I know it's rude but I basically just don't believe this is a real thing. The emperor may or may not have clothes but at least an outside analyst (a child, traditionally) can look at him and decide one way or the other. But everyone who makes claims to be able to do the Jhana thing is just saying stuff about their internal state, without even as much potential evidence as people who spend their lives claiming to be able to do telekinesis or clairvoyance.
As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
The fact that it's only themselves they are hurting doesn't really seem to change the matter. Unless their job/life is so beneficial to others as to make up for the difference they are choosing to fill the world with more suffering and less pleasure than they could by spending more time in that state.
Also I gotta get my act together and quit lazying out on meditation.
With no disrespect to Nick and others it’s going to take a little more than these anecdotes to persuade me that they are having an experience that is both extremely pleasurable and that they do not much care to seek out very often.
When something is pleasure on demand (like heroin) it can lead to an addiction and people taking too much of it. But if something requires work to achieve, it will be harder to overdose and get addicted. To achieve jhana one needs to meditate pretty intensely, so it's naturally more difficult to overdo it, and it would be difficult to "overdose". Meanwhile all that work makes the experience less superficial and empty and more meaningful. Similarly if someone likes the runner's high, they're less likely to mess up their life then if they get addicted to heroin.
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.
Hāl (pl. ahwāl), or Haal, translated "spiritual state", appears many times within Sufi texts as the opposite and complement to maqaam.[1] As an early authority on Sufism, Ali bin Usman Al-Hujwiri in his book Kashf ul Mahjoob: a Persian Treatise on Sufism, defines Hal as "something that descends from God into a man’s heart, without his being able to repel it when it comes, or to attract it as it goes, by his own effort."[4] The maqaamat and the ahwal are clearly presented as two series of spiritual states, the first being something one must acquire and the second being something that must be received. To reach a new maqaam does not destroy the preceding maqaam. Hāl, on the contrary, is by its very nature "instantaneous", though not necessarily passive. The most prominent distinction made between the two spiritual states is that the ahwāl are essentially gifts from God, while the maqaamat are acquired through the exertion of effort.
It would be great if people who do lots of jhana would provide evidence they are exceptionally happy / productive / (outside of Jhana time) because to me that's the missing attraction.
Attestations of friends would do : "X seems so much happier now!"
Context: I'm pretty sure I reached the first Jhana a few yrs ago when I meditated twice a day. It was nice while it lasted, but didn't have powerful effects the rest of the day.
Accomplishing more in my life career wise has been a far more consistent mood enhancer, weirdly enough.
Jhana is just another form of meditative experience (nyam in Tibetan Buddhist texts). Meditative experiences are numberless. Similar to the Siddhis (supernormal powers) in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the Jhana states and how to achieve them are merely formulas for how to manipulate mind states. Most Buddhist teachers, even those who teach Jhana agree, these techniques never lead to realization or liberation. Ultimately, Jhana practice provides humans more opportunity to directly experience clinging to and craving for pleasurable experience and avoidance of displeasuable experience. When the practitioner finally realizes that point, insight and liberation can dawn and the pointlessness of Jhana is known.
I once read about a machine that claimed to induce this state. It was a series of programmed multicoloured lights which would flash on you as you meditated/lay down under it. I never had the chance to use it though and forget what it was called. Just an odd bubbling up from the internet which I'd forgotten about until I saw your post.
It sounds to my ear like jhana is a sort of proof by negation: you think you want pleasure, but that's not really what you want. Jhana proves this by providing maximum pleasure, thereby demonstrating irrevocably that pleasure isn't really what you wanted. After that is just the best of a rather uninteresting set - on to better things!
Have had access to Jhana(s) for around a decade, agree with most of what he said. It surpasses any normal pleasure, yet is integrated, stabilizing and reduces pleasures for other things.
It makes you more stable as a person as well, atleast those two things were correlated.
I sort of suspect harmful addiction is caused mainly by things that are pleasurable in the moment, but carry a significant cost. Junk food is addictive, not only because it feels good to eat it, but because it makes you feel lousy soon after you eat it (and thus craving the easy pleasure of eating it again). You could easily say the same thing about most drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc. It’s the pleasure-pain cycle that keeps people trapped, not the pleasure alone.
On the other hand, no one’s ever been addicted to fruits and vegetables.
I find myself mistrusting this without disbelieving the qualia of the jhanas themselves. My uneducated prejudice says that there is some insufficiently explored neurological catch to entering these states enough times, possibly creeping general anhedonia (which may well look a lot like enlightenment from some angles) induced through some kind of exotic desensitisation very high upstream.
Also, it's remarkable how difficult the Paradise Town thought exercise is. Maybe it's Slavic paranoia or something, but I'd start looking for the Westworld angle immediately.
"How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?"
Currently, close to zero minutes, walking. I've spent the fall stuck at home sick caring for small kids, sometimes confined indoors from of seasonal allergies, sometimes kept from gatherings of people by respiratory infections. After childbearing and the COVID slowdown in medical care, this is a fairly normal way for me to spend my time.
"Suppose that you read this post and decide to study meditation to reach jhana. You study hard for six months, succeed, and it’s even better than you imagined - but it isn’t reinforcing on a neurological level. Does this register as negative prediction error in the reward center? Would it make you less likely to try plans like 'study meditation' in the future, because they 'don’t pay off'?"
At this stage in my life, I'd expect that six months of intense study would mean a backlog of family responsibilities afterward. Since meditation takes uninterrupted time, I likely wouldn't pursue it past the six months for the foreseeable future -- and yes, achieving something only to conclude I can't actually use it might be rather deflating.
"When Nick says that he’s less interested in casual sex now, because jhana is an easier way to get pleasure, what is going on at a neurological level? Is this nonsense?"
Without speculating on the neurology, finding some mental state "better than sex" does not surprise me. I would consider music, and in my younger days, when I could avoid distracting cares, math, "better than sex". My rough equivalent of jhana is probably composing music, or getting to focus intently on some music I love.
That said, now that I have small kids and inadequate medical care, I've developed a stress-eating problem. Never had that before, and if sex addiction is like that, not really pleasurable, just something to smother the primal scream until the next time you've gotta stuff the scream down again, I'm not sure temporary exalted states could cure that, unless they were also helping you change all the mundane hours in your life when you couldn't be in them.
Hmm, seems similar to the states you reach on shrooms, which is kind of like a state of radical acceptance, where you are able to relinquish all resistance. Material pleasures, sex, food, etc all become frivolous because in that blissful state of unconditional self love, there are no more “holes” to fill with these desires. The great paradox which many report is that in spite of being in such an intense altered state of consciousness, it is in fact this state that feels like the natural “default setting”, while the day to day experience is in fact the “altered reality”.
The best thing about shrooms is how this feeling lingers long after the experience. Sort of a return to nature that allows you to temporarily cleanse yourself of all of the negativity we humans tend to dwell on. How long it lingers depends entirely on how well you can actively integrate the experience into your day to day habits. This is why I’m so optimistic about mushrooms combined with long term CBT for depression. They don’t actually “cure” it, but they give you the blueprints, toolkit, and step by step instructions for allowing a person to heal themselves.
Anyways, I’m curious from those who’ve experienced both, if the experience in similar. I assume there’s a lot of overlap between communities, and I’m wondering if many got into this form of meditation only after psychedelic experiences gave them a “model” of this mental state.
I’ve also realized that there are certain people who just don’t have a profoundly meaningful experience on mushrooms. It’s just cool colors and being high. Is it possible that this could be an alternative for them to reach this state? Or are these people just largely incapable of having meaningful experiences in this way at all? My gut kind of says the latter.
There are counterexamples for jhana reducing desires for casual sex. Culadasa got a lot of flack for hiring prostitutes late in his life (no judgement from me on this) and he undoubtedly could access high strength jhanas. Also sexual abuse from prominent meditation teachers is not rare.
I only have access to low strength jhanas (which is different from numbered jhanas) so I cannot confirm/deny this desire aspect first hand. For me, while I see the comparison to sex, I think of it like comparing chocolate cake to vanilla ice cream. They're sweet and tickle something in the brain but I could see myself wanting both, unless I've stuffed myself on jhana(or cake). Also, wouldn't there be some sort of adaptation to whatever chemical cocktail is released by jhanas in the brain?
Subjectively, jhanas are close to the most pleasant moments I can achieve, but I don't spend all my time meditating because at least for me, there's also friction in meditation, which builds with duration and also a sort of activation friction in the beginning.
I am someone who claims to be able to experience jhana states.
I also still enjoy casual sex, as well as various kinks.
It seems a lot of people are caught up on the "satiety" aspect. And I experience that. But there's many areas of life where we don't maximize positive feelings even when they don't have drawbacks.
Example: kissing a partner passionately feels better than a goodbye peck on the cheek, doesn't really take that much longer, and has only positive benefits. We still kiss different ways as appropriate.
> Suppose that you read this post and decide to study meditation to reach jhana. You study hard for six months, succeed, and it’s even better than you imagined - but it isn’t reinforcing on a neurological level. Does this register as negative prediction error in the reward center? Would it make you less likely to try plans like “study meditation” in the future, because they “don’t pay off”?
I don't think Jhana being non-addictive means meditation hasn't paid off - at the point you can do it, you've probably figured out that meditation is pretty key to unlocking yet more profound realizations about the nature of life and suffering. It feels like waking up from a dream - like your life before you begun to meditate was a dream. It becomes clear there is a ton of value inside your head and it's worth meditating every day.
Also, I don't know how strongly we should take "non-addictive", since many experienced meditators are meditating daily and taking regular breaks from daily life to indulge it further. It's confusing to mix enjoyable things with addictions - are model trains addictive? is christianity? Meditation tends to be a lifelong pursuit and community, once you get into it.
I've been back to Jhana about twice since Macys. The time in Macys is one of my happiest memories, not gonna lie, it feels a bit embarrassing to say that. I'm continuing to practice and hopefully will become a lot more proficient at jhana and further states.
I used to doubt all sorts of things like chakras, jhanas, enlightenment, religion, etc - total skeptic of all woo. But then I found jhana myself and had an 'alice through the rabbit hole' moment. Now I have to go back through my whole worldview and reevaluate everything. Hate to say it but chakras are looking 'real', and the path to enlightenment seems like it's pretty well understood and explained by many different people.
With all due respect to Nick, the fact that "jhana killed my desire for casual sex" seems like a rather low bar. Of course people can define "casual sex" in different ways (is there such a thing as "formal sex"?) but being in a loving sexual relationship with someone you're genuinely attracted to can also kill (or at least greatly reduce) the desire for casual sex.
Casual sex is mostly just a combination of fantasy and friction with someone you either don't know well or don't want to spend much time around, or someone that isn't interested in spending much time with you, aside from copulating. That doesn't hold too much appeal, except for providing marginal validation for those that crave it, or brief gratification (which masturbation also provides).
When I do my kind of meditation -- with no connection to Buddhism or any other spiritual practice -- I essentially am just thinking and focusing, the opposite of "emptying my mind," and am often able to resolve problems or work out a creative challenge. More akin Sherlock Holmes mentally wrestling with a difficult case, perhaps, than any kind of Eastern meditation. Afterwards I'm always glad for the mindfulness and focus.
Meditating solely to reach some kind of bliss state, especially one whose effects don't really last, must be pleasurable to the meditator, but doesn't seem to do much for anyone else. Kinda like having a good dream at night. Or surfing.
A long time ago, I made sure I could get into the first couple jhanas. And it was fizzy, exhilarating, even a little thrilling, but also in some sense really boring. Like it was sort of "contentless" and palpably "wasn't going to go anywhere," or something. Like it didn't really plug into my metaphysics, goals, or meaning. So I very consciously didn't bother to pursue it further. "Enlightenment," though, is a completely different ballgame, in my experience.
That said, learning to get into them is instructive (though not critically so, as best I can tell); there are some nice feedback loops and transferrable skills. And I could see them being a good investment for some people, modulo goals and opportunity cost.
The classical texts tend to push them as a prerequisite for enlightenment, I think, though debates as to whether they're really necessary have been going on for thousands of years. In my experience, they are not necessary.
I discussed my first jhana experience with a Thai Forest Monk. He told me that in his 24 years as a monk, maybe a total of one year was spent in a state of jhana. He said that what is important about jhana is not to spend so much time in that state. What is important is to recognize that it is there, so we stop seeking happiness in the wrong places. Having so recognized, our attachments to worldly pleasures and aversion to pain begin to lose their grip on us.
The difficulty is sustaining the concentration necessary to attain jhana, and then becoming discouraged with our meditation practice when it isn’t readily accessible anymore.
As some comments have observed how good sex is varies alot between people.
Can anyone who has had both Jhana and some really good MDMA/heroin/meth experiences compare it to the first time drug experience? As Scotf has observed they don't remain quite as euphoric even if they stay motivating but that first time euphoria is probably our best bet for interpersonal comparison.
Oh wait my friend definitely went to a party with this guy last week and said he was crazy- apparently he was covering the four stages of enlightenment? edit- friend is currently taking credit for inspiring the first tweet
#3- neurological changes- asked a room full of neuroscientists just now: meditation increases BDNF in the CSF, brain changes differ dependent on whether or not you're teaching people to meditate, all the studies suck, the monks that meditate frequently and are good at it are the only people where you'd definitely see a marked difference between meditating vs not on an MRI, and Richard Davidson at U Wisconsin does some of this research
Anyway this is why you don't use your social circle as a proxy for lit reviews
I'm pretty solid at jhanas, as in, I can reliably get up to 5th, and I can touch the others occasionally. Thanks, partially, to Nick Cammarata helping me out with some personal instruction!
And I'm less enthusiastic about them. Still pro jhana, but not as much as my creditable meditative colleagues quoted above. I think there's a lot of personal variation here; many meditators can do them, not all care that much about them. After a jhana phase of a couple of months, I got somewhat bored, and, even during that phase, they didn't really change my desire for pleasure, sexual or otherwise. They're really cool, but, to me, 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. It's like a giant package of mental sour candy that only comes in a few flavors. I revisit them occasionally, and it's fun that I can get myself harmlessly high with my brain if you give me a few undistracted minutes, but, at this point, my meditation life wouldn't feel that impoverished without them.
That said, if you're into meditation, I recommend trying them out, it's worth a try. I think they're easier than is commonly assumed, and it's fascinating watching your brain feedback loop itself into being on drugs. (And then dropping body sensations and doing all the weird stuff that happens in the formless jhanas.) Also, learning them teaches you an interesting attentional skill, the ability to lean on something with your attention without fucking with it. This video is good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K5ypXyF3dY
"Pleasure without reinforcement value" is the dual of a well-known technique to avoid preference falsification, punishment-free/anonymous error reports.
It seems like most basic human emotions (happiness, anger, lust, etc.) have plausible evolutionary explanations-- is there such an explanation for jhanas? If so, why do we not all naturally experience them without practice? Or are jhanas an 'accident' which result from some quirk of human neuropsychology that we have successfully figured out how to exploit.
I meditate occasionally, and while I've never reached a jhana, I can say that meditation in general has the same kind of 'Enjoyable but not that reinforcing' quality to it.
The closest analogue I have in my life is the post-workout high. I wouldn't say that it's a thousand times better than sex, but I'd say that it's definitely pretty great, and more than enough to cancel out the hassle and pain of the workout itself... and that's without even considering the longer-term benefits.
And yet I don't work out nearly as often as I optimally could or should, even though I know perfectly well it will be a major net-positive experience, the very-short-term pain of actually having to do the workout seems to win most of the time unless I really pull tricks on myself (like paying a PT to show up and make me do it).
So, like, what's the deal with meditation, anyway? If I can get past my skepticism, articles like this make me want to meditate more and get better at it, because if it's real, jhana sounds amazing with only upsides, no downsides. For decades, I've had therapists preaching meditation and mindfulness at me, but for all of the talk, it's never progressed past "close your eyes, relax each of your muscles, breathe fully with your diaphragm, try not to think of any thoughts, except wait, it's actually okay to think of thoughts. But then try to stop or quiet those thoughts. Or just let the thoughts happen, and follow them. Whatever!"
I've never really gotten past any initial mindfulness stuff. I can find mindfulness useful, but I have no clue what comes after it. As you may be able to tell, I'm annoyed with the meditation pushers' attitude towards the "quieting your thoughts" thing. I find the lack of instruction about how to quiet your thoughts, or if you should in fact quiet your thoughts or just let them happen, with this sort of "it's impossible to do it wrong, man, you do the mindfulness the way you want, man!" to be supremely unhelpful, and maybe this is why I've never progressed further than the basics.
**Does anyone have a theory why sex scandals have most definitely occurred among meditation teachers of great renown, including ones widely reputed to have achieved jhana-at-will abilities? **
This seems to me like a relevant BIG question since one such scandal in our lil' niche of meditation teachers popular round these here parts (i.e., the rationalist and rational-adjacent communities) was, IIRC, a much-commented-upon article on ye olde Slate Star Codex in 2019:
(Sidenote: My quick skimming, aided by CTRL+F, showed no one mentioning this 2019 Slate Star Codex article... at least as of circa 11pm EDT on Wed 10/26 when I started writing this comment. Apologies if people have now mentioned it or I missed the people who did... and ADDENDUM 11:47pm EDT: I now see user "0k" had earlier referenced the main scandal motivating the article, namely that of John Yates aka Culadasa, the author of the popular round-these-here-parts meditation manual _The Mind Illuminated_.)
