Awareness Jhanas

Day 4 Retreat: In the earliest texts the Buddha described a path to awakening that goes through several stages called "jhanas". These are not the absorption jhanas that have been talked about in the West so often. Rather they are stages of deepening awareness. On this path, the meditation techniques change as we progress. They led to a powerful well-being that is more accessible than most people imagine. This talk traces this path from joy to peace to spaciousness to cessation to freedom.

Transcript

To start off tonight,

I have a couple of questions for you.

A little quiz.

First one is,

What do going to sleep,

Going to the toilet,

And meditation have in common?

I can't force it.

They're all about letting go.

Right.

Right.

They all work better if you don't try too hard.

So the other little practice that I would invite you into is maintain,

Somebody asked me about this and I thought it was a good idea,

To maintain as much as you can a continuity of awareness of what's going on inside you at all times.

And the reason I say that little joke is because if you work too hard at that,

It will be impossible.

So it's no matter what's going on,

Where you're moving,

Whether you're in the shower,

Whether you're on the toilet,

Whether you're standing in line,

There's a place that's just lightly monitoring,

Being aware,

Being mindful of what's going on.

And if you really zero in and try real hard,

You will get exhausted and you won't be able to do it.

So it doesn't work if you try too hard.

But just doing that lightly.

Because this whole practice,

Actually the secret of this practice is to practice gently without stopping.

If you push or you break it up,

It's not as powerful.

So we'll check and see where we are at that tomorrow too.

And if you like it,

Then you can continue doing it for the rest of your life.

So here's my second question.

Very different topic.

Who is it who is most responsible for the word ego coming into the English language?

Freud?

Anybody have any other ideas?

Everybody agree that it was Freud?

You got some other ideas?

It was a translation.

I know it was originally Eva,

Which means love.

And that got scientificized to it,

Whatever that is.

And so I think the same thing happened to ego.

OK,

We're looking for names.

You can write the essay for us later.

But I'm scared of the word ego.

I'm scared of the word ego.

You can write the essay for us later.

Skinner.

Skinner.

William James.

William James.

Pardon?

Aristotle.

Any of you ever heard of James Starchy?

Starchy.

Yes.

OK.

Yeah,

As Grant was alluding to,

He was an English analyst who is the first person who relatively successfully translated Freud into English.

And Freud was interested.

He was basically a phenomenologist.

He was really interested.

It was in studying phenomena.

And so he talked a lot about self and a sense of self and how that interacted with instincts.

And when James Starchy came across this and was translating self into English,

It just didn't sound important enough to him.

It didn't sound clinical.

It just sounded too colloquial.

So he went to the Latin.

And rather than saying self to translate the German for self into self in English,

He used the word ego.

And for instincts,

He used id.

And it made Freud's work sound more important,

Have more gravitas,

And incidentally,

I'm not sure that this was in the original motivation,

But incidentally,

Made people more motivated to pay an expert to tell them what it's all about.

Am I close in that?

Yeah,

OK.

Didn't think I was making this up.

So the tendency to make things seem esoteric and more difficult is even more rampant in the area of spirituality.

So tonight,

What I would like to talk about are jhanas.

And the jhanas have been,

If anything,

Made to sound really difficult and esoteric.

I just heard of a teacher in my neck of the woods who was mad at me because I accept beginning students into my classes.

And I was thinking,

Well,

I couldn't figure out what that was about.

But I think what it is is that she didn't know much about this practice,

Except there was the word jhana in there.

And most people's understanding of jhanas are that they are very difficult and very esoteric when they actually aren't.

Well,

Actually,

In fact,

The way Paul Oak and the Burmese style of teaching jhanas is very difficult.

And most people in this country who know the word jhana know or are referring to that particular style.

It's a style which is probably closer to what the Buddha first learned when he was in his training before he was enlightened and realized failed.

So for example,

In the Burmese style,

To get into the first jhana,

You need to be able to keep your awareness,

One-pointed awareness,

On the object of meditation without fluctuating for a minimum of three hours.

And there are people who will go into three and six months retreats and come out of that without being able to get into the first jhana by that particular standard.

And it can be really heartbreaking.

What the Buddha meant by jhana was actually something quite different.

When he was talking about jhanas,

For him,

Jhana simply meant a stage of meditation or a stage of meditative understanding.

And meditative is very important in that because when I say meditative understanding,

It means it's something you understand through direct experience.

So is it raining outside?

Well,

You can consult your cell phone,

Look up stuff on the internet.

You can look in the paper.

You can remember what you heard about the weather forecast.

And you get some idea of whether it's raining or not.

But you stick your head outside,

And it rains on you.

And then you have direct experience.

And all the other figuring out just becomes irrelevant.

So with meditative understanding,

That's what it's about.

It's about insight.

And once you experience something directly,

Then any intellectual understanding you have about it just isn't relevant anymore.

So let me read you a description of the first jhana.

This comes from the Anupada Sutta,

Machiminaya 111,

That I know some of you are familiar with.

In this sutta,

The Buddha describes all the jhanas in a very succinct fashion.

And in it,

He's referring to Sariputta,

Who was one of his top students.

And Sariputta was said to be really excelled in his understanding of the jhanas,

And he has a very,

Very refined understanding of them.

Let me digress for a minute.

You know,

I'm an ordained minister,

A Unitarian Universalist.

And to become a Unitarian Universalist minister,

You have to go before this committee of people and demonstrate your understanding and training in seven key areas.

And there is a reading list of books that you have to say that you've read all these and understand them.

Now,

I was ordained in 1976,

And there were about three or four books that I had to have read.

Well,

People rotate on and off this little committee.

And every time a new person comes on,

They look and say,

Well,

You know,

There's this other book that ministers really ought to know about.

And so they add that to the list.

But nobody feels empowered to take a book off.

So I feel really bad for a lot of the theological students coming out now,

Because literally one of them took all the books and stacked them up on the floor.

And they're about this high of stuff they have to master.

And the same thing,

I think,

Happened in Buddhism after the Buddhist time,

That what he was talking about in terms of jhanas and what it actually means to go into Nibbāna,

Et cetera,

This understanding,

Was actually fairly simple and down to some essential things.

And then you would get somebody like Sariputta that came along who had this incredibly detailed understanding.

It was just a gift he had of all the fine nuances about how all these states work together.

And so as time went by,

People,

Well,

Sariputta was a fully awakened one.

So maybe to be fully awakened,

You have to have all that understanding.

Mogadallāna was another one who was very gifted in psychic powers.

And so they think,

Well,

To be fully awakened,

You maybe have to have all these powers,

And more and more and more and more,

Until this whole project sounded like you had this list of things that you had to have mastered to be fully awakened that was huge.

It was accumulation of the top end of all these sort of people.

And so the whole project began to seem more and more remote and esoteric and impossible,

Which was very good if you're a monk and you wanted a job.

You would be an intermediary for all this.

But there are some essential qualities and insights and just ways of being that are essential to this whole project but they aren't that esoteric.

They're not that far away.

And as many of you are discovering,

A lot of them are much more accessible than people realize.

So as we go through the jhanas tonight,

We'll just actually look at what those are.

And it does take work,

And it does take some commitment for sure.

But it's not that impossible.

It's really,

Really accessible.

So the first one I wanted to dispel is this idea about jhanas as being one-pointed.

And you haven't been practicing that way.

But listen to this description of the first jhana.

And the language is kind of thick,

So we will unpack it.

