Speaker 1: Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
Speaker 1: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 1: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 1: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 1: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 1: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 1: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 1: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 1: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 1: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 1: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 1: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks
Speaker 1: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Audi Ashanti,
Speaker 1: and it's actually his fourth time as a guest on
Speaker 1: The One You Feed. Pretty sure that's the record. He's
Speaker 1: an American spiritual teacher who offers talks, online, study courses,
Speaker 1: and retreats in the US and abroad. He's also the
Speaker 1: co founder of Open Gate Sanga Meditation Center and the
Speaker 1: author of many books, including the one him and Eric
Speaker 1: discuss here The Direct Way Thirty Practices to Evoke Awakening Hi, Adia,
Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. Thank you. Eric's nice to be
Speaker 1: back with you. It's been at least a few years,
Speaker 1: so nice to chat together again. Yes, it's been two years.
Speaker 1: We had been sort of making an annual tradition out
Speaker 1: of this. I would be out there in California, and
Speaker 1: we did that for about three years, but then we
Speaker 1: got COVID disrupted and you're living somewhere slightly differently, so
Speaker 1: we're doing this one remote, but I appreciate you being here.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk a little bit about your latest book,
Speaker 1: which is called The Direct Way Thirty practices do Evoke Awakening.
Speaker 1: But before we start, you're going to get to answer
Speaker 1: this question for the fourth fourth time, I think, which
Speaker 1: is we all have two wolves inside of us that
Speaker 1: are at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents
Speaker 1: things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other's
Speaker 1: a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred
Speaker 1: and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about
Speaker 1: it for a second. He looks up as grandfather. He says, well, grandfather,
Speaker 1: which wolf wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. One of the things I
Speaker 1: like about it is it it's sort of simple. It's
Speaker 1: to the point, and it hits what I think it
Speaker 1: was like our intuitive ethical buttons. Right, we'd have this
Speaker 1: intuitive sense of what's good or not so good, and
Speaker 1: right or not so right, and all of that. And
Speaker 1: so it's simple in the sense that it gives us
Speaker 1: a direction. Right, what we've feed is really really important.
Speaker 1: So where we put our mind, where we put our
Speaker 1: attention is pivotal. I think there's also it comes to
Speaker 1: mind this morning, Eric, as a deeper aspect to it,
Speaker 1: also what it means to sort of embrace are well.
Speaker 1: It's typically been called our dark side. I don't really
Speaker 1: like to use that word because it gives the implication
Speaker 1: of bad or wrong or can but everybody has a
Speaker 1: dark side, right, Everything that exists is a play of opposites.
Speaker 1: So I think there's a paradox that comes up to me, Eric,
Speaker 1: with its kind of parable, which is on a relative sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we want to be feeding the better more evolve aspects
Speaker 1: of our nature, and yet I think we also want
Speaker 1: to embrace the other aspects, the darker aspects, you know,
Speaker 1: whether those are greed or hatred, or there's something just
Speaker 1: sort of less dark, just the sort of the unknown
Speaker 1: aspects of ourselves or the source of nightmares, real or imagined.
Speaker 1: The paradox, I think is that we do want to
Speaker 1: be very mindful of where we put our attention. I
Speaker 1: think that's the sort of the hallmark of any contemplate
Speaker 1: of spirituality. It's all about where are we putting our attention.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a training of attention. And at the
Speaker 1: same time, I think that we don't want to make
Speaker 1: any kind of attempt to disassociate ourselves from these other
Speaker 1: darker aspects of our being, because along with hate, ignorance, greed,
Speaker 1: and all the sort of negativity, also part of the
Speaker 1: darkness is this sort of very unknown aspect of our being,
Speaker 1: which is often the aspect of our creativity often comes
Speaker 1: from that place, and our inspirations often come from a
Speaker 1: place we don't know where, we don't know why, we
Speaker 1: don't know when they arise. They arise almost out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: So I think I just wanted to sort of broaden
Speaker 1: the scope a little bit just this morning, so that
Speaker 1: we all are reminded of the important and stuff where
Speaker 1: we put our attention. But also, you know, be careful
Speaker 1: of trying to cast out your own monsters, because, as
Speaker 1: Nietzsche said, you might be casting out the best thing
Speaker 1: within you, which doesn't mean we want to grow up
Speaker 1: to become monsters. But there's also, like I said, a
Speaker 1: creative side, an inspirational side, a numinous sort of aspect.
Speaker 1: The great unknown of our psyche is also an operation.
Speaker 1: And to say nothing that it's healthy for us to
Speaker 1: have an acknowledgment without indulging in it, but an acknowledgement
Speaker 1: of our own darkness, that's a healthy thing. So that's
Speaker 1: what comes up this morning. It's funny you could ask
Speaker 1: that question every day and probably you get a different response.
