MEDITATION: THE SCIENCE AND ART OF LIVING
Awakening isn't some transient experience of unity and temporary dissolution of ego. It's the attainment of genuine wisdom; an enlightened understanding that comes from a profound realization and awakening to ultimate truth. This is a cognitive event that dispels ignorance through direct experience. Direct knowledge of the true nature of reality and the permanent liberation from suffering describes the only genuinely satisfactory goal of the spiritual path. A mind with this type of Insight experiences life, and death, as a great adventure, with the clear purpose of manifesting love and compassion toward all beings.
Meditation is the art of fully conscious living. What we make of our life—the sum total of thoughts, emotions, words, and actions that fill the brief interval between birth and death—is our one great creative masterpiece. The beauty and significance of a life well lived consists not in the works we leave behind, or in what history has to say about us. It comes from the quality of conscious experience that infuses our every waking moment, and from the impact we have on others.
Śamatha has five characteristics: effortlessly stable attention (samādhi), powerful mindfulness (sati), joy, tranquility, and equanimity.
Vipassanā refers specifically to Insight into the true nature of reality that radically transforms our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world.
For both śamatha and vipassanā, you need stable attention (samadhi) and mindfulness (sati). Unfortunately, many meditation traditions split samadhi and sati, linking concentration practice exclusively to śamatha, and mindfulness practice exclusively to vipassanā. This creates all sorts of problems and misunderstandings, such as emphasizing mindfulness at the expense of stable attention, or vice versa. Stable, hyper-focused attention without mindfulness leads only to a state of blissful dullness: a complete dead end. But, just as stable attention without mindfulness is a dead end, the opposite is also true. You simply cannot develop mindfulness without stable attention.
An Overview of the Ten Stages
To make progress, you should correctly determine your current Stage, work diligently with the techniques you're given, and move on only when you have achieved mastery. Mastery of one Stage is a requirement for the mastery of the next, and none can be skipped.
The Novice—Stages One through Three
STAGE ONE: ESTABLISHING A PRACTICE
This Stage is about developing a consistent and diligent meditation practice. Being consistent means setting a clear daily schedule for when you're going to meditate, and sticking to it except when there are circumstances beyond your control. Diligence means engaging whole-heartedly in the practice rather than spending your time on the cushion planning or daydreaming.
Goals: Develop a regular meditation practice.
Obstacles: Resistance, procrastination, fatigue, impatience, boredom, lack of motivation.
Skills: Creating practice routines, setting specific practice goals, generating strong motivation, cultivating discipline and diligence.
Mastery: Never missing a daily practice session.
STAGE TWO: INTERRUPTED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING MIND-WANDERING
Stage Two involves the simple practice of keeping your attention on the breath. This is easier said than done. You will discover that attention is easily captured by a distraction, making you forget that you're supposed to be paying attention to the breath. Forgetting quickly leads to mind-wandering, which can last a few seconds, several minutes, or the entire meditation session. This sequence is so important it's worth committing to memory—the untrained mind produces distractions that lead to forgetting, which results in mind-wandering. In Stage Two, you only work with the last event—mind-wandering.
Goals: Shorten the periods of mind-wandering and extend the periods of sustained attention to the meditation object.
Obstacles: Mind-wandering, monkey-mind, and impatience.
Skills: Reinforcing spontaneous introspective awareness and learning to sustain attention on the meditation object. Spontaneous introspective awareness is the “aha” moment when you suddenly realize there's a disconnect between what you wanted to do (watch the breath) and what you're actually doing (thinking about something else). Appreciating this moment causes it to happen faster and faster, so the periods of mind-wandering get shorter and shorter.
Mastery: You can sustain attention on the meditation object for minutes, while most periods of mind-wandering last only a few seconds.
STAGE THREE: EXTENDED ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING FORGETTING
Stages Two and Three are similar, but mind-wandering gets shorter and shorter until it stops altogether. The biggest challenge during this Stage is forgetting, but sleepiness often becomes a problem as well.
Goals: Overcome forgetting and falling asleep.
Obstacles: Distractions, forgetting, mind-wandering, and sleepiness.
Skills: Use the techniques of following the breath and connecting to extend the periods of uninterrupted attention, and become familiar with how forgetting happens. Cultivate introspective awareness through the practices of labeling and checking in. These techniques allow you to catch distractions before they lead to forgetting.
Mastery: Rarely forgetting the breath or falling asleep.
MILESTONE ONE: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION TO THE MEDITATION OBJECT
The first Milestone is continuous attention to the meditation object, which you achieve at the end of Stage Three. Before this, you're a beginner—a person who meditates, rather than a skilled meditator. When you reach this Milestone, you're no longer a novice, prone to forgetting, mind-wandering, or dozing off. By mastering Stages One through Three, you have acquired the basic, first level skills on the way to stable attention. You can now do something that no ordinary, untrained person can.
The Skilled Meditator—Stages Four through Six
STAGE FOUR: CONTINUOUS ATTENTION AND OVERCOMING GROSS DISTRACTION AND STRONG DULLNESS
You can stay focused on the breath more or less continuously, but attention still shifts rapidly back and forth between the breath and various distractions. Whenever a distraction becomes the primary focus of your attention, it pushes the meditation object into the background. This is called gross distraction. But when the mind grows calm, there tends to be another problem, strong dullness. To deal with both of these challenges, you develop continuous introspective awareness to alert you to their presence.
Goal: Overcome gross distraction and strong dullness.
Obstacles: Distractions, pain and discomfort, intellectual insights, emotionally charged visions and memories.
Skills: Developing continuous introspective awareness allows you to make corrections before subtle distractions become gross distractions, and before subtle dullness becomes strong dullness. Learning to work with pain. Purifying the mind of past trauma and unwholesome conditioning.
Mastery: Gross distractions no longer push the breath into the background, and breath sensations don't fade or become distorted due to strong dullness.
STAGE FIVE: OVERCOMING SUBTLE DULLNESS AND INCREASING MINDFULNESS
You have overcome gross distractions and strong dullness, but there is a tendency to slip into stable subtle dullness. This makes the breath sensations less vivid and causes peripheral awareness to fade. Unrecognized, subtle dullness can lead you to overestimate your abilities and move on to the next Stage prematurely, which leads to concentration with dullness. You will experience only a shallow facsimile of the later Stages, and your practice will come to a dead end. To overcome subtle dullness, you must sharpen your faculties of attention and awareness.
Goal: To overcome subtle dullness and increase the power of mindfulness.
Obstacles: Subtle dullness is difficult to recognize, creates an illusion of stable attention, and is seductively pleasant.
Skills: Cultivating even stronger and more continuous introspective awareness to detect and correct for subtle dullness. Learning a new body scanning technique to help you increase the power of your mindfulness.
Mastery: You can sustain or even increase the power of your mindfulness during each meditation session.
STAGE SIX: SUBDUING SUBTLE DISTRACTION
Attention is fairly stable but still alternates between the meditation object and subtle distractions in the background. You're now ready to bring your faculty of attention to a whole new level where subtle distractions fall away completely. You will achieve exclusive attention to the meditation object, also called single-pointed attention.
Goal: To subdue subtle distractions and develop metacognitive introspective awareness.
Obstacles: The tendency for attention to alternate to the continuous stream of distracting thoughts and other mental objects in peripheral awareness.
Skills: Defining your scope of attention more precisely than before, and ignoring everything outside that scope until subtle distractions fade away. Developing a much more refined and selective awareness of the mind itself, called metacognitive introspective awareness. You will also use a method called “experiencing the whole body with the breath” to further subdue potential distractions.
Mastery: Subtle distractions have almost entirely disappeared, and you have unwavering exclusive attention together with vivid mindfulness.
MILESTONE TWO: SUSTAINED EXCLUSIVE FOCUS OF ATTENTION
With mastery of Stages Four through Six, your attention no longer alternates back and forth from the breath to distractions in the background. You can focus on the meditation object to the exclusion of everything else, and your scope of attention is also stable. Dullness has completely disappeared, and mindfulness takes the form of a powerful metacognitive introspective awareness. That is, you're now aware of your state of mind in every moment, even as you focus on the breath. You have accomplished the two major objectives of meditative training: stable attention and powerful mindfulness. With these abilities you're now a skilled meditator, and have achieved the second Milestone.
The Transition—Stage Seven
STAGE SEVEN: EXCLUSIVE ATTENTION AND UNIFYING THE MIND
You can now investigate any object with however broad or narrow a focus you choose. But you have to stay vigilant and make a continuous effort to keep subtle distractions and subtle dullness at bay.
Goal: Effortlessly sustained exclusive attention and powerful mindfulness.
Obstacles: Distractions and dullness will return if you stop exerting effort. You must keep sustaining effort until exclusive attention and mindfulness become automatic, then effort will no longer be necessary. Boredom, restlessness, and doubt tend to arise during this time. Also, bizarre sensations and involuntary body movements can distract you from your practice. Knowing when to drop all effort is the next obstacle. But making effort has become a habit, so it's hard to stop.
Methods: Practicing patiently and diligently will bring you to the threshold of effortlessness. It will get you past all the boredom and doubt, as well as the bizarre sensations and movements. Purposely relaxing your effort from time to time will let you know when effort and vigilance are no longer necessary. Then you can work on letting go of the need to be in control. Various Insight and jhāna practices add variety at this Stage.
Mastery: You can drop all effort, and the mind still maintains an unprecedented degree of stability and clarity.
MILESTONE THREE: EFFORTLESS STABILITY OF ATTENTION
The third Milestone is marked by effortlessly sustained exclusive attention together with powerful mindfulness. This state is called mental pliancy, and occurs because of the complete pacification of the discriminating mind, meaning mental chatter and discursive analysis have stopped. Different parts of the mind are no longer so resistant or preoccupied with other things, and diverse mental processes begin to coalesce around a single purpose. This unification of mind means that, rather than struggling against itself, the mind functions more as a coherent, harmonious whole. You have completed the transition from being a skilled meditator to an adept meditator.
The Adept Meditator—Stages Eight through Ten
STAGE EIGHT: MENTAL PLIANCY AND PACIFYING THE SENSES
With mental pliancy, you can effortlessly sustain exclusive attention and mindfulness, but physical pain and discomfort still limit how long you can sit. The bizarre sensations and involuntary movements that began in Stage Seven not only continue, but may intensify. With continuing unification of mind and complete pacification of the senses, physical pliancy arises, and these problems disappear. Pacifying the senses doesn't imply going into some trance. It just means that the five physical senses, as well as the mind sense, temporarily grow quiet while you meditate.
Goal: Complete pacification of the senses and the full arising of meditative joy.
Obstacles: The primary challenge is not to be distracted or distressed by the variety of extraordinary experiences during this Stage: unusual, and often unpleasant, sensations, involuntary movements, feelings of strong energy currents in the body, and intense joy. Simply let them be.
Method: Practicing effortless attention and introspective awareness will naturally lead to continued unification, pacification of the senses, and the arising of meditative joy. Jhāna and other Insight practices are very productive as part of this process.
Mastery: When the eyes perceive only an inner light, the ears perceive only an inner sound, the body is suffused with a sense of pleasure and comfort, and your mental state is one of intense joy. With this mental and physical pliancy, you can sit for hours without dullness, distraction, or physical discomfort.
STAGE NINE: MENTAL AND PHYSICAL PLIANCY AND CALMING THE INTENSITY OF MEDITATIVE JOY
With mental and physical pliancy comes meditative joy, a unique state of mind that brings great happiness and physical pleasure.
Goal: The maturation of meditative joy, producing tranquility and equanimity.
Obstacles: The intensity of meditative joy can perturb the mind, becoming a distraction and disrupting your practice.
Method: Becoming familiar with meditative joy through continued practice until the excitement fades, replaced by tranquility and equanimity.
Mastery: Consistently evoking mental and physical pliancy, accompanied by profound tranquility and equanimity.
STAGE TEN: TRANQUILITY AND EQUANIMITY
You enter Stage Ten with all the qualities of samatha: effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity. At first these qualities immediately fade after the meditation has ended. But as you continue to practice, they persist longer and longer between meditation sessions. Eventually they become the normal condition of the mind. Because the characteristics of samatha never disappear entirely, whenever you sit on the cushion, you quickly regain a fully developed meditative state. You have mastered Stage Ten when the qualities of samatha persist for many hours after you rise from the cushion. Once Stage Ten is mastered, the mind is described as unsurpassable.
MILESTONE FOUR: PERSISTENCE OF THE MENTAL QUALITIES OF AN ADEPT
When you have mastered Stage Ten, the many positive mental qualities you experience during meditation are strongly present even between meditation sessions, so your daily life is imbued with effortlessly stable attention, mindfulness, joy, tranquility, and equanimity. This is the fourth and final Milestone and marks the culmination of an adept meditator's training.
CULTIVATING THE RIGHT ATTITUDE AND SETTING CLEAR INTENTIONS
All you're really “doing” in meditation is forming and holding specific conscious intentions—nothing more. Here's a brief recap of the Ten Stages, presented in a completely different way that puts the emphasis entirely on how intention works in each Stage. Refer to the earlier outline when you need to orient yourself within the context of the Stages as a whole, but look at the outline below whenever working through the individual Stages begins to feel like a struggle.
