Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Sammasambuddhassa. Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Sammasambuddhassa. Namo Tassa Bhagavato Arahato Sammasambuddhassa. Buddham, Dhammam, Sangham, Namasami. So, for those of you who might not have been here in the last couple of weeks, I've been working my way through the first few discourses of the Buddha. So, the first week I did the turning of the wheel, the teaching on the Four Noble Truths, and then last week we did the Anattalakana Sutta,

[01:06]

the teachings on selflessness. And so, today, not surprisingly, we go to the, we have the, I thought I'd talk about the third sutta, or the third formal teaching of the Buddha, which is called the Fire Sermon. In the Western parlance, I think it was T.S. Eliot gave it that particular name. I remember when I came back from Thailand, I was more familiar with T.S. Eliot than I was with Buddhist scriptures. And I came back after a couple of years in the monastery in Thailand, and came to England. And there was a very scholarly monk that we had in the community there in England, a Swedish monk, and he knew a lot more about Pali and the scriptures and the rest of it. So, I asked him where I could find the Fire Sermon in the scriptures. And so, I expected to find something that was sort of a close parallel to what T.S. Eliot had come up with, and I was somewhat taken aback by the very scanty relationship between the two.

[02:13]

But it's in his poem, The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot's poem, The Wasteland. And it's one of the sections, I think it's the third or the fourth, which is called the Fire Sermon. And it hinges around this idea of burning, this burning, burning. And the only, the kind of key element is, he ties it up with a quotation from St. Augustine, which is, To Carthage then I came. And it's, the whole of the quote is, To Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves rang about mine ears. So, it's always a phrase that's stuck in my mind, a cauldron of unholy loves. So, Carthage was obviously something like the tenderloin of the first few centuries A.D. So, but this principle of burning and fire being associated with the passions

[03:16]

and cauldrons of unholy loves that we are very familiar with in one way or another, this is what the Sutta really talks about in its essence. Now, just as the teaching of the turning of the wheel, the Four Noble Truths, has the Four Truths as its basis, and then last week the teaching that I was describing is based around what's called the Five Kundas, or the Five Categories of Body and Mind. Then, you know, Buddha was very keen on having things in neat chunks that you could remember by numbers and having neat headings. And so this is based around the six senses. And these are all parts of, all the bases of insight, the different groups of qualities that the Buddha talked about is what's called the bases of insight, that which we derive insight and liberation, understanding from.

[04:17]

The six senses is one of those groups. The other two are what are called the spiritual faculties, the indriyas. That's faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration and wisdom, and the quality of knowing. And the last one is called dependent origination. And these are all different formats that the Buddha used to describe the same basic insights, or to elaborate, or give a different context for the basic liberating insight that is the underpinning of his whole teaching. So the Fire Sermon revolves around the contemplation of the six senses, the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. To give you a little bit of background to the Sutta, this one has quite a bit more of a prologue to it. This is one of the more amusing incidents that happen that you find in the Pali Canon. Actually, the Pali scriptures are riddled with humor, I am told.

[05:22]

Oftentimes you have to be a Pali speaker to get the joke, because it's filled with double meanings and idioms and implications and double entendres that carry a particular message or have a particular flavor. But if you're not an Indian speaker, you tend to miss them. But this particular succession of incidents running up to the giving of this teaching is one of the more bizarre and amazing. So if you're not into miraculous powers and extraordinary events, then please turn off for five minutes. Because what happens with this, the Buddha, this happens just after his enlightenment. And he becomes aware, in his mind, that there's a leader of a group of fire worshippers who is living nearby, who has got a lot of spiritual qualities, but is caught up in some particularly meaty wrong views or deluded opinions.

[06:27]

And so he decides to see if he can help guide this fellow or this fellow can make any use of his insight. And this is early on in the Buddha's career, so he tended to more approach people and sort of be more overtly forward in the way that he operated. And also, later on in his career, he displayed much, much less in the way of psychic powers. But on this occasion, he was very, very free with them. So anyway, he comes upon this fellow. He's called Uruvela Kassapa. Uruvela was near the place where the Buddha was enlightened, near Gaya, Bodh Gaya. And he's called Uruvela Kassapa. And so the Buddha meets him, and he doesn't present himself as any kind of extraordinary being, but by his whole manner and his appearance, the fire worshipper recognizes that this fellow's got something going for him.

