ED,
Aaagh! I posted part 2 first. This is part 1 and describes the jhanas
beautifully. Please read and give me your impressions.
Mike
Religion & Beliefs
A Jewish Perspective on the JhanasBy Jay Michaelson / January 29, 2009
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The jhanas are states of heightened concentration that have been cultivated by
Hindus and Buddhists for just under three thousand years. They are altered
states, full of bliss and, I would say, holiness, and they play a central role
in the Buddha’s Eightfold Path ("right concentration"). Recently, I completed
two months of silent meditation retreat devoted to the jhana practice. I went
with certain intentions and expectations, which I’ll discuss in a moment, but
the experience was more profound and more religious than I expected. After a
few introductory notes, I will describe my experiences of the jhanic states
and
describe what I believe to be their significance for Jewish theology and
spirituality. As far as I know, such a project has not been attempted before.
1. What I did, and why I did it I wish to make three introductory
notes.
First, I want to explain why I undertook this rigorous practice, which
involved
sitting still for extended periods of time (usually, 90 to 120 minutes), and
spending the entire day doing nothing but observing the sensations of the
breath at the nostrils, even while walking, eating, et cetera. I had three
reasons, and discovered two additional ones during the retreat. First, my
real goal is liberation from the delusions of ego and the clinging nature of
the mind: to learn to let go of clinging. On the Theravada Buddhist path,
liberation comes from insight: directly seeing and knowing that all phenomena
are empty of substance, impermanent, and fruitless to cling to. Insight, in
turn, depends on concentration; you’ve got to get really quiet to see these
characteristics clearly. So I went to learn concentration skills as a kind of
prerequisite for a four-month retreat that I am on now, as this article is
published. Second, I went because jhana itself helps insight. Distractions
and hindrances are suppressed in jhana, and the experience is deeply
purifying
and refreshing; one emerges with an extremely sharp, clear, and quiet mind,
ready to do the rigorous, moment-to-moment noticing that leads to insight.
Third and finally, I did this practice because I was curious about jhana
itself. On earlier retreats, I experienced what many meditators experience
when
their minds become concentrated: deep contentment, bless, gratitude, love, and
awe at the beauty and miraculousness of ordinary life. Jhanas are like those
concentrated mindstates squared, amplified, distilled — and I wanted to see
what they were like. Along the way, I discovered two additional purposes
to
the practice. One is the deep "purification of mind" that is required to enter
jhana: you really have to see and let go of all of your stuff, which in my
case
included a lot of grief, confusion, loneliness, ego, expectation, and just
plain chatter. Every moment is an opportunity to let go of all this stuff, and
I had a number of extremely powerful openings that perhaps I’ll write about
some other day. In addition, the jhanas were themselves a powerful lesson
in letting go. They are like everything I had dreamed about from the moment I
became interested in spirituality as a young adult. Imagine your greatest
dreams fulfilled, in oceans of light, bliss, love, and mystical union. Now
imagine that you have to let them go. This is the lesson: that even the
greatest of states arise and pass. You can’t hold onto anything conditioned,
even the dearest and most precious experiences imaginable. This insight alone
was surely worth the price of admission. The type of practice-what I did
My second prefatory note concerns the type of practice I did. There are
different schools of thought among Buddhist teachers as to what constitutes a
jhana and how to cultivate it. Some hold that discursive thought and
perception
of the outside world must completely stop for a jhana to be truly taking
place.
In this model, a jhana is a totally absorbed state of mind; the meditator is
only aware of the object of meditation (more on that in a moment), and nothing
else. Even the passage of time is not noticed in such an absorbed state. Other
teachers, however, will say that a jhana has commenced as soon as its factors
are in place and an obviously altered state of mind has arisen. My own
practice was a hybrid of these two approaches. I studied with perhaps the
Buddhist world’s leading expert on jhana practice, who holds the more strict
view. Yet after a full month of rigorous concentration, I was unable to
achieve
total absorption as his practice demanded. I would enter clearly altered
states, but would still be aware of strong bodily sensations and the sense of
time. Therefore, after one month, I switched to the more moderate approach,
which I had learned earlier. I still cultivated the jhana in the "strict"
method: I concentrated on the sensation of breath at the nostrils until the
mind formed a mental image of the breath — a white cloudy light called a
nimitta. The nimitta would then become my exclusive focus of concentration.
