Upasaka Culadasa

The Jhanas: Retreat (January 2011)

My topic for this weekend is something that is very dear to me—the jhana practice—which I’ve been very interested in and doing for many years. When I proposed to do it as a topic for the weekend, there was some concern that only four people would show up because nobody would be interested in something that is a little more obscure in meditation than mindfulness practice and vipassana and things like that. I’m really glad to see so much interest. It’s really wonderful. Very exciting. I’m really looking forward to this weekend. It’s going to be very interesting. I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen. I don’t. I promise, at the very least, you’ll leave knowing a lot more about what the jhanas are and how they’re practiced and the role that they play in traditional Buddhist practice, which is a very important role. What I’m really hoping is that many of you will have some experience of jhanas, if you haven’t already, over the course of the weekend and it will interest you enough to want to pursue that further. Whether that happens or not, we’ll find out on Sunday afternoon.

How many of you have already done some sort of jhana practice at one time or another? A few, not a lot. How many of you know something about the jhanas? Looks like probably about three times that many. I assume that all of you are interested in knowing more, and that’s good.

Shelly, do we have very many more people likely to show up?

Shelly: Maybe two or three.

Culadasa: Two or three? OK, we’ll go ahead and assume that we’re beginning now.

OK, we’ll officially being. Good evening, once again. Welcome. It’s very good to have you here. So, let’s begin with a short meditation, just to get us in the right frame of mind. So if you’ll please make yourselves comfortable, relaxed, and just close your eyes. Take a moment to come fully into the present. Become aware of your body. Check in on your mental state. I find that it’s a happy state. It is for me. There this contentedness about being here with all of you in this wonderful place. And on this wonderful planet.

If you can cultivate some joyfulness, and then with that joyfulness, begin to do whatever practice that you normally do. Do it joyfully.

–Meditation occurs here—

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Thank you. I wanted to get us all in the mood, but also, while it’s really fresh, just reflect on what happened over the course of the last 15 or 20 minutes. What you did, and what you experienced. With this many people, there were quite a few different styles of meditation going on, but there are certain things that would be consistently true of everyone here. There was a kind of intentional activity going on in your mind to do with attention and awareness, right? Anybody for whom that’s not true? It’s hard to not be conscious, but the intention part can not be there, you mind can be going on its own. But when you’re meditating, there’s intention behind it. There was some component of directing and sustaining your attention, right? There was also an important component of an awareness of what was going on. Whatever practice you were doing, you were, I’m sure, keeping track of whether or not you were still doing it or had forgotten and slipped into a little bit of daydreaming or slipped into dullness or things like that. There’s a meta-awareness, a larger awareness, beyond just what your attention was directed towards as to what your mind was doing and whether or not it was what you intended it to be doing. This is sort of what’s at the root of all of our different meditation practices. As we learn to do them more successfully, whether or not in that particular style it’s pointed out to us, we need to learn to gain some control over the movement of attention, because attention is initially very slippery and goes all over the place. The other thing that we absolutely have to do is to develop that awareness that allows us to know when we’re not doing what we intend to do and make corrections for it. As we will see, this is the same basic element that is present all the way through to the practice of what are called the jhanas.

Jhana is a Pali word. The Buddha lived in an area of India and traveled in an area where many different dialects of magadi (?) were spoken. Pali was the formal dialect. I gather this is common in many parts of the world where there are a lot of different dialects, that there will be some formal dialect by which people from different regions can communicate with each other. So the teachings that have come down to us are in the Pali language. Pali is derived from Sanskrit. It’s one of the Sanskrit family of languages. Interestingly enough, several hundred years after the passing of the Buddha, these teachings of the Buddha that have been preserved in the Pali language were translated into Sanskrit. This resulted in new Sanskrit words coming into existence. This is called Buddhist Sanskrit. When the Buddhist teachings were translated into Sanskrit, even though Pali is derived from Sanskrit, there were a lot of words that had come to be used in a highly specific way in Pali with reference to dharma practice and meditation. When this was translated back into Sanskrit, it became Sanscritized as Buddhist Sanskrit. It became sort of a technical language or terminology for dharma and Buddhist practice.

Jhana is one of those words. If we look at the root of it, the root meaning comes from the word meaning “to meditate.” A meditator is a jhayin (?). Jhana is meditation. At some point, early on in the history of Buddhism, pretty much all meditation was referred to as jhana. One thing we do have to keep in mind is there are many different kinds of

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meditations that people do now. They share certain basic characteristics, as I pointed out to you. One distinction that we do need to make about the word jhana and the way it was used is that it referred to meditation where there was a certain amount of skill developed. It didn’t refer to any old meditation where somebody who’d never meditated before sits down for twenty minutes and there’s a lot of mind wandering or dullness or things like that. So the word jhana meant meditation where there was a certain stability of attention, a certain degree of mindfulness, freedom from dullness—a certain skill level. That’s how general the word originally started out to be. In early Buddhism, interestingly enough, from what we can tell from the sutras, this was the meditation that everybody did. It was the meditation that the Buddha did that let to his own enlightenment. It was the meditation that he taught over and over again in the sutras. As a matter of fact, if you look in the sutras, you’ll find jhanas come up so often. Every description of the eight-fold path, when it comes to samasamadhi—right concentration—says, “And what is right concentration? Right concentration is first jhana, second jhana, third jhana, fourth jhana.”

I didn’t know that when I first learned about the jhanas. As a matter of fact, when I first learned to meditate, I was first introduced to vipassana practice. Vipassana noting practice. But I was very fortunate. I had teachers who were very steeped in the oldest Buddhist practice traditions. I complained to my teacher that I was not too satisfied with this vipassana method and his response was, “Well why don’t you learn to do samatha?” Samatha vipassana. I started practicing samatha, I liked it, and the culmination of samatha is jhana. And so I followed that path for many years and learned to practice jhanas. The jhanas I learned were very deep. It’s a degree of concentration where you really have no awareness of your body, no awareness of sounds and sensations and things like that. It is a very profound state of concentration. For many years, I thought that’s what jhana was. I had no idea that it had an older history of having a much broader meaning. Over the years, I came in contact with other people who were doing other kinds of jhana practice that they had learned from different people and discovered that there were actually many kinds of jhana. Also, there was a lot of controversy around all of these different things called jhana because no matter what kind of jhana somebody did, they were absolutely convinced that what somebody else did either wasn’t really jhana, because it wasn’t deep enough, or else it wasn’t really jhana because it was too deep. It was trancelike and waste of time and blah blah blah.

I became engaged in a number of discussions with people that practice in different traditions and at one point—I don’t want to make it sound like I’m the only person that was looking into this. When meditation came to North America, a lot of very brilliant people began looking into it, learning it, and learning more about it. Quite a few of them noticed that there were some inconsistencies in what was being brought to the West that was called jhana. A lot of things that didn’t exactly line up with what you find if you read

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the sutras, the original teachings of the Buddha, or at least the closest thing that we have to the original teachings of the Buddha.

As it turns out, these very deep jhanas, like the kind that I learned, were a later development. The method of practice that I learned is described in a book called the Visudimaga (?), the Path of Purification, that was written by Budagosa (?) in about 430 A.D. that was somewhere in the neighborhood of 900 or 1,000 years after the time of the Buddha. It was a compilation. By that time, there were many different approaches to doing practice. The Visudimaga(?) was compilation. Budagosa was a scholar; he was not a meditator. He read other texts and he talked to meditation teachers and compiled this teaching, which is kind of a basis of modern teravadan tradition. This work describes jhanas in terms that are very difficult to achieve. They’re very deep, profound jhanas. They’re actually very wonderful jhanas, but they require many many years of intensive practice to be able to achieve. Many people would not be able to.

As it happens, the tradition I was trained in was also an amalgamation of teravadan and Tibetan, the kagyu sect of Tibetan. I also became acquainted with the Tibetan commentarial literature on jhanas. The same thing. The presentation of the jhanas in these Tibetan commentaries was this really amazing, profound state of concentration—complete withdrawal of the mind from the senses of a sort that very few people can achieve. As it happened, over the centuries, people stopped practicing jhana throughout most of the teravadan world and throughout most of the Tibetan Mahayana tradition.

Here’s a very interesting thing: Early Buddhism went into China, and the world jhana, when it became Sanskritized it became yana, and when it went to China it became chan. The principle Buddhism of China is chan, named after this meditation technique and the practices within that tradition continued to strongly oriented towards the samatha and the absorptions that are, as I’ll explain to you, probably much more what the original jhana was. Then from China, it went to Japan and chan became zen. Indeed, in zen, zen is the meditation practice that leads to these same absorptions that are spoken of in the sutras.

It’s not that these methods were lost anywhere, but they became rarely taught and rarely practiced in the teravadan countries and in Tibetan Buddhism, where they had gained this sort of mystique as being super-difficult-to-achieve meditative states that only one in a thousand virtuoso meditators would ever be able to accomplish.

Have any of you heard or read anything about jhanas that gave you that impression, that they were very difficult to achieve, that it was quite wonderful but for most of us, forget it?

Back to the personal part of my story here—As more and more Westerners came in contact with these Buddhist teachings—and being the kind of people that we are, we listen to what the teacher says but then we want to go back and read what it says in the

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books, right? They noticed that the teachers sort of blow off jhanas and they give this very difficult version and discourage you from ever going after them, but you back and you read in the sutras and all it is is jhanas, jhanas, jhanas. So you wonder what’s going on there. A discussion began, a very interesting discussion. At some point, they began to distinguish commentarial jhanas from sutta jhanas as two different kinds and saying, you know these jhanas in the suttas that he was talking about all the time and that wanted everybody to practice—and it seemed like everybody was able to practice and everybody was practicing—when you examine really carefully, they are not nearly so onerous as what’s in the Visudimaga and what’s described in the Tibetan commentaries. This was illuminating and we began to learn a lot more about the true natures of jhanas and Buddhist meditation as this was explored and discussed and things were compared. Unfortunately, these labels—Visudimaga jhana or commentarial jhana and sutta jhana or sutra jhana—stuck a little bit too well and they led inevitably, as you can imagine, to the debate, “Which are the real jhanas?” Which are the real jhanas. These are the real jhanas. No, no, no, these are the real jhanas. These are the ones the Buddha taught, they must be the real ones. As the discussion went on, it became clear to some of us that—especially if you go and read the sutras—you would find that there are sutras in which jhana is discussed in precisely those terms that the commentaries did. So those are real jhanas too. They’re not some different kind of jhana that was made up a thousand years later or fifteen hundred years later. They’re in the sutras too. What it really tells us is that jhana shouldn’t be thought of as quite such a restrictive term as it has come to be thought of, no matter which side of the fence you’re on. We do have two sides of the fence. If you start looking into jhana practice, there are the people who do so-called sutta jhanas, and these are easy jhanas and those other jhanas aren’t real jhanas and they won’t get you enlightened anyway. They were invented a thousand years later and blah blah blah. Then there’s the other side.

But taking a second look what we discover is that the jhanas, as they’re described in the sutras, can be practiced at many different levels or depths of concentration, different degrees of concentration. They’re not out of reach. They’re available as a practice to any of us, as available as any other meditation practice is. They do, like any meditation practice, take time, regular practice, some contact with a good teacher, so on and so forth. But they’re no more unattainable than any other kind of meditation practice. Of course, as you become more skilled, you can enter into deeper and deeper versions of the jhanas.

This was really illuminating for me, because I had learned the deep jhanas. I started out with the idea that these are the real jhanas and I don’t know what those rinky-dink things are that other people are doing. I do the real jhanas. The person who really opened my eyes to the tremendous value of real jhanas in the sense of jhanas that can be practiced at many different levels of concentration, was Lee Brazington. Anybody heard of Lee Brazington? Yeah. He teaches a kind of jhana that he learned from Hiakema. As it turns

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out, there are a variety of different jhanas being taught in the world right now at different levels of concentration, which I’m going to talk to you about over this weekend and we’re going to try to enter into some of those jhanas together.

Just to give you an idea of those—these are Hiakema’s books—Who is Myself and The Iron Eagle Flies, where she talks about jhanas. I call these the lite jhanas. I’ll explain why later on. Sheila Katherine wrote this book Focused and Fearless. This is a somewhat deeper from of jhana practice. Then there is Ajon Brahm, Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond. This is a book that you may have seen. There’s also this little free book that you can write off for and they’ll send to you called The Jhanas. These are a deeper kind of jhana and I call these light jhanas, because they use the illumination that comes up as a part of piti as a way of entering the jhanas. The of course, Pa’a Sayuda and two of his students, Stephen Snyder and Tina Rasmussen recently published this book on jhanas. These are fairly deep jhanas but they still use the light as the meditation object for entering the jhana. Then there’s Hanapola Gunaratna. This book The Path of Serenity and Insight was originally a PhD thesis that he did. He was a monk since he was a young man. He came to the United States to take over a teravadan center in Washington, DC. He did a degree in Buddhist Studies on jhanas and on samatha meditation. This is his more recent book, Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English. What these represent is a spectrum of different approaches to jhana that are practiced at different levels. And there are others that haven’t arrived in book form yet. What I call the ultralite (light?) jhanas, which, as far as I can tell, are about the lightest jhana that you can enter into that’s really a jhana and it really has all the benefits of jhana practice, where you can actually sustain in that state without either slipping into dullness or distraction for thirty seconds or a minute. I’ll talk to you about all these different jhanas and explain them in more detail over the weekend.

The idea here is that whatever it is that the word jhana refers to, it has a broader meaning than just these very strictly defined and difficult to attain deep jhanas. It has a tremendous utility. It has just an incredible utility. I’ll say a little bit about that too.

Here’s another thing that some of you may have heard, many of you may have heard, about samatha and jhanas both: These aren’t appropriate practices to do. Jhanas lead to trancelike states and yeah, you feel good but it doesn’t go anywhere. People don’t get enlightened from jhana practice, or from samatha in general. If we look at the history of Buddhist meditation, we’ll see that this is insupportable. One of the things that you may have heard is you can’t practice mindfulness in the jhanas. Anybody ever heard that? Somehow these two are totally incompatible and if you practice jhanas, there can be no mindfulness in the jhanas. This usually goes along with the description of jhanas as being trance-like. That too, it turns out, is not really the case. The history of this meditation technique—it existed before the time of the Buddha. After he left home, he went, one after another, to two teachers—Alarakalama and Udakaramaputra. The first one,

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Alarakalama, taught him jhanas and under that teacher he mastered up to—we’ll talk about the different jhanas later one—what’s sometimes called the seventh jhana or the third formless jhana. It’s the jhana of the base of nothingness. When the Buddha-to-be had mastered that practice, Alarakalama said, “Join me and we’ll be teachers together. You now know everything that I know and you’ve experienced what I’ve experienced. This is the highest achievement of the spiritual path.” The Buddha was not satisfied with that, so he left Alarakalama and went to Udakaramaputra. Ramaputra means “son of Rama.” He studied under Udakaramaputra and mastered what’s called the eighth jhana or the fourth formless jhana, which is the jhana of the base of neither perception nor nonperception, all of which sounds very mysterious, but I’ll explain it to you as we go along.

This was an even higher level, and as it turned out, he actually surpassed his teacher, Udakaramaputra, attaining a practice level that Ramaputra’s teacher, Rama—that’s why he was called Ramaputra, because he was the disciple of Rama—he achieved the level of mastery of Udakaramaputra’s teacher, Rama. Udakaramaputra said, well, you achieved everything that Rama did, so you should take over my crowd of students here, and you be the teacher. The Buddha said, no thank you, this is not what I’m looking for.

Let me explain to you what those people were teaching. They were teaching jhanas, very effectively. This meditation practice had developed in the Brahaminical tradition, and the philosophy behind it is that Brahmins were desirous of breaking free of the wheel of cyclic death and reincarnation. They were seeking divine union with Brahma, with the ultimate. In their understanding, Udakaramaputra’s and Alarkalama’s, was that the way to achieve this liberation was through a series of meditation practices that basically reversed the Brahmin cosmology. So that you went from being in a solid body to progressively finer and finer states of refinement, leading to the states of infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, neither perception nor nonperception. Essentially what you were doing in this jhana practice is working your way backwards through the process by which human beings had been created by Brahma out of the ultimate. When you sat in meditation, when you entered the jhana of the base of nothingness or the jhana of the base of neither nor nonperception, you were dwelling in a state that was very close to this primordial state. It was discussed in terms of having discovered the true self. This is you true self that you were when you were in this state. They considered residing in that state to be very important, and the more time you spent in that state, the more likely you were achieve the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal, the ultimate liberation didn’t happen until after you died. When you died, if you’d been practicing in this way, then you would realize your true nature and become one with Brahma and you would never again be reborn into the cycle of individuality and suffering.

This was the teaching that the Buddha rejected. He was looking for a liberation, awakening, an enlightenment—although, I think at those points, perhaps those words, he

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wouldn’t have used those, because he didn’t know what form this was taking. He was looking for a liberation in this life, not something that was going to happen after you died as a result of spending a lot of time in a trancelike state. Because of the view that was help by the Brahmins, they did these jhanas in a way that was very trancelike. The more totally, completely absorbed and removed from the world of samsara you were, the better, the stronger the effect would have and the greater your chances of becoming liberated when you died. They did these practices in a very trancelike way.

After the Buddha’s enlightenment, he took this method and he changed it in a very profound way. He said, you practice the jhanas with mindfulness, not trancelike, but with mindfulness. And he said, liberation is achieved in this life, not after you die. These were two really significant changes.He learned the method of the jhanas, he did them according to this system of thought. You have to understand that the Brahmanical religion was very ritual based. Most of that religion involved the performance of rituals and everything that happened was a result of how well rituals were performed. The impression that comes down to us is that this is the way they tended to regard the meditation practices. The liberation that they were seeking, too, is that it was like a ritual. If you went into these deep states of meditation and you stayed there often enough, long enough—it’s like performing the ritual in the right way—then in a sort of magical way, when you died, this liberation and ultimate freedom from reincarnation would occur.

The Buddha rejected this and left Udakaramaputra. For the next six years he wandered and it seems, from what he says in other sutras, he must have had contact with a number of different teachers, studied with them, learned their doctrines and their practices. He also did a lot of ascetic practices, living on a couple of grains of rice a day and never sitting or lying down. Things that are really torturous to the body. He those a whole variety of things for six years and that got him nowhere. Then he reconsidered. When he reconsidered, he went back to the jhana practices and he did jhana practices but he did them in his own way. He achieved his own enlightenment as a result of doing jhana practice. That’s in the sutras. You can all read that. Were you already familiar with that? Did you know that’s how the Buddha became enlightened? I’ve got a handout for you that has a lot of this detail in it. I didn’t include that particular description. It’s a really sweet one. He sat down and entered the first jhana, second jhana, third jhana, fourth jhana and then from the fourth jhana he experienced the insights that led to his awakening. Thereafter, he taught the jhanas.

Where he teaches the jhanas, it’s very interesting. There’s one sutra where he has a conversation with a Brahmin who is obviously familiar with these practices. The Brahmin accepts him as being an enlightened being and says, “So for me to cross the flood, great teacher, what is the object of meditation that I should use?” The Buddha recommended to him the jhana of the base of nothingness. He said to practice with

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mindfulness. The Brahmin did kind of a head-scratch on that one, and said, “With mindfulness, but can a yogi stay in the jhana if he’s in the jhana with mindfulness?” The Buddha assured him that he could, and not only that, he would achieve liberation.

We see this—and you’ll see this in a handout that I’ll give you—all of the descriptions of the jhanas have the word ‘mindfulness’ in them. They stress that word, mindfulness. So mindfulness is a part of the jhana practice. It’s what makes the difference. It is what the Buddha discovered and introduced into the practice that makes the whole difference—practicing the jhanas with mindfulness.

Because you see the other thing that the Buddha discovered is that awakening isn’t a magical event that happens as a result of doing things in just the right way. Which actually is, even today, a widespread belief, that somehow if you sit and meditate in just the right way, then sooner or later, like a lightning bolt, it come through the top of your head, and you’re enlightened. But that’s precisely what, in the sutras, the Buddha said doesn’t happen. He said that liberation, awakening, enlightenment is a cognitive event. And that’s why you have to practice mindfulness. It is a realization, not some magical thing that happens to you. It is seeing and understanding things as they really are. The reason that the jhanas are such a wonderful way to do this is that, when we look at them more closely, they’re like a serial dissection of the mind. You take the ordinary, everyday mind, and then you refine it to the state of what’s called access concentration, from which you enter the first jhana. You enter the first jhana and it has certain characteristics that define it. You go to the second jhana, which is a further refinement, and it’s like peeling another layer off the onion. So going through these jhanas is like dissecting the mind, one layer at a time. It’s done with mindfulness, and by doing it with mindfulness, it leads to insight and the insight leads to awakening. That’s the whole idea behind the jhanas. Any questions about that?

Student: Because I’ve heard different things from different teachers, I think what I heard was that the jhanas—well, one teacher says that you have to move through the jhanas. That’s Tanusaru Jef (?) Bikhu. Other teachers, like Adjanamaro (?), say jhana-banana. You can’t really get enlightened through the jhanas because they’re all conditioned states. The jhanas are conditioned and enlightenment is not conditioned.

Culadasa: What Adjanamaro says is absolutely true, but meaningless. The only unconditioned state is nirvana. Which is like saying the only way you can get enlightened is nirvana, and anything else you do isn’t going to work, because it’s a conditioned state. What he says is true. I’ve heard all of these things many many times from many different teachers, myself. There are a lot of misunderstandings that have been perpetuated in many different lineages for many many centuries. We tend to hear these things over and over again.

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You mentioned Tanusaru Bikhu, Tan Jef. I recommend this book highly to those of you who would like to go into this a little more deeply. It’s called Wings to Awakening. This is an aside. The title is a pun on a very important topic. In the meditation community, there’s this idea that we’ve got samatha and vipassana, we got concentration and we got mindfulness and never the twain shall meet. The wings to awakening that this title refers to are samatha and vipassana, samadi and sati. The metaphor is that they’re like the wings of a bird and the bird cannot fly with one wing. There is a section in here, Section F on Concentration and Discernment, and Tan Jef translates discernment as sati. Because mindfulness is really a terrible translation of sati. But we’re kind of stuck with it. In trying to correct that, when he wrote this book, everywhere the sutra said sati he made it discernment. So there’s this whole section on concentration and discernment where he points the role of the jhanas. He says, “The role of jhana as a condition for transcendent discernment is one of the most controversial issues in the teravada tradition.” And he goes on to talk about these different views that have come up. Some believe the only way that you become enlightened is through the jhanas; there is no other way. Then there are those that say you only need the jhanas for the third and fourth final stages of enlightenment. Then there are the people who claim that you’ll never get enlightened practices the jhanas. So there is a lot of confusion and a lot misunderstanding out there. It’s wonderful when somebody like Tan Jef, who is one of the most major translators of the Pali sutras into the English language, has gone to the trouble to get all these different references and sutras and line them up together. It gives you a chance to see that, indeed, from the point of view of the Buddha’s original teaching, which obviously Adjanamaro is not familiar with, the jhanas are a path to enlightenment. Whether they are the only path or not, that’s a different question. That’s not actually addressed by the Buddha in the sutras. They are unquestionably the path that he taught.

