So it's worthwhile to ask oneself why are we practicing? What's our goal?

And there are many legitimate intentions or goals for practice.

One legitimate goal is simply to reduce stress.

And if we have addictive impulses also

to reduce our cravings for drugs and alcohol and other substances and behaviors.

And there are a lot of tools in spiritual practice that help with stress reduction.

Breath, meditation, concentration, meta practice,

certain kinds of mindfulness practice are very very good in reducing stress.

Another reason why we can come to practice and our goal for it might be that we find ourselves

in a time of life where we're pretty kind we're pretty alienated from what our life has become, or we feel dissatisfied, and we're

looking for a sense of purpose in life, something that will bring meaning and clarity to what we want

to attain in this human birth that were given.

And the Buddha has a whole series of recollections,

ten recollections, and he has the precept practices, and he has some suetas for householders,

and they're all really, really wonderful tools to develop a fresh set of priorities

for living and if you're interested in that I've given a lot of talks on both stress reduction and

reprioritizing and finding meaning in life and they're all in the podcast and you can all

them open for free. Tonight I'm going to talk about what I consider to be

possibly the third most common goals of having a spiritual practice and that is to actually

achieve some lasting remove

remove from our normal state of mind,

an actual liberation from the consciousness that we're normally in,

...