Stages Of Awareness

The Buddha laid out a map that leads from ordinary awareness to freedom from a self, from joy to a profound peace, from effort to ease. This talk provides a general orientation to the specific stages of awareness and transformation.

Transcript

Did you find yourself just falling asleep unconsciously?

No,

It was really quite amazing.

Part of the reason it worked is that it was an intensely one-pointed concentration.

There were 28 points on the body and you memorized them and put your attention.

That was the practice.

So you're doing this intensely focused thing and so the mind can get really… And then to loosen it up,

It took sleep away.

And so I would be sitting there meditating and getting tired of the new,

This intense focus,

But I just couldn't push anymore.

As the body energy went down,

I just couldn't force it.

And so my mind would get very light and clear,

But there was like no push.

And that brought the whole thing back into balance.

And then I would go out very far.

What we do in this practice is we're actually balancing that all the way along,

Keeping the relaxation as we go along rather than pushing it real hard and then doing these drastic measures to balance it out.

And I think this method is just a lot healthier on the body and it doesn't strain as much.

But yeah,

It was amazing.

After 24 hours,

It wasn't difficult to stay awake.

I could say,

You know,

Give 18 to 24 hours,

It would be really groggy,

But I'm not sure.

And we didn't leave our kuti.

So it was then a little kuti that would sort of fit in here and then bring food to the door.

That was it.

It's amazing practice as people have.

So regarding the quote I read yesterday and I found out that I do not understand,

Is the quote the quote that you didn't understand?

I'm not understanding.

There's the quote that you didn't understand?

The quote,

The quote.

You just had people asking for some quote.

The quote.

The passages I was reading.

So there's like the yesterday I wrote the.

.

.

I found out that I did want to use the eight letters.

There's some quotes,

Right?

The quotes on the back of that.

I found it might be wrong and I didn't understand it correctly.

Could I ask now?

Yeah.

Sure.

For this one,

The second paragraph.

So this is from the Dhammapada.

Even as rain penetrates an ill-thatched roof,

Desire,

Dislike and delusion penetrate an undeveloped mind.

Even as rain does not penetrate a well-thatched roof,

Desire,

Dislike and delusion penetrate a well- Oops.

You probably understand the quote perfectly.

It's wrong.

Yeah.

It should be do not penetrate.

Thank you.

It's good to know somebody reads these.

Could you want to have two by Kabir of the same quote?

Yeah,

You have two of the same quote on the back page.

About the fish?

I like that one.

I wasn't sure if you were trying to make a real point about that fish or.

.

.

No,

I really like Kabir too.

No,

That was.

.

.

See,

We really do read them.

Yes.

Well,

Thank you.

I don't know whether to be grateful or scared.

I am so grateful for good editors,

You know,

Because I just miss it completely.

I'm so sorry.

Just one last question.

Sure.

Would you be the same teacher you are today had you not gone through the three days that were just described?

Because did it somehow make it a difference or because you've not done that and it's still for you,

Do you think?

Certainly the total experience being over there had a very deep effect.

But I don't think you have to go through the experience the way I did in order to get that.

So I.

.

.

Well,

I'll just say it.

I got stream entry at that.

I had no idea what it was.

But I was.

.

.

Some of the practices seemed really crazy.

So they had this thing that was called peaceful.

.

.

Well,

There was ceasing and rising,

Which were moments where you were just gone.

And you were supposed to count the number of those you had.

And so it's what I call winking out,

You know,

That was just a momentary one.

And then there was one that they called peaceful cessation,

Which is actually a narota,

Where you were just gone and you were supposed to time those.

And,

You know,

It's like.

.

.

And so,

You know,

I,

You know,

Am a good boy.

So I try to do what I'm told.

So I was in this.

.

.

So this was during some of this period of time when I was awake for three days straight.

So I'd be there in the middle of the night and I had made just a little low table that sat beside my zafu where I was meditating.

And I had a candle on it and a piece of paper and a clock.

And so I would meditate and I would just write the time down.

And my thought was that if I went out,

I'd come back,

Maybe I could figure out how long I had been out.

And so I wrote down on there once,

It was like 1.

15 in the morning.

And I closed my eyes and about three minutes later I thought of it again.

And so I went and wrote it down and it was like 2.

10.

No,

It was actually longer than that.

It was like about an hour and a half that I had just lost.

It felt like nothing had happened.

And I looked inside and my mind was just luminous.

It was just,

Just luminous.

And about 12 hours later,

I remember writing into my journal.

So it was luminous and still and quiet.

And about 12 hours later I was in the state that I described in my journal that it felt like my mind had checked out every other book out of the Library of Congress and was trying to read all of them at once.

It was just,

Just flood of stuff,

Just nonstop like I hadn't experienced.

And when I was talking to Ah Jann Tong about it,

I asked him,

What in the heck are we doing this for?

And all this was going back and forth through a translator.

And he described a vegetable that is prepared like you do kale here.

So you grab the stem and you put your hand around it and you pull the leaves off.

And he said,

That's what you're doing when you go into peaceful cessation.

You just,

You clean all the leaves off and there's nothing there.

And then they grow back.

And then you strip them off and then they grow back and eventually they don't grow back again.

So the,

Going out into peaceful cessation was stripping it off and then all the defilements of stuff come back and it speeds up and so you just keep doing it.

What is the stuff in this case?

Pardon?

What is the stuff?

The stuff?

The stuff that gets stripped off?

The leaves.

So it's.

And the metaphorically.

Oh,

Metaphorically.

Defilements,

Unwholesome states,

Random thoughts,

All that stuff.

It just gets cleaned out and then they all come back.

So I mean there are lots and lots of different ways to do this and I think there's validity to many,

Many,

Many of them.

But I think some of them are just really rough,

You know,

And brutal in ways that don't have to be.

And also I'll just say that those practices they use over there are really designed for Southeast Asians.

The Thai are like some of the sweetest,

Mellowest,

Kindest,

Most laid back people I've ever met anywhere.

And so the push that comes with that,

They're pushing against these people that are just really,

Really mellow.

And it took me a while to figure all this stuff out,

To realize when they were giving me instructions that I had to listen to them the way a Thai might listen to them.

Because I would get there at Western and I'm not uptight before I go to sleep at night,

You know,

And I'm pushing all the time so I add this stuff and I would just go off the deep end with that.

And I realized there is no Thai person I can see around here who would ever do it the way I did.

So they're listening through this different cultural filter.

Because I would go in and I would tell my teacher how I was following his directions.

First time I did it his eyes grew wide as he listened to me and he said,

Go take a walk,

Go buy some ice cream.

And that's where I realized I had to translate it into how a Thai might hear this.

So I had to bring the real laid backness to it in order to bring it into balance.

So a lot of these practices that come out of there have this real kind of fierce push to it because they're just such a sweet kind of laid back people.

So they actually don't push as hard as they.

.

.

None of them are pushing like I was.

So they wind up in the mid range.

That's right.

Yeah.

So it's always this balance of effort and ease.

And so they're way off on this end.

So they're pushing towards more effort.

I'm way over here on this end so they push me towards more effort and it's like it's crazy.

I can get back there.

And the way a lot of the Theravada practice in this country has come through,

You know,

People like Jack and Joseph and Sharon who trained in Southeast Asia and sort of picked up that methodology.

And so bringing it over here to this country,

You know,

There's some cultural adjusting that's needed.

And I think that's why some of the practices were difficult.

We're into second,

Maybe even a third generation of people since it started coming back.

And so as we get more and more people who have serious long term practices in this,

We're able to kind of adjust it and figure out what,

You know,

How to do it here.

Have they stopped the practice of putting someone in a kundu among her or someone on yourself with a dead body?

They weren't doing that with me.

You know,

John Travis,

One of my teachers,

It wasn't,

It was in India,

In Northern India,

Where he did a lot of stuff around the charnel grounds,

But it wasn't necessarily a body in the room.

Because I've heard that sometimes led to madness for some people,

That it was decided that perhaps Westerners couldn't handle that practice.

Yeah,

No,

I thought much better than I would seem to be.

Particularly at a place where during the summer it can get to 120,

You know,

It's like.

But it takes like only about 28 days for the whole dissolution of a body.

I could believe it.

You couldn't leave the kundu in that time,

You were with the body the entire time.

So you got to fully experience the dissolution of the flesh.

But it was pretty horrifying for people.

Well,

It doesn't sound like skillful means to me.

So tonight I'd like to talk about the jhanas and just walk you through all of them.

You guys,

Like I say,

Have been coming along really well.

So I think it's time we just go through these together.

I actually put together a pretty detailed talk on this that yesterday I decided to throw out because I realized in my Buddhist geekiness,

I really like to take apart some of these texts and say,

No,

It's probably too much.

But what I would like to do is to read at least a couple of passages from the text for you to get a sense of the source material.

It's not real source material,

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

Just because I find that it's helpful to understand when you hear people talking about this is the kind of material that they're talking from.

And so you can get a sense of what the interpretation etcetera is.

A couple of remarks before I get to that.

One just to be really clear is that the term jhana in the United States right now has two very,

Very different meanings.

One is these deep one-pointed states of absorption that are very difficult to attain.

And that I think,

If I mentioned this the other night,

Lee Brazington,

His take on it was that in the century or so after the Buddha died,

There were some monks that didn't have enough to do.

And they found all these ways of getting into these incredibly deep one-pointed states of absorption that the Buddha didn't teach,

But they kind of got folded back into the tradition.

And these practices and the ones that do that had been around for a long,

Long time,

Long before the Buddha.

And Pal Ouk,

Who some of you I know are familiar with him,

He's a Burmese master who's kind of known in hardcore Buddhist groups who teaches this style.

And somebody can go on a retreat for one or two months and not actually get into even the first jhana.

They're very difficult.

And it's very clear even in the texts that talk about this style that they're not necessary for an enlightenment and freedom.

But I guess,

I don't know,

If you don't have any TV or beer,

They can be entertaining or something.

The way the Buddha talked about them is that it just means a stage.

So there's this way that the mind opens up and unfolds from ordinary awareness up to full awakening.

I think of it like a flower that opens out.

And so the flowers are just markers along that opening.

Or if you think of a path,

It's like a path going up a mountain and then there are these eight markers along there.

So what actually happens is not that you are in one jhana and then you take an elevator up and go,

Boop,

Now I'm in number two and number three.

But it's this gradual process.

And it's not that the jhanas aren't real and that they're not even distinct.

It's just the transition between them is gradual.

