Dan Harris

Uh, so it's, it's from Jon Kabat-Zinn who is, um, another of the really senior teachers here in the West.

Um, uh, and we, what he means or what I understand is that if you think of the mind as like a nonstop, uh, a stream of consciousness, mostly me, me, me thoughts, uh, just rushing all the time, uh,

If you think of that as a waterfall, then you can think of what's in the rock face behind the waterfall.

There might be a little indentation or crevice from which you can observe the thinking mind.

And so every time you wake up from distraction in meditation and you notice, oh, wow, I've just been in the grips of mana or envy or comparing mind or, oh, wow, I've just been thinking about, wonder if they'll have pastrami at lunch or whatever it is, they won't.

Yeah.

whatever it is, then you are in that little nanosecond there behind the waterfall.

You're not caught up in the contents of your consciousness.

You're seeing it with some hopefully non-judgmental remove.

So does that make any sense, what I'm saying?

Well, I'd be curious to hear from the more experienced teachers on the stage about that.

But in that little glimpse where you're just watching it instead of inhabiting it, you are not attached.

Exactly.

As Jeff said in the meditation for the one little part that I was awake for, the...

You, letting go, which is another way of saying non-attachment, is probably better translated as letting be, letting it just be there.

So you're just like watching, hopefully with like a little grin on your face, how crazy you are, right?

And that just for, it's not some permanent state, at least not for us unenlightened worldlings, as the Buddha calls us.

It's just a little glimpse of, oh yeah, I could just let that be there.

And then you're right back in it.

And then you're free again.