Meditation 103 | Advanced : Samadhi & Siddhis (3/3)

This lecture covers the Samadhi & Siddhis - demystifying these advanced and exotic topics. Learn how sustained meditation leads to the trance/absorbtion states and how they're often accompanied by the arising of siddhi's ("psychic powers" or attainments). Part of a "101" series which provides a sweeping and comprehensive overview of meditative development from foundational concepts, the relationship of meditation and healing as well as the samadhi states and siddhis.

Transcript

Hi,

I'm Keith with Field Dynamics,

And this is part three of the path of meditation.

This is advanced practices,

Siddhis and samadhis,

The culmination of meditation.

So some people are really interested in the kind of more esoteric,

The more kind of mysterious states that lie at what you could say is the end of the path or the culmination of the path as I believe is a normal translation of some of the definitions of samadhi from the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.

So the culmination of the path and why would they be called that?

So imagine just sitting.

Let's just say you take yourself or anybody and you say,

What happens if a person were to just go out to the woods or go to a supportive environment where they could just basically sit,

Meditate,

Not add any tasks,

Anything to do.

They can just sit.

What happens after days and weeks or even months of doing that?

What happens to the mind?

What is the state of the mind?

So this has been done a lot.

There are a lot of places and traditions that do long-term meditation retreats in general,

And there is a huge amount of documentation around kind of rarefied states of consciousness,

And these have been called the samadhi states.

Now they're called the jhanas in Buddhism,

And what they are,

Are they're actually the essential levels of the mind.

They are the rudimentary aspects of the mind.

So what happens to that person when sitting,

After a while,

All of the inertia in the mind,

All of the kind of,

All of the like,

The experience that has been accrued that keeps generating thoughts,

You know,

What am I going to eat later?

And what about that experience I had with that person?

And oh,

This pain exists in the body here,

Or just all of these ways in which the mind is constantly kind of bringing forth thoughts with automaticity,

That inertia,

That inertia slows down.

When you stop feeding the mind,

When you stop feeding new experience,

Naturally there's going to be a settling.

And what begins to arise,

What begins to arise is these states.

One enters into these states of tranquility,

Of absorption,

Or of trance.

And there are,

Often there are eight or even nine samadhi states or jhanas that are described.

Again,

There's so much scholarly discussion around this stuff.

There's a bunch of books from contemporary authors,

And then there are traditional texts that go back thousands of years on describing these samadhis.

So my viewpoints and opinions around this is firstly anchored in personal experience,

And also from looking around at how different traditions document these things.

So consider this to be an opinion piece on samadhi and sittis,

Born of primarily experience.

So what happens is,

Is one starts to enter into these rarefied states.

And these states,

As I said,

Are the fundamental aspects of mind.

So don't think,

There's a way of misperceiving these as that they are achievements,

Meaning they are you're gaining something that you previously didn't have,

Or you're attaining something you previously didn't have,

But that's not the case.

What they are,

Are they are the foundations that all thought and all forms of mentation are actually built upon.

So if the mind were a building,

These are the floors,

The foundational floors,

And the normal waking state of consciousness that we're generally experiencing,

Where we notice a thought arising,

Or we're generating thought,

We're thinking actively,

Consciously,

That's actually happening on those higher floors,

And all of this substrata is actually already in place.

So developing samadhi and moving into these absorption states are actually about uncovering or discovering what is already there,

What your mind is already made of.

And what happens initially is generally that these are quite,

These are quite profound experiences that the translation is normally samatha practice,

Which is that single pointed practice is often translated as tranquility,

And it is traditionally the case that people would practice this tranquility practice,

This samatha practice,

And do single point meditation and move through these stages in sequence,

Or they come up in sequence normally for people,

But sometimes people dart around these different numbers,

These seven,

Eight,

Or nine samadhi states.

But basically it is single point meditation that's usually used to achieve these,

And the reason that they're used is because they bring about incredible amounts of purification,

And they set the stage for people being able to gain insight about the nature of themselves,

Right?

So that's kind of the strategy that was developed that is most traditional and seems to continue to work today.

But certainly this is the way in which I went about doing meditation practice.

So you develop these concentration states,

The concentration states enables the mind to be very,

Very sharp,

Very,

Very clear,

And then when you kind of look around at phenomena,

Not the object of concentration,

But when you look around at phenomena in normal waking state or even in a meditative process,

The kind of the sharpness and the clarity of the arising and the falling away of the phenomena becomes much more vivid,

Much more clear,

And you can actually delineate the nature of things,

The phenomenological world much better.

