Signs Along the Road

In the Canon, when they talk about the nimitta of concentration, they’re referring to the theme you focus on. In the passages that describe it, the themes are the four establishings of mindfulness: remaining focused on the body in and of itself—ardent, alert, mindful—putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world. The same with feelings in and of themselves, the mind in and of itself, mental qualities in and of themselves. For example, when you focus on the breath, this is an aspect of the body in and of itself. Then you follow the instructions for breathing mindfulness.

Basically, the descriptions of right mindfulness in the Canon are descriptions of what you* *do in order to get the mind into right concentration. The descriptions of right concentration are basically talking about the states you get into. Right mindfulness is the how; the descriptions of right concentration are the what.

Then, as you focus on the breath, some people find that they do get nimitta in the sense that the Commentary uses the term: as a “sign.” A white light may appear—that’s something that the Commentary focuses on as really necessary. But, as Ajaan Fuang noticed when he was teaching meditation, many people can get into deep concentration without signs like that. Some people have other kinds of signs related to other senses, such as strange feelings going through the body, or a strange sense that the body is bigger than it really is, or that parts of the body are bigger than they really are while other parts disappear. There are also nimittas of sound. Certain people have strong sounds coming into their ears as the mind settles down; or smells. There can be all kinds of things.

By and large, he would have you treat these things as signs the same way you’d treat a sign as you go down the road. When there’s a sign that says that you’re now entering Valley Center, you don’t drive on the sign. You just note it as you go past it and you stay on the road. In other words, if a light appears, a sound appears, strange feelings appear in the body, you stay with the breath.

There would be one exception, which would be if you had a light appear. He’d say, “If you can get the light under your control, you can play with it for a while. First get it white or off-white, pearly colored. If you can’t do that, have nothing to do with it”—because you don’t know where that light comes from. The white light is the light of the breath. Then make it large, make it small, make it near, make it far, make it disappear, make it reappear. Once you have it under your control, then you’re in charge. What you don’t want is for the light to suck you in, because that way you lose your foundation. You want to maintain your foundation in the body. Get the light in the context of the body and then bring it in. It’ll sometimes light up the body as you do so. Some people actually see parts of their body—bones, organs—appear in the light when they do this. Ajaan Fuang would have you play with this for a while, because it’s fun. But then he’d have you stop and go back to the breath, because that’s where the real work is.

As the Buddha noted, you want to get so that you’re aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out. Then you calm bodily fabrication. You want to get the body to be really still. You don’t tamp it down but you do want to have a sense of the whole body having whatever breath it needs. Simply through the stillness of the mind, the breath-needs grow more and more gentle over time until you’re fully aware of the whole body, and the whole body naturally grows still.

The image in the Canon is of a man wrapped in a white cloth from head to foot, with no part of his body uncovered by the cloth. In the same way, the Buddha said, your body is filled with a bright awareness—bright, not in the sense of a light necessarily, but just very, very clear. Getting there, though, requires some adjustment of the breath, which is why the Buddha has you be aware of the whole body breathing in, the whole body breathing out as you adjust the breath, because you want to develop a sense of well-being.

Think of the images he gives in his similes. There’s the bathman working water into a ball of bath powder so that the whole ball of bath powder is saturated with water but it doesn’t drip. Or a lake with a spring fed by the rain: The spring comes up from the depths of the lake and cools the entire lake. Or lotuses immersed in water from their roots to their tips.

The images are very precise and very useful as you’re working with the breath. To begin with, you have to work it through the tensions in the body. This is where it’s good to think of Ajaan Lee’s comment that there are three levels of breath in the body. It makes it a lot easier to deal with.

This is the point where the Commentary parts ways with the Canon. The Commentary insists that if you try to push the breath into the body it’s like pushing air into a bag of beans—the body is just too heavy for the breath. That’s a misconception right there, thinking that you have the body starting out as a solid, and you’ve got to push air into it. The breath isn’t air. The breath is energy.

Remind yourself that the breath is there first. Of all the different elements in the body, the breath is the one you’re aware of before the others. You’ve got to keep that perception in mind.

And there are three levels of the breath, as Ajaan Lee points out. There’s the in-and-out breath, the main one that moves up and down through the torso. Then there’s the secondary breath, as that main breath sends ripples out through the body, and the movement in the torso gets echoed in different parts of the body through the blood vessels, through the nerves, through the fascia. Then there’s the still breath that already fills the body. All of these forms of breath energy are already there. As the mind settles down, you want to detect them and use them.

