The Buddhist Hour Radio Broadcast for 1 January 2002

12midnight to 1am

Broadcast Script 205


Glossary


antidote: anything tending to counteract an evil.

metta: (Pali) loving kindness

New Year: celebrated by western cultures at the turning of 1 January each year.

prediction: prophecy, prognostication, foretelling, presage, augury.

resolution: the act or process of resolving something, a settled purpose, the results of this

vengeance: the return of an injury for an injury, in punishment or retribution; the avenging of an injury or offence; revenge.



The topic of today's broadcast is:

A New World Order



We wish our listeners a happy and prosperous new year.


We are currently in the period of seven, which began in 1984 and ends in the year 2003. The number 7 is known as the Joyous, or Tui, period, signifying both a mouth and a lake. It suggests bliss, harmony, tranquility, enjoyment, indulgence, mid-fall, and a young girl. Coming after all the responsibilities and ambitious inclinations of the Age of Six, it is also a time of laughter, relaxation, and enjoyment. This time is known in Feng Shui as the "Period of Communications." During this period the number 7 is considered. But once this period comes to an end the number 7 itself becomes unlucky.


With the events of 11 September 2001 a new world order began.


Our prediction is that it will take 28 years of fighting to come to some resolution.


Operations of war have effects that directly and indirectly affect everybody in the world. The operations of war can result in panic. Viewing things correctly allays panic.


We must prepare our mind for operations of war, otherwise how can our minds be ready for peace when the war is over?


We have entered into World War 3 and the hate will make it last 28 years. A whole generation will be nurtured on vengeance. The only antidote is to learn metta in Pali (loving kindness).


Metta in Buddha Dhamma is a state of mind. Its object is the loveable being. It is the state of wishing to promote the welfare of the loveable being.


It would be nice if you conquer hate this life and attain the perfection of metta but this is unlikely under the present and future propaganda that will flood the world. When the war finishes, persons will seek more love. So if you practice metta for the next 28 years, you may be able to give persons drained by war operations, some solace.


It would be nice if students of Buddha Dhamma could set aside reserves of merit to account for their daily exposure to negative states of mind. Unfortunately, the quantification, to the next likely exposure to negative states is not an exact science and can be no more than an educated guess. An unexpected death may oppress us, where as an expected death of someone older may be quite manageable.


Since war and operations at war may extend over the next three decades, religious persons should seek to bring war to an end as soon as the forces of vengeance weaken in the new world order.


Our Members who are live on air have generated sufficient merit from previous broadcasts and during the 5 day Bhavana course that was completed yesterday to run this morning's live Buddhist Hour New Year 2002 broadcast.


We wish to thank the station's management for their help and efforts over the year.


We dedicate the merit of this evening's program to them.


We wish to come together with them again and again to bring the Buddha Dhamma to persons like you now and in the future to help world peace.


We stir up the energy to arouse the intention to show our listeners the ancient Path to come to peace.


Our Members have chanted good things for you so you can start the year on the right mind.


We thank our listeners for their attention and send our New Year's Greetings to you and your family for the coming year.


Our wishes are that you be well and happy and free from harm.


Members and friends of the Centre that are not at the live broadcast are enjoying their New Year get-together at our Centre.


This New Year get-together concludes our 5 day Bhavana course run 27 December 2001 to 31 December 2001.


Our Teacher prepared a discussion paper outlining the theme of the 5 day Bhavana course "Knowing the time and the place to establish merit".


As our Centre is located in the Shire of Yarra Ranges and the risk of fire during the summer months in the Australian Climate is high it was fitting that during the 5 day course Members and friends worked in teams on developing a Fire Prevention manual and practical fire hazard reduction tasks.


We take extra precautions during this high danger period to protect ourselves and our Centre from harm. We have an emergency fire plan and a fortnightly do list, and Members who are trained in fire fighting. We have regular fire drills to rehearse procedures.


The Fire Prevention Manuals with easy to read font size and colour photographs are styled for speed learning.


