Freedom. Everyone wants it, but knowing where to look for it is another matter.

And to make matters worse, the world is full of things that feel like freedom, but might just get us more tangled up in everything we're trying to escape.

How much freedom can money buy? How much money? How free are you on a tropical vacation?

Would uploading your consciousness into the cloud and downloading it into a robot

avatar on Alpha Centauri make you more free? How about falling in love again? How about three

margaritas with friends? Or six? A better government? Less government? No government at all?

I'm here today with Joseph Goldstein, a great and beloved teacher of Buddhist ideas and practice

in the West and a personal inspiration to me to talk about freedom of the mind and spirit

and the kinds of effort and insight that can lead there. Joseph is the co-founder of Insight

Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts, and the author most recently of Mindfulness, A Practical Guide to Awakening.

We spoke once before just about a year ago.

I'm so happy to be here with you again, Joseph.

That's great.

Great to be here.

I think I want to start with something decidedly less sexy than freedom, which is ethics,

Sila, Buddhist ethics.

And I guess I should say for the audience that kind of the three steps on the path, as I understand

it, are a grounding in ethics, like awareness and practice, then a calming and concentration of the mind,

and then insight, an understanding of Dharma and the way things work.

I'd like to talk a little bit about ethics because I think a lot of people get into meditation,

get into thinking about Buddhism and Dharma through, well, meditation,

which is a rather different and interesting and, as I said, kind of sexy thing, different from our

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