The jhānas are eight altered states of consciousness, brought on via concentration and each yielding more concentration than the previous. This way, as you pass through the jhānas, you stairstep your way to deeper and deeper levels of concentration—that is, you are becoming less and less likely to become distracted. Upon emerging from the jhānas—preferably the fourth or higherf—you begin doing an insight practice with your jhānically concentrated, indistractable mind. This is the heart of the method the Buddha discovered—these states are not an end in and of themselves, unlike what his two teachers had taught him shortly after he’d left home to begin his spiritual quest. They are simply a very useful way of preparing your mind, so you can more effectively examine reality and discover the deeper truths that lead to liberation.
The jhānas themselves are not awakening, but they are a skillful means for concentrating the mind in a way that leads in that direction, and they are attainable not only by monastics, but also by many serious lay practitioners.
The four preliminary practices of keeping the precepts, guarding the senses, maintaining mindfulness, and being content with little are “off-the-cushion” practices that you need to make the four cornerstones of your basic way of life. Without the support of these practices, meditation “on the cushion” usually proceeds in fits and starts, if it proceeds at all. For learning jhānas, it really is necessary to have a quality daily on-the-cushion meditation practice worthy of the word daily, hopefully of at least forty-five minutes and preferably an hour or more. These four practices go a long way to making that possible.
Access Concentration
The setting aside of unwholesome mind states is known as abandoning the hindrances. There are five of these hindrances, usually listed as sense desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and remorse, and doubt. They could also be listed as wanting, aversion, too little energy, too much energy, and doubt. The overcoming of these five unwholesome states of mind is the same as generating access concentration.
We could define access concentration as concentration strong enough that no hindrances arise. More practically, we can define access concentration as being fully with the meditation object, and if there are thoughts, they are wispy and in the background and don’t pull you away into distraction. The general method for generating access concentration is to put your attention on a suitable meditation object, and when your attention wanders off, gently bring it back. Keep doing this until the distractions fade away and your attention on the object is unwavering. This recognition that you’ve become distracted and the returning your attention to the meditation object should be done without becoming upset that your mind has wandered off yet again.
It is probably better if you can observe the physical sensations at the nostrils or on the area between the nose and the upper lip, rather than at the abdomen or elsewhere. It is better because it is more difficult to do; therefore, you have to concentrate more. Since you are trying to generate access concentration, you take something that is doable, though not terribly easy to do, and then you do it. When noticing the natural, uncontrolled breath at the nose, you have to pay attention very carefully. In doing so you will notice the tactile sensations, and then your mind will wander off. Then you’ll bring it back, and it will wander off; then you’ll bring it back, and it will wander off. Eventually though—maybe not the next time you sit in meditation, maybe not even tomorrow or next week or next month, but eventually—you’ll find that the mind locks onto the breath. You’re really with the breath, and the mind is not wandering off. Any thoughts you have are wispy and in the background.
When the thoughts are just slight, when they’re not really pulling you away and you’re fully with the sensations of the breath, knowing each in-breath and each out-breath—this is the sign that you’ve arrived at access concentration. Whatever method you use to generate access concentration, the sign that you’ve gotten to access concentration is that you are fully present with the object of meditation.
Entering the Jhānas
You may discover that the breath becomes very subtle; instead of a normal breath, you notice you are breathing very shallowly. It may even seem that you’ve stopped breathing altogether. These are signs that you’ve likely arrived at access concentration.
If the breath gets very, very subtle, or if it disappears entirely, instead of taking a deep breath, shift your attention away from the breath to a pleasant sensation. This is the key thing. You notice the breath until you arrive at and sustain access concentration, and then you let go of the breath and shift your attention to a pleasant sensation, preferably a pleasant physical sensation. There is not much point in trying to notice the breath that has gotten extremely subtle or has disappeared completely—there’s nothing left to notice.
The first question that may arise when I say, “Shift your attention to a pleasant sensation,” may be “What pleasant sensation?” Well, it turns out that when you get to access concentration, the odds are quite strong that, some place in your physical being, there will be a pleasant sensation. Look at most any statue of the Buddha: he has a faint smile on his face. That is not just for artistic purposes; it is there for teaching purposes. Smile when you meditate, because once you reach access concentration, you only have to shift your attention one inch to find a pleasant sensation.
