Thank you for this awesome article! I would like to add under the fact that Yidams are not self existing, external deities or entities that most of the teachings make it clear that YOU are not a real self existing entity either. Your ego is just as generated as the Yidam or to put it another way you are not any Realer than the Yidam.
Of course it’s important to define what “you” means here.
Is yidam practice similar to method acting? It seems compatible with descriptions I've read, but I haven't seen the comparison directly addressed. If yes, then mentioning this would seem to be helpful for westerners to understand the point.
I would say they are similar in that method acting = full immersion in the world, perspective, and being of the character
Some differences come to mind: the practice of yidam is not about your individual performance and you're not inhabiting a character with human foibles. Also, method acting is riddled with psychological assumptions that might be unhelpful when practicing yidam.
That said, the similarities between yidam and acting were a big part of what drew me to Vajrayana! I have the suspicion that acting method could be adapted to make yidam more accessible and potent, but that's just my half-baked theory.
Would it be fair to describe yidams as the scaffolding practice that enables playful exposure to a range of emergent patterns in order to gather experiential exaptation of various "strange attractors" in a devotional way. This is what I gather from "superimposing the mandala, the elaborate envisioned environment of the yidam, on actuality".
Thank you for this article. It helped clarify the purpose of yidam practice and why I might be interested in doing that. It's also interesting that you mentioned tsa-lung. I didn't know that it was an alternate bypass in the Buddhist scheme to Dzogchen realization. Up until now, I'd just been doing it because I thought it was a useful practice to do (and it is! On days when I do it together with meditation, my degree of ease in my usual stuff and interactions is much better). At this point, I am probably most limited by time and energy, since I work; I can't meditate and do tsa-lung every day. However, this post has clarified why I might even want to look into yidam practice instead of tsa-lung: you say it's easier for most people. I saw you advertised and undertook a yidam practice online session recently with EG, but alas, I ended up skipping that.
Hi Marko, yes, it does seem like the energetic, subtle body experience as a window into Dzogchen realization is sometimes overlooked.
Yidam and tsa-lung are broad fields of overlapping practice; there are many different flavors of each. The practice I introduced recently with EG was the Vajrasattva front generation referred to in this article. We didn't make a recording of this one, but there'll be others.
In the meantime, it sounds like you've found a way to practice that makes a difference in your daily life. That's what actually matters!
Yes, I found a way to practice but so far I haven't been able to actually do that very much because I can't fit it in with working. But, at this point, amazingly enough, I think I'm looking at an era where I'll be able to meditate and do tsa-lung daily even with working. That's because I found a bunch of boons and supplements to help me, including the newest one: drinking homemade electrolyte solutions (a commercial example of this is Gatorade). Now I feel like I have the energy/will to do the exercises, even with working and the dopamine attenuation from my medication.
"The alienness of yidams, and of the practice, is important. The unfamiliarity is key: you practice in order to discover radical new possibilities, not to fix up your current psychology."
Do we have an advantage compared to the Tibetans because the yidams are more alien to us?
Unfortunately, very little! Many yidams have three heads, or are garlanded in skulls, or ride on tigers, or at minimum are gorgeous naked teenagers, and most Tibetans aren't like that.
I have to take issue with two small points in this excellent article.
Mahayana has a large corpus of praxis. Practicing the six paramitas, practicing lojong, sutra recitation, etc. There is no dearth of things to do. There is also significant overlap between dharani cults and tantra. And if we are being honest, it’s most likely that buddhist tantra arose out of a proto-tantric source tradition close to Trika Shaivism rather than out of a need for further elaboration of already voluminous sutra literature. We have the example of several of the mahasiddhas like Matsyendranath, Goraknath, et al who are considered lineage gurus of both Buddhist and Hindu traditions. They adapted their pedagogy to the needs of their various students, which itself is a Mahayana characteristic contained within elaborate commentaries on the bodhisattva vow. Vajrayana arose and prospered because of the superiority of its view and praxis and the extraordinary speed of its results. It was because people wanted *faster* methods, so that they could help others immediately rather than waiting aeons for enlightenment like some beleaguered Tottenham Hotspur fan.
