Transcription
Today I would like to talk about the second jhāna, and weave into that, as usual, some things that apply much more generally to maybe any jhāna or jhāna practice in general. As I said at the beginning, the teachings will progress through the retreat at the pace that they do, dependent on a lot of factors: partly my medical appointments, and things like that. And it's highly unlikely that -- in fact, it's totally undesirable if your practice progresses at the same rate. So at some point, you're going to coincide, and you may have already done that, or maybe later, but what we're really interested in is your pace. That's really, really important. What's your playground? What's your pace? When is it a maturing or transition time, etc.?
Let me read again -- I was very rushed through when I first read them -- the Buddha's description of the second jhāna, of which, again, there are two. There's a simile, and there's a sort of more technical-sounding one. Okay, so again:
A practitioner, with the subsiding of [listen to these interesting translations] thinking and pondering [again, there's that vitakka-vicāra, how different this translation is from the usual, or more common these days -- 'initial and sustained application'; it's really the vitakka-vicārānaṃ vūpasamā in Pali, so it's like, this is a fine translation], by gaining inner tranquillity and unity of mind, reaches and remains in the second jhāna, which is free from thinking and pondering, born of concentration, and filled with delight and happiness.[1]
So again, filled with pīti and sukha, actually, so this person's translating pīti as 'delight.' Actually, I think maybe even the other way around -- doesn't matter. It's:
With the subsiding of vitakka-vicāra, by gaining inner tranquillity and unity of mind, reaches and remains in the second jhāna, which is characterized by, it's free from thinking and pondering [free from vitakka and vicāra], born of concentration, and filled with pīti and sukha.
I will read another translation, just so you get a sense. So he's described the practitioner going through the first jhāna, and then said:
Furthermore [more than that], with the stilling of directed and evaluation [again, so here's quite a different translation of vitakka and vicāra -- with the stilling of vitakka and vicāra, directed thought and evaluation -- however we're going to translate vitakka and vicāra], she enters and remains in the second jhāna: rapture and pleasure [pīti and sukha, so again, let's just go with these words, pīti and sukha; I'm going to translate sukha as 'happiness,' and I'll come back to that] born of composure [that's interesting; the actual Pali word is samādhi, which the first person has translated as 'concentration,' and this person has translated as 'composure.' And as I said, I would translate samādhi as quite a broad term -- it's a unification, it's harmonization, it's the agreement of the elements of being, right? But different -- born of samādhi], a unification of awareness free from directed thought and evaluation [free of vitakka and vicāra], internal assurance. She permeates and pervades, suffuses and fills this very body with the rapture [with the pīti and sukha] born of composure [born of samādhi]. There is nothing of her entire body unpervaded by pīti and sukha born of samādhi.[2]
So there are a few other elements in here that we need to -- so basically, the vitakka and vicāra fade, and born of the samādhi is pīti and sukha, which is then spread. That's all we've got as a description. Couple of other things: that it's born of samādhi. So it's 'born of samādhi' is distinguishing it from the first jhāna, where the Buddha said it's 'born from withdrawal' from the hindrances, or 'seclusion' from the hindrances. So this is born of samādhi. Remember how rich that term samādhi is, how wide -- for me, at least; hopefully for you.
What's this 'unification of awareness'? The Pali is cetaso ekodibhāvaṃ. The citta -- cetaso -- unified or raised to oneness. It's unified. And then this word at the end, we'll come back to later: ajjhattaṃ sampasādanaṃ: 'internal assurance,' this person has. Sometimes you hear the word 'confidence,' 'internal confidence.' So we'll come back to that, actually, later.
That's what we have from the suttas. And then we have a gorgeous simile -- I find it gorgeous:
Just as a lake fed by a spring, with no inflow from east, west, north, or south, where the rain-god sends moderate showers from time to time, the water welling up from below, mingling with cool water, would suffuse, fill and irradiate that cool water, so that no part of the pool was untouched by it -- so, with this pīti and sukha born of samādhi, the practitioner so suffuses their body that no spot remains untouched.[3]
Remember, we're talking about a very hot climate where that kind of image is going to be super appealing, unlike Devon in December. [laughter] To me, that's a lovely, lovely image, and I feel very much, as you get more into the jhānas, some of these similes -- they actually seem more accurate than the more technical-sounding descriptions, which are open to all kinds of ambiguities over translations and terms, and what they might have meant at one historical period, and then another. So just to me, there's something much more accurate about the poetic translation than there is about what sounds more technical. And the kind of descriptions and languages, and there are these five factors, and there are these three factors, and we tend to think, "Oh, that must be the really accurate one." But you'll see how you do with it. See what you gravitate towards, what opens, what you learn as time goes on.
So these are the descriptions we have. They're pretty brief. Again, as I think I mentioned -- was it yesterday or another time? -- when the mind opens into a new realm, a new territory, a new level, it tends to experience that level as effortless at first. It's just, "Whoa!" We're suddenly not in Kansas any more. We're suddenly, "What is this?" And you're just going along with the ride, it feels like, and it's effortless and wonderful. There are always exceptions, but it tends to be that that's the case. Then, at times, after that -- after those first few experiences where it's all just effortlessly kind of happening, and you're almost just a bewitched witness of the whole experience -- then it might be that at times, the relationship with the second jhāna matures, so that at times, we're actually practising, we're conscious of, "It's not effortless any more. I need to actually practise tuning to this frequency of happiness," which at times may be super obvious and blow-your-socks-off remarkable, like "Wow!", and other times much more subtle, and maybe not so remarkable. I need to practise tuning to that and steadying my attention on what is essentially a more refined object. The sukha is more refined than the pīti.
As I mentioned, the jhānas are not primarily a spectrum of stronger and stronger concentration, "The eighth jhāna is invariably a state of more immovability of mind than the fourth jhāna or the seventh jhāna," or whatever -- that's not necessarily the case. That's not the primary thing that's changing it. It might happen that time, but it might just happen completely otherwise at different times. But rather, the jhānas are primarily a spectrum of ... [inaudible question from yogi] Increasing refinement, let's say. I'm aware there's a bit of ambiguity between the words 'subtlety' and 'refinement,' so let's choose the word 'refinement' for the way that this cloth is a lot more coarse and less refined than this cloth. The texture of it is much more refined. They're primarily a spectrum of deeper, of more and more refinement. They get more and more refined. Technically -- and we'll come back to this -- there's a reason for that. It's because they're also a spectrum of less and less fabrication. On the spectrum of the fabrication of perception -- if you've never heard that term before, I'll explain it in more detail later on. This is really, really central, and it's really, really important to understand that in general, I would say, in terms of understanding what the Dharma is, where we're going, what emptiness means, what dependent arising, what liberation means. This is a key concept.
The jhānas, too, map onto that very key central concept, because the jhānas, too, in their spectrum of more and more refinement, are also, you could say, places or areas on a spectrum of less and less fabrication. It's like this coarse cloth has almost like more material to it. It's thicker and denser. And this fine cloth has got less material to it. It's thinner, and there are more filaments. So we're actually fabricating less as we go deeper and deeper into jhānas. We may or may not be aware of that. But to become conscious of it, and to understand it, and to understand its implications, is huge, is massive. And in a way, I would say, we don't really understand what the jhānas are, really understand how they relate to insight practice, or how they integrate into the whole practice, and we don't really understand what we're doing when we're practising 'concentration' -- we don't really understand that until we understand this and its relation to the whole notion of the fabrication of perception. One fabricates more or less at different times. How? How does that happen? And what happens when we fabricate more or less? We will come back to that.
