A Powerful New Take on the Enneagram (from my new book)

Hello, my name is Susan Piver. I'm a writer and long time practitioner and teacher of Buddhism.

I've come to see that many people think of Buddhism and meditation practices associated

with it, like mindfulness, as ways to reduce stress, but I would like to tell you that

the Buddhist path is far more rich than that. It is a way to wake up to become liberated

from suffering. And forget about enlightenment, it's also a way to live your everyday life

more fully and meaningfully. This podcast is to share with you classical Buddhist teachings

that I have found enormously beneficial, and also to tell stories from my own life about

how I applied and misapplied these teachings. And I do want to tell you from my more than

thirty years of experience that the Dharma is real, and it provides an extraordinarily

nuanced, profound, and pragmatic guidebook to living a life of wisdom, compassion, and

courage.

Hello, podcast listeners. Thank you for your excellent response to the recent series on

the Noble Eightfold Path. We're going to take a break from it just for this week, but

we'll pick right back up with step number six next week. But in this episode, I wanted

to take some time to talk to you about my two favorite subjects, Buddhism and the Enneagram.

Ennea is the Greek prefix for nine, and the Enneagram describes nine ways of being.

You are one of them. I am one of them, and I have found it enormously helpful to know

that about myself and the people in my life, which is reason number one for this foray

into Buddhism and the Enneagram. This is a time of great conflict. I don't have to explain

why I say that, and difficulty in figuring out how to relate to each other. For me,

the Enneagram is a blueprint on how to create healthy relationships. So I thought it

was useful to talk about that, and also I have a book called the Buddhist Enneagram,

which I self-published a few years ago, but it's just being republished like this week

by the Great Shambhala Publications. I'm very honored. I love them. So I'm very grateful

for this book to have another chapter, no pun intended, in its life. So as you may realize,

Buddhism is famously associated with compassion. In fact, if you ask ten people, what do

you think Buddhism's about? Eight point five of them might say compassion, and that is accurate.

There are teachings on compassion, compassion practices, exhortations,

to center compassion in all the moments of your life, not just for the benefit of others,

but for your own benefit. His holiness, the Dalai Lama famously said, and I'm paraphrasing,

if you want to be happy, think of others, if you want to be unhappy, think of yourself. Now I

doubt he meant you don't count, forget about you, put others first. I guess what he meant is

when you go into the situations of your life, wondering exclusively, what's in it for me?

What can I get? What might hurt me? Those are very reasonable concerns, by the way.

The world shrinks and starts to feel claustrophobic, and your vision diminishes significantly.

However, when you go into the same situations of your life,

leading with questions like, what might be needed here? What can I offer? How do others feel?

Well, who might I be able to support and help? Well, your inner world expands, becomes much more

panoramic, and there's a sense of relaxation that comes with the question, what can I give

that is destroyed by the question, what can I get? So something to think about. It's okay,

compassion. Yes, please. It's very easy to embrace the theory that compassion is good.

However, when you go into your life, and someone is cruel to you, or someone is unkind to someone

else, or someone discounts you, or someone cuts you off in traffic, or someone holds vastly

different political views than you, or someone is just a little snooty to you, compassion can go

out the window. Interestingly, when it comes to compassion for others, the most difficult

circumstances for deploying compassion seem to occur between us and the people we love,

the people we're in relationships with. Those are the hardest people to feel compassion for.

We tend to speak to those closest to us, those we are most intimate with, in ways on bad days,

that we would never talk to other people in our life. We can feel a kind of license to be

unkind, to take things out on others, to express our grumpiness, whereas in other situations,

we might hold it back. So of course, I'm talking about partners, children, parents, siblings,

friends. These are the people we struggle with when it comes to true compassion more than others.

And so this is where the anyagram comes in. On one hand Buddhism says, be compassionate,

and I go, okay, I'll try. And then on the other end of the spectrum, the anyagram comes in and says,

here's how it begins with understanding that there are nine different lenses through which review

the same experience. So the anyagram posits nine arcs of attention, is one way of saying it.

If the nine anyagram types walk into a room, nine different things will get their attention.

