 Next up for you guys we have Michael Taft who flew in from Berkeley to be here with us today and share some of his own personal wisdom. So yeah please help me in welcoming Michael Taft to the stage. Thanks for welcoming me to the conference. It's fun to be in Portland. I lived in Boulder for a long time in Portland. I love Portland. It always reminds me of like a very wet Boulder. No, I'm in Berkeley. So in the in the mid-70s I was a teenager living in Lansing, Michigan and I was having a pretty hard time. Lots of anxiety, tremendous anxiety, lots of depression, things like that. And at that point in the mid-70s in Lansing Michigan in my family there was basically no understanding of what that might be about or what someone might do about that. You know calm down was about as much help as I got. There was no therapists, no meds, no support really of any kind. So you know that was pretty difficult and eventually I was having like immobilizing anxiety attacks. Like you get so worried you can't move and I don't know if anyone here has ever experienced that but it's unpleasant. It is not a fun experience. And so you know I suppose I was about 15 or 16 and I realized I was if I was gonna get any help with this stuff I was gonna have to help myself. And so I just started reading everything I possibly could. And my mom's a librarian and one of the first things I remember in my entire life is sorting a card catalog for you know and she's a grade school librarian and so I would be sorting the card catalog looking at all the books. And so reading about stuff is a way that I was really trained to intake information. So I decided I'm gonna have to help myself with these anxiety attacks and I'm gonna do that by reading. So I read a lot of stuff and I was also into science fiction novels but one day I was in the bookstore and I saw a very interesting hardcover book called The Scientist. Anyone ever read that book here? Really? Wow I would have expected a lot of hints here. It's called The Scientist and it's by John C. Lilly. And it was his biography at the time and I of course had no idea who this person was. But there I am in my room in in Michigan you know. Nice Midwestern family and I'm reading about this guy who's like pounding you know metal rods into donkey's brains to put electrodes in to guide them. He's talking about trying to learn the language of dolphins and how his wife would get in the tank and have sex with dolphins. It's better than a science fiction novel. But the other thing he was talking about was his invention of the flotation tank. And why he did that and how he did that and you know then taking ketamine and going in there and talking to aliens at great length so it eventually did become a science fiction novel and I really liked it and I thought wow this is this stuff this guy's talking about this could really help me. However again we're talking mid to late 70s Lansing Michigan. I wasn't finding many flotation tanks around. It seemed like a great idea you know but it just wasn't available you know at least I didn't know you know anyone was selling those anywhere I certainly didn't have 650 bucks to get one or whatever it cost at that moment and so that just ended up being a really interesting idea to me you know that you could you know enter this place where your senses were deprived of external stimulus and start to really investigate your brain. I knew that would help somehow but the tank was not available for me and so even though I was so interested it's fascinating I still haven't done it so I'm hoping this weekend to get my first flotation tank experience. It's been a while since 77 that I've been wanting to do that but what was available to me was another thing that I started reading quite a bit about which was meditation. So that at that point was free and there were books I didn't need any gear and so I started working with that and so in the ensuing years in 77 I have dedicated my life to meditating and learning about techniques of understanding the self and working with the self. I've you know done a lot of practices in India in Japan in Buddhism and Hinduism in Native American stuff and all kinds of stuff and I've kind of come around after all that after all these years to working almost exclusively not exclusively but almost exclusively in a scientific materialist metaphor. So talking about stuff that we can all agree about it just works better for me to talk about it in a nice scientific psychological way because it just seems clearer and easier. So that's the direction I've ended up taking after all these years and that's what I want to talk about today. How you can understand yourself better and have the kind of, well let me ask you, is anyone in here using their flotation take experiences for personal growth? Raise your hand, right? Okay so that's a large percentage maybe two, three or three quarters. Is that making a loud noise? Sorry about that. I feel like pacing or something we can do about that. Yeah so what I want to talk about is how to use that experience in a way that can be very very very helpful for personal growth. Okay and what do I mean by personal