Very good question. I’m sure others of you who aren’t saying anything but you’ve heard things like this. It’s important that we talk about these things. I don’t want to be another teacher that you’re hearing one version of things from. I’ve spent a lot of time looking into these things on my own behalf over the years and, over the last couple of weeks, on your behalf. I want to share with you what I’ve learned about these things. About the historical basis of these things and where some of these unfortunate views have arisen from. But I can assure you, the jhanas are probably THE most powerful path of mindfulness that does indeed, without question, lead to awakening very quickly.

Student: Pardon me for seeming a little bit thick, but it sounds as though the coming weekend will be a methodical step-through of these jhanas as clear, well-defined technique that you will narrate. Am I wrong?

Culadasa: I wouldn’t put it that way. What I want to give you is a more in-depth understanding of jhanas and to acquaint you with a number of different ways of practicing jhanas. The ones that I have in mind—see, this is all a big unknown. My own

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teachers and probably many of my peers would say what I’m trying to do is impossible. What we’ll be focusing on, initially, is seeing if as many of you as possible can have an experience of what I call the ultralite jhanas. Don’t take that as a derogatory term. Ultralite doesn’t mean that they’re almost useless. They’re very powerful and very very useful. If you succeed in that, even if it’s just for a few moments, you will have become acquainted with a tool that you can use to greatly accelerate the quality of your meditation practice and allow you much more quickly to access deeper jhanas. In general, no matter what practice you’re doing, to enjoy much greater benefit from it. Then I’m also going to spend some time with you seeing if you can experience the lite jhanas. These are the ones that I learned from Lee Brazington. There’s the ones that Hiakema taught. They require a little better concentration initially, but you don’t have to have mastered that state of concentration. You don’t have to be able to enter that state of concentration every time you sit down. You just need be able to enter that state of concentration for about 10 or 15 minutes and then you can enter this kind of jhana. So I’m going to see, as many as you as possible, if I can guide you to have an experience of these lite jhanas.

Depending on the time and the mood and everything else, we might take a stab at some of the deeper jhanas. But certainly you’ll learn about them, you’ll understand what they are, how they’re different from the ones that we do together. What I hope will emerge from this is a much clearer whole picture of what jhanas are. If I succeed in doing that, you’re going to walk out of here with a much clearer picture of what meditation is.

Student: It sounds—I want to very cautious, because I have a lot of over-freighted (?) language, just too freighted—you sound very much like my altered-state psych teacher when was describing depths of hypnotic trance and how people are hypnotized all the time. They just don’t know it. It’s not a very big deal. You can do the white-line hypnosis when you’re driving and you’re not really all checked out like people think in the movies—I’m a zombie. It sounds like you’re describing these subtle transits in trans-depth, but you earlier were very careful to say trance isn’t what we’re talking about. So I don’t want to go there, but that’s the word I learned in school, so I’m stuck with it.

Culadasa: Very good question. Jhanas are not trances. You only hear that they are from people who have never learned to practice them.

Student: Right, but apparently they have depths in them in the same was trances do.

Culadasa: Well, we’re limited by language. They do have depth to them, a depth of concentration. Some subtleties of the way the mind works. We’re working with the nature of the mind itself to lead it to be able to experience different states that are available to all of us but that without some guidance, we never know what happens when you turn left behind that tree and see what’s over there.

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You mentioned hypnosis. This is not trancelike, it’s not hypnosis. But I will say one thing: In order for me to be able to guide you, when we’re doing guided meditation, you have to go with my direction. In some ways that’s similar to hypnosis, but I’m not going to be hypnotizing you. Instead, I’m going to be inviting you to a place I’ve been, over and over again, many many times. I’m inviting you to follow me to this place, OK? So you have to be willing to go. If you’re resistant, or hesitant, then it’s not going to work as well.

Student: I told you that trance wasn’t going to be a good word, but I stuck with it. (Laughter)

Culadasa: Yeah. Well, don’t worry. That was a very good question. I hope that you got a satisfactory answer to it.

Student: Yeah.

Student: I’m curious if you’ve see jhanas in the Four Foundations practices, if you see that they overlap, are they covering the same territory or are they separate practices? Jhanas in Four Foundations practices.

Culadasa: Oh, the four foundations of mindfulness.

Student: Are they covering the same territory?

Culadasa: They’re covering the same territory. Yes, they are. Absolutely. One of the things that you may have heard is often people take the anapanisati sutra, mindfulness of the breath sutra, and say, “Oh, this is about jhanas!” And then they’ll take the satipatana sutra, which is commonly called The Four Foundations of Mindfulness,” although ‘foundations’ is a ridiculous word for applications of mindfulness. That’s what it is, right? Anybody that’s familiar with it, it’s four ways of applying mindfulness. And say, that’s something completely different. They’re not. They’re covering exactly the same territory in a different way. That’s one of the things that I really hope that you’ll come out of the weekend with. If not out of the weekend, then as we continue to work together, you’ll come to a clear understanding of exactly what it is that both of these sutras are talking about.

For those of you who are not familiar, I did do a weekend a couple of years ago on the Four Applications of Mindfulness. Those four applications are mindfulness of the body as aggregate, mindfulness of the feelings as feelings, mindfulness of mental states and mental states and mindfulness of mental objects or phenomena as the phenomena that they are. This is exactly what you do—once you’re developed the skills so that you can enter and leave the jhanas in sequence and you work your way through first, second,

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third, fourth, infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness and so forth, you are actually doing the foundations of mindfulness. They do overlap.

Student: What I’ve been wondering about is even if a jhana and mindfulness practices can be combined, is there any concern about doing both at the same time. Specifically, you taught me a new practice last week that I’m really just barely getting the hang of that’s quite different from jhana. I’m wondering about working on two at once like that.

Culadasa: OK. This is NOT two different practices. This is not doing jhanas and mindfulness at the same time. Jhanas IS a mindfulness practice. It always has been a mindfulness practice. You’re not doing two different practices. You’re doing one kind of practice with a larger understanding of what it is that you’re doing. I’m glad that you’ve been working on that practice.

Student: It’s hard!

Culadasa: Well, let’s go back to the basics. Let’s work on the basics again. I’ve given you a general introduction. Let’s go back to what are these jhanas again, anyway.

The word jhana originally meant meditation, but the way the Buddha used it in the sutras, it referred specifically to certain meditation states. It’s equally correct to use jhana to refer to meditation of a certain quality in general or to use it more precisely and specifically to refer certain meditative states that were very clearly defined by the Buddha. The word jhana is often translated into English as absorption. And that is an excellent translation, a very very good way to translate it. Mental absorptions. Mental absorption means that you are quite fully engaged with whatever it is that you’re engaged with. We all experience mental absorptions, right? Anybody here that doesn’t know what a mental absorption is? A lot of mental absorptions. Are all mental absorptions jhanas? Well, no. If we look at mental absorptions in general, we find that they can be distinguished one from another in several different way. To begin with, there are mental absorptions that are wholesome and there are those that are unwholesome. Wholesome in the sense that what you become absorbed with is inherently wholesome and wholesome in the sense that your mental state, that leads to the absorption, is wholesome. And likewise unwholesome. You can become absorbed with lust, or greed, or hatred or all kinds of other things like that, right? And those are pretty intense absorptions. I know you’ve experienced them at some time or another. Everyone has experienced intense absorptions of an unwholesome nature.

I made up a little list. This is a handout that you’re going to get later. Unwholesome absorptions are those based in greed, lust, anger, hatred, dullness, addiction, escape, fear, worry, guilt, cynicism, self-doubt, self-pity or self-loathing. With a more complete list, has everybody identified at least a couple of absorptions that they’ve experienced? (Laughter) There was a sutta where this was made very clear and I did include that in the

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handout. What the Buddha called jhanas were only wholesome absorptions. For an absorption to be wholesome, what the Buddha defined as the five hindrances—and you’ve heard me talk about that, but some of you may not be familiar with it—must be completely absent, even if they’re only temporarily absent. They must not be a part of the jhana, or of the absorption. For an absorption to be called a jhana, first of all, it has to be a wholesome sort. What sort of mental absorption did the Buddha praise? There’s the case where a monk quite withdrawn from sensuality, withdrawn from unskillful mental qualities enters and remains in the first jhana, second jhana, third jhana, etc. The object can’t be something that’s inherently unwholesome and the mental state can’t be unwholesome.

That’s one way that absorptions differ from each other and we can distinguish what the Buddha called jhanas. The other thing is, when the Buddha defined them, either a part of each jhana or else the state from which the jhana was accessed was characterized by joy, happiness and unification of mind. Another jhana factor is equanimity. For a state of absorption to be what the Buddha called the jhana, it had to either include or be accessed from a state where these jhana factors of unification of mind, joy, happiness and/or equanimity were present. So it is narrowed down a little bit there.

The fact that joy is present is really interesting. Reflect once again on the absorptions that you’ve experienced in your life—on  the wholesome absorptions, or at least ones that are not unwholesome—and the joy and happiness that you experienced when you were completely absorbed in doing something that you really wanted to do, and that you were good at, and that you were doing well. We’ve all that experience, right?

As a matter of fact, —– Hailey, positive psychologist, has studied optimal experience and discovered a state that he called “flow,” which is a perfect description of what the Buddha was talking about when he said mental absorptions that are based in unification of mind, joy, happiness and/or equanimity. ——- Hailey said “these investigations have revealed that what makes experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow—a state of concentration so focused that it amounts to complete absorption in an activity. Everyone experiences flow from time to time, and will recognize its characteristics. People typically feel strong, alert, in effortless control, unself-conscious and at the peak of their abilities. Both the sense of time and emotional problems seem to disappear.” And this is something that’s characteristic of jhanas. Not to be mistaken with trancelike states, but what they have in common with some trancelike states is the normal sense of time is disturbed, it’s changed. In deep jhanas, you may have no sense at all of the passage of time. But in any jhana, you’ll have an altered sense of the passage of time. I know some of you have had that in meditation anyway. You’ve sat in meditations and they might have been jhanas and you didn’t know what name to put them, or they might not have been. When you enter into that flow state, it will seem like, “Wow, how could the meditation be over with already?” That is one of the characteristics.

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Emotional problems seem to disappear, and there’s an exhilarating feeling of transcendence. That exhilarating feeling of transcendence is what is called piti in Pali—meditative joy. What the Buddha said, we’re only talking about the ones where that’s present at least in the state from which you access the jhana. It’s not present in all of the jhanas. In some jhanas, you’ve actually moved beyond that. You’ve peeled the onion to a depth where you’re beyond that. However, you entered the jhana from a state where it was present.

We’re going to continue with some of the things that ——- Hailey discovered studying flow in ordinary people in ordinary daily activities. “The activities that give rise to the flow experience are performed as an end in themselves, not for any other purpose.” Does meditation qualify? “The goals of the activity are clear, and the feedback is immediate. What is most important about the feedback is a symbolic message it contains: I have succeeded in my goal. This creates order in the flow of consciousness.” If you’re following your breath, as you continue to follow the breath—in breath, out breath, in breath—that’s an unending stream of little successes, right? When you forget, you know it instantly and then you bring in back.

“Flow appears at the boundary where the challenge of the task is perfectly balanced with the person’s ability to perform the task.” This is where we go wrong in meditation very often—we want to be better than we can be. We want to be able to perform our meditation practice at a level that we have not trained our mind to the degree to be capable of, or else, we sat down with a mind that was sufficiently disturbed or dull already that we can’t do that. No matter what the state of the training of your mind is, your meditation can become a flow experience if you adjust your expectation to match what you’re capable of doing. It appears that the boundary from the challenge of the task is perfectly balanced. You have to be doing your absolute best, but you have to adjust your level of expectation so that moment by moment you are rewarded by the success that you’re capable of. Even if you forget and your mind wanders, if the expectation that you hold is that the instant you realize that, you will be glad you realized, let go of it and come back to the breath. You’ll have succeeded. If you meditate in that way, rather than reacting with, “Oh no, I forgot again. Oh no, oh no,” it becomes, :”Oh yeah, oh yeah, I’m a winner.” And joy begins to arise and happiness begins to arise.

Student: That doesn’t sound like exactly what he’s saying. It sounds to me like he’s saying you have to adjust the actual task to make it easy enough to succeed.

Culadasa: This is just a brief synopsis. Here’s the book, by the way. I recommend it. It’s very good. There’s a new version of it out: Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience. He describes it in here, he makes it clear. The question comes, why is this person experiencing flow and this person doing exactly the same thing is not. This is the reason—the internal adjustment is really critical. The expectation that you hold. Surgeons,

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athletes, assembly-line workers. If you have an expectation that you’re not able to consistently meet, you’re not going to experience flow. That internal adjustment is a part of it.

In the things that —— Hailey is talking about, flow in the world, the task itself is a very important part of it. People will discover that they can achieve flow doing a particular thing—playing the violin. They might not even be very good, but they’ve discovered that they can do that. The same person might not be able to enter flow doing other things. In terms of what —— Hailey is looking at, he’s looking at the fact there are a lot of different activities that certain people can experience flow in more readily than other activities. So the activity is a part of it. The skill level is a part of it, too. For example, if you’re learning to throw darts, when eight out of ten darts don’t even hit the target, it’s going to be hard to make that into a flow activity, right? But when you get to the point where eight out of ten are in the circles and the other two don’t go off the board, somebody says, “Your dinner’s ready” and you say, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be there in a minute,” you’re in the flow, you’re lovin’ it and you don’t want to quit. That’s the kind of difference.

All of these factors work together. In terms of meditation, if you remember that the expectations that you created are going to have a big impact on whether it’s a flow experience or not, you can learn to make the meditation into a flow experience. That’s the point here. OK? This little synopsis is not quite as complete as the whole book.

“What makes the flow experience enjoyable is the sense of successfully exercising control, which is not the same as being in control.” Once again, you have to read the book to see what the distinction is that he’s making there. If you have a need to be in control, that’s actually more the mindset where anything that happens that you’re not able to control is going to keep you from entering flow. Exercising control is an important part. “During the flow experience, a person becomes so involved in what they’re doing that the activity becomes spontaneous, almost automatic, and they cease to be aware of themselves as separate from what they’re doing.” When you’ve had a really good meditation, isn’t that what happens? It starts to flow, it starts to be automatic. You’re right there, you’re on top of it, moment by moment by moment. No matter what kind of practice you’re doing. If you’re doing an insight practice, it’s like you’re just hitting on every little—and it just feels so good. It becomes automatic.

“A complete focus on attention is required, allowing only a very select range of information into awareness, leaving no room in the mind for anything else. All troubling or irrelevant thoughts are kept in abeyance.” What’s important about this is that in your meditation practice, one of the most important things you’re trying to achieve is a unification of your mind. The reason that you experience life the way you do is because different parts of your mind are trying to go in different directions at all times. When you

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sit down to meditate, you find there are different parts of your mind that are not with that agenda at all. They have other things they want to think about, other things they’d rather be doing. Unification of mind. Whenever you forget your problems, your concerns, and you become totally focused on one thing, joy arises, happiness arises. It becomes a very pleasant, satisfying state. Simply because you’re no longer being plagued by all of these other heady concerns, worries, so on and so forth.

Finally, “the flow experience appears to be effortless yet requires the application of skilled performance. While concentration lasts, everything happens seamless, as if by magic.” Once again, remember he’s talking about ordinary, everyday activities that people experience as optimal experience. We’re talking about meditation. Do you see that what he has discovered in his research is very helpful to us in meditation in understanding what it is that we’ve been doing and been trying to do all this time.

The Buddha knew this. That’s why, when the Buddha said what I call jhana is characterized by these factors—unification of mind, joy, pleasure or happiness and/or equanimity. In some of the jhanas we’ll see that the joy passes away but there is equanimity.

So this is the second of all the different kinds of mental absoprtions. Jhanas are wholesome absorptions that involve the jhana factors of unification of mind, joy, happiness and pleasure and/or equanimity. Right? You remember that? OK.

A third way, which we’ve already alluded to, that mental absorptions differ from each other is some—the ones that —– Hailey studied—happen in daily life out there in the world. The ones that we’re talking about happen in meditation. Buddha restricted his use of the word jhana to the ones that happen in meditation. Of course, because that’s what jhana means is meditation.

I’ll sum this up for you by saying that when we look at the sutras, any meditative state that involves an absorption that is wholesome and involves joy, happiness, pleasure and equanimity is a jhana, according to what the Buddha taught. So you have all probably experienced states, for short periods of time at one time or another, that would definitely have been called jhanas.

There’s one more way that mental absorptions can differ from one another and that is the depth of the absorption. How completely absorbed we are in whatever it is we’re absorbed in. We can sort of absorbed, enough to feel joyful and happy and really enjoying what we’re doing, but still we’re aware of other things and still having other thoughts. There can be greater depths of absorption. I know all of you have been so absorbed in something at one time or another that somebody’s had to call your name three or four times, and you didn’t hear it. Or you’ve become completely oblivious of things going on around you. So, you all know there are many different depths of

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absorption. When I was talking about depths earlier, this is what I mean by depth—how completely focused you are on whatever it is that you’re preoccupied with. That’s the depth. The debate that came up that I referred to earlier between commentarial jhanas and sutra jhanas is one of depth. The commentaries and the people that follow that view would say that the only real jhanas are the ones that are at such a depth that if somebody comes up and claps their hands next to you, you’re not going to hear it. Or if they put a hand on your shoulder, you’re not going to feel it. Adjan Brahm defines jhanas in this way. He tells a story that supposedly one of his students was in jhana and his wife thought he’d had a heart attack, called an ambulance, he was taken to the emergency room, they put the defibrillator on him and things like that, then he came out of jhana and said, “What am I doing here?” It could be a bit hyperbolic, I don’t know. (Laughter) But there are those people who will say that’s the only real jhana. You have to be that deep. And that’s the kind of jhana that I first learned to do. It’s the kind of jhana where you’re sitting there in jhana, and you’re pretty much oblivious to everything. There is a part of your mind that still knows what goes on. I can tell you because I was practicing jhana and there was a car crash on the street in front of where I live, a little narrow street in Vancouver. There was a car crash, and after I came out of the meditation, someone I was living with said, “Did you hear that car crash?” I hadn’t, but when they said it, I remembered that yes, that had happened. But if they’d not mentioned it, I would never have known. There was still an imprint in my mind. If they’d waited half an hour, I wouldn’t have remembered it at all.

What’s happening in these absorptions is the same thing that you’ve already experienced and are familiar with. You become so completely preoccupied that a lot of stuff just doesn’t come through. But there are all kinds of different levels. Anyway, I already covered this aspect earlier: Is jhana dependent upon a particular depth or level of concentration, preoccupation, absorption? It’s not. Not if we examine the sutras carefully. If you do that, you’ll see that there are cases where the Buddha is speaking about somebody’s absorption and they’re in the first jhana and he refers to sound as being the enemy of the jhana. Obviously this is a person who can still hear sounds. If somebody makes a noise, it will disturb him from the jhana. But there are other descriptions that make it clear that the person that he’s speaking about has entered a much deeper state where they are much more totally oblivious.

The most exaggerated story that I know of from the sutras themselves has to do with somebody—Udakaramaputra was once in a jhana so deep that a herd of elephants ran by and he didn’t even notice. So the Buddha responded with, “I’ve been in jhanas so deep that lightning struck the building and it burned down around me and I didn’t know it.” There are these references in there to different depths.

That’s what the jhana is—an absorption, a mental absorption in meditation, that involves unification of mind, which we’ve talked about but not all of you have been here for those

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discussions about what unification of mind is. Let me just explain that a little bit. There’s a word Samadhi, which is usually translated into English as concentration. If you want to enter a jhana, you have to have a certain degree of concentration or Samadhi. But if we look at the real meaning of the word Samadhi, it comes from sam-a-da, which means to collect or bring together. So Samadhi, which we translate as concentration, is a very reasonable translation but it gives a little depth of understanding if we realize that the actual root etymology refers to the collecting together, the bringing together, of the mind. When you practice Samadhi, at some point you will achieve what’s called ekagatha. Ekagatha is another one of those words that has sadly been misunderstood and mistranslated. The complete term—the way you’ll find it most often used—is cittas ekagatha. Cittas means mind, eka means one, or unity. Gatha means gone. So cittas ekagatha means—unquestionably it means—a mind that has gone to unity. A unified mind. Often this word is translated as single-pointedness, which is not what it means in Pali. But it’s a very commonly used technique to achieve ekagatha—unification of mind—is to practice single-pointed concentration, where you put your mind on one thing unwaveringly for as long as possible. But there is this confusion. Ekagatha is unification of mind; it’s not single-pointedness. Single-pointedness is a way of getting to ekagatha.

Unification of mind, in my own personal experience—I didn’t get this from books  or anything like that—and in many of yours too, what you’ll see is you’re meditating, your concentration is pretty good, you don’t lose the meditation object, your attention is pretty firmly fixed on it, but there are these other thoughts that keep coming in, and background noises. Every now and then, one of them will stand out, or some sensation in your body or things like that. If the quality of your practice improves just a little bit, what you’ll find is those thoughts fade away and disappear. The tendency of an outside sound or sensation to be able to intrude like that disappears. I’ve experienced that and you’ve experienced that, and I’ve examined that. This is what mindfulness is. Mindfulness is you examine the ordinary things that you experience. You just keep looking at them until one day, ah! That’s what happens. One day I realized that there are parts of my mind that were thinking about this other stuff and they were doing it the whole time. When they finally stopped, no more distraction. There were parts of my mind that thought whatever that sound was, was important or the ache in my ankle was important. When I got to the point where those parts of my mind weren’t trying to say, “Hey, you need to attend to this other thing, enough of this,” and my mind became unified, meditation became very easy. As a matter of fact, it’s a classical stage in the development of samatha. It’s called effortless concentration. It’s amazing when it happens. You’re get to the point where you don’t even have to try anymore. It’s because all the different parts of your mind are on the same task at the same time, so there isn’t this struggle of “no, not that; no, not that either.”

That’s unification of mind. And that’s what Samadhi is about. Samadhi is collecting together all of these different parts of your mind and getting them on the same task.

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Single-pointed practice is a way of bringing that about. Once it’s brought about, once your mind is unified, you don’t need to focus on one thing anymore. You don’t. It’s totally unnecessary. As a matter of fact, there are very powerful meditation methods that are based not on focusing on one thing but on open awareness. You have to achieve that level of unification of mind in order to practice those methods effectively. So, that’s ekagatha. That’s what we’re after, is the unification of mind.

In order to experience the jhanas this weekend, to experience the jhana for thirty seconds, you only need to have thirty seconds’ worth of unification of mind. Some thought may come along and bump you out of it or some sensation or something else. But for that period of time, you’ll have a taste of jhana and you’ll know what it is. Not only a taste of jhana but a taste of unification of mind that leads to jhana.

I’ll tell you something else about unification of mind and the fact that you don’t need single-pointed attention. Let’s talk about mindfulness again. Mindfulness involves attention and awareness—two different things. You need to have both of them to be truly mindful. What’s most important in terms of developing mindfulness is developing that awareness aspect. What we’re all really good at is focusing attention. We’re so good at it, that this is where we lose our mindfulness. We get caught up in something and everything else is lost. So there’s attention and awareness. Mindfulness involves both, but the difference between mindfulness and the way our minds ordinarily work has more to do with the consciousness that’s in that realm of awareness.