And when you have some sense of where your attention goes with the knowledge that that's only one

thing that could get attention, but your inner situation was someone who may be paying attention

to something else, of making this sound too complex. I'll give you an example. So on the anyagram,

I am a number four of the nine, number four. And the attention of anyagram fours tends to go to

meaning. What does this mean? What is happening under the surface? Where are the shadows? What is not

being said? Where is the emotion here? These are the kinds of things we enjoy paying attention to.

Now my partner is a one on the anyagram. His attention goes to something very different. His attention

goes to right and wrong. Correct? Incorrect. Done well? Done poorly. His attention seeks error.

Briefly, the attention of twos goes to other people's needs. The attention of threes goes to status.

The attention of fives goes to what can be learned or what knowledge is useful here. The attention of

sixes goes to threat. The attention of sevens goes to possibility. The attention of eights goes to

control. And the attention of nines goes to other people's points of view. So those are really

different things. Error, other people's needs, status, meaning, so on. Those are all important

things to pay attention to. But when my attention goes to one of the nine, I expect that the other

eight of you are also looking at that, but you're not. So this is where you receive very practical

instruction on how to begin to be compassionate with the people we are close to. So again, an example

from my personal real life with my personal real partner. When we are in an argument, which he calls

discussions, my attention goes to, as mentioned, what is everybody feeling here? And what does it mean

that we feel these things? That's perfectly reasonable thing to think about. However, his attention goes

to what went wrong? Who made a mistake? Where is the error here? How can we correct this? How can we

not repeat this mistake? Those are also reasonable things. But it took us many years to understand

that what the other person was interested in discussing was not silly or weird. Like, why would you

want to talk about what went wrong when we can talk about what does it mean? And vice versa.

So in our arguments slash discussions, we've learned over many years to ask each other, well,

what does this mean to you, Susan Pivert? And I have learned to say, what do you think went wrong?

Not as a manipulative strategy, but to show that I am actually interested because I am in what he

is thinking about, what he is bothered by, what he is experiencing. So we find ways to come

toward each other through this very simple understanding of the arc of attention, because we know

each other's anyogram numbers. Now another example, and I believe I shared this example in my book,

the Buddhist Anyogram, I used to work on creative projects with a wonderful, very creative,

very interesting, very talented man. And I would sit in my office thinking about, well, we could

do this, we could do that. And I would go into his office and say, what do you think about this?

And he would immediately shoot it down. He would tell me all the things that could go wrong

with my idea. And I ended up not liking him, alternating with not liking myself. And that was not

a good climate for creative projects. So I realized that he is a six on the Anyogram,

and his attention goes to threat. When mine goes to meaning, very broadly speaking, so when I would

tell him my idea, instead of exploring it with me for what it might mean, he would discern without

blinking an eye what the threats were to this project. And then he would tell me what they were.

So I learned not to tell him my ideas until I wanted to know what could go wrong. So that took all

the emotional agitation out of our working relationship, which is great, because I love him. And

he's been an important person in my life. So just to reiterate briefly, Buddhism talks about

compassion and the importance, introduce real life circumstances. The Anyogram then explains

how to relate to those real life circumstances with people in our lives from a place of compassion.

I have personally found it invaluable. I use it every single day of my life, not just in my

relationship, but with my family members, my friends, my students, myself, most of all. So I'm not

going to go into detail on all the numbers because that would be like hours of podcast. But I want to

explain some basics about the system and then go into great detail on one of the numbers. My own

number four, because I feel most confident talking about it. So the first thing to note about the

Anyogram, the nine numbers, is that they are divided into three groups of three, according to

center of intelligence. We each possess all of these centers. You got them all. I got them all.

But for you, one of them predominates. So this is a place to begin when trying to discover our

own type is what is my primary form of intelligence. Again, you have all three. Don't forget that.

So eight, nine and one are called the gut triad or the instinctual triad. These are people who

rely on their intuition, their instincts to explain reality to them. They might not be able to

explain why they have the opinion they have or why they decided to go left instead of right. But

something inside them said, that's it. Now we all have that once again. But for one third of us,

that's the primary intelligence. And until they know what their gut is telling them about a person

or a situation or a decision or a juncture, they don't know what it is. They don't know what to do.

They have to wait for that hit that moment. Two, three and four are known as the emotional triad.

