Description
Everybody probably has a road that would come to mind. I remember getting a bus in Tasmania and driving through the west coast mountains to a mining town where I was going to work, get a job, and how the snow was coming down and the bus would just go around this really narrow road like that, and there are certain parts of the world that have truly alarming narrow mountain roads with truly alarming drivers and very ancient buses.
John:
HAAAAAA! [laughter] Okay. I want to say a couple of things about koans, and then I’m going to talk about a koan. The kind of things I’m going to say about koans… there’s a way in which certain koans come into you, seem to come into you, and then they do things to you that you hadn’t necessarily agreed to, although in a certain overall sense you’ve been looking for something without knowing what it was, and that’s why you put up with it. And so there’s this category that we call miscellaneous koans, surprisingly creative term, which just means a whole bundle of koans kind of thrown together. But it’s an ancient tradition and it comes originally from China probably about a thousand years ago, passed carefully down through Japanese temples, and existed in somewhat the form we have today in the 1700s. We know because we inherited it from the Japanese teacher Hakuin. So that may be more history than you need to know to grapple with a miscellaneous koan, but it’s just to say that it’s a kind of form that’s evolved. I suppose that’s the take-home point. And they’re short, usually short.
So if you carry one around with you, it changes your point of view, and it doesn’t really matter whether it changes your point of view with a rush or it changes it gradually and you notice that everything’s different, you will notice certain fairly reliable features of the changes. Like I noticed I had more empathy. I was less bad-tempered. Being less bad-tempered wasn’t a very high bar for me, but I was. I had more sort of interest, feeling for people’s lives. And also you’ll notice that perhaps… for me that thing they always call doubt, which is that sort of uneasiness of – oh maybe we’re not doing it right, maybe I’m not doing it right – really eased up a lot. And you’ll notice that when things ease up, it’s not that you don’t get them, it’s that they’re no longer so persuasive. And maybe you don’t get them at all, you don’t have that am I doing it right thing. But if you do, it won’t be such a big deal. Or oh my god it’s all terrible sort of thing. And if you do have that, you realize you’re just having a party with your Gothic despair or something and don’t take it so seriously. So the miscellaneous koans have those kinds of effects.
The other thing I noticed was a sort of participation, a joining of the world, being a member of the world, realizing that we’re all linked in some way and that I’m linked into the world, and so not being that solitary lost creature, but the solitariness… there’s a koan that goes “solitary brightness,” and it’s part of the brightness of everything. But it’s also yours. So those qualities happen.
But the koans themselves, which I want to talk about today, they’re little fragments of something. They’re little fragments of the universe. And by meeting that little fragment, you do this, you start participating with the universe, you enter the universe. But you can only enter without taking you, and so – in other words, all the stories you tell yourself about what you can’t do and who you are and who you shouldn’t be, and how this other person shouldn’t have done that, are all revealed to be not very interesting, what your secret ambition is and so on, not terribly interesting, because the world when you enter the koan is so full and bright and meets you so well.
The other thing about the koans is that they’re not just fancy, nice situations, because life is full of everything, and the fancy, nice situation is just something you already have pre-approved and has your housekeeping seal of approval, and it’s probably something you’re not going to learn anything from, because you’ve already got it managed. So already it’s not real in a way. Some koans have a predicament quality to them, the one we spoke about last night: You find yourself in a stone grave. The doors are locked from the outside. There are no windows. Your cell phone doesn’t work. No one can hear you. How will you get out? So that’s like: Spin straw into gold. Guess the name of the goblin. There’s a fairytale quality to the task. There’s a bunch of them, one that I put in, like… we’re gradually developing, inventing new koans, like: Save the person jumping from the World Trade Center. Make it real. That’s an impossible task. Or: Stop the war. Put out the fire that’s across the river without going across the river. So there’s that kind of thing where you suddenly meet… whatever dilemma you have in your life will get drawn up like a fever, the way fever is drawn out of you, will get drawn up by that koan.
Some other koans are sort of mysterious in a different way, like there’s one that goes: Save a ghost. Everybody’s usually got a ghost, especially if you don’t believe in ghosts. Taking the form of the goddess, the deity of compassion, the goddess of compassion, Kuan Yin, taking the form of the goddess of compassion, find shelter for the homeless person. Why can’t the person who is very strong lift up her leg? They’re all situations. Here’s a fun one: A dog is pissing toward heaven in front of a Buddhist shrine. This is a poem of an old Zen teacher: In a well that has not been dug, water from no source is rippling. Someone with no shadow or form is drawing that water. That’s more or less how… you can tell that something mysterious and shining and empty and transparent – it’s beautiful in its own way.