Speaker 1: It's going to be sort of like the Audi Ashanti
Speaker 1: Goodwolf calendar. It's just going to be each day I'm
Speaker 1: going to ask you the question, We're going to get
Speaker 1: a different response. That does bring up an interesting question. Though,
Speaker 1: by and large, your teachings are about awakening from the
Speaker 1: things that aren't real. Maybe that would be the simplest
Speaker 1: way of saying it, waking up from things that aren't real,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these things that we would consider
Speaker 1: more these shadow sides of our personality. They're real and
Speaker 1: not real, right, Given that you had so many profound
Speaker 1: awakenings pretty young, and you've had a lot of years since,
Speaker 1: Curious how dealing with recognizing, embracing learning from those darker
Speaker 1: aspects of your personality, if that's the word we want
Speaker 1: to use, for lack of a better one, how has
Speaker 1: that looked for you? And has it been something you've
Speaker 1: consciously spent time on. Sure it is the one that
Speaker 1: comes up most readily. Is I think I was born
Speaker 1: coming out of the womb with a pretty strong competitive
Speaker 1: sort of aspect. If there was a race to get
Speaker 1: out of my mother's womb and I had a twin,
Speaker 1: I would have been racing. So it's not really something
Speaker 1: I learned. It was just something that was always a
Speaker 1: part of me, and of course when I was young,
Speaker 1: you know competitive, you know, great things can come out
Speaker 1: of it, Inspiring things can come out of it, and
Speaker 1: also it can be sort of you know, dark, And
Speaker 1: I used to joke, I've even said it in my
Speaker 1: teaching many times. I said, you know, when I was
Speaker 1: twenty two years old and a competitive cyclist, I probably
Speaker 1: would have ran over your grandmother to get to the
Speaker 1: finish line first. Now, that's not the most evolved impulse
Speaker 1: in the world, right, And yet, you know, whatever one
Speaker 1: might judge the competitive instinct, if you're kind of someone
Speaker 1: that's born with it, it's not like you can just
Speaker 1: jettis in it out of your system. It's not quite
Speaker 1: that simple. So what I noticed first, I noticed where
Speaker 1: it was working for me and working against me. That
Speaker 1: was really really important. So which was very situational, Like
Speaker 1: there's situations where the competitive instinct was called for. You know,
Speaker 1: at that time of my life athletics. I even used
Speaker 1: it because I was also born dyslexic, and so I
Speaker 1: kind of used that same tool to kind of challenge myself, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to get out of any sort of remedial
Speaker 1: reading class by the time I'm in third grade. And
Speaker 1: I challenged myself and I use my competitive instinct, and
Speaker 1: so it really worked. Also from an educational point of view,
Speaker 1: I did notice that as my spirituality evolved, the competitive
Speaker 1: instinct it didn't necessarily go away, but it kind of
Speaker 1: naturally fell into a kind of rhythm. It was no
Speaker 1: longer this blanket thing where I was competitive about everything.
Speaker 1: It became like just very situational. If I'm involved in
Speaker 1: something where the competitive instinct is useful, it seems to
Speaker 1: just kind of come to the four now, and when
Speaker 1: I'm not, it's kind of in the background. It's no
Speaker 1: longer sort of dominating, you know, the whole internal atmosphere
Speaker 1: at all. But that's a really good example of something
Speaker 1: that can be both light and dark. It can cut
Speaker 1: for you and against you. You know, we can do
Speaker 1: some amazing things utilizing that instinct, and if we lose
Speaker 1: control of it and it takes over us, well, then
Speaker 1: it can be destructive to ourselves and others. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's such a great example. More and more I've
Speaker 1: become aware of how almost any personality trait is that way.
Speaker 1: Take it too far becomes problematic. Too little of it
Speaker 1: also problematic. What's the right amount of it, you know,
Speaker 1: given the right circumstance. Was that something you consciously worked
Speaker 1: on and looked at in your life? Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: consciously worked with. I didn't sort of take it as
Speaker 1: a project like, Okay, now I have to kind of
Speaker 1: eradicate this, But I just saw through my especially my
Speaker 1: spiritual experience, my spiritual practice which I started also in
Speaker 1: my early twenties, about twenty, and I wasn't competing against
Speaker 1: anyone or anything, but I took this certain orientation that
Speaker 1: I had from my athletic background and thought, Okay, basically
Speaker 1: meditations like training. And I became really good by out
Speaker 1: training most of the people I know, and so okay,
Speaker 1: I'm going to apply that to my meditation in practice.
Speaker 1: You know, right now, it seems kind of naive looking back,
Speaker 1: but at the time seemed like, Hey, this thing's worked
Speaker 1: for me, I wis We'll just use it here. And
Speaker 1: the nice thing about the spiritual practice was it just
Speaker 1: showed me quickly, not that I learned quickly, but it
Speaker 1: showed me quickly that to approach spiritual practice from that
Speaker 1: attitude is almost the opposite of what you want to
Speaker 1: be doing, you know. And so it just led to
Speaker 1: a lot of sort of frustration and you know, trying
Speaker 1: to have breakthroughs in the same way that I was
Speaker 1: trying to win races and it simply didn't work. Probably
Speaker 1: at that point, after a couple of years of that,
Speaker 1: that's when I consciously started to reevaluate like, Okay, this
Speaker 1: isn't working. This is an aspect of my personality I've
Speaker 1: had in my whole life, and I just sort of
Speaker 1: slipped into applying it here without even thinking about it much.
Speaker 1: And it's clearly not serving me. So I have to
Speaker 1: start to make some different choices. You know. It was
Speaker 1: that moment that seems very like a small moment, but
Speaker 1: the moment I realize it doesn't work here in this way,
Speaker 1: and I can make a different choice, right. I think
Speaker 1: you referred to this a minute ago, Eric. I call
Speaker 1: him like our swords, like those things in life, like
Speaker 1: your personality traits that cut for you, that they opened vistas,
Speaker 1: they open avenues, like for some people it might just
Speaker 1: simply be their raw intelligence, right, they just apply that
Speaker 1: to everything. Or in my sense, it was this incredible
Speaker 1: work ethic, not just in general, because I can be
Speaker 1: extremely lazy too, but when I was inspired, I can
Speaker 1: imply this incredible worth ethic and sort of pushed through.
Speaker 1: So that was a sword, right, helped me in my education,
Speaker 1: help me in lots of ways. But then I hit spirituality,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, that sword that sort of
Speaker 1: was cutting new pathsways open for me, was actually cutting
Speaker 1: back against me. It was getting in my way and
Speaker 1: I've seen this as a teacher for a long time now,
Speaker 1: that we all have those go to traits in our
Speaker 1: personality that sort of work for us the best, and
Speaker 1: they'll usually be one or two, but those will also
Speaker 1: be the same traits that we tend to not have
Speaker 1: learned how to control what We just applied to everything
Speaker 1: in the same way, and some things they work and
Speaker 1: in other areas they don't work. So I think a
Speaker 1: lot of it is and spirituality really taught me this
Speaker 1: more specifically spiritual practice was I had to realize what
Speaker 1: my innate strengths when they were working for me and
Speaker 1: when they were working against me. And I've seen as
Speaker 1: a teacher everybody's we're all kind of the same in
Speaker 1: that sense. We tend to go towards our strengths just intuitively,
Speaker 1: whether they're what the situation needs or not. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: see that in working with coaching clients all the time.
