This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Guided Meditation: Effortlessness; Samadhi (59) Effortless Clarity. 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.
Hello and welcome. As we begin, I’m reminded of a story told of the Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. In the 1960s, when he came to the United States, he was asked by a student, “If I practice Zen, will I become enlightened?” And Suzuki Roshi answered, “If your practice is sincere, it’s almost as good.”
This idea that sincere practice is as good as, or almost as good as, awakening is a remarkable statement. To be sincere, I understand, is to give oneself wholeheartedly to the practice with a certain humility, a certain giving oneself over to it, but without straining or conceit, without trying to attain awakening, even though that’s the purpose of it. A sincere engagement with the process just for its own sake in this moment.
I think of sincerity as being very closely related to honesty—an honest understanding of how we operate, what drives us, what our challenges are, and to hold that with a certain humility, a certain non-reactivity. And in the end, there is a learning to give up, give away, and cease all the efforts in the mind, the heart, the body—maybe all the efforts that are not needed. All the reactions, all the judgments, all the trying to make something happen, build something up, try to avoid something, try to fix something—anything that’s extra to the radical simplicity of presence, of attention.
One of the ways to appreciate this is to appreciate the way in which practice and attention can be effortless. It’s not something we have to put effort into, but something that we align ourselves with, or open to, or allow to move through us. We have this capacity as human beings to have mental and emotional processes operating that don’t seem to require any active intention or effort on our part. They are just there. Just as the heart beats and the diaphragm moves as we breathe, for a good part of human life, we’re not actively working on having the heart beat. Mostly, we just let it do its thing. It’s effortless in the sense that it takes no effort of choice, no mental effort.
Practice becomes that when it’s sincere. One way of understanding this path of jhāna1 is a deeper or fuller experience of effortlessness. When we come to the fourth jhāna, it’s remarkably satisfying because of the amazing clarity of awareness that’s there without any personal effort, without any choice.
So, assume a meditation posture and gently close your eyes.
To begin appreciating a certain kind of effortless quality of practice, it helps to relax deeply. First, sitting here and feeling, sensing a global experience of yourself, as if whatever way you are right now is fine. There’s no need to add judgments or preferences or reactions to how you are, but to allow there to be a global awareness that, for a few moments, it’s all okay.
Into that global awareness, to experience it all in a fuller, more expansive way, take a few long, slow, deep breaths. On the long exhale, relax any holding and tension in the body. The energy that goes into being tense is extra; it’s not really needed. So, softening, relaxing what you can.
Then, letting the breathing return to normal. For maybe three more breaths, see if you can allow a relaxing of the body on the exhale.
Then, sitting quietly with this simple, global awareness of your body in whatever way that’s easy for you, without making any special effort for it. In that global awareness, can you find, maybe in the middle of it, a settling place, a grounding place within? A place deep inside that has a kind of feeling of being home, or a center of all things, that takes no effort for it to be there. It is just there. Perhaps feel that effortless quality of the centering place, the grounding place, maybe at the end of the exhale.
As if there’s a resting place deep within that’s waiting for all of who you are to join in the rest, in the effortlessness. Is there any tension in the mind? Be aware of mental tension in an effortless way. Don’t make it a problem, nothing to fix or change. Back up, step back to where you can gaze upon it effortlessly, equanimously. Just known, and that’s all.
Then, return to your breathing. While you might have some effort in staying with the breath—breathing in and breathing out, returning, sustaining—notice that part of awareness, of knowing, of mindfulness, that seems to have the least effort in it. Maybe it has a receptive quality, a quiet stillness. Appreciate the interface between effortless attention and breathing.
As you’re sitting here, is there any feeling of comfort, of pleasure? Maybe with the edges of breathing, maybe just beyond the breathing sensations, a kind of simple pleasure or well-being that exists effortlessly, maybe with its own hum. And the awareness that knows it, receives it without effort, almost like a breeze will blow through an open window with no effort on the part of the window.