Pleasant sensations can occur pretty much anywhere. The most common place that people find pleasant sensations when they’ve established access concentration is in the hands. After you’ve been “long enough” in access concentration, if you notice that there’s a nice pleasant feeling in the hands, drop the attention on the breath and focus entirely on the pleasantness of that sensation.
It does not matter where the pleasant sensation manifests; what matters is that there is a pleasant sensation and you’re able to put your attention on it and—now here comes the really hard part—do nothing else.
If the pleasant sensation goes away, you don’t really have any other choice than to return to your previous access method. The disappearance of the pleasant sensation is a sure sign of insufficient concentration. Again, regenerate access concentration, and stay longer in access concentration before once again turning your attention to the pleasant sensation.
It’s also very important to let go of the breath when you make the shift to the pleasant sensation. The breath (or other meditation object) is the key to get you in—”in” being synonymous with establishing strong enough access concentration. The key has done its job, and you let it go. It’s exactly the same with the breath or other meditation object. Totally let go of it, and focus entirely on the pleasant sensation. Of course, this is easier said than done—you’ve struggled for a long time to stay locked onto the breath, and now that you’ve finally managed to do so, the first thing you are told is to stop doing that. But that’s the way it is—if you want to experience jhānas, it’s going to be necessary to totally give yourself to fully enjoying the pleasantness of the pleasant sensation.
So you’ve found the pleasant sensation and fully shifted your attention to that pleasant sensation. You now observe the pleasantness of the pleasant sensation and do nothing else. If you can do that, the pleasant sensation will begin to grow in intensity; it will become stronger. This will not happen in a linear way. At first, nothing happens. Then it’ll grow a little bit and then grow a little bit more and then hang out and grow a little bit more... And then eventually, it will suddenly take off and take you into what is obviously an altered state of consciousness. In this altered state of consciousness, you will be overcome with rapture... euphoria... ecstasy... delight. These are all English words that are used to translate the Pali word pīti. Perhaps the best English word for pīti is “glee.”
First Jhāna
To summarize the method for entering the first jhāna: You sit in a nice comfortable upright position and generate access concentration by placing and eventually maintaining your attention on a single meditation object. When access concentration is firmly established, then you shift your attention from the breath (or whatever your meditation object is) to a pleasant sensation, preferably a pleasant physical sensation. You put your attention on that sensation, and maintain your attention on that sensation, and do nothing else.
The move from access concentration to the first jhāna is to shift your attention to a pleasant sensation and stay with that as your object of attention, ignoring any background thinking. If you can stay with your undistracted attention on the pleasant sensation, then pīti will arise. The pīti, being the physical release of pleasant, exhilarating energy, could be anywhere from mild to quite intense. It can be finger-in-the-electrical-socket intense; it can be so intense that it’s not even pleasurable. And hopefully the pīti is accompanied by sukha, which is an emotional state of joy, happiness. Both pīti and sukha are required in order for the experience to be classified as the first jhāna. And most likely, the experience brings a big grin to your face. The first jhāna is enough of an altered state that if you think some experience perhaps might be the first jhāna, it probably isn’t—there’s an unmistakable quality to the arising of pīti and sukha that lets you know for certain that something quite different is happening.
To remain in the first jhāna, stay focused on the experience of pīti and sukha.
Another thing you can do in the first jhāna is play with the intensity level of the pīti. Once you’ve gotten to the point where you can stabilize it, see if you can decrease the level of intensity of the pīti and then bring it back up. You are, so to speak, finding a sort of mental volume control for the pīti. It is easier to bring the pīti down and then back up than it is to try to pump it up higher still. Besides, the pīti may be quite intense, and pumping it up higher may not be something you want to do. The method for decreasing the volume on the pīti is to give it a little less energy, a little less attention. Don’t pay quite as much attention to it, and it will begin to decrease. Once it comes down, put your attention fully back on it, and bring it back up. Once you are skilled in playing with the intensity level of the pīti, you can try to shut it off suddenly and completely, followed by immediately bringing it back. These skills will begin to give you mastery of the pīti that will be useful for learning the second and third jhānas.
Pīti can manifest as rocking or swaying, or it can be very intense so that you are actually vibrating to the point where it is visible to others. It can manifest as heat and get very, very warm. Hopefully it has a pleasant aspect to it. Most often, it manifests as an upward rush of energy, often centered up the spine. I’ve talked with people who practice kundalini yoga, and it seems that pīti is the same energy. I’ve talked with people who practice tummo, which is the Tibetan practice of generating heat, and I was told that this practice also involves generating the same sort of energy. It’s a known, widespread phenomenon that is used in different ways. Here it is used to grab your attention and take you into a concentrated state due to it being so strong that it is easy to put your attention on it and absorb into the experience.
