Cortland Dahl: A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism
In this Wisdom Dharma Chat, Buddhist scholar, translator, scientist, and meditation teacher Cortland Dahl discusses the central framework of his book A Meditator’s Guide to Buddhism: the three‑fold structure of View, Meditation, and Application. He explains that the View is how we see ourselves and reality, Meditation translates that view into direct experience, and Application brings the insight into everyday life. Dahl elaborates on the concepts of naturalness (un‑fabricated, allowing experience to unfold without trying to improve it) and spontaneity (the unscripted, responsive expression of that natural state in the world). Using the metaphor of the mountaintop (retreat) versus the marketplace (daily life), he argues that modern practitioners must learn to integrate practice into work, family, and other activities, rather than confining it to formal sitting. He describes the Buddhist qualities of awareness, compassion, and wisdom as a continuous thread of knowing that can be cultivated without intellectualizing. Dahl also outlines a scientific effort to map meditation practices: distinguishing object‑oriented versus subject‑oriented attentional practices, and categorizing them into attentional, constructive, and deconstructive families. He discusses the challenges of measuring meditative states, noting the limits of self‑report, the need for behavioral and neuro‑physiological metrics, and the problem of introspective accuracy. He shares findings from the Center for Healthy Minds that early‑stage application‑focused practice can yield benefits comparable to formal sitting meditation, suggesting that shifts in view may be the primary driver of change. The conversation concludes with practical information: Dahl mentions his limited social‑media presence, directs listeners to Tergar courses and retreats for deeper engagement, and Wisdom Publications promotes the upcoming Wisdom ebook app and a generosity campaign during the sacred Sakadawa month, encouraging donations to support the dissemination of Dharma.
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We're addicted to seeing what can be fixed, what can be improved. And a lot of this is like a different paradigm. It's like a different ball game. And so a lot of the practice is just letting go and being so that you can start to see what's actually already present, rather than thinking you need to improve your awareness and get more aware or more of this or more of anything, really. Welcome to the Wisdom Podcast. Today's episode comes from our online video chat series, Wisdom Dharma Chats.
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Welcome, everyone, to tonight's Wisdom Dharma Chat. Thank you for joining us. Tonight we have the pleasure of being joined by Kortland Dao. Once again, thank you for coming back to Wisdom Dharma Chat. It's a pleasure. I think people remember Kort from last time. He's a Buddhist scholar and translator, also a scientist and meditation teacher. We have a lot to talk about tonight. We'll probably touch on a little bit of all of those things, hopefully. One of the things I wanted to do was invite Cord back, because last time we had a podcast, you were promoting this book, A Meditator's Guide to Buddhism. But I didn't know you were promoting this book. One of Caud's great.
I'm probably the worst book promoter of all time.
He's very, very humble.
Right?
And so we had a whole conversation in the middle of his book launch. He didn't mention his book once, and I didn't bring it up. My bad. And then I was talking to a mutual friend, and I said, oh, you had a great conversation with Kot. They mentioned, oh, he was promoting his book. I said, promoting his book. He didn't mention the book at all. And then So I got the book. He sent me a copy. And it's an incredible book, A Meditator's Guide to Buddhism. I. I did want to talk a little bit about some of the themes that come up in this book tonight. Everyone should go buy the book. It's fantastic for people new to meditation, wanting to get a sense of Buddhism, but also for Buddhist practitioners. This is, you know, from a real master, actually. This is what I love about Kurt is I feel like he represents in some ways, the promise of transmission to the west because he's very close to his teacher, Mingyu Rinpoche. He's very well trained. Over many years. He spent eight years in Nepal, done lots of retreats. He knows the languages. He's also a scientist. He also has a family. He lives in the world. He runs an incredible organization, terga. So this is this meeting of really authentic Dharma with the modern Western way of life. And we're great friends, and we often talk about what's Buddhism going to look like in this modern world, in America, in Australia, in Europe, wherever you are. And there's a part in this book called application and living with naturalness and spontaneity. So I want to talk a little bit about application. What is naturalness? What is spontaneity? And then we're going to talk a little bit about science as well and see how these match. So maybe we start with. So application is part of a set of three View, meditation and application. And I was wondering if you could start by introducing us to these three concepts.
Well, this is obviously a huge thing in the tradition. As, you know, simply put, the view is just how we see things, how we see the world, how we see ourselves. I think especially how we come to relate to our own inner experience. And meditation is how we kind of translate that into our own direct experience. And application is then bringing that out into the world, bringing that to life. And I think the interesting thing for me as a practitioner is that I came into this really through meditation. And that was the thing that was like everything that dharma was. It was what you did on the cushion. And I feel like we haven't really done the work to figure out what is it in the rest of our lives, but that's where most of us live. We're not meditating full time. We're not milarepa, we're not full time scholars. So I think this is kind of the challenge for the Dharma in the modern world, is really kind of creating this new tradition or redefining the tradition in a way that allows us to bring it into watching a zoom. Watching something on zoom, or sitting at the table with your family or doing stuff at work. What does the dharma look like in those experiences? So in a way, application is just that. How do you actually bring it into your life?
Actually, something you mentioned at the book launch a few months ago at the Ruben, you said that there's a great focus in some traditions on the view and in other traditions on meditation. And there's these famous lines in various texts where you can find meditation by relying on the view, or you can find the view by relying on meditation. But application seems to get. No one talks about application.
Nobody says you could do anything through application. Yeah.
And so this is what I was hoping to maybe explore a little bit, like, the role of application in our lives. How does that work? So the other thing we were talking about is this idea of the mountaintop and the marketplace, right?
Yeah.
And so up in the mountaintop, like, we're thinking people in retreats, right. And people in retreats versus, you know, someone in the world, like working, raising a family. These are different types of practice, practitioners. And it would feel like that. Often we think that, oh, the person up in the mountain, they're the professionals. And where the. Where the amateurs. Right down in the world. But there's another way of thinking about this, and it feels like application becomes very important because it seems that the advantage of the mountaintop is view and meditation or meditation especially. But the disadvantage of the mountaintop is you don't get to apply these things. If you're sitting up in a cave by yourself, you're not being challenged, whereas in the marketplace, you're being challenged all the time. But the question is, what's your meditation practice? And so in the marketplace, for example, how do you see meditation? If we have busy lives, how much meditation do we need to really be able to work with application? These two sort of dials how we should be working with them.
