Choose Again

bacon

Writing about these types of things is difficult. It's hard to avoid giving the wrong idea, because the ground from which we are speaking is a wrong idea. Or a confusing idea. It's like trying to accomplish something in a dream. You pick up a hammer and the nail turns into a clock, or you get on a bus and it turns into an elevator. Everything is constructed in such a way that nothing actually ever happens. It's the same in this waking dream, only we fool ourselves into believing it is otherwise because things seem to last longer. In fact they don't last at all. Any continuity we perceive is purely of our own projection.

So in that sense the whole idea of achieving enlightenment begins to be seen as folly. It's folly because the character (me) who is going to achieve enlightenment is just a temporary dream character. When you start to see the truth of this there is a big relief, and that portion of the dream tapers to an end (or perhaps in your case ends dramatically).

It is not that you don't exist, it's that you don't exist as the person you think you are. You are, but you are not what you think. Talking about it becomes ridiculous after a while.

For me, and perhaps for those of you who are reading this blog, it helps to come at the situation from a number of different viewpoints. The wonderful Course in Miracles, Buddhism, Advaita, the Tao. They all evoke the same non-dual message but they come at it in different ways. In the end they all bring us to a point of stillness—of stopping.

It is this point of stopping that is necessary in order to begin to see what is actually happening. We have to be convinced that there are no more tools we can pick up to make this dream "work." It won't work, ever, because it doesn't exist in any sense that can work. And we, who we think we are, are part of the dream.

We have bought into this dream, and in that sense a choice was made. But the choice, as ACIM points out, was not made in the past. It is being made every time we choose ego, thought, mind, over the silent, still, non-judging awareness that is at the center of our being. We are lost in thought and we believe that this state, of being lost in thought, constitutes a self. It does not.

The ego is a temporary apparition, and it is afraid of death because of this. Yet we, who we really are, are not temporary. We fade in and out of this state known as consciousness. But this particular state that we are right now defining as human life is not all of what we are. It's a temporary dream. As A Course in Miracles says, there is "nothing so deceptive as perception of form."

But perception of form is what we have to work with. We have to point at the truth of the situation using hammers that turn into clocks and buses that turn into elevators and words that morph in meaning as we speak them. Yet I still think it is worthwhile to speak them. Had not many others spoken them, perhaps imperfectly, I would not have been able to finally come to stillness.

We don't, upon beginning to get glimpses of truth, suddenly become pure beings who don't laugh or cry or grieve, or occasionally still get lost in thought-struggles. Our histories may now be irrelevant to us but they can perhaps be used to demonstrate something or to make a point for someone else.

That's what I've been trying to do here. I'm using whatever I have, and a lot of it is just junk, to evoke the choice that you can make for stillness—for what is. Choosing what is, a kind of radical dropping of the argument, a complete and full stop, is the only thing I can offer. It is the argument itself that creates the seeming problem of separation. And the argument, the opinion, the judgment, is just a thought, just a dream. It has no effects outside of the dream state. It does not touch what is. Yet being lost in it can be painful.

The ego has a lot of energy, a lot of momentum. Just look at the billions of us who are trapped in the dream and you can see how convincing it is. Sometimes you have to distract the ego with a story, or a bit of ritualized busy work in order to evoke the message. It's a lot like trying to give a dog some foul-tasting medicine. You may have to wrap it in bacon. The bacon does not prevent the medicine from working.

surprised by self

Recently I had a very deep, surprising experience of receiving approval and affirmation from someone from whom I'd long ago desired such things but had given up ever receiving them. That was a very warm and loving experience. It made my heart pound and my vision swim. For the next few hours I replayed the experience in my mind, savoring it. Then I let it dissolve. Hard on the heels of that, the very next day, I experienced what I perceived to be a surprise rejection from someone I very much admire and respect. That was shocking. It made my heart pound and my vision swim for a little while, and colored the tone of the next few hours while I tried to understand it. Then I let it dissolve.

My life is usually rather steady-on. It's a happy life for the moment. I am content. Neither one of these experiences changed anything about my life, yet they both created in me a renewed and temporarily strengthened sense of self. One "good," the other "not so good."

Neither one of them is real, because they are both temporary. As I watched my mind, it converted the first experience into any number of things, from a gift from God to a diabolical scheme. It did the same thing with the second experience—trying, as mind does try, to define, pigeon-hole, and make permanent something that is ephemeral and gone. Done and over as though it never existed.