Second Jhāna
The thinking, which was in the background of both access concentration and the first jhāna, subsides when one enters the second jhāna and is replaced by inner tranquilitya and unification of mind. As a practical matter, to move from the first jhāna to the second jhāna, you should take a nice deep breath and let it out slowly and totally, which will calm down the pīti yet leave the sukha strong enough so that you can focus on it. In the first jhāna, the pīti predominates and the sukha is in the background. To move toward the second jhāna, you want to do a foreground-background reversal. When you take the deep breath and deeply exhale, both the pīti and the sukha calm down in intensity, but the pīti drops much more in intensity and is now low-grade and more in the background. The sukha, although perhaps now a bit less intense than it was before the deep breath, is still strong enough to now be the more prominent of the two. The “inner tranquility” mentioned in the description of the second jhāna reflects the shift from an experience of pīti and sukha to an experience of sukha and pīti.
Place your attention on the sukha—that sense of emotional joy/happiness—and stay focused on it. Its intensity may increase a bit, yet the experience will leave the pīti in the background as long as you don’t let the sukha increase too much in intensity. The inner tranquility is a much calmer experience than the experience of the first jhāna. Now let your mind collect on this sense of happiness. In the first jhāna, it is like holding a piece of paper with both hands upon which a marble has been placed; you have to really pay attention to hold it steady. But if you let the paper fold up around the marble, then it will stay there easily. This is similar to what is happening here. Your mind collects around the experience of happiness and settles into it, so that it’s much less likely to go wandering off. This unification of mind occurs as the thinking subsides and fades away.
What you want to do is to be able to get to this state and be able to maintain it for at least 10 to 15 minutes. If you lose it by getting lost in thinking, just come back to the happiness. If you get distracted, the sukha won’t entirely disappear at once—there quite possibly will be some weaker remnants of it hanging around when you notice that you’ve become distracted. Just put your attention on those remnants, and see if the intensity level will come back up to moderate. If not, or if indeed the sukha has completely disappeared, you will need to return to focusing on the breath, mettā, or whatever your access method was, regenerate access concentration, and try again. It is important to give yourself extended time in the second jhāna to let your concentration deepen; the objects of the following jhānas are going to be even more subtle than the sukha of the second jhāna.
The most common problem encountered when learning the second jhāna results from the fact that the sukha is a more subtle object than the pīti of the first jhāna. It takes a more concentrated mind to be able to stay with this more subtle object. It sometimes happens that you generate strong enough access concentration to be able to enter the first jhāna, but when you move on to the second jhāna, you soon fall out of it. The solution is to stay longer in access concentration and let it deepen before moving to the first jhāna.
Third Jhāna
The key thing that happens when you enter the third jhāna is that the pīti—the rapture—fades away. You are in a place where you are just happy. But, you are also in a state of equanimity, mindful and clearly comprehending. The best word to describe this state is contentment. You are in a state of wishlessness, a state of satisfaction, and you want for nothing. This state is without pīti, so there is no sense of movement. You are very still and happy and hanging out in an ongoing state of wishlessness.
As a practical matter, to get from the second jhāna to the third jhāna, again take a deep breath and let it all out. As you do, dial down the intensity level of the happiness. You’re in a bubbly, happy state in the second jhāna; to move to the third, you let that happiness become less intense and begin to fade. As it starts to fade, it might be helpful to remember a time when you were very contented. As an example, you might remember a time when you’d just eaten the perfect meal, you didn’t overeat, and you don’t have to wash the dishes. Remember the incident briefly—a quarter of a second—and pluck the feeling of contentment out of it. As the happiness of the second jhāna continues to decrease in intensity, put your attention on that feeling of contentment, let the decreasing happiness become that contentment, and let the contentment become the focus of your attention. At this point, there should be no pīti left at all. The third jhāna is a very still state. There is no sense of movement and the feeling of contentment is rock steady. It usually is not necessary to do anything directly to make the pīti vanish; it seems to fade away on its own as your mental system calms down from happiness to contentment.
