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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So, so, so, probably. So probably most of you know that today is a holiday.

It's Juneteenth day, June 19th, is now a federal and a state holiday, and I guess the post office is closed.

And, um, and, uh... office is closed and it's a wonderful holiday. It's, some people say it's the second U.S. Independence Day.

And it marks the kind of the final ending of slavery in this country. There was well after the end of the

well enough after the Civil War that there were the slave owners who weren't going to tell their slaves they were now free.

So the slaves didn't know.

They weren't getting the newspapers.

And so then, you know, the military came in and made the announcement and then these slaves were finally free.

And so there was, it started to be celebrated, you know, in Texas many years ago, and that

celebration then grew through the country and now it's a national holiday. And so for Buddhists, it's kind of like a Buddhist holiday. Any independence, any movement

towards liberation is because that's what the calling card for Buddhism

is, is to become free of internal bondage.

The Buddha actually used the language of bondage. We don't use the, us

Western Buddhist teachers don't usually talk about bondage that much. We talk about attachments.

Sometimes we'll use the word fetters, but to hardly know, people

hardly know what that means. But bondage, but to be free of bondage, the internal bondage that

we carry. And what strikes me thinking about

this today is that of course anybody who is enslaved will want to be free.

There's a natural movement

in the hearts of everyone to not be restricted, not be limited, not be locked up, not be

free to, there's a movement out of slavery out of the lack of freedom it's I think

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