Yeah, I mean, I think this is the question for us to figure out. I mean, the first thing I think to realize, which is sort of strange, because I feel like it took me a very long time to realize something very obvious about the tradition that's coming down to us, which is just realizing who was writing the books that we read and the stories that we hear about. And they were professional meditators. They were people who were living in caves or hermitages or they were professional scholars living in monasteries, largely. But they weren't people like us. They weren't people who had families, largely I mean, for the most part. So they just didn't have a life that resembled in any way the lives that we lead. So, of course, the books that they wrote, the teachings that they gave, they were speaking to people kind of assuming that they had a similar context, they were living similar lifestyles, and for the most part throughout history, they were. But we're obviously in a very different time and place. We're living different lives, and yet we still want to benefit from these teachings. And so I think it's this kind of question of the normal order of things has always been that you kind of study, you practice meditation, and then you do your best to bring it into your life. But I don't know that the ordering necessarily needs to be that way. It certainly has been historically. I mean, if you're trained in a yogic tradition where you're doing hardcore retreat, that's kind of the thing. It's like what you go. You know, you go. And you put your butt down on the cushion and you practice really hard, and then at a certain point, you can go back into the world. But in theory, there's no reason why it couldn't start with what you're doing in the world and then deepen into your meditation practice, and then maybe deepen into a deeper kind of understanding of the view, like the ordering of things. Like you were saying earlier, you hear like, you can come to the view through meditation, or you can come to meditation through the view, but what if you could come to the view and meditation through application, through the life you're living in the world? And just what that balance is? I mean, I could guess of, like, you know, just how much meditation do you need? But honestly, I think we don't know, because really, nobody's really been doing it this way. I think what nobody would disagree with is that we need all three.
Right?
You need that shift in perspective.
You need.
Something obviously needs to be happening in experience, and we need dedicated times to explore that. But what is the balance of that relative to being in the world and just kind of practicing as you're in the world? I think the one last thing I would say about it is that there's a very interesting part of the tradition which historically has always come kind of at the end of things, where people might do very, very deep retreat, sometimes decades of retreat, and then at the end, they're back in the marketplace, they intentionally leave because you've gone as far as you can go in that cloistered setting where you're just kind of on your Own. And then you're intentionally, you know, you're throwing yourself into real world situations to take it to the next level, to kind of make your practice indestructible. But again, I'm kind of curious of like, how we are sort of intentionally or unintentionally inverting that whole paradigm. We're kind of starting at that point and then deepening into retreat. So I don't know. I think there's lots of interesting questions. I have more questions than answers. The one thing I feel certain about is that we need to figure this out. We need to experiment and try and just see what comes of the experiment. Yeah.
This relationship between view and application.
Yeah.
And there's sort of like meditation is the mediator in a way.
Yeah.
In some ways, I think the measure of your view is the measure of your application in terms of if you. If you cannot deal with this world in a way that's like, you know, comport yourself in a good way, it means that there's a failing in your view.
Yeah.
So if you got strong in the view, then your application should be strong. And so since there's that relationship, if it goes one way, why can't I go the other way? Why couldn't you? Through your application, like, if you're practicing Lojong, you start to be very clear about, you know, the thoughts that are coming up about the con. When you face certain conditions, what thoughts are coming up? Could that lead to an insight into the nature of thought, the nature of mind? But then for that to happen, it seems like you do need some sort of meditation practice for that to be a possibility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think there's a practical piece which is you need some momentum in your experience. Like if you don't. And that's what daily practice can give you in terms of applying in daily life. It gives you almost like a little nudge so that when you're out in the world, you have some conditioning that's kind of rewiring the habit energy of your experience so that you even remember. I mean, remembering is probably the biggest challenge in the being in the world. You can understand everything from a viewpoint of view. You can have a strong meditation practice, but if you don't remember at all, even to apply, then all of that is just gone. And that's the challenging thing. Just the habit energy of life.
Yeah. The key to application is remembering. You also describe in the book application as naturalness and spontaneous. Is that correct?
From the. Yeah, so I think I talk about. So in the book, we kind of go through this whole architecture of the three yanas, which is a whole thing unto itself. And then I talk about the view, meditation and application from the point of view of each of those traditions. And so that is from the Vajrayana point of view. When you get into Vajrayana, what does daily life application look like in a Vajrayana context? And then it's not the rule book. It's not right and wrong and what you do and what you don't. It's more about being responsive to kind of what's right in front of you and infusing that with awareness, compassion and wisdom. So grounding yourself in this inner experience of awareness, compassion and wisdom, and then it's just what life presents you with. So it's a lot. A lot of the wording you hear in describing that is exactly that. It's how you just be completely spontaneous and natural.
So this idea of awareness, compassion and wisdom, I'm going to come back to that. So if I was to think of what's the difference between naturalness and spontaneousness, or are they some sort of. There's a relationship here.
Yeah, I think naturalness. Well, there's this whole term which I know you're well aware of, especially in the meditative traditions of Mahamudra and Dzogchen and Vajrayana more generally of the technical term is unfabricated or non fabrication. It's basically the idea that you're not trying to alter, improve, fix, or even change experience. So I think that's the element of naturalness. It's just like you're allowing especially your inner experience to unfold as it is without trying to kind of get in. And I should be having this emotion and less of that emotion, or more of these thoughts or less of that. It's like you're just letting the whole system just unfold naturally. So I think that's what the naturalness aspect is pointing to is this term of unfabricated, of just being, letting everything be as it is. And spontaneous spontaneity, I think, has much more the sense of how you're interacting from that space of naturalness than how are you in the world, how are you in interacting with other people, how are you just going about your life and it's just meeting whatever's there from that place, but then how you engage in the world. So it's almost like the expression of that, you could say, and then it's just kind of unscripted is another way to look at it. Just kind of whatever plays out in that moment.
That's very cool. So the naturalness is from what's arising from you inside internally. The experience that's arising internally. You're not sort of manipulating that. Yeah, this is natural. Right. And then the spontaneous from that state, how you interact, that's the unscripted, you said. Very cool.
