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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So, hello, and welcome to this be the last talk on the Samadhi series.

And the idea is that

when I'll be away for three weeks,

we have guests coming to replace me.

And then when I come back,

in a sense I'll do the second part of this series, which will switch to Vipasana, to the clear seeing, to insight. And the reason for that, or how this works, is that there's a traditional Buddhist

idea that the purpose of samadhi, to go into the Janhas or deep concentrated states,

is for the purpose of that at some point coming into a capacity for deep insight, deep seeing.

There's something about the clarity of mind and the softness of the mind,

the readiness, malleability of the mind in deep states of meditation, that predisposes it to both

see clearly, but more importantly, to have the mind let go of any clinging which is not needed.

And I say it that way, that's not needed,

so that's a little bit more welcoming this idea of letting go.

And it's a little bit of a, I don't know,

a trick in that there is no clinging that's needed.

But until you know that, don't worry about it.

If it's not needed, if you see that, let it go, let it go, let it go. But the ability to let go, the ability to relax, the ability to calm the overactivated mind is part of what samadhi helps us to do.

And so samadhi in Buddhism is not an end to itself, but is a means to discovering

the end of suffering. It means to let go of what often is impossible to understand how to let go of. There's feelings of

distress, dismay, depression, sadness, all kinds of deep emotional pain that people carry. That it's

...