Day 3 8-Fold Path - Aug Retreat - Delson Armstrong at DSMC

We've heard of many different kinds of traditions of Buddhism. There's Theravada, there's Mahayana, there's Vajrayana, and there's all kinds of subsets underneath that. But if you looked at the essence of what the Buddha is speaking of, really, if it is in alignment with the four noble truths, then it is in alignment with what the Buddha would have said, because the four noble truths are part of a formula that allow us to understand first and foremost, what suffering is. That's the first noble truth.

To learn how to abandon the causes and conditions for that suffering, namely what we would call craving. And the third is to experience and realize for ourselves the cessation of that suffering in the form of nirodha. That's the third noble truth. And to do this, we apply and cultivate and develop what is known as the eightfold path.

That is the fourth noble truth. And so once we recognize where the craving is arising and how it's arising and letting it go, we experience the relief from that suffering, relief from that craving. But in order for us to do that, we have to apply certain steps. We have to apply certain kinds of practices. I've spoken a little bit about the Eightfold Path. I kind of referenced it a few times.

And I've said that the essence of the path are the 6R's because they constitute what's known as right effort. Today I want to go through the steps of the Eightfold Path because once you understand that, that is the entire spine of the practice. If you have this, and if you understand what these factors are, and you apply them in the way that they are to be applied, then as the Buddha assures us from the suttas, it is natural for the mind to experience liberation.

It is almost effortless for that to happen. The only effort we need is to have the right intention, the right view, and so on. We're going to look into what all of these things mean. So what are the factors of the Eightfold Path? Right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right collectedness.

These are the eight factors of the path. Notice how it starts off with right view, right? We have seen how it has been constructed where we see sila, samadhi, and panya. Sila we spoke about a little bit yesterday when we talked about keeping the precepts. Samadhi we will talk about in due time. Panya is really the essence of the Dhamma. It is being able to see for oneself the emptiness of our condition. In other words, noticing, seeing, observing, experiencing and developing the wisdom born from dependent origination, from seeing dependent origination.

Right view is that understanding at the core of it. And there are two types of right view. There is the mundane right view and there is the super mundane right view. In fact, each aspect of each path has a mundane part and a super mundane part. So the Buddha starts off with, look, if you want to do this practice, then you need to straighten up your view.

How you perceive the world, how you interpret what's going on, will help you develop the mind in such a way that you will be able to experience for yourself what wisdom is. This is the word, wisdom, panya, right? Wisdom, the cultivation of wisdom, is the realization of the impersonal nature of what we call the I, me, or mine, or myself. But we can't do that just logically. We can't do that just intellectually. We can't do that just by reading books and being academics. We must be able to see it for ourselves. We must be able to go deep in the practice, deep enough for the mind to cultivate enough samadhi. Samadhi here means the balance of the mind.

I'll get into that later. But developing and cultivating to such an extent that one is able to realize, or the mind is able to realize, that indeed what we consider to be a self is nothing more than an accumulation and an inheritance of various causes and conditions that create the sense of a personality, the sense of an identity, the ego structure, whatever you want to call it.

That's why the Buddha starts with the mundane right view. What is right view? In right view, there are certain components. Number one, that there is meaning in what is given. There is meaning in what is offered. There is meaning in what is sacrificed. What do we mean by this? We must understand the context behind the Buddha's words. The Buddha lived in ancient India.

And in ancient India, there was a certain kind of culture. And that culture included the practice of generosity, the practice of sacrifice. Now, he corrected certain things because at that time they were doing things like animal sacrifices, they were doing fire sacrifices, they were doing all kinds of things. And what is offered, what is offered to the gods, what is offered to the priests, what is offered to monastics.

But there is a deeper layer to this. There is meaning in what is given, there is meaning in what is sacrificed, there is meaning in what is offered. First and foremost, that there is meaning. Atta or Artha. That there is a purpose for what we do. This immediately shows us that Buddhism or the Dhamma is not nihilistic in nature. Which sometimes people will mistake it for being.

That there is no purpose to anything. Why do anything? If everything is empty, then why should I do anything? If the self is empty, then what is the purpose of going on? What is the point of living? Some people actually misinterpreted what the Buddha said when he talked about the emptiness of self, and they said, why continue living? And they killed themselves.

