Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming out this Wednesday evening. I want to thank Mary, the Tonto, the head of practice here, for inviting me to give this talk. I want to welcome anybody who's here for the first time to Beginner Mind Temple. I also feel like I am a beginner. in this moment, since I've never lived at city center before, nor have I ever given a talk here. So this is all new to me as well. And I'll just say a few lines about myself since there are some people who live in the building who don't know me. I spent the last four years living at Tassahara. I had lived there for a few years before that and came and went a couple of times. I just moved into this temple at the end of December.

[01:06]

It's been a lot of fun, and to define fun in Zen terms, it's a little different for other people. It's been adventurous and... a little discombobulating, going from a monastery and coming to a temple and learning about the temple ways, which are different from the Tassajara ways, meeting new people, courting with a different schedule, having a different supervisor. So that's been fun. And I appreciate everybody's support and patience while I continue to get acclimated in this fun routine. So one thing that I'm really surprised about is how difficult some habits are to break, even if you spent the last four years in a monastery. And one of those habits is Netflix.

[02:07]

So I am a lover of stories and unfortunately a sometimes part-time, occasionally, never-say-always Netflix binger. But I feel like wherever we go, the Dharma is there if we keep our eyes open to it. So I'm going to start with a story, not my story, but an episode from this sci-fi show called Black Mirror, which I know started a long time ago, but I was probably in the monastery when it first came out. So it's kind of new to me. And I apologize in advance if my recounting any of this episode, which has... Some mentions of violence, if it upsets anybody, that's not my intention. So the setting is in a foreign country after a war. The U.S. military is there trying to protect these villagers from these people that they call roaches. These roaches are raiding their food supplies and just terrorizing the villagers.

[03:14]

These roaches are people... They used to be people. They are now very disfigured. They have swollen facial features. They have teeth like sharks. And they speak in squawks and screeches. So the military unit, the army, is supposed to protect these villagers. That's pretty much all the backstory that we get. And the first mission that they do, they are going to a farmhouse because... there's a farmer there who supposedly is harboring these roaches. And the two main characters are this female soldier, Hunter, and this other soldier, Stripe. And Stripe is the new guy. So Hunter, who's very keen on killing these roaches and also was raised on a farm and knows how to hunt, she keeps telling Stripe to watch out for these roaches and that they're very disgusting and dirty. So she's very gung-ho, and Stripe is just kind of taking it all in. So they get to the farmhouse. They find the farmer there who doesn't say very much.

[04:17]

And as Stripe is going through the farmhouse, looking behind walls and closets and everything else, he pulls, I guess, a sheet across. And behind there are some roaches, and they are pretty disgusting-looking and horrifying. Anyway, one of them tries to combat... And he holds up a wand about this big with these two LED lights on the end, like trying to protect himself. So a scuffle ensues and eventually Stripe kills this particular roach and this other roach. And of course, all of his buddies are congratulating him on his first two kills. You know, they're all very excited about this. So after this incident... Stripe starts to feel some headaches and has some insomnia. He feels like something's wrong with him, but the doctors are like, don't worry about it, you're okay. Just go back, keep on fighting, right? So fast forward, maybe a week or so, they go on another mission, just Hunter and Stripe.

[05:19]

They get attacked by a roach who has an assault rifle. They hunt them down an abandoned building, and Hunter shoots the roach who has the rifle. She proceeds to go through the building, and she just starts to indiscriminately, from Stripe's perspective, shoot human beings, regular human beings. That's what he's saying. One of them has a baseball bat, and she's trying to protect herself, and Hunter shoots her. When they go into this one room, there's a mother and son cowering in the corner, and Stripe tries to protect them. He knocks the gun out of... Hunter's hand. The gun goes off and shoots him in the side, and she's knocked unconscious. Hunter's knocked unconscious. So Stripe, the new guy, he takes the mother and son as he's in a lot of pain, but he's driving this Humvee, and he takes them to safety before he passes out.

[06:21]

And they're now in the underground hideout, where the mother and son are hiding out from all this war that's going on above them. So the mother tends to Stripe's wounds until he wakes up. And when he wakes up, they exchange a few words and she says to him, can you see me? Do you see me? And Stripe says, of course I see you. But their conversation is kind of cut short because Hunter jumps into the hideout and she, to a horrified Stripe who's too wounded to do anything, she ends up... shooting the mother and son as well. So what's happening here? Are the mother and son, are they really roaches or are they really human beings? We have these two perspectives. And since this is a Zen talk, I'll say both perspectives are true. You know, yes and no. They're both roach and human.