So the one I want to talk about tonight – I just, to give you that sampler… chocolate, it’s a chocolate sampler. It’s not all dark chocolate or all truffles, it’s a sampler – is a very simple, apparently innocuous one called: Go straight on a narrow mountain road with 99 curves. Everybody probably has a road that would come to mind. I remember getting a bus in Tasmania and driving through the west coast mountains to a mining town where I was going to work, get a job, and how the snow was coming down and the bus would just go around this really narrow road like that, and there are certain parts of the world that have truly alarming narrow mountain roads with truly alarming drivers and very ancient buses. Some may come to mind for you. Go straight on that. How do you go straight on – ? So it’s got a little bit of that impossible task quality, which is different from a predicament. A predicament is you’ve just jumped from the World Trade Center. That would be a predicament. Or you’re in a stone grave. This is more the impossible task, but it’s intriguing, and an impossible task also is attractive in some way.
So I was thinking about how do you go straight. In Zen you can try to take the koan up to the top – get on the elevator and push top floor and you go right up into the top of your mind and you start thinking intelligent thoughts, and after awhile you realize my knees hurt or something like that, which seems somehow more fundamental. You realize maybe that’s not the way to do it. But it’s not like there’s anything wrong with trying to think our way through things, and some things we can think our way through, but there’s something else needed in life, because we don’t really taste and feel into life that way. And so what else is needed might be, there’s something else.
Then having given that up, we start forming a relationship with the koan, which is kind of what we have to do with life and with anything or anyone we love. So if one of the things the koan does is open our hearts, then it’s clearly about relationship to the world and relationship to ourselves and like that. And also part of that is we have to really forgive ourselves for how dopey we are about the way we go about it, because in a way that’s part of the impossible task. You’re kind of just going to have to feel – like in the Greek fairytale you’ve got to sort this pile of tiny seeds as big as this room and there’s seven kinds of seeds and you’ve got to sort them in separate piles before dawn, and there’s just you and you don’t have a light. So some despair and self-reproach might be part of this, part of the path. So that might be one of the curves on the path, but it may not be the place you end.
So go straight on a narrow mountain road. So I was thinking, one of the ways I tried to go straight really was I knew that I had a very active mind, but I also like to attack things with zest, so I thought I will get really good at having concentration and things like that. So I learned a bit about that and ended up with koans, and so then I tried all these great techniques. In those days we had a one-syllable koan which we left in the Japanese, “mu,” which means “no,” but we left it in Japanese “mu” because – I don’t know, it was more mysterious that way or something.
So “muuuuu” I’d say to myself, and then “muuuu” again, and breathe out and breathe in and I’d match it to my breathing and match it to my steps when I was walking, so trying all kinds of tricks in a way, tactics. And there’s nothing wrong with that, and eventually I think I realized that… I’d get a little bit of concentration, then immediately my knees would hurt, or I’d have a fantasy of some kind, I’d start looking at a pretty girl across the Zendo or something, or I’d get lost listening to birds, completely forget about everything, my koan. But now I would say, completely forgetting about everything, that might be… follow that. When you forgot about what you were doing, that might be more of a gateway. But then I thought no, no, muuuuu. So in a way I was trying to use it as an appliance, a can opener, and I was using it as a can opener. So I would get very concentrated and put myself in situations where I was deep in retreat… In those days you are sitting there meditating, somebody says, “Don’t move!” Oh yeah right, I moved. “Don’t move!” So it was kind of great in a way. It was dopey, it was one of those things, one of those curves.
