This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Vast Clarity; Samadhi (47) Calm and Clarity. 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.
Good morning and welcome. One of the invaluable characteristics of deepening meditation is no longer clinging to anything, no longer being preoccupied by anything in particular, including experiences we can have in meditation itself. For example, some people are preoccupied with getting concentrated, and so that’s the focus and what the mind is concerned with. But as the meditation goes deeper, there’s less and less clinging or preoccupation about anything.
It’s a little bit of a paradox that for deepening meditation, you can’t try too hard to have it happen, because then you’re focusing on something. When we get to the second Jhāna1, one of the characteristics is inner clarity. In my understanding, clarity is like when the fog has cleared. You can’t put your finger on where the clarity is, or take out your hand and grab it. Clarity is not something that can be grasped. Clarity is something that you allow, appreciate, and enjoy, but we don’t appropriate it. It’s not something that you can easily push away. You can close your eyes if the sky is clear and not see it, but the clear sky is not something you can push away or hold on to. It doesn’t lend itself to clinging. We might cling to the idea of a clear sky, but the experience of clarity that the clear sky provides is not something you can hold on to.
So in the second Jhāna, an inner clarity arises, and this sense that we’re settled in the moment, here and now, kind of resting or being with this inner clarity. Some people might feel it more as their body starts feeling very spacious. The body seems like there’s a lot of space in the body, and so there’s a kind of lifting of the fog, and much of the body from the inside out starts feeling like empty space. You don’t want to get too logical about that, but it’s the way that it’s experienced.
Then the mind starts getting very clear. Awareness is clear. For the mind, it’s a clarity that comes when thinking has reduced to a bare minimum. It’s like a vast open sky where maybe occasionally there’s a small cloud that drifts by. I was in the high Sierra some years ago, in the mountains, resting after having lunch, and the sky was completely blue. But it was a particular spot where the updrafts were happening in the mountains where we could see these little clouds form and dissolve. It was such a pleasure to sit there and watch them. From my point of view, the clouds arose out of nothing; they just manifested and then they disappeared into nothing. It was a real pleasure in the clarity of the great blue sky.
In the same way, thoughts can seem to just float in the vast clarity of the mind, the vast clarity of the body. The alternative to thinking a lot is this wonderful feeling of spaciousness or clarity. The mind becomes more and more clear. A mind that’s crowded with thoughts, with the cascade of one thought after the other, so that there are thoughts lined up, crowding in, ready to fill the space—there is no feeling of space. But in the second Jhāna, there’s lots of space in a very satisfying, tranquil, calm way. And it’s a spaciousness, a clarity that can’t be clung to. We can maybe cling to calm, but not with clarity.
So, assuming a meditation posture and gently closing the eyes.
Taking some slower and deeper breaths, and on the exhale, relaxing your body. As you exhale, relax and let the edges of your body dissolve. Soften into the surrounding air.
Letting your breathing return to normal. As you inhale, feel the sensations of your thinking mind. Maybe there’s pressure or agitation, a lot of energy, a feeling of activation. Maybe there’s tightness, constriction. Whatever might be in your thinking mind, as you exhale, soften without ambition. Like the thinking mind is a thinking muscle that relaxes as you exhale. The energy, the pressure to think, dissolves beyond the edges of thought, as if the edges of the cloud of thinking vanish in the clear sky around it.
Then, to center yourself on the grounding spot with breathing, the settling spot at the end of the exhale where the inhale begins. The sensations that are born as you inhale and spread through your body are moving through a vast space all around you. There’s a spaciousness, a space that is the container for all your inner experiences.
If you’re preoccupied by anything or have some certain emotions that are strong, it’s all okay. With the rhythm of breathing, breathe with the sense of preoccupation, the emotions, as if everything is dissolving into the space around itself. That everything is received by the clarity beyond the edges of your thoughts.