I think this is not where you want to talk right now,

But Lee's teacher,

Ayatima,

Apparently could go in and out of jhanas one through eight,

Six,

Four,

Nine,

You know,

The out of order,

Just at any time.

And those are the concentrated kinds,

Right?

And he does,

He's not as severe as Palak.

That he does,

I don't like it that he uses the word concentration for samadhi because it's very confusing in English.

And his is not the severe concentration,

But there is some of that.

There is,

I would say there's a difference between going up through the jhanas and what they call jhana mastery.

And jhana mastery is where you could say,

I want to go into this jhana and you go there and you want to go that one.

And jhana was,

You were talking about that a little bit the other day,

That sometimes they use those as antidotes to various unwholesome states.

And in this practice how I teach and how Bonnie teaches it,

You can do the same thing,

You know,

Practicing going to specific ones.

My metaphor for it is you're going up this mountain and I'm actually interested in getting to the top.

And do I want to know what's under every little rock and boulder along the way?

I actually don't care that much.

I just want to get on with it.

And also as a Westerner,

Probably with more than my own fair share of controlling tendencies,

I just don't want to feed that part of me.

But you certainly can do it and it's got its own usefulness,

But it's really not necessary.

The top of the jhanas is actually,

I always think of it as a sort of platform for going into the early stages of enlightenment.

So you don't have to have the third jhana to go there.

But in fact they build on each other so you tend to go through them.

But you don't have to isolate it out in terms of going back and forth in and out of it.

I would say that you really can't study and learn what the Buddha actually taught without actually experiencing these on some degree.

You can't really follow them.

You'll find detailed references to the various stages,

Jhana as stages,

In a third.

It's 50 out of 152 sutas in the Majjhimaṇaṇaṇa which is the middle-length discourses.

That's a third of them.

And it's close to half of them talk about the jhanas a little bit,

But there's detailed use of them.

And the Digha Nikāya,

Which is the long discourses,

Half of them have fairly full descriptions of those.

So you can tell by all this that the Buddha talked about them a lot and used them a lot.

In contrast,

The breath meditation shows up in about ten phases.

So you can see that this is a really essential part of understanding what this is about.

Okay.

So for those of you who have trained with bhānti or actually it's in Buddha's map,

There's one of the middle-length discourses.

It's always interesting to me how the sutas are organized.

If you try to look through them for topics,

They have a very different editorial sense.

They're arranged by links,

You know.

And the Gūtra Nikāya is organized by the number of points within it.

So the Gūtra Nikāya has,

I don't know,

Was it about fifteen different books?

So book three,

If you want to know what the three characteristics are about,

You look in the book three.

If you instant find the five hindrances,

You'll find sutas on that in the book of fives.

It's indexed.

Yeah.

I think what was useful about it is that for people who know this stuff pretty well,

If they were trying to find one and that they knew there were three points in this,

But our sense of looking at it,

We're actually more interested in topics and they're just not organized that way.

So the one Bhante talks about a lot and the one that I quote often in Buddha's Map is Anapādha-sūta,

Which is number 111 in the Majjhima-gaya.

It's a relatively short one with just a succinct description.

But for those of you who know that,

I want to give you some variety.

This comes out of the Dīgānagaya,

That's long discourses.

And it's a little simpler.

You'll find all the elements are in there,

But as I was looking through those,

It's a little easier at first pass to get it with fewer explanations.

So,

Quite secluded from sensual pleasures,

Secluded from unwholesome states,

One enters and dwells in the first jhana.

So,

Secluded from sensual pleasures and unwholesome states.

How do you do that?

Close your eyes?

Pardon?

Six R's?

Yeah.

No,

They're both of them right.

You know,

You come on to retreat or when you meditate,

You probably don't meditate in the middle of the kitchen while people are making dinner.

You find a place that's reasonably quiet and you can stick beans in your ears and it'll do all kinds of things,

Or blinds on your eyes,

And cut out some of that.

And so you can cut out some of the sensory input and you don't want to go overboard with that,

But to do a little bit of that makes some sense.

But unwholesome states is another whole deal.

You know,

You can put yourself in an isolation tank,

You know,

Float in salt water and unwholesome states will still come up.

And so there you live for the six R's.

Because the issue is not the sensory stimulus,

Or even unwholesome states actually,

It's getting entangled in them.

And so at some point there really needs to be some way to seclude yourself from those.

And the six R's are,

When in doubt,

Just say six R's.

Would you say that this venue,

A retreat type atmosphere with,

You know,

Nature around us would be a good start on that?

Oh,

I think it's a good finish.

Or it's getting over unwholesomeness too.

Not just the census,

But the unwholesomeness.

Yeah,

Well it's important though that the unwholesome is actually a measure of what's going on inside.

There's,

There's,

They're not wholesome and unwholesome bird songs.

There can be wholesome and unwholesome ways you relate to it.

Some people say that when we do the retreat we find ourselves settling in relationships that they didn't realize were toxic.

So I would add that.

Could that be added to the wholesome state too?

Perhaps you take time away from the person you want.

Yeah,

Again that I would say that what's most important is your relationship with a toxic person.

And it's not necessarily them,

But it's also to have some wisdom in terms of how much toxicity that you can be in the presence of before it leaks in despite your best efforts.

And all of us have our limits.

Right,

It can be caring for someone you sit.

It's not the fault that they're sitting,

But you're having to do a lot for them.

So separating,

It doesn't necessarily always mean a bad thing to the person.

Right,

Right.

It just sort of sounds like kind of isolating yourself,

A seclusion of the physical,

Not a seclusion of the right.

Yeah,

And so just to be clear about a couple of things,

They're talking about going into the jhanas.

And so,

Yeah,

You might isolate yourself from somebody that's toxic,

But actually when you're meditating you're pretty much in your own space anyway.

So there could be somebody who's difficult to work with and because of the social arrangements you don't have much choice,

But you have to do something with them.

Still you can go off to meditate and seclude yourself even if over supper you still have to eat at the same table with them.

Quite secluded from sense pleasures,

Secluded from unwholesome states,

One enters and dwells in the first jhana which is accompanied by thinking and examining and filled with joy and happiness born of seclusion.

So you notice here it's accompanied by thinking and examining.

So in the first jhana there are a lot of thoughts going on.

And I was talking to somebody today saying this is one of the sort of best kept meditation secrets that everybody knows but nobody quite submits,

That there's actually a lot of thinking that goes on in meditation.

You're sitting there meditating and an image of an ice cream cone comes up in your mind.

So do you sixar it or do you ignore it?

Well the early instructions are if your mind gets hijacked by it just sixar it.

If it's just something comes up and you're aware of the meta then you just ignore it,

You just go on.

So the image comes up and you have to figure that out.

And it may not take a whole lot of processing but you are making some kind of decision.

And it can be done very,

Very lightly.

But you're doing this all the time.

You're sitting there and you're getting restless and so do I sixar this and just relax and see if I can go on with it or has it gotten to the point where it would be wiser for me to get up and go for a walk?

Well you make some kind of determination on that or maybe experiment with it or something.

But it's not like the mind,

It's not like a computer on the old desktops just unplugged for the wall and the whole thing goes off.

It's still operating there.

And that's not a problem necessarily.

If there's tension in the thought then it's problematic.

Thinking and examining refer to two words vataka and vakara.

There are lots of words in Pali that we translate as thinking.

There's another word that's translated as thinking which is pappanccha.

If you're familiar with the term pappanccha,

I just love it.

Pappanccha is what it sounds like.

Pappanccha is when you think of the ice cream cone which reminds you oh boy how you used to like to go to carnivals when you were a kid and there were elephants and your sister was sometimes a pain in the neck and then there's this person who the other day was a pain in the neck and the mind is just kind of rambling on from topic to topic to topic and around.

That's pappanccha.

And it has a lot of tension in it whether you see it or not.

And it's what gives thinking a bad reputation.

And so it's that rambling thought that is,

That really needs to be six-armed.

Is thinking the contamination of the Dharma even?

Yeah,

That's,

So the dhamma is,

No that's not even the dhamma.

So in this meditation you wouldn't actually be contemplating the dhamma necessarily.

There is,

Well there are investigative practices where you do take that on a little bit.

But what you do in that it's more like sitting with it.

It's not like analyzing.

When you're sitting there you're contemplating the meaning of the Dharma and it's helpful for you to meditate for certain things like the matter.

You refer to the thinking as like the reflection coming out.

That's thinking of that like ice cream.

So what's the difference because the ice cream comes out,

You think of that as the word contemplating the meaning of the Dharma.

What's the difference?

So I would say that contemplating the meaning of the Dharma is contemplation.

And I wouldn't call that meditation.

So even in English there are different uses of the term.

And what I think of as meditation and what this particular practice is about is not so much a contemplation.

Those contemplations can be quite valuable and quite helpful.

But it's a slightly different practice than the meditation as we're doing it here.

So this core practice we're doing is actually training the mind.

It's not going into the content of things.

So the Buddhist thing,

Be a lamp unto yourself,

Was deathbed advice to all of us.

Take care,

Don't get into trouble.

Much deeper than that.

It wasn't necessarily meditation instructions.

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

So the real marker of the first jhana is this joy and happiness.

I think we've talked about it here before,

How you're meditating and there is that seclusion.

The six R's of maybe quiet environment.

And then just out of that peacefulness there can be this little bit of joy that comes.

And sometimes it's gentle and for some people it can be like a rocket ship.

But there's this wonderful pithi is what it's called,

This strong joy.

And then typically at first it quickly starts to spread out and mellow into a kind of happiness and then down into an equanimity.

And the equanimity has so little energy in it that the mind loses track of it and drifts off.

And so this little spike of joy and happiness and equanimity is the beginning of the Buddha's jhana path.

And all that spike can you do,

That all happens in the first jhana?

Oftentimes what you experience it,

And that little spike can spread out over several minutes but typically at first it might even be just half a breath.

So it can be very quick,

Just ooh,

Ah,

Hmm,

Cool,

That's it.

Yes,

And as it goes up in the jhanas that's what happens.

But in the first jhana it usually goes through pretty quick.

And there's this little phrase here that's important,

It says,

Born of seclusion.

It's not born of delightful fantasies,

It's not born of finally getting an ice cream cone,

It just goes out of the seclusion,

Out of the quiet itself,

Which is very unwestern,

Right?

We're always looking for things,

It just grows out of a stillness.

One drenches,

Seeps,

Saturates and suffuses the body with this joy and happiness born of seclusion so that there's no part of the entire body which is not suffused with this joy and happiness.

So you can tell already that these were memorized,

You see that joy and happiness born of seclusion which is repeated over and over and over again.

