"I went through a similar dynamic with lucid dreaming. For years, for hours every night, I was a god, I could create any world, do any thing, the only limit was my imagination. I explored a lot of things deeply, and I'm glad I did it, but it got ... old. It cured me of the hunger for experiences, or something like that."
Reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft ('The Silver Key'):
"When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon."
> This was a fun one. I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying.
As someone who experiences Jhana through meditation and other practices, I can't stop giggling about the fervor with which so many people seek to doubt my experiences and those of others. Helloooo, they are my experiences!! I do not need your approval, I am sharing them for your benefit and not mine. What do you have to lose from spending a small amount of time sitting with yourself, bringing awareness to your thoughts, and relaxing?
I'd have been more skeptical a few years ago about the whole topic, but I think I might've experienced something slightly similar in, of all places, smallbore rifle shooting - on a particularly good shot, the moment of absolute focus that you can achieve as you pull the trigger comes with a sensory void and a slight high that I imagine is at least a little similar to what meditation enthusiasts describe experiencing. I definitely wouldn't be as weird about it as the jhana guys and say that it's like, super sensually pleasurable or something, but there is certainly that feeling of tipping off an edge, and in a sense it is a very pleasant sensation, just a short one compared to what I imagine meditation can achieve.
With centerfire rifle and most other shooting disciplines you're too busy thinking about other stuff and anticipating the sound and motion, so you'd have to be some kind of ascetic to get that focused. I've asked a friend who practices archery whether he's experienced anything similar, and he said no, but that he'd heard from his fellows that some people did experience that. Hearsay, basically, so who knows.
> Nick Cammarata recommends Right Concentration by Leigh Brasington (I’ve read this one too, although I thought it was kind of short and basic)
Ok, but, what if entering Jhanas turns out to be kind of simple and basic? Shouldn't the guidance reflect that? In my experience, Leigh's guidance is sufficient (what he writes and says is very consistent), the issue is generally effort and commitment to following the instructions.
A group of people with a shared interest transforming into an insular community with its own ingroup rituals and subculture then transforming into a pretty traditional and run-of-the-mill cult is a fun thing to watch in real time – and hopefully the restraints on some kinds of beliefs like 'speaking to the dead requires a high burden of proof' prevent it from doing much real-world damage.
During lockdown I took up meditation, got as far as achieving 1st jhana a few times, and nevertheless lost interest in meditation and gave up. Which I've struggled to explain even to myself, considering 1st jhana was pretty amazing like everyone says, but I think Sasha Chapin's comment articulates it really well – the problem is it's a completely contentless, untethered form of pleasure.
Maybe it's useful to distinguish between pleasures you desire while you're having them and pleasures you desire even while you're not having them. Certainly, during the times I was in 1st jhana, I never wanted it to end. But while I wasn't in 1st jhana, it held no magnetism at all. With sex or MDMA, by contrast, my memories of those things, and the reasons I want them to happen again, aren't just about pure pleasure – they're about the combination of pleasure and other elements of the situation. With 1st jhana there isn't any such combination.
Is it also possible that there's a physiological requirement that isn't universal? At some point as a kid I figured out how to manually flood my body with anxiety, with basically the same amount of conscious effort as holding my breath. I've never heard of anyone else doing this, so I've always thought it was probably something like being able to wiggle your ears.
I think it’s really silly to compare Jhana to migraines. Other than maybe getting time off work, there is absolutely no incentive to lie about migraines. No one is going to admire you as a super enlightened spiritual guru and write articles about how cool you are when you get migraines. I don’t think it’s fake, but I do think that for every person who claims to have reached Jhana there are many, many more who just had a nice time meditating and told themselves it was Jhana to be a part of the cool kids club.
This made me think of an ecstatic state I get into while competing in fencing that, kind of maybe, sounds adjacent to this. I've spent <10 hours trying to meditate in my life so if this is an adjacent experience it is probably not via meditation.
>having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while
This strongly backs up my long-held belief that, contrary to popular and scientific opinion, we are not after pleasure per se. We want what pleasure points us toward: Achieving our goals in the real world. But, despite many claims, we would not simply stay on the holodeck forever. After a while, it gets old, and we want something *real.*
> But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. The reason I’m not in jhana right now is that I tried a bit to learn meditation, got distracted, and didn’t keep up with my practice, which is the same reason I never succeeded at learning foreign languages or running a marathon. The reason other people aren’t in jhana is because they don’t believe it exists, or haven’t heard of it. These all seem like good logical explanations.
The reason *I'm* not in jhana, nor trying to achieve it, is that I am extremely cautious about alterations to how my brain works. I am very aware that meditation can shift one's sense of self and priorities a whole lot, and frankly, current-me who doesn't want to be rewritten finds that prospect very creepy, and doesn't wholly understand why people pursue it.
On the topic of comparisons to sex and the question of why anyone capable of achieving jhana isn't doing it constantly, my question was "Why are you not masturbating right now?" (Assuming you aren't, you do you I guess.) As a non-asexual adult man, I have a very good mental model of something which is pleasurable, easy, free, and basically devoid of risk but which I don't always want to do, even when in private.
> But why believe seizures can cause this, but not meditation? Is it because meditation feels “religious” and seizures don’t? Why not just classify meditation as “nonreligious” if it’s going to screw you up like this?
> I agree that many meditators seem to become convinced meditation has supernatural effects. The very smart and careful ones say something like “I know there’s a lot of evidence supernatural effects aren’t real, and this could just be something I’m saying because I’ve fried my brain too many times with weird states, but I can’t help feeling like [description of some very unconvincing evidence] had to be supernatural, take that however you want”. The dumb and reckless ones just go around claiming to have psychic powers.
Asked and answered. The genetic fallacy isn't logically valid in the true sense, but one can't just declare any usefulness it might have as a heuristic to not exist.
>> As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
>> My ethics are a little odd because I don't believe suffering (or pleasure) is any kind of fundamental entity in moral calculus, and I believe that years of intense, constant lucid dreaming plays a large role in that.
> But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much. Maybe there are dozens of infinite-bliss hacks like jhana or lucid dreaming floating around out there, and we just never hear about them.
Meditative bliss on demand is better to have than not have, but it's demonstrably not Earth-shattering. The conclusion that hedonic utilitarianism is deeply flawed follows.
I love your applied rational arguments, about a topic with so much rationalisation!
I would like to add an argument from authority: there are a bunch of provably smart and rational buggers that quietly support what superficially appear to be “mental” ideas. My go to example is
As someone who was raised Mormon, what you are describing sounds like what Mormons would call an "intense experience of the spirit." I remember one time in particular that I felt this after praying. I felt calm, happy and at peace, recognized that I was feeling the spirit, and was happy about that fact, which kind of started a feedback loop where I was feeling more happy and at peace because I was feeling happy and at peace. It's interesting to hear a similar experience described from another point of view.
I did a lot of lucid dreaming at one point but stopped because it was messing up my life. I found lucid dreaming incompatible with properly restful sleep. This made waking life worse and worse and escape to lucid dreaming more and more attractive. This was a nasty vicious spiral. And the lucid dreaming wasn't that great in the scheme of things because I was aware that it was only a dream. Aware in a very particular, gentle sort of way - too aware woke me up - but aware nonetheless. I stopped lucid dreaming and now deliberately forget my dreams as a valuable part of sleep hygiene for me.
I've done MDMA, had decent sex, and lucid dreamed. Sex is significant better than the other two. Lucid dreaming is bullshit, everything feels fake and disjointed because half of your brain isn't working normally, but when this inevitably annoys you, you try to fix it by focusing but the only fix is to wake up. I don't think the concept of fully lucid dreaming is meaningful - if you're fully lucid, you're not dreaming, just fantasizing. If you're dreaming and parts of your brain aren't in consciousness mode then you're not fully lucid.
MDMA is well understood and anyone can do it. If you've never felt like everything's going well in your life and things will be ok no matter what, then yeah, it's life changing. But if you're mentally and emotionally healthy I can't imagine it seeming very good.
I personally believe 95% of reported migraines are malingering, along with the other diseases that get this accusation frequently. I also am skeptical that there is an infinite pleasure brain hack that's relatively easy to achieve and reduces desire for sex, food, etc. - this ability should face negative selection pressure, especially if it can spontaneously arise from something like hunting or waiting or watching the environment, extremely common in the EEA. Why do Jhanas only come from one part of the world if they're realistically achievable? Where are the New World Jhanas? The African and European Jhanas?
If we want to try to draw lines between Jhana and charismatic ecstasies in other religions, then we'd have to contend with the path to experiencing them being extremely different, which undermines the idea that this is a real, consistent effect with a biological basis that is strong enough and specific enough such that "wrong" meditation can be worse at getting you to it than "right" meditation.
On the question of "why would people lie about this?": I'm moderately skeptical about Jhannas, less because I don't believe that they're real and more because they seem to fall into a category of internally experienced, seemingly profound, status raising experiences that can be reported on, but are difficult or impossible to directly measure.
So while I'm fully willing to believe people can meditate their way into intense pleasure or satisfaction, I'm much more skeptical that the whole category phenomena reported here isn't being substantially overemphasized. And to be clear - I think people broadly aren't lying, but I do think there's a natural human temptation to first delude yourself into thinking something is more significant than it actually is, and to then embellish the retelling to further inflate it.
Unfortunately this really does generate a bit of an impasse - I can't image it's fun to be told "this thing you experienced probably isn't significant", but this sure seems to pattern match a lot of other things (people thinking LSD let them talk to the universe, monks talking to God, etc.) where there might actually be something fundamental going on, but it takes more than a few grains of salt to get to it.
I guess an interesting question for people who have experience Jhannas - is there anything about it that seems consistent across people and not predicted by this theory of successive embellishment? Because while I'm not very convinced, I wouldn't say I've ruled it out either and that seems like the way you'd distinguish between something real and counterintuitive (Jhannas) and something that just isn't real (mushrooms letting you talk to god).
I was somewhat skeptical so I decided to give it a try, despite reading that it takes a lot of work to do. Surprisingly, I managed to get it after a few false starts.
I haven't been able to reach that state again, most likely because of what the first comment mentioned, i.e. after experiencing Jhana my desire/focus balancing act is out of whack.
I didn't start with 0 experience: I've always been interested in lucid dreaming, and have tried a number of lucid dreaming techniques which are similar to meditation. Just wanted to post a bit of anecdata to say that you might not need 6 months of focused effort to get it.
I'm glad you quoted Dekans above because I hadn't seen the comment originally and like this whole thing:
"When you see ice cream in the advertisement or an attractive person walking down the street you will still feel desire. When someone cuts you off in traffic you will still feel aversion. But, you now know to some degree that it's bullshit. You obviously might still act on these cravings/aversions. But, the more times this insight gets hammered into you the less likely compulsive action is. There is a difference between "knowing" something and knowing something."
Arriving at that more continuous awareness that one's dance of clinging and aversion "is to some degree bullshit" produces in my experience a substantial improvement in one's quality of life, both because of the reduced suffering in the moment and the reduced tendency to say and do things that amplify the suffering.
Good CBT can also produce this permanently shifted perspective that supports equanimity, but there's not as much depth to that usually as the one to be had through Buddhist practice.
Beyond bliss or other pleasant emotional states, there's just a steadiness and a confidence that comes with being less driven around by one's continuous stream of desires and aversions. I would say part of what the practice does is build other rooms in your house, and once you've built them, you may still walk past them some days, but you know where they are and how to get into them should you choose to.
Tangent re. "I usually hate this kind of thing (cf. Bulverism)":
Isn't Bulverism (and the ad hominem "fallacy") correct in Bayesian reasoning? It seems obvious that if you're questioning witnesses as to whether Alan murdered Bob, Alan's "no" gives you far fewer bits of information than Chuck's "no". The fraction of possible worlds in which Alan murdered Bob and then said he didn't, is probably much larger than the fraction of possible worlds in which Alan murdered Bob and Chuck said Alan didn't.
If anyone’s interested, I spent two years in college getting pretty deep into lucid dreaming. For me, the goal was to use it to help me with a novel I was writing.
And in the beginning, it was incredibly useful in that regard. After a while, though, a few things happened for me which ultimately made me stop:
1. My dreams became less creative. I think this is because being more in control of them meant that my more-creative sub conscious had a smaller role.
2. I was spending too much of my dream trying to remember what was happening long enough to write it down when I woke up, instead of staying in the moment.
3. It was kind of a useless skill. I felt in the end like I was developing elaborate strategies to help me cheat at solitaire.
I will say though that ten years later it’s left behind some interesting effects. In my dreams I tend to see myself like an actor playing out a role. Even if I don’t remember I’m dreaming specifically, I usually know that what’s happening isn’t real and if I get into a bad situation I tend to switch into a sort of “god mode” where I just overpower whatever problems I’m having.
"Chords are elements combined in a way that is appealing, but not because the combination describes reality. Chords exploit the many evolved sweet spots of the senses. They can be comprised of “real” things but prioritize creation of an experience over transmission of knowledge...
...Maps describe what exists. They exploit the evolved need to understand how reality behaves. They can be aesthetically pleasing but they put the task of abstraction first."
Jhana sounds like the deepest expression of the "chord". Maybe it doesn't fulfil the need for mappier things.
A similar phenomenon of the form of 'basic state of experience that has almost definitely been lying around all along that went unnoticed' is ASMR. ASMR is a much more shocking example in my opinion- jhannas were at least written about thousands of years ago whereas as far as I can tell ASMR was first described by Virginia Woolf in 1925. It went unnamed until *2010*. ASMR is not difficult to trigger and it's not especially rare- something like 25 to 50% of people are thought to experience it in some form. I think this is strong evidence that internal states go under-noticed, so it's not surprising to me that jhanna is so ignored.
I think what this discussion is really missing is the role of jhanas in a larger context of practice. They are not there simply to be learned, done, and then added to your list of accomplishments. Jhanas 1-4 (and any subsequent are just icing on the cake) help narrow your concentration to such a fine point that you can then move into a vipassana/insight practice. Vipassana practice is centered on deep understanding, which cannot happen without deep concentration; otherwise, your mind becomes too distracted to attend for more than a few moments or minutes at a time.
All of that to say…who cares if it’s better than sex? Who cares if you don’t believe it’s real? The purpose of jhanas is completely lost in this discussion. The Buddha’s big message was “try this for yourself and see.” So if you don’t believe, try it and find out for yourself.
I am both Joshua Graham (not real name) & the quoted PericlesOfGreece.
I am eagerly awaiting the publication of the results of Delson Armstrong's jhanas 1-9 brainscan done by Ruben Laukkonen and others: https://imgur.com/gallery/rYLJMye at an unnamed university in the Netherlands. Delson discusses the brainscan in some detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn9WlWH3rPE (until the study is published, I think this is the best resource for learning about jhana brain science; it is sub-optimal, but still very interesting).
Few bits I remember from the video:
1. 9th jhana is experientially (not neurologically) equivalent to anesthestic/death (absolutely no experience/oblivion). From what Delson says, the moments before and after 9th jhana are unmatched in terms of pleasure as compared to any other known experience. Frank Yang has said that coming out of 9th jhana is more profound than his positive peak 5-MeO-DMT trip, and the profundity never stops. I had an anesthestic used on me when I was a child, so I remember what it's like to go into and come out of oblivion extremely quickly: the doctor counted down from 5 and before he got to 1 I instantly woke up in a different room.
