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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So I have been away and retreats the last two weeks and I still feel somehow the presence of those retreats.

And so I'm going to offer something this morning for meditation that does come, that does come to, from the retreats and we'll see if it works for you all this way outside of retreats.

And, um... And so now some people are saying they good. Okay, so I think that How about other people say sound is good?

Okay, so I think that it might be a local issue.

So, okay, we'll start and I'll take you maybe on a little journey for for the attitude that we live our lives by and some of these attitudes are quite deep.

Some of these attitudes are, we're not often conscious of them, but they can be pervasive setting the mood or setting the orientation perspective by which we live our lives and how we understand ourselves. And part of the possibility of

meditation is that it's a quieting movement of the mind so that we begin quieting some of the voices, some of the

attitudes, some of the beliefs, some of the ways of thinking, ways of believing about ourselves, our life, that have a chance to quiet down because

they're no longer active.

Every belief, every way of thinking is an activity of the mind, it's not inherent in the universe.

And so to quiet the thinking mind so that we see ourselves and see the world without the usual

filters of how we approach the world, the usual filters for understanding ourselves, the internalized messages we have from our society about who

we are or all kinds of conclusions we have.

And these are getting quieter.

And so when we start meditation with the process of relaxation,

this is not beginning Buddhism.

It's really the part and parcel of this very deep movement to

settling, deactivating,

some of the unnecessary activations of the mind

that do not give us a accurate perspective on this life of ours. So to assume a meditation posture and

to gently close your eyes.

...