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

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So, I was reading a book about William, William James and it was, yeah, got the the potency of the darma.

And, um, and this is from, uh, from his dad actually kind of intense quote I saw.

So James's dad says, every person who has reached, even their intellectual teens

begins to suspect that life is no farce, that it is not genteel comedy, that it flowers and fructifies, on the contrary, out of the profoundest tragic depths of the

essential dearth in which its subjects roots are plunged.

The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is in an unsubdued forest where the wolf

howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

It's a little grim maybe,

but speaks to something important.

Life is no farce,

it's no farce.

Great. It's no force. Great, as the Zen folks say, great is the matter of life and death.

And so, what are we doing here?

What are we doing here?

What is actually on offer in this path, what is the Buddha's promise?

And... promise.

And to meet the kind of

to meet the kind of existential intensity of the human condition

with some modicum of dignity,

to meet it with some modicum of dignity,

...