I'm Josh. This is Darmapunks, New York. Welcome. Great to see you. Thanks for stopping by.

And just a couple of announcements to make. April 13th, so about a month from now, Kathy and I on Sunday from 10 to 4 will be doing an addiction workshop for all kinds of

addictions, any kind of addiction you want to address.

We'll be going over the psychology and different insights into the root of addiction,

both from Buddhist spiritual and from contemporary addiction theory,

and then also we'll be doing practices to provide some choice or some ability to override those routines.

So again, that's at New York Insight, April 13th.

And we will be doing at Omega Institute on Memorial Day, a three-day gathering there.

You can look up that retreat Memorial Day weekend.

And the one at New York Inside is called Hungry Ghosts.

So if you would like to support my work, everything I do is entirely supported by donation

without charge.

The way to donate to keep me going is Dharma Punks with an X, NYC.

And there's also a PayPal and a Patreon link on the

Darmapunx NYC website. So thanks for that. Now tonight's talk is on ego death, which is a topic

that I'm really excited giving a talk about many many talks over the last 20 years,

but never one specifically dedicated to this specific, specific theme.

So I'm just going to start by saying that it was around 500 BC, or roughly 2,500 years ago,

where spiritual traditions and teachers emerged who taught that, depending on anything unreliable

causes suffering in life.

So in Taoism, Lao Tse, who wrote the Tao Te Ching,

noted that when we pursue material aims single-mindedly

...