[07:30]

He's very tall, very clear-eyed, very radiant, kind of composed, serene being. And then, so the Buddha asks him, can I stay in your hermitage for tonight? I'd like to stay in what's called the fire chamber or the firehouse. This is like a sweat lodge that people would have in those days. And they said, well, certainly you can do, but there's a dragon that lives in there that will certainly kill you if you try and spend the night in there. It's very ferocious and malevolent. And the Buddha says, well, I'd like to spend the night in there anyway. And so then they think, oh, well, we'll do the funeral for you in the morning. No problem. So anyway, the Buddha goes in and spends the night there, and then it goes into long descriptions of his battle with this, what's called a naga. It's like a dragon, this naga serpent. And basically, he ends up taming the naga. And he comes out of the fire chamber in the morning, not even singed, and with the naga shrunk down inside his arms bowl,

[08:31]

his begging bowl, and says to Uruvela Kasava, well, here's the naga. It didn't have much of an effect. Here is your naga who is so mighty and powerful and dangerous. And Kasava thinks, hmm, this is certainly a great monk, and he's very mighty and powerful, but he's not really an arahant. He's not an enlightened being like me. And then, but he's obviously a bit on edge about this, and so a few days later, they're due to have a big festival. And so that he thinks, well, I'd better be ashamed if this great monk is around, and he kind of outshines me at this festival. I'm supposed to be the great enlightened sage, and this fellow might show me up in public. And so the Buddha reads his mind and then disappears and doesn't show up that day. And so the next day after the festival is over, and Kasava says to him, where did you go to? You know, you didn't come yesterday. And the Buddha said, well, I realized that you were afraid that I might show you up in public, and so then I stayed away. So this makes it even worse for Uruvela Kasava and says,

[09:33]

well, okay, well, maybe he did read my mind, but he's not really an arahant like me. And then you get this long succession of more extraordinary and wild and miraculous things that the Buddha does. Goes off to the continent, the Uttarakuru in the far north and brings back this sort of magical fruits. When the fire worshippers, because Uruvela Kasava has like 500 disciples, and they have to bathe in the river, and it gets to the cold season of the year, and then the Buddha notices all the fire worshippers shivering and shaking by the side of the riverbank, and he conjures up 500 fires, braziers, for the fire worshippers to warm themselves by. And then he does a whole series of other extraordinary procedures, after each one of which the thought passes through the mind of Uruvela Kasava. Well, the great monk is certainly mighty and powerful, but he's not really an arahant like me.

[10:33]

So anyway, finally after weeks and weeks of this, there's a great flood, and then the water rises, and so the whole district is being washed out, and so then Kasava gets worried about the Buddha and says, oh, well he was just living in that little hut down by the river, he's going to get washed away. So they went down there in a boat to see if he could find him. And rather than the Buddha having been washed away by the flood, he's doing walking meditation on the ground, and all the water is sort of parted around him, like in the Red Sea in a Cecil B. DeMille movie. And so the Buddha's just calmly walking up and down with the water swirling all around him, feet deep. And Kasava comes up in his little boat and says, are you all right? And he says, yes, I'm fine. And Uruvela Kasava looks down and thinks, well, the great monk is certainly mighty and powerful, but he's not really an Arahant like me. And the Buddha realizes this fellow is totally hopeless.

[11:36]

So he rises up in the air, out from below the water level, floats across, stands on the edge of the boat, which in itself is quite an achievement. And then he realizes that Kasava is still hanging on to this thought, and so he says to him, okay, well I suppose I'd better give him a shock. And he says to him, Kasava, you are neither an Arahant, nor on the path to becoming an Arahant, nor are you doing anything that could possibly bring you onto the path of being an Arahant. So Uruvela Kasava at this point realizes that he's gone a bit too far and says, okay, I admit. And he bows to the Buddha and asks for instruction. Anyway, he becomes very inspired by the Buddha and says, I want to become your disciple. And the Buddha says, well, you can't just do this. You're in charge of 500 fire worshippers. You can't just convert and follow me. What about them? So then Kasava asks his followers and they say, well actually, we've had a lot of faith in the great monk for quite a while now. And so we're very happy to follow him.

