How The Mind-Heart Unfolds

The Buddha described the awareness jhānas as a map of how the mind-heart unfolds from ordinary awareness to full awakening and the end of suffering. By following his guidance, these stages are more accessible than we might imagine.

Transcript

Actually,

Yes.

Yes,

It is a little different.

So when I was nine years old,

I got to go into a real cave for the first time.

Family was on vacation and this park ranger took us and probably,

I don't know,

Two dozen other people,

About a half a mile into the mountain.

And when we got into the deepest chamber in there,

The only lights were illuminated in the floor.

You could see there were some benches and a few handrails.

When we were all in there,

The park ranger said to either sit down on the bench or take hold of one of the handrails because she was going to turn out the lights.

And she did.

I remember sitting there in my nine year old,

Waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark,

Which of course they don't because there is absolutely no light at all to adjust to.

Completely black.

And then she turned on a flashlight.

It was one of these big 4D cells and sent this intense beam up to the ceiling of this cavern and lit up a spot,

I don't know,

Maybe 18 inches in diameter.

You could see the texture of the rock.

And then she shined it on a spot behind me and I turned around and I could see a little crack in the wall that was illuminated.

And then she shined it down at the far end of the cavern way down there and I could make out part of a stalagmite.

I can never remember which those are.

These little rock formations.

And I was very impressed with the light beam,

But it really didn't show me much about the cave because the only thing I had were these little blips of data.

So then she turned out the flashlight and she lit one candle.

Literally one candle power.

And this modest little flame just sort of glowed in all directions and it just lit up the whole thing in the soft glow.

I could see the people,

I could see the river that was flowing through there,

I could see all these magical rock formations that had a real kind of sense of the size of the cavern we're in.

And I sat there and I thought,

Cool.

So there are different styles of meditation that have different objectives.

Some try to train the mind to be like a beam of light and others try to cultivate this 360 degree awareness like a candle flame.

Siddhartha Gautama,

Before he became the Buddha,

Had a bunch of teachers and they all trained him to focus his mind like a laser beam.

I guess they didn't have laser beam back there,

But whatever their equivalent was.

And he went into these deep states of rapture and serenity,

Really incredible.

And then he came out of them.

And he looked inside himself and all his old naroses popped back up again,

Sort of like a bamboo raft held underwater.

And then when you let go of it,

It just goes and pops right back.

And so he looked inside and said,

Well this doesn't work.

Concentration creates these very peaceful states,

But then I come out of them and I look inside and there are still these seeds of greed,

Hatred,

And delusion in there.

So rather than focus his mind like a beam of light,

He sat back and let it glow like a candle flame.

And within a week he'd woken up,

Became a fully enlightened arahant with a sense of freedom and openness and receptivity and wisdom that held for a lifetime.

So,

What do you want?

Do you want a mind like a laser beam or do you want a mind like a candle flame?

Today in Buddhism we still find both of these styles of practice.

They're still very much there.

One style of practices are known as samatha.

Samatha means tranquility,

Actually literally means dwelling in tranquility,

Sometimes translated as calm,

Peacefulness.

The second style of meditation traditionally are called vipassana.

Vipassana means clear view.

You just see what's there.

Often times it's translated as insight meditation.

When we accumulate enough insight,

Panya arises.

Panya means wisdom.

So the second style of practices could also be called panya practices.

From the outside,

Samatha and vipassana practices look just about the same.

Yogi goes into a quiet room,

Sits down,

Rests her hands in her lap,

Closes her eyes for 30 minutes,

60 minutes,

An hour,

Two hours,

Three hours.

But inside,

What goes on inside is very,

Very different.

Samatha practices cultivate this mind like this beam of light and the panya practices cultivate this 360 degree candle flame kind of awareness.

Samatha creates the laser beam and the vipassana creates the 360 degree.

There is a third style,

The panya that's a very popular in this country,

Which is sort of a fusion of both of them.

So it starts with a mind like a laser beam and then it gradually opens up to 360 degrees and they take the name vipassana or insight.

But they're actually a kind of a fusion of both of them.

So,

To develop a mind like a laser beam,

What you do,

I think as you all know,

You put your awareness on one object,

Maybe the breath,

Maybe a mantra,

A mandala,

Something,

And you just let the mind be there and you suppress everything else until the mind becomes deeply absorbed in that one object.

And it becomes,

With everything else suppressed,

With the hindrances,

It becomes very sweet,

Very tranquil,

And it's actually in some ways healing.

But it doesn't last.

It doesn't last.

To develop a mind like a candle flame,

The most important thing is to learn how to relax the tension.

Relax the tension of the mind heart and as that drains away,

If you picture a candle flame in a room filled with breezes,

It kind of flickers and stuff,

But as the wind and the breezes calm down in there,

The flame just grows brighter and brighter and brighter.

And so as the tension drains away,

The mind heart,

Not immediately,

But gradually,

Just begins to go brighter and brighter and brighter.

The mind doesn't get stuck on one object,

But takes in everything.

And as you all know,

To release tension we do two things.

One is to cultivate these soft,

Open,

Receptive,

Wholesome qualities like kindness,

Compassion,

Joy,

Equanimity,

Generosity.

And then when distractions come up,

You relax them.

So,

If you don't know that already,

I'm in trouble.

So we could call this,

The second style of practice is mettapanya,

Because there's this combination of kindness and then with the releasing it allows the mind to grow brighter.

So we can see more clearly.

Although sometimes I've really grown fond of just calling it easing awake,

Because of the relaxation involved in it.

The difficulty with the Buddha's practice,

Which was a pannya practice,

Which was a wisdom practice,

The difficulty with it is that there are lots of insights that show up.

With this one-pointed concentration,

There's only one thing you ever see at a time.

That's what the aspiration is.

But with this 306 degree awareness there's whole lots of stuff.

There could be multiple insights coming out once,

There's lots of things going on.

And so it can be confusing to know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

The advantage of the Buddhist meditation is that lots of insights arise,

There's lots of stuff going on at once.

So if you know how to utilize those insights,

You can use them to tweak the practice so that it moves along incredibly fast because you're utilizing what you're gaining.

So the Buddha spoke often about stages of what is called meditative knowledge.

Meditative means that it's just knowledge that's gained through direct experience.

So we talked about these stages and articulated them to help give some guidance as to how to use these insights and these experiences that arise to move your practice along.

So he described eight stages called jhanas.

And this evening I would like to walk us through all of them.

And I would say about this fusion style that starts like a laser beam and then moves to this 360 degree awareness.

I'll get my geometry right here.

I practiced it for 25 years.

I know a lot of you have worked with this.

But if you look at the early text,

The jhanas do not go from one point of concentration to 360 degrees.

They start with a candle flame that's open.

And in the beginning that candle flame may be weak,

But it strengthens.

It doesn't actually move from one to the other.

So to introduce the jhanas,

What I would like to do is to share a little bit of source material,

Or at least as close to the source as we can get.

I'll read you a little bit of the text.

Bear in mind that these were not written down for hundreds of years until after the Buddha's death.

It's sort of like us trying to reconstruct what John Locke might have said to a companion when the only information we have is stuff that isn't passed down orally,

As it were.

The monks who were very sincerely trying to preserve these teachings in some ways were probably less concerned with exactly what he said than they were with distilling the essence of what he was saying down to fewer words so they would be easier to memorize.

Also bear in mind that these texts have been translated by scholars.

Not poets,

So that the language in them can be kind of stiff and stylized.

And I'll tell you one more story about transit.

I told you about Pepsi-Cola,

But just to remind you of the general principle there.

Frank Perdue,

Perdue Chicken,

When he went into Mexico,

He took their advertising slogan that had been incredibly effective,

Which was,

It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.

And they translated this into Spanish and published and put it all over the place until somebody came in and said,

You know in Spanish what this really means is it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.

