Hi everyone,

In response to a drop in concentration recently I've been revisiting my anapanasati practice and reading a bunch of stuff on the practice again.

One thing I've always been a little hazy on is what exactly is meant by "sustained thought". Moreover, what is meant when people like Ajahn Lee talk about "evaluating" the breath in this context. Does this mean I should be thinking constantly about the qualities of the breath like "short breath, long breath, breath that is pleasurable, breath that is neutral, breath that is hard to detect at the anapana spot" etc.. or does it simply mean paying attention to the bare sensate experience at the anapana spot (or the whole breath-body) etc?

Ajahn Lee talks about "giving the mind something to do" when "thinking" about the breath. I can imagine how pondering the breath would at least give the mind a subject of thought as well as sensations to work with. Unfortunately I read this after my morning sit today so wn't get another chance to experiment until tonight or tomorrow.

Can anyone comment on this?

it means that you should use whatever thought is necessary to create pleasantness and peace. if this means constantly adjusting the breath long, short, heavy, etc. then so be it. if it just means focusing on a single perception or image then use that too. "evaluating thought" is a factor, a description rather than an instruction (in the suttas), in terms of instruction you basically find a way to create pleasantness, which can require thought, memory, imagination, pattern-recognizing, etc. so the thinking shouldn't be "noting" but rather planning, figuring out, understanding.

Basically you have to keep apying effort to thinking about the breath. Vitakka is said to be like the striking of a bell and vicarra is like the reverberation. Another interesting thing is that the Pali formula list the factors as a single word vitakkavicaram. For me a good sign that concentration has arisen is I get sort of a sinking in feeling of being fully engaged. Ajahn lee uses another image of a Coleman lantern. The kind you have to pump up. Say the light is going dim and you start applying effort to pumping it up. From that the light bocomes brighter (piti-sukkham rapture and pleasure). All of this is the singleness of preoccupation or single pointedness ( which for some reason is not a factor listed in the original Pali sutta formula, but anyway) if you prefer nose tip awareness rather than whole body awareness. In short as others have said of the witness, make love to the breath .

singleness of preoccupation doesn't seem like it necessarily implies nose-tip awareness (although i guess it depends how you use the word). if we are looking at what Ajahn Mun-Lee-Fuang-Thanissaro say then full-body awareness is something to strive for all the time, especially in jhana.

I am assuming that it was what ajahn mun said (because his student and the student of his student said so), i don't think he ever addressed the subject directly in the limited direct words of his that are available.

Yes I should of been clearer. The folks that tend to use single pointedness usually teach nose tip awareness where as those that use singleness of preoccupation talk of a whole body breath awareness image.
Ross

So thoughts on lovingkindness would be a valid thing to consider while watching the breath Josh? That, or as you say, constant adjustment --for relaxation/pleasure/ease?



What is it that you are thinking about in regards to the breath Ross? Do you meant "noticing" or are there actual verbal / conceptual thoughts concerning the breath going on in your mind?



Yes. When concentration is good I literally feel like im sinking down into the floor/myself and this can continue for quite a while before it levels out.



I've had good results with both approaches but I think the combination of a single anapana spot (or even one that shifts around a fair bit during the sit) and whole body awareness (sometimes just "whole body tingling" other times whole body moving/changing with the breath) seems to work best for me. It seems to give the mind more to do, so better chance of not getting distracted.



That sounds like "whole body moving/changing with the breath" right?

I was thinking more about thoughts of energy and brightness, or stillness, or different ways of thinking of the breath as a whole (expanding+contracting, moving up, moving down etc.), but lovingkindness and metta might work too, the best advice is to experiment.

Having experimented a lot I now basically do the exact same thing every time I sit for getting into first jhana, I get pleasure by focusing on the perception of breath moving through the bones, along with the sensations of moving energy that seem to exist in the bones corresponding with in and out breathing.



I think the two approaches give different results. If you are focusing spatially, that means you are likely causing some distortion. This distortion can cause a type of tingly pleasure, I would suggest staying away from tingly stuff and trying to find a smoother pleasure. What I did for a while was to get the tingly pleasure, then try and tranquilize and widen awareness and move towards the smoother pleasure, or even move through the tingly-type jhanas up till the 4th and then try to widen and smoothify from there. So I think it is definitely valuable to work on both types.

When I concentrate now though, I stay with the widened, smoother type of jhana because for one thing it is much more pleasant, and for another it allows you to see the attention waves movement more clearly which is useful. I think the smoother type is a bit more difficult though, so in the end all I can say is experiment with all your options.

