I’ve never attempted to develop concentration. It may be true that concentration leads to immense pleasures that are incomparable to anything in the world. But why would I want these pleasures that last only for as long as there’s only one thing in the world for me?
I wish to not suffer amidst that which would incite suffering. I wish to be unmoved by that which would otherwise move me. I do not wish to get infinite pleasure; I simply wish to not be a victim to suffering. Not being a victim to suffering amidst that which would otherwise incite suffering: that is the pleasure; that’s what I want.
How does single-pointed concentration lead to the inability to suffer regardless of the permutation of the world, outside of the single-pointed state?
Consequently, it isn’t of great interest to me whether concentration leads to “some” reduction in suffering and better coping; I’m not looking for “some” reduction or a coping mechanism; I’m looking for eradication of the root. How does concentration eradicate the root?
Single-pointed concentration, the type that takes you out of the five senses, can help you suffer less in the following ways:
You can directly experience how this whole world of the five senses arises and disappears based on the way you use your mind. I.e. the world’s nature of vanishing and arising becomes clear and apparent to you.
You can come to the conclusion that it’s better to be without the five senses. You can experience how this kāmaloka is suffering in a relative way.
This makes it easier to detach from the world and what goes on in it, IMO.
Like, if you knew everything was just a handful of conditions away from disappearing completely, maybe it’s really easy to be at peace with whatever happens?
Why is the disappearance of the senses required to see the nature of the world? I can discern, presently, that sights and forms arise dependent; not independent. If sights were independent, I would have a say in them. That being so, sights and forms are not in my control. I regard the practice as the gradual acting-in-line with the insight that what is arisen is not one’s own; i.e., one dwells in one’s life not intending in a manner that has as its basis the assumption that things are one’s own when they in fact aren’t.
For example, my current activity of talking-online-about-dhamma is rooted in delight, it’s rooted in delight in company, delight in the sense-experience-of-company; in short, it’s rooted in delight in the senses. I shouldn’t be doing this, but I’m willingly doing this, and the practice would eventually be to cease all activity rooted in delight (in regards to reputation, duty, work, talk, family, etc; all of these pertain to the senses).
Doing so eventually leads to the dis-appropriation of the senses, and the knowledge that they’re not worthy of taking up as it becomes more and more apparent that they’re the basis of my experience as a whole, and can disappear at any time.
I do not require the senses to disappear for this. And it’s far more expansive in that it includes my entire life, as opposed to just a few hours of the day. What is incorrect with this?
I feel that isn’t really solving the problem. The senses are the issue? Why should we not just remove our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin? I do not wish to run away from the things, I wish to be unmoved amidst things; I wish to be unmoved whilst the sense experience is there, and that is how I understand an Arahant to be. Arahant is one who’s unmoved by phenomena, he hasn’t removed the phenomena (the world) to begin with.
But I do not take an issue with granting you that it’s better to be without senses. This question still remains:
How does concentration eradicate the root?
What you’re describing is that concentration is simply a means to get knowledge, that can then help you in your day-to-day life keep perspective about things. How does it eradicate the root of suffering?
IF by “concentration” you mean samādhi, I can’t answer this, but I can say that after my first five months or so of sutta study, I am finding the answer to this question kind of spread out all over the suttas in bits and pieces. A lot of what I’ve read so far seems to be directly addressed to your question, but I’d need to have been studying for a lot longer before I could try to summarize it for you.
If by “concentration” you mean something other than samādhi (or, come to think of it, something other than samma samādhi, right samādhi, because apparently wrong samādhi is also a thing), then no, there’s no reason to believe that would help. If I understand anything about it, wrong samādhi is what happens when you practice jhāna without doing anything at all to develop the other 7 path factors (right view, ethical behavior, etc). This is why how it addresses your concern is hard to explain: all by itself, it would not. It’s only one out of eight of the eightfold path.
