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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're not going to. Welcome to our meditation together.

And I'd like this meditation to be about something that I've in the past have called

integrity but not necessarily the modern understanding of that, of maybe ethical integrity, but doesn't exclude it.

But integrity kind of like being whole, everything coming together into one.

And we have the possibility of each of us of sitting quietly and relaxing all the ways that we live divided, fragmented, and having an experience of ourselves as being whole and being whole comes

with maybe a feeling of being at home, of a deep belonging here,

belonging here in this universe.

There's nothing that undermines our sense of place and sense of,

you know, nothing undermines us.

And how this wholeness can be found is not by convincing ourselves that we're whole or that argue the point. It's easy enough to use logic to come to all kinds of

different conclusions in this regard. But rather to discover what happens when we are no longer

seeing our life, seeing ourselves through the lens of our concepts and ideas.

When the thinking mind quiets, when the thinking mind is no longer the dominant filter through which we know experience ourselves,

the thinking mind is often fragmented.

If we are caught up in preoccupations,

then that itself is a fragmentation because it leaves so much of ourselves out if we're

hyper-focused on one particular thing and if what the preoccupation has to do is about ourselves, that there's something wrong with us or

with our problems, not to diminish the fact that we have challenges in our life, but to be preoccupied with it limits the full

scope of what we take in, the full scope of all that we are. And so there were fragmented, we're divided. And so as we meditate,

to begin quieting, relaxing, settling,

so that we can appreciate how we are when we don't have words, ideas, images, that in any kind of way limits us, any kind of way undermines us, in any kind of way puts us in conflict with part of who we are.

...