growth? I mean to have the kind of first of all to relieve symptoms of the kind that I was describing like anxiety and depression even incredibly you know incredibly intense experiences of that and furthermore to have the kind of major personal growth experiences that we may have heard about such as peak experiences or experiences of the you know deep self or even enlightenment type experiences. And what I've learned about those kind of experiences is that it comes down to, we can describe them in many ways, right? There's a lot of metaphors, okay? We can talk about becoming one with everything, the sense that there is no boundary between you and the world, right? You hear about that a lot. We can talk about the sort of shamanic vision of being torn apart in the underworld, dissolved, and then reconstituted in a new way, you know? We can talk about sort of skanda theory from Buddhism where the self is made of these various components and all of those have one thing in common as far as I'm concerned and that is the idea that the experience of being a person is an experience that is an actual experience. You're having it right now probably that you're having the experience of being a self, being an ego, but that experience can be deconstructed and shown to be an experience only, not actually pointing to a real entity, okay? So the point is, and the reason that's important, is if you can notice even for a moment that your experience of being a person is not imaginary, it's a real experience, but is pointing to something that doesn't fundamentally exist, your problems in life begin to become much easier to handle, right? I would say that every problem you've got is, or at least most of them, are based on the fact that you believe the story you're telling yourself about who you are. You believe the story of the, of in your head that you're constructing about your identity and that story is something we can, as I said, we can look at and see is a construction and if you look at it and see it's a construction and you see that clearly, that's an enlightenment experience. Even a small version of that is a small enlightenment experience, a large version of it will change your life forever, but it's not something, in my opinion, after having investigated this in many, many, many different ways for decades and decades, it's not something very hard to do and it's not something fundamentally trippy or mystical, it is simply a process of pointing your attention at the right stuff, at the right time, and noticing what's going on and if you notice what's going on in your own experience of yourself in the right way, you can't help but have the experience that it is a construction, that it's something that you're putting together as a story. It just has to happen that way and so it's not hard and yet it's incredibly important for helping all kinds of problems and furthermore, I feel like it's always surrounded by a lot of extraneous material that make it difficult or make it seem impossible or make it seem like this goal that's going to happen in the distant future somehow and so what I want to talk about is how to, a very practical way to look at this experience you're having right now, being a self and notice that it's a construction, okay, so that's where we're going. Everybody with me? Yes, so I'd like to make a metaphoric illustration of what I'm talking about, okay, I'm not, we could use the idea that Paul just used quite a bit about everything's a dream or this self is a dream or something like that, that's an interesting metaphor. The one I'm going to use is different, it's about pink threads, okay, pink threads, so let's say I had a whole sheaf, a whole stack of threads and I showed this to you from the stage and you saw that it was pink, okay, you could see, I would say what do I have here? You would say you have pink threads, but if I let you come a lot closer and closer and closer and in fact then gave you a magnifying glass and allowed you to examine the threads, you might see that in fact there, what I had in my hand was 50% red threads and 50% white threads, okay, perfectly red threads, perfectly white threads, there's not a pink thread in the whole bunch. Where did the pink go? Where did the pink go? Was it never there? Is it an illusion? Is it some kind of spiritual mistake or a problem? No, it's just a matter of misperception, you weren't looking closely enough and I've kind of come around after all that, after all these years to working almost exclusively, not exclusively, but almost exclusively in a scientific materialist metaphor. So talking about stuff that we can all agree about at least in terms of its existence and its materiality, not that I think the other types of information, the other types of belief are untrue or don't exist, but it just works better for me to talk about it in a nice scientific, psychological way because it just seems clearer and easier. So that's the direction I've ended up taking after all these years and that's what I want to talk about today. How you can understand yourself better and have the kind of, well, let me ask you, is anyone in here using their