Our dharma brother Houn Jeff in Japan wanted to express his gratitude to our sangha for the support that we have shown him, not just recently but over the years, so he sent us this gift of tea and snacks.

Soshin will be leaving in a couple of days late Monday night, she will be in Japan for a number of weeks at the Soto nunnery monastery there, so we will be thinking about you and sending you good thoughts.

Maybe it’s good that there’s not so many people here today because what Roshi wants to talk to us about is a topic that we almost never talk about, for good reason. It’s not always looked favorably on to have this conversation, but we’re going to have it anyway. Most of the what we call ‘wisdom’ spiritual traditions come from India, and that includes Buddhism and Hinduism and Jainism and many others. All kinds of forms of meditations, ancient meditations, some of which don’t exist anymore. That’s always been for some reason a real hotbed of spiritual exploration. Depending on the tradition or form that you practice, teachers of those forms would often teach the form, the practice, how to do it, but also share sort of the inner life that goes along with that, what one could expect spiritually by engaging in that practice. Each one of these traditions has these explanations. Some are quite complex and esoteric, some are a little bit easier to follow, but they map this kind of fascinating spiritual astronomy that one could expect in one’s spiritual journey.

In Zen, for a number of reasons we don’t really do that very much. We do have one very famous sort of protocol or dogma story that has to do with the Ten Ox Herding Pictures that we’ve talked about here, and maybe we’ll talk about again. Essentially they were developed in China, and they explain the different spiritual stages that happen during Zen practice. These are kind of large picture spiritual shifts that happen. For the most part, when you go from one into the next, you don’t go back to the first. You really progress through them. And they’re large picture all-encompassing kind of explanations of one’s spiritual shift as one practices Zen over decades and over a lifetime.

But prior to that, other systems for explaining this inner life existed, including before Shakyamuni’s time. One that is not too esoteric and not too complicated, maybe it is a little bit, but one that Roshi thinks we can look at is called the jhanas. And the explanation of the jhanas has existed before Shakyamuni. So he just wanted to share that with you as maybe a way to get some insight into things that we may be experiencing while we do intensive zazen.

First, the prerequisite to understand the jhanas is is to understand that in Buddhism we talk about the three realms or the three worlds that we live in. The first world that we live in is called the worldly realm. There’s the worldly realm, the form realm, and the formless realm. Each one of them have four stages that you move through. But the worldly realm, just to be brief about it, has to do with the world that we all engage in. Hunger, desire, relationships, physical challenges, all the things in the world that we kind of struggle with that don’t create the best feelings in us all the time, that make us a little bit uncomfortable or unhappy, that keep us away from really any sort of deep satisfaction or wisdom. Those are the worldly realms which everyone operates in. It’s often because of the worldly realms experience that we’ve all had that we start our practice. So once we start our practice, we start to experience the jhanas. He will say this is not a “maybe you’ll experience the jhanas,” it is almost guaranteed you’ll experience the jhanas if you practice seriously.

Why can he say that with confidence? Because there are certain fundamental truths or facts about our existence which just happen. For example, let’s say you were to wake up today and say, you know what, starting today, and every day, for as long as I can, I’m going to walk five miles a day. I’m going to walk five miles a day, every day. The first time you do it, your legs hurt, you barely get through, you’re sweating, you’re panting, it’s rough. But you made this commitment. So you walk five miles, every day. After a month of that, maybe two months of that, you come back one day and you go, “You know what? My legs don’t hurt. I didn’t sweat. I actually feel OK. Wow!” In reality, it’s not a wild moment. That’s just biochemistry. That’s just physics. That is going to be the natural outcome of walking five miles a day. Now it may be that you suddenly notice it, you didn’t notice it for those two months that you were doing the change, and you just noticed the change on that day, but that is happening every day, guaranteed. It is basic physiology, chemistry, biology, whatever you want to call it.

It’s like if you said, OK, today I’m going to do bicep works. I’m going to work my biceps for an hour every day, and you did that every day. And then two months from now, you change your clothes and you look in the mirror and you go, “Whoa, check out those guns. I’ve become Schwarzenegger like overnight!” Well, you didn’t. You’re actually there were you’re going through a biochemical process that created great biceps, you put the work in and that was the outcome. It is actually shocking if it is that big of a surprise to you, that’s another question. So it’s the same thing with the jhanas. If you’re really serious about your practice and keep doing them, these changes will happen. Guaranteed. So Roshi says let him just go through them, and then we’ll talk about our attitude or approach to them.

