Day 6 "The Jhanas 5-8" with Delson Armstrong

Yesterday we spoke about the jhanas, and I told you about what we would speak about today, which is the ayatanas. So the ayatana means the sphere or the base of something, or the dimension of something. There are four ayatanas, or four arupajanas. Arupa means without form, formless. And these four are known as infinite space, infinite consciousness, nothingness, and neither perception nor non-perception. one, reach them. For all of you and for everyone who comes on retreat, for the beginners, we give them the practice of sending metta to your spiritual friend. And after a while, based on the interviews, I will hear what you have to say and I'll nudge you along the way and see, look out for this or look out for that, see what's going on.

And I'm going to be looking for certain things, and if I know this person has gotten at this point, then it's time for them to change their practice. So what do I give you? I give you something known as breaking down the barriers. This helps to intensify, for lack of a better word, or to make more expansive the metta, the loving kindness.

And then after you do that for a bit, I will give you what's known as the six directions. Now the six directions are in front of you, behind you, to your right, to your left, above you, below you. So in these six directions, how do you do that practice? How do you do the meditation? Generally, we spend about three, four, five minutes in each direction. 30 minutes of having gone through each of the six directions, and then from there you imagine yourself in a bubble of loving kindness and you radiate that outward. You're not pushing it. You're just observing how the feeling moves in all directions and grows outward and encompasses the space around you, encompasses the hall around you, encompasses all the people that are in the hall, encompasses the forest around you, the entire campus of Dhammasuka, and on and on and on you go, and it keeps expanding outward until it reaches, you know, the entire planet, let's say, and then beyond that through space, and beyond that through deep space, and beyond that just keeps going.

And when you do this, the experience of that expansion, ongoing expansion, is known as boundless space or infinite space. A space without borders. It just keeps going and going and going. This is the first extension of the fourth jhana. Recall yesterday I said in the fourth jhana you have purity of mindfulness due to equanimity, which becomes unwavering. And once you're there with the practice of sending the metta outward, your mind remains in that field of ever-expanding space.

Now the question arises, do I focus on the metta or do I focus on the expansion, the radiating, the pervading? And my response to that is, it's about 70% radiating and 30% metta. You want to be in that field of spaciousness. Which is why I tell those who are in the six directions, who are doing the six directions, to start with loving kindness to yourself first.

Suffuse the entire being from the top of your head to the tips of your toes. Kindness. Feel the loving kindness pervade the entire body, the entire system. And then from there, let the loving kindness expand outward. If it feels natural to do it individually in the different directions, do it individually in the different directions. If it feels natural to go in all directions at the same time, go in all directions at the same time.

So when you do this, as you are doing this, at a certain point, the loving kindness can change. The feeling of loving kindness can change. It can turn into what's known as compassion. In terms of the experience of compassion, it is a softer form of loving kindness. Diffuse. Feels more quiet. There is a sense of ease in that compassion. That compassion.

What is compassion? Remember we talked about this. Compassion is the recognition of one's own suffering and the suffering of others. So the wish for compassion is, may I be free of suffering, may all other beings be free of suffering. So loving kindness is, may I be happy and may all other beings be happy. Compassion is, may I be free of suffering and may all beings be free of suffering. So if you want to start with compassion, you can start in this way.

Once you have tapped into that feeling, you can start with the memory of that feeling and let that blossom from you. So from that infinite space, you get into what is known as infinite consciousness. What do we mean by infinite consciousness? What do we mean by that? Sometimes it's known as boundless awareness, infinite consciousness. What is that? Does it mean that we become one with consciousness and aware that there is only this consciousness present?

For some people, that happens. They feel like their awareness fills up the space of infinite space. But it can get deeper than that. The infinite consciousness here can change and show you something much deeper, which is, somebody who is more visually oriented. If you are visually oriented, what can happen is as you are meditating and sending loving kindness in the different directions, and perhaps the loving kindness changes into compassion in different directions.

And as this happens, you may start to see some kind of vibration behind your eyes. If you are more auditory, you may actually hear the flickering. It's like this continuous, fleeting sound of like a drumbeat or some vibration ticking, whatever it is that happens. If you are more oriented towards your sense of touch, you may feel vibration on the body.

You may feel tingling in the face. You may feel tingling in the arms. You may feel electricity coursing through the body. If you are more, let's say, you can have phantom smells. It's like you're smelling flowers when they're not there. You're smelling incense when it's not there. You're smelling beautiful things that are not there. Phantom smells. Or your tongue is tasting something.