What we think of as enjoyment or pain is often just this: the temporary creation of a self that is defined in relation to something that seems to be occurring in the environment—whether "good" or "bad." Like eating a meal or scratching an itch, these flare-ups of self are the crests of sensory waves, and then over. They pass through what is actually you the way clouds pass through the sky.

a quiet mind reflects love

When you choose peace of mind, what is over any conjecture, fear, opinion, construct, concept or definition, you have begun to trust that perhaps life happens better if you don't interfere. This is love.

All things come to the quiet mind. The quiet mind reflects heart.

Meanwhile, the body-mind keeps busy. It's like a little chipmunk that sniffs around trying to find the nuts and seeds and hide them somewhere so it'll never run out. It's harmless unless you shift your identity-attention into it, which is what we mostly do. Even then it's just confusion. Nothing has changed except the presence of suffering.

Experience comes and goes. Heaven and hell are both peak experiences that pass. One day you have a great day. The sun is shining and you're with your favorite people. There is laughter and health and good food and it feels like the best dream ever. And then it's over. And perhaps the next day you catch cold and your boss is especially cantankerous and it rains, you get a flat tire and lose your wallet. And then it's over.

The quiet mind is in love, yet even this it puts second to silence. Love is the reflection in the water of stillness. Stillness is primary.

the drive to recreate

The more mindful you are, moment to moment, the more pleasurable glimpses you get of how delightful it is to experience life with a quiet mind. And yet you become aware of something insidious and completely reflexive in the mind's reaction to this type of pleasure.

As soon as you receive one of these glimpses, the mind says, 'Oh Wow,' and tries to rewind the moment. It tries to recreate the moment, and the experience, whatever it might be, is lost, while a sense of "me" as separate from the experience, is created. In other words, the experience happens independently of the idea of "me" and is obstructed as soon as it is noticed as desirable by the mind.

This is not a problem, really, but it's something interesting to notice.

The mind's greed for pleasurable experience becomes more and more obvious, the more mindful you are. You can watch the same reaction happen again and again. There's a constant desire, on the part of the thinking mind, the conceptual mind, to recreate experience.

Noticing this tendency can be very helpful if you find yourself experiencing the sense that you "got it" and then you "lost it." Just come back, out of thought. Turn your attention away, and drop it. The whole problem is fictional.

the six bardos

My son has been reading Turning the Mind into an Ally by Sakyong Mipham. He's been starting to meditate lately and has expressed an interest in Chogyam Trungpa. So I was looking through my bookshelves the other day wondering what I could send him to read and came across a book by Trungpa that I couldn't remember reading. It's called Transcending Madness, The Experience of the Six Bardos.

While technically the Tibetan word bardo is associated with after-death states, in this book Trungpa talks about the bardos as particular qualities of ego which continually cycle one into the other. So the Tibetan Book of the Dead becomes more like the Western Life of the Ego.

In the first chapter he gives a brilliant little talk about the bardos, followed by a dialogue with students. The bardos, which are characteristic ego states, or descriptions of the experiencer and its experiences, are: the god realm (heaven, bliss, in which there is almost but not quite, an elimination of duality), the jealous god realm, the human realm, the animal realm, the hungry ghost realm and the hell realm.

If you are familiar with your own mind, I don't really need to describe the realms. But the interesting thing he pointed out, was that we cycle repeatedly "down" from the god realm to the hell realm and back up again until the state of confusion is seen clearly.

As long as there is duality—a sense of being separate—there is, even in states of heavenly meditative bliss, the certain possibility of ego—of the factor arising that wants something more, something different, in its quest for completion. And in these high states, that factor may be the knowledge that through a degree of acceptance, experience can be intensified. Working the system, in other words. So the goal of intensity of experience underlies the "correct" method, yet determines the outcome, which is, in this analogy, a descent from the god realm to the jealous god realm.

As long as we are craving experience (attention is trapped by the ego) we cycle continuously. Heaven becomes somehow too clean, too blissful, and so we begin the descent, only to eventually wind up in hell and begin the ascent again.

It is the desire for a different experience, in any realm, that gives rise to the experiencer. They arise together. The temporary delusional self is created by the desire for something different.

