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

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So, hello, and welcome to this series of talks on insight.

And there are three major insights.

And we're in the middle of exploring the insight into not-self, but we're not really addressing

that directly this week.

We're preparing the ground for it.

And I think that when we go too quickly to try to explain the Buddhist teachings on not self, too much

gets left out. It becomes a little bit too reductionalistic. It's a profound insight,

the insight into not self, but it occurs in a wider context of experience, wider context

of understanding that is useful to have first.

And so I'm trying to offer this over this week.

And today's emphasis is how often we overcomplicate our experience

when we bring or apply or assert or interpret it through the lens of me,

me, myself, and mine, through the lens of I, my identity, this says something

about me, I'm the one who is, and how will other people think of me now? And so there's a lot

of self-referencing that goes on. And one of the big, uh, kind of surprises and powerful insights around this

that I had, and which I've talked about before, so bear with me. And that was that, uh, when I was

living in Japan, I was living in a Japanese Zen monastery only with Japanese men.

And in the monastery, there was maybe one or two people who spoke English.

And so everything wasn't Japanese.

And if I wanted to speak to people, I had to speak in my

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