The first jhana arises after the student has gained the ability to actually steady the mind on some object such as the breath, i.e. after a state called “access concentration,” meaning the level of concentration needed to access the first jhana or insight practice. Notice that if we are spinning lost in thought this is basically impossible. If you wish to attain this, I would try to stay as completely as possible with an object for perhaps 1 minute. When you can do this, try for 10 minutes. When you can do this, try for an hour. For instance, if you were using the breath as an object, try to be aware of every single breath at least in part for a full ten minutes, and then for an hour. This is definitely possible, and a reasonable goal. Try not paying too much attention to the individual sensations themselves, but conceptualize the breath as a coherent and continuous entity, with many different types of sensations all being thought of as being the breath. It is important to know that really getting into a sense of the breath as a continuous entity for 10 seconds will do you more good than being generally with the breath on and off for an hour.

    Tune into the illusory smoothness of things by purposefully and calmly working with illusions of solidity or fluidity. There is a certain “into it” quality which helps, sort of like really getting into a slow groove when playing an instrument, having sex, playing a sport, or just sinking into a well-deserved and warm bubble bath. Being in a silent and safe place is very helpful, as is giving yourself permission to relax, put the cares of the world behind you, and enjoy.

    If you are using the breath as an object, you might try purposefully visualizing it as sweet, smooth waves or circles that are peaceful and welcome. Try breathing as if you were in a garden of fragrant roses and you wish to experience the fullness of their fragrance. Perhaps these tips will help illustrate the kind of non-resistant and peaceful presence that can help one attain these states. Tune into sensations in and around the primary object that feel good. Harbor no guilt, anxiety or fear related to the depths of pleasure, ease and well-being. The spiritual life need not be some sort of relentless, austere grind, particularly when doing concentration practices.

    As concentration improves, it is as though the mind “sees” the first jhana and grabs on to it. Having an idea of what you are looking for, i.e. something enjoyable and steady, can be helpful for this. It has the five primary factors of applied and sustained effort or attention, rapture, happiness and concentration. Thus, it is great fun, feels good, but takes consistent effort to sustain. The attention is focused narrowly, as though one were looking at a small area of this page. This state can be quite a relief from the pain and discomfort of sitting meditation and can temporarily quiet the mind somewhat. As with all the concentration states, it is generally quite easy to concentrate on something that is very enjoyable. Thus, one’s concentration skills may improve rapidly and easily after attaining the first jhana and tend to basically flounder until one has attained the first jhana. Thus, attaining the first jhana is really, really important.

    People tend to really like this state, and may cling to it for the rest of the retreat if on retreat, or cultivate it again and again in their sitting practice at home. It is a valuable attainment, as it serves as the minimum foundation for both insight and concentration practices. From the first jhana there are basically three things a meditator can do. They can either get stuck there (I know someone who spent some twenty years cultivating the first jhana in their daily practice and thinking this was insight practice), they can progress to the second jhana, or they can investigate the first jhana and thus begin the progress of insight.

    By “investigate” the state, I mean that they can direct their attention to breaking the illusion of the solidity of that state into its component individual sensations so that one can understand their true nature, i.e. the Three Characteristics, as is done in insight practice with all objects. Special attention must be paid to trying to experience the precise arising and passing of every individual sensation that makes up the state, particularly the primary beneficial factors of the state listed above.

    While it is not actually possible to perceive the arising and passing of every single sensation or to even be mindful of every sensation, it is definitely possible to be clear about enough of them to get enlightened, and that is what matters. It is somewhat common for people to do this half-heartedly and not pay particular attention to the myriad sensations that make up rapture and happiness, as they secretly wish them to be permanent, satisfy and be self or the property of self. Stagnation is basically guaranteed in insight practice if you cling to pleasant sensations in this way, or anything else for that matter. Put another way, if you fail to see the impermanence of objects, you will have artificially solidified them (“clung to” them) and will not gain insight from them.

    The near enemy of the first samatha jhana is access concentration, and when the applied and sustained effort or attention flag somewhat, access concentration sets in. As the texts rightly say, the applied and sustained effort, i.e. the fact that you have to make effort to get into and stay in this state, are also somewhat annoying. This becomes more and more apparent, and clear awareness of just this simple fact while staying in the jhana causes the mind to eventually bail out of the first jhana and into the second jhana.