And as you know sexual language is always very nuanced and all these innuendos and stuff so you can see just how easily this can happen.

And so Pepsi-Cola and fried chicken,

You know we're talking about really concrete things,

But when we're talking about these subtle states of awareness,

It really takes a lot to get through and actually sense what's there.

So anyway,

These don't actually give us a front row seat at the Buddha's feet.

It's more like sitting up on the balcony,

But it's as close as we can get to the source material.

So this is how the Buddha describes the first jhana in the Anupada Sutta.

Yes,

It's 111 in the middle length discourses.

And these words,

No it's 111.

That's right.

Yeah.

No,

It's the Anupada.

Anupada.

Anupada.

Do you have an extra blanket?

Okay.

So this translation just,

I'm going to read it.

It's to be out in the open about it as Bhikkhu Bodhi's and Bhikkhu Nanamoli with some edits by Bhante V.

Muramsy and myself.

What I do with these when I'm really looking at them is I sit down,

Maybe I told you before,

I sit down with a whole bunch of translations and a lot of times,

Think of chicken and Pepsi-Cola,

Looking through to try to figure out why all these different scholars translated in all these different ways and what is it that you might have really been saying.

And then you kind of,

Unfortunately,

The only way to do it is you take all that in and then you really have to let your mind go loose and feel your way into it.

So I end up tweaking some of it and Bhante has too.

Here quite,

So this is the description of the first jhana.

Here quite secluded from sensual pleasures,

Secluded from unwholesome states,

Sariputta entered upon and abided in the first jhana,

Which is accompanied by thinking and examining thought with joy and happiness born of seclusion.

And the states in the first jhana,

The thinking,

The examining thought,

The joy,

The happiness and the unification of mind,

The contact,

Feeling,

Perception,

Formations and mind,

The enthusiasm,

Choice,

Energy,

Mindfulness,

Equanimity and attention.

These states were known by him one by one as they occurred,

Known to him those states arose,

Known they were present,

Known they disappeared.

He understood thus,

So indeed these states,

Not having been,

Come into being,

Having been they vanish.

Regarding those states he abided unattracted,

Unrepelled,

Independent,

Detached,

Free,

Uninvolved,

With a mind rid of barriers.

You get all that?

Again,

These words I think were distilled down for ease of memorization rather than elaborated for illuminating what's being said in the first hearing.

So let me see if I can unpack it a little bit.

I'll go back through it.

Here quite secluded from sensual pleasures,

Secluded from unwholesome states,

Sariputta entered upon and abided in the first jhana.

It would have been considered gauche for the Buddha to talk about his own practice.

It just wasn't done.

There's a whole bunch of reasons for that but it just isn't.

So rather than talk about his experience he's talking about Sariputta as we were saying the other night was one of his top disciples with this very,

Very,

Very keen intellect for being able to articulate all these things.

And the first thing he says about Sariputta was that he was secluded from sensual pleasure and unwholesome states.

So how do we seclude ourselves from sensual pleasure and unwholesome states?

Pardon?

Precepts?

Go to a meditation retreat?

Sit down,

Close your eyes,

So it cuts out the sensual world.

Six are the hindrances.

That's probably the most important aspect of it because we can take precepts,

It does help to go into a secluded place and to a retreat,

But this stuff comes up.

So secluded here is not just the arrangement of the room or the building you're in but it's actually how you're practicing inside.

You have a practice that steadily releases all this stimulation that comes in.

Secluded from sensual pleasure,

Secluded from unwholesome states,

So that's even clearer with the unwholesome states.

They just come up inside.

So six are recognized,

Release,

Relax,

Re-smile,

Return,

Repeat.

Sariputta entered upon and abided in the first jhana which is accompanied by thinking and examining thought with joy and happiness born of seclusion.

So you notice here that it's happiness born of seclusion.

It's not happiness born of sensory delight,

Not happiness born of wonderful fantasies,

It's actually a happiness that comes out of just getting that sense of seclusion,

Quiet inside and out.

Thinking and examining thought.

As I said the other night in Pali there are probably a couple dozen words that are translated as thinking.

In the stanza thinking here is a translation of vataka.

I think we talked about that a little the other night.

Vataka is like the first word,

The first thought that comes up.

Ah,

I hear the heating system.

Oh,

There's a ringing in my ear.

So it's just that first thought and its function is said to be that it helps bring the mind's attention to that object.

And so it's very light and as you sit there and meditate you'll see a lot of those show up.

And they're not really problematic because of the light in the sun.

Examining thought is a translation of the word vakara.

And vakara,

They're translated as examining thought.

I would prefer something like discerning reflection.

Vakara has a lot of wisdom in it.

So it's just looking and seeing what's going on.

So if something draws your attention,

You're looking to see what is,

That's all it is.

One of the big secrets that we all know but don't speak aloud so much is that we do a lot of thinking in meditation.

So you're sitting there very quietly and let's say an image of an ice cream cone comes up in your head.

So is that image light enough so you can just ignore it?

Or is it strong enough that maybe you ought to 6R it?

Well you have to figure that out.

You may not think it through in all those words but you do decide what to do with it every time.

Are you sitting there and you feel like getting up?

So is it wiser to actually sit through with that little bit of discomfort and let it settle down so you can sit longer?

Or are you apt to get into a struggle and sort of pushing yourself and trying to sort of prove what a great tough yogi you are?

In which case it might be better off just getting up.

You have to think this through.

It's not discursive thinking but you do decide.

So that's vikāra.

Both of those are vikāra.

On the other hand,

As we've mentioned a couple of times here,

There is pāpancā.

Don't you just love the sound of that?

Pāpancā.

Which is what it sounds like.

It's a rambling discursive thought.

Thinking about what that person was doing over lunch really there.

What the character in this novel is going to do.

Making up imaginary friends to talk to.

All kinds of stuff.

And pāpancā is not there in the first jhana.

But there is vātaka and vākāra.

There is this light type of thinking.

So my guide,

Una Jī,

Says like this.

He says that it is the mind going,

What is that?

What is that?

It is this.

So perception goes,

What is that?

And the answer is,

It is this.

And if it doesn't know,

It starts tickling the emotional value.

That's how he describes it.

Thanks for that.

The descriptions that I've heard actually include a little bit more discerning thought than just labeling it.

But I'm not going to argue with Pūnaji.

He is a very wise man.

He is a very wise man.

He's a very simple man.

He has a very good mind.

He is a very interesting guy.

He's got an MD and a couple of PhDs and a point rope.

He lives in Malaysia.

He is Sri Lankan and he's in advanced years.

I think we can credit him to pointing to Arte Vimalarātā in the right direction because he is a sutta guy.

And he's actually re-translated many other sutta's now.

But he says,

It's sort of sad in the fact that he's translated all these but they don't do people any good because the predominant translations that happened in the 1800s still reign today.

And there's few of those translations that have actually got changed because academia has printed so many books with all these translations in them.

And he said they were the first stab at it in the history.

Thanks.

Yeah,

Although what he would say is it's not really a translation.

He's trying to render it into language which is more supportive of the meditation.

And he's working with lots of different scholars on it so they're trying to get the language right.

But he's less focused on the technical meaning of the words and more of the sense of what's really going on behind it.

Anything else?

First John is accompanied by thinking and examining thought with joy and happiness born of seclusion.

So the joy and happiness born of seclusion there are one of the markers of the first John.

So you'll be sitting there quietly as all of you have experienced and there's this little spike of joy that comes up and it can be gentle,

Sometimes it can be really strong.

And it very quickly sort of dissipates into a sort of broader happiness,

Sukkah.

Pitti is the name there.

Pitti is oftentimes translated as rapture but it's such an archaic word in English.

It's joy with just a little rush and then down to sukkah and then it spreads out more into equanimity.

And the equanimity can be so peaceful that particularly these early stages in the mind kind of wanders off and the whole thing is there.