2. Delson claims to be able to go into 9th jhana (cessation/nirodha-samapatti) for 6 days straight. Tells a funny story where he later found out that Covid-lockdown began while he was still outdoors in 9th jhana, and his friends couldn't wake him up, so they carried him to their house where he came out of the jhana many days later.
3. Delson said that 8th jhana experientially is extremely similar to deep sleep (you can learn to be aware while in deep sleep). He said the people scanning his brain weren't sure if he actually was in deep sleep when he was, because included in the types of brain waves active in his brain scan were the kind that you only see in waking minds. They also weren't sure that he was actually awake (and not just sleeping) while he was in 8th jhana, because included in the types of brain waves active in his brain scan were the kind you normally only see in minds that are asleep.
4. For those who feel the 5-8 jhanas are even more woo than 1-4, Delson makes very clear descriptions of these jhanas in a non-poetic way. The sense of space going away. The sense of clear forms going away (no more thoughts, but maybe fractions of a thought). Seeing individual moments of experience (much less woo-sounding than "infinite consciousnesses", the common term for the same thing).
I recently read in Ajahn Brahm's book that the method of using the entire body as a the meditation object for "breathing" is an incorrect translation of the original Pali, but that method is what Delson Armstrong used to reach 9th jhana and subsequently enlightenment. I've used both the "only nostrils area" and "full body" and have been able to get into jhana either way, but I prefer the "full body" method, just using the nose area feels contracted.
Last suggestion: watch Frank Yang (he has done an interview with Daniel Ingram and Andres Emilsson, but his monologues and Instagram posts are the real gold).
I think there's a wishy-washy middle ground for soft Jhana-scepticism. Specifically, people aren't achieving "neurological Jhana" but "placebo Jhana."
What I mean by this is that the best rational explanation for a real Jhana is that some people can hack/distort your own brain in some way through intense meditation to switch it to a state of consciousness that brings pure bliss (neurological Jhana). I think that's materially different from people who really want to achieve Jhana, identify as the sort of person who achieves Jhana and think they're at about the point where they would achieve Jhana just convincing themselves that they're experiencing a state of pure bliss. Given the numbers of people who can convince themselves of obviously, observably false claims to satisfy their egos, and what we know about the placebo effect, a combination of placebo and self-deception seems sufficient to get people who will genuinely say they feel pure bliss through meditation, even to themselves (placebo Jhana). It also sits more comfortably with "It was pretty cool, but I kept forgetting about it and just went back to finding pleasure the normal way."
I'm only 80% sure that neurological Jhana and placebo Jhana are meaningfully different conceptually. However, I don't think that placebo Jhana is an explanation that any Jhana-claimant would accept so I think the answer to whether people can achieve Jhana is still "no" if they only achieve placebo Jhana. Placebo Jhana (along with its correlate, placebo enlightenment) is my default hypothesis, as it seems way more compatible with Buddhist sex scandals, the guy with the brain tumour, the general slightly seedy dodginess that pervades Buddhsim etc). Also, I'd struggle to believe that placebo Jhana wouldn't be a thing even if neurological Jhana also was, so until we've stuck these people in an MRI it seems parsimonious to say its only placebo Janaa.
"They're all lying" is a pretty strong claim. "They're all lying to themselves" is the human condition.
I was raised Mahayana/Theravada Buddhist (my parents converted when I was about 8), so re: point 1, why don't more people do it, is that most regular Buddhists in societies with big Buddhist populations is that we're pretty sure we can't manage it without losing a whole shitload of external stressors. Sure, there might be someone at the temple claiming to have reached it but most adherents, if they ever get there, only ever manage it on a month long meditation retreat that runs once a year, during a year their business is doing really well and they don't feel stressed about their livelihood, and also being the sort of person who already meditates every single day for like decades leading up to that point. And monks. I'd expect monks to have managed it.
Never attempted meditation personally, but I did once have a dream in which I experienced such intense pleasure that it kind of broke my desire/pleasure mapping mechanism. So I can buy the "I can experience infinite bliss on demand but don't often care to" argument, though I'm still skeptical of the "but the *later* jhanas are where the *real* action is" followup.
I'm honored to have my comment featured on the "front page", as it were -- thanks, Scott. That said, pure unvarnished vanity compels me to point out that the link just leads to the discussion page for the post where I made my comment, not to the comment itself ( https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10017660 ).
I don't really describe my dreams as "lucid", but there were a few occasions where I didn't have access to my computer for a few days, and the result was I would sleep for 22 hours a day. Any time I wasn't eating I was sleeping.
(The dreams I remember, I always have some control over, but I don't actually want anything more than just seeing what happens. People underestimate how limiting one's imagination really is.)
Good on you for shooting down the “it’s all made up” theory. Were you to adopt that theory, I would be unable to take you seriously anymore. Denial of the existence of something I know 100% to be true would be proof of flawed heuristics.
> As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
This one certainly made me stop and think. Unilaterally decreasing one's own utility (all else equal) seems *obviously* morally permissible, even within a hedonic utilitarian framework. Does this result in weird paradoxes if taken seriously? If you'd asked me to write out a formal mathematical statement of utilitarianism before reading this comment, I probably would have missed that edge case.
At first I wondered if this might just be quibbling over the definition of "moral" ("morality for others' utility, instrumental rationality for my own"), but I don't think it's that easily separable—for example, I'm pretty sure it's normally permissible under utilitarianism to make selfish decisions as long as the utility for yourself outweighs the total harm to others. So a moral agent's own utility is still part of the picture, even if we then postulate that the agent is not obligated to optimize it.
Inspired by the link to the review of "Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha", I checked out his website and came across the extensive section of the book dealing with "magickal" phenomena that--he asserts--can be frequently achieved through meditation.
He makes it clear that these phenomena which he and many others have experienced--like reading other people's thoughts, foretelling the future, and telekinetically moving physical objects--are in his view *real*, and are sufficient to disprove our current scientific paradigms.
I'd be *extremely* interested to know what other people here think about this.
Unfortunately, the SlateStarCodex review doesn't discuss this aspect of the book at all. Ingram does have a lengthy disclaimer about how he was reluctant to include the discussion of magical powers because he was afraid it would lead people to dismiss the whole book as hopelessly unscientific.
The fact that he's willing to harshly deny traditional Buddhist claims that enlightenment leads to guaranteed happiness or moral perfection means that I can't dismiss him as a "fundamentalist" determined to maintain all the traditional supernatural claims of Buddhism.
"[...] having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much [...]"
I don't talk about it much, but not because of skeptical people. Think of it this way: I don't talk about paper clips much, either. Paper clips and pleasure are both super useful, but you wouldn't want to tile the universe with either of them.
The image for your thumbnail is very reminiscent to me of my own emblem and a background I made using some photo editing software and a program I use to create patterns for alteration.
I have no problem believing you can enter a very pleasant state by training your mind enough. I just really doubt it's worth using up so many hours to get there.
Sumilarly, I can believe that by trying a lot (i.e. meditating) you can eventuay also end up reconfiguring your brain. I just doubt the chance of the new configuration being 'better' is sufficiently high for the cost of putting in so many hours to be worth it.
Additionally, I've spent quite a lot of time on lucid dreaming, can do it, and it's never been as consistently amazing as described here. I thought it would be but in practice control is more limited, I feel less, and everything is just less in lucid dreams including my cognitive abilities and the world itself.
I'll defend my hypothesis on a numbers basis, despite having no actual numbers: Culadasa is obviously one of the few "bad apples" that lied about and/or resists even the effects of jhana, but *overall* they have beneficial effects on behavior.
*cough* Or, uh, maybe not. I maintain still that there's more reason to be skeptical of supposed "dry path" masters — I'd *bet* some small amount that if we did have numbers, we'd see more e.g. Tibetan and Zen scandals than those in notably "wet" schools like the Thai Forest tradition (which I keep using as an example because I can't think of any more at the moment, so it will be real bad if it turns out those guys are also riddled with scandal); but Scott brings up a good point here.
*****
As outlined in Slime Mold Time Mold's interesting post about scurvy, which I cannot remember if I found here or from Eliezer: it feels fishy to add epicycles to rescue an idea, but sometimes there actually *are* epicycles, so...
...I'll note that Culadasa's background — teaching meditation from a "scientific, progressive perspective" and having largely (half-ly?) Tibetan Vajrayana training — is one I would have been skeptical of before any scandal broke (and indeed I was! I have receipts on the crank-y, weird, but somehow still sort of charmingly earnest Great Western Vehicle forum!).
The former view (progressive, Western, scientific) wouldn't tend to buy into — or, at least, buy into *as much*, on a deep subconscious level — Buddhist disapproval of sense pleasure or sexual, uh, innovation, so might be less protected against this sort of temptation; the latter (Tibetan Vajrayana) has sex all over the place in it, endorses "shortcuts" (using what appears to be somewhat suspiciously-convenient theories about how doing the stuff you'd want to do anyway is okay), and seems to commonly result in this sort of thing.
Additionally, Culadasa is known to favor the commentaries for jhana practice, rather than the original "suttic" form. In other words, he does not teach jhana *as found in the suttas*... although I will admit that there's controversy over whether the suttas and the commentaries really differ all that much; and the "strong" jhanas from the commentaries are very interesting and attractive to me, so I wouldn't have thought it'd be a problem to go that route.
So... If we go to someone who teaches Buddhism from a traditional Buddhist perspective, advocates the jhanas, and doesn't go in for any "shortcuts"... maybe we'd see the behavior we're expecting a bit more?
***
As with the Visuddhimagga vs suttas, I'm also pretty divided on the Tibetan stuff, to be honest. On one hand, I have been pretty... unimpressed with the behavior of a lot of the community, and the emphasis on guru yoga seems like a terrible idea, and having lots of traditions of "crazy wisdom" — where a guy goes "sure I attack people and get drunk and have sketchy creepy sex orgies, but it's because actually everything I do has deeply wise and beneficial effects" — also seems like a recipe for bad apples.
That said, *it's just so cool...* I admit being a bit seduced by all the flowery Jewel Ornaments of this and Wish-Fulfilling Gems of that. It's so elaborated and has so many wild practices — some of which ARE legit, like tummo — that I can't bring myself to write it off entirely. As Scott is convinced, in some respects at least, by the weight of self-report evidence here, so am I; I do feel like *even if it's whacky religious stuff*, surely centuries of study and (self-)experimentation have yielded *some* fruit... if only in the area "how to do weird stuff to your mind" — and hey, that's what I'm after in the first place, really, so...
(And, c'mon, "enlightenment in this very lifetime"? Shortcut or not, I'm totally on board.)
But anyway, that'd be my defense on the Culadasa thing. Now, if a bunch *more* jhana teachers turn out crummy... then I give up.
I'm skeptical... ish... of jhanas. Why? They seem to me like the equivalent of a $100 bill on the sidewalk: if the $100 bill is real, why hasn't anyone picked it up by now?
I agree with many other commenters that pure pleasure, without meaning, does not make for a good life. Even so, people do want to be happy and to experience pleasure. So many people are desperately unhappy/depressed and self-medicating with illicit drugs, alcohol, junk food, etc. If there was a way for people to experience supreme bliss with no side effects, why wouldn't more people know about it and use it? Shouldn't there be tremendous demand for learning how to achieve jhanas? Why isn't anyone picking up the $100 bill that's better than sex with [your favorite celebrity] and the best food and a dose of the most potent psychedelics all rolled into one?
>the pleasure that you get from jhana, while intense and lovely, has a flatness and artificiality to it, because it's totally separate from any narrative content and doesn't have much variety
This kind of thing is why I'm unenthusiastic about hard drugs or simple wireheading, even if there were non-addictive variants of them. If it's one-size-fits-all experience that doesn't interact with unique features of my personality, then is it really me that would experience intense bliss or whatever, or just some blob of meat undergoing chemical reactions, and "I" might as well be dead?
Has anyone collected statistics on what percentage of people who attempt to learn to enter jhana succeed (or say they succeed), and how long it takes them?
Seems like that could be useful both for convincing people that the training process is actually doing something and for helping people make cost/benefit decisions on whether it's worth trying.
(Of course, I realize that neither of those confers any particular benefit to the person doing the hard work of collecting those stats.)
> For example, I've seen people get access to Jhana 1 through a mental question "Are you aware?" "How do you know you are aware?"
> Then observe the actual mechanism by which you validate your own experience of awareness, and stay in that place. That "place" is essentially the location of Jhana 1, at least for a good handful of people I've seen.
Oh wow. Worked for me! So, uh, are there any other cheat codes you can offer?
I can't help but suspect that all of this focus on debating the validity of the pleasurable qualia of jhana experiences is missing the point. I am not myself a practiced meditator, but isn't the whole point to learn how to set aside attachments to the particular form of central-agent-focused cognition we typically find ourselves in, with its attendant desires, sensations, and modes of processing? Whether you are interested in achieving that as instrumental toward some higher good or a goal in and of itself, it seems like the bliss of jhana is mostly a beneficial side effect at best, and indeed many experienced meditators seem to treat it as such. I suspect much of the pushback to these claims within this community comes from strains of utilitarian impulses that place significant (though not necessarily primary or sole) weight on hedonic experience, which would struggle to deal with highly pleasurable low-motivating experiences, even outside of the neuropsych evidence that might bear on the plausibility of such experiences.
I achieved Jhana on the first try, never meditated before. I tell you how. When I was a kid (like 9 years old), I have heard something about meditation. They said, you can learn to switch off your thoughts. There was no internet and I have no books about meditation. I have no idea what is this about. But I liked to experiment. So I though, OK let's try to switch off my thoughts for at least couple of seconds using any method I can find.
So I tried to switch off my thoughts somehow in my brain without any success. I could hold my thoughts for 0.1 second and than my brain started to process incoming information from senses and generate a thought the very next second, so there was no silence of mind.
One day I watched how birds move their head. Some birds have very robotic head movements almost looking like driven by servomotors. They look at something very shortly, than change position of the head sharply. OK, I tried to mimic this because why not. And I found a funny thing, while quickly jerking the head with eyes fixed like a birds do, I was able to shut down all thinking and pattern recognizing in my mind! So I trained this ability and gradually was able with this method to shut down thoughts in the brain for minutes. After that, I ditched the "head jerking movements" method and just looking straight, I was also able to shut off the brain. There are things though, that make the brain start thinking and it is not possible to stop the thoughts. One example is, if any letters are in the field of vision, the brain immediately recognizes a pattern and tries to read it and that starts the thinking.
Till today, I am able to shut down any thinking in my brain very effectively at will. After I read the SSC post about Jhanas, let us try this! I just kneeled silently (I tried also lying), I switched off thinking, as I know to do it almost immediately, focus on the breath, breathe without any thinking going on in my mind. Than go with the focus to a pleasant place in my body and whoa it works! Really pleasant. The other day I tried my second try and already got a tingling and pleasant sensation all over my body!
While I haven't experienced them (yet?) I suspect Jhanas are real, but...
