BG 184: Bodhisattva, Superstar

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Episode Description:

We’re joined this week by filmmaker Michael Trigilo, to explore some of the themes from his newest allegorical documentary, “Bodhisattva, Superstar.” Included in our conversation are questions around what it means to be “spiritual but not religious”, what purpose Religion serves and what difficulties come with it, and why anger is such a hot topic in the Buddhist tradition?

We also discuss controversy in spiritual communities—with Michael highlighting his own experience of disappointment and disillusionment—and how these controversies and scandals can become opportunities for a more transparent “cultural conversation” to occur. Finally he shares what he hopes both Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike might get from watching this edgy and sophisticated Buddhist documentary.

Episode Links:

• Bodhisattva, Superstar
• Excerpt of Bodhisattva, Superstar on Buddhist Geeks
• “The Buddha” on PBS
• Bewitched, Buddhist, and Bewildered (scroll down to middle of the page)
• The Kalama Sutra

Transcript:

Vincent: Hello Buddhist Geeks, this is Vincent Horn. And I’m joined today over Skype with a very special guest, filmmaker Michael Trigilio. Michael, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me again.

Michael: Thank you. Yeah, I’m glad to be here. It’s great.

Vincent: And the first time we talked was actually last year. You contacted me and asked if I wanted to be a part of a documentary that you were filming, which has now been released. It’s called “Bodhisattva Superstar.” And I’m guessing that’s playing off of the Jesus Christ Superstar, is that right?

Michael: Sure, yeah. I mean, it’s just, it is. It’s not a Buddhist version of Jesus Christ Superstar. It’s just a way of referencing kind of pop culture, and perhaps some of the humorous and irreverent qualities that I have in my film, while having a fairly serious reflection on Buddhism, also.

Vincent: Nice. Nice. And you’re a professional filmmaker, and also a multimedia artist, teacher. You teach at UC San Diego.

Michael: Right.

Vincent: You’re on the visual arts faculty there.

Michael: Yes.

Vincent: And you also have been involved with a religious organization, a Buddhist organization, and were even an ordained member for several years before breaking off and doing other things. So you have a kind of filmmaking background, and then you also have an insider experience with the Buddhist tradition.

Michael: That’s right, yeah.

Vincent: And I guess both of those things kind of went into this documentary. And you describe it as an allegorical documentary, which I’ve never heard before.

Michael: Yeah.

Vincent: Could you say a little bit about that, and also the differences in the way that you approach this film, and this documentary, as opposed to many of the documentaries we see out today that have the Dalai Lama in it. You know what I’m saying, Ten Questions with the Dalai Lama, more common Buddhist documentaries that you might see.

Michael: Well, the last part I can address first, and I think it will help explain the reason I’m calling it an allegorical documentary. I mean, a lot of the Buddhist documentaries that I’ve seen, they’re wonderful documentaries. They’re fantastic. But they are often times, and I haven’t seen every single one, so I can’t speak to all of them, right? But they sometimes are, for lack of a better term, kind of anthropological films about sort of the culture of Buddhism in a particular culture, in Japanese culture, or in Tibetan culture. Or it’s a kind of a booster film kind of explaining our religion. Like, this is what Buddhists believe, and this is what Buddhism is. And recently the PBS just had a documentary called Buddha. Which was a very slick, polished articulation of the Buddhist story, the Buddhist, you know, myth, and then also of Buddhist practice, Buddha’s life. And those things are very valuable, but there was a sense of kind of a, almost a National Geographic quality to them. Right? And I always feel like there’s a way in which they’re treated as sort of cultural anthropology, and not the way we treat other religions in our culture in America. Which is sort of to poke, and prod, and unpack, and understand, and come to terms with how religion actually plays itself out in our daily lives as Americans, rather than just celebrating how religion plays itself out. And I think religion is such an important part of our culture in the United States. And people alternatingly deal with it kind of with a lot of piety or with a lot of scorn, which is something I wrote about. And I was just interested in saying can we find some balance in here?