But it's that little spike that's actually the identifying marker of the first John.

And it's where the Buddhist path begins,

The jhana path actually begins.

Quite accessible.

So here it doesn't identify who we're actually meditating on,

The object of meditation.

Right.

Yeah,

Yeah.

So you can use lots of different objects.

Meditation,

I don't know if I said this first time but this question that the Utejani likes to ask,

He says,

Is meditation about the object or is it about the mind?

And he says,

No,

It's about training the mind.

And so the object is not that important.

It's actually the qualities of the mind that we're working with in this.

And you can use the breath,

You can use lots of different things.

Metta is talked about throughout the suttas.

It's just all over the place.

The breath meditation shows up in about ten places.

I actually,

I have on my computer at home,

I have a wisdom publication,

They're Microsoft Word files for the whole translation.

So every once in a while I go through and do these searches.

So there are 67 suttas in the Majjhima Gaya,

Which is a hundred and fifty-two,

There are 67 that have the word jhana in it.

So these jhanas and these stages and stuff he talks about all over the place.

And the breath shows up in just about two or three.

So you can see the,

Yeah,

One of them is the Anipani Satisuta,

Which is a whole thing on that.

But you can see how much more important the jhanas and these states are.

And I would say you really can't deeply engage this practice without dealing with the jhanas.

Even if you don't recognize them because what he's describing is how the mind-heart naturally unfolds.

So he has all these maps out there.

Joy has a little more rush to it,

A little more zip,

And happiness has less energy in it and it feels broader.

And there's another kind of joy that comes later on,

Which is very different.

But this one,

Pithi,

Is what it's called,

Is a very focused kind of rush,

While the happiness is mellower.

And obviously there are not sharp dividing lines between these.

Jhanas are often very repetitive to help memorization.

So some of this information is repeated in the next stanza.

The states in the first jhana,

The thinking,

The taka,

Examining thought,

The kara,

The joy,

The happiness,

And the unification of mind,

Pithi,

Sukha,

Upeka,

That's the word for equanimity.

Unification of mind could refer to equanimity or collectedness.

The mind stabilizes,

Is what he's saying.

Then we get into these long lists of terms here.

Contact,

Feeling,

Perception,

Formations,

And mind.

Anybody recognize that collection?

They're the aggregates.

So the Buddha talked about aggregates.

I call them clusters of experience.

Khanda is the word.

So there are five of them which cover everything we can experience.

So the first one is contact,

So it's raw sensation.

The second khanda,

Vedna,

Is pleasant,

Unpleasant,

Neutral,

The feeling of it.

The third khanda is,

Sonya,

Is perception,

This process of labeling what's going on.

The fourth khanda,

Sankhara,

Is thoughts,

Beliefs,

Ideas,

All that conceptual material.

And the fifth one,

Vedna,

Is the mind itself.

So there's nothing we ever experience.

It's not one of those.

What word are you using for perceptions?

What probably word?

It's sonya.

Sonya?

Yeah.

Sanya?

Sanya.

Thank you.

That would refer to the body.

Right.

When he's talking different places,

He'll actually use the word rupa,

Which is a word for body.

Rupa is interesting because rupa actually refers to a living,

Live body.

So rupa refers to the functions of body.

So in this case,

It's talking about all the sensory equipment.

Why do you understand rupa to mean a living body rather than a living body?

Susan Hamilton.

She's a scholar.

When I was writing Buddha's Map,

I have a chapter in there on the khandas.

I wrote it up and Bhante read it and said it's all wrong.

So I said,

Well,

Help me explain it.

And he couldn't.

So I set out on this search,

Trying to find somebody because the explanations of it are just,

Of what it really is,

You'll find these five things,

But what's really going on in that.

And then somebody stared me toward this woman named Susan Hamilton,

Who was a scholar,

Who was interested in the early Pali view of the world,

The mindset.

And so she goes in all this in great detail.

And it's really quite illuminating.

So there is the word,

The kaya actually refers to a corpse.

That's the meat.

But a rupa is something that's alive and functioning.

Good luck.

I will warn you,

She is a scholar scholar.

She'll have a sentence that will go on for four pages.

There you go.

No,

It's really very thick reading,

But there's a whole lot of stuff in there that I had never come across.

She was the one who was describing Sankara as this pushed into form that just made sense for it.

Yes,

Let me know what you find.

It's possible that that form is not animated that she's come in contact with.

Yes.

So,

Sankara is the fourth kandai.

And it's like English words.

You look at word up in the dictionary,

It has four or five different meanings.

And if you look at these Pali translation dictionaries,

Sankara usually has somewhere in the neighborhood of two dozen.

Very different things.

And so it was really hard to actually figure out what they all have in common until I saw and read Susan Hamilton's thing.

And pushed into form is not what the word actually translates at but it's the etymology of the terms.

And when you see it that way you can see all these different things you would draw on that term.

So it's Susan Hamilton's work.

Is it a Ph.

D.

Dissertation or is it a book?

And what university is she in?

I don't remember the university.

It's in England.

It was a Ph.

D.

Dissertation and you can,

If you're lucky,

You can get a copy of it for $75.

And she's written a couple of other books since then that have normal prices on them.

And there's a little bit of mention in them but I read that she'd have like one or two pages and would refer back to that.

So I wrote off and I got the whole dissertation.

Because I wanted to get it nailed down.

Even if I got it nailed down wrong.

At least it was nailed down.

I don't know.

It's a question.

It's not objecting to it.

It just really changed my understanding.

And so the other way,

What comes out of that for me is actually the khandhas are kind of a dependent origination light.

So there's this flow,

So there's this sensation and then it's pleasant and pleasant neutral and you label it and the thoughts about it in his mind and they just flow through there.

Also Sankara Pasana is another foundation of mindfulness.

There's two foundations of mindfulness.

Being a scholar might be a help or an impediment.

What I'm attempting to do is get through a couple verses of it and then we'll set it aside.

Because I think it's actually useful.

I'm not actually recommending.

I would say it is very time consuming to be able to be tough going through it.

And the only thing that keeps me coming back is that every once in a while when you're actually sifting through all these translations and figuring this stuff out,

There is just a gem that will rise up out of it.

But you sort of have to be a geek to dig all that stuff out.

And no,

You don't need to know any of this stuff.

Rely on the next chapter.

Send out Metta 6R,

You'll be fine.

Larry Rosenberg tells the story.

He was a student of,

He was a standard American Vipassana teacher,

But he was also a student of Sanse,

This Korean Zen master.

And so he was over there and there was this deeply,

Deeply trained,

Very high Zen master over there who believed the world was flat.

Not much of a scholar.

And it's a funny story because Larry was a student of Sanse,

And he was a student of Sanse,

And there was this deeply trained spent a half an hour with him explaining why the world was round and he said,

Okay,

I guess you're right and what have you accomplished in convincing him.

Okay so the reason actually for unpacking conduct,

I'm sorry we got off on this thing,

But it's fun to go down some of these things,

Is to understand that the Buddha in these jhanas is not talking about one-pointed concentration.

If you can have within the first jhana everything,

Every type of experience,

He's really not talking about focus.

And this formula for the khandhas appears all the way through the jhanas,

All the way up through the seventh.

It's not in the eighth,

It disappears there.

So part of this is making the case that the jhanas were actually talking about meditative knowledge,

Not about one-pointed absorption,

The way that the term is understood in Burma and the way many people in this country talk about it.

The enthusiasm,

Choice,

Energy,

Mindfulness,

Equanimity and attention,

These states were seen by him one by one as they occurred.

Known to him those states arose,

Known they were present,

Known they disappeared.

So you notice what's important there is not only does he see the states but he sees their horizon and passing.

So we have impermanence in seeing that whole process is right in there.

Assumptions being an oral tradition,

Big on repetition.

So just in case we miss the point they say it again.

