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Early Buddhism: the Dharma of Pleasure - Bernat Font

The following talk was given by Bernat Font at The Sati Center in Redwood City, CA on August 16, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Early Buddhism: the Dharma of Pleasure

Introduction

And thank you to the Sati Center for inviting me and trusting me here today, and to all of you for showing up. I guess it's evening for most of you at least. I see a couple of familiar faces who took my course on Vedanā¹, so there might be a lot of repetition for you; I hope that that's okay.

Let's just dive right in. I wanted to start by asking you, what have you heard Buddhism say about pleasure and about that which is pleasant? If you maybe think of just briefly, just one sentence of what you have heard Buddhism teach about pleasure, you can type it in the chat or you can just speak.

[Chat discussion ensues with audience members suggesting: "jhāna² is a pleasure not to be feared," "leaning to pleasure," "Joy is one of the seven factors of enlightenment," "nothing about pleasure," "avoid sensual pleasure, it is a hindrance," "the Vinaya³ says laughter is bad," "it also says monastics should not tickle each other and play in the water," pleasure is "impermanent," and "pleasure is present, attachment is optional."]

Thank you. So, I like to—oh, there's another one, "pleasure is present, attachment is optional." Great one.

Just to read a few sentences from the blurb of this event. I said that the widespread idea that Buddhism is against pleasure is a misunderstanding, that actually early Buddhism at least is built on our natural tendency to avoid the pain and seek the pleasant, but in a way that harnesses it for the sake of liberation. And that we can see early Buddhism as a form of what I call "refined hedonism."

I just wanted to speak a little bit about that. I think if you look at the early texts, although it's easy to find a lot of criticism of sensual pleasures or sensual desires... It's usually the word there is kāma⁴, which is sometimes translated as desire rather than pleasure. It's a bit of an ambiguous term whether kāma refers to something feeling good or your relationship of desire towards it. But I would say early Buddhism is all for feeling good. In fact, Nibbāna⁵ is called the greatest sukha⁶, the greatest pleasure.

It has criticisms of desire and of pursuing certain pleasant things, but I think it's important to distinguish desire and pleasure. Sometimes we don't make that distinction. As one of the comments in the chat said, pleasure is something present that feels good. Desire usually is wanting something pleasant that is not here now. And very interestingly, in the Abhidhamma⁷, desire is considered a form of aversion. Greed is something that's pleasant now and you want it to continue, you want it to increase, you want more of it. But to desire something pleasant that is not here is interpreted in that literature as a form of rejection of the present moment. It's, "I don't like this, I want something else." So I find that quite interesting.

We hear a lot about the underlying tendencies and trying to counter them, trying to not always want more of what's pleasant and reject what is unpleasant. And that's part of the path. But at the same time, I said that early Buddhism is built on those tendencies, but it uses them not for reactivity but for liberation. Some of the ways it does that is trying to sublimate our natural turning away of the unpleasant into letting go, using that energy but with the right objects to let go. And I could even say, hijack our natural pursuit of what feels good in order to cultivate what is skillful, because what is skillful, it is said at least, brings well-being.

So the problem is less this approach-avoidance behavior per se. The problem is having a distorted view or an unrealistic view of what actually brings well-being and what brings suffering. But when something does bring well-being, go for it. So the Buddha discourages us to seek sensory pleasure because in the Buddha's view, it's actually not that pleasant. The argument is never that pleasure is wrong. The argument that you find in the texts is that it's not actually pleasant. If it were pleasant, go for it. The reason we shouldn't go for it is that it's not actually pleasant, at least that's the Buddha's view in the texts. If you just count the amount of satisfaction and dissatisfaction that a chocolate brownie brings you, you'll get to the conclusion that there's more suffering than pleasure, therefore you shouldn't pursue it. Why? Because it's not pleasant. So that is built on the tendency: you should not go for what's unpleasant and you should go for what's pleasant. You can disagree with the Buddha about chocolate brownies—I mean, chocolate brownies are not in the suttas—but at least that's the Buddhist argument. So just to get clear on what the problem is.