The bathman working the water with the bath powder is like the first kind of breathing—getting the whole torso involved.

The spring filling the lake is like the second kind of breathing. It ripples out and fills the entire lake. In the same way, the breath energy ripples out through the blood vessels, through the nerves without your having to work it through anything. The fullness you get is not the fullness of eating a lot of food, it’s just that the nerves feel full of energy, vibrant. Ajaan Lee’s image is of putting electricity through a jungle: You string up the wires, and then the electricity in the wires lights up the lights. Everything gets energized.

Finally, the image of the lotuses in a still pond of water: The lotuses are standing still, the water is still, but they’re drenched with water. There’s a still breath that fills the whole body and it’s already there. You want to get in touch with that because when the mind settles down and you think of all the different breath channels in the body being connected, all the blockages are dissolved away, dissolved away, you’ll naturally get in touch with that still, pre-existing breath, the background breath. It feels sufficient, in and of itself.

Up to that point, you’ve needed the in-and-out breath and the breath going through the blood vessels to bring your attention to the body and to work through the patterns of tension, work through the pains. When you’ve gotten through that, then there’s the still breath, and you can rest there. Everything is very alert, very awake. With this kind of concentration, you can actually do the work you need to do, because that’s what concentration is for—not just to rest in what the Buddha calls a pleasant abiding, but also to develop your mindfulness, to develop your knowledge, to do away with your defilements.

This is what you want to see when you’ve got a state of mind and a state of the body like this: how you relate to form, feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, and consciousness. The aggregates are all right here, and this is a really good place to watch the aggregates. This is one of the best things you can do with them: to create a state of concentration. You get to see subtleties in the aggregates that you wouldn’t have seen before if you just approached them through your ordinary awareness. Here you’re still, in a broad range of awareness. You don’t have to worry so much about looking after the breath, because now the breath is very still.

The one thing you have to be wary about is that sometimes the sense of the body will begin to dissolve away and disappear. For the time being, don’t go there yet. It is possible to go there, and there are good things you can do with the sense of space that can come, but for now try to maintain the sense of the body filled with still breath energy, because then you begin to see the subtler movements of mind that you would have missed otherwise.

It’s like tuning in to a radio station. If you’re not quite tuned in right, there’s a lot of static. You can’t hear the message of what’s being said or what music is being played. But if you’re tuned in just right, the subtleties come out, and you can catch the small movements of the mind. It’s in those movements of the mind: That’s where you’re going to see your cravings, that’s where you’re going to see your clingings, that’s where you’re going to see the processes of becoming as they begin to form. A little knot of tension develops, and then you slap a perception on to it as being a thought. Then there’s the question, “A thought of what?” and then you embroider it, string it out, move into it.

You can see this most clearly as you’re fully inhabiting the body: your awareness fills the body, still breath energy fills the body. So try to get in touch with this still breath that’s already there and hold in mind the perception that the breath is first. Your first awareness of the body is through the breath element. Then the other elements build on that. Usually, because we use the body physically in the world so much, we tend to focus more on the earth element—the solid parts of the body—and we get everything backwards. We think we have to push the breath into the solid parts. Actually, it’s a matter of allowing the breath to be first. It becomes primal. Breath breathes breath. It energizes the other elements. That’s when you can see a lot of things you wouldn’t see otherwise. That’s how you can do the work you need to do.

So the signs you see in the meditation are sign-posts along the way. And as I said, you don’t drive on the sign-posts. You note them as you drive past but you stay on the road. If they were an essential part of the meditation, the Buddha would have put them in his similes of the jhānas or included them in his descriptions of what’s going on in the concentration—but he doesn’t. So they’re optional.

As Ajaan Fuang pointed out, you can play with them for a while, but remember, they’re just play-things. There was a woman studying with Ajaan Fuang one time. He would sit and meditate with a group of people and talk to them about their meditation. If someone had a vision appear, he would sense that fact as it was happening, and he’d say, “Did a vision just appear? Did a light just appear?” If they said yes, then he’d tell them what to do with it. Of course, everybody else in the room was all ears to what that person was doing. But this woman said, “Here I’ve been meditating for years. My mind is really still, really quiet, and yet nothing like this is happening.” Ajaan Fuang said, “Do you realize how lucky you are? Other people have all this other stuff coming in to disturb their minds while they’re trying to settle down and get work done. You can go straight to work.”

That’s the message: Go straight to work. Stay on the road. Don’t get pulled off to the side-roads where you might get lost.