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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So, hello, and welcome to this third talk on the third insight, the insight into not self,

and before going directly into what this teaching is, what this aspect of meditation is about.

It's first and very important to understand a few things about our sense of self,

the way we orient ourselves around me, myself, and mine,

and recognize something about it that become wiser about it, to understand it better.

And one of the things to understand better is the degree to which our sense of self is often

a magnet for a lot of suffering. It's a magnet for the tensions and stresses that we have in our life.

And so the question is, why do we carry this self around

if it has such a strong connection to suffering and tension. And one of the reasons for that

is that the sense of self can have a sense of being very real. After all, it's me and I'm important.

And sometimes the realness of it is not just a figment of imagination,

but comes with the feeling that we're in touch with it,

has a location in our body, maybe in the mind and the head.

Maybe there's a sense of solidity there around this sense of selves. Of course it's there

because the very feeling of I-Mness is not, it can be very broad and spacious, but it can also be kind of condensed, centered around

this particular feeling or sense in the body and the mind, somehow, the heart. And there might be

tension, there might be pressure associated with it, and there might be tension, there might be pressure associated with it,

and there might be tightness associated with it,

and that the sensations of tension,

kind of give it a sense of, it's something, it's a place, it's a location, it's a real thing.

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