The Basic Method

of Meditation
by Ajahn Brahmmavamso
CONTENTS:
PART 1
● Sustained attention on the present moment

PART 2
● Silent awareness of the present moment
● Silent present moment awareness of the breath
● Full sustained attention on the breath

PART 3
● Full sustained attention on the beautiful breath
● Experiencing the beautiful Nimitta
● First Jhana
PART 1
Sustained attention on the
present moment
“The goal of this meditation is the beautiful silence, stillness and
clarity of mind.”

Meditation is the way to achieve letting go. In meditation one lets go

of the complex world outside in order to reach the serene world
inside. In all types of mysticism and in many traditions, this is known
as the path to the pure and powerful mind. The experience of this
pure mind, released from the world, is very wonderful and blissful.
Often with meditation there will be some hard work at the
beginning, but be willing to bear that hard work knowing that it will
lead you to experience some very beautiful and meaningful states.
They will be well worth the effort! It is a law of nature that without
effort one does not make progress. Whether one is a layperson or a
monk, without effort one gets nowhere, in meditation or in
anything.

Effort alone, though, is not sufficient. The effort needs to be skilful.

This means directing your energy just at the right places and
sustaining it there until its task is completed. Skilful effort neither
hinders nor disturbs you, instead it produces the beautiful peace of
deep meditation. In order to know where your effort should be
directed, you must have a clear understanding of the goal of
meditation. The goal of this meditation is the beautiful silence,
stillness and clarity of mind. If you can understand that goal then
the place to apply your effort, the means to achieve the goal
becomes very clear.

The effort is directed to letting go, to developing a mind that inclines

to abandoning. One of the many simple but profound statements of
the Lord Buddha is that “a meditator whose mind inclines to
abandoning, easily achieves Samadhi”. Such a meditator gains these
states of inner bliss almost automatically. What the Lord Buddha is
saying is that the major cause for attaining deep meditation, for
reaching these powerful states is the willingness to abandon, to let
go and to renounce. During meditation, we should not develop a
mind which accumulates and holds on to things, but instead we
develop a mind which is willing to let go of things, to let go of
burdens. Outside of meditation we have to carry the burden of our
many duties, like so many heavy suitcases, but within the period of
meditation so much baggage is unnecessary. So, in meditation see
how much baggage you can unload. Think of these things as
burdens, heavy weights pressing upon you. Then you have the right
attitude for letting go of these things, abandoning them freely
without looking back. This effort, this attitude, this movement of
mind that inclines to giving up, is what will lead you into deep
meditation. Even during the beginning stages of this meditation,
see if you can generate the energy of renunciation, the willingness
to give things away, and little by little the letting go will occur. As
you give things away in your mind you will feel much lighter,
unburdened and free. In the way of meditation, this abandoning of
things occurs in stages, step by step.

You may go through the initial stages quickly if you wish, but be very
careful if you so do. Sometimes, when you pass through the initial
steps too quickly, you find the preparatory work has not been
completed. It is like trying to build a townhouse on a very weak and
rushed foundation. The structure goes up very quickly, but it comes
down very quickly as well! So you are wise to spend a lot of time on
the foundations, and on the `first storeys’ as well, making the
groundwork well done, strong and firm. Then when you proceed to
the higher storey, the bliss states of meditation, they too are stable
and firm. In the way that I teach meditation, I like to begin at the
very simple stage of giving up the baggage of past and future.
Sometimes you may think that this is such an easy thing to do, that
it is too basic. However, if you give it your full effort, not running
ahead to the higher stages of meditation until you have properly
reached the first goal of sustained attention on the present
moment, then you will find later on that you have established a very
strong foundation on which to build the higher stages.

Abandoning the past means not even thinking about your work,
your family, your commitments, your responsibilities, your history,
the good or bad times you had as a child…, you abandon all past
experiences by showing no interest in them at all. You become
someone who has no history during the time that you meditate. You
do not even think about where you are from, where you were born,
who your parents were or what your upbringing was like. All of that
history is renounced in meditation. In this way, everyone here on the
retreat becomes equal, just a meditator. It becomes unimportant
how many years you have been meditating, whether you are an old
hand or a beginner. If you abandon all that history then we are all
equal and free. We are freeing ourselves of some of these concerns,
perceptions and thoughts that limit us and which stop us from
developing the peace born of letting go. So every ‘part’ of your
history you finally let go of, even the history of what has happened
to you so far in this retreat, even the memory of what happened to
you just a moment ago! In this way, you carry no burden from the
past into the present. Whatever has just happened, you are no
longer interested in it and you let it go. You do not allow the past to
reverberate in your mind.

