Accessing Jhanas 1-4 via Eye Focus

Kenneth walked me through accessing the 1st four jhanas via eye position during one of our first meetings.

Briefly:

1. To access Jhana one, stare at a circle (kasina) with your eyes fixed in position on it. Staring at the disc will bring up feelings associated with 1st Jhana

2. Allow your eyes to cross slightly so that you get something that looks pretty much exactly like the mastercard logo ( www.peoplestrust.com/images/mastercard_logo.jpg ). Keep your focus on the wedge in the middle. This will put you into 2nd Jhana territory

3. Allow your eyes to completely cross/defocus so that you get two circles far apart and everything is unfocused. You don't want to be looking at anything in particular, but again allow your eyes to stay in this position. This will bring up feelings associated with 3rd Jhana. I typically notice cool sensations on the skin, moving air, etc. at this point.

4. Bring the eyes back to a normal position but don't focus on the disc. Instead notice that you can hear distant sounds and your awareness is panoramic. Again, allow your eyes to remain in a static position but notice that you are aware of everything sort of at once, rather than having your focus fixed on the circle as in the 1st example.

Hopefully this makes sense.

Thank you mumuwu, this is so helpful.

Months ago I built my own kasina (following Kenneth's specifications - an old post on DhO ) and went to step 2 and 3, but I was thinking that the two circles apart were a sort of hypnagogic state to stay away from... and dropped the whole thing.

(this completely cross/defocus perspectiive came before kasina practice with little experiments with impermanence in the visual field, following hints by Shinzen Young)

Thank you again for sharing this

Edited for typos

Vesica Pisces?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesica_piscis

Exactly Ian. I thought the same thing when I was doing it as well.

Is this necessarily a step-by-step process, or it is possible to jump between the jhannas? (ie: start out with eyes completely crossed or something?)

Not step by step. The eye position for some reason seems to be linked directly to the Jhana. It's actually a really neat exercise to jump between them, going from 4 to 1 for example can be somewhat jarring in terms of energy.

I found it to be a really big help in knowing where I am in the insight nanas as well because you get a feel for the types of focus associated with dissolution, equanimity, etc.

Cool practice!!
This actually kinda leads to a "chicken and the egg" type of question. It is noted a natural shift in the eye position during entering a rupa jhana, and there is a perfect match between Kenneth's instruction as to how to shift the eyes to enter a jhana while using a kasina, and the natural shift in the eyes that (at least in my experience) happens when one enters the jhana. Is it the shift in the eyes and hence in focus what leads to entering a jhana? or is the entry of the jhana that causes the natural shift in the eye position? could it be that once one has achieved enough concentration to go into absorption the shifting on the eye position sort of "pulls" our focus into a particular jhana? all the experience I have using kasina dates back to about the past 30 minutes I read this post, and although not hitting the jhanas hard in any way, a shift in sensations that describe such jhanas was felt when I "force" the eye shifting to the particular position related to a jhana.

I need to get more involved in this Kasina practice!! it's pretty interesting!

I don't think it's a chicken or egg situation. Jhanas involve a specific focus of awareness - single pointedness, donut hole, donut, panoramic. These eye positions setup those types of focus in a sense. Another way of thinking of it is directed attention on an object, absorption into the object, diffuse focus, panoramic focus. This forces these types of focus.

I'm going to try this right now. Thanks for the tip, mumuwu.

Definitely fascinating! I'm going to start spending some serious time practicing kasina. Thanks to Jayson Ian, geppo, and all others that are providing their feedback on what their experiences are practicing with kasinas!
JF

The traditional way of using the kasina is to just stare at it and go through the chicken herding stages as per Kenneth's descriptions here: kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/page/Jhana+and+%C3%91ana

Once you get a feel via this manipulating way, try having an eye for the same sorts of changes in focus without deliberately manipulating the eyes. A timer helps get over the initial hurdle of phase 1 :"You feel anxious and frustrated." "It doesn't mean you are doing it wrong, it's all part of the natural unfolding of the process. Although you may be tempted to abandon chicken herding as futile, do not despair. With perseverance, phase two will eventually arise."

"This is the gold standard practice for attaining "hard" concentration and jhana. A kasina is a colored disk that is used as a visual object. It doesn't much matter what color, but I favor pastels or earth tones. I use a cereal bowl. For years I carried around one of those cheap plastic bowls they use for bathing from tanks in Burma. Mine happened to be brown, about 8 inches in diameter. You prop the bowl up against the wall, sit a comfortable distance from it (about 5 to 8 feet) and stare at it. That's it. Your mind will go through the five chicken herding stages described above. At some point you will enter jhana. You will recognize it as an altered state of consciousness that feels very stable and very pleasant. Note that the first four jhanas correspond to chicken herding stages 2 through 5. Each jhana develops in the five stages, so it is like nested Russian dolls. Jhanas 5-8 are a subset of jhana 4, so there is always this nested relationship."

Whoa! I didn't know that eye crossing was okay! I've never permitted the eyes to cross, because it seemed distracting. Maybe I'm mistaking "distraction" for "diffusing of attention."

Well, you are intending to get absorbed when you do this. You probably wouldn't do this stuff and do vipassana at the same time, say, but yeah, try it and see what happens. No worries, give stuff a shot.

It does cause the middle to become diffuse, but things like sensations of coolness or air on the skin become clearer at that point. 3rd Jhana is about the center of experience becoming diffuse but the edges coming into clarity. And the thing is, once you get a feel for it with eyes crossed you can probably get into without doing that more so and then you can experience how your attention just shifts to the outer edges of your experience.

