This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Entering and Abiding; Samadhi (42) Applied and Sustained Attention. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Welcome to this meditation session. To begin, assume a meditation posture that is supportive for you to feel an embodied connection to here and now. It’s not so much that you’re going to use your mind to direct yourself to be here now, but to start with the body. When you’re careful with your posture, this is the beginning of coming into the present with your body, as if your body is the very foundation, the beginning, the source for being here and now.
So, being a little careful with your posture, making small adjustments. You might sway back and forth, sideways, and even forward and back as a way of finding a midpoint for your sitting bones, your tailbone to hold your weight if you’re sitting upright. If you’re lying down, adjust a little bit, rock back and forth to adjust your shoulder blades so they’re a little bit more down your back. Those sitting maybe can sit a little straighter, bringing the spine between the shoulder blades.
There’s an art to closing your eyes, where you do that quite consciously, carefully attending to the eyes as you close the eyelids, and allowing the eyesight, the eyes, to rest. Closing the eyelids is a practice of beginning to turn your attention into the body so you can feel and sense the body more fully.
Closing the eyes, in a sense, what we’re interested in is the subjective experience of the body. If we live in our heads, in our thoughts, where we direct our attention to the body, the body becomes the object. But the body is a field of sensations. With the eyes closed, what we actually experience is this field of sensations, and they are just as much part of ourselves as a thought is. In some ways, maybe it’s more deeply who we are because all the sensations of the body are connected to a deep mental field of understanding, responding, feeling that, in a certain way, is the foundation for how we understand ourselves. So, not to hold yourself apart from the body, be here in the body. Be your body for a few minutes.
And as you exhale, soften the body, relaxing the body. As the body softens and relaxes, it can have a nice effect on the mind. Maybe the mind begins to relax. Feeling your body more fully as you inhale, releasing into your body as you exhale.
Then, centering yourself on your breathing. In a certain way, breathing is at the nexus, the crossroads of almost everything that goes on in your body. Breathing adjusts and changes depending on our emotions, level of agitation, or energy. And as we relax and settle and get calmer, the breath slows down, the heartbeat slows down, stress hormones in our body reduce. Centering yourself on your breathing.
At the end of the exhale, take a moment to pause. Don’t breathe in right away. Pause just long enough to feel where, deep inside, is the urge, the original urge to breathe in. And as soon as you feel that, then allow yourself to inhale, starting from that place where the original urge, the first urge, the deepest urge is. And follow the inhale calmly, relaxedly. Accompany the whole length of your inhale.
Let there be a short pause at the top of the inhale. Becoming quiet in your mind so you can better feel the urge to exhale, and then release the exhale. Relax with the exhale. Accompany the whole length of the exhale.
Feeling the whole sensations of breathing in and breathing out continuously allows the influence of awareness, the influence of feeling and sensing, to spread beyond the edges of the sensations of breathing.
Letting the thinking mind quiet during the transition from breathing out to breathing in, and for the thinking mind to become quieter in the change from breathing in to out, out to in.
And then, a small image, a metaphor for focusing on breathing: imagine you’re going to thread a needle, and you want to do so on the first attempt. On the inhale, you line up the thread and the hole of the needle, and you allow yourself to be very, very still and quiet, so everything is quiet, still. And then, on the exhale, it’s like you focus on the exhale, the sensations of exhale, very carefully and precisely, as if you’re threading the needle. But again, letting the thinking mind become quiet so you can be fully there for this delicate and precise act of threading the exhale, being right there to the end.
Threading the eye of the needle by sensing, feeling the whole length of breathing out, preparing to do it by feeling the whole length of the breathing in. Quieting the thinking mind. You don’t have to stop thinking, but let thinking become quieter, calmer.
The eye of the needle that you’re focused on is whatever is pleasurable, whatever pleasant sensations there are related to breathing. Maybe it’s a generalized sense of pleasure, well-being, goodness, sweetness around the edges of breathing. Feeling that as you breathe in, and in its precise way, pass your awareness through the eye of the needle of pleasure, of well-being, as you exhale, as if you’re entering.
Gently, calmly, with a loving dedication, enter into your breathing, the pleasure, the well-being of breathing, and abide there. Rest there over and over again. Gently, with each inhale and exhale, enter and abide.