flotation take experiences for personal growth? Raise your hand. Right? Okay, so that's a large percentage, maybe two thirds or three quarters. Is that making a loud noise? Sorry about that. I feel like pacing or something we can do about that. Yeah, so what I want to talk about is how to use that experience in a way that can be very, very, very helpful for personal growth. Okay, and what do I mean by personal growth? I mean to have the kind of, first of all, to relieve symptoms of the kind that I was describing like anxiety and depression, even incredibly, you know, incredibly intense experiences of that. And furthermore, to have the kind of major personal growth experiences that we may have heard about such as peak experiences or experiences of the, you know, deep self or even enlightenment type experiences. And what I've learned about those kind of experiences is that it comes down to, we can describe them in many ways, right? There's a lot of metaphors, okay? We can talk about becoming one with everything, the sense that there is no boundary between you and the world, right? You hear about that a lot. We can talk about the sort of shamanic vision of being torn apart in the underworld, dissolved, and then reconstituted in a new way, you know? We can talk about sort of skanda theory from Buddhism where the self is made of these various components. And all of those have one thing in common as far as I'm concerned, and that is the idea that the experience of being a person, it's not there. I don't want to get into the ontology of it, but it's not a self anymore. It's some components of experience. So that's the metaphor. And if you just remember that, what happened to the pink? Where's the pink? That's all I'm talking about. It's not magic at all. It's just a matter of looking closely at an actual sensory experience. Okay, so I keep using the word self, but let's use another term which is ego. Why do we have an ego in the first place? I think most spiritual traditions will tell you it's a bad thing. You shouldn't have one. You should try to suppress it, get rid of it, deny it, tame it, make it nice, whatever. But I tend to come these days from an evolutionary standpoint, and by that I mean like Darwinian biological evolution. So why do we have an ego? You know? Why do human animals, why did they evolve to contain a psychological illusion called an ego? Anyone care to talk to that question? Helps us navigate, let's say physical reality. Yeah, sure does. Interesting. It's kind of metaphoric. See what you're getting at. Yeah. Yeah, so you guys have the idea. The human animal needs to coordinate its actions. It has a lot of concepts. It has a lot of different parts of its brain that are competing to tell it what to do. And there needs to be a unifying agent so that you don't walk in two directions at once, or you know, both grab a sandwich and throw it away at the same time. And in fact, there's people with unfortunate neurological conditions who do stuff like this, like their own hand is trying to choke them. So the ego is there to help unify your behavior, to help put together all the various parts of what's going on with you into a coherent narrative so that you can have coherent behavior. And it turns out, guess what, to be really important and really useful. What do we call people who do not have functional egos? Crazy, yes. It's psychotic. If you can't form a functional ego, that is called being psychotic because you can't make a coherent external narrative to make behavior that makes sense. So if we destroy, negate, deny, somehow get rid of our ego, it's probably not such a good thing, right? You don't want to, we're not trying to make the pink go away, right? So to speak, we can't anyway. But that whole move of trying to get rid of that, I think is actually not only not beneficial but harmful. And instead, the idea is to simply see it for what it is. Okay, if you can see that the pink is made of red and white, there you go. That's really all it takes. And the deeper that realization is, the more profound the awakening is, the more profound the psychological health will be. Okay, so it's just a matter of getting in there further and further and clearer, more clearly and more clearly and seeing that for what it is. So to me, this is tremendously exciting. Having been in a lot of traditions that want me to do a lot of very difficult stuff to have some magical realization. It turns out it's not that hard and it's not that weird. It's just about seeing certain parts of your experience in a very clear way. Bingo. Okay. So where did egos come from? Do any animals have egos? Turns out they do. Anyone heard of the mark test? What a mark test is? It's funny. It's a funny test. It's cute. They will, for example, while let's say a chimp is asleep, they'll put an X on its nose in white paint or chalk or something. And then when it wakes up, they'll show it a mirror. The mirror's already been there. The chimp knows about the mirror. And the chimp will walk up to the mirror and see that it's got a white X on its face. How does the chimp react? Does it think there's a funny monkey in that mirror with