Transcription
Hi, everyone. I'm recording this from home. I got home and realized there were a few questions that I hadn't had time to respond to that I think would be helpful for people at later points in their practice. There were a few other technical instructions that also, I think, would be helpful for most people at some point or other, as they go forward with jhāna practice, and a couple of general things. Most of what I want to go into -- not all of it, but most of it -- kind of falls into the category of working in sort of grey areas, jhānic grey areas.
So, as I mentioned, sometimes when a jhāna opens, for the first few experiences, it's very intense, very clear, seemingly effortless. One's very much in the jhāna, and might feel like there's nothing to do, nothing to improve on even. And as one gains more experience in and out of that jhāna, and gets more familiar with that particular jhānic territory -- whichever it is, whatever jhāna we're talking about -- then there do appear times, or it becomes apparent in one's practice, that sometimes it's very clear, very pure, if you like, a pure jhānic experience. Other times, we're sort of in the jhānic territory, but not quite; sort of para-jhānic territory, or kind of half in and half out, or on the edge. Or, as I mentioned, I'm mostly in, but some very subtle hindrances are kind of yapping quietly at the borders of consciousness, or there's an area of the body that won't clear up, or these kinds of things. There are many things, but it falls into that kind of territory, the grey area, working in the grey areas or transitional states. Not everything, but a lot of things.
Before that, though, there are a couple of general things, and then something about soulmaking in jhāna. So let's see how we do. The first general thing is, again, to make clear that I would say it's more optimal, for the way we're practising jhānas, to not fall into a sort of strict, unbroken rhythm of formal practice: sit, walk, sit, walk, sit, walk, forty-five minutes, forty-five minutes, one hour, one hour, however it's divided up. Of course, sometimes that will feel like it's the most helpful rhythm at that time, but the key thing here is: does it feel like it is? Again, am I listening? Am I being responsive? Am I being attentive? Am I tuning my practice rhythm at the moment, right now? Not for this retreat, but right now, for this morning, or whatever it is, or this afternoon, or this evening. Am I tuning it to what feels best, what feels like it's actually most fertile?
Sometimes if you sit, and the jhāna's coming, and it all feels really good, you can go way beyond one hour -- way, way, way beyond. Just sit in an unlimited way. You run out of batteries, try again. Try to get the jhāna again, without getting up, maybe two or three times. Sit as long as you can -- not with any forcing, but just sit as long as it works, as long as it feels good. And the same with walking practice, and the same with standing practice, unless for some reason you only have twenty minutes, or forty minutes, or whatever it is: "I know I'll just go forty minutes to walk now," or whatever. That's all fine. But basically there needs to be this responsive attunement of the rhythms of our practice, and we're really finding out, feeling into, getting a sense for, and finding out what's the most helpful right now, and breaking out of a kind of rigid, tight, predefined, preset mould of a rhythm for practice, for different postures. This is also part, as I mentioned, because the day needs to breathe, and there needs to be space for appreciation, and beauty, and a little bit of exercise, and open-heartedness, and all that.
So I'm reiterating that, but I also want to say that when some of you will start exploring insight ways of looking, as a sort of huge stream of investigation in your practice, and when that opens up, I would say the same principle applies there. You can have times where it's sit, walk, sit, walk -- very rigid and predefined. That's absolutely fine. But you also really want times where it's this more fluid, attentive, open scheduling that's much more responsive, because again there, in the way that I most commonly teach insight practice (which is through different insight ways of looking, learning them, employing them, seeing what happens with them), again, we still want the day to breathe. We still want space in the heart and the soul for appreciation, and beauty, and to be touched, and the open-heartedness.
We also need space to notice the after-effects on perception. So whether we're doing jhānic practice, as it goes deeper, and they become more common, and we know to look for them and look out for them, very gently, without pressure, but also in insight ways of looking practice, again, potentially very powerful, very noticeable after-effects on perception there as well. But there's another reason, when we come to insight ways of looking, practising insight ways of looking: partly the way that process works, in this way of teaching insight meditation, is not through the continuity, through the accumulation of a sort of power of mindfulness through just being completely continuous with the mindfulness as I sit, walk, sit, walk, unbroken, go to lunch, continue the mindfulness. Great way of practice, and a certain intensity in this continuity of mindfulness will be developed, hopefully, that way, and through that continuity of mindfulness, it can illuminate certain things. So that's great.
But an alternative way of going about things is actually deliberately practising different insight ways of looking. Then I actually need the comparison. So I need to practise this insight way of looking, and then, actually, in a way, let it go, and compare the difference in perception when I let it go. Now I'm just back to a normal consciousness. Of course there's a way of looking, because there's always a way of looking, but I'm not particularly trying this or that way of looking. And it's through the comparison that I learn about the dependent arising. So I'm not trying to accumulate so much mindfulness that I then perceive 'The Truth,' because there isn't one truth. I'm practising a way of looking, and then I let go of practising that way of looking, because then, when I practise the way of looking, I notice what it does to perception. I notice the sense of things. When I stop practising, I notice there's a different sense of things. So in a way, we actually need a looser, or rather, less continuous schedule of practice, or intention of practice. Again, it can be continuous for a long period. That's absolutely fine. But it does need some kind of coming out of the insight way of looking, and maybe just going into a more normal consciousness, without a deliberate intention, so that we can see, through comparison, the effect of the insight way of looking. It's not that it always has to be like that, but sometimes that's part of it, too. There's less of this emphasis on continuity. I see, when I practise this insight way of looking -- I should see, in ten minutes, in twenty minutes, in an hour, whatever it is -- it should be obvious what's happening there, obvious its effects on perception.