I mean here, samadhi, generally speaking. As I understand it, the general understanding is that it’s one-pointedness. How does Ajahn Brahm understand it? I’ve heard Ajahn Brahm describe the jhanas as extreme pleasures; so my question regarding single-pointedness would apply to such states as well.
Reading stuff on here, it seems there are those who argue that even an arahant can still feel suffering. It would seem ( to me) the only way out of it, is parinibbana.
I’m sure the Buddhists on here will give you good info on how altered states and learning first hand in them that the things we perceive as being ours/ mine ( the senses - and even sense of self) actually are not ‘you’ at all, will cause you to naturally start detaching from them, and that with that comes detaching from reacting and responding to them in ways that induce further suffering.
I don’t really know how much of the change in myself ( and my levels of suffering) over a couple of decades I should attribute to the above paragraph, and how much is something more akin to plain ol boring ol psychology and just viewing things from different perspectives.
Eg: if your car breaks down on a major highway in peak hour traffic, you could freak out, get anxious, get angry and start swearing and fuming …. Or you can go, ok, this isn’t great, but I’m not going to be stuck here forever, grow hair to my ankles slowly starving to death, something will happen to get me out of this situation, might as well just call someone to come sort it and chill out, have a nice chat with the passengers and decide ok, this is just what I’m doing in the game of life for today. No biggy.
Or if someone abuses you, you can get angry, insulted, bite back, etc, … or you can observe their behaviour, wonder where it comes from, how did they learn that, what happened in their life ( past & present) … and maybe you’ll just write it off with a shrug coz you are looking at them instead of feeling something about whatever names they just called you. Maybe you will conclude it’s them actually having a hard time and have some compassion for them. Either way, it’s possible to choose to not make it about you and take it on board and snuggle up with it and start feeling suffering about it.
Of course not every situation is quite that easy, but these are good and easy ways to start on not sweating the small stuff at least.
In my view, both of these are reframing of the present situation. Why would one need to reframe one’s current frame? Because the current frame is suffering. So one adds a layer of interpretation, one shifts how one views the situation so as to make it more tolerable.
One who’s incapable of suffering wouldn’t have to do such extra things; they’d be unmoved by their car breaking down, or them getting insulted.
But again, to go back to the initial question: how does concentration/samadhi/meditation in itself lead to being unmoved amidst suffering? How does it destroy the root of suffering?
I personally don’t know if it’s required, but it is a particularly striking way in which impermanence makes itself visible to the mind.
Experiencing the sense of sight itself disappearing while being aware and mindful is the same idea, only taken to the extreme, as far as I know.
I’m not sure there’s anything incorrect with this
Maybe some teachers focus on the type of absorption withdrawn from the five senses because it’s really difficult to miss the point of impermanence?
Right view will lead to right samadhi eventually anyway (whatever that is), so to my mind it makes sense to have a big emphasis on right view and maybe just meditate to relax a bit?
To keep the necromancers from creating a powerful skeleton army, of course
I think seeing the impermanence of the senses really clearly (like in an absorption) can help with that, but it’s not the only thing that helps with that. Obviously things like death contemplation, the selflessness perception, etc. are also nice tools in the tool bag.
I dunno beyond helping to develop the perception and understanding of impermanence I hope to find out how the root of suffering is eradicated one day though!
Yes, I do re-frame things to avoid suffering - but if the reframing is immediate, the suffering ( in those examples) hasn’t even necessarily even arose first … so it’s something more than nothing I guess.
I think to get to the root of all suffering and eradicate it ( and I’m not a Buddhist btw) you will have to aim for Arahant and then come and tell ‘us’ instead lol.
Here’s a thought tho, … what if, on that quest, you came to a conclusion like this whole existence is just one big illusion/ delusion. Would that remove your suffering, or would the fact your stuck in that illusion/ delusion (for now) just be another form of suffering in itself? (Just musing btw )
Did the Buddha have something to say on all this? I’m not sure myself, but obviously millions of people follow his path coz they blv he is the guy who had the goods on all this stuff. Maybe someone can point you to some suttas that would be helpful
[quote=“TejvR, post:3, topic:37268”]
Why should we not just remove our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin? [/quote]
… remove all that and you still have the mind sense anyway … to remove the mind sense I don’t think there is any way other than the concept of parinibbana. I think that’s your only potential solution.
