The empowerment ritual


[Students were not recorded]

Ken: Much more so than the Sutrayana, Vajrayana is an intricate blend of very deep spiritual principles and methods and ritual. And the ritual is also deep and intricate. This dual nature has been a stumbling block for many people in a variety of ways, and I’m speaking of many westeners. There are those who regarded the ritual as empty form, beside the point, and a waste of time. That was one form of stumbling block. And there are those who, having difficulty really penetrating the very deep spiritual principles, latch onto the form of the ritual as the practice. That’s another stumbling block. There are many other ways people run into difficulties here.

This retreat, I’ve put the emphasis on understanding the deeper principles in this practice, not only intellectually, because that’s pretty straightforward, but also as much as possible getting some experiential flavor of it. In doing so, I have up to this point, not introduced you to much of the ritual and the role of ritual, which is what we’re going to be turning attention to today. We really need another two days, but we don’t have them, in order to do this side justice, but we’ll do what we can.

Towards the end of the first three-year retreat, I was reading a text by Jamgön Kongtrül the Great, one of the great teachers of the 19th century in Eastern Tibet, one of the architects of the non-sectarian approach. And I came across this phrase; I’ve got to figure out how to translate it now. Okay. The conceptually-based ritual, the relative power of the deity, and what really is pristine awareness.

This just made so much sense to me right at that time. It was only later that I came to understand that conceptual base, relative power, and what is, were a framework that was used to describe the mind-only school of Buddhism, and had been subjected to all kinds of logical critique, etc. etc. But the framework provides a very good basis for understanding how ritual and deep spiritual practice interact, or can interact, in a very powerful and fruitful way.

All rituals consist of forms, usually liturgy as well, things that are said, sometimes movement of people, objects. And these are invested with meaning. In our case they’re invested with meaning related to the deity, awakened compassion. And through this interaction of activity and symbolic meaning, conditions are created internally and externally in which direct experience and understanding can, and do, arise.

Empowerment, well, all of the Vajrayana, is imbued with rituals. You could say it’s a ritual-based system. I practiced these for seven years and we learned some of the more complex rituals. In the scheme of things, I came to appreciate much, much later after the retreat, that Vajrayana rituals are extraordinarily complex and sophisticated, even the simplest.

In 1989, I did a weekend retreat with Robert Bly and Michael Meade, which was a fascinating experience from this perspective, in that during this weekend the whole group of us did a number of rituals that, in contrast to the very elaborate and complex rituals that I was used to, these were like, we put a brick here, and a brick here, and one there. That’s the ritual. They were really, really simple, and yet nevertheless very powerful. And it really gave me a very different appreciation of what my own training had been.

One of the challenges here, is that rituals that have developed this level of sophistication and complexity require a great deal of background information. So that one has some connection, maybe not even a conceptual understanding, but some kind of emotional connection with all of the ritual elements and symbols. Otherwise, “What the hell is going on?”

So, this morning I want to try to cover some of that ground, particularly as it will also relate to those of you who, after this retreat, choose to make this part of your practice because we haven’t touched yet on the actual ritual of the practice itself, which we’re going to start to do this morning as well and continue that this afternoon. Let me go through some of the elements of the empowerment ritual so that you can relate to them and have some idea of what’s going on. A lot of the stuff is not very well explained in the Tibetan tradition because really everybody just depended on the power of the teacher to invest everything with so much energy that the conditions were created.

There are three phases to any ritual: preparation or setting the stage, performance of the ritual itself, and putting everything away. And it definitely helps to think in terms of drama or theater here; there’s a lot of overlap there. The empowerment will be held here. The empowerment will be held in this sutra hall. Before you come in, I will be doing some preparatory work myself, which is my preparation, preparing the space and the shrine, etc., for the empowerment. And then when you come in.

Preparation phase of empowerment


Ken: The first step is purification, and this is done symbolically, by rinsing your mouth with water, which will be at the door. The verse is, “Just as when the Buddha was born the gods bathed him, so now with this pure divine water, I bathe you.” And the allusion to Buddha’s birth is not in any way coincidental. Particularly with empowerment, the idea is you are being born as the deity. So, in entering into this, you wash yourself of all of the old habituations and associations, things like that, and they’re left outside.

