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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Thank you. So hello everyone and welcome. And it's a fairly simple thing to sit down or

come in a meditation posture and do very little to put aside our daily affairs and

activities and concerns even if we can. And to be here,

simply sitting, being, breathing, and noticing how much extra we do,

how much extra we add on top of the simplicity of this moment as it's unfolding.

And the simpler we get in meditation, the more we can see what we add, maybe add unnecessarily to the present moment.

And we can develop wisdom, understanding,

and even freedom in relationship to what is extra.

One of the movements of this simplification to the present moment is to, in relationship to the present moment,

to move towards a simplification of how we conceive and perceive the present.

We don't perceive it through the filter of abstractions.

So if I'm listening to the weather report on the news.

And the person giving the weather report says that a cold front is coming in together with lots of rain. It'll be a torrential rainstorm.

So I get concerned about that. And I have in my mind, torrential rainstorm. And it just evokes danger, it provokes all kinds of issues. I have to

close my windows, I have to get a raincoat. But then, maybe I'm on a hilltop and I can see in the distance the rain is coming.

And I can see, oh, there's a rainstorm coming, I can see.

But all I see is a dark, very dark zone under kind of darkish big clouds.

And from that experience I see a rainstorm.

It's just this massive thing that's coming.

But then the rain does come, and as it gets closer, it looks like there's streaks.

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