Try thinking about it the other way. Let’s shift the original question from (paraphrasing) “what is the benefit of concentration?” to “what is the benefit of still unification?” — if that’s okay with you. Rather than forcing the mind to experience something, we could switch to asking: what is the benefit of forcing the mind to not be still?
Why move the mind? Why be in a state of constantly shifting attention from one thing to the next, without resting in contentment? What benefit is there?
If it is because the mind is incapable, that would be due to the hindrances. Everyone ought agree that hindrances should be purified. If the hindrances have not been purified, the mind is incapable of proper understanding. So that ought be a priority. Hindrances such as interest in the senses, aversion, restlessness, etc. will be difficult to purge if one is constantly indulging them and trying to remove them at the same time.
If someone has no hindrances, their mind would have no reason to move other than out of mere practical concern. Reflecting, daily duties, communication, etc. But assume that one is in a scenario where they have no need nor compulsion from hindrances for the mind to be moving and dispersed: why would it be? What benefit is there other than as an excuse for restlessness and inability to be still?
I agree that non-activity is superior to activity, but not all movements of attention are volitional. If the body is touched by something cold, attention may simply attend to that, automatically. There are instances in which people have an acute awareness of their breathing at all times when they don’t want that, and it actually drives them mad. The point here I’m illustrating is that shift in attention doesn’t necessarily imply craving or a hindrance because attention isn’t fundamentally in our control if that’s what you assume.
That said, although my initial question was “why develop single-pointed concentration?” I elaborated on it in the initial post. The main question I intended on asking was the following:
Since you’ve chosen to replace single-pointed concentration with “still unification”, the question would still remain the same except it would become:
How does still unification lead to the inability to suffer regardless of the permutation of the world, outside of the state of stillness?
I believe that question – which was the main question – still remains unanswered.
Ignorance of what is it that is removed? Why is it that with the presence of the ignorance of that, there is suffering (mental turmoil, as you call it)?
Ignorance of the 4NT. When there is ignorance we go towards things or pull away from them. We have lust and aversion. This causes mental pain (domanassa) when alive and both that and more physical pain (dukkha) when dead.
Or, to put it another way, when you see that life is impermanent, misery and insubstantial then you will no longer crave this or that. Not craving this or that you maintain mental balance in life, which means no mental suffering when alive and no condition for another consciousness when dying.
You see that even these profound meditative experiences, full of bliss and equanimity, also cannot last. There is nothing worth having in the world. Just like the everyday, the most refined realms are also impermanent, suffering and empty. They are impermanent because of conditions. Because of impermanent conditions suffering permeates all, and because of the dependent nature of things there is no essence or substance to be found.
Well you can, but for non-arahants it’s a tool used to see the true nature of reality. In our unawakened state we have a distorted perception where we thing things are blissful, lasting, real or we think there is another mode of being we can get too which are those things (think Hinduism or Christianity here).
Which did not really answer the initial question of how concentration on an object leads to seeing life as impermanent, so I assumed that that meant seeing life as impermanent is a prerequisite to concentration.
But now you say for “non-arahants it’s a tool used to see the true nature of reality”; to which I would again ask: how does concentration on a single object lead to discerning the nature of all of reality? Surely, all of reality is greater than that single object?
You start by seeing the folly of sensual pleasures and ordinary experience (sex, cars, loved ones, pets). This leads on to the Jhanas. Then you see even the highest states of existence have the nature of the 3 marks too. If your question is more specific, namely how can focus on one object to the exclusion of the other senses lead to this, well my answer would be the same.
I hope to find out how the root of suffering is eradicated one day though! 
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