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Yesterday there was a nice article on NPR about Buddhists and the “mindfulness industrial complex” that noted mindfulness is only one step of the 8-fold path. These days everyone teaches “mindfulness”, the common translation of the Pali word Sati (Smrti in Sanskrit) which Sensei and I prefer to translate as wholeheartedness. The 8-fold path has some familiar Sanskrit words in it, and I recommend the translation website for spoken Sanskrit. Each of the 8 starts with samyak (Sanskrit. or samma in Pali) meaning right or correct. If you see “sam” that’s usually what it means.
1) …drsti = gaze, view, as in understanding, which we recognize from asana practice (where is your dristi?)
2)…samkalpa = determination or intention
3) …vac = speech. In Pali it’s vaca <pronounced vacha> is like voice.
4) ..karmata = action. you know karma = action.
5) …ajiva = livelihood. This is an odd one like an idiom. a-jiva literally is not-alive, but the meaning is livelihood.
6) …vyayama = effort, exercise as in what you do at the gym.
7) … = mindfulness/wholeheartedness. Be present; know what you are doing while you do it.
8)…samadhi = literally concentration/unification, epitomized by jhana.

The question came up this week, can a person can get jhana seated in a chair or is full lotus required? I mentioned on 6/12 the story of Buddha’s final moments (see part 6 section 9). Here we have his disciples watching him in jhana as he lay on his deathbed. So certainly you can get jhana without full lotus posture if you are enlightened. So I gave it a try this last week and succeeded without too much difficulty. My mind simply stops caring where my limbs are as it moves toward jhana. If you have never experienced jhana or if you only experience it now and then in your meditation, then you really need to express your body-mind’s “effort” toward jhana. And wrapping your body up tight is excellent for that. (remember your mind will settle if you stop stirring it and allow it to come to rest, but there’s a little more needed to go deeper than your common resting point. That little more is the nudge of effort I’m referring to here).

These long meditations of 30-60min differ from the short 5min ones like at Chapel because we are trying to confront the obstacles that keep us from perfect stillness or jhana. And here we see the parallel between meditation and life in general. The same obstacles keep us from being happy, free and spontaneous and lead us into various painful suffering experiences. So let’s consider obstacles. You might say life is about relationships. With people, objects, circumstances. An example is your car. Typically you identify part of yourself as the person who drives that car, so when you get a new car you feel a little changed, a little like a new person. Same with clothing, homes, jobs, degrees, relationships, etc. You find that the specifics change while the theme persists, because you still have the same relationship to mature, grow, learn from. They often say this when you find yourself dating the same kind of wrong person, but it’s true in all parts of life. So what are your limits? Yoga is about facing your limits not extending them. It’s more important to develop a better relationship with dropbacks like not being afraid of them, than it is to be able to do dropbacks. The same is true of most asanas. How do you feel about a deep twisting pose like Marichiasana D? Each time you practice you can feel in more harmony with it, regardless of increased flexibility, strength, balance, etc. If you’re lucky enough that your limits don’t have the upper hand, then you’re not lost in panic or despair. In a sense you gain confidence by facing your limits. Real confidence, not the fake confidence you can get by pretending. Then once you are confident you can question the sources of confidence which include more than just the limits you’ve learned to be comfortable with. It’s like considering your attachments. For me I gained confidence from affection, money, college degrees, ordinations, appearance, life-skills and traveling, other specific skills, my parents, mentors, friends. Then when I ask why, I delve deeper into how I get confidence from each. That’s part of knowing myself which just by knowing, generates more confidence. Then of course sitting in jhana permeates me with confidence.

Why retreat? What is the purpose of going on a meditation retreat? A few things that came to mind are: 1) It’s a time apart from diversions and a chance to try better. Meditating at home is good, but also more challenging because the things we care about surround us – plans for a trip, family concerns, maybe work. When we go somewhere to meditate like a temple, studio, friend’s house, or a park, those things are less apparent and thereby easier to drop from our attention. I say here try better because try harder and try more are not really helpful as we apply effortless effort. 2) A chance to share advice with each other in person. Each of us has specific expertise, unique perspectives, and our own ways of expressing things. It’s wonderful to support each other and particularly in person. 3) it’s fun. At the weekend retreat last year, I think everyone was refreshed and enthusiastic in sharing the experience, the cooking, and the time away. This camaraderie is a great inspiration for practice. Some other ideas you mentioned included 4) hearing other viewpoints and discussing them like we did at the Sambuddhaloka temple with the monks. I’m looking into 3 retreat type events over the next 3 months and will see if there’s interest in each.

