This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Non-Discursive Calm; Samadhi (46) Intro to Second Jhana. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Unknown at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning and welcome. To begin with the meditation, one of the really useful things to notice to support dipping into samādhi1 is the way that the discursive mind—the mind that thinks a lot, thinks about things, has conversations, talking about things in the mind, living in images and visions of what the mind can produce—the way that that keeps us kind of separated from the body. It keeps us in a part of the brain-mind that’s activated, more energized in a way that is not usually so relaxing or calm. We’re living in our thoughts and living in the activated energy that keeps discursive thinking going, rather than settling deeply in.
Discursive thoughts can be mesmerizing, they can be captivating, they can have a kind of authority, like, “This is really important to be thinking about.” Our sense of self, of who we are, is often closely, maybe unconsciously, but closely connected or associated with the mind that’s having discursive thoughts, partly because a lot of the discursive thoughts have to do about me, myself, and I.
So what we’re learning to do in meditation, especially samādhi, is to become attuned, aligned with something different than that—a place that’s maybe deep inside, maybe in the torso, in the chest, or in the belly, where there’s a feeling of settling, a feeling of being more grounded and connected to ourselves.
One way to move into this more grounded, connected, embodied sense, rather than a kind of disembodied version of the preoccupations we have, is to start feeling whatever degree of well-being there is in the body. Of course, there’s a lot of feeling of distress, feeling of discomfort, emotional challenges. There are a lot of ways that we feel the opposite of well-being that we then prioritize. But not to ignore it, not to deny it, not to betray our unhappiness in any kind of way, but to care for it deeply. It can be very helpful to not focus on it directly, to let it just be there as part of the atmosphere, part of the weather in a sense. And for somebody to begin feeling even the ways that you sense well-being in the torso, in the body. That can be a sense of calm. Even if it’s just like 2% calm next to 98% turmoil, allow the turmoil to be. Don’t stir it up even more. Attune yourself to the calm.
Or there might be a feeling of settledness, or a place of settling that’s in the torso, in the body, that’s not in the mind that has all this discursive thinking. Settle with the settling. Calm yourself with the calm. And there also might be a feeling of satisfaction or contentment, or joy, delight, or some kind of feeling that’s pleasant, a kind of pleasure in being embodied in the body instead of activated in the activated thinking.
So, assume a meditation posture. And as I like to say, no matter what the posture—sitting, standing, lying down—to give some care to how the body is positioned as a beginning of entering into an embodied connection to yourself. To support this turning inward into the pleasure, the goodness, the calm in the body, gently close your eyes.
To begin connecting to your body, coming into your body more, take some fuller breaths, deeper and fuller in a comfortable way, but fuller and deeper enough that you’re intentionally connecting and engaging the ribs, the diaphragm, the breathing in the torso. Feeling as you breathe in, the expansion of the torso. And then see, as you exhale, if you can slow the exhale just a little bit, so it’s still comfortable to exhale. Slow it and extend it longer. Letting there be a feeling of fullness as you breathe in, like a full balloon, and then a releasing, relaxing as you exhale, as the balloon lets out the air, it gets smaller, comes together.
Breathing in, relaxing as you exhale. And then letting the breathing return to normal. But feel now the more subtle way in which there’s expansion as you breathe in, and a releasing, relaxing as you exhale.
As you come to the end of the exhale, let there be a small, maybe even infinitesimal pause. And in that short pause, feel whatever sense of stillness or calm pleasure there is in your body, maybe connected to breathing.
As you breathe in and out, see if you can drop down into your body, out of the discursive thinking mind, like you’re lowering yourself into a very pleasant pool of water. And feel whatever is pleasant, whatever pleasure, well-being, calm, settledness you can find in your body, your torso that’s breathing. As you breathe in, as if the expansion, the breathing in, is breathing through or with or into the calm and the pleasure, however small. As you exhale, see if you’re exhaling into that calmer groundedness, settleness.
Feeling the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. Letting your awareness stay connected to breathing, riding on the breathing. So there’s a sense that awareness is being massaged, or awareness is doing the massage. Breathing in and breathing out. As you exhale, letting go of your thoughts, thinking, so there’s more room in your awareness to feel the pleasure, the calm that might be here.
If you find yourself having discursive thoughts, conversations, see if you can feel how unsatisfying it is for the body to have this form of thinking. How there’s a more energized, activated kind of a pulling away from the body. And how more satisfying it is for the body to be settled, for awareness to be settled in the body, breathing.