But this is like the full thing.

So the Buddha is talking about Sariputta and describing his awakening,

Which took place in a half a month.

So we only have seven days,

But if we had another week.

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.

So that's the short description.

And then he goes on to flesh it out.

And the states in the first jhana,

The thinking,

The examining thought,

The joy,

The happiness,

The unification of mind,

The contact,

Feeling,

Perception,

Formations,

And mind,

The enthusiasm,

Choice,

Energy,

Mindfulness,

Equanimity,

And attention.

These states were defined 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,

Unattached,

Unrepelled,

Independent,

Free,

Dissociated,

With a mind rid of barriers.

OK.

So let's pull this apart a little bit.

I'm wondering how many of you recognized right in the middle of this description there was these five qualities.

Talk about the contact,

Feeling,

Perception,

Formations,

And awareness.

Anybody recognize those five?

Pardon?

Qualities.

Components of dependent origination.

OK.

Five aggregates.

Five aggregates.

Five aggregates.

Candas.

OK.

The five aggregates.

I call them clusters.

So the five aggregates are kind of a dependent origination short.

The five aggregates,

Contact,

Sensation,

Feeling,

Feeling tone,

Perception,

Which is recognizing what something is and putting the label on it,

Formations,

Thoughts,

Storylines,

Beliefs,

Ideas,

And awareness.

Those five cover the whole range of what it is that we can experience.

If there's anything that we can experience,

Falls into one of those five.

Contact or sensation,

Feeling,

Tone,

Perception,

Formations,

Thoughts,

Ideas,

Storylines,

And awareness.

You're saying that contact is body.

Contact is raw sensation.

But as an aggregate,

It's generally,

Aggregates are generally considered a physical aggregate in a form that's I know.

So the word for the first one is rupa,

Which means body.

But there's another word in Pali,

Kaya,

Which refers to body.

And kaya can refer to a corpse.

Rupa refers to a body that is alive and functioning.

So that in the people that I've read most deeply,

What they're saying is he's talking about a living,

Breathing,

Functioning system.

As opposed to body,

They can sound like you're just talking about the flesh and blood,

Et cetera.

And the way we experience that are through sensations.

So your point here is that contact is referring to the body.

Right.

As opposed to a component of dependent origination.

Because I've always looked at it as a component of dependent origination,

Contact,

Feelings.

So if the formations are so far away.

Yeah.

Well,

Perception is not independent origination.

Perception can arise anywhere.

So believe me,

When I was writing the chapter in Buddha's Map,

The most difficult chapter in some ways was the one on the khandhas.

Because nobody understood him.

You know,

I showed the chapter to Bhante and he said I had a wrong.

And said,

OK,

So let's talk about what it is.

And he had trouble articulating it.

And I went all over the place until I found a scholar,

A Susan Hamilton in England,

Who had written a lot about the early polycanon view of the universe.

So it was in this area.

And she had written her doctoral dissertation on the khandhas.

And so I set off.

Cost me $75 to get a copy of this thing.

And boy,

Was it written like a dissertation.

It was really thick.

But she had some angles on this stuff that just lit it up for me once I could dig through all that.

One of them was this whole thing about rupa and what the Buddha was really talking about in that.

Another one was the first time I understood sankara,

Which is translated as formations,

That I stretch out into saying thought,

Beliefs,

Ideas,

Storylines.

Sankara,

The root is kar,

As in karma,

Which means action.

And san gives it a little bit of push.

So what she says is what sankara really means at its root is something that has been put together.

The difficulty,

So it was something that was formed.

And it gets translated into English as formation,

Which connotates rock formations.

But in the original Pali,

It was talking about something that was put together.

And anything put together can fall apart.

So it was actually talking about the fragility of things.

So sankara cover a whole raft of things,

From the khandhas themselves to the precepts to thoughts to ideas,

Everything.

It's a term that means a whole lot of stuff.

But I think that's what it's doing right here.

It's actually talking about mental formations,

Things that have been put together.

The most important thing is that they fall apart eventually.

Can you say a little bit about perception?

Perception?

Perception is,

So I told that story last night about the Vermilion flycatchers.

So that's an act of perception.

So what happens when we perceive something,

Other people can have other understandings of it.

But within the Buddhist context,

What's being talked about is the process whereby the mind puts a label on something.

So there's the raw sensation.

Then we say,

Oh,

That's what it is.

And so it's the introduction of concepts.

So a perception is,

It's important to it.

Because you could say,

OK,

This is a bowl.

Well,

The label bowl is actually a concept.

Because it's actually a chair for elves.

Or it's a hat for,

You can put all kinds of different labels on it.

So it's just a concept.

Underneath it,

There is something that you can feel and touch.

But the act of perception kind of puts it into a category.

The activation of a platonic ideal.

Yeah,

Roughly.

Although in Buddhism,

There's not the sense that there's an abstract world of ideals that's coming in here.

But it functions that way for a lot of people.

I read this chapter this afternoon.

I was surprised that the contact is also a thought.

Yes,

In the Buddhist psychology,

That the mind is considered in some ways to be a sense organ that perceives thoughts the way that the eyes perceive light or the ears perceive sound.

And the way it's talked about,

It's not actually equated completely with the five senses.

It's just a similar function.

And sometimes it's talked about a little differently.

But the reason for doing that,

And you've all experienced that,

You're sitting there very quietly,

Haven't done anything,

And blip,

A thought shows up.

You didn't actually do it.

It just appeared.

And then you may do something with it,

Have a thought about that thought and another one.

And then you start adding on to it.

But there are times when it just appears.

And if you think you did it,

And therefore you've got to get rid of it,

Then you're in trouble.

It's like,

How do you get rid of the sound?

How do you get rid of the light?

It just shows up there.

So in putting it in the same neighborhood as the five senses,

It encourages us to look at it as something that's impersonal,

That just arises on its own,

Because we really tend to identify with our thoughts.

OK.

My goodness.

Well,

We'll rush along here.

These are great.

So.

Could you go through that list?

Because there's more pieces there.

And I still don't buy it.

Go through the list and explain it.

I'll.

Can you say something?

I think that there's some scholars in the room that can pick this apart all night long.

And then there's the rest of us that really want to get the general idea of things.

And I will never get through this if the scholars are picking it all apart,

Each sentence as we go along.

Fair enough.

OK.

I will do it a little bit.

Here quite secluded from sensual pleasures secluded from unwholesome state.

Sariputta entered upon and abided in the first jhana.

And these are the key parts,

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

And then in the background of all that are all these other things,

Including the khandhas and everything else.

And the reason that those are really important is that if you think of a jhana as one point of absorption,

Your attention as one object.

Well,

Here he's saying,

And putting the khandhas in there,

That anything that anyone can ever experience is included in this jhana.

And this list is included all the way up through the seventh jhana.

So we're talking about a wide open field of awareness.

And in that,

There's thinking and examining thought,

And then there's joy and happiness born of seclusion.

And when I go back and start walking through,

I'm going to pick out.

That'll be the quality.

That little blast of joy is actually one of the primary markers of the first jhana.

Happiness born of seclusion means happiness arising from solids,

From nothing.

Right.

Right.

Any others?

This translation are you using?

It's based on Bhikkhu Bodhi's.

And there's a little of Bhante van Mwaramsi,

Thanh Jef,

And Doug Kraft.

Let me give you another story.

Maybe I won't get to that.

We will.