[07:22]

What we come to find out is that that little LED baton, interrupted or disrupted this neural implant that Stripe has, was put into Stripe's spinal cord or his brain by the government. But Stripe and all the other soldiers, none of them have any memory of this, but they all consented to it. So this neural implant has now been disrupted. So instead of seeing roaches, Stripe actually sees human beings, which is how they really exist. So he's seeing... He saw all these people that Hunter was killing as regular human beings, just like himself. They were no longer other. They were no longer disfigured and disgusting. They were just regular human beings who were trying to survive these attacks. They were trying to defend themselves. So that's what the woman meant when she said to him in the hideout, did you see me? And he says, yes, I see you. She's like, but not as a roach, right?

[08:26]

He's like, no, I see you. So I've watched all the episodes of all the seasons of this show, which I find to be quite disturbing and brilliant. I was very impressed with the creative genius behind this show. And as someone told me recently, it was just too intense for them to watch, which I totally understand. But for some reason, that seems to be how I am wired. But this episode stood out. Many of the episodes stood out. But this one stood out for a number of reasons. I think first because I was disturbed by its gritty realism, and it was like an emotional punch in my stomach watching all this happen, and also because it depicted these ethical and moral conundrums that soldiers are thrust into when they're in a war zone, right? These are situations that arise from them, maybe not because of a neural implant, but they are often in these types of situations where everybody's life is at stake and they have to make these decisions very quickly.

[09:28]

And I was looking, I just decided to Google conflict in the world because Google knows everything, right? And there actually is a website, Global Conflict Watcher, and it pulls up a map of the world and it has these little red, green, and yellow, depending on the significance of these global conflicts to the United States' interests. Of course, it's all about the United States. And I think there's 26 people conflicts right now all around the world that they're watching with regard to how it affects U.S. interests. I thought it was very odd and telling that the whole North America had no conflicts. And I think, oh, there's no conflicts going on in the United States right now? Really? Okay. I think I would have thought that's where all of them were. The ones that were really affecting the United States were right here in the U.S., close to home. But according to this website, there aren't any. So there's still all this violence, as we know, in the world and these ongoing conflicts that are based on a lot of ancient twisted karma.

[10:39]

This website lists, like you can click on the dot and it lists, gives you a summary of when it began. And some of these conflicts began decades and decades and decades ago. I also thought that this episode really tied together possible dystopic future where we still have all these military conflicts going on and we're using artificial intelligence to manipulate human consciousness. Now, maybe some of you who are more up to speed about AI, maybe that's already happening. I mean, I've seen things. I know that there are certain experiments or I've been reading about something like this could happen or maybe it already is happening. I think the Atlantic Monthly had an article like weaponizing the brain. So... This isn't that far away, or maybe they're already doing this, and what do I know? It's not anything that I would have any knowledge of. So for me, despite it being a science fiction show, I also thought it was a modern-day parable that clearly illustrates the Buddha's teaching about the origins of conflict.

[11:49]

And now I'm going to explain that to you from my perspective. So the Buddha, I learned this new word, papancha, P-A-P-A-N, So the Buddha calls the habit of mind that leads to conflict Papancha. And Tanisaru Bhikkhu, who is a teacher in the Thai forest tradition, says that the word doesn't really have any clear definitions. The Buddha never really defines it in his discourses, but he does discuss how it arises and how it can lead to conflict. The word Papancha is always associated with negative connotations and thoughts about conceit and views. And some agreed-upon definitions are probably some that you've heard. Conceptual proliferation, obsessive and repetitive thinking, exaggeration, distortion, and self-reflexive thinking. So in the Honeyball Sutra, the Buddha carefully explains how the perceptual process can arise and lead to conflict, even just from our seeing somebody, right?

[12:55]

We just see somebody for the first time. So this is my rephrasing of the Buddha's systematic analysis of the possibility of conflict arising. So when I form, so when I meets a form, I consciousness arises. This contact gives rise to a feeling of neutral, pleasant or unpleasant. And so for the soldiers, right, their contact with these roaches gives rise to repulsion and aversion. So what the soldiers feel, they perceive, right? So now they're labeling in their mind, and they're not aware of this going on, and they're thinking about it, right? And since they've all been programmed the same way from this neural implant, and they don't know they've been programmed, they share these fixed views and attitudes and express hatred and aversion toward their common enemy. So this group think, if you will, this military Borg... they reinforce each other's perceptions, not only of the roaches, but also of themselves.