I describe this as developing your mind like a padded cell! When any
experience, perception or thought hits the wall of the ‘padded cell’,
it does not bounce back again. It just sinks into the padding and
stops right there. Thus we do not allow the past to echo in our
consciousness, certainly not the past of yesterday and all that time
before, because we are developing the mind inclined to letting go,
giving away and unburdening.

Some people have the view that if they take up the past for
contemplation they can somehow learn from it and solve the
problems of the past. However, you should understand that when
you gaze at the past, you invariably look through distorted lenses.
Whatever you think it was like, in truth it was not quite like that! This
is why people have arguments about what actually happened, even
a few moments ago. It is well known to police who investigate traffic
accidents that even though the accident may have happened only
half an hour ago, two different eyewitnesses, both completely
honest, will give different accounts. Our memory is untrustworthy. If
you consider just how unreliable memory is, then you do not put
value on thinking about the past. Then you can let it go. You can
bury it, just as you bury a person who has died. You place them in a
coffin then bury it, or cremate it, and it is done with, finished. Do not
linger on the past. Do not continue to carry the coffins of dead
moments on your head! If you do, then you are weighing yourself
down with heavy burdens which do not really belong to you. Let all
of the past go and you have the ability to be free in the present
moment.

As for the future, the anticipations, fears, plans, and expectations let
all of that go too. The Lord Buddha once said about the future,
“Whatever you think it will be, it will always be something different”!
This future is known to the wise as uncertain, unknown and so
unpredictable. It is often complete stupidity to anticipate the future,
and always a great waste of your time to think of the future in
meditation. When you work with your mind, you find that the mind
is so strange. It can do some wonderful and unexpected things. It is
very common for meditators who are having a difficult time, who
are not getting very peaceful, to sit there thinking, “Here we go
again, another hour of frustration”. Even though they begin thinking
like that, anticipating failure, something strange happens and they
get into a very peaceful meditation.

Recently I heard of one man on his first ten-day retreat. After the
first day his body was hurting so much he asked to go home. The
teacher said, “Stay one more day and the pain will disappear, I
promise”. So he stayed another day, the pain got worse so he
wanted to go home again. The teacher repeated, “Just one more
day, the pain will go”. He stayed for a third day and the pain was
even worse. For each of nine days, in the evening he would go to the
teacher and, in great pain, ask to go home and the teacher would
say, “Just one more day and the pain will disappear”. It was
completely beyond his expectations, that on the final day when he
started the first sit of the morning, the pain did disappear! It did not
come back. He could sit for long periods with no pain at all! He was
amazed at how wonderful is this mind and how it can produce such
unexpected results. So, you don’t know about the future. It can be so
strange, even weird, completely beyond whatever you expect.
Experiences like this give you the wisdom and courage to abandon
all thoughts about the future and all expectation as well.

When you’re meditating and thinking, “How many more minutes

are there to go? How much longer have I to endure all of this?”, then
that is just wandering off into the future again. The pain could just
disappear in a moment. The next moment might be the free one.
You just cannot anticipate what is going to happen. When on
retreat, after you have been meditating for many sessions, you may
sometimes think that none of those meditations have been any
good. In the next meditation session you sit down and everything
becomes so peaceful and easy. You think “Wow! Now I can
meditate!”, but the next meditation is again awful. What’s going on
here? The first meditation teacher I had told me something that
then sounded quite strange. He said that there is no such thing as a
bad meditation! He was right. All those meditations which you call
bad, frustrating and not meeting your expectations, all those
meditations are where you do the hard work for your `pay cheque’…

It is like a person who goes to work all day Monday and gets no
money at the end of the day. “What am I doing this for?”, he thinks.
He works all day Tuesday and still gets nothing. Another bad day. All
day Wednesday, all day Thursday, and still nothing to show for all the
hard work. That’s four bad days in a row. Then along comes Friday,
he does exactly the same work as before and at the end of the day
the boss gives him a pay cheque. “Wow! Why can’t every day be a
pay day?!”