Whatever sensations of pleasure or joy, well-being are here as you meditate, enter into the subjective feeling of that, as if that’s who you are more than your thoughts and ideas. And as you breathe, feel it. As you breathe in, enter it. As you exhale, rest in it. Like a gentle massage, entering and abiding.
When you come to the end of your exhale, pause for a brief moment until you feel the urge to breathe in. Give in to that urge, and as you breathe in, imagine that your field of awareness spreads outward through your body, beyond your body, out into this room you’re in, out across the lands. And that as you exhale, you’re abiding, resting in the middle of this wide field of awareness. Breathing in and entering the whole world with awareness, with your imagination, with your sense of spatial awareness. Entering a wide field as you breathe in, and abiding in it as you exhale, almost as a subjective field of becoming awareness that embraces the whole world.
And then, letting that wide field of awareness become a channel for your goodwill, for your care, your kindness. As if you’re able to nourish the whole world by the unseen ways in which our kindness travels through our speech, our actions, our thoughts.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And if nothing else, may this practice show me how I can free all beings from my own desires, aversions, and projections. Maybe we can start with that. May all beings be free.
Hello and welcome to this next talk on samādhi1. We have now reached the point of immersive samādhi, which the word in Pāli is jhāna2, j-h-a-n-a. There is some idea that the etymology of jhāna might be connected to the word for a flame. If that’s the case, then it’s a candle flame which is completely out of any kind of wind, and so the flame is completely still, but it’s luminous and dynamic. This luminosity and dynamism of samādhi that comes when things are really completely still. We’re kind of entering almost a kind of a stillness that has dynamism in it.
The full stillness is partly being fully in the present moment, fully just here. Think of it as fully in the subjective experience, not the subjective interpretation of this experience, not the subjective opinion about the experience, but the subjective sensations of it, the feelings, the direct experience of it. You know, you could watch someone go for a nice dip in a peaceful, quiet, safe lake, and you can just appreciate that they seem to be luxuriating in the cool lake on a day when it’s really hot, or a warm lake on a day when it’s cold. But it’s out there, it’s kind of objective. It’s very different to go into the lake oneself and feel how subjectively, “Ah, this is good.” The subjective experience comes with a feeling, “Ah, this is good. Now I’m here. This really feels nice.”
The feeling of niceness, of goodness, is very subjective and it’s very kind of embodied. It’s not a thought, it’s not an opinion, it’s not a conclusion. It’s something that’s deeper than that. That’s one of the reasons why to go into deep absorption, the thinking mind gets very, very quiet. Eventually, in deeper states of concentration, the thinking mind, especially the discursive thinking mind, seems to stop entirely or almost entirely.
But to go into the first jhāna, what stops is discursive thinking. There’s no more telling stories, no more coming to conclusions and having opinions. There’s no more thoughts about the past and the future. These are all the story-making mind, the discursive mind. That level of the mind, which takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of abstraction and ideas and bringing them together into a story, into a conversation—that becomes quiet.
What happens instead is there might be still very simple thinking, but it’s thinking just about being here. It’s almost like we’re telling ourselves, “Oh good, stay here. Oh, this is good.” At some point, there’s this transition where the ordinary discursive mind becomes quiet. Sometimes that can happen kind of quickly, kind of suddenly. We feel something shifts or changes or turns upside down or settles in the mind, and now the discursive mind is no longer there. Sometimes it’s some inner feeling of arriving, boom, we’re here. And there’s no doubt about it. Then the mind doesn’t want to wander off. We’ve entered and abided in the first jhāna.
This arrival here is still dynamic in some ways. The important qualities that are present are something called vitakka and vicāra3, which, as we’ve talked about earlier, has to do with one way of understanding it: applied attention and sustained attention. Entering and abiding. Applying, like, “stay right here.” It’s kind of like the movement you do with kneading water into flour, massaging something. It’s the movement of a bird that’s lifting itself up off the ground by gently, maybe a very big bird, flapping its wings calmly and fully, powerfully. It needs to do that flapping, it needs to lift and push down. There is a kind of connecting and sustaining, a kind of placing yourself on the slide and then sliding down, placing yourself in the waves and being carried by the wave. Kind of entering into and then abiding there.
