Day 5: Selflessness

IS A THE Is Is Is Is Is Is Let's begin with a bit of practice, again just that sense of being held by Mother Earth effortlessly. Nothing we need to do. The spine is straight but relaxed, flexible, a strong back, a soft and open front. And now just allowing the mind to settle, offering it an object, the breath. No need to fixate, just let the mind ride on the breath.

As thoughts arise, simply notice them as thoughts. Sensation, simply sensations. No need to get caught. And if you are caught, it's fine, just notice and let go. And now as we begin this session.

Just consider the question of, well, what do we want? What are we here for? One very straightforward answer to that question is that we want to be happy and we don't want to suffer. And actually this is a kind of core idea in Buddhism. That part of what it means to be a sentient being, part of what it means to be conscious even, is that we are caught up in seeking happiness and avoiding suffering.

There are certainly styles of Buddhism, especially earlier styles of Buddhism, that really try to emphasize the way in which that whole process of seeking happiness and avoiding suffering is a problem. And it certainly can become that merry-go-round of suffering and indeed the idea is that for us, in our ordinary state, before we are truly awakened, we are going to be caught up in some ways in that process. But as Buddhism develops, something changes a little bit in the attitude toward that process. Which is not that seeking happiness and avoiding suffering is a problem in itself. In other words, that drive is not the issue.

That drive, in fact, in a sense, is a kind of world-making drive. It's what creates our reality in a way, and we'll explore that more. But for now, what we can say is that that idea, that process of seeking happiness, avoiding suffering is part of what you might call our basic goodness. And this is a term that you hear various Buddhist teachers use. I like the way especially Mingyur Rinpoche uses this term, a Tibetan teacher named Mingyur Rinpoche from the Terigarh community.

And part of what this means, this idea of basic goodness, is just that this drive to be happy, the wish to be happy, and the wish to be free from suffering is not a problem. And in fact, the sense that we wish to be happy is not something we need to at all try to fix or change. That's not the issue. The issue is our confusion around how we do that. So let me tell you a little story I like to tell, a kind of moment of, let's say, a way I like to illustrate this kind of confusion.

So let's just suppose, I don't know, we're friends, and you come over to my place, and you see me sort of anxiously in front of my closet, and maybe I've got a little bowl of food, like a dog bowl of food there, and I'm sort of looking anxiously, and you say, what's wrong? And I say, well, he won't eat. He won't eat. And I say, you say to me, who won't eat? Is it your dog?

I say, no, it's the blue monster in the closet. He doesn't want to eat anything. And you say, OK, maybe he's had a little too much of something, but anyway, are you sure about this? I say, yeah, he's there. I've got to make him happy.

I'm sure he's so unhappy. I just want him to be happy, and he needs to eat. And you say, OK, yeah, well, actually, there's a problem with me wanting to make the blue monster happy. He doesn't exist. How can I make a nonexistent entity happy?

It's not possible. Likewise, just like that sort of idea of the blue monster, we can have a sense of self that is unreal. And so our attempts to find happiness, again, finding happiness, seeking some kind of genuine, sustainable happiness is not the problem. The problem is, in this case, that we're confused about who we're making happy. So this brings us to this very important idea in Buddhism of what we call selflessness.

Selflessness is about the view. Remember, we talk about view, meditation, and life? So selflessness is about the view, the way we see reality, or what is real and what is unreal. So what kind of self might we ordinarily think we have? Well, there are two ways of talking about self.

One of them is that we can think about self as an object, and another is we can think about self as a kind of subject or subjectivity. So when I'm thinking about myself, let's say I'm making a plan to do something tomorrow, or if you remember this, this is mental time travel, or I'm thinking about what I did yesterday, very often the way in which I do that, it can be a kind of simulation, but it's like a story, like those simulations are kind of like stories, they're almost, you could call them narratives, and sometimes they're very explicitly narratives, they have a kind of narrative structure as we're thinking about what we're going to be doing, or when we're thinking about who we are, we're often thinking about ourselves as if we were someone else, like we make ourselves into a kind of object, and that's me. So that's self as object, and we're going to focus on that kind of self for now. There's also a sense of self as subject, which is the sense of as you're sort of looking out from your eyes, there's a sense of there being a subjectivity in there looking out here. So that's another sense of self, a sense of self as the seer, the knower, the feeler.

