Day 5 "The Jhanas 1-4" with Delson Armstrong

Today we will talk about jhanas and what are jhanas. So you may have heard of a lot of, maybe if you've been following different traditions in Buddhism and so on, a lot of hullabaloo about jhanas. There is a lot of craze now in different parts of the world regarding these jhanas. And a lot of people will want to get to jhanas because it's been marketed as: on demand, you know, you will be able to get happiness whenever you want, and all of these nonsensical things.

Jhanas. What does the word Jhana mean? Jhana comes from the Sanskrit Dhyana. Dhyana means to put your attention on something, to focus on something. Dhyan. In India, when they say to pay attention, they say Dhyan Raku, meaning place your attention, pay attention to what I'm saying. So it's learning how to pay attention. That is what Dhyana is, or Jhana is.

And so in this journey that we've been through together so far, we've been talking about ethics, the sila aspect. Now we will be moving into samadhi, the samadhi aspect. So samadhi here is the mental development or cultivation of certain mental states. So this is what's known as meditation. It is known as bhavana, to develop. So, samadhi. When we say samadhi, samadhi means collectedness.

Sometimes it's translated as concentration. But the word samadhi actually is a compound word. Samadhi means same-same. It's equal, or it's balanced. And dhi is the short form for buddhi, which is our intellect, our mind. Samadhi means even-mindedness, or even-minded. So samadhi is even-mindedness. And so when we talk about sama-samadhi, which is right collectedness, right meditation, it generally incorporates the four jhanas, so the four levels of dhyana, the four levels of how you pay attention, the levels of attention. So you will hear oftentimes they talk about eight jhanas, or they'll talk about it as the form jhanas and the formless jhanas, or the rupa jhanas and the arupa jhanas.

But in reality, there are only four jhanas, which we will talk about specifically today. And then there are what are known as the four ayatanas, which are the four spheres, we can say, the four bases, we can say, extensions or part of the fourth jhana. We'll get into that probably tomorrow. But why is jhana so important in the context of practice?

First, we must understand that there are two types of jhanas. There are the jhanas that people get into where they want the bliss on demand, which doesn't get you anywhere. It only gets you into constructed states of mind that cause further clinging to those states, that cause further identification with those states. And, more importantly, those who profess this bliss-on-demand jhana a lot about ethics.

Don't really talk a lot about morality. Don't really talk a lot about precepts. They may, you know, gloss over it and talk about, okay, yeah, you do this and you do that. But unless you are following the way in which it has been assembled and shown and cultivated, that you follow sila first, that you cultivate the right speech, right action, right livelihood first, that you get your act together by getting the right perspective and the right intention.

So that you can apply right effort, the six R's, to get you into right mindfulness, where your mind is composed, is clear, is resting with strong and deep presence on its object of meditation. Loving kindness, compassion, quiet mind, whatever it is. Now, why the emphasis on the sila before the samadhi? Because with the sila, with the ethics, your hindrances start to lighten up.

Your hindrances start to become more manageable. If anyone has ever been in some kind of crippling debt, which causes the mind a lot of unease, causes the mind a lot of anxiety and tension, and you have to keep paying off that debt over and over and over. But how does it feel when you make that last payment?

So that you're no longer in debt. How does that feel? It feels good. It feels freeing. Ah, relief. If somebody has been imprisoned and they have no, you know, sight of when they will be free from that, and they mark the days, they continue to mark the days. And finally, on their last day, they're told, you're free to go.

How does that feel? Joyful. Liberation. Freedom. If you've ever been out in the desert for a while and you forgot to carry water with you, continuing on for miles and miles, and you think you're going to die. But then you see an oasis in the distance, and you go there, and there's fresh, cool, crisp water. How does that feel?

You feel quenched. You feel satisfied. You feel delighted. This is how you feel when the hindrances go away. These analogies are not my own. These analogies are from the suttas. This was the instruction given by Ananda, the Buddha's attendant, to, I believe, a layperson in the Digha Nikaya. And if I'm not mistaken, it was either Digha Nikaya 11 or Digha Nikaya 12.

And these are the analogies that he gives about being free of hindrances. Because once you are free of hindrances, then jhana begins. Then real meditation begins. Which is why it is said that in the first jhana, you have five factors. The first factor is being quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states. These are the two. Quite secluded from sensual pleasures. What does that mean? You have sat down.