STAGE ONE: Put all your effort into forming and holding a conscious intention to sit down and meditate for a set period every day, and to practice diligently for the duration of the sit. When your intentions are clear and strong, the appropriate actions naturally follow, and you'll find yourself regularly sitting down to meditate. If this doesn't happen, instead of chastising yourself and trying to force yourself to practice, work on strengthening your motivation and intentions.
STAGE TWO: Willpower can't prevent the mind from forgetting the breath. Nor can you force yourself to become aware that the mind is wandering. Instead, just hold the intention to appreciate the “aha” moment that recognizes mind-wandering, while gently but firmly redirecting attention back to the breath. Then, intend to engage with the breath as fully as possible without losing peripheral awareness. In time, the simple actions flowing from these three intentions will become mental habits. Periods of mind-wandering will become shorter, periods of attention to the breath will grow longer, and you'll have achieved your goal.
STAGE THREE: Set your intention to invoke introspective attention frequently, before you've forgotten the breath or fallen asleep, and make corrections as soon as you notice distractions or dullness. Also, intend to sustain peripheral awareness while engaging with the breath as fully as possible. These three intentions and the actions they produce are simply elaborations of those from Stage Two. Once they become habits, you'll rarely forget the breath.
STAGES FOUR THROUGH SIX: Set and hold the intention to be vigilant so that introspective awareness becomes continuous, and notice and immediately correct for dullness and distraction. These intentions will mature into the highly developed skills of stable attention and mindfulness. You overcome every type of dullness and distraction, achieving both exclusive, single-pointed attention and metacognitive introspective awareness.
STAGE SEVEN: Everything becomes even simpler. With the conscious intention to continuously guard against dullness and distraction, the mind becomes completely accustomed to effortlessly sustaining attention and mindfulness.
STAGES EIGHT THROUGH TEN: Your intention is simply to keep practicing, using skills that are now completely effortless. In Stage Eight, effortlessly sustained exclusive attention produces mental and physical pliancy, pleasure, and joy. In Stage Nine, simply abiding in the state of meditative joy causes profound tranquility and equanimity to arise. In Stage Ten, just by continuing to practice regularly, the profound joy and happiness, tranquility, and equanimity you experience in meditation persists between meditation sessions, infusing your daily life as well.
FIRST INTERLUDE: Conscious Experience and the Objectives of Meditation
Consciousness consists of whatever we're experiencing in the moment.
Conscious experience takes two different forms, attention and peripheral awareness. Whenever we focus our attention on something, it dominates our conscious experience. At the same time, however, we can be more generally aware of things in the background.
It's important to realize attention and peripheral awareness are two different ways of “knowing” the world. Each has its virtues as well as its shortcomings. Attention singles out some small part of the content of the field of conscious awareness from the rest in order to analyze and interpret it. On the other hand, peripheral awareness is more holistic, open, and inclusive, and provides the overall context for conscious experience. It has more to do with the relationships of objects to one another and to the whole. In this book, whenever the term awareness is used, it refers to peripheral awareness. It never means attention. The distinction between the two is key. The failure to recognize this distinction creates considerable confusion. You work with attention and peripheral awareness to cultivate stable attention and mindfulness—the two main objectives of meditation.
JUMP STARTING YOUR PRACTICE
Posture
Whether you sit in a chair or on a cushion on the floor, make yourself as comfortable as possible with your back straight.
Get your back, neck, and head in alignment, front-to-back and side-to-side.
I recommend closed eyes to start with, but you can keep them open if you prefer.
Relax
While maintaining a straight back, release any tension in the body.
Relax your mind. Take some moments to appreciate the fact that you're gifting yourself with time away from all the usual tasks and worries of your life.
Intention and Breath
Resolve to practice diligently for the entire meditation session no matter how it goes.
Breathe through your nose as naturally as possible without trying to control your breath.
Bring your attention to the sensations associated with the breath in and around your nostrils or upper lip. Another option is to center your attention on the sensations associated with breathing in the abdomen. See which of these is the easiest for you to focus on and then stick with that one, at least for the sit at hand. This is your meditation object.
Allow your attention to stay centered on your meditation object while your peripheral awareness remains relaxed and open to anything that arises (e.g. sounds in the environment, physical sensations in the body, thoughts in the background).
Try to keep your attention centered on the meditation object. Inevitably, your mind will get distracted and drift away. As soon as you recognize this has happened, take a moment to appreciate the fact that you have remembered your intention to meditate, and give your mind an imaginary “pat on the back.” The tendency is to judge yourself and feel disappointed for having lost your focus, but doing so is counterproductive. Mind wandering is natural, so it's not important that you lost your focus. Remembering and returning your focus to the meditation object is what's important. Therefore, positively reinforce such behavior by doing your best to reward the mind for remembering.
Now gently re-center your attention on the meditation object.
Repeat step 3 until the meditation session is over, and remember, the only bad meditation session is the one you didn't do!
THE FIRST OBJECTIVE OF MEDITATION: STABLE ATTENTION
Stable attention is the ability to intentionally direct and sustain the focus of attention, as well as to control the scope of attention. Intentionally directing and sustaining attention simply means that we learn to choose which object we're going to attend to, and keep our attention continuously fixed on it. Controlling the scope of attention means training the mind to adjust how wide or narrow our focus is, and being more selective and intentional about what is included and excluded.
Intentionally directed and sustained attention means spontaneous movements of attention stop.
Repeating simple tasks with a clear intention can reprogram unconscious mental processes. This can completely transform who you are as a person.
THE SECOND OBJECTIVE OF MEDITATION: MINDFULNESS
Mindfulness allows us to recognize options, choose responses, and take control of our lives. It gives us the power to become the person we want to be. It also leads to Insight, Wisdom, and Awakening.
Mindfulness is the optimal interaction between attention and peripheral awareness. Attention analyzes our experience, and peripheral awareness provides the context. When one or the other doesn't do its job, or when there isn't enough interaction between the two, then we respond to situations less effectively. We may overreact, make poor decisions, or misinterpret what's going on.
COMPARISON OF PERIPHERAL AWARENESS AND ATTENTION
| Peripheral Awareness | Attention |
|---|---|
| Holistic, relational, contextual. | Isolates and analyzes. |
| Filters all incoming information. | Selects information from awareness. |
| Acts as a watchful alert system. | Hones in on objects. |
| Less processing, quicker response. | More processing, slower response. |
| Less personal and more objective. | More “self” centered. |
| Can be Introspective and Extrospective. | Can be Introspective or Extrospective. |
Attention and awareness draw from the same limited capacity for consciousness. The goal is to increase the total power of consciousness available for both. The result is peripheral awareness that is clearer, and attention that gets used more appropriately: purposefully, in the present moment, and without becoming bogged down in judgment and projection.
STAGE ONE: Establishing A Practice
Preparation for Meditation
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| Motivation | Review your purpose for meditation. Be honest! Don't judge your reasons. Be aware and accept them. Example: I want more peace of mind. |
| Goals | Decide what you hope to work on in this session. Set a reasonable goal for where you are in the Stages. Keep it simple. Keep it small. Example: not to get annoyed when my mind wanders. |
| Expectations | Bring to mind the dangers of expectations and be gentle with yourself. Find enjoyment in every meditation, no matter what happens. There is no such thing as a “bad” meditation. |
| Diligence | Resolve to practice diligently for the entire session. Recall that the best way to overcome resistance is by simply continuing to practice, without judging yourself. |
| Distractions | Perform a quick inventory of things in your life that might come up to distract you. Acknowledge these thoughts and emotions and resolve to set them aside if they do arise. You may not be wholly successful, but at least you have planted a seed: the intention not to let them dominate your mind. |
| Posture | Review your posture and get comfortable. Attend to your supports, your head, neck, back, shoulders, lips, eyes, and breath. Relax and enjoy yourself. All the activity of meditation is in the mind, so the proper state for the body is like a lump of soft clay—solid and stable, but completely pliant. This will keep physical distractions to a minimum. |
A Gradual Four-Step Transition to the Meditation Object
STEP ONE: Focus on the present.
STEP TWO: Focus on bodily sensations.
STEP THREE: Focus on bodily sensations related to the breath.
STEP FOUR: Focus on sensations of the breath at the nose.
Beginners often find the large movements of the abdomen easier to follow at first. But when the breath becomes very shallow, the coarser sensitivity at the abdomen can make it harder to detect the breath sensations. I recommend the nose because the nerve endings there are much more sensitive. Choose whatever area around the nostrils works best for you.
Counting your breaths at the start of a sit really helps stabilize your attention. If you're a novice, you should use this method all the time. Your goal will be to follow the sensations continuously for ten consecutive breaths. When your attention slips or you lose track of the count, which will happen frequently at first, just start over again at one. Try this: consider the beginning of the out-breath as the start of the cycle. That way, the pause occurs in the middle of your cycle, and is less likely to trip you up. This may seem like a small detail, but it often makes a difference. Another approach is to silently say the number during the pause at the end of the out-breath. This “fills the gap” and helps keep the mind on task. Once you've succeeded in counting to five or ten, keep observing the breath sensations, but stop counting. Counting quickly becomes automatic, and you can still forget the breath and have your mind wander while continuing to count. Therefore, counting beyond ten breaths has little value.
ESTABLISHING A PRACTICE
Nothing works as quickly or effectively as diligence. The simple act of consistently sitting down and placing your attention on the meditation object, day after day, is the essential first step from which everything else in the Ten Stages flows. Then, once seated, you must train yourself, gently and without self-judgment, to actually meditate rather than engage in some more entertaining mental activity. Notice that I said “train yourself,” not “force” or “discipline yourself.”
The practical steps: choose a suitable time and place, find the posture that's best for you, cultivate the right attitude, and generate strong motivation.
Begin with shorter meditations. I suggest 15 or 20 minutes each day for the first week or two. Then, increase the length of your sessions in five-minute increments weekly or every few days until you reach 45 minutes. Use a meditation timer rather than looking at a clock, and train yourself not to look at the timer. Just listen for the bell.
A regular place for meditation is as important as a regular time. It's best to have a place just for meditating.
Remain as still as you can during sitting meditation, despite any discomfort. This can be challenging for a beginner, but always wait as long as you can before moving. Then, don't stop meditating when you change position, but rather move slowly and deliberately with full attention to the sensations in your body as you shift.
You have mastered Stage One when you never miss a daily practice session except when absolutely unavoidable, and when you rarely if ever procrastinate on the cushion by thinking and planning or doing something besides meditating. This Stage is the most difficult to master, but it can be done in a few weeks.
SECOND INTERLUDE: The Hindrances and Problems
Familiarize yourself with the hindrances and their antidotes. Recognizing them both in meditation and daily life will pay off quite well.
The Five Hindrances
| Hindrance | Explanation | Opposing Meditation Factor |
|---|---|---|
| Worldly Desire | Pursuit of pleasures related to our material existence, and the desire to avoid their opposites: gain-loss; pleasure-pain; fame-obscurity; praise-blame | Unification of Mind: A unified and blissful mind has no reason to chase worldly desires. |
| Aversion | A negative mental state involving judgment, rejection, and denial. Includes: hatred, anger, resentment, dissatisfaction, criticism, impatience, self-accusation, and boredom | Pleasure/Happiness: There's little room for negativity in a mind filled with bliss. |
| Laziness and Lethargy | Laziness appears when the cost of an activity seems to outweigh the benefits. Lethargy manifests as lack of energy, procrastination, and low motivation. | Directed Attention: In meditation, “just do it” means directing attention to the meditation object to counter procrastination and loss of mental energy. |
| Agitation due to Remorse and Worry | Remorse for unwise, unwholesome, immoral or illegal activities. Worry about consequences for past actions, or about things you imagine might happen to you. Worry and remorse make it hard to focus mental resources on anything else. | Meditative joy: Joy overcomes worry because it produces confidence and optimism. Joy overcomes remorse because a joyful person regrets past harms and is eager to set things right. |
| Doubt | A biased, unconscious mental process focused on negative possible outcomes; the kind of uncertainty that makes us hesitate and keeps us from making the effort needed to validate something through our own experience. Self-doubt saps our will and undermines intentions. | Sustained Attention: This is achieved through consistent effort. Success leads to trust, and doubt disappears. |
Meditation does not repress Worldly Desire. It frees you from being ruled by desire.