Then, gently, very gently, open yourself to the simplicity of effortless awareness, effortless attention, effortless knowing that is perhaps nonverbal. It requires almost nothing of you, so that awareness settles into itself by recognizing a certain clarity of awareness, openness of awareness, effortlessness.
And in that effortless awareness, might there be some quality of peace? Awareness aware of itself. Awareness aware of its own clarity. Clarity like the clarity of unobstructed space.
As you sit here, in the most gentle, almost effortless way you can, don’t do anything. No, I don’t mean do anything with the mind. If you find yourself thinking, that involves some degree of effort. See if you can find the place where that effort is not happening, where you can stop meditating to just be. No conscious effort.
As we come to the end of the sitting, consider how an open window allows the breeze to come in effortlessly. An open window will not break if a rock is thrown at it. And an open window allows the radiance, the light of our love, our care for the world, our goodwill, to shine out, unobstructed by curtains or tinted glass.
So we sit here at the end of the sitting with an open heart, allowing the gentle breeze of the world’s suffering to light the warmth of care and compassion, so that our open heart can radiate its goodwill out into the world, spreading the medicine of care far and wide.
May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.
Thank you.
Good morning, or good day, and welcome to this next talk on samādhi2. We’re talking about the fourth jhāna, and it’s not something that people will experience often and regularly in life. Maybe occasionally it’s experienced in very particular circumstances, something like this, but even in meditation, it’s not something that is easy to enter and abide in. But one of the ways, maybe, to get a feel for it is through the imagination and through some of the characteristics of it which might appear in ordinary life. One of those is a deep, effortless quality that is highlighted in the fourth jhāna.
Before entering into samādhi, there is a kind of effort that’s being done in practice—sincere effort. And hopefully, an effort that you enjoy doing, that you find a way that it’s enjoyable and satisfying. You look forward to it, just like you would look forward to certain kinds of activities that are fun to do, like playing an instrument or maybe cooking, if you enjoy that. Sometimes we put a tremendous amount of effort into some sport or something, or go for a hike in the hills, and it takes a lot of energy, but there’s a pleasure, there’s a joy, there’s a kind of effortless quality in the sense that we’re not having to work hard against ourselves.
So, to really enjoy the practice, and then to begin finding a way to a deeper settling, a deeper quieting and calming, while being deeply centered and unified and really feeling like we’re fully here in the present moment, centered here in this time and place. And then as we go through the deepening samādhi, slowly—sometimes with big jumps—but slowly, there’s a transition from how much effort we have to make to how much effortless effort there is. The practice, rather than us doing the practice, the practice is doing us. And so to go along with that, to feel that shift, so we’re not overriding the effortless part, overriding the way the practice practices us, because we think it’s always up to us, we’re pushing and striving and doing.
There’s an art to knowing when to let up just enough, but to stay really present—not so much that the mind drifts off, but not too much so that there’s a strain. And so this art of knowing how to make this gradual transition, until there’s less and less effort from us needed because there’s no wandering off. We’re just here. We’ve entered and abided, we’ve arrived here.
The four jhānas, one way of understanding them—yesterday I talked about progressive stages of calming—another way of understanding them is a progressive entering and abiding in an effortless awareness. Less and less effort is needed until we get to the fourth jhāna, and it seems like there’s really no effort at all. It can seem like there’s no effort in the third jhāna, for example, but from the point of view of the fourth jhāna, there’s still a little bit of orientation of the mind towards the happiness, towards the good qualities of it.
In the fourth jhāna, the joy of clear recognition, the happiness of awareness, the happiness that’s a little bit of activated energy, quiets down even more. And so there’s this deep feeling of effortlessness, but it’s an effortlessness that seems to leave what’s left as a broad, unbounded sense of awareness, of clarity, of knowing, of sensing, of just being, that maybe has very few characteristics to it. It’s almost as if the awareness is aware of itself. It’s kind of like, I’m nearsighted, and without my glasses, I don’t see so well. At certain distances, it’s all blurry. But when I put on my glasses, everything is clear, and I can see in certain directions, certain distances. The seeing, it’s kind of like the seeing sees its own clarity. While it is the object that’s there that I see clearly, there’s a feeling that it’s not so much about the objects; there’s almost a feeling that the eyes themselves have now cleared. The eyes see their own clarity, almost.