And then you come in. And we also put our sense of self-importance aside, and honor the potential for awakening of, in our case, awakened compassion, and also the role of the teacher in the empowerment by doing three prostrations. And again this morning I’ll show the traditional way of doing prostrations for those of you who don’t know it. It has all of those three elements.

Bowing has a very long tradition in Buddhism, all traditions of Buddhism, and is highly regarded as a gesture of humility, leaving aside one’s sense of self-importance, or inflation, or what have you. Equally important, if not more important, because many people ask about this, “Who are you bowing to?” You are bowing to or honoring your own awake nature.

So when we bow to an image of Buddha, it’s not in the biblical sense of: “Thou shalt have no graven images before me.” Before you, whatever, it’s not an idol or a figure. The essential metaphor or principle is: Buddha is the teacher. And the teacher is the one who shows the way. And the way is only useful to those who have the potential, which happens to be all of us, everyone.

So in bowing to Buddha Shakyamuni or to any of the other representations, one is saying, “Yes, you show the way and I have that possibility.” And it is that gesture of respect and appreciation, which is really the heart of prostration. It’s also a gesture of respect and appreciation to the teacher, who is creating the conditions for the ceremony, and putting you in touch through the power of the ceremony, with your awake nature.

Then the next stage in the preparation is to get rid of all the bad guys. That is, all of the forces of distraction, and disturbance, interruption, are summoned. And those that are workable are propitiated through an offering, which I will perform. And those who aren’t workable are chased away. And those that don’t get chased away are destroyed. So it’s clearing out the environment from all of the forces which create distraction, disturbance, interruption, and so forth.

Then we establish a boundary, which is known as a vajra enclosure. Vajra, as we’ve talked about before, is indestructible, impervious, and able to destroy all forms of disturbance. So establishing an enclosure preserves the space of the empowerment, free from any kind of disturbance.

And because of the importance of this, then a formal offering is made for requesting the empowerment. This is basically an offering of the universe. Let me talk a little bit about offerings and generosity. There are three forms of generosity. One is offering material objects. One is giving things that aren’t owned by anybody, which I’ll explain in a minute. And the other is with your imagination. In Vajrayana, the imagined offerings are regarded as the most effective.

Now, giving somebody money, or shelter, or food, they’re very good things to do, and it gets generosity right into the body. It’s a physical act, and it’s one of the things I recommend to people who say, “I have a problem with generosity.” I say, “Well, that’s fine. Every day give one thing, even if it’s only a paperclip, to somebody else.” It’s the crack in the dam approach. By just doing that physical act of giving something that you have, even if it’s as trivial as a paperclip, you’re actually breaking the pattern. You’re putting a little crack in the dam. You all know what happens when a little crack occurs in a dam, after that it’s only a matter of time.

Offering what is not owned by anybody goes a bit deeper, because if it’s not owned by anybody, you can’t be attached to it. Things that we give physically, we can think, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t given that.” So it can bring up attachment and we get into that whole struggle. But when you give things that aren’t owned by anybody, for instance you’re flying into LA. Now LA is a big sprawl of a city, but when you’re just flying in at night it’s just this array of lights, it’s actually very beautiful.

They used to do retreats up at the Mary and Joseph Retreat Center, which is up on the Palos Verdes. And at certain points there you can look at the whole LA basin, and it’s just shimmering jewels. It’s very beautiful. Or mountains, or sunsets, or vistas, anything, you can just offer it like that. Very difficult to be attached and say, “This is mine, I don’t want to give it.” So you’re actually experiencing giving without any attachment.

And then, the imagined offerings take that even further. It’s still silly to be attached to stuff that you’re imagining, but people do it anyway. But you can just let your imagination go wild—totally free—and offer things that you could never conceive of offering ordinarily. And again, this brings about a huge open expansiveness, all free from any emotional confusion. And that’s why in Vajrayana this way of offering is regarded as so powerful and effective. Powerful and effective, just offering things in your imagination.

[Unrecorded] Yes. Vajrayana is nothing if not outrageous. So you’re going to offer something to accompany one’s request for the empowerment? Well, you don’t stop short of the universe, that’s what you offer. You might as well just go the whole hog. The traditional form, which I’ll read, and you join in with your imagination. But what I’m trying to do is give you the flavor of this, is an arrangement of the universe as it was conceived in Indian cosmology 1,500 years ago, which is Mount Meru in the middle, and then the four continents, which were actually India, and Africa, and Southeast Asia, and the north around Mount Meru, and then the various islands. It’s kind of a representational map of what was the known geography of that region. But it’s all nicely symmetrically arranged. So you imagine this whole thing as offering.

