I had read the instructions on Leigh’s website about attaining the jhanas. The instructions for the first jhana are to paint a faint smile on your lips while you meditate, and when you have stabilized your attention on your object (access concentration) you switch your attention to a pleasant sensation. After a few weeks of practicing in this way a positive feedback loop got engaged between the smile and the pleasant sensation of the smile. I ended up with this huge grin on my face and an overwhelming sense of joy. I could not remember having experienced such intense joy for so long (about an hour).
This constituted a huge breakthrough for my practice. From this point on, meditation became something I did for its own sake rather than something I did because I thought it was supposed to be good for me. It gave me an alternate way to seek pleasures, one that was independent of external circumstances, one that was free, safe, beneficial, and always available. The amount of time I meditated every day surged because it became more enjoyable than anything else I could be engaged in. One can still enjoy other sources of pleasure when they are available, but one is no longer dependent on them.
The Buddhist teachings say that jhanas are only a way station toward awakening because when they fade one still has one’s ordinary deluded mind, subject to ill will and clinging. However, I found out on that same day that it wasn’t entirely true. As I was driving and smiling because of the beautiful Canadian Shield landscape I was going through, I experienced the same run-away smile that I had during meditation. My mind had found a path to that state, and now it started falling into it whenever it could. I just had to keep it under control while driving!
In the summer of 2004, I left my job at Wavemakers Research Inc, the software company I had co-founded, and took early retirement at the age of 45. I ramped up my meditation time and started going on longer retreats.
With the first jhana available, I hit the ground sitting at my first 10-day retreat with Leigh in October 2004. I learned to access the first four jhanas at that retreat, going through them up and down. Leigh also taught us the body-scanning meditation that he had learned from Ayya Khema, which is very similar to that taught by Goenka, another teacher in the same lineage who has established a series of Vipassana centres around the world.
With the amount of concentration that I had built up, body scanning produced (or revealed) strong sensations in any part of the body that I focused on. This was interesting for a while, but after a few days the sensations took on a life of their own and would not stop. I started referring to these roving sensations as “the entity”. Shinzen Young talks about “the yucky feeling of concentration” that many meditators experience as being similar to cobwebs on their face, which is pretty much what I experienced. Instead of being more and more concentrated on one object and having the rest of perceptions becoming fainter and eventually drop away completely, I find that I become more and more sensitive to weaker percepts, e.g. feel every heart pulse in my face, detect weak smells, hear faint sounds, etc.
That yucky feeling associated with concentration plagued my meditation for years, and I had to stop practicing body scan meditation despite its obvious benefits. Eventually I learned to make friends with the entity, as it is one of my signs of concentration (nimitta). Ajahn Sona even wrote an article that argues that the concentration nimitta (sign) does not necessarily only mean a disk of light, as many teachers insist (e.g. Pa Auk, Ajahn Brahm) but can also be a sound or somatic feeling like mine. Shinzen Young advocates pushing through the yucky phase.
After a few years of practice, the body nimitta eventually stabilized and its motion ceased to be distracting. Still I had to keep my attention away from focusing on any part of the body, even the breath. Instead, I did a lot of metta (loving-kindness) meditation, and jhanas, and even metta as an object of jhana. This much intense metta practice over several years is bound to shift someone’s emotional makeup, and it has.
I had been introduced to metta practice before, where you repeat some stock phrase such as “may I be happy; may I be free from suffering”, then thinking of another being: “may they be happy; may they be free from suffering”. I had never taken to these practices, finding them too symbolic, too artificial, too verbose. But Leigh introduced us to the wonderful visualization metta practices developed by Ayya Khema. I found them less busy, and easy to practice for extended periods of time. More importantly, I found them effective at generating the aim of the practice: feelings of unconditional love. Once the feeling is generated you can drop even the visualization. Metta was to become the foundation of my practice.
One stumbling block that many Westerners have with the metta practice is that you are supposed to start by giving metta to yourself. But because so many people in our culture have self-hatred rather than self-love, they encounter major resistance to that part of the practice.