a white X on its face? Touches its own face. Okay, that's interesting. That's really interesting. Touches its own face. It knows, oh, I've got a white X on my face. If you show a lower monkey that same test, it thinks there's a funny monkey in the mirror with a thing on its face. It has a totally different reaction. If you show a human infant, if they put lipstick on their face while they're asleep, it thinks there's a funny kid in the mirror and it'll try to get behind the mirror, crawl behind the mirror to see who's there with the lipstick on their face. But around 18 months old, all of a sudden they go, oh, wait a minute, there's something on my face. It's a totally something grew in them. The idea of me. Okay, there's this thing that I would call the idea of me. And you need to have a certain amount of brain power to have the idea of me. So little children can't demonstrate that yet. Their brain is not developed enough. And you know, there's some controversy about the what the mark test means and which animals pass it or whatever. But it seems pretty clear that, you know, children are having a non egoic oceanic type experience. And that at a certain point, they begin to develop an ego as their brain develops. And the mark test tracks that perfectly. And then very soon after that, they'll start using the language of I me mine quite a bit. As that idea of me gain strength. And it's funny what other animals pass that although it's hard because if they're not chimps, it's difficult to see what their reaction is. For example, elephants seem to pass it. But you know, are they touching their own face with their trunk? It's it's you know, it's weird. There are those who say dolphins pass it. But you've got a mirror in his tank. How are they going to touch their face? But they, you know, people work really hard to figure this stuff out. And it does seem that the more brain power you've got, the clearer it is that you have an idea of me. And as you go into animals with smaller and smaller brain power, they don't have that at all. So this ego that we have did not appear out of nowhere. It came from it evolved. It evolved just like everything else. And that's what's so interesting about it to me. It has a history and evolution. It has a background. It's there for a reason just like your liver is sitting there, filtering your blood just like your stomach is digesting your food just like your lungs are breathing. The egoic function in your brain is doing its function that it evolved for. It's not something you want to cut out. It's not something you want to shut down. It's not something you want to destroy. It's doing its job. Okay, and the freedom that we can have psychologically and the growth and the huge experiences and the depth and even I would use the term enlightenment comes from just seeing what its job is really clearly. Okay, it's a very different model of freedom. So how do you know you got one? Right now, how do you know you're having the experience of being a self? This is an important question because this is how we're going to learn to take this thing apart. This is a whole whole talk about deconstructing this thing seeing the seeing the construction. So how do you know you got one to begin with? Anybody want to venture a guess? And I'm talking experientially right now in your own experience. How do you know you have an ego? Do you have one? People seem to be nodding their head. Yep, I have one. Okay, how do you know? Nobody? Okay. I would say that you know it because you're having certain kinds of experiences. One kind of experience is that you're having self referential mental experiences. I eat the idea of me. You're thinking thoughts about yourself. There's self self referential. So and that's a special category of thought you might be thinking you sometimes you're thinking about ideas out there you're thinking about buildings, you're thinking about cars, you're thinking about other people. But sometimes you're thinking about this thing. And that's the idea of me. So that's one part of it. Another part of it is emotions. Right? You're having emotions and most of those seem to be yours. Something about you and about your experience and they're pretty important to how you feel about your life and your day and what you're doing. And then there's some other stuff, such as certain just normal body sensations like the feeling of breathing and things like that again, self referential body sensations. Okay, and that's it. That's it. Anybody think there's anything more to add to that? I'm open. I think that's it. Okay, interpersonal stuff, right? Super important. Half of half of you are half of who you are as other people. But that's still an idea of me and another person. Okay, or a physical interaction. But it's me plus. So it's memory. That's an idea. Again, that's that's a self like autobiographical memory is a huge part of the human ego. This is one of the things that it appears that animals have very little of dogs now last about three seconds. But humans now can last a very, very long time and we can remember stuff from 6070 years ago, right? So that memory is very important. But