Because the pīti has faded out, this state is a much nicer place to spend time. The sukha still has its nuance of happiness, and that happiness is felt throughout your whole being. The equanimity mentioned in the description of the third jhāna is felt as an unruffled quietness. You don’t want anything, nothing is disturbing you, and you sit there with a faint Buddha-like smile on your face. To become skilled in this state, you should learn to maintain it for at least 10 to 15 minutes.
The third jhāna is less energetic and feels lower in the body, more toward the belly level. In fact, there is a strong sense of the locus of each jhāna moving physically downward as you go up in the numbers.
Fourth Jhāna
The aim here is to attain an emotionally neutral state such that your equanimity can fully purify your mindfulness. As a practical matter, to enter the fourth jhāna, let go of the pleasure of the third jhāna, and hopefully when you do so, there will be a sense of things starting to physically drop down. Go with this sense of dropping down, and continue to let it drop. In the third jhāna, you may find you have a faint smile, a Buddha-like smile. If so, all you have to do is relax the muscles of your face. Both the smile and the sense of pleasure disappear; then usually a sense of things starting to drop down follows. Just stay focused on that sense of dropping, which can continue for quite some time. Eventually the mind settles into a place of quiet stillness.
The fourth jhāna is an emotionally neutral state. There is no pleasure and no pain, only the quiet stillness. The fourth jhāna requires a bit more letting go than any of the previous ones, so let go of anything you are holding on to—that is, fully give yourself to the experience.
Ayya Khema said that being in the third jhāna is like sitting in the mouth of a well—you are a little bit isolated from the world around you. To enter the fourth jhāna, drop down the well to the bottom. Since the fourth requires more letting go than the previous jhānas, don’t think of climbing down the well; just let go and drop. The sense of dropping down isn’t like a free fall; it’s more like drifting down, perhaps like drifting down to the bottom of a swimming pool—another possibly helpful image: in the third you are just under the water; in the fourth you drift down to the bottom. Or in the third you are sitting in the mouth of a cave, and in the fourth you go deep inside the mountain (and the cave has a downward sloping floor). The feeling of dropping down is so pervasive that you might find yourself physically slumping over. This is a quite common experience and nothing to worry about. As you move from the third jhāna into the fourth, just let go into the feeling of dropping down, and if your body also droops over, let it go into that slump as well.
To be skilled in this state, again you should be able to maintain it for at least 10 to 15 minutes like you did for jhānas two and three. When the fourth jhāna is done well, it is an incredibly restful state. We spend our days thinking and doing and our nights either dreaming or oblivious. Finally now you are in a state where you are fully conscious and almost nothing is happening.
The quiet, still, neutral state of mind that is the object of the fourth jhāna is considerably more subtle than the objects of the previous jhānas. This makes it more difficult to maintain your attention on it. If you find that you are frequently becoming distracted from the fourth jhāna experience or if the background thinking begins to kick in again, it’s a sure sign that your concentration level is not strong enough. The best remedy, and the only real long-term solution, is that the next time you are in access concentration, stay longer in access concentration before entering the first jhāna. It is possible to enter the first three jhānas having generated sufficient concentration while in access, but not having generated sufficient concentration to stabilize the fourth jhāna. Counteract this by staying longer in access concentration.
Insight Practice
The purpose of the jhānas is to generate a mind that is concentrated, pure and bright, unblemished, free from defects, malleable, wieldy, steady, and attained to imperturbability, which you can then direct and incline to knowing and seeing. Knowing and seeing what? Body and mind. The jhānas provide you with a mind that can do insight practice more efficiently; they are a warm-up exercise for investigating your body and your mind. Whatever your insight practice is, whatever method you choose to investigate your body and your mind, it will be more effective with a mind that is concentrated, bright, wieldy, and so forth.
We can define an insight as an “understood experience.” If you’ve never tasted a mango and someone describes a mango to you—it’s a yellow-orange fruit with a big seed in the middle, you have to peel it, the inside is yellow and juicy and very sweet—do you have any idea what a mango tastes like? Of course not—you think it’s a peach! But if you bite into the mango—if you have the experience of tasting a mango—then you know what it tastes like (although of course you only know that’s what a mango tastes like if someone tells you that’s a mango). You need both—the understanding and the experience. Understanding without any corresponding experience is useful, but not transformative. Experience without understanding is baffling. We need both to progress on the spiritual path. Insight practices are practices—both on and off the cushion—that aim to give us experiences of the true nature of the world in a context such that we can understand them.
