A lot of reading on meditation can give it a technical vibe.
To approach jhana, which can be described as heavenly mental states or divine abodes, it can help to have this adjacent intuitive explanation using the closest possible proxy.
The closest possible proxy is what is understood to be the heavenly sensations available to the five physical senses.
There are people who can immerse themselves into those sensory heavenly mental states, among them the people in the very comments to that song. What is the difficulty is that things hinder one from being immersed. They are skeptical doubt, dullness, hate, greed, restlessness and remorse. These forbid anyone to properly enjoy and be with it.
So what is the practice? The practice is to give these up. To give these up is to develop one of the three mundane drives of an eightfold practice: renouncing or letting go. Wanting nothing to do with these hindrances. Forgetting them. Finding a loving heart.
Ottorino Respighi has some nice heavenly music for practice.
As one develops the practice, the mind may at some point quiet on itself. The heart can find a path of traction beyond the sensory heavens. It may then even want to seclude from the experience of heavenly song. Secluded from even the sensuous heavenly states, the mind enters what is known as first jhana.1 As piti makes places for sukha, the mind enters second, then third, then fourth. Then it can abandon all sense of materiality, entering immaterial mental states: infinite space. One is mindful: there is no limit to this spaciousness.
Upon first entry to this, there was mindfulness of eruption of so much joy, in the sense of ‘no way that this is a thing’, standing up with a sense of happiness not felt before. This went so natural and easy that it gave way to the interest to practice what is known as the cessation of perception and feeling alltogether. This has also been described by others. 2
Cessation of perception
117MN describes a mundane version of an eightfold practice. It also describes a transcendental version. In the practice of these heavenly mental states, at some point it became possible to discern which faculties and to what degree they would be present. There would be awareness: there is such and such development of the faculty of effort. Having come to such awareness based on discernment, there arose the idea of using that faculty of effort to develop the faculty of wisdom which was used to make that discernment in the first place, and that faculty itself would also be discerned in its level of development and presence. The very specific development of this path, which would be the development of the transcendental path as described in 117MN, lead to the availability of practicing these mental states at a depth that was new.3
In this practice, there was an intuitive deepening of each of the states, going from one place to the other, until at some point the piti, sukha and other factors would be very strong. That is the first step in the sequence that was not known. Then, in dependence upon those factors, the body wanted to sit upright, extremely so. That is the second point in the sequence. With an immense amount of sukha and the body wanting to sit very upright, the next point is that there is the mindfulness that consciousness of specific sense organs cease. First it was cessation of experience of the sense base of taste. Then there was the cessation of experience of the breath and heart beat. At this point, it means there can be mental awareness that there is no experience of taste, heart beat or breath. At this point, the practice fell apart several times due to wanting to check if the heart beat was still there.
Based on understanding, and understanding what this process could be, after quite some times falling apart at this point, the same sequence happened again. At every time doing this, there had been the study of what is known as aggregates and how dependent upon perception there can arise choice. If, in neither perceiving nor non perception, there is no perception, then there is no choice on the basis of any perception. If there is no choice on the basis of any perception, there doesn’t arise any contact dependent upon any perception or choice. If there doesn’t arise any contact, there doesn’t arise any experience and concomittant with that any perception. Thus, the cessation of perception cascades into cessation of experience. 4
The key moment that happened was that, after the experience of the five physical senses had ceased, was this realization, in light of there only mental activity being left, what was going on with those remaining aggregates. In the very moment of wanting to inspect that, everything stopped. No experience, no perception. Just a blank.
Without awareness of passage of time, at some point consciousness came back. This was a purely mental experience. There was the mindfulness: this is a purely mental experience. Thereafter, the consciousness dropped back into a body, which felt like a sack of potatoes.
What is described in the texts is this exact sequence of first the verbal choicing ceasing, then bodily choices, then mental choices. Upon return from such a cessation, first the mental arises again.
What this experience showed was how mentality can drop off the body, and also land back into one. And so this became one of the experiences that lead to more intuitively living in alignment with the cosmological map of many possible states of existence, and the idea that mentality can land somewhere based on matching conditions. Studying with Leigh, it lead to a third, fourth and fifth point in october 2022. And then a sixth experience of ceasing and insight in the summer of 2023.
- Link: https://www.leighb.com/jhanantp.htm ↩︎
- There are people describing what they understand as nirodha samapatti.
Experience from Tomas Piskacek.
How to attain Nirodha Samapatti (with Vilas Kadival)
Study at VU Amsterdam ↩︎ - This same practice allows one to discern the path dependent upon which one made a significant breakthrough in understanding. It also allows of the discernment of the rhetoric of the nikayas in developing the nikayas. It isn’t just that the digha is for the development of saddha, the majjhima for virya, the samyutta for sati, the anguttura for samadhi. It is it that within these nikayas there are designated sections for one faculty developing the other, such as how sati can develop saddha or vice versa, as is the case in the early chapters of the samyutta. ↩︎
- This also an offered understanding as to why nirodha samatti is called cessation of perception and feeling, as opposed to cessation of feeling and perception, with perception ceasing first. And it implies the eight jhana as a location for the start of this cessation of perception. And the eight jhana starts from the seventh, which is when the mind doesn’t take anything as an object, thus entering the state of no-thingness. And this state of no-thingness starts as a result of mental consciousness not dividing into itself, which reveals that any particular consciousness doesn’t belong to a me, instead there a vastness of consciousness into which a conditioned consciousness isn’t whirling itself into, hence this feels as infinite consciousness.
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