In the deep jhanas—I’m getting ahead of things that I was going to tell you about tomorrow, but I’ll go ahead and tell you tonight—in the first jhana, the jhana factors that are there are directed and sustained attention, joy, pleasure and happiness. In the second jhana, directed and sustained attention are not present. They have been relinquished. If you look at the description of these two jhanas in the Pali and in the English translation of the Pali, it says that the second jhana is characterized by unification of mind without directed and sustained attention. We use directed and sustained attention, that focused aspect of consciousness, to enter the first jhana. But if the mind is truly unified, we can let go of that. We don’t a meditation object. The second jhana is just pure awareness. The second jhana is characterized by unification without vidaka and vichara (?), without directed and sustained attention but accompanied by joy, pleasure and happiness. You have the experience of joy, pleasure and happiness—you’re aware of joy, pleasure and happiness—but you’re not focused on any one thing. You’re not attending. There is no directed and sustained attention.

In the deep jhanas, all of the higher levels of jhana—second, third, fourth and all the formless jhanas—do not involve attention to an object. What they do involve is awareness. That’s where the mindfulness comes in—that awareness in these jhanas is the mindfulness.

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Student: If mindfulness is there, and at the same time you’re so absorbed that you can’t hear a sound outside of you, what kind of mindfulness is that?

Culadasa: That is a very good question. To understand mindfulness, you must—I’m sure you’ve already done this; I know some of the people you practice with—do a walking meditation with the instruction to try to be aware of everything in the moment. Have you done that practice? And it’s absolutely impossible. With the greatest degree of awareness that you can cultivate and bring into presence, you’re only going to be aware of a relatively small subset of everything that makes up the present. This is a really important thing to realize. When the Buddha discussed mindfulness, or discussed sati, which we translate as mindfulness, he made it really clear that for mindfulness to truly be valuable, it needs to be combined with sampajana (?), which we translate as clear comprehension. Sati sampajana. The translation of clear comprehension totally loses the essence of the meaning, because the way it’s explained, sampajana is knowing what is happening, why it’s happening, what its causes are and what its purpose is, and whether it’s appropriate or not. Introspective awareness is what I can this, because if you learn to watch your own mind, you start out learning to watch your own mind so that you’ll know if your mind’s wandering, you’ll know, if you’re slipping into dullness. You develop a habit of watching your own mind. That becomes sampajana, because sati sampajana is where you know what’s going on in your mind, you know what its causes and purposes are, and you also know—not analytically, not by thinking about it and saying “that’s not really what I want to be doing”—you know in an immediate way, this is not what my mind… You know, if you practice mindfulness regularly, you’ll experience sati sampajana when you’re the middle of a situation and you think it should go this way but it’s going that way and then in a moment, you mind will say, “OK. I don’t need to resist this.” That sampajana. You know what’s happening, you know why it’s happening—I got attached to this outcome—and you know that isn’t appropriate. You know immediately without analyzing it. If I stay attached to it, I’m just going to be unhappy. So then you let go of it. That’s an experience of sati sampajana in daily life. Sati sampajana is knowing what’s going on in your mind, why it’s going on and whether it’s appropriate or not.

This is what you have throughout the jhanas, when you’re not paying attention. I don’t know if I’ve lost track of the original question. What was the original question?

Student: I was just saying that you talked about being so absorbed in the jhanas that you didn’t hear something that was right—you heard on the street but it really wasn’t part of you mind. My question had to do with mindfulness, which, to me, mindfulness brings up the idea that you are aware of everything around you and how you’re responding inside.

Culadasa: OK. It’s impossible to be aware of everything, and what it’s most important to be aware of—this is what I was getting at—what the Buddha said is most important to be aware of is what’s going on inside. You can’t be aware of everything, so since you can’t

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be aware of everything, be aware of what’s most important. What’s most important is what’s going on in your mind. An illustration of the difference between sati that is directed outward versus sati that’s directed [audiofile ends abruptly here]

Session 2

Culadasa: Subjective. OK, so that all of your interpretation has to do with you. How does what you’re paying attention to impact on you? What can you do with it, or what should you do, or so forth?

The other mode in which you can pay attention to something is very objective, where there’s still the subject/object duality but it polarizes and the knower becomes very separate from the known. This is still attention. So whenever there’s attention, there’s very much this subject/object duality that’s a part of it. Whether everything is being interpreted very subjectively or whether the mind is making the separation and it’s becoming very objective, there is no mistaking. You think about it, when you pay attention to something, you’re conscious of something. Who’s conscious? I, whoever that is. Me. There is this knower. I know that thing. So I’m either entangling myself with it, because I’m concerned about what its implications are for my future well-being and happiness, etc., or else I’m objectifying it and creating this separation. There’s always that duality.

Let’s turn to the other mode of knowing—awareness. The distributed knowing. Most of the time—not always, but most of the time—even when you’re paying attention to something, there is simultaneously an awareness of the context, an awareness of your body, some degree or another of awareness of your mind, mental state, mood, so forth, awareness of other things, processes, activities going on around you, awareness of where you are. Right now, there’s an awareness of how you came to be here, right? There’s an awareness of why you’re here. There’s a lot of background present in this awareness, which gives whatever you’re paying attention to its context. If you examine that way of knowing, what you’ll notice is there is much much less processing taking place. As a matter of fact, this background creates a context for your present experience and it seems to be experienced as a whole, as a package, all at once. You know what I mean? It’s not broken down into parts. If you can study it a bit, what you’ll realize is there’s more of an awareness of how everything relates to everything else. It’s the relationships, the relationships of things to each other and the relationship of things to the whole that is more prominent in awareness, rather than focusing on any individual thing, as happens with attention,

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Normally we will be attending to something, there will be a certain amount of focusing consciousness on something in a moment, while simultaneously there’s this background contextual awareness, this other way of knowing. This awareness has a function. It alerts attention to something that is unusual or important or seems to require more attention. So thinks pop out of awareness and attention goes to them. As soon as attention goes to something that has popped out, it gets processed in this way I discussed, and evaluated. This may lead to it immediately being let go of, or it may lead to a continuation of the focus of attention on it. Then there are times when whatever attention has been focused on, doesn’t seem so important anymore. It’s as though attention spontaneously begins to browse the field of awareness to see if there’s something else out there that’s more interesting and useful to pay attention to.

Mindfulness is when both of these functions are working the way they should. Mindfulness fails us if our attention becomes too focuses and we lose awareness, and whatever we’re focused on no longer has context. Not only that, things may come up that should be attended to, but they’re not. Or there may be things that are more important, more deserving of attention that don’t come to be known so they don’t come to be attended to. When you become overly focused on something, awareness just sort of shrinks and fades. Whatever you focus on loses context. Of course, if it has a lot of emotions involved in it, this can become one of those unwholesome kinds of absorptions that we were talking about last night. That’s exactly what happens when you start becoming too focused on the pain in your ankle and you lose awareness of the pleasantness in the rest of your body or the calm that was is your mind before you started worrying about whether this pain is your ankle is going to become so bad in ten minutes that you can’t stand it. You lose the options, you lose the discrimination, you lose the discernment that allows you to use attention most effectively, when you become overly focused. Attention plays an important role. It allows you to know and evaluate and understand something more intensely. When you get sucked too strongly into focused attention, you lose awareness, you lose contact, you lose perspective.

This is something that we all experience all the time. It’s what happens in meditation when you become overly focused on one thing and you forget that you’re meditating. Then, your attention will move from that to something else. Then your attention will move from the second thing to the third thing. But you’ve lost the context. You forgot what you were doing. When you’re meditating, it’s awareness of what you’re doing that you lose when you forget. To succeed in meditating, you have to have mindfulness in the sense that there is both focused attention in balance with awareness.

What you rely on in meditation is this awareness to alert you to when you’re not doing what you intended to do. When something’s happening in your mind. When I say “you’re not doing” isn’t very good terminology because a lot of what’s happening in your mind, there’s no intention or doing; there’s no self behind it. It’s happening. When your mind

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goes to something else, it’s something that happened. You didn’t do it. The “you” that is a doer is pretty much limited to that intention to meditate, and when it comes back into the present, then, at that point, there becomes the possibility of the doing in the sense of letting go of the distraction and coming back to the meditation object. So awareness lets you know what is happening in the mind so that you can do whatever is appropriate. When we talk about mindfulness, as we were last night, the most important aspect of mindfulness for us to cultivate is the awareness of what is actually happening in our mind. Sati sampajanna. The introspective awareness. This is most important in all of the times in our lives, not just when we’re meditating. If we become too focused, then we’ll lose the ability to do what it is that we intended to do, because we lose the awareness and then we don’t know when the situation has changed. I the knower don’t realize when what’s happening in my mind is something different than what I originally intended. That’s the distinction. It’s not that I don’t know what I am doing, because if I was doing it, I would probably know it. It’s happening, and because I wasn’t aware of what was happening, I have no ability to respond to it appropriately.

Let me hear a little bit from you about this. This make sense to you? Any questions?

Student: I’m probably getting way ahead but often I’m able to stay in this pleasant state until something or someone else startles me out of it. Someone stomps by and says, “oh that copier.” As you pay more attention about what’s going on inside yourself, that becomes almost an assault. You notice it. And then you get chain-reacted into “Oh, that distracted me. Oh, now I’m really distracted. Look at where I’m going now.” Whatever you were doing at your desk, that’s gone. Thanks. Then of course you can chain that together as many ways as you want. OK. We’ve kind of caught on to returning to the state of cultivating “this is pleasant.” The world isn’t going to stop assaulting you with “oh that copier” or whatever the heck it is today. How do you deal with that? How do you deal with, “It’s someone else’s fault taking me out of my nice space?”

Culadasa: OK. Thank you. That brings up something that I wanted to get to. When the attention becomes focused, we lose awareness and then very often what happens is attention moves. There’s a difference between awareness of the context of what’s going on and where attention is going “there” and “there” and “there” and “there.” All of these little pieces can create an illusion of awareness, but it’s not awareness. Attention moving from one thing to another can fill the mind, and there’s no awareness present. What you need in the situation that you described is to train your mind not to completely lose awareness. When you see the context, instead of your mind getting caught in that chain—you get assaulted by the world, as you put it—if you look at what’s happening, attention is moving but awareness is gone. Where awareness should be are all these isolated pieces picked up by rapidly moving attention. These fleeting impressions that aren’t real in the sense that if you had awareness, you’d say, “Oh, why am I getting so disturbed by this?” You’d let go of that and go back into that nice place. Isn’t that what sometimes happens?

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Isn’t that what you sometimes feel has been the benefit of your mindfulness practice—those occasions when exactly that happens? Awareness does come up and awareness puts the whole thing in perspective, the context returns. When context returns, then it’s easy to say, “I don’t need to do this. Let me just back to being and I’ll deal with the copier. It’s not a big deal.” So that illustrates the difference.

We lose awareness when we become too focused. Awareness can’t come back if that intentional activity is just jumping from one thing to another. It will create the illusion that you still know what’s going on. But you don’t, really. You don’t. The part of your mind that sees it in the way that allows you to have context has been deprived of the illumination and consciousness. It’s not contributing to your experience. It’s just the illusion. Does that make sense to you?

This is important because this term mindfulness is a very unfortunate translation of sati and sampajana. In English, if you look at all the ways that the word is used, its major connotation is paying attention. That is not the essence of mindfulness. Attention is a part of mindfulness but it’s not even the part of mindfulness that is our greatest problem. The part of mindfulness that we need is to not lose awareness. We need to strengthen awareness. And we need to maintain a balance between attention and awareness. So when we use the word mindfulness and we think “attention”—mindfulness means remembering to pay attention, I’ve got to remember to pay attention. One of the things we do when we practice mindfulness…you go to a retreat and they say, when you eat, taking the spoonful of soup—that’s all focused attention, right? Bringing the soup to my mouth, tasting it, swallowing it, everything else like that—you’re really not practicing mindfulness when you do that. You’re practicing focused attention. You’re practicing concentration. And that’s good, because most of us, the problem with our attention is it’s going all over the place. If we weren’t doing that, we would be eating and not even paying attention to it, we’d be thinking about something else—you know, I wish that person didn’t wear that cologne, all this other kind of stuff would be going through your mind, from one thing to another. But that’s all attention—uncontrolled, unrestrained attention, constantly moving attention.

Mindfulness isn’t constantly moving attention. Mindfulness isn’t attention darting about from one thing to another, trying to hit on everything and then starting the cycle all over. That’s not mindfulness. Mindfulness is placing attention somewhere, not having all of your consciousness sucked in to that focus of attention so that you’re attending but at the same time, it’s within this larger contextual awareness. Having more distributed consciousness that makes sense of everything. That’s when you’re really practicing mindfulness.

In all of these different ways that we practice meditating, they’re all encouraging the development of mindfulness in different ways. Also, there’s the focusing, the attention

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element as well. The only way you’re able to do any of these practices is to develop enough awareness—introspective awareness, in particular—to know what’s going on in the moment. Until you do that, your practice is this interrupted series of a few minutes of noting, thinking or feeling, or whatever. It’s very short periods of following the breath interspersed with these long periods of attention going all over the place, and there’s no awareness. When you get good at it, it’s because you’ve developed enough awareness that you know immediately when what’s happening in your mind starts to be different than what you intended, and you bring it back to doing that, to doing what it’s supposed to do.

Student: It seems like it always comes back, for me, to having this really deep internal peace of understand reality really, because otherwise the attention does dart all over the place. I think what was coming up for me was thinking I grew up in a really chaotic environment and so I learned to be constantly aware of everything. I thought, looking back, when I was a young adult looking back at my childhood, I thought I was aware of a lot of things at once. I had to be aware of everybody’s emotional state, what might fall apart, what might happen, who might do what, everything at the same time. Now, looking at it, maybe it was attention darting all over the place, but it’s one thing to be aware of everything that’s happening around you and be constantly able to have a sense of everything, or what you think is everything, at once than what’s happening in your mind, the awareness of what’s happening. We’ve been talking about that it’s more important to be mindful of what’s happening in your mind than everything around you, and yet you kind of have to have both. So I always come back to, since we live in such a chaotic society and world right now, it just always comes back, to me, to finding that peace of understanding reality. But then you have to meditate to get that. I keep coming back to “I have to meditate more, I have to meditate more.” For me, it’s wanting to reach more than a split second of that understanding. I feel like I see glimpses of it and I feel it, but I can’t hold onto it. But the glimpse of it is enough for me to want to have it all the time, so that it’s with me all the time in the chaos. That, to me, to be able to have that internal peace, to have the awareness. I really like your metaphor of the light, the focused light and the spotlight versus the floodlight. To me awareness is not really like fractioning attention but it’s kind of like relaxing it. To have that, you have to have that peace, and to have that peace, you have to understand reality. You can’t have that until you relax. It’s like a difficult thing to do in our society that’s so chaotic. And you’re expected to be so good at concentrating and focusing on your task. To be good at your job, you have to be so focused and so, “OK, I can do this.” But there’s all this chaos, all this chaos. We’re all ADD and all the kids have to take Ritalin. It’s a hard world to get that peace. So it’s nice to be able to retreat, but how do you really meditate every day? I guess I’m talking to myself. (Laughter)

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Culadasa: There are a couple of important points that you brought up for us. One of them, earlier on, is that it’s important to be aware of what’s out there but it’s also important to be aware of what’s in the mind, and vice versa.

To just leap ahead here, at some point, you realize they’re both the same thing. The only way that you can really be aware of what’s out there in an effective way is to be aware of what’s going on in your mind.

Student: With perspective, so that you don’t get sucked in.

Culadasa: Yeah. And that’s where what I’m called awareness is much more fundamental than attention. It’s much more powerful and it has more unconscious roots. There is unconscious awareness or subconscious awareness, and then there is what I’ve been talking about, which is conscious awareness. That’s the small part of awareness that does register in our consciousness. Superimposed on all of that is this little spotlight of attention. The awareness that I’ve been talking about is rooted in a lot of subconscious and unconscious mental processing. To be aware of what’s going on in your mind is to be conscious of a good chunk of awareness. And that has already been pre-sorted. These deeper, unconscious and subconscious processes have already sorted it out so that the “out there” that you experience “in here.” In other words, what’s going on out there that, if you are aware of in your mind, has already been sorted to include what’s most important.

The other thing that you mentioned is the relaxation. The peace. This is something that when we talk about awareness versus attention, think about those times when you’re really relaxed and at peace. Nothing is bothering you. Sometimes this happens after you’ve finished some major project. There are different causes for it. But you know what I mean? You’re not really paying attention to anything in particular and it feels like your mind just kind of opens up and you’re just there with everything. You’re sitting on the porch looking at the mountains or whatever it is, walking through the woods and breathing the air. That’s in that place of awareness without this focused attention. It is a very relaxed and peaceful state. The greater degree that you bring awareness into balance with your focused attention, that’s going to be part of the background and context of the way you deal with things. Subconscious awareness is already prefiltered, so that what’s in conscious awareness is what is most likely to be significant or important to you. Then, if you can pay attention to whatever in there is most important, without losing awareness, then it’s pretty sure that whatever you focus your attention on will be what’s most important. Conscious awareness gives you this larger picture, this context. If you’re focusing on something that isn’t important, like being upset about the photocopier, awareness allows you to be aware of the fact that this is creating an unpleasant mental state. It’s not helping anything. It’s not solving any problems. You can let go of that and shift your attention to something else that may solve the problem, rather than being

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caught up in the negative aspects of the problem and the bad feelings about the problem and so on and so forth. You experience more peacefulness.

Bring this back down to meditation. Developing awareness and actually coming into a state of flow, which will allow you to enter jhanas. You’re meditating and you’re cultivating this introspective awareness of what’s going on in your mind and you are doing the simple task of meditating. Your attention is focused on one thing—and this is really important. If your attention is moving around, it’s really hard to experience awareness when attention is moving. When attention is still, then you can experience awareness. I find a visual example of this is very very good. You can right now focus on one particular thing—for example, you could focus on my teacup, hold your eyes there, and allow yourself to become aware of everything else around here. You can hold a large visual awareness while your eyes are still. That’s very much like when you stabilize attention, then you can experience that larger contextual awareness as the background to it. It’s much harder to do that when your eyes are moving. It’s much easier to miss something important if your eyes are darting around from one thing to another.

As a matter of fact, have you ever dropped something on the floor and you’re looking and looking and looking, your eyes are darting from one focal point to another and you can’t find it. Then you sort of back up and you just, “Oh, there it is!” Ever had that experience? Your mind works exactly the same way. In a way it’s amazing how similar our visual system is to our cognitive system. I think it’s the intuitive awareness of that which explains why we use the phrase, “Oh, I see” to mean we understand. Or we’re “watching” the breath. We’re not watching the breath. We’re observing the breath. You’re knowing the breath, you’re experiencing the breath. There are a lot of great similarities between what happens visually and what happens in the cognitive systems of the mind. This is a really good illustration of it. In order to develop awareness is just like developing peripheral vision. To do it effectively, you need to gain some control over the movement of the eyes, and likewise you need to gain some control over the movement of attention. Which doesn’t mean that attention can’t move, because it can. You need to stop attention from moving until you can come to this place of being able to sustain this larger awareness. Especially this introspective awareness of what’s happening in the mind itself.

If we at it sequentially, the development of samatha and then practice of the jhanas, that’s what it’s doing. We start out, we sit down, and the first thing we try to do is to steady our attention, to stabilize our attention. We really can’t do anything else until we’ve done that. When we first sit down, what happens—we may not recognize it immediately but we do after we’ve meditated a little while—is that we have a meditation object and that’s what we want to pay attention to. Anything else that’s present is a potential distraction, right? The world is divided up into two categories—meditation object and distractions. What will happen is that the attention will shift away from the meditation object to one of those distractions. When that happens, it’s called gross distraction. We may not have

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forgotten the meditation object yet. If we stay on that gross distraction for very long, we will forget. And once we forget, then the attention is free to move from one thing to another and we have mind-wandering. The sequence of what happens is we place our attention on something, gross distraction occurs followed by forgetting followed by mind-wandering. This is followed by remembering and bringing the attention back.

In the development of samatha, we work through this process from the other direction. First, we say, “Let’s try to deal with mind-wandering.” The first state is developing a practice and the second stage is really working to overcome mind-wandering so the periods of mind-wandering become short. In the third stage, we work on forgetting. You overcome forgetting. Then in the fourth stage, you never lose awareness of the meditation object but other things displace it. You have gross distraction. So you’re aware of two things at once. In the fourth stage, you work on overcoming gross distraction. Once you get through the fourth stage, now you have some attentional stability. There’s still a lot of other stuff in your mind but it stays in the background and you’re aware of it in the background. But your attention can stay focused on your meditation object. In the process of doing this, how you got here was by developing awareness, exercising awareness, practicing awareness, because you have to be aware when your mind is moving away from the meditation object so that you can bring it back. Until you start becoming aware of things like that, until you’ve gotten to the place of being aware of what’s happening in your mind, there’s nothing you can do to correct for it. Whenever that awareness is present, then you can do something. Then you can have that victory, and you bring it back. As your awareness develops, this becomes easier and easier to do. It becomes a more and more continuous process.

The other main obstacle that we experience of the mind is slipping into dullness, especially when we are no longer paying attention to all the stuff that would ordinarily stimulate the mind. The most fascinating meditation object in the world will become stale after a little while. It’s really hard to retain its fascination after you’ve spent so many hundreds of hours looking at it. When you carefully observed your first two hundred thousand breaths, it holds very few surprises anymore. So there’s a tendency to slip into dullness. So in the fifth stage, you work on overcoming dullness.

When you come to the sixth stage, you have stability of attention and you’ve trained your mind not to slip into dullness. That’s the first point at which we can begin practicing jhanas, at the sixth stage of the ten stages of samatha.

If we look at the jhanas themselves, what are these jhanas anyway? We keep saying it in plural. They are basically four of them. Often you’ll see that there are eight, but it turns out that the latter four are really variations on the fourth. So there are basically four jhanas. They’re called the Four Form Jhanas. They’ve been defined in terms of particular attributes that are called the Jhana Factors.

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The first jhana is an absorption in which there is directed and sustained attention while there is awareness of the mental state of joy and feelings of pleasure and happiness. Piti. Piti is the mental state of joy. Sukha are feelings of pleasure—bodily pleasure—and mental happiness. Directed and sustained attention. Vitakka and vicara. So there are these four jhana factors that are definitive of the first meditative absorption.

Does everybody have a hand-out? Anybody that doesn’t? Let’s get hand-outs for those that don’t.

Student: I just want to regurgitate, so that I think I got it. In the literature, they use the word mindfulness. At least the Western interpretations of what [inaudible], so mindfulness, you said is perhaps more correctly or at least in a more Eastern form a little better interpreted as awareness—awareness of what’s there, as opposed to focused attention, which, if I’m sitting here focusing on my breath or in mindful eating or mindful walking, that’s practicing focusing my attention. It’s not on what’s there. In fact, overall, we need both of those.

Culadasa: That’s right. We need both of those. You started out saying that the Eastern interpretation of mindfulness is that it was awareness. What it is—it’s both of those. Sati is both of those. It’s attention and awareness in balance, working together optimally. The problem with the translation of mindfulness is that it’s connotation in English—if you looked at some of the bigger dictionaries where they give you lots of examples of how a word is used, you’ll see most of the ways that mindfulness is used refer to attention. Which is what makes it an unfortunate choice, because most of us, growing up speaking English, we’re going to immediately gravitate towards that particular implication of the word mindfulness. That’s unfortunate, because in terms of sati, which is the optimal balance of the two, that’s not the one that we’re most lacking in. We’re most lacking in keeping that in balance with the awareness.