When Coca-Cola went into China,

They took their slogan,

Come alive with a Pepsi generation,

And they translated it into Chinese and put it up on billboards and everything.

And then somebody came around and said,

You know,

Actually in Chinese,

This thing's red.

So the slogan was,

Come alive with a Pepsi generation.

In Chinese,

It came out,

Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

I'm not sure exactly what the words about you get.

English,

Come alive,

Is usually a metaphor.

And so you translate it into another word that has a slightly different meaning.

And the whole thing gets turned on its head.

Words have clusters of meanings and understanding and connotations.

And they're not just a word that's a word that's a word that's a word that's a word that's a word that's a word that's a word that's a word that's a word that's connotations.

And they just don't translate one for one into another language.

So when you get to the suttas,

And they're talking about soda pop.

When you get talking about things as subtle as mind states,

It's really hard to translate it.

And so what some scholars do is they put these long phrases in there to try to indicate what the connotation of this is.

And then you end up with these long,

Long sentences.

And you look at the original Pali,

And there may be 20 words.

And you look at the English translations,

And there's 75.

And some of the scholars were not meditators.

And so which meaning and connotation they took are wrong.

So what I always do when I'm looking at these is I get a whole bunch of translations and compare them and look at them and dig into them.

OK,

Let me just see if I can move this ahead.

The Buddha,

I want to say just a few general things about the jhanas,

And then I'll walk you through them.

One is to understand that the Buddha talked about the jhanas a lot,

A lot.

Just to give a comparison,

In the Goldilocks sutas,

The middle-length discourses,

The Majjhima Nagaya,

There are 152 sutas.

And you'll notice these pages are pretty thin paper.

So in here,

He talks about breath meditation about 10 times.

I ran a search on this because I actually have the full translation of this on my computer.

So I had the computer search through that.

And in 67 out of 152 sutas,

He talks about jhanas.

So you could say,

You could make the argument that they are 6 and 1-2 times,

The jhanas are 6 and 1-2 times more important than the breath.

So if you want to understand what the Buddha was talking about,

The jhanas,

These stages of meditative understanding are really,

Really crucial.

And what the jhanas describe is how the mind-heart unfold from a relatively ordinary quality of awareness unfold in a pretty smooth sequence all the way up to full awakening and the complete severing of a sense of a personal self.

Just a gradual process.

And the jhanas,

They seem like they're laid out.

So you go from jhana one to jhana two to jhana three to jhana four.

But they actually don't work that way.

There's jhana one.

And the second jhana includes all of jhana one plus some more.

The third,

They actually grow out in this.

For those of you who are familiar with Ken Wilber,

He uses the phrases transcend and include.

Each jhana transcends the one before it in that it is larger and deeper.

But it totally includes it.

So you don't get to bypass any of these.

So if you get stuck in some place in a jhana and you just want to skip ahead because you're tired of it,

You can only go so far.

Sometimes you can do that a little bit.

But eventually,

You've got to come back and pick up what was missing there.

The kind of awareness,

Then,

That this is looking at is what we talk about a lot.

And I just want to give you a little image of it.

When I was about eight or nine,

I went into a real cave for the first time.

I was very excited.

A park ranger took myself and my family and about a dozen other people about 3 quarters of a mile deep into this mountain.

And when we got to this innermost chamber,

We walked in there,

And there were just some lights lighting up the floor.

You couldn't see anything else.

And the park ranger said,

There were a few benches and the railings that have been put in there.

And the park ranger said that she wanted us to either sit down or hold on to one of the railings because she was going to turn the lights out,

Which she did.

And I remember sitting there in my nine-year-oldness,

Waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark.

But of course,

It doesn't because there's no light to adjust to.

And so what she did then was she turned on a flashlight.

And it was one of these four-cell,

Big four-D-cell flashlights that sent out this powerful beam straight up.

And it lit up this little circle about this big around,

That big up on the ceiling of this cavern.

You could see a little bit of moisture and the texture of the rocks.

And then she shined it on the wall behind me.

And there was the edge of a stalagmite and shined it down at the other end.

You could see a few more things in a couple other places.

And I was very impressed with the flashlight.

But it was a very unsatisfying view of the cave because all you had is these little dots of information.

So she turned the flashlight off.

And she lit one candle.

And it was literally one candle power.

But of course,

The candle sends out light in all directions.

And it lit up this entire cabin.

Lit up the whole thing.

Wasn't in a bright light.

But you could see the rock formations.

You could see where the river,

This little stream went through this cave and all the people around there and rock formations and actually the depth of the cavern itself.

It was all right there.

So there are a lot of practices and a lot of ideas about meditation that try to create a mind like a flashlight beam,

Like a laser beam,

That can see,

Penetrate right through in anything.

But that tight focus doesn't give us much of an understanding of what's going around because it's just little tiny pieces of data.

And so what the Buddha taught was a meditation that cultivates a mind heart that's more like a candle flame that goes out in all directions at once.

And as you go through the jhanas,

At first that candle flame can be weak.

And this is where my cave metaphor breaks down.

But as,

Well,

It's a little bit.

If you've ever seen a candle flame in a room with drafts,

It kind of flickers and there's not much light.

But as you have a flame in still air,

It just actually grows bigger and brighter.

And as you go through the jhanas,

It just gets stronger and stronger and stronger.

So that's what we're after.

OK,

Let me just,

I feel bad that I kept on trying to keep this short.

But we just go on and on.

I go on and on.

So the first jhana is,

As I just described,

The characteristic of it is joy.

There is this little,

As you go into it,

So you all know what the practice is.

You're sitting at loving kindness and you're six-arring.

And at some point,

There's this little spike of joy.

And the joy may just last a short time.

And then it quiets down into a quieter state.

It's called sukha,

Happiness.

And that quiets down a little more into equanimity,

Peacefulness,

Which has very little energy.

So the mind loses track of it really quickly and it's gone.

And this little spike can go by in a half a second.

But it's just this little thing.

And that's the marker of the first jhana.

That's what I'm looking for in people.

Not particularly extraordinary.

So then as a person continues to practice,

What happens is this,

Rather than this short,

Quick spike,

Is it actually starts stretching out.

So the joy lasts a little longer.

And it runs out of energy a little slower.

The happiness lasts longer.

And the equanimity,

The peacefulness lasts longer.

And typically,

As a person experiences this,

They start to recognize,

Wait a minute,

This is actually getting longer.

This practice seems to be doing something.

It's actually working.

And so with that,

They begin to get some confidence in this practice.

So those are the markers of the second jhana,

Is this the joy,

The happiness,

And the peacefulness spread up much longer.

And there is a beginning of some confidence in this.

And the line between the first jhana and the second is really,

Really fuzzy.

It's not a sharp demarcation.

And what we'll see in all these jhanas,

Even though you have one,

Two,

Three,

Four,

Five,

There's a 2.

74 and a 3.

65.

There are all these gradations in between.

So then what happens is this whole arc spreads out even further,

But so much so that the joy stops arising.

In other words,

The person just goes straight into this peacefulness,

Into the equanimity.

And it's really kind of amusing because they will come in and you can see them.

I won't read all the text because I think we'll get bogged down in it.

But what it says in there is that you can perceive a calm abiding.

It's actually visible.

You can actually sense the peacefulness in this other person.

And what happens to the person who experiences peacefulness is that the joy is not gone.

And they usually think that they've lost the meditation.

So I'll have people that will come in and they will say,

And you can see there's this very calm,

There's a lot of equanimity.