And you can see, actually it's interesting that this is where the dynamic between view and meditation and meditation and application becomes so important. Because that term non fabrication, obviously is so important in meditative traditions. But if you've really done that eternally on the cushion, like you've trained yourself to sit down and just observe your experience, be with your experience, and eventually you're not even, it's not even you watching your experience, but you're just kind of this open field of experience and you've trained yourself to just let all of that unfold. Then when you're in the world, it's quite, you know, natural to do that. Right. That'll happen kind of naturally. And similarly, if you do that, you train yourself to do that when you're just going about your life, then when you sit down to meditate it again, it's sort of reinforcing that, so it becomes sort of a self reinforcing loop in a way.
Is this idea of meditation and post meditation, right? Yeah, this on the cushion, off the cushion. So if you're doing a certain practice on the cushion, that should be influencing the practice of the cushion. Yeah. So if you're like, you're just like this naturalness, Right. So if your meditation practice is about naturalness, if you've defined it as like whatever arises internally, not modulating, not sort of manipulating, if that's your practice, then in the world that's off the mat, that's your practice.
Right?
Exactly.
Or if it's like some tantra, everything is sealed with bliss off the mat. Right. These are the. How meditation affects post meditation.
Right.
And so what we're sort of playing with here is if you get really good at non fabrication post meditation, then can you see that might improve your meditation as well, I wonder?
Yeah, yeah, I certainly would think so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so the other theme that's running through the book is awareness, compassion, wisdom. Can you. Let's start with awareness. Because awareness are tricky, a tricky word. Awareness, sort of slippery, right? Awareness, consciousness, mind. What do all these terms mean? And I'm wondering, even from a scientific point of view, I guess this must be a challenge when you're, you know, you're in the lab you're trying to run experiments about meditation and brain activity. And you've got these terms, you know, mind, consciousness, brain. Like what's awareness mean in this book? Are you having this type of challenge in the lab?
Yeah, well, don't even get me started on that. The scientific piece is a total quagmire. I mean, what I'm trying to capture in the book is more the meditative perspective. And from that point of view, I think actually something quite simple. Not trying to get into the mind brain problem of trying to explain it, but just pointing to that there's something very basic to experience, which is that regardless of what situation we're in, what we're doing, who we're with, whatever is happening in our lives, there's just this thread of knowingness. We simply are experiencing the world. What we're experiencing is changing. But the fact that we're aware and we have this knowing presence that is just a core part of our existence is just like this thread, this through line that's always present. And we usually identify with the stuff that's happening to us and within us and around us, much more so than we do with that knowing quality itself. And a lot of the meditative process is kind of reorienting to that of just saying, oh, it's, you know, to use the analogy, it's like the sky and the clouds. We're always watching the clouds and wanting to have nice weather. We don't have bad weather. Nobody's ever thinking about the sky and just the openness itself. But when you do that, it just becomes a source of feeling more grounded feeling, a sense of peace and openness that doesn't depend on the weather patterns. So, you know, it goes to this Buddhist concept of Buddha nature and orienting to the things that are already there, orienting to what's right versus what's wrong. And that's, I think, a theme, certainly I try to capture in the book, is how we. How we try to orient ourselves to what's whole and what's not broken, versus always trying to fix the mind and trying to fix our experience. And awareness is just one of those basic qualities that we can always tune into.
Fascinating. Awareness as knowing.
Right.
So you said there's a stream of knowing.
Mm.
It's very interesting because we directly know things, the things of the world we directly know only because of awareness, actually. Of course, we can indirectly know things through inference and stuff like that, but awareness is the way we know things actually. But we can't actually step outside of awareness to know like, you can never step outside of awareness. Of course, we can use awareness to see the cup, the book, and we know things. Right. But there's no stepping outside of awareness. So then how do we know awareness? Right. So this is sort of a tricky thing. So we have some sense of knowing awareness. And so I guess this is the meditative tradition, right? When you say you internal in, look in.
Yeah.
So let's talk a little bit about how it is that we get to know awareness when knowing. Awareness is the thing that does a knowing. Right. So like, we might use an analogy. An eye can't see itself directly. You know, the tip of a finger can touch many things, but it can't touch itself directly. Right. And so normally, I think that the instrument cannot act on itself. If awareness is the means of knowing and we can't step outside of awareness, how is it we know? Awareness, I guess, is the question.
Yeah, I mean, there's something interesting that even if you're totally distracted or even if you're asleep, say you're sleeping and I suddenly wake you up, and I say, what were you just doing? What was going on? You wouldn't say, I did not exist a moment ago. You'd say, I was sleeping. Part of you knows you were sleeping. Or if you were totally distracted and you're totally zoned out and on autopilot, I could tap you on the shoulder and I could say, hey, how are you doing? What's going on? And you say, oh, I was just distracted, or I was daydreaming, or I was, you know, whatever. And that's pretty much true of any experience. I mean, there's technical, philosophical terms for this kind of reflexive quality to awareness. The way Ming Rinpoche always describes this, and this is a very classical example, is like a candle flame. The candle flame can illuminate everything in its surroundings, but it also is self illuminating. Like, you don't need to take a flashlight to see the candle flame. It's. It's sort of illuminating itself at the same time that it illuminates everything in its surroundings. And so awareness has that same quality. It's not as though like some awareness splits off and then, like, observes another part of awareness. It's just this very simple kind of intrinsic knowing quality where we just. We just know both what's going on in experience, but we also are aware of awareness itself. We can be aware of awareness itself. And so it's. It sounds a little weird and funky to say it that way, but from a meditative point of view, it's really important because it can start at the beginning where we're just distracted. Right. We're not used to even thinking about awareness. And then we can use something like the breath or any experience. And it seems like it's about the breath, but actually what's happening is we're starting to reorient to the knowing quality itself. And we get to know that, but eventually, once you get grounded in that, then it's like this whole area to explore. I always feel like it's like we had this whole universe inside of us that nobody told us about, and we're just so out there in the world and exploring everything and completely oblivious to this incredibly fascinating world within us. But it can be as simple as just being aware of your breath just opens that door. And then you just see there's just this amazing, amazing richness. And, I mean, just no end to the exploration that can happen there.
And it was always there.
And it was always there. Yeah, I mean, it's like. Yeah, just this. This whole universe that was just like right behind, just right out of sight that we didn't see.
So. Yeah. It's interesting how our attention is normally always flowing outwards to things.
Yeah.
