 Since I met you, I started to experience more of this inner joy that felt very concrete. And when I went home to my meditation group in Sangha there, I noticed that many people were what we call blissed-out state. Even I could just feel an air of it in the space when we would do the meditation. And it felt less authentic and to see the distinction between these two blissed-out versus blissed-in. Can you talk a little bit more about those two things? You know, the human body, the human being is actually created to move or rest, to move or rest. In the Upanishadic period, the post-Vedic period, there began all around the world the attempts to grasp the cosmos, to understand what is out there. So we developed practices to push the consciousness out to experience various states of samadhi, where the contour of the body itself is not felt anymore and at one point there is just something that is sensing everything and at one point that's not there either. And then you come back and then you come back slowly into the body. This is the Upanishadic Rishis who made these experiments in consciousness. Those processes have continued and continued and continued till we now have the neo-advaith in processes of conceptual querying, for example. If a person continues to ask themselves, who am I, who am I, who am I, and continues to observe everything about themselves as the observer, that in most cases, not in all, but almost all cases, at one point will lead to a conceptual overload and a crash of the system. What does that mean then? The awareness starts to move out. That is why you see many neo-advaithans who are not really present. They are blissed out, tuned out a little bit, not really present. Because it's a conceptual overload that has happened. You also have that in extreme bhakti, which is emotional overload. All these various practices that sort of bliss you out are practices that take you away from the here and the now, that take you away from your master, which is the soul within, which you can only reach when you're present and here. You can only bliss in if you're not blissed out. The choice is, do you want to bliss out or do you want to bliss in? And when you bliss out, what happens is you're not present here. When you're not present, something takes over. And that's something that takes over is the ego in its various faces. So the more you bliss out, the more suffering increases over a period of time. The more you bliss in, tuning into the master within, the more the joy will increase. And the joy increasing means that you're just present, that you know what day it is today, and you know who this person is in front of you, and you tune in and you can feel because you're tuning into your own master, to the source, to the soul. You also tune into the other because it's the same material in the other. That's why that concrete joy increases. So a lot of people who bliss out, bliss out because the pain of living is too much to bear. It's just too much to bear. And that's why the blissing out happens. But what happens is that the more you bliss out, the more the suffering increases in the long term. The less you can deal with people, the less you can handle what's happening around. There are always exceptions, but there are very few. So the blissing in is actually the tuning in. It's the next step after blissing out, let's say. Once you've blissed out, okay, you know it, then you start to bliss in. You come back down into the body, into the here and the now, and that's what makes you so powerful. Powerful to empower others. Not to have power over them, but to empower. Do you empower the other in that you are tuned into the master? Because when you're in servitude to your soul, you become a servant of the other. It's just that motion. It's also one of the reasons why many people reject what I'm saying, very angrily rejected, because it doesn't allow you to bliss out. It says, no, you're blissed out, you're spaced out. This is not the path to self-realization. It isn't. It may be a path to enlightenment, but then why do so many of the enlightened gurus and masters come here to the satsangs and say, okay, we know about enlightenment, now what? We are enlightened, we get it, but now what? Some of the world's very well-known gurus and masters have come. They've come to ask me this question. Why do they ask that? Because the time of enlightenment is over. It's over. That's what it is. It's the time of self-realization, circumventing the enlightenment processes. Being here and now all the time, not going out into samadhi. That time is over. Just over. So that's why you felt strange, because you were there with a group of people, with a sangha, where everybody's blissing out and they cannot bear after a while the pain of this life, because the more you bliss out, the more the pain grows. It does not reduce, it grows. And the way you actually experience the bliss of thisness, one can say, is by being this here, now. It's very challenging to people who have spent years trying to reach enlightenment, trying to become awake. What is this become awake? We are awake when our eyes are open, and we are asleep when our eyes are closed. Become awake. It's about surrender. It's about surrender. It's only about surrender. It's about bending to the master within, feeling the soul and bending, bending, bending. Even if you don't feel it, even if you don't feel it, you will feel it one day. But if you start to take up practices that distance you from yourself, you'll only get more and more distance. The practices of observation of that my anger is not me, my this is not me, my that is not me. You don't have to look at all that stuff. It's ego. Don't look at it. Look at the soul. And I mean, I'd like to see what argument can be held against this, what I'm saying, because why would you want to empower that ego by looking at it? Even if you're distancing yourself from it. So when you don't empower the ego and you start to bend in this posture, then you start blessing in. You're blessing in, and so you're not blissed out anymore. That's what I would say about this, your experience, you know. Because once you have this experience, you just cannot, you can't deal with all of that stuff, that spaced out sort of, it results in fragile beings that are not in touch with themselves. Not always, of course. I mean, I'm just making these strong statements so that something also penetrates, because it's like very hard to even grasp what I'm saying, because of so many years many people have of actually tuning out there. Is there a role for that observation? For instance, when I hear someone talking, and I know they're completely immersed in the role they're playing in the drama, just to be able to point out to them that they are in a whole, you know, a role or drama. Is there a role there for that observation? And then how would we step into the understanding or experience that you're speaking of? So if I have understood you correctly, your question is, if someone is in that drama, that emotional drama, would it help to actually make them observe the drama as something separate from themselves? It could help, but wouldn't it help far more if in that moment the person is just told, hey, it's all right, try to feel the soul, the master, try to feel that, focus on that, leave it, let the other thing be just for this moment, only for this moment, focus on your master, on the soul. Would that not perhaps be a shorter route? Because often people are very strongly in that intensity of emotion and are not able to step out of it, but if you want to say something to that person in that moment, why would you actually want them to look at that? It is a valid question, isn't it? Why would you want to look at it, that which is causing you suffering in the first place? When you can say, hey, you know what, even if you don't feel your soul, just try to imagine this universe within you and see if you can tune into that center of that universe within which is the soul. And then the person will say, yeah, but I don't feel my soul, that's all right, focus on your ring, think that's your soul, focus on your heart as an organ that you all feel, think that's your soul for the moment, just in order to bring surrender into the system. A person in surrender will not suffer as a result of the ego's impact. It's the surrender, isn't it like this that when you experience surrender, when you really feel it, that you just do not suffer in that moment, the ego cannot impact you when you're in surrender. So it's a matter of switching, even if you don't as yet feel the material presence of the soul, you can imagine it, you know, because you're anyway imagining so many things, tigers everywhere most of the time, so you might as well imagine the soul. Also I have to say that, like especially you, you have a sangha, it's very important that when you direct a person to the soul, that in that moment you also feel you are in touch with your own soul, because otherwise it won't work. It won't even work as a suggestion. That power of being in touch with the soul when you say it is what comes, and then they will pick it up, because this suffering that so many people are enduring, it's not something which they should actually look at or connect with. It doesn't help, because if you transform one thing, there'll be 10 other things showing up. Then you go under the carpet, then you go to the floor below, and then you go under the earth, and you come out in South America or something, and there's still stuff there that you haven't been able to deal with. So that first step is you tune in, you feel the master within, and then you give that to the other.