The first of the form jhanas or worldly jhanas, the description is this. And again, this is provided you’ve been sitting for a bit. The first jhana, meaning a state of being, is marked by joy, physical rapture, and active thinking focused on the meditation object. Now this should be something, this is something, that all of you have experienced. You’ve all come here, sat down, and just as a result of spending some time in the cushion, just felt calmer. Everyone. Another way they define the worldly realm is that they often describe it with the adjective of being coarse, harsh. When we get into the form world or the jhana world, they define those four stages as refined, where the coarseness starts to go away, the abruptness of it. And you kind of feel that when you walk into the space, things start to flow. There are forms, people engage with each other in a more refined way, the sitting, all of the things that we go through start to refine our feelings. So the very first stage of the first jhana is a sense of, “Oh, okay, I’m not so wrapped up in the emotion of the world out there, my mind is starting to calm, I can see things maybe a little bit more objectively, a little bit more distance, my cortisol levels are coming down, my anxiety is starting to drop a bit, I’m breathing a little bit easier, I just feel calm and good.” That is the the first jhana which he thinks everyone has experienced here.

The second jhana, again with practice, is when the thinking which we are actively doing in the first jhana—we’re actively looking at ourselves, looking at our life, looking at our situation, and trying to bring some wisdom to it—in the second jhana, that starts to fall away, where we just start to be. We’re not thinking so much. We’re being. And the description we see there is thought activity stops, deep inner joy and emotional happiness remain. So what happens is when the thoughts start to drop off, this really deep joy starts to surface, because it’s not being filtered anymore. Thoughts are like, when you’re thinking about everything, everything has to be filtered, the emotions, everything through that. When that’s removed, you’re feeling this genuine joy, genuine happiness, sometimes they use the expression rapture, of just “I’m alive, I’m here, I’m being.” It feels really, really good. That’s the second jhana.

The third jhana is after that’s happened for a while. We all would love to be in rapture all the time, what a great state of being that would be. But the fact is, that’s also a kind of a trap. Reese’s peanut butter cups are great, but not 24/7, right? It becomes a hang up, and it becomes a problem. And so it is with rapture, if we are just constantly in a state of rapture. So what happens is in the third jhana state, the rapture also fades. We come to a purer sense of just consciousness of all things. We’re there and we’re connected. We’re conscious, we’re not being swayed by emotions either way, there’s equanimity, there’s calm, there’s happiness, there’s rapture, but it’s not our predominant emotion. So we’ve evolved kind of out of that into a higher state of just consciousness. And the fourth state, the fourth jhana in the form realm, is when the body, the forms that we’re in, start to melt away as well. So time starts to disappear. Our body starts to disappear. All the forms that we’re used to living in start to fade. And a more pure form of consciousness remains.

Now the jhanas, unlike the the Ox Herding Pictures, they’re fluid. They go back and forth. You could be in one stage, and then shift over for a second to a second jhana, and then go back to the first jhana. And then stay there. And all of a sudden you experience something in the third jhana. Then you go back to the first. It’s completely fluid. Some people have talked to him about experiences that they’ve had. And often it can kind of be looked at through the filter of these jhanas.

And then we move into the formless genres which he is not going to go into, because when you’re in the first, when you’re just beginning your practice, you can kind of comprehend the first and second jhana. When you’ve had the first jhana, and the second jhana, you can kind of get the third and fourth. But until you’ve had the fourth, it’s kind of ridiculous to look at the formless forms because they’re so obscure and obtuse. Like the first of the second four is space, you just become part of all form. It’s formless. All form disappears and you become part of pure space. And then pure consciousness. It is hard for us to even wrap our minds around, so he is not even going to go there. But for our purposes, if we continue our diligent practice, you’re going to experience one if not all four of the jhanas at some point. And it can be astonishing. And that’s why it’s a problem. And that’s why we don’t talk about it. Because it’s a trap.

It’s a trap for a couple of reasons. One reason is, sometimes we feel like having experienced that jhana, we have somehow become enlightened and we’ve become the heir apparent to Shakyamuni, and we’re ready to launch our own temple, and have our own followers, because we’ve had this magnificent new spiritual experience we’ve never had before. The sky’s opened up, and oh goodness it’s so incredible, and I’ve finally broken through to this other world. And that’s not what happened. You experienced a jhana. It’s natural, just like walking five miles a day every day for months, and you’re going to get stronger. You keep practicing. You’re going to experience this. Just because you’re feeling good walking five miles a day doesn’t mean you’re ready for the Olympics. It just means you’re getting stronger and you’re shifting. Something is happening. Same with the jhanas. Yes, we’re having this experience. Our meditation is getting deeper. Things are shifting. It is simply a transition. And one of the things about Zen practice is, one of the beauties of it is, it’s very simple. We sit. We sit. We sit, to come to a realization of our true nature.