Okay. So that's one general thing. A second general thing is about posture. I mentioned on the retreat, eventually you can kind of access jhāna and stay in a jhāna in almost any posture. Posture becomes very, very not important. But before that time, before the practice has really ripened to that stage, posture is actually very important, particularly at the beginning. I was encouraging, in some of the early guided meditations, etc., really to sense into the poise and the balance in the posture, and see if you can get a feel for, a sense for the beauty in the posture -- the beauty, the dignity, the nobility that is reflected in the balance between the citta qualities that the posture manifests, expresses, reflects, between openness, relaxation, softness, and between brightness, alertness, poise of intention on the other hand. But also just the sense of actual balance in the posture, and the actual way that the mind, when it encompasses the whole body in and includes the whole body space in a very alert, open, receptive, sensitive way, that the posture is actually very, very subtly affected, and subtle changes in the posture can affect our ability to have that kind of pervasive energy body awareness.
So this is really, really important. If you're not familiar with this, as I said at the beginning of the retreat, it's really, really worth taking a little time to play with. I remember actually Kirsten showing me a picture of her very young nieces -- I think she has three or four nieces; I can't remember -- meditating, or sort of trying to meditate. They're very, very young, between, I think, 2 and 10, their ages. But one of them, it was very interesting -- it was quite a young one. You could tell from the photograph that her awareness was spread throughout her body. They were all sitting cross-legged, sort of copying Kirsten [laughs], with their eyes shut. But the awareness was spread through the whole body, and you could feel from the photograph the poise in the posture, but also in the attention, in the awareness, and you could feel the quality of the attention, and that it pervaded her whole body. It was very alive and right there. It was quite interesting. The posture and citta quality go very much together at first, and it's really worth playing with that if you're not familiar with it.
I remember one of my first teachers, in an interview. This was many, many years ago, and I got called in for an interview. I think I was one of the first people. They would call you in for interviews on these retreats, and I was one of the first people to get called in. I thought, "Oh, why am I first?" I was a teenager. And he said, "You're very out of contact with the earth," or something like that. "Very out of contact with the ground." I had no idea what he was talking about, but it struck me as being really a problem. It sounded like a very serious ailment. And so he got me to sit, and played with my posture a little bit, and at a certain point, he just said, "There. There." I was not really in contact with my body at all back then. I had no training in that. I was probably pretty disconnected, as probably most teenagers in that generation were, disconnected from my body. He just said, "There." He was just gently moving my shoulders and my torso, and then he said, "There."
Really it wasn't so much a visible kind of yoga-looking posture that he was responding to. He was responding to, he was feeling, the way my posture helped my mind kind of inhabit the whole body, the whole body space, in a very natural, and open, and upright, and alert way. I think that's what he was picking up on. Of course, to me, it just seemed like some kind of supernatural power at the time. Now that I'm much more used to all this, and teaching, and energy body is very much what I emphasize, I can easily understand how it's possible to have that kind of awareness with another person, of another person -- how their mind and body are right now, and how their energy body awareness is, and how the posture is, perhaps, allowing, supporting, or limiting certain possibilities psychically, certain possibilities for the citta, or certain possibilities in relationship.
I remember working with someone in an interview, and they were in a very difficult space in their heart and mind and soul, and I was asking them to come into presence, to be in relationship with me, with the open heart and the sort of holding there, and encouraged them to open to their body experience as well. But I could tell that there was just something very, very subtle in how they were sitting and holding their posture -- certainly nothing like being hunched over, or contracted, or some kind of obviously defensive posture. It was extremely subtle, but that was enough to prevent her from coming into a different relationship with herself, but also coming into a different relationship with me. And we played with that just a little bit, and it allowed the relational space, both with herself and with myself, to open up to possibilities that were just not available two minutes beforehand, five minutes beforehand. And she had no idea.
So the mind, the citta, affects the body and the posture, and the posture affects the citta. This goes very, very subtle and deep, until it begins to be the states of openness, and states of jhāna, states of samādhi and all that, become much more familiar, and they're less dependent on the posture being like this or like that to enable them. But maybe for quite a while for some people, it is quite posture-dependent. So it's really worth taking the time to play with posture, even in almost what might seem like microscopically subtle ways. That was part of what I was trying to encourage at the beginning of the retreat.