The Seven Problems and Their Antidotes
| Problem | Antidote |
|---|---|
| Procrastination and resistance to practicing | Frequently recall the benefits of practice, constantly refresh and renew your motivation, and “just do it.” See Stage One. |
| Distractions, forgetting, and mind-wandering | Each part of the problem is addressed sequentially. In Stage Two, work with mind-wandering. In Stage Three, work on overcoming forgetting. In Stages Four through Six, work on overcoming all distractions. |
| Impatience | Rather than identifying with impatience, learn to observe it objectively. Cultivate joy, peace, contentment, and equanimity. See Stage Two. |
| Monkey-mind | An agitated, overly energized mind is in constant motion and can't stay focused on anything. The antidote is to get grounded in the body. See Stage Two. |
| Self-doubt | Do everything you can to keep your motivation strong. Don't compare yourself to others. Make meditation a habit. |
| Dullness, drowsiness, and sleepiness | Decreased mental energy leads to dullness, then drowsiness and sleep. Counter strong dullness by energizing the mind using techniques described in Stages Three and Four. In Stage Five, work on overcoming subtle dullness. |
| Physical discomfort | Find the most comfortable position possible. See Stage One. Use physical discomfort as part of the practice to develop the Insight that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. See Stages Three and Four. |
STAGE TWO: Interrupted Attention and Overcoming Mind-Wandering
The goal for Stage Two is to shorten the periods of mind-wandering and extend the periods of sustained attention to the meditation object. Willpower can't prevent the mind from forgetting the breath. Nor can you force yourself to become aware that the mind is wandering. Instead, just hold the intention to appreciate the “aha” moment that recognizes mind-wandering, while gently but firmly redirecting attention back to the breath. Then, intend to engage with the breath as fully as possible without losing peripheral awareness. In time, the simple actions flowing from these three intentions will become mental habits. Periods of mind-wandering will become shorter, periods of attention to the breath will grow longer, and you'll have achieved your goal.
The combined problems of forgetting and mind-wandering will dominate your meditation sessions in Stage Two. Forgetting means we forget the meditation object, as well as our intention to focus on the breath. Mind-wandering is what happens after we've forgotten what we were doing: the mind will wander from thought to thought, often for a long time, before we “wake up” to what is happening. A critical moment occurs during mind-wandering when you suddenly realize you're no longer observing the breath: you abruptly “wake up” to the fact that you weren't doing what you had intended. The way to overcome mind-wandering is by training this unconscious process to make the discovery and bring it into consciousness sooner and more often. Yet, how do you train something that happens unconsciously? Simply take a moment to enjoy and appreciate “waking up” from mind-wandering. Savor the sense of being more fully conscious and present. Cherish your epiphany and encourage yourself to have more of them.
Sustaining Attention on the Meditation Object
Once you've redirected attention, you want to increase the periods of sustained attention to the meditation object. A technique that helps is called following the breath. Following the breath engages the mind by giving it a challenge, and can be treated like a game. Find the beginnings and endings of each part of the breath cycle, and the pauses in between. Then try to observe all these points with equal clarity.
The instructions for this Stage are simple. You sit down, finish the Preparation for Practice, make the gradual transition to the sensations of the breath at the tip of the nose, and count ten breaths. Hold the intention to follow and sustain attention on the breath sensations at the nose. Very soon, however, you'll find yourself forgetting the breath and mind-wandering, sometimes for seconds and sometimes for many minutes. Eventually, you'll abruptly “wake up” to the fact that, even though you intended to watch the breath, you've been thinking about something else. Feel happy and pleased about this “aha!” moment of introspective awareness. Then, gently direct attention back to the breath. To engage more fully with the meditation object, practice following the breath. As long as you appreciate the moment of “waking up” to mind-wandering, diligently return attention to the object, and fully engage with it, you're on the right track. If you sit through the entire session without getting discouraged and if you keep returning to the breath when your mind wanders, consider your meditation a total success.
The best way to avoid or resolve impatience is to enjoy your practice. While this isn't always easy, a good start is to consistently focus on the positive rather than the negative aspects of your meditation. Notice when the body is relaxed and comfortable, or when the mind is focused and alert. Seek out and acknowledge these rewarding aspects, no matter how unimportant they seem. Savor a fleeting sensation of physical pleasure, the satisfaction of following a whole breath-cycle, or the sense of accomplishment that comes with just sitting down and making the effort to meditate. As these pleasurable feelings grow stronger, relish and encourage them so they grow stronger still.
Here's a formula you should commit to memory to make joy and relaxation a natural part of your practice: relax and look for the joy; observe; let it come, let it be, and let it go. Recite it every time you sit, especially when you catch yourself thinking meditation is difficult.
STAGE THREE: Extended Continuity of Attention and Overcoming Forgetting
The goal for Stage Three is to overcome forgetting and falling asleep. Set your intention to invoke introspective attention frequently, before you've forgotten the breath or fallen asleep, and make corrections as soon as you notice distractions or dullness. Also, intend to sustain peripheral awareness while engaging with the breath as fully as possible. These three intentions and the actions they produce are simply elaborations of those from Stage Two. Once they become habits, you'll rarely forget the breath.
You begin Stage Three with longer periods of sustained attention to the breath. The mind still wanders sometimes, but not for as long. Just keep practicing what you learned in Stage Two, and mind-wandering will eventually stop completely. The main goal for this Stage is to overcome forgetting. To do this, you'll use the techniques of following the breath and connecting to actively engage with the meditation object and extend periods of uninterrupted attention; and you'll cultivate introspective awareness through the practices of labeling and checking in. These techniques allow you to catch distractions before they lead to forgetting. You will also learn to deal with the pain and drowsiness that often arise at this Stage. You have mastered Stage Three when you no longer forget the breath. This is also the first Milestone Achievement: continuous attention to the meditation object.
There are two distinct types of distractions—subtle and gross. The difference between the two is the amount of time attention is on the distraction versus the breath. When less time is spent on the distraction, and the meditation object remains the primary focus of attention, it's called a subtle distraction. These subtle distractions, along with peripheral awareness, are what make up the “background” of conscious experience. However, if one of these distractions takes center stage, occupying your attention for most of the time, and causing the meditation object to slip into the background, it becomes a gross distraction.
To strengthen introspective awareness, use labeling to practice identifying the distraction in the very moment you realize you're no longer on the breath. For example, if you catch yourself thinking about your next meal or something that happened yesterday, give the distraction a neutral label such as “thinking,” “planning,” or “remembering.” Simple, neutral labels are less likely to cause further distractions by getting you caught up in the labeling. If there was a series of thoughts, only label the most recent one. Also, always avoid analyzing distractions, which only creates more distraction. Once you've labeled the distraction, gently direct your attention back to the breath.
Instead of waiting for introspective awareness to arise spontaneously, check in periodically using introspective attention. Yes, checking in disrupts your focus on the breath, but when you pause to reflect on everything happening in your mind, attention needs to shift. At this Stage, this is not only completely OK, it's actually the key to cultivating introspective awareness. Always check-in very gently and briefly, turning your attention inward to evaluate how much scattering was just occurring. Is gross distraction present? If so, you know you were about to forget the breath. When you recognize a gross distraction before it completely captures your attention, return your attention to the breath and sharpen up your focus. That will keep you from forgetting.
You have mastered Stage Three when forgetting and mind-wandering no longer occur, and the breath stays continually in conscious awareness. This is a whole new pattern of behavior for your mind. The mind still roams, but it's “tethered” to the meditation object, never getting too far away; the unconscious mental processes that sustain attention never entirely let go of the meditation object. Because attention no longer shifts automatically to objects of desire and aversion, you can purposely hold your attention on an emotionally neutral object like the breath for extended periods of time. The ability to continuously sustain attention on the meditation object is remarkable, so take satisfaction in your accomplishment.
THIRD INTERLUDE: How Mindfulness Works
At its most basic level, mindfulness is simply about moderating behavior. The magic of mindfulness—its power to transform you as a person—only starts working when we move beyond the first level. At the second level, by maintaining more powerful mindfulness for longer periods in daily life, we become less reactive and more intentionally present. The third level entails reprogramming the deep conditioning that has shaped our personality, and only occurs in meditation. The fourth level is the radical reconditioning of the innate tendencies that create all our suffering, and only occurs through Insight experience.
Staying mindful means you're calmer, don't react so quickly, or get distracted by your own emotions. With mindfulness you recognize more options, make wiser choices, and take control of your behavior.
When attention isn't so totally captured by the intensity of the moment that awareness fades, we're able to observe ourselves more closely and consistently. Attention and awareness provide the unconscious mind with new, real-time information that is directly relevant to what's happening right now. Unconscious processes are informed that the reactions they're producing aren't appropriate in the current situation, harming more than helping. With this new information, reprogramming can happen at the deepest levels of the unconscious. And the longer we can be mindful in a particular situation, the more new information becomes available, and the more mindfulness can work its magic.
Whenever some event triggers one of our “invisible programs,” we have the chance to apply mindfulness to the situation so our unconscious conditioning can get reprogrammed. Anytime we're truly mindful of our reactions and their consequences, it can alter the way we will react in the future. Every time we experience a similar situation, our emotional reactions will get weaker and be easier to let go of. We can respond mindfully to the actual situation rather than reacting mindlessly. As we grow less reactive, we are empowered to respond more objectively and conscientiously. Eventually, those skillful qualities become our new conditioning.
Mindfulness in meditation can accomplish more than the piecemeal process of confronting conditioning in daily life. Conditioning that emerges in meditation drives a wide range of reactive behaviors.
The most valuable effect of mindfulness is that it allows Insight experiences to sink in, radically reprogramming our intuitive view of reality, and of who and what we think we are.
If we believe we're separate selves who need certain external things to be happy, we'll spontaneously act out of that territorial feeling, causing harm to ourself and others. As paradoxical as it may seem, the craving to avoid suffering and pursue pleasure is the actual cause of suffering. But when we let go of our self-centeredness, we automatically act more objectively, for the good of everybody in each situation. Then, we will have discovered the true source of happiness, and the end of suffering. This is how mindfulness overcomes sorrow and grief, and brings release from all suffering.
STAGE FOUR: Continuous Attention and Overcoming Gross Distraction and Strong Dullness
The primary goal at this Stage is to overcome the scattering of attention caused by gross distraction and strong dullness. To accomplish this, you need to develop continuous introspective awareness, allowing you to detect these problems, correct them, and return your full attention to the meditation object. While you want to completely overcome the coarser forms of distraction and dullness, you will learn to tolerate and even make use of subtle distractions and subtle dullness. They will help you navigate another important challenge of this Stage: learning to identify and sustain a balance between an over-energized, easily distracted mind and a dull, lethargic mind.
By now, you have grown quite familiar with the “inner landscape” of the mind, and are accustomed to how it constantly shifts and changes. Physical sensations, thoughts, memories, and emotions continue to arise and pass away in your peripheral awareness. As attention alternates rapidly between the meditation object and these other stimuli, it makes them stand out from the background so they are more prominent than other objects in peripheral awareness. As long as the meditation object remains your primary focus, they are only subtle distractions. But often, one of these competing objects can become your primary focus. When this happens, the sensations of the breath seem to fade. They continue as an object of alternating attention, but are perceived much less clearly. This is gross distraction, the first major obstacle to overcome in this Stage.
Stilling the mind does not mean getting rid of thoughts and blocking out all distractions. It means reducing the constant movement of attention.
There are two steps to learning to overcome gross distractions. The first involves dealing with gross distraction that is already present. Simply continue the practice you learned in Stage Three to prevent forgetting: recognize when a gross distraction is present, let go of it, and re-engage with the breath. The second step is a refinement of the first that prevents gross distraction from occurring in the first place. Recognize when a subtle distraction has the potential to become a gross distraction before it happens. Then, tighten up your focus on the breath so the subtle distraction doesn't draw you away. Finally, engage with the breath more completely to keep it and all other distractions at bay. In both steps, you use introspective awareness to detect distractions. Then, you work with directed attention to make the breath your primary focus, and with sustained attention to keep it the primary focus of attention.
Continuous introspective awareness alerts you to gross distractions. Use the breath as an anchor while you mindfully “watch the mind while the mind watches the breath.”
As the mind grows calm and everyday distractions fall away, significant material from the unconscious starts to well up into consciousness. This is a very significant event in the progress of your practice. However, this powerful material doesn't always surface right away, but may instead be preceded by strong feelings of restlessness and impatience. They're like the tip of an iceberg, indicating that much more lies just below the surface. So, if you experience restlessness, don't suppress it. Accept it openly, inviting whatever lies below to come up.
In summary, when the mind is quieted through meditation, charged emotions, thoughts, and visions well up from the unconscious into consciousness. There, they become gross distractions. To overcome them, simply make them the object of your attention, acknowledging and accepting them until they fade away on their own. That's it! It's not important to consider why you're having these thoughts or where they come from. That kind of discursive analysis takes you away from the real work of meditation. In fact, there's no need to do anything at all. Whenever you judge instead of just observing, mindfulness is less effective. By simply allowing material from the unconscious to come up—by mindfully bearing witness and not reacting—you re-program the mind more deeply than you ever could through intellectual analysis. You're purifying your mind of all the afflictions you've accumulated throughout your entire life.
As you become more skilled at dealing with distractions, strong dullness will become your next major obstacle. Dullness occurs when we turn the mind inward, which reduces the constant flow of thoughts and sensations that usually keep the mind energized and alert. Therefore, the overall energy level of the mind drops. When noticing and correcting for progressive subtle dullness becomes automatic, you'll have completely overcome strong dullness.
Three Steps for Overcoming Strong Dullness
Apply a strong enough antidote to completely awaken the mind whenever strong dullness or progressive subtle dullness is present.
Use introspective awareness to recognize the return of dullness as soon as possible, before subtle dullness becomes strong dullness, so you can apply the appropriate antidote.
Repeat this process until the dullness doesn't return.
