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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Hello and welcome to this meditation session.

And as a beginning, I'd like to tell you of a study that I read about many years ago,

where they took some teenagers from deep in metropolitan New York,

grew up kind of in a, without ever leaving New York,

and living kind of, I think there were people living somewhat poor lives and, you know, so their range of experience was quite small.

And they took them to someplace like the jungles of Costa Rica

to go out with people who had spent their life, teenagers who had spent their

life living in that environment. And the locals in Costa Rica would point out birds and

different things happening in the forest and that stood out, jumped out to them,

was obvious to them that they could see them.

But the teens from New York could not see them.

They didn't have the ability.

They didn't know where to look and how to see.

And so this story points to the idea that we get accustomed to a particular way of what we're familiar with

and we maybe pick up what's familiar, but there's a lot that we miss as a result.

In meditation, that tendency comes, that we come with our familiar world of

thoughts and concerns and even the way that we think of ourselves can be kind of set in our ways

so that we're not so sensitive and attuned to notice other aspects of our experience.

To become skilled in samadhi is to begin to become sensitive and expand the range of what we're aware of.

So we can be aware of the subtle shifts that go on, the shifts that show us the path of samadhi,

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