The answer to this problem is the moment the image arose, and the pleasant feeling arose you would want to start relaxing into that perception right away. You want to release your attention from it, relax the tightness around it. Then the rest of the thoughts don’t come up. You also don’t get frustrated because you have truly let go and have not suppressed anything.
The word “tranquilize” in modern use often refers to stress relief. One might use a tranquilizer drug to take the stress away. In much the same way, we are tranquilizing the hindrance and taking away its tension and tightness.
Returning to The Buddha’s Awakening story he sat in meditation again, but this time he relaxed and let go of the "tight mental fist" wrapped around those thoughts that pulled his mind out of the present. He relaxed into and tranquilized the tightness arising in his mind, in his head.
In the first watch of the night, the Buddha followed this method. He reached the fourth (Tranquil Aware) jhāna. When one adds the relax step, progress in the jhāna practice is indeed swift! The Buddha called progress “immediately effective” or akāliko in pāli.
From there the triple-knowledge arose: he remembered his past lives, experienced other realms, and realized how karma worked. At last, through seeing with wisdom (understanding dependent origination), he attained Nibbāna that very next morning.
The Buddha’s process of awakening was what is called the "Three Knowledges" (Tevijjā). But the process of going through the jhānas is the same. More on this later.
What he taught the most, however, as in the Anupada Sutta which we are going to study next, is the path that goes through all the four material jhānas, the four immaterial states and on to Nibbāna. Again, these are the Tranquil Aware jhānas, not the absorption jhānas of yoga or other methods.
In the Majjhima Nikāya, the Buddha teaches jhānas in 50 suttas out of 152.[vi] Clearly, the Buddha recommends the jhāna path to awakening; it just needs to be the right type of jhāna!
In addition to the fact that the tranquil aware (TWIM) jhānas will take you all the way to Nibbāna, a significant advantage with the aware jhānas is that they develop in a fraction of the time it takes to attain the absorption jhānas.
Consider that the Buddha taught many uneducated farmers as well as princes. He had to have a simple system of meditation that was “immediately effective” (akāliko). These farmers didn’t have the time for, or interest in, a practice that took a long time to understand and master.
Relaxing tension and tightness eventually eliminate hindrances. With one-pointed concentration practice, all you are doing is suppressing hindrances for a short period of time. The same ones just keep coming back after your concentration power diminishes, so you must drive them away again each time you sit.
With the absorption jhānas, meditators dislike being disturbed from their meditation — for example, a loud sound arises, and dislike comes up. For the most part, the reaction to a hindrance is aversion or restlessness. You try to beat that hindrance away. In TWIM, you are "treating the illness" right there, removing the tension and tightness from the hindrance so that it loses its power.
Comparing Aware and Concentration Jhāna
As we sit in the aware jhānas, we can still hear sounds, and if the teacher calls us, we hear this and can respond right away. Someone might tap us on the shoulder and say something. We will feel it, and we can choose to respond or not. At the same time, when a loud motorcycle is outside the meditation hall, the mental balance is there — we hear it but pay no attention to it. Mind uses the relax step to observe, accept, and let go of the hindrance that pulls our attention away.
When you get into the higher aware jhānas, you do experience a sort of pulling away from the body because, in the immaterial (arūpa) jhānas, where there is only mind, it is operating on a subtler level — the senses have receded into the background. Only when there is contact do you notice the outside world. The word contact here means something happens to draw your attention — something unexpected like the teacher calling or the phone ringing.
Some teachers may advise you to stay away from (concentration) jhānas because you could become attached or even addicted to them. Actually, this can be true for absorption, one-pointed concentration jhānas, as they can become really intense. You might become caught by them because some are very blissful, and you could stop right there.
I have read accounts on discussion sites online where people experience absorption jhānas and think they are enlightened. They talk about how blissful it is yet they have only attained the first jhāna — there is still so much more to be learned!
But why would the Buddha give you a practice that had potential pitfalls like this? And wouldn’t a student naturally want to move on and see what’s next?
Based on the sutta texts the Buddha did not give us the absorption jhānas. He had already rejected them in the first part of his journey (sutta MN 36). You never need to worry about becoming attached to the aware jhānas. It’s like saying you are attached to the third grade and never want to progress to the fourth because you don’t want to learn anything new again.
With the aware jhānas, we are always looking to progress, to see what is next. In the suttas many times it is said that the meditator can easily experience this or that aware jhāna state, but that he knows this is not the final experience — that there is more to be done. So, the meditator keeps going. Progress does not stop.
In MN 105, Sunakkhatta Sutta, it says that the meditator, upon attainment of the realm of nothingness, now looks forward to the realm of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. He wants nothing to do with the previous state and, in fact, even considers it to be repulsive:
14. "It is possible, Sunakkhatta, that some person here may be intent on the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception. When a person is intent on the base of neither-perception-nor-non-perception, only talk concerning that interests him, and his thinking and pondering are in line with that, and he associates with that kind of person, and he finds satisfaction in that. But when talk about the base of nothingness is going on, he will not listen to it or give it ear or exert his mind to understand it. He does not associate with that kind of person, and he does not find satisfaction in that.