However, having said all that, in the second jhāna, we've just got "born of samādhi." So I think it's true to say that usually, a state of second jhāna is an improvement of concentration on the first jhāna -- usually. But that samādhi -- again, it's a wider word: unification, harmonization, etc., a wider word than it usually gets translated, as just 'concentration,' I would say.
[13:57] So it may be that a practitioner is still, at this point, staying with their breath. The breath is the primary object, and the pīti has come up, and they're really mixing that with the breath, and getting into that. And then the happiness comes up, and one can, if one wants, stay with the breath. Or the mettā might be the base practice, and one can, if one wants, stay with the mettā. But what happens, or what should happen is they get mixed. It must feel at some point that I'm breathing happiness, or the breath has become happiness. Or the mettā has become happiness; I'm radiating out sukha and happiness. Or the body has become happiness. The Buddha says: "No spot, no part of the body left unpervaded by this sukha and pīti."[4]
Now, what I meant by saying what I just said, you have the option of keeping with the breath, if that's your base practice, and you want to, and that's what helps, or keeping with the mettā. But it should integrate. The sense of the base practice objects, the mettā or the breath, should completely integrate with the happiness. Like I said, they just become happiness. Or you can, like I described with the first jhāna, you can make the happiness the primary object, and what you're primarily paying attention to. And then the breath or the mettā may support that a little bit, or it's just gone. You're really not concerned with it. And you have a bodily -- we'll come back to this -- a body-sense of happiness, an emotional sense of happiness, and that's what you're concentrating on.
[15:50] I think I threw this out already -- if we were just all to take a sort of school trip to Newton Abbot, and each one of us were to stop someone on the street and say, "Think of something that makes you happy, and then, can you concentrate on that happiness?", I think most people would just be baffled, and it would feel impossible or very, very difficult. So for most us, actually, happiness, as an object to focus on and to steady the mind to, and to tune to, is actually something we never do, and we wouldn't know how to do, and we wouldn't be able to do. So we're training that. We have to train that. We're not, as I said, concentrating so much on a spatial point. We're concentrating, if you like, on that frequency or that bandwidth of frequencies which is happiness. That's really what we're doing. Within that, or within our intention to do that, and our playing with that, there may be times when the attention is really steady and really focusing on a spatial point. But that spatial point is happiness, or it's the centre of the happiness. So again, what we're really doing is focusing on the happiness, and that's central, rather than thinking of concentration as a focus on a spatial point. It may be, at times, that that's what's helpful. And at other times, that's not what's helpful; we let go of the sense of the spatial point being so important. And it's the frequency.
Okay, so this word sukha in Pali -- it's an emotional quality, the emotion of happiness. And again, I mean that word in quite a broad way. So it's technically, in Buddhist psychology, it's a citta quality. It's a quality of the heart and mind. However, it's also physical, and this we really want to emphasize. You feel it as much in the body, and you need to feel it in the body. This is why, partly, the person in Newton Abbot (or wherever we're going) won't be able to do it, because it's just an extremely ephemeral, extremely wispy mental quality. They can't locate it in their body. So feeling it in the body, pervading the body with it is exactly, partly, what enables us to really get into it, and really stabilize with it.
So when I say 'in the body,' I mean in the energy body, in the whole space, in the vibration-tone. It becomes happiness. The vibration-tone of the energy body space becomes happiness. So at the beginning, at first, when you open to this level -- either the second jhāna or just the emergence of the sukha -- identifying it as an emotion is, for most people, actually quite a crucial distinction to make: "Ah, the pīti is a primarily physical quality. The sukha is an emotion." Just making that distinction -- although, because of what I just said, it's actually not quite true; they're both energy body vibrations; they're different energy body vibrations -- but it will really help you make the distinction, get a sense of the different playgrounds, get a sense of the territory, and actually build the whole thing, if you recognize it and feel it as an emotional quality as well. That's what's going to really start to distinguish it from the pīti. So that identifying it as an emotion, an emotional quality versus a primarily physical quality, which the pīti -- we could regard the pīti as*,* and the pīti isn't just that either.
So again, it's not this black and white, but sometimes making things black and white is actually really helpful, at a certain stage, to make things clearer. Is it the ultimate truth? Definitely not. But just making that division at first is really helpful. It will help to draw it out of the mix, to draw out that emotional quality of sukha from the mix: "Ah, this is the emotion. Ah, that's what I'm paying attention to," at first. And to begin to distinguish: "This is pīti. This is sukha. Aha!" And you really need to taste it, which really means feel it in the body, and feel the different qualities and enjoy them several, you know, quite a few times, perhaps, to really get used to this.
At first it might be very, very obvious. If the second jhāna just explodes out of the first, it's very obvious: "I'm in a completely different territory now." But again, as time goes on, there might like, "Hold on a minute. Where's the division here?" So this distinguishing, this making discernments, is actually really [key], because again, what we're talking about when I emphasize sensitivity, attunement, discernment -- that's all really key, not just to jhāna practice (what we said right at the beginning), [but also] to the quality of your relationship with your own emotions, and your wisdom with your own emotions, your sensitivity to all kinds of things in life, your capacity in relationship, the skill you can work with in emptiness practice, in soulmaking practice, in brahmavihāra practice. That's why we emphasized it.
I would say (or rather, a lot of people say, and I agree with them) that, as the Buddha says, pīti and sukha are both present in the first jhāna, and they're both present in the second jhāna. But what's characteristic of the first jhāna is that the pīti is to the fore. We're kind of entranced by that more, and maybe there's more of it in the mix. And then in the second jhāna, that flips, and the sukha becomes prominent over the pīti. The pīti is still there, but the sukha becomes prominent. And the sukha is our primary nimitta, whereas in the first jhāna, the pīti was the primary nimitta.
So Keren asked me, "Is that ...? That's not in the Pali Canon." No, I've never seen it in the Pali Canon. I mean, it might be somewhere. I very much doubt it. I don't think so. Maybe it's in a commentary somewhere. I'm not sure. So when I say that, I'm speaking from the teachers that I have really trusted, and who have taught me jhāna practice, or from whom I've learnt jhāna practice, and from my own experience. Just so that's pretty clear. Is it in the Pali Canon? Don't think so. We get these very brief descriptions; as we go into the further jhānas, the descriptions are even briefer, so we have to somehow discern and get a sense of what the territory is.
But as I said -- I think I've already said it twice, and I'll say it once more -- back to this distinguishing between pīti and sukha, really making that distinction: what can happen if we don't is this kind of stagnation. It's the discernment that takes us deeper. It's the sensitivity that takes us deeper on the whole path, deeper on the jhāna path in a full way. And again, I know people, I know practitioners who sit a lot, etc., did sit a lot, put a lot of work in, and they reach a kind of place that's sort of around this area, and it's a kind of a mix. And either they do not take the instruction, or they do not bother to make the differentiation. And it's twenty years later, and they're still pretty much hovering around in the same kind of soup. You know, that might be completely fine with them, or they might want something different. But they're not going to open up anywhere deeper unless they make the distinctions, the discriminations, the subtle discriminations. It's nice, where they are, and they can sit for quite a while, etc., but it hasn't gone anywhere, and not much even new insights. So it doesn't just apply to the depth of samādhi practice; it applies to the insight practice as well. That all got stagnated as well. I don't know why they didn't want to make the discernment. Maybe it was -- I don't know. Why do people ...? It's a whole other question.