> Why not just classify meditation as “nonreligious” if it’s going to screw you up like this?
That would be easier if it didn't keep coming packaged with dopey stuff. Traditionally the same people who teach it, teach about reincarnation and what not. But modern people seem to get infected too. Even David Ingram, who was supposed to be this pragmatic, down to earth meditator, gives considerable attention in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha to psychic powers and even "casting spells" (your review didn't mention that!), lists them as one of the missing items on his checklist to full Buddhahood, and I recall he even came to this blog to defend them.
On the subject of addictiveness and degree of pleasure from hacking the brain:
If there's an intensely pleasurable, addictive state you can enter by cultivating a particular plant, refining a psychoactive chemical from it and injecting it into your veins, human evolution plays out the same way it actually has. We haven't had the ability to produce e.g. heroin for a significant length of time, in evolutionary terms.
If there's an intensely pleasurable, addictive state you can enter by thinking the right (or wrong) way ... then people who are susceptible to it will spend time in that state rather than eating or having children, and will be out-evolved by their less-susceptible peers.
I take Scott's point that you would expect a "brain-hijacking" form of pleasure to be more intense than a natural one ... but if it's attainable by something like meditation, which in principle can also be done by primitive humans, then I'd expect evolution to ameliorate it, tack on an aversion to repeatedly entering the state, add a tendency to get bored of it, etc.
I don't think Culadasa's case quite qualifies as a sex scandal. Sure, it was a scandal and it involved sex, but usually what we mean by "Buddhist sex scandal" is something along the lines of "teacher having sex with students, with varying degrees of consent". In his case it was "having sex with someone who was not his wife, but definitely also not his student, and possibly giving that someone money that was donated by his students into his non-profit". His excuses were along the lines of "my wife and I have grown apart by that time" and "I considered that money to be my own". I think it's also important to note that at the time he was suffering from chronic Lyme disease and perhaps also undergoing chemo treatment from metastasized cancer (not 100% sure about the timelines here though), which may have affected his judgement (despite being an advanced practitioner).
Like a couple of others on this thread, I experienced *something* from trying the "are you aware?" shortcut (having almost never meditated before), and it seems to be reproducible.
I don't know whether it's a jhana or not (or maybe some sort of partial jhana or step on the way). I would describe it as pleasurable, but not supremely blissful, and not better than sex. It's like a fizzy, excited, expansive feeling in my chest and throat - a little bit like being wired on caffeine. It's definitely more of a physical sensation than an emotional state.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have experienced jhana about whether or not this is similar to what they experience.
What baffles and intrigues me about jhanas (based on only this thread and the previous one; I haven't done any further reading) is that they're a subjective emotional experience but they seem to be categorisable and classifiable in a way that people agree on. The inter-rater reliability gestures towards there probably being something real there, IMO.
Scott quotes a commenter talking about "bliss, happiness, contentment, or deep peace (i.e. the first four jhanas)". Bliss, happiness, contentment, and deep peace seem really similar: like, a priori, I'd expect them to all fade into one another in a kind of spectrum, and I'd expect one person's "bliss" to be another's "happiness" and yet another's "contentment". But jhana practitioners seem able to talk about the first four jhanas as if they're four distinct things, and as if there's no confusion or fuzzy edges between them. People don't sound as if they're in any doubt about which one they've experienced.
To me this is as surprising as if, say, sufferers of depression (as opposed to medical professionals) had categorised depression into four types, with really similar-sounding names like "sadness, unhappiness, misery, and deep gloom", and when two depressed people got together they could talk about which one they were experiencing and about other ones they'd experienced in the past, without any uncertainty or confusion between the types, and with a confidence that A's "misery" was meaningfully similar to B's "misery" and meaningfully distinct from either of their "unhappiness".
(FTOAD, I am not saying depression isn't "real"; I'm saying that if we can't do this clean categorisation for depression and we can for jhanas, that seems to imply jhanas are at least as "real" as depression. Feel free to pick a different analogy: maybe four distinct types of sexual pleasure, or four distinct types of flow state.)
People often impose arbitrary taxonomies on types of human experience, and then argue or introspect about which one a given experience falls into (e.g. "is this true love or just infatuation?"). But I'm not seeing that in these comment threads (although maybe I would if I read more widely on the topic?) I'm just seeing people stating that they experienced the first jhana or the second one or whatever, as if there's no uncertainty about the categorisation.
While I'm open to the claims being true (indeed post inspired me to really practice my meditation more to check it out) I think it's worth presenting the best case for the skeptical side.
And I don't think that skeptical claim is that no one experiences the kind of pleasure described but that, like the aforementioned seizures, it's a rare lucky few who are capable.
And that would explain the apparent paradoxes. I mean it seems like fewer people who aren't part of certain religious movements put in the effort and succeed than put in the effort to do things like regularly run for the endorphins high or learn chess or whatever. It would also explain how there can be an amphetamine abuse problem amoung young monks in southeast asia.
I also tend to believe that individuals who experience ecstatic states during prayer or group worship are telling the truth as well but that for most of us only a weak version is available. That seems like a possible explanation here.
--
But I'm not convinced of that position. I just think it's worth presenting it.
Weirdly enough after reading Leigh B's description of them it seems obvious that they could/should exist. Like, yes, if you empty your mind of thought through sustained focus and then focus on something nice, that nice thing can be more intense than when your mind is otherwise distracted? Putting the mysticism aside, I can rationally see why this could work and also why it doesn't address the Buddha's fundamental concerns, of being upset when nice things are taken away or being happy when they're provided.
I think the best explanation for the people who claim to have reached jhana is that jhana isn't the bliss in itself, it's the ability to convince yourself that you've achieved bliss. Does this mean it's not real? Depends on how you think about emotional states. I'm on team "emotions are downstream of what you think about reality, and messing with your interpretations of reality in a way that colours your perception doesn't actually matter much". If you wear rose-tinted glasses you do actually know the world isn't pink, even if it does "look pink" in some real sense.
This also explains why it rubs many people here the wrong way when people talk about reaching jhanas. For a lot of us our whole thing is that we should focus on reality and try to walk away from our biases and attempts to fool ourselves. To see people be smug and self-congratulatory over their supposedly successful attempts to fool themselves is pretty grating.
"But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much. Maybe there are dozens of infinite-bliss hacks like jhana or lucid dreaming floating around out there, and we just never hear about them."
If it gets old isn't that also consistent with developing tolerance to the experience and thus the amount of pleasure actually felt being reduced?
"But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much."
I think this hits the nail on the head. I have loads of friends I know who would be into the Jhanas if they believed they were possible, and not just spiritual mumbo jumbo. I hint at them every now and again but never really talk about them outside of very specific circles because people just default to not believing in them.
My experience is that Jhanas actually amplify other pleasures, while reducing attachment to them. Learning Jhana gives you more subtle powers of attention that seem to make it easier to really get into things like sex and listening to music. You get the ability to better tune out distractions and really amplify the pleasurable parts of those experiences. But, when you know you have pleasure on tap, other pleasures are more of a nice-to-have than an existential necessity.
One other tiny correction, the resources from Rob Burbea are audio, not video. If anyone is interested in Jhanas I think they're a great resource. Rob has an incredibly intelligent and subtle approach that I think lots of people here might appreciate.
Grunching but I want to weigh in because I have over 5000 hours of meditation:
I haven't read about jhanas and obviously I have never tried to achieve them. There is a sensation though after about an hour of silent meditation that I often experience. It feels like something is slowly and warmly detonating inside my spine and spreading into my brain. It tingles, and it feels warm and good. I suspect that achieving this state has lasting positive effects on my mental state, but that is pure speculation.
Just to say that I personally don't find this state to be anywhere near as "good as sex" or whatever. I agree with the commenter who says that people may be exaggerating. But then again people would probably say the same thing about me so who am I to say?
I am not surprised that people experience Jhanas, and I imagine people really feel, on the inside, that they experience all kinds of spiritual things, especially in times and places where it is more social acceptable. I can also imagine people faking it for clout. Ever since I learned about Amok Syndrome, I have been increasingly convinced that most mental illness is just culturally bound conversion disorder, and a lot of people really just have anxiety(status anxiety of some form seems like it would be pretty much a human universal) and attach those feelings to whatever is a plausible explanation in their life/culture. Anecdotally I have always been shocked by the ability of the people around me to confidently proclaim that they understand their own body on a physical level, much less on vague experiences of consciousness. I don't understand my body very well at all, headaches allergies nausea aches and pains, out side of a small subset of very straight forward cause and effect issues, I have an incredibly hard time pinning down what is going on inside me. I think I am lactose intolerant, pretty sure anyways. I eat dairy all the time, and some times, under some conditions I still don't understand, it seems to really fuck me up, but some times I eat literally the exact same food, and I am fine. I mostly take lactate and have never had problems after taking it, which is what mostly convinced me, but I feel this way about almost everything. It is all just so confusing in here, and I guess I imagine that has something to do with the pattern matching slider in my brain. I think that people experience reality differently, and their level of confidence in that experience is also variable, and so it seems to me that almost any strange human experience could feel real from the inside.
Can anyone speak to meditation as a cure for depression? People talk about how if you want to get off of SSRIs, you should start meditating. Does this actually work? If so, when should you actually stop taking SSRIs? And why does it work? It's it just that you can see your mind more, and choose to suffer less, or do the jhanas cause you to have less depression, or something else?
"The reason other people aren’t in jhana is because they don’t believe it exists, or haven’t heard of it. These all seem like good logical explanations. "
Less sure these are good logical explanations. The tweet said 2000 years, so we should be expecting societal effects or something. Compare sex (perhaps unfair, sex has been known and important to the species for longer than 2000 years, plus biology). Why are people not having sex right now? Well, finding/convincing a willing partner can be hard, which seems a reasonable parallel to "I tried mediation but didn't stick with it." But there aren't really people who haven't heard about sex, or don't believe it feels good, even if they only have other people's reports for what it's like. Is innate sex drive enough to explain the 0.001% -> ~100% gap? Maybe, not sure.
Anything that sounds like supernatural claims is going to get some people's hackles up. The hardcore materialists will be (1) that didn't happen, you're deceived or lying (2) if it did happen it was only because of wiggly bits in your brain, and drugs or machinery will make those same bits wiggle so it wasn't supernatural (3) if you said it was different to ordinary experiences, you're self-deceived, lying, or not having good sex
(That last really makes me laugh. "Well *I* have *great* sex, you poor loser don't know what you're talking about!" 🤣)
Your tyrannical commenter has a good point. I've never actually gotten that much out of sex. and once I finally had it, it was so disappointing I always wondered what was so great that it motivated people to do all those crazy things for it, but then I never actually managed to do it with anyone I was attracted to. Perhaps that is the difference.
Sorry if this has already been brought up. Regarding the confusion over Jhanas being something religious, this might come from the fact that today's religions could have originated in Jhanas and similar experiences (although they have certainly evolved to something very different).
Our modern languages have evolved very much, we have vocabulary to distinguish between religious and non-religious things, we can say we are "meditating" instead of "praying", but thousands of years ago, I am pretty sure the languages didn't always have such, uh, subtleties. So if a person experienced the Jhanas thousands of years ago, they might not have said "I have experienced a state of consciousness that brings much pleasure", but instead "I have been one with God" or "I have seen the light" or something similar.
And when people would have asked them "how can I see the light too?", they would not have answered "you need to meditate an hour a day, keep distracting things away from you and concentrate on something pleasurable, don't expect anything but let it happen" - rather they would have said "you need to pray an hour a day, lead a simple life, keep temptations away; ask and you will be given" - see religious scripts for other examples.
So, maybe most religious founders and prophets were experiencing Jhanas or similar states, and they tried to lead other people to them, using the language that was available to them back then. I think many religious texts and, uh, "wisdoms" could have been meant as some kind of meditation advice.
Of course, modern religions are something very, very different from that, which makes it necessary for us to use concepts like "meditation", because "praying" is something different today.
Lots of these points remind me of something I can do which I think is unusual - with a small amount of effort akin to tensing a muscle, I can induce a pleasurable sensation throughout my body, on the scale of perhaps 1/4 of an orgasm. I found out my brother can do the same, and like me he'd never mentioned this ability to anyone up until then. I later mentioned it in passing to my PCP and he had no idea what I was talking about.
I can do this at any time, as much as I want. Its a (small) amount of pleasure on demand. But like the jhanas, I sometimes just forget I can/don't do it at all for days/weeks sometimes. I don't sit around doing it all day every day.
I'm pretty sure its not frisson, as I have experienced that as well and it is very different.
Can other people do this? Can everyone do it and no one talks about it for some reason? Is there a name for it? Is this a mini-jhana, or a precursor to a jhana?
There are many people who meditate for years if not decades and never experience such states. Two family members of mine, for instance, met in a zen commune in the 1970s and have been practicing daily meditation, attending retreats, etc. ever since. One of them has passed koan study and so (I am led to understand) could become a zen master if he so wished (he does not). I'm fairly confident neither of them have ever experienced the Jhanas as described here, and I'm certain that they cannot obtain such states on a regular basis. Nor do their teachers or colleagues seem to be regularly experiencing such states, or expect such states to be a regular part of their meditative practice.
Thus it seems to me that an important component of what the Jhanas are or may mean seems to be missing from this discussion. Namely, whatever the Jhanas are, they are rare and (appear to me to be) unrepresentative of meditators in general.
I've done lucid dreaming, along the lines of "summon your ideal sexual partner and have sex with them" and it is much less pleasurable than IRL sex. If I get too excited I wake up. That's possibly one reason why people don't do more lucid dreaming.
If I just close my eyes and try to be happy, I can make myself almost orgasmically happy in 20 seconds, without having ever studied meditation. I wonder if this is the first Jhana.
No offense, and this is probably a bad argument, but the descriptions of higher Jhana levels remind me of Scientology's OT levels, which are just sci-fi written by some charlatan, and there are lots of otherwise sane people who genuinely believe they've reached OT levels. I'll bet people who try hard enough can conform their experiences/memories of meditation to any arbitrary levels a culture expects them to reach. e.g.: Jhana 69: the sensation of 69ing Elon Musk in zero-gravity after humanity is a multiplanetary species with good AGI and no further X-risks and nothing to do but enjoy life. I'm sure somebody could go to a quiet place and close their eyes and have that fantasy in great detail and enjoy it but that wouldn't make it a level in some objective system.
I believe Jhana exists *now*, but I definitely didn't in your previous post. You've presented it in a way that essentially was maximally sketchy.
"Buddhists say..." great start if you want me to think something is wrong.
"Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. [...]"
OK, so now you are saying Jhana exists to the same extent that Enlightenment exists (i.e. it doesn't). Got it, you are trying to say Jhana does not exist. Understood.
Then you go into Nick's tweets, and his description just sounds *super* fake. Complete with the implication that he still likes sex, just not *casual* sex. I mean, what? Most people in the world don't like casual sex; they prefer some romantic bonding first (just ask most women). The average number of sexual partners is, like, 6, so most people in practice just don't have much casual sex. It's not special not to seek casual sex!
Notably absent is any claim that Nick no longer masturbates. Did anyone else catch this? I assume Nick still masturbates at least when away from sexual partner(s).