So, this question of "how are *jhanas* not addictive?!" might in the context of all this advanced, systematic meditation stuff be more like "Is it somehow that jhanas are A-OK, but other altered states of consciousness on the road to 'enlightenment' --- at least according to some traditions of mindfulness meditation --- are in fact the dangerous ones, the ones that breed temptation / behavioral addiction / sociopathy / etc?!"
FWIW, two cents of hypothesizing on the issue is this: jhanas just hit that oh-so-sweet spot of giving you major actual satisfaction **that doesn't noticeably decrease each time you try to engage in it again**. (And if numerous commenters have pointed this out while I've taken my dang sweet time finishing this here comment, then I humbly second all your motions.)
This idea of diminishing-returns-on-momentary-joy/ecstasy/etc seems to me to be an-oh-so-diabolically-effective heuristic to engender compulsions in our po' po' lil' brains and personalities. Presumably, it got naturally selected as a tendency in many of us since it really drove some particularly fecund individuals in our evolutionary past to rise to the top of sex and status competitions. (Ok, I'm compelled to say it not just seems to me to be so, but seems to major bestselling nonfiction authors to be so, e.g., Robert Wright of Bloggingheads/Meaningoflife.tv fame and, most pertinently for this discussion, the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Buddhism_Is_True )
To bring this comment to a close, two closing thoughts:
1) First, a "bleg" (does anyone say that anymore for an ask on a blog?): Didn't some formerly-heroin-addicted musician or other poetic soul have some pithy quote to the effect that heroin isn't addictive because it puts you in the throes of ecstasy, but *because the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc times you try it* it tantalizes you with just a little less ecstasy... just a little oh-so-PAINFULLY-noticeably-less ecstasy... hence you spend your life "chasing the dragon" of your first high, yada yada yada? If so, does anyone know who and when exactly?
2) What's the community's consensus on that classic and controversial experiment that supposedly shows rats won't compulsively push a lever for morphine, insanely eschewing food and water until they die, *provided that they're given lots of other, wholesome, rat-eudaimonic activities to do with other sociable rats?* I'm speaking of "Rat Park" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park).
P.S. This might just be a confession that I'm a weird person, but I gotta share that first thought after first being exposed to the story of the "Rat Park" experiment was "Oh, that explains why Mickey and Minnie haven't flamed out in some horrible addiction scandal like oh-so-many-other Hollywood stars! They have each other and many friends with whom to engage in wholesome activities!")
Separately, in what sense is jhanna per se pleasurable at all? Is that not sukha? The sensual references employed seem rather counter to the elimination of stimulus response Buddhist meditation generally aspires towards, unless they are meant strictly apophatically ("this is so much unlike X, it is like X").
Maybe this is one of those things where believing it is true is what makes it true, since it’s all internal states? But I do think that gets fuzzy because mental models of internal states definitely enter feedback loops with the rest of your body. I do know a bit about that.
I know that may sound discrediting to people entering Jhana but I’ll explain. Note: the next part will sound braggadocios so I will add that I am a poor athlete, have a childish sense of humor, and overeat as a bad habit, which I confess just to raise my believability in terms of me not saying the following for ego reasons.
I am really good at altering my internal states/forcing myself to deeply emotionally believe something until my body starts to involuntarily react as if it is happening and I have the best dexterity/internal body control of anyone I have ever met including magicians. I don’t think I did anything in particular that made me this way other than maybe noticing I was better than some stuff as a kid and then I just kept doing it. I also tend to stumble and drop stuff when I am not actively doing something like this so maybe it’s a weird optimization valley.
Weird stuff I can do: give myself goose bumps at will. Which I do by imagining that I am really, really cold. It’s like I make myself believe that I am cold so that my body responds as though I am. I am good enough at this that I can give myself goose bumps on one side of my body but not the other by imagining only that side is cold. Or just an arm or just a leg. Doesn’t seem to matter what temperature the room is I can make my arm hair/leg hair/whatever stand straight up.
All sort of weird finger manipulation stuff that has no practical purposes other than being really remarkably good at twirling a pencil around and getting people to ask if I’m a drummer. To which I have to respond I’m just a pencil twirler but a really good one. Then I’ll add in a second pencil to my twirl and have it go the opposite way of the first pencil so people know I wasn’t lying about being really, really good at pencil twirling.
I can write different things with each hand at the same time… kinda. I can definitely do this better than most people including people who were born ambidextrous (I consider myself to ambidextrish) but I have to do it by coordinating pencil/pen strokes between each hand. I can do simultaneous to a limited extent but it is a for sure practiced skill and I’ve lost a lot of it with time because I no longer have enough free time to just fill up legal pads with practice all day. Even after I’d dedicated like three months to it I was definitely straining to make it happen. Doing a circle with one hand a square with the other was the hardest, even more than words of different lengths. But the weird thing was that it became strangely easier when I imagined I was my own left handed twin brother, writing next to my own right handed self.
All of which is to say there is certainly plumbing from your brain to the rest of your body and it’s a bit sloppier and more slippery than we tend to think. Your mental model of reality, insofar as it is connected to the reality of your actual body, can certainly exercise some sort of recursive control. Your nerve endings can tell you it’s cold but also your brain can tell your nerve endings they are cold. If you believe you are left handed and just writing something with your right handed brother maybe for a few minutes your brain can just operate as multiple agents.
I’m a bit eccentric and I don’t know if that helps. I’m higher IQ but probably only average here. I have done something like Jhana, or a sense of deep profound contentment at least, although I don’t really consider what I do to be meditation or anything more than the result of being profoundly bored a lot as a child and wanting to show off for friends. I’m also probably a bit nuts.
Part of me wants someone to dare me to post evidence. It’s been a bit since I’ve done a good pencil twirling or two handed writing (which was great for writing down ideas and keeping my hands strong but was just too precocious to do at coffee shops without feeling like an asshole).
Back when I was meditating intensively I had intermittent access to jhana. There’s been a lot of comments essentially asking “If it’s so great, why isn’t everyone doing it?”. I think there are a couple major reasons:
- It’s not actually that quick or easy for most people. The subreddit for The Mind Illuminated is full of posts like “I’ve meditated diligently 45 minutes a day for the last year and still haven’t experienced jhana or had any special meditative experiences.” 6 months to achieving always-on access to the jhanas is remarkably fast.
- Many people run into some at least temporarily destabilizing experiences. If you’re meditating enough to get into jhana, you’re meditating enough to trigger a nice little existential crisis or three. People keep trying to break meditation down into concentration(the fun stuff that puts you into jhana) and insight(the stuff that triggers existential crises but also makes you enlightened), but at the end of the day concentration experiences lead to insight experiences and vice versa. It’s a bit of a mystery box from person to person as to whether your 6 months of intensive meditation will earn you access to the jhanas, complete boredom and lack of progress, some really weird experiences, an existential crisis, or re-opening a mountain of trauma you didn’t know you had.
When nerdy types start talking about “amazing sex,” I can’t help but roll my eyes. Sorry, but I don’t really value your opinion on this subject because I don’t think you’re attractive enough to have a serious understanding of that kind of pleasure. Maybe if a movie star or Hugh Hefner preferred jhana, I’d sit up and listen.
I happen to be doing a retreat soon to try to learn (some of) the Jhanas, can anyone think of any question/experiment for which it would be useful to get data/a question from someone both before and after trying to learn the Jhanas? I mean I guess an obvious one is just like, "pre-registering" to say whether I do end up experiencing them or not, as one data point for how hard it is. Anything else?
I think Bill Kaminsky raises a salient point: if meditation and spiritual practice lead to such enlightened states, and freedom from worldly wants and pleasure-seeking, then why have a number of high profile practitioners been credibly accused (and even admitted) to scandalous and/or exploitative sexual behavior?
I'm a dude, and I totally understand the urge to get laid, even when inappropriate, but aren't those endless hours of meditation supposed to cleanse them of that? It has always seemed like a damning indictment when yet another venerable old holy man is revealed to have been more interested in the bodies of attractive younger female acolytes than in their spiritual progress.
It doesn't surprise me coming from Christian preachers, they're a pretty mixed bag of hypocrites and self-dealers, but gurus always claim to have done the hard work to free themselves of that. And yet many of them still sleaze out when they can. . .
>watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free
That's called the internet, and I don't have to leave my room for it. The other stuff would be nice too, and I would be willing to invest some effort into it, like a couple hours on the weekend, but as I understand it, reaching jhanas is much more difficult.
I am one who has gone in and out of what Nick calls Jhana my whole life. Now 67 years old, my first memory of this state is from my fifth year. I can attest to what Nick says, namely, that this ecstatic experience is more pleasurable than sexual orgasm. I can also attest that when one is in Jhana, one can carry on one's regular daily routine, yes, even walk and talk at the same time, except that when one is walking, one floats, and when one talks, the words flow effortlessly.
Those who have not been in Jhana and thus gainsay the actuality of it should realize that it cannot be expressed in words, just as any other experience cannot be expressed in words. For example, if you've never tasted an avocado, it would be impossible for me to describe the taste to you. You just have to taste it yourself. The same with Jhana; you just have to experience it yourself. And I wish that everyone could experience Jhana, as I believe the world would then become a more peaceful and loving place.
This touches on the problem of language. Nick has chosen, and for the sake of this comment I have complied with his choice, the Pali word, Jhana, which is sometimes translated as meditation. In Sanskrit, it is Dhyana, which became Chan in Chinese, Seon in Korean, and Zen in Japanese. It seems that the ancient Indian spiritual practice has given us the most useful vocabulary to try to communicate this blissful, liberating state. Other Indian words attempting to describe this state are Ananda (bliss), Sambhoga (supreme pleasure), Samadhi (concentration), and Advaita (nonduality).
I applaud Nick and Scott for bringing this discussion of this real experience to the foreground and making it a subject to be studied physiologically as well as psychologically. (Sam Harris alluded to this in the closing pages of his book, The End of Faith.) May all be happy, peaceful, and free!
I’m the founder of Jhourney, a neurotech company attempting to map the neural correlates of the jhanas and use tools like neurofeedback to help make them more accessible.
Scott's questions get at the curiously highly-pleasurable-but-non-addictive nature of the jhanas. A few excerpts from my response:
[Experience suggests] they're not addictive. It’s not as if you wirehead yourself into some wildly different equilibrium, you just never go reaching for them the same way you start automatically reaching for your phone if you’ve been spending lots of time on Twitter. My colleague and neuroscientist Kati Devaney informs me that you can predict the addictiveness of a drug by the first derivative of its dopamine spike. Drugs that see more gradual rates of change of dopamine don’t see such addictive responses. This implies that despite their extreme pleasure, the neurological mechanisms of jhanas don’t have a high dopaminergic rate of change.
But for those concerned about wireheading like a heroin addict, perhaps even greater reassurance is that the idea of *living life* with the jhanas seems much more fulfilling than just doing the jhanas all day. By having access to the jhanas, in the form of either bliss, happiness, contentment, or deep peace (i.e. the first four jhanas), I’m able to “splash” them into everyday life. Walking in the woods with my partner? How about a little J2? Coming home after a long day? How about a little J3? Rob Burbea talks a lot about mastery of the jhanas being a process of learning to delight and play and weave together the jhanas with one another and in everyday life. Every now and then I meet someone who talks about the jhanas like “been there, done that” and I think, “Holy shit is this person missing out.” And since it takes a little practice, they’ve lost the ability to get back to the jhanas and need to relearn.
...
My favorite way of explaining the jhanas is “they may be the opposite of a panic attack.” Most everyone is familiar with an anxiety “loop” – one anxious thought begets another. By the time you’ve been at it for a few minutes, you start seeing physiological effects: your heart rate and breathing change, maybe your hands get sweaty. It turns out a little personal experimenting is enough to learn to create that same positive feedback loop with a positive kernel… and the results are better than anything you imagined.
...
Kati (my neuroscientist colleague) observed to me that people seem to go through phases with the jhanas:
- Pre-jhana: lack of awareness and then either rejection or fascination
- Phase 1: Fascinated and trying to learn
- Phase 2: Learn them, fascinated, and think they are absolutely life-changing
- Phase 3: Gradual forgetting how big of a deal they were and possible loss of interest
- Phase 4: Cycle periodically back through Phases 2 and 3
I think even Nick would admit he was fascinated for a while – I think he spent over an hour a day for a year in the jhanas. So did I.
I seem to be able to trigger the "frisson" response to music much easier than others. If I find the right song, I can squeeze as much frisson juice out of it as possible before I get too accustomed to it and it does nothing for me. Of course, you get similar feelings when you smell a fresh breeze and so on, I'm wondering if this Jhana state is in any way similar to that, where you've trained your brain to respond in a very ecstatic way. With that being said, could you potentially have a similar burnout where the same response just isn't felt anymore because you're so used to it?
So. I've only come across the concept of jhana this week, but it resonates because it seems plausibly like a description of an experience that I've had on and off since I was a teenager.
Potentially relevant context: I'm autistic but wasn't diagnosed until I was 34. Before diagnosis I experienced generally high levels of anxiety and stress, mostly due to the effort that I was putting in to act 'normal' plus a deep sense that nobody should have to put in that much effort, plus the relatively infrequent but unpredictable moments when I unwittingly did something weird and suffered social or practical consequences. I was brought up in a pretty religious but non-dogmatic Christian household and discovered Christian forms of meditative prayer fairly young.
At some point I found that if I sat quietly and contemplated, there would be a sort of shift and everything would seem/feel different. Tension just unravels, I become more aware of my own body (in a good way), everything around me feels a bit more spacious, colours and light a bit brighter, and I feel happy and not anxious any more.
Over time I got better at cultivating that 'shift' - when I was a kid it was quite hard, by the time I was at university I could reliably sink into it during prayer and came to classify it as 'the experience of the presence of God' on the theory that what I was doing was setting aside distractions to encounter the (Christian) God. But something felt a bit off about that because the experience - while all-encompassing and generally associated with a deep sense of wellbeing - didn't really feel strongly personified. Though if I just sit there feeling great I often feel like there is some big positive thing around me, but (I am aware how this sounds and am cringing as I type) that's just - everything else out there being great, right?
I'm in my late 30s now and haven't been so sure on the faith thing for decades (I describe myself as a Christian agnostic, heavy on the agnostic). I've practiced various forms of meditation at different times, but I don't meditate regularly, just when I remember to or need to. But I can still summon that different state and occasionally do, not always on purpose. Just typing about it now I keep slipping into deep breathing and can feel some tension lifting. It's always there, kind of available, and given how great it feels it is a bit weird that I mostly don't think of it tbh.
Further description: I do associate the state with meditation though these days I don't have to meditate much to slip into it. I usually therefore sit up straight, cross my legs, or stand still, often close my eyes. There's a kind of release, there's a kind of opening-up, I become very aware in a non-stressed, non-focused way of a kind of comfortable congruence all over my body. Hard to express how comfortable. Everything just feels sort of good, whatever I was worrying about is in perspective and the perspective is that the universe is basically fantastic whatever happens. I'm a big fan of sex but I would 100% say in terms of just pure physical pleasure this state is better than orgasm. Lasts longer too.
Genuinely don't know if that is jhana, but if it sounds like it is then put me down as a data point of some kind.
Dhammarato is a former American engineering professor and PhD psychologist who became a Buddhist monk in the lineage of Bhikkhu Buddhadāsa in Thailand. He’s now a layperson, but teaches (free-of-charge) over Skype from his home on Koh Phangan. You could do a lot worse than follow his explanation of the jhāna. https://youtu.be/P3mxq8h8o4I
1) Once you know you have immediate pleasure right here and now, you tend not to seek it anymore.
It also reveals that most of our pursuits are indirect pleasure chases, and when you can stop doing something for pleasure, you tend to view it from a more detached perspective, which reveals the mechanics.
Once you see how a loop works you tend to fall into it less (disinterest)
2) There are other paths than meditation that lead to the same result. Deconstructing the nature of self, our models, epistemology. None of this needs to be on a 'neurological level', it changes the nature of the software that runs on the mind.
3) Physical pleasure might evoke some kind of signal that the software on the mind is interested in. It activates some kind of pleasurable representation that you experience virtually in the mind. This you can shortcut and directly activate the representation of pleasure. So you get disconnected from the neurological or physical, as it gets revealed that is an indirect path
I believe I've been experiencing 'jhana', but approaching it from the more 'scientific' angle of trying to recreate drug-like euphoria at will. My interest started when I read about people reporting euphoria during psychedelic drug tests, even though they were given a placebo. I took a 'euphoric' substance and paid more attention than usual to how it felt, and used some old Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques to 'anchor' the experience (https://inlpcenter.org/nlp-anchoring/), to help re-enter the state later. Over the following weeks I experimented, and successfully was able to enter various levels of contentment-delight-euphoria-frisson, by using my recollections as triggers, along with musical cues (playing techo in my head), and imagining my 'chakras' being filled with warmth/energy. Also saying to myself "Man, I'm so high right now!" is surprisingly helpful.
A low level is now is achievable in a few minutes, and can be done while walking or performing other simple tasks (such as commenting on blogs ...). More intensity takes a bit more time and concentration, and isn't always achievable. But, like in the post, I often forget to use it for days on end, still regularly feel anxiety, and still drink too often.
