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

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Okay.

So, yeah, good to sit with you.

So... So, yeah, good to sit with you. So one of the hallmarks of a successful animal,

animals like us, is the ability to stay secure and protected.

And in a sense, if you want to be safe, you better know a lot about danger.

And you better have a kind of robust threat detection system, and fear serves that function. So here's brain

scientist K-Tai. She writes, fear is an intensely negative internal state. It conducts orchestration of

coordinated functions serving to arouse our peak performance for avoidance, escape, or

confrontation. Fear resembles a dictator that makes all other brain processes from thinking to breathing, subservient.

Fear can be innate or learned. Anate fear can be a response to environmental stimuli without prior

experience, such as that of snakes or spiders and humans.

Fear associations are the most rapidly learned, robustly encoded, and retrieved, and prone to activate multiple memory systems.

So in other words, activate multiple memory systems.

So in other words, our system is pretty good, you could say that.

How many times has fear kept me safe? I don't even know. How do you even count? Million, right?

And how many times has the alarm bell of fear gone off, but there's no actual threat? Probably a

hundred times that. So, on the one hand, I'm glad we have fear mechanisms,

but we've probably over-learned the lessons of fear. And so why do I begin with all of this?

A couple weeks ago, I think I was talking about the difference between sensitivity to suffering and fear of suffering.

And I was very cognizant of being sensitive to suffering, even as a kid,

...