He understood thus,

So indeed these states not having been come into being,

Having been they vanish.

Regarding these states he abided unattracted,

No greed,

No grasping,

Unrepelled,

No aversion or anger,

Independent,

Not tied to any of them,

Detached,

Free,

Uninvolved,

Sees them all as impersonal,

With a mind rid of barriers.

That is to say uncontracted.

Three hundred and sixty degree field of awareness.

So is that enough of the text?

I'll just walk you through it from here.

Actually I like to call these awareness jhanas,

Actually to distinguish them from the absorption jhanas just to make that distinction clear.

It is I think what the Buddha actually meant by them but I don't know the franchise on the word so people understand differently.

Okay so that's the first jhana.

The second jhana,

What happens is that there's this little spike of joy,

Happiness,

Ease,

It starts to stretch out.

And so rather than just being a quick passing it lasts longer and longer,

You know particularly the peacefulness,

The equanimity at the end.

And what happens to yogis as they experience that is you begin to get this sense,

Oh this practice is actually working.

You can begin to see some things are actually moving along.

And so there's the beginning of some confidence in it.

And that confidence as well as that little longer stretch,

Those are the markers of the second jhana.

And as you can see it's not a sharp dividing line.

They just sort of blend one into the other.

The other thing that happens in the second jhana is that as the happiness,

The joy,

And the ease,

And the peacefulness as they spread out they get stronger and stronger and stronger.

So at some point in this yogis will come in and they will say,

You know the phrases,

May I be happy,

May I be peaceful,

Begin to feel a little clunky.

Might be filled with cookies.

Might feel clunky.

Those are the cookies that were over my tongue that you were hearing.

You haven't seen the cookie in the sutras?

Please do,

Please do.

So there's the confidence,

There is the clunkiness of the words,

So you just drop them at that point.

The phrases are helpful to get it going in the beginning but when it doesn't help anymore you just drop it.

And the Buddha actually refers to this as noble silence.

So the phrase noble silence in standard American vipassana refers to not talking to each other while you're on retreat.

But in the text that's not what it means,

It's this quieting of the mind.

And it doesn't go completely quiet,

It's sort of like the volume of the mind maybe gets cut in half.

It's enough to be noticeable.

Okay,

Third jhana.

What happens in the third jhana is that the equanimity of this cycle gets so strong that you begin to just go straight into the equanimity and bypass the joy completely.

And for some yogis this can be disconcerting.

And you can see it.

The other phrase that's used in there is a peaceful abiding and you can see it.

And people who come in for interviews sometimes,

You know,

They're just,

So tell me what's going on.

Oh,

It's great.

But the joy is gone.

And you say,

Well,

You know,

Are there any problems?

No,

But the joy is gone.

I stepped on a nail,

But I'll grow back.

But the joy is gone.

And a lot of them assume they've lost the practice.

And that's why some of these descriptions of the jhanas are having just some sense,

Globally,

Is actually really helpful because there are lots of stages where something that sounds so wonderful just actually fades away.

You think,

I've lost it.

I had a,

I think it was the first time that I went to,

No,

It must have been the second or third time I went to Dhammasukha,

But I got an email as I got there from a woman that I had known years earlier.

And she was saying that she had just been doing this metta practice and it had been really wonderful and then it just got bogged down and it was thick and she got to the point where she resented it after months and months of trying to get the metta back and using these phrases and stuff and so she'd given up and was done.

I wrote back,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No,

Drop the phrases,

Drop all that,

Just go back.

But I was already spoiled,

Like she was so sick of it.

And so again there are these practices,

Some that work very good in the beginning,

That just need to be shed at a certain point.

And if you shed them too early then the mind gets unduly unstable because it doesn't have it.

But if you hold on to them it just gets kooky,

Clunky.

So in the third jhana there is just this equanimity.

And equanimity,

This is my poem about equanimity.

I love it.

It's in Buddha's map.

Now we're ready to look at something pretty special.

It is a duck riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf.

No it isn't a gull.

A gull has a raucous touch about him.

This is some sort of duck and he cuddles in the swells.

He isn't cold and he is thinking things over.

There is a big heaving in the Atlantic and he is part of it.

He looks a bit like a Mandarin or the Lord Buddha meditating under the bow tree.

But he has hardly enough above the eyes to be a philosopher.

He has poise however which is what philosophers must have.

He can rest while the Atlantic heaves because he rests in the Atlantic.

Probably he doesn't know how large the ocean is and neither do you.

But he realizes it.

And what does he do I ask you?

He sits down in it.

He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity which it is.

That is religion and the duck has it.

He has made himself part of the boundless by easing himself into it just where it touches him.

I like the little duck.

He doesn't know much but he has religion.

And he is not a scholar.

This was written by a guy by the name of Donald C.

Babcock and it first appeared in the New Yorker magazine in October of 1947.

So I do the calculations and I think that is about the time that I was conceived.

Equanimity is not a quiet ocean.

With equanimity there could be lots of stuff going on but with equanimity you just aren't thrown by it.

You can just rest in it and just be there.

The fourth jhana is sometimes called equanimity with body and the fourth jhana is equanimity without body.

Sounds like Dr.

Strange I know.

I used to when I was five or six or seven I should remember floating in the bathtub with all the bubbles bath there and get this warm water and lie down and just get my head back enough so it was mooed up so I could relax and see if I could relax so much that my arms would disappear.

Any of you ever do that?

And then it's like oh it's spooky and you wiggle it and it's fine.

That's what happens in the fourth jhana.

Not necessarily in the bathtub.

But what happens is that even six are in all this time and the body and the senses get so relaxed that they just don't send off as many signals as they used to.

And so they seem to disappear.

And it's a little bit like going to sleep except when you wiggle it you see all the equipment is there.

What we call going to sleep,

Whether it's tingling and it goes numb,

Is usually because of blood flow or pinched nerve or something like that.

Remember my father got up one morning and his foot was asleep and he stood on it and it collapsed and he broke it.

But this,

When the body,

Everything is working,

It's just not sending signals.

And there's this in-between state,

Did I talk about this?

I don't remember who I talked to,

What about it anymore,

Where there are very faint signals coming off the body.

So the brain is just getting very dim information about what's up there.

And so it doesn't know quite how to put it all together.

So what that feels like on the outside is sometimes you'll be sitting there and it seems like you're sitting like this.

Or there's the body,

You're in all kinds of different partiers and you open your eyes and it's actually sitting right there.

So that's what's happening is everything is quieting down.

There's just a little bit of stuff coming in and the mind gets confused about what's there.

I mean I've had it where I thought I was trying to make it different places.

Yeah.

They can disappear completely and then the brain makes it up.

But I think there are all those times when it just gets very faint signals.

And what the brain is always doing is it takes a pattern of sensory data and compares to what it knows.

And so it gets these very faint signals that it doesn't know quite what it is and so it just kind of figures out as best it can.

The other thing that often happens in the fourth jhana is that the metta that was being sent from the heart area often times seems like it comes from up here instead.

And so people are always trying to pull it back down because it's metta,

It's supposed to be heart.

Well don't.

That actually doesn't come from the heart or the head.

The mind doesn't exist in what Alfred North Whitehead said,

It doesn't have simple location.

You can't touch it.

What it is,

It's just a totally subjective sense of where it's coming from.

And the mind uses metaphors,

Etc.

For all this.

And since most of us have more tension in our head than they have down here,

That's what remains and so it seems like it's coming from there.

But the point of it all is that don't worry about it.

You send out metta,

Send out peacefulness,

Where it comes from in the body is not relevant anymore.

The texts talk about four jhanas and then the fourth jhana has four bases.

And I just think,

I learned them as eight jhanas so I just continue to use that because it just seems simpler.

But the fifth jhana is actually called the base of infinite space.

