Picture a practitioner a few months into a serious commitment. The precepts are being kept. Speech is quieter, the habit of acting out on impulse has loosened, and the reading of the discourses has begun to feel like company rather than homework. Then one day something opens up: a warmth, a spaciousness, a sense of being beyond the usual pull of things. The natural conclusion arrives almost before the feeling has finished: this must be it. In a short teaching published on the Hillside Hermitage channel, Ajahn Nyanamoli takes that moment apart with the precision of a luthier checking a neck for hidden warp. His argument is that pleasant feeling, confidence, and unusual experience are not evidence of attainment, that the mind is very good at persuading itself otherwise, and that the only dependable test is whether something survives being questioned.
The teaching starts from something ordinary. A person who is practicing virtue, restraining themselves and contemplating with reasonable accuracy, will often begin to feel good. Life is going better. The contemplations are going well. So, as Ajahn Nyanamoli describes it in the opening minutes, you should feel good. The trouble comes next. Because you are reading the discourses and contemplating the four Brahmavihāras, the immeasurable states of friendliness, compassion, appreciative joy and equanimity, the good feeling gets sorted into the categories you have been studying.
"Very quickly uh people will assume that this might this must be the joy that is the jhana joy... This must be the joy, the safe, this feeling of safety is the joy of metta and of upekkha." (Ajahn Nyanamoli, Hillside Hermitage video, around 1:10)
This is the mechanism at the heart of the piece. A pleasant state arrives, and it is matched against the textbook description of a lofty state. The match feels convincing because the practitioner has been studying exactly those descriptions. Ajahn Nyanamoli is not saying the feeling is fake. He is saying the label is being applied too fast, and that the label then starts to shape how the practitioner behaves. Once you believe you have reached the top, you begin to relax, and relaxation is the opposite of the training.
The most useful part of the teaching is its insistence on what the four Brahmavihāras demand. He uses the word itself as a guide. Brahmacariya, the holy life of celibacy, is named as "faring like a Brahma," which implies a way of living that is completely above sensual craving, because the existence of a Brahma is so lofty. In the same spirit, a person truly developing the Brahmavihāras should be above sensuality, ill will and aversion in their conduct, not merely in their inner glow.
"If you're developing Brahma Viharas, yet are not even able to fare physically above centrality, above desire, you're not developing Brahma Viharas." (Ajahn Nyanamoli, Hillside Hermitage video, around 2:31)
This is a sharp correction, and it is worth slowing down on because it is easy to miss. Ajahn Nyanamoli does not dismiss the confidence or the sense of vastness that a practitioner may have developed. He grants that such experience is real enough, and that it may have grown out of sincere restraint. What he disputes is the identification. The experience is "not what you think it is." The sequence matters: first the withdrawal, the taming, the surmounting of acting out through desire and ill will, and only then anything that might be called loftiness. He puts it plainly: "recognize first is first and second is second."
There is a practical instruction in this. You do not have to deny the experience or force it into something else. You keep it if you want, but you set it aside and begin emphasizing what the actual training says to emphasize. Whatever remains after that has been carried by the training rather than by the story about the training.
Here the teaching becomes concrete, and it is the part most readers will want to keep. Ajahn Nyanamoli offers a test that does not rely on how the experience feels in the moment. Instead, you watch what happens when something presses on you. Do people want to pressure you, make you suffer, provoke you? If the practice is genuinely working, the mind does not move, or moves very little, and does so effortlessly. You do not need to reach for mantras, convictions or psychologizing to hold yourself together.
"It's like, 'Oh, wow. This always used to wind me up. This always used to provoke me. This always used to stay lingering.' Now, the mind was like, 'Didn't even touch it.' ... 'Oh, so the practice works.'" (Ajahn Nyanamoli, Hillside Hermitage video, around 3:43)
The phrase that carries weight here is "didn't even touch it." It describes a change you can actually notice, measured against your own history. The old irritant used to linger, and now it does not. That is evidence you can check against past behavior rather than a sensation you are interpreting after the fact. Ajahn Nyanamoli contrasts this with the retroactive move, in which someone has an experience, decides it must have been a particular attainment, and then builds a story to fit. "You're just building up stories in your mind," he says. A practitioner may have been practicing rightly up to that point and then, out of conceit, fall for the trap of convincing themselves that this moment was special.
The teaching's most memorable phrase is also its most counterintuitive: it is always better to think it is too good to be true. The reasoning is elegant. If a special experience is genuinely real, it will stand on its own, and it will withstand even your dismissal. You can say "it's too good to be true, I'll continue practicing," and the experience, if it is authentic, will still be there.
