Twenty-some years ago, at my first retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, on one

of the first days of that retreat, we were given a metaphor for spiritual practice,

for coming into the present moment, and in a way for coming to retreat, and it went

like this, that it's like jumping off a plane with a parachute, and then realizing that

you actually don't have a parachute, that there's nothing really controlling, and then

that there's no ground to hit, you know, things keep unfolding, and then finally that there's

no one that jumped.

So I've learned not to start retreats with that one, but one of the simple understandings

of Enlightenment or freedom is really waking up from this self-story, and it doesn't mean

that the sense of ego self is gone.

I mean, we can still relate to our Polynesian Danish American heritage, and all the other

attributes, whatever, but that there's a remembrance of wholeness, of beingness, that we're not

living inside a story of a separate self.

And if you investigate your moments here, you know, when you felt almost happy or peaceful

or open-hearted, you'll notice that those were not moments when your mind was circling

around concerns about self, when you weren't judging or comparing or sensing how to get

more comfortable.

Instead, there was probably a pure experiencing of, you know, breath, their sound, our sadness

or beauty, but it wasn't self-centered.

So some months ago, I think I shared with, and many of you might have heard this, I read

an article by a palliative caregiver who'd been with many, many people dying and said

that the primary regret of those that were dying was that they didn't have the courage

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