[15:50] Okay. So let's run through a few more specific technical things. As I said, most of these are relative to things kind of going well, but hitting some tricky spots where it's just not quite coalescing or coming together. We spoke about -- sometimes there can be pain, obviously, or discomfort in the body, or a sense of contraction, or holding, or tightness somewhere in the energy body, the physical body. And we spoke about the possibility of actually taking that difficult spot and, for example, if you're doing mettā practice as your base practice, imagining the centre of the mettā there. The mettā is radiating from that very difficulty. Or imagining the breath coming in and out there. Or the energy, that being the centre of the energy body and the centre of the breath energy, if you like, or the centre of the light, the white luminosity, or golden-white luminosity that might pervade the energy body. Just almost exactly where you'd least expect it, imagining that to be the centre of what you're trying to encourage. Sometimes it can turn out, just as we'd least expect, counterintuitively, to be the loveliest place.
What I want to add now is, similarly, that if the mind is fuzzy, or foggy, or woolly, the mind, the head, and if you're tired, a similar thing can work: imagine light there in the head. The head feels dull, or there's that kind of tiredness behind the eyes, or just the kind of woolliness there. Imagine the light centred there, if you're working with light as part of the energy body awareness. Imagine the breath energy coming in and out there, or coming in or out through the top of the head, through the sides, the front, the back, whatever it is, or radiating, expanding out from that very woolliness. So just the same principle, but applied to qualities of the citta. Same principle as we suggested with regard to bodily discomforts or blocks, we can apply to discomforts or blocks in the citta. And often they do feel in the head, so we just imagine them in the head.
Some of these are quite basic. Some will apply to later jhānas, and I'll go into that, the specific jhāna. Some of them apply to working outside of a jhāna, before you're even in jhānic territory. Or, as I said, the jhāna's kind of going okay, but there's a little bit that's not kind of brought into the fold of the jhāna; it hasn't spread there. So some of these things will apply at any level.
We just mentioned pain. We mentioned on the retreat -- and again, it could be any jhāna; say it's the second, or first, or whatever -- the jhānic nimitta is there. I'm in the territory of the jhāna, but it's not quite suffusing the whole body, and indeed, there's some place in the body where there's pain or discomfort. So it's in the jhānic territory, the nimitta has arisen, but it's not fully suffused, and I'm not fully absorbed. Well, it's not always best to hurry to spread or suffuse the nimitta. That may be exactly the right thing, but sometimes just pause a little bit, because we've got a few options. Sometimes it may be, yeah, just go ahead; try and spread it in the ways that we listed in the possible methods of spreading the nimitta through the bodily space, to pervade and permeate, as the Buddha says, suffuse and saturate the whole body space. Sometimes that's the best thing to do, and just go ahead and do that.
Sometimes, though, don't rush to do that. Stay, enjoying where it's okay first. Find those okay places where there is pīti, where there is a sense of happiness (if you're working in the second jhāna). Stay there. Enjoy that more first, before you think about spreading. Sometimes just in the staying and enjoying, it will spread, as we said on the retreat. And then there are other options too. We talked about playing with perception. Many of you had a lot of success with that. There's pain, there's discomfort -- can I actually just imagine it, begin to see it, play with the perception, the malleability of the citta, of the perception, of the way of looking, and see this pain, see this discomfort as pīti, or as sukha, or as stillness, or whatever the jhānic nimitta is that's possible to have there when we change the perception? But basically, there are different options. We don't always need to rush to try and suffuse as the first option. But they're all good.
Sometimes -- now something specific to the second jhāna -- we might be working in the second jhāna, and we've known very effusive happiness, and intense happiness, and really grinning for hours on end, almost so that the face hurts afterwards. Other times, experiences with the jhāna, less intense happiness, or something else. So for instance, one might be in the second jhāna, but it's not quite stabilized. Something about it feels a bit flimsy. Well, it may need a bit more 'body' in it (I'll put 'body' in inverted commas), a bit more pīti. It may need a bit more of that kind of body/energy body awareness. So what you can do, you're working in the second jhāna, but it's a bit flimsy, it's a bit weak somehow; it's not quite stabilized, perhaps. It could be any of those issues. And then you can just dip back to the first jhāna. What you're effectively doing is mixing more pīti and more body pleasure in. Just dip back. It could be for a few moments. It could be for a few minutes. Sometimes these things work -- just for a few moments, just dip back, get more body in the experience, more pīti, and then come back, and see how the second jhāna goes.