Now, OK, if the claim is that you can futz with your brain via meditation until you reach a bliss state, and there's a bajillion witnesses attesting this is true, I believe it. But that's not what you started with, and it feels weird to make an argument of the form "Buddhists say..." and then complain when people are skeptical.
Are some of these jhanas simply a variant on the "flow" state, also known as being "in the zone", that happens when you're strongly focused on executing a skill to the exclusion of everything else, as commonly experienced by athletes, musicians, and video game players?
Hey, can anyone recommend a rationalist-friendly teacher for this kind of stuff (insight, concentration/jhana, etc)? I’ve looked a little, but never found someone to work with via voice chat.
>A few people have started speculating on why people are so reluctant to believe jhanas.
Well, here is one reason: People who keep going on on how jhanas are so awesome sound bit too similar to that not-exactly-your-friend who keeps telling you how awesome weed/MDMA/opening up your relationship/drinking binges/grinding your own coffee/potato diet/traveling/rock climbing/not having kids/having kids/GURPS [1] are and how you are missing out. You can smell his scorn (it usually -- but not always -- is a "he") at your square boring lifestyle choices when he feigns politely "you do you" [2] after you politely tell you are not interested (and you know the topic is going to come up again next Saturday as long as you hang out together).
[1] Non-exhaustive list of activities without any consideration of how they rank on the Oh-My-Mohs scale of blissful experiences, but I for one like to think the each pushy person is overrating the respective experience they are gushing about.
[2] Picture in your mind the aliens guy meme, but replace the text with following: "I am not saying you are missing out ... but you are missing out".
Regarding lucid dreaming, I have a friend who has a problem with what's called 'maladaptive daydreaming', in a way that operated kind of like a drug or video game addiction. Basically the fantasy worlds of his mind are so much more appealing than their real life that they do it compulsively, and every hour they aren't doing it feels like wasted time.
Are all of these different states of Jhana a human universal or more a cultural conditional? Would a human doing meditative exercises on their own with no preconception arrive at the same system, up to isomorphism?
Priming is obviously a thing. Telling a human that they shall see a vision of dread Cthulhu will have an influence on the probability of that outcome.
I suspect that most schools of meditation do not even bother with control groups and double blind experiments. :-)
How many distinct states of human consciousness are there anyhow? From my mundane experience, there are quite a few (continuous) axes (joy, exhaustion, arousal, depersonalization, pain, panic, etc) and some linear combinations of them might deserve their own word, but most of them don't: "Exhausted joy mixed with a hint of arousal" does not need a label any more than the color 255*(r,g,b)=(63,255,0) needs one. ("Harlequin", btw.)
From the distinct descriptions, these meditative states seem more like the (clearly separate) doors of the Mansus in Cultist Simulator than any particular setting on the dozen state variables I would perhaps use to describe macro state of the human mind.
Off-topic:
Could substack perhaps save typed responses locally using cookies and javascript? It is not like the are adverse to the use of either technology. Typing in an external editor (emacs, once laughed at for its resource consumption) because there is a 20% chance that the substack page will get out-of-memory-killed every time I open a wikipedia tab is getting really old really fast. In the alternative, I would also take recommendations for browser plugins to accomplish that.
"If orgasms and jhana are both very good, would orgasm during jhana be super-amazing? I tested this out with a romantic partner who is an experienced meditator. ..."
This is what I come here for - information you can't find anywhere else. Thank you Scott.
...I didn’t read any models for what the stages/forms are actually like when reading the first ACX post about them, merely speculated about the potential therapeutic usages with addiction reduction, but after reading them linked here, I have a lot of questions. I consider myself a novice meditator- I don’t follow any particular guidelines and even went back to some pre-meditating basics my partner recommended recently- yet I have had experiences similar to what Mishra describes for the first, third, and fifth jhana.
I get extremely bad "stress headaches" when I am not managing my sleep/stress well. As much as a couple times a month until I figured out the triggers, and still a couple times a year. And I still don't believe 90% of the reports of "migranes".
In my experience, I get addicted to things that serve as an escape. Things that have the power to come into my brain kicking and punching out the shallow suffering or the anxious narrator in my head.
If being calm and disciplined and accepting and introspective is a pre-requisite for some intense positive experience, that doesn't work. It's like the advice to lonely men that you have to be happy being alone before you are ready for a romantic partner -- kinda defeats the purpose.
How people describe the euphoria achieved through Jhana 1 sounds similar to an effect I've been able to achieve since I was a child while trying (and obviously failing) to learn telekinesis.
I close my eyes and I build up tension in my brain (even though my brain isn't able to be tensed) and then I release it and hold (but not hold?) onto the feeling of relief and manipulate it in a way that it spreads throughout my body. Like tensing your arm without performing the act.
I imagine it works in a similar way to the body transfer illusion. I'm exploiting some dumb flaw in my brain by trying to do something it's incapable of doing and by doing that I'm able to semi-consciously tap into the behind-the-scenes part of the normal brain function of tension->release->pleasure.
But the pleasure is entirely hollow unless you ascribe meaning to it. As a kid, I thought I was tapping into something mystical and powerful, which enhanced the experience by magnitudes and filled me with adrenaline and a sense of mystery and wonder, but now it's just an experience devoid of attachment. Like mentally picturing a vibrant red. I can do that, but so what? It can't compare with a vibrant red I see in the real world with all the contexts surrounding it, like a red dress on a beautiful woman. It's pleasure devoid of context. Even the pleasure you get from drugs has context.
How would we evaluate claims of "speaking in tongues" (which may have just meant being a polyglot) and the ability to translate ostensible "tongue speaking" vis a vis the evaluation of jhanas?
The question of migraine claims came up. But there are objective ways to distinguish a migraine from some other kind of headache or from purely psychosomatic claims. People do lie about migraines or self-diagnose incorrectly.
There may also be a useful distinction between malingering and factitious disorder. There could be lying about jhanas as a specific con to get people to buy books or enroll in classes and there could be an exaggeration of ostensibly achieved states as an intentional or unintentional means of self-aggrandizement or attention seeking behavior.
I have been involved in thousands of claims of injury. There is exaggeration and sometimes outright fabrication.
In Maryland law, for example, the test for purely emotional claims of injury as been recognized by the Courts as viable when "it is capable of objective determination." What does that mean? Good question. But it certainly means more than the subjective statements of a claimant. Expert medical testimony is required. And a question that astute (in my estimation) attorneys will ask a medical expert: is there a way to tell the difference between an actor pretending to make the claims and a claimant who actual has this emotional injury.
Can we tell the difference between an actor claiming to have (is have the right verb?) jhanas and a person who has actually experienced jhanas.
Is there a way to falsify the hypothesis? It does not seem to me that has been properly investigated.
The one fMRI study is very problematic for the same reason that Clever Hans is problematic. It is a case study of 1 person! "At the time of testing, this subject was to our knowledge the only person in the US who had the requisite training in jhana who was willing to submit to the experimental protocol." The subject signaled with double tap - kind of just like Clever Hans.
Maybe it's a thing, maybe it's not. Meditation practices are not without dangers. "Zen sickness." We should not push that under the rug.
Wouldn't this also be based on a person's views on life? If one of your principle values is to make the world a better place, time spent in meditation is time you aren't spending eg. feeding the homeless.
> [In response to a claim that thousands of people claim to have reached jhana:] Thousands of people have also claimed to be able to speak to the dead, or perceive things over long distances, or hear god telling them what to do.
This is such a weird response. Yes people have claimed to be able to speak to the dead. The ones that sincerely believe it no doubt have some kind of *experience that implies they are speaking to the dead*. You can doubt that their experience is an accurate reflection of what's happening, but you can't doubt the existence of the experience itself. For jhanas, the self-report is about the experience itself, so there is no reason to doubt such self-reported experiences.
One interesting direction that I've discovered as I dug further -- I've heard it reported by Jhana practitioners that the sensation of ecstasy in Jhana ("piti") seems to be the same thing as (or at least very similar to) the experience of "frisson"/chills when listening to music, which has in turn also been connected to the euphoric states produced by ASMR. These areas have been studied a bit more than Jhana (which isn't saying much and it seems they are not well-understood). So perhaps we could get more data points by looking at the studies done on these phenomena too; for example, do we see the same patterns of neural activity? If musical frisson is euphoric, why doesn't this trigger addictive behaviors? It seems to be a similar quesiton to the one you originally posed on Jhana.
For example Salimpoor et. al. 2011 investigates frisson with PET and MRI (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21217764/), and finds activation in the Caudate preceding chills, and the NAc during the experience of peak emotional response. The discussion in that article is very interesting (but alas a bit above my pay grade):
> One explanation for this phenomenon is that it is related to enhancement of emotions. The emotions induced by music are evoked, among other things, by temporal phenomena, such as expectations, delay, tension, resolution, prediction, surprise and anticipation. Indeed, we found a temporal dissociation between distinct regions of the striatum while listening to pleasurable music. The combined psychophysiological, neurochemical and hemodynamic procedure that we used revealed that peaks of ANS activity that reflect the experience of the most intense emotional moments are associated with dopamine release in the NAcc. This region has been implicated in the euphoric component of psychostimulants such as cocaine and is highly interconnected with limbic regions that mediate emotional responses, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. In contrast, immediately before the climax of emotional responses there was evidence for relatively greater dopamine activity in the caudate. This subregion of the striatum is interconnected with sensory, motor and associative regions of the brain and has been typically implicated in learning of stimulusresponse associations and in mediating the reinforcing qualities of rewarding stimuli such as food. Our findings indicate that a sense of emotional expectation, prediction and anticipation in response to abstract pleasure can also result in dopamine release, but primarily in the dorsal striatum. Previous studies have found that amphetamine induced dopamine release in the NAcc spreads to more dorsal regions after repeated exposure to the drug, which suggests that this area may be involved in improved predictability and anticipation of a reward. Similarly, previous studies involving rewards such as food and smoking that contain a number of contextual predicting cues (for example, odor and taste) also found dorsal striatum dopamine release. Conversely, in studies in which there were no contextual cues or experience with the drugs involved, dopamine release was largely observed in the ventral striatum. Finally, evidence from animal research also suggests that, as rewards become better predicted, the responses that initiated in the ventral regions move more dorsally in the striatum. These results are consistent with a model in which repeated exposure to rewards associated with a specific context gradually shift the response from ventral to dorsal and further suggest that contextual cues that allow prediction of a reward, in our case the sequences of tones leading up to the peak pleasure moments, may also act as reward predictors mediated via the dorsal striatum.
This result gives more detail than Hagerty et. al. 2013, which didn't do PET scanning.
This is interesting to ponder; it seems quite plausible to me that there are different mechanisms at work in the initial production of these ecstatic states from music vs. Jhana (say, perhaps the Caudate is not involved in Jhana?). Indeed this must be so at some point, since in one case you're hearing music and in another you're concentrating without music; these are two distinct activities upstream of the euphoria. But then at some point downstream they merge, at the latest in the NAc into the same pattern of brain activity. However it's not ruled out that the Caudate could be involved in Jhana too, so I suppose a PET + fMRI study would be what you want to explore this further?
> The notion that dopamine can be released in anticipation of an abstract reward (a series of tones) has important implications for understanding how music has become pleasurable. However, the precise source of the anticipation requires further investigation. A sense of anticipation may arise through one’s familiarity with the rules that underlie musical structure, such that listeners are anticipating the next note that may violate or confirm their expectations, in turn leading to emotional arousal, or alternatively it may arise through familiarity with a specific piece and knowing that a particularly pleasant section is coming up
This doesn't sound out of place referring to Jhana instead of music, from my readings.
How do people typically react to first jhana physically? Like, does it tend to make you smile? Laugh? Cry? Moan? Jump up and down? Go limp and collapse? Shake and tremble?
I'm sorry, did I do something to offend you by highlighting the personal bias based on your personal experience, while sharing my own experience that is contra-your perception of the experiences of other? If so, I don't know what did it or made you feel the need to turn my (intended to be) compassionate invitation into a jab at my reality. You can simply decline the invitation.
Maybe I was just bad at it, but even when I was lucid dreaming almost every night, I definitely wouldn't call it "infinite bliss". It was fun, but I've had equal or greater amounts of fun while awake.
The big issues IME are a) you're never *entirely* lucid, you're always kind of dozy and stupid
in the usual how-did-I-not-notice-thar way of dreams because you are ultimately asleep, and b) dreams are not actually the kind of high-fidelity a simulation as you may initially assume, and if you've practiced lucid dreaming you've gotten much better at seeing the seams. You're not actually an omnipotent god, you're just lying there in bed *picturing* all the cool things you *would* do as a god in slightly more vivid detail than while awake.
It seems a bad sign that no one would ever be able to tell a person is "enlightened" without the person talking a lot about it as if they are. Seriously, no one's ever found any behavioral correlates or special skills linked to this phenomenon? That just doesn't bode well at all.
If I've spent thousands of hours meditating over years and years, it's very much in my interest to explain why it wasn't a complete waste of time. Just saying.
Even with the jhanas... This chap roon claims it's a wonder that these things have been known about for thousands of years, and yet almost no one goes on and finds them. It's not that much of a wonder. Spending an hour or two a day for several months or more is a huge investment and for all you know it won't happen for you at all. People who *do* claim they access the jhanas don't have any discernible benefit from it other than the claims they make. So like... yeah...
If someone could invent a way to get there much quicker with much less risk, great. I'm 100% going to do it. I sense, however, that those who claim to have accessed these states would be quite sour about the notion of others getting there without a lot of masochistic discipline. Also a bad sign.
>Jhnana is literally worthless. What good is an eon of being immersed in bliss if when you emerge you still haven't figured out what this place is all about?. It's ignoble to seek bliss for yourself, ignoring the darkness and suffering of others. Jhnana up to the fourth is actually an obstacle.
That's epic. Basically what I believe. This is the problem with eastern religions in general; this total collapse into the mush of undifferentiated subjectivity. The real world is out there, not within us.
Also, to your point about believing what people say—why not believe what people say about prayer? That in prayer they experience a real experience of connection with God? Nothing is more human than that connection, it's virtually a cultural universal. Surely worth trusting as much as Jhana.
Wow I just experienced it after reading your article. Can definitely confirm that it is real. Exactly as described here: https://www.lionsroar.com/entering-the-jhanas/ just took half a dozen attempts, although I guess it may be pre-jhana piti as they describe it. I have been meditating on and off for basically my whole life and never knew this was a possibility. Thank you so much for brining it to my attention!
The postrat Discord thing is missing a link.
"I went through a similar dynamic with lucid dreaming. For years, for hours every night, I was a god, I could create any world, do any thing, the only limit was my imagination. I explored a lot of things deeply, and I'm glad I did it, but it got ... old. It cured me of the hunger for experiences, or something like that."
Reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft ('The Silver Key'):
"When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon."
> This was a fun one. I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying.
As someone who experiences Jhana through meditation and other practices, I can't stop giggling about the fervor with which so many people seek to doubt my experiences and those of others. Helloooo, they are my experiences!! I do not need your approval, I am sharing them for your benefit and not mine. What do you have to lose from spending a small amount of time sitting with yourself, bringing awareness to your thoughts, and relaxing?
