Includes tags: Right Concentration, Rapture, Unification, Jhāna
See also: Concentration
3. Comment: You spoke about suffusing the body with extreme well-being. But I’ve been in states like that and my body seems to disappear. [Jhāna] [Happiness] [Rapture] [Mindfulness of body] [Gradual Teaching] [Meditation/Unusual experiences]
Response by Ajahn Pasanno.
Quote: “It isn’t so much the experience of extreme well-being that is the goal. It’s the ability to gain clarity and stability so that one can see through the experience as something that is uncertain or impermanent, has a changing nature. The mind often wants to disregard that. The tendency to identify self with experience on a refined mental level is tempered by the body experience.” [Jhāna] [Rapture] [Clear comprehension] [Concentration] [Knowledge and vision] [Impermanence] [Delusion] [Self-identity view] [Relinquishment]
Follow-up: “Are you saying you can become attached to these states?” [Clinging]
8. “In that talk he [Ajahn Sim] seemed to stress doing samatha meditation before practicing vipassana. Is that strictly held within this tradition?” Answered by Ajahn Pasanno. [Ajahn Sim] [Calming meditation] [Insight meditation] [Thai Forest Tradition] // [Tranquility] [Knowing itself] [Concentration] [Language]
Quote: “The qualities of the one pointed mind are vitakka, vicāra, pīti, sukha, and ekaggatā....It’s not one pointed excluding. It works together, it harmonizes, it’s balanced.” — Ajahn Chah [Ajahn Chah] [Unification] [Right Concentration]
10. Quote: “One of the things I often attend to is the juxtaposition of stillness and movement. It’s not that one is right and the other wrong. We can be still and really dull or the mind can move with clarity and acuity. But stillness and movement, what’s generating it, what’s pushing it? That bhavadiṭṭhi/vibhavadiṭṭhi is the engine behind it and the force behing the arising of a sense of self, a sense of me.” — Ajahn Pasanno [Ajahn Pasanno] [Insight meditation] [Calming meditation] [Right Concentration] [Not-self] [Clear comprehension] [Nature of mind] [Conditionality] [Craving not to become] [Views] [Self-identity view]
5. “Is jhāna only in meditation?” Answered by Ajahn Pasanno. [Meditation] [Jhāna] // [Right Concentration]
Quote: “Only farangs [Westerners] go into meditation rock climbing! Does he contemplate the Four Noble Truths?” — Ajahn Chah [Ajahn Chah] [Culture/West] [Recreation/leisure/sport] [Jhāna] [Four Noble Truths] [Right Concentration] [Directed thought and evaluation] [Relinquishment]
14. “That sukha (happiness) is still experienced through the sense object of the mind?” Answered by Ajahn Pasanno. [Happiness] [Rapture] [Sense bases] [Jhāna] // [Mindfulness of body]
Quote: “The way the Buddha describes the jhāna factors, all the images are grounded in the body.” (MN 39.15) [Jhāna] [Similes]
19. Quote: “There are a lot of confusing views and opinions about jhāna and meditation. It’s helpful to ask, ‘What’s the Buddha actually say? How does he put it?’ I have a lot more faith in him than in a lot of what’s out there.” — Ajahn Pasanno [Meditation] [Faith] [Views] [Buddha] [Jhāna]