I put together the framework for this week's talk before the Saturday night, Sunday morning shooting in Orlando.

And I do think that the theme actually is resonance to that event.

There's an important story in the Buddhist canon called the water snake scutah where the Buddha says,

you know if you want to understand my teaching, imagine a traveler following a path that eventually leads to a vast body of water.

And there's no boat or bridge for crossing to the far shore where the path continues.

So this traveler gathers up grass and twigs and branches and leaves

and constructs a raft to cross the river

to get to the other shore where the path continues. Once the

travelers reach the other shore and the raft has served its purpose should

this person drag this raft about wherever they go.

And all of the people around the Buddha say, of course not.

The Buddha asks a lot of rhetorical questions.

And so at this point, the Buddha says,

friends, all of my ideas are like a rat.

Simply for the purpose of in any situation trying to cross over to liberation,

but none of my teachings are for holding onto.

Holding onto is grasping or clinging.

And this teaching at first sounds very kind of obvious.

The idea that one shouldn't drag around one's views and opinions and cast them onto every situation in life as we try to make sense

of our experience. But in fact, almost all of us to different varying degrees tend to have

ready-made prefabricated beliefs or stories that maybe we don't think all the time, but when we are faced

with the unknown, the tragic, these ideas. the to not feel the overwhelm, not feel a tragedy, not feel sadness, not feel confusion.

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