Is this really the best path to enlightenment? (Part 4)

Something isn't adding up...

In the past posts (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) we went over two meditation techniques which allegedly contribute to achieving awakening. To review, noting is where you try and notice every single bit of mental activity arising in your conscious awareness - itching, imagining, intending, planning, breathing, twitching, hearing - everything. Jhāna is essentially an immensely blissful trance state that occurs when you are able to maintain Jedi-level concentration on a meditation object.

Since Daniel Ingram’s meditation practice was mostly based on Mahasi Sayadaw’s methods, particularly the noting technique, I picked up a copy of Mahasi Sayadaw’s book Manual of Insight. It’s a quite massive book : 528 pages, excluding the notes, glossary and index.

I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit. Some of it is very interesting, some is a mind fuck, and some I can't quite wrap my head around.

On page 145 he stresses the importance of observing phenomenon “the moment it takes place.” He says: “It is impossible … to perceive the lightning bolt as it really is if we imagine or analyze it after it has disappeared.” If you retroactively note something - maybe you realize half a second too late that there was an itch in your knee - that's not helpful. Just move on and keep noting. 

As for the jhanas, on page 33, he makes it sound like they are not necessarily necessary to achieving enlightenment. They sound more like a way to rest your mind from the exhausting process of noting every little blip of mental activity that you’re able to be aware of. He writes: “When one’s insight concentration and insight knowledge are yet immature, and one practices sitting for a long time, one grows physically exhausted … and one’s mind becomes restless. Then one retires to the attainment of jhana so as to relieve the exhaustion and stress. Then the practice of insight meditation is resumed. …Thus the attainement of jhana is very helpful to insight meditation.”

So the jhanas are amazing but just simply a way to chill you out after you stress the shit out of your mind?

As discussed in the last post, it takes at least 6 months of consistent practice to have a hope of being able to pull off this jhana thing. …and the insight practice (noting) is what takes you through the insight stages (also discussed in a previous post) which leads you to awakening. So why don’t I just do the insight “noting” practice and take a nap when I get tired?

Now, you very astute reader may be thinking: “If the aim is to see mental phenomenon as they are, why not go into the blissful state of jhana and do the noting practice while you are in jhana?” Very good question.

The thing about the jhanas is that they require such intense focus on the object of meditation, that you don’t have the wherewithal to do the noting practice while in jhana. They say you are “absorbed” in the jhana. It's said that while some people are in jhana, you can lift their arm up and they won't even notice that.

On page 126 of Manual of Insight, under the section “Lessons to Learn from Those Who Take the Vehicle of Tranquility to Enlightenment,” it’s written that what you are supposed to do is (1) go into jhana, (2) emerge from the jhana, and then (3) retroactively review the phenomenon that were present in the jhana state.

Wait a minute.

Didn’t he just say earlier in the book that it’s super important that phenomenon are noted the moment they take place? 

Something didn’t add up for me, so for the time being I wrote the jhanas off as a kind of super fun and pleasurable magic trick that might not be worth the time if the goal is to attain awakening. (Some have even said that the jhanas can be a distraction and that people become attached to them, wanting to just bliss out on jhana, rather than making any progress on the path to nibbāna / nirvana / awakening.) I put my interest in jhana on hold and promised myself that sometime soon I’d go off and do a 10 day retreat where I did noting for as many hours a day as possible.

Before long, my friend in Amsterdam told me about a neuroscientist he knew doing some brain scanning research on a very advanced meditator named Delson Armstrong. Apparently Delson could do all the jhanas and could go into “cessation” at will.

Cessation is, as the name would suggest, the cessation of all conscious mental activity. It sounds like falling asleep at first, but it’s not quite like that - since all awareness, even the awareness of a lack of awareness or the cognizance of the passage of time, ceases. When you fall asleep you have a slow fading out of consciousness, and then a fading in of it when you wake up. You also have a sense that time has passed. However, with cessation, you don’t have any of this. So if we’re to compare it to a movie, it’s not like the screen going black for a little while. It’s like frames have been edited out of your experience of reality. You’re watching an action movie - the main character is in the middle of a workout montage and halfway through, the scene changes without transition and the hero is kissing the girl in front of a burning building. You only know you were in cessation when you come out of it.

Not only that, Delson was claiming to be fully awakened. As mentioned earlier, there are 4 stages of awakening and Delson was claiming to have progressed through all of these.

So where’s the proof, hotshot?

At this point I should mention that all these meditation techniques and Buddhist concepts come from the suttas of the Buddha. Suttas are essentially sermons, but I like to think of them as podcasts. The Buddha does these podcasts, the monks memorized them and they were spread and preserved orally. Then they were written down, with the earliest suttas written down in the pali language.

Manual of Insight quotes many of these pali texts to make his points. Many times, when people are arguing about some aspect of Buddhism they are arguing about translations or interpretations of the pali texts.

Coming back to Delson - in the pali texts, it is mentioned that the technique for entering cessation at will is only available for someone who has achieved the 3rd stage (anāgāmī) or 4th and final stage of awakening (arahant)

What does cessation look like in a brain scan? Well, science hasn’t looked into this enough to come up with a particular type of brain activity that acts as a signature of cessation. Apparently the research is yet to be published (some data crunching is still required), but IIRC what I’ve heard from videos talking to Delson about his time with the researchers:

-Delson told the researchers he would enter cessation after 15 minutes and emerge from it after 1 hour (his eyes were closed and he wasn’t using a timer or alarm clock)
-Delson sat down to meditate
-The researchers observed a sudden drop in brain waves right at the 15 minute mark
-His brain started producing very slow delta waves, like those seen in a very deep sleep, but apparently these were even slower than that
-Right at the 1 hour mark, Delson’s brain activity whirred back up and he got up

Is that solid proof of being fully awakened? Not exactly, but it got me interested.

I thought maybe Delson mastered the noting technique and went the extra mile and mastered all these jhanas as well. However my friend told me he does a totally different technique called TWIM. In fact, this TWIM technique leads to a different type of jhana. This caught my attention, so I started looking into TWIM with hope that it was as effective, but not as exhausting as noting.

(To be continued)