This is really good and I’m glad you posted it and I will be trying a lot of what you mention. Also, I’m glad Google helpfully informed me that there are two different uses of “jhana”, because I only knew the other one and was about to post that if you reached dhyana your first time meditating I was pretty sure you were the Maitreya Buddha.
I find I have to meditate sitting up because I become very sleepy if I do it lying down. If you can avoid sleepiness, you may escape that need. I’ve also heard uncomfortable positions like lotus suggested because you’re trying to stop all body movement, all positions become equally uncomfortable when you can’t move at all in them, and it’s better to have a position you know you’re supposed to be uncomfortable in so you don’t try to fake a shift. That having been said, I can’t stay in lotus for forty minutes.
My biggest problem when meditating is that when I focus on my breath, I switch to breathing consciously, and I can’t consciously get it right. I either end up gasping for breath or hyperoxygenated (which causes paraesthesias and which I confused with sort sort of mystical body energy or something for a while until I realized what was going on). Do you not have this problem?
There are few references for the jhanas that I like, but this one seems maybe the simplest and most informative: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/jhana-2.html . In general there’s an unfortunately large amount of Pali words that you have to check the definitions of ever 10 seconds. Also, it can be a little difficult to determine when you felt ‘transcendent joy’ versus ‘all-encompassing joy’ and the like. The names aren’t as important as the experiences of course, but as a rationalist I do have something of an obsessive urge to track my progress (which is said to be counterproductive). It’s similar when comparing effects of drugs like nitrous oxide. Two people who both have strong reactions have no real metric to compare the intensity of their experiences. (By the way, I suspect that doing nitrous oxide before meditating is a cheap hack to get started off on the right foot. Nitrous oxide is generally a wonderful drug to experiment with.)
That having been said, I can’t stay in lotus for forty minutes.
Lucky, I can’t even really get into a good half-lotus for more than 30 seconds… even when I try the acceptance trick for the pain, which normally works really well, there’s a purely instinctual desire to change positions. I think I’ll try it for 10 minutes while not meditating after writing this comment, to test how well I can deal with pain and discomfort.
My biggest problem when meditating is that when I focus on my breath, I switch to breathing consciously, and I can’t consciously get it right. I either end up gasping for breath or hyperoxygenated (which causes paraesthesias and which I confused with sort sort of mystical body energy or something for a while until I realized what was going on). Do you not have this problem?
Generally, no… if I relax my shoulders (something I consistently forget to do) and just focus on my nostrils, my breathing tends to be very light and normal-paced. If I try to breathe like that normally (when I’m not relaxed or feeling calm) then I feel as if I’m not getting enough oxygen. So for me at least the key is to try to relax all of the muscles in my body as soon as I notice they’re tensed. Luckily I can tell they’re tensed when my thoughts are wandering and my breathing starts getting heavier or more intense. Distracting thoughts, tensed muscles, and bad breathing all seem to be correlated, and when I notice and fix one it tends to automatically fix the others, at least until I lose focus again. I’ve been doing a lot of running recently so it could be that I need less oxygen than most; though of course, I doubt most monks do a lot of running.
This is really good and I’m glad you posted it and I will be trying a lot of what you mention.
I’m really glad you think so! There seems to be a general practice of not sharing one’s meditative experiences. I can sorta see why: it’s hard to do so without sounding pretentious, and I wasn’t really able to avoid that. Also, talking so long about myself just seems wrong, as it’s violating a well-known social convention. But I figured the benefits of sharing outweighed the costs. I’m happy you got something out of it.
There seems to be a general practice of not sharing one’s meditative experiences. I can sorta see why: it’s hard to do so without sounding pretentious, and I wasn’t really able to avoid that. Also, talking so long about myself just seems wrong, as it’s violating a well-known social convention. But I figured the benefits of sharing outweighed the costs.