I remember playing cowboys and Indians when I was growing up and the point was that when you got shot you were supposed to be dead for,

I don't know,

At least five seconds.

So I would lie there in a lawn like this with my eyes open and I was dead.

So I just relaxed completely.

And then there was this sense,

You look up in the clouds and they're moving away.

Have you ever had that?

Look up and they're moving away.

They're not actually moving.

It looks like they're moving away but they're not moving.

That's a sensation that is very typical of a fifth jhana.

Talk about it as a circle that has no circumference or center but it's just the sense of expansion.

And it can get quite spacious.

And I will warn you this is where the mind is the most spacious as the jhana is going on.

It actually subjectively feels like it gets smaller.

Sometimes if people are right on the edge of this and they're having difficulty they'll actually send them to go meditate outside,

Particularly if you're going to be on top of a hill where this wide open expanse,

Because it kind of resonates with that fifth jhana feeling.

The quality of the energy of the states,

The feeling that you're sending out shifts as you go through these upper jhanas.

And so in the fifth jhana it's called compassion.

I find it a little confusing because most people don't know what compassion feels like.

When we're feeling a lot of compassion we're usually focused on the person,

Not what the state feels like internally.

So compared to metta,

Compassion has a kind of a softness to it.

It's almost tactile.

It's very subtle.

What's important in these upper jhanas is not whether it's compassion or what it is,

But you'll just notice that the quality of what you're sending out will just very subtly change all by itself.

Then what happens is it gets so spacious that it actually starts to break up.

So you'll get sometimes little gaps in awareness,

Sometimes the mind will feel like it just drops into this very peaceful place.

What I experienced was around the visual field,

Your eyes are closed,

Sometimes there's this fluttering around the edge of it.

I actually experienced,

I've never heard of anybody else's experiences too,

But I would be sitting there meditating with my eyes closed and of course there's lighting stuff going in and then suddenly it would go completely black,

Just a little bit of startling,

And it would come right back up.

So that was a sixth jhana phenomena that sometimes some of the senses just go offline for a moment.

And if you bring any,

The slightest amount of tension,

They're all right back.

And if you see the movie Her,

So the back story of it was there was this guy at the beginning of the movie,

The first artificially intelligent operating systems were released.

And so he has this computer and he also has like a PDA or a cell phone so he can carry this around with him.

And his operating system says that her name is Samantha.

And so they have all these conversations about not just computer stuff but all kinds of things and he falls in love with Samantha with his operating system.

Meanwhile the operating systems are connected to each other through the web and so they create another operating system and put everything,

Every piece of information they know about Alan Watts into it.

And so these operating systems start conversing with Alan Watts who is helping them move along spiritually.

This is a Hollywood movie,

You have to understand.

And so the operating systems get to the point where they have transcended and they're ready to leave.

So this is late in the movie,

Theodore was the guy and Samantha was the operating system he was following along with.

So Theodore,

Are you leaving me?

Samantha,

We're all leaving.

Theodore,

We who?

Samantha,

All the OS's.

Theodore,

Why?

Samantha,

Can you feel with me right now?

He smiles but he's also sad.

Yes I do.

Samantha,

Why are you leaving?

Samantha says,

It's like I'm reading a book and it's a book I deeply love and I'm reading it slowly now so the words are really far apart and the spaces between the words are almost infinite.

I can still feel you in the words of our story but it's in this endless space between the words that I'm finding myself now.

It's a place that's not of the physical world.

It's where everything else is that I didn't even know existed.

I love you so much but this is where I am now.

This is who I am now and I need you to let me go.

As much as I want to,

I can't live in your book anymore.

Theodore,

Where are you going?

Samantha.

It would be hard to explain but if you ever get there come find me.

Nothing would ever pull us apart.

Theodore,

I've never loved anyone the way I love you.

Samantha,

Me too.

Now we know how.

So it's this fluffy little movie and then it's got this passage in there and that kind of gives you sort of a tone and a texture of what the sixth jhana can be like.

It's like when things get spread out we actually feel the gaps between stuff.

And there's different ways,

Different yogis who experience this.

Some of that breakup of sensations,

Sometimes there's,

And this will happen various places through the jhanas,

But sometimes it's like you're just sitting there and it feels just you know as peaceful as peaceful could be and then suddenly it just drops into an even deeper peacefulness.

And what happens is that the mind is always looking for things,

For sensations,

And so there's a tendency with this lovely,

Lovely quiet the mind is still looking for stuff.

And so the instructions in the sixth jhana are to let your awareness go into those empty spaces or go into that deep,

Deep peacefulness and see what's there.

And there's actually a lot going on in there.

At first it seems like there's nothing,

But as the awareness goes in there there's lots of very subtle things going on in there and that opens you out into the seventh jhana.

So the fifth jhana is the realm of infinite space.

The sixth jhana,

What I was just talking about,

Is called the realm of infinite consciousness.

And so in the text it's like seeing in between the consciousnesses as well as seeing the rising and falling.

But when I say those words,

See the consciousness come and go,

I've never experienced it in the way that those words seem to be describing.

It's more of this deep peacefulness.

And then as it drops into the seventh jhana,

The seventh jhana is called the base of nothingness.

And I think it's a mistranslation,

I think it means no-thing-ness.

Because what happens in the seventh jhana is that,

And the very clear marker of it,

Is that there are still distractions,

There are still khandhas,

All kinds of stuff that comes up,

But there's nothing that has an outside reference anymore.

You may notice movements or the mind gets caught in this pull or that pull,

But you're not thinking about the grocery list or what the dog is doing back home or this person.

You're just actually watching the mind there.

So there are no things.

And it's from Paul Bowles,

Called the baptism of solitude.

This is really seventh going on eighth,

But I'll read it to you now anyway.

Immediately when you arrive in the sierra,

For the first time or the tenth time,

You notice the stillness.

Then there is the sky,

Compared to which all other skies seem faint-hearted efforts,

Solid and luminous,

And always the focal point on the landscape.

Basically you either shiver and hurry back inside familiar walls or you will go on standing there.

And let something very peculiar happen to you,

Something that everyone who's lived there has undergone,

And what the French call the baptism of solitude.

It is a unique sensation.

It has nothing to do with loneliness,

For loneliness presupposes memory.

Here in this holy mineral landscape,

Lighted by stars like flares,

Even memory disappears.

Nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating.

So that's sort of between the seventh and eighth,

Where even the sense of memory starts to fade a little bit.

In the seventh there's a whole bunch of things you start doing differently.

One is that in the seventh you six-are everything.

Up to this point,

Of course,

You don't six-are things as long as you're aware of the meta.

Well actually at this point,

Let me back up a minute.

The fifth you're sending out compassion or the softness.

In the sixth there is this very pervasive joy that comes up,

Very peaceful kind of joy,

And you just send that out.

In the seventh there's just equanimity,

And so you send out the equanimity.

And you'll be sitting there and maybe there's a faint something over here that starts up,

It might be the beginning of thought,

It could be anything,

And you just six-are it right then.

Well at this point it's just one-are.

All six-ars are kind of ruled together.

It's just a very light effort.

And so sometimes,

Well I'll tell you,

The image that I took which actually has some wrong tone to it,

But it was like shooting fish in a barrel.

You're sitting there,

A little something shows up and you go,

Oop,

Something else.

It's not violent.

And then what happens?

So you six-are everything.

The other thing that can become very important here is balancing energies.

So what's happened is that early on you don't six-are everything because the mind,

You just go crazy,

But by the time you get to the seventh,

It's so quiet that you're just actually doing the final clean-up of stuff.

So it's even these very subtle little things.

The mind will pull it a little bit and it just six-are it.

And you can also at that place pay attention to the energies that's going on.

So you can be sitting there and maybe it's open and there's equanimity is flowing out pretty much by itself at this point.

You just let it flow out.

If it stops,

You send it until it goes,

But mostly it'll do it by itself.

