So let's say a naturalist found a meditator in the jungle. Okay? Here's a meditator in the jungle and how would they describe them? Well, they are interested in a lot of physical characteristics. They would say, well, this is a eukaryotic part of the biosphere. It's a polycellular organism with a spinal cord. It's about biredeal symmetry. It also happens to give birth to live young, has memory glands. It feeds those. It's also a hominid, like characteristics it walks upright. And it also has advanced linguistic and toolmaking and learning capabilities. And they would say, well, this is a homo sapiensapiens. So that's what they care about. And they're right. And they describe all these things really extraordinarily well and meticulously detail. But when we try to go to mapping inner experience, which is incredibly rich and incredibly vast and incredibly complicated, yet we totally fall down. So in comparison to the way they were able to describe the limited organisms and the massive range of life that's out there and all its complexity, we are positively medieval by comparison. So we are totally shackled by ancient systems that are incredibly limited, incredibly naive. And I've spent a lot of time studying the maps and the terms and all these things. And they are woefully inadequate to the task. I don't mean to needlessly criticize them. Amazing traditions that have helped us get to where we are, but we need to do way better. So anyway, I know a tremendous number of meditators now. Not nearly as many as I hopefully I will know after I get to know some of you and even more people. But what I have learned is that the maps, which are very incredibly limited, simply totally fail to describe the richness of the inner life. They totally fail to describe the developmental progressions of what we see in terms of how people go through the path and what their individual experiences are like. They totally buy into certain package models such that if you get this thing, you will naturally get all these other necessarily abilities automatically. No questions asked. And they totally fail to describe the richness that we see. So what happened so a little bit now? I ran into people such as Willoughby and Judd. And so what part of why I'm giving this talk. And I realized when I started thinking because I've got this science training, I actually have taken basically all the courses of PhD epidemiologists would take in addition to having an MD and I've got published scientific papers and what not. But I realized that the language I myself was using to describe this field I care so passionately about was just total crap. And most of it's just terrible. It's not truly useless. It's just bullshit. And I was buying into that. And I had never really examined it from my own point of view. And I don't wait a second. Hold on. So there's this whole segmented part of my brain that had just totally failed to apply the things that had learned, monon scientific method and my fascination and love of the naturalist to what I myself was doing in my own life, my own practice, my own book and all these things. So anyway, it's a real problem. And so I realized that we need to do a whole lot better when describing meditators, given that I have all this scientific background and training, I of course turned to Dungeons and Dragons. So, thank you very much. Anyway, so being an ultra geek of the first order, thank you very much. I of course turned to Dungeons and Dragons. And I thought back to the character sheets because I was, these contemplative neuroscientists were starting to come up with these sort of scales and these sheets and trying to figure out what we actually have there because they want to do FMRI studies, which I think is great. The most fun I had last year actually was a three and a half hours I got to play in an FMRI. Yeah, I don't know if that's a sad or beautiful commentary and it saves my life, I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a lot of fun. So, and I realized that they were using these trying to develop scales that you could actually say publish a journal like Science or Nature or you could put on the news or you could actually tell people about and have it not be totally burdened with terminology that is basically just going to cost terrible reactions, the vast majority of the time. And so I started thinking about my D&D days, which were, there were a lot of them. And I started to think about the character sheet. So the character sheet, so you describe these characters and everybody would have a different character. How many people here have played Dungeons and Dragons? Anybody got a hand? Oh yes, thank you very much. Okay, now keep them up. Let's add to this. How many people have ever played any kind of fantasy role playing game, World of Warcraft or Star Wars or whatever these things are, get them up. Okay, anyway, so a lot of people, you'll know what I'm talking about in the rest, you just have to pretend. Okay, anyway, so, but we have a character here and this character is the class of this character is the geek. If you can't read this, I'll read it for you, some of you in the back of the kit, see this? So, and a geek that had various attributes and Dungeons and Dragons, so they have strength and intelligence and wisdom and dexterity and constitution and charisma. And these would be basically on a three to 18 scale, those numbers kind of meaning something in terms of what you could do, 18 being better. And it would, you know, say how easy it was to hit you and how many hit points you had, how much damage you could take if you were attacked and all these things. And, you know, and then various skill sets, and then the various classes and each character has their own little thing they do. But this here, it says, the techie may forego paper in pencil games entirely, but when he plays, he does as much as he can on