"I'm aware again. It was only 20 minutes." Let's not get too worried about how long we're off for. We have to come back. We have to come back. We have to come back. It's all conditioning. It's all conditioning. People here have different occupations. Why do we ask about your occupation on the registration form? It helps us understand the person a little better as to their background, but it also gives us an idea whether the meditation practice will be slightly easier for them or slightly harder. With some occupations, there is automatically an ability to relax in the meditation, to work harder to get better concentration. With some other occupations, it's really hard.
A lot of you want to know some examples. The one that's really hard: writers of fiction. They live in the book. We actually had a writer come here, do two retreats, leave and come back about a year later to do another retreat. When they came back, they were very excited, telling me about the book they were writing. They filled in their form, they handed it over to me, and I said, "Who's this?" They didn't put their name. They said, "That's my protagonist in the book. I'm sorry." They were so identified with the person they were writing about in the book, semi-autobiographically, that they didn't even know their own name. Wow. Another example is university professors. They know too much. They really know too much. As I mentioned last night in the hall in the tea cup story, what can we do with somebody who knows too much? Rosemary and I don't have tea that we bring out in the interviews like the teacher in the story does, you know. It's hard. It's very hard when people are caught up in lots of words as a writer or a university professor. There is a lot of extra stuff there that gets in the way.
On the other side is simplicity; people who are more simple in their life: gardeners, brick layers, people with simple occupations, artists sometimes, depending on what art they're into. An artist develops very good concentration depending on the art. People who work with oil paints have to be very careful and they can be very minute. If you've ever seen Rosemary's drawings - well, just take a look in the book; you've probably got her drawings in the book - they are pen and ink, but some of them are very minute; you have to get very concentrated. The ability to concentrate is a little stronger for that type of person. But, then, other artists - maybe those that use water colors, that just kind of splash and move - don't have to get so concentrated. It's a different sort of art, so different levels of concentration are required in there. These are occupations that have more simplicity or require more work on concentration.
So your background in terms of your occupation, and in other ways, this is all your conditioning. Your conditioning. You get lost for twenty minutes; it's just due to your conditioning. It's not something you want to continually repeat, just like we would rather not want to continually get lost 40 times in one hour, either. But if it's going to continue to happen, okay, we recognize it's happening. We're aware again, we start again, we get lost again, we start again, we get lost again, we get started again. It's the whole practice of starting over and starting over. If we get upset anytime that we're lost, all we've done is taken a step backward instead of starting again and taking a step forward.