I've recently been reflecting on the use of concentration practice to generate positive mind-states that stick around to support insight practice. Normally, I'd think about this just in terms of jhana numbers (1,2,3, etc). However, recent experiementation is showing that there's a lot more too it than that. The quality of the jhana object formed in access concentration can vary widely, and it seems to me that the quality of the access concentration object matters just as much or possibly more than the jhana number of hardness of the jhana when considering the positive residual effects of the mind state.

For example, with metta there are numerous variables that go into the strength and breadth of the object.

Just a few:
How many different beings one practised metta toward?
How many different categories of friend, neutral, enemy, etc?
How many different multi-person classes?
How many different directions was the metta sent in?
How strongly was boundlessness established in each direction?

Then you could cross multiply all these considerations with how much jhana time/depth was spent with each sub-object (e.g., 3 minutes in a medium-hard 2nd jhana toward a friend in the upwards direction.) Lately, I've taken the time to try to really develop the metta-field rigorously by doing jhanas on multiple beings from multiple categories in 14 directions (plus the centre, making 15 total). Then extending the field outward until it becomes boundless in all 14 directions (I use the sides of a cub-octahedron to visualize the 14 directions). I can report that the post samatha practice quality of this metta-field was extremely strong in comparison to previous attempts where I've tended to just pick a single object and spend a long time developing as hard a 3rd jhana as I can on that one object. Using the multi-object strategy, I just spend a minute or 2 in fairly soft 1st jhanas on each object, but the resultant mind-state was much more powerful than the stronger jhana on a single object.

What do I mean by the post-samatha quality of the metta-field. I mean that in practising vipassana afterwards there is a rock-solid bullet proof feeling of utter safety and ease. Shit can be going crazy through dissolutions, wild vibrations, and emotional upheavals all over the place, but my attention can stay with them and stay with the practice without disturbance. In addition, there is a profound healing quality to the field such that after the period of insight practice, I feel utterly centred and peaceful and emotionally satisfied rather than frazzled by the hell I've just gone through.

Tonight, I tried setting up a field using the quality of bhakti/devotion. This is not a quality that is often talked about on this board, or by secular Buddhists generally, but in the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions, devotion is quite commonly used. Devotion is basically the kind of profound love that a parent has towards a child or that a person has for their beloved spouse. It's a completely different type of love than metta. Metta is universal and can therefore arise in response to any being, whereas devotion arises only in response to beings with which one has established a special devotional relationship. Most religious traditions rely heavily on devotion to generate states of concentration. If you look at Western religions, they don't have much in the way of formal concentration technique, but mystics in these traditions are able to achieve profound mystical states simply through the continuity of devotional practice. The reason is that devotion naturally concentrates the mind (I was recently told by a reputed source that this principle is a major foundation of practice in the Shingon school of Vajrayana).

So to get on with my point, I used my usual prayer/mantras and visualization to establish the quality of devotion and ran through 1st to 3rd jhana on it. Then I returned to access concentration and generated it in 6 directions and then expanded the field out to boundlessness. Once the field stabilized, I re-entered jhana on a little spot in the field and this felt significantly harder and more powerful than the first time around. Then I exited jhana and began practising vipassana.

This was the best support for the practice I've managed to generate so far. I felt like a my mind was about 3 or 4 times as fast as normal for noticing sensations and I just effortlessly moved through really atrociously bad dukka states as if they were a walk in the park. The afterglow of the state lasted for several hours.

The long and the short of it is I highly recommend using supportive positive mind-state fields for vipassina practice. I'd love to hear if anybody else has had good results with this, or if there are any combination of mind-state fields that work particularly well for you. Also, I'd welcome more general discussion of the much greater complexity of concentration strength that is acknowledged by jhana numbers + degree of hardness.

Avi Craimer

Hi Avi,

I love reading your posts.

I have spent the past month or so during pure noting. I managed to attain first jhana just a few days ago and I realize now that not paying attention to concentration states was an error. Insight practice without jhana is like running an engine without lubricant-- it works, but it's vibratory and very harsh.

Have you read the Longer Heartwood Sutta? It basically provides a framework for working with morality, concentration, psychic powers, and insight practice. The implication being, one cannot really expect to master insight practice without working with the others first.

