Salamu alaikum warahmatullahi ta'ala barakatuh everyone and good morning Masha'Allah Thank you all for Taking time to seek knowledge and waking up on a early on a weekend To seek sacred knowledge as the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sahbihi wasallam Informed us that whoever goes out on a path seeking sacred knowledge Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala facilitates for them the path to paradise and that this religion is Built upon knowledge That without knowledge we don't have guidance and without guidance We're not able to be successful and truly live in the way that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Has commanded us to and that the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sahbihi wasallam has taught us to live So in order to accomplish that we need sacred knowledge So these gatherings and this time that we spend together insha'Allah ta'ala is of the best time The best way that we can spend our time in this life Insha'Allah in today's a bridge Seminar we're going to be looking at this really beautiful and Profound book by Imam al-Ghazali from his Ihiya ulum ad-Din the revival of the religious sciences and This is book for The 40 books that Imam al-Ghazali authored as part of this collection the revival of the religious sciences and in this book He goes into an explanation and a description of the sada of the prayer teaching us and Kind of giving us an overview in the book of the outward Dimension of the sada as it relates to the validity of the sada and making sure that it's sound according to the outward aspects and dimension But he focuses Primarily and really gives us deeper insights into the meaning of the sada and the state that a person should have When praying so insha'Allah in today's seminar, we'll have four sessions To Beginning with this session the merit of prayer and then the next session insha'Allah was she here rotis will be on this inner states of prayer Imam al-Ghazali tells us that we should have these internal states Within the sada in order for us to truly be experiencing and benefiting from the prayer And then in session three insha'Allah ta'ala. We're going to talk about reverence Khushu having this Khushu and reverential all and Presence of heart in the sada and then finally with sheikh and session four He will cover the inner meanings of prayer and that's going to be insha'Allah very valuable Imam al-Ghazali's his treatment of that This the the state of heart that we should have when we hear the Azaan When we're engaging in will do when we begin the prayer and all of the movements of the prayer in the fatihah all of the Inner meanings that should be present in our heart through all of those various aspects of the sada So insha'Allah we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for Taufeeq and we ask Allah that he blesses our time together And that he really allows each and every one of us to walk away With greater presence of heart and a deeper appreciation and realization of the sada Which is the the pillar of this religion and the greatest means by which we draw closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala So insha'Allah we'll begin with the first session the merit Of the sada and we'll look at the merit of the Azaan We'll look at the merit of the obligatory prayers and the congregational prayer and We'll look at the merit of prayer in the mosque and then finally the merit of sujood of prostration in this session Ta'ala insha'Allah ta'ala. So Imam al-Ghazali he begins his book with this really beautiful introduction Beginning in the name of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem All praise belongs to Allah who has immersed his servants in his gentleness and Who cultivated their hearts with the lights of this religion and the rituals of worship Who has in his generosity and mercy Come down from the throne of majesty to the lowest heaven in Order to make himself To call out to his servants So he mentions here this hadith of the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa alihi wa sahbiyya sallam That at the end of every night and the last third of every night Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala He descends in his mercy and in giving people the opportunity to draw closer to him And he calls out every night Is there anyone making dua that I may answer them? Is there anyone seeking forgiveness so that I may forgive them? And that Imam al-Ghazali he has this beautiful description. He says look at how the kings of the world You have to sometimes pay a bribe just to get an opportunity to meet with them that there is all of this red tape It is extremely difficult to be in the presence and have access to the kings of the world But Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has opened the door and lifted the veil So that we can be close to him and call upon him and enter into his presence at any time Tamaa, so this is a really beautiful Imam al-Ghazali has this way of Showing us the the depth and the beauty of this opportunity And this is one of the first things that we have to take into consideration when we're learning about the Sada Is that it's not a burden We cannot look at the Sada like it's a burden sometimes people so you have to get up very early And it seems like a lot praying five times a day, but in reality, it's the dunya. That's quite heavy It's the world that we want to always have Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's support and as the messenger of Allah Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam He taught us that when he would ask Sayyidina Bilal radi Allahu anhu to make the adhan. He would say Give us our comfort Through the adhan bring what brings us comfort by calling for the prayer So here Imam al-Ghazali is saying that this is from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's mercy and gentleness with us So he has made the prayers a way that they can draw close to him and be in his presence Whether in congregation or whether a person is alone and not only that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Gave us that opportunity to be with him and then he also in his merciness in his mercy and gentleness He has actually made it He has encouraged us and invited us in addition. It's an obligation But Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in addition to that he has invited us in a very gentle way and Has called us to be with him So how exalted and glorified is he and how gentle and Beneficent is he towards us subhanahu wa ta'ala? So then he begins the book with that that this is a great opportunity and a gift from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Then he has a breakdown of the book because this is an abridged seminar We're just going to focus on the topics that I had mentioned inshaAllah and Maybe in a in another opportunity will be able to go into more depth in the book, but inshaAllah this will still be Very useful and beneficial be in the light so the first chapter is on the merit of The various aspects of the prayer the prayer itself Prostration praying in congregation the adhan and so forth So he starts off with the adhan Kala Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wasallam the messenger of Allah sallallahu alaihi wasallam said La yasma'u sult al muaddini jinnun wala insun wala shay'un illa shahida lahu yawm al qiyamah That anything whether it is the jinn or any human being or Anything even inanimate objects in creation whenever they hear someone call the adhan They will testify and bear witness to that on the day of resurrection So this is a really beautiful thing that whenever you call the adhan The trees the animals other people other jinn will testify on behalf of that individual and say I heard this person call the adhan So Imam al-Ghazali is telling us that the adhan Will be a proof for us when we meet Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Allah ta'ala says in the noble Quran Waman ahsan wa qawla min man da'a ila Allahi wa amila saliha Who is better in speech in other words? There is none better in speech than the one who calls and invites to Allah and Does righteous actions that some of the scholars of defci regarding that verse Some say that it's in relation to da'a wa calling people and inviting people to Allah other Mufasirin son, this is specifically in regards to the mu'addin Right, this is the one who invites to Allah is the one who calls to the prayer Right, so this is the one who calls people to the salah That's one of the meanings of this ayah the messenger of Allah Salallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa salam also said If I heard the adhan If you hear the call to prayer then repeat what the mu'addin says This is a really beautiful and important sunnah that when we hear the adhan We should you know bring to a conclusion any Conversations or pause the conversation that we're having and listen to the adhan and respond and when the mu'addin says You know That we also say We'll talk about the inner meanings of that what should come to our heart when we hear the adhan in session four And then when the mu'addin says Come to the prayer our response there should be There's no power or ability saved by Allah Heya ala falah come to success once again We say la hawla wa la quwata illa billah that there is no power or ability saved by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and then after the mu'addin is done and we repeat all of the things that he says We should say this du'a. Allahumma rabba haadihi d-dawat at-taam. Oh Lord Oh, Allah Lord of this comprehensive Supplication was salat al-qa'ima and this prayer that is about to be established Ati Sayyidina Muhammadan al-wasila ta wa al-fadila give Sayyidina Muhammad the wasila and Fadila this Specific rank that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala will grant him what darajat al-aliyat al-Rafi'ah and An exalted and lofty rank Wa ba'athhu al-maqama al-mahmud al-ladi wa-aqtah and grant him the praise worthy station that you have promised him Inna ka la tuqlifu al-mi'a'ad. You do not you always fulfill your promise and This is the messenger of Allah sallallahu alaihi wa alaihi wa sallam. He said who hears the adhan and Responds and says this du'a. I will intercede for them So one of the ways that we seek the intercession of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu alaihi wa alaihi wa sallam is by responding to the adhan and also once it is completed to supplicate with this du'a Ka la Sayyid ibn al-musayyib. So this is not a a hadith But it's related to something that was passed down in tradition. He said man sallah bi-ar-din Fala whoever prays in kind of a barren or uninhabited area Sallah an yameen hi malakun waan shimad hi malak And when a person is traveling or out in the woods or in the middle of nowhere or camping or something of that nature and They pray even if they're alone There will be an angel praying to his right and to the left So then the the the statement continues So if a person is alone and they just pray there's two angels on either side praying with them But if the person calls the adhan and then calls the eqama Sallah wa ra'ahu an thalul jibali min al-malaiqa There will be A multitude of angels like the mountains that will pray with that individual person If they call the adhan an eqama So this is once again an indication of the merit of the adhan It's not something to be taken like lightly. Now. I remember Habib Husayn al-saqaf May Allah preserve him. We're actually you know one of the beautiful memories in this message Is actually being here with with him. InshaAllah. He comes back to America time and time again Fikheir wa afya He was saying that one of the Indications of how quickly a person Will traverse over the slirat on the day of resurrection that they will go over the traverse over Hellfire is according to how quickly they respond to the adhan And he said another indication is how quickly they reject evil insinuations And and the