With every desire that arises, there also arises the birth of a temporary self, designed to implement the desire. The self is created by mind's belief in and identification with the desire. This creates the sense of "I" in relation to what is happening. The same thing happens when fear arises. A potential self is created whose goal is to escape the source of fear.

The antidote is always awareness. No matter what arises, the attitude is always that of the witness—things are exactly as they should be, full stop. In ACIM terms, this is forgiveness, the shift from the ego to the Holy Spirit. Attention shifts away from the self-creation mechanism and its hypnotic spell to the ever-present space of silence.

In the dialogue section after the talk, one student asked Trungpa Rinpoche if he had ever experienced a hell realm. He replied, "Definitely, yes." So the student asked him, "What do you do?" And he answered, "I try to remain in the hell world."

equal

Realization seems to be a process of understanding how to shift your attention from form to content. It's as though this ability to shift the attention uses a long-atrophied muscle of awareness that must first be located before it can be moved.

There are not a whole lot of great ways to put it into words, but thousands of beings have tried, some with greater success than others, and I have benefited from these attempts. When you feel trapped or imprisoned, it's wonderful to come upon the legend of a way out, and then, with persistent intention, to discover that the way out involves only a shift of attention and a quiet mind.

It's important to realize that any kind of chauvinism about the superiority of one method over another method is a trap. There are thousands of paths, and the one that works for you finds you, takes you to a certain stage, and then leaves you there until the next one comes to find you. The information you need wants to find you as much as you want to find it. What you need comes to you every day if you are receptive.

It's easy to see the common ground in all non-dual thought systems. They're all wonderful and effective. It's rare to come upon one that does not insist it is the only way, or the fastest way, but all such ideas are nonsense. They're all just the ego squeaking in there for one last lick. Any concept that contains notions of superiority or inferiority must be seen as just so much noise within the form camp. If you pay attention to the experience of believing that some thing/thought/concept is inferior or superior to another, you can feel the special subtle pain by which the ego is known. Ego cannot appear without this pain—it's like a tone or a color—a telltale sign.

Any system, adhered to and believed with faith and persistence will bring you home to yourself. What is important is to learn to locate and move that muscle of attention.

And because we are unable to distinguish what it IS, it is easier, for some of us, to use a process of elimination and figure out what it is NOT. When everything it is not is seen, content emerges. Attention must be painstakingly withdrawn from every concept and phenomenon the mind attaches to as real. It's like de-hypnotizing yourself.

what good is it if i can't know it

Reading Nisargadatta's "I Am That" last night before bed. This line: ...all knowledge is a form of ignorance.

In the context of the paragraph:
"For the purpose of discussion you can arrange words and give them meaning, but the fact remains that all knowledge is a form of ignorance. The most accurate map is yet only paper. All knowledge is in memory; it is only recognition, while reality is beyond the duality of the knower and the known."

It reminds me of back last year some time when I was trying to understand Bernadette Roberts when she said that there is no such thing as conscious non-duality. As long as there is consciousness, there is the witness (in non-dual terms)—they arise together. In ACIM terms, the ego and its antidote, the Holy Spirit, arise together.

Our minds (consciousness, ego) cannot help being addicted to knowing. We are addicted to finishing the sentence, to drawing the conclusion—addicted to finding some ground, finding some way to explain, to contain in words (hence this blog) so that we can feel that we have a handle, a foothold, a way to control the seeming chaos of the event stream. Through knowing, we maintain separation, duality. This is consciousness.

And because our attention is trapped by the fascination of this addiction, trapped by the overuse of this somewhat limited tool, we overlook something. What we overlook is being. Being cannot be known by the thought-based mind. In our worship of the known we have devalued the very ground in which all knowing occurs. We have overlooked what we are, because we turn to the mind, and the mind says, "what good is it if I can't know it?"

We are constantly searching for something—constantly trying to find "it." The fact is that we ARE it. But we can't see this, or even value it, because we are looking for something that can be known and understood by the mind. We think the mind is the only tool in the toolbox. This is what ACIM means when it says that God is unaware of the ego, or the universe the ego has created. In order to BE, what IS does not need to be known.

All knowing is of the ego. It's all memory—the cobbling together of existing thought-forms to provide an explanation—a story—a narrative.