This newly generated, less egocentric viewpoint with its pure, bright, malleable, wieldy mind is a temporary experience, and your mind will soon return to its usual egocentric wants and worries. The amount of time this new, more useful viewpoint is available to you is dependent on how much concentration you generated in the jhānas and what you do upon emerging from the jhānas. The very best thing possible to do is to continue your sitting meditation, but now switch to doing some insight practice, some practice of investigating reality. The Buddha recommends that practice be something that helps you understand the characteristics of your body and mind, to see their interdependent relationship and their impermanent nature.
The transition from the jhānas to insight practice is extremely simple. Stop focusing on the object of the jhāna—for example, the quiet stillness of the fourth jhāna—and start doing your insight practice, whatever it is. You don’t have to go backward to the first jhāna and then to access concentration in order to begin. In fact it works best if you begin doing your insight practice from the highest jhāna you know—that’s when your concentration is strongest. The sense of the jhāna will remain for at least a few moments, if not longer, when you begin your insight practice, but it will fade away as you continue your insight practice. That’s perfectly OK. The jhāna has done its job and gotten you strongly concentrated; let it go, and use your concentrated mind to investigate reality.
It is very helpful when you first sit down to begin your meditation practice to decide what insight practice you will undertake after you emerge from the jhānas. That way you don’t waste any time thinking, “Now what should I do?”—you know what to do with your concentrated, sharp mind. If upon emerging from the jhānas, you really want to do some other practice than the one you decided upon at the beginning of your sitting, it is OK to change your mind once. But whatever insight practice you begin, do continue that insight practice until the end of that meditation period.
There are two basic categories into which insight practices can be divided: meditations and contemplations. Meditation techniques involve the wordless, or nearly wordless, examination of some sort of sensory input. It is usually easier to stay focused and not become distracted when doing an insight meditation. And it is easy to recognize that you have become distracted: if you notice thinking happening, you can let go of the thinking and come back to the meditation object. Contemplation techniques involve thinking about a specific topic. The particulars of a topic may come from sensory input (e.g., contemplating the four elements via sight and touch), or the particulars might come from remembering a teaching and pondering the implications of it (e.g., contemplating dependent origination or contemplating the five daily remembrances). It is more difficult to recognize a distraction when contemplating than when meditating since obviously not all thinking is a distraction when contemplating. It is helpful when a contemplation has a word, phrase, or sentence that serves as an initial key to beginning that contemplation. When you recognize a distraction, you can rethink the key to get settled in again.
The Immaterial Jhānas
From reading the suttas, it would appear that the Buddha considered the fourth jhāna sufficient for generating the “higher mind” of concentration deep enough to enhance your insight practice. But there are also the four immaterial states, which are sometimes mentioned in the suttas as being practiced after the fourth jhāna. This sequence of eight states of concentration led in the later literature to the four immaterial states being referred to as the arūpa jhānas—meaning, “immaterial jhānas.” The first four jhānas were then referred to as the rūpa jhānas—meaning, “material jhānas.”
Jhānas are not superhuman mind states—they arise naturally when your mind is sufficiently concentrated and you turn it toward a thought or feeling that is close enough to the experience of a jhāna. In chaos theory there is the notion of an attractor. An attractor represents a state into which a system finally settles. If we start with different initial conditions for the system, under certain circumstances, we find the same pattern emerging. The circumstances for which this holds true is called the basin of attraction for the attractor. It seems as though the jhānas are attractors; if your mental system gets close enough to one of the attractors—that is, you have sufficient concentration plus some other mental factor(s), such as pleasure or joy or contentment or the notion of vast space—you are in the basin of attraction for that jhāna and settle into the pattern that we call the jhāna.
The jhānas were not invented; they were discovered. People in India had been practicing mindfulness of breathing for many centuries by the time of the Buddha. They had been stumbling into deep, stable states of concentration for a very long time. Eventually these states were codified and arranged in order of increasing subtlety of object.
Other Benefits of Jhāna Practice
Besides the jhānas being a way to prepare your mind for insight practice, they can also have the following benefits as well:
reduce effort necessary to sustain attentional focus,
decrease emotionally reactive behaviors,
reduce your automatic fear response,
move your emotional set point in the positive direction,
provide pleasure more desirable than worldly pleasures, and hence
provide an antidote to sensual craving,
provide a pleasant abiding here and now.