Sometimes, though, they're a mix. The pīti and the sukha are mixed, and it's hard to tell at the beginning. So if you're new to the second jhāna, there will be times when, "Well, I'm not quite sure." But generally speaking, we want to be clear: "This is pīti, and this is sukha." Generally speaking, they do kind of separate like that. But there will be times when it's actually quite hard to tell.
What all that means is that part of the work and/or play, depending on your favourite word there, part of the work and play at this stage is exactly that. That's part of your job. Can I really get used to what the differences are? Can I make the discriminations? That's really part of the work.
So how does the second jhāna arise? Well, what colour is an unripe mango? Is it green? What colour is a ripe mango? That kind of yellow-red. Yeah? [inaudible response from yogi] But let's say it's more yellow-red. Yeah? Is that okay? So one of my teachers, Ajaan Geoff, used to say: "Don't take a green, unripe mango and paint it yellow-red, and then call that a ripe mango."[5] Don't take your practice, wherever it is, and try and do some stuff, and call that the second jhāna. Don't take your first jhāna and push it or put pressure on it, or just do something that you're kind of forcing a mango to ripen. So his approach was very much, like, these things will ripen in their own time, and if you do it that way, rather than kind of jumping the gun or forcing anything, or wanting to achieve something, or having some kind of timetable, it will be much, much more fruitful -- again, generally speaking. There are all kinds of exceptions, and I'll come back to some of those exceptions.
So again, remember when we talked about pīti, we said, generally speaking, you could say there are two ways that pīti arises. (1) One is, I take an object -- maybe it's a point in the abdomen or the nostrils if it's the breath, maybe I take the mettā, whatever it is. And I just work with that, work with that, work with that. I do not put up with the hindrances when they come. I really try and work with the hindrances, and I have this background awareness, and I play with this idea of more intense attention, less intense attention, delicacy of attention, subtlizing the attention. If I do all that, those four things, then the way the pīti tends to arise is sudden and eruptive and quite strong, after (for most people) quite a while. So that's good.
(2) And then there's another way, which is taking the energy body experience from the beginning, and actually just kind of tending to the little ember of well-being there, fanning it when it needs fanning, protecting it when it needs protection from the winds, etc. -- building, in a way, coaxing it to become more of a campfire, the pīti. But that needs work and play: playing with the modes of attention, playing with kind of very intense probing at times, or intense attention, intense opening, radical opening, receiving, etc. So I have to be intense. At times, at least, I have to be intense with how I'm coaxing this ember. Sometimes, let's say, my intention and my attention and my whole work and play has to be quite intense -- without putting pressure or a demand on it. So that's also part of the whole deal.
[28:34] When we get to the second jhāna, this happiness, it might be the case, as I said, that it probably relies more on its arising in a way that's helpful. It probably relies more on a really very gratifying relationship with the pīti. The pīti -- one is really into it and really enjoying it. So if you're sort of, "The pīti's okay, and it's kind of ... eh, it's okay," and then a bit like, "Maybe the second jhāna would be better," that goes back to the foolish, inexperienced cow.[6] Remember that? It means then, that again, with the pīti that's arisen, I have to work and play with that, in these ways. I actually have to shape it. I need to really take care of it and take care of my relationship to it. The sukha of the second jhāna will only arise when I do that.
So if it matures, if the sukha of the second jhāna matures organically like this mango, it emerges through working and playing with the pīti, and through the pīti feeling really lovely, really pleasurable, really enjoyable, then the sukha emerges in a much clearer way. It's like, "Whoa, okay, this really is something else now. Now this is really something quite extraordinary. And this is clearly what that word sukha means. It's clearly the second jhāna," whatever, depending on where you end up.
After that, to say in different words what I said earlier, after a few times of that -- in other words, after quite a bit of experience with the second jhāna, then you might find yourself needing to go back, and you can work with a much more subtle and unremarkable sukha and build it up, the way we built up the ember of well-being into pīti. So does this make sense, what I'm saying? It's like, if I've got a pīti that's not that great, then my chances of taking a happiness that's, "Yeah, you know, it's okay," and building it into the second jhāna are probably -- probably; there are always exceptions, and I'd be really interested, if there are, actually, to hear back, just for teaching purposes -- but it's more likely that the happiness that comes when the pīti wasn't that remarkable, and then the sukha is not that remarkable ... it will be hard to get that to feel really gratifying, and like, "This is really something," versus the pīti that can arise, with patience and time, from just working with the ember in the energy body. Can be. Does this make sense? The distinction? Not quite. Okay.
With the pīti, we can go two ways: (1) I take an object. I stick with it, but I have to be careful how I'm sticking with it -- be intense, and watch it, be subtle with the attention, and delicacy, and all that. I can do that. Or (2) I can just take the ember of well-being in the energy body and build it and build it and build it. So basically I can get either of two ways to a pīti that's really nice.
When you come to the second jhāna, I'm just wondering whether the probability of coming to a sukha (which is characteristic of the second jhāna) that's really nice is -- it's not an equal probability. I can't start from a happiness that's not really that gratifying, especially if that was built on a pīti that never got really that gratifying. It's probably possible, but at first it's unlikely. At the pīti, I have to get really into the pīti. I have to really get that fine, really enjoy it. And then it's more likely to succeed. After a lot of experience with the sukha in the second jhāna, then you can take a really quite unremarkable happiness, and you're already quite skilled, and it's already quite familiar, and that can grow. Yeah? I'm sure I could have said that more elegantly.
Okay, so having said all that, sometimes what happens, sometimes what I encounter in teaching is someone whose first jhāna is just great, and they're getting all the elements of mastery, so it's usually the case, as a person really starts to gain those elements of mastery through practice with the first jhāna, that the second jhāna is already kind of intruding, emerging, showing itself. That's usually the case. Occasionally, or sometimes (I don't know, can't remember; I don't know what proportion of times), someone's first jhāna -- they're really enjoying it, they're really into it, and there are some of those elements of mastery, but the second jhāna is not showing. It's not emerging, etc.
This is not how Ajaan Geoff would teach this -- you never paint that mango at all, or you never force a ripening. I would say sometimes there are some things that you could do, little tricks you can play with.
(1) One is: **here's the *pīti. ***I'm really used to it. I'm really into it. It's going great. Right now, it's going great. Generally, I'm into it, I've practised with it, etc. I've gotten used to all that, all the mastery, or a lot of the mastery. And then, right now, it's going great in this sitting, walking, standing, whatever it is. And then, when it's going great, I can just drop a question, like just a really light question: "What is the emotion right now? What's the emotion I'm feeling right now?" And the answer should be: "Happiness." It should be sukha. So that's one possibility.
