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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So hello everyone and welcome.

everyone and welcome. And it's helpful when we sit down to meditate to have a bit of an attitude or an approach that we're doing it for the first time,

maybe with a certain amount of

it's new it's something new to discover new to be

that we don't really know the maybe the subtleties or the depths or the corners or the

attics or the basements of our lives that might show itself in any given meditation.

So to meditate as if it's fresh and new,

and new we're entering a new world,

not assuming or bring with you the expectations

or the assumptions from before.

And in that regard it's helpful to think of meditation as a form of curiosity. But a form of curiosity that doesn't stimulate more thinking, but the opposite.

A form of curiosity that is a keen interest, what's going on here that quiets the mind? And the analogy that I like is that if

you're in, say, the forest and you hear a sound that's unfamiliar and it's very faint and maybe it's very faint and

maybe it's the sound of the river that you need to find.

And you find, is that the river?

What is that?

Or there's a sound of a bird?

And you would,

to be able to listen kind of acutely or carefully, your ordinary thinking might quiet down. You might stop thinking ordinary thoughts.

There may be some very simple thoughts about the sound, but something inside of you gets very still and quiet and connected focused to the

hearing and things get very quiet and in that kind of way, we can ask ourselves to kind of be possi in a question that I asked myself when I was in Burma practicing there was the question, what is this?

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