Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. The ninth mental state — effortless, spontaneous concentration, like reciting a memorised prayer — opens this 45-minute session with Geshe Pema Tsering. He distinguishes it from the eighth, where a brief effort at the start of a session sustains focus throughout, then explains the step into true calm abiding: pliancy of mind and body, accompanied by bliss. A crisp recap maps the key transition between all nine stages, pinpointing where dullness and excitement lose their grip and when they vanish entirely. Q&A covers using calm abiding at death (helpful, but only if directed toward refuge, bodhicitta, and renunciation rather than bliss alone), a shifting visualised object as a sign of combined dullness and excitement, and practical advice for beginners to prioritise breath and bodhicitta practice outside retreat. Suited to practitioners already working through the nine-stage framework.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 14 CAR 2002 10 08.mp3
UUID: a5f685ec-90e3-439b-8536-555a0390ff67
Teacher: Geshe Pema Tsering
Collection: Calm Abiding Retreat (Geshe Pema Tsering)
Date: 2002-10-08
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Duration: 44.9 minutes
Words: ~3,160
So what’s happening in this eighth level is that right at the beginning of our meditation session, we have to put in a little bit of effort to refocus on the object and to remember what the object is. But after this little bit of effort at the beginning of the session, we don’t actually have to refocus at all during the whole session. Can concentrate on the object for the whole session, even though we’ve had to apply this little bit of effort at the beginning. And the pitfalls of excitement and dullness don’t really harm us, because what’s been happening is it’s like a process, like if we had an enemy and the enemy has been growing weaker and weaker. So at the beginning we had to fight the enemy and then in the middle stage we didn’t really have to fight because it didn’t have as much power.
And now it has absolutely no power over us, So we don’t have to worry so much about this dullness and excitement, which is like our enemies to meditation. We just have to concentrate a little bit on the object at the beginning of the session and that will carry us through the whole session. Yes. So, because we can do this and we don’t have to keep putting our focus back on the object and it just rests on the object and it is only relying on a little bit of concentration or a little bit of memory at the beginning of the session, the actual mental process we’re going through at this stage is called uninterrupted attention or fixation, that is, able to place your mind on an object and not have that focus broken at any point. So the other thing is that in this eighth mental state, our power of perseverance becomes perfected, or becomes completely established.
We actually generated it in the seventh state, and it becomes completely perfected, or we’ve established it properly, in the eighth state. So, in our ninth state, what we’ve actually reached here is being able to concentrate on the object for the entire of our meditation session without any effort at all. It spontaneously happens and we don’t have to put in any effort, don’t have to get tired, we don’t have to concentrate on it, or we’re spontaneously concentrating, as opposed to putting any forced effort in. And the example they use here is it’s the same way as when you start doing a piece of your practice that used to say the first line and then the rest of the prayer comes spontaneously on. And I said to Ken, ‘Maybe if you’re Geshe-la that happens, but not if you’re me.’ And he recited a whole prayer just like, So at this stage, in this ninth stage, what we’ve actually achieved is what is akin to what they call the calm abiding, which is at the peak of the desire realm.
And in Buddhist cosmology they say that there are three different realms: there’s the desire realm, the form realm and the formless realm. So what we’ve achieved here is the concentration that’s at the peak of the desire realm, but it’s not actually calm abiding. You have to keep that in. It’s called the desire realm’s calm abiding, but it’s not real calm abiding. The power that we can achieve here is called hang on, it’s hard to translate it so I have to keep looking up.
The power of complete familiarity. So we’re completely familiar with what we’re doing and we don’t have to work hard at all. And Geshe-la said, That’s a bit different to what we’re doing now, because we’re struggling really hard to do any meditation. So at this stage, it just happens spontaneously and we don’t have to put in any effort. But this isn’t actually calm abiding.
What this is, is we can concentrate on this object for as long as we want. And there’s no effort there, so it can be for however long we want to concentrate on this object. But if we do keep concentrating on the object, then what happens is the actual calm abiding comes about. The bliss that comes from the pliancy actually comes about. Once we become really familiar with the object, then this desire realm calm abiding turns into the real calm abiding.
So once you’ve achieved this ninth state of calm abiding and you become more familiar with it by meditating again and again for as long as you want, and this bliss comes about, this pliancy of mind and body, the bliss that comes along with it, that comes about, then that’s the sign that you’ve achieved calm abiding. So how we know that we’ve achieved calm abiding is that we have these two pliancies, there’s a pliancy of mind and a pliancy of body. They usually say pliancy, but what it literally translates as, Whatever you want to do, it will do it. It’s like, Whatever you want your mind to do, it will do whatever you want your body to do, it will do. Then along with that comes a bliss feeling of mind and body that comes along with that.