So we can broaden this, and actually extend it to make a more general principle. Again, we're talking about when there have been lots of really clear, deep, pure experiences of a certain jhāna, and as you're working more, trying to marinate and develop mastery with that jhāna, you're in and out, in and out, getting very familiar, and sometimes it doesn't go so well. It doesn't stabilize, or it's hard to enter it fully on certain occasions. So if that's the case with a certain jhāna, whichever jhāna it is, you can, in order to stabilize it or to enter more fully, apart from just working in all the ways we've talked about with SASSIE and all that, sometimes it can help to go back, as we just discussed, from the second jhāna to the first (but could be the fourth to the third, or whichever jhāna). Just go back one step. Or, if you already know the jhāna ahead, if you've already got familiar with the jhāna ahead ... Let's say I know four jhānas, but right now I'm working on the third jhāna, and it's not quite stabilizing; I can't quite enter it fully. I could just dip back to the second jhāna. It might be for really a few moments, or longer. Or I could go to the fourth jhāna if I already know it. I skip forward. It's the opposite of what I assume. I think, "It's not going well. I better go to a simpler level." Sometimes I go further, to the fourth jhāna. Again, it might just be for a few moments, literally dipping the citta and the body in for a few moments, and then coming out. Or it could be longer -- a few minutes even. Or if you're trying to stabilize and deepen the fourth, and it's not going so well, but you're familiar with it, could go back to the third, or to one of the formless realms, and then back to the fourth. So this is a general principle here, skilful working when things feel like they're not going so well on those occasions. They're still going well, but they could be better.
Here's one thing particular to the third jhāna. I mentioned sometimes what happens at this level is that, in the stillness that emerges at the third jhāna, it's like it allows the breath to perhaps become sensible again. In all the pīti and the sukha, it might be that we hadn't noticed the breath -- we've let the breath go. The pīti and sukha become the primary nimittas, which is a completely fine way of working, as we've emphasized. But sometimes, not only does the breath organically, naturally become more sensible because there's more calmness, sometimes, as well, it may actually help the third jhāna to bring back an attention to the breath. At this point, the breath should be very, very subtle, very, very delicate, and like we said, the very movement of the breath is peacefulness. The very movement of the breath there, that subtle, delicate, gentle breath, is peacefulness, like those strands of seaweed in a lagoon, just gently, so subtle, they're swaying peacefully. There's movement of the breath, but the very movement is peacefulness. Sometimes deliberately coming back to find the breath again. It may emerge, as I said, just organically we begin to notice it and include it, or sometimes that can help deepen and consolidate the third jhāna, if you feel like you need it.
Again -- this is a more general point -- particularly as we go into the deeper jhānas, and we have a sense of secondary nimittas, which we've talked about (for instance, the secondary nimittas just of release and relief), these are, I think, important ingredients of the jhānic mix, and any experienced jhāna meditator will notice these things, should notice these things. And so they're not primary nimittas, but sometimes noticing them. So again, I'm working in a jhāna; it's not quite coming together. I'm definitely in the territory, but it's not quite coalescing. I'm not quite fully getting into it as much as I know is possible. Sometimes, actually, then beginning, just very gently, very delicately, without any pressure, just looking for the secondary nimittas, say, of relief and release, and noticing them, and just for a little bit, focusing on them and enjoying them, even just for a few moments. That can allow the whole jhāna to deepen or consolidate like that. That's also a very skilful sort of subtle movement of the attention. We're working. What will help here? It's almost like we're taking that relief and release, or whatever the secondary nimitta is, and kind of using it as part of the glue, part of the stitching to help cohere the jhānic experience at that point.
[28:30] Now something particular to the fourth jhāna. We talked about oftentimes there is a brightness there, white-golden light, and that's quite central. The stillness is the light; the light is the stillness. Sometimes that can feel like a kind of vertical column of bright stillness through the centre of the body space. Sometimes it can feel all around you. Sometimes it can be it's not quite all around you yet, or one can imagine this vertical column of bright white light that is the stillness. The stillness is the light; the light is the stillness. And it's right up through the centre of the energy body space. One can begin to allow that, or even encourage that light, to melt outwards -- melt outwards from that central vertical column -- and in doing so, it kind of dissolves the body into it, dissolves the body with it. So that can be really helpful at times.
Other times, with different jhānas -- but this may be useful with the fourth jhāna particularly -- again, when that kind of leaning forward, or if that leaning forward occurs in the fourth jhāna, for whatever reasons (we discussed a few possibilities there, but the intensity of the focus, and the conceiving of the stillness and the nimitta in front of us), sometimes it's really helpful to feel that you, or the body, or the energy body is kind of falling backwards into a jhānic realm. You conceive it backwards, but in addition to just conceiving it behind you, you actually also fall back into it. In a way, again, you're working differently with the attention. It's a different mode of attention to be probing forwards, or trying to enter/penetrate something in front of me, than it is to fall backwards, and that's different from something within me, this vertical column that I'm expanding outwards. We talked about different modes of attention, and different conceptions of the directionality of the attention. The same thing with the jhāna in relation to the nimitta, and the whole body in relation to the jhānic nimitta.
Okay. So one other thing about the fourth jhāna. We mentioned, when we talked about the Buddha's description, what's left is nothing but this pure, bright awareness. "Wrapped in this cloth of pure, bright awareness" was his description of the fourth jhāna.[1] And then we talked at other times about the idea of mixing cooking ingredients to move between jhānas. So I kind of mentioned this; it's just an extension of a point I've already made on the retreat. I can turn up the sense of presence in the fourth jhāna, and that will take me [to the sixth jhāna], because presence is consciousness, consciousness is presence, so to speak. Turning up that sense of presence. So rather than stillness, as I said, a different perspective on the fourth jhāna is to notice the sense of presence, and that will take me to the sixth jhāna, the infinite consciousness. It will begin to open that up. It's already there. The fourth jhāna is already pregnant with it. It's already implicit in the fourth jhāna.