    The second jhana is like the first, i.e. a seemingly solidified mind state. With the dropping of almost all of applied and sustained effort the rapture and happiness factors created by concentration can really predominate. Thus, whereas the first jhana feels like something you need to pay attention to, the second jhana has the quality of showing itself to you. The focus of attention widens out somewhat, sort of like looking straight ahead without focusing the eyes on anything specific. Whereas mind-generated objects in the first jhana are stable, they will move (e.g. spin, pulse, resonate, etc.) in the second jhana in ways that correlate with the phase of the breath, moving slowly towards the top and bottom of the breath and more quickly in the middle.

    The silence of the mind is noticeably increased, and the pleasure of this state may increase greatly as well, particularly if pleasure is the focus of attention. When this state is really cultivated, the intensity of the pleasure of this state can become pretty much as strong you can stand it. Again, this state is a fine attainment but can be quite captivating. Some may get stuck cultivating this again and again for some period of time ranging from days to years. Again, the meditator also has the option to try to go on to the third jhana or to investigate this state and begin the progress of insight, paying careful attention to completely deconstructing the state into its moment-to-moment components.

    If the meditator decides to go on to the third jhana, then just cultivating the second state more deeply and noticing that the rapture or emotional “wow factor” of that state eventually becomes annoying can cause the mind to eventually abandon this state and shift into the third jhana.

    In this state, the rapture drops away, and what is left is more cool “bodily” bliss and equanimity with a lot of mindfulness of what is going on. (It must be noted that it is possible to be so deeply into any jhana, even the first jhana, that the sense of the body is quite vague, distorted or even entirely absent, so this must be kept in mind when reading these descriptions.)

    The attention is now in wide focus, sort of like resting in the half of space that is in front of one’s self. The third jhana is like the counterpoint to the focus of attention of the second jhana. In the second jhana, wherever we look we see clearly, whereas in the third jhana the wide periphery of our attention is clear and the center of our attention is murky. This can be extremely confusing until one gets used to it, and trying to stay with one object in the center in the third jhana will cause the meditator to miss what this state has to offer and teach. Moving from the second to the third jhana is like going from focusing on the donut hole to focusing on the outer edge of the donut, except that now you are sitting in the center of the donut. Remember this when you get to descriptions of the Dark Night in the section on the stages of insight, as the Dark Night has as its foundation the third jhana but adds the Three Characteristics. Focusing on the wide periphery is a more inclusive, broader, more sophisticated and complex kind of concentration than the first two jhanas, like going from listening to Elvis to listening to very complex, dissonant Jazz.

    In its pure and simple spaciousness, profound clarity, balance and contentment, the third jhana is even better than the second jhana. It is no wonder that people can easily mistake these states for enlightenment, as they can seem to fit the descriptions of what enlightenment might be like. Remember that enlightenment is not a mind state, nor is it dependent on any condition of reality. It does not come and go as these states do.

    Again, from this state, the meditator has a few options. They can get stuck, which definitely happens, they can move on to the fourth jhana, or they can investigate this state and begin the progress of insight. This would require extra special attention to make sure that all of the specific sensations that make up peace, equanimity, bliss and spaciousness are clearly observed to arise and pass, not satisfy, and not be self or the property of self.

    These qualities are not easy to let go of, and so this can be difficult. However, upon leaving such a state, the mind will still have a measure of the good qualities of the state. This can be useful to insight practice if one is willing to not cling to such things. This applies to the other states as well, and this is why many teachers have their students master concentration states before they move on to insight practice. On the other hand, such states can be so intoxicating and such a stagnant dead end for those that become fooled by them that some teachers have their students avoid them like the plague until they have some very deep insights into the truth of things.

    As before, if the student wishes to go on to the fourth jhana, then they just cultivate the third jhana and begin to pay attention to the fact that even the bodily bliss is somewhat irritating or noisy. Eventually, the mind will abandon the third jhana and shift into the fourth jhana, which is the height of equanimity. This state is remarkable in its simple spaciousness and acceptance. The extreme level of imperturbability would be astounding if there was not such pronounced imperturbability. This is by far the most restful of the first four jhanas.

    The focus of attention is now largely panoramic and thus even saying “focus” here is a bit problematic. In the first jhana the object was finally clear but static and solid that we can stay with. In the second jhana the object begins showing itself and some simple motion is allowed. In the third jhana we go from a spot of attention to a wide circle of attention and the motion gets more complex, so we now have two spatial dimensions and time. In the fourth jhana things get three-dimensional and mind-made objects such as visualizations take on a life of their own, becoming living, luminous and transparent. The fourth jhana includes space and awareness in a way that the previous three do not. Mindfulness is considered to be perfected due to equanimity, though this factor does not stand out as in the third jhana. When we are really in this state, the basic sense we have of where our body is and what it looks like can get very vague or even vanish entirely, though this is less true if we are in this state with our eyes open.