And anyway, after some time of this, awhile of this, I was in a retreat and my mind was incredibly deep, I didn’t know why, and really I realized one doesn’t have to know why, and very still and I thought wow I’m going to get there, and then: don’t think that, that’s in the way. And then but wow… then my mind seemed very deep and suddenly it went all to hell, like really to hell. I mean I had bits and pieces and fragments like bad advertising jingles and sort of sorrows and regrets that I hadn’t even remembered and old griefs about things that didn’t even matter, and then – there’s a kind of ( I didn’t realize it at the time) but there’s a kind of – I’m looking for something here that I forgot to get… Can’t find things when you try to find them in the middle of the talk…
So the pieces of the world – but I had actually seen Tibetan images of this, where there’s a tiger turning into an elephant, turning into a castle turning into something like that. For me it was more like a rag and bone shop in a way. There was just bits of things that didn’t seem to be in my own experience, and Czeslaw Milosz has a great poem about that in which he says that there are moments in us like a caravel staving its hull against a reef, or a woman looking at her face in a bronze mirror, and they’re just these fragments that come into our minds, and so I know that he knew about that just from that poem. Things come that don’t even seem to belong to us and we never could have seen or known. So it was that. There’s a technical name for that; it’s called the storehouse consciousness in Zen.
So that appeared, and my normal strategy was to sigh, to despair, to tell myself how terrible I was, and start again. Another strategy was a sort of trick where I thought: I’ll punch the wall out after the bell has rung, not before. So I may have been a bit frustrated as well. And that way I would get myself through, because there was always another bell to wait for. But my mind went all to hell. Normally I would despair and start again, and instead of doing that, I laughed and it was just really funny, and that was the way to go. So in a certain sense that was going straight on the narrow mountain road, because there’s all these curves, and it was just funny. I realized I’d done it exactly the best way I knew how and it was clearly not working, absolutely clearly not working, and I would even probably match my meditation states to those manuals of wonderful meditation states, and clearly even so it wasn’t working. What have they got to do with it? That’s the Samadhi of blah-blah. Yes, it is. When it goes away you will be just as deluded as you were beforehand. [laughter] And so it was great. So that was a narrow mountain road experience. So then I started laughing, and so that was really nice. And I just kept laughing quite a long time.
So something just comes up in us, it’s kind of like it’s already here in us and it starts to wake up in us, and we might say the koan draws it to itself, but it’s not our excellent technique or anything like that, or holding our mouths right that does it. It’s just a capacity in us. We stop being in our way for a minute. I stopped disapproving. I had this crazy state of mind and instead of disapproving of it I forgot to disapprove of it, it’s that simple. So if you have a moment of not disapproving of your mind, you don’t even have to be in a deep place. That’s it. Because, you know yesterday I spoke about we start to get out of prison and then we turn around and start banging and saying let me back in. That’s the disapproving of our own minds and not forgiving our own minds, and all the things we want to collect because we don’t approve of ourselves. I don’t approve of myself therefore I’ve got to be special. That kind of thing.
So I had another experience… I think I can talk about… I don’t know, maybe. Let me see, going straight on a narrow mountain road. So then there would be a thing where you go, you’re meditating and your mind is doing something, and you start judging somebody. This is a pretty common thing, and then there’s this great thing happens where you realize – oh, I do that. It’s great. It’s like you say to a friend: Wow, you’re really angry with me, and you realize, wow, I’m angry with her. So that sort of thing. And it’s funny, and it’s a release. And then you’ll see that instead of chasing the world out here, as Hakuin says, you’ve turned the light backwards, and you start seeing the vastness of things, because you’re not putting something in the way. And so that would be something to do with going straight on the narrow mountain road. It’s incredibly liberating, because you’re not worried, you’re not defending yourself, none of that.
Then what you do is, then fine, then you start to feel like oh I can feel the koan in my body, I can feel the koan. It’s not just an insight, it’s not a thought, I can feel it, that whatever I’m doing, I’m going straight. Or whatever I’m doing, if we’re in the stone grave we might think well I just can’t get out of it, but we haven’t yet – we get out of it when we find well what’s my personal stone grave. It’s not somebody else’s, it’s not a theoretical one, it’s not a scenario, it’s what’s my personal road that bends and curves. And everybody’s got one. We could say the whole life is one. If I look at the back of my footsteps, that’s their pattern. And nothing we want will save us from having to have that. Nothing we want will save us from having to solve this koan. And no approval from another person will save us from having to enter life, really.