I’m glad you shared as well. I think the general practice of not sharing is part of the culture of no-self; it seems egotistical to talk about one’s meditation awesomeness. I also think the benefits of violating it outweigh the costs. I’m going to try to comment with some of my experiences later.
even when I try the acceptance trick for the pain, which normally works really well, there’s a purely instinctual desire to change positions. I think I’ll try it for 10 minutes while not meditating after writing this comment, to test how well I can deal with pain and discomfort.
It seems to me that the pain associated with certain physical positions exists to warn us of potential harm. Circulatory trouble is the obvious one; I don’t know if stressing muscles which aren’t strong yet is actually harmful, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t. Setting aside helpful mental discipline of accepting pain, are you concerned at all about actual damage being done to your body?
I also appreciate that you posted this; it’s a subject I’m curious about (as demonstrated by how much I’ve been interrogating Luke_Grecki). I will try to find the time to read the guide you linked and, if I follow along, try practicing it.
Setting aside helpful mental discipline of accepting pain, are you concerned at all about actual damage being done to your body?
Yes indeed, but I think that I’m going to really need to stretch to improve my flexibility. I’ll try not to go overboard with it though.
I will try to find the time to read the guide you linked and, if I follow along, try practicing it.
I was thinking about scheduling a Less Wrong Meditation Day, in a week or two after people get a chance to read up, where we choose a Saturday and everyone meditates for 6 hours, all starting at roughly the same time. You put social pressure on yourself by committing to report back with your experiences, and this way you can try out extended meditation without having to go through with the scary 10 day retreat. Lots of people won’t be able to find time in their schedule, but I think a few people might, and if there are enough people then it could be good. I’m really interested in seeing the variance of experiences.
I also appreciate that you posted this
Awesome! Any suggestions that’ll make it better than −1? There are some automatic problems of pretension/self-absorption that I’m not sure how to fix, but there might be other obvious problems I’m not seeing.
I think that I’m going to really need to stretch to improve my flexibility
Ditto. I was in a good routine of arm and shoulder stretches for a while, because of the guitar, but I didn’t succeed when I tried to fold some more general stuff (for cycling—legs, glutes, core), and then I trailed off. I wonder how I could get the habit to stick. I suspect it would have to start with normalizing my daily routine in the first place.
I was thinking about scheduling a Less Wrong Meditation Day
That sounds great. I’d definitely want to try it first, to experiment with positions and techniques, but the idea is very appealing.
Any suggestions that’ll make it better than −1?
The people who voted you down would probably have better ideas than I do, but I can guess. The description of effects may not need to be so detailed as to include repetition; recording the patterns might suffice. In the part where you mention the two major poles of LWers and your preference, I’d like to see either more acknowledgement of the counterarguments or less opining. That is, some people clearly disagree with you, because they belong to the other pole; you can strengthen your case by noting why they disagree and why you stand by your position. But I’m not sure that point is needed at all—you could just talk about why meditation is useful to rationalists, regardless of their origins. This is the thing I was needling you about in another subthread, and why I was needling you about it. :)
Similarly:
But hopefully LW starts moving in a more Buddhist and effectiveness-oriented direction.
Even if you don’t associate Buddhism and Buddhist techniques with religion of the sort most LWers disagree with, some of them will, and this could bring up hackles. Failing that, it’s also advocacy of a general personal philosophy; advocacy of specific techniques in order to move towards specific goals might be better received.
I will try to find the time to read the guide you linked and, if I follow along, try practicing it.
I just want to say that it’s really strange reading this two weeks later and having now done the reading and tried it a few times (and planning to do so again right after I wrap up with LW right now). I’ve been deliberately cultivating the habit of actually doing things instead of just talking about them, but it’s startling to come across a concrete reminder of success!
I was thinking about scheduling a Less Wrong Meditation Day
This sounds great. And then making an open thread for everyone to report back?
I was wondering if this sort of thing would be more useful than me writing a post giving instructions. You mentioned (and I agree) that the Mindfulness in Plain English guide is very good, and what I’d end up writing would be a concise set of instructions with some advice that seems most helpful to me. A place where people could report their personal difficulties and respond to each other might be better.