And of course, we intuitively know in some sense that we have some sort of insight into awareness, because we can sort of say, you know, the mind is dull or the mind is more clear. You can actually have a sense of how the mind is knowing. So if you have a sense of how the mind is knowing, then you must have some sort of access to this knowing. Yeah, you have to know the lamp is. Rinpoche uses this. It's a really cool example, actually, because it gets around the finger touching. Right. Or the eye. The instrument. Right. The instrument acting on itself. The lamp gets around that sort of problem in a way, because it's very obvious. You don't walk into a dark room with a. With a flashlight looking for the lit lamp. Right. Because you don't need the flashlight. Right.
Yeah. You need it for everything else.
Yeah, I want to see everything else, but not the lamp. Not the lit lamp. You know, so you don't need another. You don't need to step outside of awareness with another awareness. To know awareness would be taking that metaphor and people.
I think it happens in meditation almost. The people want to observe, like, they try to observe awareness as though it's like an object to itself, rather than you're kind of resting in the knowingness itself. Like you're just seeing. Oh, it's just happening. It's not that you need to do something to it or kind of look at it in a more object oriented way.
I think this is really important because people get stuck on this. And maybe one way is this maybe a misunderstanding of the lamp metaphor because actually the lamp is not really illuminating the lamp. Its nature is illumination.
Yeah, exactly. It is illumination.
It is illumination. So it's not illuminating itself.
Yeah, this is where like language kind of doesn't.
It's really difficult, but it can send people astray because they think, okay, now I need my awareness to be aware of this thing called awareness. Yeah. Then you're back to the I seeing itself.
So we've been actually this kind of loops back to the science because we've been trying to. And I work at the center for Healthy Minds, we've been trying to create frameworks so scientists can understand the practices that basically help us to do this in language that they will understand rather than, I mean, if we come and try to lecture them about Buddhism, I mean that's, you know, obviously not going to be particularly successful, but really just helping the scientific world see that there's this incredible array of meditation practices far beyond mindfulness. But how do you, how do you talk about that in a scientific way? So we, for example, we created this framework and one of the distinctions we use in discussing this is we talk about object oriented forms of meditation versus subject oriented forms of meditation. And there's practices which of course go very deep by exploring the objective side of experience. And this is where you hear in the Buddhist tradition about impermanence and interdependence. And it's kind of exploring conditioned reality, like what happens when you go really deeply into that. But there's this whole other way of doing it which is you don't focus so much on the stuff of experience, but you focus more on that which is experiencing. And there, it's a very different ballgame. It's kind of going straight to, in Buddhist terms, what you'd say the unconditioned, like it's not impermanence. It's like you look and you're not finding anything. Right. And it's kind of going, it's like you're exploring space versus the weather patterns in space. And so there's, there's just whole traditions built around these very different approaches. So that's part of what we try to do scientifically is just map the terrain in scientific terms so scientists can begin to study the stuff.
So you're using this different language for meditation, subject orientated, object orientated. That Sort of language.
Yeah, we published a whole paper on this. But basically we talked about three families of meditation. There's an attentional family. Within that family, you have object oriented and subject oriented. And then there's what we call the constructive family, which are basically you're cultivating positive qualities like compassion. And then a third family which is deconstructive. And that too has an object oriented, subject oriented and then even a non dual orientation. So anyways, there's a whole mapping that we tried to do, but.
So you've published a paper on this sort of mapping? Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Yeah.
And so that then the scientists can all start to use the similar language to talk about the same thing. Because this is a problem, right. If someone's using the word awareness that they don't, it means something different or consciousness. Like, for example, a lot of people talk about consciousness as like lights on. You know, you have this metaphor. The lights are on. Like if you're unconscious, nothing's happening. But if you're, if, if you're aware, then lights on.
Illumination. Yeah.
So is this.
People think of like illumination. You hear the term luminosity a lot with consciousness. They think it's like a bright white light, but it's more the illuminating quality. I think that's the important part of that metaphor, not the light.
So you would consider. So how is this awareness of that knowing and this consciousness that's lights on? Are we talking about the same thing or are these two different aspects of the mind and. Yeah. Similar sort of stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar. I mean, from a scientific point of view, it gets very.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
Yeah, it gets very tricky. And honestly, I don't, I think science has, doesn't have a lot of subtlety in conscious. I mean, this is of course the, the view, the mainstream view is of course still very materialistic, that this is all basically phenomena that are arising out of brain activity. I think it's still the general view. It's not the universal view, but it's. It's still the general view. But nobody can explain how that works or even in the brain. If you talk about something like awareness and if you define that as the knowing quality, there's really no understanding of what brain networks are kind of underlying that kind of activity. What we know from a neuroscientific point of view is still very, very rudimentary, actually.
Yeah, this idea of physical processes in the brain and what we're talking about, which is the experience of lights on or knowing something. How do you get from A to Z that chasm? You'll get a Nobel Prize if you can explain that, I'm sure.
Yeah. There was one famous neuroscientist who I was listening one time and he was saying that if understanding the brain is like a marathon, we basically have just started to lift our foot to take the first step in terms of the level of knowledge we have. Like there's what we don't know. I mean, it's just.
I suspect that these things are parallel and increase in knowledge on physical processes of the brain. No matter if you can go to the infinite, you will never get an explanation for the experience. That's my hunch, but we'll see.
I mean, yeah, the brain is. I mean, talking about the universe within the. The brain by some estimates has 80 to 100 billion neurons. Each of those can have tens of thousands of connections. So the number of interconnections between each of our years is like on the order of the number of stars and planets in the Milky Way. I mean, it's just like massive complexity. It's kind of staggering, actually.
It is staggering. And complexity doesn't necessarily allow you to leap category.
No.
So to take one category and make it more complex doesn't automatically get you to a different category is called category error. But anyway, let's get back to. So we're talking about awareness and this idea. And you mentioned something that often the meditation instruction is to relax, right? So it's not this like I need awareness, looking to find my awareness necessarily.
A lot of the meditation, it's almost like the absence. I mean, I think that's. That's one of the things is that we're so oriented to what we don't have or what we feel like needs to be improved. And we just bring all of that into meditation. It's just like the problem oriented. We're almost addicted to seeing problems. We're addicted to seeing what can be fixed, what can be improved. And a lot of this is like a different paradigm. It's like a different ballgame. And so a lot of the practice is just letting go and being so that you can start to see what's actually already present. Rather than thinking you need to improve your awareness and get more aware or more of this or more of anything really. But just the habit energy behind that is so strong. It's really hard to let that go for sure.
