Hey Jim, since this is the soft jhana thread, I thought you might like this post/info that I remembered earlier this week...
Balanced Effort and the ‘Chronic Yogi’ – Kenneth Folk Dharma
KF: Right. So here is the dark side of what we do in the so-called hardcore dharma scene, where we are saying, “Look. You can get enlightened. I did it and you can too. Here’s how.” And we are saying, “You can have measurable progress literally within a few days.” And so I’m not kidding when I say I have talked to people on the phone and they can get the arising and passing away within a few days as soon as I model the technique for them and talk them through it, walk them through it in real-time.
They are getting measurable progress within days. That is very exciting. And yet it is tempting for people to think, “OK. Then I should be an arahat next week.” Highly unlikely.
That was one of the reasons I moved away from the Dharma Overground because we had, with all good intentions, created this McMeditation culture. There were a lot of problems. One was that every 20-year-old kid thought that he was an arahat. The other thing was that we had—there was this kind of snarky culture where everybody was saying, “Well, you don’t even know what you’re talking about. I’m an arahat now and I…” All right. We’ve got to take a deep breath. [laughs]
JG: And that’s the thing, there will be a shadow side to anything that is here in our human realm. It is just knowing what that is and being clear about it I guess—the near enemy or the shadow or whatever you want to call it.
KF: Right. And on that same theme let’s look at the shadow of overemphasizing concentration. There is a group of young men who live in the desert out West. They call themselves “The Blessed Brotherhood of the BMX” and they ride bicycles all day and that’s their whole job. They are supported by their adoring fans. All they have to do is ride these bikes. They can do incredible tricks. They can do 360s, 720s, back-flips on a bike, and all kinds of remarkable things. To them, unless you can do a back flip on a bicycle you have never even ridden a bike. And yet all around the world there are billions of people who ride bikes every day to get to work and do the shopping and go visit their friends. Are they not riding bikes?
The Blessed Brotherhood of the BMX has a kind of skewed idea of what bike-riding is. What they do is wonderful, but we don’t want to define something in terms of the extreme. So some people have taken an extreme view of what jhana is: “You haven’t even gotten into jhana unless you can sit there without thinking in some particular jhana for four hours.” Well, by that definition I have never in my life entered jhana. So I do not find that to be a helpful definition of jhana. I find that to be like the Blessed Brotherhood of the BMX. People have a reason for saying what they do and it generally has to do with justifying their own existence.
What I care about with regard to jhana is, how does it support awakening? If you can awaken without learning how to be in jhana for four hours at a time—and you definitely can—then being in extreme jhana is interesting and wonderful, but let’s not make a big deal out of it. Let’s not tell people that they are doing it wrong if they cannot do that.
So if the mountain is analogous to enlightenment, I want to be able to get to the top of it and be able to walk up and down it and have full access to every point of altitude. Let’s divide the mountain up into bands. Let’s say that every 1,000 feet of altitude there is a habitat band and as I’m walking up there, up and down each day, I go a little bit higher each day. I’m eventually going to get to the point where I am enlightened. I am at the point where I can just walk up and down the mountain in each sitting and see virtually everything that is there. Enlightenment is actually much better than that because you can move to any point of the mountain at the speed of thought.
So how much time do I want to spend becoming a master of any given habitat band? Let’s say I get to the first band and my teacher says, “OK, but I don’t want you to go on to the second band until you have identified every animal and every plant in this habitat band.” Well there are a lot of bands and I just don’t have time. In one lifetime I cannot spend a lot of time in any given band. It is not that I’m not interested and it is not that I will not investigate and explore. But that exploration—every habitat band is infinite.
There are four parameters that I like for people to have some facility with as they develop jhana. You want to be able to advert to the jhana, which literally means to look at it. So you are sliding around in access concentration and you can go to the particular stratum of mind where that jhana is and you are looking in, but you haven’t entered it. And then you want to be able to enter the jhana, which is the second of the four parameters. You want to be able to dwell in it, which is the third parameter. And you want to be able to exit it, the fourth.
JG: So you are saying “know the terrain of the mountain that you’re going up and down, but you do not have to be a biologist and classify every single species.”
KF: Yes. That’s right. We can see the parallel in biology where if you really want to be good at reptiles and amphibians you had better specialize there. If you want to be really good you had better forget about reptiles and just do amphibians, and you had better get more specialized. You had better look at a particular species of newt and make that your life study so that you really understand that critter.
Well, it is infinite how many creatures there are and what aspect of it you want to study. The question that I would ask the people who are the proponents of what I think of as extreme jhana is, ‘Are you getting the balance right? Are you getting enlightened? Are your students getting enlightened?’ If not, maybe it is time to tweak the balance.
Yes, it is interesting and it is very valuable. But what is the priority? If the priority is awakening, then you might have to spend a little less time in each habitat band and get really good at going up and down the mountain.
JG: With an extreme form of jhana mastery, very few students might be able to do it.
KF: You might not live long enough to awaken if you spend so much time at each level and that is a problem because in my priority system, awakening is much more valuable than being able to spend four hours doing anything.
JG: But I suppose anything can be taken too far and this is the primary argument, I suppose, that the dry insight workers make, which is that you might die tomorrow. Do not bother with jhana or concentration—just do vipassana and understand the three characteristics because that can lead to awakening and enlightenment. And you might get stuck—you might get attached if you focus on concentration.
KF: Yes. And I think for some people, dry insight works. It also has its dark side. You can get the striving, over-amped, anxious yogi. I see a lot of that. People come to my forum who are actually doing it right and they are making good progress, but they think it should be faster and if they were really doing it right it would be going faster. They are hindering themselves because they are not adding any concentration to speak of into the mix. So they’re just trying to do it through effort. It is messing with their lives because they have turned themselves into balls of anxiety and so you have to find a balance.
Most chronic yogis are probably at that stage because they do not have enough concentration. Western yogis tend to be good at investigating their experience once they get the hang of it, and the fact is, once you get the first arising and passing away, your mind knows how to do that. It is going to spontaneously deconstruct whatever stratum of mind you can access. The question is, are you accessing the relevant strata of mind? The answer is, no, obviously not, because if you were you would be enlightened already.
So concentration becomes the trick. The caveat here, there is something called khanika samadhi, which means momentary samadhi, whereby you become concentrated moment by moment as you’re noting. I will demonstrate here in real-time. If I look at just whatever arises in the mind: pressure, warmth, coolness, pleasant, annoyance, tension, pleasant, unpleasant. Well if you just keep doing that you develop khanika samadhi and you can access all of the strata of mind by doing that. Some people can get away with that and some people can’t.
If you do that and you access all of the strata of mind at once, you become an arahat. But then the question is, where does that lead? Do you then become an anxious arahat who still has no ability to concentrate because you have not developed it? Would you be better off if you had taken a little more time and had developed platforms of proficiency all along the way so that you could revisit everything that you saw all along the way? Would you be a better teacher if you really understood the way your mind is set up in this stratified structure?
JG: Yes. Otherwise it seems like it would require some kind of hypervigilance to maintain—if you had not built the scaffold.
KF: So teaching is a balancing act with every individual student. You are trying to find the right ratio of concentration to investigation to make optimal progress and not drive that person insane.
JG: And isn’t this just right concentration: balancing samatha and vipassana, the Buddha’s basic teaching.
KF: That is exactly right.