insinuations of the nefs or wasawis is the speed with which they reject those things that are displeasing to Allah Is another indication of the speed of how quickly they traverse over the slirat So when we hear the adhan, it's extremely important. We'll have questions inshaAllah at the end so This is one of the things that the adhan and then it's also Preparing for the Salat That in order to have presence of heart and really be in a state where you are Internalizing the meanings and the states of the prayer. It's not something that just when the Imam says Allahu Akbar and you enter into the prayer you're there But it's actually this gradual process that begins with the adhan that begins with making wudu and As we mentioned yesterday at lighthouse masjid that Sayyidina Ali Zayn and Abidina radiya Allahu Anhu When he would actually be making wudu his color would change and he would be turned yellow And they would say what is what's going on you look different? You look pale your color has changed and he would say to them after making wudu He says do you know before whom I am about to stand? So he would be present even in his wudu. So all of these things help facilitate our presence in the Salat Then Imam al-Ghazali takes us to the merit of the obligatory prayers and Allah Subh'anaHu Wa Ta'ala says in the noble Qur'an In the salat a cana ta'ala al-Mu'mineena kitab al-Muqutah That the prayer is at prescribed times for the believers And this is related to the obligatory prayers because those are the prescribed times The messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa alihi wa sahbihi sallam teaching us The centrality after the shahada After the testimony of faith there is nothing greater Than the salawat It is one of the it is central after the shahada It is the central pillar that holds everything up in our Dean So he tells us salawat allahi wa salamuhu alayhi 5 salawat kitabakunna allahu ala al-ibad There are five prayers that Allah has made obligatory for the servants So whoever establishes them the five prayers and Does not lose any of or does not Leave aside any of its rights out of thinking little of the prayer Then that person has an oath with Allah that he will enter him or her into paradise The person establishes the salat and does not you know I'll pray it later or does not think that they're unimportant and they literally give their lives and That they construct their lives around the salawat. That's what we have to do It's not something that we fit into our day But really that the salawat are the pillars of our day and everything else is fit in around them and That we establish them properly and that we give time to Learning the reality and the inner states and meanings of the salat. This is this is the purpose of our life And whoever does that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam says that they have an oath with Allah that he will Enter them into paradise in other words. It's a guarantee from Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala the hadith continues So that's the case of the one who establishes them properly Wa man lam yati bihin and Whoever does not pray these five prayers. Falees alahu and Allah. He has no oath with Allah He has no covenant with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala insha'a ad-dabahu wa insha'a ad-dhalahu al-jannah if Allah wills He will punish that person and if Allah wills he can enter them into paradise This is an indication that they're Muslim, but we don't even want to be in the situation of of danger We don't even want to risk it and As Imam al-Ghazali is going to teach us inshallah ta'ala not only do we not want to risk it The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa aalihi wa sahbihi wasallam he said wa ju'ilat qurra tu'aini fa's-salat The most beloved thing that Allah gave me and placed in my heart in the life of this world is the salat So that's an indication of all of the various degrees of nearness and the gifts and the Blessings and the mercy and the openings that a person can receive through the salat And this is something the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sahbihi he established and you see that it Saturated the souls of the Sahaba radiallahu anhu You know one of the things I always think about is that they didn't have alarm clocks So how do you get up for you know not for them? It wasn't even a fajr. Fajr wasn't even an issue. It was like Iyam al-layhi Now they were getting up in the the middle of the night on a regular basis And they were praying and it's something that was instilled in their hearts of the reality of the salat Now that is the Sahaba, but when we seek this type of knowledge and whoever is sincere with Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala and puts forth an effort Those same treasures are open to us as well That's why even to this day you find people the the greatest thing in their life is the salat and as Sayyidina Umar ibn al-Khattab radiallahu anhu said or It might even be attributed to others That if the the people of the world Sayyidina Umar radiallahu anhu said one of the the reasons that I One of the only reasons that I love to remain in this world is And one of the reasons that he mentioned was the night prayer Iyam al-layhi and Other Salat ni'hin they said if the kings of the world the people who love luxury and they vie with one another and Compete with one another about the things of the dunya and they want to have all of these different experiences and In joy the the they think that they're joy They're trying to acquire as much of it as they can in the life of this world if they knew the joy that we experienced in Qiyam al-layhi They would try to take our lives in order to steal it from us if they could but they can You know this has a very special door that you have to go through and that door is abudiyah Servitude to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and recognizing that this is far better than you know very superficial and fleeting worldly things The messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam the ahadith continue. This is one of my Favorite and it's it's often It's often referred to with regards to the salawat that he said sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sahmi sallam Mathele sallawat al-khamsi ka mathele nahrin Adbin ghamrin Beba be ahadikum yiqtahimu fihi kulla yoman khamsa marat The likeness of the prayer if you really want to understand the salat and what it does and some of the spiritual benefits within the Salat it is like a sweet and deep River or stream That flows right at the door of one of your houses.  Any filth or anything that's unclean that remains on him if he's swimming in this river this very you know Life-giving and vibrant and beautiful river and he swims in it and immerses himself in it five times a day Would that person have any dirt and Obviously the answer is no So the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa alaihi wa sallam he said Fa innas salawat al-khams To the hebud dhu nooba kama yudhi pul ma'ud daran He says the five prayers they remove Sins the way that that water removes Filth and things that are unclean But once again this goes back to why we're studying this book and the importance of Understanding this Dean in the fullest sense and really seeking sacred knowledge that is comprehensive of the outer and inner dimensions of these acts of ibadah Because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala he says in the Quran In the salat that I know fa hajai wa al-mumkar That the salat Prevents one from vile and evil deeds and wrongdoing So someone might say I know someone who prays regularly and so forth, but why is it that? they they are not refraining from wrongdoing and from vile actions and And oftentimes, you know, especially young people they'll notice that that there might be something that's not fully aligned That a person's actions and a person's state do not really seem to be indicating the same thing and The ulema of the inner science of the heart they say that that's because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in this verse is referring to the reality of the Salat It's not just standing up and going through the motions But the reality of the Salat is meant to be transformative that if someone enters Into the presence of the king of kings subhanahu wa ta'ala Someone's heart is before Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and they are knocking at his door and they are witnessing him as one is meant to The Salat is transformative It's a it's a powerful Experience so it's not something that is just meant to be outward And there were people even in the time of the Prophet Sallallahu alaihi wa alaihi wa sahbihi sallam and he said that they from these people you'll see in the future That you will find people who their Salat will make you embarrassed about the state of your own prayer their outward Salat Their slayam will make you feel like you're falling short in your own slayam But it's a merely an outward reality because those people then start just like Iblis may Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala protect us They start to think that they're better than others They start to think that they're better than other look at my Salat look at my slayam, but it's just an outward form If you had the reality of the Salat you would it would humble you you would not look down on others You would realize and begin to witness Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala blessings upon you and his mercy and you would desire good for others So it's not the outward form once again. It's a balance. It is both It is both that the shari'a remember hearing this from from sheikh Yahya wrote it down that the shari'a is like the outer shell And in order to get to the pearl inside you have to have the shari'a You have to have the outward dimension of this need, but then the spiritual reality is the pearl inside So you need the shell to protect the pearl But we also we want to get to the pearl We want the the fruit the essence of Of that act of Ibadah of that act of Ibadah So here the process I said I'm just saying that these prayers they remove Sins just like if a person immerses himself in this River this flowing river and that they will be cleansed of all dirt and impurities And this is also further Further emphasized or supported by another hadith of the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sallam Also narrated by imam musnam In the salawat al khafs kaffaratun lima baynahun majtunibat al kabahir That the five daily prayers are expiation. They expiate they remove the sins that occur in between them As long as a person avoids major sins So this is an indication that this refers to the minor sins Right that the salawat They remove and they cleanse us of those sins The prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sallam He also said He said the difference between us and hypocrites Once again, it's really interesting and it's undeniable How the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sallam He made the prayer and congregation and praying on time The the indication of the soundness of a person's imam And the lack of that in an indication of hypocrisy So he says that the difference between us and the hypocrites is Being present for the isha and subah prayer So atama is isha and subah is also referred to oftentimes as fajr That those two prayers, especially The that the hypocrites are not able to pray them So if we have a deficiency And especially those two prayers we have to make an effort to rectify that And the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam also said in another hadith That That the heaviest the weightiest that weighs them down Prayers for the hypocrites is And then what did he say sallallahu alayhi wa sallam If they knew what Allah gives in those two prayers They would come to them even if they had to crawl Imagine someone can't even walk and all they can do is crawl if