June 7 -Day 3 -In Depth Jhana Talk- Excellent! Delson Armstrong

A lot of you have been asking about jhana in the interviews. And I was going to wait to talk about it, but knowing that in some of your minds you will not be satisfied until you know about jhanas, I figured I'll talk about it today. And then we'll talk about more important stuff like liberation. There are two kinds of jhanas.

There's the jhanas that keep you stuck in samsara, and there are the jhanas that help you liberate from samsara. What are the jhanas that help you liberate from samsara? They are part of what is known as samma samadhi, right meditation. And right meditation, as I said before, is dependent upon the rest of the factors of the Eightfold Path.

You need right view. You need right intention. You need right speech, right action, right livelihood. Thereby, you'll have right effort, right mindfulness, and then finally, right meditation. If you do not have these other factors, and you go ahead and start meditating, you will have to suppress your mind in order for the hindrances not to be present. And when you do that, without taking into account the sila aspect, without taking into account the precept part of it.

You'll experience some great states. You'll experience a lot of joy and happiness and bliss and all of these things. But when you come out of it, maybe for a couple of hours you'll experience happiness. Maybe for a couple of hours you'll experience all of this bliss. But you'll get right back to square one. Difficult situations will come into your life and you'll just be propagating the same kind of situations over and over, having not learned what to do to let go of old karma.

The tools that the Buddha has provided, what was his very first sermon, traditionally speaking? The burning of the wheel of Dhamma. And in that he said there is the path of the ignoble and there is the path of the noble. The ignoble path is the path that is overindulgent. It's something that the entire world is burning with to possess more, to be validated, to be popular, to have as many resources as you can.

And that stems from a lack of right view. And on the other side, you have these groups of people who decide to leave the household life and they become ascetic. And they do all kinds of practices. Earlier this year, there was something known as the Maha Kumbh Mela. It happens in India every so often, every four years, every 12 years, and then there's one that happens every 144 years.

And this year was the one that happens every 144 years. A lot of people, I'm not sure what the number was, but a lot of people throughout that month coming and going to the Maha Kumbh Mela. We're talking about probably, on a conservative scale, tens of millions, but more realistically, hundreds of millions of people.

It is the original Burning Man festival. And there's all kinds of sadhus, all kinds of different ascetics present at the Kumbh Mela. There are those who are known as the naga sadhus and they are completely naked. They're only covered in ash and in these beads that they wear called rudrakshas, dreadlocks and all these things. And they never come out of the mountains except for doing the Maha Kumbh Melas, so it's a real treat for people to see them and interact with them. And you have all kinds of ascetics there. There are ascetics who hold their arm like this for decades because that's part of their practice. Can you imagine holding an arm like this, and their arm just becomes withered bone and flesh?

You can see it. And there are other sadhus who do really strange ascetic practices, too strange to our eyes. But they do it because that is their devotion. That is their belief that it will lead them to awakening, lead them to out of samsara. The Buddha did all kinds of practices like that. when he was an ascetic for six years. He did all kinds of things. First, he went to these two teachers who taught him the access into nothingness and then the access into neither perception or non-perception.

Afterwards, he left those two teachers and then he went out on his own and became an ascetic. And the Buddha said that it didn't help him to relieve suffering. Because remember, the Buddha's journey as the Bodhisattva was not about awakening or enlightenment. It was about, I see there is suffering in this world. I see that I am burning with suffering.

Is there any way out of this suffering? He was inspired by the four sights. Now that's the traditional story, inspired by the four sights. What are the four sights? First he saw a sick man. And then he saw an old man. Then he saw the corpse of a dead man. And then he saw a sage or an ascetic practicing under a tree, meditating.

And he was so inspired by the calmness on that man's face. He said, there is so much peace in him. How do I get that? How do I get to ceasing suffering? And his journey began. So he learned how to get into nothingness. He learned how to get into neither perception or non-perception. He must have learned all kinds of meditation processes.

But none of them were rooted in necessarily sila. There was an emphasis on, okay, let's just get out of here as fast as we can, which is, by all means, a pretty noble intention, because you've seen enough suffering. But if you do it in a way that suppresses the mind, it's only going to take you so far.

If you do not understand the laws and mechanics of karma as he did when he became awakened, which is that the Eightfold Path is the path that leads to the cessation of karma. Karma is what binds us to samsara. And if we don't have our view in place, our right view in place, then we don't have anything.

We need right view. What is right view? There's two parts to it. I will explore this in detail, but we're going to get into the jhanas today. The two kinds of right view are the mundane right view and the super mundane right view. The mundane right view is the understanding of action and consequence and acceptance of the idea of karma.