Why can’t every meditation be `pay day’? Now, do you understand

the simile? It is in the difficult meditations that you build up your
credit, where you build up the causes for success. While working for
peace in the hard meditations, you build up your strength, the
momentum for peace. Then when there’s enough credit of good
qualities, the mind goes into a good meditation and it feels like
`pay-day’. It is in the bad meditations that you do most of the work.
At a recent retreat that I gave in Sydney, during interview time, a
lady told me that she had been angry with me all day, but for two
different reasons. In her early meditations she was having a difficult
time and was angry with me for not ringing the bell to end the
meditation early enough. In the later meditations she got into a
beautiful peaceful state and was angry with me for ringing the bell
too soon. The sessions were all the same length, exactly one hour.
You just can’t win as a teacher, ringing the bell!
This is what happens when you anticipate the future, thinking, “How
many more minutes until the bell goes?” That is where you torture
yourself, where you pick up a heavy burden that is none of your
business. So be very careful not to pick up the heavy suitcase of
“How many more minutes are there to go?” or “What should I do
next?” If that is what you are thinking, then you are not paying
attention to what is happening now. You are not doing the
meditation. You have lost the plot and are asking for trouble. In this
stage of the meditation keep your attention right in the present
moment, to the point where you don’t even know what day it is or
what time it is — morning? afternoon? — don’t know! All you know
is what moment it is — right now! In this way you arrive at this
beautiful monastic time scale where you are just meditating in the
moment, not aware of how many minutes have gone or how many
remain, not even remembering what day it is.

Once, as a young monk in Thailand, I had actually forgotten what

year it was! It is marvelous living in that realm that is timeless, a
realm so much more free than the time driven world we usually
have to live in. In the timeless realm, you experience this moment,
just as all wise beings have been experiencing this same moment
for thousands of years. It has always been just like this, no different.
You have come into the reality of now. The reality of now is
magnificent and awesome. When you have abandoned all past and
all future, it is as if you have come alive. You are here, you are
mindful. This is the first stage of the meditation, just this
mindfulness sustained only in the present. Reaching here, you have
done a great deal. You have let go of the first burden, which stops
deep meditation. So put forth a lot of effort to reach this first stage
until it is strong, firm and well established. Next we will refine the
present moment awareness into the second stage of meditation —
silent awareness of the present moment.
PART 2
Silent awareness of the
present moment
Silent present moment
awareness of the breath
Full sustained attention on
the breath
“Silence is so much more productive of wisdom and clarity than
thinking.”

In Part 1, I outlined the goal of this meditation, which is the beautiful

silence, stillness and clarity of mind, pregnant with the most
profound of insights. Then I pointed out the underlying theme
which runs like an unbroken thread throughout all meditation, that
is the letting go of material and mental burdens. Lastly, in part one, I
described at length the practice which leads to what I call the first
stage of this meditation, and that first stage is attained when the
meditator comfortably abides in the present moment for long,
unbroken periods of time. I made the point that “The reality of now
is magnificent and awesome. Reaching here you have done a great
deal. You have let go of the first burden which stops deep
meditation.” But having achieved so much, one should go further
into the even more beautiful and truthful silence of the mind.

It is helpful, here, to clarify the difference between silent awareness

of the present moment and thinking about it. The simile of watching
a tennis match on T.V. is informative. When watching such a match,
you may notice that, in fact, there are two matches occurring
simultaneously — there is the match that you see on the screen, and
there is the match that you hear described by the commentator.
Indeed, if an Australian is playing a New Zealander, then the
commentary from the Australian or New Zealand presenter is likely
to be much different from what actually occurred! Commentary is
often biased. In this simile, watching the screen with no
commentary stands for silent awareness in meditation, paying
attention to the commentary stands for thinking about it. You
should realize that you are much closer to Truth when you observe
without commentary, when you experience just the silent
awareness of the present moment.

Sometimes it is through the inner commentary that we think we

know the world. Actually, that inner speech does not know the world
at all! It is the inner speech that weaves the delusions that cause
suffering. It is the inner speech that causes us to be angry with
those we make our enemies, and to have dangerous attachments to
those we make our loved ones. Inner speech causes all of life’s
problems. It constructs fear and guilt. It creates anxiety and
depression. It builds these illusions as surely as the skilful
commentator on T.V. can manipulate an audience to create anger or
tears. So if you seek for Truth, you should value silent awareness,
considering it more important, when meditating, than any thought
whatsoever.

