This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Calm, Clarity, and Unity; Samadhi (48) Wholeness. 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.
Hello everyone, and welcome to our meditation. As we go into exploring or considering the second jhāna1, one of the features or characteristics of it is an experience of unity or unification. The word is ekodi2, which can be loosely described as weaving into one, bringing everything into a oneness of sorts. It’s a feeling of inclusion, that everything is included in such a way that we’re not apart from anything, and nothing is apart from us. In a certain way, everything becomes subject; there’s no object for the experience.
What’s operating here is experience. Logic, understanding, and common sense can give us a subject-object distinction. There are things we focus on which are objects, and that’s part of normal consciousness. But we experience the world very differently in very deep meditation. This is not meant to be a metaphysical statement or provide us with philosophical truths about stuff; it’s just the nature of experience. If you’re absorbed in reading a good book, you could say you become one with it. You’re so fully in it that the book is not an object; the letters are not objects out there. You’re in the story; there’s a unification with the story in a sense.
This kind of not holding ourselves apart from anything, not resisting anything, not judging it, not trying to make something happen that’s different than what’s happening—a kind of becoming one, a kind of becoming whole. I like the word “whole” quite a bit. It’s a subjective sense of wholeness where nothing is excluded. It’s quieting the mind enough that the activity of the mind that objectifies—the thinking, the way the mind operates that has a “there” and a “here,” that has “that” and “this,” that has “me” and “mine,” my breath versus just being breathing—settles. “My body” is an objectification of the body; just being the body is closer to it all being subject.
Now, this is not something we have to do as an objective thing. It’s something that we settle into, we relax into, as we get more and more absorbed, immersed, centered, and settled in our present moment experience. This is the world that we swim in in the second jhāna. I use the word “swim” intentionally because floating is the metaphor for the second jhāna.
So, to assume a meditation posture and to gently close your eyes.
With your eyes closed, give some care to your posture—not as an objective thing from the mind thinking about what a good posture is, but from a subjective sense of being inside the posture. Feel what would be nice, what would be a nice adjustment, almost as if asking, “What does the body want?” It might be very different than the ideal, the instructions you’ve had. What posture does your body want to have in order to be centered and alert in the meditation?
The body, in a sense, wants to breathe. It will breathe without your thinking about it or directing it. The body just breathes.
Can you now sense and feel the way that the body wants to breathe? Whatever way that is, putting aside ideals of how it should be, just allow the breathing to breathe itself in whatever way it happens to be breathing.
And within the experience of breathing, what is it in that experience, in those sensations, that wants to be known, wants to be felt? What is it in breathing that reveals itself to a mind which is present and clear?
Experiencing your breathing within the wider field of your body’s sensations. Is there anything in your body that wants to relax as you exhale? Don’t “do” relaxing, but let there be an open allowing for relaxing or softening.
And might there be somewhere in the body, in the experience of breathing, a center point for breathing? A center of gravity, the beginning point of the inhale. And in that center point of breathing, is there any feeling of calm, however weak, however brief? Let yourself touch into the calmness of breathing.
And as if the calmness of breathing is like a soft pillow for your head, allow your thinking mind to relax and settle into whatever inner tranquility there is. No need to be thinking. The gift to the mind is to let the thinking mind rest.
And together with the calmness that’s here, might there be some experience of clarity? The clarity, however brief, however small, of awareness that’s in between your thoughts, beyond the edges of your thoughts, maybe at the center of your mind, that makes more room to receive the experience of breathing.
To have this sense of yourself as the experiencer, the subject of objects of experience, is to hold yourself apart. There’s a little bit of work, of effort, in the mind to create the subject-object distinction. That interferes with everything being subject, interferes with a oneness, a unity, a wholeness.
And whatever sense of wholeness there might be, could it be permeated with tranquility, with calm? Could the very atmosphere in which it exists be clear?
And breathing, intimately part, intimately continuous with calm, clarity, and unity. Breathing in and breathing out.
Relaxing the mind, the thinking mind, and relaxing into the middle of your experience. Becoming your experience of breathing, becoming the calm, the clarity.
Like someone floating on the surface of a lake, forgetting all concerns and becoming one with the lake, unified in the floating—relaxed, tranquil, clear.