And one of the ways that I tried to find that balance was to interview kind of your Buddhist experts, for lack of a better term, people who are seriously engaged in the creation, the sustenance of an American Dharma, an American Buddhism. But also to allow there to be an allegorical component. A kind of fiction, if you will. A character. A scripted quality, so that you could have metaphors emerge. A metaphor for the kind of challenge of seeking. Kind of an allegorical story about a seeker who is struggling with her relationship with taking on a religion, and converting to a religion, and doing the things a religion, she believes, says to do. And what are the kinds of successes and the kinds of disappointments and the kinds of unique difficulties that arise for all of us, those of us who have converted from our root or family or lineage tradition to a Buddhist tradition in America.

Vincent: Nice. And it’s interesting, because you start off the film with a sort of shot of you on a kind of a white background. And you’re sort of talking to the viewer. And you’re saying something along the lines of, “I can’t stand when people say they’re spiritual, but not religious. For myself, I’m religious.” So, could you say a little bit about that? What’s the deal with religious but not spiritual?

Michael: Yeah. Well, I say that I’m religious, but I’m not spiritual. But I hate myself.

Vincent: Right.

Michael: So there’s a quality there that I think is important. I think a lot of times, what I’ve experienced, and I’ll say a tremendous amount of this film is based on my own experience. And you know from Dharma discussions and Dharma talks, and being part of the Buddhist community “from ones’ own experience,” is a very important way to place what you articulate. Is that right?

Vincent: Yeah.

Michael: And so I have found that in order to avoid some of the difficulties or the challenges or the struggles that we have with a religion that we’ve picked, we will sometimes throw off the trappings of those things and say, “Well I’m just a spiritual person.” And that feels very vague to me, and I feel like I’m a person who feels incapable of having faith in something. I have a very difficult time articulating or even understanding what faith really is, faith outside of empirical evidence. And it’s by own struggle, right?

And I see spirituality as being this kind of vague, faith-based system. But I feel very positively, and also I have very complicated feelings really, about what religion does. Because religion is a kind of structure, it’s a kind of architecture, it’s a system, right? And that system allows us to access. It has entry points and it has exit points, it has chutes and ladders and all of the kinds of wild intricacies that human beings actually make. Some of them are wildly beautiful and breathtaking and others are very dangerous or disappointing. And as a result, that kind of complexity is something I’m very, I’m very attracted to. And I think of that kind of complexity as religion, and spirituality as a vague statement, I find to be fairly vague and unclear.

And so, in the way that I articulate it, I attempt to at least pull apart this thing that I feel like we hear a lot in culture anyway, people you’ll meet. So, you know, when religion comes up, they’ll tell you they’re not religious, they’re spiritual. And I also thought, well what if we did it the other way around? I’m not a spiritual person at all, but I am very religious. It might be an interesting way of unpacking just that, that one sentence, you know?

Vincent: And what, what about the “I Hate Myself” piece?

Michael: And, well, yes, some things never change, Vince. [Laughter] I should probably pay you like $100 for this interview.

The I Hate Myself piece is a way of frankly being self-deprecating, right? It’s saying, I can’t stand it when someone does this, and I do this other thing. But it sort of turns, it pivots too, but I’m also being self-deprecating. I have a lot of insecurities, I have a lot of fears. I’m not sure I really know what the hell I’m talking about some of the time, if not most of the time. And so the hope is that kind of punch line allows us to see me as someone who isn’t coming across as Bill Maher, frankly, you know?

Vincent: Gotcha. Well, it works, it works really well I think.

Michael: Thanks.

Vincent: I got a copy of the film like a week ago, and I really enjoyed watching it, actually. I was telling you before the interview, I don’t usually really get into Buddhist documentaries, I mean, I enjoy seeing the Dalai Lama, it’s fun to see him answer questions, he’s an amazing person. And he tends to be the main figure, I see in different documentaries and he just…

Michael: Yeah.

Vincent: …wasn’t present in Bodhisattva Superstar.

Michael: No.

Vincent: And instead you had a very interesting mix of people, including myself, which…

Michael: Yes.

Vincent: …I think is very interesting that you…

Michael: Yeah, you were fantastic in it. I, I really appreciated you being part of it.

Vincent: Yeah, and it was really great to see all these different perspectives come out in the film, and one theme that I really enjoyed personally a lot was this whole look at the ways that, as you were saying, we misperceive what Buddhist practice is about. Or maybe we rightly perceive, that could be the other piece.

In particular, this notion that Buddhist shouldn’t get angry, or we shouldn’t be angry, or anger is something we need to get rid of. And you really attacked that head-on with your interview with Natalie Fisk, with other teachers in the film, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about that theme, and why it’s so central?