(2) A second possibility: again, here it is, going quite well. Again, this is something that it doesn't need to be going well; after a while, after a lot of practice, it doesn't need to be going well for this one to work. But here, let's say, at the beginning, when it's not quite happening, here I am, and I drop in the word, whichever word I prefer, a whisper, a grain of magic alchemical chemical, just drop it in, a drop into the citta: "happiness," or "joy," or "sukha," or whatever word it is that you prefer. As I said, the mind goes deeper in samādhi, becomes more and more suggestive, and potently so. More and more sensitive the mind becomes, sensitive to suggestion, sensitive, becomes more malleable in all kinds of ways. So that would be a second.
(3) Another funny thing you can try is, you've probably noticed that most often, pīti tends to flow upwards in the body. One feels a sort of upward current of it. And what you can try sometimes is, just feel that upward current -- again, this is when you're really used to it, and it's great, and you're enjoying it. And then the upward current -- imagine it shooting out the top of your head, like a fountain, like a spout of a fountain. The water comes out the top of your head, and then, like a fountain, it falls back down. Just imagine that. See what happens.
(4) A fourth possibility. I'm not sure how much one might want to try this. We'll see. It may well be very useful for some people at some times. Again, here's the pīti. It's going well. I'm into my practice right now. And just the memory, introduce -- again very subtle, just the memory of something that makes you happy, or a happiness. Just like a little tincture, a little drop of tincture into the citta, the memory of a happiness. While the pīti is there, drop that in.
These are all little tricks. In a way, the safest gamble is to let something mature, and just get really, really into the pīti. Find that enjoyment. Find that intensity of relationship with the pīti. So don't confuse intensity with this kind of forward probing, narrowing. That's one form of intensity. Another form is, how intensely am I opening? But an intense and intensely enjoyable relationship with the pīti, and it matures out of that in time. If not, or if you feel like, "Well, I'm kind of ...", or if the teacher says, "Well, kind of ...", you know, maybe you want to try one of those tricks.
If you're playing enough, you will discover your own tricks, at this point, at this threshold, at this border between the first and second jhāna. You should discover your own tricks, and come and share them with us. All kinds of things are possible. Eventually you won't need any tricks, because hopefully, you'll have mastery of the second jhāna, which means you just have the subtle intention for the second jhāna or for the sukha to arise, and it goes there. And all the tricks -- it's like, I can't even remember the tricks I've learnt, I used to play with. This was all I could come up with, because I couldn't remember. So after while, one just doesn't need them. It's just from intention. But there is that point of learning new territory, where you will be like, "Well, it's gone there before. And how do I get it back?" Or if it needs a nudging.
Okay, so going back to something I mentioned earlier, there's this phrase there, and in Pali it's vitakka-vicārānaṃ vūpasamā, which means something like, "With the subsiding, with the allaying, with the cessation, with the calming of" -- vitakka and vicāra are what? Thinking, thinking about, initial and sustained application. That begins to not make much sense at this point. So what is that? He refers to that as part -- that's characteristic here. Vicāra, that word, also has a particular meaning sometimes. So it's used as a pair; vitakka-vicāra just means 'thinking.' Vicāra has a particular meaning of 'discursive thought.' What I mean by that is the mind getting hooked on a thought and following a thought, for more than one moment. So this thought leads to that thought, or I'm following a train of thought. This is discursive thinking. So 'discursive' in English comes from the Latin currere, which means 'to run, to move, to move fastly.' The mind is hooked and it's moved. The mind is moved with a thought. One thought follows another. So when we reason, "This, therefore that, therefore the next thing," that's also, in English, discursive thought. That's also one of the meanings of discursive thought. It's a consequential movement of thought.
I would say that if you're careful enough in your attention, and if you're sensitive enough in your attention, you will notice, in the second jhāna, that it may be that thought arises at times. This citta, which has infinite depth and subtlety -- it may be that thought arises at times, but what there isn't in the second jhāna is any being hooked to a thought. The mind is not then moved off on a thought. One thought does not lead to a second thought: "This follows that, or I was thinking this, and then ..." Or the kind of thought that arises is probably very, very wispy, very, very subtle; it's not extended in time either.
So there's a larger point here, I think, just about, in addition to mapping out what actually is the range of experience of the second jhāna. And there's a larger, perhaps even equally important point: what is it to have a thought? We use that word so much. "I'm thinking," or "There was thought," or "There wasn't thought." I would say the whole idea of thought, the whole experience of thought has an enormous range to it: the mind shouting something, and completely lost in a tangle of shouting at itself or whatever it is, and very coarse thoughts, to extremely, extremely subtle -- the kind of subtlety that most people wouldn't even notice. And we're not used to, we're not even aware that, "Oh, there might be this level there." So an invitation, alongside all this, to open up that investigation, to pay attention and notice: what do we mean when we say 'thought'? And what does it mean when the mind gets quiet? Is it completely quiet? Is it quiet at a certain level? What kind of thoughts have gone? What kind of relationship with thought has gone?
What has gone is the being hooked onto a thought, and one thought hooking us to the next, one thought being hooked to the next. That's gone, and also gross thought has gone. Again, this is the sort of thing -- it may take a while to notice this. And I really mean, again, this is also why I keep -- sorry to anyone who doesn't like this, but -- why subtlety and sensitivity are such an important part, for me, in the teaching. One begins to realize, "Oh, these things are not so black and white." And there's way more subtlety of range for most phenomena than we tend to realize at first, and we can develop our sensitivity, and get aware of that range of subtlety. And that pays enormous dividends. All this business about "What is thought?" actually has huge implications for very, very deep insight. [43:17] People talk about non-conceptual awareness, and "The mind was completely non-conceptual," etc. What's the difference between a conception and a thought? And does a conception have to be verbal? Does a thought have to be verbal? I need to notice all this for the really deep end of insight, when you're talking about really deep unfabricating, or understandings of emptiness, and the way certain words are used in texts and stuff like that. But we won't talk about that now.
So like I said, it may take a while to notice this. In a way, what happens with the samādhi of the second jhāna is: partly what enables us or should enable us to do this is to begin to notice this a little bit. But as I said (whenever it was), usually, at first, when the mind enters a new level, it's like a dam bursting, and the water is just gushing, and you're just going along for this water ride. And it just seems like there's no thought happening. In time, it's like your eyes getting used to a darkened room. You see, "Ohhh, hold on a minute. There are some things here I didn't notice at first." But we're talking about something very, very subtle, and it's a whole different relationship, a whole different level of thought. So you don't need to go -- well, let's leave that.
But this encouragement, I said: how wise would it be to use my perception of the presence or absence of thought as a kind of measurement of where I am in samādhi? And I keep kind of glancing there, "Has it stopped thinking yet?" I don't think that will very helpful or very wise at all. And given (A) the confusion of what vitakka and vicāra means, and (B) the subtlety of the range of what thinking might be, I can't see that much value in it. You will notice something in relation to thought if you're really getting into this. So don't make that the primary criterion.
I would like to say, as I said before: each jhāna has a primary nimitta. And the second jhāna, the primary nimitta is sukha. That's the thing that we're really making primary, really getting into, and we're really taking care of, and we're really opening our relationship with, etc., and getting into. So there's what's significant in practice, but why is that significant? Why are we making that the significant thing in practice? There may be -- I would be very surprised if there aren't -- people out there with the idea that the most significant thing about the second jhāna is the quieting, the stilling of thought. I don't know. Maybe there are.