And they say,

How's it going?

Fine.

But the joy is gone.

Are there any problems?

No.

I cut my foot,

But it'll heal.

But the joy is gone.

And a lot of them,

It's like they're trying to make themselves a little depressed because they think they've lost the practice.

But actually,

It's a sign that the whole practice is going deeper because there's all this equanimity.

The joy is short-lived.

It has a whole lot of energy.

It'll just burn itself out.

But the equanimity doesn't have a lot of energy in it,

Which makes it difficult to see.

But it also means it doesn't burn out very quickly.

So the joy spreads out more and more.

Grant calls me Friar Duck sometime because I love this poem about the duck.

So this is a poem about equanimity that really describes what equanimity is.

Equanimity is a stability of mind is another way of describing it.

All kinds of stuff come up where they just don't faze you.

This was written by Donald C.

Babcock,

Which appeared in The New Yorker magazine in October of 1947.

I like to think of it,

The poem was conceived about the same time I was.

Probably not.

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

It is a duck.

Ride in the ocean 100 feet beyond the surf.

No,

It isn't a gull.

A gull always has a raucous touch about.

And 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 Bo 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.

So that's what the Third Jhana is like.

It's this peacefulness that doesn't come from nothing going on.

There is still a heaving.

There's still stuff that comes through.

But you just rest in what's there.

When there's a lot of equanimity,

There can be a big noise outside.

And you'll sit there and you'll hear it.

But it just passes right through you.

If someone is doing one pointed concentration and there's a big noise outside,

Either they don't hear it at all,

Or if they do hear it,

It sort of knocks them.

What are you doing?

Something's going on.

What are you doing?

Somebody's messing up my meditation.

But when the equanimity is real strong,

It just passes right through.

And the equanimity is a really important quality that just gets stronger and stronger and stronger as the practice goes forward.

So what happens next is that the body,

The mind,

The whole system gets so relaxed that it stops sending out signals.

I discovered this when I was about five or six years old.

I used to love to lie in the bathtub with soap and bubbles and all that stuff around.

And then when there was nobody there,

I would just lie back and I would let my ears go under the water and I would just float there.

And I knew if I relaxed enough,

My arms and legs would start to disappear.

It was a little scary,

So I'd wiggle them and I'd think,

Oh,

Shoot,

Why did I do that?

They want to quiet back down.

Any of you ever float in a bathtub like that?

Yeah.

So that's what happens in the fourth jhana,

Is that the body gets so relaxed that everything is functioning.

There are just no signals coming off it in places.

And it's different than what we call going to sleep.

You know,

When a hand goes to sleep,

There's that tingling that's used because there's pressure on a nerve,

Our blood supply,

And it actually goes numb.

And then if you try to use it,

It doesn't work.

My father actually broke his foot one morning when he got up and his foot was asleep and he didn't realize.

And he put his weight on and it collapsed and he fell over and broke it.

But in this place,

In the fourth jhana,

When that sensation disappears,

You just put a lot of awareness there and you notice it.

Or if a bug walks across your hand,

You notice it.

Everything is functioning.

It's just there's no signals coming out of it.

OK.

So what happens next?

Do you have any questions as we go along?

A lot of you are familiar with this,

But not everyone.

So what happens next is from that place we go through this transition exercise of sending out love and kindness to various groups of people.

To establish that the metta is really strong.

And then you start sending out metta in all directions,

To all beings.

And it gets very,

Very spacious.

And there is a particular kind of sensation that I recognized from my childhood too.

I used to,

We'd be running around,

I spent my early years in Houston,

Texas,

And so we'd run around playing cowboys and Indians.

And the deal was,

When somebody says,

I shot you,

You're supposed to lie down and play dead.

And so I used to lie down on the grass.

And I just loved to actually look up at the clouds.

And I knew that if I relaxed enough,

The clouds would start to move away.

I could see them recede.

I could see them recede.

They wouldn't actually be moving,

But it looked like they were moving.

I would look at this,

And my brother would come over and I'd say,

Hey,

Ricky,

You ever seen this way the clouds move away?

Dog,

You're an Indian,

Get up.

So I got no support for that.

But do you recognize,

If you had that sense of just being very relaxed and looking out at something in the distance,

And then there can be this subtle sensation of something moving away.

In the text,

This is called the realm of infinite space,

Which makes it sound very esoteric,

But it's just talking about a feeling of deep,

Broad,

Expansive spaciousness.

Sometimes it's described as a circle whose circumference is everywhere and middle and whose center is nowhere.

It's just this wonderful spaciousness.

Some people it gets a little scary.

I remember I was back when I was doing one point of concentration.

I used to go up into the attic of our house where I had an office built up there.

And I would sometimes sit in the middle if I woke up in the middle of the night.

I remember sitting there meditating once.

My eyes closed and the room was dark,

So everything was black.

And it felt like I was inside a closet with all the lights off.

And then suddenly,

Visually nothing changed.

But rather than being looking at a black wall,

It was like I was out in the middle of space,

This vast universe,

Including nothing underneath me.

I was almost kind of a vertigo.

Sometimes people would get these strong flashes or something like that.

But more often,

It's just a feeling of spaciousness.

And if people have difficulty moving into the fifth jhana,

One of the things that's really helpful is to go and sit outside.

Because when you're outside,

Particularly the weather around here the last couple of days,

It just resonates with that feeling of expansiveness and ease.

So what is happening at this point,

Too,

Is in the lower jhanas,

There's a tendency to send metta out from the heart area.

Seems more natural.

But as the body sensations go away,

There's a tendency for it to feel more like it's coming from the head.

And some people keep trying to pull it back down here.

But it's just let it go where it runs.

It actually doesn't come from the head either.

It's coming out of the mind.

But subjectively,

It will feel like it's coming more from up here.

And it can be a mistake to try to pull it back down.

You just let it go where it runs.

And that expansiveness as it spreads out,

The quality of the metta changes.

It gets a little soft and kind of cottony.

And in the text,

That's described as compassion.

And I found this really confusing because there's talk about the different qualities at different jhanas.

But the labels they use for them don't necessarily match my experience of that.

And I realize with compassion,

Most of us don't really know what compassion feels like.

Because when we feel a lot of compassion,

We're usually focused on the person who's suffering and don't quite notice what's going on inside.

But I find when I do that,

That the metta that seems kind of clear does take on a sort of a softer texture.

But what's important is not figuring out what it actually is or what the labels are for it,

But just notice these subtle changes that happen and just allow them.

The Buddha and the wee hours of the morning every day would get up and go on to the fifth jhana and send compassion out around the world.

So any questions?

Did I tell you what I used to tell my congregation about my job is to speak and yours is to listen?

If you finish your job before mine,

Let me know because I'd rather be in dialogue anyway.

Do you want to say something about how you go from one jhana to the next?

I know,

But it's good for people to hear.

Because in other jhana practices,

It's like,

OK,

You need to be firmly established in this,

Find this quality of that experience,

Pull it out,

And then go into that.

But this isn't like that.

No,

This is much gentler.

It's actually a natural unfolding.

And it's not important that you,

If you're working with a teacher,

It's not important that you actually know what jhana you're in.

It's just important that the teacher knows.

Because what will happen at each jhana is it will tend to evolve on its own.

And as I was talking about,

As people go into the third,

When the joy disappears and a little equanimity,

They think they've lost it.

And so sometimes it's helpful to have some encouragement to just know that this is actually,

This is progress,

And to just continue on.

