Visible Here and Now by Ayya Khema

Author:Ayya Khema [Khema, Ayya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2022-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

9. THE NINTH FRUIT

Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Jhānas

THE FIRST FOUR ABSORPTIONS are called in Pali rūpa-jhānas. Rūpa means body, and jhāna is absorption. These fine-material absorptions fill us with joy, rest, and peace. The fine-material absorptions are called that, not because they are physical sensations, but because in living in the material world, we have all experienced states of rapture, joy, contentment, and equanimity. But these experiences during the jhānas are much more sublime, much more refined. Thus they are referred to as “refined experiences from the ordinary world” or “fine-material absorptions.” The boundary lines we normally experience so sharply become blurred and the heaviness disappears.

These first four jhānas are followed by the four arūpa-jhānas, with the a translated as “not.” Thus these are the immaterial (formless) absorptions that are purely spiritual and have nothing to do with any conscious states we have known before. They are located completely outside the sphere of our usual knowing. They are described as a continuation of the fourth absorption, but they sometimes appear quite spontaneously after the third. With every step that we take, the mind is prepared for the next one and thereby becomes ever more subtle.

The first jhāna gives the mind a perfectly natural power that leads without strain or effort to the further jhānas. But the Buddha doesn’t say that we should wait until something spontaneously happens, only that we should divert the mind to the next stage. That is, we should deliberately start opening ourselves to the next step.

The fifth jhāna leads our consciousness into a feeling of infinite space. With the first jhāna we are dealing with bodily feelings, and this is somewhat the case even with the fifth. A feeling of infinite expansion of the body can emerge till there are no more limits, and the infinity of space becomes the only thing consciousness can make out. The Buddha gives the following explanation for this: If we see a house, we can imagine that a village is there. We can perhaps see a whole village and a single tree, and then all the other trees. Thus we can soon imagine the entire village, the woods, indeed the entire country and the whole continent, and still more and more until everything disappears, and only the entire space of the universe remains in consciousness.

Some people will get to a point where the body can stretch no further and infinite space is not yet recognized. Here we are talking about an intermediate stage; and we can imagine the sky without a horizon, so as to experience infinite space. Other people experience infinite space without any intermediate stage. In this infinity there is nothing—no person and no “I.” And this is the knowledge that, by means of this experience, lends us a whole new vision of ourselves.

The first three immaterial absorptions are the great insight-absorptions that open the way to clarity and liberation. Here our own experience is decisive; nothing else can lead to liberation. After the experience of space, worldly things don’t affect us so much because we have experienced another truth.

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