Vipassana as taught at the dhamma.org courses is different than that given in the Mindfulness guide, but I’ll address that in another comment.
Vipassana as taught at the dhamma.org courses is different than that given in the Mindfulness guide, but I’ll address that in another comment.
The whole thing is really confused, seemingly. You have this modern vipassana movement, but the types of meditation endorsed by the vipassana movement are sometimes anapanasati and sometimes vipassana.
There are 16 core instructions of anapanasati, only 4 to 8 of which are actually directly related to breath. And they seem to imply that you should enter the first or second jhanas, but normally you are told to stop focusing on breathing when in jhana and instead focus on the feeling of physical or emotional bliss (at least in the first two/three jhanas); why then such instructions would appear under the title of anapanasati is thus beyond me.
Then in the realm of jhanas there are apparently these weird vipassana jhanas that I’ve never seen anywhere besides Wikipedia, and are perhaps particular to Burma. These 8 jhanas are a lot more popular and agree more with my limited experience. The vipassana jhanas seem to be describing the results of successful vipassana meditation, whereas normal jhanas are the results of successful anapanasati meditation. But the definitions and meaningfulness of the vipassana jhanas are controversial: Buddhaghosa held that the jhanas were for anapanasati, not vipassana.
Vipassana itself is unrelated to the jhanas, and I do not understand it, having kept thus far within the domain of anapanasati. Only in your posts on mindspace do they seem to share a common theme. But where you focus your perception on different parts of your body, moving your concentration along, it is elsewhere suggested that in vipassana one should consider loftier things, like the 40 canonical objects of meditation. Apparently it is because the aim of vipassana is to investigate the four satipatthana in order to see the three marks of existence, in the process reaching new states of knowledge and then attaining nirvana (bodhi).
I think I’m going to order Buddhaghosa’s famous book and try to see where my understanding is shaky.
ETA: Actually, I’m a little saddened that Mindfulness In Plain English was so apparently misleading. Anapanasati is a form of samatha meditation, and thus the jhanas seem to be mostly anapanasati/samatha but with a touch of vipassana (at least that is my naive interpretation). Interestingly, the following is from Wikipedia:
As Thanissaro Bhikkhu writes, “when [the Pāli suttas] depict the Buddha telling his disciples to go meditate, they never quote him as saying ‘go do vipassana,’ but always ‘go do jhana.’ And they never equate the word “vipassana” with any mindfulness techniques. In the few instances where they do mention vipassana, they almost always pair it with samatha — not as two alternative methods, but as two qualities of mind that a person may ‘gain’ or ‘be endowed with,’ and that should be developed together.
ETA 2: Actually, I think what tripped me up is that it’s more subtle than that. Anapanasati in the sense of concentrating on one’s breath might be samatha, where anapanasati in the sense of being mindful of one’s consciousness as one concentrates on one’s breath is a form of vipassana. I am not sure of this, but if true, then there is needless confusion going on that is hard to untangle. But it would be neat if this were true, as it means that anapanasati is both vipassana and samatha at once, which matches the bikkhu’s description in ETA 1 as well as my own subjective experience of attaining the second jhana: mindfulness of breath is what let me focus my mind and concentrate, but it was the insights into my breath and the mindfulness of my consciousness of breathing that actually led me to experience jhana. I think. But this is guesswork.
The Buddha found the ninth jhana, and that is Vipassana, the development of insight that will take the meditator to the ultimate goal beyond the misery of sensory experience.
Yeah. Note how I said I was going to write a post on anapanasati and then wrote one on vipassana. I was trying to reconcile the distinction between the two while I was thinking about the post.
In the end I think it comes down to this: you need to develop concentration and you need to apply it in non-judgmental observation of your own mental processes. Some traditions encourage practicing these separately while some indicate that you should practice them in the same sitting. It seems natural to just think of them as a single technique, and this is the perspective I tried to take in my post.
ETA: It may be useful to alternate focusing on concentration vs observation, seeing as you may only be able to make certain observations after developing your concentration to some threshold.