So there is a very gentle, and if there’s any thinking involved, it’s the thought of, “stay here, go here, be here.” Some people think that these two qualities are a little bit more thoughtful, with thoughts that are a little bit more evaluating. It’s more like, “Oh yeah, here, this is where to be. Ah, this is good, this feels nice.” It’s kind of like we’re really getting close and into this experience of samādhi and kind of becoming, without trying to attain anything, get anything, just a very gentle kind of being present, feeling it.
One analogy is like taking a cloth to polish a brass bowl, a bronze bowl, and then touching it and then gently kind of rubbing it. The ancient analogy is that of a bee that comes to the edge of a flower and then walks around the top of the flower looking for the nectar, kind of getting to know it or just flying around it. So connecting or being and circling around, stay here, enter and abide.
In particular, what supports this is the joy, the thrill, the goodness, the pleasure, the pleasantness, something that we enjoy about the meditation itself. And sometimes in this initial jhāna, that enjoyment, the joy, the pleasure, is kind of dynamic. It feels a little bit like the flame that is completely still, but still there’s a kind of movement inside the flame, of the heat. And so there is this kind of feeling of this applied and sustaining. It’s a little bit like blowing on the flames sometimes, like a bellow, where you’re blowing and the flame gets stronger, then you stop blowing and it gets quieter. There’s a kind of dynamic relationship between now staying there with the experience, staying with the pleasure, and the pleasure kind of gets a little bit stronger or fuller because we feel it, we sense it, we make room for it.
And as that happens, what’s very useful to do, and maybe even important to do, is to let that pleasure, let the joy, spread through your body. Some people in these jhānas are a little tight or a little bit concentrating too hard. There’s a kind of narrowness of focus, a one-pointedness of focus that the mind has gotten tight, and maybe even the eyes have gotten tight a little bit. Something’s often kind of contracted, and then the ability for the body to be unified and whole and for things to flow through it gets limited. It can feel like some of this dynamism of the good energy is blocked and gets stuck someplace. For some people, it’s in the forehead; there can be a kind of a tightness and tingling that’s quite strong. Sometimes it’s in the spine, sometimes it’s other places. The idea is to keep softening, keep letting it spread. Just gently, this shouldn’t be a project, so don’t be looking to do anything or make anything happen. But there’s an art to just kind of being with it, entering and abiding, connecting and sustaining. And this abiding, this resting, is what spreads it out.
It’s kind of maybe like you are blowing on a flame, the flame gets larger, and you feel the warmth spread further out into your body. And that warmth spreads because it’s warm, not because you’re making it spread. It’s a wonderful world. It’s maybe a little bit unimaginable for people who don’t get close into this state, that this is what’s going on, but it feels really right. You can feel, as we enter into this first jhāna, that the alternative of coming out of it and getting back involved with the usual preoccupations, with the usual hindrances of the mind—desire and aversion, doubts, anxieties—that’s not as healthy or as good or as satisfying or as meaningful as really being here fully. It’s like now we’ve entered our life in a complete way. There’s a sense of vitality or aliveness or goodness or, you know, this is satisfying.
So, we can’t wish ourselves into this exactly, we can’t force ourselves into it. But if we sit with sincerity, then from time to time, this is what we begin dropping into. The instructions here are not meant so that now you’re able to actually do this, but hopefully they give you a feeling for it, a sense of it. It’s kind of showing you the landmarks of what’s up ahead. And then if you come to that place, you see the landmarks and say, “Oh, now I know where I am. This is a good thing.” And it may be easier to be here. There are not a few people who drop into the first jhāna and they get so excited they pop out. They come out and say, “Wow, this is really great!” So, stay calm. Enter and abide in the deep calm and peace of being immersed in this here and now practice.
Thank you very much, and we’ll continue talking a little bit more about the first jhāna for the rest of this week. Thank you.
Samādhi: A Pāli word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, where the mind becomes still and unified. ↩
Jhāna: A Pāli term for a state of deep meditative absorption. There are traditionally eight jhānas, each representing a deeper level of concentration. ↩
Vitakka and Vicāra: Pāli terms that are key factors in the first jhāna. Vitakka is often translated as “applied thought” or “initial application” of the mind onto the meditation object. Vicāra is translated as “sustained thought” or “sustained attention,” the act of keeping the mind connected with the object. The original transcript said “vaka and vichara.” ↩