The sound of the bell helps to calm the body, speech, and mind, bringing us back to our true home. Deep in our store consciousness, or ālayavijñāna, we carry both positive seeds, such as compassion, joy, and understanding, and negative seeds, such as anger, fear, and violence. Taking care of our mind like a garden requires the practice of selective watering, where we make a commitment to water only the positive seeds in ourselves and in others, while refraining from watering the negative ones.

Nothing can survive without food, including love, hate, anger, and depression. To transform suffering, we must look deeply into its nature to identify and cut off its sources of nutriment. There are four kinds of nutriments:

1. Edible food: What we eat and drink. We practice mindful eating using the five contemplations: first, recognizing food as a gift of the sky, earth, living beings, and labor; second, eating with mindfulness and gratitude; third, preventing negative mental formations like craving; fourth, eating only what brings well-being and prevents illness; and fifth, determining to practice transformation, healing, and compassion.
2. Sensory impressions: What we consume through our six sense organs, including television, music, books, and conversations. We must guard our sense organs to prevent toxins like craving, anger, and violence from entering our consciousness.
3. Volition: Our deepest desire, intention, and motivation. Wholesome volition aims to bring relief and cultivate compassion, whereas desires for revenge, fame, power, or wealth lead to suffering. True happiness is found by living happily in the here and now, or dṛṣṭaDharmasukhavihāra.
4. Consciousness: Individual and collective consciousness. We must protect ourselves from toxic collective consciousness, such as collective anger and hate, and instead nourish ourselves with environments of harmony and brotherhood.

Transformation and healing are cultivated through mindful breathing, mindful walking, and the practices of compassionate listening and loving speech. These practices allow us to recognize the suffering of others, which gives rise to compassion and enables reconciliation, even among groups in deep conflict like Palestinians and Israelis. On a global scale, violence and hatred cannot remove violence and hatred; they only create more. The root of terrorism and conflict lies in wrong perceptions, which can only be resolved through deep listening and gentle, compassionate speech to understand the suffering and misunderstandings of all sides.

Questions from the audience:

• How do you approach nationalism with our responsibility for global understanding, global brotherhood and sisterhood, and how do we deal with national identity?
• Is there another way, without eating the flesh of their son, they can cross the desert?
• What directions and intentions should a scientist have when scientific knowledge could potentially be used in a dangerous, deadly way?
• How can one avoid watering the seed of fear, and once fear is present, how do we deal with it?
• What was the collective consciousness of those who participated in the Buddhist movements in Vietnam in the 1960s, and who holds responsibility for causing the release of poisons during the war?