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

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So welcome, folks.

folks.

Yeah, I'm happy to be with you.

So, well. Yeah, I'm happy to be with you.

So, well, do the usual thing.

I'll say a few words and will say it and offer some reflections.

So, meditation involves Meditation involves directing our attention.

making effort.

It involves making effort.

It involves exert effort. It involves exerting a certain kind of intentionality and willfulness. And it involves all these things, and yet all of those things generally invoke a sense of self,

the sense of intentional agency,

the sense of making effort,

of intentionality or willfulness.

And so, meditation also is about a kind of awareness that doesn't depend on attention

direction. It's about effortlessness, the kind of deep relaxation of a pure kind of receptivity.

It's about choicelessness.

It's about relinquishing all sense of like doing, all sense of willfulness, all sense of autonomy really.

It's about all this stuff, right?

And it's not like the self is bad

and not self is good.

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