Access Concentration and the Jhānas

In this talk, Vince Fakhoury Horn explores what Access Concentration is, how it works in meditation practice, and how it relates to entering the jhānas.

💬 Transcript

Vince: So, what is Access Concentration? This is the question I want to bring forward in this talk. I recorded something about this many years ago now—I hate to admit how many—in which I was working on a project that was kind of like a secular meditation-style app. Basically, that’s my whole career: doing these kinds of things. And this project was called Meditate.io. We had a course called Concentration Meditation, and we wanted to explain the basics of concentration—how concentration really works. This course lives on in The Jhāna Community under the course name Concentration 101.

One of the fundamental ideas is Access Concentration. I felt that this idea was so useful in my own experience within the Buddhist meditative context that I really wanted to bring it forward into a secular context and share it in a way that was more secularized. So there’s a YouTube clip below that basically gives my best overall definition of what Access Concentration is. I’m not going to go into depth here because that recording already exists. That’s the beauty of recording something—you don’t have to repeat yourself over and over.

This is how I formulate it for myself: I’m in Access Concentration when the subject of my focus—whatever it is, whether it’s the breath, the body, something I’m hearing, a visual orb, a mantra, whatever object—becomes the center of my attention. It flips into the foreground of my attention, and everything else goes into the background. It’s not that everything disappears. It’s not that there are no distractions or thoughts happening. It’s just that now those things are happening in the background, and this is in the foreground of my attention.

This is a really important shift in the practice, where you start to hone in on your focus. That’s the main thing that’s happening. You can fall out of Access, and people get confused about this and think, “Oh, I’m only in Access Concentration if I’m in Access Concentration for the whole time I’m sitting.”

No. That’s very deep, stable Access Concentration. What you’re describing takes time to develop—unless you’re just a real natural at this and come to it easily, which not many people do. It usually takes time. Rather, in any given moment that the breath or whatever your meditation object is becomes the main thing in your attention—when it’s in the foreground and everything else is in the background—you’re in Access Concentration. Something might be grabbing at you, trying to pull you out of your focus. That happens. We fall out of Access and then we have to remember to come back, return to the breath, be with the breath. The breath might not yet be the main thing in our attention while we’re with it. It might be moving around—50%, 30%, 20%—and then something grabs us over here. The practice of concentration is dynamic.

In my experience, when I’m getting deeper into it, it becomes dynamic. And at some point, we become so focused on our subject that it becomes the main thing we’re focused on. More than 50% of our attention is on the breath. It has the gravity of our attention. There’s a gravity well, and we want to put more attention into it.

There’s a sense of really being interested now in the breath in Access Concentration. It’s called Access Concentration traditionally because this is the place from which you access the jhānas.

Our earliest Buddhist teachings do not mention Access Concentration. This is a later development in the early Buddhist school, around a thousand years after the Buddha’s lifetime. Imagine a thousand years of Buddhist dudes—primarily. There were women in the earliest Buddhist order, but at some point it got too conservative and ossified and lost its radical edge. It became all these dudes meditating in monasteries, probably trying to out-meditate each other.

Then they developed this ridiculous tome—it’s like a giant meditation manual called the Visuddhimagga, or The Path of Purification. In that tome is a definition of what’s called Access Concentration, in the section on concentration. There, they define the state you have to reach before entering the jhānas. That’s Access Concentration from the traditional standpoint. They describe many objects you can use to get into Access—forty, according to the Visuddhimagga—and I doubt they caught them all. Hopefully that Pokémon reference got captured by someone. Yeah, Access Concentration.

What is Access Concentration? Another way of looking at it is that it’s one of the five Jhāna Masteries. One thing you have to be able to do if you want to master meditation is access the states you want to get into.

To put it simply, in Access Concentration we’re accessing whatever we’re focusing on. From there we can get absorbed in it. If you want to put it in math terms, Access is greater than 50%. When you have more than half of your attention with something, you have access to it and it has access to you. Then you can become more and more absorbed—closer and closer. This is the movement.

There’s a visual movement. I’ve been developing this meditation app recently called KASINA, in which there’s a visual orb on your monitor. You can move it, and as you move it closer to you, the circle eventually fills the whole screen. You become one with it. We become one with the breath in the same way—or with love, or the body, or the earth, or who knows, with not knowing. You become one with the state you’re focusing on. That’s jhāna.

The process of jhāna, one through eight, describes the evolving relationship you have with this merger. At first the merger is blissful—first jhāna. The initial merger. Think about first love. It’s like spring—intensity, first beginnings, magical, fireworks. At some point that chills out as we get to know each other, and we become a bit more at ease. We just want to be more focused. We move into the second jhāna, and so forth. The jhānas move through this pattern.

But we have to be able to access something to bring us into this process—into this merger. I think it’s interesting that the Visuddhimagga says there are forty objects that work for this, because that implies there are many that don’t. I have a question about that. I actually have a different opinion than the early Buddhists. I think anything could bring you through this. But why would you want to become one with terror? And could you handle being one with terror and being okay with being terrified?

Some people love horror movies. I’ve never understood this. I feel like life is horrific enough. But some people watch horror and feel elated or something—like, “Oh my gosh.” Okay, first jhāna. Maybe that’s through the doorway of horror or terror. I’m open to that. It’s just not my door. It’s not my doorway.

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