That's basically the gist of the mundane right view. The super mundane right view is the understanding of the Four Noble Truths. He became the Buddha when he realized the Four Noble Truths. What were the Four Noble Truths? What are the Four Noble Truths? That there is suffering that is to be understood. What does that mean? That I should recognize that first and foremost I am suffering.

A lot of people numb themselves from that suffering through all kinds of activities, through all kinds of substances and experiences. And so suffering leads to two things: further confusion, because I want to just numb the pain out by doing all kinds of things, by distracting myself. There's an interesting book that I read recently called The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté, esteemed professor, I think, of psychology.

And they're meeting, of all places, in like a sports bar. And there's all kinds of television screens on. People are shouting and screaming and drinking and all of this stuff. I think it's probably at the airport that they're waiting for their flight. And he looks around and he says, what is all this? He asks the professor, and the professor says, it's trauma.

It's just trauma. People are distracting themselves from the suffering. You can't do anything about it, so I'm going to just ignore it. That's also part of ignorance. I ignore that there is any kind of suffering, which only leads me to further confusion. But there's a second path out of suffering, which is the search for a way out.

Either it leads you to further confusion or it leads you to a search, and you say, I've had enough. There must be a way. And this is what's known as samvega. It's this sort of disenchantment. Of course, I'll tell you more about disenchantment later and why I'm changing that word. But it's basically the realization that, hey, I can't keep doing this anymore, in the same kind of loop.

And we're fortunate when we're able to recognize that. And so we then look for a way out. And there are many ways we do that. We become spiritual. We become meditative. We do all kinds of things. And by some karmic road, we come to the Dhamma, which is that which is rooted in the Four Noble Truths and applies the Eightfold Path. I don't care about Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana and all of these sects and ideas.

All I care about is the Four Noble Truths. That I know that everybody can agree upon. So, once we understand the suffering and realize and recognize, I am suffering, now we find a way. Why does the suffering arise? How does the suffering arise? How do I get out of it? So we abandon the suffering by abandoning the craving that leads to it. And we experience nirodha.

That's dukkha nirodha, the cessation of suffering. But how do we do it? What is the process for that? The Eightfold Path. So you can see already there's these circular kind of reference points. The Four Noble Truths talk about the Eightfold Path, but the first part of the Eightfold Path talks about the Four Noble Truths. So you need that in place.

And then you need right intention, which is what we spoke about the first day. What is our intention here? Is it to be the greatest meditator in the world? Is it to have bragging rights to how long we can meditate? Is it for awakening? Is it for more joy and clarity and happiness? What is it for? And can we let go of our preconceived notions of how things should be and see things as they are?

Cultivate non-ill will and non-cruelty. And then, of course, the precepts. Right speech, right action, right livelihood. Then we're ready for meditation, which is the right effort, right mindfulness, and right meditation. I will walk you through each of these components of the Eightfold Path. But my point is, if you want to do jhana correctly, you need all these other parts.

Because the only person who is ready to enter the stream, as it were, is the person who follows the Eightfold Path. Is the person who walks the Eightfold Path. Doing meditation for the heck of it, we may have the intention that we want to be free, but if we don't have all these other things in order, then our mind will not be developed in the way the Buddha intended when he talked about this middle path.

So now we're going to zoom in on samma samadhi. What is samma samadhi? Samadhi consists of four jhanas. There are in reality only four jhanas, but there are eight levels of meditation. Because in the fourth jhana, there are four extra, what usually is known as arupa jhanas or ayatanas, which are fields or dimensions of experience. Jhana.

How do you get to the first jhana? First and foremost, one is secluded from unwholesome states. What does it mean to be secluded from unwholesome states? Free of hindrances. Free of distractions. How do you get to that? The 6R's. What are the 6R's? Right effort and right mindfulness. Secluded from unwholesome states, quite secluded from sensual pleasures. Here you are on retreat. Why? Because it's much easier to meditate.

It's much quieter. It's pretty secluded. And so the Buddha, when he says, "He goes to the root of a tree or an empty hut." You all have your own cabins. We have this Dhamma hall where we can all meditate together. And it's quite secluded from sensual pleasures. Relatively speaking, we have really great food and chocolate cake courtesy of some meditators here. From sensual pleasures means that we close our eyes, we can't see anything, right? We start to center our mind around an object.

So we sit down, we relax the mind and body, notice what's going on, and so we have mindfulness established before us. By mindfulness established before him, before them. We are bringing mindfulness into the present moment. So now we may hear the birds chirping. We may hear my voice. We may hear all of these things. We may feel the air conditioning on our skin. We may feel the fly buzzing around us. All of these things, that's fine. The object of meditation: the attention is less dispersed around those sensual experiences and is gathered and collected around the object.