But where you focus your perception on different parts of your body
This is the kind of vipassana taught at the dhamma.org courses. Here’s how I mentally unified this and anapanasati: I think of the mental procedure of systematically observing the parts of your body as your anchor, which you return to in between observing what’s naturally arising in your mind.
As for the jhanas, I’ve never really thought much about them. I’m certainly interested though.
ETA: It may be useful to alternate focusing on concentration vs observation, seeing as you may only be able to make certain observations after developing your concentration to some threshold.
It seems as if there’s a few standard approaches here:
Buddhaghosa suggests entering (the fourth?) jhana and then retreating, after which the mind will be naturally very concentrated, sharp, and ready for insight meditation.
In contrast, the Samaññaphala Sutta and other suttas suggest entering the fourth jhana and engaing in insight meditation from there, without leaving.
“One approach emphasized insight practice almost exclusively, feeling that since insight gives rise to the wisdom necessary for enlightenment, this was what was more important. An excellent example of a sutta reflecting this approach is the Sammaditthi Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya #9). Here Sariputta gives a beautiful discourse on Right View. He discussed 16 important topics and ends each topic by saying “When a noble disciple has thus understood [the topic], he uproots the underlying tendency to greed, hatred, the ‘I am’ conceit and ignorance, and arousing true knowledge he here and now makes an end of suffering.” Here enlightenment is achieved solely through insights; the Jhanas are not even mentioned.”
I definitely can’t enter the fourth jhana at whim, nor do I feel at all prepared for vipassana meditation. But I think this confirms your reasoning that there are many potentially successful approaches to balancing concentration and mindfulness, which might be good to keep in mind.
Sorry, I kept on editing and editing my comment! But anyway.
In the end I think it comes down to this: you need to develop concentration and you need to apply it in non-judgmental observation of your own mental processes. Some traditions encourage practicing these separately while some indicate that you should practice them in the same sitting. It seems natural to just think of them as a single technique, and this is the perspective I tried to take in my post.
Yeah, I think the whole concentration/mindfulness dichotomy hadn’t really clicked with me yet; I understood the distinction, but couldn’t identify their qualia. Thinking back on my meditation experiences now, though, I understand their difference.
This is the kind of vipassana taught at the dhamma.org courses. Here’s how I mentally unified this and anapanasati: I think of the mental procedure of systematically observing the parts of your body as your anchor, which you return to in between observing what’s naturally arising in your mind.
That seems very natural and clever.
As for the jhanas, I’ve never really thought much about them. I’m certainly interested though.
I had only a vague idea of what they were until I experienced that incredible body high / uncontainable bliss and checked Wikipedia and the like for what that possibly could have been. Some texts said ‘they are distracting, practice vipassana instead’ but reading this and just generally looking at how Buddha attained enlightenment via the jhanas made me think that my efforts should be aimed at mastering as many jhanas as quickly as I can. As much as I love meditation, the penultimate goal is awesomeness, and the jhanas are awesome.
Hence I’m a tad wary of the various vipassana practices and will probably keep to anapanasati till I get strong diminishing marginal returns on jhana achievement. (Various texts talk about how desiring jhana makes you less likely to attain jhana. I think what they mean though is thinking about jhana during meditation, not when planning meditative styles beforehand. Hence the Buddha telling people to do jhana, obviously implying that they could achieve jhana despite deciding to aim for it beforehand.)
Anapanasati in the sense of concentrating on one’s breath might be samatha, where anapanasati in the sense of being mindful of one’s consciousness as one concentrates on one’s breath is a form of vipassana.
This rings true to me. It’s the most clear description of their relationship I’ve come across.
what I’d end up writing would be a concise set of instructions with some advice that seems most helpful to me.
I’d like to read that, in addition to the full guide. It would tell me which elements someone who’s already practiced this finds especially important.
A place where people could report their personal difficulties and respond to each other might be better.
I’m not sure the two need to be mutually exclusive. An open thread in the discussion section might be good for this, since it wouldn’t be of general interest to everyone on LW but the people who are interested could use a meeting point.
