Yeah, there’s such a vast range in quality of sex, from "ew, I wish I hadn't done that" to spiritual mountaintop experiences, that "better than sex" has very little meaning.
I think it would be more useful if framed as "I'd rather lose my ability to have sex than my ability to reach Jhana." Unfortunately there aren't really any ways to do an experiment on that.
Oh for sure. I can make money and improve my career through the Internet, but I can't do either of those things via sex (although some folk can, of course).
This assumes that you already have kids, I wouldn't change that for anything.
Before I read your comment, I was thinking about the peak pleasurable experiences, and I also thought of eating particularly satisfying food when hungry. But probably the best experiences I've had were social ones, feeling pure acceptance and contentment.
Good orgasms are up there too, but we all know that most sex is not a peak-tier experience.
I've heard multiple women describe kidney stones as far worse. Or even stubbing their toe! It's not just subjectivity -- there's also just a tremendous range of personal variation.
In this I wonder if I'm an outlier, then? For one, I was a virgin at marriage and have stayed faithful for nearly 23 years now, so I'm already a sexual outlier. For the other, even in middle age, I still enjoy sex quite a bit. It's not always transcendent, and it's often mediocre, but GOOD sex is probably the top tier sensation, if I was ranking them. And it's not even that I have to work that much for it, or that it's infrequent. About 2-3x a week, I guess? And about 1 in 10 of those is GOOD. I'd take good sex over a perfect steak about 80% of the time, if I was putting numbers on it. Would depend on how hungry I was, I guess.
Maybe there's something to be said for the traditional sexual setup, when it's working as intended. It's been good for me too. I'm not excellent at ranking my experiences, but roughly I'd say that for me only spiritual feelings (which are for me the most thoroughly embedded, as someone put it, in a narrative) are stronger than the best sex.
Ditto, would guess the wife and I are at about 15 times a month after 14 years of marriage. And usually a couple of those are amazing, and most of the rest are pretty great for me and of varying quality for her. Can’t think of any other activity I would rather keep.
I love team sports, books, video games, traveling. I wouldn’t trade sex for any of it.
People seem to vary a lot in how much they enjoy sex, and it can vary enormously from one sexual encounter to another, as well. But cheap sex is about the same price as an expensive meal, so I think we should expect them to have about the same value on average.
I think it also depends on what constitutes the 'sex' part. All of my best memories and all of the best moments in my life are similar, I meet a girl, we flirt, a hand on the arm turns into dancing, turns into a kiss, turns into sex. The whole 3-24 hours from when we first met to when I fall asleep is what I sort of intuitively compare things to when people compare things to sex. The orgasm in isolation is nice but it doesn't come close to the whole experience. Obviously this is a very idiosyncratic way to view this, but it always seemed like a clearly bounded concept to me on the inside, and the sort of persistent exhilaration and excitement, the nervous energy, and the focus that it elicits in me is really something.
That is a really great point. Those first stages of relationships are for sure among my “most enjoyable days” top 20 or whatever. Even when they didn’t necessarily end in intercourse.
That feeling that someone is truly into you and accepting of you is the greatest drug there is.
I think both that "sex" is underspecified, and that it's entirely possibly for people to have different internal models of the experience.
Firstly, are we talking about the best/worst/average/mode sex? You're right that "worst sex in my life" is a low bar for another experience to clear, and as a result probably so is "the average hedonic value I'd expect to get from a sexual encounter". But I generally have really good sex, and there's _maybe_ one or two things that I can favorably compare to "the best sex I've had so far". So if we're really talking "a sample from the set sexual experiences I've had", that's already a higher bar. And if "jhanas are better than sex" expands to "jhanas are better than the best sexual experience you're capable of having", that's both surprising and (if true) a rock solid argument that you should spend six months or however long getting the ability to enter jhana.
Secondly, people are different. I could imagine both someone having a different sexual-pleasure distribution curve (in the sense that they have really good/really bad sex much more or less frequently than me), and also a different relation to sex (in the sense that they derive less pleasure from it in general than I do).
My favorite thing in the world is foot worship. I could do this everyday, for hours at a time, tho I do need different women on occasion. I wouldn't say it's better than sex, but I don't more, I want it more, and I can do it longer. But I'd still consider this in the realm of sex. I never had an experience that was near as fun as foot worship ... Or sex.
I'm with the commentator who basically dismissed the entire thing (about jhana) and the other commentator who said basically everyone he's ever met that talks about this stuff is ... Well, basically, an ineffectual. There was a discussion about bias and people were arguing what bias is and what it means - and it pretty much went exactly how I and the two commentators I mentioned see it of the jhana crowd.
I know people who do mushrooms - and my friend regularly chats with that MacKenna guy (I forget which one) and his discriptors of trips is wild and I don't disbelieve him but mostly that's because I understand drugs can make your brain do stuff (sorry I'm no scientists) and there's dozens of phds (if not hundreds - or thousands even now) doing research into psychodelics.
But anyway, maybe you disbelieve about the foot thing as much as I disbelieve then about the Jhana thing and that's kinda funny.
I find this perspective fascinating because it's just so different from my experience. Sex for me is hundreds of times better than say the best tasting meal I've ever had, or any other experience I have had. It seems people have drastically different experiences of sex.
I feel like "Artist Tyrant" might have a point, for me (as a straight male) the quality of sex depends a lot more on how attracted a woman is to me, than how physically attracted I am to them. I'm not sure if it's appropriate to be this graphic, but good sex always involves having my partner be aggressively, desperately motivated. For example, I like to tell women what to wear to go on a date with me, which involves a dress and no underwear. Sometimes I will usually notice that her leg is wet down to her feet at some point during the date, which is always a precursor to a really intense experience for both of us.
imo nearly all of the work is having a clear mind. In that sense, jhana is mostly a therapy/psychology/integration thing. Once you have a clear mind most of the time going in and out of jhana is relatively simple
Clearness of mind can be traded off with more shamatha before switching into jhana, because shamatha leads to a tranquil and alert mind
Thanks for this comment, haven't heard it put this way much before.
