I want to share an insight about the nature of understanding through Buddhist meditation that I haven’t heard from other teachers yet, which I believe is crucial for anyone curious about where this form of meditation can lead you.
First, let’s cover a bit of background. Traditionally, Buddhist meditation is seen in two main ways: tranquility (samatha) and insight (vipassana).
Tranquility meditation is about calming and steadying the mind, cultivating peace and joy. This state of deep concentration is known as jhana or absorption, discussed extensively in Buddhist scriptures. The Buddha even described jhana as “the path to Awakening.”
On the other hand, insight meditation involves closely examining our experience to realize that we don’t possess a substantial, permanent self.
In the early scriptures, which reflect the Buddha’s teachings most accurately, tranquility and insight aren’t portrayed as two separate types of meditation. There’s little emphasis on separating them. Instead, they’re treated as complementary, working together to support one another.
Typically, it’s said that we need to develop tranquility to steady the mind so it can thoroughly observe our experiences through insight practice. One way to think about it is to compare a regular flashlight to a laser. A flashlight’s light is not focused enough to pierce through steel, but when you align the light waves into a focused laser, it can. Similarly, tranquility focuses the mind, allowing it to cut through delusion.
However, I find this explanation incomplete. It’s not that it’s wrong; it just overlooks something essential.
The missing element is that tranquility itself completely changes our relationship with our being. Absorption, or jhana, can be seen as a form of insight practice.
When we develop tranquility and experience jhana, we learn to calm the mind enough to stop being caught up in our usual mental stories. This allows us to pay close attention to our body, feelings, and emotional experiences.
What we find is that the body is experienced less and less as a solid object. Instead, we recognize it as energy, a pleasurable, tingling aliveness. Even firm physical feelings, like the knees pressing against the floor, dissolve into twinkling sensations that come and go.
As we deepen this absorption, we become more fascinated by joy, and practically everything else fades away. Joy, an intangible quality, becomes our entire experience, constantly changing moment after moment. This shift from experiencing ourselves as a solid body to an ever-changing, flickering constellation of sensations leads us to question the existence of a stable, permanent self. Eventually, we realize such a self is impossible, and the belief in it vanishes.
The sense of having a solid body is a mental construct, a part of our delusion of having a solid self. Concentration and absorption in meditation help dissolve this false sense of self, revealing a fluid, ever-changing experience instead.
In this process, we don’t lose anything except the burdensome illusion of a solid self, and we gain a joyful sense of freedom.
I guide people step-by-step into experiencing jhana or absorption. It’s not a mystical state for elite meditators; it’s accessible and natural once you know the steps. Even before fully achieving jhana, you can sense this dissolution of solidity, which significantly supports insight practice.