So it is a form of refined hedonism. And I said that this perspective, these teachings on pleasure, can balance approaches to the Dharma practice that are excessively rationalist and cold, unemotional, or teachings that can double down on our tendency to focus on what's suffering and what's negative. So what I'm going to offer today is not to deny teachings on dukkha⁸, it's just a complementary approach for the sake of balance. If we want equanimity in a way, in a balanced view, and we have a tendency, as some of us do, to focus on what's wrong, in order to achieve that balance, we will have to focus on what's right and what's nice.

I would say, I don't know about you, that generally we're better at suffering than at enjoying. We're quite good at creating suffering for ourselves and others, at least I am, but we're not so good at enjoying. In a way, that's why we flee the present moment. We are not at ease in it. We're not at ease in the present moment, so we go somewhere else. So you can see Dharma practice, one of the ways to see it, is as trying to find a way to finally be at ease in the present moment. And if you completely achieve that, maybe that can be considered Nibbāna, where you're finally at ease in the present moment, where you're finally enjoying in a way.

But in general, just the teachings on dukkha and sukha, pain and pleasure, they work together in a dance. So suffering and the perception of suffering helps to let go of whatever we want to leave behind. So if you think of a ladder, you have to grab one step and let go of another. The teachings on sukha help you grab onto the next step; the teachings on suffering help you let go of the previous one, and thus we move on.

The Middle Way and Skillful Pleasure

We start with the middle way, obviously. And there are many ways to understand what the middle way is; I'm going to present one of them. This is allegedly the Buddha's first discourse, which I'm sure that many of you are familiar with.

"Practitioners, there are two dead ends that those who have abandoned domestic life should not practice. Domestic life being a metaphor for ordinary, non-practicing life. Which two? The obsession with gratifying sensory desire, which is inferior, vulgar, ordinary, ignoble, and fruitless; and the obsession with mortifying oneself, which is painful, ignoble, and fruitless. Avoiding these two dead ends, the Buddha has fully understood the middle way, which gives rise to seeing and knowing, which leads to peace, understanding, awakening, and to putting out the fires—to putting out the fires of reactivity, greed, hatred, delusion."

So the middle path is about avoiding this one extreme, which would be mindlessly pursuing whatever feels good, especially sensory things, and the other being the other extreme of just trying to make things more difficult and make oneself suffer. It's that sort of ideology that, "I need to suffer in order to grow; great art comes from great suffering," and all that. In a way, that's like mortifying oneself. And so the middle path is something which is neither of those things because they don't lead anywhere; they are dead ends. The middle way is about skillful pleasure, skillful well-being if you prefer to translate it that way. It's about healthy things that also feel good, and pleasure is quite important.

You probably know that the Buddha practiced a lot of asceticism and found it to be fruitless. That was the Buddha's conclusion. So we have in this discourse where Prince Bodhi asks the Buddha, he says, "Venerable, this is what I think: pleasure is not obtained through pleasure, but through pain." What does he mean by this? Well, the goal, both in Buddhism and in other religious movements of that day, is spoken of as "the great well-being," "the greatest bliss," "the greatest pleasure." So that's the first pleasure in Bodhi's sentence. So pleasure, this kind of great bliss, is not obtained through pleasure but through pain. And that's sort of the view I was talking about, like "great art comes from great suffering," etc. And it's probably a widely held view in the Buddha's day among many circles because the Buddha replies, "Before I woke up, when I was just an aspirant to awakening,"—that's my translation of bodhisatta⁹—"I also thought pleasure is not achieved through pleasure but through pain."

But then the Buddha changed his mind. He did all this extreme asceticism and concluded, "I have experienced as many sharp, acute, self-inflicted feelings of pain as any ascetic and Brahmin of the past, present, or future." So in a way, like, I've overdone it, I've done it as much as one could do it. "Yet through this painful, severe work, I have not achieved any superhuman states or any truly noble distinction in knowledge and vision. Could there be another path to awakening?"

