Jhanas and 'Focus on Rest'

Someone wrote in and asked what's the relationship between what I call the restful States and the traditional practices that are known as shamatha or John's or absorption practices well the relationship is pretty simple.

The restful states are my reworking of the absorption practice of early Buddhism by reworking I mean, I've taken some of the principles involved in that not all of them and put them into a completely modern type of vocabulary and formulated them as a procedure.

I technically refer to that procedure as focus on rest.

I have People work with 6 distinct flavors of restful experience.

That way the experience of restfulness or tranquility, Shamatha by the way means triangle tranquilizing's from the same root is Shaun T. That means peace. I'd like to make the experience of the tranquilizing or tranquility, aspect of the practice to be intangible and sensory. I always like to work with tangible sensory flavors that have locations in space and durations through time.

So that the practice is always based in just sensory experience.

I distinguished 6 flavors of rest fullness that I have People work with.

One is physical relaxation of the body which I called relaxed or relaxation. Another one is what happens when you intentionally defocus your eyes your eyes are open, but you just sort of letting light in.

This is used in East Asian martial arts, where it's called far mountain gazing. It's also in shamanic cultures among native People that sometimes called Spirit Eyes and it's a restful experience of the external world of Sight. You're not fixated on objects. You just sort of letting light in and it turns out actually you can process visual information better in that state.

Then in the sort of fixated gaze on this, or that and that was actually used by some samurai, they would put their life at risk. They would defocus their eyes when faced with an enemy if you're going to leave that with a live blade because they found that they could respond more quickly in that une fixated visual state. So I call that light 'cause you just let him right in then I count that as one of the restful states.

Then you listen to the absence of sound in different directions. The absence of sound like a sort of defocus your ears with regards to physical sound so that gives you a way of having a tranquil experience of the object of world. The body physically relaxes. The eyes defocus, the ears. D focus so you have relaxation light silence, then you can find some restful states within your subjective world.

For example, at any given instant you may or may not have internal talk going now. I know you might think it's always, there, but it's not necessarily always there.

And there are even ways that you can sort of turn it off without fighting yourself.

In general, we don't want you to fight with yourself. But there are ways of finding quiet in your head where talk normally occurs.

And it could happen that there's no emotions in your body. I call an absence of emotion in the body. You could have pain in the body without having emotion in the body for example, but emotion is things like anger fear sadness. Joy interest smile. That kind of thing. Those flavors so conscious awareness of an absence of emotional sensation in the body is an awareness of the presence of emotional piece. So I call that restful flavor of peace and that takes care of sort of the.

Affective side, the emotional side of subjective experience, then we have of course thought.

Well, part of thought is internal talk so if you experience quiet that's a restful state for talk space. Then you could look into your image space image space means where you see mental pictures.

You could look into image space, but not at any images or maybe there wouldn't be any images there's just blank.

So we'll call that blank so a restful state.

In the visual part of thought. I called blind a restful state in the auditory part of thought. I called quiet and a restful state in the?

Emotional body I got peace.

That then gives you 6 really delicious and distinctive flavors of tranquility, relaxation light silence peace like quiet so I have People work with those and to note them to create them and note them and that's sort of.

That will then take you deeper and deeper and deeper into states of high concentration and Restfulness Shamatha.

Is interesting because it means the schama part means?

Tranquil but the tar is sometimes taken to mean abiding.

In fact, in Tibet and it's called Chinet. She means tranquil, and ambiance of I did not so than air. Part is high concentration. One pointedness andassi part is this sort of restful for tranquilizing well. There's a relationship, the way I interpret the at least part. Not all but part of the traditional Johnna system is that it's a biofeedback device.

If you produce pleasant experiences, the more you focus on those pleasant experiences. The more pleasant. They become encouraging you to focus even more thus creating a positive feedback loop that Revs up your concentration power and also takes you into deeper and deeper states of tranquility, and hence the shamatha or the tranquil, but also develop concentration Top card is the high focus.

That's my reworking of part of the classical system and if you look at how the classical system of the absorption's is described for example, in D kind of Kaya. You'll see that what the book that describes over and over again is going into these tranquil, States and then seeing beyond.

To something to an absolute rest called Nirvana.

On Euro to meaning sensation that is not.

A pleasant tranquil, experience it's something beyond that, beyond time and space. But one of the classical ways to get there is to go into these tranquil, States and then see beyond them until they?

Are penetrated and dissolve into?

The absolute rest of the source.

By giving you by making them sensory experiences, you can then observe their impermanence eventually get to their emptiness and then that becomes a path to classical enlightenment.