But another way you can think of this is kind of like with those cooking ingredients: I mix a bit of this, add a bit more of this ingredient to this jhāna, and it will take me to another jhāna. You could say we're adding more presence to the fourth jhāna, adding even more. But how are we adding it? By tuning to what's already there. So here it's different than cooking. The tuning to the sense of presence -- again, when I notice it, when I tune to it, it amplifies it, so effectively I'm adding more of that particular ingredient into my cooking pot, and the fourth jhāna will then change into the sixth jhāna. I've turned up the sense of presence just by tuning to it, and I'm amplifying it. Tuning to it does amplify it, and that turns it up, and it goes to the sixth jhāna.
Anyway, of course, there should be, as I mentioned, a very strong sense of presence in the fourth jhāna. It's almost spellbound -- the mind is spellbound. But still, we can increase things by tuning to them, increase certain factors within the jhāna, and then that can sometimes just help that jhāna consolidate. It's very common for the fourth jhāna, with a lot of experience, to get just a little bit dull. So just turn up that sense of presence. But if I really then tune into the sense of presence, and hone in on that, I'm amplifying it, and that can take me to the sixth jhāna.
One thing I mentioned: the Buddha says technically the breath stops in the fourth jhāna.[2] Whatever we think about the so-called biological reality of that, that will be the meditator's experience. It's hard to locate a sense of breath in the fourth jhāna. It feels as if the body has stopped breathing. But be careful. Don't try to assess, "Is this the fourth jhāna?", by keeping on checking whether your breath has stopped. That's not going to be helpful, just as checking whether thought has stopped, as I said, that's not going to be a helpful way of checking whether you're in the second jhāna. Doing that kind of thing, checking my breath -- "Has it stopped? Oh, it hasn't stopped yet" -- in a way, it's kind of reinforcing that pattern that I talked about, this micropattern in our psychology, micropattern in the citta, the saṅkhāras of the mind, to just give attention to the negative, to look for what's not quite right, what's not quite measuring up. Rather, just get into the stillness. The stillness is there. "Am I in the fourth jhāna yet?" Just get into the stillness. Really enjoy it. Really be with it with a very alive attention. Really see if you can penetrate into that stillness. See if you can dissolve into that stillness, if that stillness can dissolve into you -- the mind, the body, dissolving into the stillness; the stillness dissolving into, and dissolving the mind and body. That's what we need to do, and it will mature into the fourth jhāna if there's that alive attention and that right attention with it, rather than just keep checking whether the breath has stopped.
Someone wrote me a note -- actually, I mentioned this -- about breath. So this person was obviously working around the territory of the second jhāna, I'm guessing, from the note, which seems very clear. "Quick and possibly silly question. Does it matter if the breathing is through the nose or the mouth? The combination of a cold plus an enormous grin [indicates probably the second jhāna], open-mouthed, means I sometimes breathe through the mouth." She had a cold, and there was this enormous grin, and so she finds herself breathing through the mouth. But then she says, "Sometimes it feels like it dissipates the strength of pīti or sukha." Breathing through the mouth actually dissipated the pīti or the sukha.
So I would say if it's from the grin, you don't have to stop your grin. The grinning is good and fine. But probably it's the case that you can just very minutely, almost, move the position of your tongue against your teeth, and that will somehow allow you to keep grinning without the mouth actually being open, and then you can breathe through your nose. So we can have a full grin, I'm pretty sure -- try it. If the tongue is in a certain position, we should be able to breathe through the nose, because it may well be that -- in fact, it often is -- when we breathe through the mouth, the breath isn't allowed to become more subtle. So what the Buddha calls the bodily formations, the breath, are not allowed to become more subtle, and with that, it's harder for the citta to become more subtle. If we're trying to be in jhāna, as I said, it's characterized by refinement of body energy vibration, and the refinement and subtlety of the citta. They have to be there for jhāna. So if we're getting in the way by breathing through the mouth, and that keeps the breath unsubtle, then it can be a problem. So if it's possible, if it's not because of a cold, if it's just because of a grin, there are probably things one can do with the tongue, to start with, that allows breathing through the nose, and then, maybe, if one's ready, anyway, it goes beyond the second jhāna. Continue with the nose breath, and the whole thing gets more subtle.
If it's a cold, and a bad cold, well, you'll probably just have to breathe through the mouth, and put up with it for a while. However, as the citta gets more subtle, if it can (and it's not completely prevented by breathing through the mouth at all; that won't completely block things), you should find, as the citta gets more subtle, the breath will get more subtle. With a heavy cold, this might even take avoiding the breath at first, going via what you remember of the energy body vibrations, of different states, of different jhānic states, or just remembering a jhāna. If you get in the territory where the citta is subtle, then the breath will become subtle. Again, body affects mind, breath affects mind; mind affects body and breath. So if the citta can be helped to become more subtle, even if we have a bad cold, and we're breathing through the mouth, the breath will become more subtle. Because the breath is more subtle, actually less air is being moved. And less air being moved, you might find that even with a relatively blocked nose, a quite blocked nose, you can actually still breathe through the nose, because we're not moving that much air. A little amount of air can find its way through the blocked nose. But it's not that we're trying to make that happen; it's just that we're helping the citta to become, or allowing the citta to become, more subtle. Naturally, that allows the breath to become more subtle, and effortlessly, we will probably find that we're breathing through the nose, or nose-breathing is happening, without us kind of trying to manipulate that physically.
