My 10 day quest to see if the jhānas are real (Part 6) (Patreon)

(Continued from Part 5: A more practical, less exhausting path to enlightenment?)

Let me point out that my reading of Daniel Ingram, Mahasi Sayadaw and David Johnson’s books happened over a span of more than a year with a significant gap before I found out about the TWIM practice. In that time I was also watching lectures about Theravadan Buddhism and stream entry online and later on was watching a lot of videos with Delson Armstrong in them. As mentioned earlier, I in fact had interviewed Daniel Ingram and was intending to post it on the channel but felt kind of off doing so without having even been on a meditation retreat nor having meditated enough to experience the jhanas or insight stages. I'm a pretty open minded guy but I gotta see the pudding. I like to try things out myself before talking about them on the channel.

So I had been meditating on and off, but never did anything serious. My buddy who had been on three vipassana Goenka retreats set up a two and a half day retreat for us over in Izu. The main thing was to sit and meditate on the breath, focusing on all the sensations in and just around the nostrils. We meditated 10 hours a day and most of it was back and neck pain, but there were a couple moments of flow here and there. Two or three sessions even went by faster than I expected. The main thing that was interesting was seeing how the fidelity of your senses improves. By the last day I felt like I could feel just the tiny line of skin under my nostril and above my upper lip. I could also feel quite clearly my heartbeat in my upper lip.

After that short retreat ended, I tried to get in about an hour of meditation a day in the couple weeks leading up to my ten day solo retreat in Nikkō. I decided that for those ten days, I would just mimic the schedule my buddy set up for our mini retreat - meditating 10 hours a day, doing the TWIM technique.  

On the other hand, the actual TWIM technique seemed kind of unusual: The meditation object is mettā, which is often translated as “loving kindness” - I understand it as a general wishing for someone else’s happiness. What you’re supposed to do is bring up the feeling of this loving kindness, and then radiate it out towards someone. So whereas normally you have a very concrete physical sensation like the breath to focus on, here you are focusing on the feeling of radiating good vibes to someone. Think about a time when you were really happy and felt warm all over - maybe a cat or dog comes over and rolls up into your lap, or a toddler runs over to give you a hug, or someone gave you a super thoughtful gift. You’re supposed to bring up that warm feeling and then generate a feeling of transmitting / radiating / sending that out to someone. It’s pretty tricky. You’re also supposed to smile during the whole meditation to make this process easier. (There is a bit of science on this fake it till you make it approach)

(I know "radiating loving-kindness" may feel a bit Gwyneth-Paltrow-crysta-magic-woowoo-y, but again, they didn’t just make this technique up. Using the transmitting of mettā to someone as a meditation object comes straight from the suttas, the written sermons of the Buddha.)

I tried the TWIM technique a couple times at home and just couldn’t get the hang of it. It was pretty frustrating having to first generate the object of meditation before you could actually focus on it. So I would think of my niece or a cat get the feeling of metta going - once I got it going I tried to focus on that feeling, it would last about 15 seconds tops. Then I had to go back to square one and recreate the feeling. The other instruction is: When you’re distracted, when your focus is pulled away from the object of meditation is when you’re supposed to relax any tension in your body before returning to the object of meditation. (Discussed more in last post) But.... I couldn’t even create the object of meditation. I thought that maybe my focus wasn’t good enough or the fidelity with which I could …feel… wasn’t good enough. 

With the Goenka method, what they do is have you do is breath meditation for 3 days and then from the 4th day they teach you the body scan technique. This is where you basically focus on a small section on the top of your head then slowly move your focus down to your forehead, then down to your brow, then your nose and cheeks and so on until you’re down to your toes and you then sweep back up. Without those 3 days of honing the fidelity of your focus, the body scan wouldn’t accomplish much. You need to be able to feel those sections of your body in high definition as you do the scan. So I decided that for my 10 day in Nikko I would spend the first 3 days focusing on the breath to hone my focus then switch to the TWIM technique from the 4th day. 

