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

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So hello everyone and welcome to this series on the Ten Protectors.

And so today's protection is as you do with contentment and it's a particular form of contentment.

But before I talk about the particularity of it, I'll say a few things, repeating myself from the guided meditation,

that there are people who consider contentment to be a dangerous state.

Because it undermines the motivation that people get from being discontented.

That if we want to, if we're discontented with the state of affairs as they are, then we won't fight, we'll work to change them.

And certainly there are things we should not be content with.

And there are things that maybe are not healthy to be discontented with.

There are people who have plenty of money who are discontented with what they have and want to be richer than that.

There are people who have plenty of pleasures but always want more.

And there are people who have plenty of stuff but they always want more and better.

And so to be driven by discontent is what supports many economies in the world.

And so there's a vested interest in people who, many people, to keep us discontented.

So we keep buying or so we keep working long hours to try to get ahead.

And to kind of be feeding or encouraging discontent is, I think, part of what advertisements they'll do.

So in some ways to be content in certain ways is a radical act. It's a disrupting act.

For the Buddhist point of view, the benefit of contentment is that then it's easier to focus on the practice, to focus on what's happening here and now.

And if there and then are two-dimensional reality and if fantasy is a one-dimensional reality, then being really rooted and grounded here in ourselves is entering into a three-dimensional reality.

It's more rich, it's more multi-colors like going from black and white to multi-color.

And being this three-dimensional reality of now does not mean that we don't think about the past and the future or that we don't in some ways let the creative mind fantasize.

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