Dr. Rollin McCraty | Energy connectivity: coherence and the global field environment

Transcription note: The text below was typed and reviewed live, during the transmission of the lecture and/or translation. It is possible that this lecture is in the process of subsequent revisions for its improvement. If required, it can be verified with the corresponding recording. (Suggestions or comments: transcripciones@emapaz.com)

 

Something happened and I cannot hear you.

I hope you all can hear me. I’m not sure if you can but I’m going to start then.

Thank you very much to the organizers, it’s an honor to be here, the presentation [AUDIO CUT] ...connected with each other and with the Earth itself as has never been previously imagined, and how our attitude, our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs really do matter and reach out and affect others; they are not just within us but they literally reach out and affect people.

So the mission of the HeartMath institute is to really help people bring their physical, mental, and emotional systems into balanced alignment with their hearts, intuitive guidance, and this unfolds the path of becoming heart-empowered individuals who choose the way of love, which they demonstrate through compassionate care for the wellbeing of themselves, others, and planet Earth. 

So our research is really focused in kind of main areas: Our personal coherence, social coherence, and global, and I’m going to be talking today mostly of global coherence.

Coherence is a term that used in physics to describe when different parts of a system, in this case we are talking about Earth and humanity, work together in harmony and have energy efficiency, is always part of coherence; so what it means is that all parts of the system are connected and somehow are working together in a harmonious way.

So personal coherence is an optimal state in which... [AUDIO CUT] That may sound like an odd statement at first, but I want to ask some of you or ask you to all consider if there’s been a moment or a time recently when you were either asked to do something or thought you should do something but there was a deeper inner sense that that wasn’t the correct action or that that wasn’t aligned with your deeper values or who you really are. So, that’s kind of what I am talking about here; that disconnect between… really the heart or the heart's intuitive guidance and our mind, and I would suggest that this is one of the most unrecognized sources of stress in humanity. This is a very big issue.

Now we also use personal coherence in the context of physiology, of our body. So physiologically it’s when our body’s system, such as our immune systems, hormonal system, and especially our nervous systems, function in a state of energetic coordination.

Just a little it more on basic physiology here and I’ll get into global coherence. So, the heart and brain in the human system are more interconnected and talk to each other more so than any other systems in our bodies. In fact, the heart sends more information through our nervous system to the brain than the brain sends to the heart; and this may sound like a new discovery but this has actually been known since the late 1800s, and the quality of these neural signals flowing from the heart to our brain have profound effects on the brain, on our mental activity. It has a lot to do with our emotional experience.

So we have a very scientific understanding of why there are so many sayings in our languages about “play with heart,” or “go to your heart, it knows the right answer,” or “sing with heart.” Right? All of these saying have a very sound reasoning; we’ve just intuitively understood this, but didn’t really have the science to understand it until more recently.

And what wasn’t known history until more recent years, in the last 30 years, was that the heart actually has its own brain: It's called the Intrinsic Cardiac Nervous System or the heart’s brain… [AUDIO FAIL] And this brain in the heart is sending many signals to the brain up in our head. Now that is a very different presentation to go into that physiology that I am doing today but it is an important aspect to understand.

Now one of the ways that we can understand... [AUDIO CUT] is called the heart’s rhythms or heart rate variability. In a healthy person, our heart rate changes with each and every heartbeat, it is not a steady rhythm like it was believed for many years. So what you see here on the screen are two different rhythmic patterns from the same person; the one of the left we call “incoherent,” and this is the message or the rhythm that the heart is beating out, kind of like Morse Code; information is encoded in these rhythms. When we’re feeling things like frustration, or impatience, worry, irritation, whereas on the right side, this is what we call a “coherent heart rhythm,” and our heart naturally is into this rhythmic pattern and this quality of information that is being sent to the brain, when we are truly feeling things like appreciation, kindness, care, love, or we have the courage to speak our truth, these types of things. 

Again, this would be a whole presentation, to understand the importance of this... [AUDIO CUT] I am giving you just one aspect on how this affects the brain.

So when we’re in the incoherent state, that literally is what is called “inhibits” or interferes with mental functions, optimal brain function, and the way this works is these neural signals flow to a very core part of the brain called the thalamus, and one of the thalamus’ roles is to synchronize the neural activity in the entire brain.