We'll address that eventually too, but for now let's go with that self as object. So one way of thinking about that self is that it is a character in a story. When we think about who I, when you ask who am I, we can say oh I'm this person who looks this particular way and has these kinds of habits and has these kinds of feelings and is from this place, and again like we're describing a character in the story. And there's a couple of things we should really notice about when we do that. The first of them is actually that you are not a story.

As you are right now in this moment, you are simply an aware conscious being. The story of your past is a set of thoughts. That doesn't mean they have no connection to reality. That doesn't mean that there isn't what you might call a series of events that seem to have happened that we experience. So there's a kind of reality that we could say is certainly relevant to that.

But the story you tell of yourself is something that we've extracted from those series of events. So that story is not who you are right now. The story of who you think you will be in the future is also just a story. We might even not make it to tomorrow. Who knows what will happen.

The idea of impermanence and death is actually a really good way of responding to this fixation on the story of the self. We can have an idea of where we're headed and what we're going to be doing, but of course all of that future self could be just a complete imagination, a complete active imagination because of course we might die at any moment. So this way of really seeing through the story is critically important in Buddhist practice. You are not a story. Now what do we mean by that a little bit more precisely?

So if we think, what do you, when I say me, what does that refer to? When I think of, if you take the word John, what does John refer to? This being that exists supposedly in the past and in the future. Well if there were, let's take some other independent person, I don't know, let's just call him Bob, right? So let's say we're talking about Bob because talking about yourself in this way is just like talking about somebody else.

You're making, you're talking about some object in a way, right? Some character. So let's say Bob who is present somewhere right now. The Bob in the past, if the Bob in the past existed and the Bob in the present also exists, do we say that the Bob in the past is real in the way that the Bob in the present is real? So is the future Bob real in the way the present Bob is real?

If all three Bobs are real, the past Bob, the present Bob and the future Bob, they're all equally real in the same way, then it seems like there's three Bobs, right? Either there are three Bobs or there's one Bob who somehow exists in, he's a time traveler. He like exists in the past and in the future and he also exists in the present. Clearly this idea of there being a character who's the same person in three different moments doesn't really work out too well. So remember when we talk about the view, part of the way we talk about this is in terms of the ultimate and the conventional.

The way things really are ultimately and the way things are in terms of how we make our way through the world. Another way of saying this is from the standpoint of the meditative session where we're seeing into the ultimate nature of reality, there's a perspective and then there's a perspective that we need to employ when we're off the cushion between sessions. So from the standpoint of the ultimate, there is no Bob who is this single character existing in the past, present and future. Think about this in regard to your own self now, your own story of yourself. Imagine yourself as five years old, maybe you can remember that, five, ten years old and yourself, imagine yourself when you're 95, let's give you a nice long life.

And then the self you are right now, are you the same person? Very few of us probably really want to say we're exactly the same person as we were when we were five years old. How about when you were one years old? How about the day of your birth? Is that the same you?

Leave alone this problem of like there being three entities that are real over time is also just the fact of our development. We know that we change. So what is this idea there's one single person that's you, the unchanging you, that's me who is this character in a story, the same character over time. From the standpoint of the ultimate perspective of seeing the way things truly are, what we call yatha bhuta darshana in Sanskrit, seeing the way things truly are, this kind of self can't exist. That doesn't mean we can't tell stories, of course we tell stories, but there is an incoherence in the story.

That means that the story can be convenient, it can be fun, we can tell stories of all kinds of fun stories, of all kinds of characters. We can imagine things about ourselves, but we also just have to recognize that ultimately it doesn't make sense. You are not who you were five years old. You're not the 95 year old person that maybe someday you will be. You're not even the person you were yesterday or a minute ago.

You're not the person you're going to be in a minute from now. There's only, in a sense, to the extent we could say there's a you from this ultimate perspective, maybe the only thing we can say is there's what's happening right now. We'll come back to that, whether that could be you, we'll see. But for now, the story clearly is not who you are. So ultimately, you're not a story.

Now when we think about the stories we do tell about ourselves, and this is where again our capacity for noticing, for using our awareness is very important, especially that meta-awareness to notice as you're even going through the day, to try to cultivate more and more a sense of hmm, how am I, now what am I thinking, but how am I thinking? What's the sort of larger background of the way I'm thinking? And to start noticing what kind of story do you tell about yourself? What kind of character have you created? Again ultimately, you're not that character, and actually really touching into that is so valuable to take a moment, even right now, to notice that your imagination of yourself in the past, thinking about yourself yesterday, just recognizing that's a thought.