Three things: 1. Interesting, though small numbers. N 1 (or N10, but from a rather non-representative sample);
2. Scott wrote before about a real-life-master-meditator who got caught with prostitutes, and Scott concluded that this "bliss" does seem to do much less than advertised.
3. I do like my sex (non casual for whatever that means), my chocolate (Lindt-dark) + a few other sins, thank you. Reminding me of Scott`s "last-non-enlightened hero" . - Both pieces SSC-era, if I remember correctly. Won`t go there to look, as I have my tax-declaration to do - and only 4 days left. SSC too full of bliss. No time for this. :/
If you are curious about the methodologically rigorous, ontologically neutral, and globally scalable research on jhanas (and other phenomena classified as "psycho-spiritual"), I highly recommend looking up The EPRC (https://theeprc.org/). The Jhana Study is a core part of Consortium's agenda, and feeds into its numerous projects, explained in the whitepaper (see: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/0aqIDHp5R/the-jhana-study?v=M6pP_Tb7W6).
I think there is no wonder that something can be extremely pleasurable but not attracting/attaching.
For example, DMT is always blissful for my friend's cat but she has no desire (in a sense like having desire to check inbox when you are waiting for some email) to do it.
Here's a really easy guide to a light form of jhana. It's like the deep jhana but mild. it can probably give you a clue about what is going on. You could spend 6 months working on it or you could find good guidance (like this one or a direct pointing out instruction).
The book "practicing the jhanas" by Tina Rasmussen talks about setting up a 3hour window for each jhana (on different days or whatever) to sit and soak in them. The proposal is that the really grabby parts of the psyche who are like, "the only way to feel the good j1 feeling is to eat ice-cream" (or other material desire), will tend to pop up over that 3hr window and release their grabby desire. You can still have ice-cream but your grabby suffering mental loop is now freer from thinking the only way to get the good thing is ice-cream.
This causes a general "falling away" of desires that were crud anyway. The deep desires remain and the meaningful desires definitely remain. In fact it's easier to put up with the negative hardship on the road to the deeper desires when you have access to jhana.
A colloquial question is - why are meditators always depicted as smiling? It's because they can access all kinds of good subjective states, any time they like.
Meditators also know of a maturing relationship with bliss. Where you get enough of it, often enough that it gets less interesting and you prefer more stable states like equanimity (j4) to the energetic, exciting, blissful and irritating state of j1.
People like Daniel p Brown (meditator and psychologist passed away in 2022) put state skill as a part of healthy adult development. The (it's not consensus in the) integral community agrees that state navigation and skill is important and has people showing up more adult and more mature. Daniel Goleman also said similar that skill over emotional states is important for maturity. (and many more researchers)
Have some experience meditating and come from a family (father/mother) of 60´s hippies that truly lived the experience for some years; they went to India worked with gurus and so on. Yogis are real and can do amazing things with body and mind. But it takes years and years of great persistence and practice for someone who is born in the non-narcisistic cultures to achieve starting levels. To westerns I would say it can increase lifes experience and have benefits in general psicological health, but very marginal for a non practitioner. This people talk is truly bullshit. The detachment from the pleasure center comes from increased conscience; it is nullified as a trigger response by hightened conscience. It is all or nothing; there is not 'less casual sex' for a monk; a monk 'do not sex'; the state of bliss/grace/jahna is achieved after years of great compromised work that entails giving up most of narcisistic life (self, family, community, etc.). All religious traditions have individuals working toward such goals, but in the east it has been organized as 'procedure' and focused as such. Bull
I got a more detached perspective to sex when I started living with a girlfriend whose sexual drive was a bit stronger than mine. Previously there always was this feeling of scarcity, that I would like to have sex more often than I do. But now there is an understanding that the satisfaction of this desire is extremely easy and can happen any time I want it so the desire became less intense.
I think there is a general pattern here. When you're needs are chronically unsatisfied, the desired are powerful and hurtful. When your needs are met all the time and you know that, it's much easier to deal with rare dissatisfaction.
I’ve meditated for years. I’ve never read anything about this jhana business but I often experience something like what is described above. I used to really enjoy drinking, but I noticed a while back that I prefer, as Nick put it, to “just live a normal peaceful day,” as opposed to craving feeling altered as a way of escaping stress or feeling elevated. Not that I don’t order a manhattan if we go out to dinner. I’m not too holy to have a drink or something. I don’t get the commentary about fun casual sex, though I enjoy sex plenty, just not with random women. My sense is meditation is a psychological/biological self-mediation routine, kinda like jogging or lifting weights for the brain and emotional system, rather than some cosmic thing. It works. Try it.
Aside from "jhana" which sounds delicious there are the less poignant self-regulating benefits of meditation/mindfulness that we can all benefit from. Even five minutes ~daily proves it's worth!
I've attended 2 and 4 week retreats with Leigh Brasington studying his style of Jhana and have, at times, reliably achieved J1-4 at various levels of intensity. For me a minimum of 1 hour of daily meditation (for weeks) is required to be able to reliably enter Jhanas and the quality is dependent on my recent volume of meditation. Brasington does warn about the risk of becoming a Jhana Junkie but not excessively, it seems a temporary trap. For him the point of the Jhanas is to develop insight, not the pleasure they create. Going through J1-4 then applying the resulting state to a contemplative practices or even work is a huge amplifier. If you're in it for the pleasure, you're missing the point. Becoming addicted to it would be like having to run a daily 10k to maintain a heroin addiction.
J1 is unpleasant for me, too intense. J2-3 are nicer and a solid J4 is amazing oceanic calm that leaks into the next day. I had surgery a few years ago. When they pumped a bunch of opiates into me before doing some nerve blocks I though "meh, I can do better than this", felt like a middling J3.
I have lapsed in my meditation practice despite how much I enjoy Jhanas. This is common particularly without a community of practice around you.
As for the questions:
1) Not sure how to answer this. I'll have to think about it.
2) I have pretty much done this, as described above. Meditation payoff is longer term, more like exercise than drugs. Jhanas give the impression of immediate payoff but it's illusory, demonstrably insufficiently reinforcing to commonly lead to addiction.
3) I dunno. Maybe a lot of meditation was reducing some sort of pathological need that led to having casual sex. Perhaps a control; If he meditates a lot without entering Jhana, just deep concentration, and doesn't feel the need for casual sex it could be argued that the meditation is causing it. Personally I never liked casual sex for the same reason I don't like J1; too intense.
I recommend Brasington's book "Right Concentration" for anyone interested in achieving Jhanas. He makes a solid case (backed by plausible scriptural arguments) that the Jhanas are core to Buddhist meditation but have been neglected. He's an excellent teacher with pretty much all of his content available online.
A little while ago I posted a comment that referred to Suzuki Shuryu's short 1970 book, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." I'd like to mention a way I think it relates to issues that neuroscience addresses now.
Here's a short description from Suzuki's book ("zazen" = "sitting/doing jhana"):
**When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air goes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It
just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no “I,” no world, no mind or body; just a swinging door.**
Suzuki is describing one of the signature points of the exercise of zazen, experiencing the contingency of the self (a basic ideological feature of Buddhism is the belief that the experience of the self as a real entity is illusory).
I have in mind parallels with neuroscientific analysis of the experience of self--specifically, Rodolfo Llinas's "I of the Vortex" (which I think is a terrific book [not so much the last chapter], despite Llinas's occasional struggles with English). Llinas, who is a senior neuroscientist at NYU, is concerned (in part) with demonstrating that and how the "self" is a complex and fragile composite; Suzuki was concerned with experiencing that this is so. Llinas's claims are scientific should be judged analytically, by examining his statements and their relation to data. Suzuki's claims can only be judged through a synthetic methodology by trying out the practice he describes in his book. A Scientific American article I linked to in another comment (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zen-gamma/) reflects research that addresses ways that the relation between what people like Llinas and people like Suzuki discuss can be explored.
Freudian interjection -- what most people want is not "pleasure" but "satisfaction". Nick's second tweet makes a cute equation between the two: he believed he was unsatisfied because he lacked pleasure, so he found One Neat Trick (Psychiatrists Hate Him!) to get pleasure, and then he felt satisfied. The general case is "people want to get what they want", rather than "people seek out pleasure always".
But as with your discussion Q #3, satisfaction isn't always pleasurable. It can even be distinctly *unpleasurable*. It's not like e.g. self-harm actually transforms the sensation of pain into pleasure; it uses the sensation of pain to derive *satisfaction*.
Lacanian extension -- "jouissance" is precisely the repetition of an originally pleasurable action until it becomes painful, but it still remains satisfying, because you made that connection "X = pleasure" a long time ago, and never un-learned it.
So, if you feel like you need a hit of pleasure, you smoke a cigarette, don't feel pleasure, but do feel satisfaction. And the flip side here, is that despite feeling satisfied in your pain, you also somehow still feel empty. Why? Because you didn't get the original thing inscribed into your memory. So, the shallow satisfaction is felt on a deeper level as suffering, as being deprived of the thing you wanted even though you did the thing that your memory-brain believes will get it. Almost as if desire is the root of suffering, or something...
1. No matter how far away it was i would just move there permanently. If I really had to commute, the round trip time could be up to 2x the amount of time I spent at the destination, assuming I can listen to a lot of audiobooks while my tesla drives itself.
2. I get very very suspicious when someone describes something as supreme bliss with no negative side effects, but also that they have no desire to do it often. I would think, "is Jhana really that good or just social desirability bias"?
"How come no one voluntarily buys X? Because people don’t actually like X – at least not enough to pay for it. Why does everyone praise X? Because praising X sounds good. Why do people unanimously vote for lavish spending on X? Because voting is just a special kind of talking."
I don't expect eastern religion to be less bogus than western religion. A non-reinforcing pleasure could be observationally equivalent to an SDB-fueled profession of religion.
3. I'll offer a boring, obvious explanation. Plenty of other people "get religion" in various ways and become less interested in casual sex. A lot of behavior is driven by one's sense of identity. If your sense of identity is as a devout member of a religion like Buddhism that sorta looks down on carnal desires, then you're going to be less interested in casual sex.
So, I've meditated daily for about 4 years. I didn't know the name for the concept of Jhana, but I think I might have felt that at points. I'm still somewhat skeptical that meditation modifies your base desires, even though that is very much a concept and an explicit goal in some forms of Buddhism. From Nick's perspective, it mostly looks like he had a very high baseline happiness and low neuroticism even prior to meditating, and there are many things that could have altered his desire for casual sex which he falsely attributed to Jhana meditation. It would be interesting to see his testosterone levels, because if those had gone down, that would be a much more obvious and mundane explanation for why he doesn't desire casual sex. From reading about people's perspective taking some of the new weight loss drugs, it looks like desire for dessert is much stronger in some people than others, and if Nick was never morbidly obese, then altering his desire for dessert through meditation is probably a much easier task than he is making it out to be.
Personally, I don't really have desire for dessert or really rich food either, but that happened much prior to learning about meditation, and I would attribute it to learning that sugar is bad for you.
My issue is, from learning about my own internal states through meditation, I don't really know why I have my internal states at all. I don't have any access to why desires arise, and I don't know what my internal state will be before I actually notice the state. This part makes me believe in luck much more, because it's mysterious to me why I choose to make good decisions (sometimes), rather than screw up my life really badly.
Although meditation is occasionally very pleasurable, I agree that it isn't really reinforcing the way drugs are. Personally, the reason I don't spend 5 hours a day meditating might be because I still have desires. Maybe if enlightenment is possible and some of the further claims about mental states are possible, I would actually meditate or try to convince others to meditate much more. I do worry that people who claim to achieve these certain types of bliss just have different brains, and the claims they are making are tantamount to tall people giving advice on how to be tall. They are fundamentally missing the point that they are not actually training all too hard to achieve Jhana, and it is impossible for others.
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. 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.
The description of the experience of jhana doesn't seem internally consistent to me, and that greatly increases my skepticism of the whole thing. I think a reasonable definition of pleasure just is "that which is desired" but jhana is described as both intensely pleasurable and not desired/sought by the people who can get it. That just feels like a contradiction. Compare: a scientist has created a device that does something in the brains of mice when they pull a lever, and given the choice the mice pull it maybe every few days. Would you really infer that whatever is happening in their brains is intensely pleasurable, better than food and sex? I don't see how. Maybe another way to phrase it is that the self-reported experiences of jhana-practitioners strongly conflicts with their revealed preferences in a way that makes them seem untrustworthy.
1. I'll assume that nothing "productive" happens in this town, other than whatever productivity is implied in experiencing pleasurable scenarios. No shop talk, obviously, but also no conversations that give you an insight you can use in your life outside the town, etc. In that case, I might never go even if it was next door, for myself. Though I might end up going just to exercise a relationship with someone who finds pleasure valuable per se.
2. I don't know how something could be reinforcing on anything other than a neurological level? AFAICT, the whole lesson of bliss-at-your-fingertips is that pleasure is not fundamentally valuable, nor even instrumentally valuable except as a quirk of psychology. Consider money, if you could go get any amount of money you wanted with no negative side effects, how much would you spend? You might get tired of spending a billion dollars a day, but you'd settle on a steady state where you spend more than you do now. With jhana, it seems like the opposite, you settle on a steady state where you seek out *less* pleasure than you did before.
3. If cravings for the pleasure of sex causes sex addiction, then yes, I'd expect easy access to jhana would often cure it. Your description ("it's not even pleasurable anymore...") makes it sound like the causal chain doesn't contain much reference to bliss...
I’m not sure if this state of mind is a good thing. Part of the drive to make your life better is discontent. To be able to retreat from the world and experience unlimited pleasure seems like a possible way to stagnate. Not to mention, it seems dangerous to hack your brain and sensory experience. And I’m not speaking theoretically, some people have reported ill effects: https://www.insider.com/why-meditation-can-be-bad-2018-3?amp
Of course some people can do it safely, but how do I know if I’m doing it safely?
It is interesting how we actually have two opposite scientific explanations of how desires work. From the "homeostatic" perspective, you desire the things you miss, and once you get them, you don't miss them anymore, so you do not desire them so much, at least for some time. From the "reinforcement" perspective, if you get something that feels good, you will want it even more.
These models often provide opposite predictions. After eating a delicious cake, the former predicts that you will say "thank you, I am full", while the latter predicts that you will say "that was awesome, can I have seconds, please?". (If you have read the Sequences, having perfectly logically sounding scientific explanations for both X and the opposite of X should make you a little uncomfortable, right?)
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There is a concept of substitute goals (not sure how exactly it is called) in psychoanalysis or something. The idea is that you want some X, but either you cannot get it, or it is socially unacceptable to admit that you want X, therefore you start desiring some Y instead, and redirect your emotional energy towards chasing Y.
What often happens is that no matter how much Y you get, you will feel that it is not enough. That is because there is a part of your brain saying (incorrectly) that you want Y, and another part of your brain perceiving (correctly) that you are still not getting X, and if these parts are confused enough to believe that they are talking about the same thing, their joint statement will be that "yes, you want Y, but you are not getting enough of it".
The solution of course is to recognize that you actually wanted X, and when your emotional energy returns to desiring X, you will no longer feel the need to get endless amounts of Y. Thus, if you notice that no matter how much Y you get, it never feels enough, you should suspect that Y is just a substitute goal for some X that you actually wanted.
In this model, sex can play both the roles of X and Y (for different people). Some people believe they are looking for friendship or spirituality, when they actually want sex. Other people believe they are looking for sex, when they actually want to feel powerful or accepted. Maybe most bodily pleasures are just substitutes for something, and the jhana experience makes it obvious on a System-1 level. Maybe the entire sexual experience is a mixture of multiple things, only one of them being what you truly want, and the jhana experience is the concentrated form of that, so it satisfies your needs for a long time.
(It would even make some sense from evolutionary perspective, because nature is not trying to make you happy, it is trying to make you reproduce more. So if people do too much of the "almost right, but not exactly right" things, it would be an evolutionary advantage to make sex one of them.)
What's the difference between "jhana" and "really deep meditation"? Not trying to be disrespectful here, I'm really wondering. When I meditate for about 5-10 minutes I feel happiness/peace/calm comparable to other recreational things (running, reading, eating good food, playing a relaxing video game, etc.), but not as good as sex. I feel like this mental state is easily accessible and I'm not addicted to it. Couldn't jhana just be really deep and skilled meditation? Is that significantly different from what people are claiming? Maybe I just wrote a pointless comment???
Well, I don't meditate, but years and years ago I successfully induced a powerful spiritual bliss state where I felt oneness with the universe and intense lovingkindess towards everyone after a day of prayer. It lasted for about two hours? It was definitely intensely pleasurable in a way unlike anything else I've ever experienced, and it made doing very mundane tasks feel great, like setting the table, because I really intensely wanted to be doing things for other people. It gave me very intense motivation to be a better person for a few weeks after, I don't remember exactly. I made a bunch of massive structural changes to my life as a result. Not all of them the right choice,in retrospect. It also made me believe in religion for about ten years or so, but I never accessed the state again and eventually the weight of skepticism from other more daily factors became overwhelming. I can't confirm whether it's non-addictive because I badly wanted to experience it again and never managed, and it's hard for me to understand why, given an option of existing in intensely pleasurable permanent heightened awareness and motivation and desire to be my best self I *wouldn't* want to stay in that forever. Certainly when I was in the state I hoped it would last forever.
