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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Okay, so good morning, good morning again.

So today I'm continuing on this theme of these letters, a story of letters that

Mara is writing to the leaders of his armies, he has ten armies, and these are said in contemporary times.

These letters were written by Ajahn Kunidamo of the Arrow River Forest Hermitage in Northern Ontario, Canada.

And so they're kind of a whimsical, but they have a little bit of bite also these letters.

And in particular, the letter I'm going to be talking about today.

But before I go into that, we might just a reminder who is Mara.

And Mara is this character that shows up the Buddha to be when he's sitting underneath the bodhi tree and has made this commitment that he's going to become awakened.

And before awakening, he's the Buddha to be is visited by Mara, who is accompanied by ten armies.

So there's a number of different versions of this story of the Buddha's awakening, but I'm just focusing on this one and this character, Mara.

And then, as I've said before, I'd like to emphasize that in this tradition, Mara is not this demon that wants people to go to hell or anything like that.

We're Mara to encourage complacency.

So he doesn't care if we have tons of central pleasures.

In fact, he would prefer that that we are having such a fantastic time with our life that we don't even consider practicing to find in a way towards greater freedom.

So the story of Mara versus the Buddha is a story of complacency versus commitment to practice.

It's not a story of good versus evil.

I just want to emphasize that Mara is perfectly happy if we are having a fantastic life.

And so we might ask, well, how can we use these stories, these things that you're sharing, Diana, what relevance do they have us for our practice?

There's a number of them.

And one is that it can help us recognize our common humanity.

...