Speaker 1: And the thing is that a lot of times that
Speaker 1: approach takes you to a certain point and then it's
Speaker 1: just like boom, you're stopped. It makes me think of
Speaker 1: that business book. I don't even know if exactly what
Speaker 1: it was about, but the title was what got you
Speaker 1: here won't get you there. And the basic idea was,
Speaker 1: you know, the things that got you to be like
Speaker 1: an upper level manager are not going to get you
Speaker 1: to be an executive. It's a different skill set to
Speaker 1: jump and if you keep just hitting those same things,
Speaker 1: that's why you're sort of stuck there. And so I
Speaker 1: see the same sort of thing in coaching clients all
Speaker 1: the time, which is we've got something that's worked really
Speaker 1: well for us until all of a sudden, either we've
Speaker 1: played it out or we've come into a situation that
Speaker 1: it doesn't fit for Yeah, that's a great, really really
Speaker 1: good example because that trait did work for me for
Speaker 1: a while and then I had to develop new ones.
Speaker 1: It's exactly like what you're talking about. It'll take you
Speaker 1: a certain way. But we also think have to be
Speaker 1: mindful for when we feel like we're stalling out, that's
Speaker 1: usually an indication of okay, maybe it's time to reassess
Speaker 1: our whole approach to practice, or sometimes it's an attitude
Speaker 1: sort of change the way we feel about it, the
Speaker 1: way we think. The attitude with which we're approaching something
Speaker 1: is critical. I'm going to go back to something very
Speaker 1: foundational that you have on your website that I want
Speaker 1: to use as an orienting point as to what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. And it's basically what you say is what
Speaker 1: spirituality is. You say spirituality is not something set apart
Speaker 1: from life. Rather it is a plunge into the heart
Speaker 1: of existence. Say just a little bit more about that,
Speaker 1: because I think this term spiritual has used so many
Speaker 1: different ways. I mean, we've got a course called Spiritual Habits.
Speaker 1: I mean it's used a thousand different ways. But I
Speaker 1: love that definition of it. Yeah, thank you. I think
Speaker 1: it's important. You know, there's part of a lot of
Speaker 1: people's spiritual instinct, and maybe everybody to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: you know, we have that part of us that would
Speaker 1: simply like to sort of transcend this confusing world and
Speaker 1: maybe just sort of hover above it if we can
Speaker 1: at all manage to or be in the bleachers, you know,
Speaker 1: watching it as it goes on, but somehow in essence,
Speaker 1: to get ourselves off the playing field in some way, right,
Speaker 1: not permanently, but so that it's much more smooth. And
Speaker 1: I can understand that, and spirituality can do that, and
Speaker 1: that's part of naturally what having certain insights gives us
Speaker 1: a little more of a transcendent witnessing perspective. But I
Speaker 1: do think in the long run that spiritualitying its truest sense,
Speaker 1: is really a way of plunging into the mystery of
Speaker 1: our existence, the mystery of who we are and what
Speaker 1: this life is and how we live this life. And
Speaker 1: that sense of sort of plunging into life rather than
Speaker 1: trying to get an escape patch from life, I think
Speaker 1: is a really pivotal orientation, and I've found that it
Speaker 1: will in the long run, it will dictate how far
Speaker 1: people even go spiritually. You know, if we're just using
Speaker 1: it as an escape patch, it'll take us that far,
Speaker 1: but then we won't have it very integrated into our lives.
Speaker 1: So I mean, good Lord, look at life, you know, Eric,
Speaker 1: like life itself, it's just as unimaginably vast mystery. I
Speaker 1: do think that life is that which is weirder than
Speaker 1: we can even possibly imagine. And you know, the more
Speaker 1: we unpackage any aspect of it, whether it's spirituality or psychology,
Speaker 1: or biology or chemistry or physics, or you know, the
Speaker 1: cutting edge discoveries of anything, tend to show us this
Speaker 1: is more bizarre, more weird, like nobody would have believed
Speaker 1: it if they wrote this in a novel. And I
Speaker 1: think that's what spirituality is, kind of forces to plunge
Speaker 1: us into the heart of life, into the essence of life.
Speaker 1: You know. I think of spirituality almost like a safer
Speaker 1: form of mountaineering. Right, It's mountaineering of the soul. It's
Speaker 1: adventuring of the soul. But if we don't have the
Speaker 1: adventuring kind of spirit, we will tend to stall out
Speaker 1: at some point. I think, so taking that as the
Speaker 1: spirituality being a plunge into the heart of existence, I'd
Speaker 1: like to go back to where you started your formal
Speaker 1: spiritual journey, which is with Zen, and I want to
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about that because since you and
Speaker 1: I last talked, I have become a pretty avid Zen student.
Speaker 1: I've been doing co on work with a teacher. I
Speaker 1: recently passed my hundredth co on, So I have an
Speaker 1: appreciation of the ways in which Zen shows up in
Speaker 1: your teachings that I did not have prior to that.
Speaker 1: I see it. So I wanted to ask you. Your
Speaker 1: teacher asked you to teach, which is a classic sort
Speaker 1: of Zen thing. Right. The teacher says, okay, I now
Speaker 1: give you authorization to teach, but you chose to then
Speaker 1: move sort of out of that lineage, or maybe that's
Speaker 1: not even the word you would use, but your teaching
Speaker 1: became broader than that, And I'm just kind of curious,
Speaker 1: what was your reasoning or your feeling for doing that. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, I took one of her pieces of advice
Speaker 1: absolutely concretely, maybe more or I don't know. She seemed
Speaker 1: to be fine with him, but maybe even more concretely
Speaker 1: than she had in mind. But one of the piece
Speaker 1: of advice she gave me when she asked to teach
Speaker 1: was she said, always always an only teach from your
Speaker 1: own experience. And I took her at her word, and
Speaker 1: I know what she was saying. I don't think it's
Speaker 1: just a good spiritual teacher thing, Like what if we
Speaker 1: all did that, What if we really spoke from our experience,
Speaker 1: or at least when we weren't, that we made that known.
Speaker 1: You know, we might be a much more benign towards
Speaker 1: each other if that was the case. And I kind
Speaker 1: of see myself sort of within her lineage. Now, she
Speaker 1: was asked to teach by her teacher, and yet the
Speaker 1: way she was asked to teach was sort of very
Speaker 1: unusual for Zen. It was kind of like the way
Speaker 1: I was asked to teacher. Teacher used to come up
Speaker 1: and do these week long retreats at her house because
Speaker 1: there were no Zen centers at the time, in the sixties.