It's like the lamp is not there sitting. I must illuminate myself, you know, like trying really hard, naturally just Yeah, I need more light. It just sort of naturally illuminates itself. And so this sort of idea of relaxing and letting you know, all this sort of instruction seems like very appropriate for meditation. Right. So then now we're sort of talking about application.
Going back to application. Yeah.
So how. So we sort of get a feel for how to do this. You know, awareness, practice, subject orientated meditation in meditation. But we also want to talk about how do we go down into the marketplace? How does this sort of practice apply in the marketplace? How. How would we bring that? One thing I want to say is the naturalness and spontaneity when you meet Mingyu Rinoche, that's something that comes through.
Yeah.
It's not how he's doing it. Yeah.
So you could see that. Yeah. I mean you could see that in great masters like Mingyur Rinpoche. I mean, one thing is, I think we equate being as the opposite of doing. This is going to sound very weird. Being as like sort of stopping. Like you have to be sitting still and not like that. That's being like if you just kind of. But actually we can sit totally still, most of us, and we're filled with doing. Right. Like the mind is churning all sorts of thoughts. There's all sorts of. I mean there's a very distinct lack of being. And conversely, you can meet, especially when you meet a great master and you're around them, you can sense that they can be very active. But there's this quality of presence, there's this quality of ease, there's this quality and it's really being. Even if there's a very like physically, verbally, even potentially mentally active, as strange as that might sound. And so I think it has to do more with, rather than replacing what's going on, like swapping activity with non activity, for example, it's almost a widening experience. It's like you've widened the aperture of experience as wide as it can go. Again, to use the sky metaphor, it's like if you can become fully the sky and you're oriented that then all the stuff, you can have a clear sky, you can have a cloudy sky, all of that can kind of come and go and you've oriented to that widest expanse of being. And then you can carry that, using that as a metaphor, you can carry that sense of spaciousness, that space of being, even when you're in the world, so to speak. You can be at work, you can be having a conversation, you can be at the dinner table, you can be Doing anything, conceivably. But you can bring that into it. You can be doing from a space of being rather than seeing it as the absence or the opposite of doing. That makes sense.
Yeah, totally makes sense. Because, you know, when you're doing, it's not that you're not being.
Yeah.
How can you not be?
Yeah, yeah. So exactly. It's an orientation. It's an orientation to a quality that we already have versus, like, losing sight of that, in a way, is another way of looking at it. And actually, there's a lot of meditation traditions that are training us to do that. They're training us first to recognize that quality of being and then to integrate it with activity, with doing. Like, there's actually a lot of meditative traditions where you actually systematically do that. You get familiar with it, and then you bring them together, and then you learn to express it. It's quite a beautiful thing.
So what would that look like?
Like, as a practice.
Yeah, as a practice. So if I'm like, you know, I'm practicing meditation being, but I want to, you know, have a practice for moving into doing, but sustaining that being.
Yeah. So maybe first, from a meditative point of view, actually, this is a great question from a daily life, like, how would you actually do this from a daily life application point of view? But maybe we can talk about a very traditional way of doing this. So in the Tibetan tradition, you have all these visualization practices. There's different kind of bodies of meditative practice. One of them is you use the imagination, like you imagine yourself as a Buddha, to get in touch with innate qualities, like compassion, for example. The way you typically do that is that you have this pretty intense mental activity. You're imagining all sorts of stuff. It takes tremendous mental effort, especially at the beginning. And then you do that. You have all this stuff going on in the mind, and then you dissolve it and you drop it, and then you are just sort of resting. So it's like the equivalent of, like, working really hard and then just stopping and then resting and then working really hard and then stopping and resting. But that's the beginning. That's not the whole practice. That's the beginning of the practice. Like when you're first learning the skills, that does a lot of things. But one of the things it does is it's putting in. It's creating an experiential contrast between doing and being so that you can. One of the benefits is so you can recognize being more clearly. You can really. In the same way that when you tense and then Relax. You can feel the relaxation more. It's kind of like that in almost like a meditative way. But then something really amazing happens is that as you drop into that space, you become more and more familiar with that quality of being at the beginning. You don't even. We just aren't used to that. Right. So you have to get familiar with that. But then what's going on is you're essentially alternating. It's not like you just do one and then you stop and you're done. You're weaving back and forth between those. And eventually, as the familiarity with being goes or stabilizes, then the doing part, that used to seem like the opposite of the being, it can start to happen within the being. So I remember in my own experience, one of my first times playing around with this was just using chanting, which is, of course, a very common part of different Buddhist traditions. But I noticed that there's this habit just to keep chanting and chanting and chanting. But I was doing this doing and being thing. And so I thought, well, what if I just chant a line and then rest and then chant another line and then rest? And then it was almost like, oh, I could let the next line kind of happen. But I didn't lose that sense of being. But because the chanting was so simple, it wasn't some complex visualization. It was relatively easy. Easier, I would say, to do that. And then slowly, it doesn't feel like you're alternating anymore. Like, the doing and being kind of merged together. So similarly with the visualization, you can do the same thing eventually. It's what's called the union of development and completion. Right. You can have all of the visualization, and yet you still feel like you're the sky. And it's just all. That's when it's like the spontaneity and the naturalness is just sort of unfolding within that. So that's like a meditative technology that's designed to do that. Basically, that's essentially what it's for.
Incredible. The union of doing and being. So the imagination is the doing at first, and then the dissolution is the being. And then you imagine again, but you keep the being while you're doing. Think of the union of being and doing.
Yeah. So even, like prostrations or using a mala or all these things that seem so esoteric in many ways, you can look at them as, like the doing part of the technology and the being that kind of allows you to integrate the two together.
So it seems the problem when we're doing this application, when we're in the world is when we're doing the doing, we lose sight of the being. Being's obviously there, but we've lost sight of it. So in the midst, in the marketplace, when we're doing the doing.
So you could do the same thing.
How do we connect with the being then? Like, say you're.
