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.

So I remember long time ago, I was returning from a retreat and was telling a friend about a dissolution experience, a kind of prolonged experience of the self, having no trace whatsoever, and kind of melting away of agency and boundaries and sense of centerlessness.

Everything was the background.

There's no foreground background is like everything was background.

And it was exquisitely peaceful.

And as I'm describing it, she's laughing, saying this sounds horrible.

You know, and when people describe a kind of emptiness,

those descriptions often echo. people describe a kind of emptiness,

those descriptions often echo some unsettling kind of psychiatric symptoms,

and de-personalization,

derealization characterized by feeling kind of very detached from one's feelings and experiencing one's surroundings and objects and people as people often say unreal or distant or artificial or lifeless.

And yet the person experiencing that is their reality testing.

It remains intact.

They're not having psychotic symptoms.

But it leads to huge distress and impairment,

and almost everybody with that has co-occurring depression,

anxiety conditions.

And here's Nagarjuna describing the positive dimensions of emptiness.

It says whenever there is belief that things are real, desire and hatred spring unendingly.

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