The current weakening of the dhamma is marked by the pursuance of serenity rather than insight.
Insight is only for the few, Conventional and Ultimate reality p 36:
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Haha, language doesn’t determine truth. Anyway, I didn’t read the other sources you have. I rather keep my faith in Jhanas strong and practice towards it. I think the best is personal experience matching with suttas. Instead of arguing if Jhanas are needed, just practice the path clearly leading to it, and don’t waste time.
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Leading to what ?
If jhana is not needed there’s no need to practice anything leading to jhana because it’s a waste of time
If you mean Leading to extinguishment I agree
You have not convince me here do you think a person who knows nothing about pali can know what the Buddha said in pali better than a person who masters the pali or not ?
To Jhanas. There’s more time wasted on arguing on this which can be used for Jhanas already. It’s a risk to think it’s not needed and Buddha did highly praised Jhanas.
Ajahn Brahm knows his Pali, he taught Ajahn Brahmali. Anyway, the more critical issue for me is not Pali knowledge, it’s whether the person had practiced Jhanas, and then able to teach them well.
For the Pali thing, we have so many different translators already, I am not convinced that the truth of the Dhamma is so elusive as to be only found if you learn Pali. The Buddha allowed us to learn the Dhamma in our own language. The deciding factor whether one person is a believer in hard Jhanas or not has more to do with other factors of their practice rather than their knowledge of Pali language. Those who didn’t get good instructions for Jhanas, practiced it wrongly, naturally prefers that the Buddha didn’t taught that Jhanas are necessary.
Or those brought up in dry vipassana traditions which is overly influenced by the intimidation that only a few in so many can attain to Jhanas in the commentaries would naturally see Jhanas as optional. I don’t buy any reasoning from those motivations when the path to Jhanas are so clear and open as Ajahn Brahm taught them. Youtube Ajahn Brahm meditation retreat.
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With great respect. I have just read through this discussion with interest. Analayo (2003 pp44-46) Satipatthana, The direct path to realization, sums up the confusion.
“Applying the epistemological position of early Buddhism to actual practice, oral tradition and reasoning, in the sense of some degree of knowledge and reflection about the Dhamma, form the supporting conditions for a direct experience of reality through the practice of satipatthana.”
With Metta.
Well, there was this paper, which was rather interesting:
where they got Leigh Brasington to go through such states and get fMRI and EEG scans etc. of the process. Though, of course, not everyone will agree that this was jhana. It would be fascinating if someone could repeat the process and compare with other (obviously lay) jhana practitioners, e.g. Shaila Catherine coming from the Pa Auk Visuddhimagga approach. I guess the results would be somewhat different but perhaps there would be many similarities too.
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Interestingly if you dig deeper you will find the same or similar patterns with the effects of psychedelics and the Kundalini experience. If you read a little closer you will see that these induce the pleasure and reward system in the brain. Therefore the active pursuit of jhana is Craving, Dukkha.
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Jhanas are stages of letting go. Drugs doesn’t produce the causes of letting go, so it cannot simulate real Jhanas. There was a heroin addict who reported to Ajahn Brahm that Jhana happiness is better than heroins.
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As Jhanas are stages of letting go, it cannot be craved for. If you want Jhana, you cannot get it (method language). To attain to Jhanas, one has to let go all the way. Anyway, if you become a Jhana addict, the Buddha said only 4 results will happen: stream enterer to arahanthood. It’s encouraged (goal language). Not to be feared.
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Respectfully
Drugs are an escape from reality, reality is suffering. An addict suffers without the drugs.
Jhana states are an escape from reality, reality is suffering.
The difference is that drugs are easily obtained and are only a problem is someone gets addicted.
The addiction of jhana states is not the experiencing of them but the craving to get them. One who craves the jhana state never finds it. The issue is not the jhana state but the delusion and craving caused by trying to obtain it.
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I doubt all of these phenomena are the same. Only recently I heard mention on a science radio programme about new work on how the brain reacts to LSD (fMRI scans etc.). Actually, I think a link to a Guardian article about this paper was posted earlier in the OP:
IIRC they found that LSD allowed the mind to flit and wander more easily and with less energy between different mind states and with the filtering function normally making sense of the world less active and experience being more sensory, which generally sounds rather different in some respects to jhana descriptions.
