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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're not going to. So good morning everyone and a good day,

day. Hello and welcome to the Insight Meditation Center virtually. So I'd like to offer the theme for today's meditation

to be something fundamental to Buddhism and that is freedom or liberation.

And what we can learn about freedom in the mind or in the heart, maybe through meditation or through Buddhist practice,

as invaluable lessons to offer us for how to live in our regular life and the world with the

degree of freedom and liberation as well. But we learn it here, we learn it in our own minds.

And to have a mind which is not free is to have a mind which is caught in its

preoccupations, a mind which is cut up in fantasy and lost in its thought and we bring

the mind back to the breath or to the moment and then immediately the mind has a mind of its own and takes us away.

And we feel like we have no control, no role, no agency with our own mind. And there's two things that stand out to me when I think about the freedom in the mind.

One is certainly to have mastered a degree of agency with the mind where we can choose what we think about,

where we can direct our attention and the mind will stay there. We know, have the skills, we have the capacity, we have the freedom

to be able to direct the mind where we'd like it to be. And so in meditation that's

invaluable to direct the mind to the present moment, to the breathing,

to being focused here and now is profoundly meaningful and valuable.

and now, but the other understanding of freedom, because we can't always have that level of agency and freedom in the mind is the freedom to be aware of what's happening in the mind,

the freedom to know.

So it's kind of like there's an over, you know, there's a kind of sense of of a independent observer or observation that goes on.

Well, yes, what the mind thinks about,

what it's involved in maybe is not so much under our control,

but we feel free because we can observe it, we can know it as it's happening.

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