Pitfalls & Opportunities

Yesterday, we talked about getting the mind into jhāna, focusing on the breath, adjusting the breath so that it feels good. Then, when it feels good, you try to maintain that sense of feeling good, and then spread it through the body until you have a sense of the whole body being suffused by good breath energy. Then you maintain that sense of full-body awareness, and eventually you get a sense that the awareness and the breath begin to become one. Instead of watching the breath, you feel like you’re bathed in the breath. Eventually the breath gets so calm that it seems the in-and-out breath seems to disappear, and the body is filled with this good, still breath energy. Then you maintain that.

Today I’d like to talk about some of the things that can happen as you develop this skill: some dangers you have to watch out for and some opportunities you want to look for.

One possible occurrence is that you begin to see light. I want to say at the very beginning that if light doesn’t appear, don’t worry. But if a sense of light does appear, in the beginning, try to maintain your awareness not with the light but with the breath. If the light becomes steady, see if you can get it under your control. First, see if you can make it disappear and then reappear, grow large, grow small. If it’s not white, can you make it white or off-white? If you can’t, let it go. If it does become white, bring it up close, make it go far away.

Then, when you have it totally under your control, bring it into the body, and you’ll find that it’ll create a great sense of ease in the body. You may start seeing different organs in the body appearing in the light or you may even see a vision of yourself in the light. If you’re meditating on your own, let these visions go away. You can manipulate the light on your own, but the visions require some supervision. Try to stick with the breath.

Another thing that starts to appear to some people in the beginning is that they start seeing beings coming to them. Again, if you’re meditating on your own, just send them goodwill and let them go. Sometimes they seem to be well-meaning, but you never know for sure. They don’t carry identification papers. And even if they are well-meaning, you have to be cautious. Sometimes they come to share knowledge, but who knows how much they know? Some beings can become devas without knowing much at all. There’s a story in Canon of a deva who tries to proposition a monk, which shows you the extent to which devas can be foolish and ignorant. So if any beings come, wish them well and then let them go. If they don’t want to go, you don’t pay any attention to them. Fill your body with good breath energy and, as Ajaan Lee would say, “Fight them off with goodwill.”

Another thing that can happen is that, as you get more and more familiar with the breath and more familiar with these states of concentration, you begin to get a sense that it’s not so much that the breath is changing from one state to another. It’s simply that, as the mind settles down, you’re tuning into different breath energies that exist on different levels in the body. There’s a still breath, or a potential for still breath, that’s always there, and there are also the frequencies of the breath energies going through the nerves and the blood vessels. You sense that, as your concentration deepens, it’s as if you’re simply tuning into these different energies that are already there.

It’s like tuning a radio. Even as your radio is tuned into the stations that come from Aix, you know that the frequencies that come from Monaco are also always there. It’s simply a matter of tuning into them.

This indicates that you’re getting more proficient in concentration, but two things can go wrong here. One is that you feel, “Hey, I can tune in at any time.” And in the beginning, that’s true: When you know the station, you can tune in very quickly. But if you get lazy and heedless, you begin to lose that ability. In other words, it’s as if the radio frequencies from Monaco and Aix are still there, but you’re not taking good care of your radio and you get to the point where you can’t tune in anymore. So you have to be careful not to get heedless.

Another thing that can go wrong is that—as you get a sense of this still awareness that’s potentially always there—you develop wrong view about that potential. You think that you’ve reached the “ground of being” or your already-awakened potential. This is where the idea of “awakened Buddha nature” comes from. Actually, it’s just the consciousness aggregate. When you reach a state like this, try to be very careful to watch what fabrications go into maintaining it, because it is a fabricated phenomenon. When you see how it’s fabricated, you can avoid falling into wrong view about it.

Now, as you get the mind more and more confident in getting still, the Buddha recommends that you start using this concentration to become more mindful and more alert—in particular, becoming more and more alert to what you’re doing as you get the mind concentrated and try to maintain that state of concentration. This is where the Buddha has you think in terms of fabrication. And this is how you use jhāna as a basis for insight.

Now, there are two ways in which you can analyze the mind in concentration. One is in terms of the three fabrications we’ve been talking about: bodily fabrication, which is the breath; verbal fabrication, which is the way you talk to yourself—and here we’re talking about how you talk to yourself about the breath and about the state of your mind; and finally, mental fabrications, the perceptions you use to maintain the concentration, and the feelings you’re developing as you get the mind still. That’s one way of analyzing the fabrications.

Another way is in terms of the five aggregates. It’s a very similar type of analysis. Start with form. This would be the way you sense the body from within. Then again, there’s feeling, which here is the feeling of pleasure or equanimity you develop with the concentration. Perception, the images you hold in mind to get the mind into concentration and maintain it. Fabrication, which here means the intention to maintain it. And then consciousness, which is aware of all these things.

Now, the Buddha recommends that you analyze the mind into these different types of fabrication—either the three fabrications or the five aggregates—to make you more and more sensitive to what you’re actually doing as you’re maintaining the concentration. In the beginning of concentration practice, you’re very acutely aware of what you have to do. But as you get more skilled at it, it becomes easier and easier until it gets to the point where it seems automatic. You become less conscious of what you’re doing.