Taking a few moments to feel whatever it is that might be pleasant, comfortable in your body. Whatever might be more settled, maybe deeper than any ways in which you feel uncomfortable. Deeper within than any place that you could be having discursive thoughts. Finding the place where breathing, the influence of breathing, the atmosphere of breathing is pleasant, enjoyable. Maybe as there’s a sweetness or a glow in your body which offers the atmosphere in which the breathing body expands and contracts.
For a very short time, maybe only 20-30 seconds, entrust yourself to that which is calm or settled in your body. No matter how small, give yourself over to it. Breathe with it.
And also spend a few seconds letting your thinking mind become quiet. The kind of quiet you might do if you were going to listen to a faint sound far in the distance. Let your thinking mind become quiet to listen to, to feel the most subtle feelings of contentment, tranquility.
And then as we come to the end of this meditation, imagine that your tranquility, your settledness, your calm can radiate from you out into the world. That to some degree it radiates beyond the edges of your body into the room where you’re at, the place you’re in. Almost as if whatever empty space is around you receives your calm, your well-being. And whatever feeling of settledness or calm you have, it can spread outward beyond the building you’re in, beyond the neighborhood you’re in, just going outwards and outwards. And on that can ride your well-wishing for this world.
May your care and love and well-wishing for the world be carried on the wide glow of goodwill and kindness.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
And may how we are settled in ourselves, tranquil in ourselves, be the way that our goodwill can be with us as we encounter others. May all beings be happy.
Hello and welcome to this continuation of our samādhi series. We’ve had a break for a week, and so I hope that the meditation today was a little bit of getting you back into the flow of what we’ve been doing these last months. For the topic of this week, the focus will be on the second jhāna2. The last week I was here, I discussed the first jhāna, and the second jhāna is a deeper form of well-being, a deeper form of pleasure and joy and happiness.
One of the characteristics of it is that it is a sense of well-being, joy, and happiness—pīti3 and sukha4—that’s born of concentration, born of samādhi. In the first jhāna, the joy and the happiness that’s there is born from seclusion, from being separated from the preoccupations and concerns of our everyday life; and even more importantly, being separated from unwholesome thinking, from being caught up in the hindrances of greed or ill will, a rigid, dull mind, restlessness and regrets, or doubt. There’s this delight and joy and happiness when we’re no longer caught in the unwholesome, no longer caught up in the difficulties of the mind.
What’s fueling the first jhāna sense is vitakka and vicāra5, two of the jhānic factors—this massage of applied attention and sustained attention. So there is some intentionality, there is some giving ourselves over to the meditation in the first jhāna, and this joy of, “Finally, I’m here. Oh, it’s so good to be present. I’ve been so distracted, so caught up in my mind and my thoughts and preoccupations. Ah, this is good.” But in order to stay there, there is a kind of gentle massage of applying and staying, applying and staying.
In the second jhāna, the need to kind of keep applying and sustaining attention is no longer there. Certainly, the applying—coming back and connecting again, connecting again—is no longer needed. And also, the little movement of the mind to stay, to ride, to be here, that has a little bit of intentionality involved, is also not needed because now we’re settled. We’re kind of rooted here. We’ve arrived, and the mind is not going to wander off. In the first jhāna, there can still be some thinking, mostly thinking about the meditation, and the thinking is all wholesome. There’s nothing unwholesome about it; it all helps us to get connected and be in the practice. In the second jhāna, there’s no real need for thinking anymore, and the mind now has a lot of space, a lot of quiet. Some thoughts might arise, but there’s hardly anything to pull us away, or we don’t get caught in them or involved in them. There can be mostly a feeling of a lot of empty space, beautiful space, clarity in the mind.
So I want to read to you the classic description of this second jhāna:
With the stilling of applied and sustained attention, a practitioner enters and abides in the second jhāna, consisting of joy and happiness born of concentration, born of samādhi, with calm inner clarity and unity of mind, free of applied and sustained attention, free of thinking and examination.
So now there’s almost no thinking, and so it’s characterized by an inner clarity. Sometimes the word that’s translated as clarity is translated as assurance, sometimes as confidence, but one of the meanings can be clarity, the brightness. For me, this represents the quiet of the mind where thinking has just about stopped. Because there’s so little thinking, certainly no discursive thoughts anymore or no conversations within our inner mind, it feels like awareness, the mind, has a lot of space, a lot of clarity. Like the fog has lifted, the smog has gone away, and we can see across the vast terrain, see the mountains in the distance because of the clarity.