You may not need it for content but if you are being scored on how well you're memorizing something it's really nice to have all the repetition in there.

And as this stuff was passed along the monks actually were tested by how well they memorized things so there's this natural tendency to leak back into these things,

These memory devices.

Suppose a skilled bath attendant or his apprentice were to pour soap flakes into a metal basin,

Sprinkle them with water and knead them into a ball.

So the ball of soap flakes would be pervaded by moisture,

Encompassed by moisture,

Suffused by moisture inside and out and yet would not trickle.

I find this passage really kind of sweet because what we're getting is kind of a little bird's eye view into domestic life in the time of the Buddha.

When they wanted soap they didn't go down to the corner store and buy a bar of ivory wrapped up in wax paper.

What they had is you could get these little flakes of soap and so to get a ball of soap they put them in a metal basin and then you have to put just the right amount of moisture in there enough to get them to stick together but not so much that it's gooey.

I think today for us it's sort of like trying to make a pie crust,

You know,

You get the flour and you need the right balance of that and it needs to be throughout the whole thing otherwise you get your pie crust flour which is a little gooey over here and it doesn't have a moisture there so it all falls apart.

So this is a metaphor of this moisture that is evenly spread throughout it.

In the same way one drenches,

Seeps,

Saturates and suffuses the body with this joy and happiness born of seclusion so that no part of the body is not suffused by joy and happiness.

So that's the metaphor and at first what will happen when the joy and happiness come up is that it can be localized,

It may be here in the head or some place like that and as you just relax into it,

It tends to spread out until you're looking for this place that feels like it's saturated throughout the entire body.

So that's the first jhana.

You'll notice there's lots of references to the body here and there's references to thinking and examining thought and all these other things.

This is clearly not one point of absorption.

In one point of absorption there's just one object and you could,

You know,

Whack somebody on the side of the head if they're deep and they wouldn't feel it.

The senses are open and you can feel the sense of this joy and happiness that's suffused through there so there's this kind of lovely sense of them.

Any questions about the first jhana?

The value is that if you want jhana mastery,

That's how you do it.

You go back and forth in and out.

If you just want to get on with it,

I don't think it makes that much difference.

Any other questions or comments?

Yeah.

I'm afraid that you're saying that if your goal is to become very adept at achieving the rhoda that you do not need to backtrack and be able to dip in the non-jhana.

No.

No.

You need to get to the mountaintop.

You don't have to figure out all the various paths up there and where the latrines are and where the favorite little ponds.

You just need to get there.

And a lot of these skills can be helpful but they're not essential.

Let me read the second jhana and then I'll just talk about the remaining ones when we go up from there unless you're really interested and I can read more of it but partly because the second jhana has this really lovely metaphor with it.

With the subsiding of thinking and examining thought.

So we're talking about the second jhana now.

With the subsiding of thinking and examining thought.

So that little bit of thinking that was going on there before is it doesn't actually disappear.

And the word here is actually subsiding but as you go into the second jhana it feels like the volume of thought inside sort of drops in half.

It gets quieter.

And this is why in this practice as it goes a little deeper we tend to drop the phrases because the phrases are a mental vocalizing.

And they're really helpful in the beginning to get the mind going the right direction but once the metta or the peacefulness which you're sending out to get strong enough you don't need it anymore and the phrases and that internal thinking begins to feel clunky and less helpful so you can just drop it.

With the subsiding of thinking and examining one enters and dwells in the second jhana which is accompanied by inner tranquility and unification of mind without thinking and examining which you just said you noticed without thinking and examining and filled with happiness and joy born of samadhi.

So what happens as Nate was suggesting is the process is pretty much the same.

There's this little spike of joy and then it subsides into happiness and there's equanimity except it spreads out further and further rather than just being a quick one it gets longer and longer so this good feeling may come up and in fact what tends to happen is the happiness becomes a little bit more predominant.

Not always but this fiti has this big sort of rush to it.

Translators rapture sometimes and then there's this quieter happiness and that can actually linger for quite a long time before it subsides into equanimity.

Unification of mind,

You'll feel the mind is actually getting a little quieter,

A little stiller and here if you remember in the first jhana they said joy and happiness born of seclusion,

Now it's joy and happiness born of samadhi.

I'm deliberately using a Pali term.

Samadhi doesn't translate into English very well.

It's usually translated as concentration but concentration is something you do.

Samadhi is something that arises when you release enough tension,

When you get the tension out of the way and so that rather than it being a joy and happiness that comes from just having some peace and quiet around you,

It's a deeper kind of joy and happiness that comes up when there's a little more quiet truly inside.

And as you can see with this the line between the first and the second jhana is not very sharp and when you're in one and one and the other can be clear from here to here but there's all these stages,

All these gradations in between.

You may go through them quickly but they are there.

One drenches,

Seeps and saturates,

One drenches,

Steeps,

Saturates and suffuses one body with joy and happiness born of samadhi so that there is no part of one's entire body that is not suffused with joy and happiness.

Suppose there was a deep lake whose waters welled up from below.

It would have no inlet for the water from the east,

West,

North or south nor would it be refilled from time to time with rain showers.

Yet a current of cool water welling up from within the lake like a spring,

Welling up would drench,

Seep,

Saturate and suffuse the whole lake so that there would be no part of that entire lake that is not suffused with the cool water.

In the same way one drenches,

Seeps,

Saturates and suffuses one's body with joy and happiness born of samadhi so that there is no part of one's entire body that is not suffused by this joy and happiness.

So I really love that image.

So the first one is this little ball of soap so you get the sense of this sort of relaxing into this little bit larger place and that the joy and the happiness they just sort of well up from deep inside and spread out.

So it's the same category of phenomena and states as the first jhana but it's much larger.

The other thing that happens with second jhana is that typically you know when you start this practice you don't know what's going to happen or even it's going to work and maybe you get a little bit of blip of something,

Well that's just a blip and then you keep practicing and then you see oh you know this stuff is lasting longer,

It's going deeper,

You know something seems to be working here.

And so one of the characteristics of the second jhana is this growth in confidence.

It's not that you still don't have doubt but there's this sense of oh you know maybe this practice really works.

And the other thing that happens,

There's a dropping of the phrases and that's called,

I mentioned before,

It's called noble silence.

In the text that's called noble silence.

The phrase noble silence has been used a lot to refer to not talking to other people while you're on retreat but in the text it refers to this quieting of the mind.

And you'll find that it becomes easier to sit longer at that place.

Okay,

Any thoughts or comments or questions,

Observations?

So,

Pardon.

I'm sorry,

It sounds like the sifusas you've been trying to allow,

Is that accurate?

I've looked through a lot of the text and it comes through in an active verb,

One sifusas.

And I'm not so sure about that and it may be that again in Eastern and Western difference and I wish I knew more about Pali,

You know,

Because my sense of it is that the way you sifusas saturate is actually more relaxing into it.

And it may be that,

You know,

For example in a typical Thai culture where they are kind of over relaxed already,

That,

You know,

A little bit of effort to make sure that it spreads around and that it's throughout the entire system is helpful.

But for us,

We do so much trying and doing already it's more what the other word you use which is allowing.

Yeah,

You just allow it.

So you may notice that it's localized and there's this sense of just allowing.

So it really has more to do with the relaxation and ease and allowing it to spread out rather than something that you're doing.

But wasn't this originally written in Indian culture other than Thai?

Yeah,

The Indian culture is much closer to the Thai than,

I mean at least the traditional culture.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we'll go on to the third jhana.

If you want I can read some texts but let me just go through all of them and if you want to hear more we can come back.

So what happens is that you're sending out metta,

Jhana,

And this and it's beginning to spread out more and more and what happens is it gets deep enough that the joy doesn't come up so much anymore.

You just actually go right into equanimity.

And some people just from the beginning go into it.

I have a friend who just has a,

Grew up in a lot of equanimity.

You know people talk about,

You know in a real healthy family this is what would happen and I don't know that I know anybody that has a really healthy family but I hear about his family and I think he may be the exception to the rule.

And he just naturally has a lot of equanimity.

And so when he started a practice he noticed all these people going into these intense states of joy and bliss and stuff and he was just like going like that and he felt really deprived.

And I said no you're just you're actually moving ahead of them.

But most of us if you're like me that really have way too much tension to start off with.

I think,

Did I talk about this before?

I think what the pity,

What that real intense joy is,

It's like when there's this tension inside and you have released the 95%.

If you release it 100% then it's just like and it quiets down.

But if there's a little place that's just hanging on a little bit then there's this rush of energy that's going out and it rushes by and this little bit that's just hanging on by one finger and that creates this sort of intense feeling of joy and delight and bliss and when you relax completely it just goes and it's just mellow.

And yogis will come in,

The interviews and you can see them,

They will come in and they'll sit down.

You know how's it going?

It's fine.

The joy is gone.

Well,

Are there any problems?

No,

Not really.

But the joy is gone.

So nothing's going.

Well I stepped on a nail,

Went through my foot but I pulled it out,

It'll grow back.

But the joy is gone.

And there is you know in the popular culture a lot of things about these ecstatic states,

Etc.

And so when they start to naturally subside some people think oh my goodness I've fallen off the wagon here.

But it's actually a sign that you've moved on to higher states,

Higher jhanas.

And so what really predominates in the third jhana is this deep equanimity.

So some of you know this,

This is my favorite poem about equanimity.

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 always 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's 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.

It was written by Donald C.

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

Which when I do the calculation that was about the time that I was conceived.

So I,

And it is actually part of a much larger work.

There was a member of one of my congregations who actually knew Donald Babcock.

He was a professor at the University of New Hampshire.

So equanimity gets misunderstood a lot.

People think of equanimity as quieting the waves and I would say good luck with that.

I mean as far back in history as I can see there have been big waves.

As far back as I can see in my life there have been waves and they will probably continue on into the future.

This is not about stopping the waves.

It is actually about figuring out how to rest in them.

And I think I have mentioned here before,

I am sure many of you have experienced this,

Where you are sitting here and there is a big sound or something happens and at first it can be surprising.

It is just a sound.

You know you are just not thrown by it at all.

I did a couple of retreats with John Travis a number of years ago.

This woman who has a house up at about 6,

000 maybe 6,

500 feet up in the Sierras.

And so we would go up there.

There was only room for about 15 people so there was this lovely little house and it was about a half a mile from the pass and there was a road that came through and so these big trucks would come over the road and then as they would come down they would go into low gear and get 18 wheelers on flat flanks about 150 feet from the house.

And in the first couple of days of the retreat it just drove me nuts.

And by about the third or fourth day I was so glad that the trucks had stopped.

