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

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Okay, so welcome, yeah, warm welcome to all of you.

I'm Matthew. Matthew and yeah, yeah, let's practice.

I don't know what we'll do, sort of find our way together. I'm You're going to be here. Very natural to just keep reiterating our self. effectively to predict Matthew for the next moment.

To predict yourself,

your model of self in the next moment. One neuroscientist said, I predict myself, therefore I am. I'm What would it be to be genuinely open to the next moment, not overly structuring it with the expectation that I'd be exactly the same person in the next moment. You're going to be here. Oh, You're going to be here. What kind of openness might we know?

If we didn't expect to find exactly our self in the next moment. We didn't know how we would feel, how life would feel.

How life would be.

if we didn't know who we would tell.

what stories we would tell. You're going to be here. You've been humming the story of self for so long. on. And now we know the melody so well.

We know when the chorus is coming. Can we relax all of this? You're going to see? I'm going to We can't simply direct our attention to our breathing or our body feeling, because we bring the echoes and reverberations of that song

into the attentional field. So instead we make opaque what was transparent. parent.

The song we've been humming That's just felt like me

actually because that just felt like me actually becomes an object of awareness. You're going to be here. We become slightly alienated.

From every song we sing of myself, every story of me.

Every story of me.

They don't all become false, but we just become little little fatigue. little fatigued alienated from them. You're going to be here. Yes. I'm going to be here. You're going to. You're going to see? We don't fight self with more self.

We, to use a phrase from Shinsen Young,

we love, love it to death.

Love the self to death.

death. This frees us up to pay a different kind of attention to be here. somehow less crowded, crowded by the childlike moralism of what story of me, the pros and cons, Matthew.

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