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

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There was a period in, yeah, last couple decades when the sort of like the educational system was

was aggressively supporting the development of self-esteem and is very understandable in a lot of ways like if you have a more

positive view of the self. It'll support academic and social development. But as it turned out, it didn't really work out that way.

And the improvements in self-esteem in self-esteem,

when they could be made,

it's not so easy to make, but when they could be made, in translate to that much.

And to really make changes, the kind of the deep models of self,

they've been reiterated so compulsively

that it's like a song we've been humming, you know, to ourselves for many years, non-stop.

And so it takes something of kind of industrial strength to actually change that at a deep level.

And so this week we've been exploring faith, faith, and what does it mean to have faith

in oneself, faith in oneself? Does it mean that we have a kind of rigid model of what we are and that model is positive, positively

balanced. I don't think so. It's more like when you know what you're not.

Is it possible to have faith in oneself.

When you know what you're not,

then we can actually have faith in ourself.

When you are no longer kind of taking refuge in the stories of self, you can have faith in yourself.

Because the story, all the elaborate eye-making,

my-making, the egoic story,

is a kind of static really that actually muddles are knowing, muddles our sensitivity to this moment.

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