You have relaxed the body. You've closed off the sense experiences around you. You've closed your eyes. And now you are bringing your mind towards an object. So obviously with your eyes closed, you can't see outside anything. And as your mind gets more collected around an object, you become less interested in what's being heard, you know, you're less interested in what's going on on the skin, whatever it is. Your mind starts to get into the other world, the world of the mind. Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states. What are the unwholesome states?

The hindrances: sensual craving, aversion, restlessness, sloth and torpor, and doubt. And so it is said, quite secluded from sensual pleasure, secluded from unwholesome states, he enters and abides in the first jhana. So the letting go of the hindrances, the beginning of that, creates something known as relief, or pramodha in Sanskrit. He enters and abides in the first jhana, which is accompanied by thinking and examining thought, vitakka and vichara. So, what is thinking and examining thought? That's the translation they give, roughly. But vitakka, or vitarka, and vichara. Vitarka is to place the mind on something.

So whenever you're thinking about something, you're placing your mind somewhere, right? You're utilizing your mind and mental energy towards a specific thought or series of thoughts. So when you bring up loving kindness, when you start the practice and bring up an object, that's the vitakka. That's the thinking, so to speak. And the vichara, the examining thought, is to stay, or to intend to stay, with that object, to keep your mind's attention fixed on the object as best as possible.

So, quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, he enters and abides in the first jhana, which is accompanied by vitakka and vichara, thinking and examining thought. On account of which, due to seclusion, he experiences piti and sukha. Piti and sukha. So what is piti, and what is sukha? We're not talking about the fat cat sukha. Piti is a feeling of bubbling joy.

It's an effervescent kind of joy. You may experience it emotionally as a feeling of the mind being uplifted, the heart being uplifted, or tingling in the body, tingling in the face. These are all signatures of piti. It all depends upon your specific sort of sensorial experience. And sukha is comfort and ease. You know, in the Yoga Sutras, it says something about placing your body on the mat or the chair or whatever, and it says asana. Asana is your posture. Any good asana or any good posture is that which is sthira and sukha, that which is stable and comfortable.

Sukha. So there is a certain sense of comfort in the body. There is no tightness and tension present in the body. So the actual factors that we talk about are the thinking and examining thought, and sukha, or the bliss and happiness, or joy and comfort. And with that, accompanied with that, is something known as ekagata. Ekagata is usually and mistakenly translated as one-pointed concentration.

When we say one-pointed, there is a, for the mind to think, okay, I need to be super focused and I need to just concentrate completely pinpointed at my object and not think about anything else. That's not what ekagata is. Ekagata means to be unified in your mind. There is a certain kind of orbit that happens in your mind.

A certain kind of gravitational field that's there in your mind. Which is to say that when you are feeling loving kindness and you stay with the feeling of loving kindness, if it is within the orbit of your mind, you have ekagata. It's like a satellite that orbits the earth. happen. The gravitational field of the earth will pull it down and it will crash.

If it's too far away, what's going to happen? It's going to swerve away out into space. You need just the right amount of focus to know that there is present loving kindness. That's it. Thoughts are there in the background. Other things are going on. That's all right. But there is this attention given to loving kindness. That is more than enough.

Of course, when the satellite gets too close to the earth, when the attention becomes too focused on the loving kindness, what happens? Your mind gets suppressed, doesn't have the opportunity to actually develop wisdom. Because how do you develop wisdom? Attention moves. Otherwise, it's just samatha. It's just so-called pure meditation. That's not even meditation. It's concentration. Meditation is the joining of samatha and vipassana, of serenity and insight.

So if you get too focused, you're not meditating anymore. If you're too loose in your attention, if you're too loose in your practice, what happens? The satellite starts to swerve off into space. So what do you do? You need to send something else out there in space to redirect the satellite. Or if the satellite has different controls, you can control it and bring it back.

That is the process of the six R's. That's the process of right effort, is to balance the concentration, to balance the collectedness. You need that sweet spot, that Goldilocks spot, right? Not too concentrated and not too loose. Just enough for your mind to stay with its object. That's ekagata. So in the first jhana, what is going on?

First and foremost, in order for jhana to happen, like I said, you need to be free of sensual pleasures. You can't be thinking about this or that. You can't be getting distracted here and there. You need to sit collected and composed. Sit in a chair, sit on a mat, doesn't matter. Just sit and relax. Close your eyes.