that is that's a thought. So again, that's self referential thinking. So what I'm saying is the ego, the ego or your experience right now of being a person is made of some pretty basic stuff, pretty direct, pretty simple stuff that you can touch with awareness with attention right now. Okay, it's not again, it's not magic. It's not an esoteric thing. It's a simple experience. So picture the house you grew up in in your mind's eye right now. Everybody able to do that, at least one of those houses. Okay, that's part of the experience of being a self. Think of something you said to your relationship partner today. Right, some sentence. That's another part of the experience of being a self. Feel, remember the feeling of an emotion you had today on your having right now. If you're having one right now. That's part of the experience of being a self. Okay, that's it. That's it. There's nothing else. And the idea is that these what I'm calling red and white threads that make up the pink are these sensory experiences that I'm pointing to. Okay, so once you start seeing these sensory experiences separately in the way I'm describing, like visual memory, visual imagery, verbal mental type activity, emotions, it starts to pull apart that experience starts to pull apart the pink, and you're able to see the red and the white. Okay, so let's talk about let's start with what came first in evolution. So emotions, we don't necessarily know that animals have emotions, but it sure seems like they do. And they have the brain structures for the same brain structures we do for them and stuff like that. They don't report having any emotions. But in every other way, they seem to have them. So what's an emotion? And why do you have one? You ever wonder why they exist? Your whole day is made up of emotions, right wanting to do this, not wanting to that feeling happy about this feeling worried about that. What is that? What's it for? Why did it evolve? Defense mechanism, some of it coping mechanism. That's what I would say is the closest all of those are included defense mechanism coping mechanism. But more fundamentally, it's guidance system. It's to motivate and direct behavior. Simple emotion fear, right? What's fear for get me the hell out of here, right? My behavior is now motivated and directed. That's a simple example. But all of the emotions fall into that category, it's going to show you what to do next and give you the motivation to do it. Even something even social emotions like guilt, shame and embarrassment are there to direct your behavior within a culture, your behavior within a group. So embarrassment arises. Guess what? If someone they've done tests, if someone knocks over all the cans of soup in a store, and they pick it up, they pick up all the cans of soup, they put it back. But they don't seem embarrassed about it. The other people in the store don't like them. They report not liking that person, even though the person sat there and put everything back. However, if the person looks embarrassed and acts embarrassed and doesn't put any of the cans back, everyone still likes them. Why is that? Because we're social creatures and these social emotions we have are there for a reason. They do something. And one of the things they do is let everyone know that you know that you transgressed and you did something wrong. It's demonstrating that. And so people then forgive you for it. And if you don't demonstrate that you're in trouble, it doesn't matter what you do to make it up. So again, social emotions and even personal emotions like fear or anger or something, they're there for a reason. And again, to me, this is really liberating. I now don't have to, it's not that there's bad emotions and good emotions. It's not that there's some kind of poisonous emotions and there's emotions that are wonderful for the world. I mean, yes, it's nice if we're nice to each other. I'm not saying but it's really important to see that every emotion that's arising in you has a purpose just like your liver. It has a purpose just like your brain, it evolved for a reason. It's not just something to judge and deny. It's there for a reason. So how do you know you're having an emotion? Feel it where in your body? Okay, you guys have had a lot of experience sitting there feeling emotions. Most Americans, if you ask them how they're feeling, they'll say, you know, how are you feeling? The person will say I'm, I'm angry because there will be a whole list of reasons why that why they're angry. They're angry because because because because because and none of that is like, how am I feeling? Well, I'm feeling some heat in my face and I'm feeling some constriction in my brow and my throat is tightening and I'm feeling this upwelling of energy in my pisser balling. You know, the embodied sense of anger, right? It's very different than reason, reason, reason, reason. There's a, especially because we've had so many years of cognitive psychology, which I really like by the way. But there's this idea that emotions are really mental events. And it's true that the brain triggers emotions, it certainly has to come through the brains appraisal. But