But for our purposes since most of you won’t be familiar with that, just imagine that you are offering everything you can possibly think of. And there’s all these: the mythological accoutrements of the universal monarch, the precious queen, and precious minister, and precious general, and precious horse, precious wheel, precious boss, a couple of other ones. I mean these were all things that just were symbolic of wealth, power, and beauty in Indian culture and that’s what was used. It’ll be interesting to see how this whole section evolves over time in the West. That’s where we are now.

Who are you offering it to? You’re offering it to the teacher as awakened compassion. And so you’re offering, as I said earlier, the teacher and awakened compassion have this little pact. [Unrecorded] So you’re offering this, and asking to be squished. But that’s what you’re offering, and you’re requesting, and generosity in any form is an act of opening. When you give something, in the act of giving you open. It’s impossible to be otherwise.

And so in doing this, you are opening in a way so that you can actually receive the essence in the empowerment, which is planting the seeds of experience. You are opening so that you can receive what is the essence of empowerment, which is the planting of seeds of experience. Then I will explain very briefly the lineage through which this particular transmission comes and that completes the preparation.

The main section of the empowerment


Ken: It’s followed by the main section of the empowerment, which begins with a formal request, and then it goes through the empowerment stage by stage. I’m not going to go through that in detail right now; I will explain it at the time. But as Bokar Rinpoche discusses in his book, the ceremony consists of being formally introduced, really four or five steps. One is being invested with the energy of awakened compassion, and then being formally introduced to the form, which is Chenrezi depicted in the thangka, the speech which is the mantra, om mani peme hung, and the mind of awakening. And that’s what the empowerment consists of.

The conclusion phase of empowerment


Ken: Then at the end there’s the conclusion stage. And in the conclusion stage there is first the acceptance of commitment. And what you say here is, “I undertake to do all that my master tells me to.” Or guru, whatever you want. Now, in the sorcery cults from which a lot of this stuff originated, when you became an apprentice, you were basically indentured, and that was how you paid your dues for learning sorcery.

And within Vajrayana, I think we find the last vestige of the feudal system. In the feudal system a contract between the warlord and the peasant was basically, “You give me your loyalty, I stop you from being killed,” which wasn’t a bad contract in those days. The peasants were out there tilling the fields, and any other warlord could come and just stomp all over them. And so the warlord built this big castle. And any time war broke out, all the peasants came into the castle with all their produce. And when the warlord went out with his knights and fought off the people. When it was safe, they went back out and tilled the fields. Of course, they had to pay for that heavily with loyalty and taxes, etc., etc., but that was basically the contract. And you find virtually identical language used in these rituals.

Even in the setup, there’s establishment of the domain of protection. And at another point in the ritual you say, “Blessed one, please take care of me. I ask you to protect me.” So, it’s very much coming out of the same mentality. But I would also like you to think of this in a somewhat different way. Who is the real guru? Yeah, awakened mind, in our case, awakened compassion. So, this commitment is to listen and heed what awakened compassion, as it is present in you, points you to do.

Many of you have heard me say this before, but I think it’s important. At the beginning of Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor’s book, the opening paragraph says, this is a paraphrase, it’s not an exact quote: “In its institutional forms, Buddhism provided very powerful answers to questions of the spirit.” And that’s very true. “But sometimes the power of the answers overwhelms the stammering voice which asks the questions.”

Now, in my own teaching in working with students, I try to hear the stammering voice in a student. It’s very true, the answers Buddhism provides are extraordinarily powerful. But in my experience, that power is largely dissipated if it’s not an actual response to the questions in the stammering voice. Well, through your experience in this retreat, guess what? You’re going to have another stammering voice inside you, and that stammering voice is awakened compassion. [Unrecorded] Yes, I’m being poetic, okay? [Laughter] And your commitment, in my view, the essential commitment is, you’re going to listen to that voice.