That said, at the time, it made a concept that came up in religious studies class, of five levels of pleasure, much easier to understand.
(The five levels of pleasure, where each is supposed to be incalculably better than the one before:
1. Physical
2. Love
3. Meaning
4. Power and creativity
5. Encounter with God - presumably, the bliss state described above
There was also a lot of discussion of counterfeit pleasures that are fake alternatives to the five, like porn vs sex. Etc. The whole framework was from Rabbi Noah Weinberg if someone wants to read up on it, I definitely think his way of describing the differences between different classes of pleasure might help articulate some stuff people are talking about in this thread, it's just tied in with a bunch of religious stuff I don't really endorse anymore. Maybe I should try some more all day prayer and I'll end up becoming religious again, who knows.
> Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
This would mostly be limited by the monetary costs of travel, not the time costs. But since part of the premise is that you can eat as much food as you want, there's no real reason I'd ever *leave*; the location of my house is moot.
‘Buddhism is religion for paraplegics’ (or something like that, Machado de Assis, I think in the Bras Cubas book)
Seriously, I have meditated more or less frequently (avg sessions of 45 min, around 4 times a week) for around 3 years, since 2017, I think I got jhana once (experience was unmistakable - felt like flying), but often states of very pleasurable deep concentration. Found it very hard to replicate that one time ‘flying’ experience. Gradually I lost interest in meditation, there’s a world out there and things to do. Still meditate very occasionally for relaxation, it’s great with some Brian Eno playing.
Caution: I'm neither neuroscientist nor a psychotherapist, so my lingo may be very much off.
For starters, let me divide positive experiences into euphoria and pleasure. I believe these two are physiologically different, but they can come together sometimes. The pure euphoria experience is the proverbial "reward lever", and the pure pleasure experience is something like making a scientific discovery (have experienced only the latter, but also had some euphoric experiences). By Nick's description, jhana looks like a pleasure and not euphoria.
I believe that any pleasure, besides being pleasure in itself, may be also colored with some other emotions which affect the overall experience. These emotions make the pleasure more meaningful and differently enjoyable, because an extra qualia dimension is added (for a crude analogy I'd suggest watching porn with no sound vs watching porn with sound). However, when we get the pleasure of the same kind over and over again, the payoff from experiencing certain qualia diminishes and these pleasures become less enjoyable. The same also applies to the pleasure by itself: there are diminishing returns from getting every extra unit of pleasure.
Thus, it is reasonable to desire different pleasures to experience different qualia and do not hit these diminishing returns. For example, right now I'm on a vacation and am free to do whatever I find pleasant, so yesterday I went on a hike (aesthetic pleasure from the views + bodily exercise pleasure), and today I'm chilling out at home, because the hike-related emotions won't be so bright today.
From what Nick describes, jhana looks like a rare case of pleasure which is not colored by any other emotions. I would agree that casual sex lies in the same category, while tasty food doesn't: eating a burger is very different experience from eating a white chocolate bar.
As an individual, I strive to have many pleasures of different kinds, that come with different emotional coloring and different qualia attached to them (and thus are more fulfilling). I also want to have some basic level of pleasure in my life, so Nick's story motivates me to learn to get to jhana in order to have a "Advil for my soul pains" for the gloomier days in my life, but not more.
Thus, answering the questions:
1. The description of the town looks way better than the jhana description (shows are interesting, different food is tasty in a different way etc.), so I'd go there every weekend, if it's less than 2 hours commute one way. If we replace this town with a jhana town, I'd probably go there only when I'm sad, so there would be no particular schedule (and the frequency of the trips would depend on how much I feel sad and how long is the commute).
2. The description here is very logical and in line with Nick's description and my perception, so I wouldn't anyhow update my priors.
3. I'm very much unsure about the neurological level, but I think that on the psychological level there might be various reasons for sex addiction. For example, one may feel unattractive and casual sex is a quick way to understand that there is someone who desires you so much they're up to having sex with you. Thus, a jhana for this kind of sex addict may increase overall life pleasure, and in an optimistic scenario this sex addict will be happy from spending enough time in jhana and won't care about feeling undesirable. However, most probably this insecurity will still plague them and they will seek casual sex not for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of getting validation (which aligns with the description provided by Scott).
Another way to relate to Nick C's over-the-top description of the experience of mastered jhana practice would be to link it to descriptions of experiences deploying skill mastery that were explored by Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi in developing his concept of "flow." People who describe ecstasy in flow experiences--e.g., highly skilled athletes or performing artists--sometimes resemble Nick C in the extremity of their language. In a book that preceded the better known "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience," called "Beyond Boredom and Anxiety," I believe Csikszentmihalyi did include Zen masters among the classes of people he felt achieved this type of experience. In later research, involving more lab monitoring, he and collaborators looked at EEG correlations that extended, if I recall, to video gaming as well.
The model of flow can be useful because it identifies the brain states Nick celebrates as pervasively available in reduced form--we all can get pleasurably lost in small activities involving deployment of ordinary skills (puzzles, games, sports)--with the potential to become overwhelmingly satisfying if honed to a very high degree and optimally deployed. We might feel it's a stretch if a ballet dancer said she felt that when she was locked the midst of a complex performance she had totally mastered, the joy was ten times better than casual sex . . . or a pianist, skier, etc. . . . but we probably wouldn't consider it mysterious or dismiss it out of hand, and we might grant the possibility based on smaller-scale rewards we encounter ordinarily for smaller-scale skill mastery and deployment.
A common feature among these experiences is the measurably suppressed scale of frontal-lobe activity that accompanies focused deployment of mastered skills--correlating to reported loss of any sense of personal identity ("I")--along with intense but effortless attention to the physical environment, as seen, heard, or felt. Hypofrontality--the suppression of the brain's executive function--and the experience of losing the sense of self (in this case raised to a central tenet of ideology) is equally a measurable feature of meditative trance states such as jhana.
Last January, I practiced jhanas 1-4, and I have (what I think is) a somewhat more balanced perspective.
The jhanas are kind of controversial within Buddhism. There's a sutta/story where the Buddha describes mastering jhanas 5-8, concluding they are not very useful, and then remembering jhanas 1-4 and realizing they are very important for progress toward liberation. However the Zen folks don't use them at all and your mainstream Vipassana people have always been a little skeptical of them.
First jhana is basically MDMA. You can find several people who advocate MDMA as absolutely life-changing, everyone should be on MDMA, etc.
If you believe that about MDMA, believe it about first jhana I guess. I will say the first time I did first jhana (with poor technique but hey), I did have the feeling "oh my god this is what I've needed, so much!" Better than really good, mindblowing sex? Well, different anyway, if the love and acceptance feeling is what you lacked before.
Personally I found both first jhana and MDMA to have a rocky comedown, which put me off repeating them. They are really high energy and I crashed hard afterward. However, I may try the jhanas again and I'm optimistic they won't always cause that crash. Maybe my opinion of them will improve!
Dropping into fourth jhana (via 2-3) was really life-changing. I would not have believed I could personally experience a state like that. Deep quiet, feeling physically sitting at the bottom of a well.
Doing the jhanas, and then comedown, got me meditating seriously and consistently for the first time ever, and it's basically slowly solving all my problems (therapy helps).
I haven't really gone deep on the MRI side, but I'm interested in citations for empirical work.
This one (Hagerty et. al., 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659471/) seems to get at the quesiton Scott is posing about which reward machinery is being triggered, using MRI to investigate. In particular they substantiate this hypothesis:
> H5: Jhanas should show increased activation compared to the rest state in the dopamine reward system of the brain (NAc in the ventral striatum and medial OFC). A broad range of external rewards stimulate this system (food, sex, beautiful music, and monetary awards), so extreme joy in jhana may be triggered by the same system (the VTA is also part of this system, but is too small to image with standard fMRI methods, but see [35] for successful imaging methods).
> Now, what does the released dopamine do? In PFC (via the mesocortical pathway), it draws attentional resources to the surprising stimulus and its plausible causes, gating out the processing of other, less relevant stimuli. Simultaneously, in NAc, it strengthens connections between PFC inputs and the endorphin-releasing cells, thereby wiring together the hedonic features of the reward and the sensory features of any cues predictive of it. This imbues the cue with the ability to release the GABAergic brake on VTA DA neurons all by itself. Phenomenologically, it results in us "liking" the cue as much (or nearly as much) as we like the reward (this is what allows, e.g., animal trainers to reinforce behavior with only the sound of a clicker that has previously been paired with food).
So, speculatively, if Jhana is somehow short-circuiting NAc to trigger without specific signals from PFC, are we weakening the existing connections from PFC that previously triggered NAc? Something like normalizing the weights over a bunch of input signals, but with the new input signal being "non-causal / Jhanic stimulation"? Thus reducing the weight of other causal hedonic pleasures (like casual sex in this example)? So these signals from PFC would not elicit as much dopamine response through NAc activation as they did pre-Jhana.
Perhaps there is also something here viz the second part:
> But once the brain learns that a reward is reliably predicted by a cue, the reward ceases to elicit a surprise signal. This means it no longer increases VTA DA neuron firing rate. It may still cause endorphin release and thus keep the GABAergic brake off, but if there's no surprise signal driving phasic firing, dopamine release will be minimal.
> That is to say: We still enjoy expected rewards; we just don't much *care* about our enjoyment of them.
If you can reliably produce the Jhanic pleasure state, perhaps this condition eventually obtains as well; it's no longer "surprising" that you can experience this bliss state, and therefore it's not addictive/appealing. But, maybe it's still a strong-enough stimulus in the NAc system to continue to reduce the weight of the other, more-surprising NAc activations from the PFC, so it's also displacing those surprisingly-pleasurable states from firing.
Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
The fact that Nick even has a "max ideal everything is 100 % perfect casual fantasy sex situation" and uses that as a benchmark for real/desirable pleasure/happiness tells me that our minds work so differently as to make anything more he says potentially irrelevant to me.
I realise we're a community of sceptics (and I appreciate that!), but I have to admit I was surprised at the amount of scepticism in the comments. I've never attained jhana, but the pleasure and anti-addictiveness of it reminds me a lot of e.g. "a sense of wonder for the world". I can tap into that any time I want, it's a fairly intense emotion, but I don't tap into it a lot. Similarly, the difference between "contentedness" (basically by definition long-term) and "happiness" comes to mind - once you achieve a certain level of contentedness, happiness becomes a lot less important. I can totally imagine jhana raising contentedness, in the same way some other things raise contentedness (e.g. if I recall correctly, 'having kids' is one of those). So the basic phenomenon passes my sniff test quite easily; which doesn't guarantee it's real, but it means my prior lands quite firmly on that it is.
(To be clear, I still really enjoyed this comment section - big thanks to the community here for insightful and friendly commentary, as always.)
Hello Nick, I Just came off a 10 days meditation retreat where we practised a very peculiar type of Vipassana meditation, that makes you concentrate on differents parts of your body, the sensations you observe in these different parts of the body to reach a state where you flow through your entire body and finally you reach a state (that I did not reach, yet) where you experience complete body dissolution. It was a very, very intensive course and I must admit I did not enjoy it. This kind of Vipassana is been exported out of Burma by Mr. Goenka. You can check it out. Let's say I am much more interested in Zen meditation or mindfulness meditation. I am interested in the workings of the mind, concentrating on one thing, posing the question Ramana Maharshi said one shoud pose to onself: "Who am I ?". And much less in the "sensations" in my body to "purifie" the mind, as I think that the question is not really how to purifie the mind but how to transcend the mind.
All that to ask you what kind of meditation would you suggest I practise to try to reach that state of bliss you so forcibly praise ?
>Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
It's an experience machine. No.
I mean, how come I have "lots of great friends there" already at this remarkable place I've never been to, and as many attractive people as I want who want to have amazing sex with me (because if they're being paid to fake it or they're androids or whatever it's not so amazing), and so on?
Now, for ordinary, real levels of excellence, I found it worth while to go to London yesterday to three museums and an art gallery. I do this every few months, and it's a journey of two hours.
Not hard to accept his internal reports if you've experienced hypomanic states. Surely I'm not the only who has said this? On the "First Floor," I function abnormally well, just w more energy & ecstasy, and less need/desire for voluntary chemical mood enhancements. And sometimes that's as far as it goes. (Second Floor, I worry friends, annoy strangers, make suboptimal decisions, have weird arousals but not often bad enough to get fired or dumped. Third Floor... bad.) But even where meds are the only reliable ceiling, there are ofc life practices to help stay off the rides altogether. Seems only logical that *some* people, with an intense practice like meditation, could initiate, maintain, manage similar mental states. I'd only be dubious of a claim that most or even many ppl would have the same startling results from the same practice. Mood ranges are rather bespoke, I think? Which makes me curious to know if meditation as a way of life is mainly attractive to those with mildly hypomanic potential that could be activated in other ways.
I'm late to this discussion but I think Nick's point about the "non-addictive" nature of Jhanas and even forgetting about them overlooks the importance of bliss states as motivations for meditation. I started meditating because I'd heard so much about how great it was for my brain and my emotional well-being, but even 20 minutes was a chore. After sticking with it and attending a bunch of retreats, I had extended my meditations to 45 minutes or longer because it had not only stopped being a chore, but after 30 minutes or so my meditations got really pleasant. Whether or not I sometimes entered a jhana I don't know, but my meditations always get so pleasant that I'm never tempted to skip them anymore. Another plus is it gets relatively easy to experience, to one degree or another, the pleasantness at other times & places (for example, stopped at a traffic light or waiting in line at a grocery check-out). My hat's off to whoever it was who was able to stay in a jhana while having sex.
Because yes, as various commenters have noted, getting blissed out isn't the goal or main point of meditation. The goal is to reach a deep & intuitive understanding of your relationship with reality, both subjective (your mind and body) and objective (the rest of it). "Enlightenment" might be more than that depending on whose definition you accept, but intuitively apprehending your connectedness to everything else is one way of describing a common thread in most descriptions of enlightenment.
I don’t have much experience with meditations and prefer yoga nidra. But I tried this phrase “am I aware”. I tried to think if I’m dead or alive and what would I feel. And I immediately felt a very powerful feeling, with such intensity that I couldn’t breathe properly and tried to escape it. (I concentrated on a breath for 10 minutes before this). And now even I’m not meditating, when I start to think about if I’m aware, my body starts shaking. I can compare this sensation to a time when I was under a huge stress. (Could it be because of adrenaline? )
Question #1: Why have I not simply *moved* to Utopia already? ;)
Question #4: The concept kinda scares me because what if I learn to do this and all it does is actually make all of the things I'm currently feeling (generally depression, anxiety, panic, self-loathing, anhedonia, bitterness, rumination) the things that end up being amplified instead?
Question #2: If I did that and that's what happened, it would *definitely* bias me away from trying again. If I tried it and it worked, but didn't self-reinforce, I wouldn't consider that a failure and it would not bias me against trying other techniques in the future. I'd probably just set a calendar reminder to remind me to do it, particularly if I was feeling depressed and it helped "fix" that.
Question #3: I have no idea, not being a psychologist, but having a close friend who runs an Addiction IOP, I *do* wonder if this technique would be useful to teach to people with heightened amygdala response, or if would be the worst possible idea.
Distinctive points in the progression of meditation. I mean, states one encounters as one goes "deeper". (aka "jhana", right?) I have some experience with the concentration-meditation (samatha to the buddhists) version of that. Jhana 1 : get high, 2 : gets easy to keep yr attention on yr object, 3 : encounter a vast space. That's pretty much as as far as I've gone with that. I do dry vipassana these days.
>> I don’t think normal models of reward have a good explanation here.
Maybe can be modeled as "it's easiest when you've been practicing, and gets harder the longer you've waited". So it's like a city with all the good things that is continuously getting further away. It doesn't seem urgent to visit when it's close, and it has diminishing appeal as it gets far, perhaps.
The general idea is that our brains evolved into what they are because we needed to hunt and track. The reason that we CAN do science is that the kind of thinking that science requires is the same as the kind of thinking that we evolved to track and hunt game.
Not only was it useful to be able to observe and deduce, but it also "feels good", the ultimate evolutionary reward, similar to sex. Meditating is an internal form of this same practice which brings us to a similar state without being focused on external stimuli.
I know it's rude but I basically just don't believe this is a real thing. The emperor may or may not have clothes but at least an outside analyst (a child, traditionally) can look at him and decide one way or the other. But everyone who makes claims to be able to do the Jhana thing is just saying stuff about their internal state, without even as much potential evidence as people who spend their lives claiming to be able to do telekinesis or clairvoyance.
As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
The fact that it's only themselves they are hurting doesn't really seem to change the matter. Unless their job/life is so beneficial to others as to make up for the difference they are choosing to fill the world with more suffering and less pleasure than they could by spending more time in that state.
Also I gotta get my act together and quit lazying out on meditation.
With no disrespect to Nick and others it’s going to take a little more than these anecdotes to persuade me that they are having an experience that is both extremely pleasurable and that they do not much care to seek out very often.
Did you mean jnana?