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.029.than.html

I used to think that dry insight was perfectly fine, but nowadays I think that, outside of a retreat setting, it is probably best to cultivate jhana as a base for insight, using metta or straight-up concentration practice. Meditation has gone from being a chore to being something I look forward to, thanks to the pleasant side effects of concentration practice.

Generating a field of metta is considered a psychic power, if I remember correctly. Bill Hamilton talks about it in his book woth regards to Dipa Ma. I was coached by a woman who was clairvoyant, so I used to have powers but then I crossed A&P and it all went to shit. Goddamn. I used to be happy and feel so safe when I was able to "read" everything.

My wife is a Christian, so I explored contemplative Christianity in hopes of finding a way to bridge insight practice with her beliefs. Meister Eckhart and Bernadette Roberts were very interesting, but ultimately I could not bring myself to surrender to a god I no longer believed in. Evenlyn Underhill's Mysticism is a fantastic resource available for free on sacred-texts.com for anyone interested in these traditions.

At one point I figured that I would have better luck with devotional practice if I actually managed to meet a deity, but sadly that never really worked out. I have attempted shamanic journeying a number of times but was only somewhat successful on one occasion. I am fascinated with indigenous spiritual practice but I suspect I will not be able to pursue this axis of development until I attain to stream entry.

At any rate... regarding concentration attainments, there is this tidbit from the appendix of MCTB that is interesting:



Hope this contributes to the discussion.

E

Thanks, it's nice to know that other people get something out of them. I sometimes feel like I'm talking to the void : )



Cool I'll check it out.



I sometimes wonder if calling these things "psychic powers" makes them seem more unattainable than they really are. I mean it's not like one gets the ability to read people's minds like an open book or literally physically levitate and such. That's what "psychic power" brings up in the mind of the average person, and I'm very doubtful that such psychic powers are possible (if they are there has been no public evidence of them). There is evidence of subtle psi abilities but it's not the sort of effect that is noticeable except by pooling large numbers of trials statistically. On the other hand things like super-powered metta fields and talking with spirits and gods in non-physical realms of existence are totally possible with concentration and insight. I wouldn't really call these psychic powers, they are more like skills of navigating and shaping consciousness. I suppose it's all semantics.



How did the A&P screw up your powers? Is it that the dark night made them turn scary? You might just need to develop stronger psychic self-defence and be really careful of your ethics when using the ability. Also, getting through to stream entry might help (or force you deal with whatever you've been avoiding by not using them). In my experience, the really crazy powers stuff started after stream entry.



You don't have to believe in God exactly in order to set up a devotional relationship. Consider metta. Do you believe in loving-kindness? Is loving-kindness a thing you can point to somewhere out in the world. It's a mind state that can either arise spontaneously or be generated through deliberate practice. You generate it by acting as if it's real and systematically cultivating it with the power of intention expressed through appropriate words. Devotion is the same way. That said, it is important to find a devotional object that has some natural appeal to you personally. Trying to worship the Christian God when you don't have strong positive feelings towards Him probably won't work so well. If you're into Buddhism, you could worship non-dual Awareness or the Buddha. Of course, if you pray to Awareness, you have to understand that your prayer experience is not Awareness itself, but rather a conditioned mind state of devotional feeling. This is just the same as praying to God in the Judeo-Christian traditions. We don't experience God's ultimate ineffable being every time we pray. We experience nice feelings that we come to associate with God and which over time can lead one down the path to mysticism where the ineffable being of God can be experienced. The more I think about this stuff, the more the Buddhism concept of Awareness and the theistic concept of the Godhead seem basically identical, but others will surely disagree. Regardless, the important thing is that one cultivates a devotional mind-state because it is positive in itself and because it aids your insight practice.

If you start with heartfelt prayer toward some vague undefined notion of Awareness or God, that's totally fine. Cultivating this type of generic devotion may eventually lead to a breakthrough that will reveal to you a more specific divine manifestation as your ideal (Ishta Devata). Then you may discover a deity or other archetypal figure who best symbolically expresses your personal ideal. Just as an example, if you started praying to pure Awareness, you might in time find that Awareness appears in the shape of the Buddha, or one of the tantric gods, or a Bodhisattva, or Shiva, or even Jesus! You never know how your mind will manifest your ideal in concrete form. The important thing is that whatever form your mind/soul is naturally most drawn toward (so long as it is something spiritually positive), trust in that and cultivate devotion toward that form. You don't need to universalize this form and impose it on anybody else, it is just for you. This is the basic principle in Bhakti Yoga of the Ishta Devata (Swami Vivekananda's writings on this are great). It's also possible to have strong devotion without worshipping a human form at all, Judaism is all about this. However, even in Judaism, there is sensory foci to stand in for God in the devotional act (mainly the physical Torah scrolls and visual and auditory instantiations of divine names). I think that some kind of sensory focus is probably necessary for developing strong devotion, at least initially. This is not too different from how one needs to use a specific individual to begin cultivating metta, even if eventually one learns to simply tune into the feeling of metta without anybody as a specific object.