The Buddha was on retreat at the time. When he got off of retreat, he found out about this. He was informed of this. And so he was intent on making sure that the message was understood clearly. It is not that there is meaninglessness in this universe. This is the reason why the essence of the Dhamma is, with the arising of this, there is the arising of that. With the passing away of this, there is the passing away of that. With the arising of this condition, or this cause, there is the arising of this particular effect.

With the passing away of that cause or condition, there is the passing away of that effect. What the Buddha is saying is the sense of self that we have is conditioned. It is, as I say, an accumulation. That's why we call it the five aggregates. Form, feeling, perception, intention, and awareness. So there is meaning in what is given. There is meaning in what is offered. There is meaning in what is sacrificed.

What the Buddha is saying is, there is a give and take in the world. When I offer to a teacher, when I offer to a monk, when I offer to an elder, when I offer to a priest, whatever it is, when I give in charity, when I give to those in need, when I sacrifice, in this case, not animal sacrifice. That's the wrong type of sacrifice. But when I sacrifice what? When I let go of the things that no longer serve me. When I let go of the things that draw me down more into the complexities of samsara, this matrix.

When I sacrifice those things, there is meaning in that. It leads me to a certain kind of consequence. The essence of this is action and consequence. My actions have a purpose. Well, my actions have a consequence. So this is one aspect. There is meaning in what is given. There is meaning in what is offered. There is meaning in what is sacrificed.

Then he says, there is this world and the other. Now, at the outset, that could mean that there is this world and there is an afterlife. How do we know this? We have heard of reports of people having near-death experiences and having experiences in which there is a continuation of the life principle beyond this life. And so with that, we may say, okay, there might be that there is another. There is another world there.

But we can go deeper than this. When we talk about this world, we're talking about, this world is basically what we perceive and experience through the five senses. The eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body. These are our interfaces with the world. They receive different vibrations. And the mind is that which interprets it, feels and perceives into it.

The other world is the world that you experience when you go into meditation. This is why when we talk about jhanas, which we'll talk about later, much later, the jhanas are essentially meditative states of different awarenesses. There are different attainments in that sense. And they correspond to certain Lokas. Lokas are certain worlds, certain realms. And the beings in those realms have those particular consciousnesses that are in alignment with how we experience jhanas.

So we are literally, when we are entering into jhanas, in the right way, in the way the Buddha had taught it, we are literally entering into a different dimension. This is the other way to understand it. The other world. There is this world in which I am enmeshed with the senses. And there is the other world where I am free from that. And I am experiencing the bliss of being free from that. And of letting go of that enmeshment. There is mother and father.

This is also part of causality and conditionality. Now remember, the Buddha came from a culture, as most Asian cultures are, of filial piety. Filial piety means that we give respect to our elders. So you will see this in India. You will see this in a lot of Asian traditions, that we give the right amount of respect to our mother and our father.

Now, obviously, even in the Judeo-Christian mindset, we have the same thing. What do the Ten Commandments say? Honor thy mother and father. Now, granted, when we become teenagers, our parents know nothing. When we become adolescents, when we turn 20, we are in our 20s, in our 30s, we blame our parents for everything, right? I am this way because my father said this to me. I am that way because my mother didn't hug me enough, right? We go to psychoanalysts and psychiatrists and then they feed off of that and they say, yeah, you're right, it's because of this and this, right?

But real maturity is realizing that at some point, I am responsible for my mess-ups, I am responsible for my behaviors, I am responsible for learning from that. So we cannot blame our parents all the time. When we become mature, we realize that I have a choice. I have a choice to be the so-called victim where I'm this way just because of my parents, or I have a choice of seeing this and transcending that and letting that go.

The Buddha has said that the debt that we owe to our parents is so great that we will never be able to repay it because they allowed for life to flow. They allowed for us to come into this existence because granted this existence is terrible. Granted this existence has all of its complexities. Granted this existence has annoyances and bad relationships, and nothing seems to work out. But this existence also carries the gateway to Nibbana, the potential for us to finally let go and experience full awakening.

And that is a gift that you cannot repay. So no matter how annoying our parents were, no matter how abusive our parents might have been, that doesn't justify their abuse, but we realize we can at least give some level of gratitude to them for having brought us into this life so we can actually take steps towards the path and awaken. There is mother and father. This is part of right view.