When something is pleasure on demand (like heroin) it can lead to an addiction and people taking too much of it. But if something requires work to achieve, it will be harder to overdose and get addicted. To achieve jhana one needs to meditate pretty intensely, so it's naturally more difficult to overdo it, and it would be difficult to "overdose". Meanwhile all that work makes the experience less superficial and empty and more meaningful. Similarly if someone likes the runner's high, they're less likely to mess up their life then if they get addicted to heroin.
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.
FWIW, something vaguely parallel, from Sufism:
Hāl (pl. ahwāl), or Haal, translated "spiritual state", appears many times within Sufi texts as the opposite and complement to maqaam.[1] As an early authority on Sufism, Ali bin Usman Al-Hujwiri in his book Kashf ul Mahjoob: a Persian Treatise on Sufism, defines Hal as "something that descends from God into a man’s heart, without his being able to repel it when it comes, or to attract it as it goes, by his own effort."[4] The maqaamat and the ahwal are clearly presented as two series of spiritual states, the first being something one must acquire and the second being something that must be received. To reach a new maqaam does not destroy the preceding maqaam. Hāl, on the contrary, is by its very nature "instantaneous", though not necessarily passive. The most prominent distinction made between the two spiritual states is that the ahwāl are essentially gifts from God, while the maqaamat are acquired through the exertion of effort.
It would be great if people who do lots of jhana would provide evidence they are exceptionally happy / productive / (outside of Jhana time) because to me that's the missing attraction.
Attestations of friends would do : "X seems so much happier now!"
Context: I'm pretty sure I reached the first Jhana a few yrs ago when I meditated twice a day. It was nice while it lasted, but didn't have powerful effects the rest of the day.
Accomplishing more in my life career wise has been a far more consistent mood enhancer, weirdly enough.
Jhana is just another form of meditative experience (nyam in Tibetan Buddhist texts). Meditative experiences are numberless. Similar to the Siddhis (supernormal powers) in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the Jhana states and how to achieve them are merely formulas for how to manipulate mind states. Most Buddhist teachers, even those who teach Jhana agree, these techniques never lead to realization or liberation. Ultimately, Jhana practice provides humans more opportunity to directly experience clinging to and craving for pleasurable experience and avoidance of displeasuable experience. When the practitioner finally realizes that point, insight and liberation can dawn and the pointlessness of Jhana is known.
I once read about a machine that claimed to induce this state. It was a series of programmed multicoloured lights which would flash on you as you meditated/lay down under it. I never had the chance to use it though and forget what it was called. Just an odd bubbling up from the internet which I'd forgotten about until I saw your post.
So anyone have any resources for learning how to do it?
Is sex addiction a real thing? I think this is the first time I've seen Scott discuss behavioral addiction
It sounds to my ear like jhana is a sort of proof by negation: you think you want pleasure, but that's not really what you want. Jhana proves this by providing maximum pleasure, thereby demonstrating irrevocably that pleasure isn't really what you wanted. After that is just the best of a rather uninteresting set - on to better things!
Have had access to Jhana(s) for around a decade, agree with most of what he said. It surpasses any normal pleasure, yet is integrated, stabilizing and reduces pleasures for other things.
It makes you more stable as a person as well, atleast those two things were correlated.
I sort of suspect harmful addiction is caused mainly by things that are pleasurable in the moment, but carry a significant cost. Junk food is addictive, not only because it feels good to eat it, but because it makes you feel lousy soon after you eat it (and thus craving the easy pleasure of eating it again). You could easily say the same thing about most drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc. It’s the pleasure-pain cycle that keeps people trapped, not the pleasure alone.
On the other hand, no one’s ever been addicted to fruits and vegetables.
I would like to see some receipts on the "no more pussy for me please" dimension here
I find myself mistrusting this without disbelieving the qualia of the jhanas themselves. My uneducated prejudice says that there is some insufficiently explored neurological catch to entering these states enough times, possibly creeping general anhedonia (which may well look a lot like enlightenment from some angles) induced through some kind of exotic desensitisation very high upstream.
Also, it's remarkable how difficult the Paradise Town thought exercise is. Maybe it's Slavic paranoia or something, but I'd start looking for the Westworld angle immediately.
"How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?"
Currently, close to zero minutes, walking. I've spent the fall stuck at home sick caring for small kids, sometimes confined indoors from of seasonal allergies, sometimes kept from gatherings of people by respiratory infections. After childbearing and the COVID slowdown in medical care, this is a fairly normal way for me to spend my time.
"Suppose that you read this post and decide to study meditation to reach jhana. You study hard for six months, succeed, and it’s even better than you imagined - but it isn’t reinforcing on a neurological level. Does this register as negative prediction error in the reward center? Would it make you less likely to try plans like 'study meditation' in the future, because they 'don’t pay off'?"
At this stage in my life, I'd expect that six months of intense study would mean a backlog of family responsibilities afterward. Since meditation takes uninterrupted time, I likely wouldn't pursue it past the six months for the foreseeable future -- and yes, achieving something only to conclude I can't actually use it might be rather deflating.
"When Nick says that he’s less interested in casual sex now, because jhana is an easier way to get pleasure, what is going on at a neurological level? Is this nonsense?"
Without speculating on the neurology, finding some mental state "better than sex" does not surprise me. I would consider music, and in my younger days, when I could avoid distracting cares, math, "better than sex". My rough equivalent of jhana is probably composing music, or getting to focus intently on some music I love.
That said, now that I have small kids and inadequate medical care, I've developed a stress-eating problem. Never had that before, and if sex addiction is like that, not really pleasurable, just something to smother the primal scream until the next time you've gotta stuff the scream down again, I'm not sure temporary exalted states could cure that, unless they were also helping you change all the mundane hours in your life when you couldn't be in them.
The wim hof breathing method gives me very euphoric feelings but I similarly forget to do it for months at a time. Perhaps related.
Hmm, seems similar to the states you reach on shrooms, which is kind of like a state of radical acceptance, where you are able to relinquish all resistance. Material pleasures, sex, food, etc all become frivolous because in that blissful state of unconditional self love, there are no more “holes” to fill with these desires. The great paradox which many report is that in spite of being in such an intense altered state of consciousness, it is in fact this state that feels like the natural “default setting”, while the day to day experience is in fact the “altered reality”.
The best thing about shrooms is how this feeling lingers long after the experience. Sort of a return to nature that allows you to temporarily cleanse yourself of all of the negativity we humans tend to dwell on. How long it lingers depends entirely on how well you can actively integrate the experience into your day to day habits. This is why I’m so optimistic about mushrooms combined with long term CBT for depression. They don’t actually “cure” it, but they give you the blueprints, toolkit, and step by step instructions for allowing a person to heal themselves.
Anyways, I’m curious from those who’ve experienced both, if the experience in similar. I assume there’s a lot of overlap between communities, and I’m wondering if many got into this form of meditation only after psychedelic experiences gave them a “model” of this mental state.
I’ve also realized that there are certain people who just don’t have a profoundly meaningful experience on mushrooms. It’s just cool colors and being high. Is it possible that this could be an alternative for them to reach this state? Or are these people just largely incapable of having meaningful experiences in this way at all? My gut kind of says the latter.
There are counterexamples for jhana reducing desires for casual sex. Culadasa got a lot of flack for hiring prostitutes late in his life (no judgement from me on this) and he undoubtedly could access high strength jhanas. Also sexual abuse from prominent meditation teachers is not rare.
I only have access to low strength jhanas (which is different from numbered jhanas) so I cannot confirm/deny this desire aspect first hand. For me, while I see the comparison to sex, I think of it like comparing chocolate cake to vanilla ice cream. They're sweet and tickle something in the brain but I could see myself wanting both, unless I've stuffed myself on jhana(or cake). Also, wouldn't there be some sort of adaptation to whatever chemical cocktail is released by jhanas in the brain?
Subjectively, jhanas are close to the most pleasant moments I can achieve, but I don't spend all my time meditating because at least for me, there's also friction in meditation, which builds with duration and also a sort of activation friction in the beginning.
Another piece of anecdata:
I am someone who claims to be able to experience jhana states.
I also still enjoy casual sex, as well as various kinks.
It seems a lot of people are caught up on the "satiety" aspect. And I experience that. But there's many areas of life where we don't maximize positive feelings even when they don't have drawbacks.
Example: kissing a partner passionately feels better than a goodbye peck on the cheek, doesn't really take that much longer, and has only positive benefits. We still kiss different ways as appropriate.
I'm the kid who was blissing out at Macy's
re: 2:
> Suppose that you read this post and decide to study meditation to reach jhana. You study hard for six months, succeed, and it’s even better than you imagined - but it isn’t reinforcing on a neurological level. Does this register as negative prediction error in the reward center? Would it make you less likely to try plans like “study meditation” in the future, because they “don’t pay off”?
I don't think Jhana being non-addictive means meditation hasn't paid off - at the point you can do it, you've probably figured out that meditation is pretty key to unlocking yet more profound realizations about the nature of life and suffering. It feels like waking up from a dream - like your life before you begun to meditate was a dream. It becomes clear there is a ton of value inside your head and it's worth meditating every day.
Also, I don't know how strongly we should take "non-addictive", since many experienced meditators are meditating daily and taking regular breaks from daily life to indulge it further. It's confusing to mix enjoyable things with addictions - are model trains addictive? is christianity? Meditation tends to be a lifelong pursuit and community, once you get into it.
I've been back to Jhana about twice since Macys. The time in Macys is one of my happiest memories, not gonna lie, it feels a bit embarrassing to say that. I'm continuing to practice and hopefully will become a lot more proficient at jhana and further states.
I used to doubt all sorts of things like chakras, jhanas, enlightenment, religion, etc - total skeptic of all woo. But then I found jhana myself and had an 'alice through the rabbit hole' moment. Now I have to go back through my whole worldview and reevaluate everything. Hate to say it but chakras are looking 'real', and the path to enlightenment seems like it's pretty well understood and explained by many different people.
With all due respect to Nick, the fact that "jhana killed my desire for casual sex" seems like a rather low bar. Of course people can define "casual sex" in different ways (is there such a thing as "formal sex"?) but being in a loving sexual relationship with someone you're genuinely attracted to can also kill (or at least greatly reduce) the desire for casual sex.
Casual sex is mostly just a combination of fantasy and friction with someone you either don't know well or don't want to spend much time around, or someone that isn't interested in spending much time with you, aside from copulating. That doesn't hold too much appeal, except for providing marginal validation for those that crave it, or brief gratification (which masturbation also provides).
When I do my kind of meditation -- with no connection to Buddhism or any other spiritual practice -- I essentially am just thinking and focusing, the opposite of "emptying my mind," and am often able to resolve problems or work out a creative challenge. More akin Sherlock Holmes mentally wrestling with a difficult case, perhaps, than any kind of Eastern meditation. Afterwards I'm always glad for the mindfulness and focus.
Meditating solely to reach some kind of bliss state, especially one whose effects don't really last, must be pleasurable to the meditator, but doesn't seem to do much for anyone else. Kinda like having a good dream at night. Or surfing.
A long time ago, I made sure I could get into the first couple jhanas. And it was fizzy, exhilarating, even a little thrilling, but also in some sense really boring. Like it was sort of "contentless" and palpably "wasn't going to go anywhere," or something. Like it didn't really plug into my metaphysics, goals, or meaning. So I very consciously didn't bother to pursue it further. "Enlightenment," though, is a completely different ballgame, in my experience.
That said, learning to get into them is instructive (though not critically so, as best I can tell); there are some nice feedback loops and transferrable skills. And I could see them being a good investment for some people, modulo goals and opportunity cost.
The classical texts tend to push them as a prerequisite for enlightenment, I think, though debates as to whether they're really necessary have been going on for thousands of years. In my experience, they are not necessary.
I discussed my first jhana experience with a Thai Forest Monk. He told me that in his 24 years as a monk, maybe a total of one year was spent in a state of jhana. He said that what is important about jhana is not to spend so much time in that state. What is important is to recognize that it is there, so we stop seeking happiness in the wrong places. Having so recognized, our attachments to worldly pleasures and aversion to pain begin to lose their grip on us.
The difficulty is sustaining the concentration necessary to attain jhana, and then becoming discouraged with our meditation practice when it isn’t readily accessible anymore.
As some comments have observed how good sex is varies alot between people.
Can anyone who has had both Jhana and some really good MDMA/heroin/meth experiences compare it to the first time drug experience? As Scotf has observed they don't remain quite as euphoric even if they stay motivating but that first time euphoria is probably our best bet for interpersonal comparison.
Oh wait my friend definitely went to a party with this guy last week and said he was crazy- apparently he was covering the four stages of enlightenment? edit- friend is currently taking credit for inspiring the first tweet
#3- neurological changes- asked a room full of neuroscientists just now: meditation increases BDNF in the CSF, brain changes differ dependent on whether or not you're teaching people to meditate, all the studies suck, the monks that meditate frequently and are good at it are the only people where you'd definitely see a marked difference between meditating vs not on an MRI, and Richard Davidson at U Wisconsin does some of this research
Anyway this is why you don't use your social circle as a proxy for lit reviews
I'm pretty solid at jhanas, as in, I can reliably get up to 5th, and I can touch the others occasionally. Thanks, partially, to Nick Cammarata helping me out with some personal instruction!
And I'm less enthusiastic about them. Still pro jhana, but not as much as my creditable meditative colleagues quoted above. I think there's a lot of personal variation here; many meditators can do them, not all care that much about them. After a jhana phase of a couple of months, I got somewhat bored, and, even during that phase, they didn't really change my desire for pleasure, sexual or otherwise. They're really cool, but, to me, 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. It's like a giant package of mental sour candy that only comes in a few flavors. I revisit them occasionally, and it's fun that I can get myself harmlessly high with my brain if you give me a few undistracted minutes, but, at this point, my meditation life wouldn't feel that impoverished without them.
That said, if you're into meditation, I recommend trying them out, it's worth a try. I think they're easier than is commonly assumed, and it's fascinating watching your brain feedback loop itself into being on drugs. (And then dropping body sensations and doing all the weird stuff that happens in the formless jhanas.) Also, learning them teaches you an interesting attentional skill, the ability to lean on something with your attention without fucking with it. This video is good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K5ypXyF3dY
"Pleasure without reinforcement value" is the dual of a well-known technique to avoid preference falsification, punishment-free/anonymous error reports.
It seems like most basic human emotions (happiness, anger, lust, etc.) have plausible evolutionary explanations-- is there such an explanation for jhanas? If so, why do we not all naturally experience them without practice? Or are jhanas an 'accident' which result from some quirk of human neuropsychology that we have successfully figured out how to exploit.
I meditate occasionally, and while I've never reached a jhana, I can say that meditation in general has the same kind of 'Enjoyable but not that reinforcing' quality to it.
The closest analogue I have in my life is the post-workout high. I wouldn't say that it's a thousand times better than sex, but I'd say that it's definitely pretty great, and more than enough to cancel out the hassle and pain of the workout itself... and that's without even considering the longer-term benefits.
And yet I don't work out nearly as often as I optimally could or should, even though I know perfectly well it will be a major net-positive experience, the very-short-term pain of actually having to do the workout seems to win most of the time unless I really pull tricks on myself (like paying a PT to show up and make me do it).
> How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
Why not live there permanently? I thought Singapore looked dope so I moved there.
My point being, what motivates people to exit jhanas if they're so good? Just thirst and hunger?
So, like, what's the deal with meditation, anyway? If I can get past my skepticism, articles like this make me want to meditate more and get better at it, because if it's real, jhana sounds amazing with only upsides, no downsides. For decades, I've had therapists preaching meditation and mindfulness at me, but for all of the talk, it's never progressed past "close your eyes, relax each of your muscles, breathe fully with your diaphragm, try not to think of any thoughts, except wait, it's actually okay to think of thoughts. But then try to stop or quiet those thoughts. Or just let the thoughts happen, and follow them. Whatever!"
I've never really gotten past any initial mindfulness stuff. I can find mindfulness useful, but I have no clue what comes after it. As you may be able to tell, I'm annoyed with the meditation pushers' attitude towards the "quieting your thoughts" thing. I find the lack of instruction about how to quiet your thoughts, or if you should in fact quiet your thoughts or just let them happen, with this sort of "it's impossible to do it wrong, man, you do the mindfulness the way you want, man!" to be supremely unhelpful, and maybe this is why I've never progressed further than the basics.
One BIG Question comes to mind:
**Does anyone have a theory why sex scandals have most definitely occurred among meditation teachers of great renown, including ones widely reputed to have achieved jhana-at-will abilities? **
This seems to me like a relevant BIG question since one such scandal in our lil' niche of meditation teachers popular round these here parts (i.e., the rationalist and rational-adjacent communities) was, IIRC, a much-commented-upon article on ye olde Slate Star Codex in 2019:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/
(Sidenote: My quick skimming, aided by CTRL+F, showed no one mentioning this 2019 Slate Star Codex article... at least as of circa 11pm EDT on Wed 10/26 when I started writing this comment. Apologies if people have now mentioned it or I missed the people who did... and ADDENDUM 11:47pm EDT: I now see user "0k" had earlier referenced the main scandal motivating the article, namely that of John Yates aka Culadasa, the author of the popular round-these-here-parts meditation manual _The Mind Illuminated_.)
So, this question of "how are *jhanas* not addictive?!" might in the context of all this advanced, systematic meditation stuff be more like "Is it somehow that jhanas are A-OK, but other altered states of consciousness on the road to 'enlightenment' --- at least according to some traditions of mindfulness meditation --- are in fact the dangerous ones, the ones that breed temptation / behavioral addiction / sociopathy / etc?!"
