Travelogue to the four jhanas

  Travelogue to the four jhanas
  Ajahn Brahmavamso


  
  This morning the talk is going to be on Right Concentration, Right Samadhi, on
  the four jhanas which I promised to talk about earlier this week and about
  exactly what they are, how to get into them, so one can recognise them after
  they've arisen and also to understand their place in the scheme of things. If
  one ever looks at the Buddha's teachings - the Suttas - one finds that the
  word 'jhana' is mentioned very, very often. There is a common theme, which
  occurs in almost every teaching of the Buddha and is part of the eightfold
  path - Samma Samadhi - Right Concentration, which is always defined as
  'cultivating the four jhanas.' In this meditation retreat, if we are really
  talking about meditation and we want to cultivate meditation, there is no
  reason why we shouldn't aim to cultivate the jhana states, because they give a
  depth to one's meditation which one can experience as something quite special
  and one could also experience the power of these states as well as the bliss
  of these states. It is that quality of bliss and that quality of power which
  you will later be able to use to really develop the powerful insights into the
  nature of your mind and the nature of all phenomena. I shall begin by talking
  about the Buddha's own story which is related in the Suttas. He attained jhana
  almost by chance as a young boy sitting under a rose-apple tree, just watching
  while his father was doing some ceremony. It was a very pleasurable experience
  and what the Buddha, or the Buddha-to-be, remembered was just the pleasure of
  that experience and a little bit about its power. But like many people, like
  may meditators, many practitioners, he formed the wrong view that anything so
  pleasurable can have nothing at all to do with ending suffering and
  enlightenment, that something so pleasurable must be a cause for more
  attachment in this world. It was because of thoughts like these that for six
  years the Buddha just wandered around the forests of India doing all sorts of
  ascetic practices. In other words almost looking for suffering, as if through
  suffering you could find an end of suffering. It was only after six years of
  futility that the Buddha decided, having had a meal, and this is how it is
  actually said in the Suttas, that he recalled this pleasurable experience of
  the first jhana as a young boy, maybe he said "this might be the path to
  enlightenment." and the insight knowledge arose in him, "This is the path to
  enlightenment, to Bodhi." Because of that insight, the Buddha, as everyone
  knows, sat under the Bodhi tree, developed the jhanas and based on the power
  of that jhana, the clarity of that jhana, developed all of these wisdoms,
  first of all recollecting past lives, recollecting the action of kamma, the
  depth of kamma, how it sends beings to various parts of rebirth, and then
  lastly the Four Noble Truths.
  It was only because of the power of that sort of mind that he could penetrate
  to such a degree of subtlety and uncover things which had been clouded
  completely from him. Since then he always tried to teach and encourage the
  practice of jhana as an essential ingredient of the Eightfold Path, an
  essential part of becoming enlightened. If one wishes to use Buddhism not as
  only a half-hearted path but to take it to its fullness, and aim for
  enlightenment, then sooner or later one will have to come across these jhanas,
  cultivate them, get to know them and use their power and do exactly the same
  as the Buddha did and become fully enlightened.
  Many of the other talks which monks give tell you about the problem of
  suffering in existence, they tell you about the difficulties of life and the
  problems of rebirth and more death, but I think its also our responsibility,
  if we are going to tell you the problem, then we must tell you the solution as
  well and tell you the solution in all its detail, not holding anything back.
  Part of that solution, an essential part of that solution is developing these
  things which we call jhana.
  Now what these jhanas actually are - I'll just talk about the four jhanas this
  morning and I'm going to carry on from what I might call the launching pad of
  that second stage of meditation which I've been talking about a lot while I've
  been teaching meditation during this retreat. The second stage of meditation
  in my scheme of things is where you have full continuous awareness of the
  breath. So the mind is not distracted at all, every moment it has the breath
  in mind and that state has been stabilised with continual attention until the
  breath is continually in mind, no distraction for many minutes on end. That's
  the second stage in this meditation. It coincides with the third stage in the
  Buddha's Anapanasati Sutta, where the meditator experiences whole body of
  breath, where the body here is just a word for the accumulation of all the
  parts of an inbreath, all the parts of an outbreath and the sequential
  awareness of these physical feelings. The next stage, the third stage in my
  scheme, the fourth stage in the Buddha's Anapanasati Sutta, is where, having
  attained that second stage and not letting it go, not letting go of the
  awareness of the breath one moment, one calms that object down, calms the
  object of the breath down.
