Right Concentration
If we got lost on the path, the best way to get back on is to tend to causes and conditions and see what was forgotten. It all leads up to Right Concentration, which for Thanissaro Bhikkhu is a full bodied awareness, as opposed to a narrow pointed concentration on a colored disk, like a kasina. You gain pleasure up the Jhanic arc, and develop rapture (Jhana 1), bliss (Jhana 2), satisfaction (Jhana 3), and equanimity (Jhana 4). These aren’t spaced out states, sleep states, they’re not a grind, but instead they are bright aware Flow states that are quite happy and peaceful. It’s a form of emotional feeding and satisfaction that is to replace external sensuality. “We’ve got to train the mind to raise its standard of taste. That’s one of the functions of concentration: to give us a better standard of pleasure, a pleasure that comes not from sensuality but from form, i.e., the body as you feel it from within. This pleasure doesn’t require that the world outside be a certain way. All it requires is that you pay attention to what you’ve already got here—which means that there’s a lot less unskillful activity involved in accessing this pleasure and maintaining it. It doesn’t require that you take anything from the world, and it doesn’t obscure your vision in the same way that sensual pleasures do…So being in concentration is actually a lot safer than not being in concentration. When you’re not in concentration, you go back to your old fascination with sensuality. And it’s because of sensuality that people kill and steal and lie and engage in all sorts of unskillful behavior. But nobody’s ever killed over jhana, nobody’s ever stolen anything. In fact, being in jhana makes you a lot less likely to kill and steal, because you’ve got something really, really good here that doesn’t have to depend on anybody else.”
I have a summary of the standard Jhanas in my video Jhanas, but it’s the actual practice that matters. “You can read as much as you’d like about discernment, inconstancy, stress, not-self, emptiness, whatever, but it’s not really going to have a hold on the mind until the mind settles down firmly and can be still. However much the mind likes to read about those things, its feeding habits are still low. Ajaan Chah’s image of Westerners is one of those comments that’s right in your face. He said that Westerners are like vultures: They fly very high but they eat very low. We like to think about abstract concepts, but when we’re looking for pleasure, where do we go? Straight for lust, all the gross sensual pleasures.” Of course we need the comparison between different types of pleasures, but without an ability to feed on concentration, the weaning practice of mindfulness will be difficult to maintain. With Right Mindfulness, there is an understanding of too much striving, but when there’s little to no control over the mind, many negative vibrations are released, including narratives of the past, resentments, undeveloped areas of the mind, and temptations to return to sensuality. The value of concentration shows that simple things, like getting lost on a smartphone, and being interrupted, show that where we put our concentration and how it compares, with what in the end is always sensuality concentration, that being interrupted in regular concentration on the breath isn’t as bad as sensual feeding and THEN being interrupted. The mind gains a taste of freedom and learns to interrupt its own concentration less and to prefer concentration over other objects because of its clean aftertaste. “It’s a matter of having the right balance: knowing how to encourage your concentration without pushing it so hard that you kill it.” Concentration is an understanding of the limited attention span, and the danger of multi-tasking, but it can reinforce all the other factors on the eightfold path as per MN 117 “Any singleness of mind equipped with these seven factors—right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, & right mindfulness—is called noble right concentration with its supports & requisite conditions.” This non-linear approach to the path views each part of the path as a support for every other.