So when we are in this incoherent state, which again is when we are feeling things like hate, or frustration, or irritation, these types of things, it interferes with the thalamus’ ability to synchronize the brain globally, we can’t think clearly, this is when we make bad choices or we become more violent, these types of things, more stressful.

It especially affects the frontal part of the brain where we have foresight and the ability to understand how our actions will affect the future; this is inhibited, taken offline, whereas when we are in a more coherent state, which we can learn how to shift into at will by the way, that enhances neural synchronization, so we have much more options available, much more capacity to self-regulate our emotions, our behaviors, and how we especially interact with others.

Another neural pathway is directly to the amygdala in the brain. In fact the activity in the amygdala is literally synchronized to the heart rhythms; so this is how the heart really informs to a large degree, how we are feeling. So we can’t think ourselves into a more optimal state, it really takes the heart shifting first.

So we also talk about social coherence, and this is big focus of our research now. So social coherence describes how groups, communities or entire countries and organizations can achieve stable and harmonious relationships. And this allows for the efficient flow in utilization of energy and the communication required for optimal collective cohesion and purpose. And this is also something we can measure, again, I’m not going to go into a lot of that today but that is a big area of our research. 

Now, moving more into the energetic type of communication that occurs to help understand this: We’ve done a lot of research here that shows that... well first of all when we’re in a heart coherent state, the heart literally radiates a more coherent electromagnetic signal into the environment that can actually be detected by and affect the nervous systems of other people or animals.

So this image you see here is the shape of the magnetic field produced by the heart. Now how do I know this is true? We can measure it. This is a magnetic field that is measured with devices called magnetometers; and we can detect the hearts magnetic field about three feet from the body, whereas with the same magnetometer, a measurement device you can measure a brain wave about an inch from the body. So the heart has a huge magnetic field relative to the body.

So these magnetic fields, when they’re in the audience you are all sitting within the field of each other, [AUDIO CUT] ...influence each other through the fields that we create. Again, we can measure these [AUDIO CUT]… by the hearts magnetic field. So this is what... these two things you see here, these two graphs, one is called... these are called spectrums; so one is what the information looks like that we are radiating into the field environment when we are in a state of appreciation and the other is what looks like when we are angry or upset.

Not that the patterns matter so much but the point is that they’re very different; and this is the same thing as how a cell phone works, we use a magnetic field or electromagnetic field to carry information. The voice, the picture, your text message is being carried by the electromagnetic field from your phone to the cell tower.

Now it’s the magnetic component that allows your phone to work inside; these magnetic field penetrate, they go right through walls and so on, and that’s why your phone can work inside. So it works the same way in the human body; the magnetic field radiates externally to the body.

And this is Josh and Mabel, who is my son, and he was much younger than when I did this experiment then he is now but… [AUDIO CUT] the experiment I want to show you here is... is when Josh, who is on the bottom of the graph… [AUDIO CUT] they’re being monitored to look at they’re heart rate rhythms, both Mabel the dog and Josh my son; and when Josh shifted into this coherent rhythm which is a technique that we call “heart lock-in,” where you really go to the heart and feel appreciation and radiate that to other, to yourself and others, you can see that the dog, Mabel, shifted instantly.

Now what is important to understand here is that this is an energetic type of experiment. There’s no physical contact, in fact they are quite a few feet away. So what we see here is that the dog picks up on the information in the field that Josh is radiating, and makes a makes a profound shift in her own rhythm. So this is what you could called dog coherence. And this has been confirmed many times, not just with dogs but with horses and other types of animal systems. They’re very sensitive to the field environment and they can shift to mirror our states. 

Now this is an experiment that I think is important. This is, I won’t go into all the details, but it was a large experiment with many people and they were put around the table and wired up to measure their physiology, especially their heart rhythms, and three of the four at a time were taught, several weeks before the experiment, how to use the technique to shift into a more heart coherence. The fourth person didn’t know what the experiment was about; they were naive to this.

So the question was/is when, at random times, these three people are signaled to shift into this coherent heart rhythm, does it have an effect on the other person, the naive person? And you can see on the screen the answer: They became more coherent. So what this proved is that when we’re coherent we are creating a personal field environment that can literally, measurably help lift others into a more optimal state, where they can make better choices, they can feel better, and connect more with their own hearts’ intuitive guidance.