[13:56]

So one of the most fascinating for me and detrimental aspects of human consciousness is that even after an object of the senses goes away, after it fades away, our mind consciousness can still conjure memories and stories about this missing object, right? So when the roaches are no longer in the presence of... the soldiers can still think about, see, have senses about, sense impressions left in their body and mind from their encounters with the roaches, especially if, as we all know, if we have a lot of adrenaline rushing through us, which is what people do when they are in the military and it's their life at stake and they're trying to kill somebody and not be killed themselves. So our minds still hold on to this impression. And we can relive the past, distort the present, and also fantasize about the future. So when the soldiers, what they think about, they complicate. This is a word, how Tanasara Bhikkhu translates it, they complicate.

[15:04]

So they complicate, and the result of this complicating is that the soldiers, right, ready? The soldiers now become victims of their own conceptualizations. their own perceptions, their own conceptualizations, and their own objectifications. So Hunter and Stripes warp perceptions that others, the enemy, and gives rise to their own warped attitudes toward these roaches. So this hatred for the other builds from this inner tension in their own minds, right? Their mind consciousness is basically their own, their personal battlefield. where the soldiers are, as the Buddha says, both the assailants, right? So they're both the attackers and also the victims of everything that's going on in their minds. They don't even have to leave their barracks. So the soldiers are assailed by their own conceptual proliferations, this papancha, because they are unaware of this perceptual process. And they're relating to all this arising mental phenomena and other sense objects,

[16:10]

as though these objects were actually permanent and independent. And somehow these objects are outside of them and not linked at all to their own sensory apparatus. They're objectifying everything they're perceiving. They don't think it has anything to do necessarily with them. And they certainly are completely unaware of this neural implant that's coloring their view. So they don't ever question their perceptions until Stripe's neural implant starts to malfunction. So now he has a different view from the soldiers of these roaches. He no longer has a fixed view. So his shift in perception changes his attitude toward the roaches, which changes his speech and changes his actions. So instead of trying to kill the roaches... who he now sees as humans, he's actually trying to save them. So he tries to save these people.

[17:10]

So his thoughts, words, and deeds, his karma, is now founded upon more accurate sensory input. Like he says to the roach who saves him, you know, of course I see you, because he's no longer blinded by ignorance, which is one of the three poisons, and he interrupts the cycle of harming himself and harming other people. So it's interesting to note that the villagers don't have any neuroimplants. So they see perfectly well that these supposed roaches are actually people who look just like them. They're their countrymen, as a matter of fact. There's no difference between these people, except the villagers are people who have bought in to the societal and cultural narratives that say that these roaches are not purebred. that they carry some kind of disease and that they need to be eliminated in order to maintain the purity of their race. So the villagers don't have any neuroimplant, but yet they have some type of implant of this karmic thing from their society and their culture.

[18:21]

And of course, they never say anything to the soldiers, right? They don't ever give up that piece of information. So both the soldiers and the villagers are indeed poisoned by their misperceptions. So the people who have the most accurate understanding of what's happening are, in fact, the roaches. They know that the soldiers have been programmed by these implants, and they also know that the villagers are purposely buying into this story and making them other. So the roaches are the least deceived by this propaganda. And as history has shown us many times, that these truth-tellers are often the people who are most persecuted. A Pali word for ignorance is avija. Avija means knowledge, and A is like against knowledge. So it's the absence of accurate knowledge, avija. At the heart of this ignorance is this conceit of a thinker, a sense of ourselves as solid, independent, and abiding, a separate,

[19:26]

I am. In one of the Buddhist short sutras titled Quickly, I'm not exactly sure why it's titled Quickly, but I kind of like that, Quickly. So he says that the way to establish peace is to put an entire stop to the root of objectification and classification. This papancha, to stop it. To stop, I am the thinker. He goes on to say... that touched by contact in various ways, a monk, or we could say a soldier or a human being, shouldn't keep theorizing about self. So touched by contact, and all of our senses make contact with sense objects. We shouldn't theorize about self. Stop the self-reflexive thinking. So stilled right within, a monk or a soldier shouldn't seek peace from another.