And this process of gathering and collecting the mind around an object is known as vitaka and vichara. Vitaka is the intentionalizing of bringing up an object. For example, bringing up an image in the mind that makes us feel uplifted. Saying in our mind, may I be happy, may I be well, may I be free of suffering, may I be filled with loving-kindness.

Whatever you use is the process of vitaka. Vichara is the sustaining of that. What does that mean? The car. I have put the key in the ignition and I've started the car. That's vitaka. Now I put the car into drive and start to slowly drive out. That's vichara. I'm sustaining that process of the object of meditation. It might be for a while.

But what's the point of continually turning the ignition over and over and over? Once it started, you don't need to go back and do that. And because my mind is free of the hindrances, there is relief that arises. That relief comes from the word pamojja. And this relief brings about an experience of joy. It's not a joy dependent upon external pleasures.

It's a joy of being free of hindrances. The Buddha has likened hindrances to a debt to be owed, a prison to be escaped from, a thirst that needs to be quenched. How does it feel to be out of debt? You're no longer a servant or a slave to those hindrances. How does it feel to be freed from prison?

Now you're free to do and roam around as you please. How does it feel to quench your thirst? There's immense satisfaction in that. That bliss is that piti that we're talking about. Starting the meditation, they intentionalize bringing up loving-kindness. And they feel into that loving-kindness. So that's the vitaka and vichara. And because there are no hindrances present in the mind, the mind feels happy, relief, and joy.

And there's a deeper sense of comfort throughout the body. This is known as sukha. Not to be mistaken for the fat cat in the dining hall. Although whenever you see Sukha, he's always in sukha. And you have another factor, which is known as ekaggata. Ekaggata is usually translated as one-pointedness. And people have all kinds of notions about what this means, one-pointed practice. It means I become, this is the idea, general idea that people have, it means I become hyper-focused on my object of meditation to the exclusion of everything else. And by doing so, my mind becomes like a laser.

But as Venerable Metananda would say, and awareness to be like a lantern instead of a laser. So what do we mean by ekaggata? Ekaggata generally just means that your mind is in orbit around the object of meditation. If you press too hard, you will crash into the object. If you are too lax, you will fade away from the object. Your mind will go somewhere else.

So the ekaggata is unification of the mind or the collecting of the mind's attention that orbits around the object. So this is the first jhana. Free of hindrances, secluded from sensual pleasures. There is relief and joy in the body, and there is a collectedness of attention. In order for you to go into jhanas, you also need what are known as the enlightenment factors.

Now, I'm going to be giving you a lot of information. There's no need for you to memorize all of this, okay? It's just to understand a little bit of the territory. I don't want you to try to figure out where you are, or if you have reached this place or that space, or is it this, or is it that, or which enlightenment factor am I supposed to be playing around with.

I'm just telling you that in order for you to be in a jhanic state of mind, you need the enlightenment factors, and these enlightenment factors are activated by right effort, by the 6R's. What are the seven enlightenment factors? Mindfulness, discernment, energy, joy, tranquility, collectedness, and equanimity. When you recognize that you are distracted, you bring up the mindfulness factor.

The realization that you were distracted is also the discernment factor. The discernment between what? Between what is wholesome and what is unwholesome. When you release your attention from it and when you relax the tightness and tension, you are balancing your energy. So now you are bringing in the energy factor. When you smile, you have the joy factor.

And because you have relaxed, you also have the tranquility factor. And when you come back to your object of meditation, you have the collectedness factor. And thereby you have been equanimous through that process. What do we mean by equanimity? The word equanimity comes from the Pali upekkha. And actually upekkha is more than just equanimity. Ah, as apeka or apeksha, which means expectation.

So upekkha is without expectation. How many times have I told you guys, those who have been on retreat with me, it happens when you least expect it. When you least expect it. No apeksha. No expectations. So when you're 6R-ing this process, or going through this process of the 6R's, you're activating these enlightenment factors. They're coming into play. And the mind then becomes jhanic.

Also, there is the finger snap sutta, or the set of the finger snap suttas, where it is said that if one were to have a finger snap length of loving-kindness, his mind is not devoid of jhana. So when you cultivate loving-kindness, your mind is easily prone towards experiencing jhana. So in order for jhana to arise, you need these enlightenment factors. You need to be free of the hindrances.

And then you need to be secluded from sensual pleasures. And your mind needs to collect around an object, which then allows the mind to experience relief, joy, comfort, and this deep unification of the mind. First jhana. Second jhana. In the second jhana, you have a certain level of self-confidence in the practice. Now you feel like things are happening in a flow.

