Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
@seeker, why did you say that? 'When I was doing 4+ hours of meditation on a daily basis I found that my sex drive reduced to near zero! '
now nobody is going to meditate! jhana vs sex, sex 1: 0 jhana
Ha! But, what I didn't say was that it was the most peaceful, happiest and most effortless period of my entire life! And even to say that would be an understatement, by far! Everything was illuminated. There was no more darkness anywhere. Everything was uncovered. The entire universe was in palm of my hand. The past and future disappeared. All questions were answered. All problems disappeared. Everything was perfect just as it is. No more need to go and get "something else". Everything that I needed to be perfectly happy was entirely contained within a sunset or the sound of the rain or the taste of an orange.
And then I stopped doing meditation because I believed that I had "found it". Holy shit! that was so stupid! Biggest mistake I ever made! I learned a very valuable lesson though. I learned that when you stop making problems, you stop having them. Some people say that meditation can not solve all of your problems. I completely disagree!
Dhammapada 282. Wisdom springs from meditation; without meditation wisdom wanes. Having known these two paths of progress and decline, let a man so conduct himself that his wisdom may increase.
'When I was doing 4+ hours of meditation on a daily basis I found that my sex drive reduced to near zero! '
now nobody is going to meditate! jhana vs sex, sex 1: 0 jhana
That wasn't my reaction exactly. What @seeker242 wrote makes sense to me -- and jhana sounds very appealing. I remember from the Pali Canon that the Buddha acknowledged that sensory pleasures are, well, pleasant -- but that jhana is much more blissful. That makes sense too.
I'm interested in the practical problem of whether you can cultivate jhana if you don't want to be celibate (for whatever reason), or if you're still involved with/interested in various worldly goals or activities. Certainly I can see the possibility of "knocking out the hindrances" temporarily while on retreat, or if one is doing 4+ hours of meditation, but I wouldn't want them to be knocked out forever.
Relationships involve two people, so one can't just make unilateral decisions about stuff like that. The overall sense that I get is that samatha can be cultivated to some degree, but there are going to be tradeoffs, naturally -- so I'm interested in how other people negotiate among these different priorities in their lives.
...what I'm still trying to figure out here is whether jhana practice is feasible if you're in a sexual relationship or not aiming to be celibate. If jhana bliss makes sex seem "trivial...nothing" by comparison, then wouldn't one just start to lose all interest in erotic behavior? And seeing as sensory desire is a "hindrance" that one abandons in the course of developing jhana, wouldn't this practice automatically result in loss of libido?
Well, I am 40. Some reduction in libido is predictable. But yes, there has been a marked reduction.
Regarding sensual desire as a hindrance, that is not a monolithic component of experience. It is sensual desire which arises during the cultivation of jhana which is the problem. Of course, having developed the capacity to drop sensual desire in meditation, it becomes increasingly feasible to do so in the rest of daily life.
The only fear I am hearing about is that something you consider to be infallable (jhana,s) is being questioned. No where do I say it's not something to explore & experience, just that if one treats it a something more special than the mundane world around us..you've already been snared.
You're somersaulting from this ill-advised statement:
The question to ask when comparing sex with jhana's is not about the relevent value of each but is instead about whether we turn either phenomena into a source of attachment or not.
That is an appropriate attitude later in the path. Until the jhana is mastered, hankering for it is totally appropriate, a factor in many of the wings to awakening.
Seriously, this sort of search for ever deeper altered states of consciousness can be a distraction from the hard work of being a Buddha. If you reach the fifth or eights or whatever level of jhana, then what? When you get home from the retreat, the grass still needs mowed, the landlord calls to say the rent is late, and your wife is complaining that you forgot her birthday.
First of all, what is this hard work of being a Buddha? You think the Buddha paid rent or kept himself busy raising a family?
Comments
And then I stopped doing meditation because I believed that I had "found it". Holy shit! that was so stupid! Biggest mistake I ever made! I learned a very valuable lesson though. I learned that when you stop making problems, you stop having them. Some people say that meditation can not solve all of your problems. I completely disagree!
I'm interested in the practical problem of whether you can cultivate jhana if you don't want to be celibate (for whatever reason), or if you're still involved with/interested in various worldly goals or activities. Certainly I can see the possibility of "knocking out the hindrances" temporarily while on retreat, or if one is doing 4+ hours of meditation, but I wouldn't want them to be knocked out forever.
Relationships involve two people, so one can't just make unilateral decisions about stuff like that. The overall sense that I get is that samatha can be cultivated to some degree, but there are going to be tradeoffs, naturally -- so I'm interested in how other people negotiate among these different priorities in their lives.
Regarding sensual desire as a hindrance, that is not a monolithic component of experience. It is sensual desire which arises during the cultivation of jhana which is the problem. Of course, having developed the capacity to drop sensual desire in meditation, it becomes increasingly feasible to do so in the rest of daily life.
Secondly, what happens when a jhana is mastered? Well, here's how it worked for Sariputta.