You have mastered Stage Four when you're free from both gross distractions and strong dullness. Physical sensations, thoughts, memories, and emotions still arise, but they no longer draw attention away. Dullness no longer leads to drowsiness, nor causes perception of the breath sensations to grow dim or take on hypnagogic distortions. By the end of Stage Four, you can direct and sustain your attention at will. This is a unique and powerful ability.
FOURTH INTERLUDE: The Moments of Consciousness Model
Our everyday conscious experience of the world—the thoughts and sensations that arise and pass away—appear to flow together seamlessly from one moment to the next. However, according to the Moments of Consciousness model, this is an illusion. If we observed closely enough, we would find that experience is actually divided into individual moments of consciousness. These conscious “mind moments” occur one at a time, in much the same way that a motion picture film is actually divided into separate frames. Because the frames pass so quickly and are so numerous, motion on the film seems fluid. Similarly, these discrete moments of consciousness are so brief and numerous that they seem to form one continuous and uninterrupted stream of consciousness.
According to this model, consciousness is a series of discrete events rather than continuous, because we can only be conscious of information coming from one sense organ at a time. Moments of seeing are distinct from moments of hearing, moments of smelling from moments of touch, and so on. Therefore, each is a separate mental event with its own unique content. Moments of visual experience can be interspersed with moments of auditory, tactile, mental, and other sensory experience, but no two can happen at the same time.
The Moments of Consciousness model posits that, within each of these moments, nothing changes. They are truly like freeze-frames. Even our experience of watching something move is the result of many separate moments of visual consciousness, one rapidly following the next. Therefore, all conscious experience, without exception, consists of individual, brief moments, each containing a single, static chunk of information. In that sense, we can say that each mind moment provides only a single “object” of consciousness. Because moments of consciousness coming from different sense organs contain such different information, consciousness is less like a film, in which every frame is similar to the last, and more like a string of differently colored beads.
In this model, the different types of moments of consciousness vary according to which of our senses provides the “object” in a given moment. In all, there are seven kinds of moments. The first five are obvious, since they correspond to the physical senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. The sixth category, maybe less obvious, is called the mind sense, meaning it includes mental objects like thoughts and emotions. Finally, there is a seventh type of consciousness, called binding consciousness, that integrates the information provided by the other senses.
However, if the contents of one moment are gone before the next arises, how do these distinct kinds of information ever get integrated with each other in conscious experience? How do we ever put it all together so we can understand what's actually happening? The answer is that the content of many separate moments, provided by the first six sense categories, get briefly stored in a kind of “working” memory, where they are combined and integrated with each other. Then, the “product” of this integration is projected into consciousness as yet another distinct type of mind moment, the combining or binding moment of consciousness.
Any moment of consciousness can be either a moment of attention, or a moment of peripheral awareness. Moments of awareness contain many objects; moments of attention contain only a few.
Moments of awareness provide minimally processed information about a lot of things at once. Attention isolates specific objects to be analyzed and interpreted in detail.
Non-perceiving mind moments are another important part of the Moments of Consciousness model. These are potential rather than actual moments of consciousness. No perception occurs because none of the sense organs provides them with any content. But nevertheless, they are real mental events, replacing perceiving moments of consciousness, and they are associated with a feeling of pleasure. Non-perceiving mind moments are interspersed among perceiving moments of consciousness.
Non-perceiving mind moments are also non-intending mind moments. The lack of intention results in more non-perceiving moments, so dullness grows stronger.
Mindfulness means just the right balance between moments of attention and moments of awareness. Increasing mindfulness means increasing the proportion of perceiving vs. non-perceiving mind moments.
STAGE FIVE: Overcoming Subtle Dullness and Increasing Mindfulness
At the start of Stage Five, attention is much more stable. You're free from gross distraction, but still experience subtle distraction. You've also overcome strong dullness and progressive subtle dullness, but remain in a state of stable subtle dullness. Your goals for this Stage are to completely overcome the tendency to slip more deeply into stable subtle dullness, and to heighten the power and clarity of consciousness. In other words, you want to develop more powerful mindfulness that includes vivid attention and strong peripheral awareness. To achieve this, you'll learn to recognize when subtle dullness starts to deepen. Then, you'll learn to correct it and restore your mind to its previous alertness. Finally, having recognized and corrected for subtle dullness, you'll increase the power of your mindfulness even more. You've mastered Stage Five when you've completely overcome stable subtle dullness and the intensity of mindfulness actually increases as your session progresses.
This new level of stable attention is precisely what makes us more vulnerable to slipping into a deeper state of sustained subtle dullness. That's because the mental agitation that stimulated the mind and helped keep us awake in the earlier Stages, has subsided. As subtle dullness deepens, it causes both peripheral awareness and subtle distractions to fade. If we don't recognize this as a sign of subtle dullness, it can easily be mistaken for the strong, exclusive focus of Stage Six. The pleasant feelings that accompany subtle dullness can also be misinterpreted as first signs of the meditative joy of advanced Stages. Without guidance, meditators often confuse a deeper state of subtle dullness with having achieved the more lofty states of later Stages.
We can sustain this type of subtle dullness for very long periods. It's often described in these kinds of terms: “My concentration was so deep, an hour seemed like only minutes.” Or, “I don't know where I went, but I was just gone, and felt so peaceful and happy.” When the pleasure of dullness is particularly strong and our peripheral awareness of thoughts and sensations fades completely, our meditation can even seem to fit the description of a meditative absorption (jhāna). We can quickly get attached to such experiences, prizing them as proof of our meditative skills. Yet, relative to the practice goals in this book, they are complete dead ends.
Subtle dullness has three characteristics. These occur together, though only one or two may be obvious at a time.
The vividness and clarity of the meditation object decline.
Both extrospective and introspective peripheral awareness fade.
There is a comfortable, relaxed, and pleasant feeling.
As subtle dullness deepens, the sensations of the breath are no longer as vivid, and your perception of the details isn't as sharp and clear as before.
When subtle dullness deepens, the field of conscious awareness shrinks, sounds and bodily sensations fade from awareness, and thoughts are fewer.
Dullness of any kind is always pleasant, except when you actively resist. You'll be aware of a sense of comfort and ease, rather than of dullness.
Pleasurable subtle dullness is a trap and a dead end. You must recognize and avoid that trap.
As a general rule, the more mindful you are in the moment, the more difficult it is to be either startled or surprised. Once you have been startled into a state of greater awareness, reflect on and examine the quality of your meditation just before you were startled. This will help you recognize the characteristic signs of subtle dullness.
The best way to detect subtle dullness is by making introspective awareness stronger. The key to doing that is intention.
Sharpen up your observation of the meditation object when you notice a decrease in the quality of awareness and attention. Use the techniques of following and connecting. Follow the sensations of the breath while intending to perceive the details as clearly and vividly as possible. It's especially important to connect changes in the breath with the degree of alertness or dullness of the mind. When you're more alert, does the breath tend to be deeper or shallower, longer or shorter, and how do the pauses change? What about when you're dull?
Another way to counter subtle dullness is by expanding the scope of your attention to include the sensations of the body. This works to energize the mind because we automatically use more conscious power to observe sensations in a larger area. You will even find that your scope of attention tends to spontaneously expand at this Stage. For instance, you might find yourself observing the sensations of the breath in both the chest and abdomen when you were intending to focus only on the nose.
Increasing the number of perceiving moments of consciousness through intention is the key to detecting and countering subtle dullness, as well as to increasing the overall power of mindfulness. Whenever we intend to detect subtle dullness, we transform non-perceiving, potential moments of consciousness into actual, perceiving moments of introspective awareness. And whenever we intend to correct for subtle dullness by making our perception more vivid and intense, we transform non-perceiving moments into perceiving moments of attention.
You've mastered this Stage when you're able to consistently sustain a high level of intense and clear perception—of both attention and introspective awareness—during most or all of your session. Attention will gain intensity, making all the details of the meditation object quite vivid. It will also gain in clarity, so you can experience the actual arising and passing away of individual breath sensations. You'll naturally abandon abstract concepts like “inhale” and “exhale,” which you were in the habit of using to follow the breath. Even though attention is extremely focused, you remain extrospectively aware. Your introspective awareness detects and automatically corrects for any subtle dullness. Mastering this Stage doesn't involve reaching any particular level of mindfulness. Your mindfulness will continue to grow stronger through all the later Stages. Rather, it is the ability to consistently sustain and increase your overall mindfulness in each meditation session. Your meditations will steadily improve with each sitting.
FIFTH INTERLUDE: The Mind-System
You'll notice we're calling it the “mind-system,” instead of the “mind.” That's because, although we usually talk about the mind as if it were a single entity, it's really made up of many distinct but interconnected processes. This complex system is composed of two main parts, the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is the part of our psyche we experience directly, while the unconscious is the part that, with its many complex “behind the scenes” activities, we can only know indirectly through inference.
The models we've presented so far talk about “consciousness” and the “mind” as though they were the same. The Mind-System model, however, recognizes that consciousness is only one part of the mind—a much smaller part, actually, than the unconscious. We can think of the conscious mind as a screen. Projected onto it are the contents of moments of consciousness from the six categories of sensory experience—visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, and mental—and binding moments of consciousness. The conscious mind can be described entirely in terms of these seven types of moments of consciousness. In other words, consciousness is visual experience, auditory experience, etc.
The conscious mind is not the source of its content. It's more like a “space” into which the unconscious minds project their information and intentions.
The unconscious part of the mind-system is divided into two major parts: the sensory mind and the discriminating mind. The sensory mind processes information from the five physical senses. It generates moments of sight, sound, smell, and so forth. In contrast, the discriminating mind, the greater part of which is called the thinking/emotional mind, produces moments of consciousness with mental objects, such as thoughts and emotions. It's the part of the mind where reasoning and analysis occur.
The sensory and discriminating minds are each composed of many individual sub-minds that function simultaneously and autonomously. Like major divisions within a corporation, each with many departments serving specific purposes, each sub-mind independently performs its own specific task in the service of the mind-system as a whole.
Each sensory sub-mind has its own sensory field and its own function. Its job is to process and interpret raw sensory data as it comes in.
The products of information processing by the sensory minds are projected into consciousness as input for the discriminating mind.
The discriminating mind generates perceptions based on sense-percepts, thoughts, and ideas. Because emotions come from the discriminating mind, we also call it the “thinking/emotional mind.”
The discriminating mind consists of many separate sub-minds, just like the sensory mind. Each sub-mind performs specialized activities and has its own particular function and purpose. This can be anything from performing arithmetic, to caring for a baby, to deciding when a situation calls for you to get angry. Any or all of these sub-minds can be active at the same time, and although several may be working on the same task, they do so independently of each other.
With all these unconscious sub-minds working independently and at the same time, the potential for conflict is enormous. The conscious mind is what allows them to work together cooperatively.
Because the conscious mind is both a universal recipient and a universal source of information, all the unconscious sub-minds can interact with each other through the conscious mind.
The conscious mind doesn't actually do anything. Although an enormous amount of important activity takes place there, the conscious mind can be regarded as a “space” where things happen. Everything that appears in consciousness—decisions, intentions, actions, and even the sense of self—actually comes from the unconscious mind. Even when these become conscious, what happens with them depends on the activities of the unconscious sub-minds. However, this does not mean the conscious mind is just some incidental byproduct of the unconscious mind that doesn't affect anything. Without the conscious mind, the unconscious sub-minds couldn't work together to perform their many different jobs.
Executive functions are higher-order cognitive tasks required in situations where pre-programmed behaviors are not sufficient.
There isn't an “executive sub-mind” in charge that performs these functions. Executive functions are the result of many sub-minds communicating through consciousness.
All intentions ultimately come from unconscious sub-minds. A conscious intention is one that gets projected into consciousness so many sub-minds have a chance to support or oppose it before it produces an action.
In the dynamic interplay between conscious and unconscious intentions, the mind-system as a whole chooses what to block or pay attention to.
Individual sub-minds are highly responsive to conscious intentions. Every time you sit down to practice, it gets easier to stabilize attention on the breath because more sub-minds agree on the benefits of meditating.
An unconscious intention that has been repeatedly supported as a conscious intention can give rise to automatic actions.
Every new skill and novel action results from interactions of the mind-system as a whole in the performance of executive functions. Learning any skill, like meditation or playing an instrument, involves effort, trial and error, evaluation, and correcting your mistakes. During all of these learning activities, unconscious sub-minds are interacting collectively in consciousness to create new programs for individual sub-minds. They can also override individual programs at any time. With repetition, the individual sub-minds become programmed so that in the future, whenever it's appropriate, they automatically repeat the same activity. In other words, consciously practicing a skill trains unconscious sub-minds to perform their new tasks perfectly.
The narrating mind is a sub-mind of the much larger discriminating mind. However, it has a very special role and importance all its own. It takes in all the information projected by other sub-minds, combining, integrating, and organizing it into a meaningful summary. The narrating mind then produces a very specific kind of mind moment called a binding moment of consciousness.
The output of the narrating mind is particularly easy to convert into words, because the very structure of language reflects the organizational patterns characteristic of the narrating mind. However, don't mistake the activity of the narrating mind for language. The process of putting something into words is a separate mental activity carried out by a completely different sub-mind of the discriminating mind.
