Access Concentration - A Pragmatic Approach

One of the things that threw me when I started seriously meditating and using the Buddhist framework was the concept of access concentration. I had spent a long time working with other conceptual maps and meditative techniques, over ten years of experimentation with everything from raja yoga to ritual magick, but I thought that this was some major meditative accomplishment which would require months of practice. It was only when a more experienced yogi pointed out that, since I was claiming to have attained stream entry, the first of the four paths of enlightenment of the Theravdan Buddhist map, I should be able to get access concentration through bare attention. This worried me and I thought, “Shit, maybe I didn’t really get 1^st path at all, maybe I’m deluding myself here”, as I still thought that I should be able to see some major perceptual change happening once I got into the seemingly miraculous state of access concentration. Having this pointed out to me was a major turning point in my understanding of these techniques, I sat down that night and, in a change to my normal practice, dropped the flame kasina and immediately focussed on attention itself while being more attentive to what happened.  Sure enough, a shift did occur but it was far more subtle than I anticipated, and it happened within a second or two of focusing before a more pronounced shift into what turned out to be 1^st jhana. I had been getting into ‘hard’ 1^st jhana within a few seconds and mistaking this for access concentration.....at this point, a facepalm occurred and a lesson was learned.

The shifts experienced early on in meditation can be subtle, sometimes almost negligible particularly if one is concentrated enough, so it’s easy to go looking for something that simply does not occur in actual practice. I’d like to try to provide a more pragmatic and down-to-earth description of one of the most fundamental parts of any good meditation practice: Access concentration. It’s easy to over-think this stuff, depending of where you read about the various states and stages described by the Buddhist maps, which is the model I tend to use as it’s without a doubt the clearest and most straightforward I’ve ever worked with, you could go away thinking that access concentration is either an impossible ‘attainment’ only available if you become a monk, or thinking that it’s some over-complicated state that will create some profound change in awareness. Neither of these is helpful because neither is true, but I don’t think I’m the only person who’s experienced this sort of misunderstanding and so I hope that this post will allow those interested to improve their own practice and take a step closer to awakening to the way things are.

So, where do we start? Presumably, at the beginning, but I’m open to suggestion.

Sitting down, to use the standard example, although you’re free to assume whichever posture, asana, pose or stance you like, even lying down is fine (if you can avoid falling asleep), the easiest way to practice concentration is through counting the breath:

1. Breathe naturally, don’t force the breath or try to get it into some yogic cycle thing, unless that’s what you’re doing of course, and allow yourself to settle and relax.
2. Begin by shifting your attention to the area between the nostrils[1], either the outside or inside, whichever works best for you and allows you to maintain the focus most easily. Feel the coolness of the air on this bit as you inhale, it happens naturally and you don’t need to do anything other than pay attention to this area.
3. Do the same with the exhale, the air feels warmer and less distinct but it’s there if you pay attention. Try to follow one whole cycle of inhale/exhale, keeping the attention on the spot between the nostrils.
4. Each time you complete one whole cycle and manage to hold the attention on this spot without getting distracted by thoughts or any other sensation, count “one” as you complete the exhalation. If you get distracted, return to “one” and start again.
5. Each time you get to “10”, start again at “One”. Aim to do this for at least five minutes without losing count and work your way up from there.     

If you can follow three sets of ten whole breath cycles, chances are you’ll be in access concentration. It’s that simple, if you can maintain the attention on one thing for more than a few seconds then you’re more skilled in concentration than the average person, and concentration is one of the most important aspects of the developmental process. Concentration is the foundation of meditation practice and access concentration is the foundation of concentration, that’s how important but deceptively simple it is. This practice is excellent for working on concentration in general and can be integrated into your daily life whenever you’ve got a spare couple of minutes.

Now, what caused me some confusion was what actually happened when I entered access concentration. Would there be a big change in how I felt? Would I, all of a sudden, become completely unaware of my surroundings? Would I no longer have a sense of my body existing in time and space? Once I learned to identify access concentration based on my own practice, I could see that I had massively overcomplicated this whole thing and expected a change more typical of states more advanced than I had explored yet. In reality, it’s very simple and can be explained as follows:

If you’ve ever been to a party and found yourself talking to someone amidst the usual hubbub and music, you’ll probably be familiar with the experience of being entirely engaged in the conversation to the exclusion of everything going on around you. This is pretty much what access concentration feels like, it’s not that you’re completely unaware of what’s going on, it’s just that you’re so involved in your immediate interaction that you don’t notice, or aren’t distracted by, the environment or your own internal dialogue. In fact, it’s usually only after someone, or something has distracted you from your conversation that you realize just how involved you were. The same applies to access concentration; it’s not unusual to find that you’ve already been in access concentration only once you leave it.