Most people have an inner critic, an internalized version of the feedback they received as children. I have the opposite “problem”: my inner voice is an inner cheerleader: everything I do is wonderful! ;-) That’s an internalization of the encouragement that my parents gave me as a child, especially my mother. It is just as wrong as the inner critic, but it sounds more pleasant. The danger is that I tend to try for something beyond my abilities. Another downside is that when I do fail it comes as a shock, and can be devastating, and I sometimes then just give up. The advantage is that I don’t miss out trying something just because of the fear of failing.
I have found that for those with an inner critic, imagining an external being that gives them metta is a more effective practice than trying to give it to themselves.
Having access to all four material jhanas after a few months of practicing them, I felt like I had precise control over my internal states, being able to range from rapture and bliss to satisfaction and equanimity at will. Looking in the mirror while shaving in the morning, it was like I had seen a little trap open in my forehead. “Look at that! I am an android! Cool!” Then, starting to poke around the wires and integrated circuits I had found a set of tiny levers that allowed me to control my mood and emotions. How freeing! Admittedly I was often incapable, or willing, to access those dials, especially in the throes of strong negative reactions. More work needed to be done.
While visiting Chiang Mai, Thailand, in February 2005, I decided to do a retreat at Wat Ram Poeng as a way to experience the local culture more in-depth. The Asian retreat centres are usually a lot stricter than the western ones in the sense that only one technique is taught or even tolerated. Compared to the other retreats I had attended it felt like boot camp. I did not mind doing the bowing to the Buddha statue and the Ajahn (teacher) because it felt part of the culture there. (While in Rome…) I was instructed to alternate sitting and walking meditation, with strict decomposing of the walking motions and internal noting. Sitting, I was to focus my attention alternatively on a series of spots on my body. The number of spots was increased gradually during my stay. I had a short daily interview with the Ajahn, or an assistant when he was not available.
The continuous focusing of attention over a ten-day period prevented mind wandering and eventually lead to periods of mental silence like nothing else I had experienced before. Mental silence per se is not awakening, but it may be a means toward it. I also realized for the first time that I was in control of my negative thoughts and emotions, which was and is very liberating. For example, there was a lot of dog barking and blaring music going on around the Wat, like many places in Thailand. At first it bothered me, giving rise to much internal complaining for the first few days. Then I remembered the instructions of the Buddha: “if an unskillful state has arisen, let it subside; if an unskillful state has not arisen, let it not arise; if a skillful state has not arisen, let it arise; if a skillful state has arisen, let it continue.” I had become quite adept at making the skillful states arise, but I was still at the mercy of the unskillful ones being driven by external circumstances, or even just memory and imagination. From then on, I included mindfulness of all states, continual monitoring of whether they were skillful or unskillful, and followed the Buddha’s advice more or less successfully.
For a couple of years after the Chiang Mai retreat, I included slow walking and noting as part of my practice. I did not adopt the practice of focusing attention on spots of the body as I found it too “busy”, too forced.
My next retreat, in April 2005, was a fourteen-day retreat with Leigh. I accessed jhanas five to seven, known as the first three immaterial jhanas (spheres of infinite space; of infinite consciousness; and of nothingness). For me they were not necessarily deeper states of concentration. I could still hear sounds and feel my body, and even have a few wispy thoughts. Therefore, some teachers would not count my states as true immaterial jhanas, but they were still states of clarity and inner peace that I had never experienced before. I spent hours every day dwelling in them.
I had a profound dream towards the end of the retreat. I was dreaming that I was walking around the meditation center and decided that it was a good time and place to meditate, so I closed my (dream) eyes. The dream dissolved, i.e. I did not see or feel or hear anything anymore but remained completely conscious. I do not know how long I remained in that state since there were no events to mark time, but eventually I felt a sense of anxiety due to a buzzing sound that I became aware of, which built up to the point of waking me up. There was a wasp nest outside my window, and the sound of the wasps flying around their nest at dawn had penetrated by my sub-conscious as being threatening and had woken me up. To this day, that dream has been my only experience of pure awareness without an object that I can remember.