the way you know you're having one is an experience in your body. So like modified James Lang theory to get technical, it's a body experience. Okay, so one of the easiest, deepest, most powerful ways to cope with the emotions you're having is to let go of all the mental talk about it, just feel the embodied piece. You know, wow, I'm, I'm anxious. I have some tension in my belly, my breathing is a little fast, like that, right? Like mindfulness meditation, how you attract that experience in your body. As I said, emotions are present in most mammals. mice seem to have emotions rats, ocelots, otters. What do we have in Portland? Deer bears. All these creatures have emotions. So do you think they're having a mental event? You know, not much of one, probably, I mean, they might, but the structures for higher level mental events do not appear to be there. But the structure for a solid emotion is. And so that embodied experience of feeling the motivation in your body, feeling the readiness for action. And the desire to take action is very noticeable thing. So where I want to give you a pointer as to how to begin deconstructing the self, check out your emotions. And in order to check out your emotions, clearly, you do not deny them, you do not make any of them bad, you do not make any of them wrong, you do not try to get rid of them or suppress them, or sell them or ship them to China. You feel them in your body. There it is. Wow. Okay, I'm having this experience. It's arising. Guess what that experience was, you know, programmed in evolution. It's a it's a natural response. It's in my body. There it is. Nothing else. Okay, it doesn't mean you're a good person or a bad person. It doesn't because the whole idea of the self is an idea of a person. The minute you extract one of these elements from that idea, it loses that potential, it loses that power of meaning something about quote, you. Instead, it's a physical reaction that you can track. And guess what? Emotions change constantly, constantly, they're moving things in your body. So if you want to begin to notice the experience you're having as a self, in order to let that experience deconstruct, check out the experience of emotions in your body, it's very powerful. And what's great is you don't have to have a full experience of the self falling apart or noticing the construction of the self, noticing the egos, pink, like nature, in order for that emotional meditation, that emotional contact to really be a big deal. Just that is tremendously powerful, tremendously helpful. If you've ever done, you know, mindfulness meditation, there's a lot of it where you work with feeling emotions in the body. And it will help you with everything throughout your day, because emotions tend to lose their painful negative quality when you see them and experience them that way. What's really happening, you're just letting go of the idea of an emotion and what it means, and instead just feeling it. Again, this is, it's not, it's not complicated. You're just letting go of your ideas about it and feeling the physical manifestation. And so that's, you know, in my own journey that I was describing working with anxiety in that way, feeling it feeling it feeling it feeling it not thinking about it not perseverating about it but just checking out Wow, that's kind of an unpleasant feeling in my belly. Took a while but that ended up completely dissolving that anxiety attack reaction. Absolutely. Okay. So I need to hold this closer to our mouth. Okay, sorry about that. So yeah, just that little bit of deconstruction is hugely powerful. And of course, in the reduced sensory state in a flotation tank, I imagine it's much easier to contact because you don't have the distractions of the external world as present. Okay, so that's emotions. What about thinking? This is where the real problem begins. We're probably the only animal that has higher cognitive function. We don't know that in any, you know, final way but we can examine animal brains and they don't have the parts that it appears it would take to have those kinds of thoughts. So how do we so we have this advanced cognitive function? What do we use it for? Why is it there? Why did evolution favor monkeys that had that? Why can we think anybody? Great. So there was a feedback loop with technology and thinking, right? And that's true. Or it's probably true, you know, proto humans that could make better tools, got better food and survive longer. And it's a feedback loop and they got smarter. So part of it is to make stuff. But what's involved in making something, the ability to picture what it's going to be, right? It's not just the you're not just making it like in a rote fashion, you have to imagine what it's going to be. And that leads us to the sort of more fundamental part about thinking, which is planning, right? Our higher cognitive functions are there so we can predict and plan. You want to get something done, you have to imagine what it's going to do in the future. Okay, you have to imagine. You want to get food, you have to figure out where it is and how you're going to go get it and the tools you're going to make