I'd have been more skeptical a few years ago about the whole topic, but I think I might've experienced something slightly similar in, of all places, smallbore rifle shooting - on a particularly good shot, the moment of absolute focus that you can achieve as you pull the trigger comes with a sensory void and a slight high that I imagine is at least a little similar to what meditation enthusiasts describe experiencing. I definitely wouldn't be as weird about it as the jhana guys and say that it's like, super sensually pleasurable or something, but there is certainly that feeling of tipping off an edge, and in a sense it is a very pleasant sensation, just a short one compared to what I imagine meditation can achieve.
With centerfire rifle and most other shooting disciplines you're too busy thinking about other stuff and anticipating the sound and motion, so you'd have to be some kind of ascetic to get that focused. I've asked a friend who practices archery whether he's experienced anything similar, and he said no, but that he'd heard from his fellows that some people did experience that. Hearsay, basically, so who knows.
> Nick Cammarata recommends Right Concentration by Leigh Brasington (I’ve read this one too, although I thought it was kind of short and basic)
Ok, but, what if entering Jhanas turns out to be kind of simple and basic? Shouldn't the guidance reflect that? In my experience, Leigh's guidance is sufficient (what he writes and says is very consistent), the issue is generally effort and commitment to following the instructions.
A group of people with a shared interest transforming into an insular community with its own ingroup rituals and subculture then transforming into a pretty traditional and run-of-the-mill cult is a fun thing to watch in real time – and hopefully the restraints on some kinds of beliefs like 'speaking to the dead requires a high burden of proof' prevent it from doing much real-world damage.
During lockdown I took up meditation, got as far as achieving 1st jhana a few times, and nevertheless lost interest in meditation and gave up. Which I've struggled to explain even to myself, considering 1st jhana was pretty amazing like everyone says, but I think Sasha Chapin's comment articulates it really well – the problem is it's a completely contentless, untethered form of pleasure.
Maybe it's useful to distinguish between pleasures you desire while you're having them and pleasures you desire even while you're not having them. Certainly, during the times I was in 1st jhana, I never wanted it to end. But while I wasn't in 1st jhana, it held no magnetism at all. With sex or MDMA, by contrast, my memories of those things, and the reasons I want them to happen again, aren't just about pure pleasure – they're about the combination of pleasure and other elements of the situation. With 1st jhana there isn't any such combination.
Is it also possible that there's a physiological requirement that isn't universal? At some point as a kid I figured out how to manually flood my body with anxiety, with basically the same amount of conscious effort as holding my breath. I've never heard of anyone else doing this, so I've always thought it was probably something like being able to wiggle your ears.
I think it’s really silly to compare Jhana to migraines. Other than maybe getting time off work, there is absolutely no incentive to lie about migraines. No one is going to admire you as a super enlightened spiritual guru and write articles about how cool you are when you get migraines. I don’t think it’s fake, but I do think that for every person who claims to have reached Jhana there are many, many more who just had a nice time meditating and told themselves it was Jhana to be a part of the cool kids club.
This made me think of an ecstatic state I get into while competing in fencing that, kind of maybe, sounds adjacent to this. I've spent <10 hours trying to meditate in my life so if this is an adjacent experience it is probably not via meditation.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4857.msg171497.html#msg171497
>having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while
This strongly backs up my long-held belief that, contrary to popular and scientific opinion, we are not after pleasure per se. We want what pleasure points us toward: Achieving our goals in the real world. But, despite many claims, we would not simply stay on the holodeck forever. After a while, it gets old, and we want something *real.*
> But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. The reason I’m not in jhana right now is that I tried a bit to learn meditation, got distracted, and didn’t keep up with my practice, which is the same reason I never succeeded at learning foreign languages or running a marathon. The reason other people aren’t in jhana is because they don’t believe it exists, or haven’t heard of it. These all seem like good logical explanations.
The reason *I'm* not in jhana, nor trying to achieve it, is that I am extremely cautious about alterations to how my brain works. I am very aware that meditation can shift one's sense of self and priorities a whole lot, and frankly, current-me who doesn't want to be rewritten finds that prospect very creepy, and doesn't wholly understand why people pursue it.
On the topic of comparisons to sex and the question of why anyone capable of achieving jhana isn't doing it constantly, my question was "Why are you not masturbating right now?" (Assuming you aren't, you do you I guess.) As a non-asexual adult man, I have a very good mental model of something which is pleasurable, easy, free, and basically devoid of risk but which I don't always want to do, even when in private.
> But why believe seizures can cause this, but not meditation? Is it because meditation feels “religious” and seizures don’t? Why not just classify meditation as “nonreligious” if it’s going to screw you up like this?
> I agree that many meditators seem to become convinced meditation has supernatural effects. The very smart and careful ones say something like “I know there’s a lot of evidence supernatural effects aren’t real, and this could just be something I’m saying because I’ve fried my brain too many times with weird states, but I can’t help feeling like [description of some very unconvincing evidence] had to be supernatural, take that however you want”. The dumb and reckless ones just go around claiming to have psychic powers.
Asked and answered. The genetic fallacy isn't logically valid in the true sense, but one can't just declare any usefulness it might have as a heuristic to not exist.
>> As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
>> My ethics are a little odd because I don't believe suffering (or pleasure) is any kind of fundamental entity in moral calculus, and I believe that years of intense, constant lucid dreaming plays a large role in that.
> But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much. Maybe there are dozens of infinite-bliss hacks like jhana or lucid dreaming floating around out there, and we just never hear about them.
I seconded this takeaway, in a different comment branch: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10027703
Meditative bliss on demand is better to have than not have, but it's demonstrably not Earth-shattering. The conclusion that hedonic utilitarianism is deeply flawed follows.
I love your applied rational arguments, about a topic with so much rationalisation!
I would like to add an argument from authority: there are a bunch of provably smart and rational buggers that quietly support what superficially appear to be “mental” ideas. My go to example is
Jim Keller (undeniably smart) mentioning using meditation to help his thinking in: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
As someone who was raised Mormon, what you are describing sounds like what Mormons would call an "intense experience of the spirit." I remember one time in particular that I felt this after praying. I felt calm, happy and at peace, recognized that I was feeling the spirit, and was happy about that fact, which kind of started a feedback loop where I was feeling more happy and at peace because I was feeling happy and at peace. It's interesting to hear a similar experience described from another point of view.
I did a lot of lucid dreaming at one point but stopped because it was messing up my life. I found lucid dreaming incompatible with properly restful sleep. This made waking life worse and worse and escape to lucid dreaming more and more attractive. This was a nasty vicious spiral. And the lucid dreaming wasn't that great in the scheme of things because I was aware that it was only a dream. Aware in a very particular, gentle sort of way - too aware woke me up - but aware nonetheless. I stopped lucid dreaming and now deliberately forget my dreams as a valuable part of sleep hygiene for me.
Other people's experiences are very different.
I've done MDMA, had decent sex, and lucid dreamed. Sex is significant better than the other two. Lucid dreaming is bullshit, everything feels fake and disjointed because half of your brain isn't working normally, but when this inevitably annoys you, you try to fix it by focusing but the only fix is to wake up. I don't think the concept of fully lucid dreaming is meaningful - if you're fully lucid, you're not dreaming, just fantasizing. If you're dreaming and parts of your brain aren't in consciousness mode then you're not fully lucid.
MDMA is well understood and anyone can do it. If you've never felt like everything's going well in your life and things will be ok no matter what, then yeah, it's life changing. But if you're mentally and emotionally healthy I can't imagine it seeming very good.
I personally believe 95% of reported migraines are malingering, along with the other diseases that get this accusation frequently. I also am skeptical that there is an infinite pleasure brain hack that's relatively easy to achieve and reduces desire for sex, food, etc. - this ability should face negative selection pressure, especially if it can spontaneously arise from something like hunting or waiting or watching the environment, extremely common in the EEA. Why do Jhanas only come from one part of the world if they're realistically achievable? Where are the New World Jhanas? The African and European Jhanas?
If we want to try to draw lines between Jhana and charismatic ecstasies in other religions, then we'd have to contend with the path to experiencing them being extremely different, which undermines the idea that this is a real, consistent effect with a biological basis that is strong enough and specific enough such that "wrong" meditation can be worse at getting you to it than "right" meditation.
What’s the biological mechanism by which meditation leads to pleasure?
On the question of "why would people lie about this?": I'm moderately skeptical about Jhannas, less because I don't believe that they're real and more because they seem to fall into a category of internally experienced, seemingly profound, status raising experiences that can be reported on, but are difficult or impossible to directly measure.
So while I'm fully willing to believe people can meditate their way into intense pleasure or satisfaction, I'm much more skeptical that the whole category phenomena reported here isn't being substantially overemphasized. And to be clear - I think people broadly aren't lying, but I do think there's a natural human temptation to first delude yourself into thinking something is more significant than it actually is, and to then embellish the retelling to further inflate it.
Unfortunately this really does generate a bit of an impasse - I can't image it's fun to be told "this thing you experienced probably isn't significant", but this sure seems to pattern match a lot of other things (people thinking LSD let them talk to the universe, monks talking to God, etc.) where there might actually be something fundamental going on, but it takes more than a few grains of salt to get to it.
I guess an interesting question for people who have experience Jhannas - is there anything about it that seems consistent across people and not predicted by this theory of successive embellishment? Because while I'm not very convinced, I wouldn't say I've ruled it out either and that seems like the way you'd distinguish between something real and counterintuitive (Jhannas) and something that just isn't real (mushrooms letting you talk to god).
I was somewhat skeptical so I decided to give it a try, despite reading that it takes a lot of work to do. Surprisingly, I managed to get it after a few false starts.
I haven't been able to reach that state again, most likely because of what the first comment mentioned, i.e. after experiencing Jhana my desire/focus balancing act is out of whack.
I didn't start with 0 experience: I've always been interested in lucid dreaming, and have tried a number of lucid dreaming techniques which are similar to meditation. Just wanted to post a bit of anecdata to say that you might not need 6 months of focused effort to get it.
I'm glad you quoted Dekans above because I hadn't seen the comment originally and like this whole thing:
"When you see ice cream in the advertisement or an attractive person walking down the street you will still feel desire. When someone cuts you off in traffic you will still feel aversion. But, you now know to some degree that it's bullshit. You obviously might still act on these cravings/aversions. But, the more times this insight gets hammered into you the less likely compulsive action is. There is a difference between "knowing" something and knowing something."
Arriving at that more continuous awareness that one's dance of clinging and aversion "is to some degree bullshit" produces in my experience a substantial improvement in one's quality of life, both because of the reduced suffering in the moment and the reduced tendency to say and do things that amplify the suffering.
Good CBT can also produce this permanently shifted perspective that supports equanimity, but there's not as much depth to that usually as the one to be had through Buddhist practice.
Beyond bliss or other pleasant emotional states, there's just a steadiness and a confidence that comes with being less driven around by one's continuous stream of desires and aversions. I would say part of what the practice does is build other rooms in your house, and once you've built them, you may still walk past them some days, but you know where they are and how to get into them should you choose to.
Tangent re. "I usually hate this kind of thing (cf. Bulverism)":
Isn't Bulverism (and the ad hominem "fallacy") correct in Bayesian reasoning? It seems obvious that if you're questioning witnesses as to whether Alan murdered Bob, Alan's "no" gives you far fewer bits of information than Chuck's "no". The fraction of possible worlds in which Alan murdered Bob and then said he didn't, is probably much larger than the fraction of possible worlds in which Alan murdered Bob and Chuck said Alan didn't.
If anyone’s interested, I spent two years in college getting pretty deep into lucid dreaming. For me, the goal was to use it to help me with a novel I was writing.
And in the beginning, it was incredibly useful in that regard. After a while, though, a few things happened for me which ultimately made me stop:
1. My dreams became less creative. I think this is because being more in control of them meant that my more-creative sub conscious had a smaller role.
2. I was spending too much of my dream trying to remember what was happening long enough to write it down when I woke up, instead of staying in the moment.
3. It was kind of a useless skill. I felt in the end like I was developing elaborate strategies to help me cheat at solitaire.
I will say though that ten years later it’s left behind some interesting effects. In my dreams I tend to see myself like an actor playing out a role. Even if I don’t remember I’m dreaming specifically, I usually know that what’s happening isn’t real and if I get into a bad situation I tend to switch into a sort of “god mode” where I just overpower whatever problems I’m having.
The stuff about untetheredness reminds me of this post, from back when wordpress blogs roamed the earth. https://lipoblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/chords-and-maps-3/
"Chords are elements combined in a way that is appealing, but not because the combination describes reality. Chords exploit the many evolved sweet spots of the senses. They can be comprised of “real” things but prioritize creation of an experience over transmission of knowledge...
...Maps describe what exists. They exploit the evolved need to understand how reality behaves. They can be aesthetically pleasing but they put the task of abstraction first."
Jhana sounds like the deepest expression of the "chord". Maybe it doesn't fulfil the need for mappier things.
> The boundary of a boundary is Zero.
Why are there chain complexes here...? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_complex )
A similar phenomenon of the form of 'basic state of experience that has almost definitely been lying around all along that went unnoticed' is ASMR. ASMR is a much more shocking example in my opinion- jhannas were at least written about thousands of years ago whereas as far as I can tell ASMR was first described by Virginia Woolf in 1925. It went unnamed until *2010*. ASMR is not difficult to trigger and it's not especially rare- something like 25 to 50% of people are thought to experience it in some form. I think this is strong evidence that internal states go under-noticed, so it's not surprising to me that jhanna is so ignored.
I think what this discussion is really missing is the role of jhanas in a larger context of practice. They are not there simply to be learned, done, and then added to your list of accomplishments. Jhanas 1-4 (and any subsequent are just icing on the cake) help narrow your concentration to such a fine point that you can then move into a vipassana/insight practice. Vipassana practice is centered on deep understanding, which cannot happen without deep concentration; otherwise, your mind becomes too distracted to attend for more than a few moments or minutes at a time.
All of that to say…who cares if it’s better than sex? Who cares if you don’t believe it’s real? The purpose of jhanas is completely lost in this discussion. The Buddha’s big message was “try this for yourself and see.” So if you don’t believe, try it and find out for yourself.
I am both Joshua Graham (not real name) & the quoted PericlesOfGreece.
I am eagerly awaiting the publication of the results of Delson Armstrong's jhanas 1-9 brainscan done by Ruben Laukkonen and others: https://imgur.com/gallery/rYLJMye at an unnamed university in the Netherlands. Delson discusses the brainscan in some detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn9WlWH3rPE (until the study is published, I think this is the best resource for learning about jhana brain science; it is sub-optimal, but still very interesting).
Few bits I remember from the video:
1. 9th jhana is experientially (not neurologically) equivalent to anesthestic/death (absolutely no experience/oblivion). From what Delson says, the moments before and after 9th jhana are unmatched in terms of pleasure as compared to any other known experience. Frank Yang has said that coming out of 9th jhana is more profound than his positive peak 5-MeO-DMT trip, and the profundity never stops. I had an anesthestic used on me when I was a child, so I remember what it's like to go into and come out of oblivion extremely quickly: the doctor counted down from 5 and before he got to 1 I instantly woke up in a different room.
