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

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Okay, so I'm a rusty. I've been in a way quite a bit from here and so all the buttons to push and things to check.

And the settings were set. We're not proper in the software part of this YouTube broadcast this morning.

So I wasn't able to get it up and running until just a few minutes before 7.

So thank you for being here. I'm delighted to be with you.

And the last two weeks I've been involved with teaching the Dharma, teaching practice in outdoor settings.

First, 24-7 in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where I even slept outdoors under the stars, taught and practiced in a grove of trees in a wonderful meadow.

And then this last week in Colorado and the mountains outside of Boulder at 9,000 feet.

And beautiful places to be practicing and in Colorado practicing together with Moose, who were in the area.

So my friends, I think that while mindfulness practice, the awareness practice we do in mindfulness is very simple, but in being simple it's both very radical.

And it's also, you know, maybe sometimes hard to appreciate the simplicity of it.

So the simplicity of it is that it's just to know very simply what's happening to be aware of it.

But to be aware of it, the simplicity of it is to be aware of it without any reference to oneself.

Meaning that it isn't the usual self, the usual me and my concerns, my orientation, my projections, my values, my fears, my judgments, that is doing the awareness.

There might be self-concerns, there might be concerns about others, but the radical nature of awareness is that we can know those, but we're not living in them.

It's more like we're living in the awareness. We're living in the simplicity where the awareness is kind of like, if you look into the sky at a bird going through the air,

the space the bird flies through is not the bird, but it allows the bird to fly through space and allows us to see the bird.

So awareness can be almost like that. It's the awareness they can know if we're self-concerned or measuring what's happening through the filter of ourselves.

But I have to do who I am, how good I am, how bad I am. But we don't believe in those or we don't latch on to them because the awareness is not appropriated as self.

We're just aware, just like space.

And the reason why this is so useful is that when meditation is about myself, meaning when meditation is about self-concerns and measuring myself and judging myself for trying to accomplish something for myself,

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