Bodri arrives at the last two formless absorptions and does something unusual for him. He admits the words have run out.
"We usually run out of words when we try to describe these various Formless Realm samādhi scenarios."1 And then: "We may seem to be mixing our words a bit or contradicting ourselves when trying to describe this realm, but it's through no fault of our own. No words can really describe this profound state, so we can only hint at its nature using our inadequate attempts, however poor they might be."2
He gives a reason for the failure that is better than the usual appeal to ineffability. "They're all so hard to describe because we inhabit the Realm of Desire, and so our words from the level of the Desire Realm completely fail in characterizing these Formless Realm samādhi in any adequate measure."3
That is a claim about vocabulary having a home. Words were built in a realm where there are objects and appetites, and they carry that architecture with them wherever you point them. It is not that the states are mystically beyond language. It is that the language is the wrong instrument in a specifiable way — like trying to describe a colour with a thermometer.
Which means the descriptions that follow are not attempts at accuracy. They are attempts at pointing, and they should be read the way you read someone's finger.
The most useful distinction in this stretch is one sentence long and it separates two things that every practitioner conflates.
"In the various states of no-thought (no-mind), you are actually applying consciousness in a manner to push away thoughts. In the samādhi of nothingness, however, your consciousness naturally achieves this stage of emptiness."4
Pushing versus arriving.
A no-thought state is produced. Something is being done — a maintained exclusion, an ongoing act of keeping thoughts out. And because something is being done, something is doing it, which is precisely the structure the state was supposed to dissolve.
The samādhi of nothingness has nobody pushing. Bodri's phrasing: "you naturally attain to a realm of having nothing mental at all."5 Space and consciousness — the two previous formless states — are seen as gross and abandoned. "It's as if you're not taking anything to mind, not even space or consciousness."6
This is the same forced/unforced criterion that ran through the dhyānas, where a stopped heart produced by will was disqualified and a stopped heart that stopped on its own was not.7 Here it does harder work, because the two states are almost impossible to tell apart from inside. Both are quiet. Both have no content. The difference is whether an effort is running underneath, and effort at that refinement does not announce itself.
Bodri gives one usable tell: "there are no thoughts in this state, not even the form of emptiness, but your mind isn't drowsy in this visaya as they would be when you are dead asleep. Most people get drowsy if they encounter the 'state of nothingness,' but that's not the samādhi of nothingness."8
Alert, not dull. That is the whole check, and it is the same one that distinguishes the fourth dhyāna from torpor.
For the last formless state, Bodri stops trying to describe and starts stacking analogies. The stacking works better than the description would have.
The name first, because the name is the argument. "Samādhi of neither perception nor no-perception." Or "without thought and without no-thought." He unpacks it: the realm is absent of ordinary discrimination, so it is without thought; but discrimination is not totally absent, because consciousness is still operative, so it is also without no-thought. "Thus you can't say it's a state of thought or no-thought, being neither one nor the other."9
Then the images.
Half-asleep and half-awake, where you cannot honestly say you are either.10
Having forgotten where you put something and yet also seeming to know where it is.11
And the best one: looking for the continuation of an extremely fine sewing thread that appears to have been cut. "However, if we look extremely closely, we can still find the tiniest of threads there even though it is so fine it is almost nonexistent. It's so fine that we really cannot call it a thread."12
That is the state exactly. Discrimination has not stopped. It has become so fine that calling it discrimination overstates it — and calling it absent understates it. Bodri's summary: "It's both there and it's not there."13
He also gives its position and its price. It is the "Peak of Cyclic Existence," the top of the Formless Realm heavens.14 And the Zen verdict he attaches: "Even if you reach the heaven of neither thought nor no-thought, this is only achieving a second rate Zen."15
Bodri is emphatic that none of this is extinction, and he is emphatic because he thinks the mistake is common and consequential.
"This experiential realm isn't a state of annihilation or extinction or extermination or nothingness, as there is no such actual thing in the universe. There is still consciousness in the deepest state of cessation because there is still the ālaya consciousness."16
The framing he gives is not metaphysical comfort. It is a statement about location: "'You' are always in some state within the Three Realms of Desire, Form and Formlessness, but you're either in control of this process — including your actions and behavior as well as choosing where you'll go and what you'll do — or your karma is in control of you."17
You are always somewhere. The only variable is whether you chose it.
