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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So hello from IMCE and continuing this ongoing series on Insight.

And I can easily imagine that if someone joins this talk today, they don't have the benefit of all the talks that

preceded this year that laid out a kind of a gradual path of practice, gradual deepening of

practice, first with samadhi and then with insight. And with samadhi, there are

various stages of deepening and deepening samadhi that we can fall into occasionally. Most of the

time we're not there. We're dealing with an everyday mind. But there are times when things become

calm and settled enough that we can get absorbed in a deep way with here and now. And deep

states of absorption, joy, happiness, peace can arise. And then the same thing with insight practice. There are stages of insight, just like

there are stages of samadhi, and that as we mostly in the kind of more ordinary states of mind

with insight, but from time to time we also then have the benefit of samadhi, benefit of being a deeply

settled, deeply at peace, deeply present here and now, with a qualitatively different state of mind

than the ordinary everyday mind. And the teachings that are relevant,

the perceptions, the experiences in deeper states of mind,

are not the same that are appropriate for everyday states of mind.

And there's a way in which that's always made clear

when Buddhist teachings are presented.

And so it's so easy to make declarative statements about something,

maybe from the deepest kind of perspective we can have, and say

this is how it is. Whereas it's more useful to say that in particular states of mind, this is how

things are. And that we learn to shift and change our understanding of what's appropriate,

...