The “I” of the narrating mind is nothing more than a fictional but convenient construct used to organize all the separate conscious experiences occurring in the mind-system. Our very concept of Self is none other than this narrative “I,” the center of gravity that holds the story together. Likewise, the “it” is another imaginary construct of the narrating mind, a convenient fiction imputed to exist in order to link the different parts of the story together. The truth is we never actually experience any entity corresponding to “it.” All that was experienced were the image, concept, hedonic feeling, and any emotion that arose in consciousness.
The contents of the conscious mind are always and only mental “constructs,” fabrications that come from information processing by unconscious sub-minds. The feelings of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral that accompany our thoughts, emotions, and perceptions are the products of these minds as well. The “Self” and the “World” of conscious experience consist entirely of mental constructs produced by the mind-system as it processes information. Our intuitive sense of these mental constructs as real, existent entities is the result of the discriminating mind misconstruing the narrating mind's output. Emotions like desire and aversion are also mental constructs. Their specific purpose is to motivate certain types of Self-oriented behavior. These emotions, and the intentions, result from how the mind-system as a whole interprets the constructs of the narrating mind.
The basic, enduring sense of “self,” of a separate doer of deeds and experiencer of events, is nothing more than a useful but fictional construct of the narrating mind, reified by the discriminating mind. In other words, the “little man in the machine,” the soul looking out at the world through the windows of the eyes, and the person sitting in the audience of the mind's “theater,” are all just illusions. The discriminating mind expands on the nebulous narrative “I” until it solidifies into a more overt, concrete idea of an ego-Self endowed with specific traits. The discriminating mind imputes independent self-existence to this Self, imagining that it's a single, enduring, and separate entity.
Metacognitive introspective awareness is the ability to continuously observe not just mental objects, but the activity and overall state of the mind. Developing this type of meta-awareness, being able to perceive the state and activity of the mind clearly and continuously, is at the heart of your future meditation progress.
STAGE SIX: Subduing Subtle Distractions
Your primary goal for this Stage is to subdue subtle distractions, particularly those produced by the discriminating mind. The first step is to achieve exclusive attention, also called single-pointed attention. When you can focus exclusively on the meditation object despite competing stimuli, attention no longer alternates to subtle distractions. Next, you must sustain exclusive attention long enough that mental objects start to fade from awareness. Then, you'll have subdued subtle distractions. Make no mistake: while exclusive attention is a valuable skill, it's only a means to subduing subtle distractions, not an end in itself. Also, subtle distractions are only temporarily subdued. They will return if you stop exerting effort to ignore them. You won't overcome distractions completely until Stage Seven. Your second goal, which you'll work on at the same time, is to develop metacognitive introspective awareness, an awareness of the mind itself. You accomplish this by holding a clear intention to continuously observe the state and activities of your mind, while still maintaining exclusive attention. You have mastered Stage Six when attention rarely alternates with bodily sensations and ambient sounds, thoughts are at most infrequent and fleeting, and metacognitive awareness is continuous. When you can sustain exclusive attention together with powerful mindfulness for long periods, you have reached the second major Milestone, and are a Skilled Meditator.
Developing exclusive focus means ignoring subtle distractions. Subtle distractions are like children who keep trying to get the attention of a parent occupied with an important activity. If you ignore them consistently enough, they get tired of trying and don't interrupt as often. Yet, if you stop ignoring them, even for a moment, they'll be back clamoring for attention again. In the same way, you subdue subtle distractions by not giving them the energy of your attention.
Whenever you give a thought any attention, even subtly, that gives it energy to continue and potentially stir up related thoughts. If you ignore the thought and focus on something else, it fades and disappears. The next time you meditate, make a point of observing this for yourself.
The quality of exclusive focus depends as much on stabilizing the scope of attention as it does fixating on an object. Otherwise, even if your attention remains fixed, your scope will spontaneously expand to include other things, especially thoughts. Therefore, you must first clearly define and stabilize your scope of attention. Then, you completely ignore everything outside that scope.
Conscious intention is the key to developing exclusive attention. Simply hold the intention to observe all the fine details of the meditation object. At the same time, hold the intention to ignore everything else. That's it!
In terms of the Moments of Consciousness model, the intention to have exclusive attention increases the number of perceiving moments focused on the meditation object until they are as many as possible. It also decreases the number of perceiving moments focused on distractions until there are as few as possible. In terms of the Mind-System model, the practice of exclusive attention is an exercise of executive function that gradually trains your unconscious sub-minds to stop projecting distractions into consciousness.
The more fully conscious your intentions, the more completely any conflict with other intentions will be resolved in favor of focusing on the breath.
It's possible to achieve exclusive attention by just focusing over and over on the breath at the nose and ignoring subtle distractions until they fade away, but that can take a very long time. Experiencing the whole body with the breath is a faster and more enjoyable method that makes it much easier to completely ignore distractions. This practice involves clearly defining then gradually expanding the scope of your attention until it includes sensations related to breath throughout the entire body all at once. The method itself builds on the body-scanning practice you learned in Stage Five.
The differences between this practice and everything you've done before are small but crucial. First, you define your scope of attention much more precisely. Second, you focus exclusively on breath-related sensations. You used to tolerate the presence of subtle distractions, letting them come, letting them be, and letting them go. In fact, you were warned not to try to keep attention from alternating with these objects. Now, it's just the opposite. You aim to ignore thoughts and non-breath-related sensations so completely that attention never alternates with them. They remain only in peripheral awareness. Finally, you will keep expanding your scope of attention until it includes the entire body.
Specifically, this practice helps develop exclusive attention because it takes advantage of the way bodily sensations compete with mental objects for attention. When we expand our scope of attention to include the entire body, that's a huge amount of somatosensory information to take in. With all those bodily sensations filling consciousness, there's simply no attention left over for distracting mental objects. In other words, you create exclusive, “single-pointed” attention not by “shrinking” your attention down to a small point, but by expanding it so there's no room for distracting thoughts and other mental objects. Also, by intentionally focusing exclusively on breath-related sensations, you keep other kinds of sensations, including non-breath-related bodily sensations, from becoming subtle distractions. At the same time, the mind grows accustomed to sustaining an exclusive focus of attention.
As you start pacifying the thinking/emotional mind, you can experience the breath for the first time purely as a sensory phenomenon, relatively free of conceptualizations.
Your first goal is to bring attention to a whole new level by subduing subtle distractions while maintaining introspective awareness. The second is to refine this awareness until it becomes metacognitive introspective awareness. We call it “meta”-cognitive because that implies a broader view from a higher perspective. It's like taking in a panorama from a hilltop, versus being lower down and seeing only the few things immediately surrounding you. From this higher perspective, the object of consciousness is the mind itself. Specifically, metacognitive introspective awareness means being aware of the ongoing activities and current state of the mind. This is different than just being aware of mental objects, such as particular thoughts and memories, which are merely the contents of the mind.
You cultivate metacognitive introspective awareness by intending to know, moment-by-moment, the movements of attention, the quality of perception and whether your scope is stable or expanding.
Meditative absorptions are flow states that occur in meditation, and are traditionally referred to as jhāna. Tradition also defines the specific factors required for entering jhāna. They are: directed and sustained attention (vitakka-vicāra); exclusive focus and unification of mind (cittas' ekagata, ekodibhāva); and joy and pleasure (pīti-sukha). If all these conditions are present, you will be in a state called access concentration (upacāra-samādhi). It's the state of concentration that immediately precedes, and from which you're able to “access,” jhāna. Put more simply, the state of concentration that immediately precedes and provides access to jhāna requires exclusive focus of attention, joy, and pleasure.
The jhānas you can enter at this Stage are “very light,” which means that some amount of thinking, investigation, or evaluation will intrude, making the jhāna unstable. Still, they're extremely useful for deepening concentration and unifying the mind. They're also very enjoyable. As you become an adept meditator, the mind grows more unified, access concentration becomes more powerful, and the jhānas you can achieve will be correspondingly deeper.
Entering the Whole Body Jhāna
The whole body jhāna is the first meditative absorption you will practice. Prepare for it by intentionally cultivating a state of joy. Begin by purposely noticing and holding in awareness any feelings of stillness, alertness, and pleasure. You may also encourage these feelings, or even try invoking them intentionally. As you proceed to deepen your practice and move towards exclusive attention, make sure to keep these pleasant qualities in your awareness throughout every sitting. In fact, you should always do this, whether you intend to practice jhāna or not. The meditation object for this jhāna is all the breath-related sensations occurring simultaneously throughout the entire body. You may arrive at this point by first working through every body part during the practice of experiencing the whole body with the breath. Or maybe you're able to shift immediately from the nose to the whole body. It doesn't matter. The main difference is that, instead of returning to the breath at the nose, when trying for jhāna you stay with the breath sensations in the whole body as your meditation object.
Follow the sensations of the breath in the whole body as smoothly and seamlessly as possible. Each moment of doing your best is a success. Let all else fall away. Notice how pleasant the breath sensations are. They may take on a distinct vibrating quality. When everything is just right, your mind will seem to “slip into a groove” and begin to “flow” for a little while. The shift will be noticeable. You will recognize jhāna as a distinct change in mental state.
Practice this first jhāna whenever conditions are right for access. Always notice exactly what's happening in the mind just before you enter jhāna. You will thereby become more familiar with those conditions, and it will be easier to recreate them in the future. Develop skill at entering the jhāna and remaining in it for longer and longer periods. It may take a while during any given session before you can reach jhāna. Therefore, try to extend your meditation periods so you have enough time not only to enter jhāna, but also to practice sustaining it.
You have mastered Stage Six once you have subdued subtle distractions, and can sustain a high level of metacognitive introspective awareness. Your mindfulness is quite strong, and you perceive the meditation object clearly and vividly. You also have complete control over your scope of attention, allowing you to examine any object with as broad or narrow a focus as you choose. When you sit, it takes a little while for attention to stabilize, but after that, subtle distractions are more or less completely absent. Thoughts may intrude once in a while, but are often absent even from peripheral awareness. Sensations and sounds continue in peripheral awareness, but only rarely become subtle distractions. When they do, they are quickly and automatically corrected for. Remember, you've only subdued subtle distractions. You haven't permanently eliminated them. Therefore, you must stay continually vigilant to keep subtle dullness and distractions from returning. You have reached the second Milestone Achievement: sustained exclusive focus of attention.
SIXTH INTERLUDE: The Stages of an Adept
The transition from skilled to adept meditator essentially means shifting from training the mind to transforming the mind. Understanding this difference is very important. There are so many new methods introduced in the coming Stages that it's possible to become preoccupied with technique, successfully achieving śamatha while unwittingly dismissing Insight opportunities as mere disruptions of your practice. Don't let this happen. The real point of adept practice is reshaping your mind into a powerful instrument capable of the kind of investigation that produces Insight and Awakening.
The pacification in Stage Six was only partial and temporary, because when you relaxed your effort, thoughts and other mental objects once again rose into consciousness to compete for attention. As pacification continues in Stage Seven, however, an even more fundamental change in the mind-system occurs, one that completely eliminates the cause of the problem. A significant proportion of the discriminating sub-minds, rather than simply growing quiet, become unified in support of the single, conscious intention to sustain an exclusive focus of attention. The result is complete pacification of the discriminating mind, also known as mental pliancy. With mental pliancy, exclusive focus and powerful mindfulness can be effortlessly sustained for long periods. These are the changes that make you an adept practitioner.
Unification doesn't mean the mind becomes a monolithic entity. Rather, it means the unconscious sub-minds start working together in harmony. This is what gives rise to śamatha.
As the mind unifies, the senses become pacified and meditative joy arises. These two processes are different, but connected, and happen at the same time. Each has its own special characteristics.
Pacification of the senses comes from consistently ignoring sensory information presented in awareness. Sensory sub-minds eventually stop projecting their content into consciousness.
As pacification of the bodily senses unfolds, you'll likely experience some bizarre physical sensations and autonomic reactions before you reach physical pliancy.
Once the bodily senses are fully pacified, you'll experience perfect stillness, accompanied by a wonderful sense of comfort and pleasure that uniformly pervades the body.
As the visual sense becomes pacified, an inner illumination arises, which over time tends to become brighter, more frequent and last longer. When the visual sense is fully pacified, the illumination phenomenon often takes the form of an “all-pervading” light, which seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
With pacification of the auditory sense, you're no longer aware of any but the most intrusive external sounds. Inner dialogue, remembered or imagined sounds, and “tunes in the head” get replaced by a kind of white noise.
The arising of meditative joy is preceded by feelings of energy currents moving through the body. These currents grow stronger and more defined as meditative joy becomes more fully established.
Involuntary body movements often occur as well. Common autonomic reactions are salivation, sweating, tears, running nose, and racing or irregular heartbeats.
The intertwined process of strange sensations leading to physical pliancy, and energy currents and movement leading to meditative joy, is described as developing over five successive “grades of pīti.”
Physical pliancy and meditative joy are quick and easy for some, but slow and arduous for others. The biggest obstacles are the hindrances of aversion, and agitation due to worry and remorse.
Ill-will and aversion keep physical pliancy and bliss from arising. Unpleasant bodily sensations during pacification are often due to unconsciously held negative emotions.