This is recognized. The word mindfulness was brought in by scholars of the British raj who went to India and to Southeast Asia and to the colonies and studied these philosophies and religions. They introduced the word mindfulness. We’re kinda stuck with it. If you look at the scholars of today who work with mindfulness and their definition, they clearly recognize that awareness is an important part of it. This is not something that you hear in meditation classes, right? But if you look at John Cabot Zinn’s writings directed towards other professionals, you find he speaks of the importance of awareness. If you look at the Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness and how the term mindfulness is discussed there, there’s no question that they understand the importance of awareness. That is being understood, but right now, it’s not being understood at the level of most meditation classes. That’s important for us to realize.

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Everybody’s got a hand-out now, so you can follow along a little more closely. OK. The first of the meditative absorptions called jhanas is characterized by directed and sustained attention accompanied by awareness of the mental state of joy and the feelings of pleasure and happiness. In other words, this is stabilized attention plus introspective awareness, right? Well, why didn’t they just say so? (Laughter) At the sixth stage, you have enough stability of attention and enough introspective awareness—because you have to develop the introspective awareness in stages 2 , 3 , 4 and 5, to get to the sixth stage—that you can enter the first jhana. You can enter A first jhana. A lite form of the first jhana. It’s lite because your mind isn’t really unified yet. Rather than spontaneously arising meditative joy that just kind of floods your body and mind, you’ve had to cultivate it in the way I’ve been discussing. You have to make yourself notice what’s good and pleasant when you’re not meditating and then you sit down to meditate and you notice how good it feels to sit here and how nice it is when the mind is peaceful and how good it makes you feel when you’re able to just do the practice and breath after breath after breath I just follow it and stay with it. So you cultivate those things. Then you have enough to enter a jhana from the first stage. But it’s fairly lite because the mind’s not strongly unified, joy isn’t really strongly developed. As a matter of fact, if you enter—this is what I call the ultralite jhana—if you enter jhana with the six-stages access, even in the first jhana, there will still be thoughts taking place. Thoughts like, “Oh, this is what they’re talking about.” You can’t think too much, or it will bump you out of the jhana, but you’ll have thoughts. They will be there. Maybe not so verbal thoughts, but that kind of processing takes place. But you’ll recognize that you’ve entered into a different mental state. What’s different about this mental state is that your directed and sustained attention has caused a really strong coalition of all the different mental processes, so now, there is this unification of mind. That’s the one jhana factor that’s present in all of the jhanas. In most of the descriptions of the jhanas, it’s not typically mentioned because it’s always there. Unification of mind. You use the directed and sustained attention to bring about a sufficient degree of unification of mind to experience this mental state. It is a mental state where the mind is now settled, focused and functioning coherently. You’ll recognize this. It’s like, “Wow, OK.”

And you’ll recognize that you’ve had this experience before. I’ve had this experience when doing my favorite hobby and I’m just totally into it, everything else disappears, I don’t think about anything else, I don’t worry about anything. In other words, the flow experience that Csikszentmihalyi talks about. So, you recognize it as “Ah, this is a state of mind that my mind’s always been capable of and every now and then I’ve been lucky enough to enter into when I do certain kinds of things.” What’s different about it is that through meditation you’ve entered into it by doing nothing other than training your mind. It’s not dependent upon some particular activity. The study I mentioned earlier—people are most fully present and most in a flow state when they’re having sex. This means you can enter an absorption through mental training that isn’t dependent on external activity.

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It’s not like sex or other things like this. It’s completely internally generated. The important thing about it is that you can learn to do it at any time. At first, you work your way up to it, you enter the jhana and you manage to be in this state of flow in meditation for a short period of time and then you pop out. Then you have to get all the conditions right again so that you can go back into to. It’s different in that you’re not dependent on some set of external circumstances. It’s all internally generated, and it’s just the beginning of what the possibilities are.

To enter into the first jhana of the ultralite type—that’s what we’re going to try to do first—the way this is done is that your directed and sustained attention must have an object that requires so much of your conscious bandwidth that it lends itself to absorption and to everything else disappearing from your mind. The way we do that is really simple. If you’ve been meditating using the sensations of your breath, when you get to the fifth and sixth stages, you will be introduced to a practice that’s called “Experiencing the Whole Body with The Breath.” In the sutras where the Buddha discusses meditation, what you’ll find over and over again is the sequence of “gone to the forest to the root of a tree to an empty hut, he sits down, crosses his legs, his back straight, places his mindfulness before him and mindfully he breathes in, mindfully he breathes out.” When he breathes in a long breath, he knows he breathes in a long breath. When he breathes out a long breath, he knows he breathes out a long breath. When he breathes in a short breath, he knows it. When he breathes out a short breath, he knows it. Then come the lines, “Experiencing the whole body, he breathes in. Experiencing the whole body, he breathes out. Thus he trains himself.” This is the practice of experiencing the whole body with the breath. This is what you can do. If you experience the whole body with the breath, it takes all of your conscious capacity. There’s no room anymore left for other thoughts and sensations and worries about this and that. It lends itself to the degree of focus, of directed and sustained attention, that allows you to enter jhana. So that’s what we’re going to try to do first. We’re going to try to get you calm, relaxed and try to let you find the place of flow with your meditation object, then expand your meditation object until it becomes so demanding that it requires you to go into a state of absorption. If you do it properly—if we manage to get all the pieces together—this will be accompanied by a feeling of joy and happiness, and there may be some interesting bodily sensations that come along with it. But it will be an experience of the first jhana.

You’re not going to go into a trance. What you’re going to have present is attention focused on the sensation of the body. But you’re going to also have introspective awareness of the mind itself. So you’re going to be aware of what of you are doing. You’re going to have meta-awareness. You’re going to have this meta-awareness—that’s where the thought is going to come from of “Oh, well, I guess I did it. This is it.” You’re going to be aware of the sensations in your body and you’re going to be aware of the joy and happiness in your mind. That’s introspective awareness. You’re going to be in a state

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of mindfulness. You’re going to have a balance of attention and awareness and you’ll be able to stay in there for a little way. Then you’ll pop out.

Student: When you say awareness of the body, of the breath in the body, that you’re expanding the sensations of the breath at the nostril, the sensation of the breath in the body. So if you’re breathing in, you may feel it some very slight subtle change in your leg or your shoulders or your neck, but it’s a direct result of the breathing in and the breathing out. Is that what you mean?

Culadasa: Yes. As a matter of fact, what we’re going to do—and we’re going to have to get to work on doing some of these meditation exercises to get there—is what you’re looking for initially, before you get to the jhana stage, is to be able to recognize sensations that change with the breath other than those that occur at the nose and the chest and the abdomen. When you breathe in and out, the air moves across the skin here and creates clearly perceptible sensations. The abdominal wall and skin stretch as the diaphragm contracts to expand the lungs, which pushes all the contents of the abdomen down. The wall of the abdomen and the skin stretch and there may be some movement associated with that stretching, where the skin contacts the clothing. Those movements are clearly there. There is the movement of the ribcage as it arises and as the muscles contract up in here, in the upper part of your chest and shoulders—all of those produce sensations. There are clearly discernible movement sensations that anybody and everybody can observe that happen here and here and here. What you’re going to do is you’re going to look for more subtle sensations that occur elsewhere in the body. There are still movement sensations that as you’re mindful awareness becomes sharper, you’ll become aware that indeed each time I inhale and exhale, there is some slight movement in my upper arm and there’s some slight movement around the area of my hips. You’ll be aware of that there are sensations that change with the breath. You’ll see that with each inhale and exhale, there are certain subtle sensations that you can detect.

As you work your way further out more distally, the sensations become subtler and, not only that, they become sensations not related necessarily to physical movement. We won’t worry about what they’re caused by, but you’ll find you’ll be able to perceive them. After you’ve practiced this for a while—I don’t know how quickly you’ll get there—if you do the practice of experiencing the whole body with the breath, you’ll get to a place where you can feel every breath in your big toe. You can feel every breath in the tip of your ear. It’s a subtle sensation, but as you become aware of it and as your mindful awareness and attentiveness both sharpen up, it will become more and more clear.

The next thing is to put it all together. Actually, just being able to detect these sensations is a challenge in itself. But eventually you want to put it all together where you can experience the whole body with the breath, so that as you inhale—and I can feel it right now, even as I’m talking to you, I can feel it right down to my toes, I can feel it in the tips

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of my fingers. I can experience the whole body with my breath even as I’m sitting here with my eyes open and looking at you. I don’t know how soon you can do that, but I hope it’s really soon. This is something that fully occupies your mind. It’s satisfying and it’s exciting. It’s very conducive to a flow experience, which becomes the first jhana. You’re aware of the sensations in your body.

At the same time, your biggest danger in this is if you become so focused on the sensations of the breath in the body that you lose this awareness that we’re talking about. A thought will come, and you won’t notice it. And the thought will move in and become so big that after a while, you’re just thinking the thought and no longer experiencing the body with the breath. You have to stay in that place of while your attention is focused on these sensations in the body, that you continue to be aware of what is happening. In other words, there needs to be this ongoing awareness that yes, I’m still aware of the sensations in the body. A thought came and then it went, but you didn’t chase after it. A sound came and it went, but the mind stayed on the sensations of the body. You know that these things happen. You know it through awareness. You know it not through attention, you know it not through focusing your attention on these things, but rather through that immediate sense that this is what’s happening, moment to moment. You have to have that. If you have that, then you’ll truly be in the jhana. You will be aware of the mental state of happiness and the feelings.

Student: When you’re talking about the whole body in the breath, or experiencing the breath in the whole body, sometimes in meditation you’ll have tension releases and things like that, tingles that are not so much the subtle mechanical movement of the breath but just from the relaxation response. Sometimes I get a flutter in a muscle back here. Is that included in…

Culadasa: That’s included in that. Those will actually become quite strong and quite pronounced. As you develop the state of meditative joy called piti, it involves a whole lot of other things besides joy, including a lot of strange sensations in the body. And they’ll become very strong. As a matter of fact, as a part of this process, as you become aware of these subtle sensations of the breath in the body, you’ll become aware of energy currents and vibratory phenomena and things like that. That is definitely a part of it.

In your approach to this, you’re not trying to discriminate “is this part of it, or not? Is this something I should be aware of or is this something I should not be aware of?” Don’t do that, at all. If you are aware of it, it’s there. That’s all. You just be aware of what is there. Don’t judge it, don’t attach to it, just let it be and let that awareness grow and increase.

Student: So in this state, are we also to stay aware of what’s happening outside of us or no?

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Culadasa: That’s a very good question. What you’re going to notice is that as you begin to try to perform an attentional task that requires so much of your consciousness capacity, you’re going to progressively cease to be aware of more and more of anything outside of that. That is the idea of it as an absorption. External sounds, feelings, things like that, will penetrate less and less often. You don’t have the capacity left over to notice those things. Instead, all of your awareness is going to have more to do with your mental state. Your attention is focused on these sensations in the body and your awareness is of your mental state. Everything else—all of your consciousness is used up, so you have none left over for these other things.

Student: That is what I find, but I thought that since last night you mentioned about practicing the jhanas with mindfulness, I was thinking that meant maintaining a greater awareness, and I’m not there. Sometimes I feel I can’t do them [inaudible].

Culadasa: No, it doesn’t. Let me explain that. Then I know some of you need to stretch and go to the washroom. Let me just explain something there. What the jhanas are doing is they are deliberately saying that the whole realm of sensation is the first thing that we’re going to let go of. In this ultralite jhana, we don’t do that in the first jhana. As a matter of fact, throughout the ultralite jhanas, there continues to be an awareness of bodily sensation, but in the ultralite jhana, we are letting go of other kinds of sensations. The eyes are closed, but even visual imagery ceases to be. The thoughts that take visual form, there’s no room for them. Sounds, things like that. In the deeper jhanas, when you enter the first jhana, there’s a complete withdrawal of the mind from the senses. The idea is that you deliberately eliminate the whole sensory aspect. The mindfulness component is entirely introspective awareness. It’s entirely mindfulness of the mind.

Also, there was a question last night about satipatthana, the four applications of mindfulness and how they relate to this. I can tie that together at this point. In these ultralite jhanas, you have awareness and attention of the body. The attention is on the body but you also have awareness of the feelings of happiness and pleasure, which is the second application of mindfulness. You have awareness of the mental state of joy and of the unification of mind, both of which are a part of the third application of mindfulness. Cittanupassana, which is mindfulness of mental states. While you’re doing this, you’re actually practicing the foundations of mindfulness.

In the higher jhanas, in order to really go deeply into the mind itself and to understand the nature of the mind itself, the first thing that you discard is sensory awareness. You just let go of that. In no case in the jhanas does mindfulness imply that you’re aware of external sounds and things like that. As a matter of fact, those are the dangers and threats to your absorptions. They’ll bump you out of it. If there’s a loud enough sound or if somebody comes and taps you on the shoulder or something like that, you come right out of the jhana.

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Student: Could you comment on how to stabilize in the first jhana, as opposed to sliding off into the other ones?

Culadasa: Sliding into other jhanas?

Student: Yeah. If we’re going to practice first, how do we stabilize?

Culadasa: Your anchor in the first jhana is directed and sustained attention. The second jhana and all of the higher jhanas do not have directed and sustained attention. If you want to stabilize in the first jhana, it requires that you continue to be aware of your meditation object. You continue to be aware of… Here are some subtle distinctions between these different levels of jhana. There are some jhana practices where you have some kind of meditation object in all of the jhanas. In the ultralite jhanas—the first ones we’re going to do—in all four of the form jhanas you still have an awareness of the sensations of the breath in the body. There’s a meditation object in all of those. The letting go of directed and sustained attention in the ultralite jhanas takes a different form. What you’re doing is you’re letting go of those sorts of thoughts that notice what’s happening. There are thoughts and discursive thinking in the ultralite jhana. If you want to stabilize yourself in the ultralite jhana and not move to the second jhana, you allow those sorts of thought-like noticings to keep occurring. If you move into any of the other higher jhanas, then it is your meditation object that’s going to keep you… You enter the light jhanas using the strong energy sensations of piti and the feeling of joy. Moving into the second jhana, you focus on the joy and happiness and you let go of the energy sensations. So if you want to stabilize yourself in the first jhana, that’s what you have to focus on and not let go of. Not allow that attention to the energy of piti to be lost. Because if it is, then you can’t stabilize there.

This is a problem that I don’t know how appropriate it is to this discussion. When I went to Leigh Brasington and learned to do these lite jhanas, for the first few days, I could go to the third jhana and the fourth jhana but I could not go to the first and second, and it took some careful instruction by him and learning to understand what was unique to these lite jhanas to be able to enter… Because, remember, I’d done the deep jhanas. The first jhana of the deep jhanas is really more like Leigh Brazington’s fourth jhana. My mind just naturally let go of those things. I don’t think most of you are going to have that problem. The stabilization of jhana that you need to do is to be able to stay in the jhana state for a longer and longer period. You don’t need to worry about slipping up to the higher jhanas too quickly.

Student: I’ve had the experience of having an expansion and contraction and pressure, feeling like my brain is pressed against my skull, my ear canals opening up and my face is like putty, pulling and pushing. Then my head will jerk. Sometimes that feels scary. Is that part of the jhana experience?

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Culadasa: That’s part of piti and you can use that to enter the Leigh Brasington/Ayya Khema kind of lite jhanas. Those sensations are part of piti, the sensations and the movements you described. They’re an indication of unification of mind. If you look on here, the jhanas that I’ve been talking about are ultralite that access from stage 6 on page 14. The jhanas that Ayya Khema and Leigh Brasington teach, that I call the lite jhanas, are accessed from stage 7. Stage 7 is where there is no more discursive thought in your mind. You have very strong, stable concentration and you’re able to remain relatively single-pointedly focused for long periods of time. Piti arises in that stage, and its early arising is associated with strong physical sensations and movements, like what you were describing. If you’re at that stage, you can use that as your starting point and you can use seven-stage concentration as access to enter that kind of jhana.

Since this has come up, I’m just going to go ahead and briefly say the third major kind of jhana, the l-i-g-h-t jhanas, are the ones where you’ve gotten to the eighth or ninth stage of the practice, piti is strong and a light has appeared. Behind your closed eyes you experience a really strong light. You can take that as your meditation object and use that to enter this kind of light jhana, which isn’t really that light. It’s pretty deep, because your concentration is pretty strong. You’re using light, illumination behind closed eyes, as your meditation object to enter into it.

Student: I don’t understand how you use that state to move into something else. If you’re in that light jhana, how do you use it to move into something else, or why do we do that?

Culadasa: Good questions. How do you and why do you. First of all, with any of these jhanas, to move into anything else, you need to get used to them. At first, they’re amazing and they’re totally captivating. You stabilize in them, you get used to them and then you can begin be aware of what is there and what isn’t there. At first you enter any of these jhanas and you say that there’s no sense of self. Well, there really is a sense of self. You get to the point where you realize that’s still there. It’s changed, it’s in a subtler form, there’s still subject/object duality and so forth. You feel that there’s no thought, no intention, but then you realize there is still subtle kind of thinking taking place in the light jhanas. When you get used to them, when you come to understand them, then you can refine them. It’s a process of refinement. “OK, I understand what this jhana’s all about. I can see now that there’s another place I can go with this.” Then you can move to the other kinds of jhanas from there.

The question as to why you would has to do with why you would practice jhanas anyway, why you would learn to meditate. What you’re wanting to do is to gain insight into the way that things really are. It’s a big step to let go of all of this sensory input. Basically, your life has been dominated by sensation. It’s a big step to move into that place of just the mind itself. Then there are all these further refinements possible, and each refinement brings with it a deepening understanding and insight. That’s why you would do that.

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Jhanas are very pleasant and some people would suggest if you do jhana practice it’s going to be so pleasant that you’ll never want to do anything else. That’s not really true. You’ll do them until you get used to them and then you’ll become very aware that there’s someplace else to go and something else to do from there.

Student: Last night you were talking about how you were doing jhana practice and outside there was a car crash and you didn’t know about it until afterwards. For me, that’s kind of usual for a meditation practice, that I’ll get some body sensations and I don’t really notice what’s going on outside. It’s often unpleasant, or the after-effects are good but it’s unpleasant or neutral. It doesn’t necessarily fill me with joy or whatever. Sometimes the body sensations just kinda suck. What’s different about a jhana practice that creates these positive states?

Culadasa: I didn’t quite follow that whole thing. I heard what you said at the end but I didn’t see how it related to what you said at the beginning.

Student: I guess my question is, what’s the difference between these jhana practices that you’re describing where, by focusing on the body, you become absorbed in a joyful way, versus focusing on the body and become simply absorbed with what’s happening in the body, which may or may not be joyful.

Culadasa: What’s the difference between them?

Student: What’s the difference in the practice, I guess, that’s creating this joy rather than just viewing what’s in the body in the same way you would view anything else?

Culadasa: Were you wanting to respond to that?

Nancy [I think]: I have an idea of how it is for me. For me, it’s the identification with it. For me, it’s a sense of less identification with the sensations. I don’t know if you could call that ego.

Student: I know what you mean. It’s like they become less solid. There aren’t complexes around them; there are just the sensations. Is that what you’re talking about?

Nancy: Yeah, like not becoming identified with the sensations, I guess. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

Student: I think I understand. It seems like, Culadasa, in what you’re talking about, there are new sensations coming in. Sometimes there is and isn’t. In this observation, in this style, this piti and sukha come in, right?

Culadasa: Specifically what happens—the sequence is that the unification of mind gives rise to piti, which is a joyful state. Secondary to that joyful state are pleasurable sensations that are experienced in the body but they’re not derived from something

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stimulating nerve endings in the body. They are different. They’re experienced in the body and they’re pleasurable, but they’re actually the result of the mental state of piti. What I was talking about is, to help us to get to a certain degree of unification and to give the piti a little boost, we deliberately notice actual physical sensations in the body that are pleasant. We notice them preferentially rather than the unpleasant ones. That helps us to get things going. When piti comes on, the experience you have subjectively is your body is flooded by pleasant experience. It very often seems to start up here and just sort of go everywhere in your body, but it’s not coming from some external phenomenon interacting with your sensory nerve endings. And it’s not a question of directing attention to it. It’s an awareness of it.

Just a little description here of the first jhana, on page 9, “he permeates and pervades, suffuses and fills this very body with the joy and pleasure born from withdrawal.” That’s what’s being referred to there. The joy and pleasure not born from sense contact. It’s joy and pleasure suffusing the body, filling the body, that is born from withdrawal. Do you see the distinction there? So that’s coming from the joy. That’s how it’s different than actually looking at sensations—pleasant or unpleasant or neutral—that are derived from physical contact, stimulation of sensory nerve endings and so forth. It’s really coming from the mind, this experience in the body.

Student: That answered the question. So it seems like the difference between trying to get into this sort of state and just pure mindfulness of body sensations is, in this practice, we’re giving more preference to observing the pleasant sensations than observing them all equally.

Culadasa: That’s right. OK, it’s time for you to take a break and stretch and do things like that. We’ll come back here for some guided meditation practice.

Session 3

So make yourselves comfortable in preparation for meditating. Let go of all those thoughts about other things. Just be present. Just come right into this space, right here and now. Take a deep breath, relax your body. Begin by just being fully aware of where you are right now. One of the wonderful things about right now is that you have no burdens or responsibilities related to anything else. The only thing you’re responsible for right now is being here. Nothing to plan, nothing to worry about, nothing else to do. Perhaps there’s a feeling of freedom and some joy just in that thought.

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With your body comfortable and your eyes closed, allow yourself to be fully aware of this present moment. This is not a doing; it’s an allowing. Just allow yourself to be aware of your body, of your mind, of the room. Be aware of sounds, aware of sensations. Be aware of the movements of your attention. Be in a relaxed, open state of awareness, noticing how allowing everything to be there, noticing how your attention will move from one thing to another. While remaining fully aware of anything and everything that is present, gently redirect your attention to bodily sensations, any kind of bodily sensations. Let your attention move where it will, but being aware of anything and everything. Gently restrict attention to sensations occurring on or within the body.

If you discover tension anywhere in the body, let go of it. Pleasant sensations anywhere in the body, allow your attention to dwell on them for a moment. Enjoy the relaxed stillness of the body. If the mind goes to something else, just bring the attention back to sensations of the body. You’re not responsible for the movements of the attention, only for redirecting the attention back to the body. Notice how you can become aware of sounds and still be attending to sensations in the body. Sometimes attention will go to a sound, but it need not. You can be aware of external sounds while the attention remains focused. As you observe sensations in the body, obviously the most prominent are going to be those sensations related to the breath. Gently redirect your attention to sensations related to the breath. Any sensations related to the breath. Any or all. Continue to be aware of other bodily sensations, just as you’re aware of external sounds, while attention explores sensations specifically related to the breath.

Perhaps you’re aware of a comfortable, relaxed stillness of the body. Direct your attention to that for a moment. In particular, notice it’s pleasant qualities. And now go back to observing sensations of the breath. Anything else that happens, any other thought that comes, just let it be, let it happen. The only “doing” is to bring your attention gently back to sensations of the breath. And remember, at this point, any sensations of the breath, let attention freely move—abdomen, chest, nose, wherever.

You may become aware of a little tension somewhere in the body. If that happens, direct your attention to it, let go of it, relax, and bring your attention back to the breath.

Now, gently direct your attention to the sensations of the breath in the vicinity of the nose. You may continue to be aware of other breath sensations and if so, that’s fine. Just like sounds, just like other bodily sensations, let that awareness continue, but focus your attention on sensations produced by the movement of the air in and out of your nostrils.

