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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So good morning and welcome to this series on Samadhi.

And I think we're now on the 57th, the 58th to talk,

and discussing the fourth genre.

And to step back to have a little bit of a different orientation to understanding this whole process of samadhi

is that sometimes it's said to be a continuous process of letting go, that that's what's required in detaining a deep samadhi.

Another way that similar is that samadhi has a lot to do with relaxing or letting up on

all the ways in which attention has been hijacked or harnessed into our attachments, into pressure,

into subtle ways that the mind grabs onto or pushes along. It's thoughts. Subtle ways in which

we're reacting to our feelings and how we are.

Subtle ways, maybe not so subtle ways in which we're very involved in, with kind of pressure or contraction or tightness or leaning into whatever attention is directed towards.

And if it's directed towards thinking, there can be a lot of it.

And so that process of becoming sensitive to that holding, that pressure, that push, that preoccupation

around anything at all, the way attention, you know, zeroes in. And sometimes it's innocent

enough. If you've lost your keys,

then there's some part of the mind, you know,

is kind of now intent on finding the keys, looking for the keys.

And there might be a subtle kind of tautness,

intentionality in the mind.

Or there might be fear and anxiety and desperation that now the mind has really gotten tight, really gotten narrow, the holding on.

There can be a healthy tautness, healthy kind of engagement,

...