The second point is practical: we are not “…superimposing the mandala, the elaborate envisioned environment of the yidam onto actuality.” We are replacing the superimposed confusion of our ordinary samsaric vision with an imagined gestalt that allows us to participate in the experience and understanding of the realized siddha that is the source, and the lineage through which the praxis comes to us. The word “visualization” can confuse even advanced practitioners into thinking it’s something that is imposed on one’s field of karmic vision. This is incorrect. It’s imposed on one’s perspective through a process of sedimentation, a learned habitual container for the completion stage practices to refine. It’s the same process by which we have unconsciously generated the world in it’s current confusion made conscious and tied to fundamental reality.
Thank you for this thoughtful and informative comment! I agree with everything in it (and I am familiar with the relevant historical material).
I'm not sure how you are disagreeing, though; there seems no disjuncture between the points you make and what we said?
Yes, Vajrayana arose from Mahayana as an approach to the problem of "how do we actually get enlightened in finite time?" (I wrote a rather snarky explanation of this fourteen years ago, at https://vividness.live/your-self-is-not-a-spiritual-obstacle#tradition .) This new piece makes the same point very briefly in the "Historical explanation" section, I thought.
And the creators of early Buddhist tantra almost certainly drew heavily on various non-Buddhist methods including Shaivite tantra, as Western scholars have demonstrated in detail. They put those methods to different, Buddhist, ends.
Regarding:
> we are not “…superimposing the mandala, the elaborate envisioned environment of the yidam onto actuality.” We are replacing the superimposed confusion of our ordinary samsaric vision with an imagined gestalt that allows us to participate in the experience and understanding of the realized siddha
This seems to be the contrast we made between the "scaffolding practice" (a provisional initial method used in some specific practices/contexts/lineages) and "the thing itself" (the more direct method, bordering on fruition)?
Perhaps the miscommunication here is that you read the word "actuality" as implying that samsaric vision is accurate? We'd agree that it isn't! Samsaric vision and pure vision are different ways of perceiving the same world, with different consequences. We use the word "actual" to make clear that the world as seen in pure vision is not a hallucination, imagined fantasy, or other plane of existence to be found elsewhere.
Where I digress is the idea that Mahayana had no coherent theory of how to wake up. The practice of the six paramitas is foundational ethical practice for a vajrayana as much as a mahayana practitioner. In the Tibetan tradition, we actually ground vajrayana practice in the theory of the Mahayana Tathagatagarbha sutras, particularly the Uttaratantrashastra and it’s many commentaries. That’s where the theoretical underpinnings of tantric practice in a Buddhist context are most explicit. Where vajrayana differs from mahayana is in the urgency of the method and the immediacy of the view, not the coherence of its vision.
With regards to the second point, what I am saying is that seeing is not an interpretative framework for filtering and evaluating an external world at all. Vision is a generative act. Whether it produces the dream of samsara with its endless wheel of afflictive emotions or the dream of empty compassionate awareness is a matter of change of perspective. Vajrayana is an assertion of agency in authoring our perceived world.
Lama Yeshe makes an interesting point about how identifying with a yidam gives us the confidence we need to even practice with expectancy of enlightenment. If we’re always sorry for our sad state of affairs, why would we expect to gain any fruit?
There’s a weird semi-secrecy around which yidams are practised. But, it is just not that much of a secret that e.g. Hayagriva and Vajravarahi in union is a thing. There’s like, art of it in museums.
Yeah, in reality essentially nothing in Vajrayana is genuinely secret. Some bits may require a few rounds of web searching to find, but not more than that.
“Evolving Ground Vajrasattva practices include kriya tantra purifications, plus a yoga tantra method that is similar, but with sexual imagery.”
I’m just a little bit surprised by this. I’m more used to the yidams in kriya yoga practises being different from the ones in karmamudra. Thus, Tara is probably going be to be some sort of kriya yoga practise, while Vajravarahi could be some sort of higher yoga tantra thing.
Both kriyatantra and yogatantra Vajrasattva practices are original. In the yogatantra version, the mingled sexual fluids of Vajrasattva and consort drip into your head and spread through your body. I have to admit I found this shocking when I first learned of it almost thirty years ago.
