Stages of Insight Meditation
Many start practicing meditation in order to feel less stressed, more calm, to gain more control over their life, and thus feel a bit happier. But meditation can provide far more than temporary symptomatic relief from life's difficulties:
“Samatha is the Pali word for ‘calm.’ Any type of meditation whose primary aim is to generate a calm, collected mind can be referred to as ‘samatha meditation.’ …
When doing any form of samatha meditation, when the mind collects on an object and becomes unlikely to become distracted, then samadhi (indistractability, concentration) has been established. Samadhi is samatha par excellence. Samadhi is is used to generate the jhanas**; then moving through the jhanas will deepen the samadhi.
Once the mind has become concentrated, it can be turned to investigating the nature of reality. This hopefully gives insight (vipassana) into ‘things as they really are’ in that you have an ‘understood experience’ of what’s actually happening. Wisdom (panna) arises when the insights are integrated and provide a foundation so that you can operate in harmony with reality.
So you first establish samatha (calm); then deepen that calm until it becomes samadhi (indistractability, concentration). Use this samadhi to generate the jhanas, which will deepen the samadhi. Then upon exiting the jhanas, turn your concentrated mind to investigating the nature of reality so that you can gain insight (vipassana), which can be integrated to become wisdom (panna).”
** "The jhanas are eight progressive altered states of consciousness that can be identified with the aspect of the Buddha's Eightfold Path called right concentration. Training in concentration leads to these states, each of which yields a deeper and subtler state of awareness than the previous one. The jhanas are not in themselves awakening, but they are a skillful means for stilling the mind in a way that leads in that direction, and they are attainable by anyone who devotes the time and sincerity of practice necessary to realize them."
Leigh Brasington. "Right Concentration. A Practical Guide to the Jhanas." Shambhala, 2015.
