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

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Hello and welcome, and we're in introducing the meditation for today. It's part of the wider topic of

for the week of insight into self and not self. And first, it's important to have some insight into the experience we have

of self, of ourselves. And I'd like to give you a kind of a metaphor for this.

Some of you might remember the movie Wizard of Oz

and how there's this wizard of Emerald City.

And at some point, and his big, his big booming voice, this big mask on the wall,

it sounds like a great, big kind of powerful being who rules the city.

At some point, I think the little dog pulls the curtain open and behind the curtain,

there's this very old, ordinary, older kind of harmless-looking man standing there who's the wizard, who's kind of, it's all kind of a show.

So what's behind the curtain in our own minds around ourselves?

The voice, the directions, the beliefs that we have about self, the tensions, the directions, the beliefs that we have,

about self, the tensions, the pressures,

around this whole concept of self and who we think we are and how we think we are.

If we pull the curtain, what do we see?

And part of the purpose of meditation, not as an

intentional act, but as a consequence of deep settling with insight meditation, is in fact to pull the

curtain around this whole idea, sense, feeling of what self is. And so one of the things that

we can start seeing if we pull the curtain is that whatever feeling we have, sense we have,

belief we have, coalescing around something that we have around this notion of self.

It could be something seemingly as innocent as a feeling of I-Amness, the place that we

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