This is what I said earlier: one of the characteristics of the second jhāna is there’s a real switch now that we’re really here, we’re settled. It feels like we’ve really arrived. We’re not easily slipping off. With the first jhāna, it’s very hard to feel established too, but there is a kind of intentionality of staying there: stay here, be here, stay here, and ride along. With the first jhāna, this is where some people get in trouble because there’s a little bit of intentionality involved, this applied and sustained attention, that if there’s still some striving, some pushing, some trying, a kind of tightening down, people are sometimes pushing it a little bit. So the joy and the happiness that can arise sometimes gets pumped up and gets to be too much, or gets pumped into some particular bottleneck in the body, and some energy can build up there too much. There’s a lot to do with striving, and striving itself is a tightening. Something gets tightened when we strive, and so the energy of the joy and the happiness gets somehow compressed or blocked or interfered with.
In the second jhāna, the joy and the happiness can get strong, and more likely it gets even stronger than in the first. But now, it’s much less likely to go awry, much less likely to be too intense or too tight or too strainful or get bottlenecked or blocked, because now the intentionality of staying there—we’re not pumping it up anymore. We’re not blowing on the flame to let it become stronger. We’re just allowing things to be there.
In fact, I’ll talk more about this tomorrow, the metaphor or the simile for the second jhāna has to do with floating in a very peaceful, quiet, clear lake that is very comfortable and very clear. The water is somewhat still, but there is this gentle movement of an underground spring that refreshes us. So the feeling here is there’s still some movement. When it’s too intense in the first jhāna, there’s a lot of movement almost of the joy and the pīti. In the second, there’s still this movement, but it feels refreshing, it feels delightful, and it has no obstacles to it. This idea that this underwater spring in the lake just has no obstacles as the refreshing water spreads through the body. I’ll talk more about this tomorrow.
One of the lessons of this second jhāna is to be able to start seeing clearly the difference between being really dipped into the pool of water, dipped into the samādhi, versus coming out of it into the thinking mind. And how discursive thought, conversational thinking, puts us—as fascinating and pleasurable as some of those can be—in a kind of disconnect with ourselves, a disconnect with the wholeness of who we are, the fullness of us that’s embodied and present here. Part of the movement towards this deeper settling of samādhi is to learn how to relax the thinking mind and trust this deeper place of well-being, of settledness, of calmness in the body with the breathing. And so that the thinking mind is not reinforcing some of the unwholesome tendencies of mind. The thinking mind is not repeating itself over and over again, the same stories and ideas that keep us disconnected from the possibility of a deep kind of inner settledness, a deep kind of place of being calm, a deep place of just being happy to be alive, happy to be present for this moment as it is, independent of the concerns about the world around us. It’s not a turning away from the world in a resisting way or escaping way. It’s a way of starting to cleanse ourselves deeply so that we can come back into the world in a much better space, a much better way.
So we’ll go through these different aspects of the second jhāna this week. I’m not expecting you to be dipping into the second jhāna. Some of you might be familiar with it already, but some of the individual characteristics of the second jhāna can be present in even lighter states of meditation. Becoming familiar with them can give you a new orientation for ordinary meditation because you can start feeling these qualities and characteristics are present in a subtle way, in a way that maybe you ignored before or never knew to pay attention to. And the more you start feeling these wholesome, beneficial qualities within, the more engaging it is to meditate and dip into this inner world of meditation.
So thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing tomorrow.
Samādhi: A Pāli word for a state of meditative consciousness, often translated as “concentration” or “unification of mind.” It is a state of deep calm and focus. ↩
Jhāna: A Pāli word referring to a state of deep meditative absorption. There are traditionally eight jhānas, each representing a deeper level of concentration and tranquility. ↩
Pīti: A Pāli word often translated as “joy,” “rapture,” or “bliss.” It is a factor of enlightenment and one of the five jhānic factors. ↩
Sukha: A Pāli word meaning “happiness,” “ease,” or “pleasure,” as opposed to “dukkha” (suffering). It is also one of the five jhānic factors. ↩
Vitakka and Vicāra: Pāli terms that are factors of the first jhāna. Vitakka is often translated as “applied thought” or “initial application of mind,” while vicāra is “sustained thought” or “sustained application.” They represent the mind’s initial and continued engagement with the meditation object. ↩