Chapter 3
Later Retreats
This chapter is part of Vipassanā in Jhāna: A Personal Narrative and Practical Guide, by Gary Buck.
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Chapter 3: Later Retreats
Reading Time: about 26 mins. 5,200 words.
The First Enemy
After the experiences of this first retreat, I was eager to sit a new retreat. So, the next year, I signed up for a 30-day course. I remembered that increased effort was the key that had unlocked the jhānas the year before, so I was eager to work hard from the very first day and make the most of the opportunity. I was far too eager, in fact. From the first day, I pushed my concentration very hard. I literally drilled my attention into the sensation on the small area of the upper lip. However, it is not easy to press your attention very hard while at the same time remaining relaxed. After a day or so, I noticed that I was getting a strong sensation at the back of my neck—tension. I ignored it and pressed on. After a while, the pain in the neck increased into a serious tension headache. As I continued, the tension headache intensified. On day three, I did enter the first jhāna, but the neck pain kept pulling my attention away from the object of meditation and toward the very strong sensation at the back of my neck. It soon became clear to me that, in my eagerness to concentrate the mind, I was inadvertently creating tension somewhere in my head. I was not exactly sure where, but once a physical association is established, it is hard to break. After a while, the tension at the back of the neck was present even during breaks, or when I went out for a walk. I knew I had to break the association between my efforts to concentrate and the creation of this tension, but that was not easy.
I had no idea which muscles I was tensing, or even whether it was muscle tension at all. Maybe it was mental tension, if there is such a thing. Perhaps it was tension in my shoulders, or perhaps tension in my head, but it always manifested as a sharp pain at one small point on the nape of my neck. I tried massage, exercise, and relaxation, and that helped a bit, but I was never able to get my mind concentrated enough to reach the higher jhānas. As soon as I tried, the neck pain became more intense. It was clear that I had created some sort of syndrome in which the effort to concentrate had become physically associated with tension and neck pain, and that the only way to deal with it was to stop making it worse. So I backed off my efforts considerably. I had attained the first jhāna, and I was able to maintain that. So I spent the 30-day course in the first jhāna—pretty much all day, every day, doing ānāpāna in the first third of the course, and doing vipassanā in the remaining two thirds. Perhaps I may have slipped into the second jhāna occasionally; I cannot say for sure, but if I did, it was not long enough to notice.
Of course, it would be folly to be disappointed. I spent 30 days meditating, purifying my mind—most of this time in the first jhāna. This course was a wonderful experience, a deep spiritual journey, but also a cautionary tale. I had felt some tension and occasional pain in the neck during the first of these long retreats, the 20-day retreat described above, but it did not interfere significantly with my meditation. The excessive efforts I had made at the start of this second course had backfired. My eagerness to progress—or, should I say, my craving for meditative progress—had prevented that very progress. Clearly, I had much to learn, not only about how to make strong effort while remaining fully relaxed, but, more importantly, about not becoming attached to my idea of progress. “Just keep working,” I told myself, “and whatever happens, happens!”
The Third Retreat
A year later, I signed up for another 30-day course. The task now, of course, was to learn how to develop high levels of concentration without creating tension. I recalled well that once I had created the pain in my neck through excessive tension, even a light effort tended to increase that pain. So my aim was to avoid creating even the slightest tension in the first place.
In the previous course, I had tried hard to press my attention into the sensation on the upper lip—almost as if forcing my mind into it. Now I tried simply to place my attention on the sensation, lightly resting it on the object of meditation, while at the same time trying to be aware of every microsecond. At first, I found this very difficult—habits once established take time to overcome. But I persevered. During this course, I learned a great deal. The most important thing I learned was that a light touch on the object of meditation when trying to build concentration works just as well as heavy pressure; it just takes a little longer to bear fruit.
For instance, after a break, if I came to sit down again and focused on the sensation with heavy pressure, I would move into the first jhāna after just a few seconds. Now, with a much lighter pressure, it took a little longer to get there—perhaps a minute or so. The important thing was that the mind still became concentrated and I still entered the jhāna. I found that this was the same in any state, at any level of concentration. Pressure to force the concentration got me there sooner but created tension, whereas a lighter touch still got me there, requiring only a little more patience. This insight was very helpful.
But I noticed one more thing, which was perhaps the cause of the tension. As I made effort to concentrate the mind, I noticed a subtle sensation within my head—presumably somewhere in the brain. It felt as though a certain part of the brain was activated when I made an effort to concentrate. But that sensation arising from the effort to concentrate is easily confused with the sensation of muscles being tensed. It seems that, while trying to achieve the physical feeling associated with concentrating the mind, I was inadvertently creating muscle tension in the back of my neck. I do not know if this makes sense. I have never heard anyone else talk about this, but that is what it felt like.