Five Things to Do at the Beginning of Meditation
It is very helpful after you get seated in your comfortable, upright posture to generate some gratitude—gratitude toward your teachers who have taught you the dhamma, gratitude for the life circumstance that enables you to undertake this period of meditation practice, gratitude for all the millions of people who have had a hand in preserving the Buddha’s dhamma for two and half thousand years, gratitude to the Buddha for finding and showing the way, gratitude for anything else that you are currently grateful for. This begins to settle your mind into a positive state, which will be helpful for entering the jhānas. Also current neuroscience research has shown that gratitude practice begins the process of shutting down the so-called default-mode network, which is responsible for many of our distractions.
A second preliminary is to get in touch with your motivation. Why are you doing this practice? Whatever it is, getting it clear in your mind hopefully will inspire you. Then work up some determination—not determination to get anything, just determination to do your very best to use this time as wisely as possible. Get as strong a sense of that as you can; then let it go. It is not useful to begin your practice with a tight mind. But a few moments of working up some determination will have a residual effect that will carry over into your access meditation, when you begin that.
At the beginning of every meditation period, you should always do some mettā (loving-kindness) practice—always for yourself, and additionally for others, if you wish. Mettā practice enhances the positive mind state generated moments earlier by the gratitude practice, as well as starting to generate some concentration. If mettā meditation is not something you like doing, it is still required that you do at least a little at the beginning of every sitting. You don’t have to feel anything; you just have to remind yourself that it really is OK to be well and happy, and that it would be nice if others that you know are also well and happy. Don’t feel you have to do this mettā practice for an extended period—30 seconds is fine. And don’t feel you have to send mettā to everyone you know—the nice people and the difficult people. It’s OK to just do mettā for yourself (always required!) and for a few people you really like.
The last of the five things to do at the start of a meditation period is only useful if you are using mindfulness of breathing as your access method; otherwise, just skip it. There is a gatha (saying) from Thich Nhat Hanh: “Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile.”1 This is exactly what you need to do to generate access concentration using mindfulness of breathing. Don’t take the saying too literally—just breathe in and out and smile and get calm.
Five Things to Do at the End of Meditation
The five things to do at the end of a meditation period begin with recapitulation—what did you do, and how did you get there? This includes remembering what your posture was at the beginning of the period, what it was like to do the five preliminaries mentioned above, what you used for your access method, how you knew you were in access, how long you stayed in access, what was the pleasant sensation that you switched to, what was it like to be with that pleasant sensation, how did the jhāna begin to manifest (if one did), how you responded, and so forth. In fact it can be helpful to remember things that you did before coming to meditate: Had you just eaten? Had you just come back from a walk? Did you read something inspiring? If you have a meditation the likes of which you would like to have again, it is helpful to know the factors that went into generating that experience. So remember anything that might be relevant. Then when you meditate the next time, try, to the best of your ability, to repeat those factors. You are not going to be able to repeat the experience—that’s over and gone. But you will have a better chance of having new experiences similar to the previous one if you have some idea of what you did to generate that previous experience. Not everything you remember preceding some meditation experience is going to be relevant—just keep doing the recapitulation after each sitting, and eventually you’ll discover the important contributing factors.
The second thing to do at the end of a sitting is reflect on impermanence—all those high, but mundane, concentration states are now gone; they too are impermanent. The Buddha said, “It is better to live a single day perceiving how things rise and fall than to live a century not perceiving this.”2 The jhānas are impermanent, just like all the other things of saṃsāra. Directly experiencing this is insight into impermanence, one of the three “marks of existence,” which constitute the primary areas of exploration that lead to liberating insight.
The third reflection is insight: Did you get any insights? What were they? Insights are understood experiences. Some insights are personal; the deepest ones are about the impermanent, ultimately unsatisfying, empty nature of the universe. If you gained any insight, it is very helpful to keep bringing it to mind. Insights really only have a transformative capacity if you can keep them fresh in your memory. Remembering them, if you gained any, at the end of a sitting is the way to begin to keep them fresh. Otherwise they seem to slink back there with your long-forgotten high school foreign language and don’t resurface until you have another experience that reminds you, “Oh, yes, I knew that—but I forgot.”
The meditation practice you do has effects beyond just you personally. Recognizing this is quite helpful and a good way to remember it is to dedicate the merit from this sitting for the liberation of all beings. You can just think something like, “May the merit from this meditation period be for the liberation of all beings everywhere.” This helps to counteract any selfishness (“What a great meditator I am!”) and puts you in touch with the fact that we all are interrelated and in this together.
