[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRtc-k6dhgs&w=560&h=315]

 

You can download the transcript for Occupy Wall Street

TRANSCRIPT

1 [00:16] This movement isn’t about the 99% defeating or toppling the 1%.

2 You know the next chapter of that story, which is that the 99% create a new 1%.

3 That’s not what it’s about.

4 What we want to create is the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible.

5 A sacred world.

6 A world that works for everybody.

7 A world that is healing.

8 A world of peace.

9 You can’t just say, “We demand a world of peace!”

10 Demands have to be specific.

11 Anything that people can articulate, can only be articulated with in the language of the current political discourse, and that entire political discourse is already too small.

12 [00:59] And that’s why, making explosive demands, kind of reduces the movement and takes the heart out of it.

13 And so it’s a real paradox.

14 So I think that the movement actually understands that.

15 This system isn’t working for the 1% either.

16 You know, if you were a CEO, you would be making the same choice as they do.

17 The institutions have their own logic.

18 Life is pretty bleak at the top too, and all of the baubles of the rich, there’re kind of this, phony compensation for the loss of what’s really important.

19 The loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning.

20 Everybody wants to live a life of meaning.

21 And today, we live in a money economy, where we don’t really depend on the gifts of anybody.

22 But, we buy everything.

23 Therefore, we don’t really need anybody, because, whoever grew my food, or made my clothes, [02:00] or built my house, well, if they died, or if I alienate them, or if they don’t like me, that’s okay.

24 I can just pay somebody else to do it.

25 And it’s really hard to create community, if the underlying knowledge, is ‘we don’t need each other!‘.

26 So they all kind of get together in action nights and maybe they consume together, but joint consumption doesn’t create intimacy.

27 Only joint creativity, and gifts, create intimacy and connection.

28 You have such gifts, that are important.

29 Just like every species has an important gift to give to an ecosystem.

30 And, the extinction of any species hurts everybody.

31 The same is true with a person, that you have a necessary and important gift to give.

32 And that, for a long time, our minds have told us, that maybe we’re imagining things, [03:00] that it’s crazy to live according to what you want to give.

But I think now as more and more people wake up to the truth that we’re here to give, and wake up to that desire, and wake up to the fact that the other way isn’t working anyway, the more re-inforcement we have, when people around us say, “This isn’t crazy! This makes sense! This is how to live!”

33 And, as we get that reinforcement, then our minds and our logic no longer have to fight the logic of the heart, which wants us to be at service.

34 This shift of consciousness that inspires such things is universal, in everybody, 99% and 1%, and it’s awakening in different people in different ways.

35 I think love is the felt experience of connection to another being.

36 An economist says that, essentially, ‘More for you is less for me!’.

37 But the lover knows that, ‘More for you is more for me too!’

38 If you love somebody, then their happiness is your happiness. [04:00]
Their pain is your pain.

39 Your sense of self expands to include other beings.

40 That’s love – love is the expansion of self, to include the other.

41 And that’s a different kind of revolution, there’s no one to fight, there’s no evil to fight, there’s no other, in this revolution.

42 Everybody has a unique calling, and it’s really time to listen to that.

43 That’s what the future is going to be, it’s time to get ready for it, and help contribute to it and make it happen. [END OF RECORDING 4:50]