Right Concentration

If you find that you are frequently becoming distracted from the fourth jhāna experience or if the background thinking begins to kick in again, it’s a sure sign that your concentration level is not strong enough. The best remedy, and the only real long-term solution, is that the next time you are in access concentration, stay longer in access conce

At first, what’s most likely to occur is that either your mind wanders away from the subtle pleasant sensation or the pleasant sensation itself goes away. If your mind wanders away, as soon as you notice this, return immediately to the pleasant sensation. But if this wandering away is happening repeatedly, it’s a sign of insufficient concentration;

Then when you get skilled enough to stabilize the first jhāna, you’ll find that it is possible to move the energy into the arms and legs so that your whole body is filled with it. The method is to just move your attention from the location where the pīti feels the strongest to an area where it does not seem to be occurring, such as down an arm. You

It is not helpful to force your mind to remain fixed on the meditation object. It’s not that this cannot be done; it’s that doing so will generate a mind so tense and tight that it will not have the relaxed diligence necessary for entering the jhānas.

To refrain from killing living beings, To refrain from taking that which is not given, To refrain from committing sexual misconduct, To refrain from wrong speech, To refrain from intoxicants.

People in India had been practicing mindfulness of breathing for many centuries by the time of the Buddha. They had been stumbling into deep, stable states of concentration for a very long time. Eventually these states were codified and arranged in order of increasing subtlety of object. By the fifth century b.c.e., these were well known and were b

When the fourth jhāna is done well, it is an incredibly restful state. We spend our days thinking and doing and our nights either dreaming or oblivious. Finally now you are in a state where you are fully conscious and almost nothing is happening.

Practicing the jhānas, with their focus on a series of increasingly subtle objects, quiets down the normal ego-making processes. When you emerge from the jhānas, the ego making does not immediately spring back full-blown—you have some period of time to investigate the world from a much less egocentric perspective.

A pleasant mental sensation can certainly be used as the meditation object for generating pīti—but there are two major drawbacks: the pleasant mental sensation, which is most likely an emotion, is likely to have a story connected with it that then leads to distraction, or the pleasant mental sensation is unstable and soon fades away.