 Who am I? My name is Jer. I have a bachelor's degree from this wonderful university where I studied communications and they didn't really teach me PHP, but I taught myself. I've been doing websites since 2003, WordPress since version 1.2 before there was widgets or even pages. I've been working at Global Voices, a citizen journalism website that I'll show in the next slide since 2006. So basically since I was still in university. And I founded WordCamp Montreal nine years ago in 2009. And my pronouns are they and them because I'm non-binary and if you're not sure just use my name, but definitely don't write him if you tweet about me or I guess in the review if you want to write a review of me, but it doesn't matter there. So that's me. All right, this is the site I work on just for context. It has basically nothing to do with this talk except that it's a big, giant, complicated WordPress site. And I've been working on it for 12 years, which means I've accrued quite a bit of karma in the code and setup and content of this website that reminds me of some of the lessons I've learned studying Buddhism. The one thing it does have to do with me is that Global Voices is the reason I was in Sri Lanka last year, which is a Buddhist country I visited and got really interested as a result of being there. So my previous relationship to Buddhism is probably like a lot of people, something along the lines of if any religion is right, it's probably Buddhism because it seems to have the right idea and I'm a vegetarian and it all sinks up. So I don't know if anyone else fits in that category, but the visit to Sri Lanka got me really thinking because I was having a hard time, having a lot of problems, feeling a lot of suffering, and the Buddhism really hit the spot by telling me that was valid, but there's ways around it. So when I got back, I found this great community called Refuge Recovery, which is like a 12-step kind of AA thing except it's Buddhist. And so there's no higher power, which is pretty sweet because I can't ever get in touch with that. And there's still 12 steps, but it's the Four Noble Truths followed by the Eightfold Path. So it's kind of four and eight instead of 12, but it works really well and they meet on Fridays and Mondays and Montreal. There's one in Toronto and I think there's one in Ottawa too. So if any of you want to get over your addictions, it's a really wonderful way. It's a great book you can just buy to the book. Yeah, and so that's one of the things I started doing. I go there weekly and we meditate together. I also meditate every day since I started studying. At first I was like, maybe I can just learn the Buddhism and all the ideas and the philosophy and skip the meditation because that sounds bad. And then every single place I looked was like, no, the meditation is the most important part. If you skip that, then you won't get any of the benefits. And so far, if I ever try to skip my meditation, I end up really wishing I hadn't and then doing it before the end of the day. So I've now gotten to 175 days in a row on my cute little Insight Timer app, which I'll talk more about later. So one thing I'll just say is, okay, I really bit off a big bite with this talk, trying to talk about WordPress and somehow summarized Buddhism in 30 to 35 minutes. I've picked just some things I think are really key and important and they might not be the ones that you would think of as important. Or is anyone a Buddhist? Yeah, does anyone else like Buddha curious and has done some research? Yeah? Okay, who has meditated? All right, and who meditates like every week? All right, good work, everyone. Okay, who meditates for more than half an hour at a time? All right, okay, cool, cool. So all the meditation is good meditation, the longer the better. All right, so let's get into some of the things I thought were pretty cool. But first a note, which is that there's a lot of Buddhism and obviously I could spend hours. You could take a whole university course that does nothing but taxonomize the different types of Buddhism and Buddhist beliefs. It's not at all a single thing, not even close, not even within a country, not even within a city. The branch of the tree that I study is closest to Theravada, which means school of the elders. It's the oldest texts is what it's based on, which were written about a few hundred years after the Buddha was alive. They had been talking about it, chanting it orally and then they wrote it down. Most of the other ones are based on things that were written down later. And so you find this one in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. It is the root of a lot of the secular kind of ones like the vipassana movement that you can study, which means insight. And so it's also called insight meditation. There's a lot of, in the U.S. there's a lot of big places you can do insight meditation. And then secular Buddhism is a new term where you kind of really try and pull out the core ideas while taking out some of the stuff about heaven and hell. And those are all tend to be based on Theravada because it has the least amount of saints and historical magic stuff that a lot of people now have trouble relating to. So the main contrast with Theravada is Mahayana, which refers to the greater vehicle, which is the way they refer to themselves as being sort of more effective at spreading Buddhism around the world. You find this all over Asia. Also the version from Tibet is called Vajrayana. I didn't try and put it all on, but it's sort of, that's its own branch of Mahayana compared to Theravada. So there's two main languages people used to talk about Buddhism. One is called Pali and one is called Sanskrit. Sanskrit has a lot of shared words with yoga because it's sort of the one closer to modern