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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Hello, my friends, and I very much appreciate the gathering of this meditation community

that's represented by all of you who are chatting and greetings in the chat.

And for those of you who are not, it's wonderful that you're here,

and I hope that you also appreciate that the

goodwill that's being expressed in the chat that may that represent all of us.

Now we hold each other. So, mentioned something yesterday that I'd like to mention again today,

that the nature of attention, the nature of awareness,

is a little bit magical or special

because the way that we know many things is reconstructed in the brain.

The present moment experience comes in, like when it comes in through the eyes.

It comes in in little packages of sense data, pixels in a sense,

and then it gets recreated in the mind,

and sometimes it gets recreated in a faulty way.

For example, it still happens at least once a year or twice a year that I'm

walking in the hills here, hiking in the hills here, and I'm convinced that I see a snake, and it's just

a twisted root that's exposed above the ground on the trail. And so the nature of awareness is that whatever we are aware of in the present moment

is kind of, in some ways, reconstructed.

So if you're sitting in a room, it's accurate enough to say you look around and see the room,

but the seeing of it and the room are, as you see it, is the same thing. Seeing and the room are seen.

With the seeing of the wall, the wall appears in the seeing. The capacity to see and the wall don't really

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