IN THE SUTTA DESCRIPTION of the jhānas, the point of demarcation between the first and second jhānas occurs when the vitakka and vicāra—the thinking—fully subsides. If you’ve been paying attention, you might feel this contradicts what I wrote earlier in the chapter on the second jhāna, where I seemed to indicate that the point of demarcation between the first and second jhānas occurs with the foreground-background shift between pīti and sukha. What’s going on here?