Notice when the inbreath begins and notice when it ends. Likewise with the outbreath—notice when it begins and when it ends. Specifically, notice when the sensations caused by it arise and when they pass away. Follow the cycle of the breath—try not to miss any part of it. Follow it as the air enters the nostrils. Those sensations specifically. Notice

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how there continues to be an awareness of sounds and other bodily sensations even as the attention is focused on the cycle of the breath at the nose.

Is the body relaxed and comfortable still? If so, that should be a part of your awareness. What is the state of your mind? Be aware of the state of your mind, even as your attention continues to follow the sensations of the breath. You may become aware of subtle, rapid movements of your attention to some of these other things. That’s fine. Be aware of it.

Be aware of the pleasantness in your body as you sit. Be aware of the peacefulness in your mind as your attention follows the sensations of the breath. Perhaps there’s a certain contented, joyful happiness just sitting here, observing the sensations of your breath while being aware of the world, your body and the mind.

Enlarge the focus of your attention to include your abdomen. So now you’re following the sensations of the breath at your nose and at your abdomen at the same time. This may seem very natural to do.

Shift the focus of your attention to the sensations at the abdomen. Let the sensations at the nose become a part of the background awareness. Notice in particular the sensations the beginning of the inbreath and the end of the inbreath and the beginning of the outbreath and the end of the outbreath. Any other thought or sensation that intrude, just gently let go of it and bring the attention back to the sensations of the breath. Whenever things like this happen, it’s not your problem. All you need to do, when you become of it, bring your attention back. And enjoy the stillness of the body, the calmness of the mind, the pleasure, joy and happiness of just sitting here, just being here.

If your attention should go to some external, what’s important is that you’re aware of it. You’re aware of what’s going on in your mind. This allows you redirect your attention.

Expand your awareness once again, so that you’re observing the sensations of the breath both in the abdomen and in the chest. Let your attention explore all these different sensations.

Continue to be aware of the calm, relaxed stillness of your body, the peacefulness of your mind as you observe these sensations. Now tighten up the focus of your attention a little bit so that now you’re focused fully on the sensations of the breath in the chest. Let those abdominal sensations be part of the background awareness. Note the sensations that mark the beginning and end of the in-and-out breath, the beginning and end of each breath. The little pause as each breath cycle ends before the next one begins.

Expand your awareness once again, this time to include your shoulders and your upper arms. Explore the sensations in the chest, shoulders and upper arms. In particular, be aware of any sensations that happen to change with the breath, and sensations that arise

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and pass away with each in- and outbreath. Still be aware of the relaxed, pleasant sensations in the body, the sense of presence, the background awareness of sounds outside. You can focus your attention on one thing and be aware of these other things at the same time. Are you aware of the peacefulness in your mind as you do this, the relaxed happiness, alertness? Allow attention to check in on bodily sensations. Relax anyplace that there’s any tension. Notice where there’s any pleasure. Then come back to the sensations of the breath in the chest, the shoulders and the upper arms.

Tighten up the focus of your attention a little bit again. This time, it’s the shoulders and the upper arms that you want to primarily paying attention to. Let the awareness of sensations of the chest become part of the background, along with the sensations in the abdomen and the nose. Really carefully examine those sensations of the shoulders and the upper arms and how they change with the breath. Follow the breath with these sensations. Notice the sensations that mark the beginning and end of each in-and outbreath. Perhaps they’re more subtle, but as you observe them, they become clearer.

Now expand your awareness again to include the chest—the chest, the upper arms and the shoulders. Put a little smile on your face, just a little gentle smile. Follow the breath in your chest, shoulders and upper arms.

Expand your awareness to include the abdomen. You can do this. You can be aware of all these sensations, you can pay attention to all of these sensations at once. You can follow the breath in your entire upper body, your torso, upper arms, shoulders, abdomen, chest.

Feel the satisfaction and the joy begin to arise.

Expand your attention to include the sensations at the nose again. You can follow the breath with your attention, taking in this much larger area. Even as you do so, be aware of your body, be aware of the world outside, be aware of your own mind, be relaxed, at ease, and enjoy it. Thoughts may arise, but if they do, notice, do you really want to be bothered by them, or do just want to leave them be? Be in the flow of these sensations that you’re observing. With each new inbreath, there’s the opportunity to practice following the sensations of the whole breath cycle, to practice being aware of them in multiple areas at once. If you miss something, it doesn’t matter. Another breath cycle will follow. You can be really good at this.

Gently bring your focus back to the sensations around the nose as the air enters and leaves. Let everything else become back of the background awareness and attend to every subtle nuance of the sensations of the breath coming, the pause, the breath going out, the next pause, and then the repetition. And put that little smile on your face. If it slipped away, time to bring it back.

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Perhaps there’s a little discomfort in some part of your body. Notice the other parts of your body that are still at ease, relaxed, pleasantly still.

(Gong sounds.)

 

Well, how what that? Anybody have any comments?

Student: My main issue seems to be the build-up of piti. Traditionally, I’ve always sort of slid of into fourth or fifth jhanas instead of dealing with it. So I was trying to work with it, staying in first jhanas. It did all kinds of interesting things. But I was wondering about your comments about that topic.

Culadasa: When you say piti, what are you referring to specifically?

Student: Specifically it feels like joy that arises in my body that has nothing to do with bodily sensations. It’s not like my skin feels so nice in the air. It’s not that kind. It’s just like whoa, and then… My jaw and the back of my neck are fairly tight.

Culadasa: So you let go of those sensations when you feel that tightness?

Student: Let go of the sensations of tightness? Not possible at this time. And if I associate into some other sense of body sensation, it increases the piti. This is how I’m describing it. I may be wrong, but I go to my feet or my toes or something and it intensifies.

Culadasa: As compared to if you direct your attention at the throat and jaw?

Student: The two places I found that seem to be most beneficial was I started just letting myself go to dullness. I have no idea what that was, but it felt helpful. The other was I would open my eyes and would let the interaction between the color of your book and my internal self just kind of cycle.

Culadasa: When you start having feelings of piti in the body, of any kind, the best thing to do is to just…you have a meditation object. Like in this meditation, it was these sensations of the breath that I was guiding to you, is to put all of your attention there and let those piti sensations be part of the background. Just leave them as part of the background. If they become so intense that they keep drawing your attention away, then take them as the meditation object until that intensity fades. Ultimately, it’s when piti is incomplete and interrupted that it produces these disturbing sensations.

Student: This is definitely an interruption.

Culadasa: What you need to do is to continue practicing in a single-pointed way until there’s enough unification of mind that piti arises fully. When piti arises fully, all of these

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disturbing sensations fade away. There’s an energy of piti with self that eventually comes to be perceived to be disturbing when you’re ready to let IT go. But in the first stage of refinement, it becomes really nice. It becomes enjoyable to have this piti. Piti hasn’t fully arisen as long you’re having disturbing sensations, uncomfortable sensations, distracting sensations as a part of it.

Student: The other thing is I was looking at you and I thought, I’m going to try what you look like you’re doing, which is putting your head back. That completely shifted everything. So I’m wondering about your comments about putting your head back.

Culadasa: I don’t put my head back. It goes back…my body takes on certain positions that correspond to what I’m doing at a particular time. I just let it happen; I don’t do it. If you deliberately move your head one way or another, you’ll notice it changes things. As I was guiding you, I was allowing a strong feeling of joy to come. It was just a strong feeling that was there in the background. Usually my head kind of tips to one side, but I guess it might tip backwards as well. Whatever happens with you will be unique to you. It’s not going to be the same as me.

Student: I found it very helpful, the whole guided meditation. It helped keep a center, it helped keep focus, it helped a lot. That was really useful.

Culadasa: Good.

Student: In the beginning of the meditation, it seemed relatively easy to follow your suggestions. As the meditation went on, I got more distractions and my attention to my breath was maintained for shorter intervals and the distractions that rose up tried to offer more urgency in directing my attention away from them. It got harder. But at no point could I identify why it got harder. So I guess my question is, why did it get harder or is that unimportant?

Culadasa: Well, let’s just examine. When you say it got harder, in what way did it get harder?

Student: There was, in the beginning, exactly what you suggested that we do—watch the breath, feel the pleasant sensation. Then you’d fall away from that and come back, fall away from that and come back, and then you made the suggestion that we could be good at this and I’m saying, “Yeah, let’s be good at this.” Still, the interval of intentionality got shorter and shorter and the intervals of distraction on either side of it got more clinging, more intense, more urgent, more…not having to do with what you’d said earlier about just no longer being captivated by your object of meditation. It was as though there was something else working against me.

Culadasa: OK. And there is—other parts of your mind are working against you.

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Student: But is that important?

Culadasa: What you’re saying. I just want to examine this. Distraction comes along. Is that distraction there at the same time as you are following the sensations of the breath. Have you forgotten what you were doing due to the distraction, or is it just two things happening at once?

Student: Some of each. There were times when I got lost completely. There were times when I knew I was lost but I knew I could still see my object over here in the corner. As the meditation wore on, I tended to be more lost. I was almost recaptivated by the clearness that the urgency to attend to something else was entirely fake. But it was still there. “No, no, I want to go back to this.” I kind of got lost in my getting lost. I’d go back to the meditation when you brought me back to it, and say now pay attention to this for a little while. I’ve never really observed, before today, that my intervals of distractions get and my interval of attention gets shorter over the span of a longer meditation. What’s making it harder?

Culadasa: By harder, you mean the fact that the tendency for distraction is coming more frequently and lasting longer? OK. That’s what I wanted to know. Why that was happening in this one, I’m not sure but can you interpret your experience in terms of your mind consists of…there’s really multiple minds inside in your head, and they’re not all wanting to do the same thing.

Student: Yeah.

Culadasa: This is a mind that is not unified, because there are different parts of it that want to do different things, want to go in different directions.

Student: Yes, it’s more not unified at the end than it was at the beginning.

Culadasa: Yes, in your case, this time, it was ununified at the end than it was at the beginning. That’s unfortunate. I’m not sure exactly why that is. The idea of what we’re doing, the sense of what you as a doer can actually do is to formulate an intention and then to redirect the focus of your attention whenever you become aware it’s not where you want it to be. OK?

The mind’s really tricky. A distraction comes up and you decide to ignore that distraction and bring the attention back to the breath, but then some third factor comes in that wants to have a big discussion about the whole thing. Right? And that becomes the real distraction. The one that you let go of, that was just a decoy. The real distraction was the thinking about well, this is hard to do, this other distraction is attractive and I’m having to force myself to go back—that was the real distraction.

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Student: So really all I’m going to be able to say is it got harder because I have gremlins in my head.

Culadasa: We all have gremlins. What we all have are heads full of gremlins. You be patient. You don’t worry about these things that are happening. You just keep doing the one simple thing that you can do—just bringing your attention back. I’m not sure why you had the particular experience you did. Expectations can be a part of it. If you start off a meditation with expectations, then those expectations can work against you. I don’t know if that’s what happened or not.

Student: It’s just strange.

Culadasa: Yeah, it’s just strange. Right.

Student: So I was having this experience of when I would kind of get into what I was focusing on and lose the other stuff the sense of “I got to move my legs right now, I have to stretch them right now.” Like a really reactive reaction to getting absorbed in it. What do you do with something like that? Do you just keep trying it?

Culadasa: When you have this sudden thought that, “Oh, I gotta move my leg” comes up. That’s what you’re asking?

Student: No, sorry. I’m not describing it well. It’s like a reaction or a panic. It feels like I’m about to go someplace and then a huge reaction comes up against going someplace, like “I shouldn’t do that right now.” It manifests as some task that I have to do right now that I actually don’t.”

Culadasa: Be aware of it and try to go back to continuing with what you’re doing. It’s very tempting to try to do something valid, but it’s actually more productive just to let it be.

Student: For me, when those kind of distractions—particularly the physical sensations—one that I’ve had that I’m not having these days was a very very strong sensation of tickling in the back of my throat. Excruciating, it gets so strong. This is my understanding of it. This is my story. It’s that it is, on some level, frightening to go to this deeper unknowing place, and there’s part of me—and it’s a protective part of me—that distracts me as a protection.

Culadasa: Yes.

Student: And that it’s a gentle thing. It’s so that I can sort of accept that. I’ve had to do what you suggested. It was so strong that I couldn’t leave it in the background. I had to go and put all of my attention on it, let it rise to the peak of excruciating discomfort, and then it went away. I see it as a protection, not as some distracting thing that some other

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part of my brain is trying to…I like to give it more of a protective, helpful, function. That’s how I experience it.

Culadasa: Right. And that’s good. All of these parts of your mind that are going to provide resistance to one degree or another, they’re not all capricious. As a matter of fact, what you could probably assume is that part of your mind thinks it’s doing what’s best and most appropriate at the time.

My objective was for you to gain some familiarity with your ability to move attention, to expand and contract attention. The fact that you can increase the scope of your attention and maintain that enlarged content with a high degree of clarity and vividness—that’s what I’m hoping that you were discovering. Also, that you would notice the interaction between the background awareness and the content of attention. The relationship between them is interesting. When you become very focused on the content of attention, you tend to lose more background awareness, but you don’t have to. It only happens if you’re don’t realize that it’s something that you’d rather not have happen. I’m first encouraging you to be aware of all of these sensations related to the breath in sometimes a larger and expanded area. Then I’m redirecting you to notice the sensations in your body, notice external sensations and things like that. I was hoping that in that moment you might become aware to any degree that “Oh, I kind of lost that awareness, but I don’t have to lose that awareness. I can sustain it. I can keep it there and let it be.”

When we went back to the breath at the nose at the very end, I was hoping you might have noticed how much clearer, sharper, vivid, more intense that perception was compared to when you first started out with the sensations of the breath at the nose.

Student: There are two things. First off, the guided meditation really helped, especially with dullness, to bring the bigger scope of what we’re doing back into perspective. One of the things I noticed that was interesting was this tendency, when this energy in the body started to arise, to start verbalizing gently. It was something I realized I had internalized from retreat a while back when I was going through this a lot. So I was offering that. I don’t know so much if verbalizing it would help people like it helped me, because that can be kind of a slippery slope. But it became so entrained that it didn’t. It didn’t turn into spinning off into discursive thought. It was just a nice reminder, a kind of release, to allow it to rise versus getting really excited around it.

The other thing is opening up a question about something Patricia brought up that’s been a block for me, which is going into these absorptions and these finer and finer states. The loss of that discursive thought and that analytical thinking component of the mind is really threatening to me. It’s the part that I most identify with. One of the things I was going to offer but I was also going to open it up to ways of working with this is I’ve noticed I’ve been trying to notice more throughout the day and in meditation is the

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feeling that I’m giving up something that’s solid and real to go into this place and I’m kind of losing myself in the process. I guess this is how we should be practicing anyway, to notice when that self is really flimsy and how sporadic its arising is, so that it doesn’t feel like something that’s constant that I’m losing but something that was never really constant, so it’s not really that big of a transition. It’s something I’ve realized has been a huge block for me and it still is.

Culadasa: There’s a lot of attachment to those familiar discursive thought processes—the analyzing and thinking and yakkity yak inside. To counteract that, to take a different perception of those is “Oh, this is peacefulness, this is calm, this is beautiful, this is relaxed, this is easy.” It’s not that you’re losing the familiar thought processes that you identify yourself with but that you’re gaining a sense of peacefulness and happiness, of being relaxed and at ease.

You’ll find what you’re attached to. It won’t be the same for everybody, but you’re going to find what you’re attached to. You’re going to find where that resistance comes up, in whatever form it takes. It may take a while. You may not recognize exactly what it is at first, but it will keep coming up and you’ll have lots of opportunity. Just be aware of it. You don’t need to analyze it, you don’t need to try to figure it out. If you just allow yourself to be aware of it while it’s there and while you continue to do the practice, the recognition and understanding of what it is will become clear to you. Then it will become much easier to let it go.

Student: I’m going back to something you were talking about last night. How do you determine the difference between whether you’re in a trance or in a deep meditative state?

Culadasa: There is a subjective quality of clarity, of being really really alert and aware, that will be there. If you’re in a trance, what’s happened is that there’s a kind of dullness developing. It makes it easy to stay in a particular state but there isn’t that vivid quality of really being fully conscious.

Student: Could you work through that dullness, or if you go back and forth between the two, is that an OK thing to work on it that way?

Culadasa: The best way is to detect that dullness as soon as it starts to develop, because that’s when it’s easiest to counteract. If you’ve already got to a state where the dullness is strong and it’s trancelike…I’ve often had people in classes say, “Boy, that was a good meditation. I don’t know where I went, but I was gone.” That’s the trancelike dullness. (Laughter) You can sit there and an hour’s meditation passes like nothing. You’re not really there. You don’t want to do that. It’s really hard to change that when you’re in that state. If you do that very often, your mind will tend to gravitate towards that state, because it’s a really easy way to pass the time between when you sit on the cushion and

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when the bell rings. (Laughter) So your mind will tend to do that—go into a suspended state. What you need to do is you need to practice being aware of dullness entering into your meditation as early as possible and then rouse yourself out of it, bringing yourself back to a state of vividness and clarity. OK?

Student: I’ve never had a problem with dullness so I’m not working from that direction. One of the things I discovered was that the vividness and so forth can be seasoned a bit with a little dullness.

Culadasa: As a matter of fact, yeah.

Student: Right at the beginning of dullness seemed like a really alert place, and very un-American.

Culadasa: The best way to season it is to step back into a meta-awareness where you have this larger awareness of the mind itself and what’s going on, where you’re observing the mind as the mind observes the meditation object. When you’re observing the sensations of the breath, for example, sometimes they can become so intense, they’re almost painfully intense. When that happens, you don’t need to stay that focused. You can kind of step back and take a larger view. It will ease that up quite a bit. It’s good to have that degree of vividness and intensity. Put it this way—it’s good to have that power of consciousness present, but use that to enhance the awareness component rather than having it all crammed into the focus of your attention.

We do have to be careful of dullness. There’s a pleasant stability to dullness. I’m not talking the deep, strong dullness, drowsiness, things like that. I’m talking about a sustained, subtle dullness that makes it really easy to sit there and just kind of space out until the bell rings. You want to be fully alert. You want to be fully present. You want to be much more fully conscious than normal. You don’t want to go to the other direction. So you need to watch out for that. When you find your mind slipping into dullness, sharpen up your perception. Intensify the focus of your attention until the dullness disappears, and then enlarge the background awareness as well. The more you can sustain this background awareness, the less likely you are to slip into dullness. The more focused you become on some narrow little thing, then the easier it is for this dullness to develop. If you find it’s there, sometimes intensifying what you’re focusing on can be the most immediate antidote to it. But that needs to followed up by expanding your awareness. Otherwise, you’ll just go right back into dullness again.

Student: My question really was more about the definition, because I think I’ve experienced that, but that’s not essentially what I’m experiencing. But I’m still understanding the term.

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Culadasa: That’s the definition. The less mindful awareness there is, the more dullness there is, then the more trancelike it is. The more mindful awareness that’s present and the less dullness there is, the more it’s the kind of meditative state that we’re wanting to achieve.

What we’ll move onto after lunch in the afternoon is we’ll do the experiencing the whole body with the breath practice. This is where you start exploring different areas of your body with your attention, becoming really clear on the sensations that are present and asking yourself whether or not any of these are sensations that change or are related to the breath. Then we’ll begin sort of like we did this morning, adding these areas together and seeing if we can get to the place of actually experiencing the whole body with the breath simultaneously. Maybe you notice it this morning that because you’re trying to monitor much more sensory information at one time, there’s not as much room for extraneous thoughts to come in. The mind is not quite so likely to go and listen to the jet airplane flying overhead or the dogs barking next door. You’ll be aware of those, but the attention doesn’t move and pursue them. We’ll see if we can draw closer to entering a jhana of full-body awareness this afternoon.

Session 4

Student: Would you say that Tanasara (?) Biku practiced the key to the ultralite jhanas? I know he focuses on the whole body and things like that.

Culadasa: I’m not sure what Tanasara Biku’s views on the actual practice of jhana would be. I’ve only sat with him once, very briefly, it was a very general discussion. Jhanas didn’t even come up. I can’t really tell from anything that he’s written. Do you have some experience or…

Student: I’ve listened to a couple of his talks and read some articles. It sounds pretty similar, because he does keep that whole-body awareness in the process.

Culadasa: That would be what I’d call the ultralite jhanas. Right.

Student; I participated in a jhana retreat that he gave, and I didn’t understand most of it, because at that time I wasn’t really ready. It seemed to me he taught the whole gamut of jhanas, not just ultralite, not just body consciousness.

Culadasa: But also deep jhanas that involve withdrawal from the senses? Aha. It would make sense that he would be one that I would expect to be aware of the whole range of jhanas. Whereas many teachers are stuck in this one particular way—“This is jhana and

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anything else is something else.” Tanasara Biku would be very aware of the different ways it’s practiced. Makes sense.

Student: And he really thought they were very important, so…

Culadasa: Yes. Very important and very misunderstood. There are some interesting questions about methods of practice that don’t involve samata training in jhanas. I probably shouldn’t really get into that, but there are people that claim to have higher-path attainments, including arhat. In dry vapassana tradition, they then turn around and say that the things that the Buddha said about the description of arhats and nonreturners and once-returners and so forth are not accurate. That makes me really wonder what’s going on there. It’s not something to get into.

Student: What is meant by the term the “dry vapassana?”

Culdadasa: Dry vapassana is a vapassana practice that does not involve the deliberate cultivation of samata and its dry because it specifically lacks the moisturizing lubrication of samata, of the joy, happiness, tranquility and equanimity. Most of the things that you would have encountered under the label of vapassana in this country, the method of Ubaken (?) that’s taught by Govinka (?) and his students and the noting practice that’s widely disseminated from Mahasisayadah (?) and has been predominate at IMS and Spirit Rock, these are dry vapassana practices.

Any other questions that anyone might have related to the handouts at this point?

Student: I had a small question about Mahali’s (?) characteristics of flow. He talks about how the flow experience is a feeling of exercising control and not being in control. I was wondering if you could explain that a little bit.

Culadasa: Briefly, the feeling of being in control comes from an egocentric basis. “I am controlling this.” Because a person can never be completely in control of everything, it makes it very difficult for somebody with that point of view to actually experience flow. They’re constantly finding themselves in conflict with the things that they can’t control. The distinction here, to be capable of doing something, and to be doing the very best that you are capable of, that is exercising control. That also happens with the recognition that no matter how good you are at doing it, you won’t always be completely successful, and there will always be other factors that enter in that interfere with that. That’s the difference.

On page 7 and the following pages is a description of the characteristics of the jhanas. I thought I would just briefly go over that with you. The specific meditative states that the word jhana usually refers to are organized as four distinct stages or states, meditative states, that are described as the form jhanas. There are four other meditative states called

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formless jhanas, which are usually described as being variations of the fourth form jhana. Once you reach the fourth form jhana, then you can practice the jhanas of the four formless bases.

