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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Good morning, good hello. And greetings.

Sometimes I enjoy a little bit of fun

by reclassifying human beings rather than calling them homo sapiens.

I call them, consider them to be homostorica, that we tell stories. One of the distinctive characteristics of humans is their ability to tell stories.

Other animals, no, they can understand a lot. But I don't know how much

other animals tell stories the way we do and we tell stories we make plans we Past judgment, we bring things, experiences people into the court of our mind and where we are the judge and we will be judging things.

We fantasize, we imagine, we tell stories of all kinds.

And certainly part of the richness of human beings,

sitting around a campfire and telling stories,

and it's part, and sometimes it's the way we understand ourselves,

understand our people, our history and make sense of the world.

So stories are a very important part of being a human being.

And so is, you know, other things. Eating is important, but if all we did was eat all the time

that would be a problem.

And sometimes when we meditate, the story-making mind is clearly a form of agitation,

formally a way of being spinning out

or being preoccupied, being in a certain kind of way

disconnected from ourselves in the present moment.

And it can be lovely in meditation when that's storytelling mind, planning mind stops, reviewing mind stops.

I think it maybe belittles that moment to associate it with or compare it to the hum of the refrigerator

going off and there's a, ah, that's good.

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