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 Warm greetings from meditation hall here at at Insight Meditation Center.

And I'm delighted to be here

and I'm delighted to, in a certain virtual way to be with you all where you are and that

to feel the net, the interconnected net of all of us spread around the world.

I'd love to

everyone, each of us the place we're in, and then lines from each of us

to everyone else in here, sitting here,

and how those would criss-cross and what kind of net that would make.

So thank you for being here. This morning I was thinking about what used to be called, maybe still called Russian dolls,

these series of dolls of different size that if you, the outer ones you can pull them apart and then

the smaller ones are inside and they get smaller and smaller until you get to the smallest one which is

is whole you can't pull it apart and sometimes in a Buddhist spirituality people can have the sense that we're made up of all these

parts, all these layers, and part of practice is to deconstruct them, to let them go, to quiet them down, to settle

deeper and deeper in until we can get to some core, a core of peace, a core of freedom, some

place of deep inner calm or deep inner sense of wholeness or honesty or integrity or well-being that doesn't dismiss

or deny or condemn all the other layers,

that it does create a different reference point

for understanding the different layers.

But as practice goes along, rather than the goal of practice is to tap into some deep

inner place of peace, that the peace, the freedom, the joy of practice begins, becomes

the outermost all.

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