And this doesn't mean that twos, threes and fours have more emotions than others. It means

this is the navigational device. Until they know how they feel about something or someone,

they don't know what that something is or who that person is. They have to find the heart connection

to whatever it is they're experiencing in order to understand it. Five, six and seven are known

as the mental triad. People who rely on the thinking brain on recent rationale, history, facts,

logics to understand what something is. That's the most commonly acceptable way to navigate. But

it's just one of the three ways to understand something. So we have the intelligence of instinct,

the intelligence of emotion and the intelligence of mentation of thinking. And

to further figure out which one you might be, you can look at your default responses to threat.

And this is very broadly speaking because there's much more nuance in the system than what

I'm fixing to share with you. But in the name of covering the basics, eight, nine and one,

the gut triad, the instinctual triad, when things don't go their way, they get angry.

There's a flare of some kind of heat. Something comes from the gut from the instinctual realm that

says no. Now within the triad eight, nine and one, they express this anger in three different ways.

And we're not going to talk about that because that's too much information. For now, I have to talk

about it in the book. Two, three and four, when things don't go their way, the emotions go out of

balance. And that can look like hysteria or grasping, needingness or emotional numbness, like

the emotions become unbalanced in three different ways. For five, six and seven, the mental triad,

when things don't go their way, thinking speeds up. They rely more heavily on thinking, planning,

plotting, lists, graphs, charts, all the things. What if this happens? What if that happens? If

they do this, I'm going to do that. If this goes over here, and then I'm going to have to go over

there. So the thinking becomes speedy. And that is called anxiety or fear. And they express

anxiety in three different ways. So that's one way to begin thinking about yourself. And where you

might be or the people in your life might be on the neogram system, not so that you can categorize

them as something or stick them in a ghetto, mark seven, but so that you can understand them.

So you can relate to them. So you can reach across any divide you might encounter to remain

connected to them without abandoning yourself. So another subdivision within the neogram,

and then I'll give you a specific example of all the things I'm saying within one number four.

So we have the triads of intelligence, instinctual, emotional, mental. We also have within the

neogram system three instinctual drives applied to each number. Like the forms of intelligence,

you and I possess all three of these instinctual drives. But for each of us, one of them

predominates. The instinctual drives are the following. Self-preservation. We have that. We have

a drive to not be dead, to be sensitive to threat, to find ways to feel secure in our environment.

And we have a ever-present vigilance to things that might threaten our existence. That seems

reasonable. All animals have this. The second drive, I believe shared by all animals or most,

is a social drive, which doesn't mean I wish to socialize. It means I wish to belong to something

within your society, whatever it might be. If this is your predominant drive, you'll be interested

in things like neighborhoods and political parties and workplace cultures and subcultures within

your culture that you might want to be a part of. Now, we're all kind of interested in that.

But for one third of us, that is the primary interest. Where do I belong? What is my place

in the herd or the tribe or the world? However, you define the parameters of your world.

And then the third drive is called the sexual drive or intimate drive. And it doesn't just

mean the drive to procreate. Rather, it is as much about the drive to connect to be intimate with

a person in the various situations of your life. It may include romance and sexual relationships,

but that's not the essence of this drive. The essence of this drive is to be connected to another.

So again, we each have all of these. So if you're a number nine on the end of the ground,

you could be a self-preservation nine. You could be a social nine. You could be an intimate nine.

These are three kinds of nines. There are three kinds of ones, three kinds of twos and so on.

So in essence, delightfully, there are 27 types, which if you like nuance and complexity,

you're going to be very happy to hear that. So I will give you an example of all of these things,

the centers of intelligence, the subtypes, aka the instinctual drives for two numbers. I think I

said one, but we'll go with two just to cover bases here. So we'll go with number one and number four,

because I know those types well. I am a four. My husband is a one. My mother is a one. I just

have some familiarity with these energies. So four is on the emotional triad of the enneagram,

along with two and three. Now within each triad, in this case, two, three and four, one number

over expresses the core intelligence. In this case, that is two. The emotions are constantly going

out. They are over expressed. They are over shared. They are overly felt in various situations.

I mean, overly may not be the right word, but they're predominant. A second number, in this case,

three, is numb to its core intelligence. So three's run on emotions, like two's and four's,

but they are cut off from their emotions in a particular way. A third number on the triad,

in this case, fours are subject, currently, holds the core intelligence in.

