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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org.

So good morning to all of you and welcome, happy to be here with you. And for those of you who are attending online, hello and welcome.

It adds a kind of richness to have you along online.

And so we could say that today is momentous day and that it's a last day of 2023 and tomorrow or at midnight

we usher in 2024.

And I think there's maybe a tradition of people wanting to give inspiring hopeful messages for the new year.

And it would be nice if I did that today.

And maybe I will. You'll have to decide. But as I think ahead for 2024, I think that we're going to have a lot of challenges,

what's coming and I mean the level of the speed in which the climate is changing

is surprising the people who were warning us that it was going to change.

It's happening faster than we expected.

It looks like we, I know it was, it's way too early to tell whether we'll go into drought again in California,

but the snow levels are quite low again all across the western part of this country.

And, you know, we can list all these things and changes.

Some of the wars that are being fought currently today, we

don't see any end for tomorrow. They'll continue into 2024 and some of them might get worse.

Might expand and stretch and the ways in which the wars spill over across their borders to other

borders to other countries around the world to create more and more division

seems to be increasing and that will probably continue into 2024.

And it's, there's certain reasonable scenarios for this country is that the presidential

election will be very difficult and we don't know who will end up being president, elected president in November.

...