And it is at this point that, as some of you may know, the Buddha remembers that when he was a child, he kind of spontaneously fell into a state of calm and well-being that then is called the first jhāna and says, "That is the way to awakening." So pleasure is obtained through pleasure. And the Buddha asked himself, "Why do I fear that pleasure which is beside sense desire and unskillful states of mind?" And he says, well, in order to achieve that, I have to eat, etc. So it's the famous moment in the Buddha's career when this village girl, Sujātā, offers the Buddha food, and the Buddha accepts this food, as if saying, "This is okay. It's okay to take care of oneself, it's okay to feel good for a good purpose, in a healthy way."

Again, we are already touching on some of the things that you wrote in the chat. So it's called like this absorption or this pleasure, this is called the "pleasure of renunciation, seclusion, peace, and awakening." I say that this pleasure should be cultivated, not feared.

A Competition of Pleasures

The point is pleasure, and the problem with sensory pleasures is that they're not actually that pleasant. So here is a little bit of a competition between the Buddha and King Bimbisāra of Magadha. Again, on this theme from a different discourse, where someone is questioning the Buddha, you know, "Is pleasure to be obtained through pleasure, really, and not through pain?" And they say to the Buddha, "If pleasure were achieved through pleasure, then King Bimbisāra of Magadha would achieve pleasure, would achieve this greatest bliss, this liberation, for he lives in greater pleasure than the venerable Gotama¹⁰."

And the Buddha replies, "The Jains have truly spoken rashly, without thinking. Do you think that King Bimbisāra can live experiencing absolute pleasure without moving his body or uttering a word for seven days and nights?" "No, friend." And the Buddha says, "I can," showing off a bit. "In that case, who do you think lives in greater pleasure, King Bimbisāra or me?"

So what is the Buddha saying here? He's like, "I'm able to experience pleasure without doing a thing for seven days straight. This is better than a chocolate brownie. It's more pleasant, it lasts longer, you don't get unwanted consequences from it, and it's up to me."

So pleasure is important if used wisely. I always give the same example, and some of you I know have heard me use this example. Let's say that you decide that you want to express your compassion and your values by not eating animals in any form. Now, how are you going to succeed with that? Do you have a better chance of succeeding if you just approach this as a self-imposed thing that you have to do begrudgingly because you don't want to participate in the suffering of animals? Or if you learn to cook delicious vegan food? If you get into vegan cooking, you know that this is good, but also your system enjoys it. You're using your tendency to seek what feels good in your favor, in favor of your values, so that they're working together and not against each other.

Types of Pleasure

Of course, we need to distinguish between types of pleasure because not everything that feels good is good. And here's the wisdom part. So being—but feeling good in itself is not the problem. The problem is things that feel good which also have unwanted consequences that feel bad, either for oneself or for others. I like to present this also as an ethical teaching. It's not just that if I eat too much chocolate brownie, then my health suffers and I suffer. It's that sometimes in the pursuit of what feels good for me, I compromise someone else's well-being. I create harm to others.

So let's distinguish a few types of pleasure. Obviously, we have the pleasures of the senses: food, sex, massage, whatever. We know those. Again, the criticism from the early Buddhist tradition is not that it's wrong, but that it's fleeting. It's external, so it doesn't usually depend on you. And it's also potentially addictive. I always use the same example: I like broccoli a lot, and yet broccoli will never be as addictive as chocolate donuts. It just won't. Chemically, it's different. And I find broccoli really pleasant, but if I'm having a bad day and I decide to solve it with food, I'm not going to cook broccoli. So chocolate donuts, they're more potentially addictive, so they can bring collateral pain for myself or again for others. The pursuit of some things that feel good can be socially disruptive, and that's the main criticism of seeking sensory pleasures in the suttas. It's actually not that it's impermanent. If you look in the suttas, there's very little criticism of that, even though today that's what we're told. The main criticism when the Buddha makes lists of the drawbacks of sensory pleasures is that in their pursuit, people engage in unethical activities. That's the main point. Or that you may try really hard to get that sensory pleasure and still fail to get it, etc. "Impermanent" is in that list, but most of it is about effort.