Even the self in the future, what you're gonna do tomorrow, recognizing that's just a thought. Even the self right now, the self that you turn into a character, into an object, the me, so to speak, recognizing also that's a thought. Does this make you disappear? I don't think so. Does it make me disappear?

This mind body system is still going right along, but it can free us from, again this is what we can do on the cushion, or in moments through the day, it's just saying, hey I'm caught in the story of myself. You're not that story, you are not a thought. But of course we do tell stories, and we even need to tell stories, stories about ourselves and others. So from the ultimate perspective, there is the story of yourself, it's not who you are, but conventionally we plan, we do our mental time travel, we think about the past, we project into the future, hopefully without too much grasping and fusion, and again that's something we can change, that's a skill we can develop to get a little bit less fused, a little bit less grasping about our thoughts, but we still need to tell that story. And one important thing to do here is of course from the ultimate perspective of selflessness to see that you are not that story, but also then to just notice what kind of story do you tell, and part of the work of the Bodhisattva path, of the Buddhist path in general, is changing that story actually, telling a new story, a different story, the story of the awakening being instead of the story of the being who was stuck on the merry-go-round of suffering.

So how do we retell that story? What do we need to do? One of the things that's important to do is to figure out well where are we starting from? What kind of story are we telling now? And for many of us sometimes that story involves a lot of self-criticism, a lot of negative thoughts directed toward the self, a lot of negative self-image.

Experience-wise, it can be extremely useful just to notice that coming up, not be averse to it, just be open to it, to notice that it's happening, and then to see it as a thought. The image of yourself as negative is itself also just another thought, another story. Which having that experientially is really valuable. So I encourage you to do that practice, especially when you notice it happening. Just see through it.

So that story, the very negative story of self-criticism, sometimes we talk about self-compassion, but here I think really we're using more the wisdom approach, the insight approach, seeing through the very idea of that kind of story. One feature of this story that's actually, I think, quite powerful culturally, maybe especially in the United States, that comes along with this kind of self-critical attitude is something that His Holiness the Dalai Lama encountered in the meeting in the 1990s. I heard about this from my friend Sharon Salzberg, the great meditation teacher, and Sharon was there. Sharon might have been the one who told him this, who was engaged in conversation with him. And basically, there are a bunch of other Buddhist teachers there, and they were talking about what kinds of issues come up in teaching Buddhism to Westerners, and I think it was Sharon that said, well Your Holiness, actually one of the issues we find is that a lot of our students really don't like themselves.

Like they even sometimes have self-loathing, like they loathe themselves, they even maybe hate themselves. And His Holiness's initial response was, no they don't, meaning he just couldn't believe it. Like what? Are you kidding? It took quite a while of translation and conversation for him to finally get the idea that there are people who actually don't like themselves.

And this was, and you can see when there's actually I think video available of this meeting through the Mind and Life Institute, and when you see it it's like, oh yes, wow, that's really, he was a bit shocked. So we can see that culturally, we have an issue maybe around this, that it would seem as much less powerful in some other cultures like Tibetan culture. Are there people in Tibetan culture who have self-loathing? Actually I would imagine so. But it's almost like a motif for our culture.

So how do we get there culturally? Well you could say that one of the ways we might be getting there culturally is that we have a tendency to do a lot of self-focus, that maybe unlike other cultures we are raised from a very young age to kind of be inwardly focused, to focus on our feelings, how we're feeling, who we are. Also who are we going to become? What kinds of an image are we going to have? When I first started practicing Buddhism, I was in, it was in 1981, I was 20 years old, and I was really not in very good shape because I had really locked myself into a particular kind of story of myself.

I wanted to be an astronaut, so I went to United States Air Force Academy. And for various reasons that ended up not working out. I left after a couple of years and it was not a good time. I ended up at Amherst College and my first teacher was a Tibetan man named Tatar Tukun Rinpoche and I studied with Bob Thurman who was there at that time. And a lot of what I found really helpful about Buddhism then was that I had a certain story of myself that I really was fixated on and it told me that story just isn't who you are.

