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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Hello and welcome to this half-an-hour meditation.

And building on what we've been doing earlier this week.

So I've been talking about how we divide ourselves, fragment ourselves,

and we lose touch with the whole of who we are

by the intensity of the desires we fixate on or the aversions

or also the ways in which we latch onto identities this is who I am and and all these gather strength by the intensity of our thoughts, our ideas, our concepts that we have.

And it isn't that thoughts and concepts are wrong to have.

What's important is to be able to see how we become divided, how we become

fragmented through them, lose touch with ourselves.

And sometimes thinking puts us in touch. Sometimes we have thoughts, ideas, concepts of maybe even who we are,

that help us to step beyond limited concepts into not just an idea of our wholeness, but a way of

being in touch, to feel, to sense, so that all our capacities for awareness are in some

ways operating at the same time, a whole field of attention.

And so two things. One is that it's not only important to see how these concepts divide us,

but also start getting a sense of the intensity and the strength of them,

how much clinging or force, pressure, compulsion is behind them.

Sometimes this is seen by the thoughts carry us away into our preoccupations

and maybe we come back to the present, to the breathing,

and then how quickly we get pulled back.

And sometimes we get pulled back, we feel the pull

...