Speaker 1: And at some point, after years of doing this and studying,
Speaker 1: and he said, you don't need me to do this anymore,
Speaker 1: why don't you do it? And that was it. There
Speaker 1: was no transmission ceremony but we think of as the
Speaker 1: big Z and passing of the baton. There was just like, here,
Speaker 1: why don't you do this? So she's taught out of
Speaker 1: her living room the rest of her life a better
Speaker 1: part of thirty years. Strangely, she got to know these
Speaker 1: other people over years that were kind of teaching, often
Speaker 1: out of their houses, in this sort of unassuming way
Speaker 1: that we're asked to teach. But it wasn't some big
Speaker 1: sort of lineage holder deal, and they kind of over
Speaker 1: years got to hear about each other and connected in
Speaker 1: with each other. And most all of them were women,
Speaker 1: which I don't think was any mistake. Us guys tend
Speaker 1: to like, you know, establishments and big impressive looking things.
Speaker 1: But so most of these were women, and they called themselves,
Speaker 1: the Zen t Ladies Society, and they just sort of
Speaker 1: made up this name for Zen teachers that were teaching
Speaker 1: in these unassuming ways, right they weren't. They didn't have
Speaker 1: the monasteries the temples. My teacher had long since before
Speaker 1: I met her, had taken off her robes. Ironically, she
Speaker 1: was one of the very first people, really early that
Speaker 1: got a robe from the monks in Japan. When she
Speaker 1: visited it, tore it apart and came up with the
Speaker 1: pattern that makes all the robes that we all wore
Speaker 1: and zend now. So the very person that did that
Speaker 1: was also the person that later decided to sort of
Speaker 1: take her robes off. And so in one sense, I
Speaker 1: see myself, even though you know, my teaching became just
Speaker 1: exponentially bigger than either one of us ever imagined in
Speaker 1: our wild this imagination. I mean, I thought I would
Speaker 1: be teaching in my living room like she did, so
Speaker 1: that was a real surprise to us. But as far
Speaker 1: as like where she came from and her own sensibility
Speaker 1: about all this, I kind of feel like I was
Speaker 1: in this sort of unspoken lineage in a way. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not like the official thing where you have the
Speaker 1: right documents you can look at. Although, like she was,
Speaker 1: she was asked to teach by a very good Zen teacher,
Speaker 1: and as I was, but we just sort of went
Speaker 1: our own ways with it, you know. She went her away,
Speaker 1: it looked a little bit more like Zen than my
Speaker 1: way looked. But I kind of followed in her footsteps.
Speaker 1: I think I just took the next logical progression. And
Speaker 1: then it just happened to be more people that came
Speaker 1: to see me, like I said, than either one of
Speaker 1: us ever dreamed of. As you started emerging as a
Speaker 1: teacher yourself, and after you had some of these major awakenings,
Speaker 1: and even in the intervening years since, has there been
Speaker 1: a role for you in your life of how having
Speaker 1: a teacher or having a trusted elder, what role have
Speaker 1: you had in your teacher was a big part of
Speaker 1: your life for a number of years. I'm kind of
Speaker 1: curious as you moved into teaching and onward what that's
Speaker 1: looked like for you. Yeah. Well, I didn't take on
Speaker 1: any other teachers after her, although I've learned from dozens
Speaker 1: and dozens and dozens of people over the years, and
Speaker 1: books and you know, all sorts of things. This is
Speaker 1: a little bit off your question, but I think it
Speaker 1: relates one of the first things I did before I
Speaker 1: gave a single talk. I actually pulled two people that
Speaker 1: I trusted most in my life, which was my mother
Speaker 1: and my wife Mukti. I pulled them aside and I said, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm in trusting you to watch out for me, and
Speaker 1: if you ever see me going off the beam, you know,
Speaker 1: doing anything that seems a little weird, I'm in trusting
Speaker 1: that you will tell me, that you will mention it
Speaker 1: to me. I say that because I think it's healthy
Speaker 1: that we're not our own exclusive resource for always how
Speaker 1: we're doing. So, Okay, you know, my mom's not a
Speaker 1: zend teacher. My wife basically became one, but neither of
Speaker 1: them were at the time. But that's not what was needed.
Speaker 1: What was needed was just people that I trust that.
Speaker 1: You know, my mom changed my diapers. She raised me.
Speaker 1: If I'm going to go off the beam, man, she's
Speaker 1: going to tell me. So in that respect, I had
Speaker 1: those sort of guardrails and I think those are very,
Speaker 1: very very important. And then as far as teaching, I
Speaker 1: feel like that's something my teacher used to say to me.
Speaker 1: She said You've got to be your own best student.
Speaker 1: You've got to be your own best student, which doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that I only listen to myself. It means basically,
Speaker 1: you've got to remain a student, whether you teach or not.
Speaker 1: And maybe if you teach, it's even more important to
Speaker 1: remain a student, to always be opening, to be learning,
Speaker 1: to be questioning yourself, to not leave that sort of
Speaker 1: student orient and for me, because I love to learn,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of an adventurer, so I love exploring those
Speaker 1: vistas and those boundaries are really what have all the
Speaker 1: energy for me. Excellent. I was talking with somebody I've
Speaker 1: worked with as a as a spiritual director. It's somebody
Speaker 1: I touch based with every couple months and we just
Speaker 1: sort of talk about my spiritual life. And every single
Speaker 1: time I talk with this guy, I asked him today,
Speaker 1: I said, dude, all your conversations end on this point,
Speaker 1: like or is it just me? Like I just need
Speaker 1: to know, like are you a one trick pony? Or
Speaker 1: is this where we always end up? And where we
Speaker 1: always end up is around the question of trust. And
Speaker 1: I don't mean trust in like I don't trust my
Speaker 1: partner or I don't trust my friend, we're talking trust
Speaker 1: in a foundational sense, and I'm curious what it is
Speaker 1: for you. If you were asked that question, what do
Speaker 1: you trust in? I'm just curious what it is for you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a great question, by the way, and I'm not
Speaker 1: surprised that a lot of it comes down to trust.