Again, we have to think: why do I choose this, to make this an emphasis over that? Of all the things I could emphasize in practice right now, of all the things I could make a priority, why this and not that? Or why that and not this? Remember we were talking about this? How I think about samādhi, and how I relate to samādhi in the present moment, is related to my big view.
So we apply that here. Here's this bag of little factors. Which is the most significant one? And why? I'm going to choose the sukha as the most significant one. Maybe there's someone who chooses the less thought as the significant one. I would say the quietening of thought is not the most significant or transformative aspect or factor. It's actually an absence of a factor here, isn't it? It's the absence of two factors that were present in the first jhāna. I would say that's not the most transformative factor or aspect of the second jhāna. I would say happiness is. And it's the happiness, it's the sukha, it's the range of happiness, it's the remarkability of that happiness, it's the fact that it comes pretty much independent of someone needing to praise me, or some sense pleasure or something -- these are the things that transform, if and only if I really marinate in it, and I really drink it, lots and lots of times, for a long time. Then that happiness is really, really going to make a difference in one's life, a huge difference as a resource (we've talked about this before), tremendous resource.
Just imagine several hours a day, just drinking that kind of happiness, that depth of happiness, that beauty of happiness -- even half an hour a day, whatever it is. Or just after a while, just knowing it's there, and that you can access it if you want to. The sense of what's possible -- this is also really transformed by the tasting of that happiness. One's ability to let go -- so that's part of the function of a resource in Dharma. This lovely, lovely feeling means it doesn't so much matter how much money I have, or this or that, if I get famous, if I get rich, if the food is nice, where I'm staying, or not nice, or pleasant. It's completely relativized by that kind of experience. So one's ability to let go is made much more vast, much more steady, much more profound, much more wide-reaching because of the happiness. And it's a happiness, as I said, that's pretty much independent of what someone is giving me, or sense pleasures, etc. It's massive, the difference -- only if we marinate, for a long period of time, with the happiness as what I'm drinking: I'm drinking, I'm drinking, I'm drinking. I'm drinking that, slaking the thirst for what we're really looking for [when] chasing the sense pleasures or the praise, or whatever it is.
I'm going to leave Soulmaking Dharma and sensing with soul completely out of this conversation for now, because some of you know that that gets a lot more interesting, and there's a lot more to say there. But I'm just leaving it out for now, not to complicate things.
If, though, I decide to say or to take, "Oh, no, it's the quietening of thought -- that's the most significant thing about second jhāna," my question would be: why? Why do you think that's [most significant], and can you explain how that fits into and makes more sense in a bigger picture? Is it that you believe that when the mind is free of thought, it's 'seeing things as they really are,' or revealing, it's thought that is the problem, and the thought creates this kind of smokescreen in front of reality or 'what is,' or whatever language? How does it fit? What actually is most significant, and why? If I'm choosing to emphasize this, or if a person's choosing to emphasize that, why is that significant? And how is that significant (A) for jhāna practice, (B) for what it's going to deliver, and (C) in the whole path?
Sometimes what happens in practice is that -- again, I don't know the figures of how common this is, but I've certainly encountered it quite a few times -- a person is in the first jhāna, great, and then they just completely leapfrog the second jhāna and end up in the third jhāna. That's the next thing that just emerges by itself. So that's quite an interesting thing. Again, maybe we have to think back to: where are we trying to go? And this way of setting up, we want, eventually, to have mastery of the second jhāna too. Then it will be a question of, okay, do we need stop now and go back, or should we let the third mature, really get into that, and then go back? It's possible.
But it may also skip, and we had this with Joel's question[7] -- well, it wasn't exactly that question, but the possibility of it skipping or moving from the first jhāna to a peacefulness that is not really akin to the third jhāna. It's peaceful, it's relatively still, there's some equanimity there, it's certainly not unpleasant -- but it's not really the third jhāna. So again, partly depends on background practice, partly depends on one's psychological patterns. For some people, there's a kind of resistance to a sort of intense happiness, for whatever reasons, or however that came to be, as a sort of karmic formation or saṅkhāra. So sometimes that needs a little unpacking, or the relationship with happiness and sort of bubbly happiness needs a little looking at. But eventually we want to tick them all off, in terms of mastery.
[53:27] We could say that each jhāna kind of delivers its particular insight. We could say something like that, but more accurately, we could say each jhāna delivers something particular in relation to the ability to let go*.* And that's, anyway, what I would translate 'insight' as. Insight is, has to be directly related with letting go. Insight is what allows letting go. So the first jhāna, people are different, whatever, but it might just be the fact that, like, "Wow! A whole other realm is possible." I think I said this already. Other states of consciousness, other dimensions are possible when the mind is not entangled. And just that knowledge, that firsthand, intimate experience, and the way, the intensity with which it impresses on consciousness as something completely different than we have experienced before -- that makes a big difference for a lot of people. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people, it will.
With the second jhāna, it's related to this happiness, I think. There is, like I said, in the Buddha's very short description, there are just two words there: ajjhattaṃ sampasādanaṃ. And it translates as something like 'internal confidence' or 'internal assurance.' But (I think I was talking about this with Juha last night) it's actually, to me, that the confidence could mean three things -- one of three things, or two or three of three things:
(1) It could mean, right then in that moment, because of the stability of the citta -- it's born out of samādhi -- and because of the stilling of thought and the sense of how integrated it is, it could be a confidence in the stability of the citta then. And that, instead of having to, like with the first jhāna, the soap mixer is doing it, quite active, and the vitakka and the vicāra, and I'm thinking, it's just kind of more still. And there's a kind of confidence from that, in the stability. Like, I'm confident that this is stable. Maybe.
(2) It could be a confidence that has more to do with the discovery, like I said, of such a profound and fulfilling happiness, that doesn't seem -- let's say -- certainly not primarily dependent on external conditions. Just knowing that, tasting it, drinking from it -- that's going to give one quite a bit of confidence in one's life. Do you get that? Yeah?
(3) Or it could be -- I don't actually know what it's referring to; it's just sort of there, hanging in a mid-sentence -- a confidence in the Dharma, and a confidence in one's self, in one's own ability to tread the path that the Buddha described. One really has a sense -- it's like, "Wow, here I am, 2,500 years later, experiencing these remarkable experiences that the Buddha described." And he's got them in a kind of spectrum. And then he describes this other stuff, and if I'm experiencing this, and it has such an intimate sense of "This really is what we're talking about," then one's confidence in the Dharma itself, and in one's ability to tread the path, gets you know, quite a support there. We say, "Well, maybe I can do more. If I can do this, I can do more, and all the way to liberation."
So I don't know which of those confidences it is, but confidence is part of the gift. And certainly the confidence of that resource. That's the one I would plump for as the primary one, but I think maybe they're all there. And certainly, actually, if I remember back, the confidence it gave me in the path, and in that I was actually walking this path, and that it was possible, and what the Buddha was talking about was really -- it made such an impact, much more impact than just being mindful, and being a little calmer, or whatever it is, or seeing impermanence and saying, "Oh, the Buddha talked about [impermanence]." It makes such an impact because of the beauty, and the depth, and the remarkability of the experience. So it really gave me a lot confidence in the path, and that I was on the path, and that I could do that, because look, I'm doing it! I feel it. But I think, probably, for me, the most important one is the discovery of this kind of happiness, that we have access to this kind of happiness. It's open to us, and it's not dependent on external conditions.
