Comments on Samādhi
—Informal comments March 19, 2025 by Tahn Pamutto
[Tahn Pamutto:] …. Yes, exactly. We sometimes don’t credit the the beginning stages of practice as having samādhi.
As an illustration, let’s understand that there is malice. I will use malice as a word for wishing harm: actually wanting to harm another person. In order for us even to sit down and talk about the Dhamma like this we have to have reached the cessation of malice. None of you are experiencing malice right now. This is samādhi. This is a level of composure. You don’t have a gross defilement present.
You would see it as it arose, if it did arise. Because it isn’t now present and because you also have the wisdom to see it if it did arise, you could choose your way around it. Say you felt yourself starting to want to hurt me, to come down here to Austin and just punch me right in the face, you would instead turn off your video, you would go touch grass, you would try to get through it, all because you would not want to tolerate that malice arising. You would not be controlled by that emotion. You would know it as a thought and work to separate the thought from any bodily conduct.
That is samādhi. That is a level of composure that you would actively be maintaining. We typically don’t credit that as samādhi. We don’t typically credit that as an attainment, but it really is. It reflects what the later and more profound levels of samādhi are. They are doing the same thing with progressively more subtle states.
Right now you actively have a level of samādhi and you are working to maintain it at all times. (Or you’ve reached such a profound state that you don’t even have to work to maintain it. It is effortlessly maintained at all times within you because there are no conditions present for the defilements to arise.)
If somebody were to come along with some gasoline and a lit torch and say, “Hey, everybody’s lighting themselves on fire. Do you wanna join?” You say ‘No.’ It is a choice; you apply your mindfulness and think, “Do I like being on fire? No, I think I’ll pass.” The reality is: the person cannot make you light yourself on fire.
That’s within the mental space when we can see the cessation of something. We know, “I’m not in mental pain right now.” Then, when something external arises: We’re already not in pain about it. We’re already not suffering about it. It’s not that we have to stop ourselves from not suffering about it. The suffering had already ceased and when/if the thing arises again our thought process is not clouded by suffering.
What we would see arise is various conditions and then we would have to do the effort to suffer. Somebody comes along with something that is provocative of lust and it actually kind of disgusts you. You would not have to work to not-feel-lust about that thing. The thing wouldn’t be of the nature to generate lust for you. But you could, though work, have lust arise. You could apply your mind in such a way that lust would arise. But that would take effort from a composed state of mind.
[Question: If we have to work to combat it, does that mean some mental suffering is inevitable?]
[Tahn Pamutto:] The thing is… if somebody offers you something that would make you angry, you have to apply your mind to it in a certain way to get angry. We make the effort to suffer. We do the thing that leads us to suffering. We choose that. It’s been our default. It’s what we know. But I’m saying that it doesn’t have to be. If we start from the third noble truth we talk about cessation where know defilements are present, and maybe that’s hard to conceive. Where is the point where it can meet up with your own understanding?
The Buddha says in the simile of the two arrows that mental suffering is the second arrow. Just get out of the way. Don’t be there. Don’t be in the forest where the assassin is. You won’t get shot with the arrow. This is what the Buddha is saying. And then we human-beings-that-are-not-Arahants say, “But I’m in the forest. And there’s the guy with a bow, how do I avoid the arrow?” And the Buddha is saying, “Well, don’t be there and then you can’t get shot.” We have to get to a level where it makes sense to us. Maybe that doesn’t make sense yet and we’re still saying, “No. I mean the forest. What do I do about the arrows? How do I dodge the arrows?” That’s just the level that we’re at right now. Later, if we got to safety and someone suggested going to the path through the dark and dangerous forest we could easily say, ‘No thanks.’ And then we wouldn’t get shot with the arrow. Cessation.
In terms of establishing right view, we want to establish it on the end product. We can establish our faith on right view so it can become rooted and not be a matter of perspective. We want to find truths that are stable truths. There is a place without that suffering, where no further effort needs to be made to not-suffer, and that would be a stable truth. We want to establish our mind on that and say, “Yeah. The things that can be riled up right now – those will not get me riled up when I’m lying on my deathbed. I will just be in the process of letting them go. Can’t do anything about them. No reason to get upset about this, that, or the other thing. You can have my stuff. I can’t take it with me, so it’s yours.” Whereas an hour earlier, we would have been worried about fixing our car. Now it doesn’t matter. But the mere existence of that state where it doesn’t matter means that is the more stable truth than the one we are in now. While we live these things seem important. When we die we realize they really weren’t. Which is the truth? One reality that they were important only works sometimes. The reality that they weren’t important, weren’t worth suffering over, can work all the time. That’s the truth we want to develop faith in. Stable truth.
The idea that suffering takes effort to avoid is a perspective thing. The reality of a state free of suffering is a stable truth, not based on perspective, that we want to get to experience.
There’s a difference between your citta and your brain. The brain is a sense base so there are some things that we’re hardwired to experience, like grief. We have something we had for a while and it’s taken away from us. We experience grief. There is an actual biological response. This is true for cats. This is true for monkeys. This is true for human beings in the human-world-level. The Buddha experienced grief. But his citta wasn’t shaken and disturbed and confused by that experience. Somebody comes along to the Buddha and says, “What’s up? You seem down.” He’s like, “Well, I’m sad.”
“Why are you sad?”
“Well, Sariputta died.”
“But I thought you were enlightened.”
And the Buddha is like, “Well, yeah, I am enlightened. But I liked the guy.”
It’s just really relatable. It has nothing to do with mental suffering. It is a human experience.