Then we have other things that feel good, but that they're not as immediate as sensory pleasure. They may take a bit more effort. As we grow up, we learn that by delaying instant gratification, we can experience other types of satisfaction later. And that might be finishing a degree, or exercising, or learning to play a sport. It takes a while, but then, or we learn a musical instrument or a language. So that's the pleasure of becoming skillful at something, the pleasure of skill. It's something that we learn, it's an acquired taste, but at the same time, it's more reliable, and there's usually less collateral pain from it. In the context of the Dharma, that kind of pleasure of the skillful we can see as the pleasure of doing what is skillful. So it's the pleasure of ethical conduct, the pleasure of practicing acts and words of mettā, the pleasure of being generous. So in general, the pleasure of non-reactivity and beautiful qualities of the mind. They also feel good, or at least we can learn, which I will be saying later, to get some satisfaction from them. The main part of this sort of skillful pleasure, or the pleasure of skill, is that it is related to what is ethical in the context of the Dharma.

And then we have a third type of pleasure which is not so common in our daily life, at least for many of us, which is like pleasures of meditative or mystical states of mind, or maybe also flow states. They are less part of our everyday lives. But the interesting distinction about these sorts of pleasure is that even though it is a skillful, healthy pleasure—there's nothing bad about it—it's not about ethics. Floating in a nice state is a healthy thing, it's not unethical. But the distinction with the pleasure of the skillful is that it's not so much about doing something that's skillful and avoiding what is unskillful.

Models of Practice and the Hedonic Curve

There are many models of practice and progress to awakening in the early texts, and then of course many more in other traditions. We have the jhānas, that is one model of progress. We have the Eightfold Path. We have mindfulness of breathing, where there's a sequence and some progress there, which we don't really have in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta¹¹. There's no model of progress in Satipaṭṭhāna; it just has a list of options. But you can of course include it, the four foundations of mindfulness.

My point, and probably one of the main points of my thesis, was that when you compare most, not all, but most of the models of progress to awakening in the Nikāyas¹², they all showcase the same underlying hedonic curve. Hedonic meaning pleasure. So there's the same progression of feeling. It says regular life is marked mainly by painful things. Again, we can disagree or not, but that's what the texts say. And then as you practice and you advance, things get more and more pleasant, and then they start to mellow into neutral or equanimity, which you can also learn the skill to perceive as a neutral pleasure, like a subtle pleasure.

We find a lot of common elements in all these models. I'm sorry this is going to look technical, but here I compare four models of progress. The "gladness formula" is something that appears in many texts, and it goes like this: when one is glad, there is joy in the mind; when there is joy in the mind, the body calms down; when the body calms down, there is well-being; and when there is well-being, the mind becomes collected or concentrated. We find this in many places, triggered by many different things: ethical conduct, mindful awareness, thinking of the Buddha, anything. And it has all these elements: Pāmojja (gladness), pīti (joy), passaddhi (tranquility or relaxation), sukha (pleasure), samādhi (concentration or collectedness), and upekkhā (equanimity).

Now, if we look at the bojjhaṅgas¹³, the awakening factors, we find lots of them. There's also pīti (joy), there's also passaddhi (relaxation), there's also samādhi (concentration), there's also upekkhā at the end, and in the same order. And in a few instances, there's actually sukha as well. So we get almost the same.

If you think of jhāna, the four jhānas, they're described as having pīti and sukha, joy and pleasure. And in the second one, samādhi appears. Then later, pīti and sukha kind of go away, and in the third one, and fully in the fourth jhāna, we get equanimity. So again, a lot of commonality.

And even in ānāpānasati, mindfulness of breathing, step five is to breathe in while experiencing joy, breathe out while experiencing joy. Step six: breathe in while experiencing sukha, pleasure, breathe out while experiencing sukha. And then later on, we again get samādhi and we sort of get equanimity, upekkhā, but a little bit more indirectly.

I just wanted to show you how much of an overlap there is. And the things that are most consistent here besides samādhi are feeling tones: pīti, sukha, upekkhā—joy, pleasure, and then equanimity.