He blames the annihilation reading on translation, and the Saṃdhinirmocana Sūtra passage he cites diagnoses the failure mechanism precisely: people who hear the teaching and "make a rigid literal interpretation of the meaning, saying that all things definitely have no essence, definitely are not originated or extinguished." The result is that "they acquire a view of nothingness, or a view of nonexistence of characteristics, in regards to all things," and then deny the characteristics of dependence and of conceptualisation along with everything else.18
The sutra's own account of who makes this error is worth noticing. Not the stupid. People who "have the power to think discerningly" but lack accumulated virtue and are "not simple and direct by nature," and who "still persist in clinging to their own views."19 The error is a capability failure, not a comprehension failure — and it lands on exactly the readers most confident they have understood.
The most interesting outside evidence Bodri brings to these states comes from W. T. Stace, and it addresses the obvious sceptical prediction.
Stace's setup is the thought experiment anyone would run: strip out sensations, then sensuous images, then abstract thoughts, reasoning, volitions, every particular mental content. What is left? "One would suppose a priori that consciousness would then entirely lapse and one would fall asleep or become unconscious."20
And the reported result:
the introvertive mystics — thousands of them all over the world — unanimously assert that they have attained to this complete vacuum of particular mental contents, but that what then happens is quite different from a lapse into unconsciousness. On the contrary, what emerges is a state of pure consciousness — "pure" in the sense that it is not the consciousness of any empirical content. It has no content except itself.21
Bodri's use of it is careful. He notes that Stace "didn't use the terminology of the four formless absorptions" and treats the finding as independent corroboration that emptying contents does not empty awareness.22
Two things worth separating.
The finding is genuinely useful, because the a priori prediction is so obvious and so wrong. If consciousness were nothing but the sum of its contents, removing the contents would end it. Thousands of reports say it does not.
The finding is also weaker than the word "unanimously" suggests. These are self-reports from people practising within traditions that taught them what to expect, collected by a scholar sorting them into a category he defined. Convergence under those conditions is compatible with a shared expectation as easily as with a shared discovery. [PLAUSIBLE — needs corroboration], and the chain runs B citing Forman's volume's rendering of Stace.23
The strongest thing in this stretch is a biographical fact, and Bodri drops it without ceremony.
"It took Shakyamuni Buddha three full years to achieve this samādhi, which marks the highest realm of mundane existence, but he ultimately discarded it because it wasn't dependable."24
Three years for the top of the Formless Realm. And it was, in Bodri's account, "championed as the final liberation during his time" — the recognised summit of what was available.25 So this was not an obscure attainment. It was the goal, reached, by the person most associated with reaching things, in three years of work.
And the reason for discarding it is the same criterion that has been running since the second formless state: "if you cultivate properly you can reach this attainment state, but if you don't cultivate, then it won't be there. Since it's not always there, this means it's a phenomenal realm and it isn't the ultimate state, for Tao is always and ever present and will never ever leave us."26
The scale attached to the reward is what makes the discarding remarkable rather than merely principled. Anyone who reaches this samādhi "can remain in the Heaven of Neither Thought nor No-Thought for thousands of aeons, but after your karma is used up, down you go again since it's still a karmic attainment."27
Thousands of aeons, and then the fall. Which reframes what the criterion is actually screening for. It is not screening for duration — thousands of aeons is as close to permanent as a finite thing gets. It is screening for dependence. A state that arrives because you cultivated it will leave when the cultivation's momentum runs out, and the length of the interval is irrelevant to the classification.
Bodri's positive statement of what survives the criterion is the cleanest formulation in the chapter: "enlightenment is always present and you just re-awaken to what's already there, what's prepositionally behind all your knowing states. That's why we say you 'awaken': you awaken to that original fundamental enlightenment that was there all along, and thus which isn't a stage of attainment."28
Not a stage. Which is why nothing on a ladder of stages could be it, and why three years of work at the top of the available scheme ended in the work being set down.
Bodri attaches a warning to these two states that is disproportionately severe, and the severity is the point.
"If you try to cultivate these particular states, then if you're not lucky in the next life you're likely to be reborn as a stupid or ignorant animal."29
What triggers it is specifically the counterfeit route — "If you practice incorrectly by trying to dim or halt the activities of your sixth consciousness."30 The term he borrows for that is memorable: "this is called a 'frozen ice' type of practice, and is a very harmful tendency in … meditation which must be avoided."31
Frozen ice. Not the stillness of water settling, but the stillness of water being held rigid by something applied from outside.
