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

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Okay, I'm back, and there is so many different steps in this technology that I don't always remember.

So, welcome again. And what I started to say is that this meditation practice leading to deep insight has more to do when we, what we don't do,

then what we do.

There's a lot of ways in which we are so actively involved in our minds and our thoughts

that it interferes with a natural capacity for insight. And one of the kind of the core principles

almost of Buddhism is that we have a profound natural capacity, profound natural abilities

that we're learning to get out of the way of. And the analogy would be, if you were going to

go canoe comfortably down, comfortable, safe, nice, slow, narrow river, maybe a stream, a creek.

And so there's a few things you have to do. You have to untie the canoe from the dock,

and you have to release your hand from holding onto the dock, and then you have to somehow

stay in the middle, and you don't want to reach out to the side and hold onto a branch coming

down. You want, if you see a sandbar up ahead, you want to avoid getting stuck on it.

So there's a few things we have to do.

But there's a natural capacity if we stay in the middle of the river to float and carry on.

Same way with this meditation practice.

And the world of insight is what opens up when we let go of the dog,

we untie the rope, we allow ourselves to flow in the river. And the way that we get to grab onto

branches and get caught on sandbars is by thinking a lot.

And thinking and living in concepts, living in attitudes, are what kind of solidifies or reifies or makes the world solid, makes the self solid,

rather than the self being fluid and moving and constantly shifting and changing in a free,

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