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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're not going to. So my friends, this is the last talk on this having to do with instructions on mindfulness of the body.

And next time will be mindfulness of emotions. I was reminded yesterday by someone that she had asked me many

years ago for some books to read on Buddhism and I had told her that the

only books you needed to read was the book of her own body. And apparently this was made in very good a book to study, the body has information, has wisdom. Everything you need to know about

Buddhism can be found in your own body. And the meditation practice that I did in Burma that when I was really learned this viposna practice was, as I've said, was a sensory awareness practice more than anything else.

Certainly we were mindful of the mind and mind states and mind activity,

but there was this default to always feel and sense

how it is physically, the sensory level of it. And part of the

advantage of that is that sensations are not thoughts.

Thoughts and ideas and stories and concepts is often where we live or it's often the filter through which we see our experience.

And so we see things a little askew because of those ideas we have, those concepts.

And even simply having a concept of something,

the concept can have a kind of enduring quality.

A concept is like platonic concepts are unchanging.

And so there's a kind of feeling that things can, and if we see through that filter, it can feel like, oh, nothing changes.

And so if you see your friend, always through the filter of some difficult experience you had 10 years ago,

then you're not seeing how the friend is changing or different every day or every occasion and every minute and every hour.

But you're stuck in that lens, that perspective.

So to begin meditation where we begin quieting and calming the mind and settling in and getting somewhat concentrated or still

It's not the purpose is not just to become calm, but rather to be able to have a kind of more lucid awareness of the

sensations of our direct experience unmediated by these concepts.

...