He also names the mechanism that makes this more than a doctrinal threat: "No-thought isn't right, however, because if you stay in that state for a long time it becomes ignorance or indifference."32 A maintained blankness, held long enough, does not stay neutral. It becomes dullness — and dullness is the definition of the destination he is warning about.
Tsong Khapa is cited saying the same thing: "suppressing thoughts from arising could lead to rebirth as an animal or as a very ignorant or dumb human."33
Take the rebirth claim at whatever weight you take rebirth claims. The observable core does not depend on it. Practising the suppression of mental activity, sustained over years, cultivates the capacity for mental inactivity — which is exactly what it says on the label, and which nobody chose deliberately. It is the clearest case in the chapter of a practice reliably producing what it actually trains rather than what it aims at.
You have been sitting a long time and the sits have gone very quiet. Nothing arises. You come out feeling like you have been somewhere.
There is one question worth asking and it is not about depth. Was anything being held?
Not obviously — nobody at this stage is grimly forcing anything. The effort at issue is finer: a low-level maintenance, a slight leaning-against, the thing you would only notice by its absence. Bodri's line between the samādhi of nothingness and a manufactured blank is exactly this and nothing else.34
Here is the practical way to find out, and it takes about four seconds. At the end of a very quiet sit, notice what happens immediately on standing up. If something releases — a small unclenching, a sense of having been on duty — you were holding. If nothing releases because nothing was held, there is nothing to release.
The second check is the drowsiness one, and it is worth running honestly because the failure mode feels good. "Most people get drowsy if they encounter the 'state of nothingness,' but that's not the samādhi of nothingness."35 A quiet sit that leaves you slightly foggy afterwards was fog during. The genuine article leaves the mind clear.
And then the long-range one, which is the only test that matters and cannot be run on a cushion. Whatever you reached — did it stay? Bodri's criterion applies to everything in the chapter including its highest state: cultivate and it appears, stop cultivating and it goes, therefore it is not the thing.36 The Buddha spent three years on the best available version and set it down on exactly that ground.37
Which means the correct response to a magnificent state is neither to chase it nor to dismiss it. It is to notice that you are the one it is happening to, and that this has been true of every state you have ever had.
Strongest evidence. The Padmasambhava material Bodri quotes at length gives an independent nine-state scheme with the same four formless absorptions and, strikingly, orders the last two differently — placing "Neither Presence Nor Absence" before "Nothing Whatsoever," the reverse of Bodri's ordering.38 Bodri prints it without comment. A discrepancy that survives into the text uncorrected is better evidence that both schemes are reporting something than an agreement would be.
The central tension. Bodri says the formless absorptions are not higher than the dhyānas, merely lateral.39 The Padmasambhava text he endorses says something stronger and different: the four dhyānas are "the shamatha that produces vipashyana … the most eminent among all types of mundane samādhi," while "the four formless states of serenity are pitfalls of samādhi."40 Not lateral — worse. He quotes it approvingly and never notes that it outruns his own claim.
A second tension. The states are declared indescribable because Desire Realm words cannot reach them,41 and are then described at length, with analogies, names, entry conditions, and a warning about how to get them wrong. If the vocabulary genuinely fails, the descriptions cannot be doing what they appear to be doing — and Bodri's own answer, that they are hints rather than characterisations, does not obviously license the amount of detail he supplies.
Open questions. Why do Bodri and the Padmasambhava text order the last two formless states differently, and is either ordering load-bearing? And: if a maintained no-thought state cultivates dullness over years, what distinguishes it in the moment from the unforced version — since by hypothesis neither has any content to inspect?
Absence note. Drawn from pp 384–390. Nothing here claims what the source says outside that range.
Bodri's handling of the Esoteric schools in this stretch is the most generous and the most cutting thing he does at once, and the two are the same act.