Go internally. Place or establish mindfulness before you. Now your mind is not thinking or getting caught up in sensual experiences. It's here in the mind. And now your mind is free of any hindrances. If there are hindrances present, what do you do? You relax, soften, let it go. Now as a result of that, you will feel gradually piti. As your mind directs itself, or you direct the mind, so to speak, to an object with the vitakka and vicara, which is to let the mind stay or keep the mind on the object, the piti slowly arises.

There's a certain level of joy. Now, the issue is that people have certain expectations of how this joy should feel based on different descriptions by different teachers. I should be feeling like I'm on, I'm a rocket ship or something. Or that there is like fireworks going on, going off in my heart. Or I'm feeling like an orgasm happening. Or something like that. It doesn't have to be so intense.

It need not be so intense. Just a feeling of, yes, this is comfortable. This is joyful. I feel good. Things feel good. That's enough. That pleasantness, that pleasure, that comfort, that's the piti sukha. Now as you're in this jhana for a while, you will then move on to the second jhana. What does the second jhana have? With the abandoning of vitakka and vicara, or with the fading away of vitakka and vicara, the fading away of thinking and examining thought, he enters and abides into the second jhana, or upon the second jhana, which have these things as their factors. Piti again, sukha, self-confidence, and ekagata. But this piti is different. It says that he has joy born of concentration.

Joy born of collectedness. Different. Here the mind is quite collected and there is a self-confidence. What is that self-confidence? There is a sense of, oh, things are going smoothly. I can go on autopilot now. Taken off the plane and I'm at cruising altitude and I can go on autopilot now. I don't have to be so controlling of where my mind is. There is a certain flow that goes on.

And the piti or the joy that is born of collectedness means that my mind is so collected at this point that the joy sustains because of that. So the verbalizing of may I be happy, the verbalizing of may I be filled with loving kindness, the thoughts of bringing up an image that makes one happy, that makes one feel loving kindness, all that is gone.

There is just the feeling as the object. And accompanied by that, the joy born of collectedness. And there is a further ease in the body. No tightness, no tension. Very good ease. And there is ekagata again. There is a continuous sort of orbiting of the mind. The mind feels steady. There is stability there. Now, from this second jhana, there is the third jhana.

At this point, you no longer have to keep thinking about the love and kindness, at the point of the second jhana. You no longer have to keep thinking about staying with your object. It flows. And so, in the third jhana, the collectedness continues, but there is the, with the fading away of piti, joy. He enters and abides upon the third jhana, which has sukha.

That's the main signature of the third jhana. There's a deep comfort in the body. Now here the body may feel expansive, the body may feel light, the body may feel heavy and grounded. You may feel like the loving kindness starts to become more. You may start to feel like loving kindness is moving around upward into the head. You may feel like there is a certain sense of relief, a sense of contentment, a sense of tranquility.

And this is why in the third jhana it says that on account of which the noble ones say that he has a pleasant abiding. Because in that space, it is so pleasant. It's so sustainable. If you think about a flame, candle flame, oil flame, whatever kind of flame that you might think of, and you think of that flame fluttering about, that's the first jhana.

There's a lot of bubbling of joy and these kinds of things. As you get to the third jhana, the flame becomes stable and still. So there's a great sense of contentment. There's a great sense of relief there. And the mind remains unwavering. The mind is easily able to stay with its object for long periods of time. From there, there is what is known as the fourth jhana.

And it says, with the fading away of sukha, with the fading away of that comfort, he enters and abides upon, he enters upon and abides in the fourth jhana, which has purity of mindfulness due to equanimity. So what is actually going on here with these jhanas? In the first jhana, you have let go of the hindrances, and you are cultivating under the hood, in the engine of the mind, the seven enlightenment factors are coming into play, and they are balancing out, and they are cycling together.

And as you get to the second, those enlightened factors continue to do what they're doing, running the engine of the mind in meditation. By the time you get to the fourth jhana, you have what is known as purity of mindfulness due to equanimity. Why does it say that? Because what's happening is, as I say, it's a cycle. The enlightenment factors are not just a linear process.

You see, the mindfulness leads to investigation of states. The investigation of states leads to energy. The energy leads to joy, tranquility. The tranquility leads to collectedness, samadhi, even-mindedness. The collectedness leads to equanimity. And then that equanimity cycles back into mindfulness. And the mindfulness becomes more stable. The mindfulness becomes more pure. That's why it's purity of mindfulness. Here the mind has very deep equanimity.

