A more practical, less exhausting path to enlightenment (Part 5)

Is this the real path to enlightenment?

After becoming a bit discouraged by the Daniel Ingram and Mahasi Sayadaw books, I started looking into this technique the alleged Arahant Delson Armstrong was using.

I picked up David Johnson’s book The Path to Nibbāna, and what caught my eye right away was that David himself was a seasoned practitioner of the Mahasi Sayadaw method. In the book, David wrote that he began pursuing Buddhism and meditation from the age of 19 and had done yearly retreats in the Mahasi Sayadaw method for 20 years. David had apparently progressed through the insight stages Mahasi Sayadaw talked about, but something was disappointing about the experience: “Those insight experiences were very intense and happened just like Mahasi Sayadaw wrote, but I was the same old neurotic self after the retreat.”

In fact, the TWIM technique comes from David Johnson’s teacher Bhante Vimalaramsi. (They both now reside at the Dhamma Sukha meditation center.) It's based on Bhante Vimalaramsi’s interpretation of various suttas, mostly from the Majjhima Nikāya, which is a portion of the original Pali Canon (the earliest written record of the Buddha’s sermons). Bhante toohad practiced extensively in the Mahasi Sayadaw method - doing many three-month retreats and even a two-year retreat. (Imagine meditating 10+ hours a day for two years straight)

After all those retreats, his teacher told him that he had achieved the final result. However, even after all that, Bhante was disappointed. He was expecting something more - the suttas claimed that an enlightened person would experience substantial and permanent personality change for the better but Bhante apparently hadn’t felt satisfied that he experienced that.

(Let me mention at this point that I don’t doubt that Daniel Ingram’s practice led to some radical changes in the way his brain operates. Were these the exact changes that the Buddha was promising? We’ll talk about that later)

After all, the whole point of Buddhism is the cessation of suffering. If enlightenment in fact achieves that, then we should expect that person to be pretty different.

Bhante Vimalaramsi went back to reading the suttas and saw something in the meditation instruction that didn’t seem to be addressed much, this phrase “tranquilize the body formation." 

Typically, the instruction is to just focus on whatever meditation object you’re using, then if you notice you’re distracted, you return your attention to the meditation object. So if you’re focusing on the breath, you just …keep focusing on the breath until you realize your mind is wandering. Then, you just go back to the breath.

"Tranquilize the body formation” just sounds like a fancy way to say “relax your body.” So you’re not supposed to just ignore distractions, you’re supposed to relax the tension they create and then go back to focusing on your meditation object. 

David Johnson claims in The Path to Nibbāna that whenever you are distracted in your meditation or just craving something in general (we could argue that craving is a desire distracting you from the present moment) there will be a bit of tension in the body and/or head. Think about any time you’re wanting / craving / expecting / anticipating / hoping for something, what do you do? You tense up just a little bit. You’re watching a football game or an action movie, you’re tensed up on the edge of your seat, waiting to see what happens. Other states of wanting don’t really sound like there would be much tension in them, but when you get that thing is when it’s revealed there was a tension. Why? Because you relax. You finally get dessert, you eat it until you’ve had your full then you melt into your chair a little bit. Something is on your mind making you tense and anxious, then you get the email notifying you that your test came back negative. You feel a sense of relief as your shoulders relax and drop.

Imagine the process like this: craving > tension > resolution > relax > craving ceases. Something is agitating you, you get that thing you wanted or resolve the issue, you relax, that thing no longer bugs you. So what if you tried short circuiting the process? Maybe it would go: craving > tension > [ - ] relax > craving ceases ?