There seems to be a general practice of not sharing one’s meditative experiences.
Given the post/comments here, and also my comment in the other thread, I’m inclined to lean the other way and keep trying to describe my experiences as fully as possible. It might be useful for other learners—but on the other hand, after thinking about that for a few moments, I expect anticipation of writing to distract me during the sessions themselves. Maybe that’s why people don’t talk about their experiences. They’re useful as introspective, personal phenomena, and habitual sharing weakens that.
My biggest problem when meditating is that when I focus on my breath, I switch to breathing consciously[...]
I’ve started to suspect that this difficulty is actually a feature. Observing without interfering seems like an important skill to learn if the goal is to be more aware of your thoughts and actions in general.
Imagine, say, being consciously aware of every detail of your leg movements while walking; it becomes a lot more difficult if you don’t know how to stay out of your own way.
A common problem at this stage is the tendency to control the breathing, and this makes the breathing uncomfortable. To overcome this problem, imagine that you are just a passenger in a car looking through the window at your breath. You are not the driver, nor a `back seat driver’, so stop giving orders, let go and enjoy the ride. Let the breath do the breathing while you simply watch without interfering.
I discovered something interesting regarding this yesterday. I mentioned that when I breathe too much, I get paraesthesias (feeling of numbness and tingling).
Well, now I’ve noticed that checking to see whether I have paraesthesias also causes paraesthesias. I don’t know if this is true of everyone, but just thinking “I wonder if my face is tingling right now” causes my face to tingle quite perceptibly.
I think this was at the root of a lot of my worries over breathing “wrong”.
I did something like that the other week. I was lying in bed and I noticed a band of tingly numbness across the top of my head. I decided to try to deliberately extend the feeling across my whole head and got a bunch of perceptible twitching in various facial muscles as a result.
This is really good and I’m glad you posted it and I will be trying a lot of what you mention. Also, I’m glad Google helpfully informed me that there are two different uses of “jhana”, because I only knew the other one and was about to post that if you reached dhyana your first time meditating I was pretty sure you were the Maitreya Buddha.
I find I have to meditate sitting up because I become very sleepy if I do it lying down. If you can avoid sleepiness, you may escape that need. I’ve also heard uncomfortable positions like lotus suggested because you’re trying to stop all body movement, all positions become equally uncomfortable when you can’t move at all in them, and it’s better to have a position you know you’re supposed to be uncomfortable in so you don’t try to fake a shift. That having been said, I can’t stay in lotus for forty minutes.
My biggest problem when meditating is that when I focus on my breath, I switch to breathing consciously, and I can’t consciously get it right. I either end up gasping for breath or hyperoxygenated (which causes paraesthesias and which I confused with sort sort of mystical body energy or something for a while until I realized what was going on). Do you not have this problem?
There are few references for the jhanas that I like, but this one seems maybe the simplest and most informative: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/jhana-2.html . In general there’s an unfortunately large amount of Pali words that you have to check the definitions of ever 10 seconds. Also, it can be a little difficult to determine when you felt ‘transcendent joy’ versus ‘all-encompassing joy’ and the like. The names aren’t as important as the experiences of course, but as a rationalist I do have something of an obsessive urge to track my progress (which is said to be counterproductive). It’s similar when comparing effects of drugs like nitrous oxide. Two people who both have strong reactions have no real metric to compare the intensity of their experiences. (By the way, I suspect that doing nitrous oxide before meditating is a cheap hack to get started off on the right foot. Nitrous oxide is generally a wonderful drug to experiment with.)
Lucky, I can’t even really get into a good half-lotus for more than 30 seconds… even when I try the acceptance trick for the pain, which normally works really well, there’s a purely instinctual desire to change positions. I think I’ll try it for 10 minutes while not meditating after writing this comment, to test how well I can deal with pain and discomfort.