Well vitakkavicaram are/is said to be verbal fabrication. And that drops away upon entrance to second jhana, so it says in the Pali cannon ( a softer jhana one could possibly speak in). Unless your breath is talking to you or actually displaying an image such as a light type of nimitta (sign/image) I would just stick to just applying as much unrementing mindfullness as you muster. If you start playing around with say cartoon images of the breath you can easily get confused and the mind is then not at a single point or having a singleness of preoccupation but is diversified. Think of a liquid concentrate. Just breath is in the mind and whatever aspect of the breath the mind is full of. And mind- full-ness of breath leads to the breath concentrate. Then concentration is right before equanimity in the seven factors of awakening and equanimity leads to atamayaata non fashioning or the unfabricated non abiding. Ok I'm gettin to far into theory here. So any aspect of the breath is worthy of attention.
Another thing for me letting go of the idea or theory that I needed to have a white light nimitta to be qualified as being in jhana, was vital to cultivation of jhana. The nimitta can be anything from the touch sensation o the breath at the anapana spot to the process of awareness itself of the breath. Basically I just had to drop the whole nimitta business, and just see what is as it is.

I think a problem with trying to let go of all fabrication and just be with the sensations in their raw form is that, rather than actually dropping those things (which I think wouldn't fully happen outside of a PCE), you are driving the intentions that create them "underground." Dropping everything is good in the context of strong concentration, but if your trying to actually get into 1st jhana you might want to control everything, use everything, figure out what works and what doesn't. That's just my take as it is what I did to figure out the first jhana. From there I did a bit more "bare" awareness, intuitive inclination towards more pleasant stuff, relaxing, concentrating, and letting go.

Thanks Ross, Josh

I just got done doing 40mins. Here are a few observations:

• Im sitting rather than lying down, so a little less comfortable, but more alert
• I really get the "make love to the breath" thing. I thought that this at times was really, really like masturbation.
• I breathed in lots of different ways until I kind of got both the type of breath and the rhythm that was most pleasurable and kept at it. All the while, feeling the breath move the body, flow through the body, energize the body, enrich the body...
• Every now and again it would start to get more pleasurable and I would really, really relax into it, breathing with real precision in just the right way and feeling it in just the right way. Like coaxing a small flame into life.
• This produced a weak, but very definite joy through the body and a warm "satisfaction" in the mind. More on this in a bit..
• Though I kept this joy/happiness (weak-ish jhanic type state?) alive, it diminished a bit and tapered off after 10mins or so as the mind continually wrote this report, committed the formular to memory, congratulated itself on a job well done... sheesh....

Joy
A couple of weeks back my vipassana hit a real high, and I was spontaneously accessing a fairly hard (by my standards at least) 1st jhana. At the time I described the bodily feeling as almost more pleasure than I could bear, but after reading some of Culadasa's writings I now recognise this feeling as piti -joy. At the time I didn't see it, but the last time I felt such heartstopping joy was when my son was born. The time before that, when my daughter was born. Now my mind has made the connection it's so obvious. So clear.

In this sit, it was absolutely the same thing, but a fair bit weaker. The really interesting/exciting thing about it for me is that it was self induced, built up bit by bit and sustained ---rather than *ping!" and it was there...

Does this sound about right to you guys?

yep, sounds like some early jhana. now try and make the pleasure as stable/constant/pleasant as possible. this doesn't mean make the feeling as intense as possible, because as you said it can feel like too much. you might notice that some of the "pleasant" sensations are less pleasant, keep inclining towards the more pleasant aspect of the sensations and try and stabilize them. it's possible to have quite intense pleasure without it feeling like too much, if you are intensifying the actually pleasant part of the jhana sensations only. spread them, purify them, stabilize them = 3rd jhana

When I sat this morning it was quite hard to concentrate but after 30mins or so I kind of got into a rhythm - the rhythm of the abdomen moving, chest moving, shoulders rising and falling, anapana spot -- a very fluid kind of undulating rhythm. It felt like a bit of a winner, but I didn't get to finish the full hour due to this rotten cold i've currently got.

Does this sound like something worth pursuing? Does anyone have any exerience of what Im talking about?

Interesting discussion:

"Vitakka is said to be like the striking of a bell and vicarra is like the reverberation" - I understand this to be like reading. For me anyway, the first few sentences or paragraphs of a boring document may require effortful attention. At some point, the mind locks on to the text and the reading is no longer so effortful. Same thing with music, etc. So in more modern psychological terms, vitakka and vicara may be simply two different modes of attention, one more effortful and the other more 'locked in'?

Paul

I think that's a good analogy Paul.

I have been finding it much easier to get into what I think is 1st jhana. There is not the overwhelming, almost painful pleasure i have occasionally experienced in a "hard jhana" but I can breathe pleasure into and through the body, filling it up, and up, and up --it is a continual effort though. If I were to stop, it would fail.

This sounds right to me.

2nd Jhana seems to "just happen", at some point there's a shift, and the pleasure increases significantly and seems to be pretty much on auto pilot. Like someone just threw a switch, instead of me having to constantly pump the bellows. There's certainly no sustained thought necessary any more.

I don't know what to do now though. 2nd will last for a while (and I just continue to breath and pay attention with a slight emphasis on attention to the pleasure) but then it fades and moves into the skin-tingly vipassana stuff --heart starts thudding a bit, occasional irritating sensations etc etc.

Can anyone suggest a way to move into 3rd? (if you think i've reached 2nd of course!)