You don't, there isn't a self like that. That's just like the blue monster in the closet. There is no such thing. You can't, you can't achieve the goals of that being because that being doesn't exist. I didn't, unfortunately I didn't really have so much of a negative story about myself at that time, but many people do have that negative story which comes from possibly a lot of this inward self focus, the kind of emphasis on creating this kind of image of who you're supposed to be.

And we do know in psychological research that high levels of self focus, even how many times a person uses the first person pronoun in a day like I or me correlates with depression. So part of what may be helpful certainly are sites of practices and we're going to be doing some compassion practices soon, kinds of practices that are about loving kindness and compassion that include oneself. But maybe something that's even more important is just breaking that habit of self focus which is to say breaking the habit of thinking that the story is real, that's who you are. So moving beyond that story is critically important for us. Again from the conventional perspective we do need a story.

So a story that's very negative is not going to be helpful. How do we change that? First we recognize that it's happening. Second we de-reify it, we see through it, we recognize that it's just a story. Third we also develop maybe a different kind of relationship to the story in general which is less fused, less fixated.

And then fourth which is key here is we start to develop new habits of storytelling where we actually have a different story to tell. And this is one of the great insights I think of the Buddhist tradition. It's not necessarily articulated this way in traditional terms but actually there is a kind of brilliant retelling of the story of the self that is available. And there are various ways that this retelling can work. So one feature of that retelling first of all is the notion that in some sense who you are is almost like a mystery.

It's not, you can't, you know, no story is going to encompass you. And when we have in particular a kind of new narrative universe that we construct suddenly new kinds of stories become available, none of them are who you are truly. But there's this amazing kind of wondrous universe that the Buddhist traditions offer for telling a new kind of story. This is really a critical part of this kind of change is recognizing how our narrative universe in a way kind of might fixate us, might get us stuck in a particular style of story so that even when we try to change the story we somehow always end up in something that just isn't working. Let me explain a little more about what I mean by this idea of a narrative universe.

So maybe you're a fan or you certainly probably have heard of things like, you know, the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or Star Trek or what have you, you know, or the story of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. So these are all different narrative universes. They're ways in which stories are told. So a narrative universe is basically a kind of world, a world of stories, a world for telling stories. And narrative universes have rules.

They're ways in which those narratives run. So for example, if I'm telling a story in the narrative universe of the Lord of the Rings, and, you know, fans do this, right? They dress up. It can be quite a lot of fun. I've seen some of these great conventions where people are dressed up very convincingly as hobbits and elves and so on, right?

So if they dress up as a hobbit, they have to follow the rules of the universe. And one of the rules of the universe that I really think is great is that, you know, elves never wear shoes and they have hairy feet. So people actually buy, you know, these like prosthetics that, you know, they wear over their feet and they're like big hobbit feet with hair on them. You've got to have hairy feet if you're a hobbit. That's the way it is.

If you're an elf, you have to have 20 years, right? Orcs look a particular way. Now if you're in the Star Trek universe, and that's another kind of world of fandom, you know, there are certain kinds of uniforms you're supposed to wear, Vulcans also have pointy ears, but not quite like elves. You know, they have green blood. I'm not sure that fans go to that extent quite, but, right?

And if you're in the Star Wars universe, then there, you know, there are Jedi knights and Sith lords and TIE fighters, you know, and lightsabers and so on and so forth. And then there's our universe, actually, like where people have cell phones and whatever. So in each of these kind of different narrative universes, there are possible stories that can be told, but there are also impossible stories, right? Stories that don't make any sense. So you can't tell them.

Like one of the ways that you can't tell a story is where you just mix together a whole bunch of different narrative universes. And you say something like, I don't know, Frodo picked up his cell phone and called Luke Skywalker because he thought Spock had taken his lightsaber. Like Frodo doesn't have a lightsaber nor a cell phone. And Spock, you know, what would he need a lightsaber for? And I don't think Luke has a cell phone either for that matter.

I mean, like the universe, and then so part of the reason you can't do this, and this actually has to do with the way in which the brain is working, because when we're thinking about narratives, narratives actually have a lot to do with prediction. So in other words, you could think of the brain, I really like Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on this, and she's written a great book called How Emotions Are Made, which I highly recommend to you. And this is a whole kind of style of interpretation of brain function that's called predictive processing. And very briefly, you can think that kind of the human capacity for telling stories is sort of related to the general capacity for brains to predict what's going to come next. So we have a set of what is sometimes called priors, like things we've learned from experience that are activated by current experience.