Or you start to see, as thoughts come, you can start to see the gaps between thoughts as they come and go. These are all known as infinite consciousness. What you are seeing is the arising and passing away of individual sense-based consciousnesses arising and passing away. Every sense-based takes in information at different rates. beautiful thing because it takes all of that and makes it into some fluid experience.

But what is happening in infinite consciousness is that your mind becomes so attentive and precise that it feels like it's slowing down the very frames of reality. I have had this experience when I did my retreat with David, my online retreat. The time when I was experiencing infinite consciousness, I walked into the kitchen where I was staying. And the people in the kitchen were moving like they were under a strobe light.

I could see every other movement that they were making. There was a gap. It felt like they were some kind of stick-clay animation kind of thing. It was very strange. I could hear the sounds slowing down and start to hear gaps between the sounds. If you're able to master infinite consciousness, whenever you want. I was talking about this last time I was here. You know, you see these aggressive hummingbirds outside the dining, right? And they're always fighting for the water around them. I feel like the water is, you know, has been spiked with some sugar or something.

That's why they're just after that. But you will see the hummingbirds, and I've seen the hummingbirds. See, this is the thing. You can be in any of the jhanas while you're walking around. You can be in any of the jhanas while you're just sitting and eating. You can still be in jhana. So, if you're in infinite consciousness, I'm saying this from my own experience, you can see the wings of the hummingbirds slow down.

And you can see them move at such a slow pace, and it's very interesting to see that all of reality just slows down. All of the frames of reality are seen. It's like when you would watch a movie in the old days, when we still had film, and somebody is behind the projector, and you can start to see the projection is just falling asleep or something's going on, and you start to see the individual frames of the movie. That's what's going on

with infinite consciousness. So what is the reason why you're experiencing this? What happens when you experience this? Well, we can say that the mind becomes so, again, so attentive and so precise that it's able to dissect reality in this way. And the beauty of this is that you're experiencing first hand, for yourself, the three characteristics. What are the three characteristics?

Anicca, Dukkha, and Anatta. Anicca is translated usually as impermanence. But really what it is, is instability. Things are unstable in this existence. So when you start to see the arising and passing away of these sense-based consciousnesses, you're not actually seeing the arising and passing away of sense-based consciousnesses. You're seeing the arising and passing away of sense contact.

When we get into dependent origination, I will explain this further. But what is contact? Contact is the meeting of the sense base, its apparent object, and the underlying sense-based consciousness that arises with the contact of the two. So you're seeing the sense-based consciousness arise and go, arise and go, based on internal contact that's happening. Because we believe that the light that bounces and hits the eyes is what makes up the image. It's the mind that takes all of that sensory data and creates a perception of what we see. So we are literally seeing the breakdown of the matrix of this world, of samsara, when we're in infinite consciousness to this level.

We are literally seeing for ourselves that this reality that we think is real is just our mind. It's just consciousness. Not from the perspective that everything is consciousness, is dependently arisen based on contact, external or internal. And so whatever contact we're making is happening always at the mind. The eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body, they are just instruments, they are just receivers.

The real process of contact is happening in the mind. And the mind, through its process of perception, rooted in memory, infinite consciousness, for us to be able to see that indeed contact/consciousness is dependently arisen, which means that it is impermanent. And when we see this arising and passing away, we see it for a while and eventually the mind gets tired of it.

It gets bored of it. Boredom is suffering. That is dukkha. And what else do we see? We see that we are not in control of this process. That this process is happening, dependently arisen. So wherein is there a controller? Wherein is there a self that says, this is what I do, this is what mechanism happens, I'm in control of this process?

It's happening due to a series of impersonal causes and conditions. So right there, I am seeing anicca, the instability of the arising and passing away, the dukkha, the boredom of continually seeing this, and the anatta, the realization that this is an impersonal process without any innate controller. Now, tied to this, we can go from compassion to what's known as mudita, usually translated as sympathetic joy or empathetic joy. Quiet kind of joy. It's a joy filled with contentment.

It's a joy that says, I am happy for you. It's a joy that says, may I celebrate in the happiness of others. May I be happy for their liberation. May others celebrate in their own liberation and the liberation of others. That's why it's a great antidote for envy and jealousy. Where does jealousy come from? Jealousy comes from the lack of security to us. No one really belongs to us. And yet we desire to possess that thing or that person or that relationship.

And when we don't have it, when somebody else has it, the mind says, how come I don't have it? Why do they have it? And jealousy can arise. But if I'm happy for that person, if I'm happy whatever it is that they have or possess or experience, then I experience my own inner joy, the joy of mudita. So this experience of having joy, mudita, can later turn into equanimity, upekkha. And that's what you may experience in what's known as nothingness.

