Drifting Off and Waking Up, Part One
During the time when I was a Buddhist monk, I meditated every day in series of one to two hour-long sittings. This afforded me a good deal of time to explore and experiment with what I experienced in meditation without becoming overly concerned if I appeared to waste a sitting or have "bad" sittings.
Initially I meditated with teachers, who, as time wore on, seemed less and less knowledgeable about meditation, and more and more dogmatic, as though they were sworn to uphold a definitive party line and question no further. This fostered doubts in me as to whether the meditation masters I had met, or those whose works I had read, actually understood how the mind works and becomes transformed through meditation. Regretfully, I decided I would have to continue my quest on my own.
Meditating without a teacher forced me to rely on the study of Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism, on my discerning intellect, and the trust I have in the onward-leading nature of Vipassana meditation. I felt free to explore, eager to see what each new sitting would bring. I became involved and curious about the process of meditation as never before, even though I still practiced within the framework of the Satipatthana Sutta; and rather than developing an interest in Zen, Tibetan or Hindu practices, I firmly believed that all I needed to know would be uncovered in the process of Vipassana meditation and the contemplation of what I read and memorized in the Pali Canon.
One of the first things I discovered was that my mind wandered less during a long meditation sitting if I allowed it to wander for a while at the beginning. Then I began to see that there was no harm in thinking, and in fact, all thought in some way masked a deeper strata of pain, desire, or confusion. In all of this, there was then a big surprise for me, one that I would never have expected from my prior training as a traditional Vipassana meditator. What amazed me was that some of these mind wanderings, appearing as non-sensical internal dialogs or voices or images or lights, were actually the initial "seeds" of mental states that would grow and ripen into extended trance-like states (samadhi) and momentary intense absorptions (jhana). It became clear to me that to increase the depth of inner tranquility and concentration (samadhi) a particular type of mind wandering, during which a verbal or visual thinking process went on of its own volition, had to occur. Thus, I realized, deeper states of consciousness relied on a particular thought process occurring (vitakka/vicara), and, are not formed by the suppression and elimination of thinking, as many meditators believe.
How did I know to equate these experiences with what was talked about in the early Buddhist suttas of the Pali Canon as samma samadhi (right forms of absorption/trance, the correct form of "meditation" described in the Noble Eightfold Path)? This question daunted me for a long time, for I had become very leery of the tendency of meditation teachers to correlate their own experiences, or those of their students, with statements found in Buddhist Suttas. I had felt that for there to be a true match, it can't be because I wished it to be so, but because I continually saw that it was so. Empirical proof, being such an important thing in Buddhism, became a central concern of my investigation into these experiences. The only way for me to prove to myself that these experiences were truly what was written about was to become as wakeful as I possibly could when I experienced them and become able to produce them at will. This is no simple task when we are dealing with experiences that seem to come out of nowhere, unbidden and, apparently, at first glance, not of our own making.
The first thing I did was to delve into what the descriptions of jhana were in the sutta material I had read. The standard description that I had memorized was not from the original suttas, but from the later Abhidhamma sources, and did not give me much insight into what I was experiencing. This description focused on jhana being one-pointed (ekaggata), which is usually construed to mean that the mind is "concentrated on a single object" for the duration of the experience. What people then look for is for their minds to fix on an image or syllable that they have been concentrating on for some time, and in the process of repetition, their minds will only have that object and nothing else; that is one-pointedness.
The early suttas do not mention one-pointedness with the same frequency as they do two other words which show a natural progression of becoming focused on an object. The first word is viveka, meaning, "separation, isolation, being outside" and is used to describe how a jhana is born. The second is the compound word ekodhibhava, meaning, literally, "being poured into one." So here we have progression from a state of consciousness that is separated (from the five external senses and the world of sense desires) to that of a consciousness which is non-dual, experiencing itself as truly "unified" and "undistracted". This distinction is made even more vivid by the fact that "thinking", as an initial and absolutely necessary aid in focusing the mind, is found in the first state, that of separation from the senses, while it is absent (it is not needed when the mind is strongly focused on something) in the state of unification of consciousness. Both of these states have the same emotional valence of being contentedly happy and infused with rapturous sensations, and this is just how they are described in the early suttas.
Before looking into my experiences and determining whether consciousness was isolated or not, or unified or not, or whether there was thinking or not, I decided to look into my experiences and just describe what I saw. This required a constant effort to be aware of each and every thing that entered my mind as I meditated and to recall these experiences while I sat. Whereas before, my mind would drift into samadhi (an extended trance state) as I sat with awareness of my body and a loose awareness of my mind wandering from one thing to another, this time I looked at what things were present in consciousness that made samadhi arise as a way to knowingly and consciously enter into samadhi. I saw that I had to first learn how to enter into a jhana with full awareness of how I got there before I could possibly produce the state through a volition to enter into it.
An example of this may help here, one that shows how visual thinking works in these states of consciousness. One day I was in my hut meditating, my mind drifting, lighting on images of trees, and then I saw the red rocks and clay that made up the path to my hut, and then, a cluster of red rocks suddenly became very bright and vivid, and for a second I saw the delicate lines and textures of three of the rocks, as though I zoomed in on them. Then the image dissolved and my attention rested on my body, and I noticed a tingling in my arms, chest, and legs, and a tremendous feeling of being released from all troubles, pain, and yearning; and I felt refreshed, with my mind clear and serene. Then I drifted off again, lighting on images of clay, of muddy red earth, and I saw the sunlight glaring off of the mud, growing brighter, and for a moment I experienced my mind inside a white sheet of light. Returning to my body, I noticed the same sensations and clarity that I had the first time. Then I decided, "Let my mind be absorbed on the color white," and no sooner had I thought this, I dropped the thought, allowing my mind to drift again, lighting on images of water, seeing the water in the bucket that I had used to bathe myself earlier in the day. I saw the sunlight refracted in the water, reflected by the metal inside of the bucket, and my attention rested on that white light inside of the water, absorbed on that whiteness for a brief moment.
What did I learn from this? 1. The nature of samadhi is drifting off with thinking, be it verbal or visual. 2. The mind will throw up recent images, with a preference for a particular form or color upon which it can become absorbed (enter a jhana). 3. The object that the mind will be absorbed on will have this particular preference, so to create an intentional absorption, one chooses something with that preferred color or form. 4. The nature of volition is such that one can choose a particular color or form, allow the mind to forget about it, enter into a samadhi and have it, or something like it, arise to produce a jhana. 5. This process aids in enabling one to truly see that such ecstatic experiences are mind-made, as all mental constructs are, and are not produced by gods, that they are not special realizations, or indications of psychic abilities or powers.
This is only one of the areas of skill-building in meditation that I teach: how to recognize, develop, and intentionally produce jhanic experiences. However, this type of learning is not so simple, as I found out for myself early on. It is not because these states are hard to develop, for they far are more accessible than many realize (though they are often cut short by such common practices as "noting"), but that there is a constant churning up of underlying emotional, ideational, and behavioral material that occurs as a by-product of this kind of meditation. From what I can gather out of my own experiences, and those of people I have taught over the last several years, a profound transformational process is initiated by this pursuit.
That transformational process is the subject of Part Two of this article.
Copyright © 1998 Jason Siff
© 2007 The Skillful Meditation Project