[12:39]

And so they all cut off their matted hair. They all had dreadlocks. Cut off all their dreadlocks and threw all of their gear for the fire sacrifice into the river and became followers of the Buddha, became bhikkhus. So then, just down the river, Uruvela Kasava had a brother who was called a Kasava of the river, who had 300 disciples. And he sees all these dreadlocks and bits and pieces of the fire sacrifice floating down the river. And he thinks, oh dear, maybe some disaster has befallen my brother. So he sends off some messengers to find out what's happened. And the other followers tell them. And they say, well, is this better than what we're doing? And they say, oh yes, this is better. So then Kasava of the river then does the same and he chops off his dreadlocks as do his 300 disciples and they throw all their stuff into the river. And a little further down the river, Buddhists always do everything in threes, there's a third brother who's called Kasava of Gaya.

[13:41]

And then he sees, he has 200 disciples. And he also is a fire worshipper. And so he sees all the dreadlocks and stuff floating down the river. And he thinks, oh dear, maybe some disaster has befallen my brother. And the same thing happens. He sends a messenger and he says, are you all right? He says, yes, we are all right. And then they explain what's happened. He says, well, is this better? And they say, oh yes, this is better. So he and his 200 disciples all become, bhikkhus all become disciples of the Buddha. So then there we are with the setting. Now you must understand this is to be taken as a meaningful myth rather than history. If your credibility is being stretched beyond elastic limits, then Buddhist scriptures are very definitely cast in a mythological form. They're not supposed to be literally sort of scientifically accurate. They're there for reflection and for kind of creating symbols and patterns and ideas for us to consider and reflect upon.

[14:44]

So anyway, then these thousand monks, then joining with the Buddha, then it's on this occasion, as they're walking along as a group together, and as the commentaries say, that it was when they were looking down from a ridge into the valley and seeing a vast forest fire burning down below them. Then the Buddha taught, gave this discourse and addressed the monks. Often you find that the Buddha used the way of life of a person, their livelihood or their position in society or some particular attribute that they had as a medium, as a kind of an analogy for teaching them. Like a farmer he would talk about plowing and sowing and a king he would talk about ruling. So for the fire worshipers and the forest fire burning he used the analogy of fire. Now the way that the teaching begins, the sutta begins, is a sabang bhikkhuve adhi tang,

[15:47]

which means all is burning bhikkhus. Everything is burning. And then he says, what is the all that is burning? Then he goes on to describe, says the eye is burning. Visible forms are burning. The whole process of seeing is burning. And the feelings, pleasant, painful or neutral that arise from the action of seeing, these are all burning. And what are they burning with? They're burning with the fires of greed, the fires of hatred, the fires of delusion. They're burning with the fires of birth, of aging, the fires of death. They burn with the fires of sorrow, weeping, pain, grief, the fires of despair. And so too with the ear. So the ear is burning. Sounds are burning. The process of hearing itself is burning. And so too with the feelings. And then through all of the six senses, the tongue, the nose, the body, physical sensations. The mind is burning.

[16:50]

And mental phenomena. In the Buddhist terminology, the mind is simply the sixth sense. The brain is the organ of perception which perceives thoughts and feelings, ideas, so that there's no distinction between the thinking, mental processes, and the other senses. The thinking process is like a coordinator of the other five senses. But the brain, the mind, is seen as simply the sixth sense. So you always have eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind in the format of talking about the sense world. And the object that the mind perceives is Dhamma, or as phenomena, mental phenomena in this case. So then this section of the Sutta then finishes with the mind is burning. Mental phenomena are burning. The whole action of cognition, cognizing, is burning. And the feelings, pleasant, painful, or neutral, that arise from the whole process of cognition, these are burning with greed, hatred, and delusion, and so forth.

[17:52]

Now again, these are not like absolute statements. These are not like judgments. And you might be thinking, well, you know, I can think of some nice things to look at. I can think of some beautiful sounds that are not burning. I can think, you know, what's so bad about birth? And aging can be quite beautiful too. But these are not like absolute statements, but more saying that there is this quality of obsession, of the mind being entangled, the mind being inflamed, the mind being caught up, enmeshed, in a state of heatedness around these different aspects of our sensory world, the eye, the ear, the nose, tongue, body, mind. So these are not like saying, it's always like this in all cases, or that anything that we see is inherently impure, but it's just pointing out that associated with seeing, hearing, feeling,

