They are all quite worthy of investigation.

The take-home message here is that rapture and raptures are to be understood as they are and related to wisely, accepting all sensations that make them up, be they pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Learn when to put the breaks on practice if the difficult raptures are teaching you their important lessons a bit too fast for you to keep it together, and learn how to open to the wonderful joy and bliss which spiritual practice may sometimes produce.

TRANQUILITY

Joy, bliss and rapture can produce tranqu ility . We can associate being peaceful with tranquility. Focusing on tranquility and a more spacious and silent perspective in the face of difficult raptures can help you ride them out, and just sitting silently and observing reality do its thing can be very powerful practice. There are actually whole schools of spiritual practice dedicated to this. Thus, tranquility is a really good thing in meditation. We may think of great spiritual masters being internally tranquil, and while it may or may not be true, there are reasons why we associate tranquility with spirituality. A mind that is not tranquil will have a harder time concentrating and being balanced. It is just as simple as that. Being kind and moral can help with tranquility, as this lessens the harsh thought patterns in our minds.

This does not mean that non-tranquil moments are not “spiritual”

or that we must adopt some sort of restrained and artificial flatness.

Remember, all types of sensations, mind states and actions are valid phenomena for investigation and real expressions of what is going on.

Real tranquility comes from a deep understanding of all of this, but all too often this ideal becomes some sort of dehumanizing exercise in passivity. Real tranquility often comes naturally, though it may be skillfully cultivated as well. Cultivating equanimity of the kind mentioned later is helpful for cultivating tranquility, as is deepening in 46

The Seven Factors of Enlightenment

pure concentration practices, the second spiritual training. Tranquility, concentration and equanimity are intimately related.

CONCENTRATION

Co ncentrati on we have seen twice before, and we will see it again in much more detail in Part III. One of the challenges of deep tranquility is keeping the mind concentrated. This may seem like a direct contradiction to what I have just said, but there may be stages of practice where there can be so much tranquility that the mind can get quite dull and hard to focus. So, just as tranquility is good for concentration and acceptance, too much is similar to not having enough energy. Remember, balance and strengthen, strengthen and balance.

As these are the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, they apply directly to insight practices, training in wisdom. Thus, the concentration being referred to here is a very different kind of concentration than that used for attaining high concentration states. It is called “momentary concentration.” In the context of insight, concentration really means that we are able to very consistently investigate each sensation that arises, one after the other. In this way, we have stability of our ability to investigate, in that it can happen again and again without interruption, but we are not trying to attain stable states or anything else, as we are doing insight practices.