I can now recognize a clear difference between the sensation created when making an effort to concentrate the mind and the sensation due to muscle tension. They are not the same thing. But they can seem very similar, and I still sometimes make mistakes when I am too eager.
It took constant vigilance to retrain my mind and learn to meditate with a lighter touch. Sometimes I would forget, or perhaps grow impatient, press too hard, and immediately the neck pain would return to remind me. Eventually, I became better at recognizing this before it developed into a problem.
This course was a great success. My concentration increased steadily as I worked. By the morning of the third day, I had attained the first jhāna, and before the end of the 10-day period of ānāpāna, I had attained the fourth jhāna. Every sitting was completely focused on my sensations from start to finish.
During those years of practice before I had attained the jhānas, there was always a small proportion of time during which my mind went off topic, wandering here or there. Sometimes it was more, sometimes less. But now my mind hardly ever wandered. Every hour was sixty full minutes on task, and every minute was sixty full seconds. And the higher the jhāna, the deeper the concentration.
As for the jhānas themselves, they were just as I had experienced them before. Of course, I came to understand them better. I learned the characteristics of each one and learned to see their differences. Now I could clearly see the difference between the first and second jhāna, both of which have pīti as the dominant sensation. The theoretical discussion helped greatly, but there is nothing to compare with firsthand experience.
I used to think that good concentration meant the ability to keep the mind consistently on the object of meditation—or, to put it another way, that the more continuous the awareness, the better the concentration. If my mind did not wander, then I thought my concentration was better. While no doubt this is true, I could now see a clear difference between samādhi, concentration, and sati, the continuity of awareness.
I had never fully understood why the ancient texts used two different words for these two things, or why both were important and separate parts of the Noble Eightfold Path. Now I came to understand that these two are very different. Sati is the continuity of awareness of what is happening, whereas samādhi (concentration) is concerned with the quality of the mind itself.
At lower levels of concentration, the mind seems somehow coarser, cruder, or rougher—less fine-grained—whereas at higher levels of concentration, the mind seems much finer, and purer. Compared to the concentrated mind while in our normal sense-sphere consciousness, the mind in the first jhāna seemed much finer, more concentrated. And then, as I went up into the higher jhānas, it became progressively finer and finer. But the continuity of awareness, sati, remained the same in each case, continuously observing the state of my mind and making whatever decisions were needed to manage my meditation.
On this course, as in the previous courses, I practiced vipassanā in jhāna in the manner I had been taught. And as in the first course, my mind tended to move naturally from the lower to the higher jhānas, so the fourth jhāna became the place where I spent most of my time. It was a natural progression to move from a lower jhāna to a higher one. But I had a sense that I needed to gain control over these states, so I sometimes tried to remain in the lower jhānas, or to move from a higher jhāna back to a lower one. I made a little progress in that respect, but I cannot say that I learned how to control them. I was still more like a passenger than a driver, naturally carried to the fourth jhāna.
The Arūpas
The fourth course in this series of six long courses was perhaps the most interesting of all. I sat this 30-day retreat at the vipassanā meditation center in Texas, six months after the previous retreat. It is a wonderful location with ideal facilities. As before, from the start of the course I found myself moving up through the jhānas, until after about a week or so I was comfortably meditating in the fourth jhāna.
It is not easy to describe the inner state of one’s mind, but if we look with our mind’s eye when meditating with a concentrated mind, we can imagine the mind as a blank wall or an empty space—a blank screen, as it were. At one point, after a few days in the fourth jhāna, I became aware that my mind’s eye was looking at something like a vast space of emptiness. I knew from my studies that there are three different spheres of consciousness: the Sense Sphere, where we normally live; the Fine-Material Sphere, where we can experience jhāna; and the Immaterial Sphere, where we can only experience mental phenomena, called arūpa or arūpa jhāna. There are four of these arūpas. The main characteristic of these four arūpas is that, while the jhāna factors are the same as in the fourth jhāna of the Fine-Material Sphere—equanimity and concentration—the object of meditation is an abstract mental object. In the Immaterial Sphere of consciousness, the mind cannot cognize material things, such as the body. The four arūpas have descriptive names, and I knew that the first of these is called “infinite space.”