Michael: Yeah. I’ll be honest, the discussion around anger was generated primarily from the people I was talking to. It was something that they were… that they had a particular interest in. I did a show in 2006 called “Bewitched, Buddhist, and Bewildered,” it was like a radio show. And in which I just wanted to talk to angry Buddhists. Buddhists who were disappointed, frustrated, angry, irritated, petty. And it was a very nice discussion and that was what I interviewed Natalie Fisk on.

And in doing so I discovered from her and from other teachers I was talking to, that this was something that a lot of people deal with and are grappling with. And in fact, it can lead to some of the difficulties that people have with their communities or with their teachers or within their own practice. Which is that, so-called unwanted emotions, emotions that interfere with our joy are difficult for us to transform, and as one person says, I think it’s Natalie that says this, that often times people will think if I’m doing the practice right, I won’t feel pain. And that isn’t, from my understanding, what Buddhism asks us to do as practitioners, to stop feeling pain. But there is a sense that anger in particular is such a negative, so-called negative emotion, it’s born maybe of our insecurities or our jealousies or our ignorance. But it’s so negative, it can cause hurt in others, it can cause hurt to ourselves, that some of the people in the film were articulating this idea, that I tend to agree with which is that in Buddhist practice a lot of what the teachings around anger are, “let’s not rehearse it, let’s not practice it let’s transform it,” but perhaps not enough at “let’s look at the root causes of anger and allow them to simply be”. That some things provoke justifiable anger. Some situations provoke anger that may not be justifiable but is understandable anger, and that there’s a way in which working through it or moving through it is very valuable.

I don’t really get into the therapeutic qualities of Dharma practice in the film, but I was very interested in the fact that when we look around in our culture and we think about Buddhism in America we don’t think about people who are really angry and jealous and ignorant and petty and full of hurt. We think of people kind of, as Brad Warner said, a kind of mash-up of every Eastern philosophy we’ve ever heard. And I think, instead, if we begin to see Buddhists like every other person, as people who are really struggling with finding a job, or dealing with a break-up, or being angry at a co-worker, that those things… if we can begin to see ourselves or see our colleagues or see people who are “the other” as just people who deal with the same crap all the time that we’re dealing with, that it could be more beneficial than sort of forcing ourselves as Buddhists to be like “No, no. I’m not angry. I’m at peace, I’m breathing, I’m smiling. I’m smiling.” And having that smile become oppressive.

Vincent: That’s a theme that seems so important considering the common misunderstandings, and it seems like the character that you had in the film, the allegorical piece, she was really struggling with that very issue of how do I not be angry and frustrated, which she was so clearly angry and frustrated.

Michael: Yeah. And hurt. You know it’s not really explained very directly. We have sort of these allusions to it. But she’s dealing with some kind of real hurt. It could be the end of a relationship, it could be a death of a friend, it’s fairly vague in the film. And is really asking Buddhism to solve the problem.

And one of the things I was really struck by as I was making the film was a sort of a realization I had in the early 90s when I began to practice Buddhism, which is that in America, oftentimes, we’re kind of making it up as we go along, what we call “Buddhist practice,” because unless your in the Bay Area or you’re in maybe Boston or Los Angeles, we don’t have real formalized Buddhist temples or communities. I’m from South Texas. You buy a Buddha statue from a mail order catalog and you get a book by the Dalai Lama and you get a book by Pema Chodron and then you read a little Alan Ginsburg and you have some incense you got from the store down the street and then you kind of develop your own kind of practice because these teachings are so powerful and beautiful. But what are we doing? Like where’s the religion part? What are the rules? And I think that’s a struggle that a lot of Americans have dealt with. I think that it’s becoming more… becoming easier, especially with the kind of technologies and the Web to connect us to other communities outside of our towns.

And she’s doing that, this allegorical character, this scripted character, is sort of combining a lot of things and trying to figure out, “How do I practice? What do I practice? What do I do to, basically, to be happy?” And ultimately, I think it causes her a lot of pain because it is so confusing. At some level the question that has to be asked is, is trying to practice Buddhism more frustrating to you than not practicing it? And I don’t have an answer to that, but I ask that question to the character.