[18:53]

tasting, smelling, touching, that these passions arise, and these are what causes distress, what causes alienation, what causes a feeling of disharmony and discord with life. So he gets to the end of that section, and then he says, Seeing thus, the wise, noble disciple becomes dispassionate towards the eye, becomes dispassionate towards visible forms, becomes dispassionate towards the action of seeing itself, and towards the feelings of pleasant, painful, or neutral that arise with the seeing process. And so too with all the other five senses, the ear, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the mind. This quality of dispassion arising towards each of the senses. And then the final paragraph is that, Becoming dispassionate,

[19:54]

then fear and desire fades away. When fear and desire, when these fade away, then the heart is released. When the heart is released, there is the knowledge. There is release, there is liberation. There is the knowledge, this is the end. There is nothing more for me to do. My work is complete. And at this point, at that realization, at that completion of the discourse, then it's said that all one thousand of the bhikkhus, the former fire worshippers, every single one of them became totally enlightened. So I'm not asking you to believe this. This might seem to be sort of taking you to be credulous. But again, one looks at these all in symbolic or mythological terms. Not to say that it might not actually have happened. I'm not saying that this is untrue. But just one is looking at it with an elastic vision,

[20:55]

if you like. One can mix a metaphor like that. A kind of fuzzy vision, if you like. The eye of the hard-nosed skeptic can put on some fuzzy glasses. So that on that description, what is being portrayed then is a simple process of the development of insight, the process of liberation occurring around contemplating the six senses and how they work and how they become causes of suffering and when there is a quality of dispassion that the eye, the things we see, the beautiful and ugly things, the beautiful and ugly sounds and flavors, events, physical sensations, these cease to carry us away,

[21:58]

cease to obsess, cease to terrify, cease to have the ability to disturb or corrupt or interfere with the realization of the true nature of mind. Now, you might notice that the whole thing hinges around that one little sentence in the middle. Seeing thus, the wise noble disciple becomes dispassionate. You say, well, that's very nice. That's, you know, half a dozen words or eight or ten words, but it's like a hinge on a door. It's like a, you know, it's just a small bit of the door, but if the door happens to be, you know, a foot thick and locked, and even if you've got it unlocked, if the door hasn't got a hinge, you can't open it. And the whole of this process hinges on that one aspect of seeing thus, the wise noble disciple. Now, when it says seeing, it's not just comprehending.

[23:02]

Now, just in this few minutes of describing this, you know, one might be able to comprehend this process and see that, you know, it hangs together. Okay, you know, I can follow the reasoning of it, the logic. But it's not just a matter of comprehending the idea. It's much more of a penetration of it, a full and profound understanding to truly realize that. It's like the difference between, say, hearing a language. Like if I was speaking in French or in Thai, you might be able to recognize, oh, that's Thai language or that's French, but not actually to be able to understand the meaning. So you might be able to recognize the external aspect of it, but not be able to penetrate the meaning. So that when we use a term like seeing thus, it's not just a matter of comprehending the mechanics of it, but it's actually an action, a whole transformation that is involved,

[24:04]

whereby there's a profound intuition. And that in that intuition, what you have is a realization of the painful result of identification, the painful result of hanging on to sights and sounds, to thoughts and to physical sensations, to flavors, to odors, that it's like a true recognition of, well, if I do this, that results. Do I really want to bother? This is painful. Why do I keep doing this? And then the response of letting go, of releasing that, of allowing that to be seen as just an aspect of nature, rather than something that is mine, that I've got to follow or I've got to escape, but just to drop the process of identification with it.

[25:07]

One thing that crossed my mind, this is something that one of the monks in England pointed out, Ajahn Sajito, who has an astute eye. The Thai word for a disciple is a luksit. I'm not quite sure of the etymology of it in Thai, but someone asked him, because in monastic vocabulary, you often get a number of words that get included in ordinary everyday vernacular, and so you would say, oh, so-and-so is a luksit of Ajahn Chah, or is a luksit of this teacher, or is a luksit of that teacher. And so someone was new to the monastery, was sitting there looking very puzzled, and they said, what is a luksit? And Ajahn Sajito said, oh, a luksit, it means a disciple. It means that you look and you sit. This is known as folk etymology. It doesn't actually have any basis in real life, but it fits quite well. Someone who is a disciple,

[26:20]

you sit and you look. You look and you sit. And so that's really what this one is doing. The wise, noble disciple looks and sits, and this is how we really bring about this kind of profound seeing. It's only by sitting, by contemplating, by meditating, and observing the results of what we do, not out of a critical place, not thinking, oh, I shouldn't be like this, and I keep doing that, and this is a stupid obsession, and I should stop it, and I could, and I can't. Woe is me. To step back from that and see that here is the should demon. Someone said to me today, should is the first word I learned to say. That was a poignant observation in life. Catholic. Presbyterian.