But then when we give up all the other strategies, like doing really good meditation was one of mine, getting approval from people is another one, things like that. And actually, blaming ourselves is actually a strategy that we think will probably lead to happiness. We clearly haven’t really checked it out. [laughter] Because it orders the world in a way. I know that I’m in charge, because I’m messed up. I have a description of things. But nothing will save us from having to really – blaming ourselves, blaming other people, none of that will save us, and so gradually – to go back to the point about the relationship with the koan, as we form a relationship with the koan, we’re actually forming a relationship with life. There’s not really a difference between life and my life(?). And then in a relationship, whatever comes, if you love someone, it’s all right. You just love them, and it’s the same with your life. Through the koan, it doesn’t matter if you can’t find it, you just trust it’s there. And actually, it is, you know. It’ll be underneath everything.
There’s a koan about a guy who is the cook – the teacher is the cook, and he walks into the meditation hall with a rice pot and he dances and claps his hands and laughs and says, “Come on and get the rice! Come on and eat the rice!” And he would just do this whole thing. So anyway somebody was playing with that koan, sitting with that koan, forming a relationship with it, and then I’d forgotten, she forgot she was doing that, and she came in and started talking about how much she wanted to just come into the meditation hall and dance. And so it was there, even though if you’d asked either of us we couldn’t remember, and I started talking about dancing, and like that, so… it’s in us and we don’t even have to be kind of – it’s like any good relationship. We don’t have to be perfect about it. We won’t mess it up. We can trust it when we mess it up.
So that’s a good thing I think to remember. You won’t mess up your relationship to your meditation. If you fall asleep, damn well enjoy it, and you’ll probably find as you start noticing, wait, I’m asleep. Then you’ll start noticing, how come I know if I’m asleep? If I’m asleep I can’t… Then you’ll notice the koan is there in some way, the narrow mountain road. So that’s the thing again about if you’re in a relationship with it, what you’re doing is probably not wrong. Even if you think you’re not in a relationship with it, you’re just deluded, and don’t worry about it. Just touch it again. Bring the koan flowers if that’s what you do in a relationship, whatever it is you do. Just hang with it.
Really what we have to give life is what we have to give each other, which is our company, to be here with each other. That’s what we can do for each other, and that’s a big thing that we can do that. We can walk together. Often there are lots of things we can’t solve for each other, most things, actually, but that’s something we can do together. We can open our hearts to each other and walk together. And we have to do that, we have the relationship to the koan, and also we have to forgive ourselves, because we’ll never forgive anybody else if we’re not… And forgiving ourselves is not, I don’t think… in a way when I say that, it’s like I run around and then sit in this other chair and: Well John, you’re not that bad, really. Oh yes I am. Well, I should have done that. And that sounds kind of clunky, but it’s more like you realize I shouldn’t have or whatever comes up or I’ve failed or all those things in the category of doubt, and actually you don’t have to deal with them. You just have the koan. Just next, oh next, koan, narrow mountain road, 99 bends. And you don’t have to argue with the person who thinks you’re screwing up, because he or she isn’t real anyway, so you’re not going to win that argument, so forget it.
So again then you can see that’s another way of going straight. There’s a freedom and a joy in that. And then if the doubt comes up it’s kind of funny. It’s great. Oh, I think, he thinks he’s screwing up again, isn’t that great? It’s just the way you enjoy your dog or something. You don’t expect your dog to know all the things you know. Neither does your delusion. So let me stop there and take any comments. So, I don’t know. Are there places where you feel like your path has been very twisting or turning or dark in some way, and that you’re noticing this koan sort of touches?
S: A couple of days ago I was picking my daughter up from crew where she rows and of course given that she’s fifteen and two years from leaving I’m much concerned about my relationship with her and my communication with her, and I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to talk about important things, and maybe give some advice on life or something. And I looked over after she didn’t answer me, and she was asleep. I was looking at her, and she was so beautiful and pure, and it was just a wonderful experience. And that was the communication, and I was making the road curvy and narrow and it was actually broad and wide. I was restricting the experience until I just let it happen.
John: Isn’t that great? And it’s such fun when we realize that too, oh, I was trying way too hard.
S: Actually I slowed down the car so she could sleep longer and I could watch, I took a different turn. [laughter]
John: Yeah it’s great, and that’s that intimacy. Narrow mountain road. So then the narrow mountain road’s really wide, as you say. Thank you.
S: I was reminded when you were talking about starting to laugh at your difficulties. I was actually reminded of the story of the Buddha, and deciding to take the milk from the milkmaid. All this stuff wasn’t working, he decides he’s going to do something different. I was wondering if for our […?] in your Zendo and yelled out “No laughing!” and then abandoned you.