The problems we face in life generally don’t require us to SEARCH for hard-to-find solutions or solve COMPLICATED issues, rather they require us to be CLEAR-HEADED to see the simplicity of it. So how do we get clear-headed? After sleeping well, we wake up and have a cup of coffee, take a shower, exercise, eat well, etc. Universally, each of us needs to feel safe from violence, in good health, have food, sleep and close friendships. Basically we need to feel OK and loved. If we don’t have these biological needs, it can be hard to be clear-headed, but as we learn to center our self we can get there in less favorable circumstances. That’s where meditation comes in. Meditation as training for an hour to learn how to wake up, not meditation as a moment to relax and let go like you would at the spa. Meditation is confrontation. We face our self vulnerably confident. Many Zen stories talk about this confrontation with metaphors like swallowing a molten ball of iron – you can’t spit it out and you can’t swallow it, so what do you do? You have to persist in the confrontation. Similarly, Sensei wrote about the Tiger Canyon where his answer was to make friends with the wolf. This confrontation is what our instinct pushes us to avoid, but eventually it’s too painful to ignore it. Pain is thus our natural motivator. Physical pain is useful in that sense because it urges us to take actions we need to, and in meditation physical pain is useful to help us pay more attention and be more alert. On the down side, it also makes it harder to relax and let go. My own experience of pain in meditation such as pain in the knees while sitting in full lotus, is that it’s intimately tied to fear of injury. This could just be me, but I think it’s a common experience. Once I face and dispel that fear, knowing the pain is not a sign of impending injury, the sensation actually abates. Then of course when I focus into deeper meditation, such things as pain, hunger, sleepiness all drop away as irrelevant objects of attention. This is Dogen’s, “all of a sudden body and mind drop away” and the entry to jhana.

Lots of people write about jhana even if they have never experienced it because it’s so much a part of Buddha’s teachings. On his death bed (see part 6 number 9), Buddha was observed by his disciple Anuruddha to enter each of the 8 jhanas then pass away. Some of what I’ve heard from students of the Vipassana tradition created by Mr. Goenka contradicts what I know of jhanas by claiming that each can be practiced separately as distinct exercises. I know them to instead be like signposts as you settle deeper into your self. It doesn’t make sense then to “practice 4th jhana” without calming your mind to the degree of 3rd jhana first.

Well, I came across a website recently describing the jhanas that I think is very good. I think it useful to talk about it here, so we can get specific about the details and therefore better evaluate our own experiences (like I spoke about last week). I believe the author experiences it regularly based on what he’s written and my own experience of jhana. I particularly noticed that he comments on the above misunderstanding that he observed as well. A couple other things seem different to me but that’s to be expected of two persons writing about their experience of the same thing. First he writes that the senses do not work in jhana, but he practices with eyes closed. I practice with eyes open and the senses appear to work fine for me. It’s my experience of the world that changes in jhana. I experience it all at once in a gestalt way, rather than experiencing this sound or that image. Second, he mentions a lasting effect, persisting for hours or even days, whereas I find myself returned to everyday mind much sooner. It may be that I’ve ‘gotten used to it’ in some sense and move back and forth more quickly than I did when I had that first life-changing experience many years ago. Lastly, his descriptions of the different jhanas seem to be different numbers than what I experience. Specifically, we line up on 1st and 2nd jhana but my experience of 3rd jhana sounds like his 6th jhana having the quality of merging into non-dual experience. Anyway, I encourage you to read his website and hear about the experience from more than just me. You might also look it up in various places such as “Buddhist Dictionary” – Nyanatiloka.

How do you know if you experienced jhana? Traditionally your teacher confirms it. The Zen tradition traces this back to Buddha’s flower sermon, where instead of speaking to his disciples and students, Buddha simply held up a flower. Mahakassapa smiled and Buddha understood that he got the message. After centuries, this process has become codified into the “dharma transmission” of the Soto Zen school and the “Inka” ordination of the Rinzai school whereby the student is formally authorized to start a new school on their own and are then called “Roshi“. So how do they know? In a monastery, after maybe years of meditating together the teacher knows the student very well, and can tell when they experience something profound. What about direct psychic perception of the student while they are meditating? I’ve done some of that and found that it’s very difficult. If they are struggling with thoughts and feelings while meditating, then it’s pretty straightforward to sense it. Otherwise it’s difficult because when someone gets perfectly still inside themself, their mind disappears from view. So what about the words they use to describe the experience? Here you can only say when the words contradict jhana, and can’t say it definitely was it. Like stillness, if you describe it as a conversation or some dramatic progression, then that’s not stillness. If you describe jhana as including any struggling, striving, clinging, of suffering, then that’s not it. By definition, first jhana is when you are free and separate from all that. So, my teacher, Shibuya Sensei, was not impressed with the integrity of today’s institutions and felt that the formal transmissions were meaningless. He said, a student’s responsibility is to get the message from the teacher. And that led to the statement that nature, including all of us, are teachers bearing a message with our very existence, even if we do not know it. It’s up to you to get the message, to free yourself to experience jhana. When you do, it doesn’t matter who confirms it.

