I'd love for you to just share briefly, fill in the gaps, um, as a quick overview on basically why should people have a listen to us now for the next couple of hours, and what it is that you are known for.

Well, thank you for the introduction.

Yeah.

So I, um, hung out a shingle somewhere in the late nineties and basically said, "If you're having weird meditative experiences, I'll be happy to talk to you about those for free.

I won't even take a donation." And somewhere around that same time, I started publishing what would eventually become a book called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, an unusually hardcore Dharma book, which back then peop- in the nineties and early 2000s, people would print out on their office printers.

And, um, it was-- And then eventually it got printed in various forms, thanks to, um, Eon Books and Oliver Rathbone, sorry, uh, Oliver Rathbone, very grateful for them.

And then, then me and my friend Vince Horn and some other people co-founded something called the Dharma Overground, which is an online site where people could talk about meditation experiences and depths of practice that you really couldn't talk about without just getting flamed off of them from the other sites that were available.

And what was that beginning like for you, Daniel? Let's go all the way back.

So before we get into the controversy your claim has generated, what does awakening mean? What is Arahat specifically? And then we can jump into, you know, why that has created such a controversy for you.

Yeah, so first of all, I should mention there is a lot of controversy around this.

I very reasonably get accused of redefining terms by some people, and depending on which part of things like the Pali Canon or the commentaries of the various traditions around this you think are most salient, some of my definitions and lived experience really line up.

Some don't actually fit some of the ancient ideals and orthodox models, and therein lies a lot of valid controversy.

I get why the orthodox people are annoyed by me.

I understand that.

I do actually go far out of my way in the book to really define what it is I mean by the term, and I'll get to that in a second, but I just want to acknowledge the complexities here.

Like, what do you really want people to know? What are you, you know, what have you been exposed to? And what is your research consortium like bringing that you want the field to know about?