• MEDITATIVE: Ordinary saṃsāric states of mind.
• TYPE OF HEAVEN: Gods of Desire, Tuṣita Heaven, Heaven of 33, Four Great Kings, humans, pretas, animals, hell beings.

Samatha (is the Buddhist practice calming of the mind (citta) and its formations (sankhara). This is done by practicing single-pointed meditation most commonly through mindfulness of breathing.

Normally our mind is like a whirlwind of agitation. The agitation is the agitation of thought. Our thoughts are principally an obsessive concern with past, conceptualization about the present, and especially an obsessive concern with the future. This means that usually our mind is not experiencing the present moment at all.

The second form of Theravāda meditation is called vipassanā, or insight meditation. This kind of meditation requires concentration (produced by exercises such as concentrating on one’s breathing), which lead to one-pointedness of mind. This one-pointedness of mind is then used to attain—directly—Buddhist insight into the saving truth that all reality is without self and impermanent and is filled with suffering, even the exalted jhānic states of consciousness. This insight, from the Buddhist perspective, gives direct access to progress along the path and to the actual attainment of nirvāṇa itself.

In the classical Theravāda texts the emphasis is placed on the jhānic forms of meditation, though the vipassanā forms are never completely ignored. In recent years, however, there has been an increasing emphasis on practices in which the vipassanā approach is predominant.

Santina explains the break like this:

Wisdom is gained mainly through meditation. After seeing the tortured worms, Buddha meditated spontaneously under a tree, reaching the 1st stage of attainment by focusing on the in/out cycles of breath. Later, he studied under Ārāḍa Kālāma and Udraka Rāmaputra. He found that meditation alone cannot permanently end suffering. This is what distinguishes Buddhism from other Indian schools, especially yoga, because in Buddhism meditation is a means—it sharpens the mind for a purpose, i.e., wisdom. Meditation allows penetration; but the goal is penetration into the real nature of things. Buddha’s enlightenment was a combination of meditation (concentration) and wisdom (insight).