2. Delson claims to be able to go into 9th jhana (cessation/nirodha-samapatti) for 6 days straight. Tells a funny story where he later found out that Covid-lockdown began while he was still outdoors in 9th jhana, and his friends couldn't wake him up, so they carried him to their house where he came out of the jhana many days later.
3. Delson said that 8th jhana experientially is extremely similar to deep sleep (you can learn to be aware while in deep sleep). He said the people scanning his brain weren't sure if he actually was in deep sleep when he was, because included in the types of brain waves active in his brain scan were the kind that you only see in waking minds. They also weren't sure that he was actually awake (and not just sleeping) while he was in 8th jhana, because included in the types of brain waves active in his brain scan were the kind you normally only see in minds that are asleep.
4. For those who feel the 5-8 jhanas are even more woo than 1-4, Delson makes very clear descriptions of these jhanas in a non-poetic way. The sense of space going away. The sense of clear forms going away (no more thoughts, but maybe fractions of a thought). Seeing individual moments of experience (much less woo-sounding than "infinite consciousnesses", the common term for the same thing).
I recently read in Ajahn Brahm's book that the method of using the entire body as a the meditation object for "breathing" is an incorrect translation of the original Pali, but that method is what Delson Armstrong used to reach 9th jhana and subsequently enlightenment. I've used both the "only nostrils area" and "full body" and have been able to get into jhana either way, but I prefer the "full body" method, just using the nose area feels contracted.
For anyone interested, Daniel Ingram did an interview with Delson Armstrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znX6w6shQ7c
Last suggestion: watch Frank Yang (he has done an interview with Daniel Ingram and Andres Emilsson, but his monologues and Instagram posts are the real gold).
I think there's a wishy-washy middle ground for soft Jhana-scepticism. Specifically, people aren't achieving "neurological Jhana" but "placebo Jhana."
What I mean by this is that the best rational explanation for a real Jhana is that some people can hack/distort your own brain in some way through intense meditation to switch it to a state of consciousness that brings pure bliss (neurological Jhana). I think that's materially different from people who really want to achieve Jhana, identify as the sort of person who achieves Jhana and think they're at about the point where they would achieve Jhana just convincing themselves that they're experiencing a state of pure bliss. Given the numbers of people who can convince themselves of obviously, observably false claims to satisfy their egos, and what we know about the placebo effect, a combination of placebo and self-deception seems sufficient to get people who will genuinely say they feel pure bliss through meditation, even to themselves (placebo Jhana). It also sits more comfortably with "It was pretty cool, but I kept forgetting about it and just went back to finding pleasure the normal way."
I'm only 80% sure that neurological Jhana and placebo Jhana are meaningfully different conceptually. However, I don't think that placebo Jhana is an explanation that any Jhana-claimant would accept so I think the answer to whether people can achieve Jhana is still "no" if they only achieve placebo Jhana. Placebo Jhana (along with its correlate, placebo enlightenment) is my default hypothesis, as it seems way more compatible with Buddhist sex scandals, the guy with the brain tumour, the general slightly seedy dodginess that pervades Buddhsim etc). Also, I'd struggle to believe that placebo Jhana wouldn't be a thing even if neurological Jhana also was, so until we've stuck these people in an MRI it seems parsimonious to say its only placebo Janaa.
"They're all lying" is a pretty strong claim. "They're all lying to themselves" is the human condition.
I was raised Mahayana/Theravada Buddhist (my parents converted when I was about 8), so re: point 1, why don't more people do it, is that most regular Buddhists in societies with big Buddhist populations is that we're pretty sure we can't manage it without losing a whole shitload of external stressors. Sure, there might be someone at the temple claiming to have reached it but most adherents, if they ever get there, only ever manage it on a month long meditation retreat that runs once a year, during a year their business is doing really well and they don't feel stressed about their livelihood, and also being the sort of person who already meditates every single day for like decades leading up to that point. And monks. I'd expect monks to have managed it.
> this isn’t even in the top three weirdest subtypes of epilepsy I know
I'd be interested in hearing some details (or at least sketches) of the top few elements of this list.
Never attempted meditation personally, but I did once have a dream in which I experienced such intense pleasure that it kind of broke my desire/pleasure mapping mechanism. So I can buy the "I can experience infinite bliss on demand but don't often care to" argument, though I'm still skeptical of the "but the *later* jhanas are where the *real* action is" followup.
Wow, that person you quoted saying that all nerds are ugly certainly had... a take of some kind.
ok serious question... what law of nature does ESP break?
I'm honored to have my comment featured on the "front page", as it were -- thanks, Scott. That said, pure unvarnished vanity compels me to point out that the link just leads to the discussion page for the post where I made my comment, not to the comment itself ( https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10017660 ).
>There would be lucid dreaming junkies
I don't really describe my dreams as "lucid", but there were a few occasions where I didn't have access to my computer for a few days, and the result was I would sleep for 22 hours a day. Any time I wasn't eating I was sleeping.
(The dreams I remember, I always have some control over, but I don't actually want anything more than just seeing what happens. People underestimate how limiting one's imagination really is.)
Good on you for shooting down the “it’s all made up” theory. Were you to adopt that theory, I would be unable to take you seriously anymore. Denial of the existence of something I know 100% to be true would be proof of flawed heuristics.
> As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
This one certainly made me stop and think. Unilaterally decreasing one's own utility (all else equal) seems *obviously* morally permissible, even within a hedonic utilitarian framework. Does this result in weird paradoxes if taken seriously? If you'd asked me to write out a formal mathematical statement of utilitarianism before reading this comment, I probably would have missed that edge case.
At first I wondered if this might just be quibbling over the definition of "moral" ("morality for others' utility, instrumental rationality for my own"), but I don't think it's that easily separable—for example, I'm pretty sure it's normally permissible under utilitarianism to make selfish decisions as long as the utility for yourself outweighs the total harm to others. So a moral agent's own utility is still part of the picture, even if we then postulate that the agent is not obligated to optimize it.
Inspired by the link to the review of "Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha", I checked out his website and came across the extensive section of the book dealing with "magickal" phenomena that--he asserts--can be frequently achieved through meditation.
He makes it clear that these phenomena which he and many others have experienced--like reading other people's thoughts, foretelling the future, and telekinetically moving physical objects--are in his view *real*, and are sufficient to disprove our current scientific paradigms.
I'd be *extremely* interested to know what other people here think about this.
Unfortunately, the SlateStarCodex review doesn't discuss this aspect of the book at all. Ingram does have a lengthy disclaimer about how he was reluctant to include the discussion of magical powers because he was afraid it would lead people to dismiss the whole book as hopelessly unscientific.
The fact that he's willing to harshly deny traditional Buddhist claims that enlightenment leads to guaranteed happiness or moral perfection means that I can't dismiss him as a "fundamentalist" determined to maintain all the traditional supernatural claims of Buddhism.
"[...] having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much [...]"
I don't talk about it much, but not because of skeptical people. Think of it this way: I don't talk about paper clips much, either. Paper clips and pleasure are both super useful, but you wouldn't want to tile the universe with either of them.
The image for your thumbnail is very reminiscent to me of my own emblem and a background I made using some photo editing software and a program I use to create patterns for alteration.
I have no problem believing you can enter a very pleasant state by training your mind enough. I just really doubt it's worth using up so many hours to get there.
Sumilarly, I can believe that by trying a lot (i.e. meditating) you can eventuay also end up reconfiguring your brain. I just doubt the chance of the new configuration being 'better' is sufficiently high for the cost of putting in so many hours to be worth it.
Additionally, I've spent quite a lot of time on lucid dreaming, can do it, and it's never been as consistently amazing as described here. I thought it would be but in practice control is more limited, I feel less, and everything is just less in lucid dreams including my cognitive abilities and the world itself.
I'll defend my hypothesis on a numbers basis, despite having no actual numbers: Culadasa is obviously one of the few "bad apples" that lied about and/or resists even the effects of jhana, but *overall* they have beneficial effects on behavior.
*cough* Or, uh, maybe not. I maintain still that there's more reason to be skeptical of supposed "dry path" masters — I'd *bet* some small amount that if we did have numbers, we'd see more e.g. Tibetan and Zen scandals than those in notably "wet" schools like the Thai Forest tradition (which I keep using as an example because I can't think of any more at the moment, so it will be real bad if it turns out those guys are also riddled with scandal); but Scott brings up a good point here.
*****
As outlined in Slime Mold Time Mold's interesting post about scurvy, which I cannot remember if I found here or from Eliezer: it feels fishy to add epicycles to rescue an idea, but sometimes there actually *are* epicycles, so...
...I'll note that Culadasa's background — teaching meditation from a "scientific, progressive perspective" and having largely (half-ly?) Tibetan Vajrayana training — is one I would have been skeptical of before any scandal broke (and indeed I was! I have receipts on the crank-y, weird, but somehow still sort of charmingly earnest Great Western Vehicle forum!).
The former view (progressive, Western, scientific) wouldn't tend to buy into — or, at least, buy into *as much*, on a deep subconscious level — Buddhist disapproval of sense pleasure or sexual, uh, innovation, so might be less protected against this sort of temptation; the latter (Tibetan Vajrayana) has sex all over the place in it, endorses "shortcuts" (using what appears to be somewhat suspiciously-convenient theories about how doing the stuff you'd want to do anyway is okay), and seems to commonly result in this sort of thing.
Additionally, Culadasa is known to favor the commentaries for jhana practice, rather than the original "suttic" form. In other words, he does not teach jhana *as found in the suttas*... although I will admit that there's controversy over whether the suttas and the commentaries really differ all that much; and the "strong" jhanas from the commentaries are very interesting and attractive to me, so I wouldn't have thought it'd be a problem to go that route.
So... If we go to someone who teaches Buddhism from a traditional Buddhist perspective, advocates the jhanas, and doesn't go in for any "shortcuts"... maybe we'd see the behavior we're expecting a bit more?
***
As with the Visuddhimagga vs suttas, I'm also pretty divided on the Tibetan stuff, to be honest. On one hand, I have been pretty... unimpressed with the behavior of a lot of the community, and the emphasis on guru yoga seems like a terrible idea, and having lots of traditions of "crazy wisdom" — where a guy goes "sure I attack people and get drunk and have sketchy creepy sex orgies, but it's because actually everything I do has deeply wise and beneficial effects" — also seems like a recipe for bad apples.
That said, *it's just so cool...* I admit being a bit seduced by all the flowery Jewel Ornaments of this and Wish-Fulfilling Gems of that. It's so elaborated and has so many wild practices — some of which ARE legit, like tummo — that I can't bring myself to write it off entirely. As Scott is convinced, in some respects at least, by the weight of self-report evidence here, so am I; I do feel like *even if it's whacky religious stuff*, surely centuries of study and (self-)experimentation have yielded *some* fruit... if only in the area "how to do weird stuff to your mind" — and hey, that's what I'm after in the first place, really, so...
(And, c'mon, "enlightenment in this very lifetime"? Shortcut or not, I'm totally on board.)
But anyway, that'd be my defense on the Culadasa thing. Now, if a bunch *more* jhana teachers turn out crummy... then I give up.
I'm skeptical... ish... of jhanas. Why? They seem to me like the equivalent of a $100 bill on the sidewalk: if the $100 bill is real, why hasn't anyone picked it up by now?
I agree with many other commenters that pure pleasure, without meaning, does not make for a good life. Even so, people do want to be happy and to experience pleasure. So many people are desperately unhappy/depressed and self-medicating with illicit drugs, alcohol, junk food, etc. If there was a way for people to experience supreme bliss with no side effects, why wouldn't more people know about it and use it? Shouldn't there be tremendous demand for learning how to achieve jhanas? Why isn't anyone picking up the $100 bill that's better than sex with [your favorite celebrity] and the best food and a dose of the most potent psychedelics all rolled into one?
>the pleasure that you get from jhana, while intense and lovely, has a flatness and artificiality to it, because it's totally separate from any narrative content and doesn't have much variety
This kind of thing is why I'm unenthusiastic about hard drugs or simple wireheading, even if there were non-addictive variants of them. If it's one-size-fits-all experience that doesn't interact with unique features of my personality, then is it really me that would experience intense bliss or whatever, or just some blob of meat undergoing chemical reactions, and "I" might as well be dead?
Has anyone collected statistics on what percentage of people who attempt to learn to enter jhana succeed (or say they succeed), and how long it takes them?
Seems like that could be useful both for convincing people that the training process is actually doing something and for helping people make cost/benefit decisions on whether it's worth trying.
(Of course, I realize that neither of those confers any particular benefit to the person doing the hard work of collecting those stats.)
> For example, I've seen people get access to Jhana 1 through a mental question "Are you aware?" "How do you know you are aware?"
> Then observe the actual mechanism by which you validate your own experience of awareness, and stay in that place. That "place" is essentially the location of Jhana 1, at least for a good handful of people I've seen.
Oh wow. Worked for me! So, uh, are there any other cheat codes you can offer?
I can't help but suspect that all of this focus on debating the validity of the pleasurable qualia of jhana experiences is missing the point. I am not myself a practiced meditator, but isn't the whole point to learn how to set aside attachments to the particular form of central-agent-focused cognition we typically find ourselves in, with its attendant desires, sensations, and modes of processing? Whether you are interested in achieving that as instrumental toward some higher good or a goal in and of itself, it seems like the bliss of jhana is mostly a beneficial side effect at best, and indeed many experienced meditators seem to treat it as such. I suspect much of the pushback to these claims within this community comes from strains of utilitarian impulses that place significant (though not necessarily primary or sole) weight on hedonic experience, which would struggle to deal with highly pleasurable low-motivating experiences, even outside of the neuropsych evidence that might bear on the plausibility of such experiences.
I wrote a thing about this: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-unfalsifiable-internal-state-claims
I achieved Jhana on the first try, never meditated before. I tell you how. When I was a kid (like 9 years old), I have heard something about meditation. They said, you can learn to switch off your thoughts. There was no internet and I have no books about meditation. I have no idea what is this about. But I liked to experiment. So I though, OK let's try to switch off my thoughts for at least couple of seconds using any method I can find.
So I tried to switch off my thoughts somehow in my brain without any success. I could hold my thoughts for 0.1 second and than my brain started to process incoming information from senses and generate a thought the very next second, so there was no silence of mind.
One day I watched how birds move their head. Some birds have very robotic head movements almost looking like driven by servomotors. They look at something very shortly, than change position of the head sharply. OK, I tried to mimic this because why not. And I found a funny thing, while quickly jerking the head with eyes fixed like a birds do, I was able to shut down all thinking and pattern recognizing in my mind! So I trained this ability and gradually was able with this method to shut down thoughts in the brain for minutes. After that, I ditched the "head jerking movements" method and just looking straight, I was also able to shut off the brain. There are things though, that make the brain start thinking and it is not possible to stop the thoughts. One example is, if any letters are in the field of vision, the brain immediately recognizes a pattern and tries to read it and that starts the thinking.
Till today, I am able to shut down any thinking in my brain very effectively at will. After I read the SSC post about Jhanas, let us try this! I just kneeled silently (I tried also lying), I switched off thinking, as I know to do it almost immediately, focus on the breath, breathe without any thinking going on in my mind. Than go with the focus to a pleasant place in my body and whoa it works! Really pleasant. The other day I tried my second try and already got a tingling and pleasant sensation all over my body!
