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

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Good morning. Welcome. Today I'm continuing this exploration of this topic of stories and in that guided meditation I try to highlight the difference

between thoughts that we have and experience, like direct experience.

And we can notice that, you know, thoughts of course are,

to be different places, different times, future, past, complete fantasy, whereas experiences

just right here, right now, of course it is.

And another distinction that maybe it's so obvious that

isn't even worth mentioning,

but there's a way in which thoughts use language, like whether

it's sexual words or maybe it's images, whereas direct experience itself isn't so much a language it's just an

experience right when we put our hand across the surface,

and just feel, I mean our, and moving our hand across the surface,

just feeling, there's just those sensations. Or as if you were to describe it or something like that, you know,

then we're a little bit removed. We're using language to describe it.

So is that is an introduction I'd like to tell a story that comes from the Polycanon and the suitas and I'll talk a little bit more about the role of stories or how humans

use stories after I give a story. So this story is about Malunkya Bhuta. Those of you who are interested, this comes from

Majama 63. And Malunkya Bhuta, he was a monastic under the Buddha, so he had ordained under the Buddha, and one time he goes to the Buddha and he says,

you know, I'm really not happy that you haven't explained to everything, and I'm going to disrobe,

I'm going to leave the monastic life, I'm going to abandon this monastic life and become a lay person again, unless you answer these 10 questions, these turn

out to be metaphysical questions. Like an example of some of these questions are, is the world finite or infinite?

So he just has these questions about space.

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