You can just stare straight ahead at an object and enter into J1 territory, allow the width of that attention to expand like a circle so it's larger (you'll get a feel for it) and enter J2 territory, allow the attention to leave the circle and take in what's around it and go into J3 territory and then allow it to expand to encompass both the J3 and J2 attention bits (the donut and the hole) as well as everything else and you are at J4 territory.

I hope that makes sense

That makes perfect sense actually. What you described is very familiar to me, up to the early J3 territory.

After an initial period of being able to stare right at the center of the kasina, it gets hard to keep the attention in the center because the mind wants to notice the entire kasina, and a bit of the background behind it. When the struggling to keep the eyes/mind focused ends, what I now bet is J2 territory appears immediately, as if it had been waiting for me to stop efforting it away.

If I stay relaxed and don't effort my way back down to J1, then eventually I can barely even focus on visual information at all, because the rest of the senses are too "intrusive." (Plus, that's usually the time when it starts getting hard to see things because the photonegative effect overlaps the actual image strongly enough that most of the visual field looks dark grey. But I've always tried to ignore optical illusions like that.) I always thought that the relaxed feeling that accompanied this territory was me being lazy and not maintaining focus.

It seems that every time I learn something about jhana, it's along the lines of "stop trying so hard to 'do' jhana." Perhaps it's even something like "let the jhana do you, and see what happens."

When I do this, I can get the feelings associated with 1st Jhana, but am a bit confused about the next step.

So, my question is about allowing my eyes to cross/defocus to get the double image. I can do this in two different ways. Let's say the kasina is about 3 feet away.

1) I can focus my eyes on a point closer to me than the kasina, or
2) I can look past the kasina.

I'm getting inconclusive results either way, but I'm wondering which way is the intent of the instructions.

I'm not quite sure which of the two I'm doing. I'm literally crossing my eyes and then allowing the image to sort of go back into place until it lines up as described and then I stare at the wedge in the middle. Try the third Jhana by allowing the eyes to cross a good bit and things to go really fuzzy. If you allow them to go back into place but stop them short of looking ahead they will be in the slightly crossed position required for the second Jhana method I described in the original post.

Thanks, that helps.

Your description appears to be more like (1). It sounds like you're crossing your eyes to look at tip of your nose, then letting your eyes to relax back almost into place, if I'm reading you correctly.

Do you find that you can "lock into" the wedge in the middle fairly well, or does it drift around for you so you have to correct once in a while?


By the way, I ran into this on a DHO thread on kasina practice:
www.web-us.com/brain/Visual_Test_Hemispheric_Dominance.htm

Sound pretty similar to the eye-focus stuff above.

Yes, it can take a while to make it stable and there tends to be some slight shifting as I do it (also find it is often switching from one eye to the other - which I assume has to do with hemispheric dominance).

Hello mumuwu,

does staring mean: NOT blinking?

Regards
Matts

Blinking is ok
try to keep the eyes from moving around

Is it possible to access also the arupa jhana in this way?

I need a way to discriminate them from other visual stuff (olographic qualities, whiteness, closeness).
For example, using the "Fun pointing exercises" hints I went to the olographic vision and whiteness, but could also observe a sort of jhana progression (including arupa jhanas) from that point... switching between eyes open and closed I noticed that the 'closeness' matched the 6th jhana. I absolutely don't know if it makes sense.
Still clueless in addressing 2nd and 3rd gear and distinguish them from "formless shamata" (I found that warning in a Dzogchen book).

Tuning into the aspect of spaciousness in your experience leads to 5th jhana
Tuning into the aspect of 'knowing' (as in who's experiencing this space) leads to 6th jhana
Tuning into the aspect of focusing on nothing leads to 7th jhana (letting go of what is focused on in 6th).
Tuning into the aspect of neither perception nor-non perception (letting go of what is focus on in 7th) leads to 8th jhana

I don't know if worrying about eye focus is conducive to these 4 jhanas or not. (probably not - forget you even have eyes).

In terms of Dzogchen - you might notice certain aspects which are hi-lighted in these formless jhanas that are present at all times (boundlessness, luminosity, etc.). You will see how those aspects don't need to be attended to, per say, for them to be present (you are always aware for example).

The closeness you mention may be the transition from a sense of space (of the 5th jhana) to the 6th jhana (in which the sense of space tends to collapse). It then feels as though you are right up against something.

Thanks a lot mumuwu! This really helps me to sort out things.

Thanks for starting this thread, mumuwu! Would anyone be willing to go into detail about any common imagery / hallucinations they get in the visual field that may be related to specific jhanas? Or maybe point me in the direction of some reference ( visuddhimagga )?

I often experience "nadis" ... channels of prana permeating the normal visual field / objects, this seems to happen just before and during when I get that murkiness in the center associated with 3rd jhana. After the sort of "cross-eyed" focus stabilizes, then I move to a later concentrated state that is peculiar, the visual field seems to become a mosiac / fractal sort of pattern, and then the localized sense of self drops away.

It's as though there is no longer a sense of separation or space between objects / self. everything seems unified in a holographic plane / pattern? any thoughts? does this correspond to a specific state for anyone? thanks!

metta!

Justin

From all the different sources I have found, I am confused as to what constitutes a jhana state. Some sources say it takes years to achieve these states, but this thread says just stare and cross your eyes and there you go! I do kasina meditation for about an hour a day, and I certainly have been in states that seem to correspond with the descriptions ... but if it is that easy, why would it take anyone years to accomplish?

I've had all kinds of weird stuff happen visually, but I haven't experienced a mosaic/fractal pattern yet. I've seen my kasina have bright halo effects, pop into 3D, rotate, jump around randomly, reverse image, split, shrink, approach my eyes, go dark, become fuzzy, and have varying textures -- but no mosaic/fractal stuff yet.