You don't need to bring up the feeling. Think about things to bring up the feeling. You don't need to verbalize to bring up the feeling, which means what? Vitaka and vichara are gone. There is no need to intentionalize. There's no need to picturize. There's no need to visualize. There's no need to do anything. The feeling is now self-sustaining because of your attention and the feeling of, yeah, I can do this. I'm getting the hang of this.

That's the self-confidence. And the piti, or the joy, which can arise in the form of exuberance, in the form of a feeling of happiness, in a body buzz, in all kinds of ways that can arise, starts to deepen. Because the noise of intentionalizing with the vitaka and vichara goes away. So your mind deepens into the joy. And there's a greater degree of comfort in the body.

And at this point, your mind's attention is undispersed. It remains with its object. You don't need to make so much of an effort to keep it there. It may wander off, and if it does, you just 6R, and you're back at it again. Then the third jhana, what goes away is the piti, that joy. Sounds sad, doesn't it? Joy. Everybody's after bliss.

But bliss is overrated. It's the newbies who go after the joy. The masters know, "Ah, yeah, here's this little new kid on the block wanting some joy, some bliss." But there is something greater and more sustaining and more magnificent than just the joy. And that is an experience of deep calm. The sukha still remains. The sukha here is a deeper layer of comfort in the body and content in the third jhana.

It's like, I don't need to do anything. I'm feeling very content where I am right now. In the suttas, this is why it's said, the third jhana is what the noble ones call, "he has a noble disposition," because he's content. He's free of any kind of desire to change anything. That's great. There's very little effort to be made to stay with the object.

And the body goes through some interesting experiences. You may be meditating and you may only feel your hands. Or your hands may feel heavy. Or you may feel like you're floating. You may feel like you're coming out of your body. You may feel like your body is expanding. You may feel like the feeling of loving-kindness in the heart starts to expand. You may feel like it starts to get up towards the head. You may feel like the body is heavy or very light.

All of these are different signature points pointing out to, "Oh, that person is probably getting into the third jhana." And the collectedness here, the attention that's there in this state of mind, is pristine. The level of tranquility you feel in this third jhana is just so well balanced. And then you get to the fourth jhana, in which he experiences, it's said in the suttas, he experiences neither pain nor pleasure.

So the sukha also is gone at this point. And what remains is namely a very deep mindfulness. And it's actually said a pure mindfulness due to equanimity. What does that mean? When we go through the process of the jhanas, we are also developing the enlightenment factors. The enlightenment factors are not linear. It's not just that mindfulness leads to discernment, discernment leads to energy, energy leads to joy, joy leads to tranquility, tranquility leads to collectedness, and collectedness leads to equanimity. No, it's not just that. When you are meditating, you experience these things through activation of the six R's. As you deepen your meditation and journey through the four jhanas, the enlightenment factors start to become stronger and more prevalent.

For example, in the first and second jhana, what do you have more of? You have more joy and you have more sukha. In the third jhana, what do you have more of? You have tranquility. In the fourth jhana, what do you have more of? Mindfulness due to equanimity, because the equanimity circles back and strengthens the next arising mindfulness. You see in the mind that is wrapped in the world around us, in the mind that is dispersed in the senses, there is an arising and passing away of mental conditions. They continue to strengthen each other through cyclical processes that are happening in every single moment. But when your mind is free of that and goes into jhana, there is another cyclical process that's happening through the way of the enlightenment factors.

So as you get into the jhanas, your mindfulness informs discernment, discernment informs energy, energy informs joy, joy informs tranquility, tranquility informs collectedness, collectedness informs equanimity. And then equanimity further strengthens and informs the next arising in that cycle of mindfulness. This process goes on, until what is left in the fourth jhana? Pure mindfulness due to equanimity. This is why in the fourth jhana it is so pure.

Where joy is like a, both these flames, so to speak, are pretty stable. The joy is flickering. And the sukha is becoming more stable. And the tranquility becomes even more still. And then the equanimity and the mindfulness become like a very still flame, unaffected by anything that's arising. It's pure and bright, like the flame of a ghee lamp.

You can experiment and try and see for yourself, treat when you go back home. When you look at different kinds of oil and you have an oil wick and you light the flame, there are different qualities to that flame. But when you take a ghee lamp, what is ghee? Clarified butter. And when you light that, you see that the flame is still, bright, radiant, just like the mind in the fourth jhana, unwavering. And this fourth jhana is the base for many things that one can do. Here, when one is in the fourth jhana, their mind is flexible. Their mind is malleable, like gold, just like molten gold that has been rarefied and purified through many different processes. Which are what?

