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

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Hello, everyone, and welcome, and welcome back to IMC.

And certainly nice to be here and it was very nice to be broadcasting from up in the mountains yesterday.

And so in this theme of these last weeks of insight, the first, and in the tradition, the most important insight is into, usually we say impermanence in English, a Nietzsche in constancy.

And in this tradition, impermanence is closely associated with the idea of emptiness.

And one way is that things that are constantly changing,

there is no center or ground that stays stable.

There is nothing which is, there's no place to stand.

There's no essential core or essence existentially,

ontologically, with anything.

It would be a little bit like,

maybe very much like someone who likes to kayak in a river, someone likes to surf,

the water is constantly changing. And the ideas about the water might not be changing. In fact,

someone might be daydreaming about how wonderful would be

to float on a river, thinking that it's going to be exactly like there was before. And the idea of

river is stable. But when you're in the water, experientially, everything is moving and shifting.

There's no solid ground to stand on in the ocean, in the river.

And so things are always shifting.

And so as we develop deep samadhi,

as we become very still inside, very quiet in the meditation,

where the world of concepts, ideas, with which we construct much of our reality

...