And so when I wrote Buddha's Map,

Not everybody has a teacher.

So I was actually trying to get as much of the details of what,

Not just the technical description,

But kind of a firsthand feel for what happens.

So that somebody working on their own might be able to recognize it and experiment with it and see.

If you move yourself too quickly in a jhana,

The practice will just kind of destabilize a little bit.

Then you can just back up until it gets stronger.

So the instructions for going on the fifth are just to send it out in all directions.

And there is that transition practice.

I won't go into all the details.

But that's basically it.

And then recognize what goes on.

As you go into the sixth jhana,

Which is known as the base of infinite consciousness,

Again,

Very confusing label,

What happens is that the awareness gets so spacious that it actually starts to break up a little bit.

And there'll be little discontinuities in awareness.

And there's a number of ways that that will manifest.

If you're a very visual person,

Sometimes there'll be this little flickering around the edge of the field of vision.

I know some people are very auditory.

They hear kind of a clicking sound.

For me,

What happened was nothing so fancy.

But it was like I was going along.

And I thought it was very peaceful.

And then the mind just dropped into something that was much more peaceful.

And it felt like,

Boy,

There's nothing there.

And this is where there is some instructions,

That when that happens,

You put your awareness into whatever that empty space is and see what's there.

And if you do that,

You actually go through that and into the seventh jhana,

Which is called the realm of nothingness.

I call it the realm of no-thing-ness,

Because there are no things there in the sense of external objects.

The real marker of the seventh jhana is that there can be lots of stuff going on.

It can be very subtle.

It won't seem subtle,

Because your awareness is so subtle.

Lots of things going on there.

But there's no references to things outside.

And there are a lot of people who get into the seventh jhana who just don't believe it.

In fact,

When I was here last Easter,

No,

It was when I was out at Dhammasukha last summer.

This yogi came up to me and said,

Bhante says I'm in the seventh jhana,

And I don't believe it.

And I said,

So is there anything going on in there that has to do with outside?

Are you thinking about feeding your cat,

Or the argument with a boss,

Or groceries,

Or whatever?

Argument with a boss,

Or grocery list?

He said,

Oh,

No.

I said,

Well,

That's the seventh jhana.

And it's deeply peaceful.

The seventh to the eighth gets very,

Very interesting.

So the instructions in the seventh jhana are to send out equanimity.

I'm sorry.

Equanimity is so soft that my voice disappears.

I will try to keep my voice up.

It's sending an equanimity in all directions.

But what happens is it gets so peaceful that oftentimes you don't have to send it out.

You just sit there,

And it goes out on its own.

So usually what I tell people is long as the equanimity is going out,

You don't have to do anything.

If it stops going out,

Then you send it out till it gets going and then let it move.

And it's important to have that movement because there's a bunch of things that sending it out does.

One is it helps break down some of the sense of self and other.

There's always connecting out there.

It just keeps that porous.

And it also keeps the awareness from getting too imploded inside the self.

But you let the equanimity go out there.

And then at some point,

You won't see it coming.

At some point,

You just come back and you realize you were gone for a moment.

And most people will say,

I fell asleep.

I was getting very,

Very peaceful,

And then I fell asleep.

And I'll ask them,

I'll say,

So was your mind groggy?

Oh,

No,

It was very,

Very clear.

So if you nod off,

The mind will be very groggy and sleepy before.

And when you come back,

It'll be quite groggy.

But this is a very different phenomenon.

The mind is very,

Very clear.

And then it's like you're gone for a second and then you're back.

And I affectionately call this winking out,

Because that's what it felt like to me when it just goes,

And it's gone for a second.

And that will,

And so when you come back,

The mind will be very clear.

And it will be quieter even than equanimity.

It can feel very silky smooth.

And there's nothing moving.

And so that becomes your object of meditation,

This clear,

Quiet,

Banti calls a bright,

Clear mind.

I find it more luminous.

So people have different metaphors for that,

But it's very still,

Very peaceful.

And that becomes your object of meditation.

What is beginning to happen is that as you were moving in the fourth jhana,

Some of the gross body sensations would disappear a little bit.

As you get up into the seventh and moving into the eighth,

There is some other functions of the nervous system that start to shut down.

I've mentioned the other day about that dream equality and about how the time and space orientation,

The part of the brain that tracks time and space orientation is one of the first things to go offline when we go to sleep.

And I think when you're in the seventh moving in the eighth jhana,

Sometimes that will start to go offline.

And it'll feel like you're in this dream state,

But you're awake.

And people say,

Can you be awake and asleep at the same time?

It's a dead giveaway that somebody is moving into the eighth.

Well,

I'll say a few other things that may show up.

One is that you begin to see some of the different ways that the mind works.

It's hard to explain.

Here's an example.

I was sitting there meditating,

And I was in the eighth jhana.

And there was this very faint scene that just went through hardly noticeable in which there was a table,

And there were two people sitting there and two people that were sitting there.

And I knew that 2 plus 2 equals 4,

So it was 4 o'clock in the afternoon.

The thought went through very lightly.

And then when I came out of the meditation,

I was shocked.

It was actually 7 o'clock.

And I've talked about this with other people,

And there are these funny things that happen where you can see there's these logical functions how 2 plus 2 equals 4,

And you draw that conclusion,

And the mind will just draw a different one.

And these are very subtle impressions,

And they're the types of things that kind of show up in dreams sometime.

You all look very confused.

I would just say that the eighth jhana is just very,

Very fascinating.

I'll leave it at that.

I'll leave it at that.

What happens next is that you wink out,

You come back,

And the instructions are to look back into that empty space there and see if there was anything going on,

Which seems very counterintuitive.

And then you look at the And then you look at the instructions are to look back And if there's anything going on,

You 6R it.

And what this is doing is training the mind and giving it a lot of permission to 6R,

Even when you're not fully conscious of what's going on.

And so the 6Rs go very,

Very deep.

At first,

The winking out will have stuff in it that you might see and sometimes you don't see.

It goes a little bit deeper,

And that's called narota,

Cessation.

Cessation of perception,

Feeling,

And consciousness,

Where it all shuts out for longer periods of time.

And then when it's completely shut down,

Then you go into nibbana.

And as I think I said the other night,

Nibbana is nothing.

There really is just nothing there.

Everything's shut down.

And then when you come back,

There is this blast of relief and joy.

And maybe that's enough.

One thing that happens there is,

As we were saying the other night,

Was the fading away of identification with the self.

And that seems kind of esoteric,

But let me read you a poem.

Hopefully this will put you in touch with a little bit of what that's like.

This is by Gail Turnbull.

And I have no idea whether it's a he or a she or who they are.

I've tried to find it all over the place.

I've tried to find the source of this poem all over the place.

I got it out of the catalog of the theological school I went to many years ago,

But I can't find the reference to it.

But anyway,

This is a poem.

I remember once in a far off country,

It doesn't matter where or even when,

It had been a hot day and a lot of work to be done.

And I was tired.

I stopped by the road and I walked across a field.

I came to the shores of a lake.

The sun was bright on the water.

I swam out from the shore into the deep,

Cool water far out of my depth.

And I forgot.

For a moment,

I forgot where I had come from,

Where I was going,

What I had done yesterday,

What I had to do tomorrow,

Even my work,

My home,

My friends,

Even my name,

Even my name alone in the deep water with the sky above.

And whether that lake was a lake of the shore of some great sea or some lost tributary of time itself,

For a moment,

I looked through.