John: So have you had that experience of laughing like that? Is there something you could say about that?
S: Not about laughing, but I have had the experience of finding that I’m not going in the right direction, even though that’s what everybody was telling me to do, and I have to sort of shift gears in another direction and it turned out to be right. Or rather, I have to let go and go in the direction I’m trying to go anyway.
John: Yeah. In a certain sense we know that really we want that relationship with each other and with life, and we want it to be genuine, really. And we can’t help wanting that. And we just get in the way, we try so hard and add things that aren’t needed. I’m thinking of another friend who was telling me about he was getting a divorce and it was kind of terrible, and what a wreck it was and how awful it was. And he kept talking, and finally got to: It’s great! It’s just putting everything in the right place. So you know we often think we know what’s going on, and as we pay better attention, kinder attention or closer attention, our verdict changes. I think our verdict is always drivel anyway. Always trying to live by a tag that we don’t care about. It’s more mysterious. The path is more mysterious.
S: I realized that curvy road brings to mind something that happened when I was seventeen. I was an exchange student in the Alps. I was in a little town that was deep in the mountains, and it was really dark down there. I didn’t actually know until this thing happened how depressed the other high school students, that depression was a big problem, because we didn’t talk about it. My language skills weren’t good enough that I would catch that stuff anyway, but because it was in the Alps there were roads, and the roads were windy. The train also, there was a wonderful train that went on a windy track on a mountain. The other American student at the high school did something that students at that high school occasionally did when things got to be too much. He stepped out on to the track where the train couldn’t see him. He died right around Christmastime, and I was thinking about it. It was interesting, because although it was really terrible, it was kind of the only way I realized that staying some place that sucked is fatal sometimes. That actually it’s a good idea to notice those things, and for me it meant I left. I had my whole thing planned out, I was going to be an excellent student, I was going to excel even though it was a foreign language. I was going to do all these things, and then it was like he died and I thought, no actually. I am going to go somewhere where people love me and where my life will work better. At seventeen it was hard, but it was kind an interesting moment to realize you… I guess maybe finding myself I realized I had to take it seriously. It wasn’t some fantasy world I was living in anymore. It was actually like, even though I was only a kid I needed to do something that was… so somehow that’s that road. That’s being on the road is not pretending I’m not.
John: Thank you. It’s like not ignoring crucial information. Yeah.
S: I just was thinking about something with my profession, my career. A number of years back at a conference, something, not a big deal, but I felt that I had done something sort of inappropriate or wrong whatever, and I really sort of took that in and let it sit there for awhile. And for a number of years since then I’ve been very questioning of what I should be doing in this line of work. How I should be promoting my business, whatever. So I looked around at what other people were doing, and I did a lot of back and forth of trying to follow other people’s paths, and if I look at it now it very much is a winding sort of road, and I wonder is going straight sort of finding your path, and not following what somebody else is – is that a way of going straight, trying to be open to that, making sure you’re following the path that’s for you and not… because somebody else is successful following this particular thing doesn’t mean you will be or that I will be or it’s even what I want to do. I think I kind of stepped off my path and started wandering around the mountainside a little bit.
John: Yeah, it’s interesting. In a way all the stories tonight have been the same story. There’s a thing in Zen that – I thought I had to give up lots of things for Zen. The first time I was – and I was really literal about it, so I remember doing a precept ceremony with some Tibetans, and I pulled out at the last minute, because there was no way I could stop just about everything. [laughter] In fact there wasn’t anything I could stop if I was really honest with myself. And I didn’t realize the Tibetans were much smarter than that, and oh, just take it, and your relationship to it will change, which is going straight, really, but I was still stuck in my curves and things. So I think there’s that… and I have thought about all these things I had to stop and give up, and really it was putting all this apparatus on, control management, command and control on top, which is really your basic spiritual fascism, really. And I’ve realized that, and I think we try to teach this, if you really notice, as things fall off, what you notice is what you love and what’s really important. And what’s really important is probably not what you set out to get, and it’s probably not what you thought, and it’s probably about pretty simple stuff, and it’s great. So that lights up everything, and then we’re kinder with other people when they lose their tempers or whatever it is. I think we’re more helpful to the world and keep the world better company. Do you want to keep going with that?