We don’t do specialized meditations that other traditions do. For example, the Tibetans have all these incredible specialized meditations, mantras, and you know, all kinds of things that they do to create special spiritualized states, which is incredible. That’s not what we do. So when we experience those things and it’s quite natural with practice, we have to realize, oh yeah, that’s a natural experience that I need to come back to my pure simple essence of shikantaza, of sitting. It’s very easy for people to get attached to those experiences because they’re so cool, because they feel so good, because they’re so new and unique, they become attached to them, they think that’s what it’s all about. And as soon as you become attached to that thing, you no longer progress. You no longer deepen it. Because it’s a trap, it stops you at that point.

Another problem with it is, if we do too deep of a study of the jhanas and all these stages, what naturally happens to us as human beings is we start to define ourselves as those experiences. And that’s not who we are. Think about yourself, and how you think about your identity. Most of us would explain our identity as something that we’ve done, something that we’ve accomplished in our life, something that we’ve experienced in our life. Who are you? And we’ll go in and we’ll talk about these things endlessly. “Oh, I took a trip, and I did this, and then…,” or “I was in a race and I got first place,” thirty years ago. We’ll go over that experience over and over as our identity. It’s not. So if you start to really get attached to these spiritual states, these jhanas, all of a sudden you say, “Oh, well, I experienced this, that’s my identity! I was in the third jhana. I did this. I had this experience.” And we’d start to define ourselves as that thing. And that’s not what we are. It’s a trap. It’s a dangerous trap.

That’s why, and he has shared with us when he, as a young monk, had these experiences and went to his teacher Ban Roshi, he has had tons of them, his teacher would just say, “It’s all a dream. It’s all a dream, just let it go. This is the only thing that’s real,” as Roshi hits his chest with kyosaku stick for emphasis. Yeah, you had experience with the fourth jhana, but how clean did you wipe yourself this morning? That’s the real thing. So it’s great that we have these experiences, but we just create the consciousness of, “Oh, okay, that happened,” and then we come back to our sitting, to our reality, to our actual identity.

Then the third reason why we really don’t get hung up on these things is they’re not necessary, they’re not prerequisites to becoming enlightened. Shakyamuni didn’t go through all the jhanas to become totally enlightened. According to what we understand, he was just doing his meditation were when he stopped, he was at the second jhana in his practice, and then had that instantaneous experience that took him all the way to satori. We have lots and lots of stories in our Zen literature of children becoming enlightened, or people with no practice becoming enlightened. It is not a prerequisite. You don’t have to go through all these stages in order to get there. It is a side effect of a very serious and good practice. And it indicates good things. But we don’t necessarily have to do that to come to full enlightenment, or realization. That’s why we don’t want to attach to them in any way.

Again, for those reasons it’s an easy trap, but you don’t want to ignore the fact that you actually experienced them. And it can be kind of freaky, and wonderful, and surprising, and all kinds of emotions come out when they happen. So we just say, “Wow, that was a really great slice of carrot cake! But you know, now it’s time to pick weeds.” Right? Time to move on. We don’t stay there. Because that’s not who we are.

So he knows as we continue our serious practice here, all of us are experiencing jhanas at some level. They will continue to change. Like we keep walking, we keep working the biceps, we keep meditating, things will happen. That’s a beautiful, wonderful thing, and by all means we can share them. But we need to make sure that that was that experience at that moment. The most important thing is the next breath.

So that’s what he wanted to share with this small group. Now we’re the only ones to know about the jhanas. Depends how well we write it up, he guesses! But again, a fascinating part of our practice. Again, our practice is not about these exotic experiences. There are these guys, these tech bros, two or three years ago, that were experimenting with the jhanas, and they had come up with a system. You had to go on one of their retreats, but they had these supplements, and they had developed these apps, and you had to go through all these things for this weekend, and that it would take you through all the jhanas. You had to spend the whole weekend there, and take all the supplements, and listen to tapes, and do the apps, and everything. But they had figured out a way to take you through all the jhanas. He was reading about it, they were talking about it. He guesses at the very end of the article, the interviewer says, “So this is like a guaranteed thing? Like if we come for this weekend, we pay all this money, it was a very expensive to do this retreat, we’re going to experience all these jhanas?” And the guy said, “We can’t really guarantee it, and actually doesn’t happen that often. But you know, sometimes you get lucky.” So yeah, that’s where the science, the algorithms of this thing comes down. Anyway, he hopes that’s something useful to keep in our back pocket.