This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Vast Awareness; Samadhi (56) Intro to Fourth 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.
Hello and welcome to this meditation session. As we begin, a few words of introduction. There are various perspectives that come into play in samadhi1, the deepening of practice. Different states of mind bring to mind different images, different sensibilities, and different images can evoke or give us a feeling for what different states of samadhi meditation are like.
Today, to introduce this week’s topic, which is the fourth jhana2, the image I’d like to offer you is being in some place in nature—maybe on a mountaintop, maybe on a vast expanse of plains, maybe on a hilltop or something where a vast plateau seems to go almost to the horizon. It just feels like there’s tremendous space, tremendous openness, tremendous clarity. This does something to many people’s sensibility; it’s captivating, it’s interesting, something very special happens when we get a sense of the grandeur or the majesty, the expansiveness of some part of this earth that we live in.
Maybe it’s somewhat akin, but different I believe, to looking deep into the night sky and imagining the vastness of the stars and the universe. The difference is that from a mountaintop, overlooking a vast expanse of the earth with the space above, there’s maybe a feeling of being part of this earth, maybe a feeling of a lucid awareness that almost doesn’t call attention to itself because the vastness, the majesty of the vista is what frees the mind, frees the eyes from staring at any one thing. The mind doesn’t get preoccupied by anything, but rather the eyes float gently in their sockets and just roam, taking in the vastness, certainly seeing the distant mountains, the distant plains, the clouds, the birds. But there’s a way in which the eyes get very soft, easeful, relaxed, with nothing being fixated on—a kind of lucid awareness.
With that as an image, sit in a meditation posture and feel yourself, imagine yourself sitting like a mountain. Or if you’re lying down, imagine that you are lying on a high mountain ridge. You are the mountain ridge—solid and stable. Feel the stability of your body against whatever surface is holding it up, and gently close your eyes.
In harmony with some inner stability, weight, the substantiality of this body, at a speed and a fullness that’s in harmony with it all, gently take a few fuller breaths. As you exhale, relax and settle into this mountain, settle into the stability of here.
Letting your breathing return to normal, and on the exhale, continue a process of relaxing, softening in the body.
To be on top of a mountain in a strong wind is not so pleasant, but the winds can quiet and even stop. Let the winds of the mind become quiet and slow down the energy and activation of thinking, the tension associated with thinking, the movements in the mind that is thinking. As you exhale, softening, relaxing the thinking mind.
As you sit quietly, soften your eyes, as if the eyes could rest in their sockets, freeing the eyes in whatever way that they want to float in their eye sockets.
Settling the awareness into the body, breathing, the movements of the body as you breathe, the sensations that appear and disappear as you breathe. Let your awareness of the shifting, changing sensations of breath be relaxed, soft, as if you’re on a great mountain watching but not fixating on anything. Floating, or you’re looking at a flowing river and the eyes again are soft, relaxed, not focusing on anything. Awareness floats and dances on top of the river of breathing.
Breathing occurs surrounded by a space, spaciousness, openness, surrounded by a kind of a lucid awareness. Even if there is thinking going on, there’s something else that’s more important than whatever you’re thinking about: this broad, lucid awareness of the body breathing, of the relaxed awareness that is not defined by anything it’s aware of, but roams and floats, gently touches whatever comes into awareness. That floating can be on the river of sensations associated with breathing, or it could be broader, wider, where the whole body becomes the field of awareness. One breath at a time.
In gazing across a vast vista from a mountaintop or the edge of the shore of the ocean, the eyes roam and open to take the vastness in without being for or against anything that’s there in the eyesight. In the majesty of this overview of vast space of the earth, the details of what’s happening recede from the judging mind, the preoccupied mind. Vast space, vast view, taken in a lucid awareness where it’s all part of nature. It’s all seen without for or against, without wanting and not wanting. All things are allowed to be. Appreciating, relaxed, open awareness in which all things come and go.
If you are thinking, feel your way beyond the edges of your thoughts. Just feel your way to the spaciousness, the openness that’s beyond the narrowness and tightness of preoccupation. Feeling the spaciousness or openness on the edges of your body, a spaciousness and openness which contains no thinking, even if there’s thinking in the background.