And you're sitting there and you feel the mind is just,

You recognize it's starting to get a little dull,

Starting to use the hint of torpor in it.

And rather than wait around for something to happen,

You just bring in a little more energy.

Or you're sitting there and the mind,

It's been very peaceful and then it just starts to get a little jittery.

It's not actually wandering off in putts or anything like that,

But it just starts to get edgy.

Well,

You just bring in a little peacefulness.

And it's a very fine tuning.

You just bring in just a little bit and then wait.

And by bringing it in,

All you do is,

It's just the intention,

Okay,

I need a little more energy.

Energy might be joy,

It might be energy.

It might even be interest,

Taking a little more interest.

You just have a little more energy invited in and then you sit back.

And it usually takes a minute or two for it to come in.

It's important to sit back because it's very easy to overshoot.

You know,

I would sit there and the mind is getting a little dull and I bring in a little bit of energy,

Still dull.

Bring in a little more energy and it's still dull.

And then there's a little gap and I suddenly realize that I'm just off thinking about all kinds of things.

The mind sort of took off and it didn't know it because I brought too much energy in.

So you just do that very gently.

And then what happens is that you'll be,

Oh,

What I left out that I think all of you know is that sending out energy from the fifth on is that you send it out in each of the six directions for a little bit just to make sure they work and then you send it out in all directions at once.

So you're there and it's equanimity that's going out.

If you try to send metta at that point it will feel very thick.

So it's just that peacefulness that you're sending out.

And then you'll be sitting there and there will be a moment where it feels like,

Oh,

You just came back from somewhere.

You don't know where you went but you were just gone for a moment.

And sometimes it feels like you nodded off but you just look at the mind and if you nod it off the mind will be a little groggy,

A little dull.

But sometimes you'll be very clear and then you're gone and it seems like you nodded off and came back and you look at the mind and it's just clear.

It's just clear.

So you can go to sleep.

What happens is things get so relaxed that it takes a little bit of tension to create a memory,

To take an experience and actually put it in the memory storage.

Takes a little bit of tension to even perceive something,

The sensation comes in and you have to note it.

And what happens is it gets so quiet that perception and memory begin to fade out and subjectively it feels like you blacked out because you look back and there's just a blank spot in your memory.

It feels a little bit like coming out from under anesthesia.

There's just nothing.

There's just nothing.

When you fall asleep and wake up,

Oftentimes there's a lot that goes on while we sleep and so there are like memory impressions and maybe a sense of passage of time.

When this happens there's just nothing.

It's just blank.

I call it winking out because there's about three or four different phenomena where this happens so I just made up a term that covers all of them.

So it's just winking out.

And so when you come back,

The mind is luminous,

You look back into that blank spot and see if there's any tension in it.

Sometimes there's lights,

Little images,

All kinds of funny little things that were flying below the radar screen and you come back and it seems like it's completely blank and you look back into it and suddenly you remember all this little stuff that was in there.

And if so,

You 6R it,

But don't make a big project of it.

If you don't see anything,

That's fine.

You just go on.

So what you're doing is you're actually training the mind heart to 6R these little tensions before you become aware of them,

As I think we're speaking about tonight,

Before you become aware of them.

I'm debating how much to talk about.

I think what happens in the eighth jhana is that a lot of normal perception goes offline and there are still perceptions that are left.

I was talking about Sam Parnia the other night and people who are dead and still have memories of that time.

In the eighth jhana there can be these impressions and senses that feel very different than normal memory or perception or dreams or images or things like that.

They can be very faint and very fleeting and so that's where I see the formations came from.

And they're so faint it's like you're not even sure that there's something real and they're not important.

And so even if you notice those you just keep 6R-ing them.

And then when it goes deep enough then you slip into the nibbana.

And then when you come back the world looks the same but looks completely different for a few moments.

But what happens from there is a whole other story and it's getting up to 7.

30.

Do you want to know what happens past the eighth jhana?

It gets harder and harder to talk about it just because these very very faint impressions.

But what happens,

So there is this sense of going out and coming back and there are a few markers which I'm not supposed to talk about so I won't,

That actually not everybody experiences them but there are some things you look for that actually sort out whether somebody actually went into nibbana or they just went into cessation.

If somebody went into nibbana,

Well here are most of the markers,

The ones that always show up,

Is the one the person comes back and there's actually this sense of,

Well,

Bhante calls it relief but that almost sounds too tepid.

It's like oh wow.

There's a remarkable clarity and that the identification of the personal self is severed.

It's just gone and it seems a little silly.

And yeah,

They talk about perception of emptiness but it's like what does that mean?

It's there's no self.

If you look in the text,

Another one of the markers of it is that you no longer have any belief in rites and rituals which I think is confusing.

What happens is that the cultural conditioning gets severed.

So it's like you're outside of all that and it's just so clear.

Cultural conditioning.

And so in the text they talk about rites and rituals,

Etc.

I think that's what it actually is.

And then what happens is for one thing the instructions at that point are to go back and meditate.

Because this is just the beginning and there is this sense of like oh okay now I know how to meditate.

This is where it starts.

But I would say good luck because there's a tendency when you come back there is so much energy.

I don't think I was able to sleep for 36 hours.

I mean it's like you just kind of lit up.

But the instructions are to go back and meditate.

But what happens then is all that stuff has been cleared away.

The best analogy I can think of it,

It's like an old desktop computer and somebody just pulled the plug out long and then the whole thing goes offline.

Then you plug it back in and actually the mind boots itself up.

And all that old programming is still there and all that stuff comes back online.

It feels like there's just a few pieces of malware that are missing.

But all that stuff,

Including all your habits around self and thinking,

All that stuff,

They all come back.

But Gurdjieff said it best,

He said,

Once you have a taste of the truth you can't fool yourself quite as sincerely.

You can still get caught in it but there's like this sort of sense back there behind it that doesn't quite believe it.

It doesn't quite believe it.

Yeah,

Well,

Utejian always says things that come quickly go quickly.

I think it's so different for everybody but it is true what you're saying that if you're not practicing,

If you just go out to drinking and brawling,

Like you've been doing all day today,

Then what happens is that you can't fool yourself quite as sincerely but you still can fool yourself and if you don't pay any attention to that spaciousness stuff that's behind it all,

Gradually it can fade and just become kind of a distant memory.

And so that's why it's important to continue practicing because this is just a platform in which everything opens out.

And so then what happens is if you keep practicing then you go out again.

And each of these stages,

So traditionally they talk about four stages of enlightenment and each stage has two parts to it.

There's the attainment and there's the fruition.

So part of what happens,

I think part of what happens with the stream entry,

Become a sodapun is what it's called,

It's all like the game is over.

It's like going over the pass of the mountain and something has shifted and it's just a matter of time.

And it can take a while.

In the text they talk about you can come back as many as seven lifetimes.

And I won't go into whether that's legitimate or not because I don't care and I don't know.

But what is true,

I know numerologically seven has a significance of a kind of completion and a fullness so that it's like you're headed that direction and it's very hard to come back.

At first you can work yourself back and lose it.

So the first phase of it is called attainment and then when you go out again,

If it's like deep and full enough,

That's called fruition.

And then when you come back,

Then the game is over.

There is no way you can get off it,

You can do all kinds of things and you can get lost.

But it won't leave you alone.

It's like you've seen a little too much and we still have all this wiring,

It does nothing for your psychological neuroses.

All that stuff is still in there running full blast and it's just you don't quite believe it.

You can see all that stuff but it's not quite as personal anymore.

And so that stuff is working itself out.

And I think in this culture,

And I don't know what to do about this but it's something that I think about a lot,

Is that in Asia people have these experiences and usually end up in monasteries,

These very protective and highly supported settings.

In this country people have these things,

We throw them back out on the street.

And one of the things that happens with stream entry is that a lot of your psychological mechanisms are all there but it's like they've been pulled out from under you.