Descriptions of access concentration where it’s described as like being in a bubble, or like being in a car with the windows rolled up are completely true but, like being engaged in a conversation at the party, it can happen without you even noticing it. For this reason, I don’t recommend making access concentration a “goal” in your practice, it will happen naturally with good practice and turning it into something to achieve just creates a distraction from the simple process of applying the attention to one thing.

In terms of how access concentration “feels” i.e. what happens in the body and mind when this state is entered, for me there is a feeling I would describe as being like warm sand running down beneath the skin on my face. (It’s much, much more subtle than this but that fits well enough for descriptive purposes.) Mentally, the mind locks in on the breath and thought cannot get a foothold so it just passes away to be replaced by another. There is no effort to “stop thought”, a common misunderstanding of meditative practice, thought just becomes far less interesting than the breath and so the attention will begin to rest on that. The bodily sensations are pleasant but subtle, muscles relax and one can sit with more ease than is often encountered at first, but this all takes a back seat to the breath itself.

If you’ve read this far then I’ll assume that you’re at least moderately interested in this and have some stake in improving your practice. I’m not a teacher, as I keep saying, I’m just a guy who applied the techniques and verified the results for myself, so if I can help anyone improve their practice and end their own suffering then I’m happy with that. What I write about is based on my own experience, not on what I’ve read somewhere or what some guy said thousands of years ago so it’s subject to change, as is everything, but, for the moment, I hope that this post will be of use to someone.

Peace & Practice Well,

Tommy

[1] I generally use anapanasati, mindfulness of the in and out breath at the nostrils, when doing concentration practice although you're free to use whichever approach works best for you e.g. observing the rise and fall of the abdomen or chest, the sensations of the breath at the base of your skull (this method is really good for getting into 'hard' jhanas in my experience, but I'll go into detail about this another time) or being aware of the breath filling the entire body. Find out what works best for you, then do it.

Edited - 27/10/11 - Added [1].

Beliefs & Suffering

Wikipedia: Belief is the psychological state in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true.

For the purpose of this piece, I will define "belief system" as this: A matrix of information, a box, or  a framework into which we can invest emotional energy e.g. Buddhism is a box full of information -  specific terminology and techniques, an entire cosmology and everything else that goes with it.

It's not unusual for awakening to involve a shift in the belief system held by an individual, in fact it's probably more typical than not and even the holy books of the major religions have stories of some person, usually someone from a different belief system to that held by the authors of the books, who has a miraculous experience and finds themselves doing an about-turn in their worldview only to take on the prevailing reality tunnel e.g. the Pauline conversion. In the case of the aforementioned apostle, the story forms a major part of the entire framework and stands as proof of the "divine will". I'm going to take this off on a bit of an imaginative stroll here in an attempt to demonstrate what I'm getting at, stick with me. So, if we stay with St. Paul [I was raised a Roman Catholic, old programming dies hard] and take a closer look at his story, break it down and remove it from the Judeo-Christian map:

We've got a guy who supported Mr. X. His belief system caused him to view the followers of Mr. Y. as being inherently bad and to see them as a threat to his survival due to what he had been told by Mr. X. While walking home one day, something happened  which caused him to change this belief system and become a follower of Mr Y. which no doubt came as quite a surprise to Mr X.

Here we have an example of one persons belief system being changed by some causal event, the nature of which I will leave until another time as it's not hugely important right now, and their entire worldview/reality tunnel shifting to one which is structured differently to that which they lived in previously. Does that make sense so far?

This basic process is typical of 'spiritual' awakening, an individual experiences something which causes them to change their basic belief system in some noticeable way. However, this phenomena is not unique to spirituality and the process of changing ones belief system is something which happens constantly but most people aren't aware of just how far reaching the consequences of such a change can be. We're used to hearing about religious conversions, or people deciding to become a vegetarian, or people who stop drinking, dozens of everyday examples of people changing their belief system and how their everyday life changes as a result e.g. they now pray to Allah, they no longer eat meat, they go tee-total. On the flip-side, there can be changes in belief which lead to suffering for the individual and those they come into contact with. For example, someone may shift into a belief system which causes them to give up all their worldly possessions and join a cult e.g. Jim Jones, someone else shifts into a belief system which leads them to commit crimes e.g. Charles Manson & The Family, another becomes a terrorist and kills people in the name of their belief system e.g. the 9/11 people.

What I'm (eventually) getting at here is the simple fact that belief is something which can be changed, for positive, neutral or negative ends depending on the desired outcome of the individual. This is something which can be tested for oneself, do not ever take anything I say as the final word on anything, and I mean ever. Belief is malleable, flexible, it's just a load of information which we package up, label and invest our emotional energy into. It becomes something we have to defend, something we identify with and which becomes a part of us, but how often do we stop and consider how much we are allowing a belief to interfere with our investigation into reality as it is? If belief is no more than a programme which we can change, at will once we become proficient in shifting between reality tunnels, then why do we allow them to influence our perception of the world as it is?