Perhaps due to a fit of mischief, or as a distraction, while in the fourth jhāna I switched my attention from the sensations on the upper lip to this mental image of an inner space. After some time meditating on this mental image—perhaps a few hours—to my surprise something happened. Again, I got the feeling of being pulled upwards, or of going up into a new state, and I entered a state that felt very much like the fourth jhāna, but the concentration seemed more intense as I focused on the mental concept of space. In this state there was no sensation. I was not aware of my body, my breath, or my sensations at all. I was in a completely mental world. It was a very concentrated state of great calm, somewhat similar to the fourth jhāna, but more ethereal somehow. But I was still aware of who I was and what I was doing, and I was aware that I could exit from this state whenever I wished. In other words, I had sati, full awareness and executive control over my meditation. But it was clear that neither ānāpāna, awareness of breathing, nor vipassanā, observation of sensations, were possible. It was clear that this was not part of my vipassanā practice; it was something else. But since I was still in the ānāpāna section of the course, I told myself this was all part of developing concentration, and so I continued to remain in that state for a while.
I knew that there are were four of these arūpas, and that the second stage of the arūpas is called “infinite consciousness.” I had no idea what infinite consciousness was, let alone how one meditates on it. Indeed, I had no intention of trying to enter that state, and I made no effort to do so. But I did continue to focus on strengthening my concentration. I noticed that although my mind stayed continually on the object of concentration—infinite space—there were times when I was more conscious of my mind actually resting on the object of meditation. That is what I started to aim for: this sense of my consciousness clearly resting on the object of meditation. I focused on this consciousness in order to improve my concentration. But I unexpectedly entered a new state, with the awareness of my own consciousness as the object of meditation. “Oh, so this is what it means; this is how you focus on infinite consciousness,” I realized. This new state was similar to the previous one, but more concentrated, more abstract, and more ethereal, with a different object of attention—namely, my own consciousness. At this point, the mind was very fine, very rarefied indeed.
By now, I felt willing to try for the next two arūpas, but again I had no idea how to proceed. The next state is called “nothingness.” Again, I had no idea what nothingness was like, let alone how one meditates on it, but it was clear that the names were descriptive in some manner. So I reasoned that the infinite space of the first arūpa is similar to nothingness, and I took infinite space as the object, as I had before, but then tried to focus my mind on nothing—to let go of the object in some manner. After a few hours, I did enter the next state. Again, the state was more intense than the last, even finer, more ethereal, purer, and far more concentrated, focused intently on nothing. Obviously, it is impossible to describe in words. But as in the previous states, I knew who I was, where I was, and what I was doing. I still felt that I had awareness, sati, and full executive control of my meditation.
These three arūpas arose quite naturally, one after the other, despite the fact that I did not know how to enter them. They seemed like a simple progression of increasing concentration. Nevertheless, they required considerable meditative effort, concentration, and calm. When I entered each of these arūpas, it took my mind a little time to settle into it—to get its full flavor, if you like. There was always a period when I first entered these states during which I felt that I was not quite properly in the state, that I was reaching, trying to grasp it better; and then eventually, after some time, I relaxed into it and felt as though I had actually grasped it. Once I had done so, each state had a particular feeling or flavor. I perceived each state as being “like something,” in the sense that one state feels like this, and another feels like that.
But the fourth arūpa was different. I had no idea what to do, or how to enter the fourth state, except to continue to concentrate with as much calmness as I could. Patience is necessary, I knew, and patience is easy in a state of such calm meditative bliss. The fourth arūpa is called in English “neither perception nor non-perception.” I had no idea what that meant either, but again I simply let nature take its course. At some point, after a day or so, my mind moved from the third arūpa into the next one. This new state was more concentrated, more refined, and even more ethereal than any I had previously experienced. Again, I found that at first I was not grasping it very well. Since this had happened with the other arūpas, I assumed that I simply needed to be patient, that I would settle into the state and get its flavor. But I never did. I knew I had left the third arūpa, and I was aware that I had entered a new state—presumably the fourth arūpa—but somehow it seemed too vague, or partly out of reach. I waited patiently, but my perception never settled. I was in the state, but somehow not fully perceiving it. At first I was a little disappointed, but then I realized that this state must be called “neither perception nor non-perception” for a reason. I thought that this state must be the limit of my perceptive ability, and that perception itself was somehow getting “thinner”, and was not fully present. This was why I felt unable to grasp it. I assumed that beyond this, there was nothing else: the mind could not become any finer, nor perception any rarer.