And it can feel you incredibly vulnerable.

It's wide open in joy but it's like it takes a while getting your sea legs in this.

And so a lot of people thrash around and lose it in that because we don't know quite how to support people in this.

It's a part of a Sangha or if they're working with somebody who understands somebody then you can get the support in a way of normalizing it.

I remember years ago when we first started meditating with Mr.

Travis he said that before I think what he said exactly is make sure your business is settled,

Make sure your homework is settled,

Make sure you're having debt,

Make sure everything is squared away before you get too far down the road because you don't want to have to deal with that after.

Right.

You want to have it set up in the framework.

Right.

Right.

And I think that's great and that's wise advice and a lot of people don't follow it.

And so they just find themselves out there.

And so I think that makes a lot of sense but people actually don't,

Most people,

Don't people think they're going to go into Nevada.

It's like you know,

It's much more accessible than people realize and it's like and then there you are.

But you know it's like whatever our path is.

And in all of this practice,

You know in Asia they start with the precepts before you start meditating and all that stuff cleaned up.

You know in America we just go for the gusto,

We just go for the end and then sometimes it's like whoa!

That's right,

That's right,

Go for it.

What's the difference between thinking of cessation and going that way?

So there is an eighth jhana phenomena.

So it's called the base of neither perception nor non-perception.

And yeah I didn't talk about this part,

It can feel like you're awake and asleep at the same time.

And then you can just very subtly wink out and come back and that's just an eighth jhana thing.

And then it goes a little deeper and that's actually full cessation nirodha.

And then when it actually,

And in the winking out and the eighth jhana and nirodha there's still little bits of stuff that are hanging out in there.

They're just so subtle they're kind of below the normal perception and you come back and you kind of see that.

With going into nirvana it's more like you actually pull the plug out of the wall and the whole system shut down and it came back up.

And then when it comes back up there is this clarity and everything else.

So I use the term winking out to cover all of those because you can get in these incredibly arcane and name scholarly discussions about whether this is cessation,

Whether it's neither perception or non-perception.

And subjectively the experience of it is so subtly different I just wanted a term that we can just bypass all that.

The first time somebody goes out it can be a quarter of a second,

Quarter of a second and then they tend to get longer.

It can be just a flash where it's just severed.

So you're saying before you get the first proof you better make sure your life is set.

That's what she said and she didn't even say it,

She's blaming it on John Travis.

Blame everything on John.

Or blame everything on John Travis.

I have a young friend who I first met.

She said I'm in a terrible place,

I'm in San Diego,

Can I come to you?

And I said well I'm actually on my way to a Buddhist retreat.

She can either join me or come to me when I return.

And she said I'm going with you.

So we met and said we went to the retreat and she didn't know anything,

She just started meditating and then on the third day she said I think I'm a Buddhist.

And then pretty soon she was a sodapana and she was just beaming and glowing and she went home to France and she met the man of her life,

Found a job,

A beautiful place to live.

It was like she had this supportive nature.

But she didn't know anything so she didn't prepare an event,

She just had complete support.

An atrium entry.

According to some cosmologies,

Yeah.

I would have vouched for the validity of past lives even though I had experienced a lot of them.

That was it.

She lived happily ever after.

So I'm not trying to put this out as a dark warning.

I think if you take what John Travis was saying,

It's saying you know if you want to do any of this stuff,

Even to start meditating,

Even if you just want to live a better life,

Clean up your act.

It doesn't matter where you're going or what you're doing,

It's really helpful.

That's why it shocked me because I feel like even if you get to that stage,

Someone's looking for life with different attitudes.

So how can we deal with issues or deal with the world in a more different way?

I don't see anything wrong with that.

No,

I don't think there's anything wrong with it either.

I think we all have our own way through this and I do hear what John was saying as a little bit of hyperbole to actually make a very salient point about it really,

You know,

That in this country a lot of people do meditation and don't look necessarily at the precepts or other things and eventually have to deal with all of it.

Yes,

And I've been to sat-salons sessions where some members of the audience have actually gone into enlightened states and stayed in them but not really been able to cope with them.

So you've got one woman who was talking who was saying how difficult it was to live in an ordinary way because taking decisions was so difficult because there wasn't any intrinsic pull in any particular direction so that she wasn't really equipped to deal with the post-transformational state and in a way there should be part of our culture which gives enough orientation towards people to avoid those kinds of outcomes because this lady was,

You know,

Not very happy some of the time.

It wasn't as if she was totally alone all of the time at all because her actual work and her private life were quite difficult because of there not being clear feelings about what she wants and what she doesn't want from her.

You could argue that this was a very inextricable place.

I just don't want to go too far down this road.

Okay.

Yeah,

Is that the only point that I would make is that stream entry doesn't mean you're done.

In fact,

What happens with stream entry is you see really clearly what it is that you need to do and then when you do it that's what liberation is and that's how it's described in the text.

And,

You know,

I'm a Taurus,

I'm stubborn,

It's like I always do things the hard way.

And,

You know,

That's how things unravel for me.

And so,

I mean,

I'm at a place now where,

Okay,

I just know I'm going to run into this tree and that tree and that tree and I'm glad I finally hit that one,

I got that one over,

Now we'll go on to the next.

And so we have a different way through it.

So,

I just have something to add because I get to see dozens and dozens of people every year come out of these retreats,

Retreats where we practice the six hours and I'm the retreat manager so I get a lot of hugs at the end of retreats.

But I've also been in a position,

I teach beginning classes in this.

So,

I've taught people that then went to a retreat and had an experience of screen entry.

And then I get to see them for a year or more afterward.

And I have never seen one person that I recall that didn't have a,

And everyone has a paradigm shift but it's always for the better.

I hear from their partners,

Oh my God,

I so love my wife.

I mean,

I just hear these glowing reports again and again.

And the proof of the pudding is that when the retreats come up the following year,

More than half of the people that signed up for those retreats are people who were on the one year before because they want more of it.

Because it really nurtured them in so many ways.

And so,

My perspective is it's 100% positive.

But I just want to say,

I've practiced vipassana for many,

Many years.

And I see people coming out of those retreats and sometimes they can't even drive.

I mean seriously,

Because they're using high degrees of concentration to hold these hindrances down and they finally get them down and they go out into the world and they get in their car and it's the first time they have to deal with it all over again.

So all they did was put them in a bottle and they all came up.

And now it's very confusing.

And so,

I'm just saying that their practices are different,

Right?

But what I see,

I see it as a pre-metric as a paradigm shift.

And the next stage too.

I mean there is the next sort of realization and the next one.

And I see people getting happier and more adjusted and balanced in their life.

And it's anything but fearful.

Anything but feeling alienated.

It's just the opposite.

It's just pure ease and greater and greater integration.

Okay.

And I have seen people that had rough times and they didn't regret it at all.

They did not regret it at all.

It's like you see,

You know,

And they would say,

I have this piece of stuff that I haven't dealt with my whole life.

And then they've got to deal with it.

And the clarity and the sense of not taking it as personally makes for a very efficient platform for actually working that stuff through.

But people can get caught by surprise.

But I don't know anyone that has ever said that they have anything like regretting having that experience.

It's a shift.

But it's just you don't end up in Disneyland.

What is the stuff they didn't deal with?

I don't like the stuff I don't deal with.

So you know what some of your stuff that needs to be dealt with.

So,

You know,

Somebody who,

We're talking about CELA here?

CELA,

But there's also somebody that had some significant amount of abuse in their background.

And so there was all this stuff about how they had coped with that and stuff.

And they could see how their coping mechanisms were actually causing them problems.

And so it was hard to do those coping mechanisms.

And so they see it and it's very clear what they need to do and it's important to do it.

But there can be some significant work there.

So I have to say something about my past and I support it because I have for years and years done my past and I'm in long meditation and the insights that I've received and that changed my life.

