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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Thank you, everyone.

And so this is my first talk of the New Year. So happy New Year to all of you.

And best wishes for the year. And it's the custom. It's a little bit loud. Is it a little bit loud for the year?

It's all good for you? Okay, it's a little bit. So,

it's the custom here, for me, for the first talk of the year to be on the four noble truths.

These are a phenomenally important and valuable template

for insight, for understanding, for wisdom,

for finding our way to a degree of freedom.

And over these maybe more than 20 years now

that I've been doing these first talk of the year on the Four Noble Truths.

What how I've presented it has changed over the years.

Someone could go back and listen to all of them and track the evolution of my thinking

and my understanding of it over time.

And that speaks to how useful these are for new understandings, for new perspectives, for new ways of touching our heart in some important way.

Rather than taking the Four Noble Truths as there's an orthodox true understanding

of it, it's a very useful thing to engage in and explore and apply in new ways.

And I once sent an email to Bikobodi, the famous translator of these ancient texts, a wonderful scholar,

and asking about one particular way the Buddha taught the four noble truths.

And he replied, not that it was the true way of understanding them, he explained, oh, that was a particular application.

It was being applied for a particular purpose.

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