With a 7kg block of ribeye, some pastrami and several eggs, I headed out for my AirBnB in Nikko. With my phone switched off and tucked away, I went to sleep at 9:30 ready to get up at 6:00 AM and start meditating by 6:30AM
I had been meditating for about an hour a day leading up to my trip to Nikko but with 4 days to go I just got so busy with work that I didn’t meditate at all. This apparently was enough to delete most all the focus I had built up.

The first day was quite hard - mostly just back and neck pain and lots of frustration. You’d be surprised how hard it is to keep your full attention continuously on the breath for even a couple seconds. At first, I was quite happy if I could keep my attention fully on the breath for three breaths straight (3 inhales and 3 exhales). No matter how hard I tried to focus on it, my mind would just naturally drift into something else. It was bizarre, my mind would sneakily morph the breath into something else. I would be on the breath and then the rhythmic inhale exhale would suddenly morph into me rhythmically swinging on a swing or something: inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, swinging forward, swinging backward, swinging forward. Then the swing would remind me of being in the park in one part of town then I’d remember I need to pay my residence tax bill then… wait a minute, that’s not the breath!

Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, digging into a carton of ice cream, putting it in the bowl, spoon in the ice cream, spoon to the bowl. Man I want some ice cream… what the hell that’s not the breath!

As the day went on, I slowly was able to pay attention for more breaths, and would snap back to the breath more quickly even after my attention drifted to images of Abraham Lincoln hurriedly and sweatily gobbling handfuls of gummy bears.
So there was some progress… but I was progressing even slower than I was during the brief 2.5 day retreat with my friend.

The second day was even more frustrating. The pain in my back and neck was even worse considering I just spent 10 hours tiring them out the previous day. There was progress, but it was very slow. There wasn’t a single session where I wasn’t trying to calculate in my head how much time was probably left (I saved myself the agony and turned the clocks face down by this point.) I made a resolution to just stick to the schedule and just be on the cushion for all the meditation sessions, no matter how bad my focus was. By the end of the second day, my goal wasn’t even to try and “experience” something but to just be able to finish the retreat able to say that I didn’t give up. I passed out in bed immediately after the last meditation session ended at 9PM. 

(I should have gone on walks these first 3 days, I mostly just stayed inside stretching.)

The third day, I was up at 5:30 AM, a bit more optimistic ... but the first two hour morning session was just as defeating as the day before’s. I would have rather ran another Spartan Race at this point. After a fantastic steak for breakfast, I sat down to do my second two hour session. It finally felt like things were flowing a little bit. The flow would start and stop, I still was spending a lot of my mental energy trying to ignore the neck and back pain and I was fidgeting plenty but it wasn’t too bad.

Then... when I was least expecting it, the timer rang. It felt way earlier than I was expecting. That little bit of encouragement that maybe the next 7 days wouldn’t just be more piles of dog crap was enough to make me jump up and say YES, fist pumping and all. Just about as fast as I jumped up, I crumpled forward and started crying in relief. This took me by surprise - I don’t think I realized how soul crushing the first two days were for me. Moving on, the rest of the day wasn’t too bad. By the end of this 3rd day I could once again feel the heartbeat in my upper lip. I went to bed satisfied that I got up to the same momentum I had finished the quick retreat in Izu with.

On day 4, I got up excited to start the TWIM method, but upping my focus with the breath practice hadn’t helped too much apparently. The metta meditation was frustrating for the same reasons explained above. It was really hard to even generate the feeling of metta, let alone make it my object of meditation. Day 4 didn’t yield much progress but I wasn't too bothered.

It was about half way through Day 5 that I started to feel like maybe I was just doing it wrong. I just could not sustain the feeling of metta for very long at all. You’re supposed to spend the first 10 minutes of the sit generating metta just for yourself, really trying to generate that warm feeling of happiness in your chest. I could kinda do that for a little while with plenty of focus. However, since it was hard to bring up, whenever I got it going, I would rush over to the second step of radiating the metta out to someone… but it would promptly fall apart.

