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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello and welcome to this fifth guided meditation related to the hindrances,

the five obstacles to staying awake, aware in the present moment.

And the five are desire, essential desire and greed, ill will, aversion, then sloth and torpor, I call it rigidity and torper, and then restlessness and remorse.

And then the last one today, it's usually translated as doubt. But it has the ancient meaning is closer to not

seeing, not understanding what needs to be done.

And so that our choice of where to put our life energy goes to something which does not serve

us.

The ancient text say that one knows what serves and what doesn't serve.

And so what serves us the most?

And to answer that question, the text talk about someone who

has this so-called doubt doesn't understand,

doesn't reflect, doesn't their way of understanding, does not come from a profound source within them.

That it's more surface thinking where the mind jumps around is distracted.

So you would say that if someone spends a lot of time fantasizing about

pleasures and something in their mind thinks that's important, that that's

something that we should serve the pursuit of pleasures. We don't think that way

consciously but apparently something within us thinks thinks that otherwise why

would we do it? Someone who has thinks that the way to serve ourselves is to wake up is to be profoundly connected

to themselves will understand that the way to serve ourselves is to wake up is to be really present and clear, really this is what's

happening. A definitiveness, a clarity of here I am and here this is what's happening.

So it's not choosing to do anything more

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