The five speed learning manuals were produced in house at our Centre at 33 Brooking Street, Upwey and are housed and catalogued in our John D. Hughes Collection Library.


The Bhavana course is a very good opportunity to experience the way the five styles are practised at our Centre and benefit from the insights gained by some of our long standing Members.


As a social group, we take responsibility for making sure our members are employable.


It is no good preparing persons for today's ways of doing commerce. An estimated 60% of present job skills using first order knowledge will not be needed within the next decade.


There is little present day formal training for an estimated 40% of the new job skills needed.


We can compare our present Australian economy with the state of mind of America when their President set a national task to place a person on the moon.


The 8000 key skills needed for such a space program did not exist at that time anywhere in the world.


All that was available was billions of dollars for research and persons of vision who believed they could find the technology to make it happen.


We have not a lot of money but we do have know-how on websites and vision of what job skills are needed by our members.


There are many projects that you may think involves work for ordinary persons in Australia.


For example, some will tell you that Australia needs to plant 5 billion trees to control salinity. But it is not affordable, if you use unskilled labour.


Perhaps if tree planting on such a scale were mechanised, it would be affordable.


It is not affordable if using the "billions of impoverished, uneducated individuals in the developing world, and tens of millions of unskilled, non-professional workers in the developed world" described by P. Kennedy in his novel Preparing for Twenty-First Century (1993).


Kennedy examines this large population of persons, describing their prospects as "poor" and in many cases "getting worse". He continues:

Their plight is the concern of the pessimistic writings about the demographic explosion and environmental catastrophes by the Ehrlichs, the Worldwatch Institute, and others, and it inspires studies on future career trends and their social implications, like the work of Robert Reich. Initially, it might seem that only one school of thought must be right, but it could be that each has examined different aspects of a single phenomenon, so that the optimists are excited about the worlds "winners" whereas the pessimists worry at the fate of the "losers".


We subscribe to both views as being correct and that the gap between the rich and the poor in Australia will widen as Kennedy suggests.


Low skill sets means first order knowledges are used.


It is our Centre's capacity to increase the third order knowledge of trainees. The associated skills that result from this training will make these persons employable in the next century.


The ability to work in a group with new software on a multi-million dollar project every day for ten hours a day until the project is complete will not only become more common, skills and aptitudes like these will become a necessary requirement for persons maintaining a common work ethos.


Two years ago, we identified 8 areas where we could train our members for future jobs. These are:

· Acquiring Information – Psychological accessibility is needed. The individual must be able to recognise his/her need for information, be willing to seek this information and be able to convey the need to a second person (the information specialist), when necessary. Using computer search engines, paper based technical libraries and Internet products and services our Members will identify information requirements, and develop sifting and gathering skills.

· Ability to Perform Practical Tasks – Emotional maturity is required to accept the demand for rapid learning of new skills. Members will need to train themselves to develop advanced skill sets, and be willing to implement learned knowledge to own and proficiently perform tasks on an unsupervised basis.

· Ability To Work In Groups & Teams – Cultural adaptability, pliability of mental states and the rapid exchange and processing of information are required by individuals in the information age, where modern organisational culture typically structures projects around team work. Members wishing to work on our projects must develop these skills.

· Scientific Knowledge - Our Geology Museum will allow scientific training to be acquired by our Members who volunteer their time. Scientific literacy will be a minimum prerequisite for all skilled workers and professionals.

· Third Order Matrix Thinking & Problem Solving - The increasing complexity and volume of information will render first and second order ways of dealing with information and solving problems obsolete.

· Enterprise & Excellence - The nature of enterprise in the 21st Century will be marked by a demand for frequent and rapid changes to business. Greater competition will force a culture of excellence upon those organizations that desire to stay viable.

· Perseverance – Project ownership requires persistence and commitment to the tasks undertaken. Our project management professionals must develop this quality.

· Performance Evaluation - All systems must be better integrated to provide performance evaluation information at much higher levels than at present .