Feeling in your body the silence in which the body operates, even if your mind is thinking thoughts. Let them be in the background, fading away, each thought allowed to fade as it appears, but centered on the silence of the body, the awareness which is silent, nonverbal. A silence that saturates, permeates the body. A spaciousness that saturates, permeates the body.
Allowing your awareness to gently float or roam in the spaciousness, in the silence, not picking up anything or fixating on anything. And even if your mind or mindfulness is not so clear, is there a way in which there’s clarity in spaciousness, in the silence, the stillness that’s here, in which awareness floats? Perhaps a field of lucid awareness, an awareness that in and of itself is not reactive, not for or against, allows all things to be themselves, as the sky allows a cloud to be itself.
Then, coming to the end of the sitting, maybe imagining awareness is a wide field that extends way beyond the body. So that with awareness, with your imagination, you consider how to be with others that radically, fully allows them to be as they are, in the way a sky allows a cloud to just be itself, not wanting anything from it, not reacting to it. An awareness with which you’re independent, free of others. A vast awareness that holds all people in the space, in the stillness that can be the medium for your care, your kindness, your love that’s unruffled, unafraid, unresisting.
Wishing with a magnanimous mind and heart: may all beings be happy, may all beings be safe, may all beings be peaceful, may all beings be free. And as a minimum, may I provide these things for others in how I hold them in my awareness, how I hold them in my heart. May all beings be happy.
Thank you.
Hello and welcome to this Monday, beginning of the week, continuation of the theme of samadhi. Today, this week, we begin the fourth jhana, which is, in some ways of understanding, the deepest of the jhanas. Sometimes there’s a list of eight jhanas, but in the teachings of the Buddha, the final four he calls the four bases, the four kind of fields, maybe. What’s called jhana is reserved for just these first four, but then colloquially, because the next four are even deeper states, people call all eight of them jhanas.
We come to a very significant step in the Buddha’s teachings around the fourth jhana because it’s a time when the mind is most malleable, most ready, most at ease, so that there’s no lingering clinging anymore, there’s no lingering resistance or pushing or preoccupation. The mind has gotten very equanimous3, very peaceful, and it sets the stage for being able to have deep insight, and for that insight to be liberating. Now, there are very few filters of concepts, ideas, or stories with which we experience ourselves. There’s a lot of equanimity, a lot of ease with how we are, and that combination allows for insights to happen. The mind is just ready to receive that in a dissolving, opening way, so that all clinging, in some radical, deep way, can let go. That deep letting go is the ultimate purpose of going through these jhanas. The purpose is not the jhanas themselves.
So I want to be a little bit careful not to overvalue the importance of these. They serve a purpose, and the purpose is freedom. That freedom can be attained other ways besides the jhanas, so it’s a little bit important not to over-prioritize or feel like we have to experience these. But at the same time, it’s remarkable that these are part of our human potential, and they create a tremendous feeling of beauty. The fourth jhana is considered to be the most beautiful of it all. So the experience is probably one of the most beautiful things we can experience in life, and it provides phenomenal peace and a reorientation, a healing—quite a wonderful experience to be had.
On one hand, we don’t want to strive for it, we don’t want to measure ourselves by it, thinking that spiritual success is only had by attaining these things, that then we’re somehow the best meditator on our block and we can get lots of status for it. That’s all extra. At the same time, we don’t want to dismiss them as unimportant or that they don’t exist. I remember many years ago when I was a graduate student in Buddhist studies, there were professors who didn’t believe in jhanas. They thought—literally, the language coming from a Buddhist scholar from the 1930s—that jhanas were the overactive fantasies and imagination of starving ascetics. It just seemed so far-fetched from what they could imagine was humanly possible.
But it is possible to dip into these jhanas; it is possible to experience them, and they are far from imagination. In fact, these are almost the opposite of imagination. It’s when imagination drops away. Sometimes, in the old school of translators, they’re called trances. These are not trances; these are almost the opposite of a trance. This is when the mind wakes up in a lucid and clear way. There’s very little that the mind is aware of in these states, so that can give the impression maybe it’s a kind of a trance, a disconnection. But it’s not, actually. It’s more of a state where we’re more deeply connected to life, to the experience of being alive, than we are when we have a lot of thoughts and ideas in which we’re navigating the ideas, the thoughts. Some people who are living a very active life in the world are mostly living in their imagination, and that’s where imagination can interfere with our experience of freedom, of deep spirituality.
