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

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Okay, it's good to sit with you.

I just, I don't say that to like put a nice darma bow on it.

It really is, I'm sitting too, you know, not just faking it, you know. So, yeah, appreciate

being together this evening.

So I was speaking with somebody

who has struggling with a personality disorder, psychiatric designation I'll say something about.

And um... say something about and I just had the sense that the layers of their suffering were very thick and not to be

uncompassionate or something but just like the sense of the wrong view felt so

visceral multi-layered and it made me reflect on the ways that the fruit of

darma practice is often something like the diametric

opposite of, you know, personality disorder.

And condition is characterized by severe instability in emotion, identity, interpersonal relationships, behavioral

dysregulation, and, um, and, um, and, you know,

borderline personality disorder, which Marshall Lenahan developed, you know, dialectical behavior

therapy for which a kind of like mindfulness, Zen-based treatment, right?

Anyway, a whole backstory there, but, but narcissistic personality, borderline

personality is something like 10% of outpatients.

And the diagnosis is known to generate a lot of agony and chaos for the person and often a lot of collateral damage for others in their life.

And it strikes me that in some sense personality pathology is

almost like the logical conclusion of egoic life.

...