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

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Okay.

It's good to sit with you.

So in meditation practice, we sometimes talk about the aperture of attention. If we think about attention as a spotlight, the question would be how wide is that spotlight.

And focusing on our breathing at the tip of the nose,

it's say as a narrow aperture, right?

Whereas doing open to all six sense gates,

doing choiceless awareness,

that's a large, large aperture.

And with our, with the pupil of our eyes, brains working okay, you know, when there's a lot of light, the pupil contracts. When you enter a dark room, pupil dilates, right?

And there's no rule for when to meditatively to adjust the aperture no algorithm for exactly how to do that

but generally excuse me generally in the process of settling in, settling into tranquility, clarity, we make the aperture small.

And it's like the rest of the world of experience is too much. It's too much light.

Too much light. It's too sticky, to open to it is to be pulled under.

And the changingness and uncertainty is intense.

And so we need a kind of smaller

pasture. We need to perceive to see less.

And the risk of going too wide, too early,

is that the line dividing awareness and thinking

can get quite fuzzy.

And so when we start a retreat or even just starting a sit,

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