Hello and welcome to another episode of the secular Buddhism podcast. This is episode number 100.

I am your host Noah Rochetta and today I'm talking about the Buddhist teaching of Keep Going.

Keep in mind you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. You can use it to be a better whatever you already are.

As I record this episode 100 of the podcast, I'm feeling a lot of gratitude for all of you who listen to the podcast.

One of the reasons I enjoy having a podcast is that it allows me to share my thoughts in an open and public way that allows people that I know and people that I love to get a glimpse into the way that I see life, the way that I understand reality.

It's sad but it's true that in most of our ordinary day to day communications, even those that were closest to, we rarely dig deep in our thoughts.

We communicate with each other usually on a superficial level. Sure it may happen from time to time that in the right circumstances we get into the deeper conversations about life and stuff.

For the most part, I think we spend a considerable amount of time just exchanging pleasantries and superficial exchanges about what we've been up to and how things are going.

But we don't really dig deep.

I mean most of our life would make people uncomfortable if you were just to ask the standard, hey how are you doing?

And they responded with something like well let's spend a few hours here. I have some very deep thoughts I need to get off my chest.

You'd be like hold on I'm back in a way here. I get it that's how we normally communicate.

But that's what I love about the podcast. It allows me to do just that. I get to share some of my deepest thoughts and explore some of the topics and ideas that are most profound for me.

And I get to do this knowing that some of the most meaningful things for me are going to be heard or listened to by people that I know and people that I love at some point in the future.

They might, I should say. I think about like my kids and their kids and who knows how many others just from that chain alone that might one day encounter these words and they might hear the words and say okay well that's how my dad thought or that's how my grandpa used to think about life or whatever.

And that's a fun one for me, especially in the circumstances that I'm in with the various ideologies that are expressed and viewed in my kids' lives.

It's fun for me to know that they will get to peak into my mind and listen and hear about topics and learn about me in the way that I see the world. So that's a fun one.

And I do think it's a little strange to have to admit that some of the people who know me best, who know how I view the world, how I make sense of the world.

Some of those people are you, the ones listening to this podcast. Many of you are total strangers to me.

I don't know you or anything about you and yet I feel a total connection to you because you do know me beyond that ordinary layer that honestly many of my closest friends and even closest family members only know me at that more superficial level.

They see what I post on social media and the you know the exchanges that we have at that Sunday family dinner those are always the more superficial pleasantries like I was talking about earlier.

But then there's this whole unique audience out there. Those of you who've listened to the podcast since the beginning, who I feel you know me at a deeper level.

...