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

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Okay, thanks folks. So I saw grief, mortality contemplating one's death, anxiety, relation to the world, equanimityity. And I think we can, I think we can talk about that.

So, um. I don't recall who it was or somebody who's maybe.

I don't recall who it was or somebody who's maybe done nursing with hospice patients, taking care of people at the end of

life. But they said something like, I don't know what I think about this, but they

said the decree of one's non-enlightement is is correlated with the degree of, but I don't know.

One thing I remember was going up and cleaning the windows on IRC's community

room if you've been in that room as a high ceiling. It's a high ceiling and I was on the roof and I don't know what I'm doing. But my job on that cleaning day was to clean the, you know,

whatever the windows up there, you know, skylights, they were.

And I kind of had some of them were sort of accessible and like it was not it was not like a clear drop of 30 feet, but then some were unprotected.

And so I'm just out there cleaning the windows, considering how un-enlightened I am, because I was not ready to die on an IRC work day.

And, okay, that's like the visceral kind of dimension,

maybe our body kind of dimension, maybe our body kind of is always

in resistance in some way to that. I read a piece on

Ram, you know, from Ram Doss's nurse,

the end of Ram Doss's life and just as the end was coming as he took a breath tried to

take a breath and couldn't get enough breath in after all these decades of teaching so beautifully about letting go, what the nurse described in Ram Dass's face was fear as touching, you know.

How do we know we're ready to let go of this life? I don't know that we can ever know.

But it's a worthy object of contemplation for many reasons.

One, just to clarify what's actually important in our lives, you know, just to sweep away what we know will be absolutely

meaningless at the end of our life.

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