So here, the Buddha’s trying to make you more and more sensitive again. Even on the more stable levels of concentration, there are subtle levels of fabrication going on. One thing you can try to notice is: Does the level of ease in the concentration go up and down? Is there any disturbance in that ease? When there is a disturbance, what did you just do? In other words, you try to look for more subtle problems, and keep looking at your actions as the source of the problems. That’s one way of becoming more sensitive to these subtler levels of fabrication going on in the mind.

As you get better at fabricating these states of concentration, you find that you become more and more addicted to them. In other words, you become more attached to the concentration. You see that this is the best state of mind that you can create.

Now, you can use your attachment to this state of concentration to peel away your attachments to other things, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing in the beginning. When you look at anything else that the mind could pursue at any point, you realize you’ve got something better in your concentrated states of mind.

But after a while, you begin to get tired of the fact that you have to keep on fabricating them. The mind gets more and more inclined to want to find a happiness that doesn’t have to be fabricated at all. This is when you start developing some dispassion for the forms and the feelings and the perceptions and the fabrications or intentions, and even the consciousness that make up the concentration. The mind gets inclined to something that it doesn’t have to create or maintain. You develop dispassion for these aggregates, so that you’re inclined to let go of the concentration and find something better.

Now, when you do this, sometimes you simply get the mind deeper into concentration, although at that moment you may not realize it’s just another state of concentration. It’s like going from a dark room into a much brighter room. You don’t see anything in the new room because the light is so bright. But as your eyes begin to adjust, you begin to say, “Oh yes, there are things here in this room, too.” What you’re doing is that you’re getting to deeper and deeper layers of fabrication until you’re left with nothing but two fabrications: attention and intention. The mind reaches a point where it realizes, “If I stay here, it’s fabricated. If I go someplace else, it’s going to be fabricated, too. And what’s the alternative to staying and going?” If things come together just right, that’s when there’s an opening to the deathless. You know it’s deathless because there’s no time or space in there. This is why it’s called unborn and undying.

What often happens, though, after people reach this point, is that they get excited. “Wow!” And that pulls you out because you’ve crashed it. But still, it’s an experience of the deathless and it makes a big change in the mind because you realize there was no suffering there, not even the slightest bit of stress at all.

So all your doubts about the Buddha are gone. You see that he was right: There is a deathless dimension, and you attained it by following the path he taught.

You also know that there were no aggregates in there at all, no fabrications at all, which is why you would never identify yourself as any of the aggregates ever again.

You know exactly what you did in order to get there, but you also realize that it was your lack of skill in the past that prevented you from getting there, which is why you would never intentionally break any of the five precepts ever again.

You also know that your experience of time did not begin with the date of your birth. You may not have necessarily gained any visions of previous lifetimes, but in leaving time and space for a while, you’ve seen how far time goes back. Far, far back.

Now, you can do this kind of analysis of the fabrications of jhāna to get to the deathless in one of two ways. One is when you’re within a state of jhāna itself. We talked about this yesterday. It’s like a man standing watching someone who’s sitting down, or a man sitting down watching someone who’s lying down. In other words, you can watch the state of jhāna from within, but you’ve stepped slightly out of it, like the hand pulled slightly out of the glove. You can see what the mind is doing, you can see all the different aggregates and fabrications in action, and you can drop them.

Another way you can do this analysis is as you leave one state of jhāna to go into another. As you realize you’ve moved from one state of fabrication to another state of fabrication, you become very sensitive to the fabrications you’ve left behind and the fabrications that remain. And again, as you gain a sense of dispassion for the fabrications in either state, you let both of them go.

When you reach the deathless for the first time, you realize that there’s more work to do because of that moment of attachment or clinging to it. But you know for sure that what the Buddha said was true, that this path does lead to the deathless. That’s what gives you more enthusiasm in the practice. You’re much more confident in what you’re doing.

So that’s the best use of jhāna. I hope all of you can do this. What’s important here is that you’re not simply going to rest in the present moment, because this experience helps you see how much the present moment is fabricated. Experiencing the deathless helps you see what you’ve left behind, and there’s no sense of the present in that experience. None of the six senses are there. There is a consciousness, but it’s not related to any of the six senses.

This is why it’s so important that we become sensitive to how the present moment is put together. Sometimes we’re told that the purpose of the practice is to get fully into the present moment, but the Buddha never taught that. He said you come to the present because there’s work to be done in the present, particularly to see how you’re fabricating it. You get the mind into jhāna to get more sensitive to that fact, and you use your states of concentration until you get to the point where you can abandon all those fabrications. That’s when you see what’s left after you’ve left the present moment.

From this point on, your relationship to the present moment will be different. One, you realize the extent to which your intentions are needed for you to experience the present moment. And two, you see how important it is that you choose your intentions wisely. You know there’s more work to be done, but you also know you’re on the right path.

In a few minutes we’ll start our walking meditation period. Again, we’ll do 45 minutes. But before we do, I’d like to make reference to one of the questions that came up yesterday. One of you has complained that during the retreat you get to a point where you tend to yawn a lot. You feel that you’re not getting enough oxygen. This is a problem that comes when we have a very sedentary retreat like this. The mind gets quiet, you sit and you walk slowly, and as you sit and walk slowly, your blood pressure goes down, your heart rate goes down—which, for some people, is what they need. But for some people it’s too much. So it’s a good idea during the walking meditation period to do some fast walking, at least for a while. Or else you can find a way of getting some exercise during the course of the day, something to raise your heart rate. That should help solve the problem.