Brian Newman opens a twelve-week jhāna course by parsing five lines of sutta into a whole curriculum—a first month of falling in love with the breath, the jhānic arc where less effort brings subtler pleasure, and the claim that any jhāna, even boundless consciousness, can be entered from a cold start once you learn how.
Join Brian Newman for a live cohort of this training (or listen to the recordings)—beginning this Wednesday, September 2nd—in the PragmaticDharma.app. It’s available for all Hardcore members (@ $20/mo).
💬 Transcript
Brian Newman: So we have 12 weeks to essentially parse the paragraph sutta that I just read to you, which said, “Establish mindfulness to the fore and then see if your breath is long or short.” That was like five lines.
We’re going to go real deep, and we’re going to find all the detail in that and get really, really specific. We’re going to start gently though, and so for our first month we’re calling this falling in love with the breath. Just really getting tuned in to what it means to have awareness of the breath in different ways, in different parts of the body.
And the reason we’re taking sort of a gentle entry is if we start to do concentration practice, and if we really kind of bear down on it, and if we try to focus on a really small point, which is what the practice is inviting us to do, there’s a tendency to get quite tight. And so instead of trying to go from wherever we are right now to kind of tight and concentrated, we’re going to ease our way in.
It’s really nice to ease our way in. And part of that easing the way in is to develop some intimacy with our breath, something that we’re not so familiar with unless we’ve done a lot of concentration practice.
As I say that, I’m just remembering, you know, is it pleasant to breathe? Do you find breathing a pleasant sensation? Does it feel constricted for you? Is there a way for you to change the way that you breathe so that it feels more comfortable? Permission to play with the breath a little bit if that’s going to be helpful.
After those first weeks of sort of establishing what this practice is and some of the foundations, it’s going to be helpful. We’re going to be getting into the very specific jhānic flavors. And as I think many of us know, we’re going to end with the jhānic stack. The jhānic stack is just a way to talk about doing the whole up and down the stack, all eight.
I think probably many of us know, but let’s take a look at what that looks like. So this is an arc. We could call this the jhānic arc. On the far left side, you can see that at the bottom on that horizontal axis, gross pleasure. Gross as in the opposite of subtle, not gross like disgusting, of course. Gross pleasure, so like big, big, big energy pleasure, and kind of high effort.
To get this practice going does require some effort. We’ve got to kind of bear down a little bit to build up the momentum. As the practice develops, it actually gets easier along the way, so we sort of tend to fall into the next state, fall into the next jhāna when we’ve reached culmination of the current jhāna.
And so it turns out that less effort is actually required as we move up this jhānic arc. There’s a sense of the jhāna taking over, the jhāna sort of taking us over and just moving us through this arc. And ultimately, the less effort means more pleasure, because effort tends to remove our pleasure.
There’s a sense of relaxation and that subtle pleasure. One way to say this is through this practice and moving up the jhānic arc, we are going to be concentrating more and more on less and less. We’re going to be concentrating more and more on less and less. I mean, just look at the words here. If you look at the seventh jhāna, you’ll see that the concentration object is no thing, nothing.
That’s quite subtle. There’s not many things that are more subtle to concentrate on than the no thing, and yet in this practice, there is something more subtle than the no thing, and that’s neither perception nor non-perception, the eighth jhāna. And so what this means is we’ll spend four months building our foundation, falling in love with the breath, and then we have — I’m sorry, four weeks — and then we have eight weeks per jhāna, essentially.
So we’re going to basically take a whole week and really look at the first jhāna, a whole week and really look at the second jhāna. What you’re going to find along the way is you’re going to have preferences. This is not necessarily a linear practice. Some of you think that you have to start at the first to get the second, or you have to get to the second to get to the third.
That’s not true. She will tell you that the third is incredibly accessible for some people right out of the gate, cold start. I’m going to teach you how to do this. So maybe the most shocking thing I could say up front here is one could enter any of these jhānas from a cold start once you learn how to do so.
One could enter directly into the realm of boundless consciousness from a cold start, from zero. It’s not required to move through the jhānic arc, although it’s nice and less effortful to do so.
