The light of wisdom, bliss, and awakening

Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Wisdom Quarterly

"Light arose, knowledge arose," Siddhartha knew as he became the Buddha (geovea.com)

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What is the light of wisdom? Following the enlightened Burmese meditation master Pa Auk Sayadaw, one might think it is a nimitta (the sign).

But it might be more subtle than that. According to one of his successful students, attained to the initial stages of complete liberation (bodhi and nirvana, "awakening and emancipation"), there are many lights in meditation.

It is not something to get hung up on. If one gets excited when first seeing a light that often accompanies single-pointed meditation to the point of absorption (jhana), that elation or distraction will always be enough to destroy the experience.

The light will go away. One will be downhearted, expectant, anxious to get it back -- all mental defilements, all standing in the way of it coming back.

What to do? Let it go. Let it be. If we let it be, it will be itself. I remember the first time I saw an "internal light" with no external source. I was riding my skateboard barefoot down a hill on a summer evening. I tried to turn into a driveway, not accounting for this one inch notch separating the sidewalk from the street, the pavement from the asphalt. The front tires stuck, and my forehead -- propelled at the same speed as a moment before -- hit the pavement and bounced like a basketball.

I was shocked. I should have been dead, as dead as a watermelon after Gallager's done with it. But rather than cry or go unconscious, knocked out by the concussive blow that must have strained my cranium to the point of using my frontal cortex like a bumper. There was no time for any of that; I was too excited, "What in the heck was that?!" I thought. That light. It was so bright, so sudden, so worth experiencing again.

All the light I'd ever heard of, I didn't believe. But I lived it. The light I saw was real. When others sat around me in group meditation and shared about their light, I had to roll my eyes and wonder if they weren't just imagining it, hallucinating, projecting, or making it up. One could relax to the point of slipping into a hypnagogic state, very suggestible, very dream-like. Sure, it's possible, but how reliable is it? How objective is it?

Our dreams, while very real and potentially meaningful, are not yet objective. Cognitive psychology is moving apace, and soon they will be demonstrable, recordable, and possibly able to be experienced again like sound on a recording medium (like magnetizable cassette tape iron filings). When they are, dreams may still not be real.

Nimittas differ for perceivers because of karma.

But light in meditation is real or seems real from all the reports. When the nimitta arises -- which it does as a function of the absence of the Five Mental Hindrances (nivarana) and defilements (kilesas, asavas, akusala citta karmas) of various kinds.

Leigh Brasington

In their place arise the Five Factors of Absorption. One needn't "do" them or expect them or project them. The essence is letting go. One would hope that, as Leigh Brasington teaches, one could develop the positive five and that way the negative five wouldn't be able to counteract them.

But that's not the way the great master teaches it. And what Brasington, a successful student of the great Western Theravada Buddhist nun in Sri Lanka Ayya Khema, teaches as a technique is to focus on piti (supersensual joy, elation, gladness, rapture, bliss) wherever it arises until it spreads and suffuses throughout the body.

I was on retreat with Brasington at the long term Barre Meditation Retreat Center, sitting with Pa Auk Sayadaw, and one day I was in line for my daily interview. Brasington was in front of me. It was a silent retreat. No one spoke. It was very quiet. And the all-wood construction of the place, sparsely furnished as it is, like a Japanese zendo, was great for its resonance. One could hear the echo of other people's private interview if one held still and the door didn't get closed all the way, as it often did not.

A Practical Guide for the Jhanas

I could hear what the Sayadaw was telling Brasington, and what Brasington was telling the Sayadaw. I thought, as Brasington must have, that the Sayadaw would be happy that someone had made a meditative breakthrough and found a way to produce the first absorption, the first jhana. He was not.

Brasington spoke highly of the bliss and how much it helped the sit, the progress of the meditation. The Sayadaw wasn't having it. Apparently, this was not the first interview that was going this way. This had come up before. And the Sayadaw wasn't having it. He got stern and, like a loving father sick to the teeth of his lackadaisical son and his hippie ways, told him to shape up and get on the straight and narrow.

Brasington didn't seem to be listening. I could imagine him smirking like, "The Old Man doesn't get my groove and where I'm coming from, Man, the blissful path, and I'm not going to listen to his jive." 

Vipassana (insight) meditation with Brasington

I was on board with Brasington. Teach us that. I couldn't understand or see the pitfall. But I did know the Sayadaw quite well, as far as Westerners go, at least for someone not a special student treated to the attention and encouragement one gets as progress starts and success is just a few sits away (with the onset of jhana and the Sayadaw is eager to establish one through as many of the eight levels of absorption and onto the vipassana practice for liberating insight).

I might never known that was what was waiting, except that I dated someone who succeeded all the way to what the Buddha called "the highest bliss." It isn't rapture (piti). That's rather low, relatively speaking. It's great, and I've tasted it. It's the best flavor because it feels just like intense pleasure in the body with the exception that one realizes that it isn't coming from the five senses.

And that's odd. Most of our pleasure, most of the time, comes from the "five strands of sensuality." Just ask a deva or someone who spends a lot of time blissed out here on earth. Piti is super-sensual and a great thing, a wondrous thing. I highly recommend it.

The great Pa Auk Sayadaw knows and sees.

Foolishly, thinker-non-practitioners fear -- and spread fear -- about becoming addicted to this very pleasurable rapture and stuck in "trance" because of it. It's never happened. Out of the tens of thousands of students Pa Auk Sayadaw led through the absorptions, not one -- not a single one -- became stuck because of the blissfulness of piti. Well, maybe one: Leigh Brasington.

He wouldn't listen during that interview. And I was shocked to hear the Sayadaw get short with him, saying something to the effect of "Get your hand out of the cookie jar and keep moving forward."

I didn't understand why he was speaking this way if Brasington was claiming to have the absorptions at his disposal, available to him as he wished. I came to understand that what Sayadaw calls an absorption and what it's for might surprise some.

It is characterized by the Five Factors of Absorption, which can be reviewed after one emerges, not before or during the experience, which would either prevent it or ruin it. There's plenty of time to review later. In fact, it's a necessity. Things go by too fast during the experience. And thinking about things -- or thinking while meditating is not meditating. That might go by the name "navel gazing."

The Sayadaw on insight meditation basics

Absorption excludes everything else but the object of meditation, and to the extent that one knows anything else, it is because one temporarily falls out to know it or one goes back to review it. While it is, it is all that is. That's what makes it great. That's what makes it temporarily purifying. People might well mistake rapture for enlightenment or some miracle. It's just a sign along the way, with the light, the nimitta, acting as the best object to absorb into. It sucks one in with enough attention. That's what I was told.

But the Sayadaw's teacher didn't think that's why it had that name. So there is not universal agreement about all of these things and terms. However, the notion that the first absorption is characterized by "thinking and pondering" seems absolutely wrong. Ven. Thanissaro, who so often uses this clumsy and pedantic translation, must not be too familiar with the experience, even if he himself fancies himself enlightened.

(Which he might do given one thing I heard him say once in answer to a Western monastic's question about how we could ever be sure we are enlightened or not. His answer suggested to me that he desperately needs a teacher, an enlightened teacher to set him straight).