A reflection on the need to develop calm and concentration
by Catherine Rathbun
May 2000
There are two distinct types of meditation: one leads to insight and the other to the development of jhana or concentration through tranquillity. If you develop insight deeply enough, you will eventually come to tranquillity. And if you develop tranquillity deeply enough, you will eventually come to insight. The end is the same, but the way of getting there is different.
Both types of meditation have their advocates; some of those advocates, historically, have cast aspersions on the other type of practice. This is shortsighted and prejudicial. It does not take into account the importance of applying the correct technique for unfoldment to the individual psyche.
Many of the early practices popularized in the West have been insight practices (e.g. certain breath practices and the Zen system). These are techniques designed to wake you up, sometimes rather the way a cold bath in the morning can stimulate you into new modalities of awareness and understanding. They sometimes deal in a kind of shock technique, startling you out of complacency and opening mental doors. There is no doubt that this is an important aspect of Path study, at times, for we can get very comfortable and set in our mental and physical patternings. They are good for developing self-discipline, as they are frequently rigid in form but often come with a demanding autocratic master.
Most of my early life as a meditator, I was trained in such ways, for my teacher’s reasoning was that I was a parent and struggling with kids and the wandering life and therefore, it was useless to try to gain tranquillity. However, I was a bundle of nerves. As soon as my life settled into a daily pattern I took up tranquillity meditations for the next six years in order to calm the formations so that the lifestream could become more integrated.
In the years since then, as I developed as a teacher, I began to switch my initial teaching from insight practices to tranquillity ones. I have come to honour this road of tranquillity meditations leading, later, to insight practices, as a road perhaps better suited to our culture. I have met a considerable number of people who have been fried by vigorous insight practices applied rigorously without modification to all students, without regard for individual needs or capacities. Some beings are too fragile for these techniques and some have experienced even severe mental disturbance in these meditation pressure-cooker courses.
It is a testament to how brave (or perhaps foolhardy) we are as a culture that we think we can forge into these ancient systems without reflection on the present conditions and needs. Indeed, we are forgetting the original purpose of Buddhist practice when we do this, which is to bring people out of suffering, not put them in deeper.
As a culture, we are very adept at critical sight, picking up on flaws and faults with ease (usually other people’s). This turn of mind naturally tends us towards the pathways of insight, with its capacity to explode stuck mental formations and its ability to see deeply into the laws of nature and the patternings of oppression. However, this journey can and frequently does make us more edgy, more critical and often more arrogant: the razor-sharp mind can cut both ways. Eventually, we see into the nature of the self, how illusory and non-solid it is, and our arrogance and critical stance begins to fall away.
Unfortunately, this process can take a very long time. Because we are forced to work with the operative ego in the world, illusion or no, that cloak of arrogant self-assurance can become a permanent part of our persona. This unfortunate presentation of self can, in some individuals, manifest even as we pay lip-service the illusion of self and speak of the law of interdependent arising and the importance of the compassionate response. Compassion indeed!
It seems to me that we are encouraging the maelstrom of frenzied human endeavour to continue, defining ourselves as being right or “visionary” while refraining from engaging in a correction of what is really wrong in our culture. The predominant error that I see is still the lack of love between one human and another, between one country and another, between humankind and the planet we inhabit. We are still engaged in dominance and submission issues when clearly the deep seeing of the absolute interdependence of nature should be cause of opening our hearts deeper and deeper into the mystery of life and death in all its pain and solace.
Tranquillity meditations address this requirement. Through the development of calm and deep concentration the student comes to what T. S. Eliot in The Four Quartets called the “still point of the turning world”. We learn to return to this place of connection when the world is frazzled. We learn to hold our hearts open in the most distressing of moments. We learn through deepening concentration not to be distracted from our place of focus and thus become more efficient and effective at what we choose to do.
As we clearly develop a knowledge of the various states of concentration, called jhanas, we can train ourselves to expand this field of concentration until eventually we are able to do many wonderful things with our minds. The capacity to alter formation leads us to learn how to heal. The ability to expand mind over great distances develops from this study. And the ability to understand other realms begins here, too.
But setting aside these extraordinary abilities, developing the meditations of tranquillity bring substantial benefits in the ordinary world. Without calm and concentration, how can we be at the bedside of a sick or dying friend? How can we help a crying and distraught child? How can we move through the corporate world with resilience and wellbeing? How can we attend an audition or a job interview without losing our focus? And, at the end of our days, how can we learn to be content in the “Land of Be” when we can no longer “Do”?
Perhaps a final benefit that comes with the clear development of the jhanas is their ability to give us rest: to bring us into such a state of quietude that our body rhythms are re-nourished and refreshed. When I returned here 21 years ago, I thought the pace of life in Canada was unreasonably hectic. Today it is exponentially worse. Where will this end but in illness and death? – unless we teach ourselves to rest, to reflect and to respond with a new voice.
One of the ways to develop these states of calm concentration is a teaching called “The Divine Abidings”. Through the development of loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy we form a platform of calm and concentration which, when deepened, will give rise to equanimity. Eventually, this equanimity can become so profound that, though we may be rocked by life, we will never stray off course for too long. We will have developed the capacity to return again and again to our deepest core where the compassionate and aware human dwells: heart open, hands ready to help all those in need.
For more teachings by Catherine Rathbun please visit the Friends of the Heart website