Feels all the feelings, but doesn't necessarily express them. Rather, in this case,

fours feel the emotions of others, of themselves, of an experience solely as something happening

within themselves. So there's a sense of disconnection while feeling things intensely.

That is a very hallmark quality of fours. Okay. Each type has a particular avoidance. Like,

I don't want that. That's the worst thing in the world. Do not put that on me. And each type has

an idealization. That's the best thing. If you told me that, I would be super complemented.

The avoidance of fours is called ordinaryness. We don't want to be like anybody else. We don't

want to be regular. And the idealization, therefore, is I am special. I'm kind of laughing because

it's true. That is the most ideal thing you could say to a four. Wow, you're really special.

Some people hear that as an insult, but we're like, oh, finally, someone gets me. So when you

feel everything that happens in the world around you, as something happening within you,

there is, of course, a lot of self-absorption and a lot of very particular nuance that makes

fours think no one can really see me. No one could get the complexity and dynamism of the lightness

and darkness that I discover within. That sounds pretentious because it is. Okay. Now we're going

to feed this through the lenses of the instinctual drives. There's a self-preservation for.

There's a social for. There's a sexual for. And then we're going to repeat all this with one.

Any gram number one, then we're going to go to our after-party, which I'm really excited about

this week. So the three fours, the self-preservation for, the social for, the sexual for, they look very

different from each other. Self-preservation for is called reckless dotmas. Modern systems call it

tenacious, but I don't like that. So I'm sticking with the old school name, reckless dotmas.

So the drive to be special, the despair at ever being seen, when blended with this constant fear of

being extinguished, which at their heart, all the self-preservation subtypes feel, whether

they're ones, twos or threes and so on, when that's combined with no one will ever see me.

And life is very threatening, effort. I'm a kamikaze, the situation of my life. I'm going to take risks.

I'm going to challenge myself. I'm going to try to do the impossible. I'm going to throw myself on

the fire. I'm going to be reckless because my despair at ever being seen is so pronounced.

And the likelihood that anyone will ever actually know me is so minuscule. I'm going to have to make

a big noise. I'm going to have to light a big fire. And if I die doing it, so be it, not literally,

by the way. Okay, that's one kind of four. That's me. I am a self-preservation for. And as soon as I

read about that, I was like, oh, someone's been spying on me. That is actually totally, or was,

when I was younger. Social four, very different. It's called shame. All fours have a lot of feelings.

They have very active inner lives. A lot of subtle perceptions of the world around them.

And when that combines with the social drive to wish to belong somewhere. But like all fours,

the social four things, no one will ever see me. How could I ever belong? There's a quality of shame.

And my visual for social four is someone standing out in the rain in the freezing cold without a coat.

Looking in the window at the family eating, you know, a big meal and laughing and singing songs.

Or whatever people do in such situations, I'll never be able to get in there. That's a quality

of social four. So I hope you can hear it's different than self-preservation for. Now we come to

sexual four or intimate four. Another measure of difference in the way the quality of four is

expressed. Sexual four is called hate or competition. So like all sexual subtypes,

the sexual four is looking at whoever they're close to. If they're in an intimate relationship,

that person gets the brunt or the delight of it. If they're your colleague, you're getting this

kind of attention. If you're a friend, you're getting this kind of attention. With the question,

who is more special here? Who has greater needs? Who sees more deeply? Who has greater

intensity in the inner realm? Well, the four is always going to win. So the answer is always you.

Sexual four. And they're not afraid to fight you on that. So most fours, two thirds of fours,

not that interested in fighting, two disturbing to the inner world. But sexual fours,

like other sexual subtypes, again, whether they're ones or twos or so on, find meaning in connecting

through battle. The heat is not unappealing to sexual subtypes. So within each number,

one of the subtypes is called the countertype. It doesn't look like the other two. Self-preservation

is the countertype within the four kingdom. We don't look like the other fours, but we are.