Indian languages. And so a lot of the words you know like karma and dharma are the Sanskrit versions. I'm going to use the Pali versions because I like them better and because that's the Theravada way. Ultimately it's all the same languages. It's language that the Buddha spoke, which is neither of these two. But when they were written down, they were written down with a specific alphabet and spelling structure that refers to these two languages. So I'm not going to, a couple of times I'll mention the Sanskrit most of the time. I won't. So is it a religion or a philosophy? It's a big question. To me the answer is best done in the form of saying what it is. So it's both a bunch of metaphysical facts that you can either believe or not believe and a lot of really practical specific advice that you can use in your day to day life to understand yourself better, to understand the world better. So I wrote most of the teachings applied directly to material life. And I think that's true or at least there's a lot of teachings. There's plenty. There's a lifetime worth of teachings that apply to material life. The reality is that the Buddhist texts, which is the Tripitaka, this enormous set of documents, it makes the Bible look tiny. No one could ever read it all pretty much. And so there's a ton of stuff that isn't directly relatable to material life and we don't have to worry about it because we could spend years studying just three pages of these texts. So from my perspective, more than anything it's an ancient science and the Buddha considered himself a scientist, a psychologist, really codifying the systems. There's a whole psychology you can learn that's shockingly accurate compared to some of the things that Christian scholars came up with in the Middle Ages to try and justify our behavior. It doesn't understand neurology, of course, but it gets surprisingly close in describing the phenomena that we perceive and that we feel and that we see in each other. So I'm going to say the ancient Indian submology, which was very similar to other things that existed at the time, is pretty weird and a bit crazy. There's a lot of heavens. There's a lot of hells. There's a lot of Buddha going up and visiting angels in heaven and stuff like that. It's very literally there. Some people say it's not there. In the original text, they're like, oh, it was added later? I don't think it was added later. I think that's what was happening at the time. That was the context they were in. I like to think if Buddha was alive today, he would just say, oh, physics, though, that works better and give us the same lessons about psychology and our motivations today. Nonetheless, I think metaphorically these ideas have a lot of value. Things like rebirth. Even if we don't think we're born into another body and hold on to some of our karma, still we can think about that and what it means within our single life and it still has a lot of utility. So in summary, Buddhism, more than anything, is a series of very useful lists. We're going to talk about the three marks of existence. We're going to talk about the Four Noble Truths. I'll briefly list the Eightfold Path, and I won't get into a lot of the other wonderful lists that are helpful for keeping track of this big complicated system. All right. So I wanted to start with a quick little meditation, so luckily most of you have tried it before. I don't want anyone to be scared. It'll be really short and it'll be pretty nice, although it might get scary. If it gets scary, just keep breathing. This meditation is based on anapanasati, which means mindfulness of breathing in and out. So could you watch the door and make sure no one comes in? Just for five minutes? No? Okay, that's fine. If someone comes in, just like, ignore it. All right. So, yeah, everyone ready? Okay. So how about this? Let's start by getting comfortable, getting in a stable position. I know these chairs, the last chairs in the universe, anyone would ever choose for a meditation. Normally you would take your hands and put them in your lap like that, or maybe put them on your legs. If you feel like that's unstable because of the way the chairs work, maybe just put them in front of you. If you're meditating for a long time, it's very important to find real stability, upright spine. Usually you sit on a cushion on the ground with your butt elevated above your feet, which gives you a nice position to stay up. When we're only meditating for five minutes, this is far less important. You're not going to get the soreness in your muscles. That comes from holding yourself at a weird angle. But get your back as straight as you can. Get a stable. That's so quiet. Everyone who doesn't feel too weird about closing your eyes, it would be a good time to close your eyes and start breathing. Maybe you were already breathing, but it's nice to notice it. Take a breath in at a normal pace. You could do it a little bit slowly. You could do it a little bit quickly. However you do it, when you breathe in, know that you're breathing in. When you breathe out, notice how you're breathing out. Feel the details of the air coming in through your nose. Maybe you feel your belly rising and then falling back down as you breathe out. You're always doing it. Your whole life you've been breathing, but mostly you don't notice it. There's a lot to learn in breathing in and breathing out. The next thing the Buddha recommends is that as you breathe in, feel your whole body. As you breathe out, let your breath come from your whole body. Breathing in, experiencing your body right here in this place. As you breathe out, let your mind be calm. Everything's okay. You're breathing. You're giving yourself nutrients like you have your whole life every few seconds. In and out. Noticing the little