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Welcome. Namaste, friends.

I'd like to begin with a poem by the poet Tukaram. He writes this. He says,

I was meditating with my cat the other day. And all of a sudden she shouted,

what happened? I knew exactly what she meant, but I encouraged her to say more,

feeling that if she got it all out on the table, she'd sleep better that night.

So I responded, tell me more dear. And she saw fully me out.

Well, I was mingled with the sky. I was comments whizzing here and there.

I was suns and heat. Hell, I was galaxies. But now look, I am landlocked in fur.

To this I said, I know exactly what you mean. What to say about conversations between mystics.

Landlocked in fur. So this is referring to our imprisonment in the illusion of a separate cell,

cut off from the vastness and the mystery and the love that's here.

A friend of mine was in Asia and a Buddhist teacher asked him to tell him the essence of

Buddhism, kind of testing him, I guess. And my friend's response was that there's no solid,

enduring self. And the teacher laughed and he said, no self, no problem.

And that's the title of a book by another friend highly recommended, the Tibetan teacher,

on a symptom. So many of you might know of this Buddhist teaching of anata, which is the

polyward for no self. And it posits that there are temporary ever changing bodies and minds.

But there's no intrinsic center. There's no owner of the body mind. There's no

locus of control, like an ego that's actually navigating. There's no centralized entity

...