[20:29]

So not looking outside yourself for peace, being still from within. For one stilled right within, there's nothing embraced. So how can there be any rejection? So in the Honeyball Sutra, the Buddha... declares that if we're able to not embrace or cling to the solid sense of I am, if we let go of that sense, or if we even start to notice it, what is our neural implant telling us? If we notice that we're actually, if we become more aware of the perceptual process, become more aware of this sense of self. So that if we don't embrace the sense of self, if we don't cling onto the sense of self, then this false self won't feel rejected. And I'm sure we've, Many of us, I won't say all of us, but many of us have been on the other side of feeling that rejection or betrayal, that constriction that happens inside of us when we feel othered by somebody or by some circumstance, right?

[21:36]

This feeling of rejection. So the Buddha says, if we let go, if we do not embrace the sense of self, then the obsessions of passion, resistance, views, conceit, and ignorance will end. And that this is the end of taking up rods and blades of quarrels and divisive and false speech. And he concludes with, that is where these evil, unskillful things cease without remainder. Which, my understanding of that means then that this karma won't be perpetuated. It ceases without remainder. if there is nobody reifying, if there's no reification of or making real of my sense of self, there is nothing to grasp onto. And that phenomena just arises and it passes away in that moment and it's not carried forward by that sense of self, by a sense of separation.

[22:38]

Of course, this is easier said than done, as many of us know. So for Stripe, it was pretty easy in that He had nothing to do with his implant being disrupted, right? Someone waved a wand and this neural implant was obstructed in some way. So these causes and conditions actually disrupted his implanted karma, if you will. His government issued karma. So Stripe was presented when he found out about this, right? Now the veil of ignorance is lifted and his perception has been corrected. And when he finds out about this, the government psychologist gives him two options. Either he can have this implant put back in and have all memory of it wiped out, like what happened before, or he can maintain some sense of liberation but be confined in a cell for an indeterminate amount of time.

[23:43]

So as I was writing this, I was thinking, wow, this would be so great if we just had a wand, right? I could just wand over everybody. And then all of our karmic conditioning, all of our karmic implants were just interrupted like that. But that's not the case. So if anyone has one of those wands or an app, let me know. Enlightenment app. I love to borrow it. But we do have this wand of the Dharma. and this posture of zazen. So when I first began practicing zazen, I remember 2002 or so, I was so identified with thinking mind. I mean, I had no clue that these thoughts and emotions that were arising had nothing to do with me, that these thoughts and emotions weren't solid. This caused great consternation for my teacher, Tia, who I think for the... for 10 years, pretty much said the same thing over and over again. And I was like, what do you mean?

[24:46]

Stop analyzing things. What do you mean? I'm not my emotions. What do you mean? I'm not this conditioning. What do you mean? And I really credit her, I don't know, her patience for sticking with me for all those years. I was a master of complicating, you know, Papancha. I was so mesmerized by that when I was sitting, just really fascinated by thinking mind and co-opted by it. So for me, one of the most transformative and instructive teachings of the Buddha is that the mind is a sense organ. No one had ever told me that 15 years ago, 17 years ago when I first started, that the mind is a sense organ, right? So the mind is a door through which all the other sense perceptions arise and So the mind perceives all the other objects of all the other senses. And the mind also perceives its own mental formations, its own thoughts, its own stories.

[25:52]

So it's also papanchizing its own mental formations, the sense impressions, the narratives that we have, just all these projections that are arising. Sometimes it feels like nonstop, the mind, that complicating is arising. So it was very painful for me at first to sit Zazen and also very distressing to sit still. And I still remember my first one day sit in Austin Zen Center. I think it was back in 2002. I had so much anxiety. It was from nine to five. And I was just really didn't want to go, but knew that I wanted to go. So I just drove there. I just kept psyching my brain out, like, oh, yeah, I'm not going to the Zen Center. I'm not going to the Zen Center. I'm not going to the Zen Center. And I drove up, and I sat from 9 to 5. And the last half hour, speaking of complicating and pampanchizing, I got so worked up about the Doan, the person who rings the bell.

[27:05]

Because I just knew this person who I barely met... was not ringing that bell just to tick me off, just to cause me pain and suffering. I was like, I know he's over there. He's not ringing that bell. I can't stand that guy. It was, yeah, you laugh. But when you're sitting there, we know that it's not such a laughable matter when you're stuck on that cushion. I don't know how long all that volcanic eruptions was going on. And just going on, and then I started crying. I was weeping that this person was not ringing the bell to cause me distress. And then when the bell struck, I got up, and I don't think I said anything to anybody. I just walked out to my car. I sat in the car. I turned on the engine. I thought, oh, my God, I got to do this again. Like, what is going on, Heather? It was just a wall. You don't even know that guy.

