On Jhana-Generant Focus Objects

When last I wrote about access to jhana, it was shortly after my first experience. I had practiced a small variation of approaches involving the breath, and at the very first success I was quickened to set down every detail. There was much to say about developing a steady relationship with the breath, but my methods became far less concrete when it came to developing pleasure; even after a couple dozen entries into the first and second jhanas, that is still the most underdetermined step. Across focus objects, I began considering the content available during concentration. The present article is my expanded investigation of focus objects, and emergent from the practical concerns of reaching the first jhana, a framework will be set out for comparing their relevant properties. In section 1, I follow the general arc of practice and motivate its particular forms. In section 2, I present profiles for particular focus objects.

1. On Practice and Principles for Selecting Objects

The first jhana is a state of continuous, energetic pleasure. Traditionally, this is expressed in five factors: Rapture, Happiness, Applied Thought, Sustained Thought, and One-Pointedness. In the latter three, we recognize this as a skill of concentration. Attendant are the strategies of pure concentration practice, which typically involve developing the energy and clarity of a focus object. In reviewing concentration, we will search for applications to pleasure.

When one approaches the first jhana, pleasure grows enormously, and it is imperative to maintain a continuous engagement (Sustained Thought) with a source of that pleasure. Here, “source” means anything that is continuously productive on a timescale sufficient for jhana entry. As with other troubles, if engagement should falter, the practitioner will likely notice the intensity of pleasure stagnates or diminishes. This is also typically the case with concentration on sustained sense-objects, and here it is more straightforward to confirm the relation: sustained attention filters out the periphery and can gradually increase the object’s phenomenal intensity unto fatigue.

Without knowing if this is the entire explanation for pleasure’s increase, I would like to offer a piece of speculation that involves reification. Continuous engagement is a behavioral pattern that ought to be explained; that it is fixed on pleasure, which is continuously rewarding, suggests there exists something rewarding, which is interpretable as an instantiated source. The concreteness and energy of this evaluation is my central concern: as it grows more realistic, pleasure has a greater warrant to grow stronger. To this end, One-Pointed focus not only plays the role of stabilizing pleasure, but may also guard the self-evidencing of pleasure from countervailing interpretations.

Sustained attention is only possible with certain properties of stability. I will expand on these later, but of present interest is clarity. In terms of sense-objects, concentration finds gain when the whole can be held at once. In this state of mindfulness, one orients to it as composed such that the composition is undisturbed by internal variation. This is exactly the action of object fabrication; it is largely autonomous, beginning in early perceptual mechanisms, but there are circumstances in which it can be applied intentionally. According to my ability, the core of this intentional process is tension. For example, if breath is your focus and is seen to be lazy and diffuse, it could be skillful to apply tension sufficient to develop intensity and sharper boundaries. Indeed, indiscriminate relaxation can prevent clarity from arising at an object. But pleasure appears to resist intentional fabrication quite dramatically, and lessens in intensity even by short applications.

This failure to raise the energy of pleasure is apparently generic to any interaction in the phenomenal field that follows one’s intuition of physics. Direct interfacing is difficult, in part, because pleasure is surprisingly dissociated from the expressions in which it arises. Strip away all of the incidental somatic engagement, and it can be difficult to even orient to pleasure! A potent metaphor that has borne out in my experience is that baseline pleasure has some properties of light: it is radiant, volumetric, intangible, and if you should try to grasp it, you cast a shadow (you create a negation). Thus, it is easy to recognize that pleasure is unintentionally fabricated quite routinely, taking many shapes and inhabiting objects.

A challenge then presents: how can one develop sustained attention and one-pointed focus on pleasure while avoiding the aforementioned direct interactions? As it happens, we can borrow the strength of concentration developed on an object. The state of concentration that is refined enough to reach jhana is typically called “access concentration.”

Access is typically defined in opposition to the Five Hindrances, which are Ill Will, Restlessness/Worry, Sloth/Torpor, Doubt, and Sensual Desire. Without the intuition of experience, this definition makes it somewhat difficult to gain direct confirmation that one has access without first attempting to enter jhana. After all, it is rather impractical during concentration to monitor for signs of subtle hindrances, and indeed the closest confirmation of their passing is often the arising of the jhana factors. For this reason, I value the appearance of signs of concentration.

