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

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Hello from Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, and delighted that this meditation hall has become so large and encompassing to include all of you and all the different places you are, and for us to have come together this morning to meditate.

And one of the emphasis I've been giving lately is that I'm defining awareness as the coordinated coming together, working together,

of all the different attentional faculties that we have.

And when they're all working in an unselfconscious way, but we're quite present for them all,

they come together to a sense or feeling of a spacious, open, receptive field of awareness.

And where maybe our capacity for spatial awareness, spatial reconstruction contributes to a sense of space

that awareness can have for some people. So it's not essentializing awareness into something,

but rather it's seen as a composite of many things operating together. So this is a minor

point I want to make, but that the more important is that we have all these different

attentional faculties.

And this week I've been emphasizing knowing, sensing, and then yesterday observing,

and clear comprehension.

There is one more that maybe ordinarily is not considered an intentional

faculty, but it can be engaged with, recruited for the purposes of greater present moment awareness.

And that is our intelligence, our capacity to understand, to figure out,

to question, to explore, to consider new options. And if someone is engaged in finding their way in the wilderness, all their senses might be open.

And one of the things that keeps them, you know, even more, right there in the present moment, is the intelligent kind of scanning the environment, trying to understand where they are,

what direction to go, what's the wise way to go. And there's a lot of engagement. It might seem like

that's tiring to apply that to meditation. But there is a natural way of using intelligence

to figure out, how can I be here in the present moment in a valuable way that is relaxed.

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