We can be floating in the middle of our experience and be so absorbed in it, so centered in it. On one hand, we’re not aware of the world beyond our body. On the other hand, we’re completely open to the wider world. The experience of unity, of wholeness, where the boundaries of our body, the boundaries of our sense of self, dissolve, so all things are included in our hearts—a heart which is relaxed, tranquil, clear, whole, undisturbed, radiating out warmth and kindness, care and love. Like a heater that’s undisturbed by the cold around it but which radiates out warmth into the wider world without reservation, without a boundary to that warmth.
So may our kindness, our love, our compassion, our heart’s care for this world radiate from us peacefully, calmly, letting everything exist within a calm home. So that the deeper, non-anxious, the deeper non-self-preoccupied attitudes of love and care and goodwill can flow from us into the world.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. And may all beings be free. And may we experience each of these things for ourselves, so that we can better wish it for others.
May all beings be happy. Thank you.
Welcome to this third talk on the second jhāna. It takes a lot of settledness, it takes a lot of capacity to be at ease, to have let go of so much of our preoccupations and agitation. It takes so much healing and settling to come into the wholeness that allows for the second jhāna.
One of the things that can get in the way of it is a mistrust of it, somehow a feeling that if we drop into these deep states of meditation, it’s a betrayal of the world around us. We won’t be able to take care of this world, of others. Somehow we won’t be able to take care of ourselves. Sometimes what happens is that people are quick to judge these deep meditation states in a particular way. They judge them as if this is the true way of being, like, “Once I go into this, I have to be this way all the time.” That somehow, if I tap into this, I won’t be able to function in my ordinary life. So there’s a resistance, there’s a reluctance, there’s a fear that I won’t be able to be an acceptable person or a caring person or a responsible person.
This is unfortunate. But what helps is to understand that these are temporary states that are cleansing, that clean us, that provide us a deep sense of wholeness, satisfaction, peace, and well-being. It isn’t that we come back into the world with all the qualities and characteristics of these deep states, but we do come back refreshed. We do come back more connected, more grounded, more calm. We do come back more able to connect to people and to our responsibilities in a wise way, in a good way, rather than being anxious, rather than being ambitious or full of our preoccupations.
So it’s not a betrayal of life to go into these deep states, any more than it’s a betrayal of life to sit down to have a glass of water when you’re thirsty. When you’re just drinking water, you’re not talking, you’re not caring for someone else, you’re not doing other things for people, you’re not taking care of your worldly responsibilities. You’re allowed to sit there and just drink your water. And doing so makes you so much better able to engage in the world in a good way. If we’re parched, things don’t go so well.
So, to be able to trust this process. When people finally come into the second jhāna, there’s a kind of confidence and trust in it, partly because it just feels so right, so good. And there’s so little required from us. In the first jhāna, there’s still something required from us: this ongoing movement of applying and sustaining the attention, the kneading, the massaging of attention on the experience and the breathing—just be there, come back, stay. But in the second jhāna, those kinds of intentional efforts to be and stay, to come back and stay here, come to a rest.
If the analogy of the scooter makes sense for you that I’ve used a few times: on flat ground, you might need to push on the scooter every once in a while to keep the momentum going. But if it’s a little bit of a slope you’re going down, maybe you don’t have to kick off so often. When the slope gets a little bit steeper, you don’t have to push off anymore. Now we can just rest and keep yourself centered, keep yourself focused on staying going down the hill, but the legs don’t have to work. The legs can rest, and both legs can be on the platform of the scooter.
In the second jhāna, we’re kind of like that now. We don’t have to make any effort anymore. And so there’s a deep feeling of, “Ah, I’ve arrived. I’m at rest. I’m just here.” One of the characteristics of this is a sense of unity or unification or wholeness. There’s a variety of words that come into play with samādhi3 that can mean unification. Some people will say that even the word samādhi means “to gather together, to unify.” Ekaggatā4, a word that’s sometimes translated as “one-pointedness,” can also mean a coming into one. And this ekodi also has the word eka in it, meaning “one.”
Many years ago, I read that the odi of ekodi can mean “to weave.” I love the idea of weaving together, weaving into one, into a whole. Sometimes when I’ve meditated, I’ve imagined that the breathing is like the warp and weft of a weaving. And I’m just gently, with the weft, moving through the strings of the warp and weaving things together with the breath. That’s kept me nicely engaged, because sometimes a little bit of an image, a little bit of imagination, adds a kind of engagement or interest that helps me to get concentrated. And then at some point, I let go of the imagination because it’s no longer needed for that.
