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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So to offer some little, a few couple of minutes of instructions or how to be here for this day.

Recently, one more time than I've heard many times over these 50 years I've been involved

with Buddhism is that these Buddhists, they kind of withdraw from society.

They go and meditate by themselves, they go off on retreats, they go off and become monastics.

They're just withdrawing from the world and not really involved in helping this world,

supporting this world.

And it's, so I heard it again this morning. It's before we came here. But it's a curious thing,

because if someone withdraws and spends the night, the day, the week, binge watching on Netflix,

they don't get the same complaint that They're so selfish. Somehow that's

immune to criticism. But people who meditate, they're selfish. So there's something about

this world of meditation and spirituality that seems to evoke a very different orientation to, in attitude to what we're

doing. So what I'd like to offer for you is a metaphor for the value of what we're doing,

and also it points to somehow a way of practicing while we're doing our meditation here today,

sitting or walking meditation.

So there is something that human beings do regularly

where we actually do withdraw quite thoroughly from the world and from our family and our friends

and we go into locked rooms and we want to really be apart from them while we take a shower.

And mostly we're left alone to do that. People don't barge in, especially people who are

maybe not your spouse for something, a partner. And no one complains that if you go do this thing, you lock the door and you go by yourself.

No one complains with you withdrawing from society.

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