FWIW, two cents of hypothesizing on the issue is this: jhanas just hit that oh-so-sweet spot of giving you major actual satisfaction **that doesn't noticeably decrease each time you try to engage in it again**. (And if numerous commenters have pointed this out while I've taken my dang sweet time finishing this here comment, then I humbly second all your motions.)
This idea of diminishing-returns-on-momentary-joy/ecstasy/etc seems to me to be an-oh-so-diabolically-effective heuristic to engender compulsions in our po' po' lil' brains and personalities. Presumably, it got naturally selected as a tendency in many of us since it really drove some particularly fecund individuals in our evolutionary past to rise to the top of sex and status competitions. (Ok, I'm compelled to say it not just seems to me to be so, but seems to major bestselling nonfiction authors to be so, e.g., Robert Wright of Bloggingheads/Meaningoflife.tv fame and, most pertinently for this discussion, the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Buddhism_Is_True )
To bring this comment to a close, two closing thoughts:
1) First, a "bleg" (does anyone say that anymore for an ask on a blog?): Didn't some formerly-heroin-addicted musician or other poetic soul have some pithy quote to the effect that heroin isn't addictive because it puts you in the throes of ecstasy, but *because the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc times you try it* it tantalizes you with just a little less ecstasy... just a little oh-so-PAINFULLY-noticeably-less ecstasy... hence you spend your life "chasing the dragon" of your first high, yada yada yada? If so, does anyone know who and when exactly?
2) What's the community's consensus on that classic and controversial experiment that supposedly shows rats won't compulsively push a lever for morphine, insanely eschewing food and water until they die, *provided that they're given lots of other, wholesome, rat-eudaimonic activities to do with other sociable rats?* I'm speaking of "Rat Park" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park).
P.S. This might just be a confession that I'm a weird person, but I gotta share that first thought after first being exposed to the story of the "Rat Park" experiment was "Oh, that explains why Mickey and Minnie haven't flamed out in some horrible addiction scandal like oh-so-many-other Hollywood stars! They have each other and many friends with whom to engage in wholesome activities!")
Separately, in what sense is jhanna per se pleasurable at all? Is that not sukha? The sensual references employed seem rather counter to the elimination of stimulus response Buddhist meditation generally aspires towards, unless they are meant strictly apophatically ("this is so much unlike X, it is like X").
Maybe this is one of those things where believing it is true is what makes it true, since it’s all internal states? But I do think that gets fuzzy because mental models of internal states definitely enter feedback loops with the rest of your body. I do know a bit about that.
I know that may sound discrediting to people entering Jhana but I’ll explain. Note: the next part will sound braggadocios so I will add that I am a poor athlete, have a childish sense of humor, and overeat as a bad habit, which I confess just to raise my believability in terms of me not saying the following for ego reasons.
I am really good at altering my internal states/forcing myself to deeply emotionally believe something until my body starts to involuntarily react as if it is happening and I have the best dexterity/internal body control of anyone I have ever met including magicians. I don’t think I did anything in particular that made me this way other than maybe noticing I was better than some stuff as a kid and then I just kept doing it. I also tend to stumble and drop stuff when I am not actively doing something like this so maybe it’s a weird optimization valley.
Weird stuff I can do: give myself goose bumps at will. Which I do by imagining that I am really, really cold. It’s like I make myself believe that I am cold so that my body responds as though I am. I am good enough at this that I can give myself goose bumps on one side of my body but not the other by imagining only that side is cold. Or just an arm or just a leg. Doesn’t seem to matter what temperature the room is I can make my arm hair/leg hair/whatever stand straight up.
All sort of weird finger manipulation stuff that has no practical purposes other than being really remarkably good at twirling a pencil around and getting people to ask if I’m a drummer. To which I have to respond I’m just a pencil twirler but a really good one. Then I’ll add in a second pencil to my twirl and have it go the opposite way of the first pencil so people know I wasn’t lying about being really, really good at pencil twirling.
I can write different things with each hand at the same time… kinda. I can definitely do this better than most people including people who were born ambidextrous (I consider myself to ambidextrish) but I have to do it by coordinating pencil/pen strokes between each hand. I can do simultaneous to a limited extent but it is a for sure practiced skill and I’ve lost a lot of it with time because I no longer have enough free time to just fill up legal pads with practice all day. Even after I’d dedicated like three months to it I was definitely straining to make it happen. Doing a circle with one hand a square with the other was the hardest, even more than words of different lengths. But the weird thing was that it became strangely easier when I imagined I was my own left handed twin brother, writing next to my own right handed self.
All of which is to say there is certainly plumbing from your brain to the rest of your body and it’s a bit sloppier and more slippery than we tend to think. Your mental model of reality, insofar as it is connected to the reality of your actual body, can certainly exercise some sort of recursive control. Your nerve endings can tell you it’s cold but also your brain can tell your nerve endings they are cold. If you believe you are left handed and just writing something with your right handed brother maybe for a few minutes your brain can just operate as multiple agents.
I’m a bit eccentric and I don’t know if that helps. I’m higher IQ but probably only average here. I have done something like Jhana, or a sense of deep profound contentment at least, although I don’t really consider what I do to be meditation or anything more than the result of being profoundly bored a lot as a child and wanting to show off for friends. I’m also probably a bit nuts.
Part of me wants someone to dare me to post evidence. It’s been a bit since I’ve done a good pencil twirling or two handed writing (which was great for writing down ideas and keeping my hands strong but was just too precocious to do at coffee shops without feeling like an asshole).
Back when I was meditating intensively I had intermittent access to jhana. There’s been a lot of comments essentially asking “If it’s so great, why isn’t everyone doing it?”. I think there are a couple major reasons:
- It’s not actually that quick or easy for most people. The subreddit for The Mind Illuminated is full of posts like “I’ve meditated diligently 45 minutes a day for the last year and still haven’t experienced jhana or had any special meditative experiences.” 6 months to achieving always-on access to the jhanas is remarkably fast.
- Many people run into some at least temporarily destabilizing experiences. If you’re meditating enough to get into jhana, you’re meditating enough to trigger a nice little existential crisis or three. People keep trying to break meditation down into concentration(the fun stuff that puts you into jhana) and insight(the stuff that triggers existential crises but also makes you enlightened), but at the end of the day concentration experiences lead to insight experiences and vice versa. It’s a bit of a mystery box from person to person as to whether your 6 months of intensive meditation will earn you access to the jhanas, complete boredom and lack of progress, some really weird experiences, an existential crisis, or re-opening a mountain of trauma you didn’t know you had.
When nerdy types start talking about “amazing sex,” I can’t help but roll my eyes. Sorry, but I don’t really value your opinion on this subject because I don’t think you’re attractive enough to have a serious understanding of that kind of pleasure. Maybe if a movie star or Hugh Hefner preferred jhana, I’d sit up and listen.
I happen to be doing a retreat soon to try to learn (some of) the Jhanas, can anyone think of any question/experiment for which it would be useful to get data/a question from someone both before and after trying to learn the Jhanas? I mean I guess an obvious one is just like, "pre-registering" to say whether I do end up experiencing them or not, as one data point for how hard it is. Anything else?
I think Bill Kaminsky raises a salient point: if meditation and spiritual practice lead to such enlightened states, and freedom from worldly wants and pleasure-seeking, then why have a number of high profile practitioners been credibly accused (and even admitted) to scandalous and/or exploitative sexual behavior?
I'm a dude, and I totally understand the urge to get laid, even when inappropriate, but aren't those endless hours of meditation supposed to cleanse them of that? It has always seemed like a damning indictment when yet another venerable old holy man is revealed to have been more interested in the bodies of attractive younger female acolytes than in their spiritual progress.
It doesn't surprise me coming from Christian preachers, they're a pretty mixed bag of hypocrites and self-dealers, but gurus always claim to have done the hard work to free themselves of that. And yet many of them still sleaze out when they can. . .
>watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free
That's called the internet, and I don't have to leave my room for it. The other stuff would be nice too, and I would be willing to invest some effort into it, like a couple hours on the weekend, but as I understand it, reaching jhanas is much more difficult.
I am one who has gone in and out of what Nick calls Jhana my whole life. Now 67 years old, my first memory of this state is from my fifth year. I can attest to what Nick says, namely, that this ecstatic experience is more pleasurable than sexual orgasm. I can also attest that when one is in Jhana, one can carry on one's regular daily routine, yes, even walk and talk at the same time, except that when one is walking, one floats, and when one talks, the words flow effortlessly.
Those who have not been in Jhana and thus gainsay the actuality of it should realize that it cannot be expressed in words, just as any other experience cannot be expressed in words. For example, if you've never tasted an avocado, it would be impossible for me to describe the taste to you. You just have to taste it yourself. The same with Jhana; you just have to experience it yourself. And I wish that everyone could experience Jhana, as I believe the world would then become a more peaceful and loving place.
This touches on the problem of language. Nick has chosen, and for the sake of this comment I have complied with his choice, the Pali word, Jhana, which is sometimes translated as meditation. In Sanskrit, it is Dhyana, which became Chan in Chinese, Seon in Korean, and Zen in Japanese. It seems that the ancient Indian spiritual practice has given us the most useful vocabulary to try to communicate this blissful, liberating state. Other Indian words attempting to describe this state are Ananda (bliss), Sambhoga (supreme pleasure), Samadhi (concentration), and Advaita (nonduality).
I applaud Nick and Scott for bringing this discussion of this real experience to the foreground and making it a subject to be studied physiologically as well as psychologically. (Sam Harris alluded to this in the closing pages of his book, The End of Faith.) May all be happy, peaceful, and free!
I’m the founder of Jhourney, a neurotech company attempting to map the neural correlates of the jhanas and use tools like neurofeedback to help make them more accessible.
I started drafting a comment in response to Scott's post and it ended up a bit long so I posted it here: https://www.jhourney.io/blog/scott-alexander-nick-cammarata-jhana
Scott's questions get at the curiously highly-pleasurable-but-non-addictive nature of the jhanas. A few excerpts from my response:
[Experience suggests] they're not addictive. It’s not as if you wirehead yourself into some wildly different equilibrium, you just never go reaching for them the same way you start automatically reaching for your phone if you’ve been spending lots of time on Twitter. My colleague and neuroscientist Kati Devaney informs me that you can predict the addictiveness of a drug by the first derivative of its dopamine spike. Drugs that see more gradual rates of change of dopamine don’t see such addictive responses. This implies that despite their extreme pleasure, the neurological mechanisms of jhanas don’t have a high dopaminergic rate of change.
But for those concerned about wireheading like a heroin addict, perhaps even greater reassurance is that the idea of *living life* with the jhanas seems much more fulfilling than just doing the jhanas all day. By having access to the jhanas, in the form of either bliss, happiness, contentment, or deep peace (i.e. the first four jhanas), I’m able to “splash” them into everyday life. Walking in the woods with my partner? How about a little J2? Coming home after a long day? How about a little J3? Rob Burbea talks a lot about mastery of the jhanas being a process of learning to delight and play and weave together the jhanas with one another and in everyday life. Every now and then I meet someone who talks about the jhanas like “been there, done that” and I think, “Holy shit is this person missing out.” And since it takes a little practice, they’ve lost the ability to get back to the jhanas and need to relearn.
...
My favorite way of explaining the jhanas is “they may be the opposite of a panic attack.” Most everyone is familiar with an anxiety “loop” – one anxious thought begets another. By the time you’ve been at it for a few minutes, you start seeing physiological effects: your heart rate and breathing change, maybe your hands get sweaty. It turns out a little personal experimenting is enough to learn to create that same positive feedback loop with a positive kernel… and the results are better than anything you imagined.
...
Kati (my neuroscientist colleague) observed to me that people seem to go through phases with the jhanas:
- Pre-jhana: lack of awareness and then either rejection or fascination
- Phase 1: Fascinated and trying to learn
- Phase 2: Learn them, fascinated, and think they are absolutely life-changing
- Phase 3: Gradual forgetting how big of a deal they were and possible loss of interest
- Phase 4: Cycle periodically back through Phases 2 and 3
I think even Nick would admit he was fascinated for a while – I think he spent over an hour a day for a year in the jhanas. So did I.
I seem to be able to trigger the "frisson" response to music much easier than others. If I find the right song, I can squeeze as much frisson juice out of it as possible before I get too accustomed to it and it does nothing for me. Of course, you get similar feelings when you smell a fresh breeze and so on, I'm wondering if this Jhana state is in any way similar to that, where you've trained your brain to respond in a very ecstatic way. With that being said, could you potentially have a similar burnout where the same response just isn't felt anymore because you're so used to it?
So. I've only come across the concept of jhana this week, but it resonates because it seems plausibly like a description of an experience that I've had on and off since I was a teenager.
Potentially relevant context: I'm autistic but wasn't diagnosed until I was 34. Before diagnosis I experienced generally high levels of anxiety and stress, mostly due to the effort that I was putting in to act 'normal' plus a deep sense that nobody should have to put in that much effort, plus the relatively infrequent but unpredictable moments when I unwittingly did something weird and suffered social or practical consequences. I was brought up in a pretty religious but non-dogmatic Christian household and discovered Christian forms of meditative prayer fairly young.
At some point I found that if I sat quietly and contemplated, there would be a sort of shift and everything would seem/feel different. Tension just unravels, I become more aware of my own body (in a good way), everything around me feels a bit more spacious, colours and light a bit brighter, and I feel happy and not anxious any more.
Over time I got better at cultivating that 'shift' - when I was a kid it was quite hard, by the time I was at university I could reliably sink into it during prayer and came to classify it as 'the experience of the presence of God' on the theory that what I was doing was setting aside distractions to encounter the (Christian) God. But something felt a bit off about that because the experience - while all-encompassing and generally associated with a deep sense of wellbeing - didn't really feel strongly personified. Though if I just sit there feeling great I often feel like there is some big positive thing around me, but (I am aware how this sounds and am cringing as I type) that's just - everything else out there being great, right?
I'm in my late 30s now and haven't been so sure on the faith thing for decades (I describe myself as a Christian agnostic, heavy on the agnostic). I've practiced various forms of meditation at different times, but I don't meditate regularly, just when I remember to or need to. But I can still summon that different state and occasionally do, not always on purpose. Just typing about it now I keep slipping into deep breathing and can feel some tension lifting. It's always there, kind of available, and given how great it feels it is a bit weird that I mostly don't think of it tbh.
Further description: I do associate the state with meditation though these days I don't have to meditate much to slip into it. I usually therefore sit up straight, cross my legs, or stand still, often close my eyes. There's a kind of release, there's a kind of opening-up, I become very aware in a non-stressed, non-focused way of a kind of comfortable congruence all over my body. Hard to express how comfortable. Everything just feels sort of good, whatever I was worrying about is in perspective and the perspective is that the universe is basically fantastic whatever happens. I'm a big fan of sex but I would 100% say in terms of just pure physical pleasure this state is better than orgasm. Lasts longer too.
Genuinely don't know if that is jhana, but if it sounds like it is then put me down as a data point of some kind.
Dhammarato is a former American engineering professor and PhD psychologist who became a Buddhist monk in the lineage of Bhikkhu Buddhadāsa in Thailand. He’s now a layperson, but teaches (free-of-charge) over Skype from his home on Koh Phangan. You could do a lot worse than follow his explanation of the jhāna. https://youtu.be/P3mxq8h8o4I
„ When Nick says that he’s less interested in casual sex now,“
It depends how easy that was to get previously.
1) Once you know you have immediate pleasure right here and now, you tend not to seek it anymore.
It also reveals that most of our pursuits are indirect pleasure chases, and when you can stop doing something for pleasure, you tend to view it from a more detached perspective, which reveals the mechanics.
Once you see how a loop works you tend to fall into it less (disinterest)
2) There are other paths than meditation that lead to the same result. Deconstructing the nature of self, our models, epistemology. None of this needs to be on a 'neurological level', it changes the nature of the software that runs on the mind.
3) Physical pleasure might evoke some kind of signal that the software on the mind is interested in. It activates some kind of pleasurable representation that you experience virtually in the mind. This you can shortcut and directly activate the representation of pleasure. So you get disconnected from the neurological or physical, as it gets revealed that is an indirect path
I believe I've been experiencing 'jhana', but approaching it from the more 'scientific' angle of trying to recreate drug-like euphoria at will. My interest started when I read about people reporting euphoria during psychedelic drug tests, even though they were given a placebo. I took a 'euphoric' substance and paid more attention than usual to how it felt, and used some old Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques to 'anchor' the experience (https://inlpcenter.org/nlp-anchoring/), to help re-enter the state later. Over the following weeks I experimented, and successfully was able to enter various levels of contentment-delight-euphoria-frisson, by using my recollections as triggers, along with musical cues (playing techo in my head), and imagining my 'chakras' being filled with warmth/energy. Also saying to myself "Man, I'm so high right now!" is surprisingly helpful.
A low level is now is achievable in a few minutes, and can be done while walking or performing other simple tasks (such as commenting on blogs ...). More intensity takes a bit more time and concentration, and isn't always achievable. But, like in the post, I often forget to use it for days on end, still regularly feel anxiety, and still drink too often.