[58:32] So I mentioned earlier that (probably when we were talking about the first jhāna) each jhāna has a primary nimitta, in our language, and a secondary nimitta. And I think I just gave one [example] -- I'm not sure how many examples I gave -- of a secondary nimitta. In the first jhāna, the primary nimitta is pīti. In the second jhāna, the primary nimitta is sukha. But in the first jhāna, for example, or any jhāna, you could have a secondary nimitta of, say, a bright, white light in the mind, or a cloud of light -- that sort of thing. For some people it's aural. They hear a sound or sounds, or whatever it is. There can be different ones. Those two are probably the most common. But there are also other kinds of secondary nimitta, which are a little bit more, let's say, intrinsically important or valuable. And one of them -- it's quite common at this stage, the second jhāna, and then, in a way, even more, or differently so, let's say, in the third jhāna -- is that mettā is there. So sometimes, people are not doing a mettā practice. I'm just working on the breath, and now it's opened to second jhāna. Sometimes people have come to me and say, "I think the mettā is the primary thing, not the happiness." It's not, technically. It's the second, or rather it's a secondary nimitta. But it's very valuable, you know. So automatically, in a jhāna, there is mettā in it. It's kind of impossible to be in a jhāna and have ill-will or aversion, the opposite of mettā.
So it's more, again, back to, like, what will I become sensitive to? What can I pick up on? What's in the mix of frequencies here? And mettā -- especially noticeable, in different flavours, in the second and third jhānas. We can allow that. And sometimes, you can focus more on that. You can lean your emphasis more into the mettā there. You know, again, it's a dialler. Like, how much? Does it become completely primary? Does it become kind of 50/50? Does it become just in the background? And there can be, for a lot people, obviously, a lot of healing -- a lot of healing with the love that's there, and particularly when we talk about the third jhāna, but a lot of healing. But we need to be clear: what's the primary nimitta? And that's the sukha. That's the happiness. So not leaning too much and too often, too long, into the love, over the stretch of our practice.
Why would mettā come up at that point? Why would mettā reveal itself, do you think? [inaudible response from yogi] Yeah, so Wah is saying, because they're both unfabricated. So if I say that slightly differently, if that's okay: when we're in a jhāna, we're not fabricating -- so I'm introducing more of this conversation about fabrication, this teaching about fabrication. When we're in a jhāna, and more and more so as we go down the jhānas, we're fabricating less and less self, and less and less of any kind of otherness, other person, or whatever, so that the duality between self and other gets less. And there's more sense of non-separation, more oneness. There's less like, "That's your space, and this is my space, thank you very much," or whatever it is -- or less judging, or less irritation. There's just a tendency -- self and other, less, both less fabricated, more non-separateness, less duality there, less polarity and all that, and all the difficulties. So in a way, there's a kind of natural arising of mettā because of that, because we feel less separate. Afterwards, even the mettā gets unfabricated, but we'll talk about that later, and that's when we get into equanimity and things. We'll talk about that later.
So, if you're practising in this territory, or when you're practising, and when this territory opens up for you, and it feels like, "Okay, now that's my playground, and that's what I'm really exploring," and you're really into it, and you've, let's say, just spent a standing period in the second jhāna, whatever it is. And it's time to end because you have to go to wash-up or whatever. So you know it's coming up, time to end, but it's still going well, and there's still energy there. Then you can spend a few minutes, if you want, just a few minutes at the end of the session, playing what I call two games: ping-pong and leapfrog.
For example, here I am in the second jhāna, and then I go, "Okay, well, let's go to just a normal consciousness." I'm leapfrogging the first jhāna, yeah? And then I go, maybe, "Okay, I'll go from there to one. And then I'll go from one back to two. And then I'll go from two back to one. And then I'll go to two again." Then I'm ping-ponging: one, two, one, two, one, two. I actually need to practise that transition both ways. So this is a minor part of our practice, but one of the elements of mastery. Can I really just move back and forth, at ease, between any jhāna and its adjacent jhāna? So if I'm practising two, can I go to one? And I haven't got to three yet. Then two, to one, to two, to one, to two. And it's all very light. It's all just a game.
And then I can also practise leapfrog. And here there are not too many leapfrog options, because we've only got zero, one, and two. You can go: two, to zero, to two. There aren't many leapfrog options. So you can just spend a few minutes of fun at the end of the sitting, playing ping-pong and leapfrog. And these are the elements of mastery, and again, I would like to encourage this. I wouldn't spend a whole sitting doing this, but they're part of learning the territory. They're part of the discrimination. They're part of the mastery. They're part of what makes the mind and the citta really malleable, and all that.
[1:05:08] So again, when we come to talking about mastery, etc., we have to think about pacing. Is it not ripe yet, to try this stuff? I'm just getting used to the second jhāna. It's like, it's too soon to try going for a walk in the second jhāna when I'm just getting used to it. I need to be really, really familiar. And when I do try all that stuff, like the whole practice and the whole tenor of the days here, we really want to encourage this kind of light playfulness. If I get too heavy and too tight and too pressured, it just squeezes -- basically, it squeezes the sukha out of things, and then there won't be the fruit. So the whole thing is very light, when it's time to play.
Okay, so I don't know where things are at in the Dharma world these days. I don't get out much. [laughter] It's actually true. But certainly, if I think back years ago, I don't know -- and maybe it's like, this is a question for you: who's heard from anyone at all, "Ooh, careful with the jhānas. There's a danger you might get attached." [laughter] Okay, so some years ago, this would've been everyone. It would've been the default. Like: "You don't really want to be ... (A) What's the point? It's not insight. And (B) there's really a danger there that you're going to get attached, and that's really pretty serious."
Like I said, it's interesting. (I'm not sure, maybe two-fifths of the people? I don't know. Anyway. Half of you put your hand up.) If you go back to what the Buddha said, what did he say about all this? There's one occasion where I can remember him talking about a monk who then was very ill, and because of the low energy, was not able to access whatever level of jhāna he was able before his illness, or when he was well. And this monk was, I don't know, having some dukkha about that. And the Buddha said, "It's anattā. It's anattā. You see it as anattā, both the jhāna and the self. So it's not-self."[8] So there's that kind of attachment.
But what the Buddha mostly said a few times is this. Talking about the pleasure of jhāna, and he said:
This [the pleasure of jhāna] is a pleasure I will allow myself.[9]
This is someone who talks about the Middle Way, you know, in terms of renunciation and senses, but basically, relative to most of us, he's a pretty extreme renunciate. This extreme renunciate says:
This is a pleasure that should not be feared. This is a pleasure that should be pursued and developed.[10]
And when he talks about sense pleasures, he talks about them as a pit of vipers, a pit of upward -- you know those elephant traps? Old hunter-gatherers, they've got these, like, big wooden stakes, you know, and the elephant, the mammoth is supposed to fall in? That's the sort of image he gives for sense pleasures. It looks like a nice piece of grass, or whatever it is there, and actually it's ...
