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Apply yourself with a sense of inquiry, with a sense of whats happening.

How does one lay practitioner female knows that one is ready to take on practice in the wilderness, edge of forest and graveyard How do you get one prepared for this practice of meditation in terms of chanting to remember by heart certain chants, paritta chanting Well, lay female practitioner, youre already in the wilderness.

And these things on wheels that can kill you at the moment, notice the forest is easy after this.

The most likely thing you find in the forest is a tour bus.

Yeah, well, you know, be prepared to get frightened.

Thats the idea, particularly as a female, prepare to be frightened, frightened of the dark, frightened of what might happen, feeling insecure, be prepared to get frightened and uncomfortable.

So prepare, thats what youre going to prepare for.

And in fact, why do they recommend going into wild places and graveyard is to get frightened.

Because fear pushes the mind into a corner.

If youre frightened, you dont find yourself daydreaming, thats for sure.

And then they were really point of it saying, you know, youre very alert.

And then you say, look, theres nothing you can do.

If some tiger or leopard or snake comes this way, youre finished, right As you cant do a deal.

So are you ready for that Are you ready to die

And youre going to die one day anyway.

So are you ready for that The inevitable Do you want to meet that Are you ready to meet it

So these are really penetrating questions, theyre really probe back right to the jugular, you know, right to the nerves.

And it comes home to you if youre in a wilderness, that theres nothing you can do about it.

And if youre in a dark place in the wilderness, where do you go You just sit there.

Thats what thats what they do it for.

Because in that the mind unifies, it gets through all the petty rubbish.

What somebody said to me five years ago is no longer a topic.

It kind of makes things very clear, you know, and what people think of me doesnt matter anymore, because youre going to die.

So your mind drops all these surpluses and becomes quite one pointed.

Because what is there to do if youre on the urge of death Wake up, be alert, be grateful, be clear, let go.

And you begin to recognize fear is about something that hasnt happened yet.

When a tiger rips your head off, you wont feel frightened.

But when you hear it coming, you will be frightened of what might happen.

So you think, well, okay, you know, can you can you meet that

And actually, you know, the only thing youll probably going to be frightened of is running out of coffee, because theres not many, not many wildernesses, tigers left.

But you can imagine it, youre making all kinds of things in the darkness and in the wild.

You hear creatures howling and screeching around you, it does all kinds of things.

But it certainly brings the mind to one poisonous.

In terms of chanting, thats, you can learn subparita chanting, because that gives the mind something so it doesnt freeze.

Theres no point free going to fear if you just lock into fear, into freezing with it.

And theres a monk who was in the jungle and theres a tiger.

So he kind of, he got stuck in a tree with a cleft in it.

And he, you know, to just protect himself.

And he couldnt handle the amount of fear in his mind just snapped.

So he never recovered from that.

So just honestly ask yourself if youre ready.

Prita chanting can help give a sense of bringing up the heart, bringing forth good energy, and entering into recollection of the dharma.

So most of the forest teachers would spend quite a bit of time chanting reciting sutras and paritta.

And you can find them in various books.

And there might be tapes of them that you can listen to recordings to help.

So in other words the concentration becomes much stronger in the second one and it has to, because it still has to become stronger yet.

The internal confidence which arises is a very important part of the second jhana and because of that one should never skip it in the process.

Its strangely enough the one that many people do skip, not intentionally of course, because one wouldnt do that, would be foolish, but because we are not used to having inner joy, most people dont even know what its like.

In fact they probably never even used the word before hearing about the second jhana.

Now here in the wording it says rapture and happiness due to concentration.

From a practical standpoint what happens is that the rapture which is the delightful sensation of the first jhana sticks around.

But in order to come from the first to the second jhana one has to let go of the attention on that very delightful sensation which overrides the emotion, let go of that, let it go into the background of the attention.

In other words do not consider it so important anymore and put the full attention on what is translated here as happiness and what prefer to call joy.

Its a joy because we are enjoying this delightful sensation, the state of mind were in where the delightful sensation was the aspect of the meditation and having enjoyed that to the full we now put our attention on that enjoying.