To confirm that concentration is increasing, one can appeal to the experience of energetic intensity in various manifestations. Strong attraction to a sense-object can show a magnetic pull– a sensation that arises to quickly resolve distractions. Strong concentration guards the sense-object by diluting all sense that is not immediately engaged. And conversely, when the brain is insulated from detailed sense data, the top-down influence of coordinated predictive systems can produce autonomous sensory manifestations– termed phantasies– that can be quite vivid.

As the sense-object develops energy, it takes on imaginal characteristics; when it is no longer itself, but also a sign of itself, I will refer to it as a nimitta. Drawing from Peircean semiotics⁽¹⁾, it is my experience that low energy nimittas are most often icons or indices, and as energy develops, symbolic phantasies also tend to arise. For example, in fire kasina, the nimitta is the trace of firelight burned into the retinae, and stirred by concentration, it moves through periods of resembling the fire in shape and color, and may eventually reform into something associated with red.

A sign that the energy and mindfulness of practice is mature enough for jhana can be seen when the nimitta becomes dramatically refined. This counterpart sign, colloquially, the counter-nimitta, is many times more crisp and realized than early stages of the nimitta. Even a visual sense-object can be further refined and engorged with mysterious felt-dimensions. For example, a flat red disk might become a holographic, crisp, shiny red apple that is jewel-like in its preciousness and significance.

Now we must answer the question of how to borrow concentration from a nimitta. The first tactic is to cause pleasure to arise directly from the manifestation of a nimitta, and the second tactic, popularized by Leigh Brasington⁽²⁾, is to switch attention onto a source of pleasure elsewhere. In the first case, I am assuming pleasure gains an object-like instantiation, but in the second, I release this requirement.

Pleasure seems to arise more frequently in the body and near-field than as instantiated in objects, so I will begin with the second tactic. Access concentration deserves special attention here, as I have noticed many practitioners take it to be a discrete stage of practice. To my sense, this is because a new failure point is created at the pivot from the nimitta to pleasure. Instead of smoothly letting into jhana by reducing hindrances, the practice now has a second phase of generation, orientation, and enhancement. Specific failures at this stage are numerous. In general, a nimitta that is sufficient for concentration may act against the generation of pleasure. Such embarrassments may occur when one is 1) continuously accommodating to the nature of the nimitta, 2) supporting the nimitta with wide tensions, or 3) actively interpreting the nimitta as austere. If pleasure has arisen and one is confident in concentration, the next problems one can encounter involve orientation. For as long as it takes to orient, the continuity of concentration and the stability of One-Pointedness are broken, so when facing the weird, un-object-like behavior of pleasure, uncertainty is very costly! Sensual Desire may again develop as the mind grasps at pleasure, or Doubt may develop when pleasure is not as certain as the nimitta. The problem I encounter most regularly when pivoting into the body is selecting pleasure from other affective valences. Just as it is difficult to pick from a poorly-maintained field, so too is it difficult to cultivate pleasure without an object. Finally, when one successfully orients to pleasure, it may be difficult to quickly take on an attitude that can bear the enormity of pleasure. Much of the difficulty I perceive in this method comes from how much time it takes to generate enough pleasure for feedback and how quickly the feedback window closes upon failure to orient.

My sense is that the direct tactic is more difficult when one has taken an arbitrary focus object. This object may be clear and evocative to attention, but so forbidding that it is not a profitable vehicle for pleasure. Against this difficulty, a skillful step would be the above method– to change attention to a different source. However, if one is at the outset of a practice specifically interested in the first jhana, and can freely choose an object, there are approaches that I believe make the direct tactic more intuitive and reliable.

