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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So I begin with thanking you for being here for the day. Some of you came all day and some

maybe came for the afternoon or part of it. But thank you. I very much appreciate the opportunity to do these

kinds of day-long retreats and hopefully it's been meaningful for you.

So I'd like to start this talk with a kind of an analogy,

little story,

analogy, I guess, that the analogy of the ant and the elephant, if a big deal

Like a horse fly or something, lands on an ant.

It's kind of a big deal for the ant. It might even make the ants life difficult.

If that same fly lands on an elephant, it's not even a small deal for the elephant, it's like nothing.

The elephant goes about its life, quite content.

So the question is, do we want to go through our life as an ant or like an elephant?

And this analogy is a little bit building on the ancient Buddhist tradition that some one of the words for elephant, sometimes in these ancient

Texas Naga and sometimes the people who become mature in this practice are called nagas.

Sometimes it means a serpent, but sometimes it refers to being an elephant.

So... refers to being like an elephant. So maybe that's a little different than how many people

think of Buddhist practice when there's an excessive

emphasis on not self it would seem like we're supposed to just kind of disappear.

Like we're supposed to be nobody going nowhere doing nothing.

Like basically, somehow not be there.

But to be, but they become an elephant, become a serpent,

they become big, so big that we're not troubled by things of the life. That's a very different orientation. Then let's find the

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