So once we’ve got these signs and we know that we’ve achieved calm abiding, then this becomes meditation without effort and with bliss involved in it, as opposed to before, when it was all about hard work and it wasn’t so blissy. Oh no! Geshe-la said that if we achieve calm abiding then we’re so blessed and we’re so happy we don’t have to go to work. And I said, I don’t understand, we don’t have to work to achieve meditation? And he said, No, no, say for example, Jackie, who is my partner, if she achieved calm abiding, she wouldn’t have to go to work.
And you’d be sitting there going, why aren’t you going to work? And he’d say, because I’m meditating. And then I said, but then I’d have to go to work. And he said, yeah, you’d have to go to work and try and achieve calm abiding, so you wouldn’t have to go to work. Because you have such a bliss and such a happiness that you don’t have to do anything to maintain it.
So to go over again these different stages on the way to calm abiding, at the stage of the the first mental setting, we get He said, it’s not calm abiding!’ And I said, ‘I didn’t say that!’ Okay. So, on the nine stages before you get to calm abiding, which I think I said, yes! And mental state, which was the mental fixation, the first one, mental setting, at this stage, what’s happening is that we get an understanding, recognise what’s going on with our thoughts. We understand that we have thoughts going on all the time and that sort of thing. At the second state, we understand what it’s like to have a little break from our thoughts, to have little breaks in between our thought process.
At the third state, our thoughts become tired, they become worn out, and they cease to come along so much. So because in the first two states, our our distraction actually lasts longer than our placement on the meditative object, but in the third state, our placement lasts longer than our distraction. And the difference between the third and the fourth state is that in the third state we are able to lose our focus on the object, and in the fourth state we’re not able to lose our it doesn’t happen that we lose our focus on the object. The difference between the fourth and fifth states being that in the fourth state you can have gross mental dullness and in the fifth state you can’t. The difference between the fifth and the sixth state is that you actually have to use concentration to get rid of the subtle dullness in the fifth state, and you don’t have to in the sixth state?
And then at this stage also, the becomes less and less, the So the difference between the sixth and seventh state is that in the sixth state it’s possible to have subtle dullness and excitement, and it’s not in the seventh. And the difference between the seventh state and the eighth state is that there is dullness and excitement in the seventh state, and there isn’t in the eighth state. And the difference between the eighth state and the ninth state is that there needs to be effort in the eighth state, and there doesn’t need to be any effort in the ninth state. I need to describe the different levels of the formless realms. Now he said we’ve finished with our descriptions of how we achieve calm abiding.
So we started with the pitfalls that we needed to avoid and the antidotes that we could use to avoid those pitfalls. And then we went through the nine levels of placement that you go through in order to achieve calm abiding. And then once we’ve achieved calm abiding and gone from the ninth mental level, which is what they call the desire realm calm abiding, then we go on to a state that is called the entrance to the first level of dhyana concentration, which is also called the preparatory level. Literally in Tibetan it is this way or no way. So you have to go to this level in order to be able to achieve calm abiding, or to go on to the higher states of dhyani concentration.
And so that’s the end of the explanation of calm abiding. Does anyone have any questions? So there’s the sixth day and the seventh day. So when subtle dullness can come and when it can’t? Now you go, I’m confused.
So what’s happening is, in the sixth state, you’re still developing developing the power of alertness. And the power of alertness is the antidote to excitement and dullness. But when it becomes completely perfected and you move on to the seventh state, even though they’re still there, they can’t go anywhere because this power has been perfected, so it can stop them immediately. And then in the seventh state, then what you have to do is get rid of them completely. So they can’t get you in the seventh state, basically, because you’ve perfected the power of alertness, right?
But they’re still there. But they can’t get you. So you have to get rid of them in that state. And then in the eighth state they’re not even there anymore. What’s that?
So you’ve perfected the power of alertness, which is the antidote to the dullness and excitement. So once that power is completely done, then they can’t do anything even if they’re there. So we have to stop them, but it’s like a spontaneous stopping. They’re there, but they’re spontaneously stopped in the seventh stage. Now what?
He said. So continuing on from that and death, does that mean probably several parts of this question. Obviously, it would be most advantageous to have calm abiding at death Mhmm. To be able to meditate on or emptiness or whatever. Can we, people like us, achieve calm abiding?
And would that be sufficient to take us through a a dying process? Would we still be clear in our meditation even though we were on drugs and or If we had calm abiding. If we had calm abiding, would that go into the further dhyani state? Yeah, right. Yeah.
Would it be enough? Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, that would be fine to get us through the death stage.
Because what would happen was, if we’ve developed calm abiding, then we can meditate on bodhicitta, we can meditate on refuge and everything, which are the things we should be concentrating on when we’re going through the dying process. So if we have developed calm abiding, then we can deal with our death very well. And we don’t have to go on to the different stages of dhyana levels, because Buddhists don’t usually go on to the other stages of dhyana levels. They Once they have achieved calm abiding, they concentrate their efforts on things like emptiness and bodhicitta and refuge and things like that. The other dhyana levels are for sadhus and things like that, they develop the different stages.