they knew what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Gives in those prayers if they had to crawl from their home to attend they would do so Of the the mercy and the blessings and the gifts and the veils that are removed from the hearts And many of the great sallalliheen we're going to get to the masajid shortly, but it's all interconnected They said that just they they received certain openings from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala a presence of heart A greater degree of witnessing Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and his attributes and his blessings kind of you know Attaining higher levels of certitude. They said we attained certain gifts from Allah related to that in the masajid That even if we were somewhere else and we strived very hard in ibadah We wouldn't have received the same portion that we got in the masjid Because there's something about the mercy that a person receives You know, particularly in those places that are dedicated to the worship of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Or gatherings where people come together collectively to worship Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Here the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam imam al ghazali is now Warning us of the danger of falling short So he says that the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam says Whoever meets Allah and that person has lost the prayer That they have not established it that they have been totally neglectful of the prayer Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala cares not for any of his other good deeds The person meets Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala And they might have a lot of other good deeds, but if they have been neglectful Of the sallah Allah cares not for those other hassanat He also said sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sahbiyu sallam The prayer is the pillar of the religion Holds everything else up Whoever leaves it or is neglectful of it has destroyed his religion Everything else is going to fall apart. It's on a very very weak foundation without the sallah One of the companions he asked the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam What is the most beloved and meritorious action? What is the best action that's most beloved to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and he said The prayers in their prescribed times praying on time Some of the sallah the way that they And and this might sound like an oversimplification, but actually it's really beautiful if you think about it This really helps us prioritize what it's all about Some of the salliheen they said our lives consist of Praying the five prayers and waiting to die in me Allah It shows us what is really about and everything else is secondary There are many other uh hadith about that No We'll end with this one and then we'll move on to the next point inshallah ta'ala Sallallahu alayhi wa sallam whoever Neglects the prayer on purpose purposefully intentionally that person has absolved themselves from the protection of Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam And from his community So this shows us this it's really Not something that we can Take lightly at all But after the shahadatain, this is the most important thing that we have to Establish and we have to Properly give Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala his due with what relates to this act of ibadah The next section is the merit of praying in jama'a and we touched on that a little bit But here imam al-ghazali gives us some a hadith related to that that the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam He said salat al-jama'ati Tafdulu salat al-Faddi by seven and twenty a daja that praying in congregation Is more is more superior to praying individually by 27 degrees Which can be understood as 27 times better than praying alone So if a person prayed for example Shall we pray salat al-duhur together for person prays in jama'a salat al-duhur And they went and prayed it by themselves 27 times Then if they did it 27 times it might equal the salat in jama'a So it shows that it is multiplied many many times over and that it's not something that we want to miss auran Or you know think lightly i'll go on i'll just pray by myself You know and even in our homes as families it should be a culture that we Cultivate in our homes that we pray together as a family You know that we we have these times and these Points where we come together and then praying together in the masjid, you know Especially for men is something that is Even and even greater emphasis and even greater reward. There are many ahadith related to that One of the ahadith the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sallam He said Whoever is present for the isha prayer in congregation it is as if that person has prayed half of the night That's a beautiful gift from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala That the person has prayed half the night and then if the person Shehidah and shahidah subhanah Maqama So and then whoever follows that up with praying salat al-fajr or salat al-subah In congregation that makes up the second half of the night and it's as if the person has prayed the entire night So a person can come pray salat al-ishah go home and sleep all night And get up for salat al-fajr and pray salat al-fajr in jam'a and it's as if they prayed the entire night It's that meritorious and important There are many other ahadith related to that but even the ones that we covered before in the previous section related to the state of the Munafiqin the hypocrites that's something that is significant enough to inform us of the weightiness of salat al-ishah and salat al-fajr, but also praying in jam'a And that the more we strive to pray in congregation and we commit ourselves to that and and Really are determined the the further away from hypocrisy We are insha'Allah ta'ala and the more it's a testimony to the soundness and the trueness of a person's iman The last section that we'll look at is fa'ile to sujud the merit of sujud And this is a really beautiful section and there are many ahadith About this particular position in the salat So we looked at the adhan We looked at the obligatory prayers We looked at praying in jam'a and then it says if imam al-Ghazali is taking us deeper and deeper and highlighting the most important Aspects of the salat and within the salat. There is something very distinct and unique about sujud And it also is the position that is the greatest representation of ubudiyya complete servitude And humbling oneself entirely Before one's lord and creator The messenger of Allah sallallahu alaihi wa alaihi wa sallam He said That a servant draws closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Allah mighty and masjistic with nothing more meritorious. In other words, there's nothing Better in drawing closer to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala than A sujud a prostration that is hidden That's in private That you just maybe at home you have a particular area where you pray Maybe in your room or maybe in your if you have a musalla at home or a room that's dedicated for prayer Or even a small area that you dedicate for prayer and no one else is around And you engage in salat and you go into sujud Nobody else sees you that is the thing that brings you Closest to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and as imam al-junayt one of the greatest imams in islamic history That the the sayid al-taifa the imam of especially in in preserving The sciences of islamic spirituality and tasawwuf imam al-junayt after he passed away Someone saw him in a dream and they say what has Allah given you? What have you received? What did you find? After passing from this world and entering into the barzakh And he said all of the various Terminologies and different sort of Things that people kind of might compete with each other about or think that is so important and so significant He said all of that kind of dissipated and what I found that benefited me the most Is two rakhats that I would pray in the middle of the night That's what I found with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala It's one of the greatest imams It doesn't mean that those other things aren't important But it goes to show if that's really what he's highlighting what he found with Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Then it's it's very valuable and weighty The prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alihi wa sahbihi wassallam was once asked and this is another one of these really kind of Central and foundational a hadith that one of the sahaba sayidna Ka'b Sayidna Rabi'a ibn ka'b al-aslami radiallahu anhu He was serving the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and he brought him his wudu water And the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam he asked him he said said he gave him the option he said ask for whatever you want And he said oh messenger of Allah I ask you for your companionship for your muraafa to be in your company in paradise And the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam he said do you have any other request Sometimes the lover is tested any anything else and then he was mashallah. He said who was that that's it That's everything And the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam he gave him the the way the formula in order to be granted that he said I'm ni'ala nafsika bi kathrati sujud Assist me With your nefs and assist me over your nefs or in order to do that with what? With abundant sujud Through abundant sujud It becomes more accessible To be in the company of the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sallam in paradise So if that was the only hadith about sujud, it would be enough That that's the way to be with the messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam in paradise The messenger of Allah sallallahu alayhi wa sallam also said Inna aqraba ma yaqunu l-abdu min Allahi ta'ala an yaquna saajidan This is a hadith narrated by imam muslim The closest a servant is to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is when he is prostrating or when she is prostrating That is the closest that a person is to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala And remember what imam al-ghazali said at the beginning of the book that You know Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala in his gentleness and in his mercy He has made himself accessible In a way that the kings of this world can never never make themselves accessible to people And that through his gentleness and mercy he has opened that door and removed the veil so that people can Be close to him and seek from him at any time And this is also the meaning of the verse of the Qur'an when Allah subhanahu sallallahu alayhi wa sallam says Allah describes the sahaba in the Qur'an And he describes the nur the light that emanates from their faces and he ties it subhanahu wa ta'ala to the sujud So he Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala could have said anything that they're the light that emanates from their faces from their zikr The light that emanates from their faces from their slia The light that emanates from their faces from all of the various acts of ibadah definitely illuminate one's heart But Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala said as sujud Sima hum fee wujuhihim min athar as sujud That their traits the radiance can be witnessed and they can be recognized From the effect from the impact of their sujud That that nur emanates from them from the impact of the sujud The prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sahmi wa sallam His great grandson His great grandson the son of imam al-husayn Sayyidina Ali zayn al-aabideen ibn al-husayn That he would That he would make sujud a thousand times a day That he would pray so abundantly that he would perform a thousand sujud a day