[27:25]

Presbyterians, it works too. So, but that's the process whereby we bring that about. And then this word dispassion is also worth contemplating. Seeing thus, the wise, noble disciple becomes dispassionate. Now dispassion, I've noticed particularly in the USA, particularly in California, dispassion is something like professional wimpishness. To talk about dispassion means that you have decided to become a total wimp and to dilute all your experience and your feelings towards life to the point where you are like a soft, wet lump, and you don't really feel very much about anything at all, and if you do, then you feel embarrassed about it. And so that dispassion has got a really bad press and in a way, it's not a bad thing because our culture has tended to revere to some extent

[28:30]

those who live passionately, those who live life to the hilt. The Jack Kerouac's and Neil Cassidy's, they even have a street named after Jack Kerouac now, down by City Lights Bookstore. Jack Kerouac Alley. And Neil Cassidy, his mate on the road, and people like Dylan Thomas. Tallulah Bankhead. My candle burns at both its ends, it will not last the night, but oh my foes and oh my friends, it gives a lovely light. I think that's Tallulah's offering to the poetic world. That was Emily Dickinson. That was Emily Dickinson. Oh, I think Tallulah quoted her then. Anyway, poetic license I'm employing here. But anyway, one observes that even though we might sort of revere the glory and the blaze

[29:32]

that people who live life to the hilt in that way, most of them seem to have ended their days with a very bad liver. And a few other problems to go along with it. So, you know, not that I condemn that way of life, but certainly it has its downside. And so, certainly within the Buddhist way of looking at things, the way to happiness and the way to fulfillment and to wholeness as a human being is not that path. That is not going to really do the trick. So that what we talk about more, we talk about this whole aspect of fire in a different way. There's one aspect of it which is, rather than kind of burning and blazing brightly, is the containing fire. Like the whole idea of contained fire is very much part of the whole Buddhist

[30:33]

and yogic tradition. So that like using the body energy, the energy of body and mind, containing it, controlling it, guiding it, raising it up from the lower and more of animal-based urges and tendencies towards aggression and sexual desire, willfulness, self-centeredness, to transform that energy, to raise it up through meditation or through yogas of one sort or another, and to transform it into energy which helps to illuminate one's whole being. And then, because one's not condemning fire per se, because the sutta is not talking about that fire is evil, but just the fire when it's out of control. So in some respects, it's talking about containing fire. And so like the precepts, the moral precepts that we live by in the Buddhist community, these are also talked about in terms of containing fire,

[31:33]

containing the fire of our tendencies to flow out into acquisition, into aggression, into dishonesty, one sort or another, to pleasure-seeking and so forth, to contain that energy and control it and guide it and use it, again, to help illuminate the mind rather than flowing out in a wasteful and dangerous and destructive way. And so in a similar way, like let's say the fire of electricity, it also is contained and controlled fire. Or like the candles, this is fire when it's in a controlled and watched, carefully guided state, then it can be used to beautify our lives, to make life easier, more wholesome, can help us with our education, our health problems, many different aspects of our life,

[32:35]

eating and warming and lighting our homes and so forth, many different things. So it's not that energy or fire is inherently a bad thing, but it's just when it gets out of control. Like if I took one of these candles and just put it to the edge of this cloth here and then broke up the table and made a nice little heap, you know, we could have ourselves a very exciting evening. But I think the congregation of St. Aidan's Church would be a bit upset. So, you know, as long as the fire is contained and controlled, then it's something that helps us, it's useful to us. But also this teaching is not just talking about controlling fire, it's talking about dispassion, about the fire going out. And this is something that people, particularly in the West, find pretty disturbing. As soon as you say, well, what does nibbana mean? And like this word dispassion

[33:36]

is a translation of the Pali nibbita, or becomes dispassionate, the verb is nibbindati, one becomes dispassionate. And the word nibbana, nibbita, nibbindati, that word nib or nirv in Sanskrit means to blow out or to have gone cool, to have become cool for a fire, like a fire going out. And it was a normal everyday household kind of expression. Like after you've cooked the rice, you leave it to nibbana, you leave it to cool down for the fire to drop down. And so when you talk about the goal of the spiritual life is this like the blowing out of a flame, the dying of a fire, then I notice particularly in the West people start to get all kind of uncomfortable. Oh dear, this sounds all very nihilistic. And you know, you mean that the goal of Buddhist life