And so the awareness knows its own clarity, knows its own purity. Or maybe there’s some deep, nonverbal knowing that knows these things. It’s a deep knowing of something very special: this effortless awareness that’s clear, it’s unruffled, there are no waves, there are no judgments. And so it’s very equanimous, and it’s not reacting to anything and not participating in anything. So a lot of things disappear, because part of what the mind is is an alarm system. We’re alert and vigilant for all kinds of things: for what we are afraid of, what we don’t want, what we want. And that kind of vigilance falls away. It’s a feeling of deep, deep safety.
Generally, the jhānas are very hard to experience unless somehow we provide our whole psychophysical system with the reassurance of a deep kind of safety in that time. Because that’s another way of describing the jhānas: a progressive state of feeling more and more safe, so safe that the idea of safety and danger disappears entirely. And we’re just there with this clarity, with this purity, with this feeling of being very clean, very still, very quiet. There are no thoughts at all, though there might be still a little bit, just in the faint, nonverbal knowing that you’re not involved in; it just kind of floats there a little bit, gently, quietly. It has no power, there’s no energy behind it.
And the mind feels very clean, as I’ve said. One of the characteristics of it, in the description in my translation, I said, “disappearance of mental happiness and mental suffering.” It’s hard to know how to translate these two words from Pali: domanassa and somanassa3. Basically, it’s kind of means “good mind” and “bad mind,” and it might mean something like a really elated mind or a deflated mind, a happily aroused, activated mind or an unhappy mind. And so the emotional tenor and quality of the mind is neither elated nor depressed, neither inspired nor dispirited, neither sad nor inspired.
It can seem like that’s an amazing dullness, an amazing blandness. Why would anybody want that? Well, to be in it, it just feels like this is really good. It feels so pure, so nice, so clear, so peaceful, that maybe describing it as a profound peace is what’s all that’s left. And maybe we’re still there in some kind of way with some kind of attention, but the degree to which there’s any self-centeredness or self-involvement has almost, if not entirely, disappeared.
And the effortless awareness and effortless peace that we abide in, we feel safe in, we feel comforted in. Like wrapping ourselves after a nice, refreshing bath in a wonderful bath towel, to just sit and be completely content and happy as we sit there, wrapped in the clean towel, clean body, refreshed body, everything vibrating with an open, clear, equanimous mind and awareness.
So I’ll read you the description of the fourth jhāna: “Letting go of pleasure and pain, with the disappearance of mental happiness and mental suffering, one enters and abides in the purity of equanimous awareness of the fourth jhāna. 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.”
And this is a mind which is unpreoccupied with itself, unpreoccupied with self, unpreoccupied with desires and aversions, unpreoccupied by fears and distress. And this makes the mind phenomenally ready for a transformation, because as soon as the mind is preoccupied by something, it’s hard for it to shift and change and be ready for what comes.
So, the fourth jhāna. We have one more talk on this fourth jhāna and the jhānas in general, and I’ll bring it to a conclusion tomorrow and talk a little bit about what follows the jhānas.
Thank you very much. May this day be a day that you feel the preciousness, the joy, the deep satisfaction of the way that your heart and mind can be effortless as it moves through the day. Don’t sacrifice the depth of who you are by making too much effort. Let the mind be at ease. Thank you.
Jhāna: A state of deep meditative absorption. The original transcript used “Janna,” which has been corrected to the proper Pali term. ↩
Samādhi: A state of meditative concentration or one-pointedness of mind. ↩
Domanassa and Somanassa: Pali terms. Domanassa refers to mental pain, grief, or displeasure. Somanassa refers to mental pleasure, joy, or gladness. They represent the emotional highs and lows that are transcended in the fourth jhāna. ↩