So how do you yourself know if you experience jhana regardless of confirmation from your teacher? You can read words others have used to describe their experience of it and see if it sounds the same. Here I’ve run into a couple discrepancies with descriptions written by persons I believe did indeed experience it. One Thai monk said he always sees a bright light. I’m sure he does, but I’m also sure that some others do not. So we have to be careful not to be too exacting in comparing words. Chapel teaches that you can evaluate your meditation afterwards by examining your mind. Specifically, if you were asleep then you feel groggy and return to alert consciousness slowly when you stop. Otherwise you are immediately alert. Also, if you are in a hypnotic state then you are not in control so that’s not it either. What if you disappear into stillness? This is the ideal “stage II” meditation from Chapel. Here you abide in a conscious state with no awareness. Time passes, but you are not aware of it until your meditation ends. Generally this is practiced for 5 minutes, not the usual 30-60 minutes. This is not quite jhana. There are two things to consider as you calm your mind: the degree to which it is calmed and the extent to which it is aware. If you shrink your circle of awareness (e.g. by closing your eyes), then there is less extent that needs to be calmed to reach perfect stillness. Jhana is more pervasive than this because you remain open and aware of your mind, your body, your senses, your surroundings. All of those things can be very distracting and prevent you from getting perfectly still. It may seem impossible, but you can do it. It is much harder. It’s worth it. Jhana includes the feeling of bliss and rapture in the first stages. Sometimes we may have an experience we think is jhana because it feels blissful, but remember jhana is euphoric but not intoxicating. I’d recommend Sensei’s book WAKEFUL pages 69-80 which describe the 9 jhanas.

Why do you meditate? I think it may have been the second serious question Sensei asked me after I started meditating with him. Basically, why are you here to meditate tonight? To give you context for the answer I gave, I’d just read the chapter on Hinduism in Huston Smith‘s “Religions of Man” (newest edition is “The World’s Religions”). He was born to American missionaries in China where he grew up, then after his Ph.D. had a career as a professor of Philosophy at MIT. This chapter has a nice section about how Hinduism enumerates the maturing wants of a person: 1) pleasure 2) success 3) service 4) liberation (moksha). This last one includes the desire to continue to be, to be aware and know, and to feel joy. The desire to know spoke to me at the time I met Sensei as I was completing my own PhD at UCLA in particle physics, as Huston wrote: “Second, we want to know, to be aware. People are endlessly curious. Whether it be a scientist probing the mysteries of nature, a businessman scanning the morning paper, a teen-ager glued to television to find out who won the ball game, or neighbors catching up on the local news over a cup of coffee, we are insatiably curious.” So I answered “curiosity”. I wanted to understand how the mind worked, how consciousness worked, how we ourselves work, and believed the answer lay in mastering meditation. I’d been meditating initially in the TM, then Chapel, and later the Soto Zen traditions all my life, but Sensei didn’t know that. He rejected my answer, saying something like “Curiosity is just a passing motive, something you might do on a weekend. What is your real motivation?” Fast forward to now. Here are some potential answers you might consider: a) I need to relax and let go, b) I need to get clear and motivated, c) I’m searching for answers and solace, d) I love meditation. The first two depend on what conditions you are facing in your life at the moment, and after years of practice and coming to know jhana, I find I simply love to just be present with that degree of perspicacity. So, what brings you to meditate at this time? There are no wrong answers, and the usefulness of the answer is to know your current self better. Your answers, like you, may mature in the sense Huston Smith described.

It’s important to be able to let go. In our daily life we have to let go to sleep, make love, or just enjoy the day. In meditation we have to let go in order to be fully present with ourself. Jhana and Enlightenment are basically the same, but with jhana you let go temporarily and with enlightenment you let go permanently. Let go of what? Of the attachments that obstruct you from being in perfect harmony, free and spontaneous to do anything you choose, from realizing universal consciousness. So then consider a short meditation period like 5 min compared with a longer one like 60 min. If you meditate for 5 minutes and spend them in jhana, that’s awesome, but unlikely for most persons. Instead some obstacle(s) will keep you from it, some anxiety you can’t let go, some concern you can’t stop worrying about, something in your environment or body that keeps grabbing your attention. In order to learn how to let go of those things you have to first separate yourself from them, and that requires applying keen investigation and holding steady clear perception of what the obstacles are. It does not require that you understand them or their mechanism; in fact that most always comes in hindsight. So don’t get lost in analytical reasoning and trying to “solve” for a solution. Well, when we meditate for a long time like 60 min, whatever we are holding on to that is holding us back starts to feel tired and worn out. That helps us perceive it. If we can hold our attention steady and crack ourselves open to let it go, then we’ve made the space for jhana. On the other hand we may get fully exhausted before we get that and have to try again another time. You may always exhaust without clearing the space, but don’t give up because anytime you might just let go and find it’s suddenly easy. After that experience, meditation practice becomes a real joy and new obstacles are welcome on the cushion and even in daily life. Eventually all obstacles are gone and you are just free and happy.