his laptop, he plays World of Warcraft, one of, out of every four hours he's awake and makes a living working as a tech support hotline and selling characters on eBay. He has four computers, each with a different operative system, just so he can say he has them. He likes techno robots and plans to become the next Bill Gates. His skills include video games, computer use, hacking porn sites, programming, and the fetal position. Anyway. So, so we have here a model for mapping spiritual development. Thank you. Okay. So, or the beginnings of one, because I realized that we have to come up with a better way of actually describing all the nuances of the individuals that are out there and drawing from the naturalist because there's a lot out there. There are a lot of animals out there in the jungle and they're very, very different. So as I've gotten to, you know, through these online communities in the internet, I've actually got to meet a lot of these obscure, really advanced, really skilled, really deep, interesting, you know, practitioners that have done all these various practices and mixes of practices that are totally unique to them, maybe their particular combination of what they did and for how long. And they each look really different. They each look really different. They have very different vibes and different interesting perspectives and different things they do really well and interesting things they saw that, you know, maybe not many other people have ever even seen. And so we don't know that. And the neuroscientists don't know that. Because no one's ever gone out and really asked to take in a particular survey of the underlying thought minutes, thank you. And really seen what's out there. So I'm going on and on. But anyway, so I started thinking about how you would map some of this stuff. And this is a picture of Sister Jesse. And I thought, well, let me go back to something kind of traditionally Buddhist too. And try to come up with a character sheet that kind of fuses traditional Buddhist criteria in, you know, maybe some modern scientific stuff and some sort of non-sectarian language. And I don't know. So I said, this is my poetry attempt at that in 20 minutes, which is totally ridiculous. Anyway, so this is Sister Jesse. And I met her in Bodhgaya. And she went to India. It was in India and saw the staggering poverty and the mistreatment of women and the stay of the educational system. It's got so angry that, of course, she decided to a very Buddhist thing and sit in silence for a year. And when she came out of her silence, I'm happy to report she was actually angry, either to ever. She was even matter and more pissed off about the whole thing. And so she went and sat for another six months. And then she came out and truly remarkable, individual. And so I started talking about morality. So morality. And she goes around helping people very selflessly in the villages around Bodhgaya and just does tremendous work there. So anyway, Sister Jesse. But it leads to, you know, got all these different animals again in the jungle and different visions of what we might be able to develop and grow. So like, you know, this is, so in terms of talking about morality or training of morality or virtue, Sheila or Sheila, whatever you want to call it. So, you know, and so the question is, we could ask ourselves, like, what's our, ourselves, what's our own character sheet look like or how we would be studied this for two interesting questions? You know, are we really kind? Are we actually really kind and how kind can you be? Do we actually know what a reasonable scale for kindness is? Like, how kind can you get and what's the real human range of kindness? I don't think we even know that or how to measure it, but we need to be asking those questions or generosity, like for ourselves, like how generous are we? And what's the reasonable human scale? Like, how generous could we be? What do the most generous people on the planet look like? What do the least generous people look like? What where do most people fall? And how do we compare with that so we can reasonably assess our development as we go along and try to become more generous? Or how's our sense of humor? You know, are we, you know, are we Robin Williams or are we, you know, so where do we fall in this reasonable scale? You know, and so, you know, or how well do we relate to all the standard temptations of power or money or sexual things or, you know, drugs or substances, you know, and what is the ordinary human range? You know, and how do these things, how do development on these things correlate with any other kind of development in the spiritual world? I will actually say a lot of them relatively poorly, but that's, we'll get to that. So anyway, this is just talking about, you know, so when we try to figure out, you know, how to come up with a scale for morality, you know, how do we actually do that? And what are actually the qualities and how do we measure them? And these are some of the things I think the neurosciences we think of, I'm almost out of time, I think, realize. Anyway, so, and then we, I'm sigging when Freud, obviously, siggy, you know, so Western Psychological Health has actually added a tremendous amount of innovation to the Buddhist traditions, as much as I'm known for kind of, you know, saying we've got to do more than that, we do. But, you know, how well are we, do we stay free from the personality disorders? How well do we avoid cluster B traits? How often do we use mature coping mechanisms? These are all actually relatively well studied things, and how do these correlate with any other aspect of spiritual practice? I'm not really sure, but I think those are questions we need to be asking, and things that need to be on that character sheet of like what are character sheet and the character sheet of everybody else and how it would change as we develop.