So in these jhanas, where the imagination quiets down and stills and there’s very little thinking, the mind becomes a lucid awareness where very little else is going on, partly because we’re not focusing on our senses. We’re not focusing on hearing and listening and smelling and tasting and all this. And even to some degree, we’re not focusing on sensing the body. When there’s no focus, there’s no tightening of the mind, narrowing the mind to focus on anything in particular. It’s more like we’re floating in this vast sea, in the lake of the third jhana, but where now even the water disappears. We’ll see tomorrow the metaphor of the fourth jhana is someone sitting meditating in the open air in a particular way. So the softness and the refreshment of water has even fallen away, and in some ways, you just feel so free and light to be in the open air in this deep meditative way. Even the sense of the body in this is not there in the usual way. So it’s a kind of a lucid awareness that’s very equanimous, very peaceful.
In both the third and the fourth jhana, there is equanimity, but it seems that in the third jhana, the equanimity has a little bit more substance, its own thing. In the fourth jhana, awareness and equanimity are almost the same thing, just about the same thing. It’s like a compound word: equanimous awareness, aware equanimity. There’s no texture, there’s no flavor, there’s no substance to either the awareness or the equanimity. You can almost not say it’s a thing. It’s almost like what’s left in the absence of… in great space. Can you say that the sky is equanimous as a bird flies through it? I mean, we don’t attribute consciousness to the sky, but the mind doesn’t react to it; the mind holds it. It’s like equanimity is not a thing that is done; it’s just that there’s no movement of reactivity whatsoever. So it’s called equanimous awareness, aware equanimity.
I’ll read to you the description. The description of the fourth jhana and the metaphor are shorter than the earlier three jhanas, and that’s maybe appropriate given that there’s so little happening now, so little to describe.
“Letting go of pleasure and pain…” How do you let go of pleasure and pain? That’s like a… what? That doesn’t make any sense. You either have pleasure and pain, but if you have pleasure and pain, can you let go of it? Well, certainly the mind can let go of its orientation, its preoccupation with it. “…with the disappearance of mental happiness and mental suffering.” So something very different is going on here. There’s no pleasure and pain, no mental happiness and suffering at all in this state. “One enters and abides in the purity of equanimous awareness of the fourth jhana.”
So the only description of the fourth jhana is the absence of mental happiness and mental suffering. A phenomenal state to be in. There’s no suffering whatsoever, and there’s no pain and no pleasure. Now, this can seem very dull, you know, there’s nothing. But this is one of the most sublime, peaceful feelings of well-being that is possible for a human being. So the description, maybe… you have to almost experience it to see, “Oh, this is good.”
“One abides in the purity of equanimous awareness of the fourth jhana. One sits pervading this body with a pure, clear mind, so that no part of the entire body is untouched by the pure, clear mind.” The word “pure” here, some people don’t like to use in their spiritual life. It can also mean “clean.” So, one sits pervading this body with a clean, clear mind. And here, “mind” means more like awareness. The whole body becomes almost like a field of awareness. That’s what it is. And a feeling of being very clean, very pure, and clear. This clear awareness. So I like to call the awareness here lucid awareness, a field, a state of vast, clear awareness. And what’s the characteristic of this field of clear awareness that spreads through the body? It’s equanimous, and it’s clearly aware.
So that’s the kind of classic description. We’ll spend this week kind of going into it with a little bit more detail and look at the metaphor and so forth. My hope is that having done these now over 50 sessions on samadhi, that as we go into the fourth jhana—not expecting to go into it, but maybe there’s some way that you can kind of feel the edges of it or feel some qualities of it that give you a sense of what this might be when it’s complete. And if not, I hope it’s at least inspiring that this is a potential for each person’s heart and mind.
So thank you very much, and I look forward to continuing.
Samadhi: A Pali word for a state of meditative concentration or absorption, where the mind becomes still and focused. ↩
Jhana: A series of meditative states of deep absorption and tranquility in Buddhist practice. The fourth jhana is characterized by profound equanimity and purity of mindfulness. ↩
Equanimity (Pali: Upekkha): A state of mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation. It is one of the four sublime states (Brahmaviharas) in Buddhism. The original transcript often misspelled this as “aquamous” or “aquatamus.” ↩