[28:07]

You know, it was just my first experience, even though I had been to a lot of talk therapy, but it was my first experience of just sitting in the middle of all this complicating and just being totally caught up in it in the moment. But then when I got in the car, I was like, that was just a wall. Okay, all right. So I was hooked, oddly enough, even though it was a very distressing, anxiety-producing, weeping kind of one-day sit. But I knew something was going on, and I knew that it was very important for me to continue practicing because of that insight, that experience. And I think at first, you know, the voices in my head felt a little bit like stumbling drunken enemies. You know, they were attacking and defending, and they're, you know, jockeying for position, clamoring for my intention and validation. So it was very noisy and confusing and just a mass of suffering.

[29:12]

So what was helpful for me was to sit still, to continue to come back to the Zen center and just keep sitting still amid all this clamor. So Zazen is a real helpful tool to establish, as some of us know, this continuity of mindfulness. So we get to sit there and pay attention to the ever-changing interior and exterior of our lives without acting on it. So we're not generating any new karma because we're not going and yelling at the Doan for causing me pain and suffering. I'm sitting in the middle of it as it arises and not acting on it. So the karma is not generated, at least in that moment when you... Arise from the cushion. Who knows what you'll do? So the key really is how are we reacting to what's arising? That's what illuminates our blind spots.

[30:15]

I don't know who said this. Maybe it was Pema Chodron or some other highly realized teacher, but she says, if you think you're enlightened, go visit your family, right? So you could sit there in the monastery and everyone's all quantumist and we're just doing our thing and get to be quiet. And then... You don't even have to go home. For me, I just make a phone call. I could just get a text. You know, just a nonverbal communication. I could even just think sometimes about my family members and the papanchizing happens, right? So I feel like the tool or the magic wand of zazen is just that, sitting there while all this commotion is going on. And imagine what it would be like if... soldiers of people in those really crazy situations actually were aware, and maybe some of them are, I don't know, aware of this process and aware of what their own perceptual projections are onto what's going on in the situation and more aware of what they're bringing to the situation and how it's affecting themselves and others, which I'm sure many of them are aware of that.

[31:28]

So when we're sitting still amid this clamor, and I think especially it's true when we're sitting in a session and we have a five or seven days where the thinking mind, the complicating mind starts to settle, right? It just becomes so compelling. And our perceptual process can actually start to sound when we're in session, right? So that perceptual process slows down. the more our body is concentrated. It's not running around doing things, not multitasking. When we're practicing in that tight container of a session, which is taking this extreme backward step and sitting still and calm on that cushion, get to notice more the proclivities of our particular karmic conditioning, what comes up for us. For me, my conditioning was always, I projected horrible things happening in the future. And then I always regurgitated things in the past.

[32:30]

So it was just this... The forward was kind of a mess. And behind me was a mess as well. So other people have other conditioning. For them, it's always sunny, maybe. But for me, it was always regurgitating stressful and suffering situations that had happened in my life. So the more that we're able to... sit with what's arising and have our perceptual process slow down. We have an experience, more of an experience of what's going on in our bodies, you know, somatic knowing, if you will. And if we're fortunate, a sense of spaciousness will arise, this non-reactivity that will happen. It's kind of a mystery of zazen for some of us, just sitting there, doing nothing but paying attention, maybe following our breath or counting our breath. can actually help with some spaciousness between what arises and our habitual reaction to it. And if we're even more fortunate, this non-reactivity or this impartiality can follow us off the cushion and help guide us while we are interacting with other people outside of the temple.

[33:46]

So for me, that's the magic of Zazen. And I think one way for me to understand if misperceiving something, which is probably all time, but most particularly I think it's really important if our speech and our actions are harming people. So if my speech and my actions seem to be causing harm to people either because they tell me or because someone else tells me or because I notice, then in some fundamental way I'm caught in a perceptual knot. And this happens to me quite often, especially around the emotion sensation of anger. I seem to have some karmic conditioning, ancient and twisted, of course. I come from kind of a reactive, volcanic family. So my family, I think the three primary emotions were anger, grief, and then somehow, miraculously, laughter. Like those three together were, fortunately, the laughter was in there.