A Hedonic Training: The Gradual Path

The Buddha in those texts is proposing a hedonic training, a training in pleasure, a training in enjoyment. To give you an overview of this training, it will be the gradual path. In the Samaññaphala Sutta, this training we could simplify as first, ethical conduct. We try to practice ethical conduct, we try to behave well in ways that take care of others and take care of ourselves. And as I will show you, try to learn to find satisfaction in that ethical conduct, in the skill of being ethical, so that the mind makes a connection between acting from mettā and from generosity, etc., things that are ethical, and thinks, "oh, it feels good." So the mind makes a connection, like the example of cooking delicious vegan food. You let the brain make the connection so it helps you, it's like, "oh, I want more of that because it feels nice."

Then we get into what we today call informal practice: mindfulness in all situations and activities. And again, learning to find satisfaction in the less reactive mind states that result from applying mindfulness to your daily activities. As many of you may know, one experience that many people relate when they're told to choose a few daily activities and apply mindfulness to it, people come back and say, "Doing the dishes, wow, I used to hate that activity. And I started applying mindfulness to it and it's not so bad. I do the dishes, etc., and after it, I feel kind of calm and well." You know, it feels good. Again, we make the connection.

And then at the end of the gradual path, we get into what we today call formal meditation. Today we do that the other way around, you see, that's quite interesting. We start learning formal meditation, then we do practicing in daily life, and then just hope that this will kind of trickle down into our ethical behavior. In the texts, it's the other way around. So that when you come to the cushion, you have been training your reactivity for quite some time, and you already kind of just sit on something that has some momentum, and you can start just to bathe in the nice feelings that come from having a less reactive mind, or a completely non-reactive mind, and just amplify that well-being and pleasure.

This is again one of my main points: that the meditative states of early Buddhism are the direct outcome of an ethical, hedonic training, not just an attentional training. It's not just, if you try to be really attentive, you'll get the jhānas or whatever. That's not what the texts say. They say, be ethical, find the pleasure in it. Start doing these things with mindfulness, find the pleasure in it. Sit down to meditate when you notice that the hindrances are absent, learn to enjoy that, and there you go.

The Pleasure of Ethical Conduct

Let's start with ethical conduct. The texts call this type of ethical pleasure "impeccable pleasure."

"Just as a consecrated king who has defeated his adversaries would see fear nowhere regarding his enemies, so a practitioner endowed with moral conduct sees fear nowhere regarding their moral restraint. Endowed with this noble set of moral conduct, they feel an impeccable pleasure within."

So it's coming from not having to fear the consequences of that.

"A noble disciple has impeccable conduct of body, speech, and mind. Thinking, 'I have impeccable conduct of body, speech, and mind,' they obtain pleasure and happiness. This is called impeccable pleasure."

And the last one, it will get to the gladness formula as I was talking about. It says, "The point and the benefit of skillful conduct is lack of remorse. The point and the benefit of lack of remorse is gladness. The point and the benefit of gladness is joy." Then we go to relaxation, pleasure, blah blah blah, until equanimity.

So this is telling us what is needed to obtain this type of well-being that the texts call impeccable pleasure, the satisfaction of acting well, of behaving well.

The Pleasure of a Non-Reactive Mind

Next step, informal practice, what the texts call "guarding the senses" and "mindfulness and full awareness."

"Endowed with this noble sense restraint, one feels a purified pleasure within."

So this one has a different name, but this type of pleasure, if the first one is about external behavior—what we say, what we do, what we shop, etc.—this one is more about internal behavior. So we start applying mindfulness to our daily activities and we start being more aware of what goes on in the mind, being aware of unskillful, harmful impulses and choosing not to follow them, and maybe quietly seeing slowly how they decrease. So it's more about internal behavior. And as we notice the decrease of reactivity, which is a partial absence of reactivity, we can also learn to tune into how this feels, feeling into how a skillful mind feels. Again, we make that connection. It feels quite nice, it's peaceful, and it's maybe slightly pleasant.