[40:05] Okay. A couple of things just to finish. Two more things. One is: we talked last night about insight ways of looking that unfabricate, and that potentially move through the jhānic stages in their process of unfabricating. However, I don't think, in that practice, the primary point, or the primary aim, is to necessarily learn a degree of skill that controls an insight way of looking to the degree that I can kind of stop the elevator exactly where I want, to an exact jhāna. That's a good skill, but it's not the most important thing there. What's much more important (and this is important to understand) is that in that process of playing with insight ways of looking, we understand the principle of lessening fabrication. We understand the principle of unfabricating to whatever degree. Through this insight way of looking, there's less clinging, and because there's less clinging, there's more letting go, which is just saying the same thing, and because of that, and because of dependent arising, there's less fabrication, and so the experience opens up, refines out, in these different ways.
Understanding that principle of lessening fabrication through insight ways of looking is really, really important; understanding how to fabricate less; and thirdly, understanding what exactly is involved in subtle clinging. So we use this word, 'clinging,' I said, in a very stretchy way. It means all the way from the most gross to the most subtle, aspects of the relationship of the citta with phenomenal experience that we wouldn't usually think of as clinging. Really, really subtle, so that, in the end, even avijjā, in the Mahāyāna, even ignorance, is a kind of clinging. Even believing, looking at something, and the unconscious belief that it inherently exists, which is what most human beings do, most of the time, most of their lives, with most of phenomenal experience -- just that unconscious and unnoticed, very common belief and assumption in the inherent existence of whatever is in perception, in consciousness at any time, we could call that avijjā, but in the Mahāyāna, they also call it 'clinging.' It's a very subtle level of clinging. And I use 'clinging' in that sense too.
So understanding the principle of lessening fabrication through insight ways of looking. Secondly, how do I fabricate less? Actually using these insight ways of looking, and getting familiar with them, and developing the art and the skill of them. And thirdly, what exactly is going on here? What exactly is involved in subtle clinging? What subtle clinging is being let go of here? And what avijjā is being let go of here? So avijjā also has a whole range of aspects, but also levels, to it, from very, very gross, of course -- complete deluded thinking, etc. -- to very, very subtle, and clinging as well. So what exactly is involved in subtle clinging, subtle avijjā, if that's what we're talking about? And lastly, fourth thing, to understand the implications of all that -- the implications of the way less clinging, less avijjā, results in less fabrication, right then, in the moment, in the moment of looking, in the moment of relating, a way of looking. In other words, understanding dependent arising and emptiness, as we touched on to some extent in the retreat.
So all that, those understandings, those four understandings, are much more the point than being able to control and kind of, "I'll be able to go to exactly this jhāna, and not overstep it to the next jhāna or whatever, when I unfabricate through a certain insight way of looking." So always the insight is more important than the samādhic experience.
Okay, last thing. I want to read to you a fairly long note from someone. This is quite important. And for those of you that are familiar with soulmaking, it's very important. For those of you who are not yet familiar with Soulmaking Dharma, but who may be one day familiar with Soulmaking Dharma, it may well be very important. It's a little bit involved, and it's a slightly long note, but I feel it's really, really crucial. It also expands our sense of how we might go about jhānic practice, jhāna practice, especially when we have some soulmaking background, Soulmaking Dharma and soulmaking practice background. So this person wrote,
This has been a dukkha-ful retreat for me. Lots of dukkha, so much pain and struggle around desire, and sustaining intention and effort. [As always, I asked for her permission to share this note, and it was fine with her.] So much pain and struggle around desire, and sustaining intention and effort [the kind of things we were addressing, and talking about, and trying to open up and inquire into at several times on the retreat. She continues,] Your teaching on desire and soulmaking the last few nights finally prompted me to try to go into the dukkha last night, to hold and sense it with soul, and to see what images of the path and the self on it might arise.
There were several beautiful and meaningful images that came from sensing the dukkha like this, and that felt like they began to clarify what I want from practice, and to give non-pathologizing place to some long-standing and painful patterns in my life. I won't go into this now. What I want to say is that, later on last night, there was a lot of frustration around, and I felt some confidence, from the above-mentioned experience, about going in through the dukkha.
So as skilfully as possible, I let the frustration rip, naming all the smallnesses and solidities in myself that I'm utterly sick of, tuning to the power, rather than the poison, of this emotion or energy. [We talked about that, as well, in the retreat at some point.] I didn't sense self-judgment in it -- just clarity and fire. [This is really, really important.] Out of this, a sense of space opened, and in that space, as I was breathing, I became aware of a very subtle sense of the energy body breathing with me. This was the language that came, and it had soul-resonances. My sense of the energy body was that they, the energy body, were creatively and definitely other than me.