In this case, for the mind, the process of the six R's, letting go of a hindrance, letting go of a hindrance, letting go of a hindrance, experiencing greater degrees of collectedness over a period of time until the mind is malleable like that pure gold. And because it's malleable, it's easy for a person, relatively speaking, different kinds of faculties, to develop different kinds of psychic faculties. This is why it is said that the fourth jhana is the basis for psychic powers.

Now don't come to me tomorrow in an interview and say, how do I get to the fourth jhana so I can experience the psychic powers? They're a waste of time. But what else does it do for you? The fourth jhana, Panyavamutti, is a wonderful place from where one can experience deep levels of insight and liberation. The one who is known as the Panyavamutti, that is to say, freed through insight, liberated by insight, this happens when one experiences the fourth jhana. And these are known as the ayatanas, the four arupa jhanas.

Before we get into it, let me give you the hallmarks of each of the jhanas, since some of you have asked this. First jhana, the intentionalizing of an object of meditation and the sustenance of that. The joy, the comfort and the unification of mind. The second jhana, the joy and the comfort and the self-confidence and, of course, unification of mind. So what goes away? The vitaka and vichara. The third jhana, there's the sukha or the comfort, the tranquility and the experience of contentment. The mind is very pure. Fourth jhana, purity of mindfulness due to equanimity. You have refined the mind through the process of the enlightenment factors, through the process of right effort and mindfulness, to the extent that now mindfulness is utterly pure. We're able to catch things, and before you need to do anything, your mind is just, oh, it's there.

It comes right back. So then we get into the territory of what are known as the formless realms, the arupa jhanas, the ayatanas. And the first of those is what's known as infinite space. Infinite space is an experience in which we start to lose, in the fourth jhana, contact. In the third jhana, we have all of these different interesting experiences with the body, but in the fourth jhana, we start to lose contact. So we become so collected that we're not really paying attention to the outside world.

But if something like a fly buzzes around us, lands on our skin, if we hear the door opening or closing, we may hear it and we may feel it, but faintly. And that's okay. Now, some people say that we stop breathing in the fourth jhana. No. In the fourth jhana, we start to let go of what is known as our bodily formations.

Our connection to the body starts to become dimmer and dimmer, and dimmer. And then by the time we are in the fifth jhana, that is the infinite space, at this point, what I will instruct you to do is radiate the loving-kindness. And in kind, that loving-kindness transforms into compassion. This is why I was saying earlier, before, in the Metta Sahagata Sutta, the Buddha says the limits of loving-kindness are from the first jhana to the fourth jhana.

The limits of compassion are from the first jhana all the way up to infinite space. And so the mind starts to feel more expansive. We encompass our entire surrounding, the people in this room, this entire hall, beyond this hall, and so on and so forth. We don't need to imagine everything in order for us to feel expansive. It is an experience that happens in the mind.

And this expansion and spaciousness can continue for as long as you want it to, or as long as it can. But the key is not to push. Oftentimes when we radiate in the six directions, we get tension in the head. So one neat little trick that I like to do is to imagine the loving kindness, or feel the loving kindness, outside of my body as a protective aura around my body. Maybe a foot or three feet away from my body. That way it has nothing to do with my body, nothing to do with my head.

And so I can see or feel the feeling going in this direction, in this direction, in this direction, behind me, below me, above me, and so on. And in all directions. He pervades one quarter with loving kindness. And so with the second quarter, the third quarter, the fourth quarter, as above, so below, as to himself, as to all, every direction. And because we do this, we start to experience that expansion of infinite space. Eventually we start to experience what's known as infinite consciousness. This is a very interesting experience. For some, it can be to the point where they realize, actually, this space that I'm experiencing and feeling is filled with my awareness.

And to that extent, my awareness is infinite. And for some people, it gets deeper. They start to see the arising and passing away of individual sense-based consciousnesses. Now, does this have to happen to you? It can happen to you. It might not happen to you. It doesn't matter. These are all just different signposts on the map, on the path to Nibbana. Available as a book behind you guys. experience of infinite consciousness. For some people, they will experience flickers behind their eyes or different kinds of dots in space or different kinds of visuals, fractals and so on and so forth.

And for some people, they'll experience sounds, flickers in their ears, clicking in their ears, maybe celestial music in their ears, as some people call it. Some will experience vibration through the body. Some will experience electricity through the body, little shocks in the body or releases in the body. Some will experience phantom smells, phantom tastes. But generally, because we are so visually oriented as a species, you will see the flickers.

If you don't see the flickers, no big deal. It's fine. Or you may hear them. What's going on here? What are we experiencing? We're experiencing, actually, the arising and passing away of sense-based contact. And that means that we are experiencing, at the level of the senses, the immediate contact with what's going on internally, over and over and over and over.