Three things: 1. Interesting, though small numbers. N 1 (or N10, but from a rather non-representative sample);
2. Scott wrote before about a real-life-master-meditator who got caught with prostitutes, and Scott concluded that this "bliss" does seem to do much less than advertised.
3. I do like my sex (non casual for whatever that means), my chocolate (Lindt-dark) + a few other sins, thank you. Reminding me of Scott`s "last-non-enlightened hero" . - Both pieces SSC-era, if I remember correctly. Won`t go there to look, as I have my tax-declaration to do - and only 4 days left. SSC too full of bliss. No time for this. :/
If you are curious about the methodologically rigorous, ontologically neutral, and globally scalable research on jhanas (and other phenomena classified as "psycho-spiritual"), I highly recommend looking up The EPRC (https://theeprc.org/). The Jhana Study is a core part of Consortium's agenda, and feeds into its numerous projects, explained in the whitepaper (see: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/0aqIDHp5R/the-jhana-study?v=M6pP_Tb7W6).
I think there is no wonder that something can be extremely pleasurable but not attracting/attaching.
For example, DMT is always blissful for my friend's cat but she has no desire (in a sense like having desire to check inbox when you are waiting for some email) to do it.
So then what explains all the sex scandals with Buddhist gurus?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lMpjh6ueqj9q4ebY3sDhDcvm5o8FNVIcZqjDKnnrWco/edit?usp=drivesdk
Here's a really easy guide to a light form of jhana. It's like the deep jhana but mild. it can probably give you a clue about what is going on. You could spend 6 months working on it or you could find good guidance (like this one or a direct pointing out instruction).
The book "practicing the jhanas" by Tina Rasmussen talks about setting up a 3hour window for each jhana (on different days or whatever) to sit and soak in them. The proposal is that the really grabby parts of the psyche who are like, "the only way to feel the good j1 feeling is to eat ice-cream" (or other material desire), will tend to pop up over that 3hr window and release their grabby desire. You can still have ice-cream but your grabby suffering mental loop is now freer from thinking the only way to get the good thing is ice-cream.
This causes a general "falling away" of desires that were crud anyway. The deep desires remain and the meaningful desires definitely remain. In fact it's easier to put up with the negative hardship on the road to the deeper desires when you have access to jhana.
A colloquial question is - why are meditators always depicted as smiling? It's because they can access all kinds of good subjective states, any time they like.
Meditators also know of a maturing relationship with bliss. Where you get enough of it, often enough that it gets less interesting and you prefer more stable states like equanimity (j4) to the energetic, exciting, blissful and irritating state of j1.
People like Daniel p Brown (meditator and psychologist passed away in 2022) put state skill as a part of healthy adult development. The (it's not consensus in the) integral community agrees that state navigation and skill is important and has people showing up more adult and more mature. Daniel Goleman also said similar that skill over emotional states is important for maturity. (and many more researchers)
Yep, Jhana is the shit. And while I agree with what was said, it makes other pleasures even better so it’s a “yes, but also...”
Have some experience meditating and come from a family (father/mother) of 60´s hippies that truly lived the experience for some years; they went to India worked with gurus and so on. Yogis are real and can do amazing things with body and mind. But it takes years and years of great persistence and practice for someone who is born in the non-narcisistic cultures to achieve starting levels. To westerns I would say it can increase lifes experience and have benefits in general psicological health, but very marginal for a non practitioner. This people talk is truly bullshit. The detachment from the pleasure center comes from increased conscience; it is nullified as a trigger response by hightened conscience. It is all or nothing; there is not 'less casual sex' for a monk; a monk 'do not sex'; the state of bliss/grace/jahna is achieved after years of great compromised work that entails giving up most of narcisistic life (self, family, community, etc.). All religious traditions have individuals working toward such goals, but in the east it has been organized as 'procedure' and focused as such. Bull
I got a more detached perspective to sex when I started living with a girlfriend whose sexual drive was a bit stronger than mine. Previously there always was this feeling of scarcity, that I would like to have sex more often than I do. But now there is an understanding that the satisfaction of this desire is extremely easy and can happen any time I want it so the desire became less intense.
I think there is a general pattern here. When you're needs are chronically unsatisfied, the desired are powerful and hurtful. When your needs are met all the time and you know that, it's much easier to deal with rare dissatisfaction.
I’ve meditated for years. I’ve never read anything about this jhana business but I often experience something like what is described above. I used to really enjoy drinking, but I noticed a while back that I prefer, as Nick put it, to “just live a normal peaceful day,” as opposed to craving feeling altered as a way of escaping stress or feeling elevated. Not that I don’t order a manhattan if we go out to dinner. I’m not too holy to have a drink or something. I don’t get the commentary about fun casual sex, though I enjoy sex plenty, just not with random women. My sense is meditation is a psychological/biological self-mediation routine, kinda like jogging or lifting weights for the brain and emotional system, rather than some cosmic thing. It works. Try it.
Aside from "jhana" which sounds delicious there are the less poignant self-regulating benefits of meditation/mindfulness that we can all benefit from. Even five minutes ~daily proves it's worth!
I've attended 2 and 4 week retreats with Leigh Brasington studying his style of Jhana and have, at times, reliably achieved J1-4 at various levels of intensity. For me a minimum of 1 hour of daily meditation (for weeks) is required to be able to reliably enter Jhanas and the quality is dependent on my recent volume of meditation. Brasington does warn about the risk of becoming a Jhana Junkie but not excessively, it seems a temporary trap. For him the point of the Jhanas is to develop insight, not the pleasure they create. Going through J1-4 then applying the resulting state to a contemplative practices or even work is a huge amplifier. If you're in it for the pleasure, you're missing the point. Becoming addicted to it would be like having to run a daily 10k to maintain a heroin addiction.
J1 is unpleasant for me, too intense. J2-3 are nicer and a solid J4 is amazing oceanic calm that leaks into the next day. I had surgery a few years ago. When they pumped a bunch of opiates into me before doing some nerve blocks I though "meh, I can do better than this", felt like a middling J3.
I have lapsed in my meditation practice despite how much I enjoy Jhanas. This is common particularly without a community of practice around you.
As for the questions:
1) Not sure how to answer this. I'll have to think about it.
2) I have pretty much done this, as described above. Meditation payoff is longer term, more like exercise than drugs. Jhanas give the impression of immediate payoff but it's illusory, demonstrably insufficiently reinforcing to commonly lead to addiction.
3) I dunno. Maybe a lot of meditation was reducing some sort of pathological need that led to having casual sex. Perhaps a control; If he meditates a lot without entering Jhana, just deep concentration, and doesn't feel the need for casual sex it could be argued that the meditation is causing it. Personally I never liked casual sex for the same reason I don't like J1; too intense.
I recommend Brasington's book "Right Concentration" for anyone interested in achieving Jhanas. He makes a solid case (backed by plausible scriptural arguments) that the Jhanas are core to Buddhist meditation but have been neglected. He's an excellent teacher with pretty much all of his content available online.
A little while ago I posted a comment that referred to Suzuki Shuryu's short 1970 book, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." I'd like to mention a way I think it relates to issues that neuroscience addresses now.
Here's a short description from Suzuki's book ("zazen" = "sitting/doing jhana"):
**When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air goes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It
just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no “I,” no world, no mind or body; just a swinging door.**
Suzuki is describing one of the signature points of the exercise of zazen, experiencing the contingency of the self (a basic ideological feature of Buddhism is the belief that the experience of the self as a real entity is illusory).
I have in mind parallels with neuroscientific analysis of the experience of self--specifically, Rodolfo Llinas's "I of the Vortex" (which I think is a terrific book [not so much the last chapter], despite Llinas's occasional struggles with English). Llinas, who is a senior neuroscientist at NYU, is concerned (in part) with demonstrating that and how the "self" is a complex and fragile composite; Suzuki was concerned with experiencing that this is so. Llinas's claims are scientific should be judged analytically, by examining his statements and their relation to data. Suzuki's claims can only be judged through a synthetic methodology by trying out the practice he describes in his book. A Scientific American article I linked to in another comment (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zen-gamma/) reflects research that addresses ways that the relation between what people like Llinas and people like Suzuki discuss can be explored.
Freudian interjection -- what most people want is not "pleasure" but "satisfaction". Nick's second tweet makes a cute equation between the two: he believed he was unsatisfied because he lacked pleasure, so he found One Neat Trick (Psychiatrists Hate Him!) to get pleasure, and then he felt satisfied. The general case is "people want to get what they want", rather than "people seek out pleasure always".
But as with your discussion Q #3, satisfaction isn't always pleasurable. It can even be distinctly *unpleasurable*. It's not like e.g. self-harm actually transforms the sensation of pain into pleasure; it uses the sensation of pain to derive *satisfaction*.
Lacanian extension -- "jouissance" is precisely the repetition of an originally pleasurable action until it becomes painful, but it still remains satisfying, because you made that connection "X = pleasure" a long time ago, and never un-learned it.
So, if you feel like you need a hit of pleasure, you smoke a cigarette, don't feel pleasure, but do feel satisfaction. And the flip side here, is that despite feeling satisfied in your pain, you also somehow still feel empty. Why? Because you didn't get the original thing inscribed into your memory. So, the shallow satisfaction is felt on a deeper level as suffering, as being deprived of the thing you wanted even though you did the thing that your memory-brain believes will get it. Almost as if desire is the root of suffering, or something...
See this part of a thread I wrote for more details on these dynamics: https://twitter.com/qorprate/status/1536087083072249856
1. No matter how far away it was i would just move there permanently. If I really had to commute, the round trip time could be up to 2x the amount of time I spent at the destination, assuming I can listen to a lot of audiobooks while my tesla drives itself.
2. I get very very suspicious when someone describes something as supreme bliss with no negative side effects, but also that they have no desire to do it often. I would think, "is Jhana really that good or just social desirability bias"?
"How come no one voluntarily buys X? Because people don’t actually like X – at least not enough to pay for it. Why does everyone praise X? Because praising X sounds good. Why do people unanimously vote for lavish spending on X? Because voting is just a special kind of talking."
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/the_public_good.html
I don't expect eastern religion to be less bogus than western religion. A non-reinforcing pleasure could be observationally equivalent to an SDB-fueled profession of religion.
3. I'll offer a boring, obvious explanation. Plenty of other people "get religion" in various ways and become less interested in casual sex. A lot of behavior is driven by one's sense of identity. If your sense of identity is as a devout member of a religion like Buddhism that sorta looks down on carnal desires, then you're going to be less interested in casual sex.
So, I've meditated daily for about 4 years. I didn't know the name for the concept of Jhana, but I think I might have felt that at points. I'm still somewhat skeptical that meditation modifies your base desires, even though that is very much a concept and an explicit goal in some forms of Buddhism. From Nick's perspective, it mostly looks like he had a very high baseline happiness and low neuroticism even prior to meditating, and there are many things that could have altered his desire for casual sex which he falsely attributed to Jhana meditation. It would be interesting to see his testosterone levels, because if those had gone down, that would be a much more obvious and mundane explanation for why he doesn't desire casual sex. From reading about people's perspective taking some of the new weight loss drugs, it looks like desire for dessert is much stronger in some people than others, and if Nick was never morbidly obese, then altering his desire for dessert through meditation is probably a much easier task than he is making it out to be.
Personally, I don't really have desire for dessert or really rich food either, but that happened much prior to learning about meditation, and I would attribute it to learning that sugar is bad for you.
My issue is, from learning about my own internal states through meditation, I don't really know why I have my internal states at all. I don't have any access to why desires arise, and I don't know what my internal state will be before I actually notice the state. This part makes me believe in luck much more, because it's mysterious to me why I choose to make good decisions (sometimes), rather than screw up my life really badly.
Although meditation is occasionally very pleasurable, I agree that it isn't really reinforcing the way drugs are. Personally, the reason I don't spend 5 hours a day meditating might be because I still have desires. Maybe if enlightenment is possible and some of the further claims about mental states are possible, I would actually meditate or try to convince others to meditate much more. I do worry that people who claim to achieve these certain types of bliss just have different brains, and the claims they are making are tantamount to tall people giving advice on how to be tall. They are fundamentally missing the point that they are not actually training all too hard to achieve Jhana, and it is impossible for others.
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. 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.
The description of the experience of jhana doesn't seem internally consistent to me, and that greatly increases my skepticism of the whole thing. I think a reasonable definition of pleasure just is "that which is desired" but jhana is described as both intensely pleasurable and not desired/sought by the people who can get it. That just feels like a contradiction. Compare: a scientist has created a device that does something in the brains of mice when they pull a lever, and given the choice the mice pull it maybe every few days. Would you really infer that whatever is happening in their brains is intensely pleasurable, better than food and sex? I don't see how. Maybe another way to phrase it is that the self-reported experiences of jhana-practitioners strongly conflicts with their revealed preferences in a way that makes them seem untrustworthy.
To answer the questions:
1. I'll assume that nothing "productive" happens in this town, other than whatever productivity is implied in experiencing pleasurable scenarios. No shop talk, obviously, but also no conversations that give you an insight you can use in your life outside the town, etc. In that case, I might never go even if it was next door, for myself. Though I might end up going just to exercise a relationship with someone who finds pleasure valuable per se.
2. I don't know how something could be reinforcing on anything other than a neurological level? AFAICT, the whole lesson of bliss-at-your-fingertips is that pleasure is not fundamentally valuable, nor even instrumentally valuable except as a quirk of psychology. Consider money, if you could go get any amount of money you wanted with no negative side effects, how much would you spend? You might get tired of spending a billion dollars a day, but you'd settle on a steady state where you spend more than you do now. With jhana, it seems like the opposite, you settle on a steady state where you seek out *less* pleasure than you did before.
3. If cravings for the pleasure of sex causes sex addiction, then yes, I'd expect easy access to jhana would often cure it. Your description ("it's not even pleasurable anymore...") makes it sound like the causal chain doesn't contain much reference to bliss...
I’m not sure if this state of mind is a good thing. Part of the drive to make your life better is discontent. To be able to retreat from the world and experience unlimited pleasure seems like a possible way to stagnate. Not to mention, it seems dangerous to hack your brain and sensory experience. And I’m not speaking theoretically, some people have reported ill effects: https://www.insider.com/why-meditation-can-be-bad-2018-3?amp
Of course some people can do it safely, but how do I know if I’m doing it safely?
I have a related question:
Are there any meditators out there who have been meditating for years, have reached high stages of meditation, but just never experienced jhana?
It is interesting how we actually have two opposite scientific explanations of how desires work. From the "homeostatic" perspective, you desire the things you miss, and once you get them, you don't miss them anymore, so you do not desire them so much, at least for some time. From the "reinforcement" perspective, if you get something that feels good, you will want it even more.
These models often provide opposite predictions. After eating a delicious cake, the former predicts that you will say "thank you, I am full", while the latter predicts that you will say "that was awesome, can I have seconds, please?". (If you have read the Sequences, having perfectly logically sounding scientific explanations for both X and the opposite of X should make you a little uncomfortable, right?)
*
There is a concept of substitute goals (not sure how exactly it is called) in psychoanalysis or something. The idea is that you want some X, but either you cannot get it, or it is socially unacceptable to admit that you want X, therefore you start desiring some Y instead, and redirect your emotional energy towards chasing Y.
What often happens is that no matter how much Y you get, you will feel that it is not enough. That is because there is a part of your brain saying (incorrectly) that you want Y, and another part of your brain perceiving (correctly) that you are still not getting X, and if these parts are confused enough to believe that they are talking about the same thing, their joint statement will be that "yes, you want Y, but you are not getting enough of it".
The solution of course is to recognize that you actually wanted X, and when your emotional energy returns to desiring X, you will no longer feel the need to get endless amounts of Y. Thus, if you notice that no matter how much Y you get, it never feels enough, you should suspect that Y is just a substitute goal for some X that you actually wanted.
In this model, sex can play both the roles of X and Y (for different people). Some people believe they are looking for friendship or spirituality, when they actually want sex. Other people believe they are looking for sex, when they actually want to feel powerful or accepted. Maybe most bodily pleasures are just substitutes for something, and the jhana experience makes it obvious on a System-1 level. Maybe the entire sexual experience is a mixture of multiple things, only one of them being what you truly want, and the jhana experience is the concentrated form of that, so it satisfies your needs for a long time.
(It would even make some sense from evolutionary perspective, because nature is not trying to make you happy, it is trying to make you reproduce more. So if people do too much of the "almost right, but not exactly right" things, it would be an evolutionary advantage to make sex one of them.)
The Buddha had no teacher.
What's the difference between "jhana" and "really deep meditation"? Not trying to be disrespectful here, I'm really wondering. When I meditate for about 5-10 minutes I feel happiness/peace/calm comparable to other recreational things (running, reading, eating good food, playing a relaxing video game, etc.), but not as good as sex. I feel like this mental state is easily accessible and I'm not addicted to it. Couldn't jhana just be really deep and skilled meditation? Is that significantly different from what people are claiming? Maybe I just wrote a pointless comment???
