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 welcome to this meditation session.

Yesterday for the meditation, I offered the phrase, no comment, that one way important aspect

of meditation is to experience ourselves, to be engaged in the meditation, without being caught

in the commentary we can make about what's happening

or especially commentary about anything else in the world while we're meditating

and of course it's difficult to do this because having commentary is partly how we try to be safe in the world, partly how we think

about and plan what we want in the world, partly it's how we create an identity or reinforce

who we are, and partly it's a way to entertain ourselves.

But meditation doesn't operate in the arena of commentary.

It operates in the arena of direct lived experience.

And that exists independent of commentary for the most part.

And so I offer the phrase, no comment.

Whatever is happening, let it be, allow it to be there, but don't be involved in it with commentary. Don't start

thinking about it. If you really get skilled at no comment, you would not judge it, you would

not evaluate it, you would not criticize anything. You would not chase anything or seek anything or try to get

something going away. There's a very radical, almost a paradigm shift of what happens in the mind

when we start developing understanding what meditation is,

mindfulness meditation?

And so what I'd like to suggest is that the commentary we make about life

is the arena of our suffering.

The arena or the field in which we grow,

...