So it can be harder to find yourself within your type if you are the countertype, like sexual

one is the countertype of one. Self-preservation three is the countertype of three and so on. So they

don't quite look like what you might expect, but they're in there. So self-preservation fours tend

to look a little more ordinary than the other fours. All fours have a great attention to quality

and aesthetics, but self-preservation four is a little more toned down. Though they have

among the fours, perhaps the greatest attunement to environment because environment is where threat

comes from. So there's a very rich sense of aesthetics and a capacity to notice fine

detail, more pronounced than the other fours, who also have a great sense of aesthetics and beauty

and harmony and environment, but it means something different if you're self-preservation subtype,

like the environment is what makes me feel safe, not my inner confidence. So it has to be right.

Social threes may have the most, quote, conventional sense of aesthetics. They want to look like the

other people look in the places that they want to belong and sexual four wants to stand out.

All the sexual subtypes they want to be noticed because that's the first step in intimacy. So

they have a lot of plumage is the word I would use. Very special, amazing, noticeable, beautiful

sense of style, which is different than the toned down aesthetics of self-preservation four,

or the sort of let me fit in aesthetics of social four. So I'm going into all this detail on

this number because A, I know it the best, and we'll do this for ones also, but this is a way to

demonstrate the richness and nuance of the system. So it's not like all twos want to help you or

all sevens have great ideas. There's a lot of richness. It's endless and extremely gratifying.

So if you're still with me, this system is good for you because when hearing about the

enneagram and its complexities in early days, some people are like, that's silly. No, I'm

going to come back next week. That's fine. But other people are like, why hasn't anyone told me this?

This is very important. You mean y'all knew this, but you didn't tell me? So, okay, now I'm telling

you if you're in this group. So now we'll look at these same things on enneagram one again because

I know this number well. So the attention goes to right and wrong, error, correct, incorrect.

So there tends to be black and white thinking with enneagram ones because something is not ever

a little bit right or a little bit wrong. It's either right or wrong. So there's a crispness and

a precision and a binary quality to the attention that can be very refreshing on good days or weirdly

personality on other kinds of days. But we need people in our world who can tell right from wrong,

that's for damn sure. So the avoidance of one, as you may expect, is being incorrect. Now nobody

likes to be wrong. But if you tell a one, hey, you know that thing you said or that thing you did,

that was wrong. That's like the world's fallen apart. If you tell me I did something wrong,

I'm like, ooh, better check that out or no, I didn't or I don't know some more prosaic kind of

response. But if you tell a one that something they said or did was wrong, the inner world starts

to collapse. So of course they do things wrong. You got to tell people sometimes. But when you do

the nuance of making such a statement to a one is important to take into consideration.

The idealization is, as you may have guessed, I'm right. And again, we all like to be right.

But if you tell a one, they're right. It's like the sun just came out from behind the clouds.

It's a beautiful day. So let's apply this to the instinctual drives, the subtypes. There's a

self-preservation one. This is called worry. Is something going wrong? Did I do that right?

Are my loved ones making a mistake somewhere on planet earth? Well, sure. The answer to that

question is always, yes, someone's going wrong somewhere. Self-preservation ones feel threatened

personally by things going wrong. Like the world could fall apart, their world could fall apart,

someone could die, the walls could collapse. That's where the self-preservation subtype attention

goes. And when it's combined with the one wish to avoid error, well, that person is going to spend

a lot of time worrying. And of course, it makes sense to worry that something could be going wrong,

because something could be going wrong. Social one is called rigid. The attention of the social

subtype, whether they're one, two, or whatever their number, goes to the way societies are arranged,

whether that society is your family home or your neighborhood or a political party or a government

or your business you work for. And there's a sense of this is how we do it. There's a right way

and there's a wrong way. This is the fork you use to eat that. This is the way you present an idea

in a meeting. These are the kinds of clothes you wear to this kind of event. I mean, these are

broad examples, but social one's attention goes to such details and they are rigid about it. They

will not hear of other possibilities. Now, sexual one is called heat. All the attention that goes

to right and wrong in any given situation is directed first and foremost to the partner or the

children or the friends. The person that this one is in a relationship with because like all the

sexual subtypes, the primary interest is in relationships, personal relationships. Are we doing

this right? Are you doing this right? Is this relationship going the right way? And so there's

a lot of heat, a lot of close placement of attention on the intimates in the sexual one's life. So

that's different than the self-preservation one who's worrying about things or the social one

who's wondering why you're wearing those pants. The sexual one is like, let's really look at what's

going on between us here. And that is the counter-type in the one universe. Sexual one does not

necessarily look like a one on first glance, but they are. So I'm going to stop there. But remember,

there's other numbers, two, three, five, six, seven, eight, nine that have just as much nuance

as the ones and fours that we investigated. I have to say, I know I've said this a couple times here.