    This is quite a high attainment, and can easily be confused with the goal of the spiritual life, though it very much isn’t. From this state the student has quite a number of options. They can get stuck, they can move on to the formless realms, they can cultivate what are described as “psychic powers,” or they can investigate this state and begin the progress of insight. When investigating this state, special attention must absolutely be given to the fact that the myriad sensations that make up equanimity and spaciousness come and go moment to moment, do not satisfy or provide a permanent resting place, and are not self.

    Again, it is easy to get attached to the sensations that make up these high states, and so great precision and attention (as well as honesty) must be given to this if the student chooses this option. Another alternative is to leave this state and then begin insight practice, as the qualities that this state writes on the mind linger for a short time, and this can be helpful if the student does not cling to these benefits.

    As to the “psychic powers” (“siddhis” in Pali), the texts list all kinds of special abilities that may be cultivated using the fourth jhana (or perhaps lower or higher jhanas) as a base, and these are attained today. These may include all kinds of strange experiences, including full blown and extremely realistic experiences of other realms that can seem quite magical and fall quite in line with what one might think of when one thinks of various “psychic powers.”

    Whether or not these are “real” is a question that I am happy to avoid, though these experiences can be so extremely vivid that they can seem more “real” than the “real world.” Much more interesting than the question of what is real is the question of what is causal, i.e. what leads to what. For example, we might decide that our dreams are not “real”, but we must admit that there are real world consequences of having dreams, and thus they are causal. All this can be a slippery business, and the “psychic powers” generally don’t turn out to be quite what they seem. As one of my friends once said, “Yeah, I can fly, but just not in this realm!” Buyer beware, or proceed with care.

    On the other hand, it does seem to be possible through powerful intent, strong concentration ability, appreciation of interdependence and careful experimentation to manipulate what we might call “this world”, as well as those in it, in very unusual and profound ways. Yes, I am referring to such things as telekinesis, mind control, reading other peoples thoughts, pyromancy, and all of that. The more you get your concentration and insight trips together and the more you look into the magical aspect of things, the more you will learn about what I will call the magical laws of the universe and how to use what initially appears to be “your will” to manipulate it.

    However, if you don’t have your morality trip really together, and perhaps even if you do, I would be quite cautious about formally and consciously tapping into that sort of power. It is absolutely vital to remember that you will reap what you sow and that like leads to like when considering the formal use of such power. Kind intention is absolutely essential, but even this is often not enough to keep us from screwing up when we give into the temptation to formally manipulate the world in unusual ways. Power corrupts, as the old adage goes.

    Spiritual traditions across the board have a clear love-hate relationship to the powers, and if you begin playing around with them you will come to understand why. The stories of the Buddha demonstrate clearly that he and those around him simultaneously found them extremely fascinating, occasionally useful, and often profound. They also found them dangerous, a sidetrack and abhorrent. Just as with any powerful energy, such as sexual energy, the powers tend to reveal our true colors, as it were.

    When playing around with the powers, I recommend careful attention to how we define “real” and the practical implications of our personal definition of “real” for our daily life. For instance, you might have just come back from a retreat where you were playing around with visualization abilities, and a few days later see a troop of radiant angels floating through the walls and into your living room where you are entertaining guests. This was your actual experience.

    Whether you choose to ignore them, give them lots of attention, mention them to your guests, get down on your knees and begin praying, or run screaming out the door will have different implications for your actual life. These implications should be carefully considered when conducting yourself in the face of such experiences. On a side note, if you have learned to see angels, you will probably run into devils soon enough.

    As to the more manipulative powers, you might begin to get the sense that you can read the thoughts and emotions of others. Do you want to tell them this, or even act on these intuitive feelings on the assumption that they are correct? You might get the sense that you can manipulate the emotions or energetic states of others in ways that would be considered magical. Is this a good idea? There are no easy answers to some of the ethical and practical questions that can arise from the powers, but I would advise a high level of caution and restraint. Respect other’s rights and remember that actions done for other than compassionate reasons are likely to cause an ugly backlash.