Which is why he's known as zayn al-aabideen the ornament the beauty of the worshipers Because he because of his sujud And he's the the great grandson of the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sahmi wa sallam And they are the greatest Exemplars and inheritors of the way of the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa alayhi wa sahmi wa sallam And then there are many stories that imam al-ghazali then mentions Of the saliheen and we'll end with a few of them that kana yusuf ibn asbatin yakud That yusuf ibn asbat he would say to Some of the the young people Oh young people He says you know take advantage of your health Before your sickness because there is no one on the face of the earth that i envy and this is not a haram envy And this is a libt that i envy in this way that what the opportunity that they have that i wish that i had Except a person who is able to perform the rukor and sujud completely and perfectly That one of the ways that you show gratitude to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for the the health and the ability to do so Is actually using that Health and that ability in ibadah in the rukor and in the sujud There might be some people for a health reason or if they get elderly that becomes more difficult So he would say to young people take advantage because the sweetness of sujud is the only thing that I envy anyone in this world over that they're able to do that Wa qala iqbat ibn muslim another one of the pious predecessors He said That the most beloved trait or characteristic that a servant has that is the most beloved to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is that that person loves to meet Allah That is the most beloved thing and we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala That he seals our lives that when we leave this world that he seals it with A good end and that he gives us at that moment the greatest love and yearning to meet him Because the prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said whoever loves to meet Allah Allah loves to meet them So this is what he's referring to so that's the first part That the the moment the time the trait that's most beloved to Allah is loving to meet him and the time That the person is closest to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is when they prostrate into sujud And then finally that the closest a person is to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is when they are in sujud So abundantly supplicate when you are in sujud Ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala When you are in sujud to fulfill your needs and to give you what you are seeking Because that is the moment that you are closest to him subhanahu wa ta'ala Insha'Allah we'll finish here Maybe we'll just take five minutes for questions and then we'll take a brief break And transition to session two insha'Allah ta'ala That's a very good question So if you're praying at home, it is always better to call the adhan yourself and even though you know a recording or youtube That's very nice According to what I understand from my teachers. That's not an actual replacement for the adhan So to actually call the adhan oneself is better Even if you're at home, even if you're alone Yes And then we'll see the sisters Yeah, please Mashallah, that's a very good question. So in the salah There are some slight Differences of opinion among the ulama Some ulama really emphasized that in the sujud you only say the du'as from the Qur'an and the sunnah or that that's most highly emphasized Another thing is that because we're in the salah And the supplications and that that we should make those du'as in Arabic So generally when we're in the salah We should stick to the du'as from the Qur'an and from the sunnah and the du'as that we memorize That are in Arabic and then outside of the salah and we're making general du'a That can be in any language and so forth but to preserve the validity of the salah That that that is a the better approach just to keep it from the Qur'an and from the sunnah What one knows in Arabic Yes Yes, that's also the case for enough of the prayers as well About du'a in Arabic in sujud Yeah, that's that's the case for You can make it in another language in your heart, but whatever you verbally say in al-sala it should be in Arabic Yes, masha'Allah Masha'Allah Masha'Allah beautiful two very good questions So al-salaatul yama wa al-qitihah that hadith indicates the prescribed times There's another hadith that talks about the merit of praying in the earlier time Over the end of the prescribed time. So there's obviously a window But the that praying at the beginning of the time Is superior to praying at the end of the time So generally speaking in addition to praying in those times That there is an added fadl an added merit Of bringing the salah and praying it in the earlier times So then his second question was Uh, you know praying in jama'a should I pray at home with my wife? For example, if there's no one else for her to pray with or should I pray in jama'a at the masjid I actually thought about that for a while and then I heard one of our teachers say something beautiful He said that many of the slaniheen out of their concern and their Uh, their commitment to praying in jama'a in the masjid Is that they would pray at home with their families and then pray in jama'a at the masjid as well So that's a way where you can You know also pray in jama'a with with your your wife and your family And then in addition to that the higher road is also to pray in jama'a at the masjid to repeat it with with the jama'a in the masjid So, uh, I thought that was the only the most comprehensive answer that that I came across I wanted to share with you anything from the sisters will take one question. Yes No, no Yeah Yeah, masha'Allah So sisters calling the adhan, uh, that's that's not the case for sisters. So thank you for asking that It's it's for it's encouraged for men to do so And then for sisters praying in congregation I know that among the the great imams of the madahab there are differences of opinion Regarding, you know, if a sister can lead other sisters in jama'a And I would just tell people encourage them to study according to One of the the four schools and follow Whatever, you know, they're that that school the position of that school And there's flexibility with regards to that. Ah, masha'Allah Masha'Allah Naam, so so once again, so this is something where a person has to try to Really do the best that they can according with their particular Circumstances and their own kind of state. So the question is, you know, If it applies to sisters to also pray in congregation and at the masjid and so forth the prophecy said didn't prevent that But he also encouraged and said that it's better for women to pray at home if they so wish so it is better But if they would like to pray and let's say for example, sometimes I have no one at home I'm feeling when I'm in the masjid. I'm with the community. That really helps me stay motivated And if I'm at home, maybe I'm going to be affected by laziness or other things So then a person can really choose based on their own circumstances But we recognize that the messenger of Allah, so I said I'm said it's better to pray at home But there were sahabiya to prayed in the masjid. So there's room. There's flexibility there Jazakum Allahu khayran


Let's talk about saving citations to Zotero in one search. As you can see, my Zotero is empty right now, but I'm going to add some items from a search in one search. I entered in my keywords and hit search, and now I have a list of resources. And instead of going into each one individually, I'm going to go to my Zotero icon in the upper right-hand corner. Now it's transformed into a little folder. That indicates that there's more than one item that you can select on a page. And when I click it, you'll see the list of items in this pop-up window matches the results list. And I can just choose the ones I want to add to Zotero, or I can select all. I'm going to choose three items and then hit OK. Because I have Zotero open, it will automatically add those items to my library. If I didn't have it open, I'd have the opportunity to save those items to Zotero.org, and then I could sync my libraries later on. So let's go to my Zotero application, and there are my three items. Once you select them, you'll be able to see all the information about them from the window on the right.


I need to get something to eat. I have a Boston cream, two summer glaze, and an apple fritter. Ah, what a nice day to enjoy this doughnut before I go to work.  What up, fellas? This is your boy, Johnny.  You ain't working out. You're hustling backwards, bro. This is honestly the key that most guys are missing. But not you, bro. You are not like most guys. You watch my channel. So today, I'm going to talk to you guys about why you have to be working out and the benefits that come with it. Let's get right into it. All right. So starting off, this is so obvious. It's going to be better for your health.  And if you even got your diet straight, you're going to have clear skin, way more energy. You'll just be a more vibrant person. All right. I know that first one was pretty obvious, but now we're going to dive into the deep stuff. Okay. The second reason is going to build your discipline. So discipline is basically doing what you're supposed to do, when you're supposed to do it, whether you feel like it or not. And there's something to be said about a dude that can stick to a diet plan, a sleep schedule and a workout plan consistently. And you know what? You might get made fun of at first for it, but that's just because you're hitting their insecurities and they're just jealous that they cannot commit to something that you can do.  You're going to be better at work, a better employee. You're going to have a better relationship with your shorty and you can finally pursue your passion. Discipline just overall is going to make you a better person. Now, next reason why you must be working out is it's all about the aesthetics, bro. Nah, but seriously, when it's summertime, it's beach season, it's pool season, you and me taking your shirt off. And when you do, all these ladies are going to be snapping their neck when they see them guide the gains from following my channel. This is also going to help with your outfits, especially when you wear a fitted shirt versus a drapey baggy one.  Fourth reason is the whole entire theme of this channel, confidence. Because you're going to have to commit to something consistently and then follow through with it, it builds a kind of confidence that cannot be faked or mimicked. Now you see people always say, fake it till you make it.   Accomplishing your daily tasks, especially your fitness tasks, is going to build trust within yourself, which is the definition of confidence. Now, the fifth and final reason is something nobody ever brings up. I don't know why, but I'm going to say it right now.  Look, fellas, this is the real world.   Because yeah, there's bullies in school, but there's still bullies outside of school.   You know, as men, we are protectors.   He's totally going to let that slide. It's not going to bother him. That's the last thing you want, man. So many people, including myself, at one point would get stepped on all the time because I was skinny and I was a nice guy, so I would let everything slide.   All right, fellas, that is five reasons you must be working out. And I always say this, that this is the real world, but it's true, man. If you don't optimize every aspect of yourself, you're going to get stomped on. And that's not what you want, man. That's not what I want for you. So if you found this video helpful, let me know by hitting the like button. Go and follow me on Instagram. It is FlyWithJohnnyTai. And subscribe to this channel if you haven't already. Leave your comments down below. And until then, stay fly. Make some gains and I'm out. Peace.