So what is nothingness? After a while, what can happen is that the mind starts to see the gaps between one arising and the next arising, or one passing away and the next arising of that particular contact or infinite consciousness. And as the mind starts to go into those gaps, the arising and passing away go away, and give space for this experience where nothing is happening.

There is just this awareness of nothingness. One isn't thinking about the outside. One isn't thinking about the inside. There's just a blank. Sometimes it's seen as a space of darkness or a space of brightness or just a clear space. Nothing going on at all. There's just awareness of no-thing-ness. Nothing present. And in that space, there is equanimity.

So you continue to radiate as you would have been doing loving-kindness. As you would have been doing compassion. As you would have been doing joy. You radiate equanimity here. And the equanimity is, very light. What is equanimity? What does it mean to be equanimous? Upeka. Upeka comes from the Sanskrit upeksha, which is very closely related with apeksha.

What does apeksha mean? To have expectation of. And upeksha is to be free of expectation. At least this is how I have understood it and seen it. And so, the technicalities of this under the hood, if you were to understand this, there is the perception of impermanence, then the perception of dukkha or suffering, then the perception of anatta or the impersonal nature of things. This leads to the perception of equanimity.

And you may radiate this for a while. It might feel like your mind is like the surface of a very clear, still lake. And you might drop a little pebble and there's little ripples of equanimity that you radiate out. It doesn't have to be strong. Now, I will say this as well. Oftentimes it can happen that you may not experience everything in succession.

You may go from loving kindness or compassion straight to nothingness, with equanimity, and that's okay. That's okay. So in this equanimity, the mind is here in nothingness, and you are sending it out for a while, and eventually it feels like the mind doesn't want to do anything anymore. It doesn't even want to radiate anymore. So you try again, and you say, okay, the mind is silent, quiet, mind feels at ease.

Let me try radiating again. Let me try sending out equanimity again. So you do it for a little while again, and then a few minutes later the mind says, no, I don't want to do that anymore. And you try again. Mind says, no, enough. And you will feel a certain tension there, which is the mind's way of telling you, stop, don't do anything.

And that is my final instruction to all of you when you get there. Don't do anything. Which means, don't try to not do anything either. Because if I give an instruction, it has a tendency to be like, okay, now I got to do nothing, right? Don't do anything. Just be at ease. Let the mind be where it is.

And this is the beginning of what's known as quiet mind. This is what's known as the luminous mind. In Pali, it's known as the pabhasara citta, the luminous mind, the mind that is clear, the mind that is pure, awareness, the beginning of pure awareness. And in that space, it might enter into what's known as neither perception nor non-perception.

Very interesting. Neither perception nor non-perception. The word perception, that's usually the translation that comes up, comes from the word sanna in Pali, or samjna in Sanskrit, which actually is recognition, or to recognize, to recognize that which has already been experienced. So perception is rooted in memory. Just as you know when I tell you, when I just say, think of red, you know what red looks like, you know what red is, because you've experienced it before.

If I tell you not to think about a purple elephant, what are you thinking of? A purple elephant. You've never seen a purple elephant and yet in your mind you have this image of a purple elephant because you know what an elephant looks like and you know what purple is and your mind is able to create that. This is perception.

The ability to label and recognize what is being When I was a little kid, I was very, very mischievous, very naughty. I was a big trouble for my mom. When she told me not to do something, I had to do it. So imagine a kid like me, and the mother says, don't touch that stove when it's on.

The kid says, what's wrong with that? So what does he do? He puts his hand on the fire. And it's hot. It burns his hand. It burns his finger. So the next time he sees the stove, what's he going to do? If he's unlike me as a little kid, he will not touch the stove again. Because I needed a couple of times to make sure that that was the case.

So he'll know every time he sees the stove, every time he sees the fire, he will connect it with, oh, that's painful or that's hot, right? So every experience leaves an imprint in the mind of it's this or it's that. That is recognition. That is perception. So when we say neither perception nor non-perception, we're saying neither recognition nor non-recognition.

It's a very interesting space to be in. As your mind settles in on itself, where mind itself becomes the object, it starts to get deeper and deeper, and you start to get into a space that's very much like a hypnagogic space. It's a very liminal space. It feels like there are certain images coming that have nothing to do with your life. It's like, maybe it's from a different life. There are images that you just, or patterns, or memories, or sequences of events that you feel like you've never been there, you know, or you've never experienced it. And they come and they go. It's like you're asleep but awake at the same time.