I passed through.

I had one glimpse as it happened one day in that far off land.

For a moment,

It was so.

Does that touch a familiar place?

Yeah.

So is that stream in here?

It could be.

But it can also come up beforehand.

And I'm not sure if it's in the water.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

It could come up beforehand.

And I think a lot of us have touched a lot of these states.

So stream entry,

Like the Jhanas,

Has a whole lot of qualities around it.

But long before I had stream entry,

I had lots of this sense of fading away.

And a lot of you,

I mean,

Just as this practice deepens,

Sometimes you will see your sense of self just seems to be a little more distant.

So it starts losing its substance.

And so a lot of the traditional descriptions make it sound like it's a black or white,

Just flipped from here to there.

But what I'm trying to,

Particularly with the poems and stuff,

Is put across that,

No,

These are actually graduated states.

And a lot of them,

A lot of us have the wisps of this.

And in some ways,

It feels like coming home,

To a home you had forgotten.

It can be this deeply familiar.

It can sound very esoteric,

But it can be just a deeply familiar kind of sense of ease.

Where does stream entry come from?

There was also,

When I was in Bonté's workshop,

Mark and Antje talked about stream entry.

What the name refers to?

Yeah,

I mean,

I don't think I've come across it in your book.

No,

I stopped the book at the eighth jhana,

Although there's a little bit in one of the appendix about,

It's called Beyond the Jhanas.

But I had to make a decision whether I was going to publish it or keep sort of adding stuff to it,

And I decided to know that that was a good chunk of stuff.

So what the reference is is that you're into the stream of dharma,

The stream of life,

The flow of how things really are.

And with that,

As I was saying the other night,

Turning back is not so much an option anymore.

And as I was saying,

There is the attainment of stream entry and then there's the fruition.

And so the attainment means you get into that state and you can easily slide out of it.

And whether you get into it deeply enough where it actually stabilizes,

That's what the fruition is.

And so there are a lot of people who will get stream entry,

They,

Ah,

You know,

I got it.

And they'll stop practicing,

And then they'll gradually slip away from it.

But even with fruition,

It's not like all your neural wiring disappears.

It's not like all your neural wiring disappears.

So all the habits and conditions are still there.

You just may not buy into it as much.

Does the ice cream sundae still taste the same?

Pardon?

Do the ice cream sundae still taste the same?

Probably a lot more vivid,

Actually.

People will walk around,

Wow,

Look at all these leaves.

It's like the awareness is just really cleaned up.

And so flavors and taste and all kinds of things just come alive.

There's so much of our experience in the world that is dampened by this sort of stream of thought and commentary.

And when you sort of get past that,

It's like,

Whoa.

So it tastes better.

If you want a real chocolate sundae,

This is how to do it.

So talking about maintaining these states,

How much meditation practice?

I mean,

Obviously,

You can't get the set figure because it will depend upon the stage of the person and their personality and their situation,

Et cetera.

But if somebody is living the life of a householder,

Is it impossible to get into extreme entry and maintain that?

Or what would you say the economy of effort would be to sustain these states over their development?

Well,

What I would say is that it's actually not impossible,

But it's difficult to get into those states outside of a retreat setting because you actually need the time for things to wind down and to open up.

But once you've got your foot in the water,

Maintaining it and actually moving forward.

A couple hours of meditation a day is enough.

Three hours is probably better.

And when you get into these states,

It can take a year or two just for them to shake down,

The implications of them.

It can feel like that old Pac-Man game.

It can feel like you've got this thing inside just running around gobbling stuff up inside,

Just cleaning things out.

Two to three hours.

Yeah.

I guess this is the time for a sort of a commercial announcement.

I wondered if you were going to do that.

The idea of concentration,

The idea of continuity is super,

Super important.

So we put together a program so that there will be three,

If not four retreats similar to this a year here at St.

Francis Retreat Center,

Which will feature Bate and Doug teaching this course so that not only can there be a continuity,

But a deepening and a very intentional deepening so that this process doesn't necessarily have to string up for years or a lifetime that you can really dive in and begin to practice and develop and seasonally come back and dive deeper into it and develop to whatever extent you wish.

So that's intentional,

And those retreats will be announced as they get confirmed.

But definitely April,

And it looks like June 28 will be the next time Doug will be here.

So I'll firm that up on the last day of the retreat and let you know what's on the horizon for 2015.

Are you thinking of longer retreats like 11 o'clock?

Probably not,

Because the cost of doing them here really exceeds most people.

It really exceeds most people's capacity.

However,

We're really looking at the 10-day marker as being pretty normal.

And within a 10-day course,

We've seen pretty thrilling results in 10-day retreats.

And that's what we're shooting for.

I would also say with this practice,

Two weeks,

Doing two weeks of this,

Sometimes is actually enough.

If you're living a householder's life,

I mean,

To really go far and then go back into your life and integrate it and then come back in.

If you want to do longer,

There's always Thomas Zukin in Missouri.

You can stay there as long as you like,

Usually.

I'm depending on how long you want to do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

OK,

So.

So.

So I'm sitting here with,

Like,

In the midst of a paradigm shift going on.

First time hearing these teachings in this way.

And according to you,

I've probably been quite a bit in,

Like,

The sixth jhana throughout retreats throughout my life.

But I thought that maybe I was just hitting,

Like,

The very first steps.

And even felt when I was young,

Like,

It was so pleasurable,

I shouldn't cling.

So I just wanted to make myself get out of it.

Right.

And so part of me sitting here,

Like,

Wow,

Can I really believe you?

And why haven't I been taught this?

Could you speak to that confusion?

Many of us have been there.

Yeah.

It's quite common.

And part of it,

I would say,

Is the self-hatred that kind of goes with growing up in this culture.

Did I talk about what happened after I got stream entry?

Any other people?

I was one of the first of Banti's Western students.

They have lots of Eastern students.

And I was at Dhammasukha.

And there was a guy who was quite advanced in his practice who was there.

And it sort of leaked out that I had stream entry.

And so he came to me and asked me,

Was I doing anything different?

How did I do it?

And I said,

No,

I was doing what I always did.

And it just slipped over.

And a week later,

He had stream entry into other people.

And I'm really sure it's not me that did it.

What happened is I think he looked at me and said,

That's just Doug.

You know,

If he can do it,

It couldn't be that hard.

And he kind of let go.

And that was it to put it up.

And since then,

It's kind of cascaded a little bit.

You know,

The people see and say,

Oh.

It's just that.

And I let go into it.

So what I would say,

Because I understand skepticism.

And stop me if I'm repeating myself.

I can't remember.

I teach so many classes.

I just remember having said this recently.

But I don't know if it was here or not.

But one time,

I was saying the same thing to Bonti about that.

You know,

Is this really what's going on here?

And he looked at me and said,

Doug,

When you look at all the stuff you've experienced,

You still have doubt?

You know,

How can that be?

And I said,

I've just had lots of practice.

And so my system just produces a lot of doubt.

And so what I would say about it,

The most important thing is to actually see the doubt as doubt as opposed to an expression of reality.

And that doesn't mean that it's wrong.

It just means that doubt has arisen in the mind heart.

And I actually encourage people more and more to use that kind of language.

Don't say,

Well,

I have doubt.

Say,

A doubt arose in the mind heart.

That's close to what happened.

And then test it out.

You know,

And see what your own experience is.

And I can go out and do wonderful things and come back and doubt it later.

