Ep. 260 – The Union of Relative and Ultimate Truth
Insight Hour with Joseph Goldstein
Be Here Now Network
4.8 • 864 Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Continuing his exploration of selflessness, Joseph Goldstein helps listeners live in the balance of both relative and ultimate truth.
This episode is a continuation of a talk that started in episode 259, "Selflessness, Dukkha, and Freedom."
This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/insighthour and get on your way to being your best self.
This time on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein discusses:
- The impersonal nature of experiencing peace
- Seeing with consciousness rather than with the subjective mind
- Reframing the language of experience with a passive voice
- Being fully present in the moment without identification
- Understanding death and dying as the natural flow of impermanence
- Having an easeful mind even when the body is afflicted
- Understanding both relative and ultimate truth
- The wonderful and joyful practice of generosity
This episode was recorded at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and originally published on Dharmaseed
“We work to understand the dynamics of our conventional reality and all the challenges of it, even as we understand the essential selfless nature of it all. This is really the heart of a mature spiritual practice, the union of these two, not the separation." –Joseph Goldstein
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This flow of changes at a particular stage in life may be predominantly unpleasant experiences. |
| 0:10.0 | There's no guarantee that the body is going to go out in an easeful way, |
| 0:17.0 | but the mind can be at ease if we understand the naturalness of the process and the impermanent nature of it. Welcome to the Joseph Goldstein Inside Hour. |
| 0:48.3 | This podcast is an expression of our shared interest in self-discovery. |
| 1:00.0 | Join Joseph as he shares his deep knowledge of the path of mindfulness. If you are interested in supporting this podcast, |
| 1:03.0 | please go to BehereNownetwork.com slash Joseph. |
| 1:10.0 | When you speak about the mind is free or the mind is at peace, |
| 1:18.3 | the temptation might be to think, well, that is the self. |
| 1:26.4 | And what you just said is it's precisely not identifying |
| 1:31.5 | with the self or with the mind as self that is liberated. And can you say a little bit more about |
| 1:38.4 | how one might think about this very subtle way of relating to the mind that we say the mind is free |
| 1:48.1 | or the mind is liberating but the mind is not not self well there are different ways or different, different ways of approaching that question. |
| 2:12.6 | From one side, we could say, yeah, peace is a quality of the mind. |
| 2:20.3 | Until we're fully enlightened, sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not there. |
| 2:28.4 | So it itself is part of the changing process. |
| 2:35.5 | And the feeling of peace itself is impersonal. |
| 2:41.8 | It doesn't belong to anybody. |
| 2:43.9 | It's not that, just like you said earlier on, |
| 2:50.6 | instead of saying, I'm angry, we could reframe that and saying |
| 2:55.2 | there is anger. |
| 2:57.8 | So in just the same way, instead of saying, I'm peaceful, a more accurate way of describing |
| 3:05.9 | it would say there's peace in the mind at this point. |
... |
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