So global coherence, and the reach we are doing here is taking what I was just sharing from the local environment, like our living rooms, our workplaces, our classrooms, to the global level.

So GCI for short, Global Coherence, the mission, is it’s a science-based project, we have a lot of collaborators are very co-creative, to unite people in heart focus care and intension to facilitate the shift in global consciousness from instability and discord to balance, cooperation, and enduring peace.

Now, some of our high level hypotheses, and really... the first one especially is not a hypothesis, it is very well established, there is actually hundreds of research studies, showing that the background fields of the planet itself, of Earth, the magnetic fields, which I will explain briefly to you, have profound effects on human mental functions, our brains, cognitive functions, our emotions, our behaviors are all affected by the planetary fields that we live within.

Now what our research is suggesting is that the Earth's fields are just like the cell phones I just described earlier, they are the carrier waves of biological pattern and relevant information, and that this connects all living systems that live within the field, of course which is all of humanity, all animals, and plants, and trees and so on, are all within the big Earth’s magnetic field; and what we are saying here is that we are all coupled to that field and, thus, we each affect the field; and I call this a global information field that we’re all contributing to.

So when large numbers of people that by activating more states of love, care, and compassion, this generates a measurably more coherent field environment that can benefit others and help offset the current planetary wide discord and incoherence, and all the poor choices that we are making.

Now this is some data from a very famous Russian astrophysicist Alexander Tsiolkovsky [AUDIO CUT] who was drafted into World War I. And being an astrophysicist, he was keeping one eye on the sun and the other… [AUDIO CUT] when there was high solar activity that people down here on Earth... it affected their behaviors in ways that weren’t always very positive in some respects.

So the blue line on top, if we go to the far left on the top, starts in 1749, so he didn’t exhaust his study of human history, and then it wraps around up to 1926, when this data was first published. And what the blue line is showing us is there’s a dot there for each year, for the number of major human events that occured that year, so these are big things: Starts of a war, revolutions, it could also be positive, but large planetary-wide events.

The red line on the bottom is the solar cycle for the same time periods, and you can see, clearly there’s a dramatic and profound effect here. So the... much much research has been done since that confirms this and takes it to modern times, that really human behavior and activities really rides on and is modulated by the solar activity or the activity of the sun.

Now, really important or in fact I should say a researcher a few years after Tsiolkovsky, when we had more data, could could look farther back into the solar records for the start of war; 80% started in a very narrow, time period around the peak of the solar cycle.

Now this may sound that the sun is out to get us but that is clearly not the case, because we know that during these same high solar activity periods, there is also the same time periods of the greatest levels of human flourishing in science, art, cooperation, peace, in other areas can also happen. So, what is happening here? The way to think about this is that during the solar cycles which is a 10 and a half to 11 year cycle, that is where the sun is literally and immeasurably putting out more energy and that that affects the Earth, which is within the Earth of the Sun’s magnetic field, through the Earth's magnetic field, add energy to it, so it is an energy influx that then affects us; so we have more energy.

So it becomes really important on how self-regulated we are, how mature we are, of how we use that energy, because people don’t understand what is happening. So if we are more mature, heart-centered, we use that energy to create new collaborations, to invent new things that help humanity, otherwise if you’re not and you are a politician, for example you, start wars and so on, or we get into more, other issues, you know, arguments with family member and so on. There is much data on this that I don’t have time to go into but I hope you get the point here.

So to do research in science on the inner connection between humanity and the Earth, we have to measure things. You can think of this like listening in on the Earth’s energetic systems, the heart, the brain… [AUDIO CUT] the Earth… And to do this we’ve created a global network of extremely sensitive magnetometers that are designed to measure the frequencies in the Earth's fields.

And this is our map here of where we hope, eventually to have the magnetometers; We are about half way there now. So we currently have these monitoring sights in Canada, here in California, in Saudi Arabia, Lithuania, South Africa, New Zealand, and we hope one will be going in somewhere in Central America soon, maybe Colombia. Guatemala would also be a great place if we could find a collaborator there that would like to host a sight, but that will be our next sight.

This is what a monitoring site looks like, this is the one here in California. So again these are extremely sensitive magnetometers and they are underground.