If you feel the pressure to think, the activation for thinking, if you feel it carefully, you might feel that within it there’s a desire to relax, to release. As you exhale, release your thinking, release the pressure. Allow for this desire to be fulfilled, the desire to not hold on to anything.
Allow there to be a settling spot deep in your body where breathing begins and ends, where that settling spot is at rest, is soft, relaxed, calm. And at the same time, a kind of peripheral awareness of clarity, of space all around everything. A clarity, a space that is more evident when there is no thinking. Even if it’s just for a few moments, stop thinking so you can feel clarity, spaciousness, as you breathe in the middle of it all.
Feeling whatever degree of calm, however small, there might be within you, breathe with the calm gently, softly. Let it radiate outward through your body, as if whatever calm is within is received in the space of clarity. Nothing to hold on to, nothing to be preoccupied with. Allowing calm to merge into the space of clarity, the clear sky of the mind.
And as we come to the end of this sitting, to allow your calm to spread out into the room. To let whatever inner peace you might feel, however small it is, whatever peace you can imagine, to allow it to spread into the world as you exhale. Perhaps one of the gifts you can give the world is your calm, is your peace. In a world that’s agitated, calm can be reassuring. In a world at war, peace can be settling. In a world where there is hate, love can be healing.
May we be medicine for this world by our calm, our peace, our love. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we contribute to that possibility.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to the second talk on the second Jhāna, the second absorption, the second state of deep samadhi2, immersive samadhi. It’s a state where the word “immersion” is particularly apt, where we feel like we’re immersed in a state of calm, clarity, and unity.
I’m going to read to you the standard description of this state from the ancient texts that I read yesterday.
With the stilling of applied and sustained attention, a practitioner enters and abides in the second Jhāna, consisting of joy and happiness born of samadhi, with inner clarity and unity of mind, free of initial and applied attention. The practitioner fills, pervades, saturates, and permeates this body with the joy and happiness born of samadhi, so no part of the body is not touched.
One of the great delights of this kind of deep concentration is it’s kind of like we have joy and happiness for no reason. Or to say it more accurately, it’s a joy and happiness that’s born from the samadhi, not from external conditions, not because wonderful things happen to us in the world, we get what we want, or we get pleasant experiences in the world. Rather, it’s not dependent on the world being any particular way, but it is dependent on being deeply settled. And deeply settled here means, among other things, that there’s a lot of calm, a lot of unity, a lot of settledness coming together just here. We’re not fragmented; we’re not divided among ourselves. There’s a feeling of being whole, and there’s almost no thinking.
For many people, this would seem impossible because of how incessant thinking can be. But thinking is an activated state. You can have a very friendly relationship with it; certainly, you don’t want to banish your thinking. It’s very unfortunate to have a negative relationship with your thinking. With time, through this practice, you become friends with your thoughts, and your thoughts can be your friend. But there is also a time where it becomes possible to relax deeply.
For people who like to listen to music, it can be quite lovely and wonderful. And it can be even more special sometimes when the music stops, and there can be a deep sense of stillness, of calm, of peace with the absence of the input. So much so that to have the music start again, even though it’s wonderful music, just seems like there’s too much input now, too much activity going on, and it was just better to be in this very simple, quiet, peaceful silence.
Maybe you have better metaphors for this than music. Some people, like me, like to walk a lot, but it’s also nice to stop walking and just sit. And then not get up to walk again can feel so content and happy, just sitting and being. The same way with thinking is that at some point, thinking can get so quiet that it almost seems to disappear, or it does disappear. Discursive thinking certainly stops, and in a sense, it’s replaced by clarity. The awareness is still present when there’s no thinking; awareness is not dependent on thinking. The ability to sense, to feel, to be conscious, to be aware is still there, but now it’s not filled with thoughts.
Because thoughts are kind of like the smog, thoughts are kind of like the waves on the ocean, on the sea, on the lake. And so when the waves stop, then the lake is clear. You can see to the bottom of the lake, perhaps. And it’s so amazingly enjoyable sometimes to look into the water of a very still lake where the water’s completely clear right down to the rocks below.
