Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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Today I'll be speaking with Joseph Goldstein, who was an old friend and quite a distinguished

and wonderful teacher of meditation, in particular of apostinum meditation, mindfulness meditation.

Joseph and I spoke before on my podcast about a year ago, and that episode was entitled

The Path and the Goal. And if you haven't listened to that, I recommend you do before

listening to this one, because this one is in fact the response to listener questions

that arose from that first podcast. The conversation this time around, because it's in Q&A format,

really does not take any kind of linear path from beginner to expert in terms of its content

areas. And one thing I'd also point out is that I make no effort to discuss the liabilities

of Buddhism as a religion. As most of you know, I don't consider myself a Buddhist. I just

find the practice of meditation incredibly useful. Joseph certainly considers himself a

Buddhist, and he is a quite well-known Buddhist teacher and largely responsible for bringing

the techniques of Buddhist meditation into more prominence in the West over the last 40

years or so. But we use Buddhist terminology, and while we define these terms from time

to time, I'm not making any effort in these conversations to divorce this topic from

its traditional Buddhist context. I do that more in my book waking up. This is just to

...