This excursion into the Immaterial Sphere of consciousness was a wonderful experience. Consciousness in the arūpas was in some ways similar to that of the fourth jhāna, but it also felt quite different. It was a state of intense calm, a state of great purity, and it felt very ethereal. But it clearly had nothing to do with the practice of vipassanā. By this time, I had spent about four or five days experimenting with the arūpas, and it was already day twelve of the course—well past the time when I should have been focusing on vipassanā. So I switched my attention back to my task and completed the course in the normal manner. I spent most of the remaining time in the fourth jhāna. Sometimes I focused on sensations throughout the body, sometimes on the sensations on my upper lip, and sometimes on both together. And I want to keep repeating this: I was doing vipassanā in the same manner I had been doing it for years, just as I had been taught, but in a different sphere of consciousness—that of the jhānas.
The Second Enemy
Six months later, I was ready for another 30-day course. By this time, I thought I was a pretty good meditator, able to sit in concentrated states for long periods of time. Instead, I found that I still had a long way to go. However, in order to explain what happened, I need to provide some context and talk about some difficult events in my private life.
I am blessed with a wonderful marriage. I have lived and loved for twenty-five years with the most wonderful woman I have ever met, and I feel very grateful for that. My wife had a son, a fine young man, who developed very serious kidney problems. He lived with intense pain, under the continual threat of excruciating and fatal kidney failure. Opiates helped considerably, but tragically often lead to addiction—and so it was. At one point, we brought him to live with us and tried to help him recover, but it was in vain. After many ups and downs, he eventually died of an overdose, as frequently happens to addicts when they relapse. During his time living with us, my wife and I struggled to help as best we could. Those who have lived with addicts will know all about the lies, the deceptions, the stories, the gaslighting, as well as the heartbreak of watching helplessly as someone you love destroys themselves. It was gut-wrenching for me, but far worse for his mother, my wife. We struggled greatly, and at times we both got things wrong. The strain affected our relationship, as we came to different understandings of what was happening and what we should do. At one point, we both said some hurtful things to each other, which led to many unwholesome thoughts—at least on my part. I spent too much time nursing feelings of hurt and resentment; I know she did too. We became somewhat distant from each other for a time. Then things came to a head in a rather spectacular manner, and our son was taken to hospital. My wife and I immediately re-established our close relationship, stronger than before: we apologized to each other and restored our relationship to what it should have been. We have remained a devoted couple ever since. Between us, all was forgiven, and, I thought, all was forgotten. All of this had happened a few years prior to the time that I sat my first long meditation course.
On this course, the fifth in the series, I soon found that many unkind thoughts arose in my mind. I remembered things my wife had said during those difficult times, and such thoughts pulled me away from my meditation. This happened again and again. I tried everything I could to ignore these thoughts: I tried meditating with as much discipline as possible; I tried switching my attention elsewhere; I even tried taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha; and sometimes I simply gave up and went for a walk. But these unwelcome thoughts still continued to arise and flooded my consciousness, and try as I might, it was very difficult to stop myself from dwelling on them.
At the start of the course, I found myself entering the first jhāna after two or three days, in what I had come to think of as the normal manner. But I never managed to get beyond that. Perhaps I strayed into the second jhāna from time to time, but I could not hold on to it. There were simply too many powerful thoughts. But vipassanā is a process of purification, and so I worked as hard as possible. I observed the arising and passing away of these mental phenomena with as much equanimity and detachment as I could muster, mainly in and out of the first jhāna. I finished the course in the normal manner. These unwholesome thoughts persisted until the end of the course, and then stopped. They have never returned.
I do not know exactly why these thoughts came up so strongly during this course, when they had not arisen in any of the previous ones. But it is not unusual for vipassanā to cause deep impurities to come to the surface. Indeed, many would say that this is precisely the purpose of vipassanā.
The idea that the results of our previous kamma—our previous actions—come to the surface during intense practice is very common among vipassanā meditators. Goenkaji specifically talks about this in his ten-day discourses. Not only Goenkaji, but other teachers in this tradition have expressed similar ideas, including when I studied in Burma with U Ba Khin’s other students. I do not fully understand this process as it is described in the old texts, particularly in the Abhidhamma section of the Pāli Canon. But the basic idea is that the unwholesome mind-moments we generate are like seeds that we plant within our own minds—seeds that will germinate into unpleasant experiences at some future date. They are unwholesome saṅkhāras; in effect, seeds of misery. Unwholesome saṅkhāras result in unpleasant experiences. The wonderful thing about vipassanā is that it brings these old saṅkhāras to the surface of the mind while we are meditating. They manifest as unpleasant experiences, such as aches, pains, agitation, sloth and torpor, and unwholesome thoughts. If we observe these with equanimity, they are eradicated, and we are, in effect, rid of that bad kamma. However, if we react to these unpleasant experiences with further unwholesome saṅkhāras, namely aversion, then these saṅkhāras are multiplied, and we sow even more unwholesome seeds. In this way, vipassanā is said to eradicate our previous unwholesome kamma. This is the process of purification. To the extent that I was able to observe these old saṅkhāras with wisdom and equanimity, to that extent I was rid of them.