Let me know if any of this resonates. All the best.

Avi

It wasn't A&P exactly, it was the dark night. First there is Dissolution, of course, which led to me mysteriously losing interest in all things spiritual. Then there was the rest of it. Everything I looked at seemed to be slipping away into nothingness, including my thoughts, so the thought of doing a reading was unpleasant in and of itself. I did try to do readings a couple of times, but my mind was noisy and chaotic, and any images I received were frightening and unpleasant. I would also get these flashing jagged edges when my eyes were closed... You know the millions of little blinking dots that make up the visual field? They had weird jagged edges around them and would make all kinds of complex geometric shapes. In hindsight, this was probably Re-Observation.

I didn't know what the progress of insight was at this point, so that didn't exactly help. After I managed to touch EQ I could still use the powers but they seemed fake and uninteresting.

As far as "really crazy" powers, this was actually what I was looking for when I began taking meditation more seriously. I could do readings but it took a lot of work to decipher what I was getting, like trying to tune in to a radio station that was far away. I wanted things to be more vivid! I was also unable to induce OBEs, which I was really interested in at the time. So I looked into more hardcore meditation practices, reality exploded in a dream, and here we are...



After much consideration, I concluded that the primary obstacle to creating a devotional practice is my own pride. Perhaps that is why I was, and still am, so attracted to Theravada. I don't have to bow my head, I just have to plop my butt on the cushion and notice the three characteristics as quickly as possible.

But, devotional practice exists in every spiritual system. It's in shamanistic traditions, mystery religions, tantric practices, and so on. So there surely must be something of value to be found in them.

Your advice on using an object such as "Awareness" is interesting. I will certainly have to try that out.

Thanks,
E

Thanks for your question, it helped me get clearer about my practice.

The key to this is to get good at switching between objects quickly without loosing the depth of concentration. I start by establishing 1st-3rd jhana on metta for one person without attention to direction. Then I focus on each person I'm generating metta for in each of the 6+1 primary directions (up, down, left, right, front, back, center). I imagine the person being located in the direction a short distance away from me (or inside my body for "centre"). So I'll do Person A in each direction, then Person B in each direction, etc. Once I've worked through all 7 directions for a being in each category (self-parts, teachers, friends, neutrals, adversaries), the whole thing starts to gel and I can feel the metta flowing in cones in all 6 directions out from the centre simultaneously. Then I expand the cones until their boundaries touch and overlap forming a sphere. Then, focusing on extending metta to all beings in the volume of space included in the sphere, I expand the sphere out to a larger and larger volume until the boundary of the sphere drops away entirely (it seems to be quite variable how large it needs to get before the boundary drops. Sometimes, it happens when it`s the size of a city, other times the size of the solar system, basically it needs to be big enough that the mind stops bothering to keep track of the outer boundary). Then I go back and add the 8 secondary directions (front-right-top, front-right-bottom, front-left-top, etc). Again I start be meditating on a specific being placing the being in each corner one after another before moving onto the next being. After doing this a number of times, the 8 directions stabilize and I become aware of 8 cones of metta emanating in those directions. I then include the previously established boundless metta field in my attention and merge the 8 cones into that field by extending those directions out to boundlessness.

I haven't yet managed to get a simultaneous awareness of the 6+1 primary directions and the 8+1 secondary directions. I suppose the way to develop this would be generate first the 6+1, then the 8+1, then switch back and forth until they merge into a single experience of 14+1 directions.

It might seem like the 8 secondary directions are superfluous since one call already create a boundless field with the 6 primaries. I think it's a matter of the stability of the field. Adding the 8 secondaries seems to really shore it up and make it feel more self-sustaining. Like having strong cornerstones for a house.

Well, yes. I wish I could take credit for the idea, but that's actually the traditional Buddhist technique for all the Brahma Viharas. Using it should help.