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

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Okay. Okay, something got turned off that is always supposed to be left on, so I didn't notice it until now.

So welcome to our Thursday morning meditation.

There's a, maybe it's a little funny to bring up the analogy, but there's this famous saying

that if a tree falls in the forest, is there any sounds made?

And a tree falls in the forest and no one's there.

Is there a sound. And I think part of the image for me is when the tree falls, whatever vibration of the air that goes on that would travel to someone's ears and vibrate the

air drums, those vibrations move through the forest unimpeded until they meet an air of some creature and then vibrates the air and

then there's what we call sound. But until it... and so this idea that the sound moving through space is being unimpededed, or a bird moving through the sky, unimpeded.

So freedom in Buddhism has a quality of being unimpeded, but there's a kind of an odd

unimpededness in that it isn't a freedom to do whatever we want to do, which is often associated with freedom.

It's primarily a freedom from impediment, from picking things up, fueling things, being involved with things,

being involved with desires,

with a versions.

And so, and with thoughts.

So thinking, thoughting can happen, there can be a thought, but for the thought to become thinking,

there has to be some engagement with it, some involvement with it, some picking it up, some participation in it, some

associated thinking that goes on or builds on it, and to be free in the mind is to create a vast space where things are

unimpeded so that a thought can arise like a bird in the sky or a cloud in the sky and

just drifts by and fades away so that cognition arises, knowing arises almost pre-verbally, almost like a sound in the woods which no one hears.

There's just space. There's no clinging, no resistance, no picking up, no judgments, no reaction, just vast space in a sense.

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