So okay,

Get into the juicier stuff.

What happens as a result of these samadhi states?

What there are,

Like I said,

There are seven or eight of these,

Nine even depending,

And what initially happens is called access concentration.

It's this kind of intermediary ground that is not necessarily called the first samadhi,

But they're actually called kind of the access points.

So you're sitting in meditation and you are watching the breath,

Let's say,

And maybe when you're practicing,

There are passages of 10 seconds,

Of 30 seconds,

Of one minute,

Where you're able to just be with the breath and nothing else is happening,

No other thoughts are coming into your awareness.

Now imagine that happening for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes,

Where really there's nothing else happening but really just total connectedness and concentration to that point.

That kind of duration,

Five,

10,

20 minutes,

Starts to potentially move on into what's called access concentration,

And what happens is different starts of qualities start to arise in the person's experience,

And that is they can be things like smoothness or an ease of continuity of moment to moment,

But often what starts to arise is a kind of feelings or sensations that are very,

Very,

Very,

Very positive or blissful at first.

They feel really good and they're called pithy in the Buddhist tradition.

Even the word rapture starts to be connected to it,

And I think most of the time now in contemporary circles,

People are using the word bliss.

They love these bliss states.

You want to bliss out.

Turns out in the Samadhi states that bliss is only at the front end and something much more rarefied and refined in a sense comes later.

We must be careful about the allure of these things because not only do they promise or consist of certain kinds of very heightened positive associated sensations,

But they also come with some of these psychic mental faculties called the itis or the sittis,

Which are known as psychic powers or attainments,

And I'll address those after going through these Samadhis first.

So bear with me.

I love this subject in general.

It's of real interest to me because I was very focused on this for many years,

And there's so much mystery around these,

And for those who are quite ardent in their seeking of this kind of process,

There's usually a huge amount of desire behind it,

And that is totally okay and understandable,

But the more clarity and more framing that we can have,

Maybe then it makes our journey all the more doable and achievable.

So we're sitting,

We're gaining this pithy,

Okay?

We're gaining these feeling tones in the body,

And they start maybe from a certain point,

Like the hands are very common,

Certain areas in the body are particularly common,

And those areas in the body that have this pithy or suffusion of quality start to actually suffuse the entire body,

So the entire body starts to fill up with what feels like a really positive sensation,

And it's very blissy.

And one crosses over from axis concentration into the first jhana,

And they move in sequence,

Potentially,

Archetypally,

They move in sequence from one,

Two,

Three,

And four,

To five,

Six,

And seven,

And then even eight,

And the first four are called the material jhanas,

And the last four are known as the immaterial jhanas,

And the reason is because the first four have these qualities that are still connected to the body.

There are sensations associated with them.

The first one has a certain kind of pleasure and rapture involved with it,

But the mind still has certain levels of discursive thinking,

And then the second kind of refines it a bit,

Where the amount or the coarseness of that pleasure kind of refines itself a little bit,

And the mind becomes more still,

And then the third one is where this kind of,

This more rapturous pleasure quality dies down significantly to where there's more of an equanimous or a peaceful energy,

And then the fourth one is where there is a really serious amount of equanimity,

And that kind of blissy feeling isn't so much there,

But rather than bliss,

Which has the bodily association of positive,

Has now actually kind of transmuted into something much more refined,

Which is that of more of a neutrality,

Of something that has an equanimous and a peaceful quality to it.

So you go from this kind of like,

Oh,

This feels so good,

To oh,

There's so much evenness,

Right?

And that evenness is very sustainable.

It's very neutral.

Now that's the fourth,

And the fourth to the fifth,

Sixth,

And seventh is where we cross over into the immaterial jhanas,

And you get into descriptions like infinite consciousness,

Infinite space,

And even nothingness.

And so what happens is that the qualities that one perceives when moving into these absorption states goes from having a bodily-born,

A somatic-born anchor point,

Into actually being just simply born of the mind itself,

The observation or the perceptual apparatus itself notices these qualities.

So infinite is what crosses over from fourth to fifth.

You literally go from having a sense of bounded reality,

Finite reality,

And then that kind of that sense of boundary dissolves,

And then there is just infinity,

And you get the infinity of consciousness and the infinity of space.