There are other tools in the toolbox. But in order to see this, you have to put down the one in your hand.

not a body, episode 768

How is it that I can hear or read something a thousand times, and have a deep intellectual understanding of it and then on reading it the thousand-and-first time, the presence of that truth in me suddenly and unexpectedly reaches out to the presence of that truth in thought and in that moment the iceberg calves, the wall crumbles and I am shocked to find that there is comprehension?

What was different this time than the other times? I have no idea. But when a block to understanding dissolves, what occurs is a profound feeling that I now know less, not more. A whole area of assumptions has fallen away, and I am left in that empty space of not-knowing. Oddly enough, the emptiness is comfortable. I can breathe freely.

Perhaps not-knowing is actually more natural to us than knowing. Or perhaps knowing can only really apply to what you are not.

Last night this occurred as I lay reading in bed. The sentence I was reading was, "When you know you are neither body nor mind, you will not be swayed by them."

I remember precisely how over the course of a weekend, about 16 years ago, I understood that I was not the (mostly painful) thoughts that floated through my mind. I understood that they had nothing to do with me—not even my deepest habitual assumptions were holding water.  Since that time there has been a continual revealing and flaking-off of hidden beliefs. Some of them are quite adhered and don't flake off—they wear away over time like the sticky remnants of a bandage until one day, they're gone.

For me, the belief that I am this body has been like super-glue. I would imagine this is true for many of you. As babies we are taught to isolate sensations, then group them and name them, and finally claim ownership of them. Ultimately, with ownership comes identification. "Show me your nose. Where's your tummy? Point to your eyes." and so on.

What was there before a tummy, eyes and a nose? A bundle of sensations. Pressure, rhythmic pulsings, coolness, warmth, seeing. As the mind quiets it becomes possible to witness these sensations and have just a hair's breadth of detachment from the experience of them, without naming them. So they feel interesting, surprising. Pain, for example, becomes oddly engaging—it's very easy to focus the mind on pain and in that focus it becomes slightly less disturbing and reveals itself as being not-continual. Attention stops running from it and fighting it and in that settling, the pain itself contains less suffering.

From there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to understanding that these sensations that arise, peak and dissolve against the sky of awareness, have nothing to do with "me." It's quite a revolutionary idea. If you entertain it for even a split second, it's too late. The grappling hook is over the wall.

Trust in your split-second realizations. Those are the seeds, and they are planted. Just let them go. They'll grow on their own.

hoist with his own petard

Who you think you are right now, in your body, with your likes and dislikes, families and jobs, good points and bad points—who you think you are right now—needs the promise of reward, or at the very least, of relief. You work so you can take a vacation, perhaps. You exercise so you'll stay healthy or look good. You eat right for the same reason—or maybe you eat compulsively to avoid feeling the feeling that makes you want to eat compulsively. You meditate and read spiritual books hoping that you'll be less angry, or less compulsive, or more peaceful. You participate in charity events because doing things for other people makes you feel less disadvantaged within—relieves some feeling of isolation.

Always implied is the idea that in some future time-space, as a result of the doing, there will be relief from "this," whatever "this" may be. Maybe for you it is physical or emotional pain. Maybe it's a feeling of anxiety, or dis-ease of some sort. Maybe it's guilt, or confusion, or sadness, or poverty.

This mind, the mind that never stops talking, the one we think of as "me," will not do anything without the promise of a reward. The self that identifies with the body, and feels separate from other bodies, feels as though if it could only add to itself one more experience, one more thing, perhaps it would feel at-one, would feel complete, would be done feeling anxious and endangered.

This whole ball of wax—feeling identified with the body, feeling isolated and impoverished, believing that the answer is to add something to the self in order to complete it, enrich it—is the theme of this human experience. It's very convincing, very thick with seeming consequences. It's difficult to extract a thread of awareness from this dense and tangled cycle.

And yet, once the mind is sufficiently quiet, you realize that, in truth, what you wanted relief from—what was giving you pain—was the very same mind that was sending you on endless wild goose chases to find the one thing that would quench its appetite for completion.

When that mind is quiet, the pain disappears. The goal becomes transparent. The chasing stops. The seeking stops. 

The mind that is sending you out to find the antidote is the mind that is feeding you the poison.