Since concentration is a necessary part of the practice, let “attraction” be the generic attitude that covers all the relevant elaborations of object-relations. This is not Sensual Desire, which is future-oriented and grasping, but a disposition of the present that simply describes behavior. In addition to attention, which is a generic filter, consider attitudes as more specific filters for phenomenal content. As the amount of content diminishes with the increase of concentration, the residual field can structure around any surviving informational content. Returning to the concept of self-evidencing in a more typical manner, the lack of countervailing evaluations should tend to pattern the residuals into the object role of the attitude. If one is compelled to dispose pleasantry, then by One-Pointedness, the action of Applied Thought is only in this direction. I refer you to the Brahmaviharas, or to the tea aesthetic in my investigation below for more elaborated examples of how attitude and object can be used with success. I leave it to the practitioner to decide how to hold a special attitude while also developing concentration.

In choosing an object, one is of course interested in properties that support reification, but now we must consider reification-with-pleasure. Personal beliefs about an object, such as its intrinsic value, are relevant because they already perform much of the work of giving pleasure a reason to arise. In early stages of concentration, one can exploit the meaning held in discursive thought and directed imagination– termed fantasies– to generate emotional content around an object. If one struggles to find anything in the present that is valuable enough to warrant strong attraction, it can be skillful to conjure memories or desires. However, simpler fantasies tend to be more stable: explicit justifications and behavioral loops are left behind as concentration increases, leaving only the immediate sense of value. If the fantasy cannot be held at once with Right Mindfulness, it imposes (potentially unnecessary) costs. One should judge for themselves what particular objects suit their circumstances, but an accumulation of nice properties can be idealized.

The hypothesis I will put forward is that good objects for the development of concentration already possess properties of a counter-nimitta. On this view, an ideal focus object should be planted, statically bound, crisply resolved, orientable, guarded, concentration diagnostic, and not diminished under Right Concentration. In short order: to be planted is to have a fixed spatial reference; to be statically bound is to have no movement of the boundary in relation to the reference; to be crisply resolved is to have vivid and sharp details; to be orientable is to allow Right Mindfulness of the whole; to be guarded is to be insulated from distractions; and to be concentration diagnostic is to provide feedback on the strength of concentration. The last property, of non-diminishment, is included as a hedge against focus objects that exist in a medium that is unstable under focus. In general, these properties are selected to ensure that attention must not continuously reinterpret what belongs to a nimitta.

Between the two tactics of pleasure induction, it is generic to desire the aesthetic alignment of the object with pleasure. In the case of pivoting to pleasure, the one unique object property I have come to value is separability from pleasure. It can be rather troublesome to dissociate from the nimitta, which has sustained attention to this point, so the ability to ignore or erase it is quite valuable. Among potential properties is the minimization of cost upon transferring concentration, but I am skeptical that a reliable measure can be established among nimitta, except in the case that pleasure inhabits a reliable spatial location like the smile. For the direct tactic, some desirable properties include: low qualitative distance from something enjoyable, and having a medium that lacks aversive elements.

Now, in preparation for the investigation of objects, I will mention some of the typical conditions used. Physically, I wore a blackout eye mask, reclined at a 45 degree angle, and drew a thick comforter over myself. Exceptions were made when required by the nature of the focus object. Where I achieved jhana, I used the pivoting tactic, except in the case of WS-23, full body, and the tea aesthetic. The focus object of each section is the exclusive source of access developed therein.

2. An Investigation of Focus Objects

Breath

Like many others who have learned through Western pedagogy, I first found access through the breath. Reflecting for a moment on its cycles, you can sense the extent of change throughout the body. There is the cool passage through the nostrils and throat, the muscular cascade in the chest and abdomen, the pressure in the limbs; and it is as simple as watching to find many more consequences. But it is far simpler for the purpose of reaching jhana that one should narrow focus to take a naturally-steady object instead of steadying a complex one.

Forming the Object: This section shall treat with the tactile sensations in the area of the septum and philtrum. After several exaggerated cycles of nasal breathing, a small region should stand out as consistently better-stimulated. As breathing calms, it is desirable that this region remain unambiguous.

Virtues:

• Active generation of the breath is suitable for initially developing engagement and attraction to the nimitta.

• Placement near the first-person perspective prevents obstruction by closer stimuli.

• Breath fills the headspace with subtle auditory stimulation, which can increase insulation from other senses.

Embarrassments:

• Prior to access concentration and depending on your sensitivity, the nimitta may shrink, disappear, or disperse its energy too widely. When this happens, one might hold in pretense that the nimitta will become bright and full again to its previous extent, but it is often better to follow what remains, however diminished, so long as its character remains crisp.