Let’s look at these first four form jhanas and how they are defined in the sutras and in Buddhist tradition. Keeping in mind, as we said last night, that a jhana is a wholesome absorption that occurs in meditation and is associated with the jhana factors. The first jhana is defined in three main characteristics we can look at here. In the first jhana, the meditator is withdrawn from sexual desires and from all unwholesome states of mind. What does that mean? The key word is withdrawn. You’ve gone, you’ve sat down to meditate, you’ve let go of your worries, your concerns, your desires, your hopes, everything else. You’re coming into the present; you’re letting go of everything else that’s not part of this. So that’s the withdrawal aspect. To the degree that you do that, have done that, you know the feeling of peace and happiness that comes with that. Just for the moment, letting go of everything. Basically, you have a time that is entirely your own, that you owe nobody, you owe nothing; this is your meditation time. You don’t have to do anything else. You can forget about everything else, let go of it all. You let go of all the unwholesome states like worry and desire and hope and fear and everything else.

The jhana factors that are present are usually present in what’s called access concentration. Before entering an absorption, you need to have already established a certain degree of piti. Already, some joy and happiness will be present, you’ll have already been practicing in that sit long enough that you’ve established a degree of focused attention, single-pointed attention. It’s already present. Then you are ready to enter into the jhana. You have meditative joy and pleasure and happiness born of withdrawal. So those are the characteristics. You enter the absorption.

The experience of entering of absorption is that what you focus your attention on and the awareness of the jhana factors together are going to fully occupy your consciousness. There’s no room for anything else. That’s the sense in which it’s an absorption. Sometimes it will feel as though you are sinking into the meditation object, when that occurs. Or, other times, it might feel like the meditation object expands and completely fills your attention and awareness. But the effect is the same, however you might choose to subjectively describe it to yourself. The end result is that you become quite absorbed with the meditation object and the jhana factors.

With the second jhana, the way that you learn to do this is when you’ve learned to enter the first jhana—which is a very distinctive feeling and as I’ve said, you’ve had it before, you’ve been absorbed in other things before. When it comes in meditation, you recognize it and it’s very distinctive. You learn to do that and you repeat it. You develop some skill in entering the jhana, in staying in the jhana. Initially, you won’t be able to stay in jhana

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very long. You’ll pop out of it. It’s like on your way to entering the jhana, you acquire a certain momentum. When that momentum exhausts itself, you’re going to come back out of the jhana. In order to stay in jhana for a longer period of time, you have your ability to create the conditions for entering the jhana and remaining in the jhana. You need to notice, in preparation for your meditation, what are the things that you did in the first part of your meditation that contributed to all of the right conditions coming together to enter into thejhana. By becoming aware of those things, you’re able to do them more readily in the future, and you’re able to enter jhana and stay for longer periods of time.

The next thing you need to do—once you don’t just spontaneously pop out of the jhana after a few minutes—is you develop the ability to determine how long you’re going to stay in the jhana. This is that same thing that some of you have already experienced where, if you time your meditations regularly, you get to the point where you know when the meditation is up. It’s not like you’re thinking about it, it just that all of a sudden the thought appears that it’s just about time and sure enough, the bell rings, or if you look at the clock, there’s only a minute or so to go. It seems that some part of our mind/brain/whatever has this capacity for monitoring time. So what you do then is you practice determining in advance how long you’re to stay in the jhana. You form the resolution before you enter the jhana that you’re to stay in jhana for ten minutes. Then you get good at determining how long you’re going to stay in the jhana and sure enough, you come out and look at the clock and it’s been about the right amount of time. So you become good at entering jhana and emerging from jhana and determining how long you’re going to stay in jhana.

Then the next really important thing is the review. This is actually part of the mindfulness process. You review the jhana. You review the state of your mind before you entered the jhana. You review your recollection of the jhana. That recollection will be very sharp and clear when you first come out of the jhana. So you recollect what it’s like to be in the jhana. Then, you compare that with the state of your mind now that you’ve re-emerged. That’s the review.

These are the things that you learn to do in the process of acquiring mastery of the jhana. This takes some amount of time. In the process, you’ll become very familiar with the jhana factors, the qualities of a particular jhana, the feeling tone that it has, and you’ll also discover that at first, entering the jhana, it’s very pleasing. You have a lot of satisfaction of accomplishment. But at some point you’ll become dissatisfied with that jhana. This is the real indication that you’re ready to move on and learn the next jhana, when you start feeling a certain dissatisfaction.

In the first jhana, you have a meditation object and what you will experience is that after a while, the jhana has this unsettled quality. It’s like it’s constantly vibrating. That’s attributed to the directing and sustaining of attention. Even though your subjective

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experience is of continuously being aware of something, in fact, it is a renewal of this conscious attention to the object happening over and over again. You’ll become aware of that as a disturbing energetic vibration in the jhana. That’s part of what you become dissatisfied with. When that happens, you’re ready to move on to the next jhana.

In the ultralite jhanas, you’ll still continue to have a mediation object because you haven’t achieved the degree of unification of mind yet in your meditation practice overall. You haven’t achieved the degree of mastery where you can dispense with the meditation object yet. As you get into the deeper jhanas, even the next level beyond ultralite, the ones I call lite, you do not need to have a meditation object any longer. You can let go of that. As a result of that, the vibrating, fluctuating quality of the first jhana is not present in the second jhana. In the second jhana, the meditator has confidence and unification of mind. What we’re speaking of here—and remember, these descriptions are applied across the whole range of different degrees of depth of jhana—is, in terms of the deeper jhanas, you now have sufficient unification of mind that you do not need a meditation object. That’s the way it’s defined. There is unification of mind without directed and sustained attention. That’s essentially defining one of the most important differences between the first and the second jhana. The joy and the happiness are still there; that part is the same. And in this jhana, it is said that the joy and happiness are born of concentration rather than withdrawal. In the first jhana, we were experiencing joy and happiness, the freedom, the liberation, the “I’m just here for myself doing my thing, forgetting all my worries and problems and everything else.” That’s the joy and happiness of withdrawal. Of course, there would have been joy and happiness reinforced by concentration in the first jhana as well. But now, it’s because of this unification of mind that it’s become much deeper. Really, the source of your joy and happiness is the degree of concentration and unification of mind that’s present.

The effect of that is that the pit, the joy, is very intense. So there’s intense joy and happiness and bodily pleasure. This is what, over time, as you practice this jhana and you become skilled at entering the jhana, remaining for an appropriate period of time, emerging from the jhana and then reviewing the jhana, as you continue to do that, you’ll reach the point where you become dissatisfied with this jhana. What you’re dissatisfied with, in particular, is that agitated energy of piti. Because piti is strong. Very strong piti. This is the time when you’re ready to move on to the next jhana. You say to yourself, something to the effect that “There’s this agitation and disturbance and I can see what greater serenity, what greater peace and happiness there would be if I could let go of this agitated energy of piti.” That’s exactly what happens, that’s exactly what you do to enter the third jhana.

There’s strong mindfulness, introspective awareness—so there’s mindfulness and clear comprehension. There’s no meditation object anymore except in the lighter versions of the practice. Essentially, all of the power of your consciousness is going into this

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introspective awareness, because it’s no longer focused on an object. Even the awareness of that joyful mental state is now gone. The jhana factors that remain are the pleasure and happiness, and now there’s an equanimity that’s developing as well. These are the jhana factors of the third jhana: sukha, which, depending on the depth of your jhana, may still involve a feeling of bodily pleasure, even though you won’t be aware of bodily sensations as such. You won’t feel the weight of your body on the cushion, you won’t feel any normal sort of bodily sensations. You’ll have a perception of the body as a pleasurable object, And there will be happiness. The third jhana is a pleasant abiding with equanimity. There is bodily pleasure and/or happiness. That sounds pretty nice, doesn’t it?

Student: You said that in this stage, all of your power of awareness is going to what?

Culadasa: All of the power of your consciousness goes to awareness. What normally happens is a large of the consciousness capacity that we have is concentrated in attention to a single object. Now it’s all available at a very heightened level of awareness. Awareness of the mind.

The third jhana also does eventually become less than perfectly satisfying. There’s a very strong feeling of contentment and happiness, but you actually become discontented with contentment. (Laughter) Once you’ve succeeded in learning to enter the first jhana, it’s not too difficult to enter the second and third. But some people find that the transition from third to fourth jhana to be a challenge. There can be a lot of attachment to the happiness. The pleasure and the happiness can be strong sources of attachment.

Student: It’s too much work!

Culadasa: Which is too much?

Student: That’s how I experience being content. It’s more work than the fourth jhana.

Culadasa: Eventually it comes to be something that you get tired of and you’re ready to move on. That’s what you let go of in the transition from the third to the fourth jhana. The bodily pleasure part of it is actually the easiest to let go of. It’s the mental happiness, the mental pleasure, that is the most difficult to let go of. Usually you won’t be able to enter the fourth jhana until you get tired of it. You do have to get tired of it. You have to start having that inkling, that sense, that there is something even more sublime, even more serene than what I’m experiencing now. That’s when you’re ready to move on.

The fourth jhana has purity of mindfulness due to equanimity, and equanimity is the only jhana factor that remains. The mind of the meditator is said to be “thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, pliant, malleable wieldy, steady and attain to imperturbability.”

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Why is it called a form jhana? In all of these form jhanas, there is still an awareness of space and that subjective feeling, the one you have right now, of being in a place in space. Do you know what I’m talking about? There it is. “I am here.” In the map of the universe in your mind, there’s the little red arrow that says, “You are here.” That and also the feeling of pleasure that you’ve experienced in your body and so forth, these are what make all of these jhanas retain their connection to the realm of the senses and the world of space and time.

Once you’ve achieved the forth jhana, you’ve refined it to the point where really the only thing that there is left to get rid of is this sense of being at a finite location in space.

Were you going to say something?Student: I have a question about that. Do all of the first four jhanas have the quality of introspective awareness?

Culadasa: They do.

Student: And is that associated with a sense of a being that is practicing that introspective awareness?

Culadasa: Yes.

Student: So there’s still a sense of self.

Culadasa:  That’s right. There is still a sense of self. Everyone, when they first enter the jhanas, it is so different than our ordinary sense of self. The absorption with the object makes it feel like you’ve become one with the object. So it seems as though as there’s a sense of self. And you’ll sometimes find people saying or you’ll read something where somebody says, “In the jhana, there’s no longer any sense of the self.” Each of these jhanas, as you practice them long enough, you’ll begin to begin aware that there still is that same self-awareness, that same subject/object duality. It’s not as apparent, but it’s definitely there. You haven’t gone beyond it. It’s still present in the formless jhanas too. It’s become very subtle there, but it’s still there.

Student: It’s still that capacity within us that notices say, even a subtle distraction and says “return.”

Culadasa: In a lite jhana, what will happen is there will be things that will disturb your jhana and you’ll become aware of them in that way of introspective awareness. If they haven’t disturbed the jhana too strongly, you can establish it immediately. So there will just be this momentary interruption of the jhana. But it actually is an interruption of the jhana that occurs. The deeper jhanas are accessed from a state of concentration where the concentration is effortless, and in those, there is not going to be that kind of distraction arising. You won’t wobble in and out of the jhana and have that experience.

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You’re full conscious in all of these jhanas. You’re not only fully conscious, your more fully conscious than normal. There’s nothing dull or trancelike about the jhana. It’s a brilliant state of consciousness.

I’ll just jump ahead to the description from the sutras of the fourth jhana. “He sits permeating the body with a pure, bright awareness, just as if a man were sitting covered, head to foot, with a white cloth, so that there would be no part of his body to which the white cloth did not extend. Even soon, the monk sits permeating the body with a pure, bright awareness. There is nothing of his entire body not pervaded by pure, bright awareness.” So this is a very highly conscious state. The consciousness is experiencing the jhana itself. It’s experiencing the jhana factors in particular and it is capable of identifying all sorts of other subtle characteristics of the mind.

If you look ahead to…there’s a sutra that I quote in its entirety here at the end, starting on page 22. This is describing how Sariputra…this is a description by the Buddha himself of how Sariputra became an arhat practicing the jhanas. He practiced mindfulness, and this is how he practiced mindfulness. This is something that’s repeated for each of the jhanas. I’ll read the section on page 22 that is about the first jhana. The important part of this is repeated for each of the other jhanas as well.

“There was the case where Sariputra, quite secluded from sensuality, secluded from unskillful qualities (these are first jhana characteristics, you’ll recognize) entered and remained in the first jhana. Rapture and pleasure born of seclusion accompanied by directed thought and evaluation. Whatever qualities there are in the first jhana (this is the part I was getting at), directed thought, evaluation, rapture, pleasure, singleness of mind—these are all the jhana factors. In addition to that (he goes on), contact, feeling, perception, intention, consciousness, desire, decision, persistence, mindfulness, equanimity and attention, he ferreted them out one after another. Known to him, they arose. Known to him, they remained. Known to him, they subsided. He discerned, so this is how these qualities, not having been, come into play. Having been, they vanish.”

So, the jhana is a state of profound introspect awareness, powerful introspective awareness. It’s not focused attention; it’s awareness. You sit in jhana and awareness encompasses all of this. In lighter jhanas, you can focus attention on and reflect on and evaluate some of these. There can be a certain amount of discursive thought and evaluation that takes place. There are probably more like the kind of practice of mindfulness that you’re more likely to think of.

In the deeper jhanas, what’s happening is you’re sitting in that place of direct experience of all of these things and as you do so, their nature begins to emerge, their arising and passing away begins to present itself. You understand their nature. You understand the relationship of them to each other, by simply observing with awareness. Not by

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analyzing, not by focusing your attention on them, thinking about them, investigating them and so forth. Just by observing. Do you follow what I’m saying? Do you know how that happens? Or is that a mysterious description to any of you?

Student: Yes, it’s complete mystery. I got lost trying to follow which…by the deeper jhanas that show the nature of something and I can’t figure out what you meant.

Culadasa: In the deeper jhanas, you’re exercising the power that mindful awareness has that does not require focused attention, thought, evaluation, investigation and things like that.

Student: Right.

Culadasa: An experience in the world that I have that’s an exact parallel to this might help you, because you might have had the same experience like this. A few years ago, I became interested in the birds—there are many birds around where we live. I tried in the usual way of focusing on individual birds, looking up what their names were and what their characteristics were, and the experience that I had was that I kept making mistakes. I think, “Oh, that’s such-and-such a bird.” Then some birder would come along and say, “No, no, no it’s not.” And I’d say, “But it has this and this.” And he’d say, “Yeah, but see there, that’s what’s different.” So, OK. And also the experience that all five of those birds look the same. How can they be five different birds? (Laughter) Yet somebody else could come along and say, “That’s that and that’s a female that, that’s a male that.” So I said, “OK, I like watching them. I don’t need to know who they are.” So I just quit, and I sat and I watched the birds, and I enjoyed watching the birds. I spent many many hours, especially during the period when I was quite sick. I couldn’t do much else. I’d sit on hot packs and I’d watch the birds for hours at a time. I wasn’t thinking about them. I wasn’t paying attention to who had a white collar and who had red earmark and all this sort of thing. Didn’t think about that at all. I just watched them. What happened as a result of simply watching them and NOT analyzing them was I gradually got to know them all. I knew this one was different than that one, because I’d watched them. They’d behave different, had different personalities, looked different. There was no analysis required or involved in it at all. There was just the understanding of them arose out of the experience of awareness without needing to focus and analyze and so forth.

From that, later on what could do is I could look them up in the bird book and say, “Yeah, that’s exactly right. I know that bird.” One thing I never did get good at was remembering their names. But through the application of awareness, my mind accomplished something that could have done through the application of directed and sustained attention and discursive thought and analysis. But it happened in a much more natural and easy way, just through awareness.

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With the practice of mindful awareness, the same thing happens. Understandings begin to emerge. One of the things that I find is what I’m calling awareness is more about the relationship between things than it is about the things as separate entities. So when you practice mindful awareness in your life, understandings and insights just arise. They come up, they generate these “ahas.” You didn’t figure them out. They just arrived. That’s the way mindful awareness works. That’s the way insight arises out of the practice of mindful awareness. At some level, what’s been seen gets processed and integrated and begins to make sense. You just get to enjoy the fruit of that. It comes up, and “Aha. I don’t need to keep doing this to myself anymore, now that I see what I’m doing.” That kind of thing.

I’m trying to explain to Alana by what I mean by how you can come to know things through mindful awareness, through mindfulness, even though there isn’t directed attention and analysis and evaluation. I want to know if that clarified that point. Does this match with experiences that you’ve had. Insights and understandings that you have, that they just emerge and you know they emerge from this more global awareness rather than analysis.

Student: To hear you describe the experience of the birds and the different way of being with those birds reminds me of how imagine people in another time, way prior to our contemporary time, before there were dictionaries and all those quantifiable measuring instruments—names and all that. People watched the way the clouds would move and how that would bring about rain here and how the birds reacted there. It was a more whole or global observation, which must have affected how they thought about their internal experience. First of all, is that correct? Second of all, it seems like we have another layer of complexity to move through nowadays, because our left brain is so engaged and we’re taught to quantify and to evaluate and to judge and compare. Whereas this left-brain function might not have been present in so-called more primitive times, which are actually perhaps more advanced in this way.

Culadasa: Yes. The kind of awareness that I’m talking about is actually…if you watch birds and deer and other animals like that…cats…I’m famous among some people for telling them that my cat doesn’t think. (Laughter) What makes us unique is not so much right brain versus left brain. We’ve got large parts of our brains that have evolved to give us special capabilities. Front parts of the brain, the forebrain. Leaving aside right versus left or where, anatomically, this is, as I said earlier, what I’m calling awareness is far more fundamental, it’s a far more fundamental property of our minds than attention is. In other organisms, this arose and was developed prior to the ability to focus attention and to analyze. before the ability to store large amounts of information in our minds and to use that information to predict the future and so on, all this sort of stuff. Both are really important. We would not be what we are if we didn’t the capacity for focused attention, for analysis, if we weren’t able to dwell in a fictional future or in a remembered past. All

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of these things are very important to what we are. Even though, in order to realize our full potential, we need to learn to temper certain activities of our mind, they’re still extremely valuable and important. So what we’re after is learning to use them far, far better in a much, much better way. Focused attention—that particular circuitry that’s kind of up here on the top of your brain—has the ability to dominate far too completely that other kind of awareness circuitry that’s located on the ventral surface of the cerebral hemispheres. Practicing mindful awareness is bringing those two back into balance and exercising them. You’re right that more primitive beings, prehomonid or even much simpler organisms like lizards and snakes and birds and things like that have, naturally, much more of this kind of awareness. If you watch a deer in the wild, there’s awareness and the deer’s attention…there will be a sound and the ear will flick and the deer will turn and focus just long enough to establish that this is not a danger, and the deer is back to nibbling on leaves or whatever it is. This is an important part of the way they are and they way they function. We’re trying to learn once again to utilize some of that so that we can achieve what we’re ultimately capable of. We have these new toys, and you know how it is with new toys. You get so fascinated with them that you forget all the old stuff. That’s kind of what happens with us. We’re so busy using our forebrain and our left hemisphere and doing all this analytical stuff that some of our potential isn’t there or isn’t being fully realized.

Anyway, insight requires certain things. Insight involves attention, and that’s what you’re doing in the stage after you come out of the jhana, where you review. You’re focusing your attention on things that are recollected from the state of mind before you entered the jhana, the state of mind when you were in the jhana and also you’re putting your attention on the corresponding things that are present in the state of mind after jhana. The important thing about attention is it’s in its objective mode. Remember last night I said, attention is always dualistic but it can either be subjectively enthralled by the object or it can have the subject/object distance. To practice mindfulness, you need to use attention, you need your attention to examine objectively and to be combined with this awareness. Out of that emerges insight. Out of that emerges understanding of the relationships between things, including the relationships between all the different kinds of mental events that take place. Out of that comes this not intellectual, not analytical, but just this profound understanding, this, “Aha, yes. Everything is just process, is impermanent, there is no self. Clinging to anything results in suffering,” and so forth. These things just become self-evident truths as a result of the practice of mindfulness.

In the jhanas, you have this awareness. You’ve brought this awareness to its maximum capability because you’re no longer hogging a lot of your consciousness capacity to focus it in on one particular thing. You’ve dropped directed and sustained attention in the first jhana, so in the second and third and fourth jhanas, and in the four formless jhanas—or the first three of the four formless jhanas—what you have is introspective awareness: the

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full power of your consciousness capacity in the form of this introspective awareness taking in the reality of what your mind is. Afterwards, when you review, then the insights begin to come up.

Did you read these descriptions of the jhanas from the sutras? They’re quite beautiful. If you’ve already read them, I don’t need to read them to you.

Let me tell you a little bit about the formless jhanas, and then we’ll take a break. The fourth jhana is a very interesting one, because here you have awareness of your own mind. That awareness actually has access to all kinds of things in your mind, about your mind that you don’t normally have access to—even the nature of mind in a way that you’ve never previously experienced it. You experience your mind as being isolated and separate, don’t you? As a matter of fact, there’s almost nothing more isolated and separate than your perception of your mind compared to anybody else’s, right? Are you familiar with Carl Jung’s collective unconscious? What does that mean to you? Would somebody like to say what that means?

Student: It means that we don’t own that unconscious knowledge but it pervades all of humanity and from that arise all kinds of archetypical beings and thoughts. And it’s the mind here, only the other way around.

Culadasa: That’s right. That’s exactly what Carl Jung was saying. He came to the conclusion that we all share this one unconscious, which is where all of our archetypes reside. And we’re all drawing from the same unconscious. Other people since then have tried to say, well, you know, so much for that airy-fairy mystical stuff. What he really discovered is that all of our minds are pretty similar, so they have the same stuff in there.

What you will find if you spend time in the fourth jhana is that the barriers between your perception of your own private, separated mind and some larger collective mind begin to disappear. The idea of the collective unconscious begins to really make sense to you. What the Buddha said is that when he entered first jhana, second jhana, third jhana, fourth jhana, he recollected all of his past lives. There’s a very interesting idea, especially coming from a man who had already told anybody that there was no self and that the doctrine of reincarnation was mistaken. All of his previous past lives. But if his mind isn’t really a separate mind but is part of a common mind, then that now has a different meaning, doesn’t it? If, in that state, he could access knowledge, memories, so to speak, of all of the different forms that mind had taken, then it was an opportunity to recollect past lives. Not one isolated series of A, B, C, D, E, F, G in a sea of other beings, but actually, if all mind is interconnected in some way, then any of our minds has access to the whole. Also, any life that’s ever been lived is essentially your past life, right? He went on to say that not only did he review all of his past lives but he reviewed the arising and passing away of beings of every kind.

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Student: So we’re all sharing this parallel life?

Culadasa: That’s exactly what this is saying to us, yes. In the fourth jhana, this is what the mind potentially has access to. The barriers that separate the individual, isolated mind break down. Which has led me to examining my dreams and realizing that I have dreams that the only that they truly make sense is if I’m accessing the actual lived and remembered experience of other sentient beings in other places at other times. I’ve been places and I’ve seen things in my dreams that no only have I never seen, I’ve never read about, heard about, thought about or even expected the existence of until I went to sleep one night, and there it was. What you have access to in the fourth jhana is really quite remarkable.

Student: This may be too involved to discuss here, so you can say no. You’ve hit on a confusion I have. One of my friends is very fond of shamanic dreaming and she very much believes that absolutely there is an objective upper, middle and lower realm that you enter in a certain way. The similarities in structure between what you’re saying here about entering and leaving jhanas and their structure is similar to what she says. So she shamanic journeys. I kind of had an interest in that and I set that aside when I decided to pursue Buddhist study a little more closely because it seemed to me I needed to be concerned about getting lost in fantasy. A lot of your previous lectures are, “Don’t get lost in fantasy.” Now you’re talking about the collective unconscious, you’re talking about possibly accessing the experiences of others. I’m on board with you there. I’m comparing it to what she says. It sounds like she could be modeling this collective unconscious very powerfully. So, my question is, if this collective unconscious is out there and there is some other technique for reaching it, such as shamanic journeying, such as studying your dreams, do we go for that or is it premature or is that an opportunity to just get lost in fantasy?