Jhanas: https://rumble.com/v1gqznl-the-jhanas.html
Emotional Feeding – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://rumble.com/v1gqvl1-emotional-feeding-thanissaro-bhikkhu.html
MN 117: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN117.html
As one periodically feeds on concentration and Samadhi, one begins to value the pleasant mind states that arise, and with the prior sections of the eightfold path, that all aim at a blameless well-being, there is a clean aftertaste, a clear conscience, and regular pursuits begin to lose their luster. Concentration also provides a direction when the mind feels rudderless with open aware mindfulness. Concentration also has its form of equanimity as well. Getting the taste of equanimity for those who are new to mindfulness, who only achieve it now and then with concentration, provides a mind stuck in depression with a glimpse of freedom. For many people, that’s how it starts and then the idea that one can develop equanimity with less concentration and can allow consciousness to move, this starts to animate the mind to go in that direction eventually. A certain amount of feeding will continue but people will have to make the choice whether one kind of sensual pleasure or another is just fine. In Paths to Liberation, there is a reminder that all desire is political and people have to be prepared to understand boundaries and how they can be crossed very easily when it comes to desire. “Due to desire, one prefers one view over all others and thus prevents oneself from seeing the truth and becoming truly knowledgeable. There is no worse barrier to mindful seeing than the belief that one has already seen and known fully…Such a person prefers a view that legitimates and reinforces his or her desires. The less-than-ideal person substitutes a particular view for a direct apprehension of reality. If one does not refer to reality directly as its own truth, one’s only criterion for choosing among the competing formulations of truth is selfish desire: which view best states what one wishes were true? When one has found such a view, one will defend it with conviction born not of personal and direct apprehension of the truth, but rather of the fact that it meets that primary selfish criterion. Hence attachment to views epitomizes the viciously circular, self-perpetuating nature of desire, attachment, and dependence in general.”
This is mainly how one moves towards concentration and mindfulness over time. The grossness of regular desires, the proneness to argument and conflict over what can’t be shared, these emotions taint what could be otherwise a regular use of one particular object or another. Even worse with sadomasochism, many people only like objects precisely because they are rare, evoke sadistic conflict, for those who enjoy sadism, and mental peace can only be seen as boredom. When people can’t enjoy peace, there’s a blindness that leads to taking on goals that are too challenging, and masochistic, and to sadistically challenge role models, similar to boxers calling each other out and demanding a match to prove superiority, which in the end is only temporary. The wear and tear of goals can’t be ignored forever, and then injury, ill health, including ill mental health, wears down the individual to the point that there may be a chance to take a second look at peace and to finally appreciate it.
The problem of course with pure concentration, is that one has to develop a certain amount of conditions, and this takes years of seclusion to master completely. When the mind gets a taste for different forms of freedom, it doesn’t mind the conditions, because external conditions for sensuality, especially endless access to consumption, usually require enormous conditions to be right in the sense of having the right skills for the right job or business. Concentration and Mindfulness can skip those difficult conditions and provide quite a lot of well-being and a certainty that if enough development is put in, there will be some facility for these mind states.
There is also a momentum with concentration that gets lost on people. Even if concentration needs cultivation and fades over time, it may fade over hours, and those hours can be quite peaceful. You are tending to causes and conditions that make seeds for negative mind states more difficult to find soil, because of the momentum. Rob Burbea talked about these residual benefits. “Then one day I was at the meditation centre, in an evening class, meditating. Some degree of samatha, nothing particularly extreme or out of this world at all. Some quietness, some settled-ness, some sense of enjoyment, calmness there. Memory came up of this person, and the beginning of the anger, the beginning of the anger. And I just saw – it was almost like the anger was a seed, and it wasn’t, you couldn’t even call it anger at that point. Because of the samatha, because there was the calmness, it was very clear: there was a non-building of that anger, a non-kind of drawing it out and pumping it up and injecting energy into the anger. It wasn’t a suppression that was going on. It just didn’t have – the conditions that were usually there to build and inflate anger were just not there in that moment. So it just came up as a moment, and disappeared. It takes conditions in the present, conditions of responding in the present, to make it what we would call ‘anger.’”