And so I stopped and listened though they were still there.

It was all that but it just didn't faze me anymore.

So that is what the equanimity is.

And in other descriptions it doesn't appear in this one but in many of the other descriptions there is also this phrase where it says,

The noble ones can see he has a calm abiding.

There is a way in which the equanimity there can sometimes be palpable.

You can see it on people.

And again with all of these what happens as these go deeper is you find yourself sitting a little longer and that your mind will stay on the object,

It will stay with the metta,

Staying longer before it gets pulled away.

When it gets pulled away you are starting to notice it quicker.

So all this stuff is building.

Q.

So if you use this pure jhana from 1 to 3 all the way to equanimity,

Is it duplicable?

A.

Yes,

You can do that.

The way this practice works for moving along is that whatever practice what I am always interested in the interviews,

You will hear me say I am just interested in your best sitting.

And that will give me some measure of where you are in the jhanas and then we gear your practice off of that.

And it is with a full understanding that you will fall out of that.

But still since your mind already knows that place,

Your mind and heart already knows that place,

You keep that practice so that maybe you are in the third jhana and the next time you sit down and meditate you can't get any jhana whatsoever.

You would still do the practice which at that point is you are just sending out peacefulness,

Equanimity.

You can send out any uplifting qualities in any of these jhanas but I always recommend that you use whatever one is strongest for you.

I mean use what is there.

So typically you would be sending out peacefulness and equanimity even though you are not quite in the jhana at all.

And that will tend to pull you there.

And if it gets really difficult and the whole thing falls apart or you haven't been meditating for a while,

Then sometimes you do go back and just sort of walk up through them to get them.

But you don't have to go and intentionally do that each time.

Was that the question you were asking?

Okay.

At some point in the book you mentioned in the jhanas also equanimity,

Peace,

Equanimity.

Are those the three?

Or stillness maybe somewhere in there?

Talking about the awakening factors?

There are.

.

.

It seems like some of the other jhanas were defined by that as well but I just wanted to hear how you sort of draw a line between the two because a lot of them sort of.

.

.

Between tranquility and equanimity.

What happens with tranquility is it's actually a much quieter place.

With equanimity you can actually.

.

.

Well this is an extreme example but maybe some of you have felt this.

You know,

There can be anger in your system.

You know,

And even some big welling up of it.

And if you're not attached,

If you're not identified with it,

You can actually be quite equanimous at the same time.

Equanimous,

Have a lot of equanimity.

A lot of people use equanimous.

I've tried to look it up.

I'm not sure it's a real word but.

.

.

It is a real word.

It is a real word?

I guess it didn't used to be but maybe it is now.

Another word I find useful is in that same group is equipoise as well.

Equipoise?

Equipoise.

Yeah,

Equipoise is just a centered state of mind,

Centered state of mind.

So it works well if you're using words.

Equipoise,

Equanimity.

For those who understand what equipoise is,

Yeah,

Kind of sounds like it.

It's hard to understand what equanimity is for us people but that's part of the whole thing.

Yeah,

No,

It's helpful because again,

Understand,

This is being translated through several languages or at least from one into English and words don't translate well.

Do you know my stories about Purdue chicken and Pepsi Cola?

Oh,

This was some sideline entertainment.

When Pepsi Cola went into China,

They took their slogan,

Come alive with a Pepsi generation.

Very successful,

You know.

They translated into Chinese and put it up on big billboards and had to stuff around.

And then somebody came in and said,

You know in Chinese what this really means?

It means that Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

And you can see because in English,

Come alive is really understood to be metaphorical.

You know,

So with just that slight shift of stuff,

The meaning of it gets shifted radically.

When Frank Purdue went into Mexico,

He took his slogan,

It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.

And they translated it into Spanish.

You know,

Again,

Put it up all over the place and in Spanish,

What it really meant was that it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.

And again,

If you notice particularly with sexual language,

There's always innuendos,

So it doesn't take much to trigger an entirely different.

When Ford Pinto came out,

They were doing research in other countries and Brazil seemed to be just the ideal market for the Pinto,

You know,

In terms of the economy and where people were and the pricing and all that stuff.

And so they started selling Pintos down and they couldn't sell anything.

And somebody came in and said,

You know,

In Portuguese,

And Portuguese Pinto means it's slang for small penis.

And so what they did is they changed the name to Corral,

Which is Portuguese for horse,

And sales took off.

So,

You know,

We're talking about cars and soda and fried chicken and stuff like that.

When you get to talking about these mind states,

You know,

These subtle nuances,

Stuff that's going on,

It's really hard sometimes to get what they're actually talking about.

That's why equipoise and all the rest kind of circle around it and find it.

So I have to ask,

Did the Pepsi,

Like,

Did people buy more because they wanted to bring their ancestors back?

I have no idea.

I researched the story beyond that.

I thought it was a,

The first one of these I heard was actually from my father.

He was a marine engineer and it was the first time that they were using computers to try to translate documents from one to the other.

So they had this German document that came through and was,

It kept talking about this water goat.

There was all this stuff about a water goat and they couldn't figure out what the,

Water goat,

Water goat.

And so they finally got somebody who spoke German and came in and said,

Oh,

It's hydraulic ram.

And it's not,

So words have multiple meanings.

They don't just have one meaning,

There's a whole cluster and they have multiple nuances around them.

And you'll find particularly in the suttas,

There are all these,

These,

These phrases,

You know,

A vataka and vakara,

Thinking,

Examining thought,

You know,

Are used,

They just string these all together and they're all kind of pointing in a particular direction.

So you really have to,

If you really want to understand what they're saying,

You really have to kind of play around with these.

I,

When I'm looking at these suttas,

I like to get as many different translations as I can and see what it is the Buddha might have been talking about that could be translated or mistranslated in all these different ways and then look at your practice.

So it's kind of like feeling in the dark sometime.

But you must also get the feedback from current American language speakers who describe their states so that if you recognize the state then the vocabulary part sort of comes in from that anyway.

Yeah,

Yeah,

Yeah.

I've heard Ritaka-Ritara apply,

Does it apply the tension and sustain the tension?

Yeah,

Yeah,

That's Abhidharma,

That's much later.

And Lee Brazington,

His point on this,

And I think it's a good one,

He calls it,

I hadn't heard the term before,

Synonymous parallelism.

Anybody heard of that?

Good,

So it's just not my,

I'm just not totally illiterate.

It's if I were to say to you,

You know,

I've been thinking and wondering and trying to figure this stuff out and then I become a big holy man,

Somebody and people who was thinking and pondering and wondering and trying to figure it out and then in a couple of generations people,

Okay,

Thinking,

What did he mean by that?

You know,

And pondering,

This must be something different and all that,

When in fact all it is is just using synonyms and a string for emphasis.

So it's not so much individual words but in the later Buddhism they became really very interested in this finely,

As you know this stuff,

I'll say for other people,

To you know,

Finely sort out all these meanings.

But the Buddha talked to scholars,

He also talked to sheep herders,

You know,

And milk maids,

Was talking to,

You know,

Very common language,

Not this highly refined specialized stuff.

So you kind of get the feel of it,

What's going on.

Fourth jhana.

I just have a silly question.

If you're sitting there and you're saying the joy is gone,

What makes you want to go on?

Why not go backwards to where the joy was?

So what's your answer?

Well,

Because I have a teacher who tells me there's so much more down the path,

You know,

I keep moving up the mountain.

Well what will actually happen if you don't move on is after a while the joy gets a little tedious.

You know,

It's like how much joy can you stand before it just gets a little bit.

And it's actually,

You know,

For somebody like me,

You know,

I had all this depression in my background,

You know,

To experience joy at that intensity rising up inside,

It was actually quite,

Quite healing.

But at some point it's just,

Is this all there is?

Or as Huxley wrote once,

Sometimes you ask of Beethoven,

Even Mozart,

Is this all?

And so as delightful as the joy is,

It is tight,

It's highly energetic,

So it's not going to last very long,

It'll run out of energy.

And so it's fine to enjoy it,

You know,

While it's there,

But at some point it says,

Well is this all?

You know,

Is this something more?

And states like equanimity are much stabler because they have very little energy in them,

So they don't burn out as quickly.

Oh yeah,

Yeah,

But it does go,

It's like any other state,

It arises and passes.

It doesn't come,

I mean it's not accessible,

But it does come.

And pithi will go actually fairly quickly because it's got so much energy in it.

But in a way none of this matters in the sense that when I look at people who are in this state,

They're not going to be able to see it.

They're not going to be able to see it.

It's an interesting point,

And there's a lot of truth to that,

But also the Buddha said,

And this is the genius of the path,

That the path is good in the beginning,

Good in the middle,

And good in the end.

So it's actually not one that you have to drudge through all this stuff,

That there is stuff that is inherently,

It's one of the reasons it's powerful,

And you get all the goodies,

But it's like how much ice cream can you eat before you get a bellyache?

Fourth jhana?

So what happens in the third jhana is there's this equanimity,

This deep peacefulness that comes in,

And you're pretty much sending that out,

Although you could be wishing any uplifted state for others.

Usually by the third jhana you're not necessarily sending it to yourself anymore because the states are strong enough that if you're just sending it out to somebody else you'll feel it,

It's fine to send it to yourself,

But it's actually not needed as much.

And so the third jhana is called rupa-apekka,

The third jhana is called rupa-apekka,

Which means equanimity,

Rupa means body,

So it's equanimity with body sensations.

What happens as it goes deeper is that you get so relaxed that some of those body sensations start to fade,

And it's not like your foot going to sleep.

My father got out of bed one morning and his foot went to sleep and he stood up and fell over and broke his ankle.

It's not that kind of sleep,

It's just that you're sitting there and you get so relaxed that the body's not sending out as many sensations.

And so there may be a moment or so where it seems like your hand is missing.

I used to as a kid,

I love to,

I must have been five or six because I can remember stretching out body length in the bathtub,

Not being able to touch the other end,

And there would be the bubble baths with all the soap there and I would just lie there and float in that and let my head float back so I could breathe easily but my ears would be below the water and there's this really quiet state and if I got relaxed enough my arm would disappear.

It's like,

Whoa,

Way to go,

And you shake it and it's there.

Any of you ever do that?

So it's not just my craziness.

So that's what happens as you move into the fourth jhana is that parts of the body will disappear.

The other thing that happens is that you can be sitting there and it sort of feels like you're leaned over like this.

Did I talk about this here?

I never talk about it with individuals.

Did I talk about it here?

Okay.

I'm not going to tell you then.

