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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Everything is teaching us, Ajahn Chah says, right, famously, everything is teaching us.

We want to learn from life, and maybe we say implicit in that is that we neither want to over-learn or under-learn from experiences.

So, over-learn, when we over-learn, we make an experience mean too much.

This or that experience disproportionately shapes our model of the world, our model of ourselves.

Right, we know those experiences that have such a deep kind of emotional resonance, a deep impact that we make it mean so much, maybe an experience of fear, for example.

We can over-learn from it, we can generalize in ways that are not justified, we make it mean too much about the rest of our life, that experience means too much.

There's so much feeling and so much affect so many thoughts that we endow it with this enormous significance.

We can over-learn, but we can also under-learn, under-learn.

And by under-learn, what I'm pointing to is the way we can fail to appreciate that this experience has implications for everything else.

And in our Dharma practice, we're sort of weaving and bobbing between over-learning and under-learning, we're trying to learn.

And this week, I'll be exploring the theme of mortality, and the ways we can learn from it, the ways where you can be softened or hardened by it.

And this is a zone where we can over-learn or we can under-learn, we can endow it with too many meanings or too few.

We can, on the one hand, just appreciate mortality death is not such a big deal.

And we can also appreciate the depth of poignancy, this life, birth, death.

And so I'm thinking about this really because I sort of always am, but also I had a death in the family one month ago, and I've just been watching my heart, watching my heart.

And trying to appreciate the ordinaryness of death, you know, like at the funeral, the grave diggers who are like very respectful, but they're there having a very different day than everyone else.

They're planning their day, they're coordinating, they're eating their lunch, very, very ordinary.

And we ought not make death seem too ordinary, or we must not miss its significance, we cannot, we ought not under-learn.

The letter Kafka wrote the meaning of life is that it stops, and we can interpret that in a kind of very bleak way that death blots out all meaning, meaning of life is that it stops.

Or that synitude is what makes anything meaningful.

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