THE FIRST JHANA

THE FIRST JHANA

Breath meditation is an ideal practice for giving rise to strong states of concentration, called jhana. Jhana then provides an ideal basis for fostering the insights that can free the mind from its habitual ways of causing itself suffering and stress. Those insights can ultimately lead to an experience of release into the unconditioned dimension—called the deathless—where suffering and stress all end. So there are three aspects to advanced practice: jhana, insight, and release.

The first jhana.

Traditionally, the first jhana has five factors:

1 directed thought,
2 evaluation,
3 singleness of preoccupation (the theme you’re focused on),
4 rapture, and
5 pleasure.

The first three factors are the causes; the last two, the results.

In other words, you don’t do rapture and pleasure.

They come about when you do the first three factors well.

In this case, directed thought means that you keep directing your thoughts to the breath.

You don’t direct them anywhere else. This is the factor that helps you stay concentrated on one thing.

Evaluation is the discernment factor, and it covers several activities. You evaluate how comfortable the breath is, and how well you’re staying with the breath. You think up ways of improving either your breath or the way you’re focused on the breath; then you try them out, evaluating the results of your experiments. If they don’t turn out well, you try to think up new approaches. If they do turn out well, you try to figure out how to get the most out of them. 

This last aspect of evaluation includes the act of spreading good breath energy into different parts of the body, spreading your awareness to fill the body as well, and then maintaining that sense of full-body breath and full-body awareness.

Evaluation also plays a role in fighting off any wandering thoughts that might arise: It quickly assesses the damage that would come to your concentration if you followed such thoughts, and reminds you of why you want to come back on topic. When the meditation is going well, evaluation has less work to do in this area and can focus more directly on the breath and the quality of your focus on the breath.

In short, evaluation plays both a passive and an active role in your relation to the breath. Its passive role is simply stepping back to watch how things are going. In this role, it develops both your alertness and your inner observer, which I discussed in Part One. The active role of evaluation is to pass judgment on what you’ve observed and to figure out what to do with it. If you judge that the results of your mental actions aren’t satisfactory, you try to find ways to change what you’re doing, and then put your ideas to the test. If the results are satisfactory, you figure out ways to maintain them and put them to good use. This develops your inner doer so that it can be more skillful in shaping the state of your mind.

Singleness of preoccupation means two things:

First, it refers to the fact that your directed thought and evaluation both stay with nothing but the breath. In other words, your preoccupation is single in the sense that it’s the one thing you’re focused on.

Second, your preoccupation is single in the sense that one thing—the breath—fills your awareness. You may be able to hear sounds outside the body, but your attention doesn’t run to them. They’re totally in the background.

(This point applies to all the jhanas, and can even apply to the formless attainments, although some people, on reaching the formless attainments, find that they don’t hear sounds.)

When these three factors are solid and skillful, rapture and pleasure arise. The word “rapture” here is a translation of a Pali word—piti—that can also mean refreshment. It’s basically a form of energy and can be experienced in many ways: either as a quiet, still fullness in body and mind; or else as a moving energy, such as a thrill running through the body or waves washing over you. 

Sometimes it will cause the body to move. With some people, the experience is intense; for others, it’s gentler.

This can, in part, be determined by how much your body is hungering for the energy. If it’s really hungry, the experience will be intense. If not, the experience may hardly be noticeable.

As I noted in Part Two, most people find the rapture pleasant, but some find it unpleasant. In either case, the important point is not to focus on it, but to stay focused on the breath. Let the rapture move any way it likes. You don’t have to try to control it.

Otherwise, you drop the causal factors—directed thought, evaluation, and singleness of preoccupation—and your concentration unravels.

Pleasure is the sense of ease and well-being that come when the body feels soothed by the breath, and the mind is pleasurably interested in the work of the meditation. Here again it’s important to stay focused on the breath and not to focus on the pleasure, for that would lose touch with the causes of the concentration.

Instead, use your awareness of the breath and your powers of evaluation to allow—that’s the operative word: allow—the feelings of rapture and pleasure to fill the body. When rapture and pleasure totally interpenetrate the body, they strengthen the singleness of your preoccupation with the whole-body breath.

In this way, the activity of evaluation, instead of being an unfortunate unsteadiness in your concentration, actually strengthens it, so that the mind is ready to settle down more securely.

As you work with the breath in this way, you’ll notice that your awareness of the body has two aspects:
focused awareness and the background awareness already in your body. The background awareness is simply your receptivity to the full range of sensory input coming in from all the parts of the body. The focused awareness is located at the spot where you’re paying special attention to that input and developing it further. One of the jobs of your evaluation is to get these two aspects of awareness in touch with each other. The background awareness is already there, just like the background breath energy in the body. The question—both with the background awareness and with the background energy—is: Is it full? Remember that, when dealing with the breath, you’re not trying forcefully to pump breath into areas where it’s never been before. You’re simply allowing all the aspects of breath energy to connect.

The connectedness is what allows them all to become full.

The same principle applies to your awareness: You’re not trying to create new awareness. 

You want your focused awareness simply to connect with your background awareness so that they form a solid, fully alert whole.

As both the breath and the awareness come together in this way, you enter the second jhana…"

✿✿✿

Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Excerpt from "Advanced Practice" in "With Each and Every Breath"

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You can read the full text here:

https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/WithEachAndEveryBreath/Section0007.html