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

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So hello and welcome to our series on Insight.

And now for the second week, I'm going to introduce to you five areas of insight

that might be significant for people who do insight meditation.

And somehow understanding that there are different forms of insight, different objects of insight,

can help us put each into context.

And so maybe we better understand what the classic Buddhist idea of insight, insight meditation, is aiming towards.

And all these forms of insight are valuable, but we don't want to be limited by any one of them.

We want to be able to appreciate each one in its own way, but not think that this is what insight is by itself.

So the word insight is, as I've said, comes from the word vipasana, which means either to see clearly

or to see distinctively,

to see each thing that occurs in a distinctive kind of wave in its own right.

And so what that means is we don't use a discursive mind

to start creating, lumping everything together in some kind of way,

but rather we are letting each

thing stand for itself so we know it well, and so that the thinking, conceptual mind,

is not so busy analyzing, conceptualizing about our experience, taking us away from it in a certain way.

So the word insight is sometimes I've, in a kind of evocative way,

I'd like to think of it as the synonym as being revelation.

And why I like that as a synonym is that revelation is not something that we are searching for

necessarily or that we're responsible for. it's something that just suddenly seems to appear

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