Agitation due to worry and remorse keeps meditative joy from arising. Until you've achieved some inner resolution, remorse about past misdeeds and worry about the future will agitate the mind.
As an adept, you can't separate meditation from the rest of your life. The influence of everything else you think, feel, say or do on your meditation practice is simply too great.
From this point forward, you will increasingly have Insight experiences that can trigger the kind of Insight (vipassanā) that leads to Awakening. This is the real goal of meditation practice.
As Insight accumulates, your understanding of yourself in relationship to the world changes. The effects can be enormously unsettling. Awakening is not without its price of admission.
STAGE SEVEN: Exclusive Attention and Unifying the Mind
Achieving effortlessness is your goal for this Stage. Effortlessness requires complete pacification of the discriminating mind, which is also the essential first step in unification of mind (see Sixth Interlude). Until there is unification, unconscious sub-minds continue to be at odds with each other, creating instability. With complete pacification, however, there is enough unification that the mind is compliant and rarely needs correction. Thus an adept meditator can drop all vigilance and effort, allowing the mind to settle into an unprecedented state of inner calm and clarity. To bring about unification and complete pacification, you simply keep applying effort until it's no longer needed. However, because exerting effort has become such a strong habit, knowing when you can safely drop it is a separate challenge all its own. Then, even when you know effort is no longer needed, you'll still have to learn to let go of being in control.
Complete pacification of the discriminating mind means that the competing agendas of all the individual thinking/emotional sub-minds get set aside in favor of a single, consciously held intention. In other words, the Mind-System as a whole becomes more fully unified around the conscious intention to attend exclusively to the breath. When competing intentions are eliminated, attention naturally becomes more stable.
To completely pacify the discriminating mind, keep doing what you've been doing. You don't pacify your mind. It happens when you repeatedly achieve exclusive attention and sustain it for as long as possible.
Effortlessness means attention is placed on the object and stays there because there's nothing trying to draw it away. Then, and only then, is there complete pacification, meaning diligence, effort, and vigilance can cease.
When you feel stuck, restless, and doubtful, cultivate an attitude of acceptance and patience. Take as much satisfaction as possible in how far you've come, and remind yourself of the rewards that will surely follow
The pleasure jhānas are a more powerful and satisfying absorption than the whole-body jhānas. As the name indicates, you use pleasurable sensations as your meditation object. The pleasure jhānas are particularly helpful in countering the tediousness of this Stage. More importantly, the state of flow in jhāna induces a temporary unification of mind, which in turn promotes more lasting unification, thus speeding up your progress through Stage Seven.
To have access to the pleasure jhānas, you'll need exclusive attention to the breath at the nose. Both mind and body must be quite stable and still. Your subjective experience should be one of sustained stillness, stability, and mental clarity. Your breath will be slow and shallow, and the sensations faint. Nevertheless, your awareness of the sensations will be so acute it almost hurts. It's normal to still have peripheral awareness of occasional sounds or other sensations, perhaps even the faint whisper of a fleeting thought. You know they are happening, but like the awareness of clouds in the sky, or cars passing on the street, they barely qualify as conscious experience.
When you have achieved this level of access concentration, without shifting your attention from the breath, explore peripheral awareness to find a pleasant sensation. They can be just about anywhere, but try looking in the hands, the middle of the chest, or the face. If you have trouble finding a pleasant sensation somewhere in your body, try smiling slightly. This is very helpful and often produces a pleasant feeling around the mouth or eyes. In fact, smiling when you meditate is a good habit to cultivate in general. By the time you arrive at access concentration, the “fake” smile you put on when you started meditating will have become genuine. Once you've found a distinctive pleasant sensation, shift your attention to it. Staying focused on a mildly pleasant feeling won't be as easy as focusing on the sensations of the breath. You will even find your attention wants to return to the breath because focusing on it has become a strong habit. Practice just letting the breath sensations stay in the background while remaining introspectively aware of how attention alternates between the pleasant sensation you've chosen and the breath. It usually doesn't take too long to get the hang of this. Then, attention will no longer alternate at all, becoming exclusively focused on the pleasant sensation.
Focus your attention in particular on the quality of pleasantness, rather than the sensation that gives rise to the pleasantness. Just observe, letting yourself become completely immersed in the sensation, but don't do anything. Let the pleasantness intensify. Sometimes, though, it will fade away. In that case, allow your attention to return to the breath. Stay in access for another five minutes or so, enhancing your peripheral awareness to allow any physical or mental pleasantness to arise. Once it does, try again. Sooner or later, the pleasant feeling will intensify as you keep focusing on it, which makes it easier to remain attentive. The pleasantness will grow incrementally stronger, in fits and starts, until it suddenly takes off. You'll feel as if you're “sinking into” the pleasant sensation, or as if it has expanded to consume all your available conscious “bandwidth.” You've entered the flow state that is the first pleasure jhāna.
Intense and unusual sensations can be very powerful distractions. It's almost as though the senses produce these strange sensations in an attempt to catch your attention. These phenomena will arise and pass away according to their own agenda. Don't chase after them, but don't push them away either. Just let them come, let them be, and let them go.
Effortlessness is like learning to ride a bike. There's that moment when you realize that if you just keep pedaling, the bike stays upright by itself. In meditation, you learn to let go when the time is right, moving into effortlessness.
Letting go is the best way to discover if the time is right to drop all vigilance and effort. Just intentionally relax your effort from time to time and see what happens. If distraction or dullness returns, you know you need to keep making effort. However, if exclusive attention continues, mindfulness remains strong, and joy and happiness arise, you've achieved effortlessness.
Still, don't be in a hurry. If you drop diligence too often and too soon, your practice becomes inconsistent, which can hold you back. Wait until you have some sign that the time may be right. You might notice, for instance, that no mental objects have appeared in peripheral awareness for a very long time. Or perhaps your overall mental state is much calmer and clearer. Or again, you might notice that even strange or unpleasant physical sensations are much easier to ignore, since no thoughts arise in reaction to them. These are the signs of mental pliancy. When you observe them, it's time to let go of that watchful feeling of being instantly ready to defend your focus.
Most of us have a lifetime habit of being in control; of thinking we are a “self” who is responsible for making things happen. Don't try to make anything happen. Just trust in the process, and let it unfold naturally.
You have mastered Stage Seven when you can consistently achieve effortlessness. The restless tendency of attention to follow objects in peripheral awareness has been tamed. When you first sit down, you still need to go through a “settling in” process—you'll count your breaths, sharpen your attention and awareness, and diligently ignore everything, until the mind is pacified and competing intentions disappear. Then, you can let go and cruise. When you can consistently achieve effortlessness and stay there for all or most of the sit, you have become an adept practitioner. You have reached the third Milestone Achievement and are ready to move to the next Stage.
SEVENTH INTERLUDE: The Nature of Mind and Consciousness
More unification produces a larger consensus of sub-minds tuned in to the information appearing in consciousness. This has far-reaching consequences.
This process has three profound effects: mindfulness keeps improving, as does the “magic of mindfulness;” deep unconscious material rises to the surface, allowing for further purification; and profound Insight becomes more likely.
From Stage Seven on, the quality of mindfulness improves dramatically. You'll feel more fully present with whatever appears in consciousness, and the experience of knowing will have more power and “richness.”
At the adept level, mindfulness can still be quite powerful even when you're dull due to fatigue or illness. So not only can you practice when you're dull, you should.
Unifying the mind also enhances the magic of mindfulness. As the audience for conscious experience expands, the amount of information assimilation and reprogramming increases proportionally.
Unification also affects how deeply Insight penetrates. As the information sinks deeper and deeper into the unconscious mind, a weak Insight becomes a powerful Insight.
Purification is important for minimizing the psychological trauma that can accompany Insight. With the greatly increased potential for Insight in the adept Stages, purification is more crucial than ever.
The information exchange process we call consciousness is “special” only because we experience it subjectively. Subjective experience seems to be limited to information exchange at the highest level in the mind-system.
Our conscious experience of ourselves and the people, things, and events we know as “reality” consists entirely of highly processed mental constructs that have already been extensively combined, analyzed, and interpreted before they become conscious.
With stable attention and powerful mindfulness, we can witness events in the mind-system that simply aren't accessible to the untrained mind. This is because intentionally directed and effortlessly sustained attention has a powerful effect on what appears in peripheral awareness. Thus, sustained, selective attention can give us access to the many different levels at which raw sensory data gets converted into our familiar conscious experience. The exceptional power of awareness and attention then allows us to observe these different levels of information processing with great clarity.
What we have called the conscious mind is not a place after all. It is simply the fact of information exchange at the highest level in the mind-system. Information exchange is the result of shared receptivity, and an expression of interconnectedness.
A natural individual is defined by the shared receptivity and consequent exchange of information between its component parts. It's our inner interconnectedness, rather than an external boundary, that gives us our individuality.
STAGE EIGHT: Mental Pliancy and Pacifying the Senses
You have two goals for this Stage. As an adept meditator—with a highly compliant mind due to a complete pacification in Stage Seven—your first goal is to exercise this mind, explore its nature, and discover and develop its inherent abilities. Think of your mind as an unknown territory where no one else has been, and no one but you can go. A spiritual teacher can point you in certain directions, make suggestions based on their own experience, and offer valuable methods developed by other meditators in the past. After all, one human mind isn't so different from another. But it's your own needs and interests that will determine how you actually proceed. Follow wherever they take you. I promise, you will go places and do things with your mind that are pointless to describe or discuss with anyone who hasn't made this journey for themself.
The second major goal is complete pacification of the senses, which produces physical pliancy and fully developed meditative joy. Since both pacification of the senses and meditative joy result from the same unification process, we treat them as two parts of a single goal. To pacify the senses, you will exclude all sense objects from attention while sustaining metacognitive awareness. To cultivate meditative joy, you don't need to do anything different or special, just keep practicing. It will arise naturally once the sensory minds grow quiet and the mind as a whole becomes sufficiently unified.
Practices for Experimenting with Attention
You may not yet realize the full extent of your abilities. You can focus your attention wherever you want, with whatever size scope you want, and for as long (or as briefly) as you choose. While sustained exclusive attention played a crucial role in developing your concentration, and will continue to be useful to you as an adept, it's no longer a requirement. Now, you can freely shift your focus of attention from one mental or sensory object to another, as quickly or slowly as you like, and as often as you like, without losing stability. You'll soon discover you no longer need a specific focus of attention at all. Attention can rest in a state of openness as you simply allow objects to arise and pass away without being captured by any of them.
Momentary Concentration: This practice involves momentarily shifting your focus of attention to various objects in peripheral awareness. Even though awareness is relatively free of mental objects like thoughts and images, sensations are still prominent. These include both ordinary and mind-generated sensations, energy movements, and actual bodily movements. You're also introspectively aware of feelings of pleasure or displeasure, desire or aversion, patience or impatience, curiosity, and so forth. Any of these can become a momentary object of concentration. Your attention is now so stable you can quickly and easily shift your focus from one object to another, maintaining exclusive focus with each. Start by choosing a sensation in peripheral awareness. Any distinct sensation will do. Shift your attention to it, making it the exclusive focus of attention for a moment. Let the breath sensations slip into peripheral awareness or disappear entirely. When the sensory object passes away, attention will automatically return to the breath. Then, select another sensation for momentary attention. At first, only practice momentary attention with physical sensations or the mind-generated sensations that arise due to pacification. Once you're confident you can do this without losing exclusive attention or metacognitive awareness, try switching to mental objects like affective reactions and emotions, such as pleasure from hearing birds outside the window, or annoyance at an itch. You can even allow individual thoughts or memories to arise, holding them briefly as your object of attention while introspectively observing the mind's reactions to them.
Meditating on Arising and Passing Away: In this practice, you closely investigate the arising and passing away of various phenomena with attention. While practicing momentary concentration, you probably already noticed how particular sensations or affective reactions arise, then quickly pass away—often to be immediately replaced by a new, but closely related object. For example, if the object is an ongoing sound, you will find it actually consists of a series of separate sounds arising and passing away one after another. If it's a single, brief noise, you'll notice that even after the actual sound has stopped, it continues to reverberate in the mind. If it's an emotion or mental state, you'll notice that it's actually made of a series of closely related but different mental states, arising and passing in waves. Other times, the new object will be something quite different, but you'll notice there's a causal relationship between it and the last object to pass away. For example, if someone sneezes, as the sound disappears, it may be immediately followed by an image of a person sneezing. When that image passes, it might be replaced by a thought about catching a cold. You can make any of these objects your focus of attention. Because of mental pliancy, whenever the causal sequence comes to an end, your attention will always return to the breath, instead of being captured by something new. It's as though attention were tied to the breath by an elastic band that always pulls it right back.
Practices to Enhance Metacognitive Awareness
Attention emphasizes the object of consciousness. Now, the emphasis shifts away from attention, toward greater metacognitive awareness; away from the object, toward the act of knowing itself.