Many listeners will recognise that persons having mastery of these eight things must be the future managers.


Over the last 12 months, we have taught present members these skills on a regular basis.


In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society" (London, 1798) focusing on what appeared to him the greatest problem facing the human species: "that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man".


The " power of population" was answered not so much by "the power in the earth" itself, but by the power of technology – the capacity of the human mind to find new ways of doing things, to invent new devices, to organize production in improved forms, to quicken the pace of moving goods and ideas from one place to another, to stimulate fresh approaches to old problems.


Overpopulation, pressure upon the land, migration, and social instability on the one hand, and technology's power both to increase productivity and to displace traditional occupations on the other – still confront us today, with greater force than ever. In other words, we should see the demographic and economic conditions of the late eighteenth century as a metaphor for the challenges facing our present global society, two centuries after Malthus's ponderings.


Lord Buddha said that giving detailed instructions of how to wake up the minds and practice to get out of suffering is the highest gift. The Pali word dana means something like "giving something of value to others".


So Dhamma Dana - the giving of the instructions of how to wake the mind to come out of suffering - is the highest gift. There is nothing higher than this.


For high skill learning at a fast rate, an awakened mind is needed.


Until recently, the history of education was a neglected focus of interest amongst historians, sociologists, educationalists and feminists. According to June Purvis (1980), even standard histories of education texts offered limited discussion of the issue.


Most adult-education provision in the 19th Century in the U.K. was the result of voluntary rather than State effort; state provision did not develop until the second half of the century, especially during the last few decades.


Why did more working class women than men become scholars at these schools?


Unfortunately, most of the research in this area relates to working-class men rather than working class women. The statements made by Dr. Pole in his address of 1813 illustrated that the kind of benefits that many middle-class persons hoped the Sunday-schools might bring, included "meekness, Christian fortitude and resignation".


The latent functions appear to be aimed at social control and class control.


The working classes were regarded as culturally and morally deficient; one way to improve them was to use adult education as a vehicle for socialisation into a different group of values.


The Mechanics Institutes movement, which began in the 1820s, is usually regarded as the major adult-education movement of the 19th Century.


These institutes never aimed to attract female scholars.


It was not until 1861 that female members were allowed to vote or hold office.


Institutes of the more popular kind, called Lyceums, attempted to recruit both working-class women and men by offering a varied program of education and entertainment at much cheaper rates than most mechanics' institutes.


Why were reading rooms regarded as a male preserve? Separate never meant "equal".


In the second half of the 19th Century, working men's colleges and institutes were established.


The "useful knowledge" taught not only included the 3 "Rs" but also a broad range of subjects - Latin, Greek, French, German, mathematics, literature, logic, elocution and drawing - all for nine pence a week.


Working Men's Colleges were established widely and tuition was extended to include chemistry, geometry, history, algebra and logic.


The choice of such subjects is understandable since "Cambridge men", according to Jonathan Ree (1980), dominated all working men's colleges.


We would now like to explain our views on how we provide access to high grade education.


Blatantly, we hold that superior mind cultivation is the first tool needed for education.


We do want to make clear is that from our viewpoint there are still three paramount issues that need to be articulated into our version of a Western civilisation learning curricula.


The first is that it is fundamental to work ethics that killing of sentient beings ought to be eliminated or at least minimised, and this precept has been side-tracked from deep analysis in work culture.


The second is that the s-curve nature of the limits to growth of bio-systems has been worked out, and there is no reason to doubt that economic limits apply to conventional education using face-to-face delivery.


The third thing is that the foundations of most Western accounts of education tend to be "normalised" to produce a curious and ideological illusion about the economic limits of education.


In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky suggested that Western culture and education has been embedded with normalisation by certain government and non-government organisations aiming to achieve political and economic power.


Normalisation appears as what "everyone thinks they know" when their minds manufacture pathways to consent to sustain the greater portion of their anti-work, anti-study lower class thinking.