Speaker 1: What we can trust, what it means to trust it.
Speaker 1: I think that's like spirituality. Number one thing is start
Speaker 1: to orient towards that inside you which you can trust.
Speaker 1: So what I oriented around I mean not exclusively, of course,
Speaker 1: but I remember hearing a talk by Kennett Roshi, who
Speaker 1: was a woman who was an abbess of a monastery.
Speaker 1: I stayed up for a while, and she had given
Speaker 1: this talk, and she had said when she was a
Speaker 1: monk that this idea that she had almost like a mantra,
Speaker 1: which was I could be wrong. I could be wrong.
Speaker 1: I could be wrong. And she said it took her
Speaker 1: so so far right to just realize I could be wrong,
Speaker 1: to not get hung up on her own beliefs. But
Speaker 1: then at some point she realized she had to also
Speaker 1: entertain equally I could be right, which means I could
Speaker 1: be wrong. Actually, I think helped orient her loosen her
Speaker 1: up so she wasn't so caught in her stuff towards
Speaker 1: what she could trust inside. Right, I could be right
Speaker 1: is like saying there can be something inside me that
Speaker 1: I can trust. Right. So what I found that I
Speaker 1: could trust was my sincerity. Because when I looked back
Speaker 1: over my life, I saw that it was my sincerity
Speaker 1: that even though I could go down, you know, a
Speaker 1: hundred different side paths, it really didn't go anywhere. Or
Speaker 1: I can make a hundred thousand different mistakes, there was
Speaker 1: this quality that had a sort of self writing mechanism
Speaker 1: that would always sort of pull me back, you know,
Speaker 1: back in line. And I think that's the thing to contemplate,
Speaker 1: like what's that inside of each person that tends to
Speaker 1: pull them back into alignment? Not that they never get
Speaker 1: out of alignment, but pulls them back. And what I
Speaker 1: recognize when I really contemplated it was that I was
Speaker 1: always very sincere right. I was always very truthful. Now
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that you're always perfectly truthful, especially with yourself, right,
Speaker 1: because you can think you're truthful but then realize maybe
Speaker 1: not as much as you thought. But just that intention,
Speaker 1: I had to realize that I could trust that I
Speaker 1: didn't need to sort of have my super ego just
Speaker 1: watching over my shoulder so incessantly, that there was actually
Speaker 1: something deeper than my super ego that was really trustworthy.
Speaker 1: And for me it was just my sincerity. And I
Speaker 1: think each person has their own aspect that they can
Speaker 1: really trust in. And yet how many human beings have
Speaker 1: been really taught to find that in themselves that they
Speaker 1: can trust Because there's so much inside of ourselves that
Speaker 1: we can't trust, right, that's not that's conditioned and prone
Speaker 1: to mistakes and all sorts of things. I think majority
Speaker 1: of human beings have a lot of emphasis on what
Speaker 1: they can't trust. A lot of people have told them
Speaker 1: what was wrong about them, but not so many of
Speaker 1: people were really told like, Hey, this is the thing,
Speaker 1: this is the good thing, this is the goodness inside
Speaker 1: of you. This is the thing you can trust and
Speaker 1: you should trust it. Maybe you should do more than
Speaker 1: trust it. Maybe you should really orient around whatever you're doing,
Speaker 1: whether it's spiritual practice or you're in business, or like,
Speaker 1: what are we going back to? What are we trusting inside?
Speaker 1: What's what's the thing that will write us eventually even
Speaker 1: when we lose our balance. Yeah, It's interesting because as
Speaker 1: I've explored this topic, every time I talk to the guy,
Speaker 1: we no matter what I'm talking about, we end up
Speaker 1: back on trust, which is why I asked him, like,
Speaker 1: is this what happens with everybody? He's like, no, just you.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting because I do have a deep trust
Speaker 1: in myself in a deeper sense. I mean, I was
Speaker 1: a heroin adic for years in an alcoholic so I
Speaker 1: know just how wrong my brain can lead me. I'm
Speaker 1: not deluded about that. It's a deeper trust. But what
Speaker 1: I've started to realize is what trust do I have
Speaker 1: in that I don't have to do it all? That's right,
Speaker 1: that's the time. And I think that's the piece that's
Speaker 1: harder for me is what can I rely on? That
Speaker 1: maybe inside me, but isn't me in the way I
Speaker 1: traditionally think of myself as me, doesn't rely on my effort, right,
Speaker 1: doesn't belong to your ego. It's just it's innate sort of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I was trying to get across. That thing
Speaker 1: that's innate. By the way, when you were talking about,
Speaker 1: you know, solving coons and stuff like, so much of
Speaker 1: solving a coon is just trust you go in, you
Speaker 1: let it rip. Maybe it gets approval, maybe it gets disapproval,
Speaker 1: but if you don't let it rip, you're never going
Speaker 1: to get very far, right Totally, it took me a
Speaker 1: while to learn that. I'd be like, I don't have
Speaker 1: a presentation, and I was eventually sort of told like,
Speaker 1: just present whatever you got at that moment, give it,
Speaker 1: show it out, see what it is. You know. I
Speaker 1: was trying to go, well, do I have do I
Speaker 1: feel like I have it figured out? And it was like,
Speaker 1: you're not the judge of that necessarily, right, that's what
Speaker 1: you got the teacher there for. Yeah, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I think that's a lot of what a good spiritual
Speaker 1: teacher is. Somebody that you can actually take those kind
Speaker 1: of risks with and if you trust them, they'll help
Speaker 1: orient you like almost like yeah, okay, that's it, or
Speaker 1: that's in the right direction or no, not quite. But sadly,
Speaker 1: often people see their spiritual teachers, but you see them
Speaker 1: as such authority figures that they're afraid to let go
Speaker 1: and take some risk like that, which we should be
Speaker 1: the place where you can take risk, where you can experiment.
