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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

I'm happy to be back here after being gone for a week.

I was at the Zen Monastery and down outside in the mountains of Big Sur near Monterey,

Tasahara, and Tasara has a river going through it, the Tasara River.

And one of the fairly well-known saying is the idea you cannot step in the same river twice.

But the full quote goes something like, you cannot step in the same river twice because it's never the same

river and never the same person. That a person's also changing all the time. Buddhism uses

a central metaphor in Buddhism is a river, flowing in a river.

And so for this meditation, I'd like to offer you an image for sitting in meditation

that emphasizes the constant change, the river of change that we're in,

the river of time, river change that's all around us.

So the image is that of a big solid boulder sitting in the middle of a river,

and the water of the river just flows right by it,

just flows and flows and flows.

But the boulder is solid sitting there,

and that someone goes to meditate on that boulder and feels like the boulder,

solid. And everything is allowed to just flow by. Every thought, every feeling, whatever is

happening, is allowed to flow, to be in the river.

We don't pull any water out of the river.

We don't pull a bucket of water and hold on to the bucket.

We just let everything flow and meditation, move and flow through.

...