And what we're doing is we're predicting what's going to happen next. And then when we get some kind of sensory information that contradicts that, we change the prediction. Otherwise, we just keep going. So it's not so much that you sort of walk in a room, and then you see your eyes interact with the material there, and then you see it. It's more like you walk in a room, and you're seeing, your brain is predicting what you will be seeing, especially if it's a familiar environment.

And then you really, your sensory information only becomes relevant if it contradicts what the prediction is projecting for you. Very interesting idea. So in order for us to do that, there has to be kind of regularity in the prediction process. In a sense, when we project that, when we take this idea and move it into the world of a narrative, there has to be kind of rules of the narrative. So this is in some ways built into our capacity for a simulation, for mental time travel, and so on.

We are, in a sense, constantly predicting, in a sense kind of like constantly telling stories in a way. So those stories on the idea of the priors, like our previous experience, which forms, we start to form rules about how the world runs. We learn this from our parents, from our families, from our cultures, right? They give us a certain kind of narrative universe. So even when we try to tell a new story, if we're stuck in the narrative universe, it may not be all that different.

If we're kind of stuck in the, let's just suppose we were stuck in the Lord of the Rings universe, right? We can tell new stories, but maybe there are still orcs and still rings of power. Let's just say it hasn't been destroyed yet. And then we can't tell a story without that stuff in that universe. We tell a Star Wars story, and you can't do it without the force.

You've got to have the force to tell that story, right? And then you've got to like the good side, the dark side, and the light side, and all that business. What if we want a story without that? We can't tell it in that universe. So one of the key aspects of this kind of work with the story of the self is, first of all, recognizing that the story is not new, but also secondly recognizing what kind of story are you telling?

What is the universe of your stories? What's possible to you? Your narrative universe forecloses, puts boundaries around the possibilities of the story of yourself. So when you see that, first of all, you're not the story, it also means you're seeing that the narrative universe is not reality, right? Yes, whatever the rules of the story are, that's not reality.

Each culture has its own kind of narrative universe, slightly different, sometimes very different. For example, there are, in Tibetan culture, we can tell a story of the self in which I could be, I could learn to fly in the air, actually, or become a Buddha, for that matter. And the Western story, and let's say an American story, maybe before contact with Buddhism, for example, you certainly couldn't tell the story of becoming a Buddha, and in our contemporary world we can tell stories maybe that, you know, a Tibetan nomad probably would have a very hard time telling, like working in an office on Wall Street on the 100th floor of a building, driving a Maserati, kinds of stories that are just unimaginable. I've had a lot of contact with Tibetans and some of them from very remote places who recently come out of Tibet, and I've had some wonderful moments of showing, you know, Tibetans from remote places like that, highways with eight lanes on each side, and they're like, they just can't believe it. It's like not in their narrative universe.

So what's your narrative universe like? Here's a key element of the Bodhisattva's narrative universe that I think is so important for us, which is that it's something that we've already touched on, actually, that we should come back to and recall, really, and that is this notion that you, in a sense, already are awakened. You have, your fundamental nature is the nature of a Buddha, of an awakened being. That is the nature of all sentient beings. All sentient beings, in their core, are awakened.

All sentient beings, therefore, can become fully awakened, that can manifest. As an additional part of this, if you like, narrative universe, is that not only is your essential core awakened, but also all of the confusion, all of the obscuration, all that which blocks our awakening is not essential to who we are. It's what we can call a Guntaka in Sanskrit, Loborwai in Tibetan. It's inessential, it's temporary or adventitious. We'll explore this more when we discuss next time the Bodhisattva path.

But for now, just think about what it would be like to tell a story of yourself in which part of what is structuring your narrative universe is the idea that you, and indeed all the beings that you meet, are in their essential nature awakened, confused, right? They're struggling, suffering, but in their core awakened. What kind of story becomes possible then? Now, in practical terms, there are other ways in which the Buddhist traditions have kind of given us clues about how we retell the story of the self. And some of these clues connect also to the whole issue of changing our habits.

