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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're not going to. So continuing on the theme of wise thinking.

You know, in Buddhist practice, all our life is a subject for practice.

Everything that we are about is a worthy object

for our mindfulness and attention,

and that includes the world of thinking and certainly there's a lot to learn

about thinking by being mindful of it but also it's the thinking is such an important activity that a necessary activity for our lives

that we don't have to leave it to chance what we think about.

We don't have to let the automatic pilot let us think whatever we think.

We don't have to be the victim of our thoughts and we could think deliberately.

Things such are supportive and helpful.

We can change the currents that were the river of thinking that we're involved in.

We can introduce new things to have filling our mind and all that.

This has to be done wisely so it's not just simply covering how we are, covering it over and kind of creating a happy scenario so that we don't feel our

sadness or grief or anger and pretend that we're kind of everything is good and nice.

That doesn't work.

But we don't have to just kind of go along with whatever our mind gives us in terms of our thinking,

our distracted thoughts.

We can, you know, in a certain sense, be in charge of our thoughts rather than the thoughts be in

charge of us. So one form of thinking that's quite common is the story-making mind.

We're constructing stories. We're constructing scenarios, images, scenes, predictions. If you're

planning the future, that's partly a story about what we think is going to happen and how we're going to

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