I've been studying this for a long time more than 30 years and I have not found the end of this wisdom.

It keeps getting deeper just like the Buddha Dharma. When you think you understand one particular thing

in either world, the world of the Buddha Dharma or the world of the Enneagram, as you continue to

contemplate and test the teaching that you have discovered gives way to become deeper, more nuanced,

more interesting, more profound than you might have imagined. So my book, The Buddhist Enneagram,

is my best effort to share this view, a non-psychological view of the Enneagram,

but a spiritual view, how we can use it to discover deeper wisdom within ourselves and be more kind

and loving in the various circumstances of our life. So thank you for listening.

Now, my friends, for the podcast after party, I don't know if I can keep this one short. I will do my best

to be concise and not drift off into memories and laughing and crying and all the things that I feel

when I think about this song, the song is a blue song called Dark Knight. The most famous

recording of this song is by a great epic piano player, musician named Charles Brown, who died I think

in the early mid-90s. Part of the music world considers Charles Brown to be the composer of this

song, but another part of the music world considers him not to be the composer. I don't know,

but he is the musician most associated with the song Dark Knight. Dark Knight is falling. Oh,

how I hate to be alone. It's an incredible song. It's been recorded by others, of course, Charles Brown,

but the recording that I want to share with you is by one of my all-time music heroes,

and I am not alone by placing him in the hero pantheon, Willie Nelson,

one of the great musicians of all time, singer, songwriter. Yeah, that's how we know him.

Unbelievable guitar player, incredible producer, arranger, has a feel or music that is the word

soulful just does not cover it, but that's the best word I have. I idolize Willie Nelson,

and I am not alone. So he's made many recordings, of course, written in credible songs, of course.

He just doesn't stop producing. He's on the road again, I'm sure, as we speak,

Black Knight is from a record that he made in the early 2000s called Milk Cow Blues.

It's a recording of blues songs or bluesy songs with collaborators,

Keppmo, Susan Tadesky, and Dr. John, aka Mack Rebynac, with whom he collaborated on Black Knight.

Oh my God. So this is a great recording, and it has great personal significance for me,

and I'll try to keep this part short and I'll try not to cry. So one of the producers,

there's two producers credited for this recording, Freddie Fletcher, who's, I know, is Willie Nelson's

nephew, son of Bobby Nelson, his Mishi Reston piece, and Derek O'Brien, a great blues guitar player,

a great ex-boyfriend of Susan Pivers, a great producer, a great human being. I love him so much,

and he composed the theme music of this very podcast. So in the early days of this podcast,

I recorded a few episodes, but I couldn't find the right music to introduce it, and so I

kept delaying, because I wanted it to be just right, and I asked Derek, would you just sit in

your house and record something into an iPhone or whatever, and he did. He was so grateful that

his playing is what introduces and altrujuses. I know that's not a word. This podcast, thank you,

Derek O'Brien. I love you with all my heart, and he is also the guitar player on this track,

Black Knight, and you will hear how great he is. Not just his solo, but his fills, his tone,

his presence, his everything. The record came out like more than 20 years ago, maybe 25 years ago.

I haven't listened to it in a while. I'm like, I think he played on Black Knight, and the second

I started listening, I'm like, that's him, completely recognizable. Along with other completely

recognizable musicians, Willie Nelson, forget about it, singing Black Knight, whoever dreamed

that such a great thing would ever fall into our laps in human society. And then, of course,

Dr. John McRebinack, who shares the vocals and plays piano and tears it up with all the laid-back,

subtlety, and spookiness and perfection that he always displayed. I got to know Mac because when

I worked at Antone's record label way long ago, he produced a record for us with three female singers,

Marsha Ball, Luanne Barton, Angela Strayley. And we got to hang around with him, not me in him,

particularly, but he was in our world for some months, and I have great memories of

not working with him, because I was just in the background, but seeing him do his work.