15. "Suppose a person has eaten some delicious food and thrown it up. What do you think, Sunakkhatta? Could that man have any desire to eat that food again?"
"No, venerable sir. Why is that? Because that food is considered repulsive."
The experiences you have when you practice an aware jhāna are unlikely ever to be repeated in the same way again. They are stages of progress. For example, when one gets an insight, it can unleash quite a bit of joy. But don’t expect that again. You have now acquired that understanding, and there is no more to be learned from that insight. That one is “in the books.”
Progress using the relax step is incredibly fast. In the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the Buddha says awakening can happen in a single lifetime, in seven years, six years, five years…or even as little as seven days. When you follow the instructions precisely, your progress can be very quick.
On a typical ten-to-fourteen-day TWIM retreat, most students will get to the 4th jhāna, and many of those will get into the higher arūpa (formless) bases or jhānas. A few might even be successful (the first experience of the awakening). It doesn't happen every retreat, but some people are just ready for it. They understand and follow the directions perfectly and have a successful retreat in every sense of the word!
When we release the tension and tightness from a hindrance, it gradually disappears. When that happens, you will have joy. For the first time, you have become free of craving until another hindrance shows up.
This experience is the basis for the First Tranquil Aware jhāna: a fully energetic, balanced, and sublime deep state of mind from which one can clearly see the impersonal processes of mind. From here you begin to see deeply into all twelve links of dependent origination, and in due time letting go of all conditions w
ill come upon an unconditioned state!
In summary, TWIM is not a Concentration meditation practice — it is a Collected meditation practice.
Chapter Four: Types of Concentration Practice
The Many Methods of Concentration Practice
I want to summarize the major types of concentration or absorption meditation techniques that exist in Buddhist practices today, especially in the Theravada tradition. This doesn’t include all of them but the predominant generic types. They include the following:
Full Absorption Concentration using meditation objects like the breath, visualizations, candle flames, or colored discs to become fully absorbed into the object.
Dry Insight where the meditator does not become absorbed into the object but uses observation to develop insight — dry means without the use of deep one-pointed absorption concentration.
Concentration Insight Meditation a mixture of the above using full absorption concentration to develop all eight absorption jhānas and then emerge and observe mind and develop insight.
We have already discussed Concentration-created Full Absorption meditation so let us look at the second point.
Vipassanā, or Dry Insight
Today, in Theravada, there are some different types of practices. There is one called straight Vipassanā (also called “Dry Insight” or Insight Meditation) that was developed by Venerable Mahāsi Sayadaw from Burma. A similar system is the body awareness practice of sweeping developed by U Ba Khin of Burma now taught worldwide by S.N. Goenka of India. They avoid jhānic concentration-absorption. As discussed previously, students are told jhānas should be avoided as they might become attached to them as a distraction to their “real” work with the dry insight awareness exercise.
You are told that there is a shortcut around the perceived long, arduous development of jhānas by developing a technique of sweeping the body with awareness. By observing bodily sensations and seeing their true nature, you are told you will attain awakening.
In the “Dry Insight” Mahāsi tradition, you are told to follow the breath and make mental notes — “noting” — or making verbal, mental notes like “hearing, hearing,” or “hot, hot” when your attention moves away from your breath or walking practice. They say this will get you to Nibbāna very quickly, much faster than the use of the (absorption) jhānas that can take many months or years to achieve. Mahāsi Sayadaw said you could attain Nibbāna in as little as one thirty-day retreat with the “dry insight” method. This is why many people are attracted to this system for this claimed benefit.
I remember reading this statement from a book by Admiral Shattuck about Vipassanā course in Burma forty years ago and getting very excited. I envisioned myself as this holy, enlightened person on the bus ride back from my first thirty-day retreat. Then I could take it easy…
Indeed I did start retreating in a Denver basement that had been broken up into kutis (sections) under a Sri Lankan trained American man who was extremely serious and demanded we stay up until midnight and wake up at 4am to begin again. And that was my first retreat — thirty days — felt more like a prison term by the end of it. I was nineteen, forty-three years ago.
I tried that path for many years, experiencing most of the “Insight Knowledges” or ñāṇas that are said to indicate progress in that method. Later, I lived and worked at a Vipassanā center in San Jose, California, but the experiences I had with this method did not produce the personality change that the suttas indicate one should expect from meditation. Those insight experiences were very intense and happened just like Mahāsi Sayadaw wrote, but I was the same old neurotic self after the retreat. Perhaps I was a little kinder — or just deluded into thinking I was holier because seeing these knowledges.