Speaker 1: We will help orient that energy. Right, But yeah, you
Speaker 1: gotta let go first. Yeah, in your latest book, you
Speaker 1: talk a lot about It's not the first time you've
Speaker 1: talked about it, but either it was more prominent or
Speaker 1: I was more in a place to hear it than
Speaker 1: maybe I had vin before. I never know which it is,
Speaker 1: But you're talking a lot in there. You've got a
Speaker 1: whole section on the spiritual heart. I'm wondering if you
Speaker 1: could say a little bit more about what the spiritual
Speaker 1: heart is. Sure, so we all know when we think
Speaker 1: of as our sort of emode of heart, right, So
Speaker 1: first of all, we're not talking about the physical beating
Speaker 1: thing in our chest. You know, conventionally we'll talk about
Speaker 1: our heart as sort of an emotional center. So that's
Speaker 1: our emotional heart. We all kind of have some connection
Speaker 1: with that. The spiritual heart. I think it's a lot
Speaker 1: of things, but in its truest sense, the spiritual heart
Speaker 1: is that which allows us to feel. Let's start there.
Speaker 1: Start with feel, because even though it's not really an
Speaker 1: emotional thing that it's it's that which allows us to
Speaker 1: feel great connection all the way to the experience or
Speaker 1: the insight of unity, right, because a unity is an experience, right,
Speaker 1: We don't just go Oh, by God, that's unity. There.
Speaker 1: I met one with the tree. Like, if that's what
Speaker 1: we're thinking, we haven't got unity, right. Unity is this
Speaker 1: incredibly profoundly intimate experience with existence. So that's one part
Speaker 1: of what I'm calling the spiritual heart. And interestingly, I
Speaker 1: find it interesting anyway that I found that different aspects
Speaker 1: of insight correlate with different areas of the body. So
Speaker 1: unity will always correlate with sort of an activation of
Speaker 1: the spiritual heart, which is basically this area in and
Speaker 1: around the chest. Right, it's bigger than the emotional hearts.
Speaker 1: It's a different kind of scene, right, we see with
Speaker 1: our eyes up here, but there's another kind of scene
Speaker 1: with the emotional heart. It's also the nice thing for
Speaker 1: the spiritual heart is as it begins to become activated,
Speaker 1: and a lot of say like practices like meta meditation,
Speaker 1: compassion meditation, things like that are trying to elicit at
Speaker 1: least certain aspects of the spiritual heart. But from a
Speaker 1: human point of view, the nice thing about it, as
Speaker 1: the spiritual heart become more activated in us, it gives
Speaker 1: our sort of human emotional heart a space to a
Speaker 1: sort of safe space to open in, you know, because
Speaker 1: we're told all the time, if it be nice, if
Speaker 1: you could be more, say, emotionally open, or emotionally connected,
Speaker 1: or emotionally available. And yet we all have experiences where
Speaker 1: we've been emotionally open and it's gotten trampled on by
Speaker 1: somebody that wasn't particularly nice, or wasn't very wise, or
Speaker 1: life circumstances happened, and that little emotional heart sort of
Speaker 1: pulls back in. The nice thing about the spiritual heart
Speaker 1: is it's sort of a ground where the human heart
Speaker 1: also can open. Because the spiritual heart has a feeling
Speaker 1: tone of a kind of invulnerability. It's that that reminds
Speaker 1: us that even though we might have been hurt one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand times emotionally, that the spiritual heart is invulnerable.
Speaker 1: It can contain all of that, and so it also
Speaker 1: becomes a place where the human heart can open. The
Speaker 1: last thing I'll say, Eric, is just to give another
Speaker 1: sense of this, is when we have those kind of
Speaker 1: insights or awakenings where we feel ourselves to be this
Speaker 1: sort of like clear awake space, you know, something like that.
Speaker 1: Of course these are just words, but something likes like
Speaker 1: a clear awake space. That's what I would call awakening.
Speaker 1: At the level of mind, which is really awakening from
Speaker 1: the mind, the conceptual mind, but it's also a mode
Speaker 1: of the awakened view. It's very transcendent, very empty, very spacious.
Speaker 1: It's wonderful, it's beautiful, but often it's also disconnected. You
Speaker 1: can be like, oh, I feel totally free, blah blah
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, and then your partner says, yeah, but
Speaker 1: you're not here, right, You're not available, you're not showing up,
Speaker 1: you're not paying attention to the kids. You know, you're
Speaker 1: forgetting the dog, you're you know, you're being disconnected from
Speaker 1: me or work or whatever. So when that sort of
Speaker 1: drops down literally almost drops into this other area of
Speaker 1: the body, then the heart gets activated and all of
Speaker 1: a sudden there's an intimate connection which exists. There's not
Speaker 1: just transcendent. We're discovering something about the world itself, the
Speaker 1: phenomenal world. I think of it is almost like a
Speaker 1: re entry of a way consciousness back into the phenomenal world,
Speaker 1: and that to a large extent, occurs at this level
Speaker 1: of the spiritual heart. You talk about awakening at the
Speaker 1: level of the head, which was sort of this clear
Speaker 1: space of awareness, awakening at the level of heart, which
Speaker 1: is more unity awakening at the level of gut. And
Speaker 1: I think oftentimes the assumption is that they may happen
Speaker 1: in that order, but that's not necessarily true because I
Speaker 1: think for me, my first big awakening was definitely the
Speaker 1: spiritual heart. It was the unity experience. It was one
Speaker 1: of great peace, great love, great warmth, great intimacy with everything.
Speaker 1: I've had ongoing experiences of more of the head variety,
Speaker 1: And you're right, I think the best way I can
Speaker 1: describe it is it's very open and it's very quiet,
Speaker 1: which is really lovely in a lot of ways compared
Speaker 1: to a noisy brain. But it does not have to
Speaker 1: me the same warmth to it, right, there's no warmth
Speaker 1: to it, so traditional zen, you know, unless you've got
Speaker 1: the spiritual heart online, they're not even going to usually
Speaker 1: often consider it a real awakening if it's just this
Speaker 1: like I'm pure emptiness, I'm nothing, I'm transcendent of time
Speaker 1: and space, like okay, good kit, now go sit back
Speaker 1: on the cushion. And whereas sort of what I'll say
Speaker 1: is like, no, there's a legitimate kind of awakening if
Speaker 1: there's a sort of a shift of your identity. But
Speaker 1: let's remember it's not complete. So yeah, and you're right,
Speaker 1: you know, the way I'll talk about these head heart
Speaker 1: and gut, it's as if this is the way it
Speaker 1: always has to be. Probably more often than any other way.