It is the high value that one gives to one’s thoughts that is the major
obstacle to silent awareness. Carefully removing the importance one
gives to one’s thinking and realizing the value and truthfulness of
silent awareness, is the insight that makes this second stage —
silent awareness of the present moment — possible. One of the
beautiful ways of overcoming the inner commentary is to develop
such refined present moment awareness, that you are watching
every moment so closely that you simply do not have the time to
comment about what has just happened. A thought is often an
opinion on what has just happened, e.g. “That was good”, “That was
gross”, “What was that?” All of these comments are about an
experience that has just passed by. When you are noting, making a
comment about an experience that has just passed, then you are
not paying attention to the experience that has just arrived. You are
dealing with old visitors and neglecting the new visitors coming
now!

You may imagine your mind to be a host at a party, meeting the

guests as they come in the door. If one guest comes in and you
meet them and start talking to them about this or the other, then
you are not doing your duty of paying attention to the next guest
that comes in the door. Since a guest comes in the door every
moment, all you can do is to greet one and then immediately go on
to greet the next one. You cannot afford to engage in even the
shortest conversation with any guest, since this would mean you
would miss the one coming in next. In meditation, all experiences
come through the door of our senses into the mind one by one in
succession. If you greet one experience with mindfulness and then
get into conversation with your guest, then you will miss the next
experience following right behind.

When you are perfectly in the moment with every experience, with
every guest that comes in your mind, then you just do not have the
space for inner speech. You cannot chatter to yourself because you
are completely taken up with mindfully greeting everything just as it
arrives in your mind. This is refined present moment awareness to
the level that it becomes silent awareness of the present in every
moment. You discover, on developing that degree of inner silence,
that this is like giving up another great burden. It is as if you have
been carrying a big heavy rucksack on your back for forty or fifty
years continuously, and during that time you have wearily trudged
through many, many miles. Now you have had the courage and
found the wisdom to take that rucksack off and put it on the ground
for a while. One feels so immensely relieved, so light, and so free,
because one is now not burdened with that heavy rucksack of inner
chatter.

Another useful method of developing silent awareness is to

recognize the space between thoughts, between periods of inner
chatter. Please attend closely with sharp mindfulness when one
thought ends and before another thought begins — There! That is
silent awareness! It may be only momentary at first, but as you
recognize that fleeting silence you become accustomed to it, and as
you become accustomed to it then the silence lasts longer. You
begin to enjoy the silence, once you have found it at last, and that is
why it grows. But remember silence is shy. If silence hears you
talking about her, she vanishes immediately!

It would be marvelous for each one of us if we could abandon the

inner speech and abide in silent awareness of the present moment
long enough to realize how delightful it is. Silence is so much more
productive of wisdom and clarity than thinking. When you realize
how much more enjoyable and valuable it is to be silent within, then
silence becomes more attractive and important to you. The Inner
Silence becomes what the mind inclines towards. The mind seeks
out silence constantly, to the point where it only thinks if it really has
to, only if there is some point to it. Since, at this stage, you have
realized that most of our thinking is really pointless anyway, that it
gets you nowhere, only giving you many headaches, you gladly and
easily spend much time in inner quiet.

The second stage of this meditation, then, is `silent awareness of the

present moment’. You may spend the majority of your time just
developing these two stages because if you can get this far then you
have gone a long way indeed in your meditation. In that silent
awareness of `Just Now’ you will experience much peace, joy and
consequent wisdom. If you want to go further, then instead of being
silently aware of whatever comes into the mind, you choose silent
present moment awareness of just ONE THING. That ONE THING can
be the experience of breathing, the idea of loving kindness (Metta), a
coloured circle visualized in the mind (Kasina) or several other, less
common, focal points for awareness. Here we will describe the silent
present moment awareness of the breath, the third stage of the
meditation.
Choosing to fix one’s attention on one thing is letting go of diversity
and moving to its opposite, unity. As the mind begins to unify,
sustaining attention on just one thing, the experience of peace, bliss
and power increases significantly. You discover here that the
diversity of consciousness, attending to six different senses — like
having six telephones on one’s desk ringing at the same time — is
such a burden. Letting go of this diversity — only permitting one
telephone, a private line at that, on one’s desk — is such a relief it
generates bliss. The understanding that diversity is a burden is
crucial to being able to settle on the breath.

If you have developed silent awareness of the present moment

carefully for long periods of time, then you will find it quite easy to
turn that awareness on to the breath and follow that breath from
moment to moment without interruption. This is because the two
major obstacles to breath meditation have already been subdued.
The first of these two obstacles is the mind’s tendency to go off into
the past or future, and the second obstacle is the inner speech. This
is why I teach the two preliminary stages of present moment
awareness and silent awareness of the present moment as a solid
preparation for deeper meditation on the breath.