• In response to the nimitta’s poor stability and its awkward optical focal distance, beginners may apply tensions in the forehead, jaw, or nasion to try and resolve the breath into solidity. Indeed, when I first practiced quitting this habit, any breath nimitta I held would decrease in those desirable qualities of crispness and plantedness.

• The inbreath is naturally exciting to somatic energy, and the outbreath is damping (cf. respiratory sinus arrhythmia). Prior to access concentration, the outbreath may spontaneously and robustly dampen the energy cultivated in the breath nimitta or in pleasure. Conversely, trying to prolong excitation can be a source of tension.

• Saccades or small somatic adjustments may obscure the nimitta’s boundaries.

• Breath that is too strong can be distracting and destroy the bounds of the nimitta, while breath that is too weak can cause the nimitta to disappear altogether.

• The timing of each phase depends on somatic factors and it is easy to overshoot into dyspnea.

Characteristic Phantasies: Breath-stimulated skin can show a great deal of random noise and buzzing. This may sometimes be felt as a facial numbness. Odor phantasies can be useful pleasure pumps on the inbreaths, and can spontaneously generate in response to textures, but they tend to flag on the outbreaths. When access is sufficiently good, the breath can become crisp and planted; what I call the breath counter-nimitta has these properties, and feels solid like a marble or a diamond. Further, all awareness of respiration can be absorbed as hidden dimensions of movement in the counter-nimitta.

Pleasure Induction: Frequent modern advice is to utilize the spontaneous pleasure of your smile. The mouth’s short distance from the septum/philtrum allows a fast and unambiguous transfer of attention onto pleasure. For the same reason of distance, it can be somewhat difficult to avoid the attraction of the breath when it is time to focus pleasure. Wider integration of pleasure may occur by coupling with the somatic effects of the breath. The pleasure that arises directly from the breath tends to give me the subvisual intuition of a bright white light.

Conclusion: The tactile sensation of breath at the septum/philtrum permits fairly easy access concentration, but ideal conditions require several habits that may be unintuitive. I have reached jhana from breath access several times, but it remains difficult.

WS-23

Forming the Object: WS-23 is a widely-available chemical used in food products that acts on the TRPM8 receptor to produce an innocuous cold sensation. This is particularly valuable in comparison to menthol and other cooling synthetics because it is low-odor and has a slow absorption that, at 30% in solution, allows cooling to persist 1-2 hours. By applying a tiny amount of WS-23 to the philtrum, cold will be stimulated from nasal breathing.

Virtues:

• Though the breath plays a large role in generating the focus object, both phases of respiration stimulate coldness, and the decay of cold energy is slow enough to smooth over breath transitions. This produces an even, sustained energy that is practically autonomous and holds engagement.

• WS-23’s coldness tends to have a much higher energetic baseline than the breath. Since TRPM8 primarily generates the sense of innocuous cold, aversion is minimal.

• The cold sense-object is planted and is easy to identify continuously.

• Placement near the first-person perspective prevents obstruction by closer stimuli.

Embarrassments:

• Should the range of application be too large, it may be difficult to sustain focus on the whole range, causing the nimitta to have ambiguous boundaries as cold noise dithers into the background. Careful use of a cotton swab is usually sufficient to avoid this.

• Some practitioners will experience shivering; though uncommon, it may be more likely if they expand cold throughout the body. This movement is troublesome when it is imperative to remain still for absorption.

• Stimulation is nearly constant, so it is very difficult to make the cold subtle when transitioning to a pleasure.

Characteristic Phantasies: I am not confident that I have yet seen the cold counter-nimitta, but I have seen the nimitta form into a circle and stand out as bright with crisp edges. Essentially, a ball of ice. Innocuous effects like facial numbing and buzzing may occur. If somatic energy is lacking, I have found the phantasy of high-frequency low-amplitude buzzing helpful.