So he talks about the jhānas in that way: "They're not to be feared. This is a pleasure I will allow myself. This pleasure should be pursued and developed." And he talks about sense pleasures -- there's a whole list of, like, pretty extreme negative similes for sense pleasures.[11]
Is it, or was it the case that somewhere along the line, modern Dharma teachings have kind of reversed that: reversed the Buddha's teachings in relation to these kinds of pleasures, sense pleasure and jhānic pleasure, and reversed the Buddha's concerns regarding sense pleasure, jhānic pleasure, and attachment to either? I find that really interesting -- I mean, historically and psychologically, and how that may have evolved, and why that may have evolved. And it may be changing. I mean, it's definitely changing, no question. It's changing.
But the Buddha's pretty clear about this. Again, I don't know if anyone is still unsure when the pīti, for example, feels very sexual or feels, like, orgasmic, and "Is that okay?", and "Surely, it's a bit much," or "It can't be right" -- just to remind you again of the Buddha's words that we've heard before, describing the jhāna, pīti, sukha: "Whole body pervaded, leaving no spot untouched."[12] So what he does not say is: "The whole body pervaded, except below the waist." [laughter] "And kind of above the middle of the thigh." He says, "whole body." So I think, again, this is one of these things. It's very easy -- it's changing now, but back X number of years, it was really quite a pervasive thing about this, "Ooh, you really shouldn't mess with the jhānas. There's a real danger that you'll get attached." Again, this [encouragement]: can we bring a little intelligence to this, a little questioning?
I mean, it seems to me that there are three kinds of attachment that are potential in jhānas, with jhānas: (1) One is attachment to the pleasure. That would be the most obvious one that people would think of, that you're going to get attached to the pleasure. So after -- I don't know how many years I've been teaching. Sixteen, seventeen years? Something like that. I honestly struggle to remember one person -- one person -- who had experienced an actual jhāna, let's say, more than ten times, who was attached to the pleasure there. I mean, maybe other people are encountering that sort of thing a lot, but I'm not. I don't think it's a problem for Westerners. I just wonder, what would that attachment look like? This someone who's attached to ... like, what, there's like a basement at Gaia House where it's a bit like an opium den ... [laughter] and these old yogis are there, just like ... [laughter] in the dark, and getting old, and not doing their work? [laughter] What do we actually think it would look like? Maybe what I think it would look like is, this person who's attached to the jhāna, they're unwilling to explore or investigate the difficult. I think it's extremely rare. I've never encountered it. I really, really sit here, struggling to think, "Okay, is there anyone I can think of?" I just can't. After about ten times of a jhāna, you're not going to be attached to the pleasure in any way -- or let's say, you're not going to be attached to the pleasure in any kind of problematic way. I can't, I just can't see that.
What I do see, and what we might recognize in ourselves much more commonly, is an attachment to looking at, obsessing with, prioritizing, attending to the difficult. And we mentioned this before. Sometimes that's just a psychological tendency. Sometimes it's a cultural tendency. Sometimes it's a Dharmically trained tendency. So when I have the option of giving equal attention, or attention an equal number of times to the pleasant, I find that I can't. I'm so trained. Immediately there's a contraction in the body, immediately there's some dukkha -- the mind goes there. And that's great. That willingness is great. But if it's not balanced with an equal freedom and willingness the other side, there's actually effectively an attachment.
And sometimes that attachment is ideological, because a person thinks: "Well, this is where the real stuff is, and what's happening in a jhāna is you're actually suppressing that or hiding it. But what's dukkha is what's real. Jhāna is a fabrication. Jhāna is a kind of construction or irreality. You're stepping out of touch, hiding from the real stuff." Again, we talk about how common attachments are, and how entrenched attachments are. That can be extremely common and extremely entrenched. So sometimes as a teacher over the years, I have to be really, really delicate and careful how I bring that sort of point up, and what I say to people, and how I might say it. So it could be an ideological attachment. It could just be habitual. It's just habitual -- again, just a tendency of personality, tendency of culture or upbringing, or tendency of Dharma practice.
And in a way, then, practising the jhānas, and doing that wholeheartedly, and being open-minded will actually remedy that opposite attachment (which doesn't even occur to people that it might be an attachment), because I'm practising them. Let's not buy into that view. Let's not get sucked into the difficult. Let's go here. I want to keep them both open, and I'm really able to do both. I'm really free to do both. That's where we want to get to: range, possibility.
(2) Second, what seems to me a second way of getting attached to the jhānas is to get all like, "Look at me, what I can do! I can reach this or that jhāna." And there's a kind of grandiosity of self-view. Again, I would say, let's say after twenty times of a certain jhāna, it should be really obvious to a person that it's not self making it happen. It arises, this jhāna, when the conditions are there. When the conditions are there, a jhānic experience, a jhānic perception arises. It depends on the conditions -- all kinds of conditions, all kinds. I mentioned that monk; the Buddha also says, at a certain point, it depends on the digestion being "not too hot, not too cold."[13] In Asian medicine, they have this idea of digestion being too hot, too cold. I certainly know: yeah, samādhi is a lot dependent on things like digestion. All kinds of things: energy levels, all kinds of factors. So one really sees. It's almost difficult not to recognize, let's say after twenty experiences, that it's dependent on conditions. It's not something the self can get grandiose and sort of pumped up about.
Again, what's actually much more common is a negative self-view in relation to not reaching a jhāna, or "I'm not far enough along yet. I can't. I'm a failure. I bet everyone else is better. I'm going too slowly." And then what can happen is a person thinks, "I want to attain this deeper jhāna," or "I want to attain the jhānas," or whatever it is, "this jhāna, that jhāna beyond where I am." But actually the intention is one of achievement, for decorating the self-view and propping up the self-view, or addressing a more negative -- that's a better way of saying it -- of wanting to address a negative self-view: "If I could just get that, then I'd feel better about myself, get a badge," whatever. And sometimes that intention is not fully conscious. We actually don't quite realize what's in the mix of our intention, when it comes to this. We don't realize, what's actually operating is a kind of avoidance, an intention to avoid a negative self-view. And that can be quite subtle, and operating subtly. So even there, the attachment is the opposite of what we tend to think. And we tend to think, "Oh, attached to the self-view and the grandiosity: it looks like this." Actually, no, it's happening in a reverse way, and sometimes much more subtly.
[1:18:34] Let the jhāna give you the deepest things it can give you, and the deepest things are the beauty of that happiness, and the way it touches the being, and the way it bathes the whole body and the whole citta. That's a much deeper, more far-reaching, more long-lasting, more impacting gift than it gives me "I have achieved," and I can say to myself, "I have achieved X or Y," or tell other people, "I have achieved X or Y." Or when there's a conversation, and several people have achieved X or Y, I can also say, "Yes, I have too," or feel to myself that "I have too." Let the jhānas give you the deepest gifts that they want to give you, that they can give you. And that also goes back to, what's significant? What are we emphasizing? We were talking about the happiness.
