This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Entering, Abiding, and Happiness; Samadhi (51) Intro to Second Jhana. 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.
Yes, you can hear me. Very nice. Thank you. Welcome to our meditation, done here at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. It’s a beautiful area with rolling hillsides, lots of oaks, and some redwood trees, with some wonderful wildlife wandering around. Maybe we’ll see some walking behind me in the hills.
We continue in our samādhi1 practice. I would like to read to you, as we start, the briefest description of the third jhāna2. The texts say that the ancient practitioners, the noble ones, described the third jhāna this way: “Equanimous and aware, one abides in happiness.” The word for aware is sati, more commonly translated as mindfulness. So it would be, “Equanimous and mindful, one abides in happiness.” This idea of abiding in happiness.
So, to assume a meditation posture. If you’ve been sitting regularly in a meditation posture, maybe there’s something about assuming the posture that’s a happy thing, a comforting thing. Yes to entering into this quiet time for the body to be still. Yes to putting aside the responsibilities of the day and to abide in the present moment, the simplicity of here and now, with nothing else to do but to sit quietly.
And to gently close your eyes. Feeling again anything that feels nice for you with the eyes closed, the body still. And into that niceness, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. Breathing in deeply and exhaling a long exhale, letting go as you exhale.
And letting your breathing return to normal. One of the first words associated with jhāna is to enter. Not to hold yourself apart from your body, your heart. Not to be in the control tower watching from up there or thinking up there, but to enter into, like entering into a refreshing bath or pool of water, or a refreshing grove of trees. So to enter into your body. As you exhale, lower yourself into your body, into the torso, all the way down to where your weight is received by whatever is holding you up from gravity.
Breathing normally, but pausing at the end of the exhale. Not to hold your breath so much, but to pause so you can dip deeper into the body, to feel the source, that urge to breathe in, and to receptively receive the inhale.
Dipping into the body, relaxing on the exhale. Softening into whatever feels good in the body. Softening into the stillness, the softness that you find in the body.
And as you exhale, to relax the thinking mind. A softening, a quieting of thinking.
And every time you relax your thinking mind, letting go of your thoughts, let go into your body, into your body breathing.
And then as you exhale, see if there can be a resting with the exhale. Resting in the sensations of breathing out. Resting as the diaphragm relaxes, the rib cage pulls in. The exhale is partly a release of tension or pressure in the diaphragm and the chest, in the belly. Abiding in the rest.
Abiding in the rhythm of breathing in and breathing out. With each exhale, resting. Resting the thinking mind, resting into the end of the exhale. Abiding in the body, here and now.
And then looking around, especially in your body, for any feelings of contentment, happiness, well-being. Even if it’s in the corners of your body, wherever there might be some feelings associated with breathing, the torso, the body. And as you breathe, rest in that well-being. Rest in the body’s contentment, happiness. Abiding in happiness, one breath at a time.
As you breathe, see if you can find in your body a peaceful happiness. And even if it’s just a hint of it, a happy peace. And as you breathe, enter and abide with that happiness in such a way that your thinking mind becomes quiet, empty, open to better receive, feel, embodied well-being.
Resting here, resting in whatever contentment, well-being is in your body. And imagine or have that well-being, feel it spread through your body, spreading out beyond the soft edges of your body. As if well-being radiates from you, happiness radiates, flows, spills out into the world. Sharing your well-being, your happiness with everything your awareness thinks of, everything you see and feel, everyone you know. Everything that comes into awareness, received in happiness.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may happiness be a stepping stone to everyone’s freedom. May all beings be happily free.
Thank you very much. And with this bow, I end the sitting, not having a bell here.
So welcome everyone to the next week of our series on samādhi. If you hear in the background all the many birds, I’m sitting meditating outdoors at the lands of Spirit Rock, accompanied by the birds and occasionally by the animals that are here. It’s nice to be meditating outdoors.
This week, the topic is the third jhāna, the third of the three absorptions that the Buddha emphasized. With this, happiness comes to the foreground. The word is sukha3, S-U-K-H-A. And perhaps when we get into this third jhāna, things get very simple, not ordinary exactly, but very simple. Nothing really special, except that it feels so good, so nice, and so still and so quiet. There’s virtually no thoughts at all, certainly no discursive thinking, no conversational thinking.
There’s one wonderful description of all the jhānas that maybe is a nice entryway into the third jhāna. Abiding in the jhāna, in any of the jhānas, is called “the happiness of renunciation, the happiness of seclusion, the happiness of peace, the happiness of awakening.” I say of this kind of happiness that it should be practiced, cultivated, that it should be frequently done, that it should not be feared.
So I don’t know how many of you fear happiness and joy, but certainly some people fear going into this very deep stillness where, temporarily, we’re putting aside all the reference points we have for how we live our life, including any reference point of “me, myself, and mine.” Conceit and self-concerns kind of fall away, which for some people is quite frightening. In a certain kind of way, our connection to other people is no longer salient, no longer operating in the moments of being deeply in meditation. And for some people, that feels like a betrayal or feels not possible.
In the time of the Buddha, I think the reason why he said this should not be feared is that the renuncient ascetic traditions of his time feared any kind of happiness because they thought it was a form of attachment, a form of keeping you trapped, caught in attachments. And the Buddha is saying, “No, there is a happiness which is not a trap, that doesn’t involve attachment, doesn’t keep you in the world of clinging.” And this is the happiness that comes from renunciation, from a certain kind of seclusion, from peace, and a certain kind of awakening—awakening from clinging with a clear awareness.
