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+ | ====== Jhana Not by the Numbers ====== | ||
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+ | Summary: | ||
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+ | When I first went to study with my teacher, Ajaan Fuang, he handed me a small booklet of meditation instructions and sent me up the hill behind the monastery to meditate. The booklet — written by his teacher, Ajaan Lee — began with a breath meditation technique and concluded with a section showing how the technique was used to induce the first four levels of jhana. | ||
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+ | In the following years, I saw Ajaan Fuang hand the same booklet to each of his new students, lay and ordained. Yet despite the booklet' | ||
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+ | As were the implicit reasons for his attitude. He had told me once about his own experiences as a young meditator: "Back in those days you didn't have books explaining everything the way we do now. When I first studied with Ajaan Lee, he told me to bring my mind down. So I focused on getting it down, down, down, but the more I brought it down, the heavily and duller it got. I thought, 'This can't be right.' | ||
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+ | So as a teacher, he tried to instill in his students these qualities of self-reliance, | ||
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+ | So, studying with him, I had to learn to take risks in the midst of uncertainties. If something interesting came up in the practice, I'd have to stick with it, observing it over time, before reaching any conclusions about it. Even then, I learned, the labels I applied to my experiences couldn' | ||
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+ | Still, Ajaan Fuang didn't leave me to reinvent the dharma wheel totally on my own. Experience had shown him that some approaches to concentration worked better than others for putting the mind in a position where it could exercise its ingenuity and accurately judge the results of its experiments, | ||
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+ | //Strong concentration is absolutely necessary for liberating insight. //" | ||
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+ | //To gain insight into a state of concentration, | ||
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+ | //The best state of concentration for the sake of developing all-around insight is one that encompasses a whole-body awareness.// | ||
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+ | The second state was one I happened to hit one night when my concentration was extremely one-pointed, | ||
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+ | After hitting this state several nights in a row, I told Ajaan Fuang about it, and his first question was, "Do you like it?" My answer was " | ||
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+ | In both these states of wrong concentration, | ||
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+ | //An ideal state of concentration for giving rise to insight is one that you can analyze in terms of stress and the absence of stress even while you're in it.// Once your mind was firmly established in a state of concentration, | ||
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+ | This was why, as long as your awareness was still and alert all-around, it didn't matter whether you were in the first or the fourteenth jhana, for the way you treated your state of concentration was always the same. By directing your attention to issues of stress and its absence, he was pointing you to terms by which to evaluate your state of mind for yourself, without having to ask any outside authority. And, as it turns out, the terms you can evaluate for yourself | ||
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