I had brought David Johnson’s book The Path to Nibbāna for reference as well as another book, Knowing and Seeing by Pa-Auk Tawya Sayadaw (because it had some interesting info on metta meditation). First I looked at Knowing and Seeing, and it really emphasized that you need to spend plenty of time creating a very strong feeling of metta / happiness for yourself. Then, when you have a strong pleasant feeling of happiness - when you know what happiness feels for yourself, then you can transmit it to others. This made sense to me. It’s like if you were like: I feel kinda sorta good… I truly wish with all my heart that you could feel this sensation of lukewarm more or less contentedness! It’s like if all you got for your girlfriend’s birthday was a single pack of off-brand gummy bears. You’re not going to be particularly excited to give that “gift” to her.
 

Doubling down and spending twice as long generating that feeling of metta for myself made the happiness transmission quite a bit easier. But I was still having trouble with it. At the back of David Johnson’s book was a practice he recommended for people who were having trouble generating the feeling of metta called “Forgiveness Meditation.” This didn’t sound too much easier. You’re supposed to sit down, say a phrase in your mind to yourself like I forgive you for not understanding, then you make the feeling of forgiveness your object of meditation. I was frustrated enough with the metta practice to give this a shot.

I sat there, told myself “I forgive you for not understanding,” then… no particular feeling arose. You’re not supposed to just repeat it like a mantra so I waited a few moments and tried again. After about 20 minutes straight of this I noticed my mind was trying to offer up random events in my life that I might be resenting myself for and could use some forgiveness. None of them really struck a chord and I felt like I was wasting my time and that I should just keep slogging on with the metta practice. After a while however, I started to get an idea of what the feeling of forgiveness felt like. After another 10 minutes of being unimpressed by the meditation, it was like I suddenly stepped on a landmine. I crumpled forward again, crying a bunch. I’m a sucker for certain scenes in movies, but things happening in my actual life rarely make me cry so this aspect of the retreat was surprising. I don’t remember much, but I do remember seeing this kid version of me and instead of the current me saying the phrase “I forgive you for not understanding,” the kid said “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
 
My guess is that I was kind of retroactively resenting myself. I always disliked who I was a kid, feeling like an embarrassing idiot - wasn’t particularly good at anything or “cool” in any way. Some unpleasant situation would arise and I would clumsily try to resolve it in my own way but that would just compound my suffering. I was lost and not so good at figuring things out. I suppose I needed to forgive myself for that.

Then, after this, I tried the metta practice again and to my surprise it was a lot easier. Things were flowing much better. I was able to generate a really strong feeling of metta for myself and that made it that much easier to do the transmitting to another person portion. I finally was able to get the meditation object going and properly begin the meditation. I guess if you resent some part of yourself (even your past self), then it makes it harder to genuinely want yourself to be happy.

It wasn’t like the metta was permanently unlocked, though. The metta juice would run out and I would do another session of forgiveness meditation, trip over a nugget of self-hatred, abruptly cry a bit, and then get back to the metta practice. Pretty straightforward. I repeated this process the next day, Day 6, and felt like I was finally starting to get the hang of the meditation.

Come day 7, I was feeling much more content with my meditations, but never felt like I was getting close to those trance-like jhāna states I talked about in previous posts. On one a particularly long session, probably over an hour had passed, and I noticed my body definitely felt kinda fuzzy and warm. Then my perception of my body started to get really wonky. I slowly morphed into this creature with a giraffe neck and a samurai helmet for a head but… the wooden mechanical doll version of that? I thought this is definitely fucking weird, maybe I’ve finally got the first jhana? After about 10 minutes of my body slowly getting more cylindrical, suddenly all the fuzzy buzzing in my body rushed into my head. A bunch of pressure was suddenly and aggressively building up in my head - it wasn’t painful but a little alarming. In reality I was completely still but it was like I had to hold on to something while everything rushed into and out the top of my head. My excitement at the situation and confusion about what I’m supposed to do next generated a lot of tension and it finally rustled me out of the sit.

 
Wow! What the hell was that?!

I cracked open David Johnson’s book to try and figure out where I was on the path; I was partly suspecting that I took a weird detour. Eventually I found Chapter Nine: 4th Jhana, page 119 where it says: “In the fourth jhana, the loving-kindness energy moves from the chest and heart area, up to your head; it is like the feeling of metta is starting to radiate from the top of the head.”

I made a small note on a scrap of paper I was using to count the days: J4?

(To be continued)