Curious which sadhana features deities in union within Yoga Tantra? I’m more accustomed to yab-yum being an earmark of the inner tantras. Is this something EG created? 🙏😘
Thanks for pointing this out! It's at minimum a disputable point, and quite probably we got it outright wrong. However, quoting Steven Neal Weinberger's PhD thesis ("The Significance of Yoga Tantra and the Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha Tantra) within Tantric Buddhism in India and Tibet," p. 277:
> This text is the Dharma Mandala Sutra, which contains references to the union of vajra (penis) and lotus (vagina) in “secret” mandalas, as well as to male-female deity pairs (yab-yum). This text, which Butön discusses as a Yoga Tantra text and appears to indicate is related to the Purification of All Bad Transmigrations, is of particular interest because it is one of the earliest exegetical works that explicitly refers to practices involving sexual union.
Weinberger's overall thesis is that Yoga Tantra is much closer to Mahayoga than later authorities were willing to admit. This is tendentious, perhaps!
I expect we'd agree that doxographical classifications and yana boundaries are always somewhat nebulous, and of limited import. Nevertheless, pedantic accuracy is sometimes worth maintaining...
Fair point on Weinberger, thanks for sharing the snippet. I've found the 1:1 mapping of Mahayoga and Anuyoga to the first, second, and third empowerments easier to hold in mind, with yab-yum as a structured practice system carrying its empowerment correspondences. Consequently easier for the average student too, which is what prompted my inquiry. But as always, I'm a fan of what works over what's "right." If it works for the chelas, that's plenty.
> I've found the 1:1 mapping of Mahayoga and Anuyoga to the first, second, and third empowerments easier to hold in mind
Interesting! The discussions I had read were always in terms of purifications of body, speech, and mind. I hadn't come across a correspondence with the tantric (sub)yanas, but it can see it making sense.
So, on reflection, we've cut out all the stuff about of the different tantric yanas, which won't be helpful for the intended audience anyway. (As well as the yogatantra classification being probably wrong!) Thanks for pointing out the issue.
Hi Peter, thanks for this. You're right, I called that particular practice Yogatantra in style and it's not strictly so. The practice could technically be described as a move from Yoga into Anuttarayoga, with the possibility for completion.
The Vajrasattva practices came from me as a gift to some folk in eG for whom it seemed timely and appropriate. If they're helpful outside of that context, that's great—but they shouldn't be taken as anything more than circumstantially generated methods for a particular time and place.
The Vajrasattva-Vajrabhrikuti form is initially externally visualized and the fluid from their heart union drips through the crown, purifying throughout the body. Here's a link to the text, in case you're curious:
I've been working with different ways to approach bhakti, the Hindu devotional practice, and it's interesting to see some parallels here. I read about Ramakrishna's practices involving specific relational attitudes called bhavas towards the deity (eg mother-child, friendship, etc) as well as inhabiting the archetype of the deity (Hanuman for instance).
After seeing that these practices were effective for me I wondered if they would be possible for people with fewer/different metaphysical commitments. Actually-existing-gods are compatible with my ontology and seemed load bearing for my practice, but it sounds like they are not strictly necessary for similar effects based on the description here.
Re. Empowerment. I would have thought you would at least want the _tri_, the philosophical explanation that comes with the empowerment. (And as for the reading transmission, well, I can also see the point of hearing the text read.)
The Good King Gesar practice is simultaneously extremely traditional and extremely non-traditional. I'm not sure how that's possible, but it is, and it seems to work.
We do *way* more _tri_ (explanation of both view and method) than is traditional. We do several hours of that on the day before the _wang_ (ritual), and then more on the day, and still more on the next day.
Non-traditionally, we do the wang in the middle of the _lung_ (reading transmission), at the point where the practice transitions from front-generation to self-arising.
The wang takes about ten minutes (atypically brief). The structure of it is untraditional (it doesn't have the four phases, which don't seem like they'd be meaningful for most participants) but elements are traditional (anointing with amrita).
I'm pleased with how well this has gone the two times we've done it so far! Perhaps some of this week's participants will write about their experience publicly, and we'll see whether my impression is accurate.
Thank you for this awesome article! I would like to add under the fact that Yidams are not self existing, external deities or entities that most of the teachings make it clear that YOU are not a real self existing entity either. Your ego is just as generated as the Yidam or to put it another way you are not any Realer than the Yidam.
Of course it’s important to define what “you” means here.
Your teachings may vary, of course.
Yes! I agree completely, and also agree that this is important.
