The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So, I want to continue with this topic of beauty which I mentioned earlier today.

And I want to start by an analogy that I like the metaphor that when we meditate, we're going deep.

Some people like the idea of the metaphor going high, some people like the metaphor.

We're not going anywhere, we're going to meditate.

We're just here and that's pretty profound.

But anyway, this idea of going deep, you get really quiet, really still peaceful or something.

So, with this metaphor of deep, you kind of come from above and you're going down.

And you can run into a barrier, big horizontal barrier, and of something.

Some resistance, some difficult emotions, some difficult belief or something.

And it can be really difficult to hit that.

And it might be maybe it's terror or it's anger.

And so, some people come down, they touch this layer inside and they ricochet off, somehow bounce off and have some reactivity activation that makes it difficult.

But, you know, they come to this point.

And it can be very hard and very sometimes very disorienting and frightening and to come into these layers.

Sometimes they're unknown, people don't even know they have them.

Some people, and then nowadays in our scene, one of the things you're not supposed to do is a spiritual bypass.

I mean, spiritual bypass is like pretty bad.

And it is pretty bad if it's done the wrong ways.

But there is actually some value in bypassing.

And so, if you come down and you can't go through this way, but if you take another route and then go deep, deeper.

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