I’m going to share something about the emergence of insight that I’ve never heard any teacher mention before, yet it’s crucial if you’re interested in where Buddhist meditation can lead you. But first, let me give you a bit of background.
Traditionally, Buddhist meditation is seen through two different lenses: tranquility (samatha) and insight (vipassana). Tranquility focuses on calming and steadying the mind, and cultivating peace and joy. This experience is called jhana, or absorption. Most references to meditation in Buddhist scriptures are about this type, and the Buddha described jhana as “the path to Awakening.”
Insight, on the other hand, involves examining our experience closely to ultimately see that we have no permanent self. Early Buddhist scriptures don’t describe tranquility and insight as separate types of meditation. Instead, they are synergistic approaches meant to be developed together, complementing and supporting one another.
Typically, it’s said that we need to develop tranquility to steady the mind, enabling us to observe our experience through insight practice. For example, the light from an ordinary flashlight can’t cut metal, but if that light is focused into a laser, it can penetrate steel. Similarly, tranquility steadies and focuses the mind, allowing it to cut through delusions.
However, I believe this explanation misses something crucial. What’s missing is the idea that tranquility itself changes the way we relate to our being. Absorption is, in a sense, an insight practice. Here’s why.
When cultivating tranquility and experiencing jhana, we learn to calm the mind and pay close attention to the body, its feelings, and our emotional experience. As we do this, we find that the body feels less like a solid object and more like energy—a pleasurable tingling aliveness. Even the most substantial physical sensations, like the contact between our knees and the floor, dissolve into constantly changing points of sensation.
Deeper into absorption, we tune out the body and become fascinated by joy, which becomes our whole experience. This joy, although intangible, is constantly changing. Thus, our experience becomes one of constant change, without a stable, permanent self.
At some point, the belief in a stable self vanishes. The idea that we have a solid body is revealed to be a mental construction, part of our delusion of a solid self. Concentration and absorption help dissolve this illusion, revealing a constellation of sensations instead. This disappearance of the self is not a loss, but rather a joyful sense of freedom.
One of the things I do is guide people into the experience of jhana or absorption. Jhana can arise naturally and easily once you know the steps. Even before fully achieving jhana, we sense that our experience is becoming insubstantial. This dissolving of our normal sense of solidity supports the practice of insight.
By learning jhana, we uncover the true nature of our experience, helping us move toward a deeper understanding of ourselves without clinging to the illusion of a permanent self.