And this is neither perception nor non-perception. And as you're in the space, the difference between that and being in a space where you're sleepy is that you still have a great deal of awareness in either perception or non-perception. And my instruction for you there is to just be present. Don't do anything when you're in that space. You're in there. The only thing you have to know and realize is the moment the mind starts to gravitate towards an image or a scene, and is desirous of knowing more about what that pattern is, what that image is.

Catch the mind doing that and let it go. Recognize and relax. Notice and relax. And the image will go away and the mind remains in itself. And you remain here for a while, and for many, many, many minutes is without a single thought, the mind is there without a single vibration, and you may cycle through where the mind feels like it's going back into that liminal space. And what's happening here is something known as formations are bubbling up. These formations are the subconscious patterns, the proto thoughts, the thoughts, the building blocks of thought, coming up and trying to assemble but unable to be fully assembled because your mind is at such a deep level.

It's starting to see what are the things that make you tick and what are the things underneath that that cause that process of wanting you to do something. You're literally reverse engineering, so to speak, how intention works. This is why it said for the advanced practitioners, if you want to get to neither perception or non-perception immediately, let go of all intention.

So, you're here for a while, and then the mind gets very still, and now you can enter, it's possible, to enter into a further liminal space, either perception or non-perception, which is known as the signless collectedness of mind. It's an objectless awareness. Here the mind is just observing, but not observing anything in particular. It's different from nothingness.

Because the awareness is just looking. It's like taking a flashlight and pointing it to the sky. And that light keeps traveling upward, out into space. Imagine there was nothing, right? There was nothing to come in the way of that light, to stop that light. And it just kept going out into space. That's the awareness that happens in signless collectedness of mind, the objectless awareness. Sometimes you may see certain things. You may see like a brightness, like a light, that comes up. Sometimes it comes and it goes. It might come on and off. It might be white. It might be orangish. It might be greenish. It might be shimmering.

Different things come and go in this space. But there's no object that the mind takes here. And so, again, the instruction, don't do anything, is to be followed. If a certain proto-thought comes. If a certain thing comes to take your attention away, by the mere awareness of that thing, of seeing that thing, that thing disappears. It self-liberates.

You literally don't have to do anything. Because the moment you do something, what happens is your attention goes completely on that thing and it's no longer an objectless awareness. Now there's an object that the mind grasps onto. The outside and the inside, the subjective and the objective, the subject and object, starts to become less and less apparent.

Now, as you point that light out into space, that flashlight, it's running on some batteries, for a while. And imagine you keep doing that, and eventually the batteries run out. And this is what happens. As you're just in the space doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because the mind keeps going and doesn't find anything to hold on to as fuel for its attention to continue fueling the batteries, it switches off.

And now we are in the cessation of perception and feeling. The mind just shuts off. And all subjective consciousness, all subjective awareness, just disappears. You don't even know that you're actually in it because the subjective I, me, or mind completely disintegrates. And when you come back online, so to speak, when the mind comes back, there is a great deal of things that can happen. You may experience lights, you may experience warmth, you may experience a glow, you may experience quick succession of lights, you may experience a ripple of concentric lights. Different things can happen.

And then followed by that, what happens is you may experience a feeling of, wow, what just happened? Before you know it, it's just like, oh, that was awesome. What was that? And then right after that, a feeling, a flood of joy and relief pervades the entire system. And when this happens, that means that you have experienced cessation and that the mind has touched Nibbana. And as a result of touching Nibbana, there's a flood of all this relief and joy that comes up.

And you may go outside after. Maybe you might still continue practicing and meditating and sitting for a while, but the beauty of that joy, that beauty of that ecstasy that's so great that you get up from your seat and you walk out, even on the dreariest of days, the trees, the greens of the leaves and the grass and the butterflies and the flowers, they're so exquisitely vibrant.

It's like you're looking at everything in 4D, HK, whatever, beyond anything. It's just so vivid, hyper-vivid. And it doesn't even feel like you're walking. It feels like you're just floating. Everything is perfect. Everything is perfect. The dining hall might be on fire. The dogs are chasing each other.

There's fire trucks everywhere. But everything is perfect. Not a care in the world. That element of truth, nirvana. And it stays with you for a while. It stays with you for a while, maybe a day, maybe two days. You can't even sleep because you're so blissed out. And it's okay. And if you have that experience, you'll tell me and I'll say, okay, good for you, wonderful.