And this is translated as infinite arising and passing away of individual sense consciousnesses. Over a period of time, the compassion changes into joy. This is known as mudita, empathetic joy. experience some kind of wholesome success. I'm genuinely happy for them. And this is a wonderful antidote for jealousy and envy. And this joy is different from the feeling of piti. It's not necessarily exuberant.

It's not necessarily vibrant. It's just this very calm feeling of, oh, I'm happy for people. When the loving kindness is, I want people to be happy, I want all beings to be happy. The compassion is the recognition of suffering in myself and in others, and the wish that they would be free of suffering. And then the realization that there are those who are freed from that suffering, even if it's temporarily.

And I feel happy for those people. That's the mudita. That's the empathetic joy. And you feel this at some point in infinite consciousness. You can feel it anywhere, from the first jhana, to the second, to the fourth, to the fifth, up to the sixth. Now, as if you are experiencing the arising and passing away of infinite consciousnesses, after a certain point, as that happens, your mind gets tired of that.

It experiences natural some vega. I've seen this before. This is enough. So what is it actually seeing? The arising and passing away is what? The instability of consciousness. The impermanence of consciousness. And the tiresomeness of that is the suffering. And at a deeper level, I realize I'm not the one creating this. I'm not the one in control here.

It's arising due to causes and conditions. And therefore, I have my first dip into the experience of anatta, not self. I'm going to say something and I'm going to unravel that as we continue. But just remember this. Through the perception of impermanence, there arises the perception of instability. There arises the perception of suffering. Through the perception of suffering, there arises the perception of not-self.

Through the perception of not-self, there arises the perception of equanimity. Through the perception of equanimity, there arises the perception of what is traditionally known as disenchantment. Through the perception of disenchantment, there is a perception of what is generally known as dispassion. Through the perception of dispassion, there is the perception of cessation and the mind is liberated. So, in infinite consciousness, what are we experiencing?

We are seeing for ourselves. Again, we don't have to experience it. I'm just giving you all of the map that I have understood through my experience. What I say is not gospel. Everybody has their own different experiences. But we'll discuss those if you've had those on this retreat in the interviews. And if they're different experiences, we'll explore that together and understand what those experiences are.

So, we experience the instability of the consciousness over a period of time. So we experience and perceive suffering. And we realize that there's no controller here. So we have the perception of anatta, of not-self. Thereby, our mind starts to dip into what is known as nothingness. And tied to that nothingness, the limit is equanimity. The limit of equanimity, I should say, is nothingness.

This is now we're talking about the Brahmavihara of equanimity, which is what? Seeing things as they are without judgment, without expectation. Your mind feels that equanimity as a very deep sense of tranquility. Going on, what do we mean by that nothingness? There's just no interest in the outside world, what's going on outside, nothing. And there's no interest in what's happening here in this internal world of the jhanas, because our mind is just fixed on the feeling of equanimity. And if you are experiencing equanimity, or if you're using equanimity as an object, what I would suggest to you at that point is just gently radiated outward.

And the image I like to use is like dropping a pebble, a small pebble, on the surface of a very still lake. When I was in Austria in the fall of 2023, I was giving a retreat over there. And I was taken to a very beautiful monastery, or what used to be a monastery. It was an abbey, actually, and it had been turned into a kind of resort slash hotel. It was in the hills and it was very beautiful. We would go walking in the fall, so you can imagine the golden leaves, and we walk in the fall and you see all these rolling hills and you see all these cows grazing on the grass there.

But when you take a walk from that space, by the way, just a little interesting tidbit from that. The organizer and I, we went into this, we went exploring in the monastery, and we went to this space where it just went down into this deep darkness, and we walked down, and what we saw in there was a crypt of skulls and skeletons.

And we're like, oh, this is awesome. And we meditated there. It was amazing. So quiet. Nobody ever visits that. Why would they? So anyway, not something I would recommend if you don't want to do that. But it's great because it gives you the sense of, yeah, these people are all, these skeletons used to all be people. And where are they now?

Direct experience or perception of impermanence, of instability. Anyway, so when you walk away from the abbey, you go down and there's this beautiful lake. And we were sitting over there. And I took this photo of the lake because it was so still, so still. And behind it was this vista of mountains, ice cap mountains. And so you could see the reflection of the mountains and the clear blue sky on the surface of the lake.

And it was like a total 180 mirror reflection. Totally still. And so if you threw just a small pebble in there, there'd just be little ripples. That's how I see equanimity. You just have a small intention of radiating equanimity and you can feel that just dispersing out in the different directions. And after a while, that starts to become quieter.

