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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're going to. So hello everyone, everyone, greetings from the dark from it's still I guess it's dawn here. It's

came down here to IMC in the dark and delighted and kind of cozy to be here with you all this way.

It's one of my favorite things to do is to get up in the morning and go to a

meditation hall. And they did it many times in monasteries and temples were involved going outdoors in the dark and

following a path to the meditation hall and such a wonderful way to begin the day.

So one of the supports for meditation practice that is usually not emphasized and that is having a vision and the reason

is not emphasized is that a vision seems to be something in the future, something elsewhere, and not

about what's here and now.

And mindfulness is so much about being present here and now. But the more we're present here and now, the more

we really settle here and let go of our distractions, let go of our attachments, that the more at peace here at some point almost like built into that

experience of here and now is a strong sense of it's possible to expand that piece further. It's possible to let go

more fully. It's possible to be more fully here and now, not just here and now, but somehow fully inhabiting

here and now, fully alive in this fullness of the here and now, in the fullness

or wholeness of ourselves.

And it's kind of like if you hold your hand in a fist for a long time and then something

happens that you get distracted from the important task of being all clenched up and you notice

that the hand relaxes a bit and then you might clench up again, you know something and you now you have a vision

oh there's a possibility here it's right here and now as well the possibility of

further releasing that hand so the hand can be relaxed finally.

So in Buddhism, at some point, there comes a time when a meditator acquires knowledge and vision,

it's a technical word, and there's knowledge and visions of different things, but the knowledge

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