A 28-year-old Bhante Vimalaraṁsi, not yet a monk — he had a different “layman name” at that time — showed up at the center. Being a skilled carpenter and having built houses in San Francisco, he volunteered to build our meditation hall. It was a beautiful job with white carpets and stained glass.
I met him again years later in 2006, after a twenty-five-year gap. He had become a monk and gone to Burma, and had spent many years at the famous Mahāsi Meditation Center in Yangon. He trained under Venerable U Panditā Sayadaw and later with Venerable U Janaka practicing Mahāsi style Vipassanā.
I came to understand from Bhante that even in Burma (Myanmar), progress for the meditators was very difficult to achieve. He observed many students while he practiced there. He did many three-month retreats and, finally, a two-year retreat. It had taken all those retreats and experiences before he was told by his teacher that he had achieved the final result. That’s a bit longer than thirty days! Later, he questioned this “attainment” because his experience didn’t match with the suttas. Even after he had completed all those retreats, he did not feel like he experienced a fundamental personality change.
When I contacted him, he told me about his experiences in Burma in detailed emails. My confidence in his detailed descriptions of what he had attained in Vipassanā Insight practice reached a point where I realized that perhaps Vipassanā itself was the problem. It wasn’t creating the change that one would expect. He had taken it to the limit and experienced all sixteen knowledges and now had decided to move on to something else.
When I looked at his website, it seemed very strange. He talked about smiling and relaxing — No motivational “have to push harder” talk. If you can’t smile, laugh? He wasn’t “serious” enough! And this is serious practice, right?! Or is that the problem?
The “Dry Insight” practice or the Mahāsi Vipassanā method seems to me to be another form of concentration, a one-pointed and focused meditation practice. What is attained is accomplished by pushing away the hindrances and grasping hard onto the meditation object instead of simply “knowing” the object as the suttas say to do. It is a powerful, focused bearing down on the object, without the Relax step.
They say, “Go into your pain and get into the middle of it. See its nature of arising and passing away.” Keep looking at it and noting it until it passes away — but that is controlling your awareness, which creates tension. Goenka teaches something similar with a sweeping exercise, but with the same type of mindfulness that focuses down on the sensations arising. The sweeping method does acknowledge distractions and lets them be and moves on, but it misses the whole relaxing step of removing the tension and tightness from the distraction. This technique is still a type of concentration practice, focusing on sensations rather than the breathing.
With the TWIM meditation, you observe a painful feeling, knowing it is there, you release your attention from it. You relax any tension and tightness that is bringing your awareness to the pain. Do not dwell on it; that is, don’t think about it, analyze it, or bring aversion into it. That doesn’t work. That doesn’t relieve the tightness and tension.
By focusing down on that painful feeling — with an already tensed up mental state — and seeing it closer you will not gain further insight to release you from suffering — there is only more suffering. Bhante describes having done the Mahāsi process and finally getting beyond the pain, but it was just a temporary suppression of the pain. He said he had beaten it into submission during his meditation and finally, it had been forced away.
This type of meditation does, indeed, provide progress in the Vipassanā ñāṇas, which are stages of dry insight explained in the Vissudhi Magga. They are very real and thus provide much credibility to the practice. There are nine, twelve, or sixteen knowledges (depending on which text you read) that arise when following the instructions just like the Vissudhi Magga and Mahāsi’s books say to do.
When we investigate, however, we find that these stages of insight are not in the suttas. When we practice with the relax step, they do not appear. Bhante explains that he did experience these insights and knowledges all the way to the knowledge of reviewing the path (the highest of the insight knowledges that arises after the attainment of Nibbāna), yet he was disappointe
d in the fact that he did not experience the personality change and awakened state he had expected.
I think people are impressed by this “dry insight” system because it does give the results it promises,[vii] and these results are very interesting. But so is an acid trip, which also can lead one to see impermanence, suffering, and impersonality if you have a Buddhist background and setting — but you will not see dependent origination.
The Buddha describes the seeing of the links of dependent origination as the door to Nibbāna. He says that one who sees the links will definitely see the three signs of impermanence, suffering, and non-self, but one who only sees the three signs will not automatically see dependent origination.
It is seeing and understanding dependent origination deeply that brings about personality change. This is why when you come out of the absorption meditative state versus the aware jhāna state, your personality, with all its neuroses, is still intact, is still the same. You only see things at a surface level because there is still craving there, just temporarily put aside. You have not seen at the deepest level revealing those most subtle of mental processes.
Many Vipassanā meditators find that their practice drops off after a certain point, and many will think that it is their own fault that they are not advancing. They think that they just need to do more retreats; they need to push even harder. Finally, many give up and think it was them and not the practice that was the problem. They think: “Maybe next lifetime I will be stronger. I’ll have more merit!”
I had these experiences, and had no real change, and gave up practicing. I kept up with Buddhist studies, but lost interest in the practice and always wondered whether I had just missed something that everyone else had figured out!
The Path to Nibbana Page 6