And just listening to him talk, because anyone ever met him would tell you that he had a very

particular way with the English language, and was a great musician, mostly known for his piano

playing, but I've heard him on many occasions play guitar and get the F out of here just as great

a guitar player as a piano player. Also on this track is a short B3 segment, a Hammond B3 organ segment,

from another local musician. May he also rest in peace, Riley Osborne, a great keyboard player.

And I just know all the people on this track, George Reigns playing drums,

commonly thought of in the blues world of Austin, which is not a small thing, as the preferred

drummer for every kind of blues, but particularly shuffles and Texas blues, peerless, and it's a Charles

Brown song. So I got to meet Charles Brown. I forgot about this, but I was talking to Derek

like 15 minutes before making this podcast, and he has the best memory in the whole world,

and he remembered this very memorable thing that I forgot, which is long ago, probably the late 80s,

early 90s, we, along with the Antones Posse, Angela, and Marsha, and so on. Other people were

invited to perform on a television show that used to be on the air in Germany, that broadcasted

live from someplace in the Black Forest, and we went for one night to Germany from Austin.

And it was crazy, and one of the singers dropped out at the last minute, and it was a classic

music business experience, but it was great. And the television show was called Anna Filter. I didn't

remember that, but Derek reminded me. And the point of the story is the next day, it turned out

that the next performer was going to be Charles Brown, the great Charles N.F. Brown, and he had

recorded something in, I think, the late 80s, a record that's one of my favorite albums of all time,

called One More for the Road. Oh my god, I've listened to that record a thousand million times,

we'll put that on an after party someday. Derek and I had breakfast with Charles Brown,

and we sat in a booth, and Derek reminded me of all this, because this is how I had my memories,

did not remember it. I've telling him, like a true fan, a true irritating fan, how much I love

One More for the Road. I love it for this reason. I love it for that reason. I can't believe how great

you are. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And he's like energetically backing away, like, how do I

get her to stop talking? And so he said something like, oh, really? Oh, that's so nice. You know,

some very polite way of responding to, I'm sure, one of the many times he'd heard people gushing

over his greatness. And Derek brought up a guitar player who they both knew in common, named Billy

Butler, also, may he rest in peace, who was great, bluesy jazzy guitar player who co-wrote

honky-tonk, a classic instrumental from back in the day that every great guitar player from

my lifetime, my world knows about this song, honky-tonk. You could google it, it's great. And Billy

Butler co-wrote honky-tonk, and so Derek was asking Charles about Billy Butler, and what he

remembers Charles saying was, yeah, he had recently passed away, Billy Butler. He died of a broken

heart. Apparently, Billy Butler's wife had passed away shortly before, and Charles's estimation was

he died of a broken heart. Charles Brown, it is just occurring to me, was probably a two on the

anyogram. All the feelings extended themselves into the environment. And instead of saying,

this is a made-up parenthetical remark by me, he has wife died, and then he got sick, or

he really loved his wife, they died really close to each other, or something anyone might say,

he went right to the heart, and could feel Billy Butler's broken heart, and discussed his

passing in a way that made us, myself and Derek, in this case, feel the truth of heartbreak,

when someone you love dies, and that you might die too, from the depth of that sorrow. So,

when you listen to Black Knight, of course, you'll listen to Willie's vocal, you'll hear Max vocal,

you'll be stunned and amazed. If you have any sense, which I'm sure you do, you'll hear Derek's

great rhythm playing, and beautiful solo, you'll hear Riley playing the B3, and George,

keeping the time perfectly without making himself noticeable, which is great drumming.

And you could remember that we all have Black Knights. Oh, how we hate to be alone,

and for me, all of that is in this one track, Black Knight. Please enjoy. Thank you for listening,

and if you have enjoyed this podcast, please review it somewhere, that would be awesome. You could

share it with someone who you think might get pleasure from it, and if anyone gets one tenth

the pleasure of listening that I get from sharing it, I will be satisfied. Thank you. Until next time,

we're going to resume our conversation on the Noble Eightfold Path.

Thank you for listening, and if you have any sense, which I'm sure you do, you'll hear

it somewhere, that would be awesome. Thank you for listening, and if you have any

time, I can't cry for my baby, but now another day is gone.

Thank you for listening, and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,

and if you have any sense, please review it somewhere,