"If it were truly special, it would stand on its own. If it were truly the liberation, you won't need to be... needing to maintain it through psychologizing." (Ajahn Nyanamoli, Hillside Hermitage video, around 4:54)
He follows the logic through two branches. Suppose the experience really is stream-entry, sotāpatti. Then continuing the practice costs nothing, because the practice only reaffirms it. Suppose instead it is not, and you stop what you were doing because you have convinced yourself you have arrived. In that case you have fallen short, and the conviction itself has done the damage. The attitude of "too good to be true" is therefore not cynicism. It is the stance that keeps you striving, and striving is what completes the work. Ajahn Nyanamoli is blunt that the alternative, wanting the experience to be what you are set on attaining, is simply conceit, and that you have fallen for it.
He does not pretend the pull is rare. Once you feel special, there is little reason to keep training, because you already feel you have arrived. He then turns the question inward, the way a good teacher does. Why do I feel chosen by this? Why am I protecting that special experience of whatever I thought loving-kindness was, or jhana maybe? The answer, in his account, is that the protection is itself the trap. A true attainment would not need your poetic storytelling to keep you elevated above ordinary things. Underlying tendencies would not be able to pull you back into lower matters.
This is where the teaching quietly reframes the goal. The question is not whether the experience was impressive. The question is whether you are honest enough to ask whether it holds under direct pressure. He advises that if you are unsure, you should lean toward the side that it is probably not. Uncertainty, in his framing, is a signal that you are not yet free from doubt, and the honest response is to keep working rather than to paper over it.
Ajahn Nyanamoli names a tendency that he says is found in everybody, some more and some less: to compensate for a lack of certainty, safety or assurance with conviction. Conviction is intoxicating. It feels like solid ground, and it can be deeply appealing when the mind is unsettled. But his point is that conviction and certainty are different things. Conviction is something you hold on to. Certainty is what remains when you stop holding.
"Conviction can be very intoxicating. So, when you're in your own, really pick up your convictions... and undermine it completely through a questioning. And even dismiss it. Because if it were right, it would remain despite you willingly trying to undermine it. That's how you test it." (Ajahn Nyanamoli, Hillside Hermitage video, around 7:45)
He adds that if you scratch the surface a bit, it does not take much to dismantle a conviction built on sand. The difficulty is willingness. Most of us prefer not to test what we have just been given. Yet the willingness to question is exactly what makes a realization durable. It becomes, in his words, shockproof.
To make the point, Ajahn Nyanamoli recounts a scene in which the Buddha found a group of monks who were too busy and too loud, and rebuked Ananda for it, calling them something closer to fishermen in a market than monks. The Buddha then said he would not handle Ananda like a potter treating a precious clay pot that might break. He would test him the way one tests a stone, and the solid core would stand the test.
"I'll smash you with a stone and the solid core will stand that test." (Ajahn Nyanamoli, recounting the Buddha's words to Ananda, Hillside Hermitage video, around 8:40)
The image is the teaching in miniature. Right view, right withdrawal and a right establishment of context will withstand whatever test you put them under. A practitioner whose practice was sound from the beginning would hardly be tempted to intoxicate themselves with stories about how special their experience was, because they would recognize its nature. Whether it is lofty or mundane, the aim is to see it as impersonal, not as one's own achievement.
The final section of the talk returns to the same place. Even the greatest and nicest experience is not to be claimed as mine. Ajahn Nyanamoli warns against resting in it, since the mind that clings to a pleasant state remains exposed to the very disturbance it hoped to escape. The instruction is not to reject good feelings. It is to hold them lightly enough that you can see them for what they are, and to keep going.
For a reader, the value of this teaching is less in any single claim than in the method it models. It refuses the comfort of an early conclusion. It asks you to measure progress by behavior under pressure, by whether irritants still linger, and by whether your confidence survives your own honest challenge. It treats the feeling of being special as a warning sign, and it treats doubt as a tool that, used well, makes realization stronger.
If this teaching made you want to look at your own practice more honestly, the best next step is to watch the video itself. Ajahn Nyanamoli's delivery is patient and conversational, and the question-and-answer rhythm makes the reasoning easy to follow. Note the chapter markers in the video description, which map the argument from the opening scenario through the final call to let go. Then try the simple test he describes. The next time something presses on you, notice whether the mind moves, and whether anything still lingers the way it used to. The description also links to the Hillside Hermitage books page at https://www.hillsidehermitage.org/books/, where his longer teachings can be read in full.