Developing Samatha/Concentration – Rob Burbea: https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/12309/
When we talk about tending to causes and effects, it helps to understand the Five Jhana Factors that lead to trusting cause and effect. The basic Sloth and Torpor sense of a lack of motivation is dealt with by simply applying the attention span to the object of concentration, the breath. With sustained examination of the breath, whether it’s long or short, the sensation quality of the breath, how it feels, the mind lets go of doubt because the best way to deal with doubt is to return the mind to the breath. Distractions are normal and its the repeated return of the attention span to the breath that lets the mind drop doubt. The irony is that skeptics who say they don’t believe in Jhanas and think they don’t exist, they experience the same jhanic momentum at work, and talk about self-consciousness going away and time being less of a drag. It’s the same thing. As time passes with repeated returning of the attention span, the mind lets go of the sense of lack and aversion toward life circumstances. When aversion is reduced, automatically the mind moves towards rapture, delight, and pleasure because of that release. As the mind then relaxes any over-excitement at these results, there’s a sense of emotional feeding that is well fed. There is contentment, joy, and gratification. Like a person who’s not desperate for wealth, clinging, greedy, and obnoxious, the person who is used to their wealth, they are content and relaxed. They finished the meal, feel full and satiated, and now are just sitting there with a toothpick. This contentment leads to restlessness and worry becoming relaxed as well. The sense of scarcity and panic is relaxed. Sensual desire eventually begins to look a little gross at this point because of the burden of having to maintain this effort in concentration. Effort is progressively let go of. Rapture in (Jhana 1) moves towards bliss in (Jhana 2) because the mind senses drawbacks related to the hindrances, and it naturally wants to escape towards bliss where the onepointedness and sustaining is more automatic and momentum is stronger. As bliss begins to appear too sugary and smooth, and a sense of a gross vibration, there’s an escape into satisfaction (Jhana 3), of being well fed and content. That contentment means that aversion is more distant, and it’s clear that these concentration states are a form of cocoon, and each progressive jhana a more deeply ensconced cocoon than the prior. That contentment of feeling emotionally satiated and full eventually leads to more restfulness, when both pleasure and the pain associated with defending pleasure, are dropped for equanimity (Jhana 4). The conditioned mind involves stress with pleasure because pleasure is simply stress that feels good, where as aversion is stress that feels bad. These practices help to relax and atrophy the use of the aversion and anger parts of the mind that obsess about external power and how to maintain external wealth against others who encroach and the exhaustion of trying to manipulate physical and social structures to maintain superiority. By dropping those draining thoughts, the mind can now explore peaceful equanimity.
Five Jhana Factors – Insight Meditation South Bay: https://www.imsb.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/FiveJhanaFactors.pdf
In MN 111, there are also insights to how the mind can see that jhanic momentum fades and it takes a lot of your time to be able to develop these states. “…Known to him those states arose, known they were present, known they disappeared.” As good as these states are for well-being, they require repetition and cultivation forever. Any long periods of time where jhanas aren’t developed, there’s a weakness of the muscle and the skills go into atrophy, just like any other skill. Though, as Thanissaro describes above, replacing more crude forms of entertainment with jhanas, and realizing that one can make time for these practices, there’s really not a sacrifice in doing these practice when looked at this way.