So this is. Yeah, this is where I think there's really exciting terrain from like, us figuring out what are these traditions in the modern world. Because you could imagine. You could imagine something very similar to what we just talked about in a formal meditation session where you're kind of. You're weaving back and forth between these different experiences with the eventual integration of them. You could imagine something very similar, but in a. Like how. Like a daily life application where the first stage of the process is you probably need some kind of alternating. And I think what this would look like, and probably many of us do this already in certain ways, is you need periods in your day and ideally lots of them, where you just drop everything and you are stopping the doing for a little bit, but recognizing that that actually is not the end point. The end point is that integration. But to get there, you probably need a little. You need to reconnect with the being quality. You need space in the day for being. Historically, I think humans had this in almost every culture. You can think of the siesta in the Hispanic world or tea drinking in Europe or in Asia. There's all these cultural rituals that are more about being rather than doing. And we just happen to have erased most of those in the modern world. But we could reintroduce those. And imagine you just between meetings or whatever, between activities. You just take a minute or two and not even meditating, just drop the whole thing and just be there for a few minutes. And then eventually you can start to reintegrate the doing, like whatever you're doing next in your day and just see if you can do a little, like retain a little bit of that inner space of being as you're kind of moving into whatever comes next. And that's a long process. Like, the more space you make for the being, probably the easier that becomes. But at first you do the alternation, and then you kind of do the integration. And then anything you do can be kind of a way to bring that quality of being into what might eventually even be intense activity. But that, of course, would take practice.
It's very nice. I like this sort of language, doing and being. It seems to me like. Like a Japanese tea ceremony. Yeah, it's sort of this union of doing and being.
I think actually Japan, I think has the most refined cultural rituals that are precisely actually around the integration. You can. The tea ceremony is one, calligraphy, even flower arranging, the martial arts, archery. I mean they have all these different rituals where the training. There's a meditative component. But the point is that you can do the perfect calligraphy or the perfect flower arrangement and you're doing that from that space of. I mean it's exactly naturalness and spontaneity. It's from that quality of being. And then it just emerges from that. And the training, the rituals in any of those disciplines is actually exactly what we're talking about here. Yeah.
I've often started thinking the marketplace and application recently and difficult conditions could be the trigger for being. Do you know what I mean? Like, so every time you encounter something really difficult, somehow there's a training that oh, this is really difficult and that's a trigger for being or whatever your practice is. Like, that would be really powerful if somehow, you know, this is classic Lojong, actually transforming problems into practice. Into practice. Yeah. So I feel like we're talking really nicely about being and doing and meditation and application. What's the connection with the view here? I imagine being and there's a connection with the view. View, meditation and conduct.
Yeah, there's. So it's interesting all the, all the work on mindfulness in the scientific world, the focus has been almost solely on mindfulness. And the way mindfulness has been defined is really just about present moment oriented attention. Basically paying attention to what's happening in the present moment without judgment is like a common definition of that. But if you look at traditional views of what it means to be mindful, actually it's much more than that. As you know, the word has this connotation of memory. Like you're, you're. It's not simply being aware in the present moment. You're also bringing online this whole worldview. You're bringing online a whole perspective of a way of seeing yourself and of seeing the world. So in some respects you could talk about application really as just remembering the view is one way to look at it. Like that's one way to think about both what meditation is. Meditation is bringing the view into experience. An application is bringing it into everything in your life. You're essentially integrating that. It's in a way, that same process of integration. But you're integrating a perspective. You're integrating a way of viewing and seeing things with your daily life. That's maybe one way you could even define what application actually is. It's pretty much embedded in the view. So from that point of view, you can see they're all, View, meditation, application are all so interrelated, they're all kind of mutually reinforcing and they're all kind of capturing an essential piece of it.
Yeah. So we can think of application as bringing the view into daily life in a way.
Yeah. Yeah.
And the view is very much related to like being, I imagine.
Yeah.
And then this is all reinforced by your meditation practice.
Yeah, and being too, even there. Not just the relaxation aspect, but you could say integrated with the view. It's that quality of being means being fully in touch with the full range of experience. It's almost like we're only seeing a narrow spectrum and again, we're kind of widening it so we're getting the full spectrum. Or you actually use the term when one of our conversations, like high definition. It's like you're learning to adjust to the high definition frequency and then you can just stay in that high definition and then bring that high definition perspective into a conversation. Work, commuting to work, whatever it is you're doing is sort of an integration of that.
Yeah, we could use that language. You could say that just doing without being, of course you're always being, but doing without knowing you're being is like low fidelity, low resolution. And then you turn up the dial, you put view into the being into doing, and you've got this high resolution experience. That's very cool. Yeah. I feel like there's a lot here. And maybe I'll ask you to put your scientist hat on now. And if you were to design a experiment to see people in the marketplace, how would we sort of design an experiment to check this?
Oh, that's a tough one. Well, one of the things at the center for Healthy Minds that we're really focused on is measurement. And it's one of the biggest challenges actually with this whole space, because to measure something, you have to define it carefully and then you have to figure out how you're going to assess it. Like, what do you actually do to see, like if somebody even what we just talked about, for example, like say you did that inner process where you. You learned first to just get in touch with what does it feel like to be and to be in touch with these, these qualities that we all have, but we're usually oblivious to what does that actually feel like. You get familiar with that and then you learn to integrate that. So you and I can be having a conversation you could be feeling this right now. Right. You could be totally in that space. But you just look like Daniel.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Like how would I know? I could ask you and you could say, yes, I am experiencing that, or no, I'm not. So I mean, one of the ways we measure that is through self report, which is basically asking people. The problem with that is people are terrible judges of their own inner experience generally. Not only are they terrible judges of their own inner experience, but it's also really hard to compare people because they have varying degrees of what you might call introspective accuracy. For example, there's research that showed that binge drinking college students reported higher levels of mindfulness than Thai Buddhist monks. So what are the chances that they really were more mindful? Like probably zero. Right. What was different was that they had different level. They were on different levels of introspective accuracy. The Thai Buddhist monks, on a scale of one to five, they probably said like, oh yeah, I'm like a two or a three because they could see they had a long way to go. Whereas the college students were like, yeah, I'm probably a five out of five on mindfulness, you know, whatever, I've already got that right. But of course they were probably negative 2.
Mindfulness.
