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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So, hello and welcome to our meditation.

And on this week, the topic, overall topic for the week is the insight into not self.

But before we can have insight into not self, it's important to have insight into how we experience self.

And so rather than asking what is a self, is there a self,

we begin by asking how do we experience ourselves?

And so when we're doing something, like for meditating,

what does the doer? What does it feel like? What's the experience of the doer, of the one who does?

Is there a center of gravity? Is there a locus, a place inside where the doer operates, where the doer is kind of felt?

Not necessarily found as if there's something to find,

but as something to experience.

Like is there pressure, tension,

is there energy activated, some sensations of activation?

So there's the self as doer, the self as feeler, the one who feels things, and the one end of

that feeling kind of spectrum, the self as victim, the one that's the one end of that feeling kind of spectrum, the self as a victim, the one that things are being done to.

There's the self as the thinker, the solver.

There's the self as the fearful one, the angry one.

There's the self as the curious one or the delighted one.

There's all these different ways in which the kind of the feeling self, the thinking self,

that so to not deny that self, not to get philosophical about it, but rather to feel experientially into that experience, what is it like?

And is there in fact, as we talked yesterday, tension associated with it, pressure,

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