  There are several ways of doing that. Perhaps the most effective is just
  developing an attitude of letting go, because the object of the breath will
  calm down naturally if you leave it alone. However, sometimes some meditators
  have difficulty letting go to that degree and so another method which can be
  very effective is just suggesting calm, calm, calm. Or suggesting letting go.
  There is a great difference between the attitude of letting go and suggesting
  letting go. With suggesting letting go, you are still actually controlling
  things, you are getting involved in it but at least you are getting involved
  by sending it in the right direction, sending it towards the place where the
  attitude of letting go is occurring, without the need to put it into words or
  to give it as orders or commands. You are programming the mind in the right
  direction. But I use both, either just letting go as an attitude of mind or
  subconscious suggesting, just calm, calm, calm, and to feel the object of your
  attention, being here the feeling of the breath, get more and more refined,
  more subtle. The difficulty or the problem here will be that you have to
  always maintain your attention clearly on the breath. In other words, not
  letting go of the second stage when you develop the third stage. Keep full
  awareness of the breath, but just make that breath softer and softer and
  softer, more and more subtle, more and more refined, but never letting go of
  it. As the breath gets more and more refined, the only way of not letting go
  of it is by treating it very, very gently. You're going towards an effortless
  awareness on the breath, an effortless attention where the breath is just
  there.
  A bit of a problem here with many meditators is that they are not quite sure
  of the correct way of knowing the breath in this state. There is a type of
  knowing which is just knowing, being mindful of, without naming, without
  thinking, without analysing, a sub-verbal type of knowing. You have to be
  confident that you are actually watching the breath. Sometimes you may not
  have the width of mind to know exactly what type of breath you are watching,
  but you know you are watching the breath. The point is, it's a type of knowing
  which is getting much more refined. Our usual knowing is very wide and full of
  many details. Here, the details are narrowing down until a point comes where
  sometimes we have so few details that we don't know if we truly know, a
  different type of knowing, a much more refined knowing. So the wisdom has to
  be very strong here and confidence has to be strong, to understand that one
  still knows the breath. The breath hasn't disappeared at all and you do not
  need, as it were, to widen the width of knowing through effort of will, this
  will just disturb the mind. Just allow everything to calm down. The object
  will calm down and so will the knowing start to calm down. It's at this stage
  where you start to get a samadhi nimitta arising. I call this part of the
  third stage.
  If you calm the physical feeling of breath down, the mental feeling of breath
  starts to arise -- the samadhi nimitta -- usually a light which appears in the
  mind. However, it can sometimes just appear to be a physical feeling. It can
  be a deep peacefulness; it can even be like a blackness. The actual
  description of it is very wide simply because the description is that which
  everyone adds on to a core experience, which is a mental experience. When it
  starts to arise you just haven't got the words to describe it. So what we add
  to it is usually how we understand it to ourselves. Darkness, peacefulness,
  profound stillness, emptiness, a beautiful light or whatever. Don't
  particularly worry about what type of nimitta it actually is.
  If you want to know the way to develop that nimitta, then this fourth stage of
  developing the four jhanas is to pay attention to that aspect of the nimitta
  which is beautiful, which is attractive, which is joyful, the pleasant part of
  it. And again, it is at this stage where you have to be comfortable with
  pleasure and not be afraid of it, not fear that it is going to lead to some
  sort of attachment, because the pleasure of these stages can be very intense
  at times, literally overpowering: overpowering your sense of self,
  overpowering your control, overpowering your sensitivity to your physical
  body. So you have to look for that pleasure and happiness which is in the
  nimitta, and this becomes the fourth stage because once the mind has noticed
  the pleasure and happiness in the nimitta, that will act like what I call the
  magnet or the glue. It is that which will draw one's attention onto it, and
  it's not the will or the choice or the decision which takes the attention and
  puts it onto the samadhi nimitta. In fact once the choice, the intention, the
  orders inside yourself arise, they'll actually push you away. You have to let
  the whole process work because the samadhi nimitta at this stage is very
  pleasurable; it literally pulls the mind into it. Many meditators when the
  possibly experience their first taste of a jhana, experience the mind falling
  into a beautiful hole. And that's exactly what's happening. It's the joy, the
  bliss, the beauty of that nimitta which is before the mind that actually pulls
  the mind into it. So you don't need to do the pushing, you don't need to do
  the work. At this stage it becomes a natural process of the mind. Your job is
  just to get to that second stage, calm that breath down, allow the samadhi
  nimitta to arise. Once the samadhi nimitta arises strongly, then the jhana
  happens in and of itself.