These practices are life-long and so if one succeeds in directing the mind to equanimity again and again, practitioners can gain a facility to let go of a sense of density in the body and the perception of forms. The mind lets go of the perception of diversity in order to escape the body into the cocoon of infinite space. A sense of 3-D awareness includes a lot of tension related to bodily location, a breath location and the sense of inside and outside. The mind finds the space between experiences of solidity as more restful and eventually the attention span merges with space. All these senses of location and solidity are forms of tension. Then subtly tuning the mind to notice the sense of knowing, and how it doesn’t have a sense of limitation like sensations do, can be a deeper cocoon than space. It’s not disturbed by anything that happens in consciousness. Shaila Catherine says that “knowing is activated without grasping particular things that are known.” The sense of knowing can still have a sense of “I’m knowing over here towards objects over there” but when attempting to find a standpoint or location for consciousness, all that is encountered is void. There is no place for consciousness. Even the voidness can then be “perceived” and the attention span has to still any intention to move towards any so called “thing” and intention or effort is stilled in the sphere of neither perception nor non-perception. The unstained awareness doesn’t require movement, intention, or objects to perceive, though there is still a subtle sense of duality in that there’s a subtle sense of time in the present moment and that the state can end. Any analysis becomes an impediment to this state. “There is absolutely nothing to do in it. In fact any activation of intention, feeling, resolve, or mental activity abruptly ends the absorption.” There is a potential for perception, but no thing can be recognized and labeled. At some point, perception itself appears gross and one can drop into cessation of perception and feeling. Daniel Ingram has a nice video on this advanced attainment and describes it as “a very smooth, complete, and surprising power-failure of all experience, with body, thought, and mind itself vanishing in that order…The mind will at some point power up again, arising smoothly in the reverse order, with mind, thought, and then bodily sensations reappearing in that order.” The afterglow of rest can last for hours and into the next day. Of course, long retreats make it easier to attain these higher jhanas because of the hours and commitment it takes to master The Jhanas. You are creating a polished and smooth consciousness with these Jhanas and they provide a sense of rest and safety from a vipassana insight practice where a sense of weaning and resistance can be quite powerful and destabilizing. Both sides of the practice help each other out.
Focused and Fearless – Shaila Catherine: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780861715602/
A Mind Without Craving – Delson Armstrong: isbns.net/isbn/9780984049752/
Nirodha Samapatti – Daniel Ingram: https://vimeo.com/248566139
There are also more open types of concentration that include the sense of automaticity of unconditioned sensation and the easeful operation of regular functions. When you “let the meditation meditate” you are allowing the mind to let go of micro-managing automatic functions, and gaining a sense of relief from a “do-er” that is cranking up the meditation. This sense of freedom points to even more freedom as the addictive mind leaps out naturally at experience and recoils back on its own as it sees its own pain and dullness. Sangharakshita describes this as “Directionless or the Unbiased. The Directionless Samādhi is a state in which there is no particular direction in which one wants to go, there is no preference. One just remains poised, like a sphere resting on a completely horizontal plane, with no reason why of its own accord it should roll in any particular direction. The Enlightened mind – the mind established in samādhi – is like this. It has no tendency or inclination to any one direction because it has no individual or egotistic desire. This is a difficult state to describe, but perhaps if one thinks in terms of a perfect spontaneity, without any urge or impulse to do anything in particular, one may get somewhere near it.” One goes through what are described as Vipassana Jhanas, which are states of reactivity to stimuli with non-reactive equanimity that is similar to Sangharakshita’s description. The addictive mind resists renunciation, then lets go, and this back and forth over time leads to a cessation non-experience of Nirvana, which has to happen on its own. Stream Entry. This “Directionless, Unbiased” territory of equanimity is a difficult one indeed. Daniel Ingram is probably the best at teasing out the variety of details in equanimity.
“Speaking of Equanimity, there are also a reasonable number of practitioners who make it past the Arising and Passing away, hit the Dark Night, and get to Equanimity. They may go through a few rounds of that, and finally manage to get relatively established in the high end of Equanimity and stay in that general end of the territory for some extended period and possibly even until they die. They don’t attain stream entry, but they have done something impressive. This attainment typically is relatively transformative. Many may mistake this for more formal awakening, but it should neither be underestimated as a spiritual attainment nor denigrated, as being relatively stabilized in Equanimity is vastly better than what most people achieve during their lifetimes; Equanimity can provide numerous valid insights as well as emotional and psychological benefits. Would I advocate that they push on into stream entry? Of course! Still, plenty of these practitioners derive enough satisfaction from this level of insight that motivation and inspiration to go further may drop off significantly, and they may continue to derive real and valid benefit throughout the rest of their lives from this achievement.” So this is kind of like being stuck in equanimous happiness.
