10 – The 2cd 3rd and 4th Jhanas

The second jhana is an improvement over the first in that

significantly less effort is required to keep the attention on the meditation object,

and clarity is increased.

The descriptive phrase in the tradition is,

“with the dropping of applied and sustained thought or effort,

one abides in the second jhana,”

but

it does take some little bit of attention to stay with it,

depending on how solidly it is developed and

exactly which phase of the second jhana you are in.

The second jhana is the phase where jhanic qualities and side benefits

begin to show up on their own, … like Grace…

and meditation seems much more something that happens

than something you must make happen.

This significant decrease in the mental processing power required

to keep the attention on the object of meditation

makes it a lot easier to perceive clearly,

such that details of the object that previously may have been unclear

tend to appear much more clearly,

and

the object tends to seem more interesting, rich, nuanced, and complex.

In fact, in the second jhana

the center of attention is the clearest of all the jhanas,

with the most fine-grained resolution and greatest brightness of mind.

You would think it would be the higher jhanas about which this is the case,

but strangely it is not.

The later jhanas add elements that the second jhana lacks, such as

space, background, and the like,

but the second jhana is the star when it comes to

centralized, focused clarity and ability to discern subtle details

with respect to the meditation object itself.

THE THIRD JHANA

The third jhana is significantly different from the first and second in many ways,

and is probably the most important jhana to understand,

since it basically

turns everything you think about meditation and progress

on its head,

thus

causing endless confusion and frustration for meditators

who don’t know what it is about and what to look for,

and even for plenty who do.

~~~

From a certain perspective,

understanding the third jhana is the key to mastery,

whether that mastery is of concentration practice, insight practice,

or a fusion of the two.

The problem with the third jhana is that it is broad,

and not just broad, but

sensations at the center of attention also tend to be

the least clear of any of the jhanas.

This can be extremely confusing for those who wish

to keep looking at the center of attention for answers since, in the third jhana,

that is not where the party is.

The party is in the periphery of attention,

those areas around the center of attention,

but we may tend to think of “good attention” as being

“one-pointed”, “tightly focused”, and the like.

Because that way of working served us so well in the first two jhanas,

and

because we generally are woefully underdeveloped at paying attention

as broadly as the third jhana demands,

most people have a lot of work to do

to learn how to get what the third jhana is about,

either phenomenologically or conceptually.

~~~

Attention seems out of phase in the third jhana, such that

those who were seeing things arise and manifest with great clarity

in the second jhana

may now notice that everything seems to be just vanishing

when you are most looking for it,

as the third jhana’s natural strength involves clarity

regarding the end of sensations,

which is the direct antithesis of the first and second jhanas,

in which every time you look for something, there it is or, even better,

it just shows up clearly without much or any work at all.

When faced with these unexpected attention and phase problems which,

by their nature, are not generally clear to most practitioners beyond a sense that

something is attentionally different or wrong-feeling,

most meditators regress and attempt to apply the first jhana way of working,

involving strong effort, to a problem that requires even more the reverse of that

than the second jhana did.

In the second jhana,

you could relax, or at least not be nearly as effortful,

and jhanic qualities and the object of attention would just manifest.

However, in the third jhana,

you must let phenomena in the center of attention not quite be there,

not really be clear, not really be present,

and allow the phase problem to just do its weird out-of-phase thing,

since

if you try to force it to be something it is not,

then like a Chinese finger trap that just gets tighter as you pull harder,

it won’t let you win that way.

Despite our ideals of steady, focused one-pointedness,

the third jhana is a significantly more sophisticated form of attention,

and learning how to pay attention in it is the necessary set-up for the fourth jhana.

We learned a lot about the center of attention and about

objects “over there” in the first and second jhanas,

but

the third jhana begins to include spacious elements,

however initially vague,

and peripheral and background elements, however initially unclear.

Without learning about spacious sensations and the background,

you won’t be able to put your whole experience field together

in the way the fourth jhana does

and thus

won’t get the complete picture of what is going on.

For those of you who read and practice from

John Yates aka Culadasa’s material,

the first two jhanas teach you a lot about what he terms “attention”,

the third jhana teaches you a lot about what he terms “awareness”,

and

the fourth jhana teaches you how to combine these together

in a balanced and complete way.

Further,

for those who get the feel of the third jhana,

the vague diffuse out-of-phase-ness gives the third jhana its best elements,

which are equanimous, subtly blissful, cool, and restful.

That said,

these elements are not as easy for most to detect as

the positive aspects of the first and second jhanas,

which tend to be more obvious, since they are coarser.

For those who can appreciate the third jhana’s strengths,

they are found to be preferable even to the fun elements of the second.

THE FOURTH JHANA

The fourth jhana is where everything coalesces.

The ability to clearly perceive the center of attention is combined with

the ability to perceive the periphery of attention, and then

a volumetric or spacious element is filled out in a way that it wasn’t before and,

more than that, an integrative element as well as a very direct element.

The hallmark of the fourth jhana is equanimity, yet,

it may not be all that noticeable.

Bliss, rapture, happiness, as well as pain and strange occurrences

may all stand out in the earlier stages,

but equanimity may just feel normal and undramatic,

making it subtle at times, or

so unremarkable that people may miss it.

~~~

Fourth is integrative in a way that the previous jhanas are not,

in the sense that it points to everything being encompassed

in the same mode of attention—all the sense doors,

space, attention itself, and what I call “core processes”,

things that really seem to be “me”, such as the application of effort,

the recognition of what is going on, the sense of questioning,

the movement of attention.

The fourth jhana consolidates these in a more volumetric, seamless, and complete way

than in previous jhanas.

In this sense,

it is a set-up for many wondrous attainments.

If we accomplish the fourth jhana well,

we have a large range of options that we can explore

that are based on it and issue from it,

such as the next four jhanas.

This article was Inspired by

Buddha’s step by step instructions to obtain Enlightenment

as refined by The Arahant Daneil M. Ingram.