This is the big thing with TWIM - this relax step. Don’t ignore distractions, relax them. You’re meditating, you notice you’ve become distracted, you gently release your attention from the distraction, you relax any tension in the body or mind and then you return to the meditation object. (It sounds like a long process but when you get the hang of it, it will be very fluid and take you 2 seconds tops)

Before really understanding the full TWIM technique, I thought I’d give this relax bit a try. I sat down to do my usual focus on the breath meditation and resolved to relax any tension that arose. I soon noticed that my neck was like a brick of tension and it felt like every muscle on my skull had this constant tension I never paid attention to before. Once I became aware of this tension, I couldn’t spend more than 3 seconds on the breath before noticing some other bit of tension in my head or neck. At some point I gave up even trying to focus on the breath and just sat there trying to relax all the tension. After about 20 minutes of this, the muscles on my temples started to feel really nice - very warm and like they were slowly melting off of my skull.

I dedicated a lot more time to stretching and exercises to loosen up my neck, and after several days and many more sessions, I finally was able to get a sense that new tension did indeed seem to arise along with the distractions.

So this is where the jhanas come in. With the typical absorption jhanas talked about in Mahasi Sayadaw and Daniel Ingram's books, you build up your focus to the point that you are able to ignore all distractions for a long time and you enter the jhana. With TWIM however, you don’t ignore the distractions - you dissipate them by relaxing. You do this continually until there are no more distractions to relax and then you enter the jhana. However, it’s a different type of jhana. They call this the Tranquil Aware jhana. It’s not as intense as the typical absorption jhana, but that allows you to be in the jhana while also remaining aware of your mental activity. So remember how I said it was odd that Mahasi Sayadaw was saying that you’re supposed to come out of the jhana in order to review what actually happened in there? Well with the tranquil aware jhanas, you can just be aware… in the jhana. (Hence the name)

In the book, David Johnson explains that these jhanas lead directly to awakening. No stressful "noting" required. That is, you enter the first jhana, you go through that into the next jhana and into the next and on and on until you enter the last jhana. Then, you keep going and you hit the first stage of awakening.

David explains what the different jhanas are like, and sounds like different parts of the brain start to power down as you continue this relaxing of distractions. In the third jhana, the perception of your body starts to fade (or you may feel a distorted perception of your body like you have a super long neck and your head feels like a big samurai helmet) Then in the fifth jhana, the sense of “space” distorts where rather than you having a sense (or knowing) of the boundaries of the apartment or house you’re in, you just feel like you’re on a plane that extends infinitely in all directions. The seventh jhana is called the base of nothingness - here there’s … no things. You don’t have a sense of space and you start to get a glimpse of how consciousness arises and fades away. The 8th jhana progresses until the mind is like the confused John Travolta meme - everything’s super quiet, no one’s around, nothing's going on. Then … when you can finally relax all craving for anything - “How long have I been sitting?” “nothing’s happening this is boring,” “when am I gonna get some of that nibbana?” “am I doing the technique right?” “is this the last jhana?” - when all that relaxes, then the conscious mind basically shuts off. This is “cessation.” (I explained this in the previous post)

 
Since there is no awareness of anything, not even a lack of awareness, you don’t know that you went into cessation until you come out of it. You have this odd sense of “how’d I get here?” Like frames edited out of a movie - the time line suddenly jerks from scene 4 to scene 15 and things don’t make sense. You’re a bit confused. As the mind slowly boots back up, you get a glimpse of just how everything works. Almost like you’ve been watching a magician do these baffling sleights of hand all your life, but when you take a video and slow down the playback to 1/10th, you finally see how he did the trick. That’s how it works! With this, you feel an immense wave of relief, like someone just popped a kink in your back that you’ve had for 30 years and that relieving sensation washes out over your entire body. Your eyes pop open and the world looks so vibrant - edges look bolded, colors look more vibrant, subtle sounds you never noticed pop out at you. Your otherwise mundane world looks fresh and new like you walked into a Studio Ghibli movie. At least, that’s more or less what the book says anyways.

But calm down bigshot, this is only stream entry - the first of four stages of enlightenment. You just peddled 3 feet on your junior wiener bicycle for little babies. You’ve still got 3 more stages to go and they’re not going to be this easy.

With an answer to my concerns about the jhanas, I was excited to give this technique a shot. I booked an AirBnB so I could do a 10 day solo retreat alone in the woods.

(To be continued)