Pleasure Induction: I generally see pleasure arise first at the nimitta and spread concomitant with the cold. The cold nimitta is somewhat more austere than the breath, and the pleasure I derive directly is naturally much smoother and brighter than its breath counterpart. The sustained energy of cold is quite forgiving to adjustments made in the body, but somatic valence may become fixed in numb austerity. I use compassion and nobility as supportive pleasures for integrating the body image and these usually spawn in the throat or chest. Since the nimitta sustains energy so evenly, there is less cost to splitting focus between coldness and pleasure. Due to the difficulty of backgrounding cold, hotter pleasures have been harder to cultivate.

Conclusion: WS-23 applied at the philtrum permits exceptionally easy access concentration, and should one cultivate a consonant pleasure, the sustained energy is among the best for supporting jhana entry.

Full Body

Forming the Object: There are two methods I have practiced. The first is to fabricate continuity across the skin’s whole surface and use this to gain full-body vibratory synchrony. The second is to take the entire sense mode of feeling as object and progressively energize duller patches. Both methods are considerably easier if you are practiced with stimulating tactile sensation by mental inclination.

I experience the first method to have a massive fabrication cost, as the cloud of sensations of the body resists smoothing large areas. The body does not quite become a stable phenomenal object until it nears total synchrony, but at this point you are basically in access concentration already! The result of the methods differs as well because the first is characterized by a nimitta while the second is not. That is, a mass of feeling does not refer to any object and is boundless, so there is difficulty investing in it any self-referential signs. In the first method, if boundaries are relaxed after synchrony is already achieved, I have found the resulting boundless vibration to be denser than that created by the second method.

Virtues:

• The majority of the body has a very comfortable focal distance, so it is easier to avoid facial tension during fabrication.

• Physical adjustments can be made without removing attention from the nimitta.

• The first method can easily cause the lower body to feel numb, which can suppress some distracting physical signals like bladder pressure.

• Despite the difficulty of the first method, it is something that can benefit from light effort all the way to access concentration. A practitioner who struggles with sloth may delight in this practice.

• Given the body’s large interior, one need not be as precise with energization as with smaller nimittas.

• Piti texture often arises automatically over a wide area before pleasure even becomes the focus, so coupling pleasure widely in the body is made easier.

Embarrassments:

• There are many forces within the somatic field that are extremely distracting. The breath, for instance, is quite engaging. One method to avoid the breath is to cleanly separate the scale of its oscillation from the finer somatic buzzing.

• The wide area of focus is naturally heterogeneous, and regions of coherence can resist synchronization.

Characteristic Phantasies: When the boundary of the body has a good fabrication of continuity, I often experience a disembarkment sensation. Namely, the whole body takes on a ghostly quality and sways along an axis. Mental inclination can easily rotate this axis. These sensations reduce the plantedness of the nimitta, so I consider them distracting for the purpose of jhana, but they are not strong to a fault. Disembarkment sensations tend to vanish with full body synchrony. I have not yet seen a full body counter-nimitta.

Pleasure Induction: The full body nimitta I have seen naturally generates piti texture, so pleasure that colonizes this texture is liable to spread quickly. Ideally, this means focus need not travel at all to find pleasure.

Conclusion: The fabrication cost of generating the full body nimitta is massive, but the access gained is exceptionally good for jhana entry. Foregoing a nimitta and simply rallying somatic energy is also fine, but somewhat more chaotic.

Phone Vibration

Forming the Object: I placed a vibration-damping cloth on a table such that my hand could rest there. Sitting nearby was a vibrating Android phone, which provided stimulation to the pad of my index finger. The tactile sensation of direct contact was taken to be the sense-object. I tried both constant vibration and 4 Hz pulses on an even duty cycle. This setup was placed laterally to my head and body.

Virtues:

• Despite being in a peripheral position, the vibratory character was distinct enough that identification was not a problem.

Embarrassments:

• The haptic actuator in the phone produced inconsistent stimulation on timescales smaller than the duty cycle, like stutter steps instead of smooth motion. These micro-surprises prevented access.

• Regardless of intensity setting, vibration spread inward from the site of contact with the phone. This prevented clear mental selection of the nimitta without continuous fabrication.

• Across time, physical sensitivity to the vibration decreases, so increased homogeneity is not a reliable indicator of increased concentration.