I has it exactly. So it's really hard to measure these things. That's the approach we've taken is we basically try to have different kinds of measures that are all pointing to different things. So those self report measures that I just mentioned, we try to find what we call behavioral measures, which are things that are not. That are reflected in behavior versus like just asking somebody. But again, those are hard to design. Like how would being show up in somebody's behavior differently than if they didn't have that? Yeah, this is like, that's not an easy question. Like some, from outward appearances, sometimes it can look almost the same. Yeah, brain activity, again, you know, there's. The brain is. I'd say our understanding of the brain is so rudimentary at this point of view. That is hard. And the brain is so complex and its patterns of brain activity are changing so rapidly that that's kind of hard to do as well. So the measurement problem is real. What we've tried to do is we're developing, we basically developed programs that are teaching these kinds of skills like the doing and being and different skills. And we're developing it in a modular way that allows us to study it more easily. So we haven't got. And we haven't looked at that specific question but what we have looked at is the question of active daily life application and how that compares to people who are doing formal sitting meditation. So for example, if say you and I are both research subjects, one of us, we're both learning about being more mindful and aware, just as an example. But you do that through formal sitting meditation. You meditate for 10, 20 minutes a day or whatever. And I don't do that at all. I learn the same skill, but I never sit down to meditate and instead I do it when I'm commuting to work or when I'm doing the laundry or doing the dishes. I only do the application part of it. And so far what our research is showing is that at the beginning, at least for the early stages of practice, the benefits seem to be the same. I would I benefit as much as you and vice versa, even though I'm not doing any formal sitting meditation.
So actually that question at the start of this conversation about application and meditation, that experiment seems to say you can get similar results through focusing on application.
Yeah, at the early stages, it's not to say it's, it's not true later as well. We just don't know because we haven't done. You have to do long term longitudinal studies to answer that. But at the one month, three month mark, it seems to be no difference between those two. Our guess is that it's because what's really shifting and what's accounting for the benefits is really the shift in view. And you're getting that equally whether you're sitting in formal meditation or you're doing the daily life application, your perspective is changing and that's driving a lot of the benefits. That's a hypothesis at this point.
But there's so much I want to ask now because that opens up a whole heap of questions. But maybe the question I want to most ask right now is you're talking about the view changing or being. And these feel like very phenomenological states. Right. And so how do you, how scientists registering these sort of states, like how would you, what would you look for in terms of being if you were doing an EEG or fmri, do we know what that is or correlates?
No, I mean, the short answer is we're not doing it very well, if at all is the honest answer. So there has been some work, probably the most interesting work has been with advanced meditators who are so adept in experience that they can actually manipulate both, not only their mental experience by their account, but we can document that they are Essentially manipulating their brain states. So there's work that started with my mentor and colleague, Dr. Richard Davidson, who you've interviewed. He did some of the pioneering work in this area and basically showed that advanced meditators, Mingyur Rinpoche, for one, Matthieu Ricard was another subject in his studies, basically could induce really dramatic brain states that had never been documented before and could sustain them over time. That then paved the way for seeing if these same skills could be taught to new meditators. So there's another scientist, another colleague of mine named Judd Brewer, who at the time he did this research was at Yale, he's at Brown now. But he did some really pioneering work where he put people in a scanner and he had them, they were totally new to meditation and he basically had them learn some basic meditation techniques and they got real time feedback of their brain activity. And they essentially were able to down regulate a network in the brain called the default mode network, willfully, like really in a matter of minutes. So that was. It wasn't exactly the same brain activity that was done with the advanced meditators, but it showed that even new meditators actually can learn pretty quickly to manipulate brain states.
Was that through just the technique or were they getting feedback?
They were getting feedback so they could see.
They could see. Okay, that's.
And then they were telling the scientists, they were like, they would ask, and this is actually in the paper, it's a really, really cool paper. But you could see like the spike in activity and then a drop. And the scientists were saying what just happened? They'd say, oh, yeah, that's when I was thinking about what I was going to have for lunch. And then I, you know, went back and then, you know, and deactivated when I was, you know, resting. And I want this open awareness and I want one. Unfortunately, they cost like $3 million. Oh, wow.
Yeah. Out of my budget.
We'll save up.
Yeah, but that would be cool, right? Also, you know, you see these machine. There's these sort of things you can buy for like 100 Baht Muse or something. And then you go into meditation and you get birds chirping, Right?
Yeah.
Then I'm like, I was thinking this could be dangerous because I don't know what, what that means. Right. Who decided that was a good meditation?
Yeah.
If you had a Mingyu Rinpoche band and the birds only chirped when you got close to Mingyur Rinpoche's mental state, then I'll be up for that. But I don't know who the birds are tuned into?
Yeah, I mean, one of the. So there's a fundamental problem, I think, with wearable technology and meditation, which is that it assumes that what we're going for is like a simple brain state that like, we just want to lock the brain in on like a certain, you know, frequency brain activity. But when you look at meditative traditions, actually what you're usually going for is more of an experiential dance. Yeah, you want something that's fluid, especially if you want something that you can integrate with the rest of your life. You don't want to just like go in, I mean, into some sort of trance where you're just sort of locked in. I mean, you want something that's fluid and dynamic so you can be flowing with experience and you can bring in, you know, again, these qualities of awareness, compassion, wisdom. And you can integrate that with perception, you can integrate that with emotion, you can integrate that with relationship. And so you want the training to reflect that kind of complexity. And so it's not that it's theoretically impossible, but it's certainly difficult to detect, like, brain activity and give real time feedback on that unless you really reduce it down to something very, very simple. And I think you can do that. But it's a somewhat impoverished view of what meditation can do if you almost have to design the meditation around the constraints of the technology. In a way.
Yeah. And it still all comes back to what you called introspective accuracy. So it still relies on people being able to say, oh, that was when I was thinking about eating lunch or like, so having. And you said that people generally have poor introspective accuracy.
Yeah, I mean, just memory alone. I mean.
Yeah, yeah.
The research on that is very definitive. That people are just. Memory itself is pretty flawed.
Memory is flawed.
Yes. Yeah. I mean, you have this whole scientific concept of reconsolidation, actually, which is a really interesting one from a meditative point of view. Essentially the way memory is encoded in the brain, and when it's encoded and not conscious, it's sort of locked. Right. But once it comes up to conscious attention, it becomes malleable again. But what usually is happening is when it. When a memory emerges, like when we consciously experience a memory, for example, it's paired with whatever experience we're having. So when it's then re encoded in the brain, it's now linked with a whole new set of experiences, which is whatever was going on when you remembered it. And that happens then over and over again every time you bring it up. It's re encoded. You're sort of shifting and changing it over time. Meditation can somewhat disrupt that process, but it just goes to show that memory itself is sort of flawed. If you just want it to be an accurate representation, it's basically a continually.
What if we take memory out of the equation and we just talk about introspection? So imagine I'm meditating and I have a dial. Right. And the dial can be like the stability measure. Strong stability of meditation, low stability, or could be dullness, clarity. Right. Is most people bad at that type of introspection? Not the memory recall, but like real time. Is my mind stable or fluctuating?