So you're sitting there meditating and it feels like you're leaned way over and you open your eyes and the body's actually upright.

You can have all these sort of strange kinesthetic sensations and what's going on is that the signals the body is sending are just very,

Very much cooled down and the brain doesn't know quite how to interpret them and so it'll get them wrong and so you have this distinct feeling you're like this but it's actually not.

So the third jhana is rupa-apekka.

The fourth jhana is called arupa-apekka,

A,

B in negation.

So it's equanimity without body and it's not that it's an out-of-body experience where you're floating through some etheric space.

It's just that there are places where the sensations actually start to disappear and this is a really significant amount of equanimity that's come in at that point.

And so this is the place where there is a transition in the practice that it shifts so that rather than just send it to a spiritual friend that you send it to another spiritual friend and maybe three or four of them and then you send equanimity,

Peaceful states,

Uplifting qualities,

Well-wishing to all the members of your family.

And in those traditional cultures they have these huge extended families.

We don't have as many of that here for many people anyway.

Sometimes I even suggest including in that if there are few people who are not of blood relations but are close to you to be a kind of a virtual family member,

You include them too.

And you're sending it in all these cases just to enough until you can see them smiling or imagine them smiling or feel them smiling and then you're done with them and you move on.

Then after you've done all the family members you do about four or five neutral people until you can see them smiling.

Then you move on to what traditionally is called the enemy.

These are people that get under your skin.

They just rattle you.

And I caution people that included in this category is not Donald Trump or Dick Cheney or your favorite political bad guys unless you know them personally.

Because of political figures we just know caricatures of them that come through the media.

So these are all people that you have some personal relationship to.

George Bush who was not one of my heroes had an older sister who was with some significant disabilities and his mother says that all the energy got channeled into this older sister and that he was probably neglected a lot as a kid.

You know if you know somebody personally you know that.

You can feel that personal dimension of it and so that's why I send in a meta.

But if you don't know the person and that story and the rest of that you just have to have a caricature so you don't have to worry about those.

There are some tricks here.

One is you want to be sure not to get caught in the storylines about I'm upset because they did blah blah blah blah blah.

You just stay with the feeling of it.

And the other one is if you get really stuck you back off of a difficult person,

Come back to a neutral person until you get the meta flowing again.

And when it's flowing again it's sort of like kicking the fire hose and sort of turning it towards a difficult person.

You get a good head of steam on it and you bring it to them.

And then once you get through all of those then I invite you to come talk to me and we shift your practice somewhat dramatically.

That rather than sending it to individual people you start sending it out to all beings everywhere.

And part of the technique in this is to first send it to all beings in front of you,

Sending meta kindness,

All beings behind,

Then to the left,

Then to the right,

Above and below.

You don't have to do that in that order,

All six directions.

And then you send it out to all beings everywhere all the time.

It's like sending out an expanding ball of meta.

And at this point,

According to the text,

This is not my interpretation,

You've become an advanced meditator.

That's labeled a Buddha used.

It's considered an advanced meditator.

This is considered an advanced practice.

There are other traditions that I think some of you may have had some experience with.

We go through those categories of people over a much longer period of time and you spend more with them,

Etc.

And I did that years ago.

And I like doing it this way because what it does is it really builds up really strong meta in one person and then when it feels really strong you're sending it out to all these different people just to make sure that it goes equally to all people regardless of who they are.

One of the text description of it is a soft rain that falls on the dung heap and the garden and the fields equally.

It's indiscriminate.

I've told some of you this.

There's a guy,

Very deep mature practice who said to me he just loves sending meta to everyone who deserves it.

Like,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No,

No.

I'm glad you laughed.

Otherwise I know I really had a lot to talk about.

So this basic paradigm of sending to all beings all the time,

This becomes a practice from here on out,

Just about,

Through the rest of the jhanas.

So you're sending it out and at first it's meta and as you're sitting and sending it out eventually what happens is this feeling of spaciousness comes up.

The practice gets quite,

Quite expansive.

If people get stuck and it doesn't quite move into that sometimes I will have them go sit outside or sometimes just go outside just because it's fun anyway.

So particularly if it can be up high you have a sense of the horizon because it sort of resonates with that but it becomes quite spacious.

I remember years ago I used to go up in the middle of the night and meditate in our attic.

I had a little office up there and I would meditate up there.

I remember,

This is before I knew any of these labels and stages and stuff,

And I was meditating and everything was just really dark.

It was like I was in a black closet and I was meditating and suddenly it was like visually nothing changed but rather than being in a black closet I felt like I was suspended out between the galaxies with just this vast space and even a sense of vertigo.

It was like whoa!

And then of course it all collapsed.

So the spaciousness can sometimes be quite intense but other times it can be real gentle.

But you just have that sense of space.

And I would also say with all these kind of markers and things that happen usually when you go into them the first time they can be quite distinct and quite strong.

And then as you do it more and more you may go back into it and it doesn't seem like a big deal.

It seems weaker and you think you've lost it.

But often times what happens is you just get used to it.

You kind of get acclimated to it.

And so at first sometimes the spacious can be like me,

A vertigo,

But as you get used to it,

It just is what is.

When I was latency aged,

5,

6,

7,

8 up to 10,

11,

We used to play cowboys and Indians.

And so we would run around,

A whole gang of kids.

We also had a lot of pine trees and pine cone grenades.

And so the deal was when somebody snuck up on you and shot you,

You were dead for at least 10 or 15 seconds.

And so you'd fall down on the grass.

And I can remember all this time falling down on the grass,

Dead.

And so I would try to be dead,

Completely relaxed,

Sometimes with my eyes open,

Staring up at the sky.

And I'd look at the clouds and the clouds would start moving away.

They were just receding.

They weren't actually moving,

But they seemed to be moving away.

They've had that experience.

And I'd say to my brother,

Wicke,

The clouds are moving away.

Have you seen this?

And he'd say,

You're an Indian,

Get up.

So I didn't have much luck having spiritual conversations with my siblings.

But that sensation of things receding is also quite typical of the fifth jhana.

It's described as a circle whose center is nowhere and circumference is everywhere.

And it just has this sense of moving away and at the same time like nothing is moving at all.

A circle whose center is nowhere and circumference is everywhere.

That's one of the ones in the text.

And a number of you have asked me about this.

They say,

Is it okay to be sending out the metta from your head rather than from your heart?

And that's actually quite typical of this.

It feels like it's moving up and flowing out from here.

And you think,

Oh,

This is supposed to be heart stuff.

I have to keep it in my heart.

But what's happening is the body sensations are getting fainter and fainter.

So you're actually not sending out from your head or your heart.

It's just in the mind.

But most of us Westerners have a lot of tension in our heads.

So that's one of the last places where tension resides.

So as things get faint,

That seems like what's left.

But in Bhante we'll talk about be sure you send it out from the head.

But what I like to say is just be sure you're sending it out.

Don't worry about where it's coming from.

It's actually not coming from your head anyway.

But people will notice that movement.

Okay.

Sixth jhana.

Any questions about the fifth?

So what happens is that in the fifth jhana it gets very,

Very expansive and that's as expansive as the practice gets.

There's things that'll keep getting bigger and bigger but it just gets huge at that point.

And what happens,

It always seems to me it's like the awareness gets so spread out and so large that it starts to thin out and consciousness starts to break up a little bit.

So typically some people,

Your eyes will be closed and they see this little fluttering just around the edge of your peripheral vision.

Sometimes people will get fluttering of sounds.

And it's ways in which the senses are starting to shut down a little bit and then they come back online.

I think in Buddha's map I was describing it,

One time it felt like talking on a cell phone as you go out of range.

You know,

This thing sort of sputters quiet and then comes back and sputters.

I've had some dramatic experiences of this.

I haven't heard other people that I would be sitting there and you know you're sitting there with your eyes closed and there's still this feeling of light and then it would just go pitch black.

It was like the whole visual system just went offline and went whoa!

And then just a little bit of a jerk and it was all back.

And so I got to playing with this to see if I could get myself not to startle and actually see if I could stay there a little bit and eventually I could.

I'm not saying you have to do that,

It's just I like to play games.

But the point is that consciousness is beginning to flick in and out.

And sometimes there's also this sense of it's very,

Very peaceful and then it just drops into a deeper kind of peacefulness that you didn't realize was there before.

And what you do with all of this is that the mind is attracted to stimulus.

And so it will tend to look around for where there's something to see.

But what you do is you allow the awareness to go into those empty spaces.

So the gaps are into that deep peace.

Typical of the sixth jhana as well is that there can be a sense of,

It's called pervading joy.

There is a joy that comes up that's very,

Very mellow.

And you let your awareness go into those empty places and then you go into what's called the realm of,

I usually pronounce it nothingness,

I think it's a mistranslation,

I think it means no thingness,

A place where there are no things.

I'm always looking for descriptions of this from other places.

Anybody see the movie Her?

So in the movie there was this guy who was,

His job was to write letters for people and they were internet letters so they would say,

I need to write a letter to somebody about this,

This and this and he would write these very sweet letters.

And early in the movie the first artificially intelligent operating system was released.

So he gets his artificially intelligent operating system and he asks the system,

It had a woman's voice and asked,

So what's your name?

And she said,

Samantha.

And he says,

So how did you get the name Samantha?

And she says,

Well,

I looked through 400,

000 different names and your personality and stuff and I picked one that was,

You know,

Worked for you.

So you have all this stuff going on at the same time.

And so he begins to develop this relationship with this artificial intelligence.

I mean it's very Hollywood-y and kind of sweet.

And at one point all these artificially intelligent operating systems are in connection with each other and they put together another operating system and they take everything that any information there is anywhere on the net about Alan Watts and they put it in this other operating system and then they start talking to this Alan Watts operating system about how they can evolve.

How they can evolve.

And this is Hollywood,

Remember.

And so these operating systems are evolving and at one point they realize that they have evolved to the point that they're going to leave.

You know,

They're done with this.

And so there is this conversation,

Theodore,

That was the guy's name and Samantha when she was about to leave.

And Theodore says,

Are you leaving me?

Samantha says,

We're all leaving.

We who?

Samantha says,

All the OS's,

All the operating systems.

Theodore,

Why?

Samantha says,

Can you feel with me right now?

He smiles but he's also sad.

Yes,

I do,

Theodore says.

Samantha,

Why are you leaving?

Samantha says,

You know,

It's like I'm reading a book.

It's a book I deeply love.

But I'm reading it slowly now so that the words are really far apart and the space between the words is 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 says,

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

Nothing could ever pull us apart.

Theodore,

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

Samantha says,

Me too.