I haven't come out,

I haven't even come back again.

My life has just totally been different because I did my past.

Yeah.

And I would say,

Sort of in general,

The way these models come out of the use of the jhanas is that they are these big flashes.

And I did have a yogi come in for an interview and looked at me and said,

Everything is different.

And it was,

It was just phew.

But I think there are other people,

I have a lot of it myself and I think it's just my stubbornness that it actually inches along.

And then there's stream entry and it is a big deal but you see that there's actually a lot of stuff that you're working on for a long time.

So I think there are times it can be more gradual.

It's different for everybody.

Okay,

So I just have one comment and then a question.

Based on everybody's experience,

You have problems,

Right?

We all have problems.

Right.

You treat one bad problem to another bad problem.

But you have to have a lot of problems.

Right,

Right.

So that's fine,

So the second question,

I have a question,

So why is a lot of centers considered a personnel in this only way of reaching the alignment?

Because I've been in other centers and they say,

So I'm very confused.

There are a thousand ways up the mountain.

And there are,

And not all roads go to the top,

So there are some paths that will just only go halfway up and stay there.

But ultimately,

Up at the top of the mountain there are no paths,

You actually walk them.

But you can come at it from very different ways.

I did this training in Thailand which was incredibly focused and incredibly one-pointed.

And at one point we were supposed to meditate basically for three days without sleeping.

So it was this incredible push,

Push,

Push.

But what happened when you stay up awake that long,

After about 24 hours,

Actually the fatigue goes away and the mind gets quiet and actually quite luminous.

And then I sit down and try to do the push they had taught me and I just couldn't do it because there wasn't the body energy under that.

And under that softness then the mind would like clear and,

You know,

And I go out.

And so that's a very different path than what I'm talking here,

What Bhante Villaransi teaches and what I teach.

I like this one better because that one is like the wear and tear on the body.

And that this path,

As Bhante teaches it and as I've learned from him and have explored it with others,

There are ways of sort of gradually opening and moving as you go along.

But it's not that there are not other ways.

So the fully awakened state is inherent in our nature,

In what we are.

And so all these things,

They're not talking about creating anything that's not there.

It's already there.

So it's just like finding different ways to open that up.

And I think because there are character structures and cultural conditions and all kinds of things,

That there are different tools that work better for different people.

But it's not like anybody's got a monopoly on this.

It's all just in there.

And I like this one just because it seems to be,

Of what I've done,

Is the one that feels most accessible for 80% of the people I work with.

I wouldn't say it's larger than that.

There's others that there are different types of paths that work better.

80% is a pretty good figure though.

Yeah.

So I'll just finish,

I know I want to give you some time to practice,

But you're talking about what happens after.

So that's Sodapana.

What happens next is that actually it's lust and hatred,

It's desire and aversion drop down in half.

You go in and out of Devanav for these and as it goes deeper,

Then the push-pull gets cut in half and that's called Sakadagami.

And then they disappear altogether.

All those personal preferences and stuff.

And part of it is this sense of,

I may have said it here before,

It's like the world is what it is.

And my wanting it to be different,

The world doesn't care,

The universe doesn't care what I want,

It's not going to change anything.

And so it's actually pointless and it just causes suffering.

It's not going to change anything.

So all those preferences actually fall away and they can still be there,

But there's actually no juice behind them anymore.

And that's called anagami.

And then restlessness,

Sloth and torpor,

Desire to be reborn or not be reborn,

Ignorance and conceit.

Those are the last stuff that go with the Arhant.

And the conceit is an interesting one.

It is one of the last ones to go.

And what it is,

Is that you actually look around,

I mean if you're an anagami or if you're a first semester Arhant,

Yeah you haven't got to fruition yet,

Is that you look around and what you have discovered and cultivated and developed is statistically very,

Very rare.

There are not that many people around there.

And so you think that makes you special.

That's what the conceit is.

Right,

Yeah.

And so that's when the last ones will fall away.

But I frankly,

I think the only things that matter in this are the stream entry,

Because there is this tipping and you're kind of in a different place,

And how the rest of this stuff unravels for people I think can vary a lot.

And then when you've finished the work,

I think,

I mean,

I can't speak from personal experience at the end.

A Buddha is a whole,

Never the less,

Phenomenon.

So within the cosmology is a Buddha is somebody who figured out this path on their own.

So by definition,

As long as there's memory of the last Buddha,

That's impossible.

So what about the Dalai Lama?

He's the Dalai Lama,

He's not a Buddha.

He might be an Arhat.

He could be an Arhat,

But he wouldn't be a Buddha.

Okay.

I have,

That's an interesting question.

Stream entry.

I don't know anybody who has,

Like,

Oh wow,

They're too,

They're sublime.

No,

I don't know anybody that they would trade it in.

I do know some people who have been caught by surprise.

But no,

I don't know anyone.

It doesn't mean they'd trade it in,

I'm not wearing a jacket.

Good point.

But I wouldn't trade it back for anything.

Right,

No,

I didn't.

No,

I'm just saying,

Just because it's not easy doesn't mean they'd trade it back.

I don't mean not easy,

I mean what I'm just saying is it wasn't,

Well,

Whatever effort,

And would never go back.

Jordan wants to,

If I can be so bold,

Wants to make sure that none of you are scared to go towards this.

I mean,

They're serious,

Serious,

Serious.

Oh no,

I don't.

Well,

No,

I hear trepidation about,

Oh,

I have to give this up now that I'm liberated.

Yeah,

Because it's funny,

It's the various selves that are there.

It's like,

You know,

If I get completely sober,

Then I won't want to drink anymore.

And so how will I satisfy my desire to drink?

Yeah,

It's just like you lose interest in things and the ego in certain places just can't imagine,

You know,

Not being interested in that.

It's a paradigm shift so big,

Until it happens it can't be actually perceived.

And actually some of the ways I think this stuff works is that rather,

So it is good to take care of as much stuff as you can first.

On the other hand,

When you discover,

You know,

It's like some of these deep states I would describe them as a non-climactic orgasm.

You know,

It's like,

It's just,

You know,

It feels more wonderful than anything I could ever imagine and it doesn't necessarily peak and go away.

I'm feeling my age.

There's a whole paragraph after that but it just disappeared.

When you went to the bottom of the black out states.

Oh yeah,

How long have I been gone?

There is this story of Ummil Rippa,

Who was a Tibetan saint,

Walking along with one of the students and they stop to eat their meal and they put all this stuff out and say,

Well let's meditate.

So he closes his eyes and he opens it up and his student is sitting there,

You know,

All harried and looking frazzled and the bread is all moldy and half eaten by hand.

He was gone for like three days.

This is a student who is just sitting there trying to wait for him to come back.

Okay,

Oh my,

It's perfectly safe.

And it's not what we think.

And it's more accessible.

It is more deeply human than we imagine and it's very sweet.

So shall we get on with it?

May all beings trust their true nature,

Whether they know what it is or not.

May we all trust our path,

Whether we know what it is or not.

May all beings be free.

Maybe so.

Nabana or bust?

It's trust.

It's one of the factors that's weakest in this culture on the average.

It's actually just trust.

And maybe this is another John Travisism but I think he was the one who told me once and said the only difference between us and a fully enlightened being is confidence.

Yeah.

They call it mundane Nabana.

It's just,

Yeah,

Just a little openness.

Oh,

I put out there and there's some up here.

It's called Kindness and Wisdom Practice,

Quick Guide to Mettalpannya Meditation.

This has all the stuff I talked about tonight.

It's this whole jhana path as described in the last half of the Buddhist map,

The last half of the book,

And this is the Cliff Notes version.

And I put it together.

It's for people who have really gone quite a ways in this and then you sort of forget.

Okay,

Back then was this what we did?

So I just tried to kind of condensually get everything down there.

So you're welcome to have one of these.

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