(I can’t fit everything important into a post, although I often try, and fail…)
Is yidam practice similar to method acting? It seems compatible with descriptions I've read, but I haven't seen the comparison directly addressed. If yes, then mentioning this would seem to be helpful for westerners to understand the point.
I don't know enough about method acting to answer that confidently. There is an analogy, but my guess is it's mostly misleading. I might be wrong!
I would say they are similar in that method acting = full immersion in the world, perspective, and being of the character
Some differences come to mind: the practice of yidam is not about your individual performance and you're not inhabiting a character with human foibles. Also, method acting is riddled with psychological assumptions that might be unhelpful when practicing yidam.
That said, the similarities between yidam and acting were a big part of what drew me to Vajrayana! I have the suspicion that acting method could be adapted to make yidam more accessible and potent, but that's just my half-baked theory.
Would it be fair to describe yidams as the scaffolding practice that enables playful exposure to a range of emergent patterns in order to gather experiential exaptation of various "strange attractors" in a devotional way. This is what I gather from "superimposing the mandala, the elaborate envisioned environment of the yidam, on actuality".
Uh... I think so? Charlie can answer this better than me, and probably will (but may take a while given their current schedule).
Seems accurate to me.
Hi Charlie,
Thank you for this article. It helped clarify the purpose of yidam practice and why I might be interested in doing that. It's also interesting that you mentioned tsa-lung. I didn't know that it was an alternate bypass in the Buddhist scheme to Dzogchen realization. Up until now, I'd just been doing it because I thought it was a useful practice to do (and it is! On days when I do it together with meditation, my degree of ease in my usual stuff and interactions is much better). At this point, I am probably most limited by time and energy, since I work; I can't meditate and do tsa-lung every day. However, this post has clarified why I might even want to look into yidam practice instead of tsa-lung: you say it's easier for most people. I saw you advertised and undertook a yidam practice online session recently with EG, but alas, I ended up skipping that.
Hi Marko, yes, it does seem like the energetic, subtle body experience as a window into Dzogchen realization is sometimes overlooked.
Yidam and tsa-lung are broad fields of overlapping practice; there are many different flavors of each. The practice I introduced recently with EG was the Vajrasattva front generation referred to in this article. We didn't make a recording of this one, but there'll be others.
In the meantime, it sounds like you've found a way to practice that makes a difference in your daily life. That's what actually matters!
Yes, I found a way to practice but so far I haven't been able to actually do that very much because I can't fit it in with working. But, at this point, amazingly enough, I think I'm looking at an era where I'll be able to meditate and do tsa-lung daily even with working. That's because I found a bunch of boons and supplements to help me, including the newest one: drinking homemade electrolyte solutions (a commercial example of this is Gatorade). Now I feel like I have the energy/will to do the exercises, even with working and the dopamine attenuation from my medication.
I am so delighted to hear, that’s wonderful!
<“Very big deal” can be a powerful method for personal transformation.> This made me laugh so hard. Thanks:)
"The alienness of yidams, and of the practice, is important. The unfamiliarity is key: you practice in order to discover radical new possibilities, not to fix up your current psychology."
Do we have an advantage compared to the Tibetans because the yidams are more alien to us?
Unfortunately, very little! Many yidams have three heads, or are garlanded in skulls, or ride on tigers, or at minimum are gorgeous naked teenagers, and most Tibetans aren't like that.
I have to take issue with two small points in this excellent article.
Mahayana has a large corpus of praxis. Practicing the six paramitas, practicing lojong, sutra recitation, etc. There is no dearth of things to do. There is also significant overlap between dharani cults and tantra. And if we are being honest, it’s most likely that buddhist tantra arose out of a proto-tantric source tradition close to Trika Shaivism rather than out of a need for further elaboration of already voluminous sutra literature. We have the example of several of the mahasiddhas like Matsyendranath, Goraknath, et al who are considered lineage gurus of both Buddhist and Hindu traditions. They adapted their pedagogy to the needs of their various students, which itself is a Mahayana characteristic contained within elaborate commentaries on the bodhisattva vow. Vajrayana arose and prospered because of the superiority of its view and praxis and the extraordinary speed of its results. It was because people wanted *faster* methods, so that they could help others immediately rather than waiting aeons for enlightenment like some beleaguered Tottenham Hotspur fan.