  Again, because the quality of knowing is very strong but very narrow in these
  states, while you are in these states, there is no way that you can truly
  assess where you are and what's happening to you. The ability to know through
  thinking, through analysing, is taken away from you in these states. You
  usually have to wait until you emerge from these states, until your ordinary
  thinking returns again, so you can really look back upon and analyse what has
  happened. Any of these jhana states are powerful experiences and as a powerful
  experience, they leave a deep imprint on your mind.
  Unfortunately there is not a word in our English language which corresponds to
  a positive trauma. The word 'trauma' is like a very strong negative, painful
  experience which leaves its imprint in you. This is similar in its strength
  and result to a trauma and you remember it very clearly because it has a
  severe impact on your memory. However, these are just purely pleasant
  experiences, like pleasant traumas, and as such you recall them very easily.
  So after you've emerged from a jhana, it's usually no problem at all just to
  look back with the question, "what was that?" and to be able to see very
  clearly the type of experience, the object, which you were aware of for all
  this time and then you can analyse it. It's at this point that you can find
  out exactly where you were and what was happening, but in the jhana you can't
  do this.
  After the jhana, one can know it by what the Buddha called 'the jhana
  factors'. These are the major signposts which tell you what particular states
  you've been in. It's good to know those signposts but remember, these are just
  signposts to these states, these are the main features of these states and in
  the first jhana there are many subsidiary features. In fact the first jhana is
  quite wide. However, if it's a first jhana experience it has to have the five
  main features, the five main jhana factors. The second jhana is much narrower,
  much easier to find out whether this is where you've been. It's the same with
  the third and the fourth jhana, they get narrower still. The width of
  description for this experience, which you may offer, narrows down as you
  attain more profound depths of letting go.
  But with the first jhana, the Buddha gave it five factors. The main factors
  are the two which is piti-sukka. This is bliss. Sometimes, if you look in
  books about the meaning of these terms, they will try and split them into
  separate factors. They are separate things, but in the first couple of jhanas
  piti and sukka are so closely intertwined that you will not be able to
  distinguish one from the other and it's more helpful not to try, but to look
  at these two factors as just 'bliss'. That's the most accurate description
  which most people can recognise: "This is bliss." The Buddha called it
  vivekaja piti-sukka, that particular type of bliss which is born from
  detachment, born from aloofness, born from seclusion. Viveka is the word for
  'seclusion', 'aloofness', 'separateness' and it means 'separated from the
  world of the five senses'. That's what you've separated yourself from and this
  is the bliss of that separation, which is the cause of that happiness and
  bliss. And that bliss has a particular type of taste which other blisses do
  not share, it is the bliss of seclusion. That is why it is also sometimes
  called the bliss of renunciation. You've renounced those things; therefore you
  are secluded from them.
  There are two other factors which confuse people again and again. They are the
  two terms 'vitakka' and 'vicira' -- which Bikkhu Bodhi in his Majima Nikaya
  translates as 'initial' and 'sustained' application of thought or 'initial'
  and 'applied' thought. However, it should be known and recognised, that
  thinking, as you normally perceive it, is not present in these jhanas at all.
  That which we call thought has completely subsided. What these two terms refer
  to is a last vestige of the movement of the mind which, if it was continued,
  would give rise to thinking. It is almost what you might call sub-verbal
  thought. It is a movement of the mind towards a meditation object. That's
  called vitakka. However it has to appear on a sub-verbal level, just a
  movement, just an intention, without the mind breaking into words and labels.
  The mind moves onto the object, and remember the 'object' here, the thing you
  are aware of, is the piti-sukha. That is why it is the main factor of this
  jhana, because you are aware of bliss. That's the object of your meditation,
  not the breath, not the body, not any words but you are aware of bliss. And
  you will also be aware, and this is one of the characteristics of the first
  jhana, that the mind will still be wobbling a little bit. The bliss which is
  the object of your awareness will appear, as it were, to fade or to recede,
  and as it fades, as it recedes, as it weakens, the mind will go towards it
  again. Attracted as it were, by its power, by its bliss, the mind goes towards
  it; that is called 'vitakka', the movement of the mind onto its object. When
  it reaches the object it will hold onto it, this is called 'vicira', which
  will be an effort of mind, but a very subtle effort of mind. This is an effort
  of mind; this is not an effort of will. It is not an effort coming from you,
  it's the mind doing it by itself. All along you are a passive observer to all
  of this. And as it holds onto it, eventually, as it were, it will lose its
  grip and will recede away from the object of bliss again. In this way, the
  object of bliss will appear to be wobbly, not truly firm. As such, the mind
  will seem to have a little bit of width to it, but not be truly solid.
