Now the second Jhana is that you begin to enter into the thinking behind the physical universe. Instead of just assuming well this is reality, it's the physical world. All of a sudden you realize that this, what appears as physical, is simply a crystallization of thought. Like this subatomic particle, this electron or whatever it is, well of course it’s the thinking of the universe that is manifested in a tangible way that means, that affects our retina for example, tangible, but it couldn’t exist without the thought that it incorporates. It is thought. It is materialized thought. And a cell of the body is a thought that is proliferating and pulsing and moving. And all of a sudden you discover the thinking of the universe.

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And you realize that you yourself are part of the thinking of the universe.

And so your connection with the physical universe is now very different. When you see a tree, you don’t think well this is a physical tree. Or when you enter into the consiousness of the tree, you don't enter into the consciousness of the physicalness of the tree, you enter into the consciousness of the thought that manifested in its physicalness as a physical tree.

It’s like the universe behind the universe. A universe of thought beyond, behind the physical universe. I say behind, but it’s still so much part of it. You can’t say it’s, you don’t jump from one to the other. It’s all one reality.

Now see if you can get into that consciousness of the thinking behind the universe, behind the physical universe.

And then you can see very well that if you are just conscious of your thinking, you can’t be aware of the thinking of the universe. It’s like, if you are sitting in that concert hall, you can’t be aware of what’s going on outside. If you just let yourself be confined to that concert hall. So in the same way, if you are just caught up in your thoughts, you can’t be conscious of the thinking of the universe.

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And so you see that it’s the notion of me as an individual that stands in the way of my experience, of the vastness of my experience. I have been caught in a limitation. And the way of Buddhism is freedom from all limitation. And so you see that it is the notion of the self that is the limitation. The more I am able to let go of my assumption of being a person, the more I am able to be aware of the thinking of the universe.

And when I become conscious of me, the I get enclosed in my personal thinking. Or let’s say that part of the thinking of the universe that’s enclosed in the section of the totality.