Next to the, yeah, yes, that's it. Okay. Thank you so much. Next to the, yeah. So here we are. Okay. And so I give us a lot of audience. And so I think this audience is pretty familiar with the difference between commercial bank money and the far left, which is what most digitized money really is, is commercial bank liabilities, ACH check, wires, etc. Crypto, which is not backed by anything in particular, not owned by any company, not backed by governments or central banks, volatile stablecoins, which attempt to be, it's a cryptocurrency backed by assets that attempt to be pegged to a fiat currency user US dollar. I think stablecoins have great promise, but I think stablecoins are not all created equal than there are issues with a number of them, some of which most people don't understand. And then the far right, we've got such a big digital currency, a liability of these, the Fed in this case, both wholesale and retail doesn't have to be delineated that way. But most payments are delineated between wholesale and retail. And so there's also a lot of misinformation about what CBDC is. So it's not necessarily built on a particular technology. I get a lot of questions about, will it be anonymous because cash is anonymous? And I don't believe we should build something that's based on a property that's based on paper. And so also people conflate Bitcoin with CBDC, we are not going to create a CBDC that is mined by the public. That's not how any central bank would at least begin. We're not going to have proof of work. So we're not going to consume the energy of Ireland or Iceland, whatever the example is in the course of the year by, by burning and minting money. It's also, if we, if we actually created a CBDC, it's not to eliminate cash, at least the retail one. It's also not a PMC. It's not going to solve all the world's problems. And I'm happy to talk about any of these, but I'll keep going. As far as why we're doing this research now, we actually started back in 2016. I actually get the bug back in the 90s when it was Mondex and E-Money and E-Gold and all that. And it's really been focusing on blockchain, DLT, and Bitcoin since the launch of Bitcoin. And we actually did work back in 2016 to create a wholesale CBDC, first with Ethereum, then Hyperlegia Fabric, because they were the only two platforms that existed outside of the Bitcoin blockchain. But then we pivoted in 2019 and started working 20 for some major reasons. First of all, China had announced that they were, will be doing a production pilot of their CBDC, which they started back in 2014. We all know Facebook announced Libra, which changes name to DM and then was sold off to Silvergate Bank, which hasn't yet launched anything. JP Morgan is JPM coins, stable coins growing. So these are all important things to have central banks to be thinking about the implications both of these products, but also the potential for a CBDC and of its own. But most importantly, back in March of 2020, there were two bills that were part of the Cares Act, which was in the US, was our COVID relief bill. And they would have directed the Fed to build a retail CBDC with accounts for citizens. And so when Congress starts to act out, neither of these made the final bill. But when Congress starts to act, it's important that we be ready to react to whatever those laws might be. There's been more legislation introduced. There's a number of bills being considered now, one passed, one introduced recently by a Massachusetts congressman that would have created a cash-like CBDC. So a lot's going on in Washington and all the more reason why the Fed has to be ready. So what I mean by being ready is understanding the technology. And so the analogy would be if we were asked in three years to build a CBDC and we don't start now with three years behind, anybody has built a system or understands payment systems, they're complicated, they take a lot of work, there are a million issues that have to be worked out. So we had to start now. And what we've done is the major part of our plan is we will call Project Hamilton, which is joint research with MIT. So with technology research, we're building a research model. I call it a prototype because that's what it really is, but it's a research model to say, can we build something that works? And not just, I mean, anybody can build a system, move some data around, call it money, and say they did a POC, and that's worth very little. Can you do that scale? And so we're trying to do this at scale with real-world problems we're trying to solve. We have various design options. This is research, so we're not just doing one, we're doing multiple. With technology agnostic, we look at DLT, but we also look at other technologies. And we recently, and hopefully people have read it, published our joint technology research paper on February 3rd, and did something the Fed has never done, which is basically issued an open-source license with MIT for the code, open CBDC. And I understand that a lot of people here have looked into that. It's also important to know that no decision has been made to move to production, but not even to pilot. A lot of people asking, when can I hook up to it? When can we test? When can we pilot with you? And I don't have even an approval to move to pilot. And obviously, there'd be a significant change from just a research effort. But obviously, it could be a step along the way, but not to be determined yet. So, step one on project Hamilton was to build the core engine. So, this is the core engine fermenting and storing and moving the money at scale in a resilient and safe way. So, our goal was 100,000 transactions per second. I've been asked, where did that number come from? And I said, we think it's the sum of all the credit card transactions in the world every second. It seemed like a good place to start. What we were trying to start at some place really high and aggressive, because we want to make sure we can work at scale, and we know that systems slow down when you add more technology to them. So, settlement under five seconds, resiliency, very robust, highly resilient. Now, this is resiliency from technology problems, generally, network issues, not necessarily a full-blown resiliency to cyber attack, dial service, etc. We've not gone that far. In privacy, just some basic privacy, how we built the identification system. Phase two, which is the next phase, we're done with phase one, we'll talk about that. Phase two is getting into different policy choices and design choices. I'll be very clear. I'm the technology guy, I'm not the policy guy. I know the questions. And the policy, as we'll talk later, is being handled by the Board of Governors in Washington. But we know the questions and the thorny issues. So, for instance, privacy versus compliance. That only these hard, but they conflict. How do you try to maximize privacy and still catch the bad guys? A challenging problem even today. For the vulnerability, should it be smart money? Should logic be within the money? Should the external to the money interoperability and cross-border key issues for any payment system and accessibility in an offline? And we're doing these tests for two reasons. One, because when you add code to the system, you'll slow it down. So, are we slowing it down? Are we adding new attack vectors? Are we slowing down speed per second? Or speed of settlement? Or throughput? But also, these conflict, privacy and compliance, as I mentioned, they conflict. And so, are there ways of looking at the newest technologies to try to solve some problems that exist today? AML, counter-terrorist financing is really hard. Not overly effective, my words. Banks hate to do it. It's expensive. It's a high liability. And that's the model we have today that banks do it. Or other payment system providers. So, are there ways of thinking about this differently with technology? In the world of crypto, there's something called a zero-knowledge proof, which allows you to examine data for particular conditions. Like, is this recipient on a bad guy list? Or without seeing the data? And I'm oversimplifying it. But could that be used in a CBDC to help solve some problems? So, we're starting to work on these now. We can talk more about them later. But that's the next phase. And phase two really is endless. It's going to continue as long as we have research we want to do into this particular set of topics. So, Hamilton phase one, I mentioned before we were, this is not a fully functional system. It's a clearing of settlement engine. We built it in C++ because we wanted to understand all the intricacies and nuances of building it. You'll learn a lot more when you do that. And we've learned some important things. We have to handle various policy outcomes. So, we had to make sure whatever we did, we weren't baking in assumptions that couldn't be unwound, like privacy considerations, or how it is distributed. So, it had to be built very flexibly. We had a goal of minimizing data, one for speed, but also for privacy. And for not having to worry about PII in the core engine. Paralyzable, one because that allows you to have better resiliency for multiple copies of the system running, but also for speed. And also, the assumption is, if we ever built this, the Fed would run it. As I mentioned before, we would not have miners, we would not have public people outside the Fed unless there were agents of the Fed. So, we wouldn't need open blockchain type consensus protocols like Group of Work, which obviously simplifies a lot. We do have consensus methods. We have ways of replicating data, but not like on the lines of cryptocurrency. So, here are the results. We ended up with two core engines. We had multiple along the way, one called the atomizer, one called two-phase commit. Now, the atomizer, we had about 170,000 transactions per second with 99% under two. With two-phase commit, we had 1.7 million transactions per second with finality under one second. We stopped at 1.7 only because we ran out of resources in the AWS cloud structure we had. And we know we could have gone faster than that. You say, well, why would you go faster? Well, we'd go faster because when you go faster and break it, you'll learn something. The one difference between these two architectures is the atomizer maintains the order of the transactions as they arrive. Two-phase commit does not. Two-phase commit does not maintain the order of the transactions, although with the speed we have, every transaction is generally done within the half-second, quarter-second of when it comes in, but it's not necessarily an order. And when you do that, you are able to totally paralyze the system because you don't need to have the order going through a single funnel. And that allows you to scale linearly, basically. And that was one of the a-has we had when we first started coding. We said, why would this system have to maintain an order? I couldn't come up with a reason, at least for a retail system. So we relaxed that, took the same code, redesigned it, and came up with Two-phase commit. Both are replicated in the cloud. We're in three different physical data centers across the US and still getting these speeds. And we brought down two data centers and still were able to process pretty much at speed. And the important part of this is that this system actually looks more like Bitcoin than it does a regular payment system. It relies on public-private key peers to identify who the user is. So right now we are able to link to an identity, but the identity is not part of the transaction per se. Just like in Bitcoin, if you understand Bitcoin, the private key is really what you use to identify who owns the public key, not the private key. And also we rely on unspent tokens, UTXO models versus accounts. We don't have accounts. There's nothing that says Jim Cunha has $100. It could be a hunk of money, say $20 that says Jim Cunha has 20 here, one unspent token. He's got 25 here. He's got 55 here. So three different types of, three different pieces of data that represent three hunks of money