Lines up with what I seem to be experiencing personally ATM - just did a 10 day solo jhana retreat to try to learn (at least) the 1st jhana, didn't succeed (yet :) ), and it seemed like the main reason was a particular psychological thought pattern/subroutine of hypervigilance/checking for what might go wrong. I experience this in daily life a lot as well, associated with anxiety, and in meditation and trying to enter jhana I would get close to jhana 1 (I described what I was experiencing to an experienced meditator and he agreed it sounded like approaching jhana 1), but this anxiety/hypervigilance thing would still be running hard and felt like it was stopping me from being able to "flow" into the jhana.
(I'm now trying out looking at this as the hindrance of doubt (vicikiccha) and working on reducing it :) )
Nitpick: I was very excited to read about Rob Burbea videos being available somewhere, but nope, it's still just the same audio-only files on Dharma Seed.
Also, I think Steven and I came to an agreement that the non-addictiveness of jhanas is likely less about the time and effort necessary and more about the requirement of being in a sufficiently let-go/non-craving state to enter them.
In case that's of interest to you: his students have also transcribed, tagged and annotated all of his recorded talks for years (total transcripts are 6000+ pages long).
>that the non-addictiveness of jhanas is likely less about the time and effort necessary and more about the requirement of being in a sufficiently let-go/non-craving state to enter them.
I'm not sure if I can offer useful input, but with N=1 there's a intensely pleasurable qualia separate from jhana that I can reach for without the requirement of a meditative, calm, or non-craving state. It also takes negligible time and effort, and I've normally no real desire to do it.
That leads me to believe there must be some other major dynamic that inhibits addictiveness (though non-craving states could still be the explanation for jhana's non-addictiveness).
It'd be interesting to try to test whether the meditative non-craving state could inhibit a different trigger that would normally causes temporary desire/craving (assuming we could devise a harmless reproducible trigger for cravings)
Another hypothesis is that the lack of a physical act might reduces the potential for addiction and conditioning. Not very many addictions are entirely in one's head. The act of having a cigarette in their mouth, or the act of insufflating powder can become the majority of a craving, even while people derive less pleasure from the drug.
Perhaps if you did a sufficiently distinct physical ritual before each attempt to reach jhana, it might be possible to start thinking about the ritual itself, start desiring the ritual? I'm inclined to say no, but I'd be interested to see the outcome =)
(Unfortunately, the pleasurable state I can reach should be a lot less credible than jhana, which has thousands of claimed reproduction and still evokes doubts. So I'm not sure how useful my case is, but here's a sincere attempt at a data point..)
I'm actually not sure it isn't! I'm a little curious to try to reach jhana to compare (also curious, if they're different, whether both could stack?)
I assumed it's different for a few reasons: it doesn't require an absence of distractions, focus, or absense of want. It's something that happens when you reach for it actively, as opposed to arising from quiet meditation and growing stronger on its own. This state you have to keep pushing to maintain, or it fades on its on.
I got the impression that jhana is something that has to find you, or that you have to locate each time (though it may only take a few seconds or a minute to reach). In comparison, I move towards that state the same way I move my hand, it responds immediately to the will
And I thought the intensity might not match exactly, jhana seemed stronger (though I'm not sure I have a solid base for a comparison, having not (that I know of) reached jhana)
I should pick up meditation, out of curiosity if nothing else!
As I do not have twitter, do you mind emailing me the link at promo -at- dnesic -dot- com; I'd like to join but don't want to open an account just for that. Thanks in advance!
I've never heard anyone talk about the 9th, but there are about ~200 members now so a wide range of experience. You're welcome to join... gmail me at mcscope or on twitter
From my understanding cessation is only rarely referred to as being a "jhana" and the route there is usually pretty different than the other 8 (cessation usually reached via insight practices), so Im not sure the jhana server would be the most helpful place to get help/info for that. That being said, I'm sure there's some very experienced meditators there who would also know a bunch about insight stuff.
"I went through a similar dynamic with lucid dreaming. For years, for hours every night, I was a god, I could create any world, do any thing, the only limit was my imagination. I explored a lot of things deeply, and I'm glad I did it, but it got ... old. It cured me of the hunger for experiences, or something like that."
Reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft ('The Silver Key'):
"When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon."
Oomph. I miss the easy impact that something like Lovecraft could have on me. Now I only get excited when a fundamental life-long belief is threatened by new evidence...
I still find myself aspiring to have the same sorts of dream-adventures as Randolph Carter did, years after reading "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadesh". That imagery just sticks. If lucid dreaming is anything actually like that...and jhana is anything actually like lucid dreaming...well. Big Delta If True.
(Also makes it somewhat hard to encounter third-rate fourth-hand inspirations based on Lovecraft, after reading some of the originals. "You're not capturing the true majesty of Leng!" "That is *not* how Azathoth works!", etc.)
> This was a fun one. I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying.
As someone who experiences Jhana through meditation and other practices, I can't stop giggling about the fervor with which so many people seek to doubt my experiences and those of others. Helloooo, they are my experiences!! I do not need your approval, I am sharing them for your benefit and not mine. What do you have to lose from spending a small amount of time sitting with yourself, bringing awareness to your thoughts, and relaxing?
There's no evidence whatsoever that you let out even a single giggle. Knowing how much and how frequently such things are exaggerated online, I have every reason to doubt your self-reported “evidence” of laughter.
lol (I warrant that I did actually make a slight laughing sound, by using the unusual phrase warrant I am providing evidence that I am either telling the truth or willing to lie in a novel manner that would be particularly noticeable to myself and therefore threaten my self image as truthful)
Well, my understanding of what I have to lose is that I have to spend a few months "learning how to meditate" before I find out whether I can have this experience or not.
> I have to spend a few months "learning how to meditate"...
Another way of phrasing this would be "I get to spend a few months learning how to meditate...".
