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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So I'll continue with the theme of knowing and not knowing by exploring the factor of investigation.

When I was about six years old, I was very, very near-sighted, but didn't have access to corrective glasses.

I lived in a city which was like totally flat

and hadn't seen much nature.

There wasn't even a tree on our street.

So, excuse me.

So when my family took a train ride across the mountains, I looked at the beautiful countryside,

and there were these gorgeous green rolling hills.

But I wasn't able to see the detail, so I assumed they were smooth, like in a picture book,

I enjoyed imagining what it would feel like to roll down those smooth mountains.

It wasn't until I was 12 and finally having glasses that I went on my first camping trip.

And to my great surprise, I found out that nature wasn't so smooth.

There were rocks and twigs and thorns and uneven ground.

There was just no place to roll down the hill.

And I now saw all the details. And so investigation is a little bit like putting our glasses on and seeing clearly the details of our experience. When investigation

strengthens as we see the distinctions of our experience, instead of seeing a painful knee, for instance, we might notice all the varied sensations that come and go and change in our perception of pain.

We might feel the pressure, we might feel tingling, we might feel a little pain, a little

sharpness, a little piercing feeling, all these different things that just kind of come and go.

They're not just one big love of pain.

This isn't meant to be an active probing, a doing,

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