The Jhanas, Gnosis and Maps

I've just finished a book on concentration meditation called Practicing the Jhanas by Stephen Snyder and Tina Rasmussen. It gives a pretty thorough map of the Jhana territory and their mastery. The Jhanas are standard meditation states that have been known since long before Buddhism.

One interesting point the book makes is that one should not aim for spiritual attainments including Jhanas. I imagine that applies to gnosis as well. One learns to do the meditation well just as one hopefully does in anything else in life. The jhanas arise naturally on their own.

I have reflected lately on how much striving and efforting I have put into spiritual practice. It is an interesting point of view to aim between striving and complete slacking.

I have also lately begin dis-trusting all spiritual maps. They are all well meant to be sure and maybe have their place at some point on the spiritual adventure. I am finding a lot of disagreements among various seasoned spiritual practitioners across all traditions and am coming to realize there's a lot of work to be done in this area.

My advice to self is to take the recipe book mentality with a grain of salt. It's useful to a point, but one must always be willing to let go of their ideas of how things are supposed to go down. There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes one cannot be aware of and one should know that this is the case and be OK with it too.

The self that does the practice is simply part of the big picture: an important part, but a part nevertheless.