Culadasa: It’s very easy to get lost in fantasy, and there’s nothing better about getting lost in some other mind’s fantasy than getting lost in your own mind’s fantasy. (Laughter) That’s a very important thing to keep in mind. Shamanic journeying—Nancy and I studied shamanic journeying, practiced it for many years after many years of practicing Buddhism. It was really interesting. By studying with Michael Harner and learning to do shamanic journeying practice, I was able to make so much sense of things in Tibetan Buddhist tradition that had been puzzling. Shamanic journeying is a method of tapping into essentially the same realm. It’s the realm of mystery and power, really. This becomes completely available to you if you spend time practices jhana. In the deep jhanas, fourth jhana. What I’m talking about here is the deepest jhana. I’m not talking about ultralite, lite or the —- jhanas or anything like that. I’m talking about the deepest jhanas. That all becomes available to you. Shamanic journeying is just another way of tapping into that, but not of coming into contact with it to the same degree. It is very easy to get caught in some other being’s fantasy, and that’s no better than being caught in your own. It’s like

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channeling. We’re channeling all these wonderful ideas from some other being, but how to you know that being is any smarter or wiser than you are?

Session 5

NOTE: the recorder stopped working and the three previous sessions were missed; so this is actually the final session (8).

Culadasa: Good afternoon and I hope you had a good lunch. I thought that it would be good to do another meditation this afternoon, but maybe not immediately after you’ve eaten. Before then, and while you’re digesting, let’s see if there are some things you’d like me to talk about before the weekend is over. It could be things like…I didn’t really say much about the formless jhanas. I really didn’t talk very much about the deeper jhanas, and so forth. You’ve had a chance to look at the handout. Why don’t you let me know what things there are that you would like to spend a few minutes talking about while we have the time and before we do that meditation.

Student: It seems like there’s a reference to hindrances I never heard of before. And it seems like there’s this constant shift between systems of, well, this is the jhana system and these are the stages of insight and there’s a correspondence between the two. I’m kind of at sea with the mapping.

Culadasa: OK. Yeah. A little bit of orientation to the maps. OK. The ten stages of samatha vipassana—I think you’re probably all already with that, that they are available on the Dharma Treasure website. With reference to those stages, we use a state corresponding to stage 6 as access for the ultralite jhanas, which we’ve done here today. If you practice those jhanas, it will accelerate your progress in becoming a solid meditator at stage 6 and also stage 7, as well as stages 8 and 9. It will definitely improve your progress there. The lite jhanas of the Leigh Brasington/Ayya Khema sort are accessed from stage 7 of the samatha vipassana scheme. When you enter those jhanas, basically as you move through the four jhanas, the jhanas themselves are very similar to moving through the subsequent stages in the samatha vipassana practice. The result of practicing those jhanas is, once again, so that you can use it to accelerate your progress through those.

I did make some reference to the sixteen stages in the progress of insight. The progress of insight refers to a book written by Mahasi Sayadaw based on the Visuddhimagga and has become pretty much the classic presentation of the dry vipassana method. The progressive stages of insight are described as insight knowledges that a person acquires

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sequentially. The insight knowledges go right through the insights corresponding to the achievement of awakening, the path and fruition knowledges, to the review stage. That’s a different system of stages, quite different. Although all of the knowledges that are described in that stage are potentially experienced as a part of the ten stages, or if you’ve become a tenth-stage meditator with fully developed samatha, then you should rapidly be able to proceed to experience the knowledges from that sixteen-stage system that haven’t already arisen for you in the process of your training. The sixteen stages are a dry vipassana method and there is one group of stages that’s commonly known as the dukha yanas, or the knowledges of suffering. For a meditator who does not have samatha, does not have piti and has not, prior to that point, had some experience, some preliminary insights into no-self and emptiness, those can be extremely difficult, disturbing stages. If you’re doing a samatha practice, they generally will not be difficult. You’ll move through them quite quickly and they’re not very disturbing at all. But they are two different systems, and if you’re interested in the stages of insight, then I would suggest that you can download for free Mahasi Sayadaw’s book. If you want to go to the source of that, Visuddhimagga is very lengthy and it’s pretty serious text. It’s heavy reading. It is available as a two-volume paperback edition published by Shambhala that’s available from Amazon and other places.

The successor to Mahasi Sayadaw is Sayadaw U Pandita. U Pandita wrote a book a number of years ago called In this Very Life. In that book, he presents what he calls vipassana jhanas. They correspond to certain stages in the sixteen progressive stages of insight. If we look at those vipassana jhanas, we see that it’s a really different usage of the term jhana as compared to what we find in the sutras, what the Buddha spoke about and what we’ve been talking about this weekend. It reflects the difference between dry vipassana and samatha vipassana. The biggest difference between dry vipassana and samatha vipassana is the absence of piti and sukha. Of course the jhanas that we’ve been talking about are defined in terms of piti and sukha as jhana factors. The vipassana jhanas that U Pandita describes, for the most part, don’t involve piti and sukha. In the progressive stages of insight, the fourth knowledge—which is the knowledge of arising and passing away—has two parts to it. In between those two parts comes what’s called the knowledge of what is and is not the path. A meditator who arrives at the early knowledge of arising and passing away has a level of concentration that is approximately that of about a stage 6 samatha vipassana meditator. As a result of that, there will arise piti and sukha, equanimity and a lot of other factors. These are listed as the ten defilements of insight, or imperfections of insight. In the Visuddhimagga and by Mahasi Sayadaw and U Pandita, in that system, if you are doing the noting practice that these adhere to and you reach that level of concentration, and piti and sukha arise, you report it to your meditation teacher. The meditation teacher will tell you that are not noting diligently enough and to go back and practice and note more diligently. The piti and sukha will go away. And they certainly will. Then, with the level of concentration that

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you have, you arrive at the late stage of arising and passing away. Your mind is very sharp and clear, and you see that everything arises and passes away, arises and passes away. That’s why it’s called the knowledge of arising and passing away. You’re doing a kind of practice that involves your mind moving back and forth between two modes of knowing. Roughly, approximately what you’re doing is you’re going into the mode of awareness and then something pops out of awareness. Then you go into the mode of attentive focus, conceptionalization and you put a label on it. Then you let go if it and go back to the mode of awareness until something else pops out. You zoom your attention in on it and attach a label to what’s happening. So your mind’s going back and forth between these two states. If you do that, you get really really good at it, but it creates too much activity in your mind for piti and sukha to be present. So if piti and sukha arise, that tells your teacher that you’re not noting diligently enough. In order to proceed along the sixteen stages, according to that particular method of practice, you need to carry out the noting practice with enough diligence that the piti and suhka pass away. So it is very much a dry insight. It’s dry of the moisturizing lubrication of samatha, the piti,/sukha tranquility.

We can refer to the knowledge of what is and is not the path—by the way, the knowledge of what is and is not the path, where these ten defilements arise is called that because what meditators are taught in this system is that piti and sukha are too attractive and the meditator will think, “Oh, I’m enlightened now, this is it, this is what it’s all about,” and will cease to practice. That’s not the path. According to this method, what is the path is you go back to noting until piti and sukha disappear and you keep on practicing. That particular stage, the knowledge of what is and is not the path, which is part of stage 4—the knowledge of arising and passing away—could legitimately be described as a jhana according to the way jhanas were described by the Buddha in the sutras because piti and sukha are present and because there is strong concentration. However, the next time in the sequence of the sixteen stages where you come to a stage that could reasonably be called a jhana according to the sutra definitions, is the eleventh stage. This is called the knowledge of equanimity towards formations. This is after you’ve gone through all dukhan yanas, the knowledges of suffering and you’ve arrived at a state of very powerful concentration and very strong equanimity in which you’re just watching phenomena—mostly mental phenomena at this point—arise and pass away. It’s a stage in that progression that’s very near to the knowledge of the path and fruition knowledge.

Student: Can you say the last part of the sentence? I couldn’t hear you.

Culadasa: This knowledge of equanimity towards formation is basically…when we speak of access concentration as being the point we access the jhanas from—the knowledge of equanimity towards formations is the access to insight. OK? This is the stage that’s the access to the illuminating insight that’s called path knowledge and fruition knowledge.

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The next stages that could be described as jhanas are the fruition experiences, because in the fruition experience, there’s a very strong bliss and there’s a very strong focus of attention. This different system, although it’s been made by U Pandita to correspond to jhanass…he’s defined these vipassana jhanas. When we look at them, they’re really quite different than the jhanas that we’ve been talking about.

Student: Do we need them all?

Culadasa: What?

Student: We need to be able to swim in two different systems?

Culadasa: No, you don’t need to. You don’t need to know anything about these systems at all except that if you’re practicing within one, it’s very helpful. If you were doing Mahasi-style vipassana retreat, it’s very helpful to understand the sixteen stages because if you practice according to the instructions, you’re going to experience those stages.

Student: I don’t want to get off the subject, but I have a question about this conversation and going on about people getting into a state of—well, Willoughby (?) has discussed it openly. This does that have anything to do with that? Like getting stuck…

Culadasa: That has absolutely everything to do with it. That is the dukhan yanas that…well, it’s more than just the dukhan yanas. There is a process of purification that takes place in samatha vipassana, and it’s going to have to happen no matter what method you do. What this involves, this is where all your old troublesome stuff of the past that’s been buried in the deepest subconscious recesses of your mind comes to the fore. That has to be dealt with. That’s quite apart from the dukhan yanas. Another part of it is that when your concentration becomes strong enough, even if you’re meditating in such a way that piti as joy and pleasure do not arise, you’re still going to experience a lot of the other physical, bodily manifestations. You’re going to experience feelings of tingling, burning, twitching, aching, rocking back and forth, jerking and twitching, involuntary movements. I think Willoughby described them as convulsive. I know a number of you in this room have experienced those. That too is something that, as part of samatha vispassana, is a good sign. “Oh, piti’s arising,” and you just let it happen, let it complete its process of developing maturation. In the vipassana practice, you just note it and let it go. That’s exactly what the correspondence is here.

Student: I was wondering about what Cynthia was asking. I was having the experience of these deeper emotions relating to—I don’t know if it’s quite called piti—the experience of free-flowing energy.

Culadasa: Yes.

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Student: This morning, the emotions were really blocking it. I felt tight area in my body. The energy wouldn’t flow. Yesterday, the energy was the cause of bringing these things up. It would sort of push things through. Is that related to what you were just talking about, the way that free-flowing energy is stopped by or moved there? Or am I just talking about a kind of a sensory image that’s different?

Culadasa: No, they’re really the same thing. You experience this energy moving in your body and then you experience it as being blocked. It’s not unusual, as you work your way through those blockages, to find that those blockages are related to past experiences or habits of mind, personality predispositions and things like that. In some meditation teachings, they carry that to the extreme, where everything that you experience in terms of energy movements, they try to relate it directly to some personality characteristic or some problem that you have that you need to work through. What I find is that although there are occasions where you have a particular block and the arising energy may become blocked in your throat, and it may turn out that you have some problem—something from your distant past or some characteristic of your personality in the present or whatever that can be metaphorically linked to the throat chakra, to right speech, and so on. Sometimes that happens. But also, very often, you encounter these blocks in energy movement, you work through the blocks in energy movement, and you never have the faintest inkling that there’s any psychological component at all related to them. Rather than go to either extreme, I would say obviously there is some psychological component involved in the experience of blockages of energy flow, but to assume that you need to somehow discover what all of these are and work through them is totally unnecessary.

Student: So what then is the practice when you’re trying to focus on flow and the blockages are too salient [not sure of what was said]?: They’re just again and again and again drawing you away from flow to the blockage.

Culadasa: If you’re perceiving an energy movement and there’s s clear blockage, one of the easiest ways to work with that—and I would suggest this be the first one that you try—is the principle that the energy follows attention. So you focus on the energy that’s blocked and you try with your mind to move it past the blockage or you shift your awareness beyond the point of the blockage and you dig in and try to detect the sensation of energy beyond that point until it begins to emerge. Very often that will help you move through the blockage. Sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes you just have to take the blocked energy experience as your meditation object and just…anything that pulls you away from your normal meditation object very strongly and very consistently, you can always take that as your alternative meditation object. Wait and see what it has to teach you. If there’s some psychological thing associated with it, then that gives it an opportunity to come up. Some memory, some emotion, something like that. Then you can confront and accept it.

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Student: So if you’re trying to that single-pointedness and the issue is that this blockage is drawing you ,drawing you, drawing you, you recommend giving up the single-pointedness for now and working with the blockage?

Culadasa: You can take the blockage as the object of your single-pointed attention. It’s not going to be a suitable object to try enter jhana in, for example, but for absolutely every other aspect of the practice, it’s extremely well suited. As a matter of fact, it has the tendency to draw your attention and hold it, so it’s even easier to be in single-pointed attention on it. You’re still training your mind. Attention is still being stabilized on an intentionally chosen object. So the training effect is just as good as it would be if you were focusing on the breath or some other intentionally chosen object.

Student: I’d like to add to that. So, that’s my state. I’ve got knots, blockages, whatever you want to call them. So in fact, going into jhanas at this point is kind of pointless. It’s just not going to happen. As you said, it wants to draw me in. These knots want to draw me in. It’s been this way seven or eight months. They are fabulous for pulling my attention in to the point where, yes, it’s very easy to meditate that way. Focus on that, feel the knot. Sometimes they release. These knots are releasing slowly. Not long ago it’s gotten such that there are so few knots that around Christmas time I found it hard to meditate, because I lost my objects of meditation. (Laughter) I just thought I would share.

Culadasa: Thank you. That’s very good. I think that will be very helpful for people.

Student: My experience today is I stopped calling those blockages by all those names. I decided they were sukha. I like contraction. It just really felt like, OK, I’ve come out of the closet. I like contraction. (Laughter)

Culadasa: That’s good too. Thank you.

Student: I’m always in a lot of knots. The only way I’ve learned to deal with it now is when you say you either go into it or you go past it. I can go into it intensively, but I still have tension around “it’s wrong.” I have to put love into it. Until I started putting love into them, they were scary.

Culadasa: You’re absolutely right. All of these things, the energy for resistance is actually coming from…a blockage is a resistance to energy flow. You have to stop resisting the blockage before that knot can untangle. As long as you keep resisting the blockage, it keeps it solid. It keeps it so solid that the energy’s not going to move. The same thing’s true if you have a very traumatic memory or really strong emotion that comes up. As long as you resist that, you’re actually feeding it strength. You have to turn it around and as you say, love it, accept it, be OK with it. “All right, you can be there.”

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Student: Until recently, I thought I was accepting it. I was paying attention to it, but what I was actually doing was not giving it love and accepting. I was trying to figure it out and paying too much attention to it in the wrong way or something.

Culadasa: What will happen, sometimes—I don’t know if this happens with you—but you have something like that that comes up and you put your attention on it and it dissolves and goes away. Then, you develop the idea that this is the solution, this is how I get rid of it. But then you’re still coming to the place of not allowing it to be there. You’re just going in there and you’re going to demolish it with permission. It doesn’t really work. When that happens, yeah, you’ve got to take the next step. You’ve got to love it. You’ve got to—how did you say—you came out of the closet.

Student: It’s not that I love it. It is love, Well, it’s not that it’s love, it just feels good. Contraction feels good!

Culadasa: Yeah. Whatever it is, you’re completely undoing your own internal resistance to it and since it is part of you, you’re undoing its resistance as well.

Student: Sometimes when I welcome whatever that is—say, maybe it’s a strong feeling—because I do believe it’s very important to love it, to welcome it and pay attention. Sometimes it dissipates then. What I do—which seems to respond—is I invite it back. I ask it to come back. I say, “I’d really like to get this back.” And if I wait very patiently and openly, it arises. I find that amazing, that we can actually invite that sort of thing. That it responds.

Culadasa: Yeah.

Student: Whatever IT is.

Culadasa: Whatever it is. But it is a part of our own mind. As long as our mind is divided against itself in any form, we are not going to be optimally what we can be.

Student: I was wondering about this John’s opinion about what that John was saying regarding…so you were saying that if the blockages are too bad to say, “jhana’s not for me today,” and to work with the blockages? Would that be your advice as well?

Culadasa: To which?

Student: There’s John, John and jhana. (Laughter) If you’re trying to do the single-pointedness and the blockages are too salient [?], would your advice be to say that jhana’s not for me today and deal with the blockages or to persist at it and see if the single-pointedness will…

Culadasa: See, that’s the decision that you have to make. What I’m saying is when that is there so strongly that you can’t just set it aside and proceed, then turn the tables on it and

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take it as your object at that point. Do exactly what he said. But you have to decide yourself. A person could potentially exaggerate this advice and every trivial distraction that comes up, they want to take that as their object. That’s going to be counterproductive. There is a point when you realize, OK, I can’t just ignore this and leave it be. I’m going to have to take more direct action. That’s when you do it.

Student: First I want to say thank you for this handout. It’s an amazing amount of information, and the things you’ve pulled together and the way you’ve presented it. There are a few things, though, that I had question marks and I’m still vague on. You said that you might talk a little more about the formless aspects. So, it’s the relationship between form and formlessness and how that…you mentioned space in here several times, in different ways. So, how the form and formlessness relates to space, and then the nimitta ?], the appearance, and the appearance of the meditation object. I think those are related in a lot of ways.

Culadasa: Yes, those are a couple of things that I can say a little bit more about. Let me go back to one other thing that was brought up earlier by Chris. She said there were five hindrances that she didn’t know what they were about. The five hindrances is a very useful concept, useful tool, in Buddhism. There is an excerpt from a sutra there, where the Buddha is distinguishing between wholesome and unwholesome absorptions and those hindrances are listed. The first one is usually called sense desire. I find that too limiting. It’s worldly desire. It’s desire for things of the sense realm that your mind believes are going to make you happy and keep you from becoming unhappy. So desire for the sense realm is the first hindrance. The second is aversion, or ill will, these negative emotional states in the entire range from impatience to hatred. The third hindrance usually is described as sloth and torpor. I prefer to refer to it as resistance, procrastination and fatigue.

Student: Is that different from mental dullness that you’ve referred to?

Culadasa: The mental dullness is an aspect of torpor. That dullness is of two origins. One is if you are mentally or physically tired. The other is because you’re focusing your attention and the mind is turned inward, it becomes de-energized, and you need to train the mind not to do that. It’s the same dullness, but for that particular hindrance, I usually am interpreting that as more concerned with the dullness from genuine mental or physical fatigue. I tend to think of the other kind of dullness as an inherent part of what happens in meditation and is part of the training. You train your mind not to sink into dullness.

The fourth hindrance is agitation of the mind that is the result of worry and remorse—worry about what’s going to happen because of this, that or the other thing, and remorse about things that you’ve done or guilt or things like this. These are major psychological hindrances that produce agitation in the mind. In passing, the best way to prevent those

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hindrances from coming into existence is through the practice of virtue. If you live virtuously, if you keep the precepts, if you practice the perfections, then you will have no cause for worry and remorse.

The fifth hindrance is skeptical doubt. “I must be doing this wrong,” or “I can’t do this. There’s something wrong with me. I’m not like everybody else.”

Student: Is it always self-referential, or could it be, “This path is stupid.”

Culadasa: That was the next one I was going to mention. (Laughter) Or, “this is the wrong method, this is not good.” Or, “my teacher’s full of crap.” (Laughter) Or, “this whole Buddhism business is nonsense. I’ve got to find something…” It’s all the same thing. It’s skeptical doubt.

So, those are the five hindrances.

Student: It feels like the self-referential part, I’m not able to…it feels qualitatively different than the other, like “the teacher’s no good” or “I don’t like sitting in this room.”

Culadasa: Yeah, well it is qualitatively different. It’s two qualitatively different forms of the same thing. Skeptical doubt is a kind of a reverse faith. It’s faith that it’s not going to work. The two qualitative kinds are who you’re blaming. You’re going to blame yourself and you’re going to blame someone else. It’s still the same thing—it’s not going to work, “I know it’s not going to work” and that keeps you from trying. That’s the whole problem with skeptical doubt. There is a kind of doubt that’s really good. It’s like, “OK, maybe so. Let me find out for myself.” That’s healthy doubt. But skeptical doubt is what keeps you from trying because you’re already convinced that it’s not going to work. Some people have a major issue with that in themselves. Everything in their life, they’ve doubted their ability to do. Or that somehow they are worthy to succeed and reap the fruits of what they do. If that’s in your make-up, you’re going to have to deal with it, because it’s going to come up really strongly over and over again in your meditation practice. The wonderful thing about the meditation practice is it’s going to bring you face-to-face with it, and you can get past it once and for all, and then eliminate it from every other aspect of your life.

Student: So there wouldn’t just happen to be handy antidotes to these, a by-the-numbers thing to do, huh?

Culadasa: Yes. You cultivate meditation. The things that we identified earlier as jhana factors are also identified as the specific antidotes to each of these five. Unification of mind, ekaggata is the specific antidote to sense desire. Piti, meditative joy, is the specific antidote to aversion and ill will. Directed attention is the specific antidote to sloth and torpor or, as I put it, resistance, procrastination and fatigue. Sukha, pleasure and happiness, is the specific antidote to the agitation due to worry and remorse. Happiness

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overcomes worry and remorse. Sustained attention is the specific antidote to skeptical doubt. Which is a way of saying, “Just keep doing it and you’ll get past it.”

Student: It will work, even if you don’t think so.

Culadasa: That’s right. But it for sure won’t work if you don’t try.

Student: It really is systematic, isn’t it?Culadasa: It is very systematic. It’s wonderfully systematic. Every now and then you’ll come to places where things have been bent maybe a little too much to make them fit into a nice system, but…

Student: I’ve heard this quote repeated a bunch of times. I think it’s from Bob Thurman. It’s, “Christians love God, Buddhists love lists.” (Laughter)

Culadasa: Somebody wrote a book, “Buddhism by the Numbers.” (Laughter) And there’s called part of the Pali canon that is all the sutras that involve one thing, and the next collection is all that involve two things, and then the next is called “The Collection of Threes,” then there’s “The Collection of Fours,” “The Collection of Fives,” “The Collection of Sixes.” That is really true.

Let me go on then to formless jhanas and nimitta, appearance. The formless jhanas are variations on the fourth jhana. As you go through these four jhanas, you progressively become more and more completely removed from the material realm, the sense realm. Let’s call it the material realm, because we’re going to refer to space here. In the fourth jhana—and this is even true of the deepest version of the fourth jhana—there still is one powerful element of what we call form that’s present. There’s one powerful connection to the material realm, and that’s the sense of location in space and limitations in space. The practitioner has achieved the fourth jhana. The next refinement is to eliminate that by taking infinite space and by essentially expanding boundaries until you have the perception of infinite space. You can take that as the object of that jhana. Then you’re no longer located in a particular place in space. From there, the next formless jhana is very very easy. That is infinite consciousness, which follows pretty much automatically that in order to have a perception of infinite space, you must have infinite consciousness. So it just takes a small shift in your focus to experience the jhana of infinite consciousness.

