Buddhist practice is wonderfully liberating because it empowers you to let go of your suffering regardless of your circumstances. However, we can also get stuck in the fallacy that conditions don't matter, thereby making it seem like helping beings (including ourselves) experience things like safety, health, freedom, justice, prosperity, and love are outside of the realm of Buddhist concern. Are we only interested in "spiritual" well-being, as if that can be separated entirely from conditions? Or do we work for the happiness of beings without worrying about distinctions like "material" or "spiritual?" You might also see this is a tension between "internal" and "external" practice. How do we balance internal work with working to make conditions more supportive and life-affirming for ourselves and others?

Mick shares his challenges to keeping a committed and confident practice at home, and reads from the Shobogenzo Zuimonki. Are we "vessels of the Dharma" even in our perceived inadequacies or difficulties? Is the big "E" attainable by me even if I feel too small for it? Dōgen's radical idea is that practice and enlightenment are not separate. It's when we return to this place, here and now, and simply do our practice that we find that thing that we're looking for.

The Buddha famously said, "Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule." How do we really manifest this, even when standing in opposition to what we think is wrong? Can we see through our own sense of self-righteousness? Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion: "This book explained why people are divided by politics and religion. The answer is not, as Manichaeans would have it, because some people are good and others are evil. Instead, the explanation is that our minds were designed for groupish righteousness. We are deeply intuitive creatures whose gut feelings drive our strategic reasoning. This makes it difficult—but not impossible—to connect with those who live in other matrices, which are often built on different configurations of the available moral foundations."