Characteristic Phantasies: As physical sensitivity decreases and focus increases, I have the vivid sense that the vibration oscillates on a spatial axis about half a centimeter long. This axis is arbitrary and readily re-oriented, but seems quite fixed without intervention. Further concentration can instead cause the phantasy of dragging the finger back and forth the same distance. Frequencies slower than 1Hz do not show this effect.

Pleasure Induction: Prior to access, no spontaneous pleasures seemed to relate to the nimitta.

Conclusion: I have been unable to reach access concentration with this nimitta, which I credit to the coarseness of the actuator’s vibrations.

Mantra

Forming the Object: I chanted the phrase “om mani padme hum” until vocal resonance produced consistent stimulation somewhere in the upper respiratory tract. Ideal placement of this stimulation is somewhere that can be precise, but not reliant on onerous muscular posturing. One such location for me is on the hard palate.

Virtues:

• When practicing alone, mantra can be ceased at will and so prevent the mind from returning onto it once pleasure is the desired focus.

• Unlike random impulses, once a mantra becomes routine, prediction can suppress the syllabic heterogeneity, allowing attention to rest on the continuous vibration.

• One’s active role in vocal production provides engagement.

Embarrassments:

• When practicing alone, the mantra is interrupted by every inbreath. The stimulation that remains in the interim is far weaker than that produced by the mantra.

Characteristic Phantasies: I have not yet encountered such phantasies.

Pleasure Induction: Pleasure can sometimes be seen as early as the first spoken syllables. Low-level vibration throughout the torso can act as a comforting massage that masks pain, but it can also activate latent discomforts. Usually, I must rely on pleasure that arises from the nimitta because I have not found a skillful way to relax during mantra.

Conclusion: The main difficulty of the mantra nimitta as a lone practitioner is gaining concentration across inbreath periods. Both access and jhana are difficult. I have not yet managed jhana with mantra.

Fire

Forming the Object: I lit a candle in a dark room and stared at the flame, seeking to continuously track the brightest regions. One can also take a safe artificial light if better stability is desired.

Virtues:

• Fire permits exceptionally easy orientation, and artificial light further provides stable boundaries.

• After long periods of staring, it is possible to gain some insight into one’s current concentration by closing the eyes and tracking the fire’s afterimage instead. This is essentially a function of crispness and plantedness. Due to this good feedback, the counter-nimitta of the afterimage is exceptionally attainable as a matter of time.

• With the eyes open, wakefulness is more easily sustained.

Embarrassments:

• Candle flame has spatially volatile boundaries that are frequently unpredictable. One can soften vision or adjust focal distance to comfortably capture the whole boundary across its movement, but this is not ideal for generating vividness. I do not experience the surprise of discontinuous jumps to be as distracting as something like the random jolting of the phone actuator, but when using a non-volatile light, absorption becomes much better in shorter order.

• Saccades and extraocular muscle engagement in general can cause the nimitta to travel across the visual field. The nimitta can travel out to the periphery, threatening to leave the field entirely, or locally, produce visual contrasts that can alter supportive details of the nimitta.

Characteristic Phantasies: Phantasies are plentiful in the closed-eye space. Compared to tactile foci, the fire afterimage presents detailed, stable patterns with far less concentration, and when concentration does develop, the patterns are far more extensive and varied. Each trial shows different semantic forms. These tend to occur first by the shape of the afterimage or as a pattern within it, then later throughout the periphery. Across different light colors, the afterimage will often take on patterns that I associate with certain colors. E.g., an apple embodiment for red, a tortoiseshell interior for turquoise. I have not seen the fire itself take on any phantasies except subtle patterns in the hazy starbursts induced by retinal fatigue.

Pleasure Induction: I have felt some sympathetic induction of pleasure that occurs by watching the fire’s dancing, but the stability of pleasure generated by concentrating on a planted nimitta appears to be far superior for jhana. Some distraction may occur while flipping from the visual to somatic pleasure.

Conclusion: Artificial light permits easy access concentration and pleasure induction, but for fire, these are more difficult. I have not yet managed jhana with either.

Open-Eye Visual Defabrication

Forming the Object: I stared at a distinctive feature of a wall, suppressed saccades, and allowed details to vanish. This technique is effectively a low-pass filter that becomes progressively stronger as concentration increases.

