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

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Good evening. Welcome. Welcome. Hope everybody's doing okay with the heat that we're having.

Hopefully we're on that tail end of that. So today I wanted to talk a little bit

about this whole notion or this idea of seeing, seeing, you know, this usual

and complicated thing that humans do. But first I wanted to talk about how we like just in English how we sometimes

use this verb to see. There's the obvious one this like literal perception with the eyes like I can see the mountains from here

Or maybe there's this way we use the word seeing to talk about, you know, dating or being a relationship.

Yeah, they've been seeing one another for a few months or you know something like that or maybe we use this

word seeing to talk about imagination or can you just see yourself going down the slopes and the skiing when it's so hot or something like this, you know, just

this invitation to imagine something in particular. Or maybe we even use this expression C to talk about like I'll accompany you.

I'll see you to the door. Or maybe there's this way we also say that scene is related to understanding.

Oh, I see.

In this kind of way.

I kind of like it when there's these simple words that get used in so many different ways

and we can look at them differently and understand things differently. In some ways we might say that that's so much about

a meditation practice, Buddhist practice, is about taking something that seems

ordinary and looking at it in a little bit different way and it has a different understanding it has a different

impact so I'm going to look at this word seeing and maybe what it points to and some of the way the

experience of it from a number of different ways.

And in particularly, like how is this part of a path of practice to greater freedom and ease and peace and well-being?

Not only just some little intellectual curiosity fun thing to do but it's something that will help to bring some more ease in our lives to understand maybe a little bit the way that we see and maybe some of the ways we don't see

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