Unrelenting mindfulness is an extremely important practice to undertake while learning the jhānas. Therefore, just before you get up from your seat, resolve to be mindful as you arise and go about your activities. Continuous mindfulness is very difficult—you need all the help you can get. So make it a habit to remind yourself to be mindful as the last thing at the end of every period of formal meditation.
Access Concentration Methods
Mindfulness of Breathing
You want to sit upright, especially if you are doing mindfulness of breathing. The upright posture helps keep you awake, and it also makes the breathing happen more easily, and therefore it is easier to be mindful of it. After you have settled in, put your attention on the physical sensations associated with your breathing. Pay attention to your breath at your nostrils if you can. Paying attention at the nostrils is more difficult than at the belly or the chest—you have to concentrate more because it’s a more subtle object. If you can successfully concentrate on the breath at the nostrils, you have more concentration than if you successfully concentrate on the breath at the belly. Since you need a strong level of concentration to enter the jhāna, it’s helpful to work with the more subtle object of the breath at the nostrils.
If you have been paying attention to the rise and fall of the belly or the chest for many years, you may find it very difficult to change to paying attention at the nostrils. Just try it and see what it’s like—see if you can make the switch. If indeed you can make the switch, it’s actually going to be very useful because when you put your attention at the nostrils, you’re signaling yourself, “concentrate”; when you put your breath at the belly or chest, you’re signaling yourself, “do insight practice,” and that can be quite useful. If you find that trying to make the switch is too problematic, go back to whatever you’re used to, but be patient before doing so. It is probably going to take working with the breath at the nostrils on a silent retreat at least for a full day—or more—to learn what it’s like and successfully make the switch.
There are some aids that you can use that can be very helpful when you are trying to get settled. They won’t take you all the way to access concentration, but when you first sit down to meditate, you might find that your mind is all over the place. To help you overcome these initial distractions, you can try one of these aids.
These are the possible aids: counting the gaps between the out- and the in-breaths up to eight; a visualization, like an ocean wave; a word or pair of words, like “bud-dho” or “peace” and “love”; noticing the details—beginning, middle, end, gap, beginning, middle, end, gap—and noticing the relative lengths of each in- and out-breath. They can help get you to the point where you’re not becoming distracted. But this is not yet access concentration. Let go of the aid—stop the counting, stop the visualization, stop the word, stop really looking at the parts of the breath, stop working to notice the lengths of the breaths—and just be with the breath. When you do, it’s going to feel like you have regressed because you’ll likely start becoming distracted again. It’s OK; just keep relaxing and coming back to the breath, and eventually you’ll settle in again, knowing each and every in-breath and out-breath. When you are knowing every in-breath and out-breath, and you’re not getting distracted and you’re not using an aid, that’s access concentration.
In summary, sit in a comfortable, upright posture that you can maintain for the length of the sitting. Put your attention on the breathing by noticing the tactile sensations associated with it. Pay attention at the nostrils if possible, or the belly or the chest. You can use one of the aids. When you get distracted, which is no big deal, label the distraction and then intentionally relax. Bring your attention back to the tactile sensations of breathing. Repeat until you feel settled. If you’re still using an aid, drop the aid; repeat until you feel settled without the aid; then you’re at access concentration. Then stay at access concentration for 5, 10, 15 minutes, if you want to enter the jhānas.
Mantra
Although the word mantra is almost never mentioned in vipassanā or Theravadan Buddhism, mantras are a highly effective way of getting deeply concentrated. In fact, that is exactly why mantra meditation was developed. It is far beyond the scope of this book to discuss how to do mantra meditation, but if you already know a form of mantra meditation, you can use it to generate access concentration. A shorter mantra is usually better than a lengthy one for generating concentration. As with all access methods, after having done your preliminaries as described in “Helpful Things to Do at the Beginning and End of Each Meditation Period,” begin saying your mantra silently. Eventually instead of it feeling like you are doing the mantra, it will feel as though the mantra is doing you. Now you are likely to have arrived at access concentration—provided of course that you are not becoming distracted. Stay with the mantra doing you for five to ten minutes; then drop the mantra, and switch your attention to a pleasant sensation. As usual, stay focused on the pleasantness of that pleasant sensation, enjoy it, and let the jhāna come and find you.