From a practical standpoint again it very often appears as if it came out of the center here and very often it appears to have a quality of being a little found.

Whatever happens is fine as long as its joy.

Again the Buddha says that we need to completely cover ourselves with it and the body is being used because this is the only reference point we have.

Its the only reference point for what were doing.

So we feel the joy of using us from head to toe.

Very often or for some people it is just a natural progression from one to the next which is of course the case because if one enjoys something very much the joy is there.

However because the physical sensation can be extremely strong it is just as well to deliberately focus on the emotion.

And in other sutras where the jhanas are explained the Buddha says also that recognizing the fact that this is still gross because it is a sensation we now go to that which is more fine and more subtle which is the emotion.

Which means that we recognize the fact that we are not meditating in order to have delightful sensations which is logical but when one is in it one its not uncommon that one has to be reminded of it.

Most people have an inner urge to go further.

However that too happens particularly in cases where people have meditated for over years and never got anywhere at all and then finally get there and then of course theyre very happy and so they take that as a landing point.

Particularly because we have already noticed that they too are impermanent and that although they have a residual effect on us we cannot take them with us constantly.

We come back to our ordinary everyday kind of consciousness.

So it is quite alright to deliberately focus on the emotion which means nothing but a change of focus.

Instead of having the mind focused on the sensation and takes it off that lets that go in the background where it will be and focus on the emotional aspect which is existing at that time.

Because this particular state of meditative progress brings inner self-confidence.

The inner self-confidence arises out of the understanding that here we have a way of happiness which is completely independent from outer conditions.

We no longer have to search for an outer condition that will bring us happiness.

Even if its successful it doesnt last and besides one is a victim because we do not have any jurisdiction over outer conditions to the last degree.

We can make some of them happen, sense contacts, but we can never make sure that they remain that way.

And being dependent upon the emotions or thought processes of other people which is usually the case in order to find happiness with other people is again a kind of situation where one becomes a victim.

One cannot be in charge of ones own inner happiness.

Here we have then found the way to have inner happiness strictly because of the condition of concentration.

Its certainly not unconditioned, but at least its a condition which we ourselves can make a right.

We dont have to wait for anybody to be nice and pleasant to us.

We dont have to wait for anybody to praise us, to appreciate us, to love us.

We dont have to wait for any sense contact to be pleasing or we have to do a sit-down and become concentrated.

And since there is nobody that has a functioning mind, cannot be concentrated, everybody can do it.

Its also a matter of determination and quite often a matter of overcoming some karmic obstructions, but everybody that has a functioning mind can do it.

It is also interesting that over the years it has often appeared that people who do them, the jhanas in the meditation courses, then remember having done them as a child.

When he was about years old, his father, who was the king of the small kingdom, went out for the plowing festival.

The plowing festival is one of the festivals which is still in use in many of the Asian countries.

It means that the king or maybe just the mayor of a district will go out with a well-decorated plow and turn over in spring the first sod and then monks chant blessings.

And the whole neighborhood is there to take part in that blessing.

He went to the plowing festival and he took the -year-old crown prince along who was supposed to also have a hand on that plow to be sort of part of this festival.

But when it came time for the father to go with the plow and turn over the first sod, the son could nowhere to be found, was nowhere to be seen.

So he sent out one of his ministers to find him.

He finally found him sitting under a tree meditating.

Now this minister, having grown up in that kind of environment, immediately recognized that the boy was meditating and did not disturb him, which in our society probably would not have happened.

We probably would have scolded him and told him what he was sitting there doing nothing.

So he went back to the father and said, your son is meditating.

And the father said, all right, thats fine.

And he went ahead with his plowing festival on his own.

When the Buddha then, as he was still the bodhisattva, left the palace and went to study with two teachers to learn the jhanas and was taught what to do, he remembered that when he was years old or when he was a boy, he had sat under that tree and had actually done that.

And so it wasnt all that difficult for him to do it again.

And this is something that have been told quite a number of times by people who then recognize the jhanas, and of course they first have to do them again to recognize it, that this was something they did as children.