It often happens that meditators start breath meditation when their

mind is still jumping around between past and future, and when
awareness is being drowned by the inner commentary. With no
preparation they find breath meditation so difficult, even impossible,
and give up in frustration. They give up because they did not start at
the right place. They did not perform the preparatory work before
taking up the breath as a focus of their attention. However, if your
mind has been well prepared by completing these first two stages
then you will find when you turn to the breath, you can sustain your
attention on it with ease. If you find it difficult to keep attention on
your breath then this is a sign that you rushed the first two stages.
Go back to the preliminary exercises! Careful patience is the fastest
way.

When you focus on the breath, you focus on the experience of the
breath happening now. You experience `that which tells you what
the breath is doing’, whether it is going in or out or in between.
Some teachers say to watch the breath at the tip of the nose, some
say to watch it at the abdomen and some say to move it here and
then move it there. I have found through experience that it does not
matter where you watch the breath. In fact it is best not to locate the
breath anywhere! If you locate the breath at the tip of your nose
then it becomes nose awareness, not breath awareness, and if you
locate it at your abdomen then it becomes abdomen awareness.
Just ask yourself the question right now, “Am I breathing in or am I
breathing out?” How do you know? There! That experience which
tells you what the breath is doing, that is what you focus on in
breath meditation. Let go of concern about where this experience is
located; just focus on the experience itself.

A common problem at this stage is the tendency to control the

breathing, and this makes the breathing uncomfortable. To
overcome this problem, imagine that you are just a passenger in a
car looking through the window at your breath. You are not the
driver, nor a `back seat driver’, so stop giving orders, let go and enjoy
the ride. Let the breath do the breathing while you simply watch
without interfering. When you know the breath going in and the
breath going out, for say one hundred breaths in a row, not missing
one, then you have achieved what I call the third stage of this
meditation, `sustained attention to the breath’. This again is more
peaceful and joyful than the previous stage. To go deeper, you now
aim for full sustained attention on the breath.

This fourth stage, or `full sustained attention on the breath’, occurs

when one’s attention expands to take in every single moment of the
breath. You know the in-breath at the very first moment, when the
first sensation of in-breathing arises. Then you observe those
sensations develop gradually through the whole course of one
in-breath, not missing even a moment of the in-breath. When that
in-breath finishes, you know that moment, you see in your mind that
last movement of the in-breath. You then see the next moment as a
pause between breaths, and then many more pauses until the
out-breath begins. You see the first moment of the out-breath and
each subsequent sensation as the out-breath evolves, until the
out-breath disappears when its function is complete. All this is done
in silence and just in the present moment.

You experience every part of each in-breath and out-breath,

continuously for many hundred breaths in a row. This is why this
stage is called `FULL sustained attention on the breath’. You cannot
reach this stage through force, through holding or gripping. You can
only attain this degree of stillness by letting go of everything in the
entire universe, except for this momentary experience of breath
happening silently now. `You’ don’t reach this stage; the mind
reaches this stage. The mind does the work itself. The mind
recognizes this stage to be a very peaceful and pleasant abiding, just
being alone with the breath. This is where the `doer’, the major part
of one’s ego, starts to disappear.

You will find that progress happens effortlessly at this stage of the
meditation. You just have to get out of the way, let go, and watch it
all happen. The mind will automatically incline, if you only let it,
towards this very simple, peaceful and delicious unity of being alone
with one thing, just being with the breath in each and every
moment. This is the unity of mind, the unity in the moment, the
unity in stillness. The fourth stage is what I call the `springboard’ of
meditation, because from here one can dive into the blissful states.
When you simply maintain this unity of consciousness, by not
interfering, the breath will begin to disappear. The breath appears to
fade away as the mind focuses instead on what is at the centre of
the experience of breath, which is the awesome peace, freedom and
bliss.