So what these magnetometers are measuring... so this is an idealized picture of the Earth and the Earth’s geomagnetic field. Now the geomagnetic field is critical for life on Earth as we know it, it is this shield that protects us. Without the magnetic field, the geomagnetic field, Earth would turn into mars very quickly; the solar radiations and wind would blow away the atmosphere and the water would dissipate really quickly and you know it would just be a very dry, dry planet with no current life like we know it anyway.

So these white lines you see represent what are called magnetic field lines. Now you might recall I think most of us in our education back in high school and before, had the experience of dumping little iron filings on a glass plate and you put a magnet under that and you kind of tap it and all these iron filings kind of magically line up in lines if you remember.

These lines that we’re seen are literal magnetic field lines, and the magnetic field of the Earth works the same way: There are these field magnetic flux lines or field lines. Now, what happens is that, if you think of these field lines like guitar strings or any kind of stringed instrument, because this is exactly how they work; so when you pluck the string on a guitar or a violin or any instrument like that, of course it vibrates, and it has a note or a frequency.

So the field lines, the magnetic fields of the Earth work in exactly the same way, and what is plucking the field lines of the Earth is the solar wind. So the solar wind are these high energy particles, this is not the photons that we see that make day and night, but it is the high energy particles that are blow out and create what is called the solar wind.

Solar wind travels about a million miles per hour on a quiet day, and it’s strong enough that it pushes in the magnetic field of the Earth on the daytime side and stretches it out on the night time side, like you can see in this image here; but Earth is turning within this, and so is the Sun. So what happens is, as the solar wind rushes by, it plucks the strings, the field lines; and new satellites that have only been up in space a couple of years, are now able to visualize the ringing, the plucking of the Earth’s magnetic fields and that is the image you see here.

This is real data; these are not artist images or something. So the little tiny white balls you see in the center of both of these images are Earth, and we can actually see and visualize the ringing in the magnetic field of the Earth.

Now what’s really important, I think, just phenomenal to understand, is when we measure these resonant frequencies, like the strings being plucked, the field line resonances as they’re called, here on Earth one of the primary frequencies is 0.1 Hz; that’s the first peak on the left of this figure. Now that is one of the primary rhythms of the heart and cardiovascular system. All of these field line records overlap with human heart rhythms and autonomic nervous system rhythms. So let me show you…

When we’re... I mentioned earlier when the human heart, when we are feeling appreciation, kindness, care, that the heart beats out this coherent rhythm. The frequency of this rhythm is exactly the same as the resonance frequency of the primary field line resonances, 0.1 Hz.

So our heart rhythms are quite literally the same frequency as the field line resonances of the Earth. I’m going to pause just for a second to let you soak that in because this is a profound understanding and finding.

There's also a second type of magnetic wave or frequency, that’s a global Earth scale frequency, and these are called Schumann resonances. Now this is very different than the field line resonances I just described.

These are magnetic waves that are rotating or traveling around the planet, that are trapped between the surface of the Earth and the bottom of what is called the ionosphere of the planet, also really critical for life on Earth as we know it; another type of shield, it’s a plasma, which is the fourth state of matter in physics, and I won’t go into a lot here, but one of the qualities of this plasma, the ionosphere, is that it is like a mirror to lower frequency magnetic waves; they bounce off of it.

This is how amateur hand radio operators can talk to other people around the world; they send out their radio wave and it bounces off the ionosphere and it goes around this cavity and that is how you can communicate with others on the other side of the Earth. So the shape or the size of this cavity determines the resonance frequencies that fit, so if the frequency fits it becomes a globally-propagating standing way, which means that it is everywhere all the time.

Now there are 8 of these human resonances. The first is 7.8 Hz, and some of you may recognize that, because it’s the same frequencies as human brain waves, of what is called the alpha rhythm. But as it turns out we now know that all 8 of the Schumann resonances overlap with human brain waves.

So what I’ve just shared with you here is that Earth itself is vibrating at the same frequency as our hearts and brains [AUDIO CUT]...

Now if we time travel back again to science class, most of us also got to do experiments with tuning forks, where you have two tuning forks tuned to the same frequency and you tap on one and one the other magically starts to vibrate with it, and this is showing what’s called resonance coupling.

Now for resonance to occur you have to have coherent systems, so tuning forks are highly coherent, very stable in their frequencies. In the case of our tuning forks you have the air molecules that transfer the energy between the two tuning forks, but it works exactly the same with magnetic waves, only you don't need the air.