But that thing about I had no idea that Zen was about finding out what I loved. And the thing is I was suspicious of my own impulses all the time. But if you’re paying attention, what you love is going to be kind of cool.
S: [?] …my dreams. About a year and a half ago in a hotel room which caught fire through no fault of my own in the night. I woke up choking. I had smoke inhalation. So eventually I managed to find an insurance company and we negotiated, in the sense that I sent them claims and they said give us more information and so on. This went on for about a year. About a month ago I got a call from this guy who said he wanted to settle. I’d been dreading this, because I did not want to sue people, because my blood pressure’s going to go up, I’ll probably die before [laughter]… let’s see how many miles away is court, and there’s all that traveling before I die [laughter]. So I thought in my heart of hearts if they’d just give me the money that I spent on gas going [laughter] it’ll be enough. And he said well we’ll pay your medical expenses and I thought, fine. And he said well, what about inconvenience. I said what inconvenience? He said well you live a long way from the city[?]. I said, that’s true, it did cost me a lot of gas money. And there’s all your pain and suffering, and [laughter] it began to sound interesting but I didn’t know what to say, because I’ve never had to negotiate for compensation. He said well, what do you want? Then I remembered John’s stories about Bodhidharma goes to the Emperor of China and he says who are you. I don’t know. I said well I don’t have a clue. I don’t deal with this kind of thing. And he said well seven and a half to ten thousand. I said I really don’t know, which was true. He said oh, well, ten thousand. I said thank you, I don’t want you to claim a commission on us, and it was actually that story which was in the back of my mind. I haven’t got the check yet. [laughter]
John: The mysteries of the earth. That’s one of the mysteries of life.
S: Seems to me like when you’re on a narrow, windy road that there is a lot of suffering, because things are hard and you’re thinking about something that’s not maybe important or whatever, and that maybe when you let go of some of that stuff, and the straight road is kind of just easy, like all those things that were a big deal weren’t really a big deal. So I wonder if that’s something that you find also, that it’s the easier path. I don’t know if that’s true or not.
John: Well I just think it’s not that… or you know, another thing would be… a couple of us were talking today – when I was starting out in meditation, I thought, I’d worked in the mines, and professional fisherman and stuff, kind of felt like being tough was sort of – it wasn’t that I thought I was tough, but it had never occurred to me that I wasn’t. You know, it was more like, it was just the culture. It was a cultural thing, it wasn’t personal to me. Don’t worry, I just broke my leg, just go on without me. So it was sort of like that, and then in meditation I would come to all these places I just didn’t recognize, there was something that would happen to me and I just didn’t recognize what it was. Then at some stage I realized I was just terrified, and it had never occurred to me that that’s what was going on. And then of course that was terrible, like how could I dare be that, and then at some stage I just noticed oh, so I’m terrified, so what. I kept trying to force my way.
Because as we open up, it becomes so unfamiliar part of us wants to grab the familiar, and that could be… the very things that we like least about ourselves might be the strongest anchors to the familiar. It’s like those Renaissance memory manuals that use disgusting images to link to bits of your talk so you remember your talk through… vomiting zombies is recommended. So it’s like that, we do that. So when I noticed oh I’m terrified, that was the beginning of going straight, but when I noticed what’s wrong with that? If I am, I just am. So it means I’m a whatever it is. Then I must be that, and what’s wrong with that? So I’m a collie dog. So I’m a wombat, whatever it is. It’s great. So I think there’s that move we make, where nothing has changed – I’m not less terrified, but I probably will be after awhile, because I’m not frightened of that.
S: You’re not frightened of what?
John: I’m not frightened of that. I’m not frightened of being frightened. Does that make sense? And so it’s that little dance move. All of the goddess of compassion is just in that one little – oh, maybe this is okay. I’m just terrified and I broke my leg and I’m having a heart attack. Nothing wrong with that.
S: I’m not there yet.
John: But you know what I mean. We disapprove of our conditions without even having noticed what they are. People are ashamed of their weight, their breathing, their car, it’s just endless, whatever we’re ashamed of. But we don’t even have to not be ashamed, we just have to not take it all so seriously.
So that’s the thing. We come to spirituality thinking I must improve myself, and to do that I must be stern, and probably using one of those whips with the little things, knots in them would be good, on my back, and we find that it’s not about that. There’s a heart opening that happens where we, and then our foot knows where to go. We don’t have to tell it. Thank you very much.