Vincent: Nice. And you did a really interesting thing at the end of the film. You asked the people that you interviewed to offer criticism or critique of the intention behind the film or of the film maker, of you. And I found that really fascinating. It was a really nice way to end the film. Similar to the remark you make in the beginning. Its like “let me also question myself, as the film maker.”

Michael: Yeah, it’s true. Well, I mean, the heart of the film, for me, really rests on a sort of a discussion of authority. And the authority that comes from outside, and the authority that comes from inside. And how do we adjudicate the kinds of authority that we follow, or that we believe, or that we trust. And as a practitioner in a religious community that has very special resonance. As a viewer of a film, it’s sometimes is a little bit trickier, right, because ultimately I am the authority, I’m the author of the film. I have total control, I have the ability to edit your interview at will. I could have made you say terrible things, Vincent.

And, and so given the kind of power and the subjective power of the artist to articulate his or her own nuanced perspective, I thought, “Well, let’s bring some self-awareness, some sort of meta-awareness to this film.” So that in the film the interviewees, the experts, begin to really challenge me and challenge what the film is and what’s the film doing? And the allegorical character actually challenges me. We have a conflict. And what you have then is, what I hope anyway, is a way in which this discussion of authority, and this discussion of perhaps disappointment or even ambiguity—kind of moral ambiguity or spiritual ambiguity, religious uncertainty—is one that as much as we wrestle with it in the film, and I wrestle with it in what I was doing with the film, that the audience is left with: “well, this is also just one artists perspective, one with which even the people in the film may not agree.”

And we’re left as an audience then, I believe, to sort of figure out, well, what is true here? What in this film made sense, and what in this film seemed to not be of any value or of any use? And so in some ways, it sort of encourages and reinforces the audience to do what I think in my mind Buddhist practice, or at least from the Kalama Sutra, asks us to do, which is to investigate, in a kind of serious and critically significant way, what we believe.

Vincent: Nice, thank you. I have to admit, when you asked me that question, I really didn’t feel like I had any answer. I didn’t know enough about other people that you’d interviewed, or really enough about your background.

Michael: Sure, sure. It’s a weird question, yeah.

Vincent: Yeah, it’s an interesting question. But I found a lot of people that ended up in the film, did have some interesting critiques. And after watching it, I figured I’d offer one more for you. [laughs]

Michael: Sure. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

Vincent: And this is kind of my one put-you-on-the-hot-seat question.

Michael: Ok, I’m ready. I’m ready.

Vincent: Ok. So there was one section of the movie, I think toward the end. And I know that you used to practice in a community that was associated with Thich Nhat Hanh, the famous Vietnamese Zen teacher.

Michael: That was the community I was ordained in. I was ordained at the Order of InterBeing in 1997.

Vincent: Nice, nice. And it seemed like a couple, or a few of the teachers that were part of the movie, were actually associated with that too, at one point.

Michael: Correct, yeah.

Vincent: And at one point it seemed like there was a critique being offered of Thich Nhat Hanh of something that had happened in his community, some sort of break, some sort of question about whether he had acted unethically with a certain issue. And it was really interesting because there weren’t a lot of details and yet it was clear that there was some sort of criticism being made of Thich Nhat Hanh…

Michael: Yeah.

Vincent: …by a couple of the teachers. So from my perspective, this seemed like a little bit of a tangent. I mean, I know it ties in with authority, but it seemed like potentially this was you or those teachers sort of venting their frustration about this situation. And that was kind of a confusing part for me.

Michael: Well…

Vincent: I was wondering if you want to respond? [laughs]

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. We could spend the rest of the podcast talking about this, but we will not. Thich Nhat Hanh’s a brilliant teacher. And I can’t think of anybody who is practitioner, or someone who’s just interested in sort of religion or spirituality, who hasn’t found a lot of… a wealth of wisdom and inspiration in Thich Nhat Hahn’s teachings. And so I want to be really clear about that. And I feel that way strongly, too.

But I worked for Thich Nhat Hanh: I was ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh, and I was a member of the Tiếp Hiện Order, the Order of Interbeing. And when I moved to California, I worked for the organization the Community of Mindful Living, and I worked adjacent to Parallax Press. And was very much involved at a time, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, that was particularly difficult within that community and within the sort of super-structure of that community, the way that the various arms of the organization were kind of working together, the machinery of it.