And again, you're back into the stillness of mind. And you may try again to drop another pebble, another intention of radiating. And it might go on for a while. But at some point, the mind will say, enough, I'm not interested in anything now. There's a slight tension in trying to do anything. That's when you know now you're entering into the territory of what is known as the quiet mind.

Quiet mind is not necessarily altogether that quiet, but we just call it that. Quiet mind. And now you're entering into the territory of neither perception nor non-perception. So in nothingness, there's equanimity, and there's no element in the mind, outside of the mind, that you're interested in. You're completely on your object. And after a period of time, you don't feel like even taking anything as an object. And what happens? The mind itself is the object.

And in neither perception or non-perception, what do we mean by neither perception or non-perception? Perception is the key word there. To perceive is to recognize or recognize what it is that we're experiencing. This, when you see this, you see it as the color black. How do you know it's the color black? Because maybe you've seen it before and somebody has told you in school or you've learned that this is what the color black is.

If you are of a different nationality, with a different language, you may call it something else in your language, but you can see it as black in your language. But what is that process of knowing that this is black? Or this is the label that this is the color black? That's recognition. And that recognition is perception. So neither perception nor non-perception is actually neither recognition nor non-recognition.

neither labeling or non-labeling. Stuff happens in this territory of neither perception or non-perception that you're not fully, completely comprehending. It's like a fever dream or like a hypnagogic state. It's like there are these little patterns or colors or disconnected thoughts that you just can't make sense of. It's like you're asleep, but you're awake at the same time.

You don't have any sloth and torpor in there. In fact, your mind is bright and alert. Very sensitive. So, those dream-like patterns may arise for a while, and then they just kind of clear away. You go through the fog of that, and what remains is a mind that is... mostly vibrationalists. And this quiet mind is now fully there, present.

And for a while, your mind will be here, and it will experience great degrees of quiet. For a long time, things might not happen. And this is the irony that makes me laugh, is that we come into meditation because we want to quieten our minds. And then when our minds are quiet, we get bored and we want something to happen.

And that is the trap. That is the trap that you must see. That when you get bored, the mind will do all kinds of things. Mara, as it were, will throw all kinds of darts and arrows at you to distract you, of restlessness. And there's a hurricane of all kinds of thoughts flung at you. And your mind is like, I just don't feel like doing anything anymore. I just, I can't meditate.

What should I be doing now? It's relentless. I'm tired. Enough of this. Should I just get up and walk away and come back to it later? Or should I keep sitting? What should I do? Here is the key. You can first bring up tranquility. Little micro doses of tranquility, because your mind is so sensitive at this time. Just the intention of tranquility.

And you see how that starts to pervade the entire mind. And the restlessness starts to slow down, until you have that stillness again. But then again, it relents. So what do you do? How many of you have seen the movie Little Buddha or have heard of it? Little Buddha? It was a movie that was made in the 90s.

It's a very interesting film. But that scene always comes to me when I think about this. There's a scene in which the Buddha is sitting under the Bodhi tree. It's a beautiful film. A lot of beautiful illustrations and ideas about the Buddha's enlightenment. And before he becomes fully enlightened, one of the things that he has to deal with, well, there are a few things. He has to deal with Mara's daughters, who are what? Greed, hatred, and delusion.

And then when he has let them go, Mara strikes at him in so many different ways. He releases his armies: an ocean of waves, turbulent storms, arrows and spears that are flung at the Buddha, or the Bodhisatta. And what happens? The Buddha is silent. Just like this, he smiles. And there is this force field of equanimity around him.

And all of those arrows and spears and waves and all of that turbulent energy crosses through that force field, and they transform into lotus flowers that sink to the ground. Why am I telling you this? Because when you are met with those spears and arrows and turbulent storms in this restlessness, you can use tranquility. Or you take one step back and gently radiate equanimity.

Because when you do this, you go back into that stillness of the mind. And then the mind goes back into and sinks into itself, into its own quietude. It may take a while, but guess what happens? You do it over and over and over again, and you experience what is known as nibbida in Pali. It's a very interesting word. Before I get into that, the flip side of the restlessness is sloth and torpor.

So you'll notice that the mind is very quiet. It's clear. It's bright. And your mind will dip in and out of what's known as cessation, and it'll be these micro experiences of dipping in and out of cessation, and your mind will be very bright and clear and alert. But there are other times when your mind dips into something and it's groggy and foggy and heavy and dull, and that's sloth and torpor. And when you're in that, what do you do?