His citta is not shaken even though he is having an unpleasant human experience. It’s kind of fuzzy sometimes because it seems like that’s a very mental thing. Right? We don’t tend to think of some part of our emotions as a product of electrons and brain signals and chemicals and stuff. We want emotion to be located all in one place. But part of what we experience emotionally as humans is in the sense-based mind. It totally is. Stick an electrode in the brain and just give a little shock and suddenly you are as happy as you were when you were five years old at your birthday party. The citta is not doing that. That’s a human flesh-bag kind of thing.
What is in the citta is not subject to those same rules. The mind has no form; no location. The mind cannot be externally manipulated. No one can make the mind do anything. Greed, anger, delusion… you yourself have to do that. You have to do that to yourself. No external force in the universe can do that to you.
Then what could make you suffer?
Greed, hatred, and delusion is something that we do. Something we do to ourselves, something that only we can do to ourselves. We chose them. From beginningless time we have built them into something that is self-sustaining. We don’t work to keep them going with knowledge; we do it subconsciously. But it takes work to keep them going.
So you think, “Well, I’m the one who does it.” And you have some samādhi, you’re at a place where you don’t have gross hatred and delusion. Then you see something that has pleasant feeling associated with it and you’re like, “I’m feeling pretty good right now. Pretty safe. I think I’m gonna go for it. I think I’m gonna get the thing.” Then greed pops up and says, “It’s worth it!” We weren’t suffering. We weren’t filled with obsession. But that thing comes in and says, “It’s worth it. Do it.” And we go for the greed. Why? We weren’t suffering!
Well, that’s the thing. It’s built in. You’d say, “Thank you, little devil on my shoulder. You’re right. It IS worth it. I’m going for it. I’m gonna get it. Because right now I’m not suffering. I’m in the perfect mental state to be able to go get the thing I want without getting tangled.” But because the thing is in the external world, entanglement follows.
With anger there’s a feeling of imperative. It’s jumping up and saying, “We have to act on this. This is intolerable. We HAVE to act on this. There’s no choice. We gotta do it. Let’s put our foot down. Let’s SAY the thing. Let’s do it. Let’s go. Let’s GO!”
And that’s anger. We choose it. It’s not that we have to. It takes effort to do anger when it’s arising from the state of having ceased. It takes effort to get the machine going, but we do. Why? “Because this is intolerable, that’s why!”
And delusion is the most insidious of them all because we’re sitting there and we see the thing and we’re like, “Yeah. If I go over there, I’m gonna be a little confused. Disoriented. Distracted. But I can’t stay here all day. I have to do … something. So I guess I gotta go over there and be confused.”
And we do it. We convince ourselves to be deluded. We recognize, “There is this thing that scares me so I’m not gonna look at it. I’m going to ignore that thing because it scares me.” We are choosing ignorance. We don’t realize at the time that we are choosing delusion. We are working to keep ourselves ignorant of that thing. It’s only later when delusion and ignorance are present we wonder why they are so murky and hard-to-define. But we set it up that way. We built those mindstates for a purpose.
It is a whole process with its built-in nutriment; it feeds itself. We continue to be afraid of that thing because a part of the mind says, “That is a thing that I am afraid of — don’t look at it.” But if we catch that voice arising that says, “This is the thing I’m afraid to look at it,” we can then say, “Wait. I know you, Mara. The only reason this is the thing I’m afraid of is because you keep saying this is the thing that I’m afraid of. If not for you saying that, it would just be a thing.” It would be an unpleasant thing. It would be an uncertain thing. But it wouldn’t be a thing we’re afraid of. It only becomes that when we choose into delusion.
When we choose into fear it becomes very tangible, “Okay, this is the thing I’m afraid of.” Then it has a package of characteristics that we call fear. This is a thing we do to ourselves. Why do we do it? “Well, I don’t know what else to do. This seems like a problem and I don’t have a solution. So I guess I’ll do this delusion thing.”
Another way to frame this is delusion is an external voice that we give credit to. It’s talking about greed but we relate to that voice as if it has an imperative in it. Who gives it that power? It is a thought that is arising in the mind. Why do we listen to it? It’s just thought arising in the mind, so why do we go with it? Well, because of delusion. Delusion and the mindfulness, “That is just a thought.” are opposites. They don’t comfortably co-exist.
When the mindfulness is present it’s, “Hey, you’re just a thought.” It doesn’t have the power to motivate us to do things. It is our delusion that gives it that power. “Oh, I had a thought about going to get the thing. Guess I gotta go get the thing.” That’s the delusion part of greed. “Oh, I had an angry thought. I guess we’re angry now.” That is the delusion part of anger. You’ve missed something about the nature of the thought.
In terms of dependent origination, in order for you to decide to do greed (because it’s going to take you doing something for it to happen), you have to be ignorant of a number of things. You have to be ignorant of the thoughts and the feelings. You have to be thinking of them as “more” than just thoughts and feelings. Now that’s Ignorance – Avijja.
When you understand them, when you have Vijja, when you know, “That is a thought, that is a feeling, that is a perception,” when you see them arising, you see them ceasing, and you don’t generate confusion around it: then there is not delusion present. There is mindfulness present. There is vijja present. “That is a thing that is arising, that was a thing that ceased. Okay.” It doesn’t lead to the next step of sankhara’s and the rest of dependent origination.
Sankhara’s necessitate us thinking that “Because this, that needs to happen.” Well, that IS the definition of dependent origination, isn’t it? We think, “Ok, this happened, so now we have to sankhara, we have to create something based on that.”