Daniel describes this territory as formless realms of infinite space up to neither perception nor non perception versions of Equanimity. That tends to make the equanimity more expansive, spacious, and all encompassing so as to be a kind of quick sand of an attainment. The mind has to find the three characteristics of all phenomena: impermanence, dissatisfaction, and not-self, including consciousness, and let go of experience on its own. People also tend to be good at one characteristic over another. Their entrance into cessation can appear differently depending on the doorway. “The impermanence door aspect relates to realizing what is ‘between the frames’ of the sensate universe (formations), and it tends to have a dat.dat.dat-gone! quality to it, as if all of space has stuttered three or four times in very rapid succession (about a quarter of a second or less for the whole thing) and disappeared…The suffering door aspect has to do with fundamental attachment, dropping attachment like a hot coal that we finally realized we were holding, really letting go, compassion, ultimate bodhicitta, the true love of God, being purged in the flames, renunciation, relinquishment, and feeling the fundamental queasy tension in the illusion of duality for just a bit longer than we ever would normally. The suffering door relates directly to ‘the mind’ releasing its fixation on the whole of relative reality and allowing the whole of it to fall away completely, meaning away from where we thought we were. It can also feel like all existence is suddenly ripped away from us. In this, as with the other doors, the mind followed a phenomenon to its final and complete disappearance and didn’t do the strange, blinking-out, glossing-over thing that it typically does regarding this gap between moments…[The no self door] relates to observing directly the collapse of the illusion of duality, the collapse of awareness into the intelligence or cognition of the perceived. It is a bit like staring back at yourself (or something intelligent regardless of whether it looks like you) with no one on this side to be stared at and then collapsing into that image. Sometimes there is just the collapse without any obvious image for those without strong visual tendencies.”
Ñana and Jhana Mind Map – Daniel Ingram: https://vimeo.com/69475208
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha – Daniel Ingram: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781911597100/
Within Buddhism there are many avenues for developing personal behavior, including the Brahmaviharas, loving-kindness meditations, and devotional practices based on imitation. Part of the practice is to learn these different lifestyles of what one considers a well trained master, and to emulate their qualities. The classical ten fetters that one is to be free from are 1. identity view, 2. doubt, 3. beliefs in rites and rituals, 4. sensual desire, 5. ill will, 6. having a desire to be reborn in the world, 7. having a desire to be reborn in celestial realms, 8. conceit over attainments, 9. restlessness, and 10. ignorance of dharmic reality. Through imitation, a devotional student, and even students who feel they’ve attained stream entry or more, they still remove confusion by relying on lists like these to see how the mind runs in its habits and to confirm if they’ve really achieved these personality changes. There is a danger of course with dogmatically following these lists and simulating their effect. The reality is that one would have to continually dip into Nirvana and repeatedly see fetters fall away naturally for a list like this to be authentic. Devotional types may be fine with following rules, but there will always be a tension related to suppression of desire and aversion.