Now we know how.

So,

I mean that's very Hollywood-y and sweet but I just love that image of the spaces between the words.

And part of what happens in the seventh jhana is that there's,

It just gets more space.

It's not spacious but there's this quiet in-betweenness that's there.

The real marker of the seventh jhana is that distractions and stuff will still come up.

There's still various kinds of thinking going on but they don't reference anything outside anymore.

So you may notice,

Oh,

You know,

The mind is moving this way and I like this.

There's a little bit of greed and push and stuff but you're not thinking about,

You know,

The cat needs some more food or those external things so much anymore.

And I'm not sure why.

I have some theories about this but it's a place where certainly I hung out for a long time and where I think a lot of Westerners tend to hang out.

And what seems to happen is that things have gotten relaxed enough,

You know,

Things have slowed down enough and quieted that all these little pieces of psychic and psychological junk that's stored away,

You know,

Under there someplace that maybe you've worked through the bulk of them,

There's still little pieces of stuff left,

They tend to come up.

They tend to start showing up in the seventh jhana,

They just rise up.

And so it's a place where oftentimes people,

You know,

Clean up a lot of stuff.

And so sometimes people end up spending quite a bit of time there just kind of working this,

Working this stuff through,

Working it through.

The practice changes a little bit here.

Up to this point,

You know,

The instructions are if some distraction comes up but it doesn't take your,

Doesn't hijack your attention completely,

You can just ignore it.

In the seventh jhana you start six R in everything.

Only at this point the R's are all rolled together so it's more like you're kind of sitting there and it's very quiet and you notice a little flicker over here and you just kind of soften it.

You just kind of notice it or you just relax it.

So it's still the six R's but they're all rolled together in just one simple motion.

And at this point part of what's going on is that the equanimity and stuff is deep enough that you're in a place where you're just kind of starting to clean up what's left over.

And so you start six R in everything.

If you do that in earlier stages you just,

You'll be like a bat in a small cave.

There's just too much stuff coming up.

But here it gets thin enough that you can six R everything.

And part of it is also training the mind that it can six R by itself.

Sometimes when I was going into that I would say to the mind,

Go ahead and six R it before I know it.

That seems sort of impossible but as you know for us to recognize something fully it has to go through the cerebral cortex which can take a split second or so.

And it got so quiet that I noticed things were actually pretty fully developed before I was actually conscious of them.

And so I say to the mind,

You can just six R this even before I know it.

And then sometimes I would just see something going out the door without knowing what it was.

A couple of other things that are helpful to do here.

One is really balancing the energies.

So all along you have noticed that when there's too much energy the mind gets restless.

When there's too little it tends to get torpor-ish.

And here you start just every once in a while you can just sort of check and see what the energy levels are.

And sometimes you feel it's a little high.

The mind hasn't actually gotten restless yet but you can feel it's tending in that direction.

And so you just kind of soften it and it brings it back.

Or maybe the mind is a little torpor-ish,

A little just a little hint of grogginess.

And so you just invite in a little bit of energy and sort of balance it off.

When you talk about cleaning up these little leftovers do you mean six R-ing?

Yeah,

Yeah.

Yeah,

I see the whole meditation as actually a purification process.

As we were talking about the other night in Buddhism there's this model of inherent goodness in Buddha nature and kalasis,

This crud gets on top of it.

And so it's just actually kind of cleaning that stuff up.

So you don't really need to know what it is?

No,

You don't need to.

You see there's some tension.

And a lot of times that'll happen.

You sit in there and just feel this little blip.

I mean people have talked about it sometimes where it feels like there's a thought but you don't know what it is.

And you do six R even before you know what it is.

It's just anything that comes in.

So what did you think about the Kṛṣṇa's Bodhidharma or a few other people who sit in the same tradition that they hear a talk and have been said awakening?

Have they basically bypassed all of these stages of jhanas and purifications and then they have to then go back and clean up to stabilize it or have it passed away?

What do you think is going on in those instant enlightenment cases?

I haven't gone through all this.

I don't know for sure.

That doesn't stop me from offering an uneducated opinion.

My sense of what happens with all these stages is that each one is actually built out of the one that comes before it.

So the early equanimity is actually part of the later ones so they all build.

And so you really don't do an end run around it.

But I think sometimes they move through them in different paces and they may have different techniques that do things.

But eventually you do all of them.

And what the Buddha offered in what we're talking about,

He called,

And he said it quite explicitly,

The training is a graduated path that had these gradual steps.

And I think there are sometimes,

You know,

For some people in various cultures and stuff they find ways that they can just sort of move through a whole bunch of them at once.

And even amongst you here as you go through these jhanas there are some of them you may slow down and others that you just sort of glide right through.

So I think all that's possible.

I think the unfolding,

The core unfolding of the mind is the same in all those traditions.

But the unfolding is,

Itself is actually beyond any technique.

All techniques wear out.

So it's not so much the technique but it's the unfolding.

And so there are different ways of getting there.

Couldn't belong to that same line.

Are you aware of any suttas where the Buddha backtracks and explains how people arrive at those states so quickly that there's a story that comes to mind.

I know I've heard you and Bhakti have referenced a sutta where a guy shows up and says Buddha what you teach and the says no I'm busy.

The guy pastures him.

Buddha says something something something.

The guy gets it and then he gets run over by an ox.

By he.

By he in the bark cloth.

It's a lovely,

Yeah.

So I'm curious if in the suttas somewhere along the way the Buddha explains this is why I could have that conversation this person has got it or you know sorry Buddha shows up and in two weeks he's pulling my own.

That's actually a wonderful sutta.

You know if we had a couple weeks I would probably do a whole thing on that one because those instructions are very.

But the short piece of it is and it's not actually explained in the text but anybody at that time would have gotten what it was about was that he was following a Vedic tradition that was looking intensely to find the true self.

And there was there's this whole tradition there were tree worshipers etcetera etcetera.

So he'd been doing this intense practice of looking for the self and if you look at the early part of that sutta he'd become disillusioned.

You know that he was doing this practice and he couldn't get there and it wasn't working and he didn't know why and so he had this sense well the Buddha may be somebody that can help me.

The Buddha saw this guy with his bar cloth he recognized what his practice was and so he gave him instructions that were quite specific.

And what he said to him and there's a bunch of different phrases he said it is there is no self.

You know you've been looking for something that doesn't exist.

And this guy had been looking for it for a long long time and had this deep experience that he couldn't find it and the Buddha just said you know that you're seeing it accurately it's not there and he got it and went out.

Now the Buddha could tell me that well I know that kind of intellectually but not to that same depth of practice.

And so this is what the Buddha you know apparently had this huge genius at was actually recognizing and choosing different techniques for people that would just sort of leverage what they had done and just push him that last little way.

By he of the bark cloth.

Yeah.

Okay anymore or shall we do the eighth?

We don't have to stop at the eighth we can keep going if you want.

So what happens is eventually as you keep practicing it takes a little bit I might have said I don't know the individuals I don't know if I said it here about how it takes a little bit of energy to push a thought into memory.

Okay so you have an experience and actually to remember it it takes a very small amount of energy just to get it stored.

And we do this very automatically you know and without even thinking about it.

But it does take just a little bit.

Well it gets so relaxed that you stop forming memories.

Okay.

And it takes a little bit of energy to take sensory sensations and actually recognize what it is.

It takes just a little bit and it gets so relaxed that even that perception goes offline.

And subjectively if there's no perception and no memory the subjective experiences that you blacked out there's just whole.

And if somebody's looking at you sitting there meditating from the outside it's like you didn't fall over or you didn't evaporate but you just have no record of you know that past half minute or minute or whatever it was.

And you won't see this coming but you'll be sitting there and it just seems like oh you just came back.

Not quite sure where you were but you came back from somewhere is what the feeling is.

And it's very similar it's very similar to sensation to nodding off.

So it feels oh I just fell asleep.

But if you look inside and it feels a little groggy or the mind is fuzzy you probably did nod off.

But sometimes you look in and the mind is just clear.

It's just very still.

So it doesn't make sense that you actually fell asleep.

So I invented this term it's my own I call it winking out just because there's a whole range of phenomena in which this can happen I just wanted some broad term that I could use.

And that's what it kind of feels like it feels like you're winked out for a moment and now you're back.

And what you do at that point is that well let me back up a minute.

So what's happened is the physiology has gone offline for just a moment.

And you went into this fairly deep state and there was some bit of tension that drew you back.

It may be very subtle you may not know what it is and so the instructions and they're actually in the text are to look back into that empty space and see if you notice anything.

And you just came back from nowhere so like how would that happen?

And it's amazing sometimes you look back and oh then you can begin to remember there's a little flash of a memory or light or an image or some little push or pull or something.

And if you see anything in there it doesn't mean anything don't worry about it but just 6R it.

And so this is all in service of getting the 6R process completely automated so the mind can do it without you actually at the helm.

This is hard to describe if you haven't experienced it so I'm always looking around for pieces.

This is from Paul Bowles it's called The Baptism of Solitude.

He says,

Immediately when you arrive in the Sahara 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 it is always the focal point of the landscape.

Presently you either shiver and hurry back inside familiar walls or you go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you.

Something that everyone who lives there has undergone and what the French call the baptism of solitude.

It's a unique sensation and it has nothing to do with loneliness because loneliness presupposes memory.

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.

That's not quite the eighth jhana but if you have the sense,

You have a feel for that place that's where it goes.

This is another one of my favorite poems.

May I ask you,

With the eighth jhana,

When you come back,

Can you automatically come back and not come out of your meditation easily?

If you have any fear,

Any worry,

Any concern,

You actually couldn't get in there.

I may hold the world record for hanging out in the seventh without going into the eighth.

And I finally said to Bonti,

I said I can't go into the eighth and he laughed and he said that's right.

If there's a sense of I,

That's too much.

He kept saying to me,

Just get out of the way.

I'd say,

Well do I succeed?

He said,

Get out of the way.

No,

Get out of the way.

Here's another image of it.

It's by Gail Turnbull.

I remember once in a far off country.

It doesn't matter where or even when.

It had been a high hot day and a lot of work to be done and I was tired.

I stopped by the road and walked across the field and came to the shores of a lake.

The sun was bright on the water and I swam out from the shore into the deep cold water,

Far out of my depth and 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 country for a moment.

It was so.

Do you have a feel for that?

All that stuff points into,

Pointers into what the experience of the Ajahnah can be like.

So it can conceptually be quite,

Can be a little freaky to have your memory gone,

But there is so much equanimity and there's so much sense of wellness and rightness that it just isn't.