While I haven't experienced them (yet?) I suspect Jhanas are real, but...
> Why not just classify meditation as “nonreligious” if it’s going to screw you up like this?
That would be easier if it didn't keep coming packaged with dopey stuff. Traditionally the same people who teach it, teach about reincarnation and what not. But modern people seem to get infected too. Even David Ingram, who was supposed to be this pragmatic, down to earth meditator, gives considerable attention in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha to psychic powers and even "casting spells" (your review didn't mention that!), lists them as one of the missing items on his checklist to full Buddhahood, and I recall he even came to this blog to defend them.
Why is that?
On the subject of addictiveness and degree of pleasure from hacking the brain:
If there's an intensely pleasurable, addictive state you can enter by cultivating a particular plant, refining a psychoactive chemical from it and injecting it into your veins, human evolution plays out the same way it actually has. We haven't had the ability to produce e.g. heroin for a significant length of time, in evolutionary terms.
If there's an intensely pleasurable, addictive state you can enter by thinking the right (or wrong) way ... then people who are susceptible to it will spend time in that state rather than eating or having children, and will be out-evolved by their less-susceptible peers.
I take Scott's point that you would expect a "brain-hijacking" form of pleasure to be more intense than a natural one ... but if it's attainable by something like meditation, which in principle can also be done by primitive humans, then I'd expect evolution to ameliorate it, tack on an aversion to repeatedly entering the state, add a tendency to get bored of it, etc.
I don't think Culadasa's case quite qualifies as a sex scandal. Sure, it was a scandal and it involved sex, but usually what we mean by "Buddhist sex scandal" is something along the lines of "teacher having sex with students, with varying degrees of consent". In his case it was "having sex with someone who was not his wife, but definitely also not his student, and possibly giving that someone money that was donated by his students into his non-profit". His excuses were along the lines of "my wife and I have grown apart by that time" and "I considered that money to be my own". I think it's also important to note that at the time he was suffering from chronic Lyme disease and perhaps also undergoing chemo treatment from metastasized cancer (not 100% sure about the timelines here though), which may have affected his judgement (despite being an advanced practitioner).
Like a couple of others on this thread, I experienced *something* from trying the "are you aware?" shortcut (having almost never meditated before), and it seems to be reproducible.
I don't know whether it's a jhana or not (or maybe some sort of partial jhana or step on the way). I would describe it as pleasurable, but not supremely blissful, and not better than sex. It's like a fizzy, excited, expansive feeling in my chest and throat - a little bit like being wired on caffeine. It's definitely more of a physical sensation than an emotional state.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have experienced jhana about whether or not this is similar to what they experience.
What baffles and intrigues me about jhanas (based on only this thread and the previous one; I haven't done any further reading) is that they're a subjective emotional experience but they seem to be categorisable and classifiable in a way that people agree on. The inter-rater reliability gestures towards there probably being something real there, IMO.
Scott quotes a commenter talking about "bliss, happiness, contentment, or deep peace (i.e. the first four jhanas)". Bliss, happiness, contentment, and deep peace seem really similar: like, a priori, I'd expect them to all fade into one another in a kind of spectrum, and I'd expect one person's "bliss" to be another's "happiness" and yet another's "contentment". But jhana practitioners seem able to talk about the first four jhanas as if they're four distinct things, and as if there's no confusion or fuzzy edges between them. People don't sound as if they're in any doubt about which one they've experienced.
To me this is as surprising as if, say, sufferers of depression (as opposed to medical professionals) had categorised depression into four types, with really similar-sounding names like "sadness, unhappiness, misery, and deep gloom", and when two depressed people got together they could talk about which one they were experiencing and about other ones they'd experienced in the past, without any uncertainty or confusion between the types, and with a confidence that A's "misery" was meaningfully similar to B's "misery" and meaningfully distinct from either of their "unhappiness".
(FTOAD, I am not saying depression isn't "real"; I'm saying that if we can't do this clean categorisation for depression and we can for jhanas, that seems to imply jhanas are at least as "real" as depression. Feel free to pick a different analogy: maybe four distinct types of sexual pleasure, or four distinct types of flow state.)
People often impose arbitrary taxonomies on types of human experience, and then argue or introspect about which one a given experience falls into (e.g. "is this true love or just infatuation?"). But I'm not seeing that in these comment threads (although maybe I would if I read more widely on the topic?) I'm just seeing people stating that they experienced the first jhana or the second one or whatever, as if there's no uncertainty about the categorisation.
While I'm open to the claims being true (indeed post inspired me to really practice my meditation more to check it out) I think it's worth presenting the best case for the skeptical side.
And I don't think that skeptical claim is that no one experiences the kind of pleasure described but that, like the aforementioned seizures, it's a rare lucky few who are capable.
And that would explain the apparent paradoxes. I mean it seems like fewer people who aren't part of certain religious movements put in the effort and succeed than put in the effort to do things like regularly run for the endorphins high or learn chess or whatever. It would also explain how there can be an amphetamine abuse problem amoung young monks in southeast asia.
I also tend to believe that individuals who experience ecstatic states during prayer or group worship are telling the truth as well but that for most of us only a weak version is available. That seems like a possible explanation here.
--
But I'm not convinced of that position. I just think it's worth presenting it.
Weirdly enough after reading Leigh B's description of them it seems obvious that they could/should exist. Like, yes, if you empty your mind of thought through sustained focus and then focus on something nice, that nice thing can be more intense than when your mind is otherwise distracted? Putting the mysticism aside, I can rationally see why this could work and also why it doesn't address the Buddha's fundamental concerns, of being upset when nice things are taken away or being happy when they're provided.
I think the best explanation for the people who claim to have reached jhana is that jhana isn't the bliss in itself, it's the ability to convince yourself that you've achieved bliss. Does this mean it's not real? Depends on how you think about emotional states. I'm on team "emotions are downstream of what you think about reality, and messing with your interpretations of reality in a way that colours your perception doesn't actually matter much". If you wear rose-tinted glasses you do actually know the world isn't pink, even if it does "look pink" in some real sense.
This also explains why it rubs many people here the wrong way when people talk about reaching jhanas. For a lot of us our whole thing is that we should focus on reality and try to walk away from our biases and attempts to fool ourselves. To see people be smug and self-congratulatory over their supposedly successful attempts to fool themselves is pretty grating.
"But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much. Maybe there are dozens of infinite-bliss hacks like jhana or lucid dreaming floating around out there, and we just never hear about them."
If it gets old isn't that also consistent with developing tolerance to the experience and thus the amount of pleasure actually felt being reduced?
"But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much."
I think this hits the nail on the head. I have loads of friends I know who would be into the Jhanas if they believed they were possible, and not just spiritual mumbo jumbo. I hint at them every now and again but never really talk about them outside of very specific circles because people just default to not believing in them.
My experience is that Jhanas actually amplify other pleasures, while reducing attachment to them. Learning Jhana gives you more subtle powers of attention that seem to make it easier to really get into things like sex and listening to music. You get the ability to better tune out distractions and really amplify the pleasurable parts of those experiences. But, when you know you have pleasure on tap, other pleasures are more of a nice-to-have than an existential necessity.
One other tiny correction, the resources from Rob Burbea are audio, not video. If anyone is interested in Jhanas I think they're a great resource. Rob has an incredibly intelligent and subtle approach that I think lots of people here might appreciate.
Grunching but I want to weigh in because I have over 5000 hours of meditation:
I haven't read about jhanas and obviously I have never tried to achieve them. There is a sensation though after about an hour of silent meditation that I often experience. It feels like something is slowly and warmly detonating inside my spine and spreading into my brain. It tingles, and it feels warm and good. I suspect that achieving this state has lasting positive effects on my mental state, but that is pure speculation.
Just to say that I personally don't find this state to be anywhere near as "good as sex" or whatever. I agree with the commenter who says that people may be exaggerating. But then again people would probably say the same thing about me so who am I to say?
:)
I am not surprised that people experience Jhanas, and I imagine people really feel, on the inside, that they experience all kinds of spiritual things, especially in times and places where it is more social acceptable. I can also imagine people faking it for clout. Ever since I learned about Amok Syndrome, I have been increasingly convinced that most mental illness is just culturally bound conversion disorder, and a lot of people really just have anxiety(status anxiety of some form seems like it would be pretty much a human universal) and attach those feelings to whatever is a plausible explanation in their life/culture. Anecdotally I have always been shocked by the ability of the people around me to confidently proclaim that they understand their own body on a physical level, much less on vague experiences of consciousness. I don't understand my body very well at all, headaches allergies nausea aches and pains, out side of a small subset of very straight forward cause and effect issues, I have an incredibly hard time pinning down what is going on inside me. I think I am lactose intolerant, pretty sure anyways. I eat dairy all the time, and some times, under some conditions I still don't understand, it seems to really fuck me up, but some times I eat literally the exact same food, and I am fine. I mostly take lactate and have never had problems after taking it, which is what mostly convinced me, but I feel this way about almost everything. It is all just so confusing in here, and I guess I imagine that has something to do with the pattern matching slider in my brain. I think that people experience reality differently, and their level of confidence in that experience is also variable, and so it seems to me that almost any strange human experience could feel real from the inside.
Can anyone speak to meditation as a cure for depression? People talk about how if you want to get off of SSRIs, you should start meditating. Does this actually work? If so, when should you actually stop taking SSRIs? And why does it work? It's it just that you can see your mind more, and choose to suffer less, or do the jhanas cause you to have less depression, or something else?
"The reason other people aren’t in jhana is because they don’t believe it exists, or haven’t heard of it. These all seem like good logical explanations. "
Less sure these are good logical explanations. The tweet said 2000 years, so we should be expecting societal effects or something. Compare sex (perhaps unfair, sex has been known and important to the species for longer than 2000 years, plus biology). Why are people not having sex right now? Well, finding/convincing a willing partner can be hard, which seems a reasonable parallel to "I tried mediation but didn't stick with it." But there aren't really people who haven't heard about sex, or don't believe it feels good, even if they only have other people's reports for what it's like. Is innate sex drive enough to explain the 0.001% -> ~100% gap? Maybe, not sure.
Anything that sounds like supernatural claims is going to get some people's hackles up. The hardcore materialists will be (1) that didn't happen, you're deceived or lying (2) if it did happen it was only because of wiggly bits in your brain, and drugs or machinery will make those same bits wiggle so it wasn't supernatural (3) if you said it was different to ordinary experiences, you're self-deceived, lying, or not having good sex
(That last really makes me laugh. "Well *I* have *great* sex, you poor loser don't know what you're talking about!" 🤣)
Your tyrannical commenter has a good point. I've never actually gotten that much out of sex. and once I finally had it, it was so disappointing I always wondered what was so great that it motivated people to do all those crazy things for it, but then I never actually managed to do it with anyone I was attracted to. Perhaps that is the difference.
Sorry if this has already been brought up. Regarding the confusion over Jhanas being something religious, this might come from the fact that today's religions could have originated in Jhanas and similar experiences (although they have certainly evolved to something very different).
Our modern languages have evolved very much, we have vocabulary to distinguish between religious and non-religious things, we can say we are "meditating" instead of "praying", but thousands of years ago, I am pretty sure the languages didn't always have such, uh, subtleties. So if a person experienced the Jhanas thousands of years ago, they might not have said "I have experienced a state of consciousness that brings much pleasure", but instead "I have been one with God" or "I have seen the light" or something similar.
And when people would have asked them "how can I see the light too?", they would not have answered "you need to meditate an hour a day, keep distracting things away from you and concentrate on something pleasurable, don't expect anything but let it happen" - rather they would have said "you need to pray an hour a day, lead a simple life, keep temptations away; ask and you will be given" - see religious scripts for other examples.
So, maybe most religious founders and prophets were experiencing Jhanas or similar states, and they tried to lead other people to them, using the language that was available to them back then. I think many religious texts and, uh, "wisdoms" could have been meant as some kind of meditation advice.
Of course, modern religions are something very, very different from that, which makes it necessary for us to use concepts like "meditation", because "praying" is something different today.
Lots of these points remind me of something I can do which I think is unusual - with a small amount of effort akin to tensing a muscle, I can induce a pleasurable sensation throughout my body, on the scale of perhaps 1/4 of an orgasm. I found out my brother can do the same, and like me he'd never mentioned this ability to anyone up until then. I later mentioned it in passing to my PCP and he had no idea what I was talking about.
I can do this at any time, as much as I want. Its a (small) amount of pleasure on demand. But like the jhanas, I sometimes just forget I can/don't do it at all for days/weeks sometimes. I don't sit around doing it all day every day.
I'm pretty sure its not frisson, as I have experienced that as well and it is very different.
Can other people do this? Can everyone do it and no one talks about it for some reason? Is there a name for it? Is this a mini-jhana, or a precursor to a jhana?
There are many people who meditate for years if not decades and never experience such states. Two family members of mine, for instance, met in a zen commune in the 1970s and have been practicing daily meditation, attending retreats, etc. ever since. One of them has passed koan study and so (I am led to understand) could become a zen master if he so wished (he does not). I'm fairly confident neither of them have ever experienced the Jhanas as described here, and I'm certain that they cannot obtain such states on a regular basis. Nor do their teachers or colleagues seem to be regularly experiencing such states, or expect such states to be a regular part of their meditative practice.
Thus it seems to me that an important component of what the Jhanas are or may mean seems to be missing from this discussion. Namely, whatever the Jhanas are, they are rare and (appear to me to be) unrepresentative of meditators in general.
I've done lucid dreaming, along the lines of "summon your ideal sexual partner and have sex with them" and it is much less pleasurable than IRL sex. If I get too excited I wake up. That's possibly one reason why people don't do more lucid dreaming.
If I just close my eyes and try to be happy, I can make myself almost orgasmically happy in 20 seconds, without having ever studied meditation. I wonder if this is the first Jhana.
No offense, and this is probably a bad argument, but the descriptions of higher Jhana levels remind me of Scientology's OT levels, which are just sci-fi written by some charlatan, and there are lots of otherwise sane people who genuinely believe they've reached OT levels. I'll bet people who try hard enough can conform their experiences/memories of meditation to any arbitrary levels a culture expects them to reach. e.g.: Jhana 69: the sensation of 69ing Elon Musk in zero-gravity after humanity is a multiplanetary species with good AGI and no further X-risks and nothing to do but enjoy life. I'm sure somebody could go to a quiet place and close their eyes and have that fantasy in great detail and enjoy it but that wouldn't make it a level in some objective system.
I believe Jhana exists *now*, but I definitely didn't in your previous post. You've presented it in a way that essentially was maximally sketchy.
"Buddhists say..." great start if you want me to think something is wrong.
"Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. [...]"
OK, so now you are saying Jhana exists to the same extent that Enlightenment exists (i.e. it doesn't). Got it, you are trying to say Jhana does not exist. Understood.
Then you go into Nick's tweets, and his description just sounds *super* fake. Complete with the implication that he still likes sex, just not *casual* sex. I mean, what? Most people in the world don't like casual sex; they prefer some romantic bonding first (just ask most women). The average number of sexual partners is, like, 6, so most people in practice just don't have much casual sex. It's not special not to seek casual sex!