There are beings who are generated spontaneously. This is an interesting one. This talks about the fact that there isn't just this material reality that we see that is generated in terms of our existence from the womb or from eggs or from moisture, as he talks about in terms of the different ways beings come into existence, but there is spontaneous generation: the angels or the devas, that are known in Pali as the deities, the beings of lower realms, they generate spontaneously in accordance with their karma. This is a very interesting one. We can't prove it, but it's part of right view, and we should give some accounting for it, saying that perhaps this could be possible.

And then he says there are those teachers and Brahmins who have walked this path, cultivated it, and who can teach us this. So here again there is this desire to show that we must give some level of credence to those who have walked the path. We must give some level of, you could say, reverence or veneration in that sense, but the acknowledgement that there is somebody who can mentor me, guide me, show me on this path. So this right view is psychologically wholesome and uplifting. It's meant to bring a certain degree of clarity in the mind that this is what I'm aiming towards.

This is my world view. This is what I'm choosing to adopt. And when I have that and go through the rest of the path, I ultimately get back to right view again as the supramundane right view, where I have realized for myself the four noble truths. I have understood completely what suffering is. I have learned how to abandon the causes and conditions for suffering.

I have realized for myself Nibbana here and now. And I have fully cultivated the Eightfold Path itself. Now, before all that can happen, we have right view on the mundane level that leads to right intention. What is right intention? Samma-sankappa. So the first is samma-ditthi or samyak-ditthi. What is my perspective? Samma-sankappa, or sama-sankhapa, means what is my intention? How do I choose to move forward?

And there are three components to this. The first is what's known as nekkhamma in Pali, which translates to renunciation. The second is non-ill-will, or avihimsa, and the third is non-cruelty, or ahimsa. And renunciation in this case can mean a couple of things. It could mean that we become monks, we become monastics, we take on the robes, we take bowls and all of these things.

But let me burst your bubble right here, right now. Just because you become a monastic doesn't mean your mind is free of craving. You still have to do the work. You still have to let go of your attachments. You still have to let go of your craving. You still have to let go of your identity. So when people come up to me and say, hey, I would like to be a monastic, what do you think about it? And the only thing I'll tell them is that's your choice, whether you want to or you don't want to. But just be aware of this, that if you choose to become a monastic, don't do this process of letting go of one identity and taking up another.

This happens a lot, especially for preceptor-less monks that are running amok without any teachers. So renunciation here really means what? It means contentment. I am content with what is given to me. I am content with what I have. I am content with the existence that I have currently. There's no resistance to reality. I don't mind how things are happening, because there's a deep layer of contentment in my heart that I am satisfied with what is given to me.

Non-ill-will is basically that, that I don't have any ill will, any desire for the harm of another person. And this is cultivated through loving kindness, what we're all doing here, the cultivation of loving kindness. Non-cruelty, how do we understand non-cruelty? First of all, what is cruelty? Cruelty is the inability to recognize my own suffering and the suffering of another.

For example, I find myself in an argument with another person. And that argument escalates into verbal daggers, as we call it in the suttas. We throw insults at each other. Now, what is happening here? I am suffering and the other person is suffering. I'm unable to see this person suffering. Instead, I just launch another series of insults at them, not being able to discern that what they're doing is coming from a level of suffering. I'm adding to their suffering. That's cruelty. Non-cruelty would be: I catch myself, oh, I'm escalating the situation, I'm throwing verbal daggers at this person, let me stop. I can see this person is suffering, that's why they're launching these assaults. I'm recognizing my own suffering, I'm letting it go, I'm recognizing the other person's suffering, and I try to help them.

By de-escalating the situation, by trying to find common ground, by whatever means is possible. That intention is non-cruelty, and it's cultivated by compassion. Compassion is the desire for the freedom from suffering for all beings. Understand that compassion is not, I take on their suffering. Compassion is not, let me do the work for them. Compassion is, I see this person suffering, I give them the tools necessary, I may help them in whatever way I can, but in order for them to come out of their own suffering, they must do the work. The Buddha was once asked by a lay person.

