Joseph Goldstein explores gradual cultivation, highlighting that even if we are suddenly awakened, we still must have an ongoing practice to work with hindrances and ingrained habits.

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/insighthour and get on your way to being your best self.

This week on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein discusses:

• The areas of life where clinging shows up most
• How clinging to sensory pleasures is so embedded in our culture
• Lightening up for enlightenment and not taking ourselves so seriously
• How a sense of humor can benefit our practice
• Unhelpful attachment to view and opinion
• The unity of clarity and emptiness (self-existing wakefulness)
• The Buddhist meaning of unborn/unformed
• Uprooting of the view of self with the understanding that there is still more work to do
• Having an ongoing, gradual cultivation of skillful means

This episode was originally published on Dharmaseed and recorded at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, a non-profit organization founded by renowned meditation teachers Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg to integrate Buddhist study and practice.

“Very often, people can have genuine realization and have a really deep understanding, and then get attached to that as if everything is done. So very often these folks can get engaged in skillful behavior, thinking it’s all coming from their deep realization, it’s really coming from all the work that still needs to be done.” –Joseph Goldstein

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Continuing his exploration of selflessness, Joseph Goldstein helps listeners live in the balance of both relative and ultimate truth.

This episode is a continuation of a talk that started in episode 259, "Selflessness, Dukkha, and Freedom."

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/insighthour and get on your way to being your best self.

This time on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein discusses:

• The impersonal nature of experiencing peace
• Seeing with consciousness rather than with the subjective mind
• Reframing the language of experience with a passive voice
• Being fully present in the moment without identification
• Understanding death and dying as the natural flow of impermanence
• Having an easeful mind even when the body is afflicted
• Understanding both relative and ultimate truth
• The wonderful and joyful practice of generosity

This episode was recorded at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and originally published on Dharmaseed

“We work to understand the dynamics of our conventional reality and all the challenges of it, even as we understand the essential selfless nature of it all. This is really the heart of a mature spiritual practice, the union of these two, not the separation." –Joseph Goldstein

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Unpacking the Buddha’s notions of self and nonself, transience and suffering, Joseph Goldstein leads listeners into the heart of liberation.

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/insighthour and get on your way to being your best self.

This time on Insight Hour, Joseph Goldstein illuminates:

• Why the Buddha paid so much attention to the concept of self
• How a felt sense of self traps us in desire and attachment
• Seeing the term ‘self’ as a designation rather than something that exists in and of itself
• Slight adjustments to our language during practice: ‘the body breathes’ rather than ‘my breath’
• Using the template of The Five Aggregates to describe experience
• Genuine experiences of momentary peace as a peak into Nirvana
• Taking an interest into the landscapes of our own minds
• Transience and the way that things are always becoming otherwise
• The ungovernability of the mind, the body, and all aspects of reality
• How selflessness can lead to both Dukkha and freedom

This episode was recorded at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and originally published on Dharmaseed

"As long as we are caught up, identified, and entangled in the view of self, then we spend our lives defending it, gratifying it, grandiosing it, judging it; we have all these responses that come out of this felt sense of the self." –Joseph Goldstein

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.