We are not interested in maintaining the causes and the culture of poverty among our Members by setting up a low skill organisation.


Since we teach in these three frames of reference we aim to cut the effects of normalisation from our Members' minds and teach them high skills on our computer systems and our 8 websites.


We do not wish to waste our valuable volunteers' time, our most precious resource, on lay persons who neither want to work in right livelihood occupations nor study work-related skills.


We have simple tests to identify who is teachable.


Our Centre is not to embark on an uncritical and unhistorical revival of educational idealism, with all its gaps and elisions.


Although we structure our learning from the ideological standpoint of that Buddha Dhamma it is taught as method and means of the information age.


It is not taught as "pure" blind theory nor is it taught as "pure" blind practice.


You might say we teach theory and practice to overcome the impression that we are dealing with 1st order knowledge that has been compared with little more than a set of proverbs.


Our learning systems are exercises in cognitive structuring up to 4th order knowledge.


The Indra Analogy (Indra's net)


We need to highlight the existence of these gems on our Websites.


To talk of advantages of convergence we use an Indra net analogy as an explanatory device to give guidelines to our publications and activities leaders.


Indra's net is exemplified by the following quotes:


Indra's net is made of precious gems and hangs over Indra's palace,

- all the other gems are reflected within each gem composing the net;

- when a gem is picked up, we can know the entirety of the net.


Because new untrained Members lack good vision at the beginning of their practice they may be able to see only one or two of the eighty four thousand jewels of Dhamma. Given time and merit they will meet all the gems.


A limited view is caused by lack of fundamentals of Dhamma.


A text that is valuable is the Middle Length Sayings, Discourse on the Synopsis of Fundamentals (Mulapariyayasutta), in which Dhamma is described as an important word with several meanings, such as: conditions, mental objects, states of mind, and things.


It would seem to untrained persons (in Pali: avinita, it also means: untrained, not led, not disciplined) that the Dhamma is "inexhaustible" (akshaya in Sanskrit) and for this reason the vows of the great Maha Bodhisattvas seem "inexhaustible" because they vow to benefit many beings within all the worlds.


The development of Mahayana teachings in China and the doctrine of Jodo or Pureland bought a close association of Pureland teaching with Ch'an (Zen).


These are great jewels.


In this jewel sense, we view Mahayana as a historical process still in forward movement across the existing jewels.


We think it is helpful to call Mahayana Buddhism primarily a religion for laypersons. Monks and Nuns in Mahayana are often there for the purpose of leading and serving laypersons in accordance with the Bodhisattva ideals.


It is important for us that we learn all the 84,000 Dhammas and write them down.


Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana and Ch'an are being taught and practised at our Centre.


We are culturally adaptable.


The process of globalisation is, to a greater or lesser extent, producing some kind of disorientation in traditional Buddhist societies, which is weakening the confidence in the relevance of Buddha Dhamma in the younger section of the population.


This erosion of confidence (saddha in Pali) is a subtle process and not immediately obvious, but nevertheless is real. In the push to achieve wealth and an increased standard of living that Western societies seem to enjoy, there appears to be an uncritical acceptance of Western life styles and value systems. In the long run this may have the effect of undermining their traditional Buddhist culture and value system.


We have a role in showing others how to hold Buddha Dhamma morality with good job skills.


We wish our listeners the best for the New Year and will continue to upgrade our websites at:


www.bdcu.org.au
www.bdcublessings.net.au
www.skybusiness.com/j.d.hughes
www.companyontheweb.com/buddhatext
www.companyontheweb.com/buddhamap
www.buyresolved.com.au
www.bddronline.net.au
www.bsbonline.com.au


Each new website is developed like another Suite or nascent office module for our Centre. We will continue to place more and more management information, newsletters and our flagship journal text with illustrations on our websites.


The advantage of websites is that they are time and place independent, as other persons are able to choose on their terms, when and where and how they read our material.


We do not borrow money to broadcast our data worldwide.


In the course of time, we will own our own broadcast facilities.


