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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org. So hello and welcome to this fifth talk on wise thinking. I suspect that for much of my life I didn't think

much about my thinking. I didn't I took it for granted or took it as being what it is and

sometimes I in a way I took it to who I am if my thinking represented me in my interests, my thoughts, my beliefs, my opinions, my emotions,

and it wasn't anything to question or consider or investigate.

It was just taken for granted as a big solid kind of event in its own right.

With meditation, I've learned to not do that, but rather to be mindful of thinking, to investigate the nature of thinking,

what goes on is I think, and the ecology of thinking. And thinking is a composite

thing. It's made up of many different component parts, only one of which is the content of the thoughts, the very particular ideas or stories

that are being considered.

And this was really a great thing to open up to the wider field of what's going on.

The emotional field, the physical field that was going on in the body energetically, the tensions, the holdings,

the emotions that were the fuel or the source for the emotions. And this is a pretty, you know, so that's included now when we do the basic introduction

to meditation instructions here at IMC and it's a whole hour and a half on mindfulness of

thinking. The and so one of the things we can begin discovering is that there are different levels of thinking or different sources within from where we think, qualitatively and different kinds of

thinking that we can do. And when we start to understanding the range of possible ways of thinking kinds of thoughts we can have.

Not so much the content, but where they arise from and what's feeding them and fueling them and we can at some point

discover that there's thinking that is free of any clinging attachment, free of any need.

Whereas the surface mind, the more

the usual way of thinking, is operating from need,

from desires, from greed, from aversion, from hostility, from criticism, from confusion, from fear.

In some, it's operating from stress. It's possible to discover a way of thinking that is stress-free. And for some people, this is the source of

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