So, this is about beginning to appreciate the quieting of the mind, the stilling of the mind. You can’t do it easily and quickly if you’re just coming off a busy life to meditate. But as things get quieter, more settled in meditation, there comes a time where you kind of see you have a choice. You see that, “Oh, I can leave the thoughts alone. I don’t have to be involved in them. I can just let them fade away. I can trust the clarity, trust the calm, trust the place where there are no thoughts.” And this allows the calm to grow. If you’re still staying with something like the breathing, then there’s this wonderful delight, this joy, this happiness from being really settled, calm, unified.
The idea of becoming unified, in my mind, is kind of like all the different psychophysical systems inside of us are now working in harmony, flowing together. And that harmonious flow of our inner energy, our inner sense of being, can come with it a tremendous sense of joy and happiness, but one that has a peacefulness and calm associated with it.
So, I want to read the metaphor or the simile that the Buddha gives for the second Jhāna.
It is like a lake that has water welling up from the depths, like an underground spring, which has no water flowing in over the ground from the east, south, west, or north, and where the rain god does not occasionally supply it with water.
So this is a beautiful mountain lake basin, and there’s nothing coming in from the outside. This means that there’s no stimulus coming in. In the second Jhāna, we’re not really involved with hearing sounds. You could, in a sense, if it’s a loud sound maybe, but that’s not the orientation. You’re not oriented towards seeing, you’re not oriented towards smelling or tasting. So there’s not any input coming from the outside.
And the rain god doesn’t rain into the lake. I understand that to mean that if our thoughts are the rain, if the rain god floods us with thoughts, then we can drown in these thoughts that we have. But here, even the thought-maker, the rain-maker, is no longer creating thoughts to stimulate us and to agitate us. Those are also kind of coming from the outside; in a certain way, thoughts are an external input on this deep sense of being immersed in a lake.
Then, “the cool upwelling water”—cool, in India, a very hot climate, is refreshing and wonderful and delightful. Maybe a cool lake in northern England on a damp, foggy day doesn’t feel very inviting for people kind of steeped in the English language. In India, where they’re steeped with Indic languages, the word “cool” is a very welcome, very inspiring word.
So the cool upwelling water from this underwater spring would fill, pervade, saturate, and permeate the lake with cool water, so no part of the entire lake would not be touched with the water. So also a practitioner fills, pervades, saturates, and permeates this body with a joy and happiness born of concentration, born of samadhi, so that no part of the body is not touched.
So here, there’s a feeling of this vast clarity, of being in a wonderful pool of samadhi, a pool of goodness, a pool of calm, a pool of clarity, a pool of unity that feels like it has no boundaries but also feels completely contained in itself, without any input from the outside. And there’s a good energy coming, there’s a sense of joy or delight or happiness, well-being, that is flowing or tingling or radiating through the body. And that is what the clarity, the calm, is making room for. It allows the room for it, and allows that calm, that joy, and that happiness—sometimes it can feel stronger, like rapture and ecstasy—to fill the whole body, fill everything, so no part of your body is not touched by those good feelings, by that pleasure.
The main point I’m trying to make today is that when the time is right, to let the thinking mind become quiet. Let it become so quiet and still that you feel the remaining clarity, the remaining spaciousness and calm that the reduction of thinking provides. And then that clarity and that calm create more space for the joy and happiness, the sense of goodness, the sense of well-being, the sense of contentment, the sense of coziness, the sense of sweetness, the sense of beauty that can well up from a deep inner well. So, the welling up of joy and happiness, letting it spread through the body.
This hopefully gives you a feeling, a sense for the second Jhāna. And even if you don’t experience this in meditation, maybe this kind of talk is a little bit evocative, like poetry might be, that maybe touches something inspiring for you. So thank you, and we’ll continue tomorrow.