    The experiences of the “psychic powers” can be infinitely fascinating, as anything you can imagine experiencing is possible. The powers can also lead to people getting really, really weird. If you want to get to know about your shadow side, this is one way to have a crash course. For instance, it might be very educational to have your relationship issues with your parents manifest as two large, slobbering demons who hurl flaming stuffed animals at you while you are traveling out of your body to the Grand Canyon, but it can often take lots of time and reflection to figure out how these sorts of experiences make a practical difference in our lives.

    As one Burmese man once said to a friend of mine, “My brother does concentration practice. You know, sometimes they go a little mad!” He was talking about what can sometimes happen when people get into “psychic powers.” Remember, most of these experiences are sufficient grounds for a diagnosis of mental illness in the conventional medical world, particularly if they begin to interfere with love and work, so seek the guidance of those who simultaneously appear to be quite sane and functional who also know how to navigate skillfully in this territory. Finding these sorts of people is difficult but well worth the effort.

    Also, playing around with visions and other extrasensory experiences, such as traveling out of body, bilocation, etc., can sometimes cause one to feel ungrounded, disconnected, otherworldly and scattered for hours or even days afterwards, something I call a “siddhi hangover.” Exercise and focusing on anything physical can help, as can heavy foods, orgasms and simply not practicing for a while.

    Very strong insight practices with a focus on impermanence can also help to break up these experiences but are not particularly grounding in and of themselves and may often be otherwise. Strongly stated resolutions to not experience or use the powers can also be very helpful, such as simply saying out loud, “I formally resolve that I will not experience or use these powers (name them here) until I formally resolve otherwise.”

    I would suggest care and caution in dealing with all the visions and other supernormal or paranormal experiences which might arise in practice. The primary danger is taking them too seriously and thus assuming that they are more important than they really are. It may be a good idea to leave them until very late in one’s practice unless one has someone around to guide them through their skillful use or unless one is fairly balanced and has a good sense of humor about them. If not, they can very easily become further tools of our defilements, long psychedelic and manipulative tunnels to nowhere or destruction.

    I remember a letter I received from a friend who was supposed to be on an intensive insight meditation retreat but had slipped into playing with these sorts of experiences. He was now fascinated by his ability to see spirit animals and other supernormal beings and was having regular conversations with some sort of low-level god that kept telling him that he was making excellent progress in his insight practice, i.e. exactly what he wanted to hear. However, the fact that he was having stable visionary experiences and was buying into their content made it abundantly clear that he wasn’t doing insight practices at all, but was lost in and being fooled by these siddhis. You get the picture. Now, don’t get me wrong. If one is looking for another way to address one’s content and stuff, visions of things like spirit animals can be very helpful. The trick is not to mix up content and fundamental insight.

    “Psychic powers” can be used skillfully as well, and there are whole traditions that use them as their primary path. They can significantly broaden one’s horizons and are so interesting that great depths of profoundly steady concentration can easily be developed. They can increase the intensity of our “mental” processes to such a high level that they become very easy to see as they are, should we choose to do so. They can also begin to blur the line between the “mental” and the “physical” in ways that can be both disorienting and profound.

    When we start playing around with intentions, extended sensate realities and energetic phenomena, it can seem as if there are two worlds or fields of experience that interpenetrate each other, the ordinary one (“the real world”) and the magical one (“second attention,” “astral plane,” “spirit world,” etc.). Integrating these two perspectives into one causal field without artificial dualities or boundaries is quite a project, one with the potential to lead to very high levels of realization or to madness. It is the high-stakes way to play the game, but unfortunately seems to be largely unavoidable past a certain point.

    The experiences of the powers can help people live in the world in a way that is at once appreciative of its richness and yet not overly serious about it or fixated on it. At their best, they can serve as a basis for a very deep exploration of sides of ourselves that we rarely see with such clarity, particularly the territory detailed by the likes of Jung and the Shamanic traditions. Occasionally, such experiences can bring profound epiphanies, times when we see our issues and shadow sides so clearly that our lives are definitely transformed for the better.

    While this next point might sound a bit radical, there are good reasons to assume that we are all acting at what might be considered a magical level all the time and just doing it with little awareness of that fact. The best argument I know of for learning how to work at the level of the powers is to bring consciousness and compassion to a process that is happening already. Said another way, as we are already casting spells all the time, actually any time there is awareness and intent, we might as well learn to do it well.

    On the other hand, playing around with siddhis can bring up really screwed up stuff from our subconscious that we are just not ready or able handle skillfully, causing “siddhi bleedthrough” into our lives that is simply unhelpful and very hard to integrate. Actually, when playing around with any meditative technology, there is no free lunch. You always end up being forced to face some further challenge having to do with personal or spiritual growth, either then or shortly thereafter. There doesn’t seem to be any getting around this.