to go get it and all that, right? That's what that's there for. It appears. And yet, there's some interesting things about that. It's a very, very useful feature. I often, boy, time goes fast. I often meet people who think that thinking is bad. Because it can make you crazy. But it's obviously incredibly important. Just like just like an ego, you wouldn't want to be unable to think. It's like you wouldn't want to not have an ego. So being able to think is really important. I'm going to go really fast now because I've only got a few minutes. But the trouble is that with human beings, we still use our emotional system to evaluate our choices we're predicting. Are we going to go north to get fish? Are we going to go south to get deer? You think about all the rational differences between those two things, but the final decision is always mediated by an emotion. One feels right, one feels better than the other. So you've got an actual physical response to thinking. You've got an emotional response. And that's fine too. That works great, except the whole idea of being able to imagine stuff has an unintended consequence, which is we can imagine stuff that doesn't exist. That's great because it allows us to build new things, make new technology, build a more beautiful world in some way. But it's also extremely debilitating because you can imagine a problem and then have a totally imaginary problem that's never going to happen, and then sit there and have a real emotional response about it. An actual physical response that's real. So you're suffering for something that's imaginary and never going to happen. So be that as it may. And again, I'm going to just move quickly here. You want to notice thinking. And I would suggest you divide it into two parts. And I was going to go into these two parts, but we don't have time. But one of them is the visual part of thinking. So the pictures. And the other one is the verbal part of thinking. So the words in your head. And if you if you just notice the difference between those two things, that's another huge element of deconstruction. The pictures versus the words, the stuff that you're hearing versus the images, you'll have images of your body, you'll have images of the world, you'll have images from memory. But those are separate from the talk. And if you separate images from talk, thinking starts to deconstruct. Okay, again, it's still there. But you're experiencing it in a new way. And when thinking starts to deconstruct, you can then also separate it from emotion. As I was describing, emotions, a physical thing in your body, you're having feelings in your body or having images and words in your head. And you begin to track those separately. You can look at them as a separate experiences. They're not separate. It's pink, right? But you can see that they're separate threads of red and white and, and a third color that we didn't include in the metaphor. So once that happens, again, especially when you notice the difference between feeling and thinking really clearly, and you track it, track it, track it, and notice how each thought that arises triggers an emotional value of response. Again, that that sense of self begins to break up begins to loosen begins to become soft and open. And eventually, if you keep tracking this very, very deeply in the simple way as I'm describing, just noticing your feelings versus your thoughts, the difference between emotional type feelings and regular physical type feelings. You know, so like the difference between a twinge in your foot and an emotional type feeling, that's something you can separate. And the difference between a visual type thought and a verbal type thought, and you track that very closely in a really quiet concentrated environment like meditation or a flotation tank, you'll begin to notice that moment by moment, those elements, those threads, the visual thinking, the verbal thinking, the emotional type body sensations, the other type body sensations are coming together, even it feels like there's a subjective feeling of it coming together. And that is what that is you. Okay, that's the sense of self. That's not the organic, physical animal person sitting there. But that's the idea in yourself of you, it's made of those components. And once you see that happening, which is very simple, it's not hard. Once you sit there and you actually notice that happening, it instantly begins to change your life. Because you've been believing that's pink forever. And now you notice it's a construction, you actually in your own experience, it's not an idea of a construction, you saw it happen, you felt it happen. Now, all the concerns of that being all the problems of that being all the suffering of that being it's not that they're not real, but it's experienced very differently. Very, very differently. And that I would say is what people are referring to as enlightenment, or at least a early version of enlightenment, deeper experiences of the same kind of deconstruction are deeper forms of enlightenment. And that is the freedom that's available to you very simply, very directly, right now, if you want it. So thank you.