details of your body, experiencing whatever the state of your mind is right now. So while you're breathing, while you're noticing how it feels coming in and going out, some questions you could think about. Is there anything in this world that can fully satisfy you and that will never let you down? And if you could have no expectations about how things should be, what would that be like? If you could accept everything as it is, would life be harder or easier? Breathing out. And if there are times when you do things that you know are wrong, how does it feel? And on the other hand, how does it feel when you do something you know is right? And as you breathe in, notice what it feels like to breathe in. Breathing out. Let the air exit you completely. Set yourself free. It sometimes said that we could learn everything we need to know just from watching our breathing. It's always there, but we rarely notice it. We can't control it. But if we're careful and mindful, we can influence how it proceeds. Everyone can open your eyes now. I meant to mention the bell would mean the ending. Okay, so that was just a little, little tiny one because I have to tell you the entire philosophy of Buddhism in half an hour. But hopefully it set the mood a little bit. The questions sort of set the stage for what I'll be talking about, what I think are the main things that I was going to get into today. So if anyone has any urgent questions, you can ask me. I'll try and leave time till the end, but I'm also going to try and have extra slides that we may or may not get to. So if there's something that's really urgent for you, you can ask me. I'll try to get your hand up, and it'll probably be okay. But don't ask a big, broad question because I know there's a lot of questions. The Buddha spent 45 years answering questions, so I'll try and keep it short. All right, so we're going to start with three things that describe the entire world that the Buddha just could not shut up about. And it's funny because he never made this list. It wasn't his favorite list, but it's one that we use all the time that is constantly reminding us about these three things. And saying that ignorance about any of these three is what captures us in clinging and suffering and samsara, which is the cycle of rebirth that's theoretically ended by nirvana, which I'm not going to talk about strangely enough. But basically everything is impermanent, everything is stressful, and everything is lacking in essential self. So we're kind of obvious, the third one, we'll try and get a handle on. So the first one in Pali is Anicha. And the best way, someone said, hey Buddha, I know you're busy, so just tell me the most important thing in 10 seconds. And the Buddha actually gave it a shot and he said whatever is subject to origination is subject to cessation. That means that everything either changes in the long run or it ceases. And also we're all going to die. And he said that we're all going to die is a really important thing to remember. And there's actually a type of meditation called maranasati, mindfulness of death. The monks used to spend a lot of time hanging out at the graveyard where the bodies would just rot and staring at those rotting bodies and thinking about how that's their body any second now. Very real, Anicha is super important. And so one way to look at it is that everything we have is borrowed, right? When we die, it doesn't matter how much money we had, it doesn't matter how many relatives we had, we're going to leave them behind. And bearing and denial about that is terrible for us because it's the truth. And when we deny the truth, it hurts us. That's like a core principle here that's going to be present in all of these different slides and stuff. So, and I wrote, sickness, death, and WordPress updates will take what we love away. And I find this very, very true. You know, there are other types of web development, like if you just wrote a PHP script in 2004, it probably still works and maybe it even still runs on PHP 7, although maybe not. But that mountain coming towards us, it has a metaphor about a mountain. If there was a mountain rolling across the land, crushing everything in its path, 20 miles wide just crushing it and it was coming for you. How would you behave? And he said, that's how you should behave right now because that mountain is coming, it's called death, and it's coming for you. And the mountain in WordPress is very present because of the update schedule and the security threats for those of you who ever skipped your updates, you know. Denying impermanence doesn't help you when you have a WordPress site. You have to keep moving. All right. So the second truth that describes everything, pretty much everything in the universe, is dukkha. And that's a word that I like to translate into stress because it really speaks to us. And it describes all the different meaning. Often it's translated as suffering. So everything is suffering. Everything brings suffering, something like that. But it also describes pain. But in this context, what's most important about dukkha is the stress, which we can think of as the pain we feel because of our thoughts about things rather than the actual pain. Like if you get, do I have the arrow thing here? Okay, there's two slides about dukkha. It's so important. It's in two of the first two lists. So I'll talk about the other thing. In this case, nothing lives up to our hopes and everything brings disappointment, right? If we think something is going to make us happy, like a relationship or a job or meditating and we think it's finally going to fix our problems, we're going to be disappointed, right? We have to have realistic expectations and so everything in the long run is subject to causing us stress if we let it. Unpleasant