But
I proceeded through the first four jhanas even though the absorption was not
total. My experiences, as profound and powerful as they are, should thus be
understood as only partial in nature. I am a beginner — some might say a
failure — not a teacher and not an expert in these practices. (For detailed
description of jhanic states and practice, please read Shaila Catherine’s
Focused and Fearless, the best contemporary book on the jhanas. The best online
resource is my teacher Leigh Brasington‘s website, where you can learn more
about the stricter approach.) Jhanas are better That said, my third and
final prefatory note is that I actually do have a fair amount of experience
with mystical states, and these blow all those experiences out of the water.
With the possible exception of ayahuasca, I have never encountered anything
like this — and I have spent many years meditating, davening, doing energy
work, and engaging in a wonderfully wide range of ecstatic and contemplative
practices. Without being too arrogant about it (which would be an ironic
reversal of the point of spiritual practice!), I think I know whereof I speak.
When I described some of my experiences to a friend, she remarked that they
sounded similar to what Elizabeth Gilbert describes in her book Eat, Pray,
Love.
I had precisely the experiences Gilbert describes on my first meditation
retreats, six years ago. They are world-shattering, mind-altering, and
profound. They provide a direct experience of what generations of mystics have
described in glowing mystical terms. I do not wish to minimize them, and have
described them in these pages in the past ("You Are God in Drag," "What the
World Is"). But the jhanas were far, far more powerful and more profound —
perhaps an order of magnitude more. They’re like the qualities of those
earlier
experiences, well, concentrated, refined, and distilled. If what Gilbert, and
I
in those earlier essays, described is like a lovely Hershey’s Kiss, the jhanas
are like a rich, hot molten chocolate cake. Get it? 2. Mikvas of
light With those provisos out of the way, I will now describe my experiences
of each of the four basic jhanas. (There are actually eight jhanas, but the
other four are less essential to insight practice. Moreover, while I had some
limited experiences with them, they require their own essay.) While the
descriptions that follow may seem hyperbolic and overblown, I assure you that
I
am deliberately understating and underdescribing the experiences. Every writer
who describes the jhanas does this. I don’t want to condition your experience
by telling you too much, and I don’t want to heighten your expectations should
you undertake jhana practice yourself (which I hope you will). First Jhana
The first jhana is like the "big wow," an awesome peak experience that arises
after the mind has finally settled on the object of concentration with
focused,
sustained, one-pointed attention. Bodily or emotional rapture called piti may
arise, suffusing the body with bliss or filling the mind with awe–sometimes
the
feeling is more "gross" and embodied, other times more subtle and purely
mental. In my experience, the nimitta would become radiant, awesome, and
beautiful, and grow to fill my entire field of vision, and surround my body;
the experience was like a glowing, energetic light surrounding and cocooning
my
whole being. It’s quite captivating. There is also a sense of seclusion–of
finally being safe from the chattering mind. From my Jewish spiritual
perspective, this was like holiness as the big amazing awesomeness, full of
mysterium tremendum and radical amazement. It’s Niagara Falls, the Grand
Canyon.
Like many mystics, I’ll use erotic analogies as well; the first jhana is like
having sex, before orgasm: panting, arousing, ah–ahh—ahh— that sort of thing.
Eventually, though, the first jhana begins to feel like too much effort. You
have to work to keep it up. This is its advantage–if you didn’t work, you
wouldn’t get in–but eventually, after anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour
or more (my longest was one hour), the mind gets tired of ecstasy, excitement,
and bliss and moves naturally onto the second jhana. The transition between
jhanas is always from gross to subtle: the more gross factors drop off,
revealing the more subtle ones underneath. In the case of first-to-second, the
factors of applied and sustained thought drop, and the other factors–rapture,
joy, and one-pointedness of mind–reveal themselves more. Usually this "drop"
is
conscious; after a few weeks of practice, I would feel a kind of mental
itchiness when it was time to move on, and would consciously resolve to let
the
factors drop and the others predominate. A few times, though, the drop
happened
automatically; the mind would just bail out. Eventually, the four jhanas are
kind of like four rooms in a house that you’ve come to know; you don’t even
have to make the resolve clearly, because you know the territory, and can
recognize it and adjust quite naturally. Second Jhana
In the second jhana, the feeling tone shifts to joy–"drenched in delight" in
Shaila Catherine’s words. Effort drops away, and the mind rests one-pointed on
its focus. I experienced the second jhana as being like swimming in a mikva of
light–in my journal one time, I wrote that when the nimitta expands, it is a
"waterfall of shimmering light that fills your body with joy." Again,
sometimes
this was a semi-bodily sensation, other times purely mental. There was often a
bright light in my eyes as well–more on that below–and sometimes a deep sense
of healing. This is it, you’re here, you can trust and let go. The sexual
analogy here is to the time of orgasm itself–not the first moment, but the
longer period of time if, like me, you like really long and drawn-out orgasmic
states. It’s like that gorgeous sexual feeling of letting go: not ah-ah-ah,
but
ahhhhhh. Sometimes it really felt as if the light were kissing me, penetrating
me, filling me. This is God as lover; the fascinans, the erotic partner
envisioned and embodied by mystics. It’s really something. Believe it or
not, the mind eventually finds all this ecstasy, even without effort, a little
gross. Piti becomes too showy; it’s almost exhausting. Now, when I was first
learning the jhanas, I would spend several days with each one before moving
on.