At this stage I use the term `the beautiful breath’. Here the mind
recognizes that this peaceful breath is extraordinarily beautiful. You
are aware of this beautiful breath continuously, moment after
moment, with no break in the chain of experience. You are aware
only of the beautiful breath, without effort, and for a very long time.
Now you let the breath disappear and all that is left is `the beautiful’.
Disembodied beauty becomes the sole object of the mind. The mind
is now the mind as its own object. You are now not aware at all of
breath, body, thought sound or the world outside. All that you are
aware of is beauty, peace, bliss, light or whatever your perception
will later call it. You are experiencing only beauty, with nothing
being beautiful, continuously, effortlessly. You have long ago let go
of chatter, let go of descriptions and assessments. Here, the mind is
so still that you can not say anything. You are just experiencing the
first flowering of bliss in the mind. That bliss will develop, grow,
become very firm and strong. Thus you enter into those states of
meditation called Jhana. But that is for Part 3!
PART 3
Full sustained attention on
the beautiful breath
Experiencing the beautiful
Nimitta
First Jhana
“Do absolutely nothing and see how smooth and beautiful and
timeless the breath can appear.”

Parts 1 and 2 describe the first four stages (as they are called here) of
meditation. These are:

Sustained attention on the

present moment;
Silent awareness of the
present moment;
Silent present moment
awareness of the breath;
and
Full sustained attention on
the breath.
Each of these stages needs to be well developed before going in to
the next stage. When one rushes through these `stages of letting
go’ then the higher stages will be unreachable. It is like constructing
a tall building with inadequate foundations. The first storey is built
quickly and so is the second and third storey. When the fourth
storey is added, though, the structure begins to wobble a bit. Then
when they try to add a fifth storey it all comes tumbling down. So
please take a lot of time on these four initial stages, making them all
firm and stable, before proceeding on to the fifth stage. You should
be able to maintain the fourth stage, `full sustained attention on the
breath’, aware of every moment of the breath without a single break,
for two or three hundred breaths in succession with ease. I am not
saying to count the breaths during this stage, but I am giving an
indication of the sort of time interval that one should remain with
stage four before proceeding further. In meditation, patience is the
fastest way!

The fifth stage is called full sustained attention on the beautiful

breath. Often, this stage flows on naturally, seamlessly, from the
previous stage. As one’s full attention rests easily and continuously
on the experience of breath, with nothing interrupting the even flow
of awareness, the breath calms down. It changes from a coarse,
ordinary breath, to a very smooth and peaceful `beautiful breath’.
The mind recognizes this beautiful breath and delights in it. The
mind experiences a deepening of contentment. It is happy just to be
there watching this beautiful breath. The mind does not need to be
forced. It stays with the beautiful breath by itself. `You’ don’t do
anything. If you try and do something at this stage, you disturb the
whole process, the beauty is lost and, like landing on a snake’s head
in the game of snakes and ladders, you go back many squares. The
`doer’ has to disappear from this stage of the meditation on, with
just the `knower’ passively observing.

A helpful trick to achieve this stage is to break the inner silence just
once and gently think to yourself “calm”. That’s all. At this stage of
the meditation, the mind is usually so sensitive that just a little
nudge like this causes the mind to follow the instruction obediently.
The breath calms down and the beautiful breath emerges. When
you are passively observing just the beautiful breath in the moment,
the perceptions of `in’ (breath) or `out’ (breath), or beginning or
middle or end of a breath, should all be allowed to disappear. All that
is known is this experience of the beautiful breath happening now.
The mind is not concerned with what part of the breath cycle this is
in, nor on what part of the body this is occurring. Here we are
simplifying the object of meditation, the experience of breath in the
moment, stripping away all unnecessary details, moving beyond the
duality of `in’ and `out’, and just being aware of a beautiful breath
which appears smooth and continuous, hardly changing at all. Do
absolutely nothing and see how smooth and beautiful and timeless
the breath can appear. See how calm you can allow it to be. Take
time to savour the sweetness of the beautiful breath, ever calmer,
ever sweeter.

Now the breath will disappear, not when `you’ want it to, but when
there is enough calm, leaving only `the beautiful’. A simile from
English literature might help. In Lewis Carroll’s `Alice in
Wonderland’, Alice and the Red Queen saw a vision of a smiling
Cheshire cat appear in the sky. As they watched, first the cat’s tail
disappeared, then its paws followed by the rest of its legs. Soon the
Cheshire cat’s torso completely vanished leaving only the cat’s head,
still with a smile. Then the head started to fade into nothing, from
the ears and whiskers inwards, and soon the smiling cat’s head had
completely disappeared – except for the smile which still remained
in the sky! This was a smile without any lips to do the smiling, but a
visible smile nevertheless. This is an accurate analogy for the process
of letting go happening at this point in meditation. The cat with a
smile on her face stands for the beautiful breath. The cat
disappearing represents the breath disappearing and the
disembodied smile still visible in the sky stands for the pure mental
object `beauty’ clearly visible in the mind.

