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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Welcome, welcome everybody. Can we turn down the volume just a tiny bit so I don't have to feel like I'm whispering. Let's see is this better if I'm speaking

in my regular voice. Oh, maybe that's a little bit too low. I'm sorry, Jim, this is hard to,

here we go okay great thank you

So tonight. I'd like to continue on the topic of questioning that I introduced last week, this idea of questioning as part of practice.

I want to expand on that a little bit and talk about how questioning is actually,

you know, in some ways we can consider it an expression of freedom. To ask is, you know, a sign that we're not locked in or stuck or somehow not even realizing that there could be an alternative. Or if maybe we are in a situation where we're just not allowed to

ask questions, whatever kind of situation that might be people in power,

sometimes like this, nope, don't ask any questions.

This is the way it is.

Maybe our parents say something like,

because I said so.

Just as the rationale,

like you don't get to really ask, but why?

Because I said so and that's enough.

Yeah, so this, even this whole notion of

be able to ask questions about anything or everything is this, maybe it's an assertion of a certain amount of freedom.

Certainly we don't think about that. Often we think that we're asking questions just because we want to

know the answer. But what if we start to think about it as an expression of freedom and that this path of course is leading to

greater and greater freedom, greater and greater peace and ease and well-being and it's and the all along the path is what's near is at the end. There's more and more

well-being, there's more and more peace, there's more and more freedom as we walk on this path or practice in this way. So naturally there's

more and more questions too. And so we can ask big questions.

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