    While magical thinking is generally very unhelpful on the spiritual path, it must be admitted that it is the only kind of thinking that can make much sense of these sorts of experiences. However, know when to turn it on and when to shut it off. If you are doing Jungian psychotherapy, shamanic pathworking, working up the Tree of Life or through the Tarot, or similar work, think as magically and mythically as you wish. It might actually be very helpful. If you are trying to do most other things, don’t!

    It is also possible to use the experiences of the psychic powers, particularly the visions and traveling out of body, as a basis for insight practice by the standard method of bare sensate investigation with a focus on the Three Characteristics of those sensations, as they arise out of extremely high levels of clarity and concentration. These experiences can also be so otherworldly in content that our normal fixations and preoccupations may be left behind. Experiences of insight in these realms can be staggering and awesome. They are not soon forgotten. Tantric visualization practices at their best make powerful use of this fact. By definition, if you have visualized a 3D intelligent entity that is doing its own thing, you are in strong concentration in the fourth jhana and it is just a question of seeing the Three Characteristics of that to get some serious insight.

    “Psychic powers” can also arise spontaneously from insight practice, particularly at stage 4. The Arising and Passing Away and sometimes at stage 11. Equanimity (see The Progress of Insight later). While the fourth jhana is traditionally said to be the basis for the psychic powers, simply getting so strongly into the first jhana that you can no longer perceive a body coupled with the previous intention to have these experiences can sometimes be a sufficient to make them occur. Get really into the jhana, leave it, resolve to have these experiences, and see what happens. Repeat as necessary. If that doesn’t work, learn to visualize the colors white, blue, red and yellow clearly as stable experiences and then repeat the above instruction. If that doesn’t work, find the rare teacher who will actually guide you into this esoteric territory. Better, find a good teacher before getting into this territory!

    If all of that is not enough, here is my best advice for working with the powers formally. Once you have enough concentration to get into hard fourth jhana with a range of objects and colors, here’s traditional Buddhist Magick 101 with some practical points thrown in:

1.    Make the bases clean, meaning bathe quietly and put on clean clothes. This instruction helps but is not necessary.

2.    Find a suitable place to work, meaning a place that is quiet and free of distractions. If you can’t find such a place or you feel compelled to do magick in less than optimal circumstances (such as in public on the fly), obviously skip this step.

3.    Think the whole thing through before you proceed. Never, ever skip this step if you can possibly help it. This step not only helps to keep you from seriously screwing up, it is actually part of the spell and a very important part of the set-up. Essential things to include are:

a.    what you are asking for,

b.    how to phrase it or intend it, being as specific as you possibly can,

c.    why you are asking for that, particularly if there is some more fundamental desire you hope to fulfill that you should focus on while letting the less important specifics happen as they may,

d.    exactly who or what is involved,

e.    and every single possible ramification of what you are about to do that you can possibly think of. Really take your time with this one, visualizing the whole thing out in time and space as far as it could possibly go.

f.    Note: if the ethics of what you are going to do feel at all strange in any part of your being, particularly your heart or gut, you probably need to go back up to the top and rethink the whole thing while looking at the problem from other points of view.

4.    Rise from the first to the fourth jhana. Build each one up carefully and fully along the way so that you have a good foundation from which to work. Those who can access the formless realms might rise all the way through them as well. Then leave the fourth jhana and formally intend to make whatever you want to occur happen, which is to say let the energy of your intention fly without hesitation or restraint. If you are going to do this, make sure you commit to it, which is why the third step is so important.

5.    Let it go and see what happens.

    One last warning on the powers: doing these things in the private is one thing, doing magickal things in public that involve other people is something else entirely. If you do overt public magick or discrete public magick, you are bound to run into someone else’s paradigms, values, and sets of beliefs about how the world is and what is possible that are not in alignment with your own. The potential for bad reactions from others is very real for a large number of reasons. Consider the long, strange relationship between the Western mainstream point of view and everything from witchcraft to crime solving psychics. In short, if you do formal magick and anyone else finds out about it, be ready for the possibility of serious backlash and fallout.

    The formless realms are the last option one can follow from the fourth jhana, and they can definitely be very useful for putting things into perspective and sorting out a few details about “awareness” (as will be mentioned below). Before I go into the formless realms, I will digress for just a moment to a brief and belated discussion of...