things. So there's unpleasant things and there's pleasant things. It's a really important concept in Buddhism. It seems really obvious, but when you start categorizing things into unpleasant things, things you consider unpleasant, things you consider pleasant, and then trying to care less about both of those things, that's the lesson we're going towards. But in this case, unpleasant things are dukkha because we can't avoid them, right? There's unpleasant things that are going to come back to us, sickness is coming, death is coming, our horrible families are coming, and we can't just avoid it entirely. But also pleasant things are dukkha and the reason things we like are dukkha is because we can't hold on to them. They're going to leave us to some degree. We're going to have to find new pleasant things. We have to be able to live with or without anything good or bad. And if not, we're clinging. We're clinging to this idea that we can hold on to good things and that we can push away bad things. And as long as we're doing that, we're going to have unnecessary extra stress caused by not being able to really control it. So the third one of the characteristics of everything is sort of more important at the time because people really believed in souls, which is atta or atman in Sanskrit. In yoga you talk about it a lot. But the Buddha, his like-being innovation was there is no soul, very specifically. Inside of us is a bunch of stuff that rolls around. It's scientific. It is like earth, air and fire and water rather than the atoms and molecules. But he really nailed it on the head about there is no inherent essence. What we are is an aggregate of different processes that create behavior. And when we mistake that for something inherent, we suffer unnecessarily. And so this applies both to objects which we can all understand that a rock has no inherent essence. It's got a geological history. A phone has no inherent essence. It's just a bunch of circuits and stuff. But we confuse it for having essence and then we blame it and we say, is that good for me and is that good for us? No. But the thing is other people also have that property. We can't suffer just because they let us down if there's nothing we can do about it. So everything and everyone are conditioned phenomena. They arise from causes. Something caused them to happen and if that hadn't caused them, they wouldn't be there. Who remembers philosophy 101 from like university or maybe you went to a good high school? It's kind of cheesy, but in this case, it's accounted for. Everything is impersonal and everything is dependent on something else. And so specifically, our sense of I am, it's called sacchia d'iti, wrong view of self, is a delusion. And it hurts us in the long run. So your body isn't you. Your thoughts aren't you. Those are just thoughts happening in your head. And by understanding them that way, they don't have as much power over you. Your opinions are not you. You got to hold your opinions lightly because when you hold your opinions too tight, ooh, wordpress should be a certain way. Watch as you experience a bunch of suffering that you could have skipped entirely and just rolled with what was going on. And your code isn't you. When you see your old code, you can let it go. You can change it. Maybe you know better code now. Maybe you have advice for coders. When you see your old code, don't suffer for it. Just learn your lesson about how bad you did it before and make sure you never do that again. Fix it if it's right. But you don't have to identify with those things that are outside of you because nothing has inherent self including you. And so here's a little pitch for my marketing slogans for every single piece of website building software that existed. This is a slogan from Refuge Recovery. This shit won't last forever. Pardon the swear, but it's great because it goes both ways. When you're having a good time, this shit won't last forever. And when you're having a bad time, this shit won't last forever. You're going to have to review it. You're going to have to find something else to do eventually. It's unsatisfying and it's essence free. It's just a bunch of code. Don't take it personally if it's bad. I think it needs to be in your image to function properly. It's just barely working and you just need to make sure it continues just barely working in your best interest. Yeah. So what do we do with the three marks of existence? We accept them and we let them go. Everything in the universe. We accept it and we let it go. That's how we set ourselves free. That's the essence of finding enlightenment. And specifically with these three, there are the three marks of existence because like a carpenter, marks a piece of wood as for a certain task with a little notch in it. We mark everything in the universe that we see. When we see our loved ones, we mark them impermanent, unsatisfying and essence free. And we see a headache. We mark it impermanent, unsatisfying, essence free. Sounds depressing, but in real life, when you do that, things stop having control over you. And specifically the unpleasant things are really deflated by it. All right. So one list down, just a thousand more to go. So this is the Katari Ariaskani, the Four Noble Truths. This is the first sermon the Buddha gave after finding enlightenment. And the essence is dukkha. We already saw dukkha, stress. It's inevitable. It's going to happen. The cause of stress, so samudaya means source, and so the cause of stress is clinging attachment when we don't let go of the good and bad things. Niroda means end, and it's the end of stress is the freedom from clinging. So if we can stop clinging things, we can be free of the stress. And maga means path. And that refers to a bunch of steps that the Buddha