So one of the key features of Buddhism historically has been monasticism. As it turns out, the Bodhisattva path actually arises as a point historically around the start of the common era when there's more and more emphasis on non-monastic practice. But there are some clues to the changing of the story that we find in monasticism that then carries over into lay practice as well. And one of these clues is the importance of changing context. So there's a way in which we kind of live out the story of our narrative universe.

We dress a particular way. We greet each other a particular way. We have ways of eating and so on, expectations, ways of predicting what's going to happen next. So if I come up to you and put out my hand and you're a Westerner, you're an American, for example, then you know I'm sort of saying we're getting ready to shake hands. But in Tibetan culture, one of the most formal greetings is actually not that many people do this anymore, but one of the most formal greetings is to stick out your tongue.

So if I come up to you and I go, you might be a little surprised, right? You weren't predicting that. So we sort of live out in our behaviors how the narrative universe that we're occupying. Just like people are doing role playing, when they're doing role playing, they put on the clothes and then they kind of try to act the way they're supposed to in that narrative universe when they're doing role playing. So how would we change, if we're going to change the story, also it's not just kind of a mental thing, it's actually also very much a question of changing the way in which we're living out this story.

So monasticism is a very interesting case of this because it involves a kind of radical change of all the aspects of the story of ordinary life, right? You don't wear the same clothes anymore, you don't follow the same eating habits, you don't, you actually follow a different schedule in most cases. There are rules and regulations that regulate monastic life that are very different than lay life, right? So for example, very strict monasticism, if there's something, if someone gives you something, a terra vada monk, some of them still follow this, the Tibetan monks don't follow this tradition so much, but a very strict interpretation would be, if I say, oh hey, here's an orange, you know, and I put it on the table, a very strict monk can't pick it up, because you can only, you're not supposed to take the not given. So there's a rule, like a very specific rule, that has to be followed.

That is a way of restructuring the narrative universe of a person. And some of them, so we don't necessarily need to go to that extent, but there are some very key ways that we can start to remind ourselves of being in a different universe. So some of that, a very interesting practice that can be very useful, is actually a practice of generosity. The first step in the bodhisattva life, the awakening life, is the practice of simply being generous. This can mean actually giving, but also it can be very simple, a simple act of like lighting a candle, and making that an offering to those who you admire, or an offering in more traditional context to the buddhas, the awakened ones, and the great bodhisattvas, the great awakening beings.

One can have a reminder of some kind. Sometimes Buddhists carry a rosary. Sometimes they have a particular image. Sometimes they carry some kind of a blessing cord, or an amulet with them, something that sort of reminds them of being in a different universe. One can change one's diet.

Of course, we know that changing your diet, and getting exercise, and maybe even becoming fabulously wealthy, and all of those things don't make us happy. We know lots of people who are in great physical shape, and have a perfect vegan diet, and are billionaires, but they're not necessarily that happy. But these can be ways, or ways of changing how we behave in this regard, including how we make our living, that those can actually be very important ways of reconfiguring our narrative universe, to enable us to tell a truly radically different story about ourselves. One of the key ways we can do that also is to tell a story that is not just confined to this lifetime. So the traditional Buddhist way of approaching this is the idea of a multi-life.

And I've said previously that sometimes it's made very simple like, oh, you are exactly this person from a previous lifetime. It's actually much more complex than that. So the idea of there being a continuity of consciousness is that this consciousness, just like the character in a story, is constantly changing. So you're not exactly the same person, just like you're not really the person you were when you were five years old, if we talk about this idea of continuity of consciousness, you're not the person who you were, you're not some person from a previous life. But you are, in a sense, the descendant of that person.

So that multi-life perspective also opens up different kinds of stories to tell. But of course, you don't have to just use the idea of the continuity of consciousness. Because we can see that, even if you're not comfortable with that idea, there are other ways very concretely in which we are continuities of the past, of past persons even, that there is a sense in which we have a tremendous cultural inheritance, we have a tremendous inheritance from our families, we have a genetic inheritance, and we will leave traces, impacts, some very big, some small, but we will continue in a sense. The traces of our lives continue. So that sense of this kind of life is somehow extending beyond just the time when you're born and die, also enables a different kind of story to be told.

With all that in mind, let's just settle now for a moment and let go of the story altogether, because this is, of course, the first moment. This is what enables us to tell a different story and just end for a moment of simply letting go.