If someone views meditation as obligation rather than something that can nourish their soul, then they will likely struggle to experience all the benefits of meditation. The benefits are in the process, and the more profound experiences are an outcome of that. Focusing on the outcomes, such as Jhana or Enlightenment, turns the practice into a process and defeats the intention of meditating. The outcomes of others can spark and inspire curiosity within ourselves, but our intention is a crucial component.
Okay, but supposing that I am a foolish and misguided person who does not know what "viewing meditation as something that can nourish my soul" even means, then I should expect to struggle and defeat my intention, and in that case trying to meditate will be a waste of time on my part - either indefinitely, or until I somehow realize what the deeper meaning of it all is.
I'm not even arguing about what you are or are not experiencing; I just think that (1) assuming there's something there, it's not trivial to get to it, and (2) as a result, there is a tradeoff in spending time trying to attempt to get there.
I see where you're coming from now and I'm with you!
> (1) assuming there's something there, it's not trivial to get to it
I completely agree with you here. That is part of the difficulty, each of us has to undo our minds own tricks. There is no definitive path we can all take.
> (2) as a result, there is a tradeoff in spending time trying to attempt to get there.
Objectively, there is a tradeoff yes I agree. As there is a tradeoff with brushing your teeth or learning how to exercise your body. I find the mind likes to optimize its resource use, i.e. there needs to be a good enough outcome with a good enough probability with low enough input to justify the action. Again, this is part of the difficulty in deciding to try a new practice like meditation and sticking to it. You could be making progress and not feel the outcome is good enough for the time spent and give it up.
For all these reasons and more, Jhana and meditation in general is not something I expect everyone to seek, not something I expect everyone to "succeed" in" and not something I expect of anyone... even though increasing the amount of consciousness worldwide is likely essential to our survival as a species. It is an uncomfortable and often painful duality to hold.
My initial comment about giggling was a playful jab at the conversation within this specific community, because I was indeed giggling about the fervor with which so many people here reject anecdotal experiences.... when all we really need to enjoy life is to connect with our own (inherently anecdotal) experiences.
You can believe jhana exists and decide not to do go through all that hassle. Seems like the classic situation where you don't want to do something, so you proclaim you *can't* do it, to free yourself of the obligation. No need to go so far! Simply say you don't want to do it! I don't want to learn to fly an airplane, but I'm sure I could learn if I tried!
Yes!! I don't see any rational basis for denying the possibility of Jhana from the dissenters in these two blog posts. In one thread of comments to this, you can read someone explicitly defining the reasons for their personal bias against it and holding onto their right to have that bias. Just choose not to do it for yourself, no need to stomp on or deny the experiences of others because you don't want it to serve you or it challenges your world view.
Well, I don't think the two examples are really analogous. I'm sure I could learn to fly an airplane, but if someone tells me that flying an airplane is a really great feeling, I won't necessarily conclude that I'll enjoy it. On a recent open thread, someone tried to tell me that running is a great feeling, or possibly that the feeling you get after running is great, and personally for me it's a hard "no" on both counts.
With jhana, the personal experience is the only part that there is. I personally wouldn't phrase my objection as "jhana doesn't exist", because I like being precise about my language and I don't even know what the precise version of that claim would be. But without putting in the effort to learn to meditate, I'm not sure I can have any kind of solid conclusion about whether I'm missing out on anything.
I agree with the emphasis on personal experience vs saying "something doesn't exist".
I also agree the comparison is rough, though I think it can be cleaned up and the intent of the comparison will hold. "flying an airplane" would be analagous to "meditation" and a certain experience while flying (e.g. doing a barrel roll) would be the blissful analogue to jhana. The same way that "running" is not the same as achieving a "runners high", which is something I'm still working to achieve more readily and only get in short bouts when I do. Curious to hear your thoughts!
I would certainly be curious. At the surface it sounds a bit paradoxical, since jhana is described with positive term... but I know from my own trauma related experiences that a "positive" experience can feel bad based on how you relate to it. So I would be quite curious to understand their experience of jhana. I would say I'm a generally curious person and I try not to cling to speciics :)
I think there's a double kick that's motivating the "it isn't a real experience" response. First it doesn't fit with a person's model so there's natural defence of your world model. I think what kicks it in to gear is that if your world model is wrong by not incorporating the possibility of Jhana it also means you are also missing out on what sounds like the ultimate life hack. This is a pretty overwhelming combo in favour of rejecting the realness of it
I quite agree. Attachment to our worldviews and "knowledge" often does us a disservce. I have been going through the process of detaching from all this myself.
What I'm hearing is you have personal bias from your experiences.
> People I know who are into this kind of crap are ineffective unhappy people so I doubt it has much real life changing benefit.
I don't understand the basis for your doubt. I was an effective unhappy person and now I am more of an effective happy person. In between that there was a period where I was ineffective and unhappy. Yes, people who are struggling are drawn to things that can help them struggle. Why does that inspire doubt in you? Is it because you haven't witnessed a certain change in those people?
>What I'm hearing is you have personal bias from your experiences.
That is literally how people form 98% of their opinions about everything. My personal experiences also lead me to believe the sky is blue and junkies cannot be trusted.
It is a good system! You would prefer people who don't use the information of their day to day lives to make personal updates to their models of the world?
I know lots of people I respect and think have it together and are great human beings, none of them are nattering on about meditation or even practice it as far as I know. I know a bunch of people who are sort of unfulfilled by regular markers of success and kind of failing at life at least a little. Some of those people love to go on and on about how much "meditation helps them".
To be clear I don't doubt it helps them, as I said all sorts of things "help people". I doubt it is some actually transformative useful experience because none of the people I know seem very transformed. They seem exactyl like that person who has been transformed by starting to eat St. John's Wort each day or whatever.
Now if my life experience I had come across some ass kicker who was 45 is interesting and smart, has a challenging job they excel at, a thiriving family, and a wide social circle who was super into meditation, I might take notice.
