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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Hello and welcome to this guided meditation.

That's part of a series of meditations and talks on the topic of not self.

And this morning as a preparation for the meditation and the talk later,

I would like to suggest an image for you.

And that is, imagine that you are in a natural setting, beautiful, safe, maybe inspiring place,

where there's a vast view of the sky, of the open space.

Maybe you're on the beach or on the cliff above the coast looking out across the vast ocean vast maybe lake

or big sky maybe you're high in the mountains where you can see maybe on top of a mountain

you can see in all directions, turn around 360 degrees, and you see vast

space, vast openness, up and sideways. And in that very open space, if you try to point to where that space is, and it's just that's it,

it's right there and you point your finger, it's kind of a ridiculous thing to do.

Of course, it's there. It's everywhere.

But to take the effort to point to a particular spot,

this being the spot, the essence,

the heart of the, the essence of the space,

the core of the space,

the true center of the space, and maybe even more, you get all excited.

You go and you take your hand and you want to grab it and have it for yourself. This is so

important. You want to bring it home and frame it and put it on a wall or do something with it.

It's just a lot of wasted effort.

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