What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that everyday takes up most of your attention, a dash, a blip between the date of birth and the date of death on your gravestone. To the personal self, this is a depressing thought. But to you it is liberating. When each thought absorbs your attention completely, it means you identify with a voice in your head. Thought then becomes invested with a sense of self. This is the ego a mind made me that mentally construct itself feels incomplete and precarious. And that's why fearing and wanting are its predominant emotions and motivating forces. When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you, I never stopped speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realize that who you are is not the voice, the thinker, but the one who is aware of it. Knowing yourself as the awareness behind the voice is freedom. When we practice when we do when we're in sushi, and when we sit, when we reach a point when the thoughts have settled somewhat, when we even maybe get into samadhi that's when we are free of this dominant mind thinker. So that's why practice is, is really vital. There are many times when we sit on the mat and it's just a cacophony of sound in the head, or the body is really agitated and uncomfortable. We don't want to be there. But as we allow our awareness to surface then that settles and we can carry that off off the mat and into our lives. The egoic self is always engaged in seeking it is seeking more of this or that to add to itself or to make itself feel more complete. It wants recognition and this explains the egos compulsive preoccupation with future. Whenever you become aware of yourself living for the next moment, you have already stepped out of that personal self mind pattern. And the possibility of choosing to give your full attention to this moment arises simultaneously by giving your full attention to this moment, and intelligence far greater than the egoic mind enters your life. When you live through the ego, you always reduce the present moment to a means to an end, you live for the future. And when you achieve your goals, they don't satisfy you, at least not for long. When you give more attention to the doing, than to the future result that you want to achieve through it, you break the conditioning you break, the pattern you're doing then becomes not only a great deal more effective, but infinitely more fulfilling and joyful. One of the hallmarks of people who have have insight or who have been practicing a long time, is that they're, they tend to be more joyful. You know, if there is no joy in your practice, then do something else. It's not. Yeah, Joy is part of it's part of life part of what we're about here. Almost every ego or personal self small self contains at least an element of what we might call victim identity. Often for very good reason I my dad, some people have such a strong victim image of themselves that it becomes the core of their personality, resentment and grievances are an essential part of their sense of who they are. Even if your grievances are completely justified, you have constructed an identity for yourself that is much like a prison whose bars are made of thought forms. If you can see what you're doing to yourself, or rather what your mind is doing to you, this will be part of freeing. Experience the emotional attachment you have to your story, and become aware of the compulsion to think and talk about it. Be there as the witnessing presence of your inner state. You don't have to do anything. With awareness comes transformation and freedom. Here again, I would say that though, for people, survivors of abuse, this becoming awareness needs the help of trauma therapy, it can't be done just by sitting and observing Roshi Bolton, though, he is really always reminding us that noticing is the important function of our of our practice, seeing what's going on rather than trying to fix it or do anything at that moment. So just noticing, at least noticing when you are experiencing the sense of victimhood or whatever the emotion is. complaining and reactivity of favorite mind patterns through which the ego strengthens itself. For many people, a large part of their mental emotional activity consists of complaining and reacting against this or that. By doing this, you make others or situation wrong and yourself right, through being right you feel superior. And through feeling superior, you strengthen your sense of self. In reality, of course, you're only strengthening the illusion of ego. Can you observe these patterns within yourself and recognize the complaining voice in your head for what it is? The egoic sense of self needs conflict because its sense of a separate identity gets strengthened in fighting against this or that and in demonstrating that this is me. And that is not me. In his previous book, The first book that Tala wrote where he talks about the pain, body identifiable experience that we have of a pain body and how it feeds on negativity, and and that's how it sustains itself. So that's a different thing, but I'll just mention it because it's important not infrequently, tribes, nations and religions derive a strengthened sense of collective identity from having enemies. Who would the believer be without the unbelievable? unbeliever? So in your dealings with people can you detect the subtle feelings of either superiority or inferiority toward them?