But it is always the girl who didn't try super hard in college and took an easy major, then travelled the world "volunteering" in villages or whatever, then got knocked up along the way, and is now back and claiming to be super together and happy and effective due to meditation while needing very simple advice about starting a business and lacking any real thought out plan for that business. Moreover she doesn't seem particularly happy, or particularly enlightened.
You might say "you are reading too much into your interacitons with the small set of the couple hudnred people you really know well". Except I have found such interacitons generally to be an absolutely wonderful guide to the world and what epople are like. They aren't perfect, but they are certainly better than "dude you aren't going to believe how Amyway changed my life"..
Well you have done a great job of detailing your bias. I invite you to let go of it, open up to the possibility, maybe even try it for yourself. I don't have much more to say :)
Well, Jack Dorsey is a meditator, was 45 at the time you wrote your comment and quite a few people consider him to be fairly smart, interesting and successful. I don't know if he has a family though. That said, success is hell of a drug so I imagine few successful people would be able to get off that treadmill regularly once they're there, and progress in meditation requires time. On the other hand, people who "succeed" at meditation are much less likely to seek worldly success and fame, so your heuristic makes sense. That does not mean meditation or jhanas in particular don't work - only that the social dynamics at hand lead to the observable outcome.
A master in the art of living makes no difference between work and play. Action and quiescence are one and the same, there is no distinguishing between them.
It is possible to "succeed" in a worldly sense while also maintaining one's true self, however that can't be done if one is focused on the outcomes (success) rather than on the intent of their action in the present moment.
Bruce Lee seemed to have achieved this duality. He had a profound impact in the world despite his short life, and his late memoir contains tombs of simple deep human wisdom. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/518792.Bruce_Lee
Well certainly I had my first jhana experience trying to recover from an emotional experience that had ruined me. I’m not born again as a different person, but I’ve been more functional since then.
This is also my experience with mysticism. I know a few successful people who meditate, but all of them seem pretty grounded in its benefits and describe meditation in similar terms as Christians who do spiritual retreats. The outsized mystical experiences ("it's better than sex," etc) come from anonymous Internet comment sections, people who are unreliable in every other aspect of their lives, and grifters who prey on the second category.
The more outspoken that someone is about stuff that nobody can validate, ("You can't prove that I'm not experiencing something profound!") the more skeptical I am. Maybe they believe it, but 5 minutes on the Internet will demonstrate that people earnestly believe all kinds of crap.
> The outsized mystical experiences ("it's better than sex," etc)
I think it is worth nuancing that "it's better than sex" is someone's subjective and comparative view of their experience. I've had a friend eat an ice cream flavor and say that it's better than sex. Purely subjective, but did they have the experience of eating that ice cream flavor? Yes.
> Maybe they believe it, but 5 minutes on the Internet will demonstrate that people earnestly believe all kinds of crap.
I'm with you on this, most of the time. An exception would be in this context right now. The concept of Jhana (Dhyana the OG spelling) and experiences of it date way farther back than the internet. There is a collective of humans reporting experiences of Jhana across a long period of time. I don't let the masses on the internet tell me what to believe nor what not to believe. A propensity to "believe all kinds of crap" does not mean that everything they end up believing is crap... just as a propensity to NOT "believe all kinds of crap" does not mean that everything they end up up believing is crap.
I know what you mean by that! Such a common thing... In this particular context it was re-emphasized again and again, they couldn't get over the experience they were having and were struggling for words. Otherwise, I'd have taken it as a hyperbole
I'd have been more skeptical a few years ago about the whole topic, but I think I might've experienced something slightly similar in, of all places, smallbore rifle shooting - on a particularly good shot, the moment of absolute focus that you can achieve as you pull the trigger comes with a sensory void and a slight high that I imagine is at least a little similar to what meditation enthusiasts describe experiencing. I definitely wouldn't be as weird about it as the jhana guys and say that it's like, super sensually pleasurable or something, but there is certainly that feeling of tipping off an edge, and in a sense it is a very pleasant sensation, just a short one compared to what I imagine meditation can achieve.
With centerfire rifle and most other shooting disciplines you're too busy thinking about other stuff and anticipating the sound and motion, so you'd have to be some kind of ascetic to get that focused. I've asked a friend who practices archery whether he's experienced anything similar, and he said no, but that he'd heard from his fellows that some people did experience that. Hearsay, basically, so who knows.
"I've asked a friend who practices archery whether he's experienced anything similar, and he said no, but that he'd heard from his fellows that some people did experience that. Hearsay, basically, so who knows."
I did enjoy it, since it's been recommended to me in a similar setting, though I didn't think it fully covered the question of whether the meditative state is associated with the sort of sensory high that modern meditation adherents describe.
Funnily enough, some other guy has written a whole little series on Zen in bullseye pistol, often considered one of the more meditative shooting disciplines: https://www.bullseyepistol.com/zeninfo.htm, so the association definitely isn't a rare observation. I found some of the advice in it useful, but am slightly suspicious that some of it might be engaging in mysticism for mysticism's sake. I'm not knowledgeable enough in this area to tell for sure.
"Zen" is usually the adjective I reach for to describe my own experience with smallbore rifle shooting, although I confess I'm very much using it in the lay manner as I can't claim to have experienced a bliss-like state when doing it and am more of a skeptic of Scott's whole psychonaut / credulity-afforded-to-mystic-traditions-without-external-corollaries exploration of meditation and enlightenment.
Can't say I've experienced that in real life (I'm not very serious about target shooting), but maybe a few times way back when Team Fortress 2 was still great and I would play sniper sometimes (though in my heart I'll always be a Pyro.)
A group of people with a shared interest transforming into an insular community with its own ingroup rituals and subculture then transforming into a pretty traditional and run-of-the-mill cult is a fun thing to watch in real time – and hopefully the restraints on some kinds of beliefs like 'speaking to the dead requires a high burden of proof' prevent it from doing much real-world damage.