So if we’ve developed calm abiding at death, we can concentrate on these different things. And said if we’ve developed refuge, then our death is going to be fine anyway. So if we have developed any old calm abiding, and we are not concentrating on the refuge of bodhicitta and said the three main ones are refuge, bodhicitta and renunciation if we’re not concentrating on them when we die, our calm abiding actually becomes a cause for us to go into the form or formless realms, which we don’t really want. So we have to concentrate on these three things, if we have calm abiding or not. But if we have calm abiding, then we’re obviously going to be able to concentrate on them better.
The other part is only small, but it’s kind of intriguing. I grew up with a lot of cats in my life, and cats have incredible concentration. Uh-huh. They it’s kinda neat. They will sit outside a mouse hole.
We always knew where the mice were because of the cats. Uh-huh. And And they will sit there without flinching for hours and hours. Occasionally, the tail flinch. Yeah.
And it just occurred to me, maybe they did develop some somehow. How do I know? Wrong route? He said, Yes, that’s definitely possible that the cats did that. But he said that we’ve also developed calm abiding a fair few times in our past lives, we’ve gone all the way up into the form and formless realms. And then the calm abiding’s finished, when that comes, and the calm abiding’s finished, then we’ve fallen down into the lower realms and done it.
So we’ve done it all before, as well as the cats. Question? Say you’ve developed calm abiding Uh-huh. And, you know, you’re doing well with it. What do you have to do to keep it up?
Can you lose it? Okay. The question was once you’ve developed calm abiding, is it possible to lose it, or how do you maintain it? Yeah, it’s definitely possible to lose calm abiding. What we need to do once we’ve established calm abiding is to keep on things like bodhicitta and renunciation and things like that, so therefore we are actually using calm abiding.
But if we just forget about it and don’t meditate at all, then he says it’s definitely possible for it to go away. And if we die, even if we have calm abiding and go to the formless realms, at some stage that calm abiding will wear off and then we can lose it in that way as well. So if we develop calm abiding then we don’t get tired, we can meditate on whatever we want and concentrate on it really well. And if we do this then we don’t have to go to work or anything, we can just concentrate on our meditation all the time. So if we develop a pliancy of body and then we don’t get tired meditating, we can meditate whenever we want, not like now where we get tired pretty quick.
He said, you know that feeling when you’ve had a really good meal and you’re sitting down and you’re relaxing and you feel really good? He said, it’s better than that. If we like, we just sat there blissing out. Yeah. Yeah.
Alright. So he said, ‘If we sit there and meditate for our own pleasure, and without thinking about bodhicitta, without thinking about trying to develop emptiness or anything, the first thing becomes a cause for us to go into the Form and Formless Realms, which are very blissed out states. But what happens in the Form and Formless Realms is we use up a lot of our karma, our good karma, virtuous karma points. We use them all up, so that when they’re all finished, it ends up being a cause to go to the lower realms, but not immediately. Yeah.
When I try and concentrate on a conceptual object Uh-huh. When you say conceptual, do you mean a A visualized object. A visualized object. It’s based in a visual form or is based in a Visual form. Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. So he said that, ‘It’s actually your mind being confused, and it actually has dullness and agitation both in it. So the dullness comes in that you’re not using the power of memory to remember what you’re actually focusing on, because if it keeps changing you don’t remember what you were actually focusing on. And you have to use the power of self knowledge, of introspection, to make sure that you’re not changing it as well.
So the excitement comes into it as well, if you’re getting caught up in changing it around. And you say, you shouldn’t turn it around, you shouldn’t make it bigger, shouldn’t make it smaller, should have it in the same size, in the same position in front of you and focus on that at the same time. You have to use both the antidotes. Any more questions? So yeah.
But can be at your navel, can be in front of you, there’s all different places you can put it. So what it comes down to is the thing that you’re most comfortable with, the thing that you can concentrate on the most. But the most important thing is, once you’ve decided on something, you can’t start changing it. Because if you start changing it, then you can’t actually achieve calm abiding. So once you’ve found something comfortable, stick with it.
Just to clarify, is it okay for us to go away now, even though we’re not in retreat, continue the process of what we’re doing, or is there a danger of getting discouraged and should we then just concentrate on the breath? Okay. He said, it’s good for us to do this meditation, but if we’re beginners like us, he said, that probably the best thing to do is after you’ve concentrated on your breath, because if your thoughts are scattered, if you concentrate on your breath it becomes a good preparation for any type of meditation practice. But perhaps the most beneficial practices for us to do is on the refuge or bodhicitta, because they strengthen the mind and develop merit. So if we’re concentrating on them, then we should be trying to do that as much as we can.
But if we can do that in retreat, then that’s best. And if we can do calm abiding practice in retreat, then that’s best.