Your Goal: Stable, unified samadhi free from hindrances.
“When the mind is unified, they know: ‘the mind is unified’. When the mind is un-unified, they know: ‘the mind is un-unified’.” MN 10 The Buddha
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Back: Meditation Skill 11: Sustained Awareness.
Next: Meditation Skills 13-16: Cultivate Skill in Jhana.
As intimacy increases, awareness also becomes steady, firm, unmoving and unifies with the stable attention, free from all meditative hindrances, with a growing presence of pleasure in the body (piti) and happiness & joy (sukha) within the mind: access concentration.
Your meditation is the same as Meditation 11, except you now focus on establishing access concentration on the experience of piti (pleasurable body feeling) within your body and sukha (happiness & joy) within your mind.
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Meditation Structure:
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Meditation Instructions:
Step 1: Sit down for meditation on a chair or the floor and gently close your eyes. Develop mindfulness of your body & joyful presence as in Meditations 03 & 04.
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Step 2: Develop sustained awareness on the experience of your whole-body breathing as you did in Meditations 05-11.
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Meditation 12 Additions:
Step 3: As you continue to increase your intimacy with the pleasurable sensation of the piti, allowing awareness to experience it from within and do this until peripheral awareness enters into an autonomous flow with the pleasantness of the experience.
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Step 4: If you allow this process to happen, attention will become completely stable and firm, sensory experience will become distant, and awareness and attention will start to merge at that point.
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Step 5: Calming the Final Two Hindrances
Anticipation: Desire for pleasurable states.
Fear: Fear of giving up all control.
Your focus should be on calming all doing and focus your final abandoning towards softening the 'doer'. The doer will arise as a feeling of wanting access concentration to develop in order to experience the pleasure or achievement of it.
Knowing the experience but not doing the experience. Smile/relax into that one point, while monitoring the five factors, encourage the joy of seclusion to grow.
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Step 6: Once awareness of the piti is unified and stable for a period of time, without any effort or distraction, free from all Meditative Hindrances, you are said to have developed access concentration (upacara samadhi).
The twelfth marker of mindfulness of breathing, access concentration, arises as an expression of unified stable attention free from desire for sensory experience, free from all meditative hindrances with piti (pleasure) & sukha (happiness/joy) born of seclusion.
Experiential Markers:
Support Article: 12 Experiential Markers
Congratulations, you have finished Cultivation 04.
You are ready to progress to Cultivation 05: Equanimity through Jhana when you:
Tip: You should also focus on developing the speed in which you can reach access concentration so that more time can be spent on insight and/or jhana.
In this simple map you can observe that when practicing Meditation 12 (blue line) the hindrances to your meditation have all been calmed.
Below I will share how to work with some of the common problems that are encountered when developing access concentration.
At some stage during mindfulness of breathing you will experience a meditation when everything comes together in harmony. it will feel effortless, free from distraction and free from all Meditative Hindrances. it is at this stage you are said to have reached access concentration.
Access concentration arises by inclining your mind:
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Access Concentration is Made up of Six Characteristics
1. Your mind will enter a flow state.
When your mind first enters this flow state it may catch you unaware.
Suddenly your awareness will become clear, your attention still, and all 16 Meditative Hindrances will be clearly absent. you attention will seem to rest on one point of breath sensation by itself becoming steady, firm, and unmoving.
A gap has now been created in habitual delusion, and the mind is experienced as clear, still, and undisturbed.
This gap will remain, and the 16 Meditative Hindrances suppressed, as long as this structure of attention (samadhi) is sustained.
Due to the absence of the Meditative Hindrances, a pleasant feeling (sukha) will arise within your mind, and also some mild pleasant physical sensations (piti).
This is a very clear marker of access concentration.
As unification of your attention develops a light may appear in your visual field, like someone has opened the curtains and letting light into the room. You may even see flickering lights in front of your eyes.
As exciting as these seem they are simply a sign of the development of samadhi and nothing to pay attention to.
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2. It will have no interest in sensory pleasure.
You need to abandon all interest in experiencing things in the outside world.
While this can be achieved through suppression, it is more skillful to observe the fleeting, and unsatisfactory nature of sensory experience, thoughts and fantasies.
This does not mean, not enjoying them, just knowing that they can never satisfy.
