This post is the first in a series of posts about meditative attainments.
After a period of strong and consistent practice, often involving years but sometimes only months or days, some meditative practitioners experience meditative attainments that are interpreted by the traditional Buddhist teachings and teachers as being signs of enlightenment. By "attaiments" I mean meditative experiences that align with those discussed in the both the traditional Pali Canon and the Mahayana literature, that provide the practitioner with insight into wisdom and compassion, and that lead to lasting changes. There are other meditative experiences that don't have anything to do with insight, for example the experiences involved in the jhanas, or even the kinds of visions that come out of deep concentration at times, such as described in the second Flashback chapter of the book. These are not likely to lead to lasting changes and so I'm excluding them here, though I might address them in another post.
This is a somewhat broader definition than others use. Many discussions restrict the term attainments to the four stages of enlightenment discussed in the Abhidhamma and the Vishuddhimagga: stream enterer (sotapanna), once returner (sakadagami), non-returner (anagami), and arhat, or full enlightenment. For example, Daniel Ingram in his excellent book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha uses the traditional four attainment Theravadan framework, in addition to an "arising and passing away" experience which precedes the sotapanna experience, to formulate a map of meditative development, though near the end of the book he briefly discusses the possibility of other axes of meditative development.
Personally, I don't like the term "stream enterer" for the first meditative attainment. In the suttas, people who become stream enterers often do so after simply listening to a discourse by the Buddha, or one of the monks. So it seems in the time of the Buddha, stream entry had nothing to do with meditation but was rather something more like taking the precepts is or should be today, namely a change in one's philosophy of life, a reorientation away from greed, hatred and delusion and towards awakening. I prefer the term "first path" for the sotapanna attainment, and similarly, second, third, and fourth path for the others. "Path" here refers to the "path moment", a moment of consciousness in which the attainment actually occurs.
Practitioners in the various traditions are generally discouraged from talking with others about their meditative experiences, and most especially about their attainments. The Buddha discouraged monks from talking about any kind of attainments with lay people. As a practical matter, monks are supposed to be humble and boasting about attainments is certainly not a way to show one's humility. Since the majority of mediators don't ever experience an attainment, talking about attainments, even in a straightforward way without bragging, can lead to the arising of envy and other kinds of negative affective states in the listeners.
But as Ingram points out in his book, this rule doesn't apply to lay practitioners, and many people, myself included, spend years trying to figure out what exactly is going on in their meditative practice, and where they stand on the meditative map. Sometimes this happens because their teachers don't have any experience with the particular attainments the practitioners are experiencing. At other times, they may be reluctant to discuss what is coming up with their teachers, either because their specific tradition doesn't recognize the experiences as being part of the standard story of meditative development, or the experience is so out of the ordinary that the practitioner doesn't want to be classed as crazy. All of these have been true in my practice at various times.
The traditions all categorize attainments has having a mystical origin. The traditional Abhidhamma explanation is that the mind makes contact with an object of cognition that neither exists nor does not exist, the nibbana (or nirvana) element which stands outside ordinary reality (it is sometimes called "The Deathless"). This moment of contact is the path moment spoken of above. After the path moment occurs, the mind experiences the fruit of the contact in a fruition moment, the nature of which differs depending on the Theravadan meditative tradition. In Zen, the different traditions have different stories about how enlightenment occurs but the basic underlying premises amounts to the same thing: it's a mystical experience, often hard to quantify or even speak about. In the traditional Theravadan account of the paths, each path leads to the elimination of some basic collection of negative affective tendencies until with fourth path, the underlying roots of greed, hatred, and delusion have been thoroughly eliminated.
I've not ever experienced the basic Abhidhamma/Vishuddhimagga path/fruit moment sequence, but my sense is that what is really happening is some kind of basic rearrangement in the cognitive and possibly emotional structure of the brain. James Austin, the neurologist and Rinzai Zen practitioner, in his book Zen and the Brain makes a similar observation. One tip off in this direction is Ingram's assertion that the observable behavior of some people who experience first path and even the higher paths does not correspond to what most folks would categorize as saintly. These people experience some kind of existential change which they can describe but it doesn't manifest in their behavior, so they continue drinking, using drugs, having affairs with their students, and generally misbehaving in ways that causes suffering for those around them (if not possibly for them, presuming they're enlightened and beyond suffering). Ingram, who claims to have experienced fourth path, says that the traditional account is wishful thinking. Actually, I'm a little less negative about the elimination of negative affective states than Ingram is, and I hope to be able to get into explaining why later in the series.
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