| | In my experience it's best to treat the labels one gives various samatha jhanas as sticky notes that you may have to move and place elsewhere, realizing that they're made of factors and those can each take the limelight at different moments without the state necessarily shifting... likewise the intensity of the jhana, at least from my experience, can vary so much that a "hard" or "deep" state can seem altogether different from a "soft" or weaker state though they are really made of the exact same things, just varying in energy and the other favorable conditions. The first jhana can be just pleasant, or it can feel like I am floating upside down and frozen.
That said, canonically, being able to investigage rapidly from object to object with "no effort" is the second vipassana jhana. In my experience since there is a lot of energy moving at that stage (generally I can reach it if I have more than a few minutes to sit but the stage is the limit of my current skill) samatha can arise quite spontaneously and strongly even if, e.g., I am going through nasty physical side-effects. Sometimes it can overwhelm my mindfulness but in those cases I either make an effort to back away from the state or to just ground out into physical objects, like subtle energy movements or some of the grosser physical side-effects, both of which I find to be very noticeable, and sometimes I just indulge in the state. Likewise, I find that the intensity of all these phenomena is subject to conditions: on the weekend if my apartment is quiet it can be quite strong; sitting for half an hour before work it's not nearly as intense. Obviously retreat would put all that into the pressure cooker. |