He decodes their vocabulary: "emptiness" for the infinite space samādhi; "clarity-lucidity-brightness" together with "joy and bliss" for infinite consciousness; "no thought" sometimes for the samādhi of nothingness and sometimes for something else entirely.42 Then the sting: "But ask any advanced monk about these matters, and they are bound to look at you with no clue at all."43
And the characterisation of what makes it secret, which is his sharpest formulation on esotericism anywhere: "it's not that this information is a secret because the information is forbidden to others. Rather, it's just a secret because people are ignorant of the facts."44
That is a real position and it cuts against both parties. Against the tradition's mystique — nothing is being withheld. And against the outsider's suspicion — nobody is hoarding. The information is unavailable because the people holding the vocabulary do not know what it refers to, which is a more depressing situation than gatekeeping and a much harder one to fix.
He also draws a limit on his own method that deserves recording, since it is the kind of thing a system-builder usually omits. "Naturally you can't make strict one-to-one correspondences of all these things across the world's cultivation schools, for some cultivation schools actually do proceed further than others, and the borders of these various stages and states can be rather blurry in places."45 And specifically: claims that a particular chakra produces a particular samādhi, or that a consciousness sits in a particular part of the body, "are all wrong."46
Set against The Formless Samādhi Belong to the Seventh Consciousness, which handles the first two of the four: the faculty account explains why these last two, however refined, remain states that a self occupies — and the Padmasambhava text's harsher verdict on them is what that account predicts.
Collective Hallucination and Crowd Testimony establishes the awkward fact that unanimity among many witnesses is not automatically strong evidence. When observers share an expectation, a vocabulary, and a framework for what they are about to see, their independent reports converge — and the convergence is produced by the shared frame rather than by the shared event.
Stace's finding is exactly this evidential structure, at its most favourable and its most vulnerable. Thousands of introvertive mystics, across cultures, unanimously reporting that emptying consciousness of content leaves consciousness rather than unconsciousness.47
The handshake sharpens what that testimony can and cannot carry, and the answer is not "nothing."
What it cannot carry: the interpretation. Every one of those reporters was trained by a tradition that told them a pure-consciousness state exists and is the goal. That an adept reports reaching it is compatible with the tradition having supplied both the target and the description.
What it can carry, and this is the part the sceptical frame makes visible rather than dissolves: the report contradicts the naive prediction, and the naive prediction is what the traditions would have had no motive to overturn. If contemplative practice merely produced unconsciousness, that would be easy to notice, easy to describe, and would still support most devotional claims. The specific reported result — no content, and yet awareness — is not the obvious thing to invent, and it is not what an outside observer watching a meditator would ever guess.
So the crowd-testimony frame relocates the evidential weight rather than removing it. The unanimity is worth little; the counterintuitiveness of what everyone agrees on is worth something. That distinction is unavailable from inside either literature, and it is the one that decides how much Stace's chapter is actually good for.
Premature Cognitive Commitments describes the mechanism by which an early conclusion, formed before the evidence is in, becomes the frame through which all subsequent evidence is read — so that the commitment stops being a hypothesis and starts being the lens.
Bodri names its contemplative form directly: practitioners at these states "often think they're enlightened when they're only experiencing states of mind rather than the true original nature, and they would rather rest in these realms then continue to cultivate for the Tao."48 And the phrase that gives the mechanism its teeth: "seductive stops for practitioners who still harbor lingering desires of attachment."49
What the pairing produces is a specific account of why the commitment is nearly unbreakable here and merely troublesome elsewhere. An ordinary premature commitment can be dislodged by contrary evidence, because there is evidence outside the commitment to encounter. At the top of the Formless Realm there is not. The state has no content, produces no predictions, contradicts nothing, and lasts — on the framework's own account — for thousands of aeons.50 Nothing will ever arrive to disturb it.
Which explains why the traditions' response to this specific failure is never argument. It is a criterion applied from outside the experience altogether — did it stay when you stopped cultivating.51 That test does not ask the practitioner to evaluate the state, because at that refinement evaluation is exactly what has been captured. It asks about the state's behaviour over time, which the commitment cannot reach. The only defence against a premature commitment with no contrary evidence available is a test that runs on something other than evidence.
Sharpest implication. The Buddha spent three years reaching the summit of everything available to him and discarded it on a criterion that has nothing to do with quality: it was not always there. A state's excellence is entirely irrelevant to whether it is the thing, and duration is not a proxy for permanence — thousands of aeons and a Tuesday afternoon fail the same test, for the same reason, and the length of the interval is not evidence about anything.
Generative questions.