  However, that width is very small and you never move far away from that bliss
  because as soon as you move a little away from it, it retracts and pulls the
  mind straight back again.
  Because it's only got a little bit of width this is called one-pointedness of
  mind: all of the energy, the focus, of the mind being in one point, both in
  space and one point in time. This experience does not change over many, many,
  many minutes in a full first jhana. This experience is maintained, it's just
  the mind going towards this bliss and this bliss lasting there for a long
  time. Now again, this is only how you'll see it when you emerge from the
  jhana. You will not be able to analyse this experience into five factors
  during that time because the mind will not have that width, that ability to
  think, the ability to analyse, while you are in the state. While in the state
  all you'll be aware of is just the bliss. You are literally blissed out, not
  really quite knowing why or what's happening, but having some sort of feeling
  or confidence that this is worthwhile, this is beautiful, this is profound,
  this is worth doing, so that you can stay in those states.
  It's usual that a person's first experience of jhana will be the first jhana.
  After a while, the strength of the samadhi, what you actually brought into
  that state with you, will begin to decline and the mind will move away from
  the bliss, and the vitakka will not be strong enough to take it back into it
  again, and you emerge from the jhana. The jhana will break up and you will be
  able to think and analyse again. Thoughts will come up into your mind and this
  will probably be one of the first things which arises after the jhana breaks,
  as it were. The mind will still have a lot of happiness and bliss to it but
  will not be as one-pointed. The body will usually not be recognised at the
  beginning and only later will the mind care to look and see what the body has
  been doing all this time.
  The mind will be very powerful at this stage. You've just emerged from a
  jhana, you'll still have a lot of happiness and bliss and in the words of the
  Buddha the mind will be 'malleable', it will be 'workable'. It will be like a
  piece of clay which is not too wet and not too dry, which you can turn into
  any shape you want with ease because of the power which you invested in the
  mind, and that becomes the experience of the first jhana. Once you've
  experienced that once then it's good to find out what caused that jhana to
  arise. What did you do? Or more appropriately, what did you let go of, to give
  rise to that jhana? Rather than what you did, what you let go of becomes a
  much more powerful indicator of the ways into these states. You usually find
  out that you developed that second stage when you started to let go of this
  'controller', let go of the wandering mind, let go of the fear of these states
  and especially when you let go of the controller and just allowed the mind to
  show its face when you're not there, giving all the orders. Once you start to
  get to know this and get to know the ways into these jhanas, then you should
  try and develop them, to repeat them again and again because not only are you
  developing insight, you are developing the skill, the skill of letting go of
  things which are the causes of deep attachment.
  As you develop these jhanas more and more, they are very enjoyable things to
  develop. Sometimes people feel that a holy life, a spiritual practice should
  be harsh and severe. If you want to make it harsh and severe that's up to you,
  but if you want to go on a happy path, a path of bliss which is also going to
  lead to enlightenment at the same time, this is it. Even though these are very
  strong pleasures, mental pleasures, the Buddha said they are not to be feared.
  He said this in many places in the Suttas and there was one place, in the
  Digha Nikaya, where he told the monks: if a person develops these jhanas,
  makes much of them, is almost attached to them, attached to their development
  then there are four consequences of that attachment to that development. The
  word I am translating here as attachment is anuyoga. Our word 'yoke' comes
  from this word 'yoga' which means 'tying onto'. Anu means 'along with' or
  'tied along with' so it literally means 'practising frequently', doing it
  again and again and again, what some people would interpret as 'being attached
  to.'