There's a great amount of tranquility. There's a great amount of calmness in the body. And at this point, it feels like the feeling of loving kindness starts to get up into the head. More so. Or sometimes it feels like the loving kindness is escaping beyond the body. It feels like you have suffused the entire body with that feeling of loving kindness.

So, the jhanas are also levels of cessation. What do we mean by cessation? Cessation comes from the word nirodha. Nirodha is the stopping of, the stilling of, the ceasing of, the cutting off of something. That's why the third noble truth is called dukkha nirodha, the cessation of suffering. So every time we get into a specific jhana, things are ceasing.

What is ceasing? In the first jhana, what ceases? The hindrances. In the second jhana, the vitakka and vicara cease. That is the thinking and examining thought. The verbalizing, trying to bring up an image, of mental energy. In the third jhana, the piti, the joy, ceases. And in the fourth jhana, the sukha, or that sense of ease, ceases. That doesn't mean you don't have ease. It just means, because the entire fourth jhana says, with the transcending of pain and pleasure, where he doesn't feel neither pain or pleasure, the transcending of duality, of this or that. The mind is just collected in itself.

It is assured in itself. It feels content in itself. And that equanimity that's there, it's so beautiful that the mind has difficulty to waver away from its object. You cannot pull the mind away from its object at that point. So understand that these jhanas are not meant to be mental Olympics. They're not meant to be something that you're doing because you're going to experience this bliss and you're going to experience this beautiful thing or whatever and it's going to heal or cure your depression and your anxiety and it's going to do this for you and it's all of this gimmick.

No, it's not going to do all that. What will it do for you? More samadhi, more collectedness. Because those who profess just jhana, without understanding the mechanics of why we're doing everything else to get to that jhana, those who just profess jhana are doing a disservice when they teach in that way. Because all they're doing is bringing more clinging to states.

They're causing people to experience, to chase after experiences. And this is why I generally don't like to talk about the more metaphysical aspects of the Buddha Dharma, but the Buddha has said when you attain these jhanas without doing all that work, he gets pretty explicit and he says those people will experience wonderful bliss, but then they will fall all the way back down, even to hellish realms. You can say psychologically, they experience such great bliss, the mind is suppressed. The mind experiences all this bliss, and when it comes back down it's unable to deal with the world, because it doesn't have wisdom to deal with the hindrances that arise. The mind craves for it. The mind clings after it. Imbalances start to happen. So don't go after jhanas in that way. Understand that the jhanas and Nibbana are stepping stones on, shameless plug, the path to Nibbana.

Written by, he's not here, but David Johnson. They're stepping stones. They're signposts. They tell you, okay, this is what's going on now. Don't make it a big deal. So what? Okay, great. I have a lot of joy in the mind or mind is uplifted. There's comfort in the body. There's equanimity. Great. Signpost. Don't get caught up in where you are, where you should be.

Don't ask me in the interviews. Where do you think I am? I just want to know, like, how much farther do I have? First of all, understand this. Nibbana can happen at any point from the first jhana onwards. You don't need to go in a sequence to experience Nibbana. Just upon listening to the Dhamma with rapt attention, you can enter the stream. You can have the first attainment of stream entry.

It has happened. It has happened. On many occasions it has happened. But it requires a good amount of collectedness, a good amount of understanding the Dhamma, understanding what is being said in relation to the Dhamma. And the mind makes the dots and connects the dots and is able to see it and has a deep experience of the impersonal nature of reality, the impersonal nature of existence.

And so from the fourth jhana, different things can happen. The fourth jhana is known as, traditionally speaking, the basis for which other kinds of supernormal powers can be developed and cultivated. And the Buddha has a hierarchy of that. He talks about how one can materialize and dematerialize. One can levitate. All these very fantastical, interesting things. But then in the larger scheme of things, the hierarchy is he's able to see his past lives, able to see the arising and passing away of beings, he's able to see other beings that are not human, let's say, and he's able to then destroy the asavas, which are the fragments, the building blocks of craving, and thereby attain towards full awakening. And so full awakening is the greatest psychic power that's available to us, to everyone.

You don't need all the other psychic powers. Indeed, there are those who apparently possess psychic powers, but have no ethics. They have no faith or refuge in the Triple Gem. These psychic powers are just nothing. They're trinkets. Full awakening is where we want to go. Full awakening. What do we mean by full awakening? Awakening from the dream of existence.

