So often, especially in some of my talks, I've talked about how practicing meditation and mental development is very much like things we do in normal everyday life. Now if you keep that in mind when you're talking to some of these types of people, you won't have much difficulty in explaining to them where they're going wrong. Somebody wants to learn how to play piano. Do they play the piano anywhere? "You should be able to practice anywhere," that's a common thing that gets said. No, you don't go and practice piano anywhere, you don't go out into the middle of the highway and practice piano out there. If you want to practice the piano, if you're very new at piano, you have got to be in a very quiet room. You have to have a good environment for practicing the piano. Now even when a person is fairly good at piano, and maybe they are able to play music in a restaurant, etc., when they want to learn a new song, they go back to that quiet room. The quiet room is very easily understood as the proper environment to learn piano.
When people challenge you, me or other meditators about, "You should be able to do it anywhere," say, "Oh no, no, that's not like normal life." And if you want to get a bit crazy, you could say, "Well I guess I should be able to swim anywhere, I know how to swim." It gets a bit ridiculous. Many of these people are taking an ultimate ideal and putting it on people who are on a lower level. Yet we never do this to someone with piano. I didn't learn myself but my sister learned, and there's no way that you take a little 10-year-old girl or boy and put them on the side of the highway to practice the piano lessons, it just doesn't work. So by explaining to people where they're going wrong in that way, that it's just not done in normal life, and it can't be done in this practice either, hopefully they will understand a little better. They still may not agree, but at least they might back off from their challenging type attitude. To remember things like mathematics, the example I give about mathematics in the normal retreat. In the first grade, we learn maybe how to add then subtract, then the next year maybe multiply then divide, whatever, slowly we get geometry, calculus, etc. And it is very much a progression. We don't expect the 6-year-old to know geometry and so on. So try to use that as showing people with their own understanding. It helps if you bring out their own understanding, they went through school, they've done music or sport or maths, etc. That helps them to resolve their doubts and so on.
As to "escaping the real world," once again, does the piano person escape the world to go into the room to practice? You know, nobody uses that expression, that you're "escaping the world" when you want to go practice. Every bit of our techniques that we give to you are for use in the real world. But to really get them very strong, you need time to practice, you need better environments in order to practice better. So to remember that everything you're learning is definitely for the real world, and yet, from time to time, you need to step out of the "wild" real world, and put yourself into an environment within the real world that can be helpful to your own practice.