So how our cell phones work, again, which there are thousands of cell phone communications of the magnetic ways right now all around you. How does your phone know how to get the one, the message, the frequency that it wants? Quite literally how that works is in the receiver of the phone we tuned it to be the resonant with the right frequency, and as soon as it is tuned to that same frequency you can transfer the energy and information instantly from the air, from the background, the magnetic field, and voilà, we’re having our phone conversation.

So what I am saying here, what this proves... from what we know from physics is when two systems operate or vibrate at the same frequency, you can transfer energy and information. So what I’m suggesting here, or more than suggesting, is that our hearts and brains and the Earth are all tuned to the same frequency; so we know we have the capacity for transferring energy and information between ourselves and the Earth itself.

And many experiments are now [AUDIO CUT] on a natural level that we have typically considered. So this is an experiment here is showing a group of people who were monitored, we made sure that their hearts, their heart rhythms, their electrocardiograms, continuously 24 hours a day for 30 days, for a full month; and what we see here... this is that the rhythms of the heart are quite literally synchronizing to, this group of people I should say, spread across the state of California in this case, are synchronizing to the power in the resonance frequencies of the Earth.

So the red line is the Earth, the power of the resonance frequencies of Earth and the other blue and black line is the heart rhythms, the variability of this group of people averaged together. So we did not expect to find this.

So this was the first indication that we’re far more interconnected with Earth then we ever imagined possible. And on the right you see what is called the spectrum and we see that there is an exact overlap of the frequencies of this group of people and the Earth, so their hearts are operating at the same rhythm, and with the Earth.... [AUDIO CUT]

[AUDIO CUT] it puts a stronger signal into the field environment making it easy for others... [AUDIO CUT] to make this shift...

**[NOTE: NO AUDIO IN ENGLISH BROADCAST FOR REMAINDER OF SPEECH. USED TRANSCRIPTION PROVIDED BY SPANISH TRANSCRIPTION TEAM]**

We also have data now that shows that if we do this in groups, like if we take a few moments and really breathe through your heart, tune into your hearts and actually appreciate each other that really amplifies the effect.

[AUDIO CUT]

Now this was a profound finding that had to be replicated before we could really leave this… is so profound. So we were able to get funding for a much larger study. So we had groups of 20 people in five countries around the world. So [AUDIO CUT] groups in New Zealand, Lithuania, California, Saudi Arabia and also a group in England. And we did the same thing, who wore these recorders to record their electrocardiograms and their heart rhythms over a long time period. And having many more people around the world, we were able to confirm: “Yes, this is happening globally.”

In other words, people’s hearts are, some people’s hearts are in sync globally no matter where you are in the planet. And even independent on what time zone you’re in. But we also found something else, something that’s really important, is on the… There are three types of subgroups within this global synchronicity: On the left you see a group pulled from over a hundred people around the planet, who are extremely in sync in what’s called “positive correlation” with the resonance frequencies of the Earth. And the tightness of the synchronization, it’s just again it’s profound how in sync we are with the rhythms of the Earth. The group on the left is also synchronized together as a group but in this case they’re having the opposite physiological reaction to the change in the Earth’s magnetic field. Now, this isn’t good or bad, it’s just two types of synchronization that go on, and we don’t fully understand why you would be in which group yet.

But more profoundly, there was a third group that wasn’t in sync with anything, each other or with the Earth, and I would suggest this is not the group you want to be in. Many new studies are now showing that it’s really important to be in sync with the Earth. So, I’m going to hypothesize now that that group that’s out of sync is really the people that are out of sync with humanity, okay? Those are really out for themselves. We haven’t proven this yet but I think that we will be able to in the future.

Now, as part of this study we also had all the group members of all these subgroups around the planet do a technique, it is a heart meditation called the “heart lock-in” together at the same time, until we organized this. And we were able to look at the individual’s level in each group, so there’s 20 people in this particular group, this is the Lithuania group here, assess how in sync they were with the Earth; and what’s phenomenal is that after 15 minutes of this heart based meditation ⏤were people who really were in their coherent rhythm⏤ is that the group members were far more synchronized with each other in the group at a measurable physiological level, meaning just more immediate information transfer between the group members of this unseen energetic level; but they also really came more in sync with the Earth and this had a 24 hour effect. So, just 15 minutes or really being the heart synchronizing with the Earth for a full 24 hours, and the same thing was true for all the groups. So, these groups all around the world became more in sync with the each other and with the Earth. I’m not going to show you all the founding… a big effect here.