That Master Gautama, sometimes that's how they would refer to him, there are those who follow your doctrine and yet there are those who don't seem to attain Nibbana, and there are those who do. Why is that? So the Buddha gives him an example. He says, suppose that you were met by two people, they were asking you, tell me the way to Rajagaha. Rajagaha was a city back then in the time of the Buddha. Tell me how to get there, and you give them the instructions. The first man follows your instructions and gets to Rajagaha,

The second man thinks he knows better, tries to find a shortcut, and never gets to Rajagaha. The Buddha says, why is it that you gave them the same instructions, and one got to Rajagaha and one didn't? And the man says, well, I gave the instructions, but I'm not responsible for whether they follow it or not.

Likewise, the Buddha says, "I, out of compassion, give you the instructions, but I cannot make you follow the instructions. You must take the initiative, you must have the intention to follow it." Right? It's the old adage: "You can bring the horse to the water, but you cannot make the horse drink it." So compassion is not about, "Let me force you to do this thing because I know it's good for you." I will give you all the causes and conditions that are ripe for you, and now you must come and take a step. So this is part of right intention: nekkhamma, contentment, non-ill-will, and non-cruelty.

Once you have that, then you can get to right speech. Right speech, the acronym I like to use for right speech is THINK. Think before you speak. The T stands for timeliness. Is it the proper time to say what I want to say? H is for honesty. Do I know what I'm about to say is true or not, or is it something I've just heard, and so I preface it with, this is what has been told to me, I can't verify whether it's true or not? But you should know whether what you're saying is true or not, coming from you. Don't deceive. I is for intention. What is the intention behind what it is that I want to say? Is it divisive or is it helpful? N is for necessity. What I'm about to say, is it necessary depending upon the context and situation, or is it just to fill the air? And K is for kindness. Can I say it with kindness?

Can I admonish someone with kindness? Not brutally beating down on them with words, but correcting them. The intention of correcting is not you trying to insult them, it's you trying to help them, and that is kindness. But the best of all of these in terms of speech is noble silence, which all of you are practicing anyway. So think before you speak, that is right speech. Right action is to keep the precepts: to abstain from causing harm, harming yourself or harming another being, to abstain from taking what is not given, and to abstain from sensual misconduct.

Then we have something known as right livelihood. Right livelihood is essentially not engaging in any kind of trade or business or career that directly causes the harm for oneself or for another. So the Buddha gave many different kinds of wrong livelihood for the monastics. Somebody once asked me this because it was mentioned in Digha Nikaya, and it's always important to read the sutta in the right context. They said the Buddha said that being a doctor is wrong livelihood. How could that be? But that's not what the Buddha is saying. He's saying for monastics, being a doctor is wrong livelihood, many other things, because for a monastic in the order of the Sangha

their project is to attain Nibbana, is to attain full awakening. And everything else is a sidebar. It's ultimately a distraction, it's prolonging, it's delaying the ultimate path for them, which is to attain full awakening. For laypeople, like us, there are certain wrong livelihoods. So in this case, dealing in trade or in business or in career, that has to do with weapons, with poisons, with alcohol, with human trafficking, and with the slaughter of animals.

So in this case, anything that causes direct harm to oneself or to another. So right speech, right action, right livelihood, these correspond to sila. When you get this right, when you get this sorted out, your mind and your mindset starts to become more collected. And then you are ready for samadhi, which is right effort, right mindfulness, and right collectedness.

What is right effort? Right effort is fourfold. Recognizing when an unwholesome state has arisen. The second is to abandon that already arisen unwholesome state. The third is to generate a wholesome state. And the fourth is to maintain that wholesome state. That's right effort. And yet you have people telling you, focus on watching the pain. Focus on watching this.

Just look at the hindrance, and it will go away. But the Buddha explicitly says here, recognize it. Everybody just does the first part when they're doing this noting practice. Just recognize it first. Yeah, fine. But then there is another aspect. Let it go, and by letting go you generate a wholesome state. Why don't people say this to us? And you keep that going. That's what's happening with the 6R's. You recognize when a hindrance is present. That's the noting of it: here is this hindrance. But there are other steps. Release your attention from it.

Relax the tightness and tension. That is all part of the first two right efforts, the recognizing and the abandoning of unwholesome states. Re-smiling brings up a wholesome state, and going back to your object of meditation and staying with it is maintaining that wholesome state. So it's not about just watching something. It's not about just being with the pain.