thought were super important to actually follow on a day-to-day basis to get that done. So being free is great, but it doesn't really help you with the problem unless there's a lot more detail. And so there is a lot more detail. But the essence of dukkha, which we already talked about, the problems are going to come up, and there'll be bad surprises always. You're going to have what you don't want. You're going to be missing what you do want. Aging illness and breath ring dukkha, and updates are dukkha, spam is dukkha, browser compatibility is dukkha. It's never going to be done. It's never going to be done, and fight them with dignity, and maybe Gutenberg is dukkha, you guys, but stress is inevitable. We're not going to escape it. So the reason it hurts so much is we're clinging to our expectations. We try to control things and suffer because we don't have that control. The second arrow is a metaphor that's really useful. The Buddha tells the story, a guy gets hit by an arrow and he's like, ah, this hurts so much. I need to find someone to pull it out, all this stuff. But then he says, ah, it just hurts so much, and maybe no one will come, and I'm never going to escape this, and then it's like shooting yourself with a second arrow of all the pain you feel from worrying about the first one. So don't shoot yourself with the second arrow. Let the suffering you already have be, and don't have more arising because of your clinging. So both the desire and aversion, like we said, the pleasant things hold us in the cycle of clinging and disappointment. And in WordPress terms, it's when we imagine WordPress won't challenge us that it makes us crazy. When we think it should just work, it makes it twice as hard, five times as hard to solve a problem. Whereas if you have a problem and you just say, alright, there's a problem, like I knew there would be because I'm paying attention and I've done this before, time to just sit down and start looking for ways to solve it, right? Which is what we all do in the end, we all have to monitor on the journey to get there and it doesn't help, right? So the end of stress is freedom come from clinging and if we accept everything without clinging to good or bad, we don't have to suffer. We notice the impermanence, remember? Impermanence, suffering, which you already noticing because it's a bad situation, and then the impersonality, whenever there's a problem, think about those things. One will go away if you fix it. Think about how it's not you. It's just a problem because the world is full of them. You were born. Your birth is the cause of all your problems. It's like a thing the Buddha says and it's like, true as heck. So when we let go of our expectations, roadblocks become surmountable and failures become survivable. It sets a new perspective, right? We want to have a better perspective on things that are hard. And in WordPress, we want to be survivable, right? These are small problems we have and we can always survive them, that's for sure. So the Eightfold Path, I already got my 15-minute warning. So I had a whole idea of talking about all of them and I was sitting and doing a meditation one day and I was like, okay, let me just cycle through them in my head. And then the bell rang after 40 minutes and I was like, okay, I don't have time to talk about all of these. I'll talk about a couple of them, but it's a great thing to study. We've got a lot of stuff we've been talking about, right? Understand the lessons of Buddhism and understand the real world. Whatever the real world is to you, keep it in mind. Don't forget what's really important, what's really there. Have good intentions. The way you approach things defines your experience of them so that your approach can resolve pain. It can steal your pleasure. You are going to have by having it all messed up. And also, ethics is a matter of having good intentions. It is half of it because you feel good when you know what you did is right. Right speech is just a whole category of being a good person, saying wise things, not lying, not picking fights. Right action is ethics, so don't hurt people. There's one about having sexual misconduct. There's one about not drinking and doing drugs. It helps a lot to be mindful when you're not wasted. Right livelihood is do things that improve the world. If you're working for the strip mining company, making a website, it's going to hurt your feelings long term. Maybe you could survive it, maybe you can't, but consider doing something that you know is ethical because there's a... You can be mindful without having to be in denial about the people being hurt by what you're doing with your life. So livelihood is important. And then mindfulness, that's sort of the meditation category of right effort, which is keeping your focus on it and mindfulness, which is sort of the one where you keep an eye on it. And we'll talk about this cards for these. So there's a few more concepts I was going to go through that aren't part of any major list. The first is dharma, which is dharma is the Sanskrit word, and it means a lot of things, but often it refers to the teachings. Like Jesus said, the word, and that's sort of the same thing as dharma. And Buddhism actually is a word invented by Western people. What they called it is the Buddha dharma, the teachings of Buddha. It also refers to all phenomena, everything, everywhere, the truth, all things. We need to remember that all the dhammas are impermanent and impersonal and bring us suffering. And if we can accept all of the truth without judgment, we can set ourselves free. So kama, whoa, big topic. But I'll just say that what it means is action because karma is our actions, the things we do in the world. And so what it refers to is cause and effect and how what happens to