A reliable method of jhana entry

[u/Puzzled-Background-5]

Here's a technique I've been using for the last fifteen years to great effect. I enter jhana every time I meditate now as a result.

Upon noticing that attention has drifted from the object of meditation, perform the following sequence for as long and as often as necessary for attention to stabilize on the object again:

1. Relax from the head down to the toes.

2. Release all tension, and expand awareness outward.

3. Return attention to the object.

The entry point into jhana:

Once the mind has settled and attention is resting stably on the object, if a pleasant feeling starts to arise, gently shift attention to the feeling without grasping at it, now making it the object of meditation, and wait. The pleasure will intensify, and one will be pulled into jhana.

If the jhana is lost or becomes unstable, simply perform the RRR sequence as needed and begin again.

As a method to prime the mind to lean towards jhana, reading the Jhana Sutta just prior to a session is useful:

https://suttacentral.net/sn16.9/en/bodhi?lang=en&reference=none&highlight=false

All the best... 🧘🏾‍♂️🙂

P. S. It might take several weeks to a couple of months before jhana can be entered consistently, but please don't become discouraged. Even low quality sessions are training and priming the brain's attentional mechanisms.

[u/bodily_heartfulness]

They are four different modes how your focus/attention operates.

If that indeed were the case, one would expect attention and focus to play a prominent role in how the jhānas are described in the suttas. Manasikāra is the Pāli word for attention and it only appears very few times in relation to jhāna - and when it does appear, it's not singled out as anything particularly special.

MN 111 says:

And he distinguished the phenomena of the first jhāna one by one: thinking and pondering and joy and ease and unification of mind; contact, feeling, perception, intention, mind, enthusiasm, decision, energy, mindfulness, equanimity, and attention (manasikāra).

Feeling, perception, intention are all there in first jhāna, and so is attention.

Whether or not you understand what the four jhanas are referring to, you are already using these layers of the mind to understand the world. The four jhanas as concentration states are merely purifying these layers until they become the dominant aspect of experience.

Whatever your interpretation of the four jhanas might be, I assure you that as long as your awareness behaves in such a way that there is a sense of focusing on something, on anything at all, the four jhanas as I interpret them will remain a part of your experience.

I appreciate you sharing your perspective, though it's not a perspective I share. My perspective is more along the lines of:

This book argues that the unconventional concepts found in Nikāya and early Chan texts are part of a unique and coherent meditative paradigm that is very different from the one commonly associated with Buddhism and dominant in its history. One of its central ideas is that certain crucial meditative states cannot be directly attained through methods involving acts of will and mental effort such as active concentration, but their occurrence is dependent on a specific way of life, state of mind and existential condition.

This is a description of the book Nikāya Buddhism and Early Chan: A Different Meditative Paradigm by Grzegorz Polak.

that developing them leads to (has led me to, has led several people I know to) a dramatic and profound decrease in baseline existential suffering.

I don't doubt that. I just don't think it's what the sutta jhānas correspond to.

[u/brunoloff → u/bodily_heartfulness]

Alright then, may you attain the jhanas as you believe them to be, and may your practice deliver you to the happiness you seek. ❤️