Choiceless Attention: Recall that some objects arrive in awareness with the intention that they will also become objects of attention. The practice of choiceless attention involves allowing attention to move freely in pursuit of the objects that arrive with the strongest intention to become objects of attention. This practice is similar to momentary concentration, except that now you're allowing objects of attention to “self-select.” Subjectively, you experience attention freely and spontaneously “striking” or falling on certain objects, one after the other, as they arrive in the field of conscious awareness. This is just like the spontaneous movements of attention in an untrained mind, except now attention never becomes so engrossed as to be “captured.” Each brief period of intense focus is followed by attention quickly moving to something else. Furthermore, since the discriminating mind is pacified and there's mental pliancy, mental objects don't predominate as they normally would. The strong, continuous quality of metacognitive awareness makes the practice of momentary attention into one of observing the mind itself as an ongoing process.
Meditation on Dependent Arising: As metacognitive awareness grows stronger, the causal relationships between various sensory and mental events become clearer. This happens because one of the basic functions of peripheral awareness is to perceive the relationships of objects to each other and to the whole. In this meditation, you follow mental events as they occur in sequence. Specifically, consciousness of a sensation or thought (contact), is followed by an affective response (feeling), leading to desire or aversion (craving), then to the arising of an intention to act (“becoming”), and finally to the action itself (“birth”). The goal of meditating on dependent arising is an intuitive understanding of the causal processes that lead us to act and react as we do.
Unifying the Mind, Pacifying the Senses, and the Arising of Meditative Joy
There are degrees of unification of mind. The degree of unification determines how much pacification and joy we experience consciously.
Complete pacification of the senses means normal sensory information no longer gets projected into consciousness because the sensory sub-minds have grown temporarily quiescent. Just as complete pacification of the discriminating mind results in mental pliancy, full pacification of the senses results in physical pliancy. With physical pliancy, you can sit comfortably for long periods without discomfort or other sensory distractions. Physical pliancy is accompanied by the bliss of physical pliancy, a wonderfully pleasant sensation pervading the entire body.
Once the mind is sufficiently unified, meditative joy arises spontaneously. As with regular joy, meditative joy generates happiness, referred to as the bliss of mental pliancy.
Jhānas are flow states that can help you take advantage of the positive feedback loop between unification, joy, and happiness.
Practices to Help Achieve Physical Pliancy and Meditative Joy
Finding the Still Point and Realizing the Witness: Finding the Still Point allows us to “step outside” our reactions to pacification and the arising of pīti. This creates enough detachment to let these processes unfold naturally by themselves. Start your meditation by becoming fully aware of the world around you. Explore your immediate environs with attention. Feel it with your body. Listen to the sounds inside and outside the room you're sitting in. Sense all of the activity that's going on. For example, you might hear airplanes flying overhead, traffic noises, birds and dogs, and various human activities. Then, let your mind identify and fill in the source of the sounds you hear. Picture in your mind the cars you hear, the airplanes flying through the sky, and the birds sitting in trees. Expand the scope of your attention to include a visualization of the constant ferment of activity going on all over the world, on land, in the waters, and in the sky. Reflect on the Earth as it spins on its axis, moving through space at thousands of miles per hour, surrounded by the constant motion of planets and stars and entire galaxies whirling through the void at inconceivable speeds. While keeping this universe of ceaseless movement and change clear in your awareness, shift your attention to your body, sitting in stillness on the cushion. Allow the contrast between the stillness of your body and the activity of the external world to saturate your consciousness. Keep your attention focused on your body while the rest of the world fills your awareness. Over time, you'll naturally become aware of movement and activity in the body—breathing, the beating of your heart and pulsing in your arteries, and maybe the energy currents and involuntary movements of pīti. Visualize all the other activity you know is taking place in your body—the movement of food through your digestive tract, the flow of blood through tissue, urine collecting in the bladder, and glands secreting substances of all kinds. Once you have a clear, strong sense of your body as a hive of activity, shift the focus of your attention to your mind. Let the hum of activity in your body join the rest of the world in peripheral awareness while attending to the relative peace and quiet of your well-trained mind. Contrast the relative calm and quiet of the mind with all the turmoil, activity, and change in the realm of physical sensations, noting in particular that quality of mental stillness and peace. Allow your attention to dwell on the difference between your mind's inner stillness and the teeming activity in your body and the world. Inevitably, you start to notice that the mind really isn't that quiet after all, except when compared to everything outside of it. At the same time, you'll become aware of an even greater stillness at the core of your moment-to-moment experience. This is called the Still Point. Find that Still Point, and make its stillness the focus of your attention. Relegate everything else to peripheral awareness, letting things remain or pass away as they will. Enjoy the Still Point, resting in it as often and for as long as you like. The strange sensations of pacification and the energies of pīti will just blend in with everything else in the background of awareness while attention rests unperturbed. Unification will continue.
You can get stuck at any point during the process of pacification of the senses and the arising of meditative joy. If you do, the answer lies outside meditation. Adept practice depends on everything you do, all day long, every day.
There is actually an advantage to working through Stage Eight in daily practice rather than in deep retreat; you have more opportunities to take appropriate action to overcome these hindrances.
You've mastered Stage Eight when you achieve physical pliancy and meditative joy almost every time you sit. Experiencing periods of Grade V pīti once or twice—or even every third or fourth time you sit—is not yet true mastery. Consistency is key. Ordinary sensations have disappeared from awareness. The perception of your body may have changed, feeling light and pleasant, and you have no need or desire to move. The illumination phenomenon, if present, has become an all-pervading light or a bright stable orb. The inner sound is either pleasant, or just a meaningless, unobtrusive background noise. You still feel energy flowing through the body, circulating between the base of the spine and the crown of the head, and between the body core and periphery, but it's much smoother and more pleasant. The intensity of joy and feelings of energy may grow so strong that they can't be sustained, or they may make you want to end your meditation early. That's normal.
STAGE NINE: Mental and Physical Pliancy and Calming the Intensity of Meditative Joy
The goal of Stage Nine is for meditative joy to mature completely, and for pīti to subside in intensity. You accomplish this by repeatedly reaching Grade V pīti and sustaining it for as long as you can. Other than that, you just have to keep out of the way while continuing to practice. When you can stay with the pīti long enough, allowing unification to proceed and joy to mature, pīti eventually gives way to tranquility and equanimity. This is the essence of Stage Nine practice.
For the intensity of pīti to calm, you need to be able to sustain it until the intensity peaks and starts to subside, giving way to tranquility and equanimity.
To deal with the distractions, urges, and misperceptions, recognize them for what they are, and just let them come, let them be, and let them go. Yes, you'll likely give in a few times at first, but as soon as the euphoria subsides, return to the practice with a firm resolve to ignore whatever arises. On the positive side, these disruptions let you practice regaining pīti after you've lost it. An adept meditator at this Stage can usually overcome these problems quickly and easily and stay with the pīti longer.
So, practice at this Stage is really quite simple: achieve pīti, sustain it for as long as possible, and start over when you lose it. Eventually, you can sustain pīti long enough for its intensity to peak and begin subsiding. Subjectively, it seems like you just “get used” to the intensity of the pīti—that it subsides because you've become familiar with it. At a deeper level, it's because the mind-system continues to unify; the same energy that once caused disruption now gets channeled into stabilizing the entire mind-system. Once that happens, you can usually sustain a state of tranquil pīti for the rest of the sit.
Another extremely powerful practice for calming pīti and generating Insight is meditating on the mind. Meditating on the mind itself involves bringing attention and awareness together in a completely open state. Essentially, you're fusing attention and awareness. The main purpose of this practice for this Stage is to generate stable, consistent tranquility and equanimity. Yet, it's also extremely effective at producing Insight.
Objects of consciousness arising and passing away in the mind are like the waves that rise and disappear due to forces acting on the ocean.
For this particular Insight experience to occur, a specific constellation of causes and conditions must be present. In addition to stable attention, mindfulness, and joy, you require tranquility, equanimity, investigation, and diligence. The more complete and lasting your śamatha, the more strongly developed these factors are, and the more chance there is for Insight to arise. Yet keep in mind, attachment to Insight can itself be an impediment. It's far better to surrender all hopes and expectations. Just practice from a place of trust, for the sake of whatever your meditation may bring. These Insights will come in their own time. Awakening is an accident, but meditating on the mind is a practice that will make you accident-prone. It's especially important not to be deceived by mere intellectual understanding. You may think you “got it” just by reading this description. However, many philosophers and scientists have understood this truth intellectually, but it hasn't transformed them. We haven't gotten it until this Insight completely transforms the way we perceive the world—especially during challenging times, like when we're in an argument with our boss or partner, in a traffic jam, or when our house burns down.
When the intensity of pīti subsides, the mind's energy level doesn't drop. The mind actually has more energy, but it's being channeled differently, so the joy is accompanied by a sense of tranquility.
When the excitement of pīti subsides and there's enough tranquility, equanimity naturally arises. Equanimity is non-reactivity to pleasure and pain.
You have mastered Stage Nine when you consistently achieve stable attention and mindfulness, accompanied by joy and tranquility. Equanimity is also present, and grows much stronger in the Tenth and final Stage. Together, these five factors constitute the state of śamatha. However, when you get off the cushion, these qualities all rapidly fade.
STAGE TEN: Tranquility and Equanimity
The goal of Stage Ten is for the qualities of śamatha to persist after you rise from the cushion. Just continuing to practice regularly will cause the profound joy and happiness, tranquility, and equanimity you experience in meditation to persist between meditation sessions.
All five factors of śamatha are present in Stage Ten. Each time you sit, you quickly enter a state where attention is stable, mindfulness is powerful, and the unified mind rests in a state of joy accompanied by tranquility and equanimity. However, these quickly fade when you rise from the cushion. Your goal for this Stage is to reach a point where śamatha persists between sittings, permeating your everyday life. This is the one real change left in the perfection of śamatha. Then, śamatha becomes the “normal” condition for the adept meditator. The distinction between meditation and non-meditation largely disappears.
As with the goals for the other adept Stages, all you have to do is keep practicing, and śamatha will last longer and longer each time after you get up. You don't need to do anything new. However, you can practice mindfulness in daily life in a way that prevents śamatha from eroding as quickly.
Practicing mindfulness off the cushion means being aware whenever desire or aversion arise. When that happens, recognize what's going on: some unconscious sub-minds are in conflict with what is, craving for something to be different. Don't resist, reject, or suppress the craving. Instead, ignore it. Then, intentionally direct your attention to that inner pleasure and happiness that has nothing to do with what's occurring externally. Likewise, purposely intend to notice the positive aspects of whatever you perceive. As long as all the other sub-minds don't react to the event, or to the feelings of desire and aversion arising in reaction to it, then the conflicted sub-minds will come back into line. When we mindfully observe and accept both the situation and our mind's reaction to it, equanimously and without judgment, then the mind will remain unified.
As equanimity grows stronger in meditation, the mind outside of meditation grows less prone to grasping, less compelled to pursue pleasant experiences, and less repelled by unpleasant experiences.
Stage Ten is ideal for doing any type of Insight practice. You can do Close Following, the Meditation on Arising and Passing Away, Choiceless Attention, the Meditation on Dependent Arising, Realizing the Witness, or anything else. Your mind is also in a perfect state to practice the luminous jhānas as well. Through these practices, Insight accumulates and matures, and the experience of Awakening quickly follows.
You have mastered Stage Ten and achieved the fourth and final Milestone when śamatha typically persists from one regular meditation session to the next. Strong desires are noticeably weaker, negative mental reactions rarely occur, and anger and ill will virtually disappear. Others may find you generally happy and easily pleased, relaxed, agreeable, unaggressive, and peaceful. You will be relatively immune to disturbing events, and physical pain won't particularly bother you. On mastering Stage Ten, the mind is described as unsurpassable. It's an ideal instrument for achieving and deepening profound Insight into the true nature of and a liberation that is not subject to passing away.
Final Thoughts
The goal beyond Stage Ten is to use the power of śamatha for the continued deepening of Insight, and to progress to the highest level of complete Awakening.
The practice in this book is śamatha-vipassanā, but we have focused mostly on the Stages of śamatha. The reason was purely practical: to prepare the mind as quickly as possible for the ultimate goal of Insight and Awakening. With every Stage of śamatha you pass through, the possibility of Insight grows more likely, and increases quite dramatically with each Stage from Seven on. Many of the techniques described in the later Stages are intended to generate Insight experiences.
Never lose sight of the fact that śamatha and vipassanā must work together. Like two wings of a bird, you need both to arrive at your ultimate destination.
APPENDIX A: Walking Meditation
Walking meditation is both a powerful practice in its own right and an indispensable complement to sitting practice. Too often it's not taken seriously enough; we imagine a meditator to be someone who only sits cross-legged with eyes closed. But walking meditation is just as effective as sitting for developing stable attention and powerful mindfulness. It's even more effective for some things. The best way to make rapid progress is to combine the two.
The practices of walking and sitting meditation are essentially the same: stabilize your attention while sustaining or even increasing peripheral awareness. The only real difference is where you focus your attention. Here, you fix it on the sensations in the soles of your feet, rather than on the breath at the nose. Alternatively, you can use the sensations in the muscles, joints, and tendons of your legs as the meditation object. Walking, like breathing, is an automatic activity, and the ever-changing sensations with each step provide a continuous anchor for attention. At the same time, peripheral awareness stays open to whatever is happening in the internal and external world. Walking meditation offers a variety of opportunities for working with attention and peripheral awareness in different ways.