This pure mental object is called a nimitta. `Nimitta’ means `a sign’,

here a mental sign. This is a real object in the landscape of the mind
(citta) and when it appears for the first time it is extremely strange.
One simply has not experienced anything like it before.
Nevertheless, the mental activity called `perception’ searches
through its memory bank of life experiences for something even a
little bit similar in order to supply a description to the mind. For
most meditators, this `disembodied beauty’, this mental joy, is
perceived as a beautiful light. It is not a light. The eyes are closed
and the sight consciousness has long been turned off. It is the mind
consciousness freed for the first time from the world of the five
senses. It is like the full moon, here standing for the radiant mind,
coming out from behind the clouds, here standing for the world of
the five senses. It is the mind manifesting, it is not a light, but for
most it appears like a light, it is perceived as a light, because this
imperfect description is the best that perception can offer.

Different meditators may describe the first appearance of mind in

different ways, such as a feeling of bliss or a vision of light. However,
this is not a physical sensation or a visual object. It is a pure mental
object that is perceived differently by different people. The
important thing is to recognize that they are all experiencing the
same thing.

You can recognize a nimitta by the following 6 features:

1. It appears only after the fifth stage of the meditation, after the
meditator has been with the beautiful breath for a long time;
2. It appears when the breath disappears;
3. It only comes when the external five senses of sight, hearing,
smell, taste and touch are completely absent;
4. It manifests only in the silent mind, when descriptive thoughts
(inner speech) are totally absent;
5. It is strange but powerfully attractive; and
6. It is a beautifully simple object.
I mention these features so that you may distinguish real nimittas
from imaginary ones. The sixth stage, then, is called experiencing
the beautiful nimitta. It is achieved when one lets go of the body,
thought, and the five senses (including the awareness of the breath)
so completely that only the beautiful nimitta remains. Sometimes
when the nimitta first arises it may appear `dull’. In this case, one
should immediately go back to the previous stage of the meditation,
continuous silent awareness of the beautiful breath. One has moved
to the nimitta too soon. Sometimes the nimitta is bright but
unstable, flashing on and off like a lighthouse beacon and then
disappearing. This too shows that you have left the beautiful breath
too early. One must be able to sustain one’s attention on the
beautiful breath with ease for a long, long time before the mind is
capable of maintaining clear attention on the far more subtle
nimitta. So train the mind on the beautiful breath, train it patiently
and diligently, then when it is time to go on to the nimitta, it is
bright, stable and easy to sustain.

The main reason why the nimitta can appear dull is that the depth
of contentment is too shallow. You are still `wanting’ something.
Usually, you are wanting the bright nimitta or you are wanting
Jhana. Remember, and this is important, Jhanas are states of letting
go, incredibly deep states of contentment. So give away the hungry
mind, develop contentment on the beautiful breath and the nimitta
and Jhana will happen by themselves. Put another way, the reason
why the nimitta is unstable is because the `doer’ just will not stop
interfering. The `doer’ is the controller, the back seat driver, always
getting involved where it does not belong and messing everything
up. This meditation is a natural process of coming to rest and it
requires `you’ to get out of the way completely. Deep meditation
only occurs when you really let go, and this means REALLY LET GO
to the point that the process becomes inaccessible to the `doer’.

A skilful means to achieve such profound letting go is to deliberately

offer the gift of confidence to the nimitta. Interrupt the silence just
for a moment, so so gently, and whisper as it were inside your mind
that you give complete trust to the nimitta, so that the `doer’ can
relinquish all control and just disappear. The mind, represented here
by the nimitta before you, will then take over the process as you
watch it all happen. You do not need to do anything here because
the intense beauty of the nimitta is more than capable of holding
the attention without your assistance. Be careful, here, not to go
assessing. Questions such as `What is this?’, `Is this Jhana?’, `What
should I do next?’, and so on are all the work of `the doer’ trying to
get involved again. This is disturbing the process. You may assess
everything once the journey is over. A good scientist only assesses
the experiment at the end, when all the data are in. So now, do not
assess or try to work it all out. There is no need to pay attention to
the edge of the nimitta `Is it round or oval?’, `Is the edge clear or
fuzzy?’. This is all unnecessary and just leads to more diversity, more
duality of `inside’ and `outside’, and more disturbance.

