During my last retreat, I was doing quite a bit of one-pointed concentration, and I made an effort to understand the quality of attention, as it rested on the breath, during or near access concentration. It seemed that the large majority of the time, attention could be binned into one of four categories (levels is maybe a better word) without much doubt as to where attention would fit at any given moment. In order of deepening concentration:
- Level 1: Very concentrated, no mind-wandering (some subtle distractions), what thoughts occur are wispy and insubstantial
- Level 2: The same as level 1, with the additional factor of having the breath remain in the same spot.
- Level 3: The same as level 2, but the breath becomes wrapped around a solid object (or the topological inverse, in which the breath curls around the inside of a solid object. This is the same thing, perceived differently).
- Level 4: The same as level 3, but the breath becomes bright and energetic, and the details of the breath become more prominent.
Level 4 is clearly access, and the teacher I spoke with indicated that level 3 was as well, and possibly level 2 (but not level 1). I didn’t play around enough with other methods of access concentration to know whether this same sort of discrete, step-wise change in the quality of perception of the object of concentration occurs, but I would suspect that it does.