Notably absent is any claim that Nick no longer masturbates. Did anyone else catch this? I assume Nick still masturbates at least when away from sexual partner(s).
Now, OK, if the claim is that you can futz with your brain via meditation until you reach a bliss state, and there's a bajillion witnesses attesting this is true, I believe it. But that's not what you started with, and it feels weird to make an argument of the form "Buddhists say..." and then complain when people are skeptical.
Are some of these jhanas simply a variant on the "flow" state, also known as being "in the zone", that happens when you're strongly focused on executing a skill to the exclusion of everything else, as commonly experienced by athletes, musicians, and video game players?
Well, now we know what the Scissor Statement was.
Hey, can anyone recommend a rationalist-friendly teacher for this kind of stuff (insight, concentration/jhana, etc)? I’ve looked a little, but never found someone to work with via voice chat.
>A few people have started speculating on why people are so reluctant to believe jhanas.
Well, here is one reason: People who keep going on on how jhanas are so awesome sound bit too similar to that not-exactly-your-friend who keeps telling you how awesome weed/MDMA/opening up your relationship/drinking binges/grinding your own coffee/potato diet/traveling/rock climbing/not having kids/having kids/GURPS [1] are and how you are missing out. You can smell his scorn (it usually -- but not always -- is a "he") at your square boring lifestyle choices when he feigns politely "you do you" [2] after you politely tell you are not interested (and you know the topic is going to come up again next Saturday as long as you hang out together).
[1] Non-exhaustive list of activities without any consideration of how they rank on the Oh-My-Mohs scale of blissful experiences, but I for one like to think the each pushy person is overrating the respective experience they are gushing about.
[2] Picture in your mind the aliens guy meme, but replace the text with following: "I am not saying you are missing out ... but you are missing out".
Regarding lucid dreaming, I have a friend who has a problem with what's called 'maladaptive daydreaming', in a way that operated kind of like a drug or video game addiction. Basically the fantasy worlds of his mind are so much more appealing than their real life that they do it compulsively, and every hour they aren't doing it feels like wasted time.
Are all of these different states of Jhana a human universal or more a cultural conditional? Would a human doing meditative exercises on their own with no preconception arrive at the same system, up to isomorphism?
Priming is obviously a thing. Telling a human that they shall see a vision of dread Cthulhu will have an influence on the probability of that outcome.
I suspect that most schools of meditation do not even bother with control groups and double blind experiments. :-)
How many distinct states of human consciousness are there anyhow? From my mundane experience, there are quite a few (continuous) axes (joy, exhaustion, arousal, depersonalization, pain, panic, etc) and some linear combinations of them might deserve their own word, but most of them don't: "Exhausted joy mixed with a hint of arousal" does not need a label any more than the color 255*(r,g,b)=(63,255,0) needs one. ("Harlequin", btw.)
From the distinct descriptions, these meditative states seem more like the (clearly separate) doors of the Mansus in Cultist Simulator than any particular setting on the dozen state variables I would perhaps use to describe macro state of the human mind.
Off-topic:
Could substack perhaps save typed responses locally using cookies and javascript? It is not like the are adverse to the use of either technology. Typing in an external editor (emacs, once laughed at for its resource consumption) because there is a 20% chance that the substack page will get out-of-memory-killed every time I open a wikipedia tab is getting really old really fast. In the alternative, I would also take recommendations for browser plugins to accomplish that.
"If orgasms and jhana are both very good, would orgasm during jhana be super-amazing? I tested this out with a romantic partner who is an experienced meditator. ..."
This is what I come here for - information you can't find anywhere else. Thank you Scott.
...I didn’t read any models for what the stages/forms are actually like when reading the first ACX post about them, merely speculated about the potential therapeutic usages with addiction reduction, but after reading them linked here, I have a lot of questions. I consider myself a novice meditator- I don’t follow any particular guidelines and even went back to some pre-meditating basics my partner recommended recently- yet I have had experiences similar to what Mishra describes for the first, third, and fifth jhana.
>When people say they have migraines...
I get extremely bad "stress headaches" when I am not managing my sleep/stress well. As much as a couple times a month until I figured out the triggers, and still a couple times a year. And I still don't believe 90% of the reports of "migranes".
In my experience, I get addicted to things that serve as an escape. Things that have the power to come into my brain kicking and punching out the shallow suffering or the anxious narrator in my head.
If being calm and disciplined and accepting and introspective is a pre-requisite for some intense positive experience, that doesn't work. It's like the advice to lonely men that you have to be happy being alone before you are ready for a romantic partner -- kinda defeats the purpose.
How people describe the euphoria achieved through Jhana 1 sounds similar to an effect I've been able to achieve since I was a child while trying (and obviously failing) to learn telekinesis.
I close my eyes and I build up tension in my brain (even though my brain isn't able to be tensed) and then I release it and hold (but not hold?) onto the feeling of relief and manipulate it in a way that it spreads throughout my body. Like tensing your arm without performing the act.
I imagine it works in a similar way to the body transfer illusion. I'm exploiting some dumb flaw in my brain by trying to do something it's incapable of doing and by doing that I'm able to semi-consciously tap into the behind-the-scenes part of the normal brain function of tension->release->pleasure.
But the pleasure is entirely hollow unless you ascribe meaning to it. As a kid, I thought I was tapping into something mystical and powerful, which enhanced the experience by magnitudes and filled me with adrenaline and a sense of mystery and wonder, but now it's just an experience devoid of attachment. Like mentally picturing a vibrant red. I can do that, but so what? It can't compare with a vibrant red I see in the real world with all the contexts surrounding it, like a red dress on a beautiful woman. It's pleasure devoid of context. Even the pleasure you get from drugs has context.
How would we evaluate claims of "speaking in tongues" (which may have just meant being a polyglot) and the ability to translate ostensible "tongue speaking" vis a vis the evaluation of jhanas?
The question of migraine claims came up. But there are objective ways to distinguish a migraine from some other kind of headache or from purely psychosomatic claims. People do lie about migraines or self-diagnose incorrectly.
There may also be a useful distinction between malingering and factitious disorder. There could be lying about jhanas as a specific con to get people to buy books or enroll in classes and there could be an exaggeration of ostensibly achieved states as an intentional or unintentional means of self-aggrandizement or attention seeking behavior.
I have been involved in thousands of claims of injury. There is exaggeration and sometimes outright fabrication.
In Maryland law, for example, the test for purely emotional claims of injury as been recognized by the Courts as viable when "it is capable of objective determination." What does that mean? Good question. But it certainly means more than the subjective statements of a claimant. Expert medical testimony is required. And a question that astute (in my estimation) attorneys will ask a medical expert: is there a way to tell the difference between an actor pretending to make the claims and a claimant who actual has this emotional injury.
Can we tell the difference between an actor claiming to have (is have the right verb?) jhanas and a person who has actually experienced jhanas.
Is there a way to falsify the hypothesis? It does not seem to me that has been properly investigated.
The one fMRI study is very problematic for the same reason that Clever Hans is problematic. It is a case study of 1 person! "At the time of testing, this subject was to our knowledge the only person in the US who had the requisite training in jhana who was willing to submit to the experimental protocol." The subject signaled with double tap - kind of just like Clever Hans.
Maybe it's a thing, maybe it's not. Meditation practices are not without dangers. "Zen sickness." We should not push that under the rug.
Wouldn't this also be based on a person's views on life? If one of your principle values is to make the world a better place, time spent in meditation is time you aren't spending eg. feeding the homeless.
> [In response to a claim that thousands of people claim to have reached jhana:] Thousands of people have also claimed to be able to speak to the dead, or perceive things over long distances, or hear god telling them what to do.
This is such a weird response. Yes people have claimed to be able to speak to the dead. The ones that sincerely believe it no doubt have some kind of *experience that implies they are speaking to the dead*. You can doubt that their experience is an accurate reflection of what's happening, but you can't doubt the existence of the experience itself. For jhanas, the self-report is about the experience itself, so there is no reason to doubt such self-reported experiences.
Scott -- thanks for putting so much effort into coordinating and collating this discussion; in addition to being fascinating, I think it's also adding momentum to an underserved cause area (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XhD9ooZeJcQD8QJZL/cause-exploration-prizes-jhana-meditation).
One interesting direction that I've discovered as I dug further -- I've heard it reported by Jhana practitioners that the sensation of ecstasy in Jhana ("piti") seems to be the same thing as (or at least very similar to) the experience of "frisson"/chills when listening to music, which has in turn also been connected to the euphoric states produced by ASMR. These areas have been studied a bit more than Jhana (which isn't saying much and it seems they are not well-understood). So perhaps we could get more data points by looking at the studies done on these phenomena too; for example, do we see the same patterns of neural activity? If musical frisson is euphoric, why doesn't this trigger addictive behaviors? It seems to be a similar quesiton to the one you originally posed on Jhana.
For example Salimpoor et. al. 2011 investigates frisson with PET and MRI (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21217764/), and finds activation in the Caudate preceding chills, and the NAc during the experience of peak emotional response. The discussion in that article is very interesting (but alas a bit above my pay grade):
> One explanation for this phenomenon is that it is related to enhancement of emotions. The emotions induced by music are evoked, among other things, by temporal phenomena, such as expectations, delay, tension, resolution, prediction, surprise and anticipation. Indeed, we found a temporal dissociation between distinct regions of the striatum while listening to pleasurable music. The combined psychophysiological, neurochemical and hemodynamic procedure that we used revealed that peaks of ANS activity that reflect the experience of the most intense emotional moments are associated with dopamine release in the NAcc. This region has been implicated in the euphoric component of psychostimulants such as cocaine and is highly interconnected with limbic regions that mediate emotional responses, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. In contrast, immediately before the climax of emotional responses there was evidence for relatively greater dopamine activity in the caudate. This subregion of the striatum is interconnected with sensory, motor and associative regions of the brain and has been typically implicated in learning of stimulusresponse associations and in mediating the reinforcing qualities of rewarding stimuli such as food. Our findings indicate that a sense of emotional expectation, prediction and anticipation in response to abstract pleasure can also result in dopamine release, but primarily in the dorsal striatum. Previous studies have found that amphetamine induced dopamine release in the NAcc spreads to more dorsal regions after repeated exposure to the drug, which suggests that this area may be involved in improved predictability and anticipation of a reward. Similarly, previous studies involving rewards such as food and smoking that contain a number of contextual predicting cues (for example, odor and taste) also found dorsal striatum dopamine release. Conversely, in studies in which there were no contextual cues or experience with the drugs involved, dopamine release was largely observed in the ventral striatum. Finally, evidence from animal research also suggests that, as rewards become better predicted, the responses that initiated in the ventral regions move more dorsally in the striatum. These results are consistent with a model in which repeated exposure to rewards associated with a specific context gradually shift the response from ventral to dorsal and further suggest that contextual cues that allow prediction of a reward, in our case the sequences of tones leading up to the peak pleasure moments, may also act as reward predictors mediated via the dorsal striatum.
This result gives more detail than Hagerty et. al. 2013, which didn't do PET scanning.
This is interesting to ponder; it seems quite plausible to me that there are different mechanisms at work in the initial production of these ecstatic states from music vs. Jhana (say, perhaps the Caudate is not involved in Jhana?). Indeed this must be so at some point, since in one case you're hearing music and in another you're concentrating without music; these are two distinct activities upstream of the euphoria. But then at some point downstream they merge, at the latest in the NAc into the same pattern of brain activity. However it's not ruled out that the Caudate could be involved in Jhana too, so I suppose a PET + fMRI study would be what you want to explore this further?
> The notion that dopamine can be released in anticipation of an abstract reward (a series of tones) has important implications for understanding how music has become pleasurable. However, the precise source of the anticipation requires further investigation. A sense of anticipation may arise through one’s familiarity with the rules that underlie musical structure, such that listeners are anticipating the next note that may violate or confirm their expectations, in turn leading to emotional arousal, or alternatively it may arise through familiarity with a specific piece and knowing that a particularly pleasant section is coming up
This doesn't sound out of place referring to Jhana instead of music, from my readings.
How do people typically react to first jhana physically? Like, does it tend to make you smile? Laugh? Cry? Moan? Jump up and down? Go limp and collapse? Shake and tremble?
I'm sorry, did I do something to offend you by highlighting the personal bias based on your personal experience, while sharing my own experience that is contra-your perception of the experiences of other? If so, I don't know what did it or made you feel the need to turn my (intended to be) compassionate invitation into a jab at my reality. You can simply decline the invitation.
Maybe I was just bad at it, but even when I was lucid dreaming almost every night, I definitely wouldn't call it "infinite bliss". It was fun, but I've had equal or greater amounts of fun while awake.
The big issues IME are a) you're never *entirely* lucid, you're always kind of dozy and stupid
in the usual how-did-I-not-notice-thar way of dreams because you are ultimately asleep, and b) dreams are not actually the kind of high-fidelity a simulation as you may initially assume, and if you've practiced lucid dreaming you've gotten much better at seeing the seams. You're not actually an omnipotent god, you're just lying there in bed *picturing* all the cool things you *would* do as a god in slightly more vivid detail than while awake.
It seems a bad sign that no one would ever be able to tell a person is "enlightened" without the person talking a lot about it as if they are. Seriously, no one's ever found any behavioral correlates or special skills linked to this phenomenon? That just doesn't bode well at all.
If I've spent thousands of hours meditating over years and years, it's very much in my interest to explain why it wasn't a complete waste of time. Just saying.
Even with the jhanas... This chap roon claims it's a wonder that these things have been known about for thousands of years, and yet almost no one goes on and finds them. It's not that much of a wonder. Spending an hour or two a day for several months or more is a huge investment and for all you know it won't happen for you at all. People who *do* claim they access the jhanas don't have any discernible benefit from it other than the claims they make. So like... yeah...
If someone could invent a way to get there much quicker with much less risk, great. I'm 100% going to do it. I sense, however, that those who claim to have accessed these states would be quite sour about the notion of others getting there without a lot of masochistic discipline. Also a bad sign.
>Jhnana is literally worthless. What good is an eon of being immersed in bliss if when you emerge you still haven't figured out what this place is all about?. It's ignoble to seek bliss for yourself, ignoring the darkness and suffering of others. Jhnana up to the fourth is actually an obstacle.
That's epic. Basically what I believe. This is the problem with eastern religions in general; this total collapse into the mush of undifferentiated subjectivity. The real world is out there, not within us.
Also, to your point about believing what people say—why not believe what people say about prayer? That in prayer they experience a real experience of connection with God? Nothing is more human than that connection, it's virtually a cultural universal. Surely worth trusting as much as Jhana.
Wow I just experienced it after reading your article. Can definitely confirm that it is real. Exactly as described here: https://www.lionsroar.com/entering-the-jhanas/ just took half a dozen attempts, although I guess it may be pre-jhana piti as they describe it. I have been meditating on and off for basically my whole life and never knew this was a possibility. Thank you so much for brining it to my attention!
@Scott The "[Original post here]" link at the top links to this page, not the original post.
The bit about boundary^2 = 0 is interesting to hear, since I was first made aware of it in algebraic topology