So, weaving together into a whole. I love the word “wholeness” more than “unity” or “unification,” because somehow unity or unification seems a little bit more complicated in my mind. But wholeness just seems to hold everything. It’s like all things are included in a harmonious way; all things have a space, with no outside.
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate as being, for me, one of the most sacred things is the awareness that is whole, the awareness that has no outside. There’s nothing which is intentionally excluded or treated as unacceptable in the wholeness of awareness. And this inclusion of everything—the good, bad, and the ugly—is not a condoning or approval of anything, except the idea that it’s possible to hold everything in a tranquil, clear, and unified heart-mind. In doing so, we’re not making the situation worse.
From the point of view of deep meditation, to start living in the world where there’s an object and a subject—”that thought is unacceptable, I don’t like that thought, that thought has to go,” even “I have to let go of that thought”—all of that is the mind being activated. Oddly enough, it’s work for the mind to have those thoughts. In an ordinary mind, it doesn’t feel like work; it just seems like what’s happening. But in deep meditation, we start seeing that that kind of activity is a work or strain; it has a kind of coarseness to it. It’s kind of unsatisfying for the mind to be involved in making a subject and object distinction. The alternative is everything becomes subject, or as some people would say, everything becomes object and there’s no subject. But maybe these two things come to the same thing.
This allows the mind to become quieter and more settled. So there are these five different characteristics that are primary in the second jhāna. There is a calm, and this calm has no boundaries, no edges. It feels a little bit more like it’s the atmosphere. There is a clarity; the mind is clear, the heart’s clear. There’s a clarity within which all things are occurring, and it’s called inner clarity. And then there’s a oneness or a wholeness or unity that is experienced with it all, without this subject-object distinction. Those are the first three.
And then the last two, which we’ll talk about a little bit more tomorrow, are the joy and happiness born from concentration. So even though there’s not exactly a subject-object distinction, there’s still, in a way (please forgive me), the object of concentration. There’s the center, there’s a place where the whole is centered on. And if it’s the breathing which is the object, then that’s the place where the scooter is happily rolling down the slope. And there’s a kind of a thrill and a happiness, contentment, a sense of goodness with being on that slope, being in that space, being with the breathing at the center of all things.
I know I’m contradicting myself with this word “object,” but I don’t know how else to talk about it—that in this state that is all subject, the heart of the subject is the center of the meditation. In this case, the offering is mostly the breathing itself. But then with that can come this joy and happiness, this pīti5 and sukha6—sometimes rapture and bliss—that can come on. And that is also part of this wholeness; that also kind of saturates everything. But it does have a sense of movement to it, especially the pīti, the thrill or the joy. It has a cleansing sense of movement, of showering through us, or a flowing through us, or a tingling or a vibrating or a sparking. Or we can feel it like waves moving through us in a nice way. And maybe with every breath, there’s a kind of a wave, a rhythm of this great pleasure that can be there.
So those are the five qualities that are mainly highlighted in the second jhāna: calm, clarity, unity, joy, and happiness. That can’t be too bad. And not only is it not too bad, it’s actually quite healing. It provides a reconditioning for us. Many of us are conditioned growing up and through life with a lot of challenges, and this is a very wholesome conditioning that can really shift things in a very, very deep way, more than a lot of other ways that we try to change ourselves. So, to drop into this calm, clarity, unity, joy, and happiness, and allow it to help us grow.
Thank you. This afternoon I’m driving up to the Spirit Rock Meditation Center, up in the countryside north of here, and I will continue with the YouTube this 7:00 a.m. from up there. So you’ll see me sitting in a different place, hopefully outside. And that’ll be through next Wednesday. So I look forward to being with you from this wonderful meditation center at Spirit Rock. Thank you.
Jhāna: A Pāli word for a state of deep meditative absorption or concentration. ↩
Ekodi: A Pāli term related to unification or “weaving into one.” ↩
Samādhi: A Pāli word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption; the unification of mind. ↩
Ekaggatā: A Pāli term often translated as “one-pointedness” of mind. ↩
Pīti: A Pāli word for “rapture,” “joy,” or “zest.” ↩
Sukha: A Pāli word for “happiness,” “bliss,” or “ease,” distinct from worldly pleasures. ↩