that I have. And if I want to give it, say, give Karen $10, I'll take the $20 UTXO, destroy it, create a 10 for me and a 10 for Karen. And that's how Bitcoin works. And then, as I said, we're very flexible. And so in a nutshell, that's what we built. This shows the throughput. And as you can see in the top, that shows the throughput. And on the bottom is how many shards is one of the pieces of processing we need. And as you can see with the atomizer, we sort of top out, start to decline with 16 shards at about 170,000 transactions per second, when all the 32 shards, which is 32 copies, up to 1.7 million, pretty much linearly. And so that's the kind of throughput we're looking at for this design. We are still researching whether the order that transaction matters. We've got lawyers and some regulators looking at it. And if anybody in the audience has used case for the retail where it matters, our thought was, you know, it's not like an account where you could kite or you can send multiple transactions on the same money. You have to spend the money discreetly. So each piece of money has to be spent discreetly. You can't spend it more than once. Jim, we just have a question come in in the chat. And I know you said you wouldn't mind us jumping in. Hart, actually, I don't know if you want to come off mute and ask your question or if you want me to just do it. Either way, Karen, whatever is easier. Go ahead. Much nicer to have the engagement. So yeah. Sure. Thanks for your presentation, Jim. I just had a question. Maybe I'm missing something about the model, but what techniques are you using to prevent double spends without a global ordering? So yeah, it gets into the architecture. So it's a multi-tier architecture. And I should have said earlier, if you Google YouTube, I'll give you the link to it later. But we have an hour and a half presentation. We go deep dive into the architecture, including each component, each layer. And what happens the first time it comes in, it's a layer that says, this is a valid transaction. Is it signed, et cetera, et cetera. And it passes to another layer that says, is there money? And once the money is there, it locks the money. So nobody else can actually use that $20 that I had in my example. And so once I have that money locked, no one else can go out with that particular money, even when it's paralyzed, when it has multiple copies running, because that's a two-phase commit, I lock the money. And then when I destroy the original money, and then create 10 for me and 10 for Karen, the old money is gone. So it can't be double spent because of how we lock that particular UTXO record. Was this the webinar on February, on February 11th? Yeah. Okay. I think I found the link. My architects and my lead designer and one of the MIT people also talks more deeply about the open source, you know, how to contribute, et cetera. And so here's just a little bit on the open CBDC. We've got, you know, and I'm not an open CBDC expert, but some who may, you know, MIT actually maintains the open source license for Bitcoin. And our license is based on the same approach and the same structure. So there's different connections here you have in your presentation, which obviously Karen can send out to you. We have people that are constantly manning this. We're creating work groups that can dive into individual problems to say let's figure out, like just say we haven't solved double spend, we'd say let's figure out how to solve double spend under the existing model. We get people starting to work and contribute on that. And eventually you could create code that would make its way into the into the GitHub for this product. So we're hoping that people will actually contribute code. And like I said, the whole process in the open source world, how that works. Now we also, you may have heard also that the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada recently joined MIT's in a bilateral relationship. And we're going to start thinking about how we do our joint work with them in an open source environment. We haven't, we're really thinking about this point, but we think there's ways that we can work together even as central banks in ways that may be open to the public, but we're still working on those. Just one more piece. That's Project Hamilton in a nutshell as far as what we're doing with MIT. We've got some of the great, we have great developers in my team. My architect actually was the architect for USC, USC, circles, contributions to stable coins, and other developers from MIT and MIT's group has, one of the core developers for Bitcoin is on the team that contributes to our code. But as far as we are, we don't believe we have the only solution. So we're also looking at open blockchain solutions, Solano and others that seem to have some promise for speed, hyperledger variations are on our list to look at. But we're also looking at private sector actors to say, are there any solutions that people have built that could meet our needs? This is not a buy versus build decision. This is really just to gather more information about what's out there to say, in case at some point in the future, if we were asked to move forward, what would be the best option? What we build? Maybe what we built on top of a different blockchain or maybe a private sector actor. So that's where we are. This is not the publication. It's really just to understand what these platforms can do and learn from them. And then eventually, once we get to a point, if we do to pilot, who can we work with out of these groups that might have some things to contribute? So from that regard, as the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, you guys are open to work with other companies that already built something and you'd love to learn from what they've built so far. This is what? Yeah. So what we're doing is we're going to be issuing our RFI request for information. We've been doing our own research into what's available with some bilateral conversations with some companies. We just can't talk to everybody because we're a small team. But with the RFI, we are going to look at who's already built a system that says they can work at scale. And then we'll be examining all of those to see which might be able to meet the needs of the US. Like that kind of throughput, the kind of privacy considerations we might be considering. And then what we do is we'll bring a few in in some form and try to test them in our labs against the same test scenarios that we've been using. So we're very open to how this unfolds going forward. Also, as part of I mentioned a minute, as part of the Board of Governors research into what the, you know, their consultation to the public, we're also trying to understand how can we talk to technology companies beyond just what we're doing in Hamilton to understand what they're doing. What's the landscape? And so there'll be more consultation coming out of the board to technology companies, but trying to do it in a way that is not a thousand meetings. If you understand, but we're definitely open to it. I'm more than open to anybody who has a system, you know, to send me information. Can I email you after the presentation? I don't have an email or any contact that I can. Yeah, I'm fine with my email being given out Karen and the presentation. I always welcome anybody reaching out to me. I would love to reach out to you because we already built something and it's very interesting. We would love to get your feedback as well. Great. Yeah, please do. Thanks. Elisabeth, this is not something we're doing this year and done. This is going to be a process. If anyone's built a payment system and knows that this is a long process and this is much more complicated than most, once you get into all the considerations. So this is definitely a multi-year effort. Yeah, absolutely. I built a number of them and this is the most complex. I understand. Yeah, but we've been working a lot building on the interoperability. We built our own blockchain and we built the cross-border payment, basically settlement blockchain. And also we've built the CBDC or at least we are almost there. If we hope that we're right, but we're also learning and we definitely would love to add value, whether with the feds or somewhere else. Okay. I should imagine too that there's other research going on inside the Federal Reserve system. Most of it is the Board of Governors themselves. They set up a technology group that's mainly, so we're going very, very deep into CBDC. They're going a little, they're going less deep, wider across multiple blockchains and looking at other things like interoperability between chains and things like that. So I'll make sure I pass your information on the Board as well. That would be great, yeah. Because we looked into all those options, basically interoperability and also we looked at the CBDC and we looked at it also from domestic perspective or from the cross-border perspective as well. We looked at a lot of these details and we have built something. So let's maybe move it online and I'll send you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ahmed. Thanks. So not the policy guy, but I understand. I mean, if you live in the Boston, we were saying, don't pave the cow paths. If you do, you get Boston streets. As you can see on the right, we are not a grid because we've paved cow paths. So what that means to me is as we think forward about this, we shouldn't necessarily build a new payment system to look necessarily like the old ones, nor should we assume that all of the policy considerations are the same. I mentioned one. Can we look at privacy and compliance differently with new technology? Maybe not, but I think it's an opportunity to look at fixing some things and unpaving some roads, if you will. So the next few slides are a bunch of policy questions and we'll not be talking about them, but the main message here is the Board of Governors has issued a public consultation paper January 20th and they're taking comments through May 20th and I highly encourage anybody with an opinion with a good idea. There are, I forget the number of questions there, but they're asking about a lot of the questions I pose here, like with financial inclusion, with interoperability, with intermediate questions. Yeah, 90s there, that's right. I was trying to think of it. It's 62 or 90s. There are a lot of questions, but you can answer them. 22 questions. Yeah, but they're complex questions. But they are asking questions about interoperability and intermediaries and obviously people from different areas have different responses there. So some of the areas that we think about for privacy and I'll just run through them quickly because I want to lead plenty of time for questions. You know, I mentioned privacy versus traceability. How do you catch the bad guys or do you have to? Financial structure. Very important to banks. Who are the intermediaries? Is it direct to the Fed? The Board has come out leaning in a direction that's probably not direct from the Fed. There's no decisions yet, but probably not. So who are the intermediaries? Likely banks, but are there others who are intermediaries? Can a customer custodian or hold their own keys? If this is a public key type of private key. Is there any potential impact on bank deposits where people flood to CBDC? These are real important questions. Interoperability we mentioned, cross-border. I personally think there is promise in cross-border, but it's not a panacea. The Bank for International Settlement, VIS, has a working group looking at cross-border. I think it's called the roadmaps for cross-border. And I believe they have the 16 or 19 different tracks of work, one of which is CBDC, which shows you how complicated cross-border is. So I mentioned double spending, counterfeit, span, how do you stop that? Is it a monetary policy tool? Is there an interest rate or not? Very complex, controversial. One of my personal views, not those necessary with the Federal Reserve System, I think a CBDC could help with financial inclusion if it's a stated goal. If it's a public policy goal that it will, I think we can help. Once again, not a panacea, but I think it can help. Innovation, I truly believe that a CBDC will spur innovation in the private sector and create new tools, new ways of doing things. Should a CBDC be smart? Smart contract. My view is not very. It could just be functionality, but not super smart money. It shouldn't stop me from buying too much bear. It shouldn't be that smart as it's getting in the way of how money should actually work, which is moving from party A to party B. And a lot of questions about wallets. Since it's a wholesale group, I want to at least mention that there's a lot of work going on in wholesale CBDC. By far, the leader is Singapore. Project Urban was going on 616. They worked with Canada and England that had three different blockchains with three different currencies and a currency on blockchain and did PVP and DVP across three platforms. So very robust testing, very, very strong. And they used Hyperledger as one, Corda as one, and I forget the third platform. And the BIS Innovation Hubs, which there are multiple across the world are looking at cross-border. Hong Kong is looking at wholesale cross-border. The New York Fed is spending up some work in wholesale cross-border work a little more narrowly focused called Project Cedar, I believe. So give the name of the person in New York if you're interested in talking about that. So let me end there and then stop sharing and then just get to questions. That was great. 