Virtues:

• Saccades give immediate feedback on concentration and relaxation.

• With the eyes open, wakefulness is more easily sustained.

Embarrassments:

• Though the object is initially crisp and easy to engage with, it slowly loses these qualities.

• While I am able to repair the boundaries of many dull tactile objects, I lack the ability to fabricate specific visual geometry, so I am unable to gather intensity into an object.

Characteristic Phantasies: In tactile nimittas, phantasies tend to develop only after concentration on the object has become sufficiently good. However, in this visual focus, the onset of phantasies is rapid, and often peripheral to the nimitta. Figure-ground confusions, visual snow, buzzing, and novel curvature are all common.

Pleasure Induction: I have seen blast-off phenomena several times through my fascination with reducing vision to monotonicity. Without an engagement of this sort, visual defabrication is just a kind of relaxation.

Conclusion: Visual defabrication is a good training ground for access, but may be difficult to bring to jhana.

Tea Aesthetic

Forming the Object: Tea is to me a central ritual of being a good host. Drinking tea gongfu is a study of changes, and its charm cannot be seen without the proper dedication of attention. One can read into the leaves and grow intoxicated by their history. The will and spirit of generations has been evident to me in every experience. Oolongs, and in particular those with notes of magnolia alba, show something I read as wakeful and compassionate. When I hold a teapot before my dantian, knowing of the many friends who have shared tea with me, I feel my vital heart embodied more keenly here outside my body than within my actual heart. I make this whole preamble to clarify why it is that I can immerse myself stably in the tea aesthetic and continuously draw pleasure from direct experience. The nimitta proper is a composite of the volume of the teapot I hold and a scent phantasy.

Virtues:

• For those whose interoception is nauseating, an external object can be a wonderful workaround.

• The teapot is planted, static, crisply resolved, orientable, and its aesthetic is guarded from profanity.

Embarrassments:

• One can sometimes suffer from embodying astringency.

• Aesthetics can randomly disappear or lose meaning, and refocusing on the physical aspect of the nimitta can be distracting. This appears more common when the aesthetic is not well-guarded against distracting phantasies or does not have a real basis of value.

Characteristic Phantasies: Fantasies related to the scent and memory of tea are directly utilized in this method, so related autonomous phantasies may arise, but I count more strongly that which is a function of concentration. In particular, I have seen a tactile numbness and buzzing at the teapot that can recall the warmth of a ready pour. This buzzing is fertile ground for piti to arise. When my palmar heartbeat mixes with a good sense of the teapot’s volume, the pot can come to feel organic and pulsating, as if I am holding my heart.

Pleasure Induction: For me, pleasure is already present in the embodiment of the teapot, so I may cultivate pleasure across the gain in concentration, or easily tap into it with the same relationships I used to refine the nimitta. A few phantasies are worth the loss of concentration for what pleasure they bring, but it can be difficult to predict these pleasure gains. To minimize losses, I prefer heavily embodied phantasies with static or simple vectors. To spread pleasure in the body, I have used the pretense of readiness to pour and personal attentiveness. I have found it difficult to use the magnolia alba character to grow excited enough for jhana 1, and usually cultivate jhana 2 directly from access. This again speaks to how heterogeneous pleasure is.

Conclusion: For me, the class of aesthetics that can sustain pleasure are few, and involve some difficulty managing, but may be a preferable arena for beginners to practice cultivating pleasure. Tea has been effective for both access and jhana 2.

Miscellaneous

Heartbeat: As I calm down to concentrate, the precise rhythm of my heartbeat fades out of my sensitive range. Though it was more reliably paced than the phone actuator, it had poor intensity stability and the lack of boundaries made it a poor target. Further, such introspection made it easy to activate noxious feelings in the head and viscera. While I have not had success with the heartbeat as a nimitta, it does often overlay body space in the transition to jhana 1, causing body clarity to fade out during each beat.

Helpful References

1. Peirce, C.S. (2006). On a New List of Categories.

2. Instruction for entering Jhana. Brasington. https://www.leighb.com/jhana3.htm