So rather than "I am the energy body," or "it's me," or "it's part of me," the sense was that they were creatively and definitely other than me. We talk about twoness in soulmaking practice sometimes.
They were taking up a space somewhat larger than my physical body, but overlapping with it, and I had a strong sense of their autonomy and intelligence. I've not really worked with energy body as image, rather than as the terrain in which image and sensitivity to image arise, but I've heard you speak to this possibility, so I really tried to lean into it, using the nodes of the lattice to tune and sense. And what opened was a gorgeous sense of twoness with the energy body, and a sense that they, the energy body, were taking me under their wing, teaching me how to be in the right relationship with them.
I would say that my relationship with pīti on this retreat, and in general, has been pretty dysfunctional -- tight with self and grasping and aversion. When pīti arose in this experience with the energy body last night, though, it felt like they [the energy body] were giving it to me, saying, "Here. Try feeling this," and holding it for me while I worked and played, taking the pressure off and coaching me to try different things. I found I could stay with intensities and subtleties I hadn't been able to stay with before, because now they were being given to me as gift by this beautiful, unfathomable other. It was freeing and energizing and humbling.
So I'd be interested to hear any thoughts you have, and specifically around allowing or inviting a sense of imaginal other into the base practice. In some ways, what unfolded wasn't all that different from the energy body base practices you outlined on this retreat, but there was a strong sense of being in twoness with mysterious otherness that ignited and aligned my desire, intention, and effort, where they've been quite confused or limp through much of this retreat. I still feel very far from jhāna, but I feel like I've begun to see the possibility of righting something in relation to why and how I practise. Thank you for reading all this. I'm sorry it's so long.
And then a PS:
Actually, a couple more thoughts around intention. My intention in working with the frustration was for soulmaking rather than samādhi. It was a surprise to me when the pīti arose, and even when it did, I'd say the intention continued to be predominantly for soulmaking, for the beauty of that dimensional relationship with the energy body. In subsequent sittings with the intention for samādhi [so she returned to the intention for samādhi], I've tried to invite that imaginal sense of the energy body, but they haven't come. So perhaps it's that this soulful experience with the energy body now becomes part of the fantasy operating in the background of samādhi practice.
That was one of the options, if you remember, that I talked about: we work with an image, and then it goes into the background as a fantasy, and helps support things. She continues,
Or I can choose to pick it up more intentionally in soulmaking practice?
So I didn't have time, but I wrote a quick note back to her, and suggested she did the second of those options: choose to pick it up more intentionally as a soulmaking practice, with the intention for soulmaking, not for samādhi. So something had happened here, for good reason -- some difficulty, some knots over the time around intention and desire and goal, those things that we were dwelling on and returning to several times in the retreat. So much importance, so much need to give careful attention to that, to inquire into that, to find right relationship with desire, intention, goal, aim, direction.
So kind of a long-standing history of dukkha and entanglement and difficulty there. My sense was, here, much, much more helpful to stay with the soulmaking. Look, something extremely important and extremely beautiful has just happened -- a real gift, a real grace. You feel that. And something that is perhaps the beginning of a much more profound and long-lasting healing. If I think, "Oh, I'm on a jhāna retreat. I want to catch up with the others," or whatever it is, and I rush too quickly back to the samādhi intention, something hasn't been allowed to ripen. To me, it sounded like it needed longer in that intention. Stay with the soulmaking intention. That's what opened things up. Anyway, it's delivering something beautiful. It's delivering the pīti and the gorgeousness, etc., and something is being healed. Something is also being ensouled. The dukkha is being ensouled. The energy body is being ensouled. Lots of things are happening that are really profoundly important, and maybe more important than whether I attain X jhāna right now, or even in the next months, or whatever it is. That was my brief encouragement in a note back, and I really think that's important.
I got a short response saying,
Thank you. Wonderful. I'm so ready to put down the intention for samādhi.
I don't know if I was hearing it right, but I was a little concerned, getting that note, that there's a difference making a choice: "Okay, now I'm going to have a soulmaking intention, rather than a samādhi intention." We talked about the intention really being the primary thing that drives this or that practice, whether I'm navigating a fork in the road between insight ways of looking and samādhi, or soulmaking and samādhi, or whatever it is. It's the intention that's really important, for a number of reasons.