Speaker 1: It is head, heart and gut. But you're an exception
Speaker 1: to that rule. I'm an exception to that because my
Speaker 1: first awakening was definitely a gut awakening in my twenties.
Speaker 1: You know, I did the whole thing backwards, as you
Speaker 1: would expect the dyslexic to do, and so that's kind
Speaker 1: of my own unfolding when that trajectory. So, no, they
Speaker 1: can hop around. Any real awakening is going to have
Speaker 1: elements of all of it. It's going to have elements,
Speaker 1: but usually there's what element that's sort of just much stronger,
Speaker 1: more more prominent, and the other elements will maybe coome
Speaker 1: more online at a different time. I read you once say,
Speaker 1: and I wonder if this is the way you would
Speaker 1: describe it or not. You once said that this was
Speaker 1: a pretty old interview, which is why I caveat that.
Speaker 1: The awakening was you have an awakening experience. That's awakening.
Speaker 1: Enlightenment is when you stay awake the difference between awakening
Speaker 1: and enlightenment, you know, one being sort of temporary, the
Speaker 1: other being more or less permanent. I'm curious if that's
Speaker 1: still the way you would disc gribe it. I'll ask
Speaker 1: that question first. Yeah, it's a good question. I think
Speaker 1: I see things the older I get just see it
Speaker 1: on a spectrum. It's a spectrum of one thing. We
Speaker 1: can have glimpses that seem to go away, but there's
Speaker 1: always an element, if they're really real, that's still there,
Speaker 1: although it may not be quite as noticeable. There's something
Speaker 1: that is much more accessible. Right. We may not be
Speaker 1: walking around in some totally clear state, but we can
Speaker 1: almost access at will. There's something of the view. Let's
Speaker 1: call it that the awakened view becomes more of the
Speaker 1: default condition. But that doesn't mean even when it becomes
Speaker 1: a default condition that other elements of experience don't become
Speaker 1: more foreground at times. You know, it doesn't mean we're
Speaker 1: just swimming in this state of total enlightenment twenty four
Speaker 1: hours a day without any undulation. Well that's a nice fantasy,
Speaker 1: but that's not really the way it seems to work.
Speaker 1: I would see enlightenment something that it's also covers more
Speaker 1: of the spectrum. Like we were just talking about it.
Speaker 1: It's a word that I don't actually use that all
Speaker 1: that much nowadays, because it's useful in the sense of saying, hey,
Speaker 1: enlightenment is a word that reminds you that they're a
Speaker 1: completely different way to experience yourself in the world than
Speaker 1: you might currently have. So it gives us sort of
Speaker 1: reference point, but all the rest, you know, like someone
Speaker 1: will say, well, are you fully enlightened? What does that mean? Like,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. It's almost like asking someone
Speaker 1: who's pregnant, are you fully pregnant? Well, I think if
Speaker 1: you're a day pregnant, you're pretty much fully pregnant, and
Speaker 1: if you're nine months pregnant, you're fully pregnant. And but
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that being one day pregnant and eight
Speaker 1: months pregnant are the same. They're obviously different, but they're
Speaker 1: just on a spectrum. So I think a lot of
Speaker 1: the problem is is in spirituality, how we tend to
Speaker 1: use these terms. There's something in the human psyche that
Speaker 1: really likes absolutely because it gives us something to hold
Speaker 1: on to you, But I think, you know, the enlightened views,
Speaker 1: it's a way of seeing and experiencing life, and it
Speaker 1: can be from shallow or to something deep. I don't
Speaker 1: think we will ever exhaust its potential. So for someone
Speaker 1: to say I'm fully awake, I wondn't even know what
Speaker 1: that means. That just means that you put a closure
Speaker 1: on your insight, which means nothing more is allowed, which
Speaker 1: doesn't really seem to make any sense to me. So yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I would stand by it to some extent,
Speaker 1: but I would want to qualify it a little bit.
Speaker 1: I've got more experience under my belt, and I do
Speaker 1: tend to carry some of these terms I think lighter
Speaker 1: the older I get. It just doesn't seem to be relevant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a term I actually haven't heard you use much
Speaker 1: because I think that this is always an interesting question
Speaker 1: to me around how active is the awakenings that I've
Speaker 1: had in my life? How much am I living from
Speaker 1: that place? And I think that where I get hung
Speaker 1: up a lot is that I believe I have a
Speaker 1: physiological condition. This is just a belief. So I hold
Speaker 1: this belief loosely a physiological condition called depression, and so
Speaker 1: it shows up sometimes regardless it seems right. And so
Speaker 1: what I've worked and tried to learn to do is
Speaker 1: to not let that necessarily mean to me that I've
Speaker 1: not made tremendous progress or had great awakenings. It feels
Speaker 1: a little bit to me like saying like you wouldn't say, well,
Speaker 1: you haven't had any deep awakenings because you broke your leg.
Speaker 1: You'd be like, well, that doesn't make any sense. No,
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense. And as you said, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure you know better than I do, Eric, that there
Speaker 1: are all sorts of reasons for us being depressed, right,
Speaker 1: and one of those reasons can just be a total
Speaker 1: physiological brain chemistry, you know, like welcome to your life.