Let the mind incline where it wants, which is usually to the centre of
the nimitta. The centre is where the most beautiful part lies, where
the light is most brilliant and pure. Let go and just enjoy the ride as
the attention gets drawn into the centre and falls right inside, or as
the light expands all around enveloping you totally. This is, in fact,
one and the same experience perceived from different perspectives.
Let the mind merge in the bliss. Let the seventh stage of this path of
meditation, First Jhana, occur.

There are two common obstacles at the door into Jhana: exhilaration
and fear. Exhilaration is becoming excited. If, at this point, the mind
thinks, “Wow, this is it!” then the Jhana is most unlikely to happen.
This `Wow’ response needs to be subdued in favour of absolute
passivity. You can leave all the `Wows’ until after emerging from the
Jhana, where they properly belong. The more likely obstacle,
though, is fear. Fear arises at the recognition of the sheer power and
bliss of the Jhana, or else at the recognition that to go fully inside
the Jhana, something must be left behind – You! The `doer’ is silent
before entering Jhana but it is still there. Inside Jhana, the `doer’ is
completely gone. The `knower’ is still functioning, you are fully
aware, but all the controls are now beyond reach. You cannot even
form a single thought, let alone make a decision. The will is frozen,
and this can appear scary to the beginner. Never before in your
whole life have you ever experienced being so stripped of all control
yet so fully awake. The fear is the fear of surrendering something so
essentially personal as the will to do.

This fear can be overcome through confidence in the Buddha’s

Teachings together with the enticing bliss just ahead that one can
see as the reward. The Lord Buddha often said that this bliss of
Jhana “should not be feared but should be followed, developed and
practised often”(Latukikopama Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya). So before
fear arises, offer your full confidence to that bliss and maintain faith
in the Lord Buddha’s Teachings and the example of the Noble
Disciples. Trust the Dhamma and let the Jhana warmly embrace you
for an effortless, body-less and ego-less, blissful experience that will
be the most profound of your life. Have the courage to fully
relinquish control for a while and experience all this for yourself.

If it is a Jhana it will last a long time. It does not deserve to be called

Jhana if it lasts only a few minutes. Usually, the higher Jhanas persist
for many hours. Once inside, there is no choice. You will emerge
from the Jhana only when the mind is ready to come out, when the
`fuel’ of relinquishment that was built up before is all used up. These
are such still and satisfying states of consciousness that their very
nature is to persist for a very long time. Another feature of Jhana is
that it occurs only after the nimitta is discerned as described above.
Furthermore, you should know that while in any Jhana it is
impossible to experience the body (e.g. physical pain), hear a sound
from outside or produce any thought, not even `good’ thoughts.
There is just a clear singleness of perception, an experience of
non-dualistic bliss which continues unchanging for a very long time.
This is not a trance, but a state of heightened awareness. This is said
so that you may know for yourself whether what you take to be a
Jhana is real or imaginary.

There is much more to meditation, but here only the basic method
has been described using seven stages culminating with the First
Jhana. Much more could be said about the `Five Hindrances’ and
how they are overcome, about the meaning of mindfulness and how
it is used, about the Four Satipatthana and the Four Roads to
Success (Iddhipada) and the Five Controlling Faculties (Indriya) and,
of course, about the higher Jhanas. All these concern this practice of
meditation but must be left for another occasion.

For those who are misled to conceive of all this as `just Samatha
practice’ without regard to Insight (Vipassana), please know that this
is neither Vipassan* nor Samatha. It is called `Bhavana’, the method
taught by the Lord Buddha and repeated in the Forest Tradition of
NE Thailand of which my teacher, Ven. Ajahn Chah, was a part. Ajahn
Chah often said that Samatha and Vipassana cannot be separated,
nor can the pair be developed apart from Right View, Right Thought,
Right Moral Conduct and so forth. Indeed, to make progress on the
above seven stages, the meditator needs an understanding and
acceptance of the Lord Buddha’s Teachings and one’s precepts
must be pure. Insight will be needed to achieve each of these
stages, that is insight into the meaning of `letting go’. The further
one develops these stages, the more profound will be the insight,
and if you reach as far as Jhana then it will change your whole
understanding. As it were, Insight dances around Jhana and Jhana
dances around Insight. This is the Path to Nibbana, the Lord Buddha
said, “for one who indulges in Jhana, four results are to be expected:
Stream-Winner, Once-Returner, Non-Returner or Arahant”(P*s*dika
Sutta, Digha Nikaya).

~oOo~