Such broadcast globalisation gives our overseas contacts quality information without us building more and more office space.


In fact, we believe it is improbable that the Internet system will last five hundred years. Technology breakdown would be expected to occur in future time.


We have proved it possible to go from local to regional, from regional to national and from national to global in a rapid period of time without incurring IT debt.


11% of Australians now follow Buddha Dhamma. May you follow them in the good things they do and learn more job skills of use for your future this year.


If you are interested in exploring some new skills, please contact us on 9754-3334.


Thank you very much for your attention and support.


May you be free from harm.


May you develop loving kindness and wisdom.


May your family relationships thrive.


We wish our listeners a happy and prosperous new year.


The authors and editors of this script were: John D. Hughes, Evelin Halls, Lisa Nelson and Pennie White.


Disclaimer:


As we, the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd., do not control the actions of our service providers from time to time, make no warranty as to the continuous operation of our website(s). Also, we make no assertion as to the veracity of any of the information included in any of the links with our websites, or an other source accessed through our website(s).


Accordingly, we accept no liability to any user or subsequent third party, either expressed or implied, whether or not caused by error or omission on either our part, or a member, employee or other person associated with the Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd.


References:


Manivong, Venerable Ajarn Chanhphy Panyanor, (1996) The Way You Are Looking For -Part 1, A Manual of Insight Meditation, Melbourne: Buddhist Discussion Centre (Upwey) Ltd, pp. 37-40.


Oxford (1964) The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Great Britain.


Too, Lillian (1999) The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Feng Shui, Element Books Limited, Dorset, Boston and Victoria.


Webster (1960) Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged, Second Edition, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York.


Document Statistics

Total:

Words: 3451
Sentences: 180
Paragraphs: 139
Syllables: 5526

Averages

Words per sentence: 19.2
Sentences per paragraph: 1.3

Percentages:

Passive Sentences: 48

Readability Statistics

Flesch Grade Level: 12.4
Coleman-Liau Grade Level: 11.8
Bormuth Grade Level: 10.3
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 52.1
Flesch-Kincaid Score: 10.6


Readability Statistics


Display's statistics about the document's readability, such as the Flesch Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease Score. These statistics help you determine if you are writing at a level your audience can understand.


Flesch Grade Level: Flesch Grade Level indicates the Flesch Reading Ease score as a grade level. See the Flesch Scoring Table.

Coleman-Liau Grade Level: Indicates the grade level of the document based on the average number of letters per word and number of sentences per 100 words.

Bormuth Grade Level: Indicates the grade level of the document based on the average number of letters per word and per sentence. These scores indicate grade levels ranging from 6.3 to 11.6.

Flesch Reading Ease Score: Indicates how easy the document is to read based on the number of syllables per word and number of words per sentence. These scores indicate a number between 0 and 100. The higher the score, the easier the document is to read. See the Flesch Scoring Table.

Flesch-Kincaid Score: Indicates the grade level of the document based on the number of syllables per word and number of words per sentence. This score predicts the difficulty of reading technical documents, and is based on Navy training manuals that score in difficulty from 5.5 to 16.3. It meets military readability specifications MIL-M-38784 and DOD-STD-1685.


Flesch Scoring Table

Flesch Reading Ease Score

Flesch Grade Level

Reading Difficulty

90-100

5th Grade

Very easy

80-89

6th Grade

Easy

70-79

7th Grade

Fairly easy

60-69

8th-9th Grade

Standard

50-59

High School

Fairly difficult

30-49

College

Difficult

0-29

College Graduate

Very difficult

(Reference: Lotus Word Pro Help Files)

For more information, contact the Centre or better still, come and visit us.


May You Be Well And Happy

This Radio Script is for Free Distribution. It contains Buddha Dhamma material and is provided for the purpose of research and study.

Permission is given to make printouts of this publication for FREE DISTRIBUTION ONLY.

Please keep it in a clean place.

"The gift of Dhamma excels all other gifts".

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