Part of this was to really nail down the jhana; the Buddha said that someone
who moves on too fast is like a foolish cow wandering from pasture to
pasture.
But another part was that it took me a while to get disenchanted with these
states. For several days, I couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than the
second jhana. But eventually, disenchantment sets in–once again, an insight
that is, itself, worth the price of admission. Eventually, the mind gets
disenchanted with anything. So the grosser factor of rapture drops away,
leaving behind only joy and one-pointedness.Third Jhana If the second
jhana
is like an orgasm with God, the third jhana is like resting comfortably on the
breast of the Goddess; its dominant sensation is contentment. Here, the love
is
less erotic and more familial; it’s like being cradled by your mother–that
kind
of "ahh." The light I experienced was golden, radiant, and warm. Many times, I
cried and felt healed. Other times, I was still and concentrated. And
sometimes, I felt like a little boy sitting by the window, with sunshine
streaming in. In the third jhana, piti is relinquished, and sukha, joy,
becomes
predominant. Sukha is quieter and more subtle than piti, it’s less embodied,
and more like an emotional, intellectual joy with a honey-like embodied
component. Meditators know sukha from whenever the mind in concentrated and
everything just feels lovely. The mind is content. What could ever be wrong
with the world? Of course, sukha is so lovely that we naturally cling to it,
which means we suffer when it’s gone — that’s what’s wrong. But for me, I
spent
about three years cultivating sukha, thinking it was enlightenment, and being
devastated when, a few days after retreat, it seemed to disappear. Fourth
Jhana Finally, there is the fourth jhana–the real point of it all, it
sometimes seems. In the fourth jhana, even joy passes away. The experience is
totally neutral: just "Ah," as in "Ah, I see." And yet, it somehow–just is. I
can’t quite describe it; there’s a powerful sense of equanimity, a closeness
to
the object, and not much else. Somehow, this state is the most beautiful at
all, even though it is totally colorless, bliss-less. The erotic flavor is not
even post-orgasmic; it’s post-post. The mind is clear, the restlessness is
gone. It doesn’t feel good anymore, but in some deep profound way, it feels
extremely good and peaceful that it’s not even necessary to feel good. This is
not the Shechinah, not awe, not love; it’s just YHVH–Is. It’s a love beyond
love; satisfaction without joy or even contentment. For me, the fourth
jhana is really the point, because it leads to one of the deep insights of the
jhanas: that God is not in the fire, or the earthquake, or the flood. There’s
a
tendency that all of us have–but particularly spiritual Jews have–to deify and
thus idol-ize certain states. Oh, that gorgeous warmth of lighting candles.
Oh,
we were so high during that drum circle / Kabbalat Shabbat / whatever, that
was
reall,y mamash, it. But that’s not it. It is what’s always here; Ein Sof,
everything. If it wasn’t always here, it isn’t it. Even the fourth jhana isn’t
it–it’s a state, with equanimity and focus that are conditioned, and thus pass
away after a time. You can’t cling to it either. Realdevekut has only one
attachment: Is. Totally colorless, totally omnipresent, and in fact, if you
look closely, the only thing that doesn’t come and go. Ramana Maharshi said,
"Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains." That is the essence
of enlightenment right there, I’m telling you. The way leads nowhere. There is
no state that is it. This is it; just this. Not feeling special about this,
not
feeling relaxed or wise or anything in particular–although sometimes those
feelings may arise in the wake of letting go. Just is. Now, does that mean
that mystical states — including the jhanas themselves — are without value?
No;
not at all. By fulfilling this spiritual seeker’s wildest dreams of joy and
rapture, the jhanas point to the limitations of states, chiefly their
transient
nature. And next month, I’ll describe in some detail the benefits as well as
the limitations of spiritual states of all kinds, mundane to marvelous. First,
though, I want to focus on a different question: God. Essay will continue.
All images by Harriete Estel Berman.