And I had real direct experience with Thich Nhat Hanh and with the sort of senior members of the community, as a young ordained practitioner, who was also kind of, this was my job. I was doing program directing and I was doing other kinds of work for the organization. And I experienced some real disappointment. I experienced some real suffering. Both myself, but also seeing other people who’d been with Thich Nhat Hahn for many, many years. And it very much informs my perspective. And I also have enough distance and enough, I believe, understanding, that this is not unique to just the Thich Nhat Hahn community. It’s something that’s happened in many of the Buddhist communities where there’s been some difficulty, some struggle, some internal turmoil, and there’s a way that we have to find to address it.

So much of my film is about this give and take between me, Michael Trigilio, the author of the film, and experts and the subjects in the film, the fictional ones and the real-life ones, like yourself. But I felt like it wasn’t going to be clear, that my perspective may not have been clear. If I shy away from, or I hide from my real difficulty, or my real pain, with my experiences with Thich Nhat Hahn. And so I bring them out. And I speaked about them, I think very honestly. I don’t say anything that I… believe I don’t say anything that is in any way dishonest. But I do articulate a kind of suffering, and the two other people who also struggled with that were senior teachers in his Order, and seriously involved with the genesis of that community in the United States at least. And they experienced some real hurt.

Now, the film is not called “Thich Nhat Hanh Superstar,” right? It’s not a expose or a documentary about Thich Nhat Hanh.

Vincent: Sure.

Michael: What it was, was… I think that it is a kind of tangent, I think that may be true. But I hope that it’s a tangent which carries with it some insight into one specific community that could be echoed in many, many others, that I had direct experience with. I don’t think it would be fair or appropriate for me to talk about difficulties in the Trungpa Rinpoche Sangha, or difficulties in the Zen Center community in San Francisco, or difficulties in some other traditions I don’t even know of, but I’m sure they’re there.

But if I’m going to talk about this struggle that practitioners really do have with their actual religious hierarchies that they’re struggling with, the only way I could do that with real honesty, a real ethical point of view, would be to address mine, my personal one, head-on. And yet, the details are… I do kind of lay out fairly clearly what I think happened with that community, but the details are vague, and I’ll be honest, except for one or two works of scholarship written at the graduate level at theological seminaries, I’ve seen very little to zero critique, criticism, deconstruction of Thich Nhat Hanh or of that community, and I find that surprising.

In terms of it being, perhaps one-sided or being just my perspective, well, the film ultimately does sit with, by the end of the film, me saying to the audience, “this is just my side,” right? I tell the audience that. In fact, the people in the film tell me, “You’re just doing a movie about things you’re interested in.” And at the same time, I think that when you have these ultra-celebrity Buddhists, you know, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama, and maybe Pema Chodron or someone, really famous, rockstar Buddhists, people who are on the cover of Shambhala Sun every other month, their side is pretty well articulated, [laughs] I would say. There’s a sense that the mainstream Buddhist media does a pretty fair job of articulating Thich Nhat Hanh’s point of view.

There is another point of view, of some disconnect, or I should say discomfort, within that community, and I think that’s what I was articulating, and hopefully there can be a kind of media or cultural dialogue that emerges. If not practitioner-to-practitioner, media-product-to-media-product. Read a copy of Shambhala Sun, and watch my film, then go read Brad Warner’s book, and see what emerges as an understanding of Buddhist practice in the West and its struggle with authority, patriarchy, power.

Vincent: Nice. Thank you. And I know you’ve been getting at this the whole time with all of our questions, but I just figured to wrap this conversation up, it’d be good to ask what you’re hoping people will walk away with, maybe not as a tangible thing, but even in terms of the ideas that they’d walk away struggling with, from the film?

Michael: Yeah. Well, I think there are probably two distinct audiences for the film. There is the Buddhist audience, which Buddhist Geeks would be a part of, right? I mean, the sort of people who are…

Vincent: Yeah.

Michael: …familiar with Buddhism, who’ve even heard of Thich Nhat Hanh, who are familiar with the three jewels, and taking refuge, and familiar with the Kalama Sutra. So there’s that community. And then there’s a community that I encounter far more often, of non-Buddhists, people for whom Buddhism is just a kind of television commercial, and who’ve never heard of Thich Nhat Hanh, and maybe are familiar with the Dalai Lama, but maybe that’s it.