Generally, no… if I relax my shoulders (something I consistently forget to do) and just focus on my nostrils, my breathing tends to be very light and normal-paced. If I try to breathe like that normally (when I’m not relaxed or feeling calm) then I feel as if I’m not getting enough oxygen. So for me at least the key is to try to relax all of the muscles in my body as soon as I notice they’re tensed. Luckily I can tell they’re tensed when my thoughts are wandering and my breathing starts getting heavier or more intense. Distracting thoughts, tensed muscles, and bad breathing all seem to be correlated, and when I notice and fix one it tends to automatically fix the others, at least until I lose focus again. I’ve been doing a lot of running recently so it could be that I need less oxygen than most; though of course, I doubt most monks do a lot of running.
I’m really glad you think so! There seems to be a general practice of not sharing one’s meditative experiences. I can sorta see why: it’s hard to do so without sounding pretentious, and I wasn’t really able to avoid that. Also, talking so long about myself just seems wrong, as it’s violating a well-known social convention. But I figured the benefits of sharing outweighed the costs. I’m happy you got something out of it.
I’m glad you shared as well. I think the general practice of not sharing is part of the culture of no-self; it seems egotistical to talk about one’s meditation awesomeness. I also think the benefits of violating it outweigh the costs. I’m going to try to comment with some of my experiences later.
ETA: Here is the comment I promised.
It seems to me that the pain associated with certain physical positions exists to warn us of potential harm. Circulatory trouble is the obvious one; I don’t know if stressing muscles which aren’t strong yet is actually harmful, but I’d be surprised if it isn’t. Setting aside helpful mental discipline of accepting pain, are you concerned at all about actual damage being done to your body?
I also appreciate that you posted this; it’s a subject I’m curious about (as demonstrated by how much I’ve been interrogating Luke_Grecki). I will try to find the time to read the guide you linked and, if I follow along, try practicing it.
Yes indeed, but I think that I’m going to really need to stretch to improve my flexibility. I’ll try not to go overboard with it though.
I was thinking about scheduling a Less Wrong Meditation Day, in a week or two after people get a chance to read up, where we choose a Saturday and everyone meditates for 6 hours, all starting at roughly the same time. You put social pressure on yourself by committing to report back with your experiences, and this way you can try out extended meditation without having to go through with the scary 10 day retreat. Lots of people won’t be able to find time in their schedule, but I think a few people might, and if there are enough people then it could be good. I’m really interested in seeing the variance of experiences.
Awesome! Any suggestions that’ll make it better than −1? There are some automatic problems of pretension/self-absorption that I’m not sure how to fix, but there might be other obvious problems I’m not seeing.
Ditto. I was in a good routine of arm and shoulder stretches for a while, because of the guitar, but I didn’t succeed when I tried to fold some more general stuff (for cycling—legs, glutes, core), and then I trailed off. I wonder how I could get the habit to stick. I suspect it would have to start with normalizing my daily routine in the first place.
That sounds great. I’d definitely want to try it first, to experiment with positions and techniques, but the idea is very appealing.
The people who voted you down would probably have better ideas than I do, but I can guess. The description of effects may not need to be so detailed as to include repetition; recording the patterns might suffice. In the part where you mention the two major poles of LWers and your preference, I’d like to see either more acknowledgement of the counterarguments or less opining. That is, some people clearly disagree with you, because they belong to the other pole; you can strengthen your case by noting why they disagree and why you stand by your position. But I’m not sure that point is needed at all—you could just talk about why meditation is useful to rationalists, regardless of their origins. This is the thing I was needling you about in another subthread, and why I was needling you about it. :)
Similarly:
Even if you don’t associate Buddhism and Buddhist techniques with religion of the sort most LWers disagree with, some of them will, and this could bring up hackles. Failing that, it’s also advocacy of a general personal philosophy; advocacy of specific techniques in order to move towards specific goals might be better received.
I just want to say that it’s really strange reading this two weeks later and having now done the reading and tried it a few times (and planning to do so again right after I wrap up with LW right now). I’ve been deliberately cultivating the habit of actually doing things instead of just talking about them, but it’s startling to come across a concrete reminder of success!
This sounds great. And then making an open thread for everyone to report back?
