and we get back to nancy mccagney's earlier comments about attention, and this is the end result of the eightfold path- to put yourself in a situation in a community, amongst people in a life situation, in which you can keep your attention focused on the present, on what you're doing, and monitor that constant, constant tendency on the part of humans to pull yourself away. in other words, the latter parts of the path- and here in buddhism we see a wide variety of meditative practices, following teachers, whatever, in order to get there. but the idea is you have to get there. the only way that you can achieve enlightenment is to monitor constantly that tendency on your part to pull away from the rest of the world around you, and run life as though you were the only power station in control of everything else. i mean, that's about the best that i can say of the analogy- it's going to be meditation practices, it's going to be rituals, it's going to be prayers and other sorts of buddhism. but what you need to do to fulfill the eightfold path is to finally- to do it. you know, that's the bud