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

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Good morning.

Good day.

Hello.

I'll have you joining us on the fifth and the last day of this series that I'm doing on these letters from Mara

to the leaders of his ten armies.

Mara, as many of you know, is this character that we find in the Buddhist teachings.

And I'm not concerning myself with exactly what Mara is or how he works.

I'm just inspired maybe by some of the things that are getting pointed out in these letters from Mara to his armies.

Or often topics that we don't talk about so much in Buddhist teachings and Dharma talks.

And yet, these things that are Mara that get personified as Mara are things that get in the way, things that might be hinders or obstruct us in our ways towards freedom.

And then to be sure these letters from Mara are nowhere in the Polycanon.

These were written by Ajahn Punidamo in the Arrow River Forest Hermitage up in Northern Ontario.

And so in the Polycanon, we do find just a mention that Mara has these ten armies.

And then Ajahn Punidamo who's in the Ajahn Chaliniage kind of set in contemporary times these letters, which I think are delightful and a little bit cutting just in the way that they're pointing to in a way that feels a little bit uncomfortable sometimes this human experience.

So I've been excerpting portions of these letters and I will be especially be doing that for this last one that I'm doing today, which is a long letter and has a number of different subcategories to it, but I'll just be pointing to one.

And the or that's been pointed to today in this letter from Mara is the 10th Army, which often gets translated as self praise and denigration of others, but I'll just be looking at a little portion of that.

So here's this letter excerpt that's written by Ajahn Punidamo.

To my bold and powerful 10th Army greetings, your task is crucial yet fortunately for us, it is also easy.

Generally, humans have a most unreasonable attitude of taking themselves quite seriously.

They seem quite unable to mentally disengage from the ego perspective.

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