So happiness is the primary characteristic of the third jhāna. In the second jhāna, there’s joy and happiness. And joy, as I said last week, the genesis, the source of it is a little bit more of a mental excitation. There’s a little bit more thrill, or the mind kind of says “yes” or something. And it manifests often with strong sensations in the body, energies in the body. But it has something to do with the excitement or the activation of the mind in a joyful way. At the same time, in the second jhāna, there also is the sweetness of this happiness, the contentment of this happiness that is deeper, more settled, more restful, more contented.
So the shift from the second jhāna to the third is a quieting of the joy. “The joy fades away” is the classic language. For many people, it’s just the natural unfolding, because as we get more and more settled, more present, we feel safer, more content not to be thinking a lot, not to be trying a lot, not to be trying to make something happen. It’s enough just to be present, just to be here. And there’s a movement towards calming that happens, it’s just a natural movement. At some point, there’s a calming of this joy, and what’s left is the happiness, this sweet happiness, this deep sense of well-being that feels very embodied.
Some people, their way to shift from the second jhāna to the third is to feel the joy, certainly, but at some point, see if you can distinguish the happiness that’s there from the joy that’s there. Find the more sweeter, the more contented, the more softer happiness from the more excited kind of joy. Find it in your body, and then put your attention there. Rest your attention in that sweeter kind of happiness, and maybe even with the exhale, kind of settle into it, rest into it more, letting the joy kind of fade away, fall away. So some people can kind of enter into the third jhāna this way.
With the mind getting very quiet, there are no discursive thoughts. There might be knowing, there is knowing, it might be a nonverbal knowing. The Buddha describes that in this third jhāna, there is still saññā4, which is a Pali word that means clear recognition. So there is a very simple knowing that simply recognizes what’s going on, and that it’s good. And that doesn’t have to involve conscious thoughts, nonverbal thoughts perhaps, but it’s really registered. We know that, “Oh, this is good, this is happy.”
And because the thinking mind, the reactive mind, has gotten so quiet, there’s almost no tendency to be reactive, to be for and against any experience. Different things happen, if they do, and it doesn’t rattle the mind, doesn’t stir up the mind. So there’s a lot of equanimity in this state. And there’s a lot of awareness. It’s not the mindfulness that is a “doing” mindfulness. It’s not a mindfulness that involves mental noting. There is no longer any need to be focusing on something. The mind is just very present. And in the midst of it, there might be breathing, and the breathing has gotten very, maybe very subtle now, very quiet. And that breathing might be almost continuous with the happiness and with that well-being. And it all happens in a real sense of awareness, a field of awareness, a field of openness, clarity.
So the classic description is: “With the fading of joy, a practitioner abides equanimous, aware, with clear recognition, and experiencing happiness with the body.” So here now, there’s four primary factors of the third jhāna that are here, that are kind of the primary characteristic. And whether these are really distinct states or whether they’re somehow all part of the same, that can be kind of, you know, like different sides of a diamond, I don’t know.
So these four are: being equanimous, aware, clear recognition, and experiencing happiness with the body. So here, the emphasis is so much with the body. We’re at rest, we’re at peace with the body. And it really feels that for the time we’re in the third jhāna, that we’re not anymore in our normal body. We’re not experiencing the karmic body, we’re not experiencing the physical body so much, with the aches and pains and all that. That body… it’s almost like we have different bodies to abide in. And the state of the mind has a tremendous amount to say about how we experience the body. Not that the state of mind is responsible for the experiences of the body, but the state of mind has a lot to do with how we experience the body.
And when thinking becomes very, very, very quiet and still, when the mind is very focused, very still and centered, when there’s very little effort needing to be done to just abide, dwell, float in the present moment, when active, energetic joy and energies in the body get really quiet and still, at that point, the body is experienced very differently. The body feels very, very light, almost like it has no weight. The body feels very open or transparent, almost as if sometimes it’s beginning to feel like it’s completely translucent or something. There’s no… it’s like very clear. The body can feel just very cozy and sweet. It can feel like it has no boundaries, not so much because there are no boundaries, but because the mind is not oriented or constructing or tuning into that sense of boundaries to the body. And very, very sweet, deep, very quiet.
So key factors of the third jhāna are the fading of joy, equanimity, awareness, clear recognition, and happiness of the body. All of which one abides in. One abides in these experiences, one rests in them. It’s almost as if we become them, we’re one with them, we’re unified with them.
So that’s my introduction, that’s the introduction to the third jhāna. And we’ll go spend the week with this, and maybe there won’t be too much to say but to practice with it. And we’ll see how this goes. So thank you, and I’ll be here at Spirit Rock for two more days and back at IMC on Thursday. Thank you very much.
Samādhi: A Pāli word for a state of meditative consciousness, often translated as “concentration” or “unification of mind.” ↩
Jhāna: A Pāli word for a state of deep meditative absorption, characterized by profound stillness and concentration. ↩
Sukha: A Pāli word that translates to “happiness,” “pleasure,” “ease,” or “bliss.” ↩
Saññā: A Pāli word meaning “perception,” “recognition,” or “cognition.” The original transcript said “sadana,” which has been corrected to “saññā” based on the context of “clear recognition” in descriptions of the third jhāna. ↩