33 minutes and I caught a few questions along the way.  Karen, promise me this is a vocal audience. Yeah, I think you've already seen that. I'm more than happy to talk about any of those topics, stablecoins, crypto, Casper. I think Mohan has a question there which says, can CBDC do financial exclusion like in the case of freezing Russian assets? Depending on how it's built, a number of my teammates came from Circle Financials. So they had both a stablecoin before that they had a P2P network and they were able to freeze currencies that they knew were in wallets of bad guys. So by design it can be done. It's basically based on how it's built, how to identify the people in the legal infrastructure. But if this is based on public key infrastructure and you knew the public key was owned by someone on a bad guy list, that's the high part, then you have ways that definitely could design in ways of freezing assets or even destroying assets in a case like that. It's all based on design criteria and then the identity verification. That's the high part, million, all of this. How do you go from the currency to identity? That definitely possible. Hi, Jim. Jumping in with a question. So segue from the last one, talking about identity and privacy. So what are the real hurdles around identity? If you could spend a minute there and then given the way I think about this in a retail sense, there's not really a digital representation of people to tie assets to. So how do you think about that hurdle? Well, we started as I said before with something that was totally flexible. So we have a public private key. So that could be tied to an identity in a directory somewhere. It could be that, I mean, the way it works today is the Fed doesn't have identity, the bank has identity. And the identity is identified. So the bank does the KYC, AM, all that stuff. We get a transaction with information that may identify the person or may have information. That's solely for the bank. We settle with banks, not with individuals. And so it could be that the intermediary we work through, I think the most logical way is the intermediary we work through is able to connect that public key with an identity. And hold the private key if the person wants it held in custody, like you would do with a coin base, or the individual can hold their own private key if that's how it works. But so right now the most likely case is there's an intermediary that connects that public private key pair with an individual. Or the other option is some mega directory that does it. Because otherwise, I don't see the Fed holding the identity. In the U.S., we don't have a national digital identity. If we did, that would be great. That would work for something like this. That'd be a way of trying to connect those things. But right now it's a challenge. Thanks for the answer. Hey, Jim. A quick question. I know in a lot of high availability infrastructures, the goal is four or five nines in terms of availability. I would expect for the Fed that even that might not be sufficient. What are you guys looking at in order to reach that 100% availability that you guys are looking at? I know you mentioned you guys have multiple places where you're hosted, and that the Fed would host all of these. But are you guys satisfied with four or five nines, or what's your plan there? Yeah, we're going to try to push, and that's part of our future testing, is trying to push the envelope there. But definitely, it is parallelized systems, multiple data centers. We've got replication of the data across the entire system, so there's no single copy of anything live. I mean, live data, not a backup, or tertiary backups, things like that. Any other option is, as a failsafe, offline capabilities. How can it work? Just say, now, offline, because the system's not available, it's offline, because you're out of a cell coverage, it's offline because of a natural disaster. It's all different reasons to be offline, but we think offline has to be part of the equation for part of that availability. But we do want to try to, we are starting to talk to some of the leading vendors. I think the most bandwidth in the entire world is used by YouTube. And we're talking to YouTube all throughput, and we're talking to Amazon and others about availability and trying to make sure we're on a leading edge. And then eventually, because this would be important factor, is we bring in the miners and the other, both from a cyber attack and also from resiliency perspective, are there things that we haven't thought of, because four nines used to be okay? So we're going down all these paths at once, because I agree. I mean, I don't want to be de-cached if you follow the Eastern Caribbean, I don't be down for a month because something went wrong. That would be failure. Sure, thank you. By the way, this afternoon, there is a call of OpenCBDC-DX, and they're accepting proposals, right? So right now, they're working strictly on privacy and open privacy compliance, you know, working group. But they are open for other proposals, including for increasing resiliency. In fact, I have submitted, in the process of submitting a proposal for multi-cloud resiliency, not dependent on a single vendor like AWS. So I am in the process of talking to the people in the MIT group on Zulip, which is their chat channel. So you should come there if you have ideas and contribute to them. We're also looking at, and I'm not an expert in this, but how it's containerized and all that, so we can work across multiple clouds. At first, you don't think one cloud vendor's going to be enough. So we are looking at multiple cloud options, and obviously, that's some great work being done there as well. And I should have mentioned that, Trevor, as well as the other way is to contribute. If there are people out there with ideas, or I'm not sure they make up the group as much, I see some CTO titles and some smart looking people, but contributions are always welcome as this starts to unfold. And another question here is, how close or far is regulatory support to pilot the CBDC in the USA? That is from Jody Panapalli, who's from BTCC. And of course, as you know, BTCC has started its own DDP based tests on CBDC. Yeah, I've talked to multiple people that aren't been on panels with them as well. So yeah, I wish I had an answer, but I will quote Chair Powell that says we cannot move forward or wouldn't move forward without congressional support because he believes that it is important enough and not just because it's a very political thing. I don't think politics is necessarily bad, but we really need the support of Congress to help ensure that we get the backing of the country to do something like this because it is non-trivial. And so part of the public consultation and part of the executive order coming out of the Biden administration, as you've seen, is trying to get to a lot of these issues so that they can be debated in a determination way. But I'm not expecting anything in the nearest of terms. Like I said, unless there's some legislation that sort of supersedes some of these efforts. I think there is a question by Sandy, which talks about the offline capabilities in case of cyber attacks or a bug. But more than just cyber attacks or a bug, offline capabilities are an important part of inclusion, I guess. And I think it kind of relates to the question about resilience. Yeah, and I actually have the chat up now because I couldn't present or watch it. Yeah, so offline is important for a number of reasons. One, as I mentioned, that Travis question is about just availability in cases and issue. But also for a cyber attack, is there a ability for an offline, if for some reason we had to move it down, it had to be done from the distributed out of the service. But bug discovery is a very different one because if the bug is replicated obviously across the code, then you may have the same issue in multiple areas, which is why you say smart contract code. I'm not necessarily calling it that. I'm just calling it logic within the core processing engine because I think smart contract code comes with many preconceived ideas. But that's why we're trying to limit the amount of code that would actually be in the processing engine to limit the potential for bugs or malware and anything else. I mean, think about it. If I want to stop myself from spending too much money on beer, and I can do that in a wallet, or if I wanted to have certain other limitations on where the money is spent or other types of controls, I can do that in layers outside of the core processing engine, less just protecting the core processing engine from the potential for bug infiltration or even just bad code. And so that's how we think about it. So I don't necessarily tie offline to bugs other than if the system's down, they would help there. Thank you. Sandy, we can't hear you. At least I can't hear you. Yeah, I cannot either. Okay, you know what? It's okay. We sent you what that I think I would have in the audience. I'll talk to us when I get a question on the chat. Okay, yeah. Yeah, he's on the chat. I want to return to your comment about the wallets, because that's one of one thing that seemed to be I mean, the details seem to be missing in the in the paper, but a lot of the capabilities, especially the verification and interaction between the wallets are necessary for the UHS to function properly, right? I mean, that's what I read from the paper. Yeah. So what we do, we actually built, we actually built the wallet. And I think, I think, I think that our developer came from BitPay who developed the wallet there, if I recall correctly, but that was more for our own testing and trying to understand the interrelationship between the core engine and the wallet. But as I said, this is just the core engine. As we think about building out more capability, eventually we have to think about the UI. And there's multiple scenarios. Would the Fed write a wallet that is distributed in white labeled? Likely not. Would the Fed potentially write some specifications that wallet have to meet from a security perspective? Maybe. Some standards so that wallets are safe and people know that they are. They'd probably be developed by vendors and intermediaries, et cetera, but we definitely need the wallet. We're just not there as far we've gone with our application development yet. The question on FedRAMP standard, you know, right now we're just working in an environment we're totally research-based. We are nowhere inside the Fed's environment. We're really totally just