But there's a difference between an intention coming out of an aversion, and a fed-upness, and an intention coming out of love and desire, and a sense of grace, and wanting something. Wanting something is different. Wanting soulmaking is different than just really not wanting to be any more with a certain intention for samādhi. So I'm not sure, and it was right at the end of the retreat, so I don't know. I didn't get a chance to find out or respond. It may not be the case at all for this person, but I think what I want to say right now is: careful about these kind of choices. It's a different thing. And where there's been a habit of aversion, or making choices out of aversion, or getting so fed up with a certain situation, or situations, or how things are unfolding or not unfolding, that we feel a lot of aversion and frustration, and then the intention is coming out of that -- that intention coming from aversion will have a different effect than an intention coming out of love for something, or eros for something, or responding to an invitation of an erotic beloved other. This is really, really important. I would guess that they will unfold differently. So it was the same move, but the intention is slightly [different]. I'm choosing the soulmaking intention over the samādhi intention, but the dominant intention is slightly different: one is eros, and one is aversion. That probably will make a difference. As I said, I don't know if it's the case with this person, but the point bears making in a general way, because it applies very, very widely.
This is all part of getting wise to desire and eros and this whole territory. These meta-questions are so, so important -- how we respond to them, how we hold them, and how we choose in relationship to them. So that's all I wanted to add, a sort of 'PS' to the whole retreat. I hope some of that has been helpful or will be helpful at some point. Okay.
Actually, one last thing I forgot. Someone was asking about resource, and I had mentioned from the beginning of the retreat and emphasized the ability of jhānas, or practice of jhānas, to really form and open up for us a profound resource of well-being in our life, and really stressing that, their function there, or potential function for us, as deep resources. So just to elaborate on this a little bit and draw out some of the other things I've been saying, to make something clear here that this person was asking.
If one only experiences a jhāna once, or twice, or a few times, it might be that for some period after those jhānic experiences, if they're strong or whatever, that there is a relatively short-lived sense of resource, of happiness, of well-being, of energy, etc., a kind of unshakeability that might come with that, even from just feeling so happy or whatever it is. But as I think I've alluded to already on the retreat, the danger with only having a jhānic experience a few times is that then it goes, and it's not around, and it may become, through the memory, an object of attachment and duality with what we experience now, compared to the jhānic experience. Then it's run out of anything it's giving us as a resource. It's not providing anything as a resource. But even worse than that, it's actually fostering a sense of suffering through the duality, through the attachment to the memory, etc.
Much more significant is when we are able to frequently practise and experience a jhānic state -- perhaps every day, or maybe a couple of times a day, whatever it is, in our busy lives, etc. Or maybe not even every day, but regularly enough that it functions as a more constant source, like a well that isn't going dry, or a spring, and there's a sense of replenishment that it brings, of rejuvenation, of energy. The energy is being, yes, replenished, rejuvenated, and a deep emotional well-being of different flavours and kinds, dependent on what jhāna we're talking about. But that deep emotional well-being allows us or supports us, helps us, to stay steady, and to meet difficulties, to sustain our creative projects, the work that we're doing, when there is difficulty; to sustain our service work, if that's what we're involved in, or our activism, or whatever it is, through the ups and downs, through the knocks, through the slog of that. And sometimes it might be work that's not either well-paid financially, or we're not getting any pats on the back for it, or recognition, or even no one else seems to notice. But this dipping in regularly, drinking from these wells, these beautiful springs of cool, clear water, will definitely provide resource in our life.
But there's a second way that I want to emphasize, and that, actually, in a way, is implicit in stuff I said on the retreat, but I really want to draw it out to make it clear. Long-term, repeated immersion in and exposure to jhānic states (let's say second jhāna and above, I would say), long-term, repeated immersion, and drinking from that, and suffusing the body in that, and dissolving, and being absorbed in that, long-term, repeated practice of jhānas will open and deepen the sense we have of what a human being is -- what we are as human beings, but also what other human beings are. It opens and deepens the very sense of the dimensionality of human beings. Our sense of our own being becomes dimensional. As I said near the beginning of the retreat, the jhānas become almost like dimensions of human being, but also dimensions of being more generally, or cosmic being, especially as we go deeper into the jhānas. So they're opening and deepening a sense of the dimensionality not just of our own being, and human being, but also of the cosmos.
In addition to the way it works as a resource, as I just described, it's this opening up of a sense of dimensionality that, even if, for some reason, later in our life, the jhānas are not accessible -- maybe there are certain life situations where we're just not able to practise for some reason; maybe there's a severe illness; maybe there's medicine trying to treat a severe illness, and that medicine is having all kinds of difficult side-effects, and preventing clarity of mind, or preventing concentration, or preventing mental energy, or whatever it is; for whatever other reason -- even when the jhānas become not accessible, they still function. Something has been seen and sensed and known by the being, by the citta, so that they still function after all that time -- it could be years -- as a resource. One senses still and knows something, knows something about one's own being, about human being, and about the cosmos. And that knowledge, if you like, if we call it, that sense of things, is there, even if one can't touch it or see it right now. It's imprinted on the psyche, on the citta, on the heart and mind, so profoundly, and opened up and changed and dimensionalized the sense of things, that one knows it's true, even when one can't touch it any more. And that knowledge acts as a long-term support for the citta, for the soul, even when, including when, circumstances, in one way or another, may be very, very challenging.
So there are two levels there, if you like, of the way in which jhānas can function as a really profound and helpful resource for our lives, and for meeting life, and opening to life, and serving what we want to serve in life.