During lockdown I took up meditation, got as far as achieving 1st jhana a few times, and nevertheless lost interest in meditation and gave up. Which I've struggled to explain even to myself, considering 1st jhana was pretty amazing like everyone says, but I think Sasha Chapin's comment articulates it really well – the problem is it's a completely contentless, untethered form of pleasure.
Maybe it's useful to distinguish between pleasures you desire while you're having them and pleasures you desire even while you're not having them. Certainly, during the times I was in 1st jhana, I never wanted it to end. But while I wasn't in 1st jhana, it held no magnetism at all. With sex or MDMA, by contrast, my memories of those things, and the reasons I want them to happen again, aren't just about pure pleasure – they're about the combination of pleasure and other elements of the situation. With 1st jhana there isn't any such combination.
Oh, snap. It’s not a *reward* for anything! That’s why we don’t crave it. It’s not a signal we’ve done a good job; it’s just a pointless good feeling. Nice, but purposeless. So you don’t chase it, because it doesn’t *do* anything.
Yeah, this is where it feels like the whole conversation starts to point toward Christianity, which has always de-emphasized pleasure and pain (even the pleasures of heaven and the pains of hell) in favor of the meaning and significance of being in a relationship with the creator of the universe.
As a life-long contrarian and skeptic I was quite surprised to have a road to Damascus conversion experience in my 20's. The results were so very different from jhana. Increased attention to cause and effect. Reduced vanity and delusion. Compassion. Desire for holiness and agape. A nexus of love between self other and god. But the key point was a sense that this kind of perception is actually the natural state of man. Years later I learned that this has been the mystical theology of Eastern Christianity for 2,000 years. At that time this just seemed easy, instantly replicable though it has not remained so, as is often the case. But contrary to the belief that faith was just a form of self delusion, it became obvious then that I and the default state of mankind was one of constant denial of how the unseen world is constantly communicating to us in many varied ways, and because of either pride or X we were denying the obvious truth that surrounds us at every moment.
I don't expect rationalists to believe me or follow the path of reversing one's priors and becoming skeptical of one's own skepticism. But I was talking to a friend from college recently, a lifelong atheist and student of philosophy. And we both agreed the ultimate question is why does something exist rather than nothing. And no explanation for existence existing makes any rational sense at all.
Residing in the bliss of the jhanas is not the end state of Buddhism either, it is more or less what you are saying. Buddhadasa has literally called cause and effect the “God” of Buddhism, and the ultimate goal of the jhanas is to increase attentiveness to self and the world and the relationships between it all.
Maybe a bit like how people who struggle to the top of a mountain relish the views, but the extraordinary views from an aeroplane seem unearned. Most people don’t stare out the window despite flying higher than the clouds.
that's an interesting one. If a traveller told a mountain climber who'd never heard of planes, there was a way to get 10000 feet higher than they'd ever been and look done, the mountain climber would be in awe at what vistas the traveller has seen.
But then when you're looking out a window, down at the clouds, you think "what an amazing view! Much better than any mountain vista. Well, now I'm going to finish this Time article."
Hmm, I do enjoy looking out plane windows more than average, especially when flying over something interesting (glaciers in Greenland is a favorite) but I wonder if plane height is just a relatively bad vantage point. Too high up to see most of the smaller scale beauty you'd see from a mountain top and too low too see the larger structure beauty you'd see from space.
I do. "Look people, we can see the clouds from above! See outside! We are fullfilling the millennia-old human dream of flying!" That's what I want to shout to my fellow passengers each time. For some strange reason I never do, though.
I feel the same way. I can never do work on planes because i am always gripped by reverence, and by a sad awareness I will only have x more flights before I die. It’s one of my favorite experiences. But yet I don’t structure my life to constantly be flying…
An old colleague claimed "lift off is better than sex". I thought to myself that this might tell more of your marriage than you wish to reveal, but given the many comparisons wih jhana people do here, maybe I should have given him the benefit of doubt.
Not really. The experience of sitting in a passenger airplane is that of sitting still in an enclosed box that sometimes you can feel move. It doesn't feel like moving through air the way that swimming feels like moving through water.
I always go for the window seat - it’s different than a view from a mountaintop, yeah - but also really cool.
I’m beginning to think this jhana thing is a bit like spiritual wanking - and who doesn’t like a nice wank now and then? It appears I’ve been missing a trick. This would explain the “better than sex?!?” disagreements too: mustn’t the fantasy, almost by definition, be more perfect than the real thing?
I’m an indolent hedonist, never had the temperament to practice meditation seriously yet. But whiling away a few afternoons messing around with this jhana stuff might be cool at some point
In my short experience with meditation - I've experienced both jhanas and some glimpses of insight that were similar in some ways and very different in others - both the jhanas and the insight were extremely pleasant, but the insight experience had a sense of potent significance that I can still taste - whereas the jhanas to evaporate when they are over.
Is it also possible that there's a physiological requirement that isn't universal? At some point as a kid I figured out how to manually flood my body with anxiety, with basically the same amount of conscious effort as holding my breath. I've never heard of anyone else doing this, so I've always thought it was probably something like being able to wiggle your ears.
I figured this out, too! I've also never heard of anyone else doing it. I tried to explain it to an adult and they were super dismissive/thought I was just being my weird-kid self, so I never brought it up again.
Never found it useful for much - content-less anxiety is even less desirable than content-less pleasure.
I think I can do this too. I've never known how to describe it; it's like the physical half of anxiety without the emotional content. Only mildly unpleasant. Like tensing up my whole body slightly.
I think it’s really silly to compare Jhana to migraines. Other than maybe getting time off work, there is absolutely no incentive to lie about migraines. No one is going to admire you as a super enlightened spiritual guru and write articles about how cool you are when you get migraines. I don’t think it’s fake, but I do think that for every person who claims to have reached Jhana there are many, many more who just had a nice time meditating and told themselves it was Jhana to be a part of the cool kids club.