trying to understand what's possible. So right now we're not tying ourselves to what currently works today and any national infrastructure, FedRAMP or anything else. And so we would go beyond what currently is capable. And then if we felt it was determined that we had to have a multi-cloud environment for this to be issued, we'd deal with that when we came to it. Once again, the cow path is how things are designed today. And maybe they're capable today of enough that maybe a CBDC brings us to new needs. So in the FedRAMP question, we're just working outside the current norms to make sure we're not limiting ourselves. CBDC interoperate with the DeFi world. We have to build something, in my view, we have to build something that is flexible enough to be used anywhere. I think that'd be the ultimate. So the ultimate would be if there's an application, like say cross-border, going from one CBDC to another, I think we should be aiming for that. That's not saying it's a policy choice. I'm just saying from a technologies perspective, we should look at it. Many people have asked me, should it interoperate with other payment systems? And I say, why? Because they don't interact today. No payment system actually interacts with another one. You go through an intermediary, with the exception of check in ACH, which is a little bit about a niche issue there. And so for DeFi, I'd say, if there was a valid business reason for a CBDC to be able to be used within a DeFi world, and it wasn't violating compliance rules, and the intermediaries could make it work, I see no reason why not. But like I said, none of the policy makers. Is he frozen for everybody else? Yes, he is. We lost you there for a second. You're back. You're back because you were frozen for a minute. Oh, you're frozen again, I guess. Video off. Hey, Karen, maybe even just a question while we're in for him to come back. So is this, do they have, or is there a specific kind of slack or discord chain in the hyperledger discord around this? Yeah, he's back. This is kind of some of that. Yes, I'm at home, my VPN just bounced. I was hoping it wouldn't. I hope it's done. No problem, Jim. I'll answer your question in the chat, Trevor. That's fine. Thank you. So we missed the last minute of what you said, Jim. Oh, is that in the DeFi world? Yeah, I think that any connectivity that was solving a business case, a valid business case that was working within regulation, I would want to be able to make a connection there. The question would get into other issues of compliance with know your customer, etc. Are those fine? And what's the intermediary? What's the connection between the currency and the DeFi world? Who's the intermediary that's helping to move that money between whatever that smart contract is and the individual? And so I think they're open questions, but I'd always go into this with an open mind to say I'd want to connect to anything where there's a valid business reason and there's no violation of any sort of regulation. But I think that does get into a bit of a policy question about what's the connectivity and does it satisfy all the appropriate rules? You could ask the same thing, can I buy crypto with it? Well, why not? But what are the rules? How do you validate KYC and stuff like that? In my own opinion. So if you look at the sand dollar, for example, which is a small crypto, I mean small Shibirisi, I talked to Richard Douglas there who runs a company called Island Bay and they connect with the ESV, which is the credit card company's standard interface. And that's how they hook up the sand dollar to the ESV. Of course, that means that somebody has to write this, somebody has to manage which is Island Bay. But he also said something very important, which is they implemented standards for wallets. I mean, they asked people to have standards for wallets and other items. And that helped them greatly. Before they started, the private operators got involved, they were forced to adhere to the standards. So in that sense, if you have those standards and then you adhere to them, then probably the rails to other systems like the credit cards, like DeFi itself could be enhanced. Yeah, I think the standards of interoperability are important. And even for a bank, a bank has to understand how a CBDC would interact with its own systems. Its core provider, how would it move money out of a DDA account into a CBDC? It's the same thing with faster payments. In the U.S., the Fed is building FedNow, a faster payment scheme. And the software providers to the banks have to be on board for this to be viable. And so it's the same for CBDC. Who are the wallet providers? Do they have enough information to build wallets early on for banks and other intermediaries to connect? So I think that's a lot of the work is working with those, you know, one step away from the actual CBDC to get it to work. Otherwise, it's not going to work. So the next is, you know, if anybody who has not asked a question yet want to ask questions, please come forward. Mark, I had a question on performance testing. Are those results something that you can share, like how the tests were done, things like that? Yeah, I believe it's actually in the material of the white paper. We built software to actually conduct those tests. And I believe it was every transaction was two inputs, two outputs, just to try to replicate a normal transaction. And we're actually trying to open source the controller that we built to drive the tests so that other people can test in the same way if they want to take the open source code outside or make contributions they can test against the controller. A little challenging, we're not there yet. We're trying to make that software available also for the open CBDC code. Just to give an introduction. I'm sorry to bar Jim, but we are already building some support for JMeter with the open CBDC prototype. It's very nice software. It's just missing that benchmarking part. The student of mine is doing that. Yeah, both Imre and Mark, the prior members of the performance and scale working group in Hyperledger. So Mark works or has worked at Red Hat, so you know something about performance and scale. Imre is a researcher from Budapest. We are trying to open source the controller, which I think would also be something that would be interested in others contributing to our understanding. Because obviously that's an important piece of technology to ensure that what people are contributing is tested in a consistent way. That's the same thing we would use hopefully against private sector actors, but that's also a challenge. Anybody else? I'll mention one more thing since we have a moment, and I usually try to say this, but it takes time. So people sometimes ask with a project Hamilton name comes from, and most people think it's Alexander Hamilton, which it is. It's a nod to Alexander, who was actually the grandfather, I guess, of the central bank. But when my team was coming together, we knew we'd work with MIT, and we called this a moonshot because we really thought we'd been building something important like going to the moon. And so the team did research, and we found that Margaret Hamilton ran an MIT technology lab in the 60s, and her team built the guidance system for the Apollo space probe. So it's as much a nod to Alexander Hamilton as to the better sex, Margaret Hamilton. So just while we had a moment, I think I'd like to put that out there. I highlight that in my Forbes article, and I call them the two Hamilton's. Yeah. In fact, I created a graphic for you guys because you missed Margaret in your main graphic. So I put Margaret on the side, and I created a new graphic for the project Hamilton website. We are open source. Yeah. Yes. So anyway, any other questions, guys? Yeah. Hi, Vipin. It's him right again. Go ahead. I'm sorry for brushing in previously, and I should have introduced myself. I did write a question about privacy. I don't know whether there was an answer to that. Maybe it got buried. Maybe. So the question is that, yeah. So I've been thinking about this a lot, and to me it seems like that using some tricks like SSI and certain ZKPs, you could actually do a CBDC that's just as encumbered as physical caches. So technologically, it seems to be doable if you are willing to share and you may not be anything about the level of privacy that you foresee for a CBDC. I would very much appreciate that. Yeah. Like you said, we try to build as private as possible only because we don't know what the privacy regulation outcome will be. Some countries are saying they'll have a de minimis value that's private under $500, and above that you have to do KYC. So we have not done a lot of looking at it really just to understand that we need to. We are thinking about a relative to programmability because it has implications there, but we're more trying to understand, let's start the minimum information, which is just a public private key pair, and see where the privacy regulation goes because it's a challenge. We have thought about other or limits on ability to hold, et cetera like that. We are not designing it yet because I want to limit limits on holding because that limits the value of the currency. We can put them on, we know how, because we haven't done much work on it yet because of the study with the most open system possible and then going from there. But it's an important issue for sure. Again, I have one last question. We have this privacy working group meeting at 3 o'clock open CBD CTX. So if you're very interested, you can get there. All right.  Sorry, I didn't realize you were adding something to that. Jim, it's really exciting to see how much the Project Hamilton has embraced open source and is putting the technology out there. You're basically the only ones doing that on this topic. As an open source community ourselves, we hope to see more of that around the CBDC research. I wanted to just ask you, aside from obviously participating in the working group meetings at open CBDC, what do you see our community could be doing or could be contributing to the knowledge base and what's useful and helpful to help people understand, help central banks understand, how to implement and figure out this use case? What role do you see us, our community, having and what could we be doing that would be helpful? I think at this early stage, and we are really early, I think it really is contributing to the current platforms that exist in the open source. I know that there's been some spinoffs from open CBDC and I think everything's valuable, so I think that's the first. Communicating with the Board of Governors in the consultation program, because some of those things may affect certain topics. And I don't know whether people have thoughts about whether an open source can help with interoperability or the wallet construction, whatever, I think those would be important comments to make to help the dialogue go forward. And I think as it unfolds, I think we'll see more narrow focus groups looking at privacy or resilience where we'll be able to get more in depth and get, some of those I think would even spin off their own product or their own pieces of open source software that could be components of a CBDC. So I don't know how it will unfold because it's so early, but I could definitely see this growing in the community, both of who's using it and also what open source platforms exist because a lot of it is compartmentalized, whether it's encryption or certain techniques for privacy, like creating a zero and all this proof that works at scale as an open source project. I think things like that I think can be really, really critical. Okay. Well, thank you so much. It's been great. Thanks for the invitation. Great questions. I'm glad the audience was informed and active. And I really appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for the great, for the fascinating discussion. We hope to have you back. Yeah, always a pleasure. Thanks. Thank you, Jen. Bye, everybody. Thank you all for your engagement. Thank you, Jen. Thank you very much.