r/streamentry • u/xjashumonx • 2d ago

Practice If 'access concentration' takes four hours every day then what am I doing?

Started meditating again for the first time in years and getting what I consider beneficial results. I've only been doing 30 minutes a day once or twice a day to build up my stamina. I'm going to aggressively avoid any Buddhist terminology and try to explain things in my own words here. After some initial difficulty what's emerged is a much more calm and fairly persistent feeling even after I finish meditating. I sit down and get a kind of stable united feeling in the body that is very pleasant, and to my surprise, compassionate feelings toward myself and others (something much removed from my typical state.) Lately I've had observations about how my senses work. For example Im beginning to regard seeing as more of a flat image as opposed to the typical way which I would say is more like looking out of a window. The phrase I've heard "in the seeing there is only seeing" now seems significant to me. And today after meditating I had a stronger sense that my body is basically empty space except for whatever nerves are being stimulated.

I say all that just to give you a sense of what I get out of my meager practice. And it's not all roses, either. The first ten minutes after sitting down is pretty killer tbh. None of this is what I would call easy or effortless. So this leads to my question, what's going on here? I'm not some genius meditator. I would say I'm probably less inclined than almost anyone. I'm definitely nowhere near jhana or even access concentration by the standards I've been introduced to here. So where are these benefits coming from? How is this ultra elementary stage described in Buddhism? If jhana IS meditation, then that means I'm not even meditating, right? The benefits feel substantial, though.

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u/dave2048 1d ago

Ayya Khema’s advice, according to Leigh Brasington: “do it faster.”

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u/xjashumonx 1d ago

Interesting. I've had that thought myself. It seems like once you know the territory, you can get back to where you were much sooner.

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u/adivader Arahant 1d ago

Yes! So if one is meditating for half an hour every day, and one wants progress, its a good idea to do weekend 'retreats' at home. Clear your schedule so that saturday sunday are free and crank out 4 to 6 hours per day. Lots of progress is possible.

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u/Common_Ad_3134 1d ago

"do it faster"

For context, afaik, that was only after he'd done all 8 jhanas, right?

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u/dave2048 23h ago

I think it regarding traversing(?) the four rupa jhanas. It was in his book Right Concentration. The book does read more like his journal of notes that he wrote while studying. It’s like a collection of all of his shortcuts.

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u/Common_Ad_3134 22h ago

I found the exchange in Right Concentration:

A year later I sat with Ayya for five weeks. I learned jhānas six, seven, and eight and was thoroughly enjoying running ’em up (one to eight) and running ’em back down (eight to one). Not too long after I gained some skill at doing this, I was again in an interview with Ayya, and she said, “Now you must do insight practice in the same sitting after you do the jhānas.”

“But it takes me the whole sitting to go up and back down,” I protested.

“Do them faster.”

I thought it was worth mentioning that this happened after he learned the jhanas, because the OP hasn't gotten to jhanas yet. It's not really possible for them to do jhanas any faster. I would guess that if the OP tried to do them faster, it wouldn't be very helpful.