PHOTOS: Happiness is a wet puppy (jhana)

Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; photog Seth Casteel (littlefriendsphoto.com)

These dogs will make your day! 10 Awesome "Underwater Puppies"

Pringles and Pickme wonder why this is happening, but it's natural to swim (Seth Casteel).

In a future life, Reason would like to morph and be reborn as a seal (Seth Casteel).

 

What is jhanic Buddhist "bliss"?

G.P. Malalasekera (PPN); Dhr. Seven (ed.), Wisdom Quarterly

Novice loves puppy (tuhoc)

Pīti: rapture, enthusiasm (joy, happiness), or keen interest. It is one of the mental factors, the concomitants (cetasika), and belongs to the aggregate of mental formations (sankhāra-khandha) in Buddhist psychology.

Because, in sutra texts, it is often linked in a compound word with "gladness" (pāmojja) and "happiness" (sukha), some Western translations have mistaken it to be a synonym of these two terms. 

However, pīti is not a feeling (emotion) or a tactile sensation, so it does not belong to the feeling-aggregate group (vedanā-khandha).

I want my own baby lama! - Me, too!

It may, instead, be described psychologically as "joyful interest" [in the object of absorption, attention, concentration]. As such it may be associated with either wholesome, unwholesome, or neutral states of consciousness.

 

A high degree of rapture (sense of uplift, effervescence) is characteristic of certain stages in meditative concentration, in insight practice (vipassanā) as well as in the first two meditative absorptions (jhānas).

In the latter case it appears as one of the "factors of absorption" (jhānanga, see jhāna) and is strongest in the second absorption.

Five degrees of intensity of meditative rapture are described in the Path of Purification (Vis.M. IV. 94ff).

It is one of the Seven Factors of Enlightenment (bojjhanga).

(Ayya Khema) The first meditative absorption (jhana) is blissful.

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I like to swim because I'm a hot dog, and it seems to be fun for Seth (Seth Casteel).