In the same vein, “Beginning from today, I offer myself to you as a servant. Look after me as a student and use me as a possession.” These are the traditional wordings. What does this mean in fact? It means, to my mind, that you’re making a commitment to learn from awakened compassion. That’s no trivial matter. This will make a complete mess out of your lives. A few of us here can testify to that. “Look after me as a student and use me as a possession.”

What does it mean to be used as a possession by awakened compassion? [Unrecorded] And how do you let go of your agenda? It’s very important. [Unrecorded] With great difficulty. [Laughter] [Unrecorded] Yes, the other meaning of how. [Laughter]

[Unrecorded] Yes, by experiencing it fully in attention, so it releases. This is not about suppression. And of course you’re meant to be perfect from today forward, right?

And then it concludes with the dedication. And after that I will say, “Leave,” because I have a number of other rituals where I have to tidy the place up.

[Unrecorded] Who do you dedicate to? You dedicate [unclear] the ritual and all the virtue generated, just absolutely what we do ordinarily. [Unrecorded] I’m the stage manager and janitor, and all of that rolled into one.

Question about ceremonies


Ken: [Unrecorded] Well, Pat asked about that earlier and I was going to bring that in today. There are a number of types of ceremonies. I think I’ll just discuss two of them in response to your question. One, your first type are vow ceremonies in which you’re assuming and undertaking. And the vow of refuge is one. Bodhisattva vow is another. The various vows associated with the individual liberation tradition, which includes lay and monastic ordination, another.

In these ceremonies, these vow ceremonies, you are declaring in the presence of a senior spiritual person, maybe your own teacher, maybe someone else, that you are going to do X, Y, and Z. In the case of refuge, it’s that you’re going to take refuge in the buddha, dharma and sangha, to the three jewels. And in the Vajrayana, that includes also the three roots: the guru, yidam and protector.

And refuge again is the old metaphor, the original metaphor was again the castle. And if you’re a peasant out in the fields, where did you go for refuge? You went for refuge with the one who had the biggest sword, because he was going to protect you. And the idea is, where do you go for refuge from the vicissitudes of samsara or pattern based existence? Well, the ultimate refuge, the only refuge that really counts is the open clarity of your own mind, which is free from patterned corruption. So taking the vow of refuge is your undertaking commitment to make that the central orientation of your life.

And so that’s what buddha embodies, that you also take refuge in the historical Buddha, Buddha Shakyamuni, because he showed that this was a possibility. You take refuge in the dharma, which is the way, the set of instructions which allows you to come to know your own mind. And you take refuge in the sangha and it provides you with support and guidance in the process. And that’s the essential meaning of the vow of refuge.

In monastic and lay ordination, you undertake not to do certain very specific acts. The core of the monastic ordination is: you’re not going to kill a human being, you’re not going to steal anything of value, you are not going to lie about your spiritual attainments, and you’re not going to take intoxicants. Then it gets elaborated from there to the 8, then 32, and then the 253, and then the 346. Monks get 253 and nuns get 346 vows; it’s total monk chauvinism. Apparently the Dalai Lama is in discussion with some of the senior hierarchs in China and elsewhere about actually changing the nature of the nuns’ vows to make it a little less chauvinistic.

Boddhisattva vow, you vow to attain awakening in order to help others. It’s different from the others because it’s not about specific actions. It’s about an attitude.

The other type of ceremony is empowerment. I’m sorry you asked this question. There are five kinds of empowerment ceremonies. [Laughter] You have the great empowerment, then you have empowerment, then you have—I can’t quite remember the order here—permission, then blessing, and then authorization.

And in the scheme of things, the ceremony that we’re doing this afternoon is a permission. It’s not a great empowerment. Great empowerment is for the major yidams—like Cakrasamvara and Vajrayogini—in which there’s a whole drama where you’re brought in, blindfolded, and you go through this whole series of things. And then the mandala is revealed to you, and then you’re shown around the mandala and introduced to all the different aspects of the deity.

It’s quite dramatic. And you’re given pointing out instructions, and so forth, and it’s investing very fully in that. And when you take great empowerment, there is also a vow included in it implicitly, it’s not stated explicitly, but there are a series of vows that are included implicitly, which a lot of people don’t understand. That’s how it is. Probably the most common form of what is called empowerment ritual is permission of the kind that we’re doing. In the permission rituals you are formally introduced to the body, speech, and mind of the deity. And by virtue of that formal introduction you then have permission to practice them.