But the thing that,

I mean,

You guys give me a lot of inspiration.

Because I see the part of me that thinks,

Well,

I'm just teaching this stuff.

And the next day,

Somebody comes in,

And it's gone deeper.

And the next day,

There's something else that's happened.

This works.

And I feel a little bit of surprise in me.

And that's the old doubt that's lingering in me.

But it works because it works,

Not because.

So why do you think Stephen Armstrong is the only other teacher in all these years that has said,

Work really hard.

Stream entry is possible.

And now this is only,

You know,

Bonté and you are the only.

Why do you think we haven't been taught that by other teachers?

Well,

Why do other teachers tend to say that stream entry is difficult and possible?

And here,

Bonté and I are saying something different.

And of course,

I don't want to try to dodge the question.

But I would say,

Of course,

I have no idea what was really going on with him.

But speculation about it is that,

You know,

Our culture grew up with these very,

Very inquisitive minds.

You know,

And this sort of inquiry and curiosity is like really big in the West.

And it's part of our power.

And the dark side of that is skepticism.

And so when the Dhamma has been brought over to this country,

It's been cleaned up.

And it's been taken away from the West.

And it's been taken away from the West.

And it's been taken away from the West.

It's been cleaned up.

And it's been talked about one of the values of Buddhism is it can adapt to other cultures.

But I think it's over adapted in some ways.

So when I had some time to do some long retreats,

I was going to do something at Spirit Rock.

And my teacher,

Who was a Spirit Rock teacher,

Said,

No,

You ought to go to Asia.

They'll pull the rug out from under you.

And that would really do you good.

And there was,

I don't understand it.

For example,

It was in this practice.

And every day,

I was supposed to evoke a quality,

A jnana,

A knowledge.

And they wouldn't tell me what it meant.

I was just supposed to evoke it.

And every day,

I would go into an interview.

And I'd talk about what's going on.

And it was exactly what that quality was,

Even though I have no idea.

I had no idea beforehand what it is.

And so there's these subtle mystical values,

Things that happen that don't fit into a Western scientific paradigm.

So that stuff has been cleaned out as it comes over.

So that's one piece of the answer.

I strongly suspect that we're in a period now when all this is going to be changing.

Because I think the Buddha-Dhamma in America is still relatively new.

But we're coming into a time when there are more and more people who have had serious long-term practices and have began to touch into some of these deeper places.

And as that happens more and more,

You can kind of see it and feel it,

That some of these things are going to emerge more and more.

So I just think it's a lack of experience over here.

But I think it's changing.

Yeah,

Because as the expectations change,

Then the process will get quicker to those.

That's right.

Like I was saying to Dhammasukha,

It's just Doug.

So you know.

Right.

That's right.

What the heck?

And of course,

A big piece of this is actually a skillful and wise surrender.

And we don't do surrender so well in the West.

And to figure out the difference between surrender and giving up.

But I think that's all coming in.

It's all coming in.

There's also so many things that I've done in this spiritual thing out there.

So many.

I mean,

I went back when I first moved to Burbank 20-something years ago.

I did the Burbank Sacking Institute.

Right.

I was searching.

So it's kind of like we're making stuff up and not looking back.

It's very hard to put.

I don't know.

Yeah.

So it's.

In the face,

There's so many people out there doing stuff.

So that's why I said that.

A lot of people are so skeptical.

Yes.

There's a lot of very sincere snake oil salesmen.

I lost my train of thought.

Winked out.

No.

Judy.

How many steps are there beyond the jhanas?

So traditionally,

There are eight phases of awakening that we talked about the other night.

There's the sodapana,

The stream entry.

And each has the attainment and the fruition.

And then there's the sakadagami,

A once returner.

There's an anagami,

Which is a non-returment.

And then there's an arahant.

And each of those have two phases.

But again,

It's like the jhanas.

It's actually a continuum.

And there are some,

In my mind,

Just arbitrary markers along the way that are useful as guideposts unless you literalize them too much.

Because it's just a flow as it unfolds.

And what happens in the practice is the eighth jhana practice is the springboard launching pad.

I don't know what the metaphor is for going into those beyond the jhanas.

The practice doesn't change.

It stays that.

And things just open up from that.

And you look at some of those qualities,

Et cetera,

And cultivate those.

A lot of us have been taught that you don't need the jhanas in order to reach awakening.

But where does that come from?

It comes from the Burmese jhanas,

Those deep absorption jhanas.

And the Vasudha Maga,

This text that was written 1,

000 years after the Buddha that talks about the Burmese style jhanas.

In there,

It says these are not necessary for awakening.

But that's the one pointed thing.

If you look at the early text,

The Buddha talks about them all over the place.

So I call these awareness jhanas.

So these jhanas,

They aren't necessary.

It's not like a requirement.

It's not like you've got to get your ticket punch there.

They just describe how the psycho-spiritual system opens out.

So it's like,

Well,

How can I walk across the river without getting wet?

It just happens.

So it's not something to,

I think,

People who use a genuine system that was not the Buddhist system would still go through these phases.

They might have different names.

They might have slightly different markers.

They may put it together differently.

But certainly,

The flow of opening is all the stuff that would happen.

But then the really interesting question is,

Is the actual technique,

The six R's itself,

One of the active components that speeds up the process compared to other techniques for dealing with reactivity?

The six R's are a on the ground,

Rubber meets the road,

Paint by the numbers version of wise effort.

They're the eight phases in the eightfold path.

And there are three of them that the Buddha says are the most essential.

It's interesting language.

He says the others flow from and circle around these three.

And they are wise view.

The core of it is the impersonal.

There is wise effort.

And the core of it is this deeply relaxed effort.

So it's effort without tension and wise mindfulness,

Which is just the awareness itself,

The pure awareness of what's going on.

And the other aspects flow from that.

Pat?

What did you say about the Burmese absorption in comparison to what you were saying?

So what did I say about them?

Is the Burmese style absorption states are not necessary to move into Nibbana?

They are not.

I think there are legitimate styles.

And I certainly practiced one of them.

It went into,

Well,

I don't know what's actually Nibbana.

But it certainly went into some far out places.

But this particular style feels like the most organic and straightforward and kind on the body.

So what about the Sri Lanka,

Kina's practice with the Jhanas?

Is that different than the Burmese?

I'm not familiar enough with those to be able to.

Well,

I could say anything.

But it would not be an intelligent opinion.

What do you embrace with them?

Are you familiar with this?

A little bit.

A little bit.

And it's a basic lotar.

Yeah.

The teacher was there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tom?

In 111,

You didn't read the refrain that comes every time you read it the first time about unification of mind.

And so how do you reconcile this idea that even in the first Jhana there's unification of mind with this concept that the Jhanas could be total unification of mind or they could be less?

Oh,

The mind becomes very quiet and very collected.

That candle flame can be very still and unmoving and still shine out 360 degrees all the way around.

The mind can become very still and very quiet without being focused in.

So there can be.

So the difficulty gets into the translation of those terms and what's meant by unification.

And in English,

It sounds like everything's been crammed into this one unified box.

But it's just referring to a deep stability.

Calm,

Abiding.

They're quiet.

But it's not one pointed.

And I think most of you have experienced this.

You get in places where it just feels very peaceful and maybe it's fleeting.

But I think all of you have experienced this very quiet place.

And that doesn't feel like there's minds and all kinds of stuff all over the place.

It feels,

Bonta uses the word collected.

It sounds like there's a lot of pieces.