Now, one other thing that I just want to share with you that we’re doing to test these type of hypothesis and measure, this is as I shared earlier, all living systems are within the planetary field. So one of the things we can also measure is that we’re creating a global network to measure trees potentials. I’ll explain what that is in a second, but trees have… created very large foliage that we can measure. So the questions we want to ask: Are trees affected by human emotions? In other words, when a large event happens, what a lot of people are feeling the same thing at the same time, we believe we’ll be able to measure that by looking at lots of trees globally and detect these responses.

We can also start doing research around with the biofuel of trees, how they can have an uplifting effect on people. Many studies are now showing that when we’re in the forest that people are more healthy, they do better, feel better; we hope to be able to dig into that more and ask why. And there’s also new data showing that as trees are plugged into the Earth we can also measure the electrical activity of the Earth itself and the changes in the Earth’s electrical potential occur before earthquakes.

So, this is a global network. This is a [CORTE] global network. So this is different trees, redwood trees here in California grow that are all connected. So we know now that what are called *** holes, which is about the same level as the human heartbeat and nobody that I have been able to talk with in terms of plants physiologist, know or understand how trees do this. So what we’re creating is citizen scientists project so anybody in the world can participate, who has an interest in it. So you can get a device and hook up your favorite tree or trees and it communicates with a base station in your home; and it sends that data to a central server so you can go to the website and see your own trees data or the trees around the world; and everybody will have access to the data. So, a way that we can also look at, not just humans but also trees, which make an ideal living system.

So, the model that I’m describing here or trying to describe (I hope it’s coming across) is it starts with personal coherence, as we learn to be more self-regulated, to align with our own hearts intuitive guidance, our larger self. That alone connects us more with others and the Earth, but as we do that in our communities, in our schools, in our workplaces, that leads to what we call social coherence ⏤again which we can also measure, that’s a different presentation⏤ where we have more harmonious relationships, we get along better, we support each other, more collaborative; and that also feeds the field, the Earth’s field and as enough communities and groups around the Earth do that, it puts a stronger signal into the field environment making it easy for others to make the shift and discover their hearts intelligence. And that will eventually lead us to global coherence because it takes both, it takes both understanding what we’re doing in the energetic world and how it interacts with the Earth and this [AUDIO CUT]...

So that’s why we have many trainers around the Earth, around the world, about 8,000 [AUDIO CUT] have trainers now teaching people techniques of how they can access their own hearts intelligence and become more self-regulated. And as we do this, we also have the data now that shows that when we do this in groups, like with you there, if you all just take a few moments and really breathe through your heart, tune into your heart, and actually appreciate each other, that amplifies the effect in the field, and we can measure this. What I’m really seeing here is that there’s a giant biofeedback system between the Earth and humanity.

So we all contribute to the global field environment: our thoughts, emotions and our intentions affect the field. And this goes on all the time. Now, it’s wonderful when we come together in meetings, like you are having there or when we have a full moon lock-ins or meditations like we do in global coherence; that puts a stronger signal in the field that helps amplify it. But what I’m really saying is: What about the other days of the year? Because we are always connected with the field and always feeding from the field.

So, what I would like to invite you to do is to, hopefully you will be able to remember this presentation and consider on a daily basis: What am I feeding the field? Am I feeding the field kindness, care, appreciation, compassion? Or am I feeding the field frustration, irritation, and so on because I am not getting my to do list done? It all counts. And the more that we can take self responsibility for own energy and what we are feeding the field, can be a major effect creating a planetary shift in the field environment.

So with that, that concludes my presentation. I’d be happy to take any questions, if I can hopefully hear you guys.

MODERATOR

With permission, I’m going to speak English with Dr. McCarty.

[IN ENGLISH] Dr. McCarthy, thank you for your presentation for us which made me wonder what a great special opportunity we have here to create this magnetic field right here and right now, and maybe only breathing together and feeling each other's heart, and I’m Brazilian, I may cry when I say that. We are working for peace so that is very important and it a great opportunity for us to be here together and your knowledge brings a great portion of consciousness to all these opportunities and my questions, [IN SPANISH] as a moderator, I am going to ask some questions, and then we can have others.