Hi everybody, how are you do our traditional wave if you're on your video there, that's good. That's great. I see, see some old friends, new friends and and new people. So it's my pleasure to join you today. I wanted to, you know Andrew likes to start with a little bit of a riff, as he calls it so the thing that I've been thinking about. And, and very much encountering is the impact on people's mental health of this whole pandemic situation. And of course we have more than just the pandemic we have. It's like a trifecta, it's the climate change in environmental extremes. My wife is in Denver, taking care of some family business and, and, and in Boulder in the foothills where Angeles, they had, they had four feet of snow. I'm, I'm here in Southern California. So, extreme weather for here, here is if it gets into the 30 so, we haven't had that kind of, but we have fires we have droughts, earthquakes, it's, it's pretty good. It's pretty crazy. And then all of the insanely divisive politics tribalism, lack of sympathy or empathy that that hopefully will be changing a little bit but it, it's the Protect to protectionism and nationalism that goes with feeling threatened, we're threatened by the pandemic we're threatened by the climate we're threatened by the politics we're threatened, and, and what's happening now is being threatened by anybody who doesn't look like us. So, it's, it's pretty scary. The end. And then the social isolation that goes with the pandemic. I have a therapist friend who he said all the teenagers are either thinking about killing themselves, or intentionally or doing it unintentionally through OD, because they're trying to escape from this terrible reality, which is something that we can address through our spiritual practice. If you're not spiritually inclined and I know this group has a lot of people doing lucid dreaming, and the but the whole point of that is that the boundary between spiritual non spiritual, spiritual and psychological, we're interested in. Ironically we we dream, and work with lucid dreaming to be awake to be awake in our dreams. From the Buddhist point of view. Awake is what it's all about. In fact, You may not know this but the word Buddha, which is the honorific title given to Siddhartha Gautama 2500 Some years ago. It's a Pali word that has the root is good, which is to awaken to wake up and add a che on the end. And it's one who has awakened. So in some of the more formal translations they call the Buddha, the awakened one because that's what the word Buddha means we're, which means there's a historical Buddha, which is the Buddha, but the principle is we all can be a Buddha, in the sense of one who wakes up. Now, when throughout our lives. Most of the time, it's a very, very short period, when we are able to, and I know Andrew has talked about this before, and it's a traditional expression. The difference between Buddhas and sentient beings are the Buddha's know that they're Buddha's. So, The real point is that whatever we're doing, whether it's religious, spiritual, psychological, the thing that we all have in common that we're here for is to wake up to wake up in our dreams,