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3. Your attention and awareness will feel unified, steady and firm.
For unification to be classed as access concentration, it must be effortless, stable, unmoving, and free from thoughts or wandering.
When this occurs, there is a distinct dropping away of effort as attention sustains by itself.
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4. There will be no hindrances present within your mind.
If the five hindrances have not yet been deconditioned from your mind, then the level of unification must be enough to temporarily suppress them.
The arising of thoughts, excitement or doubt, are a sign that unification of attention is not yet stable enough to suppress the five hindrances.
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5. Your mind will switch from applied to sustained attention.
This refers to calming the effort to apply attention to your meditation object. Once calmed, attention becomes autonomous as the mind takes over application.
In this way, attention is stable due to sustained attention being dominant. The experience of this is one of effortless, and stable attention.
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6. These will be an absence any desire to do within your mind.
Absence of doing is experienced as effortlessness, desireless-ness.
This arises by abandoning (through softening) any expectation or excitement towards pleasure, or fear of giving up control.
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7. There will be initial physical pleasurable sensations and mental joy.
Once the five hindrances are suppressed, and seclusion from the senses complete, initial piti will be experienced as subtle pleasant bodily sensation.
It may arise around your face, chest or hands, anywhere.
"Withdrawn From Unwholesome Qualities".
Sometimes the mind does not want to withdraw from the sensory world or unwholesome qualities, it is scared to let go.
There are a number of common imbalances that you can address habitual clinging.
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When Attention Does Not Completely Stabilise.
Sometimes the mind does not want to withdraw from the sensory world. There are a number of common imbalances that you can address.
If piti and sukha do not arise, it will be due to there still being some instability in your attention.
This instability will create minute gaps as attention continues to apply, allowing the five hindrances to arise. You may notice this as background commentary, about the experience itself.
Some doubt may also be present:
“Is this it, am I doing this right, where is this pleasant feeling they talk about?”
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What About Mental Dryness, Boredom & Frustration?
Mental dryness, boredom or frustration can arise when unifying attention in samadhi. All these shows that the Meditative Hindrances are rearising due to the unification of attention (samadhi) not being stable enough to suppress them at this time.
Use them as signs of instability rather than problems.
Observe what Enlightenment Factors are absent within your mind. For a start if dryness, boredom or frustration is present I can guarantee that that the factor of joy is not present within your mind.
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Since the Enlightenment Factors are balanced attention, observe:
It is beneficial to check in reverse order.
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Why in reverse order?
Because each factors creates the conditions for the next. If the previous factor is weak then the one that follow will fade.
How to Balance Unstable Samadhi
Unstable samadhi is overcome in this final stage in three parts:
The Non-linear Development of Samadhi
While the Twelve Experiential Markers are presented as a linear progression, they do not necessarily unfold this way for everyone.
When developing samadhi to establish access concentration, what always needs to be taken into account is anatta (not-self): you are not in control of your mind.
It is important to understand this.
If you fall into the second group, don’t let this concern you.
Many meditators attention develops in this way, as a series of progressions, and collapses. One day you will feel like you have got it, that you now understand the path to unification. And the next day your attention has collapsed, and you feel like you have no understanding of how to meditate.
If this sounds like you, it is important to understand that all of this is normal, and all of this is how it should be.
How the path unfolds for you, is not necessarily how it will unfold for someone else; it is all based on previous conditioning. You have come to meditation with unique conditioned tendencies, it is these that govern how the meditative path unfolds for you.
It is important not fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others. Instead observe your mind and allow it to reveal to you what is the correct path of development to take.
What is important is not to try to control your mind, but rather develop understanding in regard to the conditions that make it the way that it is.
"When this is, that is.
When this is not, that is not.
With the arising of this, comes the arising of that.
With the ceasing of this, comes the ceasing of that."
If your samadhi is not developing and mind will not let go of the meditative hindrances, then it is this way because the conditions are right for it to be.
There are Six Enlightenment Factors present in the mind at access concentration, look at the conditions they need to arise and establish:
Do these six factors describe your meditative attention?
You continue to develop your skill in using your meditative samadhi as the grounding point for your GOSS Formula in daily life.
Mindfulness in daily life is based on samadhi-gata sati.
Ground (in samadhi) --> Observe --> Soften --> Smile.
Applying in Daily Life:
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