The second point is practical: we are not “…superimposing the mandala, the elaborate envisioned environment of the yidam onto actuality.” We are replacing the superimposed confusion of our ordinary samsaric vision with an imagined gestalt that allows us to participate in the experience and understanding of the realized siddha that is the source, and the lineage through which the praxis comes to us. The word “visualization” can confuse even advanced practitioners into thinking it’s something that is imposed on one’s field of karmic vision. This is incorrect. It’s imposed on one’s perspective through a process of sedimentation, a learned habitual container for the completion stage practices to refine. It’s the same process by which we have unconsciously generated the world in it’s current confusion made conscious and tied to fundamental reality.
Thank you for this thoughtful and informative comment! I agree with everything in it (and I am familiar with the relevant historical material).
I'm not sure how you are disagreeing, though; there seems no disjuncture between the points you make and what we said?
Yes, Vajrayana arose from Mahayana as an approach to the problem of "how do we actually get enlightened in finite time?" (I wrote a rather snarky explanation of this fourteen years ago, at https://vividness.live/your-self-is-not-a-spiritual-obstacle#tradition .) This new piece makes the same point very briefly in the "Historical explanation" section, I thought.
And the creators of early Buddhist tantra almost certainly drew heavily on various non-Buddhist methods including Shaivite tantra, as Western scholars have demonstrated in detail. They put those methods to different, Buddhist, ends.
Regarding:
> we are not “…superimposing the mandala, the elaborate envisioned environment of the yidam onto actuality.” We are replacing the superimposed confusion of our ordinary samsaric vision with an imagined gestalt that allows us to participate in the experience and understanding of the realized siddha
This seems to be the contrast we made between the "scaffolding practice" (a provisional initial method used in some specific practices/contexts/lineages) and "the thing itself" (the more direct method, bordering on fruition)?
Perhaps the miscommunication here is that you read the word "actuality" as implying that samsaric vision is accurate? We'd agree that it isn't! Samsaric vision and pure vision are different ways of perceiving the same world, with different consequences. We use the word "actual" to make clear that the world as seen in pure vision is not a hallucination, imagined fantasy, or other plane of existence to be found elsewhere.
Where I digress is the idea that Mahayana had no coherent theory of how to wake up. The practice of the six paramitas is foundational ethical practice for a vajrayana as much as a mahayana practitioner. In the Tibetan tradition, we actually ground vajrayana practice in the theory of the Mahayana Tathagatagarbha sutras, particularly the Uttaratantrashastra and it’s many commentaries. That’s where the theoretical underpinnings of tantric practice in a Buddhist context are most explicit. Where vajrayana differs from mahayana is in the urgency of the method and the immediacy of the view, not the coherence of its vision.
With regards to the second point, what I am saying is that seeing is not an interpretative framework for filtering and evaluating an external world at all. Vision is a generative act. Whether it produces the dream of samsara with its endless wheel of afflictive emotions or the dream of empty compassionate awareness is a matter of change of perspective. Vajrayana is an assertion of agency in authoring our perceived world.
very helpful and enticing, thank you!
Lama Yeshe makes an interesting point about how identifying with a yidam gives us the confidence we need to even practice with expectancy of enlightenment. If we’re always sorry for our sad state of affairs, why would we expect to gain any fruit?
There’s a weird semi-secrecy around which yidams are practised. But, it is just not that much of a secret that e.g. Hayagriva and Vajravarahi in union is a thing. There’s like, art of it in museums.
Yeah, in reality essentially nothing in Vajrayana is genuinely secret. Some bits may require a few rounds of web searching to find, but not more than that.
“Evolving Ground Vajrasattva practices include kriya tantra purifications, plus a yoga tantra method that is similar, but with sexual imagery.”
I’m just a little bit surprised by this. I’m more used to the yidams in kriya yoga practises being different from the ones in karmamudra. Thus, Tara is probably going be to be some sort of kriya yoga practise, while Vajravarahi could be some sort of higher yoga tantra thing.
Both kriyatantra and yogatantra Vajrasattva practices are original. In the yogatantra version, the mingled sexual fluids of Vajrasattva and consort drip into your head and spread through your body. I have to admit I found this shocking when I first learned of it almost thirty years ago.