Some more thoughts on: A) the common perception of meditation, B) the 5 minutes twice-a-day practice prescribed in the Chapel curriculum, and C) the 30-60 minute traditional Buddhist breathing meditation practice. A) the superficial perception of meditation by a person just a little curious and trying it out is that it’s something you do in seeking a reprieve from stress/pain/etc similar to a vacation, time off work, hug, massage, etc. So it’s a way to obtain comfort. B) the Chapel practice of short meditations can help you overcome laziness since you only have 5 minutes to get still, but in general the purpose is to use your ability to create a steady and sensitive mind in order to practice other skills and generally live with more awareness. So you need to be comfortable in order to succeed in creating that. C) The lengthier practice where you allow your circle of awareness to remain open and hold your attention steady despite initially overwhelming distractions and disturbances is a confrontation with yourself. It’s opposite your instinct to seek comfort. Here we are training ourself, learning how to be comfortable with our discomfort. There are many layers of discomfort: physical like exercise, waking up early, eating; emotional like starting a new job, quitting a bad relationship; mental like public speaking, an exam or job interview; or our values like a career change, cross-country move, or grieving a death. It’s natural to grieve change (a death, a job, a relationship, money, etc) but we cling so tight that we get stuck on it. By facing it and creating peace we can get over it and move on with our life. This is true during an hour’s meditation practice as well – can you set aside your discomfort/trauma/story-line temporarily? Remember habits are comfortable, so when you go outside that circle (by choice or not), you have to face the discomfort. They say that post-satori practice (after the surprise of experiencing jhana for the first time) is moreso a welcoming of pain, embarrassment, difficulties that come to us in life as opportunities to create peace and comfort. There’s plenty to practice with. So as we start meditation, consider the easy circumstances you can arrange but don’t be obsessive about creating comfortable conditions because you can transform the experience.

The common perception of meditation is that it’s something you can do on occasion to relax, calm yourself, and improve your health. You may also hear something like, “it also helps you remember your connection to the divine by bringing that specific energy into you.” Here we consider the why of meditation more specifically. “Bring that energy into you” is basically a vague reference to 3rd jhana, where you experience yourself as merged into something greater than yourself. Practically speaking, to be in 3rd jhana you can’t just set an intention and have it happen to you. Life and meditation are like a staircase from Hell to Heaven and you have to take each step — there are no elevators where it happens to you just because you want it. You have to get 1st jhana first, and to do that you have to free yourself from every disturbance either negative or positive. Those are the stairs by which you can “visit Heaven” during a meditation period in jhana. That means, e.g. if you are concerned about the noise your neighbor is making while you meditate, you have to let that go and not care whatever noise they make. Also, simply plugging your ears may not do it, because you know that you are plugging your ears to avoid something disturbing and that’s enough to miss 1st jhana. It’s not a matter of arranging circumstances until you feel good, it’s a matter of feeling good regardless of circumstances. Rev. Gene Larr, in “Your Dawning Awareness” puts it simply: “Keep your mind still and allow it to relax….All distractions should be removed because you are going to have to still your mind and any of these distractions that can be removed before the practice of stilling, the easier it will be for you.” And here we move into the how of meditation. Keep it still and allow it to relax. Just as I’ve been saying, ‘let go and pay attention, at the same time’. The common instructions for meditating are to separate yourself from the external senses and let go of your thoughts. That’s good, but ANYTHING that catches your attention needs to be let go of to get to 1st jhana, not just the external senses. Typically a person who hasn’t meditated or is not too settled at the time is most distracted by external sounds, etc. But after some practice or in a more settled state, I see folks more often get caught by their reasoning mind mulling over problems, memories, etc. On the other hand some people get more often caught by how their body feels. There are many techniques and crutches to help with specific things, but in the end you have to let those things just be and realize you are independent of them. 1st jhana is just the sudden sensation of that freedom, when you feel your “body and mind dropped off” as Dogen Zenji wrote.