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.
Advice on jhana
DhammaDhatu
Veteran
Some comments posted somewhere. 
The three levels of samadhi are real. This teaching is most advantageous, not to diminish jhana, but to clarify there are actually various levels. Many meditators experience some rapture, etc, and believe they have attained jhana where in fact their rapture is momentary or born of neighbourhood concentration. The way to differentiate is jhana level can be entered at will and abided in for many hours in absolute stillness & control.
Jhana is a sign of purification. When the mental formations in the body & nervous system are completely purified, jhana occurs. The rapture of jhana is also merely purification. Although the mind is very selfless in jhana there is much more to do. Jhana prepares the mind for the final insight or vipassana. The rapture & bliss of jhana have no relevance to the ultimate path whatsover. These things should be regarded with total equinimity & passed through. They are to be purified, in the same manner as all other mental formations.
The genuine path of the Buddha, from start to end, only has one practise, which is abandoning craving & attachment. SN 48.9 states clearly (and MN 117 indirectly) that right concentration is singleness of mind with non-attachment or relinquishment as its sole object (vossaggarammanam karitva). As advised, jhana is merely a sign of this right concentration. One should bear this in mind & not forget it. Not forgetting this is right mindfulness.
0
Comments
i shall scribble these notes down & leave them on the community bulletin board
for all & sunder to partake & enjoy
even the johnsons whose boy took a shat in the neighborhood pool & didn't care at all.....
however, i am curious what "neighborhood concentration" means
if you know what this means, explain it to me my dear chap
so we go through these "jahanas", right, and once we reach the top floor, and break a hole through the roof and climb out, we become buddhas and fly away?
there are many villains that need to be vanquished.... and i must be able to do this in order to do so. as us all.
an "army of bodhisattvas" as we call it in the university
nothing but emptiness
nothing but form
nothing but jelly
all is good