You bring in joy. You bring in more collectedness. You bring in more energy. Just a little bit. Microdosis. So that you see how that joy starts to lift up the mind. So going back to what I was saying, when you go back to that equanimity, and you radiate it, and then you come back to that stillness of mind, and then something else comes up, and it's difficult for you to just let it go, what are you doing at this point? You're just relaxing, letting go, coming back to your mind. Relaxing, letting go, coming back to your mind. Just relaxing and returning. Relaxing and returning.

But eventually you get tired of this. And this is called Nibbida. So Nibbida, in some translations, is seen as revulsion. But that has an aversive quality to it. This is what we would call disenchantment. Really weird tone to it. Like you're disillusioned by things. Like you just had enough and you don't care anymore. You're indifferent. And that's what makes Buddhists boring.

They just walk around completely disenchanted and disillusioned by life. But that's not what we want to be. We want to be happy. We want to be free. We want to be liberated. So it's not disenchantment. It's a liberation, or it's a freedom from being enchanted. You've had enough. You have chosen, you have decided that you're not going to be enchanted by this anymore. Enchanted by what? By the restlessness and the continual cycle of going back and radiating equanimity, and then going back into the stillness, and then experiencing restlessness again. And then going back, and then spreading equanimity, and then going into the stillness, and experiencing restlessness again, and so on and so forth, and so on and so forth.

You're like, that's enough. So at that point, you don't care anymore. Your mind is just free from any interest or enchantment of what is arising in the form of those formations that arise. What are these formations? They're proto-thoughts. Before the thoughts come into full view of what they are, before they bubble up, there are these formations. So from this experience, you have what's known as an unsticky mind. This is the viraga. Viraga means lack of passion, lack of color.

It's a mind that is detached. Nothing sticks to it anymore. So I'll just say it's a non-stick mind. So a non-stick mind, nothing sticks to it anymore. Because the mind is not interested in this or that. It just remains there. And sometimes you'll experience what's known as the signless collectedness of mind. But we won't get into that right now. We'll just talk about these eight jhanas first.

After a while of this stillness, this freedom from enchantment, this non-stickiness of the mind, because you're not giving attention to any of the formations that arise, just as on the night of his enlightenment, the Buddha was not giving any heed to Mara's daughters, or to the turbulent storms, to the spears and arrows that were thrown by Mara's armies.

In the same way, something will come, something will go. You are in the eye of the storm, unaffected by it. And after a while, because the fuel of your attention to these things to be caught by your mind starts to run out, interest in trying to do this or that, and thereby your mind ceases. You experience what is known as Nirodha, the cessation of perception and feeling.

You don't know when you're in it. But you know when you come out of it that you went somewhere. That your mind dipped into something, and as a result of which you experienced a bright, pure, clear mind filled with joy and relief. And in that moment, prior to that joy and relief, your mind made contact with Nibbana.

It made contact with that which is signless, that which is undirected, that which is empty. Why? Because through the deep realization of impermanence, which doesn't necessarily have to happen on a conscious level, but it's because your mind keeps letting go, it has understood this, that no object is worth holding onto, worth grasping onto. And therefore you are in the signless, objectless Nibbana. With the realization of suffering, you see that any trying to control, any intentional sort of maneuvering through this process is a fool's errand, because all paths in the conditioned world lead to suffering.

Except for, of course, the Eightfold Path. Because it's all about letting go. You let go of all intention. And therefore it's the undirected. And because you see that there is no unchanging, permanent, independent idea of a self present in that space, you realize emptiness. You make contact with emptiness. I realize this last part that I'm telling you guys is very highfalutin, so we won't go deeper than that.

But just know that this is the process that the Buddha laid out in the suttas. Very simply put, the mindfulness of mind is to understand. So what it's known as is cittanupassana, which means you are paying attention to what's happening in mind, and you're aware of different arising and passing away of mental states. That's the mindfulness of mind. So he knows his mind is exalted, he knows his mind is contracted, he knows his mind is joyful. He knows his mind is filled with hindrance. He knows his mind is liberated from hindrances, and so on. Mind objects in this case would be things like he knows that the mind is filled with the enlightenment factors, or he knows his mind is filled with hindrances, or he knows his mind is contemplating the five aggregates, or the mind is aware of the four noble truths.

So when you are in quiet mind, when you're aware that the mind is quiet, and that it is free of hindrances, and that everything is perfectly balanced, you're fulfilling that process of mindfulness of mind, mindfulness of mind objects. Let's share some of it. May suffering ones be suffering free, and the fear struck fearless be. May the grieving shed all grief, and may all beings find relief. May all beings share this merit that we have thus acquired for the acquisition of all kinds of happiness. May beings inhabiting space and earth, devas and nagas of mighty power, share this merit of ours. May they long protect the Buddha's dispensation. Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu.