The Jit and the Jai

Luang Por Tate, one of Luang Por Mun’s senior disciples, stresses the sense of knowing. He talks about the jit and the jai. By jai he means the sense of equanimity, the clarity of knowing; jit refers to thinking, feeling, perceiving. This is his way of talking.

And he gives a very simple means of understanding what he’s talking about. He says to hold your breath for a few moments. Your thinking stops. That’s jai. Start breathing again — and as the thinking reappears, that’s jit. And he talks about getting more and more in contact with jai, as the mind becomes calm in meditation.

He doesn’t talk about a Samadhi nimitta (vision) or a mental counterpart to the breath; he talks about turning towards the one who knows the breath. So as the breath becomes more and more refined, then the sense of knowing the breath becomes more and more prominent. He says then to turn away from the breath and go into the one who knows the breath. That will take you to the highest levels of meditation (appana-samadhi).

So it’s sharpening this sense of knowing. Knowing the one who knows. And that’s what will take you to peace. But this ability — to go from the obsession with the content of experience back to the state of experiencing and that which is experiencing — is simplifying, bringing the mind more and more together. The mind becomes more and more composed and more and more one-pointed.

This reflection by Luang Por Tate as recounted by Ajahn Jayasaro is from the talk, The Beauty of Sila.