us later is caused by what we did before. Our actions determine our future. And the word doesn't mean an ethical scorecard or some kind of like up-down number that defines you. It's all the things you've ever done and all the ways it's going to come back at you. The fruition, the karmic fruition of the sort of seed you plant when you do something and you get a fruit later and maybe it's a gross fruit or maybe it's a good one. And the important thing about karma, kama, is that intention is really fundamental. If we know our intentions are truly good, we can live with the peace of mind of knowing that our actions in the past were pure. And in wordpress terms, this means do your testing, right? When you have a bug that comes up later and you didn't test, you're like, ooh, I know I could have avoided this. But when the bug comes up and affects your users, it's twice as bad. So do the testing. Do the things you know you to do. Write your high quality code. Write your code comments. Code comments are good karma because they come back at you later and help you understand what you were thinking at the time. And then ooh, ooh, that's frozen. Okay, so Samsara is rebirth, right? The cycle of being born again. We are reborn when we return to our past. We can learn from our dreams, plugins, code, and content. We inherit the decisions from our past selves, good or bad. We learn from the challenges you've passed on to yourself, right? When you see what you did before, you can become a better person. You can learn how your decisions affect the future and you can think about how right now you were born. You don't have to suffer so much in the future from the things you were doing wrong. And the other thing I wanted to say was in Buddhism it's literal. There's another person that will be born and they'll have some like, they'll be ugly because you are mean and there's some very specific things that happen to people because of their past lives. That's a very fascinating thing to think about but to me, each and every moment when you're like, oh yeah, what was I doing? That's a moment of rebirth. And even though you're a new person who can be anyone you want to as mindful and careful and good as you want you're still stuck with all the things you did in the past. And the point is, remember to be good right now and always do what you can to make a satisfying future for yourself. So mindfulness is in a lot of ways the essence of meditation. It's being aware of yourself both your body and your mind which is a duality that isn't in Buddhism and it's useful to us to think about in each moment, all the time being aware of what you're doing. It helps you be a good person because when you're aware of what you're doing you're not going to want to do things that hurt people and it's just excellent cognitive practice that makes you stronger and smarter. So remember, it means remembering not seeing it means remembering over and over to see things as they really are to notice what's going on. The Buddha says it frees you from false perceptions that things are permanent that things are personal that you have to suffer because of something. Being mindful of the reality is what frees you from that and wakes you up. You let go of delusions distractions are less effective if you're being mindful about what you're doing and you can investigate the situation with honesty. And for WordPress, I recommend learning how to use the debug log. Check the logs when there's a problem you're not going to have it checking the logs. It's a lot like mindfulness just knowing what the server is doing is going to help you understand what the site is doing and when there is a problem you'll be able to find it rather than if your log is constantly full of garbage that's not important that you haven't cleaned up and then when there's a real problem you can't find it. I don't know who uses the logs but overall keep paying attention Samadhi means concentration but it refers to meditation in this context so meditation is taking time specifically to concentrate and focus. You develop focus, you can control your mind it creates the space for practicing active mindfulness without distraction. You can do anything mindfully you can do the dishes mindfully, thank you you can give a talk mindfully some things are a lot harder than others to do mindfully like giving a talk is very hard to do mindfully but sitting still and watching your breath is something that creates a lot of space for mindfulness but that strength in mindfulness and concentration will flow out into the rest of your life and so we set aside time just for that ideally a lot of Buddhists in the world don't do that they just give money to monks and say here you do it for me that's really weird even though it's technically on brand for even ancient Buddhism we meditate on wholesome states to develop altered traits right like altered states is what you get from drugs but the altered trait that you develop from drugs is not always good often it's laziness laziness and delusion and distraction whereas if you in meditation you achieve wholesome states but if you do it often enough and on a regular basis the properties of yourself will grow and you'll become more mindful overall and so like any skill any web development you want to learn to program spend some time doing Samadhi on your programming go to the code school whatever website and really like learn those deeper ways of programming that you hadn't figured out just by tooling with WordPress themes and stuff if you want to make these things work you have to put effort and time in and in my case I feel like doing the meditation each day just sitting there and doing it shares me for sessions of private study in a way that was a lot harder before when I was always distracting