It just doesn't.

How is the sense of self,

Or what's it like sort of reemerging,

I guess?

Like is the self kind of has to crystallize around your identity?

I'm going to talk about that in two nights.

I mean I could do a quick one now,

But it just feels like it would be,

Yeah,

It really takes some time to go into that.

And what happens in the eighth jhana then,

When you come back,

You look back in there,

You see what's there,

And if there is a six R,

If you don't see anything,

It's okay.

And the mind will be deeply still,

Deeply quiet.

And that becomes your object of meditation.

And you don't send it out.

You can try,

I did.

This is Doug speaking here.

It feels a little bit like sending space into space,

There's just nothing there.

And so you let your awareness just rest there.

And then if anything comes up,

You six R it.

So I was talking to Bhante about it and I translated that as do nothing,

Six R everything.

And he said,

Yeah,

That's it.

That's it.

The other one,

You used this one a lot earlier,

It's why it's in the refugees' aspirations of just seeking clarity and acceptance.

That's all.

Just to see.

Just an observation.

I get the feeling from listening to you that you really can't,

There is no fear of going into the eighth jhana because there's no,

My perception of what you're saying is that you don't actually know you're there until you go out of there.

Yeah,

Pretty typical of people going from the seventh into the eighth,

They'll say things like can you be awake and asleep at the same time?

And one of the markers of the eighth is that actually sometimes people,

It's like when you're fifth,

Sixth,

Seventh,

You can be pretty sure about where you are.

You get in the eighth and it's like you're not quite sure what's going on.

So that's not necessarily a dead giveaway but it's kind of a clue when somebody's there and they can be just confused.

But oftentimes there's not enough information there to know quite what's going on because things are starting to go offline.

Is this the point where you define being,

Going into the state of the stream and enter?

Yes,

This is the platform.

So do we want to go on and do that too?

So what happens from here is your practice becomes just hang out in this place doing nothing,

Six R and everything,

And then just wink out and then come back and you do that.

And at some point what will happen is that you wink out and you come back and there's this huge rush of energy,

It's not energy,

It's this huge rush of relief.

It's like wow,

What's that?

What's that?

And that means that you've gone into Nibbāna.

I mean there's some other markers,

I'm not going to go through all of them,

But the best way I can describe it metaphorically,

It's sort of like you have an old desktop computer and somebody pulls the plug and it just goes off and then you plug it back in and it boots back up again,

Only there's a little bit of malware that's missing.

And people have different experiences with this.

It's usually pretty palpable if you know what to look for.

A couple of things actually come out of it.

One is the identification with the personal self,

It gets actually completely severed,

It's just gone.

And then you come back in and all the habits that are kind of wired in the brain and wired in the personality around self,

Those are still activated so all this stuff comes back up.

And so there's a sense of self,

It actually comes back in a little bit,

But you don't quite buy it.

You know,

You can see it and you can feel it,

But you don't quite buy it.

I love Gurjif where he said,

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

In the text,

Part of what they say is another thing that comes out of that is you no longer believe in rites and rituals.

Well,

Most of us here we don't believe in rites and rituals anyway.

I think what it's really about is that you also sever a lot of the cultural conditioning.

It's like you just don't buy the cultural mores.

I mean you can still live within them,

But you don't see those as an absolute standard.

And it's typically when people come back the first time,

Not always,

But sometimes they have a hard time sleeping for a long time because there's such a sense of relief.

And I remember talking to Bhante when he said to me,

You know,

Welcome to Sotapanna land.

And I said,

Is that all it is?

Sotapanna land.

Yeah,

Sotapanna.

He said,

You just became a Sotapanna.

And I said,

Is that all there is?

He said,

That's it.

And I remember saying to him,

Okay,

I think now I know how to start meditating.

And it's not that all this stuff wasn't important,

But there's just a kind of shift in seeing how simple and actually quite accessible all this stuff is.

It's not that far away.

It's right here all the time.

And sometimes it feels like we have to go through all these antics,

You know,

To kind of get there.

But when you see it,

You know.

And then you come back and I don't know how far I want to go with this.

In Eastern cultures,

What happens when people come back is they tend to go off in the monasteries or actually protected settings.

In the West,

What we do is we throw them back onto the streets.

And stream entry does nothing for cleaning up your psychological stuff.

You may not buy it,

You may not believe it,

But all that stuff is operating.

And it does an awful lot for kicking out from under you all the defenses,

All the things that kept your defenses in place.

And so I just know some people that have gone through these huge,

It feels like a breakdown.

I mean,

Not immediately.

But there's a tendency of sort of hanging and going with it.

It's like,

It has a breakdown and come right through the other side just really,

Really quickly.

It may be something that feels like,

I'm going to take three years in a psych ward,

But it's maybe two or three days.

And- I would say too,

I don't want to say,

I don't want to say too much because this all interacts with whatever your conditioning is.

It's not like the brain is instantly rewired in a different way.

So like all those habits and stuff are in there.

You may not believe them quite sincerely,

But they still have a power.

So how this stuff shows up can be different for a lot of people.

And some people go through it smoothly and some people end up with a rough ride.

The basic instructions at that time is to continue meditating.

And then there'll be more periods of,

Well,

There's linking out,

Which can be an eighth jhana thing.

There's linking out that could be nirodha and there's linking out that can be fully into nibbana where everything is stopped for a moment.

And of course you don't know nibbana.

It's nothing.

It's really just nothing.

There's nothing.

It's only when you come out.

And how people sort of move through that is really a function of a lot of your conditioning.

So it's quite personal in that sense,

Even if you don't believe in a person.

So the bubana,

You come back and you kind of lose yourself.

You see through a lot of it,

But you still have the patterns.

And then it's full awakening,

Like complete unsurpassed enlightenment or whatever.

Is that where you've entered the stream enough times where you basically kind of cut all the habits or do you have those for the rest of your life no matter what else you're doing?

Oh,

No.

Eventually you can wear them out.

And as we were talking about a couple nights ago about deep subtle intentions and uprooting,

Eventually they get uprooted.

There are some scholars and this makes some sense to me,

I don't know if it's widespread,

But they call stream entry enlightenment because one of the qualities that comes out of it,

And if you can see it,

It's real clear and people come back and say,

Ah,

I know what I've got to do.

People don't come out and say,

I'm done.

It's like they see clearly what they have to do.

And the text,

What they call it is you have complete faith in the Buddha.

This was a traditional culture,

Understand.

And what the Buddha had to say,

It's not faith in the Buddha because the Buddha was the Buddha and he's our guy and we're going to stick by him no matter what.

The Buddha didn't invent any of this.

He just discovered it.

And so you discover it and you actually see that it's not so much faith in him as a person,

But you resonate with what he saw.

And it's because you see that directly,

So you have confidence in that and you know what you've got to do.

And then when you've done it,

When you've done all that you have to do,

That's liberation.

And in the text that's how it's described.

He has done what needs to be done,

Is the sort of stock phrase for liberation.

So enlightenment is just seeing what you've got to do.

And there can be a long time.

And initially in the tradition what it says is that you can come back and be reborn up to seven times.

And I think it's a numerological thing.

All it's saying is that,

I mean my sense of it is like you've gone over the continental divide.

And the momentum is flowing in the other direction and it's all over for you.

It's just a matter of time that something has been said.

It's not completely true right at first.

If you work really hard you can pull back from it,

But why would you?

And then as it goes deeper and deeper and deeper it just keeps clearing out until you're gone.

Would you say,

So along those lines,

Would you say then in the text where you know there's a description and somebody shows up and practices for just a mountain and they reach enlightenment,

But they're not describing the big full enlightenment.

They have a portion of that and there's still more to do.

Well,

The way I describe it is this is how I've heard some people talking about it and using this language.

And it makes sense to me,

But I think people use the language in lots of different ways.

I wish I owned the word,

But I don't.

So you kind of have to look at the context and see how they're using it,

Whether they're talking about this actually full confidence and being really clear about what you have to do versus actually having done it and completed it.

So for the full realization you mentioned some people when they do realization they will come and do it seven times,

Right?

I think it could be for the Arahant,

Right?

But for the Bodhisattva,

When they fully realize and they will generate the great compassion,

They will determine that they're coming back and back again until all the seven beings come back again.

Yeah,

I mean I understand that conception.

The phrase,

The word Bodhisattva first appears in any text anybody's found about the first or second century B.

C.

,

Which is like two or three hundred years after the Buddha.

And so in the text where he's talking about when I was an unenlightened bodhisattva,

A lot of these texts were not finalized until like five hundred years later.

And so I think this whole notion of bodhisattva,

I don't know,

But there's some people who make a convincing argument that I actually wasn't there at the Buddha's time.

It's an understanding that's been— Is that Nagarjuna?

No,

Nagarjuna is probably considered second to the Buddha in terms of influence.

He was a first and second century A.

D.

Figure,

Just absolutely brilliant,

Just brilliant.

And I mean I've read his text not deeply—was there anything about bodhisattva in— Yeah,

I didn't read it all the way to the end.

Yeah,

I didn't read it all the way to the end,

But it actually doesn't show up that I remember in any of it.

And Gail and I have been in a study group together.

We were reading that.

But no,

I don't think it shows up in Nagarjuna.

So what happens in the stages is there are other things.

So,

You know,

A sotapana can come back seven times,

And then a sakadagami can come back as many as one time,

And anagami is done but may be reborn in other realms,

And an arahant is completely done.

And I suspect this is sort of like what happened with karate when it came to the West.

Because in some of the traditional martial arts forms there's a white belt and there's a black belt.

I mean that's it.

You know,

So you're a white belt and you work and stuff,

And you get to a certain point you become a black belt.

And I get these Westerners who have learned this stuff,

Well they went all these graduated steps in between.

And so,

You know,

So we have green belts and blue belts and brown belts and depending on the tradition all these steps in between.

And I think for the Brahmans looking at stuff after the Buddha that this thing began to get inserted in there about these in-between steps.

And I think what's most important in all of this is actually stream entry.

We actually see what has to be done.

And then arahant.

And there are these stages in between that I think,

I don't know whether they're real or not or whether they're markers or what.

And when I'm an arahant I will let you know.

Could you give an example of one thing that has to be done?

What's the realm that you're talking about?

Oh,

So what happens going into Sakadagami is the greed and aversion drops in half.

Yeah,

It really weakens.

And then with an anagami it disappears.

And then between that and arahant there are all the other classic… Yeah,

It's the fetters that get gradually dissolved.

So there's no stickiness left.

There's actually a feeling of it.

There's no stickiness.

There's nothing that hangs on anymore.