Well, I mean, just imagine when you first started meditating, how much space did you have to even notice what was going on in your mind? I don't speak for you, but my mind was not a pretty place, you know?
That's true.
Okay, so even just. I mean, that's just it. I mean, imagine if you're just in a room and the task is to notice what's going on in the room and just to be able to tell somebody what's in the room. Okay. If you're in a calm room like this. Yeah. You can look around. Now imagine if you're in that room and it's just filled, people running in and out, and you can hardly. I mean, how well could you do that? And that's the human mind most of the time.
Right.
So until you've trained yourself to create that inner space and the ability to sustain the capacity to observe, it's not only like the room is busy, but you're actually running out of the room every five seconds. I mean, just imagine, like you couldn't really report on anything. And so it's a skill that needs to be trained. In fact, this is one of the scientists who was a pioneer in this whole area, Francisco Varela. He had this whole idea of neurophenomenology of like, basically we need to train the mind to be an observer of its own inner states. And only until you've developed that capac capacity. Scientists, neuroscientists, can't really engage with people expecting that we're going to be able to map mental states onto brain states.
This is what I was thinking.
Yeah.
Like if you, if, if, if you're relying on a quite fallible measurement, people's own introspection. It's really difficult from day one.
Yeah. They'll tell you. I mean.
Yeah, yeah.
With a lot of certainty. I mean, people aren't going to stop saying what they think is happening in their minds. I mean the college students, they'll tell you how attentive they are, they're just not accurate.
But it assumes that meditators get more accurate over time. Because the whole idea of when you're, you know, when you do this practice, you hope at some point you're accurate about looking at what's going on in your mind to get insight into nature.
There's interesting science in this too actually.
Okay, how does that go?
Well, I'm just smiling because, you know, it's not the most hopeful reporting basically. I mean, there's certainly some science to show that this is a trainable skill and people do learn to become more accurate. However, there's some science showing that meditators as well can be fallible in this regard. For example, we did some work that was using what we call interoception, which is just bodily awareness and training that as a skill. And there's a lot of practices and a lot of mindfulness practices where you're just scanning the body and you do train this skill. So scientists thought, well, how are we going to measure this? And one of the things they thought that might be a way to do that was to have people self report their heart rate. Like if you could tune into your body, the thinking was you basically could tune into your own heart rate and you could essentially report on that. And the degree to which that would be accurate would be a measure of sort of inter, what you might call introspective accuracy, but for the physiology. What happened however was that actually the meditators were no better than the non meditators at doing that. The only difference was that the meditators were more confident than they were. Right, but they weren't. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was kind of a. But to me, I think the take home message of that is that introspective accuracy is incredibly complex. And just because you've learned to pay attention to your breath for example, that does not necessarily mean that, that, that's, that introspective accuracy carries over to everything. And who, who, who trains themselves to be aware of the heartbeat specifically?
Yeah, I don't know, I don't think anybody does.
But also it's certainly not a common thing.
So this is, this doesn't surprise me so much because this is a physiological thing.
Yeah.
But if you're like using introspection on a subjective, like the qualities of awareness, now this can, there's no objective measurement is the problem.
Yeah, yeah. There's not like a source of truth to compare it to exactly like a heartbeat or it was not.
But as soon as you get a source of truth to compare it with, you're jumping out of the more subjective states of introspection and into, like, all physical things, which is a different thing. But, like, for example, has anyone done, like, dream yoga? Put someone in an FMRI when they become lucid in a dream? And are we able to. Rather, don't tell us if you become lucid, but we can tell from the. Or eeg. We can tell from the thing that he just became lucid in his dream. Is that something we know about?
Yeah, it actually is. In fact, I was just with a researcher named Ken Pallor a few weeks ago. He's at Northwestern, and he's doing work on this. And we were just talking about it, and so there's a few things. First, I asked him about some research that I had read about that was actually using brain stimulation to induce lucidity. And there's some areas of the prefrontal cortex that. That those of us who do research on meditation and mindfulness and things like that are probably kind of some of the more promising areas that you would think would be linked to a heightened state of awareness or to kind of being mindful. What he was saying is that actually that research is not very strong. It has been somewhat discredited, basically, the idea that you can stimulate certain brain regions and it induces lucid dreams. He did say, however, that what they are doing. And they're working with adepts, like people who are really good at lucid dreaming, and he's saying that what they can do is people can signal from the dream state that they are in a state of lucidity. So you can be using an EEG net to show that they're in a REM state. And they can. I think it's through basically kind of moving movements of the eyes where they can ask them questions to the dreamers while they're still in a dream state. And they can actually signal with their eyes that they're saying, yes, I hear you, while they're actively dreaming. So there's some pretty crazy stuff. Yeah, there's some pretty. And this is still pretty early work. I mean, they're really trying to figure out how to study this stuff. I mean, it's kind of the Wild west, but it's pretty interesting.
But I'm wondering if there's a signature of the lucidity.
A neural signature.
A neural signature of the lucidity.
So that's. No, I would say I mean, in theory. In theory, it's possible to find. I mean, at this point, I think most of the work is with EEG versus, like, putting people. I mean, you'd have to, like, literally sleep in an effort. Yeah, it's difficult on many. On many levels. I would never want to subject anybody to sleeping in a fmri, but. Yeah, but in theory, I mean, it's. Yeah. So it kind of depends what you're measuring, whether it's, you know, brain function, electrical activity, obviously kind of structural measure. So anyways, I'm just joining the dots.
If we found the neural signature for lucidity in an EEG or fmri, and it would be interesting to know if that is a correlate of being.
Yeah, yeah.
Was where I was going anyway. We've run a little bit over time. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. I really appreciate it, sharing your wisdom with us.
It is an honor to be here.
It's always incredible, these conversations, and you're an amazing guide for people. And I was. And so everyone go check out the book. Is there any anything else that's coming up for you that people should know about? How do people, you know, connect with you? Follow what you're doing?
Doing.
Don't get me talking about social media. I'm like a grandpa with social media. Yeah, no, I think there's lots of always lots of stuff in Tergar going on. So if any of these courses or there's lots of retreats and courses that people can follow up on that, that would be the place to do it.
Incredible. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Ladies and gentlemen, Koh Lindau.
Thank you so much.
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