The Fetters That Fall Away at Stream Entry – Ayya Santussika: https://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/67117/
Now that this series is complete, and each of the stations of the eightfold path intersect, this is a good time to look at what life is like with these practices and whether one wants to do them at all, or if one only wants to partly develop the practice. This is a religion from between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE. There are certain views that people had back then, and one of them was rebirth. A lot of what these practices are about is a sense that our emotions and clinging keep us tethered to future lives, and how we behave in this life will affect how good or bad it is in the next life. Like beliefs in Jesus Christ being the Son of God, when those beliefs are VERY strong and believed as if completely true and concrete, these premises lead to motivations towards practices. A stream-enterer, someone who has attained Nirvana for the 1st time, and then eventually an Arhant, who is without clinging, they all progressively move out of needing to be reincarnated precisely because the goal is to avoid future praise, blame, success, failure, gain and loss for infinity. Rob Burbea, when facing cancer himself, described this mentality and motivation…”It’s a whole body of teachings that are set within the cosmology of rebirth, and that human beings, like animals, etc., are just infinitely reborn, again and again and again, and awakening, liberation, arahantship is the ending of that cycle of saṃsāra, of being reborn again and again. You have to really imagine for a second – even if you don’t believe it – just imagine yourself in that cosmology. It’s not just a few births; it’s endless. Endless cancer, endless being murdered, endless losing of people you love, endless separation, endless betrayal in romance, endless your children dying, endless pestilence and plague. It just goes on and on and on, and then you get some good bits, and they go too. So the import of what awakening meant in that cosmology, it’s enormous…An arahant has ended rebirth; they’re no more reborn into that endless cycle of inevitable misery. A sotāpanna, a stream-enterer, is said to have a maximum of seven lives left. So in the context of that cosmology, to have just seven lives left is like, ‘Oh, thank goodness! I’m almost done. I’m almost out of this meaningless, endless cycle of dukkha and suffering.’ Nowadays, I don’t know what proportion of people actually buy into that whole cosmology, really, in that sense. And we live, most of us here – and I’m saying this as someone who’s dying of cancer – we live actually pretty comfortable lives. So we don’t have that whole sense of what they had before – no antibiotics, no painkillers, nothing like that…What does it mean then? For many people who have just put aside that whole rebirth thing, what does awakening, liberation, arahantship – what does that mean? What significance does it have? Relative to that sort of infinite dukkha, the infinite dukkha of endless rebirth in saṃsāra, if I say, ‘I’m seeking to live without suffering,’ how does it sound? How does it sound to you? If you have really a lot of suffering in your life, that’s going to be very attractive – ‘I’m seeking to live without suffering.’ If we turn it around and say, ‘My purpose in life is to be free of suffering,’ how does that sound? ‘I want to go through life without suffering.'”
Stream Entry – Rob Burbea: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jYqNGiiX2cmOppb0_ZESpraGgbsoP5ir/view?usp=sharing
What Rob was getting at is that a world with more comfort, modern medicine, modern palliative care, they may provide enough comfort for some people that being free of suffering may not be the main goal. A lot of what we want is what we don’t have. There are people who have no need for psychotherapy, they experienced little trauma, and their adult mental environment is resilient to criticism and bouts of low self-esteem. There’s also an element of love and beauty that many people would like to inhabit beyond unflappable equanimity. “One of my teachers from many years ago, I remember her saying in a talk – I can’t remember the context, but she said something like – ‘Well, if that’s liberation, you can keep it.’ In other words, she was relying on her own sense of what liberation should deliver, what the path should deliver. So a person says, ‘I’ve lost this fetter, I’ve lost that fetter,’ I’m looking at them, Narayan is looking at them, and I want you to have the same right. It’s your right to look at someone – of course you don’t know everything about a person – to look at them and say, ‘Do I want to live like that? Do I want to be like that? Do I want to be that kind of being?’ A person, they say this or that, and you hear this or that about them, but you look at them and you get a sense of them, you get a sense of their life. No one can take that right away from you. They might be in a tradition where they’re honoured and this and that. No one can take that right. And even with me, you can look at me and you could say, ‘Nyeh, I don’t want to be like Rob,’ you know? That’s absolutely your right. Or, conversely, you look at someone, and you say, ‘There’s something there, or somethings there, about the perfume of that existence, about the way they’re living, about what they emanate, how they relate to life. I want that. There’s something I want there.'”
Reflections from Narayan Liebenson: https://gaiahouse.co.uk/in-memory-nl/
Right Concentration – Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/FactorsforAwakening/Section0009.html
Paths to Liberation – Robert E. Buswell, Robert M. Gimello: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780824814175/
The Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path – Sangharakshita: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781899579815/
Maha Cattarisaka Sutta: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN117.html
Samadhi Sutta: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/AN/AN4_41.html
Contemplative Practice: https://psychreviews.org/category/contemplativepractice/