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

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So thank you for those of you chatting about the exercise.

And I'll read more of them after I finish now.

So welcome to this next talk on samadhi.

And for this week, we're going to be looking at something that commonly English is called

access concentration, or access samadhi. Though the word access,

never really quite sat well with, sits well with me. The word in Pali, Upachara,

my understanding it means something more closely to approach,

approaching. Chara means to wonder and to wonder towards something. And based on that meditation we just did, the idea that attention has a little bit of wandering, soft, roaming, but it's roaming towards a particular place. It's moving

towards something. When I think of access concentration, I think of like there's a door I have to go through.

But if I think of approached, then wondering towards approaching, then it's more of a kind of a gentle movement, like a river flowing, that or I'm in

the groove of something, and now I'm gliding along, I'm in the slide, sliding, I'm approaching.

And we're approaching a shift that will happen when the samadhi kind of clicks in, when the samadhi kind of

becomes kind of envelopes us or begins to have a life of its own in a sense.

When we don't have to make as much effort.

It's not so much dependent on us practicing,

but it's more that we're being practiced at some point.

But we're approaching this point where the shift begins to happen.

And there's a number of things that begin coming together in this stage, the stage called

the approach.

And one of them is that we get in the kind of in the rhythm or in the sense of ease with

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