You can find explanations, practice instructions, and images with a web search such as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vajrasattva+yab+yum
Curious which sadhana features deities in union within Yoga Tantra? I’m more accustomed to yab-yum being an earmark of the inner tantras. Is this something EG created? 🙏😘
Thanks for pointing this out! It's at minimum a disputable point, and quite probably we got it outright wrong. However, quoting Steven Neal Weinberger's PhD thesis ("The Significance of Yoga Tantra and the Compendium of Principles (Tattvasamgraha Tantra) within Tantric Buddhism in India and Tibet," p. 277:
> This text is the Dharma Mandala Sutra, which contains references to the union of vajra (penis) and lotus (vagina) in “secret” mandalas, as well as to male-female deity pairs (yab-yum). This text, which Butön discusses as a Yoga Tantra text and appears to indicate is related to the Purification of All Bad Transmigrations, is of particular interest because it is one of the earliest exegetical works that explicitly refers to practices involving sexual union.
Weinberger's overall thesis is that Yoga Tantra is much closer to Mahayoga than later authorities were willing to admit. This is tendentious, perhaps!
I expect we'd agree that doxographical classifications and yana boundaries are always somewhat nebulous, and of limited import. Nevertheless, pedantic accuracy is sometimes worth maintaining...
Fair point on Weinberger, thanks for sharing the snippet. I've found the 1:1 mapping of Mahayoga and Anuyoga to the first, second, and third empowerments easier to hold in mind, with yab-yum as a structured practice system carrying its empowerment correspondences. Consequently easier for the average student too, which is what prompted my inquiry. But as always, I'm a fan of what works over what's "right." If it works for the chelas, that's plenty.
> I've found the 1:1 mapping of Mahayoga and Anuyoga to the first, second, and third empowerments easier to hold in mind
Interesting! The discussions I had read were always in terms of purifications of body, speech, and mind. I hadn't come across a correspondence with the tantric (sub)yanas, but it can see it making sense.
So, on reflection, we've cut out all the stuff about of the different tantric yanas, which won't be helpful for the intended audience anyway. (As well as the yogatantra classification being probably wrong!) Thanks for pointing out the issue.
Hi Peter, thanks for this. You're right, I called that particular practice Yogatantra in style and it's not strictly so. The practice could technically be described as a move from Yoga into Anuttarayoga, with the possibility for completion.
The Vajrasattva practices came from me as a gift to some folk in eG for whom it seemed timely and appropriate. If they're helpful outside of that context, that's great—but they shouldn't be taken as anything more than circumstantially generated methods for a particular time and place.
The Vajrasattva-Vajrabhrikuti form is initially externally visualized and the fluid from their heart union drips through the crown, purifying throughout the body. Here's a link to the text, in case you're curious:
https://evolving-ground-vajrasattva-union.netlify.app/
I've been working with different ways to approach bhakti, the Hindu devotional practice, and it's interesting to see some parallels here. I read about Ramakrishna's practices involving specific relational attitudes called bhavas towards the deity (eg mother-child, friendship, etc) as well as inhabiting the archetype of the deity (Hanuman for instance).
After seeing that these practices were effective for me I wondered if they would be possible for people with fewer/different metaphysical commitments. Actually-existing-gods are compatible with my ontology and seemed load bearing for my practice, but it sounds like they are not strictly necessary for similar effects based on the description here.
Yes, it's definitely possible to regard yidams as non-existent and yet relate with them effectively. I wrote about that here: https://vividness.live/yidams-a-godless-approach-naturally#existence
Re. Empowerment. I would have thought you would at least want the _tri_, the philosophical explanation that comes with the empowerment. (And as for the reading transmission, well, I can also see the point of hearing the text read.)
Yes, absolutely!
The Good King Gesar practice is simultaneously extremely traditional and extremely non-traditional. I'm not sure how that's possible, but it is, and it seems to work.
We do *way* more _tri_ (explanation of both view and method) than is traditional. We do several hours of that on the day before the _wang_ (ritual), and then more on the day, and still more on the next day.
Non-traditionally, we do the wang in the middle of the _lung_ (reading transmission), at the point where the practice transitions from front-generation to self-arising.
The wang takes about ten minutes (atypically brief). The structure of it is untraditional (it doesn't have the four phases, which don't seem like they'd be meaningful for most participants) but elements are traditional (anointing with amrita).
I'm pleased with how well this has gone the two times we've done it so far! Perhaps some of this week's participants will write about their experience publicly, and we'll see whether my impression is accurate.