Speaker 1: When you're born, this is going to be part of
Speaker 1: your experience. And then there's all sorts of other reasons
Speaker 1: to be depressed, you know, life experience and dramatic episodes
Speaker 1: and all that. Now, a lot of that more we
Speaker 1: could put that just for lack of a better term,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying this is an accurate term, but that
Speaker 1: kind of depression that's kind of caused by basically what's
Speaker 1: happened to you from the time you're born to the
Speaker 1: current time, we can call that psychological depression. That's no
Speaker 1: evaluation of it that can be unbelievably debilitating, right, and
Speaker 1: a lot of that, a lot of that. It's different
Speaker 1: for different people. Certain elements of that can be dispelled
Speaker 1: with our practice, let's say, or our insight. But if
Speaker 1: we've had sort of this brain chemistry thing like from
Speaker 1: the time you're born, it may get better. I think
Speaker 1: what often gets better when we have these deep, deeper
Speaker 1: insights is how we relate to it, right, how we
Speaker 1: handle it, how much self we derive from it, you know,
Speaker 1: or lack of self we derive from it. But if
Speaker 1: it's like you had a foot that was just a
Speaker 1: little bit off, a little bit deformed, we all have
Speaker 1: part of our physiology that's not perfect. That's for damn
Speaker 1: sure everybody. If that's sort of the origin of most
Speaker 1: of say the depression, then awakening doesn't necessarily wave a
Speaker 1: wand over it make it all go away. And that
Speaker 1: issue you brought up is a really really good issue,
Speaker 1: because I do see people sometimes that they have these
Speaker 1: really legitimate awakening experiences, and yet then they'll still have
Speaker 1: something that's sort of pulls on them right, sort of
Speaker 1: tugs on them, and they'll sort of delegitimize their awakening
Speaker 1: in their own mind, like, well, because I still have this,
Speaker 1: I still let's say I still have days where I
Speaker 1: can hardly get out of bed because I'm depressed or
Speaker 1: whatever that therefore, no, it's just that you have a
Speaker 1: hard time getting out of bed today, and the awaken
Speaker 1: you have was actually real, and both of them can
Speaker 1: occupy the same space. Yea. The idea that awakening just
Speaker 1: removes all psychological difficulty is probably one of the more
Speaker 1: damaging myths that there are about awakening. I think that's
Speaker 1: why I've always been a little bit drawn towards Ken
Speaker 1: Wilbur's talk about waking up, growing up, cleaning up, Like
Speaker 1: if you're going to be a full human and everybody
Speaker 1: has different degrees of effort that are needed in each
Speaker 1: of those areas, absolutely absolutely right, Awakening isn't going to
Speaker 1: necessarily make you great at relationships, crummiet relationships going in
Speaker 1: probably not so good coming out until you do some
Speaker 1: work right on that particular domain. So I agree that
Speaker 1: our human psyche is very, very complex. It's all interrelated,
Speaker 1: but these lines of development certainly aren't the same, and
Speaker 1: I do think that's important part of spirituality is that
Speaker 1: we not get so exclusively focused on awakening, that we
Speaker 1: forget that being like a functional, decent person is a
Speaker 1: perfectly legitimate a thing too, to orient our life towards
Speaker 1: with or without awakening. Yeah, and I think it gets
Speaker 1: even more blurred by the fact that the tradition that
Speaker 1: you come out of and that I'm in, a tradition
Speaker 1: like Buddhism, is also a very just by its nature
Speaker 1: of the things that Buddha taught has a very psychological
Speaker 1: orientation to how you work with your thoughts and emotions,
Speaker 1: like and so all of a sudden, it seems a
Speaker 1: little bit easier and say mystical Christianity to separate it, go,
Speaker 1: that's psychological, that's you know, I think those are straw
Speaker 1: men to a certain degree. But when you wait into Buddhism,
Speaker 1: it's like they almost feel like they were married at
Speaker 1: the hip from the beginning. Yeah, I think many senses
Speaker 1: they were married from the beginning, because the Buddha was
Speaker 1: like a very it was like a very early enlightened
Speaker 1: psychologist in a way. I mean, because he seemed to
Speaker 1: have had an usually astute understanding of the human psyche, right,
Speaker 1: not just the awakened view, but the mechanics. It's really
Speaker 1: interesting to me about him because he seemed like a
Speaker 1: more of a scientist sort of mindset that got involved
Speaker 1: in spirituality and we all benefit from that, right, because
Speaker 1: he was very empirical, I think, and certainly very rational
Speaker 1: about the way he analyzed the workings of the human
Speaker 1: mind and the workings of the human psyche and what's
Speaker 1: beneficial and what's not beneficial. And to say nothing to
Speaker 1: the fact that I think as is a lot of
Speaker 1: traditional sort of religious structuring is breaking down all around us.
Speaker 1: That's been going on for the better part of one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years. Part of that's great because spirituality
Speaker 1: is kind of breaking out of its religious confines. But
Speaker 1: another part of that is a little tricky because a
Speaker 1: lot of spirituality nowadays is sort of unmoored from its
Speaker 1: moral and ethical foundations, right, right, and because those are
Speaker 1: kind of inconvenient. You know, I'm awake, man, I may
Speaker 1: be an asshole, but right, and traditionally would be like, well,
Speaker 1: that's actually a pretty dangerous thing. So it's not the
Speaker 1: same as what you were just mentioning with the more
Speaker 1: psychological aspects, But I do think the ethical and moral
Speaker 1: foundation is as very psychological aspect of certainly the Buddhist teaching,
Speaker 1: and I think it was extremely wise to put as
Speaker 1: almost as a foundation, those ethical principles. And I think
Speaker 1: it's no mistake that pretty much every religion in the
Speaker 1: world that I've ever bumped into does the same right,
Speaker 1: and they seem to be remarkably consistent with the heart
Speaker 1: of it is. Yeah, yeah, I mean sometimes those principles
Speaker 1: can be communicated in ways that are more or less effective,
Speaker 1: or you know, more or less resonant, or lead to
Speaker 1: more or less judgment. But the principles themselves, yeah, I
Speaker 1: would agree, they seem to be pretty pretty universal. This
Speaker 1: stuff was worked out a long, long, long time ago
Speaker 1: through our ancestors living their lives and seeing what works
Speaker 1: and what does at work. Well, Audio, we are out
Speaker 1: of time. I would love to do this longer, and
Speaker 1: you and I are going to do it longer in
Speaker 1: the post show conversation listeners if you'd like access to
Speaker 1: the post show conversation and lots of other benefits of
Speaker 1: being a member of our community, to go to one
Speaker 1: you feed, dot net, slash Join. Thank you so much again, Audio,
Speaker 1: I think you are the first four time guest. Wow.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Eric. I just like coming and talking to you.
Speaker 1: To me, it's a win from the very beginning. But
Speaker 1: thanks for having me on again. Thank you. If what
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