Thầy teaches that living in the present moment looks like a simple teaching but is very deep: the past is still there, disguised in the present moment, and the future is already there too. Climate change, he points out, is not an issue belonging to the future. Through the image of a person stepping into a river who is also a river, Thầy reflects on impermanence, and on why the practice of coming back to the present moment is still real.

Recalling a retreat in Colorado called One Buddha Is Not Enough, Thầy explores why our planet needs a collective awakening. The technology to supply the world with wind, water, and solar power exists, he observes, but technology alone cannot bring about that change while craving, fear, anger, and delusion remain in us. He describes our tendency to seek pleasure while ignoring its danger, with the image of a fish that would not bite if she knew the hook was inside the bait. He looks at fear and anger as the foundation of war and the weapons trade, and at what leaders able to use loving speech and deep listening could do.

Thầy offers a retreat as a way of healing ourselves and so helping to heal the world, so that “our way of life will be our message.” He shares how a simple life of solar power, no-car days, and brotherhood and sisterhood shows that happiness is possible without consuming a lot. Remembering a retreat with police officers in Madison, Wisconsin, he describes how relaxing the body and tenderly embracing anger and fear—like a mother holding her crying baby—can be practiced in families, schools, parliaments, and workplaces, without having to be a Buddhist.

Thầy closes with mindfulness, concentration, and insight, drawing on the example of eating, and returns to the hope of collective awakening, in which every one of us can be the continuation of the Buddha.

This talk is from a series given during the Fall Retreat in the year 2009. Thầy offered this talk at the Lower Hamlet, Plum Village, France.