And then authorization, which in Tibetan is called lung (pron. loong), is where the teacher reads the associated texts for a certain practice to you. And in hearing them, the energy of those texts is transmitted to you, so now having heard them from someone who knows them, you now have the basis for studying them for yourself. The lung was particularly important in India because the texts there were not printed as we have today, or as was possible in Tibet, where they had carved wooden blocks and they could make copies quite easily.

There’s a lot of work carving the blocks, but once you had the blocks made, you can make texts quite easily. In India, all they had was palm leaf, or sometimes the skin of animals, leather parchment. But in the tropics, parchment doesn’t last very long actually. It’s okay in desert climates like the Middle East, they used parchment a lot, but in India it was too wet. So palm leaves were dried and then written on. But you all know how dried leaves are, they’re very fragile. And all of these texts were handwritten, so there weren’t a lot of copies around.

As a consequence, when the teacher actually read the text to you, this might be the only time that you actually heard the text and all its detail. So you really paid attention, you listened to every word. And memory, the ability to memorize things just like that, was a key ability in those days. So, you actually took it in just by memorizing it. It’s another reason for all the lists, because they made memorization easy, because you often did not have the chance to actually read this because the texts literally weren’t available to you.

The Seven Section Prayer


Ken: I want to turn to this text. [Unrecorded] I neglected to retitle this. The Seven Branch Prayer, the branch is a literal translation of the word in Tibetan. I’ve taken to using the Seven Section Prayer because that’s more suitable in English. So you can cross that out and put Seven Section if you wish. There are two forms of Seven Section Prayer. This is one of them, the other one we will be using in the empowerment itself, but I’m going to go through this one because it’s very widespread. And as a traditional form of prayer in the Tibetan tradition, goes back many, many centuries, goes back to India actually so it goes back well over a thousand years.

The seven sections are: homage, offering, what’s usually called confession but is more akin to acknowledgement, rejoicing, request for teachings, request that the buddhas stick around, and dedication. Now sometimes the seven branches are condensed down to literally seven lines, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And sometimes they’re elaborated to seven day rituals, or more, in which you will spend the whole day just paying homage. And then another day just on offering. And another day just on acknowledging all the evil you have done since time without beginning, [unclear] and going through all of the list.

Each of these counteracts a specific emotional block. Homage counteracts pride. Offering counteracts greed. Drawing a blank on the next—it counteracts anger— shame? Yeah. It’s anger, because anger is the thing that leads you to unwholesome most reliably. Rejoicing counteracts jealousy. Requesting teachings counteracts complacency, passivity. You’ve got to ask. Requesting the buddhas to stick around counteracts ignoring impermanence. “Oh, I’ll study with that person later. Oh, they’re dead.” And then dedication counteracts selfishness.

[Unrecorded] Anger. I’ll check that, anybody got a copy of Great Path of Awakening here? It’s one of the footnotes, I’ll check it and let you know which one.

So Rinpoche, for many years, he taught the basic Chenrezi meditation as it comes through Thangtong Gyalpo. And then sometime later he started inserting this prayer, the Seven Section Prayer, into that ritual. This is exactly how rituals grow in Tibet. Somebody writes a ritual, everybody goes back to that for a while and thinks, “That’s really nice.” And somebody says, “You know, it could really use a little juicing up here. So why don’t we take this prayer, or this ritual from here, and stick this in right here. And now it’s a bit longer. And then somebody else comes along and says, “Yeah, that’s great, but you know, I really like this stuff too. So I’m going to take this ritual from here and stick it in here.” So it just keeps growing, and growing, and growing. That’s how you get 12-hour rituals.

So anyway, Rinpoche inserted this. And there’s a phrase in the Tibetan tradition called: gathering the accumulations and clearing away obscurations. If you study with any traditional Tibetan teachers, I suppose non-traditional, you will hear this phrase over and over again. People get sick of hearing it, but the principle that’s involved is actually really, really important. I generally translate: gathering the accumulations of merit and wisdom, that’s usually how it’s translated, I just really don’t like the spiritual bank account in the sky metaphor.

