Pursuing Jhāna

This can be anything. Escape from your worst fear is only a change of focus away. For most people studying the art of awakening that will be a major problem.

There is a pathway between any 'here' and any 'there'. One does not change 'this' to whatever one wants just by wishing. But a person with unbending intent, to use Don Juan's term, will discover the way, the path, if they persist at it. Where there is a will, there is a way.

The jhānas become a goal for the beginner. Attaining the jhānas becomes a mark of advancement in the system. But the jhānas are not to be got. The jhānas are attained when what is obstructing them is removed. What remains after one has rid one's self of the hindrances, (the lust and the anger and the stupidity and tiredness and doubt, hesitation, losing heart and turning back) is a sense of freedom from the stress of these things.

But thinking to one's self remains. Talk and more talk and talk and talk and talk and following trains of thought that lead one away from focus on the larger picture painted by the Dhamma.

The Dhamma rides above talk and scenes and situations and scenarios and stories and hard-knock lessons and trains of thought.

That 'riding above' is the control you fear you do not have that makes you fear jhāna which makes you strive after jhāna when you know in your heart that whatever it was that was promising you peace and freedom from pain could not be a thing that would be got by pursuing.

How could a thing pursued ever develop into freedom?

It could not.

You know this. A thing you strive after you never get. What you get is something else. What you were striving after is something you invented in the past. It is there and whatever you have got is here. The two are not the same thing. But one thing applies to both. Both things, having come to be, will come to an end.

So you know that jhāna cannot be found that way. But you strive after it anyway.

How come?

To keep your fear under control. To convince yourself absolutely that you have nothing to fear from attaining jhāna because you are never going to get it that way.

So on one level you feel more at ease. But on another level you are stiflingly yourself. Suffocating yourself. And when you have let go of the hindrances, it is the knowledge of that that you experience and there is a relief connected with that knowledge, and that relief is experienced as an ending of tension and the pleasant sensations of ease in freedom from the fear and the experience of riding on the Dhamma above unskillful thinking to one's self, talk and more talk and talk and talk and talk and scenes and situations and scenarios and stories and hard-knock lessons and trains of thought that lead one away from focus on the larger picture painted by The Dhamma.

Which brings you back with a start because you can see that although there are temporary breaks from your fears, your fears remain and one of them, (how easily you can be lead off the track), has just made itself known to your consciousness.

And that is the next issue. On and on until there are no more issues.