Hi,
William David Bodell:
Thank you for your response - I hope you can make sense of my limited descriptive capacity.
You're welcome. If it is actually the case that your descriptive capacities are limited, you may find it helpful to ameliorate that situation via vocabulary building. Doing so has wide ranging benefit: improved communication, improved ability to think, improved understanding of everything in general, etc., no improvement of that nature is insignificant (and it is immediately relevant).
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Based on your responses, I am surmising that the lights you're seeing are indicative of one of the first four lower jhanas (or all of them); possibly samatha jhana, possibly vipassana jhana. A bit more specifically in the context of the samatha jhanas (but very much a guess given the provided information): the 1st could be 2nd jhana, 2nd could be 1st jhana or 3rd jhana, and 3rd could be 4th jhana.
Hypothetically speaking, if those guesses are accurate and it's not samatha jhana related (but is instead vipassana jhana related), then you'll likely notice some sort of cycling from sit to sit. E.g.: one is dominant one hour / one day / one week, another is dominant the next, another is dominant the next, etc. Sorting that out would be a mess, especially if you are post-path. More to the point: it's just not necessary to map down to the sub-jhana level, which is what would be necessary.
Regardless of the specificities, this indicates that you've likely got pretty strong concentration (could have been cultivated by focusing on these lights, could be a byproduct of your insight practice). To confirm any of these suspicions, you could dig into the samatha jhanas and hit them "hard," which is likely quite doable given your current concentration strength. If your aim is insight instead, it would be best to note the lights without fixating on them, as fixating on them will stabilize the jhana as opposed to penetrating it (which is necessary for fruition).
Trent