Well, I don't meditate, but years and years ago I successfully induced a powerful spiritual bliss state where I felt oneness with the universe and intense lovingkindess towards everyone after a day of prayer. It lasted for about two hours? It was definitely intensely pleasurable in a way unlike anything else I've ever experienced, and it made doing very mundane tasks feel great, like setting the table, because I really intensely wanted to be doing things for other people. It gave me very intense motivation to be a better person for a few weeks after, I don't remember exactly. I made a bunch of massive structural changes to my life as a result. Not all of them the right choice,in retrospect. It also made me believe in religion for about ten years or so, but I never accessed the state again and eventually the weight of skepticism from other more daily factors became overwhelming. I can't confirm whether it's non-addictive because I badly wanted to experience it again and never managed, and it's hard for me to understand why, given an option of existing in intensely pleasurable permanent heightened awareness and motivation and desire to be my best self I *wouldn't* want to stay in that forever. Certainly when I was in the state I hoped it would last forever.
That said, at the time, it made a concept that came up in religious studies class, of five levels of pleasure, much easier to understand.
(The five levels of pleasure, where each is supposed to be incalculably better than the one before:
1. Physical
2. Love
3. Meaning
4. Power and creativity
5. Encounter with God - presumably, the bliss state described above
There was also a lot of discussion of counterfeit pleasures that are fake alternatives to the five, like porn vs sex. Etc. The whole framework was from Rabbi Noah Weinberg if someone wants to read up on it, I definitely think his way of describing the differences between different classes of pleasure might help articulate some stuff people are talking about in this thread, it's just tied in with a bunch of religious stuff I don't really endorse anymore. Maybe I should try some more all day prayer and I'll end up becoming religious again, who knows.
> Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
This would mostly be limited by the monetary costs of travel, not the time costs. But since part of the premise is that you can eat as much food as you want, there's no real reason I'd ever *leave*; the location of my house is moot.
‘Buddhism is religion for paraplegics’ (or something like that, Machado de Assis, I think in the Bras Cubas book)
Seriously, I have meditated more or less frequently (avg sessions of 45 min, around 4 times a week) for around 3 years, since 2017, I think I got jhana once (experience was unmistakable - felt like flying), but often states of very pleasurable deep concentration. Found it very hard to replicate that one time ‘flying’ experience. Gradually I lost interest in meditation, there’s a world out there and things to do. Still meditate very occasionally for relaxation, it’s great with some Brian Eno playing.
Caution: I'm neither neuroscientist nor a psychotherapist, so my lingo may be very much off.
For starters, let me divide positive experiences into euphoria and pleasure. I believe these two are physiologically different, but they can come together sometimes. The pure euphoria experience is the proverbial "reward lever", and the pure pleasure experience is something like making a scientific discovery (have experienced only the latter, but also had some euphoric experiences). By Nick's description, jhana looks like a pleasure and not euphoria.
I believe that any pleasure, besides being pleasure in itself, may be also colored with some other emotions which affect the overall experience. These emotions make the pleasure more meaningful and differently enjoyable, because an extra qualia dimension is added (for a crude analogy I'd suggest watching porn with no sound vs watching porn with sound). However, when we get the pleasure of the same kind over and over again, the payoff from experiencing certain qualia diminishes and these pleasures become less enjoyable. The same also applies to the pleasure by itself: there are diminishing returns from getting every extra unit of pleasure.
Thus, it is reasonable to desire different pleasures to experience different qualia and do not hit these diminishing returns. For example, right now I'm on a vacation and am free to do whatever I find pleasant, so yesterday I went on a hike (aesthetic pleasure from the views + bodily exercise pleasure), and today I'm chilling out at home, because the hike-related emotions won't be so bright today.
From what Nick describes, jhana looks like a rare case of pleasure which is not colored by any other emotions. I would agree that casual sex lies in the same category, while tasty food doesn't: eating a burger is very different experience from eating a white chocolate bar.
As an individual, I strive to have many pleasures of different kinds, that come with different emotional coloring and different qualia attached to them (and thus are more fulfilling). I also want to have some basic level of pleasure in my life, so Nick's story motivates me to learn to get to jhana in order to have a "Advil for my soul pains" for the gloomier days in my life, but not more.
Thus, answering the questions:
1. The description of the town looks way better than the jhana description (shows are interesting, different food is tasty in a different way etc.), so I'd go there every weekend, if it's less than 2 hours commute one way. If we replace this town with a jhana town, I'd probably go there only when I'm sad, so there would be no particular schedule (and the frequency of the trips would depend on how much I feel sad and how long is the commute).
2. The description here is very logical and in line with Nick's description and my perception, so I wouldn't anyhow update my priors.
3. I'm very much unsure about the neurological level, but I think that on the psychological level there might be various reasons for sex addiction. For example, one may feel unattractive and casual sex is a quick way to understand that there is someone who desires you so much they're up to having sex with you. Thus, a jhana for this kind of sex addict may increase overall life pleasure, and in an optimistic scenario this sex addict will be happy from spending enough time in jhana and won't care about feeling undesirable. However, most probably this insecurity will still plague them and they will seek casual sex not for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of getting validation (which aligns with the description provided by Scott).
Another way to relate to Nick C's over-the-top description of the experience of mastered jhana practice would be to link it to descriptions of experiences deploying skill mastery that were explored by Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi in developing his concept of "flow." People who describe ecstasy in flow experiences--e.g., highly skilled athletes or performing artists--sometimes resemble Nick C in the extremity of their language. In a book that preceded the better known "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience," called "Beyond Boredom and Anxiety," I believe Csikszentmihalyi did include Zen masters among the classes of people he felt achieved this type of experience. In later research, involving more lab monitoring, he and collaborators looked at EEG correlations that extended, if I recall, to video gaming as well.
The model of flow can be useful because it identifies the brain states Nick celebrates as pervasively available in reduced form--we all can get pleasurably lost in small activities involving deployment of ordinary skills (puzzles, games, sports)--with the potential to become overwhelmingly satisfying if honed to a very high degree and optimally deployed. We might feel it's a stretch if a ballet dancer said she felt that when she was locked the midst of a complex performance she had totally mastered, the joy was ten times better than casual sex . . . or a pianist, skier, etc. . . . but we probably wouldn't consider it mysterious or dismiss it out of hand, and we might grant the possibility based on smaller-scale rewards we encounter ordinarily for smaller-scale skill mastery and deployment.
A common feature among these experiences is the measurably suppressed scale of frontal-lobe activity that accompanies focused deployment of mastered skills--correlating to reported loss of any sense of personal identity ("I")--along with intense but effortless attention to the physical environment, as seen, heard, or felt. Hypofrontality--the suppression of the brain's executive function--and the experience of losing the sense of self (in this case raised to a central tenet of ideology) is equally a measurable feature of meditative trance states such as jhana.
Last January, I practiced jhanas 1-4, and I have (what I think is) a somewhat more balanced perspective.
The jhanas are kind of controversial within Buddhism. There's a sutta/story where the Buddha describes mastering jhanas 5-8, concluding they are not very useful, and then remembering jhanas 1-4 and realizing they are very important for progress toward liberation. However the Zen folks don't use them at all and your mainstream Vipassana people have always been a little skeptical of them.
First jhana is basically MDMA. You can find several people who advocate MDMA as absolutely life-changing, everyone should be on MDMA, etc.
If you believe that about MDMA, believe it about first jhana I guess. I will say the first time I did first jhana (with poor technique but hey), I did have the feeling "oh my god this is what I've needed, so much!" Better than really good, mindblowing sex? Well, different anyway, if the love and acceptance feeling is what you lacked before.
Personally I found both first jhana and MDMA to have a rocky comedown, which put me off repeating them. They are really high energy and I crashed hard afterward. However, I may try the jhanas again and I'm optimistic they won't always cause that crash. Maybe my opinion of them will improve!
Dropping into fourth jhana (via 2-3) was really life-changing. I would not have believed I could personally experience a state like that. Deep quiet, feeling physically sitting at the bottom of a well.
Doing the jhanas, and then comedown, got me meditating seriously and consistently for the first time ever, and it's basically slowly solving all my problems (therapy helps).
I haven't really gone deep on the MRI side, but I'm interested in citations for empirical work.
This one (Hagerty et. al., 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659471/) seems to get at the quesiton Scott is posing about which reward machinery is being triggered, using MRI to investigate. In particular they substantiate this hypothesis:
> H5: Jhanas should show increased activation compared to the rest state in the dopamine reward system of the brain (NAc in the ventral striatum and medial OFC). A broad range of external rewards stimulate this system (food, sex, beautiful music, and monetary awards), so extreme joy in jhana may be triggered by the same system (the VTA is also part of this system, but is too small to image with standard fMRI methods, but see [35] for successful imaging methods).
Ok, now what does this mean for Scott's quesitons? I'm far from an expert here, but stitching this together with https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-unpredictable :
> Now, what does the released dopamine do? In PFC (via the mesocortical pathway), it draws attentional resources to the surprising stimulus and its plausible causes, gating out the processing of other, less relevant stimuli. Simultaneously, in NAc, it strengthens connections between PFC inputs and the endorphin-releasing cells, thereby wiring together the hedonic features of the reward and the sensory features of any cues predictive of it. This imbues the cue with the ability to release the GABAergic brake on VTA DA neurons all by itself. Phenomenologically, it results in us "liking" the cue as much (or nearly as much) as we like the reward (this is what allows, e.g., animal trainers to reinforce behavior with only the sound of a clicker that has previously been paired with food).
So, speculatively, if Jhana is somehow short-circuiting NAc to trigger without specific signals from PFC, are we weakening the existing connections from PFC that previously triggered NAc? Something like normalizing the weights over a bunch of input signals, but with the new input signal being "non-causal / Jhanic stimulation"? Thus reducing the weight of other causal hedonic pleasures (like casual sex in this example)? So these signals from PFC would not elicit as much dopamine response through NAc activation as they did pre-Jhana.
Perhaps there is also something here viz the second part:
> But once the brain learns that a reward is reliably predicted by a cue, the reward ceases to elicit a surprise signal. This means it no longer increases VTA DA neuron firing rate. It may still cause endorphin release and thus keep the GABAergic brake off, but if there's no surprise signal driving phasic firing, dopamine release will be minimal.
> That is to say: We still enjoy expected rewards; we just don't much *care* about our enjoyment of them.
If you can reliably produce the Jhanic pleasure state, perhaps this condition eventually obtains as well; it's no longer "surprising" that you can experience this bliss state, and therefore it's not addictive/appealing. But, maybe it's still a strong-enough stimulus in the NAc system to continue to reduce the weight of the other, more-surprising NAc activations from the PFC, so it's also displacing those surprisingly-pleasurable states from firing.
Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
I would move there. This would be Shangri-la.
The fact that Nick even has a "max ideal everything is 100 % perfect casual fantasy sex situation" and uses that as a benchmark for real/desirable pleasure/happiness tells me that our minds work so differently as to make anything more he says potentially irrelevant to me.
I realise we're a community of sceptics (and I appreciate that!), but I have to admit I was surprised at the amount of scepticism in the comments. I've never attained jhana, but the pleasure and anti-addictiveness of it reminds me a lot of e.g. "a sense of wonder for the world". I can tap into that any time I want, it's a fairly intense emotion, but I don't tap into it a lot. Similarly, the difference between "contentedness" (basically by definition long-term) and "happiness" comes to mind - once you achieve a certain level of contentedness, happiness becomes a lot less important. I can totally imagine jhana raising contentedness, in the same way some other things raise contentedness (e.g. if I recall correctly, 'having kids' is one of those). So the basic phenomenon passes my sniff test quite easily; which doesn't guarantee it's real, but it means my prior lands quite firmly on that it is.
(To be clear, I still really enjoyed this comment section - big thanks to the community here for insightful and friendly commentary, as always.)
Hello Nick, I Just came off a 10 days meditation retreat where we practised a very peculiar type of Vipassana meditation, that makes you concentrate on differents parts of your body, the sensations you observe in these different parts of the body to reach a state where you flow through your entire body and finally you reach a state (that I did not reach, yet) where you experience complete body dissolution. It was a very, very intensive course and I must admit I did not enjoy it. This kind of Vipassana is been exported out of Burma by Mr. Goenka. You can check it out. Let's say I am much more interested in Zen meditation or mindfulness meditation. I am interested in the workings of the mind, concentrating on one thing, posing the question Ramana Maharshi said one shoud pose to onself: "Who am I ?". And much less in the "sensations" in my body to "purifie" the mind, as I think that the question is not really how to purifie the mind but how to transcend the mind.
All that to ask you what kind of meditation would you suggest I practise to try to reach that state of bliss you so forcibly praise ?
>Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
It's an experience machine. No.
I mean, how come I have "lots of great friends there" already at this remarkable place I've never been to, and as many attractive people as I want who want to have amazing sex with me (because if they're being paid to fake it or they're androids or whatever it's not so amazing), and so on?
Now, for ordinary, real levels of excellence, I found it worth while to go to London yesterday to three museums and an art gallery. I do this every few months, and it's a journey of two hours.
Here's a profile on investigating jhana as an EA cause area (I'm one of the authors): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XhD9ooZeJcQD8QJZL/cause-exploration-prizes-jhana-meditation
Not hard to accept his internal reports if you've experienced hypomanic states. Surely I'm not the only who has said this? On the "First Floor," I function abnormally well, just w more energy & ecstasy, and less need/desire for voluntary chemical mood enhancements. And sometimes that's as far as it goes. (Second Floor, I worry friends, annoy strangers, make suboptimal decisions, have weird arousals but not often bad enough to get fired or dumped. Third Floor... bad.) But even where meds are the only reliable ceiling, there are ofc life practices to help stay off the rides altogether. Seems only logical that *some* people, with an intense practice like meditation, could initiate, maintain, manage similar mental states. I'd only be dubious of a claim that most or even many ppl would have the same startling results from the same practice. Mood ranges are rather bespoke, I think? Which makes me curious to know if meditation as a way of life is mainly attractive to those with mildly hypomanic potential that could be activated in other ways.
I'm late to this discussion but I think Nick's point about the "non-addictive" nature of Jhanas and even forgetting about them overlooks the importance of bliss states as motivations for meditation. I started meditating because I'd heard so much about how great it was for my brain and my emotional well-being, but even 20 minutes was a chore. After sticking with it and attending a bunch of retreats, I had extended my meditations to 45 minutes or longer because it had not only stopped being a chore, but after 30 minutes or so my meditations got really pleasant. Whether or not I sometimes entered a jhana I don't know, but my meditations always get so pleasant that I'm never tempted to skip them anymore. Another plus is it gets relatively easy to experience, to one degree or another, the pleasantness at other times & places (for example, stopped at a traffic light or waiting in line at a grocery check-out). My hat's off to whoever it was who was able to stay in a jhana while having sex.
Because yes, as various commenters have noted, getting blissed out isn't the goal or main point of meditation. The goal is to reach a deep & intuitive understanding of your relationship with reality, both subjective (your mind and body) and objective (the rest of it). "Enlightenment" might be more than that depending on whose definition you accept, but intuitively apprehending your connectedness to everything else is one way of describing a common thread in most descriptions of enlightenment.
I don’t have much experience with meditations and prefer yoga nidra. But I tried this phrase “am I aware”. I tried to think if I’m dead or alive and what would I feel. And I immediately felt a very powerful feeling, with such intensity that I couldn’t breathe properly and tried to escape it. (I concentrated on a breath for 10 minutes before this). And now even I’m not meditating, when I start to think about if I’m aware, my body starts shaking. I can compare this sensation to a time when I was under a huge stress. (Could it be because of adrenaline? )
Question #1: Why have I not simply *moved* to Utopia already? ;)
Question #4: The concept kinda scares me because what if I learn to do this and all it does is actually make all of the things I'm currently feeling (generally depression, anxiety, panic, self-loathing, anhedonia, bitterness, rumination) the things that end up being amplified instead?
Question #2: If I did that and that's what happened, it would *definitely* bias me away from trying again. If I tried it and it worked, but didn't self-reinforce, I wouldn't consider that a failure and it would not bias me against trying other techniques in the future. I'd probably just set a calendar reminder to remind me to do it, particularly if I was feeling depressed and it helped "fix" that.
Question #3: I have no idea, not being a psychologist, but having a close friend who runs an Addiction IOP, I *do* wonder if this technique would be useful to teach to people with heightened amygdala response, or if would be the worst possible idea.
Distinctive points in the progression of meditation. I mean, states one encounters as one goes "deeper". (aka "jhana", right?) I have some experience with the concentration-meditation (samatha to the buddhists) version of that. Jhana 1 : get high, 2 : gets easy to keep yr attention on yr object, 3 : encounter a vast space. That's pretty much as as far as I've gone with that. I do dry vipassana these days.
> better than amazing sex
that just means you have not had a threesome
>> I don’t think normal models of reward have a good explanation here.
Maybe can be modeled as "it's easiest when you've been practicing, and gets harder the longer you've waited". So it's like a city with all the good things that is continuously getting further away. It doesn't seem urgent to visit when it's close, and it has diminishing appeal as it gets far, perhaps.
You may be interested in this book and theory. https://harvard.academia.edu/LouisLiebenberg/CurriculumVitae
The general idea is that our brains evolved into what they are because we needed to hunt and track. The reason that we CAN do science is that the kind of thinking that science requires is the same as the kind of thinking that we evolved to track and hunt game.
Not only was it useful to be able to observe and deduce, but it also "feels good", the ultimate evolutionary reward, similar to sex. Meditating is an internal form of this same practice which brings us to a similar state without being focused on external stimuli.