Awakening from the dream of identification. Becoming neon and transcending the matrix. That is what full awakening is. Realizing that this matrix is the thing that keeps us going. Patterns going, all of our behavioral patterns that continue to cause us pain, continue to, for whatever reason, attract the similar kinds of relationships that continue to waste away, continue to attract similar kinds of situations where we just don't seem to learn from them because we have identification.

You can move a thousand miles away and somehow you attract similar kinds of situations. You attract the similar kinds of people. Because we don't learn. Because we're not able to let go of that. Because we're not able to disengage from all of that. The fuel of our undue attention, the fuel of our reaction, which is rooted in ignorance, that causes the repatterning. But when we respond with wisdom, we respond from the prefrontal cortex, when ignorance is not present, and we're able to see things as they are, then the decisions that we make, the actions that we take, the words that we speak, the thoughts that we think, will be in alignment with the path, that it is what is best applicable for the situation at hand.

This is the utilization of intuition. When you develop that wisdom and you develop that intuition, act from that intuition, then you are free. That is an aspect of being free. You no longer are bound by your emotions. Bound by your anger. By your grief. By your sadness. By your story of. Oh woe is me. I am the victim here. And they did this. And they did that. And all this nonsense.

You're free of that. You're empowered. And so, when you do this process of going through the jhanas, don't go for the low hanging fruit of, oh, bliss on demand. No. Go towards the sky, the clear crystal blue sky, which is Nibbana. It is available to all of us. You just have to understand everything that I see is just scenery. It's just signposts on that path.

So I'll stop there, and tomorrow we'll probably go through the formless realms, the formless states, the arupajanas, the ayatanas. If you're really interested, you should look at that cosmological chart that's under the portrait of Bhante. There it shows you, you've got the human realms, and below that you've got the animal realms, the hungry ghost realms, and then the hell realms. Above that there are actually these six heavens, six heavenly realms. And those are for the, as you say, the normal people, who haven't really done any kind of practice, but they've been generous, they've been ethical, they've been kind, they've been forgiving, they have compassion, they're very deva-like, so to speak. So those are those devas.

And then there are these lokas called brahma lokas and arupa brahma lokas. And those correspond to the different jhana states. Some kind of a heaven, yeah. It's nice, it's okay, but it's not nirvana. Yeah. Hopefully you can answer this one. You mentioned the building blocks of attachment. Can you describe those in more detail? I will describe it. I'll talk a lot more about it when we do dependent origination, but what I'll say is they're called asavas. And what that means is a stream or a flow.

I like to translate them as viruses. They're viruses that taint the mind, you know, they corrupt the software of the mind. And there are three of them, four of them, but usually there are three. So the four are what's known as Kamasava, Bhavasava, Avijjasava, and Ditthasava. So Kamasava is the building block of sensual craving. Bhavasava is the building block of habitual tendencies, the desire to be someone, to be something, or not to be, let's say, to be or not to be. And then you have the Avijjasava, which is the building block of ignorance, lack of mindfulness of the reality of every moment, the lack of mindfulness of the full noble truths.

And Ditthasava is having wrong view. So the wrong view here is contextualized as views that don't correspond to right view. And because of that, it gives rise to the ignorance, dependent origination, and it's the virus that corrupts the software of the mind that then projects all of the different links of dependent origination that lead towards suffering.

No. So it's all dependent upon karma, so depending upon the karma that's there, it will take us in one of these realms. And the way I like to see it is that these realms are already present as psychological states in the mind. So if somebody is a very violent person, an aggressive person, a person who has a lack of empathy, it's a very hellish state of mind.

And if a person is just thinking about, you know, the basics of just getting their food, getting their comforts, you know, having a lot of sex, whatever it is, then it's a very animalistic kind of mindset, and so on and so forth. So it's all dependent upon karma, and karma starts with our intention. So the idea is that in your last moments of this life, or whatever life it is, those thoughts that are predominant in the mind, which result from continuous application of those thoughts throughout your life, dependent upon the actions you've taken, wholesome or unwholesome, skillfully liberating or not, will then determine or condition the next set of causes that take you to that specific realm.

So there is a concept of heaven and hell in Buddhism. There's no void or anything like that. That's your Samarit. 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. you