| | Would a person with ADHD be able to achieve hard jhana states? Or, for that matter, any jhana states at all? Maybe it would be better phrased like this: Is it feasible for someone with moderate to severe ADHD to try and practice shamatha meditation, given that such a person's motivation requires some amount of effectiveness? In other words, if it takes twelve months of consistent, daily practice, it won't get done any time soon because of how miserable concentration practices are when there's never enough concentration to cause the arising of any pleasant jhana factors. I fall quite short of the ideal of "goal-less practice" that is sometimes praised, because I want concentration practice to produce concentration states. If I try to ignore goals, then the motivation is gone. How can a person practice something that they have to talk themselves out of caring about? (Clearly, I don't have any vipassana insight with an attitude like that, but I'm just trying to be honest about where I'm at with the hope of helping you create an effective answer.)
I suppose this could fall under the general heading of "I think I'm incapable of jhana" with a hoped for answer of something other than "If you practice long enough it will eventually happen, even if it takes two years." But, I'll trust you to say what you believe to be true, not what I hope to be true. After all, if a person just wanted to believe whatever was easiest to tell themselves, they wouldn't ask a hardcore dharma person =)
Much appreciation for your time!
On a completely unrelated note, I'm a psychology student right now and I have a lot of interest in cognition and in neuropsychology. Since concentration meditation is all about cognition, I've come up with a kind of theory about how the concentration states work. It's not as thoroughly thought out as the Visuddhimagga, but it does have the benefit of modern day research into how attention works.
It is known that in attention, which I'll define here as the selection of some stimuli for processing and the rejection of others, that both inhibitory and excitatory processes are involved. In other words, when you're paying attention to something (like food, because you're hungry), then at multiple levels of processing (thalamic, basal ganglia, and cortical probably) the stimuli marked as unimportant are attenuated (a good metaphor is that "the volume is turned down" on that stimulus). For example, the sound of someone talking about non-food stuff is turned down in the brain (at a surprisingly literal level) because the brain has marked food as important and that person's discussion of Britney Spears' children as unimportant. However, if that person were suddenly to start talking about this really good restaurant within walking distance that was having your favorite dish as the special today, suddenly that would get marked as "important" and the "volume" would get turned up. This applies at least to auditory, visual, and touch stimuli.
So, jhana. Concentration, which I'll define as the voluntary, conscious regulation of attention that is probably done by the cerebral cortex, is of course essential to the arising of jhana states. My somewhat-educated guess as to how it works, based on many different descriptions which all seem to agree on certain things, is as follows. The meditator attains access concentration. This is when voluntary attention regulation has become powerful enough to strongly block out (or "turn down") undesired stimuli, which are everything other than the object of meditation. At the same time, the conscious experience of the meditation object (let's say it's the sensation of breath at the nostrils) is very strongly "turned up in volume" by the excitatory nature of strong attention. Once you're in access concentration, many people say that you should shift the meditation to any pleasant feeling anywhere in the body, and there's bound to be something somewhere that feels better than neutral. The people who don't say anything about switching to a pleasant object seem to always have emphasized taking notice of the pleasant factors of the breath (or whatever) at the beginning of the meditation, before access concentration is reached. So, whichever path the meditator has followed, they are now very strongly inhibiting all sensations except for one pleasant thing which is strongly excited. At this point, it should be obvious why joy and ease arise: what began as a mildly pleasant sensation, not really anything strong enough to be clung to, now has the volume turned all the way up. So, pleasure pervades conscious experience.
Second jhana: concentration becomes stronger/more efficient. Either effort is no longer needed to sustain the attention on the object, or the perception of effort is inhibited (marked as unimportant) so it no longer becomes a part of conscious experience. So, either way, the meditator feels a fading of the experience of applying and sustaining the attention on the meditation object.
Third jhana: The high levels of arousal produced by the pleasant sensations go away. Since everyone who has gotten at least to the third jhana has described two different forms of "good feeling," piti and sukha, and piti is always described as somewhat irritating by this point because of its "activity" or "anxiety" or whatever, I think we could hypothesize that it's associated with forms of pleasure that are involved with motivation, such as sexual pleasure, the pleasure of eating when hungry, or the experience of cocaine. All of those stimulate dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens, which is pleasurable but is also associated with a certain sense of anxiety. Sukha would then be "somewhere else," a different type of pleasurable feeling that is not associated with anxiety. Sukha could either be the stimulation of another form of pleasure, or it could be the absence of any painful sensations. Piti would be inhibited by the third jhana, but sukha would not be inhibited until...
Fourth jhana: "the abandonment of pleasure and pain, as with the earlier abandonment of joy and anxiety." Whatever was active and felt good during 3J is now inhibited too. If it was another pleasure system, that's turned off. If it was the perception of not-pain, then that perception is turned off. The concentration is so strong at this point that the meditator can now think any thought (I use that term loosely, and I don't mean to imply VERBAL thought) and experience it as strongly as if it were a "real" sensory experience. What I mean by that is that the volume on the outside world is turned down very strongly, the exact amount according to how hard the jhana state is. Now concentration is strong enough that it could be turned onto, say, an visualized object, and it might be experienced just as strongly as if the object were standing in front of you in real life. The addition of sound and touch, smell and taste could make it indistinguishable from perception of actual objects. Might this explain the experience of the siddhis? Well, I'll leave that to you.
So, I'm new here, and I don't know if the above post contains too much off-topic, or too much speculation, or if for some other reason it's considered inappropriate here. If it is, then please just let me know and I'll delete whatever doesn't fit, or move it to a different thread, or whatever a more experienced member deems appropriate. I included it because you said you wanted to hear about theories about anything having to do with concentration. I hope it can be helpful, but my feelings won't be hurt if it's deemed unhelpful. |