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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Hello and welcome to this talk. That continues a series of talks on insight. And for those of you

have been involved since the beginning of the year, these talks on insight hopefully stands

well on their own, but they're really meant to be,

part of what they're meant to be is a continuation of the practices of samadhi

that we did the first half of the year.

That samadhi provides a very different context for insight than the ordinary everyday distracted,

caught up mind, where there's a lot of thinking and where there's thinking around self-preoccupation is so integral and part of the whole

way that we're living that it's unimaginable to have this wonderful non-preoccupation with self.

It's some people, some people can feel like a kind of a death because that's the only

thing we know and how we stay safe is by constructing and keeping and maintaining and defending, asserting,

a certain kind of self that has maybe kept you safe and really worked well growing up with difficulties of life.

Some people grow up with tremendous challenges, challenges of violence, neglect, and fear, and

building up a sense of self is really the only thing that gives them stability and a strong

sense of safety and finding their way in the world, stay protected.

And so there's a good reason why this whole teachings of not self is challenging,

and there may be even people protest.

But to come out of samadhi, a deep, deep subtleness, deep quiet and well-being,

that settled in some deep way, the tense mind, the contracted mind, the preoccupied mind,

then we know there's an alternative to the self that gets constructed and held and built and protected that maybe is really needed in life sometimes.

But it's not needed all the time.

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