"Not tonight, dear, I have a migraine." "I can't cook dinner tonight, I have a migraine." "I have migraines, they're awful, don't you feel bad for me?" "You think you've got it bad? Let me tell you how bad my migraines are." There are *plenty* of reasons to lie about migraines, and I'd bet large sums of money that many people do. On the other hand, why lie about Jhana? "I know how to feel super-awesome sometimes, therefore I'm superior to you." Yeah, sure, but that doesn't seem to match up with many of the accounts, which don't seem to be about being one of the cool kids.
I dunno, I think for lots of people, feeling superior to other people, in the different possible forms that can take, is at least as powerful a motivator as getting out of work.
Sure! That's certainly true. I'm just saying that I think the comparison to migraines holds up pretty well. Perhaps not perfectly—I'm not saying that the incentives to lie are anything like *identical* in these two cases—but I don't think the objection here holds water. And again, several of the accounts here really don't have the "look how much better I am than you" vibe, which, I mean, is almost the default in online communication nowadays.
“Get out of work” can be generalized to just “get out of stuff” for sure lol. But there’s a couple things here. Assuming the person is acting in bad faith, intentionally being deceptive for personal gain, i think the comparison holds up a little better.
However, that’s kind of beside the point, because I don’t think most people “lying” about Jhana are being intentionally deceptive to anyone except themselves. They may be meditating consistently with the goal of achieving it, then maybe after having an extra satisfying session they convince themselves they got there when in actuality they were just in a great mood that day. They may really believe they’ve achieved it but they *probably* didn’t. I’m not saying *everyone* is lying, and the people writing detailed articles on it are probably sincere. But the % of people lying about Jhana is much higher than the % of people lying about migraines, even though in aggregate lying about migraines is probably much more common.
This is why I’m curious about how similar Jhana is to a mushroom trip, and whether a psychedelic experience can serve as a “proxy” for the experience when studying Jhana. There have been many times where I’ve described the enlightenment of a mushroom trip to a friend only for them to reply “I already feel that way without mushrooms.” When they finally take shrooms they always realize how wrong they were about that. I have a feeling it’s a similar dynamic here. I imagine there’s a lot of overlap between the communities, so I’d definitely like to hear how the 2 experiences relate to each other.
This made me think of an ecstatic state I get into while competing in fencing that, kind of maybe, sounds adjacent to this. I've spent <10 hours trying to meditate in my life so if this is an adjacent experience it is probably not via meditation.
>having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while
This strongly backs up my long-held belief that, contrary to popular and scientific opinion, we are not after pleasure per se. We want what pleasure points us toward: Achieving our goals in the real world. But, despite many claims, we would not simply stay on the holodeck forever. After a while, it gets old, and we want something *real.*
I have heard with some consistency that the expectation of 'reward' is what really motivates people, that reliable happiness is most linked to having a goal and working towards it. I haven't personally looked into this claim but it seems likely to have at least some substantial truth
Agreed. Also sort-of a theological point in Christianity, as some commentators here have remarked: Pleasure is not the purpose in life, but to achieve something. And that goes for non-Abrahamic religions as well, I guess. At least per buddhism, as far as I know, the long-term goal of meditation and all related practices is to avoid rebirth. That is, to finally die and be out of it. "Pleasure" as an effect of yoga, meditation, breathing excercises etc etc can be ok but only as long as it is viewed as a pleasurable distracrion and nothing more serious. (Also to bear in mind, though, is the old buddhist saying" if you search for it [i. e. Enlightenment], you are already way off the mark. ") However, if you do not think reincarnation is a convincing idea, the Buddhist reservations against simply to enjoy the pleasures of these altered states seem to disappear. (Although I have puzzlingly come across Buddhists who did not think the idea of reincarnation was really that important for their beliefs. Difficult people to understand. )
> But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. The reason I’m not in jhana right now is that I tried a bit to learn meditation, got distracted, and didn’t keep up with my practice, which is the same reason I never succeeded at learning foreign languages or running a marathon. The reason other people aren’t in jhana is because they don’t believe it exists, or haven’t heard of it. These all seem like good logical explanations.
The reason *I'm* not in jhana, nor trying to achieve it, is that I am extremely cautious about alterations to how my brain works. I am very aware that meditation can shift one's sense of self and priorities a whole lot, and frankly, current-me who doesn't want to be rewritten finds that prospect very creepy, and doesn't wholly understand why people pursue it.
Fair point, but to kinda rain on your parade a bit, current you that doesn't want to get overwritten doesn't have a choice in the matter. You're getting overwritten every second of every day (especially when you go to sleep). Slowly, piece by piece, the ship of Theseus that is you is being swapped out. The choice isn't between being overwritten or not, it's control and understanding of the overwriting.
You do know this forum has a subset of the community that seriously worries about Roko's basilisk, right? If anything, what i said about there being no true self seems much more severe then that, and that one got some people seriously asking for these warnings.
I mean, yes i agree it's egotistic, but the other risk is that people get genuinely angry at me for "ruining their lives", so either way i lose and this one loses a bit less.
I don't think we mean quite the same thing by "overwritten".
Like… an important fact about the Ship of Theseus is that it doesn't stop being a ship. I am worried that certain meditation-based "epiphanies" are more like making a bunch of alterations to the blueprints, sharply taking all future iterations of the Ship into very different directions from what the person who first set the precedent of replacing parts of the Ship thought they were consenting to.
To put it another way, I have a certain number of certainties about the amplitude of potential "natural" future mes; unless something goes very wrong they will still share my core tastes and moral intuitions, and their consciousnesses will work the same way as mine. If current-me and an arbitrarily chosen future-me could experience each other's qualia for a minute, I am reasonably confident that we would recognise the experience as still being "ourselves". I care very much about that continuing to be the case for all likely future-mes, and (in much the same way a paperclip AI doesn't want to be rewritten to not care about paperclips) I care about caring about it.
hmmmm, i see. I guess one metaphor for this might be to describe your mind as a sort of landmass, with mountains and rivers, and your current position in it as your "you-ness". You are willing to accept movements around the map, but not alterations to the map itself? A lobotomy or heroin will fundamentally alter the physical structures of the brain/your location in the landmass of the brain, which you don't want. But just normal thinking and interacting with people will only change your location in the map.