It sounds like there's a lot of pieces.

It feels like there's a oneness to it.

It's not been shoved into it.

It's still wide open.

Excuse me.

Yeah.

Can we say that this kind of state is called Jhana consciousness?

Jhana consciousness?

What was the first part of your question?

I mean,

Relate to what is explained in the first Jhana.

Because I heard about the term of the Jhana consciousness.

Oh,

Yeah.

I'm not familiar with it.

The Jhanas,

They're actually,

There's a whole lot of different qualities.

As I read it,

There's a whole list of them.

So it's Jhana consciousness.

I suppose you could use that term.

I'd have to look at it,

See what people meant by it.

Can I ask a question?

Yes.

In your book.

Yes.

I'll come to you.

OK.

Why did I write that?

OK.

You mentioned about once you said you guide him to your second Jhana,

But when you go to the eighth Jhana,

After you get eighth Jhana,

He told you,

My job is done.

I have taught you all I can now.

OK.

So let me read this.

This is out of my book.

He guided me,

He being Bhante Vimalaransali,

Easily into the seventh Jhana.

It had taken me longer to relax and let go and move to the eighth.

But once I was there,

It was easy enough to return to it.

He,

Bhante,

Said,

My job is done.

I've taught you all I can.

Now it's up to you and your intuition to move into Nibbana.

So what did I mean by that?

Yeah.

Because later on,

At the end of this chapter,

You always say you go to the last friend,

Go to the last consultant,

And so on.

Why?

But the.

Yes.

So what that's about is that once you get into the eighth,

What remains to be cleaned up?

It's so subtle and so individual that the most brilliant,

Psychically attuned teacher is not going to know what's really needed as much as your own intuition.

And so what particularly as you get up into the upper jhanas,

It's very important to cultivate.

It's called wisdom's eye,

But it's really intuition,

An intuitive direct knowing of what you need.

So I will sometimes say to a yogi,

If they're stuck and we can't figure out what it is,

I say,

Just ask your intuition,

Which is just ask,

For example,

What's keeping me from going forward?

And once the question is clearly formed,

Then you let it go and just go back to your practice.

And it's as if you're sending a signal to the mind heart saying,

I'm really interested in this,

And waiting to hear back.

And very often,

It'll come back and say,

Oh,

Well,

You need to do this or something like that.

And then you try it out.

And that can be the most helpful thing for moving forward.

I still go back and I still train with Bhante.

And part of it for me is it's just lovely to be with somebody who I can talk with him about my experience without having to explain a whole bunch of stuff.

And my experience with him,

I keep thinking,

Well,

I don't know how far he's gotten,

But maybe if I get through this one,

I'll have caught up with him.

I go through that one,

And it's like he's standing there saying,

Well,

Welcome.

OK,

Now this is what you know.

So I don't know how far he's gone.

But just to be with somebody who really has traversed the territory with a lot of different people.

And my path through that territory might be different than his,

But still somebody that has some knowledge of the territory,

I find just very helpful.

It's sangha.

It's like having a community of people with whom you can talk with about this stuff.

Just about jhanas,

Two centuries after the passing of the Buddha,

A genius,

A guy named Patanjali wrote the yoga sutras,

Which are very short.

But however,

The crux to them has to do with what he called the upper limbs of yoga,

The four upper limbs.

And there's pratyahara,

Which is seclusion,

We talked about it.

And then there's dharana,

Which is basically unification of mind,

A gargata.

And then there is dhyana,

Which is jhana.

So it's the Sanskrit term for jhana.

And then samadhi,

Which is stabilizing,

The stabilizing on,

And those are the four limbs.

But it's basically mirrored what the Buddha had taught 200 years ago.

He just put it into Sanskrit in a form that the Brahmins would be able to accept.

But there again,

The path is jhana.

It's universal.

Yeah.

OK.

Other questions,

Comments?

Had enough talk?

Question here.

Oh,

Yes.

Correct me if I did not remember correctly.

When Buddha went to the final jhana,

He went through all the jhana at the time.

Then he reversed it.

He go down.

Why was that happening?

Oh.

Because the people know his state go up,

Then come down.

So why did the Buddha,

After he went through all those,

Come back down?

I'll send him a note and see if I can.

OK.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My guess is,

Who knows?

Who knows?

But he was really,

There's two things about him that are extraordinary.

One was his attainment.

And the other was his capacity as a teacher.

And there are many fully enlightened beings who are terrible teachers.

But he was a genius of both of those.

And part of being a good teacher is really knowing all the things along the way.

So take music,

For example.

You could have a musical prodigy who just learns the music.

It's just an inborn instinct.

It's just a native talent.

There's a little bit of training.

They go far.

They may turn out to be very poor teachers,

Because most people actually struggle through stuff.

Well,

The Buddha,

In many,

Many lifetimes,

Struggled through everything and seemed to know stuff inside and out,

And knew it really deeply and personally.

So somebody would come up with some kind of issue.

And he would just have this deep,

Deep sense of what was going on and how to handle that.

So that may have been part of what was going on.

The rest of it he didn't reveal to me.

That's a great question,

Though.

That's a great question.

Thank you.

When people went through all the jhanas,

How does the third people know you went through all that and contact them?

Oh,

He talked about it.

How did the sutta get recited?

Oh,

Well,

He actually talks about it in many places.

Like I was saying earlier,

A certain hour of the morning,

He would go into the fifth jhana,

Which is one that has a lot of compassion and radiate it.

So the fifth jhana is a place where the quality of compassion is optimal.

And so he would go there and send that out.

So that may be part of it.

OK.

Enough talk about jhanas?

Enough time to work with them?

I guess if there's just one final thing I would say or underline about them is that this is actually a very,

Very natural process.

And that there are times when there's a great deal of effort that's needed.

And a lot of it is like the frog and toad story that I read at the very beginning about the garden.

This is really,

Really hard work.

And it's humbling because you do all this hard work and you get this progress.

And then you look back and say,

Well,

Maybe it doesn't have to be that hard.

That these states of meditative understanding unfold quite organically.

And all of you are right in the thick of this particular path and this strategy of awakening.

And it has been serving people and awakening people for 2,

600 years now or close.

One of the reasons I came to Buddhism rather than all those other psychics and other people that were on the streets at that time was I was really looking for something that had been tried and tested for a few years.

And this system really,

Really has.

So shall we invite you to just acknowledge,

Even if it's difficult for you,

To acknowledge what you have gained,

Which may be more than your conditioned mind wants to acknowledge,

Of ways that you've touched a peacefulness,

Moments when you've just seen clearly,

Moments when you just actually know what needs to be done next,

Moments of deep compassion,

Moments of joy that leaks outside the boundaries,

Whatever that has been for you.

And take the benefit of all that and send it out to all beings around the planet.

May all beings know joy.

May all beings know their natural peacefulness.

May all beings trust what they truly are.

May all beings know the fullest kind of happiness.

May all beings rest in peace.

May all beings rest in ease and love.

May it be so.

Numbers Thank you.

Reviews

Really excellent talk, I appreciate your openness. Would love to sit a retreat with you

Thanks so much for sharing day four of this retreat. Really enjoyed the talk and the question-and-answer period. If you do this again please use a microphone when people are asking their questions. it was difficult to hear their questions. Otherwise it was informative, educational, and subtly enlightening 🙏🌹

Some really good information there - thanks for sharing!

Thank you for such wonderful explanation. An absolute joy to listen and learn. Namaste