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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So I want to talk a little bit about this whole notion of resistance.

And I'll start with this short little story that comes from the sutas from the time of

the Buddha.

So before he was awakened, so when he was just, you know, an unawakened person, maybe like

us here, that he encountered these people who were quarreling,

a big fight that had happened.

That there was one community that lived on the river.

And I think it was like they were on one side.

I don't know exactly how it was.

There's these two committed communities that lived along the river,

and they had irrigation into their agriculture, what they were growing. And then in a year of a drought,

you can imagine what happened. A lot of fighting happened. And they almost came onto the brink of war,

these communities over water,

right? Here we are thousands of years ago. We can still imagine something like this happening now.

And so when he saw all the conflict and a war about to happen, he describes it in this short little passage here, he says,

I will speak of my dismay in the way that I was shaken,

seeing people thrashing about like fish in little water.

I became afraid.

Then I saw an arrow here, hard to see embedded in the heart. This is really fascinating,

I think, where he's talking about how he's afraid by seeing all this conflict out there.

...