I worked within the chaos magick paradigm for several years as a sole practitioner; a big part of this system involved shifting belief systems and experimenting with what are referred to as reality tunnels, basically the maps which we overlay onto our experience which allow us to label and categorize things. This has proven to have been of immense value in my ongoing practice towards the end of suffering, but the basic point of these exercises are to show just how malleable reality is and how changes in belief can create change in everyday life. The same principle is present in self-help techniques such as affirmations, essentially changing a belief is like changing a program which runs in the mind, affirmations work to run a more useful, helpful program which then allows one to achieve some goal or another.

For a period of time I became heavily immersed in the Buddhist system as it provided the techniques which allowed me to attain certain permanent changes in perception i.e. Paths. However, I allowed my emotional attachment to Buddhism and to people within the pragmatic dharma community to cloud my judgement and cause me to suffer. It's not a slur on Buddhism, not by any means, I hold that in the highest regard as a map and model of development, but I let myself identify with being a Buddhist rather than, as I had done before, explore this belief system so as to learn more about how to end suffering. Due to this, I created something of a schism in myself which led to anxiety and a lot of anger and it's only since realizing that I had 'trapped' myself in one specific reality tunnel that this has become clear.

The point is that belief is something which is not worth suffering for. It's just another bunch of transient, selfless and unsatisfying sensations so why do we afford it so much sway in our life? Belief is useful, no doubt about that, but when it begins to cause us to suffer then it's time to question what's going on. So much of the suffering we experience is due to this, even on somewhere like an online forum there ends up being differences in belief which get blown out of proportion and no one benefits from it. Where is the use in that? How is that helping to reduce suffering?

I could probably have summed this all up in one sentence: Beliefs are not facts.

Whether or not this post has been of any practical use to anyone, I have no idea, but basically all I'm trying to say is that we don't need to allow our beliefs to cause us to suffer. If we can all get a handle on that then I'm pretty sure we could probably resolve a whole lot of stuff in this world.

Either way, hope all's well wherever and whenever you are.

T

Back To Basics

Enlightenment is possible once we drop the baggage which this word has picked up over the last few thousands years and understand what mystics and spiritual teachers throughout history have actually been talking about. I prefer to use the word “awakening” as it’s more direct and expresses the truth about spiritual realization which is more like waking up from a dream, the dream that we have a separate and permanent self. Once we understand this misperception and stop creating a self out of transient, empty sensations we can begin to live in the moment as it is, drop all the storytelling and fulfil our potential as human beings.

Someone said that enlightenment is an accident and meditation just makes us more accident prone. Meditation is one way to wake up, my own preference is the vipassana technique, which translates as “clear seeing”, where we observe and objectify any sensation which arises in awareness, realizing that by being able to observe it, it cannot be that which is observing. We see that these selfless sensations only exist for an instant before it is replaced by another one, and gradually strip back to the bare level of experience and see that what we thought was a self is really nothing more than a bunch of empty vibrations.

It’s easy to read those words and think that you can understand it, but this is something which is beyond thought and has to be experienced. It’s entirely possible for this to happen and I disagree strongly with those who would suggest otherwise, once we understand what this perspective actually is we can bring it down to earth and talk about it in realistic terms rather than have to dress it up in esoteric language. At the same time, these esoteric languages and symbols are immensely useful when it comes to discussing awakening as they provide us with maps of the territory which have been walked by countless others before us. However it’s possible to get too hung up when trying to understand exactly what a specific term is referring to, particularly when we’re working from translations which may be incorrect, or written by someone with no real insight into the subject and so being able to discuss these things in down to earth terms could be useful to many.

This is what I would like to achieve with this project, a down to earth approach to awakening to the moment as it is. There’s no reason I can give as to why you should wake up, it changes everything while changing nothing at all but you need to see it for yourself otherwise it’s just words on a page. My aim is to help others to wake up, to show people that this isn’t something which needs to be discussed in hushed terms or assigned to any specific tradition but something which is a natural part of human development and which should be positively encouraged.

Too much bullshit has been written about this, it’s time to make a change and try a more pragmatic approach to awakening. You don’t need to go to a monastery for years, although there’s no reason why you shouldn’t if that’s what you want to do, you don’t need to sell off all your worldly goods and become a hermit, but again there’s nothing stopping you if that’s your thing. Just know that this is possible, you can do this and hopefully this project will be able to point out a few things along the way which can help out.

Namaste,

Tommy