The Buddha has explained in Majjhima Nikaya 19, the two kinds of thoughts. He says, whatever the mind puts its attention on, it becomes. So the more you put your attention on the hindrance, on the pain, what's going to happen? It's just going to keep going. And people say, oh, but it feels like the pain goes away. No, your physiology is trying to numb out the pain.

That's all. It's suppressing it. The Buddha has talked about practices that are painful in the beginning and pleasant in the end. Painful in the beginning and painful in the end. Pleasant in the beginning and painful in the end. And pleasant in the beginning and pleasant in the end. Which of these would you guys like to do? The fourth, right?

Unless you're into BDSM or something. But the Buddha specifically says that his path is pleasant in the beginning, pleasant in the middle, and pleasant in the end. So if you want to follow the Eightfold Path, it is also understanding this, the heart of the path, which is these four right efforts. If you understand this, then everything else takes care of itself, really.

Because the Buddha has said in one of the suttas where he talks about the great 40, it's called. And in there he says, it is through right effort one goes from the wrong view to the right view, the wrong intention to the right intention, the wrong speech to the right speech, the wrong action to the right action, the wrong livelihood to the right livelihood, the wrong mindfulness to the right mindfulness, the wrong collectedness to the right collectedness.

Once we have this understanding, this equipment of right effort, right mindfulness occurs naturally. What is right mindfulness? First of all, we have to understand, what do we mean by mindfulness? What is mindfulness? Mindfulness, by the way, which is not really my favorite word. I don't know why mindfulness has become the word, but really mindfulness comes from the word sati in Pali, which comes from the Sanskrit smriti.

Smriti means memory. It means to recollect. What are we recollecting? We're remembering to observe how mind's attention moves from one object to the other. We're remembering to have the right presence of mind, to be aware, along with what's known as sampanjanya, the clear comprehension of what is happening in mind in relation to its object. So the recognition of this moment and the understanding of what this moment is in relation to what's happening with our mind.

So if you just understand this, remembering to observe how mind's attention moves from one object to the other. There are the four foundations of mindfulness, which we'll go into at another talk. But that is incorporated in right mindfulness. It's not about just noting. It's not about, okay, eating, eating, eating, sitting, sitting, sitting. It's about what is your mind doing while this is going on? Where is your mind while this is going on?

What hindrances are present? What hindrances are not present? And so on. And once we have that, we are in that space of what I call the knowing, the luminosity of mind, the Pabhasara Chitta in Pali. Luminous is the mind, monks. Luminous is the mind. This is what the Buddha says. But due to adventitious defilements, the mind becomes covered.

What does adventitious mean? I had to look this up in the dictionary. It means that which is not inherent to something. These defilements don't define you. These defilements arise as an impersonal process. The reason why these defilements seem so strong is because you own them. You make them mine, me, mine, myself. There's a Sutta called Chachakka Sutta, six sets of six.

And what it means is, the Buddha is going through these six things. And the sixth part is craving. He says, even craving is empty. Craving is impersonal. So it's not my craving. It's not my aversion. It is just arising due to the causes and conditions that are coming up. But behind all of that, underneath all of that, is the natural luminosity of the mind.

This is the fulfillment of mindfulness. And such a mind is always in a space of effortless collectedness, effortless meditation. Whether you're sitting for formal practice, whether you're walking, whether you're eating, whatever is going on, your mind is free of all cravings, free of all identification. So that leads us into what's known as sama-samadhi, samyak-samadhi. This is something we will get into in greater detail because it requires some detail. But this is what incorporates what we call jhanas.

Jhanas come from the word dhyana in Sanskrit, which essentially means to place one's attention onto something. And that's what we're doing with meditation. That's the process of this practice that we're doing, for the purpose of the development of what will happen later, which is known as samyak jnana or sama jnana, and samyak vimukti or sama vimukti. That is right knowledge.

That's the fruit and right liberation. That's the end point. So I'll stop there and open it up for questions. Adventitious. Adventitious. No, a d v n t i t i o u s. A d v a d v v for Victor, a d v e n t i t i o u s. This brings me back to my spelling bee days. Did you get it? Adventitious, titious, t-i-t-i-o. Yeah, yeah. The subtlety is, one is the sense of having anger towards someone. And it's like, I don't like this and I just want this to stop. So it has an aversion.

