't the way we want it.
And the question is we can't change that it happens--in some of the big ways.
I mean, there's things we can control, but
primarily the teaching is: It's not what's happening, it's how we respond.
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