And when I’ve really thought about what’s happening here, you’re generating goodness, which is terribly out of fashion these days, has been for some time. That is really very important, because when you do good work—or good works, the old sense of it—there is a palpable effect on you. What is it? When you help someone, when you’re generous, pardon? Yeah, but there’s a deeper effect. Yeah, your mind is actually lighter and clearer. After somebody gives generosity or helps somebody, you don’t feel like, “Oh, God, I just feel terrible.” That’s not the result. You feel open and clear.

So, practicing good works, doing virtue, we don’t even have a nice contemporary phrase for this, it’s so out of fashion. Maybe someone will come up with that. We completely lost a vocabulary, and really lost it sometime in the late 19th, early 20th century. I don’t know the contemporary phrase, but maybe somewhat near this, and if you do let me know, I want it. But when you do this, it is not only good for others, it’s also very good for you because it opens things up. And it generates a basis, a very positive basis, for your practice. And using practice in a very broad sense here.

And the corresponding thing is clearing away obscurations. Oh, sorry, the two accumulations I said are merit and wisdom, at least that’s their usual translation. Goodness, and through that goodness there’s a clarity that’s going to develop. So when you act this way, you’re also opening up the possibility of pristine awareness, which is how wisdom is being translated there. Now you don’t accumulate awareness as such, but in simple situations where you do something naturally as a response, so that it just happens, so that there is no conceptualizing of the action, it just happens. That is acting free of the three spheres of the concept of self: the subject, object and receiver. It just happens.

And there’s a story of this in the Zen tradition, there’s many different versions of this. But after Buddha died, Ananda was denied entry into the conference where they were going to decide what were Buddha’s teachings, because he died and they needed to get some kind of agreement. And it was really unfortunate Ananda wasn’t going to be admitted. The reason he wasn’t going to be admitted is that he wasn’t enlightened; he hadn’t woken up at this point. Because he had a photographic memory, he’d been around all of Buddha’s teachings, and he’d heard everything, and he remembered absolutely everything.

And in the Zen version of this story, Ananda comes, and Kasyapa is there at the door and says, “No, you can’t come in.”

And Ananda goes, “Oh, not fair.” And starts going up, and walks away.

And as he walks away, Kasyapa goes, “Ananda!”

And Ananda goes, “Yes?” And in that moment wakes up, because there was no thought. And so now he could come in. Everybody was much happier because now they have this authority on what Buddha actually said. Happy endings! [Laughter] Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. [Laughter]

Theravadan version of the story is quite different. Ananda goes back to his hut and he’s very unhappy about the whole thing. And just as he’s about to lie down, just as he’s in the middle of lying down, he wakes up, because he’s just right in that state. And it’s the only recorded instance of a person waking up when they were neither standing, nor sitting, or lying down. [Laughter]

Okay, so you have generating goodness and opening pristine awareness, and those two things are really important. So engaging good works, and the way that you open pristine awareness is that in any moment in which you’re just present, you make a point of really being there and not skipping over it—just, “Oh.” And so you just open it up, even if it’s only opening up a little fraction of a second longer. That’s very important.

Then the two obscurations are: obscurations of reactive emotions and obscurations of conceptual knowing. And there are many, many practices that we do to clear away the obscuration of reactive emotions. And the way that you clear away the obscuration of reactive emotions is that you experience the reactive emotions in clarity. That’s how you actually do it. Because when a reactive emotion arises, it takes you into a distracted or distorted state of mind, and you do not experience what is arising clearly. By bringing your attention and experiencing the reactive emotion itself clearly, you’re bringing attention and awareness into the experience of the confusion. Clearing away the obscuration of conceptual knowing, again, trusting the knowing that does not depend on concepts. Trusting the knowing that does not depend on concepts, and actually practicing acting out of it.

Now, the thing is that simple rituals such as this one, Seven Section Prayer, practicing Chenrezi meditation, all of the various practices, they do these things and they do these things very, very powerfully. This is not something you can think, “Okay, it’s not like scraping the rust off an old bike.” You can actually see the progress, but it’s not nearly as tangible and visible as that.

Working at doing good works and bringing attention into very mundane activities, and doing them just really clearly and as appropriately as you can, struggling with all of the emotional confusion that comes up around situations, and really being willing to experience the mess that arises when you encounter difficult situations or something. This is hard. It’s not particularly fun. But it is absolutely important, because this is how you clear away what prevents you from knowing what you are. As usual, I’ve gone over, so I didn’t do badly. I got five out six topics done.