The Pleasure of Meditative States

Then we come to seated meditation. These are two descriptions of what I think are the same thing, a state of healthy joy and pleasure from the same text.

"Seeing that the five hindrances have been abandoned in oneself, gladness is born. When one is glad, joy is born. When the mind is joyful, the body relaxes. With a relaxed body, one feels pleasure. When one feels pleasure, the mind becomes collected."

This is what I called the "gladness formula" earlier. The part in orange is important: "seeing that the five hindrances have been abandoned in oneself." I think the verb there is samanupassati, so a sort of conscious recognition, "Oh, the five hindrances are not active now." They might not be gone forever, but right now, as I was asking you just seconds ago, "Oh, irritability is absent right now, it's inactive." And seeing that, gladness is born, joy, relaxation, pleasure, and concentration.

The second paragraph is the usual formula for the first jhāna: "Quite withdrawn from sense desires, withdrawn from unskillful qualities, they enter and dwell in the first jhāna, which is the joy and pleasure born of withdrawal from unskillful qualities, with thinking and reflection. They fill, drench, pervade their body with a joy and pleasure born of withdrawal, so that no part of the entire body is unpervaded with the joy and pleasure born of withdrawal."

This describes a much fuller experience of well-being. But what are the bits in orange? The bits in orange are, where is that satisfaction derived from? Where is it coming from? It's coming from this conscious awareness of the absence of the five hindrances or unskillful qualities in general. That's where the pleasure comes from. So it's still about ethics. This is not the pleasure of concentration. This pleasure comes from noticing that the mind is not reactive. It's in a way the maximum expression of the pleasure of the skillful that I mentioned.

This stage in development, this meditative state, still has thinking and reflection. But then there is a shift.

"Because there is a lot that's common here, there's joy and pleasure without thinking and reflection, there's inner stillness. But where is it born of? It's not born now from seeing the absence of the hindrances. It's due to the subsiding of thinking and reflection. They enter and dwell in the second jhāna, which is the joy and pleasure born of collectedness."

By definition, in this samādhi, there is no thinking and reflection. So as thinking and reflection disappear, concentration or samādhi increases. And again, they fill, drench, and pervade the whole body with it. This is a different type of pleasure. It's born from the absence of thinking and reflection. So again, it's born from noticing an absence. But whereas before this was the absence of unethical or unskillful qualities of mind, this now comes from the absence of something that is not in itself skillful or unskillful. But still, thinking and reflection can bring some agitation to the mind, so their disappearance can be experienced as quite pleasant. But it's a crucial distinction here: this comes from the disappearance of something that has no moral valence in itself. And so to me, that's a different type of pleasure. It's not the pleasure of the skillful; it's not about what's ethical.

Once we've reached that, we can play with life, we can be creative.

Q&A

Miranda: The juxtaposition of standard addictions—sex, drugs, food, rock and roll—and retraining your pleasure towards skillful states... I've thought of this before, but in a more methodical way. And the idea of the text being the opposite of the way we train in the West is marvelous.

Bernat Font: The very little science I know, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is that whenever we get addicted to a substance or something, we get habituated to it and we actually start having less of a capacity to enjoy it. A smoker might say, "I haven't been enjoying this for years now, but if I don't do it, I get all this unpleasantness that I need to get rid of." The dopamine in the pursuit increases when you get addicted to something, but the actual experience of it and the serotonin released in the fulfillment of that pursuit decreases. So I think one of the ways to apply these teachings is in reflecting in a more sober way of what satisfaction am I actually deriving from this, but to be an open question. I have to understand what's the kick I get of this and also what is the pain associated with this. And then I can have a balanced view and go, "Okay, so what do I want to do?"

Peterson: Do you view that the mainstream Buddhist teaching's perception of pleasure as harmful for the spiritual path? I've been taught by mainly Burmese Theravāda monks.

