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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Good morning, good day.

Good day.

Hello.

And welcome to our Monday beginning of the week series and I'm continuing,

we're continuing with the introduction to mindfulness meditation part two and for the

meditation today I'd like to emphasize or point out that one of the primary

characteristics of mindfulness meditation is simplicity.

And one teacher, Menindraji,

who I met in India, a Vipasna teacher,

he said that if it's not simple, it's not vipasanum.

And the idea of radical simplicity includes, and this is the part that's difficult in the simplicity,

includes not projecting... projecting our mental constructs onto our experience.

If we're thinking about the past or thinking about the future, that's a mental construct that in a sense is projected on the past and projected on the future.

The past doesn't exist, the future doesn't exist in a certain kind of exist

exist essentially real way and so it's though there has to do with memory or

prediction constructs of the mind and these

can be fine an important part of life but when we sit to do mindfulness

meditation we're not even interested in the constructs of the mind

here.

The day is a kind of radical simplicity where we allow our direct experience to be itself free from comparisons, free from ideals, free from what should or shouldn't happen, free from our stories that we have about it,

free of what we think other people would say about it, just sitting here in a radical simple way

...