(3) Perhaps for me, the most interesting kind of question of attachment that might arise from jhāna is attachment to view. So for example, someone, let's say, opening up to the sixth jhāna, and the sort of infinite consciousness, and the experience there -- and it gets really brief when the Buddha talks about that -- but the experience of an infinite consciousness, and it's there, and it pervades the cosmos. Or it's a realm, almost like a transcendent realm. That's more accurate, but can be felt both ways. We'll talk about it. [1:20:10] It's possible, then, that someone opening to that experience says, "Ah, this is ultimately true," or "This is what they're talking about. This is the Cosmic Consciousness. This is" -- whatever, and decides that it's ultimately true, and gets attached to that as a view. To be attached to a view means to really believe this view is true, this perception is true. Or the fifth jhāna or the seventh jhāna or whatever.
Again, here, there's something opposite, because I would say, attachment to that kind of view -- let's say, this Cosmic Consciousness, this infinite awareness, this vast awareness being the ultimate reality, the eternal backdrop of all things, the source of all things, etc., the nature of everything, it is emptiness, etc. -- someone's much more likely to get stuck in that view and believe it's the end and the ultimate truth when one hasn't done jhānas five, six, seven, eight. So it's the opposite. It's exactly having the map of, for example, something that goes beyond this quasi-sixth jhāna state of infinite consciousness, because once you get to the seventh jhāna or the eighth jhāna, you see: "Oh, that's a fabricated state. It's only a stage."
So it's actually the jhānas that help us wean off a view to this or that as the ultimate truth. The jhānas are a remedy for certain attachments, rather than a concern, I would say. That kind of view of a vast awareness being ultimately real, Cosmic Consciousness, awareness being the nature of things, that awareness being eternal, etc., unruffled, that being the nature of awareness, all that -- that's much more likely to arise from sort of standard insight meditation practice, with a lot of practice. It's a very common experience. It's also very common in other spiritual traditions. It's actually really, really common. But if we can go beyond that kind of experience, and we have the map, and it places it, we begin, hopefully, to experience something beyond. "It can't be ultimate. I've gone beyond it."
And we begin to understand its context. So what is that, exactly? How did that experience -- this vast, eternal-seeming awareness, Cosmic Consciousness, whatever it is -- how did it arise? How did it dependently arise as a perception? We understand its context. So this understanding it dependently arising, dependently ceasing -- it's more than saying, "We see that it's impermanent," as a view, because a person can go in and out of the vastness of awareness, or the Cosmic Consciousness or whatever, many times, and think: "Yeah, my experience of it is impermanent, but it's not impermanent." That's really common: "It's eternal. It's just there, and unchanging, and radiant forever, and serene and untouched forever, and it embraces everything, and it permeates everything." There are different variations. So they say, "Yeah, I realize my experience of it is impermanent. I can either accept that my experience of it impermanent" -- we'll go into that -- "or I can just work towards making it more and more of the time I'm hanging out there." But that's not what I mean by understanding its dependent arising and dependent cessation. What I mean by understanding its dependent arising and dependent cessation is: how does this perception arise? And how does it cease? Not that it arises and ceases, but how? It's dependent on a certain amount of unfabricating. And if I unfabricate more, it goes beyond it. It's a different thing than just, "Yeah, it's impermanent. Or my experience of it is impermanent."
So hopefully, if we have, again, the right context for what we're doing in the whole of the Dharma, and how what we're doing in the whole of jhāna practice fits into that, this kind of attachment doesn't arise, or we can get beyond it -- put it that way. So the more common danger here is attachment to what the Buddha would call Wrong View, or a misunderstanding, or a limited and limiting view of emptiness, of the nature of awareness. So if I think that's the ultimate nature of awareness, it's not ultimate. It's a perception. It's a relative perception. It's incredibly useful, incredibly healing and valuable and liberating to a certain extent. Is it ultimate? No. How am I going to find out that it's not ultimate? Limited [view], or a misunderstanding or wrong view about what nibbāna is, and all this stuff.
[1:25:25] The shoe is rather on the other foot, I think, in terms of attachment and jhāna. They're actually very powerful in terms of weaning us off what can be really difficult kinds of attachment -- to sense pleasures, and in this case, to certain spiritual views. And this one, that kind of thing that I've just described -- I mean, I said I couldn't really think of anyone who got attached to pleasure, anyone that I've encountered as a teacher, or I've heard, talked to, over however many years of teaching, meeting a lot of people. Couldn't think of anyone. But I think in the first six months of teaching, how many people I encountered who, it seemed to me, were actually pretty entrenched in some version of that vast awareness, and that's ultimate, etc. I lost count, easily in the first six months. It's so common. And it can get very, very entrenched. So there are people who are there, in that kind of view, for, really, decades, and they'll never get out of it.
Sometimes the language that goes with it is very free and easy. There's this very light, "Well, awareness is ultimate, and I don't have to do anything. It's just there. Whatever happens, whether I'm aware or not, it's there. And everything's kind of equal within that." And so it can sound very easy, and the person seems unattached, and it's all very free, and maybe even goes with the view: "There's no need to meditate, because this is just there all the time." And actually, all that is hiding a really quite entrenched view that's very, very difficult to budge.
But one of the ways of going beyond it is actually with the jhānas, and with the jhāna map, and actually just putting things in their context, and as I said, understanding their dependent arising and dependent fading, and understanding the whole process, and then having this context, and a whole different relation with all these beautiful and actually really valuable mystical openings, and their relationship with truth, and therefore with liberation.
I think that's all I wanted to say today. (Nicole, was this a note for now? No? So I'll look at it later.) Should we take a couple of questions, or should we just leave it? That enough for now? Let's just sit quietly. I think that's enough.
[silence]
Okay, thank you, everybody. And time for tea.
E.g. DN 2. Cf. Maurice Walshe, Long Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Dīgha Nikāya (Somerville: Wisdom, 1995), 103. ↩︎
The translation containing the phrase "born of composure" may be based on one of Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu's older renderings, e.g. of AN 5:28. See Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, tr., "Samadhanga Sutta: The Factors of Concentration" (1997), https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an05/an05.028.than.html, accessed 18 Feb. 2020. Cf. "born of concentration" in an updated translation of the same sutta at Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, tr., "The Factors of Concentration: Samādhaṅga Sutta (AN 5:28)," https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN5_28.html, accessed 18 Feb. 2020. ↩︎
E.g. DN 2. Cf. Walshe, Long Discourses of the Buddha, 103. ↩︎
E.g. DN 2 and AN 5:28. ↩︎
Cf. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation (2013), 116, https://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/Ebooks/WithEachAndEveryBreath_181215.pdf, accessed 18 Feb. 2020: "Try not to be like the person with a tree bearing unripe mangoes who -- told that ripe mangoes aren't green and hard, they're yellow and soft -- tries to ripen his mangoes by painting them yellow and squeezing them until they're soft." ↩︎
AN 9:35. ↩︎
Rob Burbea, "Q & A, and Short Talk" (24 Dec. 2019), question five, https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/60873/, accessed 20 Feb. 2020. ↩︎
SN 22:88. ↩︎
Attributed to the Buddha in Ayya Khema, When the Iron Eagle Flies: Buddhism for the West (Somerville: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 133. For a similar quote in the Pali Canon, see MN 36. ↩︎
MN 66 and MN 139. ↩︎
E.g. MN 23, MN 54, SN 3:6, SN 5:1, AN 5:76. ↩︎
E.g. DN 2 and AN 5:28. ↩︎
AN 5:53, AN 5:78. ↩︎
