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 fifth talk on the insight into not self.

And it feels very important to not begin with that topic directly,

but to rather begin by a better understanding of what our experience of self is, how the idea of self,

the feeling of self manifest for us. And I think it's fair to say that for many people, even if there is a self,

which is no denying that there's something like that going on, that whatever,

many people overemphasize that self, are over-preoccupied with it.

And we see it, and many of us can see it easily in other people,

we see that someone is quite conceited.

Or we see that people, it's an amazingly strong, kind of a conceit,

a negative conceit, of being very critical of themselves,

very, have a very negative view of themselves. And, you know, there might be some appropriateness to see that we have foibles,

we have things that are a little odd or maybe a little bit off.

But the way in which we have created a self around that and are preoccupied and consumed with

that is overdone.

Psychologists say that's one of the leading causes of depression, by no means the only

one, but one of the leading causes for depression is rumination. And I suspect most of that

rumination is centered on me, myself, and mine, that somehow we're concerned with,

I'm not good enough, I'm not getting what I need, or I'm doing making mistakes, or I'm inadequate,

or I'm a bad person or something. And so the strength of attention, the strength of

getting glued to this whole idea of self, reinforcing it,

...