myself and just solving one emergency problem at a time okay so Meta is a wonderful aspect of Buddhism that I didn't have and it's the opposite of all the suffering it's love and compassion and compersion which is being happy for other people and equanimity and there's a whole type of meditation where you just sit there and you wish everyone well you wish yourself well you wish a stranger well you wish your loved ones well and you wish the whole world well it sounds cheesy but it's recommended by the Buddha himself he said that's how you go to heaven that's how you actually become a better person it only works when you've developed sufficient Samadhi concentration for it to do it properly but it's the good news is that there's like a nice version so when you're like too tired to do some real insight meditation and look deep into your intentions you can do Meta and just wish everyone well so Panya means wisdom and I just wanted to summarize so all experiences created in our minds and we are what we think that's one of the first that's the first line of the Dhammapada really fundamental sounds wrong but it really is true in terms of our suffering accept things as they are and let go of what's painful why not right why wouldn't we want that a clear conscience and open heart is the goal right when we know we're doing good we don't resent ourselves and we can do things without hurting ourselves any task is easier when you feel good about yourself so be mindful of your hot thoughts like Obi Wan says cultivate those wholesome traits and meditate as much as you can and all of the other parts become easier and to do so a few resources so just if you want to start meditating insight timer is a wonderful app it's free it's on the both types of phone it's got the simple timer that just goes ding when you want it to it's got thousands of guided meditations on all kinds of subjects from like really nice clean pure Buddhist stuff that you can search for in the Buddhism category to like DNA healing 45 hertz if you think 45 hertz is going to heal your DNA they got that too thousands there's a there's a thing called courses you can ignore it it costs money and they just added it it's like the tip of the iceberg of all the free content there's a social network so if you get insight timer at me Jair Clark we can like say it was nice meditating with you there's a button for that there's a few teachers so it go come find the slides later but Andy Hobson is a really nice and really smooth easy stuff they're long but they're good there's one called accept and let go if you just want to try one thing go try the accept and let go it's great and then there's a few other ones of different amounts of fame and you got to learn right like it's you got to do both the meditation and learning the principles that will guide the meditation that's the premise of Buddhism there's a whole MBS our thing where it's completely extracted from the religious context I recommend doing a little studying so Wikipedia is great they've got great articles on the big topics that also cover Mahayana like the different views on a given subject Doug secular Dharma super nice YouTube channel you can just put on while you're cooking it's this nice guy and he just teaches you and then suit a central is just the best place to go read the original texts you can read them side by side English and Pali and then there's a ton of great podcasts but against the stream is like a punk rock Buddhist club there's one in Montreal but it's starting back up in September it's linked with the refuge recovery thing and their podcast is really good just like half hour talks designed for normal people with a sort of punk rock theme so it's very accessible Joseph Goldstein's like a really heady person if you want to like almost meditate while listening but he's giving a talk to people who are on like and then Dharma seed and Joseph Goldstein have in common that it's talks being given to people at meditation retreats where you go for multiple days and meditate all day and so they're like advanced and they're really thoughtful and slow and they're great to like while you're exercising or something this is how I learned so much from these and it's an oral tradition so podcasts I think make a lot of sense and okay Sangha community is really essential to Buddhism getting together with people so I put a few of them to North insight has meetups in the evenings in Montreal and Ottawa you can go to their website a lot of them are by donation so you don't have to pay if you don't want to it's like at a yoga studio everyone comes and hangs out there's like a half hour talk and then you meditate refuge recovery like I said the addiction group really wonderful we go we do a little we meditate we do a little reading and then we do the sharing and talk about how we're doing how is this already going Vipassana Quebec is kind of intense super traditional but it's you can do it for free 10-day meditation retreat where you meditate all day act just like a monk and then secular Buddhism Association is a cool secular thing and they have bi-weekly online meetings through zoom where everyone gets together we do a meditation and then we talk that starts tonight there's one tonight and then two weeks from now so those are all great places to come together and then that was it and I think I'm all out of time I hope I didn't need into your lunch but I can stay here if anyone has questions does anyone have a really pressing question that they think is I didn't let any questions this went terribly why 2600 because it was I rounded to a nice even number but that's the number of people say at this point people say 2600 years ago it was BC right yeah cool it's also acute why not why not 2600 quarterly alright thank you guys