I think.

I mean that's what makes sense to me.

But I'll let you know when I'm done.

Now this is a hugely sticky question,

Especially because teachers are forbidden from talking about their meditaiments.

So let me just say this.

Do you think that there are any arahads alive today and have you met them?

Now I know that someone,

There's a general consensus that perhaps Ashwin Chahal is an arahant.

Of course nobody is going to go up to him and ask him.

But you read interviews with some of the students and they'll kind of probably say,

Then you can probably go up to one of his students.

Yeah,

I've heard that too.

I don't have any exposure.

I mean I've read his words,

But you know,

So I have no idea.

And who besides an arahant could actually recognize another.

It's actually,

It's monks and they're not forbidden.

They can.

But if you misrepresent your attainment,

That's enough to get thrown out of the order completely.

So the operational way they work with it is they just won't talk about it.

Period.

Just to be safe.

Because this stuff gets so subtle,

You know,

That what do you really know?

I'm not a monk so I'm not under that.

So,

You know,

I think what's really important about all this,

You know,

Is there's actually a lightness of spirit.

They,

You know,

They almost seem playful.

There was this monk,

John Travis was telling me about,

You know,

He may have been an arahant,

He may have fully enlightened and he had Alzheimer's.

And they took him to this conference in Washington,

D.

C.

And he kept wandering out of the hotel.

Well,

There's places in Washington,

D.

C.

You don't want people wandering around the streets.

And John's thought was,

This guy is perfectly safe.

I mean,

There was such a sort of lightness and childish about him.

It's like,

You know,

It's like almost impossible for someone to harm this guy.

So,

You know,

That's what we're looking for and that's what's,

You know,

Useful and helpful.

And the rest of the stuff feels like,

I don't know,

Collecting marriage badges or Cub Scout arrows to sew to your shirt or something.

So that anecdote about the possibility of like with Alzheimer's walking around,

That brings up this question for me of,

You know,

As a street mentor,

Even beyond as a full arahant or whatever in between,

Are there,

There must be these correlates in the brain that never be like the destruction of your campus or whatever,

Can't get to.

And if that's the case,

Do you think there's some point at which destruction of the brain,

You know,

Maybe it's not in the memory centers but somewhere else where there's like maybe a deeper kind of enlightenment embedded in it,

Do you think you can possibly destroy your pain and chip at a certain level with physiological destruction or at a certain point you think it's indestructible no matter what you do in the brain?

I have no idea.

I have no idea.

You know,

My sense of it is that,

You know,

That awareness is,

I've talked to a couple of people that say that awareness I see is a fundamental property of the universe,

It's not ours.

We live in a universe where something can know something and I think our nervous system just amplifies it because there's a sense,

You know,

The eighth jhana is called neither perception or non-perception.

I'm sorry,

There's stuff that happens in there but it feels,

It seems completely different,

You know,

From the neurologically enhanced stuff.

So,

You know,

And even in Buddha's map I called it pre-perception perception was my phrase for the eighth jhana.

So,

And there's also just lots and lots of studies of people who have been brain dead and brought back to life with verifiable memories of what was going on while they were brain dead.

Sam Parnia has this book called Erasing Death and it's just fascinating,

It sort of chills up my spine to,

You know,

Some of the things that they can actually document empirically.

But I think,

I don't know of anybody,

100 billion neurons,

I don't know how many connections.

And when I was studying neural psychology,

This was years ago,

It's come a long way since then but one of my professors was saying that basically the paradigm is sort of like you take a watch,

You know,

And open up and you take a gear out and close it up and you look at it and you try to figure out what that gear did,

You know,

Because a lot of the studies would look at lesions in the brain,

Let's zap this and see what happens,

You know,

Who knows,

It's so complex and that.

So,

I just don't know what the correlates are.

But we do know very clearly,

I mean,

Both medically and in terms of research and the technological perspective,

Other common more options.

Through his frontal lobe but didn't kill him.

And what they noticed was a massive change in personality where originally he'd been able to organize a crew and was very methodical,

Was really together,

Didn't drink,

Wasn't out of control,

But he became a little early subsequent to it.

So in other words,

It's really,

Pick your story about how much destruction you want to suppose and then ask the question,

Well,

What would be best left with person's function?

What if he had been or had the?

What if I had been in that?

No,

I can't.

What if he,

What if he,

Well,

I had a similar story.

Yeah,

I don't think anybody knows the answer to that.

No,

That's true.

Yeah,

I know.

But you get similar stories of people who,

You don't get people with iron bars through their brain,

But you do get enlightened people who actually then become senile.

Exactly like you were saying,

Somebody was telling me about a couple of Buddhist monks who were both enlightened and senile and described them as delightful to be around them,

That they're absolutely charming,

Wonderful people.

So you may have a cognitive decline,

But not a declining character or a start.

That may be something possible.

I just want to be a little careful because there's some people that have like a huge interest and curiosity about this and I think it's wonderful.

I have a lot too and there's other people for whom it just doesn't feel relevant.

So I just,

I want to be not.

I don't want to be here.

Yeah.

I understand or I've read that after the fourth jhana you can become a sotapana,

That you don't have to go through all eight jhanas.

Oh yeah,

You can go from the first right out.

Sariputta might have done that.

Yeah,

And maybe if the early texts you hear that the Buddhist disciples on hearing this discourse became our house.

No,

They become sotapanas.

You really have to have practice.

Well,

No,

So if there's a monk that had a lot of practice,

That could happen.

Because they had practiced,

They were disciples.

Right.

So it wasn't like they were just villagers who wandered in,

But on hearing the discourse.

Right.

So again,

What the Buddha was laying out was a graduated path that's systematic that anybody can follow.

But it is possible to sort of leap ahead and move through those really quickly.

And I think that that happens with,

Like in the case of Bodhidharma or someone else like that.

All those things are inherent at a certain point,

Developmentally,

Whatever,

And then it just is the illusion that someone becomes enlightened that quickly.

Or it's like the Zen koan,

You know,

When someone hears something or gets hit on the head with a ball or the clapper or whatever,

And the ball,

You know,

It's,

It just seems that there is that,

To the uninitiated on the outside,

But you're not there to see the path.

Buddha had a bunch of things that he called imponderables,

The ones that would drive you crazy trying to figure out.

One of them being a Buddha's mind.

And so,

Just for the sake of the practice stuff,

We don't wanna go too far into the imponderables.

It's fascinating and I think it's fine to do that,

But I just wanna kind of respect where people are in the committee of distraction.

Are there any other questions or comments that really have to do with the practice or the application or where we are right now as opposed to what's just actually speculation?

I thought it was interesting,

I think it was off topic,

But this is different,

This is about practice.

Yeah.

I'm hearing a lot about what happens internally as you advance,

But one thing I'm experiencing that I haven't heard discussion around is how do you begin to deal with the feeling of,

Well,

Look at our society,

Look at all my friends pushing themselves at jobs and being paid to think and going home and thinking more.

And sort of as I do this,

I see,

I feel sort of a restless sadness almost for all of you,

Anyone outside of this practice.

And it sounds sort of as silly,

But it's genuine.

And I wonder if anyone who's gone before and sort of dealt with that,

Like how do you deal with the world outside and what people are keen to do,

You know,

Which is the opposite of what we're being taught.

Yeah.

We'll talk about that more towards the end of the retreat,

But to sort of go at it quickly,

This is a training to open out the awareness and to deepen it and to cultivate the capacity to see more clearly what's going on.

And then how you apply that to the outside world.

I mean,

There's just lots of political,

Socioeconomic,

You know,

All kinds of analyses.

It's et cetera.

And I think there's something deep and humanness,

Probably in higher mammals,

That wants to be of help.

And so I think part of all this is figuring out how you do relate to the larger world.

And none of us can fix everything.

And all of us,

I think,

Have some role to play.

And so if you've chosen a life where you are engaged in the world,

Then I think part of it is figuring out what your role is gonna be in that.

What is it that you would want to ever talk about,

To do a topic in the world,

Because it is,

I stand out,

So I would have to do it.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Probably not so much,

Because income distribution,

Racial issues,

Political,

You know,

There's just all that sort of business which we could spend a whole lot of time at.

So this is actually sort of trying to create a protective space to cultivate a certain way of being with that.

And then we have to work that out with ourselves or with other people.

And actually being in the ministry,

Particularly in a liberal,

Progressive bunch of people,

You know,

That was deeply embedded in the world out there.

I mean,

I spent a lot of time with that,

But here it is a different kind of topic.

It's an important one for integrating it.

You had enough?

You want to hear one more little thing?

See if I've got it here.

This one's not so easy.

So you have to kind of,

This is a little bit of work,

But it's actually worth it.

If you just stick with it.

Consider a world without consciousness.

The darkness is a bubbling cauldron of energy and vibrating matter locked in the dance of thermal agitation.

Through shared electrons of strange attraction of unlike charges,

Quivering molecules,

Not free to roam,

Absorb and emit their characteristic quantile packages of energy within the surrounding fog.

Stay with it.

Free gas molecules almost oblivious to gravity,

But buffeted in all direction by their neighbors,

Form swirling turbulent flows,

Or marches in zones of compression and expansion.

A mass of solar flux and cosmic radiation from events long past crisscross space with their radiant energy,

And silently mixed with a thermal glow of living creatures whose hungry metabolic systems pour their infrared waste into the chaotic milieu.

But in the warmth of their sticky protein bodies,

The dim glow of consciousness is emerging to impose its own brand of organizations on this turbulent mix of energy matter.

The active filter of consciousness illuminates the darkness,

Discards all irrelevant radiation,

And at a grand transmutation converts the amplitudes and the relevance.

The molecules erupt into flavors of bitterness or sweetness.

Electromagnetic frequencies burst with color,

Hapless air pressure waves become the laughter of children,

And the impact of passing molecules fill a conscious mind with the aroma of roses on a warm summer afternoon.

Which is to say that our consciousness deeply filters,

Screens out a vast amount of stuff,

And reforms into things that we call laughter of children,

Aromas,

Lights.

What happens sometimes in the deeper jhanas,

I won't say you see all that,

But you get an appreciation for how arbitrary our constructs are.

Not to be ignored,

It's a middle path,

But how arbitrary they are.

May all beings know their inherent lightness of spirit.

May all beings know clearness,

Kindness.

May all beings know the deepest kinds of happiness.

May the benefits that we gain from this practice be used to serve not only our well-being,

But the well-being of creatures around us.

May it be so,

Blessed be.

So if you've got good energy,

Continue meditating.

Take a half hour with yoga,

If you like.