So I’m expecting kind of two, maybe, different things. I think from within the Buddhist community, I’m hoping people come away with another point of view. Right? Maybe you would disagree, but this is not a film that, I think, attacks Buddhism, or sets out to make Buddhism look bad…

Vincent: No, no, I wouldn’t say so.

Michael: But it is attempting to make Buddhism look like a religion. A religion that is complex, and made up of human beings, and human beings that are struggling with their own internal psychological ordeals, and also with the beauty and the importance of what, I think, Buddhism can offer to people who have chosen to convert, or for whom Buddhism is a real resource.

And what I think, I expect, or I hope, or I wish they’d come away from is: is there a way in which we can have a conversation, a kind of cultural conversation, about our religion? Which is one in which we can express some anger, some frustration, some irritation, some disappointment, and yet still be comfortable saying that we’re Buddhists. Is there a way in which we can watch the film and say “I identify with some of those concerns”?” when some of the things that Trigilio says make me really angry. And yet some of them are thought provoking. And I am thinking about what are other manifestations of Dharma practice for me as an American, with my own sort of American cultural mores and values that may be different, that may come up against the systems of authority or power or patriarchy that we sometimes find in more traditional forms of Buddhism. So that’s one kind of audience.

I think the other audience, the sort of maybe the wider audience, the non-Buddhist audience. It’s for me about demystification in some ways. Taking a religion that I find very important in my life and not sort of just setting it up as another exotic, foreign, beautiful, Eastern mysticism, that is so often perpetuated by Snickers Bars commercials and deodorant commercials and cheap stunts in music videos. But instead something that is… people are really grappling with. That Buddhism isn’t just the religion of peace that always use to counter all of the other religions, but instead is a religion made up of people, that have differences in their own values with one another; that this notion of Sangha is a complicated one, it’s not easy. That we’re demystifying something for the culture. And that if that’s possible, can we do more demystification? Can we do a demystification of Catholicism, of Islam, of Judaism? Can we have a sort of break down our systems of religion—not break down in our hearts, but break down in our conversations and in our dialogues? About what does religion do for us, and where does it fall short? Where does it succeed, but where does it cause struggle? Where does it cause epiphany? But often times religion causes both. Not for everyone, not all of the time. But often for many, let’s say. And how do we address it? How do we deal with that without feeling like we’re failing or that we’re bad, or something? Right? And so, I do think there are these two positions.

At the end of the day, frankly, Vince, I hope people laugh. I want it to be funny. And I want people to have an experience of the kind of moral and perhaps religious or spiritual ambiguity that I essentially leave with the audience around my own authorship. And yet there is a moment at the end of the film where, given a conflict I have with the fictional character, there’s a real burst of moral clarity about what right and wrong is. And that tension between things that we know are right and we know are wrong. Versus, what does religion do for me and why I am religious? And, I don’t know, but I know I like it? Those are different questions.

Vincent: And just so people can kind of find out more about the film, actually watch the film…

Michael: Yeah.

Vincent: …we wanted to let the Buddhist Geeks listeners know that we put up an excerpt on the buddhistgeeks.com site. So, they can check that out.

Michael: Yeah.

Vincent: And also, we’ve got a link to your site on this episode page. And then if people are interested in showing the film or getting it viewed, that that’s a possibility too, and they could probably contact you through your website, right?

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, sure.

Vincent: Ok.

Michael: Yeah. Right now it’s screening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, every day, through September 19th. And so it can’t really travel till after that, but then after that it’s basically going to hit the film festival market. And if your fellow geeks have a film festival that they are interested or they’re involved in, or that they’d like to see come to their town, feel free to email me, feel free to email that festival about the film, if that’s of any interest to them.

Vincent: Cool. Thank you, Michael. I really appreciate you, again, taking the time to speak about your film and…

Michael: Oh, thank you, Vincent. And you were fantastic in the film, I have to say. I mean, if nothing else, the Buddhist Geeks should just watch it to see you. Because I really think it was an important voice. What you guys are doing at Buddhist Geeks was something that I also want to be doing, but realized you guys do it a lot better than I do. So interviewing you about what you’re doing was a real treat for me. To be able to include that really, I think, important aspect to Dharma practice, which I think is generational, it’s technological, but it’s also clear-headed and I think fairly wise, the way that you all are approaching this media outlet and the kinds of conversation. So, I do really appreciate it.