Bernat Font: It's an important and huge question. I'm just going to open a can of worms. There are two problems with contemporary Buddhism, especially the insight meditation tradition. First, it's basically trying to apply monastic teachings to laypeople, and that's a huge tension. Second, a lot of contemporary Vipassanā is influenced by the Western Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Protestantism, each with its own suspicion against pleasures. That became part of the Theravāda reform in Burma and other places that produced the kind of Buddhism that Westerners encountered. So no wonder you have this internal conflict. I have it too. And I think it's our job to be more of agents in the continuing evolution of the Dharma today.

Wayne: I live at a retreat center, and there's this back and forth between silence and then being in the world which is challenging.

Bernat Font: What you're saying is a great example of a sort of middle position. Being a lay practitioner does not mean I have to live in a busy city. There are many ways to be a lay person, and we can explore that. It's also not a problem that there is diversity. There are times in our life where we're more on the retreat side of the spectrum, and then we go back and forth. I'm encouraging you to diversify your sources of satisfaction. You can enjoy a nice meal, and you don't need to rank it lower on the pleasure scale, but are you only going to rely on the chocolate brownie for your happiness?

Susmita: I grew up in India in a Buddhist family. I went through joy; joy was a very big factor from maybe the third month on. So after 30 years, I wrote a book about it called Awakening with Ease because I sometimes don't feel like I fit into anything.

Bernat Font: I think we need to remember that we are still at a very early stage of Buddhism being cultivated in the West. If you look at the history of Chinese Buddhism, there were centuries of experiments and schools and synthesis of schools until we got to the schools of Chinese Buddhism that still survive today.

Michelle: I have the belief system that because I really don't have strong jhāna practice, I don't have concentration, so oh well, then I'm not going to have the joy of Nibbāna. What can you say to that?

Bernat Font: Have you ever tried really hard to fall asleep? Does it work? No. We have to be careful not to take these models and say this is the standard, this is the script that I have to follow. I would focus on the other types of joy and pleasure. The way I've been understanding jhāna is that it is a natural outcome of doing those other things; it's not an outcome of trying to concentrate really hard. One name that state is given in the early texts is jhāna. It's one way of talking about a very all-encompassing kind of joy and pleasure from the mind being non-reactive. Just enjoy your practice.

Vic: Do you have suggestions for further investigation that you find especially worthwhile?

Bernat Font: Sure, I can prepare a little Google Doc and send it to Rob.

A Practical Exercise Suggestion

Just to finish, I want to finish with this suggestion for a practical exercise that you can incorporate in your formal practice. It's a suggestion for the first few minutes of the meditation, and it's in three easy steps.

1. After you sit down, have a few breaths, and relax the body, bring to mind some good things that you've done that day or the day before. It doesn't need to be big things. If nothing comes to mind, you can also think of good things that other people have done that you've seen, or the good quality of someone—so, gratitude.
2. Secondly, you can identify what is the main skillful quality in that action, yours or from someone else. Is it generosity? Is it patience? Is it compassion?
3. And then just allow yourself to feel that, but not to force anything. Just breathe it in. Let's say it's an act of generosity. So you remember it, "Okay, this generosity." Just tune into that sense of generosity. And then, how does it feel on the pleasure-pain spectrum? Just tuning into that dimension.

You don't need to expect it to be huge or intense. After that, just give it a couple of minutes, really enjoy this sense of maybe appreciation for that act, and then you just move on to your regular practice.

This is a training. You might start judging yourself or not feeling this or that. That can happen. Remember that is part of the practice. Continue with your intention. Bring up a good action that you've done, identify the main quality, and just tune into how it feels. Relax into it, move on.

When I started doing this, sometimes I thought, "I don't have any examples, I didn't do anything nice today." You can beat yourself up about it, or you can say, "Then maybe tomorrow I'll just do something so I have an example to bring up in my meditation." The second thing that happened is it really increased my capacity naturally to enjoy doing those things in my day-to-day life as I did them. It was more minutes in that day that I had a nice time, and I was having a nice time out of an activity that was not self-centered, was not selfish, and was not harmful in any way.

So if you want, just try to incorporate this at the beginning of your meditation for just a couple of minutes. That would be my suggestion. Thank you very much for your attention and your questions and your reflections.