Is this a fair metaphor? If so, then i agree, but i would be surprised if meditation counts are actually changing your physical brain structure. It's ultimately just thinking about stuff real hard! If that can change your physical brain chemistry, it seems like totally normal everyday behavior also can. Which, i mean i guess it can, spontaneous schizophrenia is possible. Maybe it's just more likely for meditation then in normal behavior? That's possible but seems unlikely to me.
> To put it another way, I have a certain number of certainties about the amplitude of potential "natural" future mes; unless something goes very wrong they will still share my core tastes and moral intuitions, and their consciousnesses will work the same way as mine.
So you're saying that you have morality figured out, and there's no possible way that you might have some moral awakening in the future about some important topic? That seems pretty narrow-minded if so. If that's not what you mean, then how do you know that meditation is not a tool that can lead you to greater moral awakening and self-understanding?
That's an interesting reason, the fear of your present self being overwritten in some sense.
Do you feel that way about other activities that seem like might also change the brain (I think some of them have been researched) like playing a musical instrument well, learning martial arts, taking up an intensive exercise regime, falling in love, taking antidepressants, etc? Or does meditation seem uniquely brain-changing to you?
This is not a fear I've ever had about anything, though I've heard other people voice it, and I wish I understood it better. (I'm capable of being afraid of or anxious about all kinds of various things so it's not that I don't get fear or anxiety).
I'm certainly leery of brain-altering drugs (though I've been lucky enough not to *need* any for my mental health). Learning ordinary skills is alright, insofar as I'm reasonably sure from prior experience that they won't alter the way my cognition works in the ways I care about. But I would be very very displeased if e.g. learning a martial art caused me to, I don't know, become permanently aware of my breathing on a conscious level and unable to go back to blissful pre-bodily-awareness subconscious breathing.
I had a girlfriend, years ago, who was very worried/upset about my psychedelic experimentation (LSD, psilocybin) because she feared it would change me into someone else.
Looking back, I could’ve said hey, turning 50 changes you into someone else: I’m hoping to be ‘old guy with an interesting past’ not ‘old guy who hasn’t changed in any meaningful way for decades.’
> The reason *I'm* not in jhana, nor trying to achieve it, is that I am extremely cautious about alterations to how my brain works. I am very aware that meditation can shift one's sense of self and priorities a whole lot
In my experience, you are correct that meditation does have this effect (and IMO other people who are interested in this as 'only' a cool brain hack may find the tree gives more fruits than they expected). I think this "I don't want to change myself and priorities" is a pretty general argument against human corrigibility, education and self-betterment - it's a pretty good argument against college, which is known to change people's sense of self and priorities. Is the goal to preserve your current priorities, or are your current priorities a result of deliberation and reflection of your understanding of the world. If more deliberation would cause you to update them, shouldn't that be welcome?
We're definitely talking about different meanings of "sense of self" and "priorities".
When I say "sense of self" I mean "what consciousness feels like", not the self-help book sense of "self-image". One hears about "the illusion of self dissolving", for example, and I happen to quite like being a self, and I don't want to dissolve.
Likewise, when I said "priorities", I meant in a core-utility-function sense like "whether I am prima facie inclined to pursue pleasure or not", rather than the more intellectualised sense in which more deliberation or more information can cause you to "shift your priorities".
Take moral convictions; I am all for getting more context on how best to alleviate death and suffering for my fellow humans. I'm even in favour of things like e.g. examining whether the core values I already hold logically extend to animals in a way I hadn't previously thought through/noticed. But I am not in favour of things which I suspect could cause my brain to glitch and stop caring about death and suffering because I have suddenly and irreversibly slipped into a mind-state where I perceive the material world as ineffably illusory and irrelevant.
Thanks for explaining - it sounds pretty cohesive to me, I do expect a lot of people who profess a very rationalist and materialist worldview, who start a serious meditation practice - will find that worldview challenged. It has already begun to happen to me in small ways.
On the topic of comparisons to sex and the question of why anyone capable of achieving jhana isn't doing it constantly, my question was "Why are you not masturbating right now?" (Assuming you aren't, you do you I guess.) As a non-asexual adult man, I have a very good mental model of something which is pleasurable, easy, free, and basically devoid of risk but which I don't always want to do, even when in private.
But it is not that (most) men go “been there, done that” after having sex a view times. And even masturbation needs a little logistic, while some people claim to being able to switch Jhana on in a few seconds?
From my experience it both has quickly diminishing returns pleasure-wise and requires escalating effort/stimulation in order to reach climaxes in quick succession.
The male human body has limits on how much high-quality masturbation (or even intercourse) it will allow. I strongly resent these limits and am envious of those women who have much less strict physiological limits on sexual pleasure.
Masturbation frequently causes immediate urinary problems for me, so it's not actually devoid of risk. It also invites uncomfortable levels of introspection. I have no idea how common either of those drawbacks are.
Yeah. . . masturbation remains masturbation, if you take my meaning. Sex (for me, at least) transcends that because of the involvement and pleasure of another human. But as I mentioned above in another reply, I don't know that my situation or expectations are at all universal. I've had just one partner, and we've been together for 23 years, so maybe it's just that we know what we like and have some practice with it?
> But why believe seizures can cause this, but not meditation? Is it because meditation feels “religious” and seizures don’t? Why not just classify meditation as “nonreligious” if it’s going to screw you up like this?
> I agree that many meditators seem to become convinced meditation has supernatural effects. The very smart and careful ones say something like “I know there’s a lot of evidence supernatural effects aren’t real, and this could just be something I’m saying because I’ve fried my brain too many times with weird states, but I can’t help feeling like [description of some very unconvincing evidence] had to be supernatural, take that however you want”. The dumb and reckless ones just go around claiming to have psychic powers.