I was wondering if this sort of thing would be more useful than me writing a post giving instructions. You mentioned (and I agree) that the Mindfulness in Plain English guide is very good, and what I’d end up writing would be a concise set of instructions with some advice that seems most helpful to me. A place where people could report their personal difficulties and respond to each other might be better.
Vipassana as taught at the dhamma.org courses is different than that given in the Mindfulness guide, but I’ll address that in another comment.
The whole thing is really confused, seemingly. You have this modern vipassana movement, but the types of meditation endorsed by the vipassana movement are sometimes anapanasati and sometimes vipassana.
There are 16 core instructions of anapanasati, only 4 to 8 of which are actually directly related to breath. And they seem to imply that you should enter the first or second jhanas, but normally you are told to stop focusing on breathing when in jhana and instead focus on the feeling of physical or emotional bliss (at least in the first two/three jhanas); why then such instructions would appear under the title of anapanasati is thus beyond me.
Then in the realm of jhanas there are apparently these weird vipassana jhanas that I’ve never seen anywhere besides Wikipedia, and are perhaps particular to Burma. These 8 jhanas are a lot more popular and agree more with my limited experience. The vipassana jhanas seem to be describing the results of successful vipassana meditation, whereas normal jhanas are the results of successful anapanasati meditation. But the definitions and meaningfulness of the vipassana jhanas are controversial: Buddhaghosa held that the jhanas were for anapanasati, not vipassana.
Vipassana itself is unrelated to the jhanas, and I do not understand it, having kept thus far within the domain of anapanasati. Only in your posts on mindspace do they seem to share a common theme. But where you focus your perception on different parts of your body, moving your concentration along, it is elsewhere suggested that in vipassana one should consider loftier things, like the 40 canonical objects of meditation. Apparently it is because the aim of vipassana is to investigate the four satipatthana in order to see the three marks of existence, in the process reaching new states of knowledge and then attaining nirvana (bodhi).
I think I’m going to order Buddhaghosa’s famous book and try to see where my understanding is shaky.
ETA: Actually, I’m a little saddened that Mindfulness In Plain English was so apparently misleading. Anapanasati is a form of samatha meditation, and thus the jhanas seem to be mostly anapanasati/samatha but with a touch of vipassana (at least that is my naive interpretation). Interestingly, the following is from Wikipedia:
ETA 2: Actually, I think what tripped me up is that it’s more subtle than that. Anapanasati in the sense of concentrating on one’s breath might be samatha, where anapanasati in the sense of being mindful of one’s consciousness as one concentrates on one’s breath is a form of vipassana. I am not sure of this, but if true, then there is needless confusion going on that is hard to untangle. But it would be neat if this were true, as it means that anapanasati is both vipassana and samatha at once, which matches the bikkhu’s description in ETA 1 as well as my own subjective experience of attaining the second jhana: mindfulness of breath is what let me focus my mind and concentrate, but it was the insights into my breath and the mindfulness of my consciousness of breathing that actually led me to experience jhana. I think. But this is guesswork.
To add to this confusion vipassana is sometimes called a jhana:
O_O
Yeah. Note how I said I was going to write a post on anapanasati and then wrote one on vipassana. I was trying to reconcile the distinction between the two while I was thinking about the post.
In the end I think it comes down to this: you need to develop concentration and you need to apply it in non-judgmental observation of your own mental processes. Some traditions encourage practicing these separately while some indicate that you should practice them in the same sitting. It seems natural to just think of them as a single technique, and this is the perspective I tried to take in my post.
ETA: It may be useful to alternate focusing on concentration vs observation, seeing as you may only be able to make certain observations after developing your concentration to some threshold.
This is the kind of vipassana taught at the dhamma.org courses. Here’s how I mentally unified this and anapanasati: I think of the mental procedure of systematically observing the parts of your body as your anchor, which you return to in between observing what’s naturally arising in your mind.
As for the jhanas, I’ve never really thought much about them. I’m certainly interested though.