[34:38]

is to be extinguished? You know, this is, we do, we go through all of this and we spend 10,000 hours on our Zafu just so we can get extinguished like a dinosaur, you know, so I can become extinct. And some of the translations of Buddhist scriptures come, you know, are put in that way that, oh, what bliss, now I am extinct. I have been utterly extinguished, how marvelous. And it's done in a well-meaning way, but to a Western eye, certainly to my eye when I first came across this, this was a very bizarre and highly unattractive thing. I did not want to emulate the dinosaurs as, you know, nice creatures that they are, but I couldn't see that the consummation of human existence is to be, is just to be totally annihilated and sort of squished like an unnoticed cockroach underfoot. So then it becomes interesting or one sort of, the question is raised, but what does this mean?

[35:39]

Or what is this talking about? You know, if nibbana means a fire going out, like the blowing out of a flame, and it's very clear that Buddha does use that analogy, like the putting out of a fire, the fire's growing cold. And something in us does shudder because it seems very nihilistic, but that's because in our way of thinking in the West, for a, when a fire goes out, it means death. The fire is dead. It's gone out. But in Vedic system, in the Vedic philosophy, that was not the connotation of a fire going out at all. They had a very different sense of the physics of it. And the way they looked at it was very different from the way that we do because they saw fire very much as like primordial universal energy, like the primordial, immortal, omnipresent energy of the universe. And when an object catches fire, then when there's flames, and the object is alight,

[36:39]

like, and by analogy, when the mind is ignited and alight and flowing out and blazing, then that energy is in a, is in an agitated, attached, dependent, clinging state. It is, it's in an inferior state. And when the, and when a fire goes out, rather than it being dead, what is happening is that the fire element is returning to its immortal, omnipresent, primordial state. And so too, with the mind, when the mind is not flowing out into the, into passion, into obsession, into fear, and, and greed, and hatred, delusion, when it's not flowing out in that way, when it is, when the, that fire is, is extinguished, then in the same way, the mind returns to realize its primordial, immortal state. Its, its original nature.

[37:41]

And so this is the whole connotation of a fire going out. This is what the, the, the allusions of, of nibbana, or the, or the blowing out of a flame, has in the, in the Buddhist world, the way that the Buddha was using the term. So that, when, when you come across in Buddhist scriptures this idea of, of extinction, or, or annihilation, or, or these terms that get used, it's in a way a mistranslation because English doesn't really have a, a suitable term that matches it, that gives these same connotations. But this is really what it's talking about. So when we, we say that we practice the, the Buddhist path in order to, to put out the fires, this is not in a way of saying, you know, life is, is bad, everything that we are, the, the whole energy of our being is somehow wrong and askew and distorted and, and all kind of inherently out of order. But it's more that

[38:42]

when we let go of, of greed, of hatred, of delusion, when we let go of, of identification with the, with the six senses, then the mind returns to its, to realize its original nature, to its immortal, deathless quality. So that this, in this, in this way, the path that we practice, sila, samadhi, panya, virtue, concentration, mental training, the development of wisdom, these I have, I've heard referred to as the three fire extinguishers. I once came across a Dharma talk that was being given in London and the title of it was Three Fire Extinguishers and I thought, who, who on earth, this, this is, this must be a joke and then I, I, I realized, oh, very neat, that sila, samadhi, panya,

[39:42]

these are indeed the fire extinguishers and when the, the fire goes out, rather than this being the, the state of, of complete deadness and death, it's actually the, the state of, of total life, of completely living, of, of a state of, of fulfillment, the, the realization of the true nature of, of, of what is, of what we are and the, the primordial quality of, of all things. So, I offer that for you to consider and please edit as you see fit and if people would like to ask any questions or have anything to say, then please fire away. We have a, a little while yet. No pun intended. Yes. So, basically what you're saying is that instead of it being blowing out a candle like we think in the West,

[40:43]

it's more like an engine and instead of it running a lot of friction and giving off a lot of heat to make it run smoothly so that all of the energy goes to making the engine turn as opposed to getting hot. Is that, is that what you're saying? physics analogy. Yes. We understand this. Yeah. Thank you. I definitely have had a lot of trouble with dispatch. I see you.

[41:06]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