[34:50]

I think it was very helpful. to have that laughter. So since I started with this confession of being kind of a Netflix sort of sometimes maybe, but not always Netflix binger, I want to end with a confession as well and a little bit of repentance. So a while back when I was at Tassajara, there was some somatic reactivity arising in some of our meetings. And I would notice immediately differences in my posture, in my attitude, in things I would feel really tense and like my gut was kind of holding. And I found that I wasn't really able to think or talk my way out of it. Even though I could analyze it, I understood what was going on. There still didn't seem to be any relief from this sort of somatic pop, pop, pop. And then it sort of bled over sometimes into... divisive speech with one person in particular.

[35:52]

And I was feeling a lot of remorse about this because I didn't really want to be harmful. And I really felt like I had no control. Like it was just these causes and conditions of that particular time at Tassajara. So we had been doing these council meetings at Tassajara where we'd pass the rock and people would speak when they had the rock. And I think this is what gave me the idea to actually take two rocks, which are plentiful at Tassajara, and I put one in each hand, and I would stand in those meetings with these rocks in my hands. Not to throw them. Okay. I had them there. Somehow I knew intuitively that I had to sort of short-circuit this crazy reactivity. I didn't really know what else to do, and I was kind of at my wit's end, so I just... took these rocks and I would carry them in my kimono sleeves, which, you know, are helpful to hide things, especially like almonds when you want extra ones.

[36:55]

So to nibble on later. So I had these rocks and I just found myself breathing into them, putting my attention, putting my mind on these two rocks to help stabilize that energy to kind of short circuit whatever was going on because the reactivity was so quick. Like... if I was jumping out of the way of an oncoming truck. That's how quick, it was like no thinking was going on. It was just boom. Just practice with these stones. Maybe those are my wands, my magic wands, practice with these stones for probably, I guess, six weeks or so. And that energy just started to settle and somehow it got transmuted and dissipated. And I was very relieved. And I'm sure other people in the room were relieved as well. And then I express my remorse to the people who were harmed or kind of just sort of annoyed with me, wondering why I couldn't just stand there calmly. And so I found that very helpful to connect myself to the earth in that way.

[38:04]

So let me just get back and end with Stripe. So Stripe's story is a little ambiguous, the very last scene of the TV show, which, by the way, the TV show was inspired by this book that this historian wrote about World War II soldiers that I think is called Men Against Fire and the difficulty with a battle command or something. And I think he was a general, and he said, He, according to him, 70% of the soldiers in World War II did not fire their weapons at the enemy. And when they did fire their weapons at the enemy, they fired over their heads, right? So this was a way, these neural implants was a way to make these soldiers killing machines, right? We interrupt, we program their perceptual processes. We make them really see these people as the other humans.

[39:09]

and therefore they're going to be better killers for us. And when I read that, I was like, wow, that's pretty frightening. It was kind of heartwarming, you know, that these soldiers had restrained or they just couldn't kill somebody who looked like them, right? That's the whole point. They weren't able to other them. So 70%, I believe, was the statistic. They didn't fire their rifles. So we see Stripe at the end of the episode, and he's standing in his military uniform in front of a house. And this is a house that has shown up in some of his dreams with a woman in the house. And we're not really sure who the woman is. We're never told, but somebody that he, who knows if he was involved with this woman or not, his wife or his girlfriend. But there's this house in front of him, and he's standing there looking at it. But we see two visions of the house. One vision of the house is this beautiful house, there's birds flying around it and the trees are blossoming and it's painted a beautiful white and it looks serene and happy.

[40:12]

And the other version of it is this dilapidated, you know, shack that nobody would really want to live in. And as the audience, we're really uncertain as to which vision Stripe is actually seeing. And maybe, is he even really there? Maybe the whole thing is just his own, maybe he's stuck in that jail somewhere. And this is just a figment of his imagination that he's actually back at this house. So we don't really know what's going on. So the audience is uncertain about which vision Stripe is actually seeing. And, you know, in the end, of course, perception is reality. Except, as Suzuki Roshi would say, that's not always true. So... If we question our perceptions, we might actually have a better understanding of what true reality actually is. Thank you. I don't know what time it is because I didn't see.

[41:12]

It looks like it's 8.35. Oh, this is fast. It's fast, Francis. That's okay. What's time anyway, right? Do we have time for a couple questions? No? Okay. Sorry. All right. Well, thank you all for your attention and patience. I appreciate it.

[41:35]

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