What Jhourney say about Jhana 2
- The second jhana is defined by a shift from the physical “explosiveness” of the first jhana to a state where the practitioner approaches experience with deep gratitude and love. It is described as one of the four “flavours of friendliness” brought to meditation.
- Key details and markers for the second jhana include:
Emotional and Physical Qualities
- Primary Emotions: This state is characterised by contentment, satisfaction, and a “lovely” quality.
- The Experience: It feels like a softer, more emotional happiness. One teacher compares it to “cuddling early in a relationship”, where the intense infatuation of the first jhana remains in the background while warm, loving happiness moves to the foreground.
- Physical Reactions: It is common for practitioners to shed soft tears of love or gratitude while in this state.
- Subtraction: From the perspective of “subtraction,” the second jhana arises when high energy goes away or is released.
The “Map” of Jhana 2
The sources provide specific markers to help identify the second jhana:
- Location in the Body: It is primarily felt in the heart.
- Size: The feeling is described as being the size of a softball.
- Oasis Metaphor: It is likened to “entering the oasis”.
- Clubbing Metaphor: It is described as the feeling of “fresh air with friends”.
Transitioning from Jhana 1
- Relaxing Coarseness: Practitioners often move into the second jhana after realising that the physical glee and rapture of the first jhana are coarse and tiring.
- Shifting Focus: To enter the second jhana, one gently relaxes the coarser physical energy of the first jhana, allowing it to move into the background so the softer emotional qualities can move to the foreground.
Stability and Practice
- Collectedness: As with other jhanas, the time between mind-wanderings significantly increases, often growing to several minutes or more.
- Open Awareness: Depending on the tradition, some teachings (like TWIM) view the jhanas as open-aware, meaning they can contain other stimuli like thoughts or external sounds, whereas other traditions may require deeper absorption.
Putting MCTB and Leigh B’s “Right Concentration” into NotebookLM
The second jhāna represents a significant shift from the first, characterised primarily by the subsiding of thinking and examining (vitakka and vicāra) and the emergence of inner tranquility and unification of mind. Both authors describe it as a state that requires far less effort to maintain than the first jhāna, as the meditation begins to “take on a life of its own”.
Entering and Transitioning to the Second Jhāna
• Brasington’s Method: To move from the first to the second jhāna, the meditator should take a deep breath and exhale slowly and totally. This is designed to calm the intense physical energy (pīti) of the first jhāna while leaving the emotional joy (sukha) strong enough to focus on. Brasington calls this a “foreground-background reversal”, where happiness becomes the primary focus and rapture moves to the background.
• Ingram’s Perspective: He notes that the second jhāna is the phase where jhānic qualities begin to show up naturally. In the shamatha (concentration) version, the mind “grabs on” to the state with relative ease. In the vipassanā (insight) version, this stage corresponds to the Arising and Passing Away (A&P), where the mind accelerates and reality is perceived as fine vibrations or particles.
Key Characteristics and Experience
• Attentional Focus: Ingram describes the second jhāna as having the greatest fine-grained resolution and brightness of mind regarding the center of attention. While the focus is slightly broader than the first jhāna, it remains centralised.
• Physical Sensations: Brasington notes that the second jhāna is typically located lower in the body than the first, ==often felt in the heart centre, where happiness seems to well up like a spring.==
• Visual and Auditory Effects: For those using visualisations (like a kasina), objects in the second jhāna may begin to spin, pulse, shimmer, or move in synchrony with the breath. Mantras may suddenly seem to repeat themselves automatically.
• The Bath-man vs. The Lake Simile: While the first jhāna is like kneading water into soap flakes, the second jhāna is compared to a deep lake with a spring at the bottom. The cool water (happiness) wells up from within, suffusing the entire lake without the need for external inlets like rain or streams.
Common Pitfalls and Challenges
• The Return of Thought: Thinking (vitakka and vicāra) is considered a “thorn” to the second jhāna; if active thinking returns, the meditator has effectively fallen back into the first jhāna or access concentration.
• Subtlety: Because happiness (sukha) is more subtle than the “finger-in-the-socket” intensity of rapture (pīti), it requires a more concentrated mind to stay with the object. Falling out of the state is common if the preceding access concentration was not stable enough.
• The “Golden Chain”: Ingram warns that the intense bliss of the second shamatha jhāna can be seductive and addictive, potentially trapping practitioners as “jhāna junkies” who stop investigating the nature of reality in favour of the high.
• Vipassana Side Effects: In the context of the A&P (the second vipassanā jhāna), practitioners may experience reduced need for sleep, intense “kundalini” energy flows, or explosive sensory experiences that can be mistaken for final enlightenment