So you have essentially qualities of mind,

Qualities of space,

And then it even moves into nothingness,

What's described as nothingness.

So there's no thing at all,

Right?

Not even infinite or finite,

There's just no thing at all.

Experiencing these are often peak experiences.

They are things that really open up the psyche to great extents,

And they're utilized in traditional meditation practices and methodologies because they have such transformative effects.

Not only are they deeply penetrating to revealing one's fundamental aspects of your own mind and of the mind,

But also they are deeply purificational,

Deep levels of purification.

I think I'm dropping into one of these now.

So whereas they initially are peak experiences,

Whereas initially they are woe,

What happens is as one balances themselves and integrates these over time,

What actually happens is that they become completely integrated into one's waking state.

So a peak experience becomes a transparent normal waking state experience over time.

So it's a bit of a misnomer to call these the absorptions or the transits because one could be misled into thinking that the only way that these are accessed or worked with is that one has to sit and be completely cut off and absorbed in these states,

Cut off from the world and absorbed in these states.

And that's not the case.

What happens is that essentially you bust through the boundaries or the perceived limitations of perception of the self and of other and of reality,

Objective and subjective world.

And if you continue to practice and you integrate that,

Then over time what happens is that these qualities are actually just present in your waking state.

The infinity of space and the infinity of consciousness are present now as they always were,

As they are in all of us.

It's just that actually you can actually see that transparently.

You can feel and perceive that transparently and experience reality like that.

And it's different.

These are in a sense esoteric even though they are mainstream within the meditation traditions,

In a certain sense they are esoteric.

And they're esoteric because they're not easily accessible to the casual practitioner and you can't just simply imagine what these are.

The experience of them is really what anchors these and provides you a relationship born of knowledge around these.

So the intellectual aspect and the intellectual curiosity is fantastic for actually getting into experiencing these and developing a practice such that you can make the conditions more available in which the arising of these may come about.

And what happens is that these bring about what are known as the idis or the siddhis.

These are the psychic powers or the supernormal powers.

And again these are very attractive.

They sound enticing.

Who doesn't want psychic power?

But I want to simplify this and that is to say that psychic and psyche is translated often as the soul but it's also what we're using now in psychology of course.

So what that really means is just mind.

When you think of the word psyche,

Psychic,

It's easiest I think to understand that what's being pointed to is the mind.

You know you have the body and the mind.

So psychic is mind and psychic powers means mental powers and to develop mental powers as a consequence of the siddhis simply means that when you pierce these veils into transparent relationship with these foundational aspects of mind,

What happens is you see what the mechanisms of mind are.

You see kind of like you're driving a car and you're in the driver's seat or the passenger's seat and that's all you know about it is that it goes somewhere and then you open up the hood and you start to see that oh there's a transmission and there's spark plugs and there's a timing belt and you can see how all the different parts are kind of connecting to one another and the information,

The kind of the usefulness of that means that you might understand them,

You may very well understand the mechanics of it.

Your perception is that you can actually kind of see how it is that it's working at a deeper level and if you can perceive that clearly and maybe other people or some other people aren't,

That means that that information alone enables you to have a certain kind of an insight or a certain kind of interaction with mind that may be considered abnormal,

Supernormal,

Extraordinary.

But in truth they're actually just the simplistic,

Most mundane aspects of the mind,

I.

E.

It's the foundational aspects of the functioning of the mind.

It's not the complex aspects of the mind,

It's not the many,

Many layers later of the mind,

It's the simplistic aspects of the mind,

The essential way that it's functioning.

And so the insight into this is sometimes called the cities or the psychic powers and in contemporary terminology we often call these clairsentience,

Clairvoyance,

Clairaudience,

All of these words that infer some kind of extrasensory,

Extraordinary perception that a lot of people,

Certainly that science has not only doubt on but would call a quackery.

So we want to take the kind of bang out of these,

We want to kind of deflate the bubble of overexcitement and any kind of sense of separation that may come as a result of thinking about these as better or thinking about these as something.

Reviews

Makes sense that these qualities are also a homecoming to our true nature, but I have never heard it expressed so clearly, thank you, so inspiring 🙏✨

Such a clear and practical explanation that helps us relate these to the everyday rather than misconceptions that lead to bypass and ungroundedness. Thank you!

The information you gave was helpful as I have been experiencing a higher consciousness in my meditation and trying to learn more about that. Thank you!

You curiosity and wide lens on how your experience, science and spirituality interesect is awesome.