Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas

by Leigh Brasington

So why don’t I teach like I described above? Well, from a historical perspective, it’s because when I learned the jhānas, to move from the first jhāna to the second was to make the foreground-background shift. It was only much later that I realized exactly what the suttas were saying. Then I understood also that I was indeed actually experiencing the second jhāna as described in the suttas, but it was really only occurring some time after I made the foreground-background shift—it was only when I felt I was getting more strongly into the second jhāna that I was actually just arriving there. This realization dawned on me while I was on a long retreat, so I had lots of occasions to carefully observe what was happening and was able to identify exactly what was going on. But I found there really wasn’t a distinct “landmark” that marked the shift from the first to the second jhāna. The post-foreground-background shift part of the first jhāna gave way slowly to a more concentrated state, with the thinking slowly subsiding during that time.