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

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Okay, it's good to practice with you.

So, one of the characteristics of the self, that it feels accessible, it's me, sort of right here, closer than close.

And the self feels unitary.

We have access to it.

We literally hear the self.

We can visualize the headquarters of self.

Dan Dennett, as I've often shared,

described the sense of self as the center

of narrative gravity.

We sense it, hear it.

Whatever I am, it's amenable to conscious inspection.

And we might say there are different facets of the self,

but they're available to us.

And to put it differently, self-view doesn't really have room for the unconscious.

And Freud famously said that our species has suffered three humbling discoveries that have eroded our, quote, naive self-love.

And the first was Copernicus, you know, heliocentric that we circle the sun.

It's very funny to me that we thought, I mean, you know, hindsight is 2020, but it's funny to me that we thought we were literally the center of the universe,

rather than like one planet in one kind of incidental galaxy, whatever.

Okay, that was the first humiliation.

And then Darwin, you know, that we evolved from earlier creatures, monkeys, primates, you know.

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