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Guided Meditation: Peace; Samadhi (55) Peace in Third Jhana.

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 18, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Peace (link)

Hello and welcome to this Friday meditation at IMC. As we come to the final talk on the third jhāna¹, the third absorption, the third immersion, the third way of getting settled peacefully into a wholeness. I like using the word wholeness because the idea in these deep immersive states is to have the goodness of these states, often described as joy and happiness, to be pervasive throughout the body. The whole body is included.

The body that we talk about in Buddhism is not exactly the same as our physical body. It's the body that we experience. It's the body we experience through the medium of all kinds of aspects of the mind: the state of the mind, the orientations of the mind, the preferences of the mind, the beliefs and thoughts, stories of the mind. We are not innocent experiencers of this body. We only experience a small subset of all the things happening in our body. It's a subset where the mind travels through the nerves that stretch out from or are part of the mind. It's almost as if wherever there's a nerve ending, the mind is right there as well. The whole functioning of the mind then shifts and changes how we experience the body.

As we go into these deeper states of meditation, we are shifting the orientation to the body, what we pick up in the body, what we amplify, what we add to the experience of the body. One of those things is that we start living more in a whole way. We stop selecting out a piece of it, or we stop having blinders on because we're thinking so much and preoccupied by things.

One of the characteristics of deepening and deepening in meditation, in samādhi² meditation, is an increasing feeling of peace. In the third jhāna, this is characterized by the word equanimity³. There's the peace of non-reactivity, the peace of not making something up about what's happening, not making up stories or living in the stories of what's happening, judging it, commentary, not tensing or reaching for experience. There's a deep settledness.

The peace of the third jhāna is different than what's going to come in the fourth jhāna. The peace is kind of like the peace you might find if you dive under the water and rest there for a few moments. It can be very peaceful and still, but there's still the texture, the viscosity of the water that's there. There's something there that is buoyant, maybe something there that presses gently against us, unless we go too deep. It doesn't offer much resistance. We can swim through it, but it's still there. It's not as thin as the air. So this piece of the third jhāna has a little bit of density, a little bit of viscosity, a little bit of substantiality perhaps, something that spreads through the body. It feels very whole and complete. Everything that we touch in the body, everything the nerve ends touch and that we can be directly aware of, is felt in this lake of peace.

So, assuming a meditation posture. Over time, the posture itself becomes the beginning of appreciating peace, with the body becoming still, the body not being so active anymore. For a beginner in meditation, the posture is a challenge and maybe takes work and patience. But over the months and years of regular meditation, the body and the posture become a refuge, a refuge in stillness, a wonderful form of non-activity that is satisfying just in itself. So feeling the peace, maybe the stillness of the posture of the body, and breathing deeply and relaxing.

Relaxing peacefully. If you feel your muscles relax, the moments in which it's releasing and softening are moments moving towards peace.

Relaxing, softening, and letting the breathing return to normal. The absence of the activity of breathing deeply and relaxing means that now there's a different kind of peace here, the peace of not doing those things.

As you inhale for a few breaths, feel the thinking mind. Feel the tensions or pressure or agitation there might be there. And as you exhale, relax the thinking mind. As the thinking mind relaxes, it relaxes toward and into peace in the mind.

And then, in a way that feels peaceful, gentle, lower your awareness into the body, breathing. Maybe landing on the settling spot, the grounding spot of breathing. And while you're aware of breathing, also open your attention, peripheral awareness, out beyond the edges of breathing, beyond the edges of the sensations you have of breathing. And maybe beyond the edges of breathing, there is some kind of peace, stillness, spaciousness, in which the sensations of breathing float, move, or are nested.

Gently, softly, feel the spread of peace as you breathe. As if the movements of breathing are a gentle wind, a gentle warmth, expanding the peace through your body. Reassuring the mind that it's okay to quiet your thinking.

Taking a moment to quiet your inner life, so you can feel, allow yourself to feel the influence of any degree of peace that's present in the body, in the experience of breathing, in the mind and heart. And perhaps the peace found in any degree of spaciousness here around you, within you. Allow yourself to silently feel the influence of peace.

As we come to the end of the meditation, I'd like to evoke an ancient Buddhist idea around samādhi: that there is something about the well-being of samādhi, the peace of samādhi, that we can drink. It's like medicine or nourishment. And so, to drink the nourishment of peace, take it in. The nourishment of peace, and let it spread through your body, through your arms, your legs, the back rib cage, the spine, the belly, and the front rib cage, into the head. And to feel peace as a nourishment, whatever degree, however little there is—maybe it's a homeopathic dosage of peace—feel it, sense it.

And then wish it for others. May others have a chance to experience peace. Those who are experiencing violence, may they be peaceful. May they know peace. Those who experience hate, may they feel peace, an experience of a peaceful time. Those who are ignored and marginalized, may they feel peace, a peace that allows them to be whole, dignified in their own right. And those who grieve, may they feel peace to hold the grief, to allow it to be there. And may it be that what we learn about peace through meditation, may it be that it spreads from us as medicine, as nourishment for our world.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

The Flavor of Peace

Hello and welcome to this fifth talk on the third jhāna as part of this samādhi series. Sometimes I've thought that the third jhāna is my favorite of the jhānas, maybe because it certainly has a wonderful degree of peace, but it also has a very satisfying, comforting, or deep feeling of well-being that's part of it, that seems to fill the whole body.

