USING VARIETY TO “FRESHEN UP” OUR MEDITATION – TAKING METTA INTO A JHANA

USING VARIETY TO “FRESHEN UP” OUR MEDITATION

TAKING METTA INTO A JHANA

What you should do to access Jhana through Metta, is be able to see the fire of loving-kindness without any fuel. (The fuel is like the kitten, the puppy, the dear person, etc.) Just have love. Metta is perceived as a power, as a fire or as a light — whatever way you wish to imagine it. However, now no person is giving out that Metta, and no being is receiving it. There is just disembodied loving-kindness, rather than it being aimed at anyone. If you start to focus on what loving-kindness actually is, rather than where it’s coming from or where it’s going to, then loving-kindness by itself, alone, becomes a very beautiful object of meditation. You become aware of just Metta because it’s a very beautiful object indeed! It’s inherently beautiful. Once it’s generated, once the fire is there, it’s not that difficult to sustain your attention on it, because it delights the mind.

However, one of the difficulties is that Metta without a sender or object is not that stable at first. But if you can stay with loving-kindness, it delights the mind. Try and calm the mind down and make it very peaceful and refined. Then that experience of loving-kindness itself will become your Nimitta. It will take you into a Jhana: a Metta Jhana. So developing loving-kindness is one of the ways into Jhanas. But as with all of these Jhanas, you have to simplify what you are aware of. It has to become a mental awareness, a mental object — not a physical awareness.