  So there are four results from practising jhanas in this way, not five
  results, not three results, but four results. And those four results of
  practising jhana again and again and again are stream entry, once returner,
  non-returner and Arahat. The Buddha was unequivocal about this. It does not
  lead to more attachment to the world, it actually leads to the enlightenment
  experiences, to separation from the world. The way to develop them is that as
  you develop the first jhana more and more, you can aim towards the higher
  jhanas. The only way you can aim towards the higher jhanas is to do it before
  you enter this whole area of the mind we call the jhana realm. Because once
  you are in any jhana, you are stuck there and you cannot give any orders or
  any commands, you cannot drive your vehicle once you are in any of these
  absorptions. The aiming, the driving, the putting in of instructions has to be
  done beforehand.
  It is very difficult to find similes for this. A very weak simile, but one
  I've used before is like someone charging into a house with four rooms and the
  fourth room is way down the back, the third room is just a little bit before
  that, the second room a bit before that and the first one is just inside the
  door. The floors are made out of this very, very slippery ice so you cannot
  make any momentum once you have got in the first door. All your momentum has
  to be built up from outside, so you charge the first door and if you are going
  very fast, you may be able to slip right through the first room and into the
  second room. If you are going really fast you may even get into the third room
  and if you are going very, very fast as you charge the front door, you may
  slip all the way into the fourth room. But once you are in any of these rooms
  you cannot add to your momentum. So the only way you can gain these deeper
  jhanas is, before you enter any of these states, making sure that your effort
  to let go, your resolve to abandon, that your desire to settle all
  disturbances is so strong that you settle the disturbance of this doing mind
  and next you settle the vitakka-vicira, this movement of the mind, and you
  settle many other things as well. The mind settles down, one thing after the
  other, as it goes into the deeper jhanas.
  The second jhana is the first true state of samadhi because here you've
  settled down that which was a disturbance of the first jhana, which was a
  wobbling of the mind, the vittaka-vicara has been abandoned. So now the mind
  has the object of bliss firmly unified with it, and this state is one of
  rock-like samadhi, where there is this one object in the mind, of bliss, and
  there is no room in the mind at all. It is completely one-pointed, stuck solid
  as a rock and blissed out, so the object is not moving at all, not changing an
  iota, it is there one moment after another moment after another moment.
  Because of the solidity and stability of that state, the second jhana will
  last much, much longer than the first jhana; the deeper the jhanas, the longer
  they will last and you are usually talking in terms of hours for the second
  jhana, simply because it is a very solid state. Whereas the first jhana can be
  just for a matter of minutes, a good second jhana should be quite long -- and
  it is very solid. Once you are in it there is no way you can get out until the
  energy of that jhana just uses itself up. That's the only way, because you
  cannot form the resolution, "now's the time to come out." If someone calls
  you, you just will not hear them, if someone taps you on the shoulder, you
  will not recognise that, because you are completely separated from the
  external world. You are literally right in the centre of your mind and you
  cannot be contacted. Again, that second jhana, once it starts to break up,
  will break up into what is tantamount to first jhana then it will break out
  into the verbalisation of thought. You come down again.
  For those who want to explore these states a lot, one important thing one can
  do, rather than to leave it to the momentum of your energy to quieten down
  your energy of samadhi, is to make resolutions before you enter these states.
  You just need to say to yourself, "I'll just enter the jhana for half an hour
  or for one hour." Because the mind is very refined in these states it will
  have power, your suggestion will be like programming a computer and once the
  hour is up, the mind will just come out of the jhanas. I can't say exactly how
  it works, but it does. In the same way you can go to sleep and say, "I'll wake
  up at three o'clock" and you do wake up at three o'clock or five minutes
  either side, without the use of an alarm clock. The mind, if you programme it
  with mindfulness, responds. And so that is a very useful way and a very good
  instruction; to use those resolutions so that you do not spend over long in
  those states when you have maybe an appointment or some things you have to do.
  Make a resolution first of all. However, when you are in that state, you
  cannot make a resolution, you cannot think, you cannot analyse. All you know
  is that you are blissed out, you are not quite sure what is happening and only
  afterwards you have the opportunity to emerge and then to analyse and to see
  what has gone on and why.
  If one wishes to go deeper into the jhanas, then at this point one has to
  understand that that bliss, which is in the second jhana born of samadhi, born
  of full unification of mind, a bliss with a different taste, has an aspect to
  it which is still troublesome to the mind and that is this aspect of piti.
  This is almost like a mental excitement and that can be overcome if one aims
  to quieten that bliss down.
   Ajahn Brahmavamso
  Perth, Western Australia, 1998
  (Edited from a talk given by Ajahn Brahmavamso during the 9-day retreat in
  North Perth, Western Australia, December 1997)