So somebody who's in the way of that process will meet with some kind of harm. In other words, if I want something and you're in the way of it, I have a desire to remove you from that. And there could be a sense of harming. But in this case of cruelty, it's like, I already see you are harmed. Because I see you suffering. And I'm adding it to that suffering.

Yeah. The second one is the Eightfold Path. What often does it refer to as right understanding? Do you refer to this? I say right intention. More participatory. Yeah. Which is interesting with this Eightfold Path. Everything is, in that sense, participatory. It's like, I have to do this. That's the level of effort that I have to take in order to let go of the things that add to my karma. The Buddha has talked about the Eightfold Path as the path to not only the cessation of suffering,

but to the cessation of karma as well. Because it's the only practice in the path. The path is the only practice that doesn't proliferate karma. It just deals with whatever is required in every moment. Yeah? You spoke about effortless meditation. So, does that mean that if there is some effort involved in the meditation, then it is actually going in the wrong direction? No. No, I'm not saying that. Effortless meditation is a fruition of the path.

In other words, as I become more and more mindful, as I'm able to see these things, my ability to do the 6R's becomes almost effortless. A lot of people will see this as their practice deepens. But then at a deeper level, my mind is never not in meditation. Bhante had a book, Bhante Raman Singh had a book called, or has a book called, life is meditation, meditation is life.

Is that what it's called? So, no matter what you're doing, your mind is in a space of meditative awareness. And that becomes effortless. Yes. Mundane basically just means of this world that participates in the world of karma. That every action has a consequence and so on. Super mundane is beyond the ordinary, beyond this world. And that is something that happens when you experience the fruition of the path.

You have an experience of stream entry and so on and so forth. Once you have fulfilled the path, then the right view is like the operating system of the Four Noble Truths, completely, 100% installed in your mind. So there isn't a point when you're not aware of the Four Noble Truths in every moment. That's a super mundane.

So what I just got in your explanation, and may help you, is that he didn't say super, he said supra. Yeah. Did you hear that? Supramundane. It's not super, it's supra. So that's a different meaning altogether. Yeah. I have a thought or a question in this moment. So, about cruelty, another thought I had about it is that maybe another way to look at that is cruelty is maybe even when someone's still alive and another person suffers. I think if someone's torturing someone. Even saying something like, ha, something like that, that's a kind of crazy thing. For sure, definitely.

What's that German word for... Shopping for you. Yeah, right. Shopping for you. Yeah, yeah. Taking delight in the suffering of others. Right, I should have asked you. That's right. Sankhapa, yeah, Sankalpa, Sankhapa. Sankalpa with the L is Sanskrit. Sankhapa, which is without the L, is Pali. What about Chetana? Chetana is one and the same. But Chetana is like the movement of intention.

Here it's like I'm setting an intention. Two questions. One, could you give an example of cruelty that isn't subsumed under a little? It doesn't exist. Okay. So just like an extra emphasis point? No, that's what I was telling him, the difference between the two. One is like, I want to cause harm, and the other is, I see this person already being harmed, and I cause further harm to them. Okay.

It's like when they're down, you beat them when they're still down. It's like you now have power. Yeah. It's no longer you're hating your opponent, but now you're standing over them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the first right effort is the recognition of the unwholesome states, right? So that's already the recognized step. The second is to abandon the unwholesome states, the hindrances, the distractions, whatever they are. So releasing your attention from that, releasing the distraction, and relaxing the tightness and tension is the second.

Then bringing up the smile is the third, which is to generate a wholesome state. And then going back to your object and staying with it is the fourth, which is to maintain that unwholesome state. Repeat obviously is implied, which is anytime you get distracted, you do the same thing. I wanted to ask what your choice in using the phrase "old-fashioned right" in Mind Without Craving, I use the word "affective" so this comes from the word "samyak". "Samyak" actually literally means "proper". It means that which is proper. And the reason I used effective is it's like that which is effective for the purpose of Nibbana.

It's right because it's the path that will lead to Nibbana. The path to Nibbana by David Johnson. Little plug there. So that's why it's right. It's the right thing that takes you there. The wrong thing is that it's not going to take you there. It's ineffective. Yes. Oh, right. The word right itself comes from rita in Sanskrit. So rita is like the cosmic order, that which is in alignment with the cosmic order, which includes what we would call morality and so on.