I’m not sure I’d agree re inducing the pleasure and reward centre of the brain. Sure, for lower jhana, there is piti and sukha. I suppose here part of the purpose is a more wholesome pleasure alternative to sensual cravings. Craving is given up in a stepwise fashion in the Buddhist path, anyway. Jhana is strongly associated in the suttas with non-return and above where sensual pleasures have ceased. Pleasure and pain shouldn’t be present in fourth jhana, anyway. Though maybe subtler cravings, but it’s not necessarily an all or nothing proposition.
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Well, the Buddhist path promises a more permanent escape from suffering, in which I think jhana is part of the means rather than an end.
Maybe. Usually there’s a certain desire and one practices and attains when and if the time is ready? Usually these things take a lot of hard work and effort and building a foundation, which requires a certain desire. Isn’t a lot of spiritual searching a kind of a desire to end all desire, or craving to end all craving, which may or may not be useful (depending on how appropriately and wisely directed it is).
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Show me a person who attained to Jhana and then suffers from addiction from it negatively like drugs. Whereas most drug pushers keep on forget all the overdosing, death, crippled cannot do work, cannot form relationship things that drugs addicts have.
Jhanas are allowing the mind to see reality better. When the body disappears, (after emerging from Jhana) one sees that the body is not self. Then will disappears in 2nd Jhana and going all the way into the cessation of feelings and perception. Does drugs produces enlightened beings?
Youtube Ajahn Brahm meditation retreat to deal with the craving for Jhanas. He teaches on the method language to attain Jhanas.
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Hmm
The confusion in the thread is that in the comparison with fMRI scans for brain activity there is a correlation between the states of jhana and LSD etc. The point to get across is that both open the doors to the right hemisphere of the brain. With LSD and other tryptamine derived substances the corpus collosum inhibitory factors are deactivated allowing the experience of both brain hemispheres to interact.
I’m not trying to make an argument but the coincidence is pretty stark in recorded phenomena, eg deva worlds etc.
One thing I would point out is that attaining a jhana state has taken a great deal of work and the level of mind control would be incredible. Someone with that ability can control the experience whereas people who take LSD etc have no control.
A couple of interesting reads for you would be ‘Jung in the 21st century’ Volume 1 and 2 where John Ryan Haule, the author, compares and contracts many of these states.
I find people trying to hold onto their points from one perspective may find adding a few more reference points interesting. However this site is rich from the EBT point of view.
With Metta
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Totally agree with you.
With Metta
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With great respect, I think you are missing the point of what I am saying. I am not attacking the development and attainment of wholesome states through traditional Buddhist methods. I am comparing and contrasting the jhana state and other states that have a great deal of similarity. I have read many times in modern Buddhist literature of people seeking these jhana states but give up because of the work it involves. The jhana seekers, addicted to experience only.
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So you disagree with Ven buddhaghosa that bare-insight-workers can attain non returner and even arahantship fruit, don’t you ?
Why do you assume forest meditator like ledi sayadaw who even have been seen flying during his meditation still didn’t have jhana ?
Have you seen or heard or read that ajahn brahm flying during one of his meditation or not ?
Have ajahn brahm meditated in forest for months or years ?
How do you know that ajahn brahm have attained jhana ?
I know Ven ledi have attained jhana because he left a private note which was discovered in his hut shortly after he died saying he have attained all jhanas up to the 4th
On the contrary, I think it sounds a lot like the Jhānic mind. In the Suttas, the Buddha usually describes the mind in Jhāna as “pliant” and “malleable”. One then directs this pliant mind to the three knowledges and the destruction of the fetters.
However, of course LSD is categorically not Jhāna. I’ve never consumed LSD, but I assume that the experience is outside one’s volitional control. And anybody can take LSD, but to reach Jhāna one must have first developed generosity, virtue, renunciation, abandoned the hindrances, etc, which I assume a lot of people taking LSD have not developed.
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I suppose we should be careful here as well. We say it’s “how the brain reacts to LSD” (or jhana, etc). But that’s just shorthand for: it’s how the fMRI scanner reacts to how the oxygen in the blood stream reacts to how the brain reacts to an individual being given LSD under certain circumstances.
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Yes, that too. Maybe the mechanism in the brain is similar, but one experience allows the individual to trip balls, and the other one gives insight into the true nature of reality.
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He was a forest monk before his teacher Ajahn Chah sent him to Australia to help spread Buddhism to the West, and he did a six month solitary retreat about 10 years ago.
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