Its goal is to keep you busy chasing after experiences, enlightenment, heaven, pain-relief, so you won't notice that these goals are unattainable by the self that is chasing them, for the simple reason that when the chasing ceases, that self deflates, dissolves, loses its source of life, like a marionette when the strings are cut.

In the arena of chasing after enlightenment, however, there is always a chance that the seeker will see this fact, and then the game is over. So the ego is playing a dangerous game when it co-opts the spiritual search. Given the promise of ultimate pleasure, the mind is willing to be tamed. But once the mind is tamed, there is the possibility that the whole idea of ultimate relief will be seen as irrelevant, because the feeling of being flawed and incomplete has ceased. And the engineer is hoist with its own petard.

mindfulness

I was reading an article yesterday about phishing schemes—junk email that purports to be from your bank or some other organization you're involved with, claiming that they need you to re-enter your identifying information so they can update their records. If you fall for it and click the link, you enter a fraudulent website that looks just like the real thing. If you enter your information, the owners of the site can then steal it.

In the initial spam email, there is always either a vague threat of loss if you don't comply or a promise of great gain if you do. Your credit will be blocked, your good name on ebay will be tarnished, you'll inherit a million dollars—whatever.

The article was about web browsers that warn you when you are about to enter a fraudulent or dangerous web site, giving you a chance to back out before going further.

I awoke at around 1 a.m. last night after a dream in which an acquaintance was telling me that she entered just such a website and it turned out to be so malevolent that she was unable to exit the site and bit by bit everything on her hard drive was being contaminated. In the dream I was certain that she didn't know how to exit a hung program on the Mac (command, option, escape) so I pulled up the site on my own computer to show her how to do it.

It was some kind of entertainment site, and predictably enough, when I hit the "force quit" key-combination it didn't work. Nothing worked. The program was invading my hard drive as we watched and I was unable to even shut down the computer. The only alternative left was to pull the plug.

Unless you click the link and go to the phony site to enter your information, a phishing scheme is nothing but a harmless annoyance. Its life lasts from the time it enters your email box until you hit delete.

It's the same with thought. When you believe a thought, you are clicking the link, entering your information and prolonging the life of the thought by giving it your identity. When a thought becomes true for you, it gains longevity, the only longevity it has.

In meditation, it's appropriate to pass on clicking any links whatsoever as you watch thoughts arise, peak, and dissolve against the sky of awareness. In daily life it also takes vigilance to avoid getting involved with destructive, suffering-producing strings of thought.

If you do find yourself entangled in a line of thinking that is causing you pain, or if you find yourself feeling compelled to do something out of fear of loss, or from a sense of being incomplete and lacking, it's a signal that you've already clicked the link mindlessly and you're now knee-deep in the malware. There's nothing to do but force quit. Notice the internal dialogue and just drop it.

Ideally you want to have a mind like those web browsers that flash a warning screen at you when you are about to enter a fraudulent site, rather than becoming conscious only when you are struggling to exit a life-situation brought about by following a line of thought. This is the meaning of mindfulness.

denial and the paradox of effort

One thing ACIM makes clear is that remembering to turn from the ego (thought, judgment) to the Holy Spirit (the voice for Love, or silent witnessing) repeatedly, in our life situations, delusional though they may be, is a process. It calls this process forgiveness.

My son said to me yesterday, "I know this is a dream, but I'm not awake." That sense of being split between intellectual understanding and our moment-to-moment experience is the way it is for most of us.

There's no sense in denying it. Denial, or suppression of feelings, because we want to live up to some intellectual ideal of awakening, is a dry, sad, sham. When I read Nisargadatta, he too talks about process. He, too, talks about years of mindfulness, devotion, meditation—un-learning of habitual tendencies.

So where did this idea come from that there is no need for persistence—that there is no need to work at unconditioning what took years to condition?

Because, despite the fact that there is no future "there"—only here, now—and despite the fact that it actually doesn't take any effort to be what you already are, there is, yes, effort (and sometimes discomfort) involved in remembering that the choice between mindfulness and mindlessness in our moment-to-moment experience, is ours.

grievances, miracles, and how the craving for experience prevents awakening

There's a lot of misunderstanding surrounding the idea of "awakening." The ego, the little self, the false self, the body-identified self, is desperate to maintain this state of confusion, because it is the incessant desire for a better and different experience that creates the sense of a separate self in the first place. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, since time is simultaneous, that the desire for different and better experiences arises simultaneously with the illusion of the separate, isolated self.

