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

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So I follow up a little bit on that announcement about the threshold choir.

It's a beautiful group of people who go and sing songs to people who are dying and so they're kind of a service they provide to different

places and so the songs are quite moving and soaring and peaceful and kind of appropriate for that time transition in life.

And it's also quite nice when we don't think we're in that transition. I think of people often come to meditation to be changed in some way.

There's something going on in their life and themselves, often in

Buddhism called suffering, that something which is difficult and they somehow see that meditation can change them, change something

so that there's not so much discomfort or difficulty or stress or suffering that they live with.

Some people come with the idea that there's a cause for suffering

and so you have to get the insight,

to be able to see deeply in and find that cause and pluck it out

and then live happily ever after.

Some people have the idea that there is some kind of way of touching into some wonderful state,

a wonderful state of calm or peace, a wonderful state of not self, a wonderful state of not self,

wonderful state of non-duality, non-separation,

that some place to go.

And then sometimes people drop into some wonderful state and they think, I have it made.

And yeah, maybe for that moment.

And then life comes in and they leave the retreat center or leave the meditation center and they find that they have two flat tires in their car when they go out.

Whatever that great state was is like they even forgot about it.

Does they try to be like, what two?

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