Keep going. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Now, the thing is, sometimes what will happen is when you're in that space of nothingness and you have equanimity and then you get into that neither perception nor non-perception, your mind may get caught up and your mind might be expecting, ah, something's going on, something's happening. Or your mind might get scared because sometimes what happens is you're so quiet, you can feel like your heartbeat is in your throat. You can thump, thump, thump, thump.

You feel like some kind of pulsation is happening. It's like the sense of self is clinging to being, I'm about to disintegrate. And it's holding on for dear life. But don't worry. It's worth it. Just let go. But at the same time, just because you recognize it, the recognition of it is, ah, it's coming. And there's the expectation.

And so what are you doing? You are in the waiting room of nirvana. You're waiting. And waiting is a type of craving. Have you ever noticed when you're in the line? On the line at the cashier or at the airport? And there's a sense of, okay, when is it my turn? Let's say you don't have your phone with me. The phone is what distracts us from the waiting. Let's say you don't have your phone, you don't have anyone to talk to, you're just with yourself, and you're just waiting. When is it going to be my turn?

That waiting is the subtle expectation that you have to let go of. And that's where disenchantment and dispassion comes in. So what I'm saying to you is when you experience that waiting, ah, when's it going to happen? Or you notice that the mind gets agitated when it starts to see certain kinds of symbols, like signs of that. Or you're too inundated with the images of neither perception or non-perception.

And you're unable to let the mind let go of that and then come back. All you do is just stop in that moment. Continue sitting. Just stop there. Take a step back. Relax. Take a step back and go back to the image of the still lake in the mind and radiate equanimity for a while. Because this equanimity balances out that expectation.

It balances out that distractedness. It balances out that sort of being overwhelmed by images. And eventually you go back to that same place again and you may experience that same expectation. Let it go. It's not going away. Go back and radiate equanimity. And you may have to do this a few times. But eventually, your mind gets tired of it. And this tiredness is disenchantment.

This disenchantment is sometimes translated as revulsion. So I'm going to give you my famous chocolate cake example of what that means. For those of you who know me, know that I love chocolate cake. And sometimes I say this to my own detriment because every time I say this, someone invariably gets chocolate cake. That's how I've packed on the pounds.

More and more chocolate cake. Every retreat, chocolate cake. So I should say, I have a passion for money. People should give me more money. I'll never be tired of that. Anyway, let's say chocolate cake is my favorite. So Rose is out there in the kitchen baking a wonderful, amazing chocolate cake, with wonderful whatever recipe she's gotten. And she tells me there's chocolate cake I'm making for you. I'm like, oh, that's great. I'm looking forward to it. And she says, here's a big slice. She takes the slice and she gives it to me on a plate and I eat it and it's scrumptious and it's delicious.

And oh my God, it's just amazing. And she says, here, have another one. I said, oh yeah, my greed makes me want to eat more chocolate cake. I'm like, yes, get me some more chocolate cake. Second round, I eat more of that chocolate cake. She gives me a third plate. Okay, I'll try that third plate. I'll eat that third plate. By the fourth plate, she says, come on, have some.

No, thank you. That which I'm craving is now my source of disgust. I can't eat anymore. I'm sick to my stomach. This is what happens with disenchantment. I get disenchanted with chocolate cake. You show me another piece of chocolate cake. I don't want it. I don't like it. I don't need it anymore. I'm tired of it. Take it away. The equanimity is there and then you get into that space and there's expectation.

So what do you do? You go back to the equanimity. You do that over and over and over and finally the mind gets tired and says, what? I've had enough of this. I surrender. I give up. I give up all effort. I give up all identification. I give up all trying. I give up even trying to let go. Disenchantment hits, and dispassion. What is dispassion? Dispassion is the mind that is non-stick.

No matter what you throw at it, it just slides through. Nothing sticks to it because of that disenchantment. So that dispassion, I'm in that space. I'm tired of trying anything. I don't even want Nibbana at this point. I'm happy where I am. And no matter what's coming up, I can see the heart rates, I can feel my heartbeat.

I'm seeing, I can feel I'm sinking down somewhere. I don't care anymore. Whatever has to happen, happens. I don't care anymore. The thoughts, the images, they just slide and glide. And from that dispassion, through that dispassion, you get what's known as vimutti, liberation. The mind gets completely liberated for that moment when it goes into cessation and touches the Nirvana element, as we may call it.

So just a piece of information for you that when you see this happening, go back to equanimity. Go back to equanimity. Keep that process going until you have enough disenchantment and dispassion. I think that's it. I think that's pretty much it. I think we will share some merit. 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. 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.