Seeing this is both very easy and very difficult. Easy, because the principal itself is very simple. Difficult because the second it is recognized, the ego co-opts it and replaces it with a misinterpretation. So you have to continually look, and look again. It's like driving a car looking through a peephole. It requires focus, concentration and attention.

Most of us think of awakening, or heaven, or nirvana, as a state of uninterrupted bliss into which nothing disturbing can enter. You imagine yourself, as you are, immersed in a state of bliss. You crave this imaginary experience and continually compare your day-to-day painful life with the imagined state. You talk to your guru, you do your rituals, you do your forgiveness lessons, you burn your incense, you say your prayers, hoping to qualify for the imaginary state of awakening.

There's nothing wrong with all this, except that it's a dead end trap. This is the ego version of awakening, meant to keep you from doing anything of the sort.

The craving for imagined experience prevents awakening.

In order to get the miracle, you need to release the grievance, in ACIM terms. And yet this too can be very easily misinterpreted. It's not a matter of saying "I won't have any grievances anymore. I'll forgive everybody and get to heaven." You can't prevent grievances from arising—they arise with thought. They arise with human life.

What is necessary is to see that they are not real. Anything that can change is not "real" and all thought changes and shifts—the mind changes and shifts continually. Even the concept of real vs. unreal changes and shifts, because it is a thought. However, we have to work with our available tools, in order to evoke that about which language does not apply.

It's a matter of turning your attention, which is the great divine power we are given, away from thought. It's a matter of looking between, beyond, behind, above and beyond thought, beyond any identifiable manifest experience or differentiated, changeable form. Just shift your attention away. Turn away. Forget about concepts of the present moment, or presence, or ideas of love and oneness, or whatever. Concepts become polluted immediately with the desire to achieve a better state.

As a matter of fact, completely forget about trying to turn TO anything. Just do the one thing—the turning away from thought. Don't worry about where to turn, or whatever else—that's just more thought. Keep on turning away from thought.

Drop the storyline. Leave it where you found it. Don't pick it up. Recognize your addiction to the storyline and stop. Just stop. You don't need to know what else to do. You only need to stop doing that one thing.

the hero of the dream

A Course in Miracles and the teachings of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj have many things in common. One of these is an emphasis on the fact that we are erroneously identifying with our bodies, "the heroes of the dream." They compliment each other very well—approaching the same difficult topic from different vantage points.

It's one thing to say, "I am not a body," and quite another to begin to let this register. We have ideas about what it might mean to not be identified with the body, but, as you may have figured out by now, ideas are just more of the same.

Anything we can imagine to be a new state of mind, is actually on the same level as the original state of mind—it's no more than a new room in the same old museum. It's a nifty trick we pull on ourselves. The ego has an endless toolbox of handy solutions to any problem, all of which are guaranteed to make certain the problem is never seen for what it is.

So where does that leave us? I want to talk about one way of approaching this situation, and for this it might help to have at least a small amount of experience in meditation—in settling down to observe the flow of thoughts across the sky of mind. I say this because what we want to look for is the act of identifying with the body. We want to actually see it happen, like an astronomer looking through the telescope into the night sky to catch some elusive heavenly body in transit.

We want to catch the slippery tail of the mind as it makes a decision to identify with the body—we want to see that thought in action—and to see that it actually is a thought. Once you can see that something is a thought, you can turn your attention away from it. It's a matter of distinguishing the thought from the background awareness.

If you look closely, you will see that all you can say about what you are observing of your own state, is that seeing is occurring, and hearing is occurring, sensations are occurring—heat, pressure, throbbing, cold, itch—breathing is occurring, smelling is occurring, and so on. All of these things are occurring. If you look very closely at this, you can see that the idea that "I am seeing," and so on, is an add-on. The "I am hearing this," or "My body is throbbing," is an added veneer—an overlay—a photoshop filter. It is not part of the original awareness of what's happening.

Perhaps it is simply an erroneous conclusion. If you look closely at this conclusion you may see that although it seems very convincing, it may be entirely arbitrary. It's just a thought.

This is all that is necessary. This is one more tiny, infinitesimal crack in the structure of suffering that will eventually result in its crumbling. If you catch a glimpse, fine. Let it go.