As a part of your daily practice, you can do walking meditation first to help calm your mind in preparation for sitting. Or you can walk right after sitting, which brings a high level of focused attention to the walking practice. You can also do walking meditation separately from sitting whenever it's convenient. During meditation retreats, or on days set aside for more extensive practice, alternate walking and sitting practices. This gives your body a chance to limber up and recover from the effects of long periods of motionless sitting, but without interrupting your practice. Never treat walking meditation as a “break” from your practice. If you really do need to take a break, do something completely different, like going for a stroll or taking a nap.
The best location for walking meditation practice is outdoors. An open space where you won't be interrupted, such as a back yard, gardens, or park is perfect. A place with some sort of natural beauty is ideal, but not essential, since aesthetic enjoyment isn't the main point.
To begin your formal practice, choose a comfortable pace, one that is slow enough to easily observe changing sensations in the soles of your feet, but fast enough to be mostly automatic—what might be called “slow normal.” Spend more and more time attending to the sensations in your feet as you walk. They will eventually become your primary meditation object, but don't restrict your attention to them just yet. For now, your primary objective is just to remain in the present as you walk. This means your attention can move from your feet to anything happening in the moment that you find interesting. However, these must always be intentional movements of attention! If you are outside, there will be sounds, interesting and attractive visual objects, and odors. Intentionally allow the mind to observe and explore them. Feel the warmth of sunlight, the coolness of shade, and the breeze touching your face. Investigate and engage fully with these things, taking it all in. Whenever an object of attention goes away or ceases to be interesting, return to the sensations in your feet. Again, always stay in the present. Explore and fully experience your surroundings with both attention and awareness, but don't get lost in thinking, which takes you away from the present. Whenever you realize thinking has carried you away, bring your attention back to the sensations in your feet or legs to keep those thoughts at bay. As the novelty of slow walking wears off, thoughts become more frequent, and you'll need to anchor attention to your feet more often. This is completely normal. You'll eventually be keeping the focus of your attention more or less continuously on the sensations of walking.
Always remember that relaxation and pleasure should predominate at every Stage of walking meditation. Think about walking as “staying in the pleasant moment.” What began as a slip of the tongue has since become the way I prefer to describing the walking practice.
APPENDIX B: Analytical Meditation
Analytical meditation means just what it sounds like: thinking about something. Of course, it's a more structured type of thinking. You carefully choose a topic and systematically examine it with a stable, clear, and focused mind. In fact, to qualify as analytical “meditation,” the thinking and contemplation should happen in a state corresponding to Stage Four, where the chosen subject of analysis never disappears entirely from attention. If you don't have the stability of Stage Four, your mind will wander off on tangents. Maintaining a continuous awareness of the breath in the background is a powerful way to stabilize your attention.
Topics for analytical meditation fall into three general categories. First are teachings, doctrines, or other ideas you wish to understand more deeply. Second are problems you want to solve or decisions you need to make. Last are experiences, thoughts, or realizations that seem to point to a valuable insight.
There are four stages to solving a problem: preparation, incubation, solution, and verification:
Preparation: When we prepare to solve a problem, we focus our attention on the ideas and information relevant to a solution, setting aside anything irrelevant. Psychologists call this conscious process of distinguishing what is important from what is irrelevant selective encoding.
Incubation: The next stage, incubation, is where the problem gets solved. In the incubation stage, we combine and recombine all the relevant information, searching among those new combinations for a solution. This trial and error process is called selective combination. We also compare the present problem and its potential solutions with similar past problems and their actual solutions. This selective comparison helps us appraise the possible solutions we already have, and provides us with additional possible solutions. These activities occur at an unconscious level as well as consciously.
Solution: When we eventually solve a problem, the solution may come in the form of a sudden, intuitive insight delivered from the unconscious—that is, as an “insight solution.” On the other hand, we may have the conscious experience of “all the pieces falling into place” as we systematically think about the problem, in which case it's a non-insight solution. In the simplest example of the former, an insight solution leaps immediately into consciousness, seemingly out of the blue. The most basic form of non-insight solution is when conscious reasoning leads directly to an answer. But it doesn't often happen that way. As we shall see, in most cases both conscious and unconscious processes have, in fact, contributed to that solution.
Verification: The final step in the process of problem solving is to verify the solution. Even logical, non-insight solutions need to be verified through practical application. But intuitive insight solutions must first be validated by logic—unless you're willing to proceed on the basis of a wild “hunch.” Such verification always occurs in consciousness, and indeed, this is where the conscious mind really comes into its own in the problem solving process. Many otherwise effective solutions are unacceptable for social, legal, moral, or other reasons. Also, a solution that fits the general pattern of the problem perfectly may still not match the specifics of a problem. In other words, it may work in principle, but not in practice.
APPENDIX C: Loving-Kindness Meditation
This meditation conditions your mind to readily enter a state of ease, peace, love, and happiness. It also cultivates loving-kindness and compassion toward all beings, including you. The practice is based on this simple formula: May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be free from ill-will. May all beings be filled with loving-kindness. May all beings be truly happy. There are three parts to this practice. First, you generate these feelings as strongly as you can in your mind. Make your best possible effort, since this entire practice ultimately depends on this one part. The more often you cultivate these feelings, the easier it becomes to generate them. The second part is to generate a strong wish for others to experience these same feelings. This will take most of your practice time, and involves a series of visualizations. Start by visualizing those for whom you feel the most gratitude and love. Move on to people you know less well, then to people you feel neutral about, even complete strangers. Next are those people you dislike or have difficulties with. Finally, extend this wish until it includes all beings, everywhere. The practice concludes with reminding yourself that you too need and deserve to be comfortable, at peace, filled with love, and happy. Don't underestimate the importance of this; despite our tendency toward selfishness, we ultimately find ourselves the hardest of anyone to truly love.
It's not uncommon for people to object to this practice because they find it contrived. Please don't judge it until you've tried it. This is one of the most powerful meditation practices known for transforming the way your mind works. You don't need to believe that the feelings of loving-kindness you send out have any literal effect on others, although it helps if you do. The point is, we all possess infinite resources of patience, forgiveness, compassion, love, and happiness within us. This practice trains the mind and heart to tap into those resources more easily. The satisfaction and enjoyment this practice produces eventually makes accessing those resources automatic.
APPENDIX D: The Jhānas
Jhāna refers to specific states of “absorption” that occur in meditation. To be absorbed mentally with something is just what it sounds like: your mind is completely engaged by a particular object. Some common synonyms for mental absorption are concentration, complete attention, immersion, and being engrossed or enthralled.
Jhānas are entered from a state called access concentration. To provide access to the jhānas, your concentration must be strong enough to sustain exclusive attention long enough to achieve absorption. Furthermore, the mind must be unified enough that the Five Hindrances are suppressed. Finally, the jhāna factors of joy and pleasure/happiness must be present. When these basic requirements are met and you enter a stable flow state, described in Stage Six, you're in jhāna. How “deep” the jhāna is depends on how unified the mind was in access concentration. The greater the unification in access, the deeper the jhāna.
Practicing the Whole-Body Jhānas
Stage Six is the earliest you can access and sustain a jhāna. That's because you've achieved enough continuous introspective awareness to keep you from getting lost in distraction or sinking into dullness. Whole-body jhānas are a type of Very Lite jhāna that you can access from a state corresponding to Stage Six. And even if you aren't at Stage Six in your daily practice, you may still be able to achieve this state after several days in an intensive retreat.
You enter the whole-body jhānas using the sensations of the breath in the whole body as your meditation object.
Practicing the Pleasure Jhānas
Pleasure jhānas are a kind of Lite jhāna, accessed from a state corresponding to Stage Seven. Access concentration has exclusive attention with very little background “noise” and almost no discursive thought. Whatever thoughts still occur are mostly non-verbal, appearing infrequently in the distant background. The breath will be faint, slow, and shallow, yet the breath sensations are still quite distinct. In fact, because your sense perception is so acute, they can even verge on uncomfortable. In other words, you're fully present with the breath. Even if you aren't at Stage Seven in your daily practice, this access state can often be achieved after several days in retreat.
The meditation object for entering the 1st pleasure jhāna is a feeling of bodily pleasure (sukha), often combined with the energy sensations—currents, vibrations, etc.—that accompany the arising of meditative joy (pīti). Access concentration must be stable and sustained for a reasonable period of time before you're ready to take up this new object—10 to 15 minutes initially, decreasing to as little as five minutes with more experience. Find a pleasant sensation somewhere in your body. Keep your attention focused on that pleasant feeling, becoming completely immersed in the sensation. And it's OK if you're attending to energy sensations as well. At first, the pleasant feeling may fade, and you'll need to go back to the breath. Sooner or later, though, you'll find the intensity of the pleasantness will increase when you focus on it. But then it will stop, and you'll be tempted to “help” it along. Resist this urge, because it won't work. All you can do is create the right conditions for jhāna, then get out of the way. Once the conditions have been created, it's about being rather than doing, surrendering to rather than grasping after the experience.
As you focus on the pleasantness, it will grow stronger. At some point, you may feel like you're either sinking into the pleasant sensation, or like it has expanded to consume all your available conscious “bandwidth.” When this happens, you've entered the 1st jhāna.
APPENDIX E: Mindful Review
You will regularly review and reflect on your thoughts, emotions, speech, and actions. By performing this review consistently, you will increase the power and effectiveness of mindfulness in your daily life, which in turn helps your meditation progress by removing obstacles to unification of mind, pacification of the senses, and the arising of meditative joy.
Here are the basic steps of the Mindful Reflection practice:
Set aside a period of up to half an hour each day. Ideally, it will coincide with your daily sitting practice, but it doesn't have to.
Choose several events from your day or since your last review that stand out as particularly unwholesome activities of body, speech, or mind. Even though you're emphasizing the unwholesome, it's important for you to also make note of the wholesome as well, congratulating yourself for times you were mindful and compassionate. As always, positive reinforcement is enormously powerful in training the mind.
Perform a two-part review of each unwholesome event: First, recall how much mindfulness you had during the event. Then, review the consequences of anything you said or did and consider what might have been different had you been more mindful. In the second part, you'll practice mindfulness with clear comprehension, focusing on the deeper intentions driving those particular thoughts, emotions, speech, or actions.
Unwholesome events don't always create agitation, and wholesome events can sometimes produce turmoil. So, to distinguish between the two, use this principle: an event is unwholesome if it causes harm and suffering to yourself or others that is unnecessary and could be avoided.
Thoughts and emotions also have consequences on you, even if they're never acted on. They play a major role in shaping who you are and how you'll think and act in the future. To quote a well-known saying: Thoughts become words, words become deeds, deeds become habit, habit becomes character, and character becomes destiny. Therefore, remember to include these purely mental events when choosing things for reflection.
APPENDIX F: Insight and the “Dark Night”
One of the great advantages of śamatha is that it makes it easier to confront the Insights into impermanence, emptiness, the pervasive nature of suffering, and the insubstantiality of the Self that produce Awakening. Without śamatha, these challenging Insights have the potential to send a practitioner spiraling into a “dark night of the soul.” This Christian term comes originally from the writings of St. John of the Cross, who supposedly spent 45 years in this dark night. The term beautifully captures the feelings of despair, meaninglessness, non-specific anxiety, frustration, and anger that often accompany such powerful realizations.
What is it about these Insights that can catalyze such strong reactions? Essentially, it's that these Insights completely contradict the “operating model” of reality that provides the logical basis for how our sub-minds perform their specific functions. Most of these sub-minds presuppose a world of relatively enduring and self-existent “things”—objects, events, people, and places—that have their own inherent natures, which can be comprehended with some accuracy. They also make the core assumption that a Self exists as one of those enduring things. This Self may be seen as eternal, or as something that will be annihilated at death. Another core assumption of all these models of reality is that happiness and suffering come from the interactions between the Self and this world of things. Gaining certain objects in the world will make “me” happy. Losing things “I” love or having to confront people or places “I” dislike creates my suffering. These three assumptions—that things exist, that I am a separate Self, and that happiness comes from the interaction between the two—are shared throughout this collection of unconscious reality models. They provide the foundation for our whole sense of meaning and purpose in life. Anything that conflicts with these assumptions can severely undermine a person's sense of meaning and purpose. And the “true” nature of reality, as revealed through Insight experiences, directly conflicts with all these assumptions.
It takes time for the unconscious sub-minds to assimilate these powerful Insights and create new reality models. Until then, the turmoil in the unconscious can create the despair and anxiety of a dark night. That these feelings arise from the deep unconscious for no apparent reason only makes things worse, leading some to even question their sanity. Nevertheless, intellectually understanding what's happening can provide some relief. More effective, however, is the joy, tranquility, and equanimity of śamatha. These pleasant states of mind provide an important “lubricating” quality that counteracts all this internal friction. When there's nothing else to cling to, in other words, these qualities of mind provide a palliative. As Insight matures, individual sub-minds reorganize their internal models to accommodate the new information. A person who successfully undergoes this transformation possesses a completely new worldview. Life takes on a new and deeper meaning and purpose than ever before, and there is a much greater sense of ease, regardless of what may happen externally.