This explanation of how vipassanā purifies is something I have never heard mentioned in other vipassanā traditions, nor read in other Buddhist texts. Although I think there are explanations in the Abhidhamma. Regardless, experience suggests that this is what in fact happens. Vipassanā does indeed seem to work in this way—or, to put it more carefully, the common experience of most vipassanā yogis is exactly what one would expect if this were true. Beginning meditators are often racked with pain on their first ten-day retreats. Similarly, older students who have not done a retreat for some time will often struggle at first with intense pain or agitation.
Many experienced meditators with strong daily practices find that their normal meditation goes awry at the start of a retreat. For example, in my own case, on some courses I have experienced strong pain that persisted day after day, to the extent that I thought I had a serious medical condition and considered leaving the course to consult a doctor. Then, at the end of the course, the pain has “miraculously” disappeared. Another example is the first time I experienced jhāna, many decades ago in Nepal, as I described earlier. The very next day, after experiencing the first jhāna, I began a ten-day silent retreat. I got up the next morning at 4:30, went into the meditation room, recited the Triple Gem, took the Eight Precepts, and made a strong determination to sit all day for ten days, keeping noble silence. Since my concentration had been so good the previous day, I expected it to continue in the same manner. But within an hour of starting, I was in a thick fog of sloth and torpor and was racked with pain. For ten days I struggled with this, trying to remain equanimous, and hopefully eradicating many old saṅkhāras.
I assume that this is what was happening on this 30-day retreat. Old saṅkhāras arose, and I struggled to observe them with equanimity, and to the extent that I did, to that extent I was able to purify my mind during those thirty days.
To summarize what I think this implies: at one time in my life, years earlier, I had allowed negativity to gain a significant hold over my thoughts. I had created many unwholesome saṅkhāras. Now, years later, my practice of vipassanā had brought these to the surface of my mind and had prevented me from moving up to the higher levels of jhāna. The obvious lesson is that the quality of our thoughts over the course of our lives has a significant effect on our ability to attain advanced states of concentration, the higher jhānas. Perhaps this may seem obvious to some, but it made a strong impression on me. If we want to advance in our meditation, then we need to live our lives in ways that avoid unwholesome states of mind.
The Last Retreat
The last of these six retreats, a year later—a 30-day course at the California Vipassanā Center—was fairly uneventful. I began meditating in the normal manner. Early in the morning on day three, I entered the first jhāna, and things progressed uneventfully. On the fourth day, I entered the fourth jhāna. By the end of day six, I had attained the four arūpas as well and was able to abide there at will.
As on all 30-day courses, we have ten days to develop our concentration. And here I was, on day six, having already attained the highest possible level of concentration. What should I do in the remaining four days, I wondered? I could have kept doing ānāpāna in the fourth jhāna for four days, or I could have started vipassanā four days early. Instead, I decided to try to gain better mastery of these jhānic states.
I began systematically, moving from one jhāna to the next. I went all the way up through the four jhānas, and then through the four arūpas, and then came back down as best I could. I went up and down a few times. As I have already noted, moving from a higher jhāna to a lower one was not easy, but I practiced and improved somewhat. The key was to recall the feeling of the jhāna—what it felt like—and then to focus on that. It was not easy, but I made some progress. I also practiced jumping from a lower jhāna to a higher one without passing through the intermediate jhānas. I also stood up or opened my eyes and then began meditating again, entering a specific jhāna directly without going through the lower ones. I found that I was able to sit down, for example after a break, and move directly into the fourth jhāna. In this way, four days passed very pleasantly, until day ten, when I began vipassanā in the normal manner.
I have to say that, in retrospect, I feel I may have wasted those four days. Mastery of the various jhānas is not the purpose of our practice; purification is. I should have focused simply on the task at hand: observing the arising and passing away of sensations, either on the upper lip or throughout the body. I think this is an important point.
I spent the remaining days of this retreat sitting in the fourth jhāna, and doing vipassanā. This had become my new normal. Twenty days in the fourth jhāna, observing the arising and passing away of physical and mental phenomena, my mind concentrated in a state of pervasive equanimity—this was sati and sampajañña, just as described in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta.
End of Chapter 3.
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Chapter 2: My First Experience
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