It seems as if there’s a few standard approaches here:
Buddhaghosa suggests entering (the fourth?) jhana and then retreating, after which the mind will be naturally very concentrated, sharp, and ready for insight meditation.
In contrast, the Samaññaphala Sutta and other suttas suggest entering the fourth jhana and engaing in insight meditation from there, without leaving.
“One approach emphasized insight practice almost exclusively, feeling that since insight gives rise to the wisdom necessary for enlightenment, this was what was more important. An excellent example of a sutta reflecting this approach is the Sammaditthi Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya #9). Here Sariputta gives a beautiful discourse on Right View. He discussed 16 important topics and ends each topic by saying “When a noble disciple has thus understood [the topic], he uproots the underlying tendency to greed, hatred, the ‘I am’ conceit and ignorance, and arousing true knowledge he here and now makes an end of suffering.” Here enlightenment is achieved solely through insights; the Jhanas are not even mentioned.”
I definitely can’t enter the fourth jhana at whim, nor do I feel at all prepared for vipassana meditation. But I think this confirms your reasoning that there are many potentially successful approaches to balancing concentration and mindfulness, which might be good to keep in mind.
Sorry, I kept on editing and editing my comment! But anyway.
Yeah, I think the whole concentration/mindfulness dichotomy hadn’t really clicked with me yet; I understood the distinction, but couldn’t identify their qualia. Thinking back on my meditation experiences now, though, I understand their difference.
That seems very natural and clever.
I had only a vague idea of what they were until I experienced that incredible body high / uncontainable bliss and checked Wikipedia and the like for what that possibly could have been. Some texts said ‘they are distracting, practice vipassana instead’ but reading this and just generally looking at how Buddha attained enlightenment via the jhanas made me think that my efforts should be aimed at mastering as many jhanas as quickly as I can. As much as I love meditation, the penultimate goal is awesomeness, and the jhanas are awesome.
Hence I’m a tad wary of the various vipassana practices and will probably keep to anapanasati till I get strong diminishing marginal returns on jhana achievement. (Various texts talk about how desiring jhana makes you less likely to attain jhana. I think what they mean though is thinking about jhana during meditation, not when planning meditative styles beforehand. Hence the Buddha telling people to do jhana, obviously implying that they could achieve jhana despite deciding to aim for it beforehand.)
This rings true to me. It’s the most clear description of their relationship I’ve come across.
I’d like to read that, in addition to the full guide. It would tell me which elements someone who’s already practiced this finds especially important.
I’m not sure the two need to be mutually exclusive. An open thread in the discussion section might be good for this, since it wouldn’t be of general interest to everyone on LW but the people who are interested could use a meeting point.
Given the post/comments here, and also my comment in the other thread, I’m inclined to lean the other way and keep trying to describe my experiences as fully as possible. It might be useful for other learners—but on the other hand, after thinking about that for a few moments, I expect anticipation of writing to distract me during the sessions themselves. Maybe that’s why people don’t talk about their experiences. They’re useful as introspective, personal phenomena, and habitual sharing weakens that.
I’ve started to suspect that this difficulty is actually a feature. Observing without interfering seems like an important skill to learn if the goal is to be more aware of your thoughts and actions in general.
Imagine, say, being consciously aware of every detail of your leg movements while walking; it becomes a lot more difficult if you don’t know how to stay out of your own way.
Here’s some advice from a guy named Ajahn Brahm:
I also had this problem for a while.
I discovered something interesting regarding this yesterday. I mentioned that when I breathe too much, I get paraesthesias (feeling of numbness and tingling).
Well, now I’ve noticed that checking to see whether I have paraesthesias also causes paraesthesias. I don’t know if this is true of everyone, but just thinking “I wonder if my face is tingling right now” causes my face to tingle quite perceptibly.
I think this was at the root of a lot of my worries over breathing “wrong”.
I did something like that the other week. I was lying in bed and I noticed a band of tingly numbness across the top of my head. I decided to try to deliberately extend the feeling across my whole head and got a bunch of perceptible twitching in various facial muscles as a result.