So, I want to read again the ancient description of the third jhāna as part of completing this week.

"With the fading of joy, a practitioner abides equanimous, aware, and with clear recognition, and experiences the happiness of the body. The practitioner enters and abides in the third jhāna, of which the noble ones declare, 'Equanimous and aware, one abides in happiness.' The practitioner pervades, saturates, permeates this body with happiness that is freed of joy, so that no part of the body is not touched by the happiness."

So one of the characteristics of this third jhāna is equanimity, and that's a form of peace. There's something peaceful about not reacting, about not being caught in being for and against or preferences, partly because there's no reason for it. But partly because even in this third jhāna, where the experience is just predominantly or only pleasant, we don't lean into it. We're not grabbing it. We're not involved in any kind of positive reactivity towards it. We're equanimous. We're peaceful about it because it's allowing something deep in our mind, deep in our psyche, to relax, to let go, to not have to be constantly, chronically active, doing, making, wanting, protecting, figuring out, responding to every little thing that happens.

The mind can have this tremendous clarity. It's equanimous. It's aware. There's a clear knowing of what's happening, but at the same time, everything is allowed to happen freely. The classic metaphor, as I've said, is beautiful lotus flowers that are open and just exquisitely pristine. Perhaps lotuses are considered somehow pure, floating in water, underwater, peacefully, very peacefully. And everything that we experience is held in the water of the mind, the water of happiness, the water of peace, equanimity.

As we come to the end of this week on the third jhāna, the word peace itself is not in the description of the jhāna, but equanimity is a form of peace. There are many flavors of peace. This is one of the great delights of meditation, of dharma practice, maybe one of the delights of human life, is to be able to appreciate the flavors of peace, the many flavors that we can experience. If you've never heard of this idea that peace can have many flavors, be experienced in many different ways with different characteristics, you might want to make a study of that. Maybe over this weekend, before we start again, you might give yourself an opportunity to experience peace.

Maybe there are places you can go that you can experience it. Maybe there's some kind of cathedral or church in your neighborhood that is very peaceful inside. Maybe a park with a grove of trees. Maybe there's a peaceful bank of a river that you can go sit by. Maybe it's a corner of your home, maybe looking out the window, or maybe setting up a certain kind of context. Maybe when you're alone at home, you just allow yourself the chance to not do anything except begin to sense and feel peace and the different ways peace can be experienced.

Maybe you find yourself in situations that are quite agitating and difficult, but with an assignment to feel the different flavors of peace. Maybe ask yourself, in a way you've never done before in a trying situation, "Where's the peace here? Where's the peace while people are arguing? Where's the peace when there's a difficult tension in the room?" Is there any? And there always will be somewhere. At a minimum, it can be found in the calm mindfulness, the calm awareness that searches for it.

In this third jhāna, there's a degree of peace, and that peace feels not personal, exactly. It can feel almost like it expands beyond the edges of the body, or certainly beyond the edges of any ways that we usually define ourselves or want to be. There are all kinds of lessons around this in the third jhāna, and one of them is that any appropriation, any kind of movement towards making it "mine" or "this is me having this experience" can be seen as creating agitation on the surface of the lake. It can feel like it's unnecessary; it actually detracts from the richness of the experience.

So, to begin appreciating the peace, feeling what peace is here, and becoming a connoisseur of peace. The reason for this is that in the fourth jhāna, the equanimity becomes stronger and more peaceful. So, being able to sense and have a kind of registering of the qualities characteristic of peace, characteristics of this happiness that's there, that's the means by which, or the condition by which, our psychophysical system can move into the fourth jhāna.

It's one of the characteristics of these instructions in the four jhānas to pervade, saturate, and pervade the body with the joy and happiness, with the happiness, with the peace. Partly so we can know it well. We can feel it well. We can feel it in a deep way that it's almost like we are not feeling it because we're not appropriating it or measuring it against me, myself, and mine, or defining ourselves by it, or wanting more or wanting less. Just really getting to know it on its own terms, how that is, and this deeper familiarity.

Sometimes I've known people who go into the jhānas and are in a hurry to go through them. They want to be masters of it. They want to be, somehow, this idea of being a good meditator or a successful practitioner. There might be a little bit of conceit around going into these deep states, and this is rather unfortunate because the conceit gets in the way of the deeper lessons of these states. One of the deeper lessons is to take in the selfless experience of something profound going on—a profound movement, a profound opening, a profound quality of well-being and peace that we want to really register and get to know well without any interference, any kind of agitation that comes with trying to do something with it or get more from it or speed along. Just being very settled, very peaceful, and discovering the almost selfless quality of these deep, deep states because we're not "selfing" around it. There's a deeper peace.

So, if you're at all inclined, I encourage you to spend this weekend getting to know the flavors of peace for you. Search for it, look for it. Search it out—where are places you can go, what people you can be with, what ways of doing housework, what ways of being at home—that you can actually take time to begin exploring the different qualities and characteristics of how you experience peace. And then you'll be a little better prepared for next week when we do the fourth jhāna.

Thank you very much for being part of this, and I look forward to our continuation.