The next form jhana beyond that is the jhana of nothingness, no-thingness. It is the experience of objectlessness that is built on this foundation of perception of infinite consciousness in infinite space. To an infinite consciousness in infinite space, there’s no object, there’s no thingness to be taken as object. But there’s a subtle trick in this that the mind is playing. For example, if you parked your car outside the door and then you opened the door and looked out and there’s no car there, you’re going to have a perception of “no car-ness.” It is very much a perception, and it’s a very strong, powerful

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perception. You’ve had this a lot of times, right? You open the drawer and it’s not there. In ordinary perception, your mind is constructing a concept that consciousness takes as its object to account for sensory experience. If there’s nothing there, then it’s the absence of that sensory experience from which the mind then constructs an object, which is the no car-ness or or no-thingness. So the third formless jhana still involves perception and it still involves a mental construct, a samkara (?). The construct corresponds to the absence of any thing. So it’s the base of no-thingness, but there’s still another level that you can go beyond. In the terminology of the sutras, nonperception is a state of mind. It’s a state of consciousness. It’s the state of consciousness when you’re in deep sleep, under anesthesia, unconscious. What we would normally refer to as unconscious is what’s called nonperception. Even where you’re having a perception of an absence of something, the base of no-thingness, is a perception.

So the next jhana, the fourth of the formless jhanas, is called neither perception—because the mind’s not taking any construct as an object—so it’s neither perception nor is it nonperception. You have not lost consciousness, you’re not in deep sleep, you’re not anesthetized. It is a state where you’re conscious and fully aware and but you aren’t conscious of anything. It’s like a suspension of the act of perception. The act of perception is uncompleted.

Student: So that aspect of self that exercises the faculty of perception, that’s another layer of self that’s vanished.

Culadasa: That’s another layer of self that’s been dispensed with. It’s a very nebulous kind of jhana.

Student: And you wouldn’t have mindfulness, you wouldn’t be fully aware?

Culadasa: You are conscious. Your consciousness is in the form of awareness, and it’s awareness of the base of neither perception nor nonperception. So we could still say that there is mindfulness of a sort here, but not in the form of an ordinary perception.

There is one more state beyond this that I didn’t mention in this handout. Just for completeness, I’ll mention it now. It’s called the cessation of feeling and perception. It’s not nonperception, it’s the cessation of perception. It’s accompanied by the cessation of feeling, and it also corresponds to the cessation of formations. It IS nirvana. The state of the cessation and perception has the technical name naroda (?). It is nirvana. There are two kinds of nirvana. One is nirvana with remainder, which is the kind of nirvana that’s experienced in life, momentarily, by a person when they are experiencing path or fruition experiences of any of the four stages of awakening. It is the nirvana in which a Buddha dwells throughout the remainder of his physical existence in the world. That’s called the nirvana with remainder.

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Nirvana without remainder is parinirvana. It is the nirvana that follows upon the dissolution of the mind and body at the time of the death of a Buddha. It’s called nirvana without remainder—no more body, no more mind, no more… The other nirvana without remainder is the cessation of feeling and perception. It is this ninth state that’s beyond the jhana of neither perception nor nonperception. What it says about this state—I can only tell you what it says about it—is that this is only achievable by arhats and nonreturners. No one else can achieve this ninth state. When they achieve this ninth state, they are in exactly the same nirvana that they’ll be in following the death of their body. If I understand the references to it that I’m familiar with, if a nonreturner enters the cessation, he will arise from the cessation as an arhat.

Student: What’s the distinction between a nonreturner and an arhat?

Culadasa: Technically, a nonreturner still has the inherent sense of being a separate self. Although there’s no desire for anything of the sense realm—no aversion and no desire—there still is attachment to existence. An arhat has overcome the inherent sense of being a separate self. There’s no desire for either existence nor nonexistence, because there’s no sense of being something separate that could either exist or not exist.

Student: Can you say again the name of this ninth state? Did you call that parinirvana?

Culadasa: It’s nirvana without remainder and parinirvana is also nirvana without remainder. So those are the two occasions of nirvana without remainder. One is when a nonreturner or an arhat enters the cessation and the other is upon the death of the body of an arhat.

Student: So, for the form stages of jhanas, it’s often talking about qualities, especially the fourth state of neither perception nor nonperception. There’s energy or a process that’s still going on but it’s not…we wouldn’t characterize qualities of it.

Culadasa: That’s right. There is really nothing to say about it.

Student: OK. So, shall I be silent? (Laughter) It makes me think of something I’ve heard often but I never think I understand. That’s signlessness.

Culadasa: Is which-ness?

Student: Signlessness.

Culadasa: Signlessness.

Student: Right. Which is often put up there with no separate self as being one of the main aspects that we aspire to.

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Culadasa: Yes. Signlessness, or andanita (?). It’s actually different than the eighth jhana. What it is…the sign being referred to or the appearance being referred to is the appearance of substantiality, of, if not permanence, endurance. The appearance that things have. The opposite of that appearance the direct experience of anicha (?). We say impermanence but it’s really change. Constant change, flux. Signlessness is the knowledge of essentially emptiness too. It’s knowledge of emptiness. It’s knowledge of anicha, impermanence. It is the experience of having cut through the illusion, the appearance of solidity, substantiality of self-existent entities that endure even if only temporarily.

Student: And you’re saying that’s not comparable to this jhana of neither perception nor nonperception.

Culadasa: No. To have the direct experience of things in their empty and impermanent nature is not the same thing. Because a person can experience this jhana, somebody who practices the jhanas can experience this jhana and not have that realization, not have that knowledge. The Buddha’s second teacher was teaching this particular jhana, the base of neither perception nor nonperception, but he was not enlightened and had not had insight into impermanence, no self and emptiness.

Student: But the jhanas and maybe particularly the formless ones might help us along.

Culadasa: All of the jhanas will help tremendously. That’s basically what the Buddha said—practice the jhanas with mindfulness, and insight will arise. If you practice the jhanas as trance states, which is what the Brahmins had tended to do, without that kind of mindfulness, then you would not. If you look at the jhanas that the Brahmins practiced—we’re getting into a lot of historical digression that may be boring everybody, I don’t know—but if you look at what the Brahmins did, they did jhanas based on kasinas (?) and on the elements: earth, water, fire and air. They became completely absorbed in them. The Buddha set all of that aside and defined the jhanas in terms of the jhana factors, all of which are aspects of mind that you can be aware of. It became, then, a practice of mindfulness rather than a practice of trance state.

Student: All of this has helped. Thank you. But, the nimitta…

Culadasa: Nimitta means appearance. To enter jhanas with an object, focusing your attention on an object, that object has to be of a nature that is conducive to entering into absorption. All of our ordinary perceptions are mental constructs built out of other mental constructs, essentially to explain sensory experience. They are extremely complex and complicated fabrications.

Student: Can you give an example of that?

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Culadasa: For example, if you tried to enter jhana with the breath as an object, it’s not going to work, because breath is a concept. It presumes body and it presumes air or atmosphere and it presumes space and directionality in and out. We could list a thousand other things that it presumes. So our ordinary perception of breath is an extremely complex construct and it’s not suitable. When we get to the sixth stage, the appearance of breath is altered. When you’re having this experience of the whole body with the breath, you’re not experiencing the body in such a complexly fabricated way. You are having a direct experience of sensations, more or less unmoderated sensations. This is what happens when you reach the sixth stage anyway. You’ve been observing the sensations of the breath. We make a point of calling them sensations of the breath all the time. It’s very important to do that because as your meditation proceeds, at about the sixth stage, that’s really what it is. It’s no longer breath. It’s the sensations that happen to be related to the concept of breath. Those sensations are suitable as an object to enter jhana with. You can, at the sixth stage—what this is, is this is the second kind of nimitta. The first nimitta or first appearance is breath as we normally perceive it, as a complex construct. It’s called the parikama (?) nimitta. Parikama means preliminary or ordinary or beginner’s or initial or connotations like that. When you get to the sixth stage, the appearance changes and it become the ugaha (?) nimitta. Ugaha is acquired. It’s acquired as the result of a practice and the refinement of your perceptions, so that now you are just experiencing sensations in a much more direct way. In the sixth and seventh stages, that can become even more refined to where the sensations become unrecognizable. You might have the experience that you’re observing the sensations of the breath but you don’t know which sensations belong to the inbreath or outbreath anymore, because you’re not attaching any concepts to them. You can instantly find out—you can recognize and attach the concept, but your mind is not bothering to do that anymore. You can go a little deeper into it and the qualities of warmth, coolness, movement, sharpness and everything else that you could identify within the sensations of the breath—all those recognizable qualities disappear and it becomes just like a vibratory phenomenon. These are the forms that this second appearance can take, acquired appearance. It is suitable for entering jhana. This is using the term nimitta or appearance in its proper speaking.

There’s a third nimitta. It’s called patibhaga nimitta, or the mental counterpart appearance. If you follow this progression through the tenth stage, the patibhaga nimitta will arise. This is an appearance of the breath that is not sensation anymore. It’s the impact that the sensations arriving in the mind have. It produces an imprint in the mind. That appears, and you can take that as your meditation object for entering the deepest of all jhanas.

There are these three different appearances, stagewise, that the meditation object takes over time—the preliminary appearance, the acquired appearance of just sensation. Those are two extremes. Sensations arrive that represent raw sensations. They enter the mind

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and are conceptualized. Here is just color and shape and here is “car.” Usually we “see” a car. The acquired appearance would be like just seeing the color and shape without attaching a label or recognition or concept to it. Between these two is where this patibhaga nimitta, this mental counterpart image lies. Sensations enter the mind, and then, preconceptually, before they have been processed, in this particular state you can become aware of it. You can take that as your object. It is independent of the sensations that gave rise to it. It is not a complex construct. It’s not a conceptual construct. It’s between the two. That is the nimitta or meditation object that’s used for entering the deepest jhanas.

If you’ll notice, when I went through these, you’re using the second nimitta, the ugaha, to enter the ultralite jhanas and are using the patibhaga—the mental counterpart image—to enter into the deepest jhanas. What are we using to enter into the lite jhanas and the light jhanas? In the lite jhanas, you’re actually using the piti sukha of access. Since that is something that is pretty straightforward and simple and in the mind, it’s a suitable object. I’ve never heard Leigh Brasington and people that teach those jhanas call that a nimitta. I guess they didn’t feel like it was necessary to. The people that teach the light jhanas, which use the light, the illumination, from piti as the meditation object, have usurped the word nimitta and attached it to the light. The light is not an appearance of the original meditation object, because Pa Auk and Ajahn Brahmalvamso teach meditation using the breath, and the light is absolutely is not an appearance of the breath. It is a completely different object that switch to once the illumination arises. They take the label of nimitta and attach it to it so that it will be consistent with what it says in the Visuddhimagga and things like that.

Student: So the nimitta for the deepest jhanas isn’t necessarily a light?

Culadasa: No. You can enter the deepest jhanas with a light nimitta. The light does make a very good nimitta. But you don’t need to. You can wait and allow a breath nimitta to arise. This is preconceptual and it’s also—you know, you have the sensory gateways. It’s beyond the sensory gateways but it’s not yet at the level of conceptualization. The experience of it tends to be synesthetic. In the case of the breath nimitta, when it arises, you’ll see the nimitta corresponds to the entire breath simultaneously. The breath is a cyclic phenomenon that repeats itself over and over again. Have you ever looked at an oscilloscope screen like a heart monitor, that traces the shape of an EKG, and it traces it in the same place over and over again? It appears to be renewing the same image over and over again. This is actually what’s happening with the breath nimitta. It’s an imprint on the mind that, with each new breath cycle, is renewed and becomes conceptualized. You can focus in and examine the parts of it and see six, eight, ten, twelve, sixteen different parts to the inbreath and as many different parts to the outbreath. But you can also come to this place where you conceive a mental counterpart image. You’re essentially seeing the entire breath cycle in its entirety all at once, and it just gets refreshed with every new cycle.

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Student: Why does that produce a deeper jhana than the light jhana?

Culadasa: It doesn’t necessarily…let me put it this way. It’s not necessary to use that to achieve the deepest jhanas, because you can achieve the deepest jhanas using light as well. Those who are using the light as a nimitta to enter the jhanas, the light shows up sooner than does the patibhaga nimitta. What they’re doing is they’re starting point is a less completely refined stage of concentration, corresponding to stage eight or nine of the ten stages. They can continue to deepen and refine their concentration, so those jhanas can eventually become just as deep. Since the patibhaga nimitta doesn’t even arise until you’ve reached stage ten, you’ve already basically perfected concentration. OK?

Student: I don’t want to take us off the subject, but someone asked a question earlier today—I don’t remember who asked it—but it was a good question about how to practice the jhanas, or when to practice them or how to incorporate them into our practice. This may not be the moment, but I wanted to remind you that you said that at some point today you wanted to…

Culadasa: Yes. I think this is exactly the moment. We’re getting into the kind of technical stuff that I really love to talk about, but I’m sure must be going beyond some of your interest. Let’s back up. Let’s take what we learned this weekend and talk about how to use it. I would recommend that you take this understanding of the jhanas that you have and you use it to improve the quality of your concentration and mindfulness. Go ahead and work with this jhana that you’ve… For those of you that have already had an opportunity to experience, see if you can repeat that and see if you can develop some skill around entering the jhana, remaining in the jhana, arising from the jhana when you plan to and then reviewing the jhana.

We didn’t really get into the reviewing, but that’s an important habit. As soon as you come out of the jhana, you reflect. Specifically, to begin with—you’re going to do your own exploration—but to give you some orientation about where to begin, recollect the state of your mind before you entered the jhana, the state of your mind in the jhana, and the state of your mind now, after you’ve arisen from the jhana with a view towards what is there and what is not there. As the description of Sariputra’s practice that’s given in the handout there, you could even use that as a guideline. All of these different qualities of mind, to examine them—what was there, what was not there, how is it different, how did it change, how did it arise, how did it pass away? Start off initially at least taking a moment, thirty seconds or a minute, to reflect and see if you can remember each of these states of mind of these three stages.

This will also be very helpful in your becoming able to more easily enter the jhana, because sometimes you’ll be more successful than others. The more frequently you look back at exactly what was going on in your mind when you entered the jhana, the more

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clear it’s going to become to you exactly what the conditions are that you need to create to enter jhana. You’ll get more skilled at being able to enter jhana.

Practicing the first jhana in this way until such time as you get really good at it and you start to get tired of it, then you’ll be ready to move on to second jhana. The other thing that you could do, if you’re practicing this, your concentration—keep doing your regular meditation practice as a part of this, but practice periodically…depending on how much time you sit. If you sit twice a day, you could make one a jhana sit and one just you’re regular samatha vipassana sit. If you sit only for forty-five minutes or an hour a day, what you might do is on those days when your concentration is really good and you think you’re going to be able to enter jhana, then go ahead on those occasions and practice entering the jhana. That’s the way that I would suggest that you do it. Depending on the amount of time you have to meditate, either do both or else do the jhana practice when you say, “Hey, I’m in a good place to do this today.” Then do it. Your skill level will improve.

The tremendous utility of these lighter jhanas is that it will rapidly improve the quality of your concentration. If you practice in the way I’ve described, it probably won’t be very long before you find that consistently you’re sitting down and you focus your attention on the breath at the nose, and your mind gets really quiet. When that happens consistently, you don’t need to go through all this rigamarole of expanding your awareness and using the experience of the whole body with the breath as the meditation object to enter jhana. We didn’t really get a chance to do this in detail, but you have some description to take with you. What to do then, when you have that kind of stillness, is practice entering the lite jhana using piti and sukha to enter the jhana. OK? When your meditation starts to have the qualities that are described for stage seven, then use the stage seven state as an access for entering the lite jhanas using piti sukha as your meditation object. See what sort of skill you can develop with that. If you do that, it should help you. Piti will become progressively stronger. By the way, if you’ve been doing the one kind of jhana and then you do the other, and you enter the first jhana using piti and sukha as the meditation object, you’re probably going to be quite amazed by how strong the sensations of piti are. That’s all right. They’ll calm down. You just work with them and keep going in that way.

Tell me how this goes. You see, my background is deep jhana practice. I became acquainted with the lighter jhanas more recently. I’ve been guiding people individually to use these to enhance the quality of their practice. Now I’ve given this information to a whole group of you. One of the questions in my mind—and I don’t know the answer—is it better to stay with the ultralite jhanas and, when you’ve mastered the first jhana, do second jhana and then third jhana and then fourth jhana before you start working with the lite jhanas? Or, as I suspect is going to happen, you’re going to find that the quality of your concentration becomes suitable for practicing the lite jhanas probably in the course of becoming skilled at entering the ultralite first jhana. I don’t know if maybe the most

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appropriate thing to do is to just switch from ultralite first jhana to lite first jhana. We’re covering new territory here. I wish I could give you more specific guidance. You’ll teach me and then I’ll give other people more specific guidance, OK? Please keep me informed of how your practice is going so that I can guide you, but also so that we can get the sense of what is most productive. Perhaps it will turn out that for different people it’s different things. We’ll also discover what the circumstances are that dictate one approach in preference to the other.

Questions about how to practice this?

Student: I just wondered, as a practical matter, are you going to keep up the tea sessions on Thursday afternoons and is that a place where people can come to check in with you?

Culadasa: I think we’ll keep going until I’ve sampled every kind of tea they have and gotten tired of them all. (Laughter)

Student: And when are these sessions?

Culadasa: On the first Thursday of each month at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon at the Seven Cups Tea House. It’s just sort of an informal sangha discussion. I circumvented an issue there, with that word. It’s not quite clear whether we get together and we just get to know each other socially or whether we try to talk about dharma at these tea sessions. We make it a sangha discussion, so it can be both.

Student: This is back to a technical question. The mental counterpart image, is that going to be there in all jhanas but we don’t pay attention to it until we start to go into the deep jhanas?

Culadasa: The mental counterpart, you don’t actually have sufficient focus and clarity to pick up on that until you become very advanced in samatha practice.

Student: That wasn’t quite my question. My question was, is it there?

Culadasa: Oh, is it there? Yes, it’s there. Every single perception you have involves sensory input that mental counterpart images created, and then the mental counterpart image is what’s processed by your mind, which comes up with “car” or “my friend Joe” or “flat tire” or whatever it happens to be.

Student: Then it would also make sense to me…I don’t know the one-through-ten stages, so this may be obvious if I did know. It seems to me that one could use the mental counterpart image as a meditation object.

Culadasa: Well, see, it’s always there, for every person in the world, whether they’ve ever meditated or not or no matter what stage they’re at. It’s being able to focus on it. It’s being able to perceive it.

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Student: And if one could, one could use it, similar to the way one uses breath or light.

Culadasa: If one could, yes. If one could. OK, you’re absolutely right. I don’t know for certain that there isn’t somebody who’s going to be able to pick up on that before they’ve reach the tenth stage of samatha.

Student: So are we trying to get into that part of our nervous system that is before we assign identity to “car” and just live where it’s a blur of moving color that isn’t a car until you call it one?

Culadasa: It’s not so much that we’re trying to get there and live there, because that wouldn’t be terribly practical. We’re trying to get there to have a direct experience of that, because having a direct experience of that is going to erase our attachment to the view we have now that things are really the way they look like to us.

Student: When you go there, at least the little I know about it, is that you don’t get to stay there. You get to be right or wrong about what you see. You get to…I just had this experience over lunch. I was out walking to my car and coming back. Right next to the sangha [not sure this is what she said] is a tree that’s been TP’d. It’s in the immediate yard next to us. Because of where it was placed in proximity and the fact that I was thinking, “Oh, isn’t it nice to hang prayer flags at sangha (?),” I only saw it out of the corner of my eyes and I could swear it was prayer flags. Prayer flags, next to…? No, wait. So I got to hang then with that assignment of illusion instead of that “I saw a fluttering, neither toilet paper nor prayer flag.” I didn’t get to stay with the fluttering. I fell right down into what I decided it had to be because of where it was located and what I was tripping on. What I’m asking is, if we can’t live in that pre-processing interval, we get to spend a lot of time being wrong.

Culadasa: The way it is, we spend a lot of time being wrong and we don’t even know it. So the first step is we still might spend a lot of time being wrong, but we know it. Which leads to the subsequent step, which is that we’re not wrong quite so often as we used to be.

Student: And we’re not attached to it.

Culadasa: You’re not attached to it. That’s the really important part. You’re not attached to it.

Student: Oops, I’m still attached.

Culadasa: You don’t go around trying to force yourself to be nonattached. What you do is you practice mindfulness and you let mindfulness bring you to a place where you really and truly aren’t attached. In the meantime, you just remind yourself that this is probably just a view I’m attached to.

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Student: But won’t the unattached person see neither toilet paper nor prayer flags, or will the unattached person be so clear that they’ll obviously see toilet paper, but they won’t make any…

Culadasa: That question assumes that toilet paper is what’s really there. (Laughter) You’re gonna love this. (More laughter)

Student: One more question about the mental counterpart image—is there a correlation between the intensity of the counterpart image with the intensity of the original image?

Culadasa: The experience of intensity is a reflection of—how to put it—how fully conscious you are. To get to the place of being able to observe the mental counterpart image, you have to have already really refined the power of your consciousness. Then your perceptions will become very intense. This is something that, in the course of your practice, you’re going to have those experiences where for some reason or another in the course of your meditation, you’ve been doing things that greatly enhance the power of your conscious awareness. When the meditation is over, you’re going to get up and everything is going to seem so clear and so immediate. That’s going to last for a little while. You’re going to cultivate that and the consciousness you bring to any experience is going to bring more intensity to the way you experience whatever it is. That has to develop before you’re going to…well, once again I’ll qualify this. As far as I know, that has to happen before somebody can be aware of the mental counterpart sign.

Student: I’m asking something a little bit different. If I’m in a tunnel and I say something very softly, you get a very soft echo. This is the model I’ve got here. If I yell, then I get a very loud echo. So it’s not so much the difference of whether somebody is enlightened or not enlightened. I’m asking does a loud original image create a loud mental counterpart and a soft original create a soft mental counterpart?

Culadasa: The intensity of the original sensory stimulus is going to be reflected in the intensity of the mental counterpart, yes. That’s true. It’s part of a continuum. If we kept going down the continuum, we come to the point where the sensory input is subliminal. It’s making an imprint on the mind, which we can tell, because we can do tests a minute later or a few seconds later and we can tell that sensory input did register on the mind. But it didn’t go to the next stage where it was conceptualized and you were conscious of it. There is this definite relationship between stimulus intensity and what’s called the quality of the mental counterpart that’s formed. OK? That’s what you’re asking.

Student: Thank you very much. That’s exactly what I was asking.

Culadasa: It is now three o’clock. I had proposed doing another meditation before we left.

Student: Can you give us a short break first?

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Culadasa: It would have to be a short break, yeah. So, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll take a short break and we’ll do a meditation together and then we’ll bid adieu until we see each other next time. I hope your practice goes really well. I’m looking forward to the feedback from your ongoing practice and where it leads you. I’ll say this much—I’m really pleased with the results that you told me that you got here this weekend. I had no idea how well it was going to work. And it’s working better than I had hoped. Thank you. You’re such good students!

Student: Now we’re going to go home and be out of this little hothouse of instruction and it won’t be the same. You want us to keep you informed of our practice and how well it goes. We’re going to go home and basically go with what we’re given and see where that goes.

Culadasa: That’s right. The possibilities are endless. Who knows, we might do a two-week-long jhana retreat together and then you’ll really get to go into these things.

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