Mindfulness:  A Practical Guide to Awakening, Joseph Goldstein, 2013

Goldstein, one of the founders of the Insight Meditation Center in Barre and Cambridge, has written a big and important book.  At over 400 pages, it goes into details on the “many lists and categories” in the Buddha’s teachings that lead to awakening, knowledge, and right living.  From the five hindrances, the five aggregates the four ways to establish awareness, the seven stages of awakening, the Four Noble Truths, and the Eightfold Path, Goldstein quotes the Buddha and his teachers from his retreats in India and Burma to help the reader understand how meditation and mindfulness are but tools to access the awakening and awareness of right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.  The merging of the morality and the mindfulness is the goal and the understanding of non-self, impermanence, and suffering/craving.  Excellent book for someone who wants to go deeper into the basis and mechanics of mindfulness.