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

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Thank you. So good morning. One of the important characteristics of the Buddha's teachings, his social teachings, is the idea of harmony, some aga. And the idea of harmony is that

one image or metaphor for it is for people to milk like, to mix like milk and water.

Milk and water blends together very differently than oil and water that stays separate.

For us to somehow live together in harmony.

And the Buddha talks about loving harmony,

delighting in harmony, devoted to harmony.

And the Buddhist, when I was the only community, the only community the Buddha was

actively involved in guiding, put a lot of emphasis on the community living together in harmony

and cooperating together. So for this meditation,

I'd like to suggest

that in a certain kind of ways,

each of us is a community of people.

Each of us contains a range, a multitude,

of different impulses, feelings, thoughts, maybe almost like personalities, depending

where we are. I was struck growing up and speaking different languages that I was and other people I knew

had somewhat different personalities depending on the language they spoke.

Because when we're learning a language in a culture, you learn more than a language.

You learn a way of being, a way of relating, finding yourself in the culture,

and that can vary from culture to culture. And sometimes we're divided in ourselves. We have parts

we don't like and parts we like. We have preferences about ourselves, things we want to hide,

...