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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're going to. So good morning, for some of you, good afternoon for others, good evening for maybe another

set of you, good day for everyone.

And so we come to the last day of this five day day of this five day series and the topic being today is liberation and liberation is often considered to be an absence of certain mental states, rather than the presence of something which can be a source or reason or

an object of attachment, expectation, comparative thinking.

It's an absence of greed, hate, and delusion, an absence of clinging, an absence of prejudice,

absence of bias, absence of conceit. of and covetivistness, absence of so many ways in which we, well,

human beings harm each other including ourselves and an absence An absence is a simplification of certain kinds of things.

And so one of the characteristics of liberation

is freedom from those things which harm.

And one of the characteristics of the path to liberation

is that the way we practice the path

should contain within it some of the goal. The goal is to be found in the means and what what the how to

understand that is that the very way in which we practice Buddhism,

the very way in which Buddhist practice meditation, mindfulness,

is a care, maybe a loving care, but a real care, real kind of carefulness, attention is to be paid, is to be given, that the way in which we practice is with as little greed, hatred and

delusion as we can muster, that we practice without attachment or clinging, without

hostility, without conceit, without selfishness, without strain, without complacency or holding back, without shutting down, without avoiding.

In the ancient text they talk about neither accepting nor rejecting.

And we have to understand carefully what that means that accepting and rejecting involves kind of taking and pushing away kind of acquisition appropriation and rejection.

So this absence leaves us in the state of radical simplicity.

Awake, here, just awake, with the same simplicity of what wakefulness feels like, waking up from

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