Asked and answered. The genetic fallacy isn't logically valid in the true sense, but one can't just declare any usefulness it might have as a heuristic to not exist.
>> As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
>> My ethics are a little odd because I don't believe suffering (or pleasure) is any kind of fundamental entity in moral calculus, and I believe that years of intense, constant lucid dreaming plays a large role in that.
> But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much. Maybe there are dozens of infinite-bliss hacks like jhana or lucid dreaming floating around out there, and we just never hear about them.
Meditative bliss on demand is better to have than not have, but it's demonstrably not Earth-shattering. The conclusion that hedonic utilitarianism is deeply flawed follows.
I love your applied rational arguments, about a topic with so much rationalisation!
I would like to add an argument from authority: there are a bunch of provably smart and rational buggers that quietly support what superficially appear to be “mental” ideas. My go to example is
As someone who was raised Mormon, what you are describing sounds like what Mormons would call an "intense experience of the spirit." I remember one time in particular that I felt this after praying. I felt calm, happy and at peace, recognized that I was feeling the spirit, and was happy about that fact, which kind of started a feedback loop where I was feeling more happy and at peace because I was feeling happy and at peace. It's interesting to hear a similar experience described from another point of view.
As a Mormon myself (still active) I find the comparison interesting. I don't know that I've "felt the Spirit" in quite that same way, but I have felt calm and peace coming from what seemed like a source outside myself, or I've felt a sudden selfless love for another person, especially in situations where I wouldn't reasonably have even liked that person before. But I find prayer hard, and it doesn't ever get to where it would seem like what's being described here. Interesting, though, to read how your experience was similar to jhana.
It wouldn’t surprise me if intense prayer and rituals produce a similar effect to Jhanas . Some sects of Christianity have a similar phenomenon called “slain in the spirit”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slain_in_the_Spirit
I did a lot of lucid dreaming at one point but stopped because it was messing up my life. I found lucid dreaming incompatible with properly restful sleep. This made waking life worse and worse and escape to lucid dreaming more and more attractive. This was a nasty vicious spiral. And the lucid dreaming wasn't that great in the scheme of things because I was aware that it was only a dream. Aware in a very particular, gentle sort of way - too aware woke me up - but aware nonetheless. I stopped lucid dreaming and now deliberately forget my dreams as a valuable part of sleep hygiene for me.
Yeh. A friend of mine recommends lucid dreaming but it’s clear you have to be half awake and half aware that you are dreaming. So it’s never really attracted me.
This reminds me of when I got my first "real job" and was terrified of oversleeping or being too tired to do well, so I figured out how to force myself to go to sleep. And it worked! I could fall asleep almost instantly. And then later I spent the next ten years UNlearning this, because it stole my nighttime relaxation/imagination ability. Ultimately it wasn't worth it.
I mean, it wasn't a method or anything. It was just really important to me that I go to sleep, so I forced myself to go to sleep. I was surprised that it worked. It took a few days, and then after a while I couldn't fall asleep any other way. How? How do you raise your arm? You just do it. I know that's not very helpful, but that's what happened.
I've suffered from insomnia, and it returns when my sleep hygiene slips. Doing nothing mentally energetic (no work, no browsing the internet pursuing fascinating topics... really it's better not to browse at all but to passively watch a movie or show, or read something long-form) after 9:00 is important, and so is keeping the lights rather low (yellow lamplight) during the cool-down stage from 9 to 10:30 or so. Once I'm in bed I read a little while by candlelight then blow the candle out. All that takes my brain step by step down the downward path to the lowest level of arousal and activity. It's really active thought that stops sleep.
I'm not saying no evening outings or activities ever, but ones where I'm relaxed and not under pressure are more workable.
As far as mental techniques, these are mostly stopgaps for times when I haven't done the process properly or my mind is still too active for some reason. Some of these are idiosyncratic--I sometimes think about where I left off writing in my novel and try to write the next sentence in my head, but weirdly this worked with my previous novel but doesn't with my current one. Another that I think would work for more people: recall a recent dream and play it through my head step by step. This mimics the free-associative, nonlogical thought that favors sleep, and I think it generally triggers more of the same, leading my brain on that downward path. A similar technique is to form illogical word pairs in your head: "jungle cake," "peppery armchair," "kitchen tree," etc. It gets easier as you do it.
Also, go easy on yourself. If nothing's working and I'm getting frustrated, a snack and some more reading by candlelight (no screens!) can "reset" the process and sometimes bring on sleep right afterwards.
One last solution, which I only use when necessary, for reasons, is masturbation. It's shockingly effective (though when occasionally it doesn't work, nothing will) and I'm perennially surprised nobody seems to talk about it as an insomnia cure. I can't tell if it's assumed or socially unacceptable to talk about, or if maybe it wouldn't work for a lot of people. It also can't completely replace sleep hygiene. There's no magic bullet.
I've done MDMA, had decent sex, and lucid dreamed. Sex is significant better than the other two. Lucid dreaming is bullshit, everything feels fake and disjointed because half of your brain isn't working normally, but when this inevitably annoys you, you try to fix it by focusing but the only fix is to wake up. I don't think the concept of fully lucid dreaming is meaningful - if you're fully lucid, you're not dreaming, just fantasizing. If you're dreaming and parts of your brain aren't in consciousness mode then you're not fully lucid.
MDMA is well understood and anyone can do it. If you've never felt like everything's going well in your life and things will be ok no matter what, then yeah, it's life changing. But if you're mentally and emotionally healthy I can't imagine it seeming very good.
I personally believe 95% of reported migraines are malingering, along with the other diseases that get this accusation frequently. I also am skeptical that there is an infinite pleasure brain hack that's relatively easy to achieve and reduces desire for sex, food, etc. - this ability should face negative selection pressure, especially if it can spontaneously arise from something like hunting or waiting or watching the environment, extremely common in the EEA. Why do Jhanas only come from one part of the world if they're realistically achievable? Where are the New World Jhanas? The African and European Jhanas?
If we want to try to draw lines between Jhana and charismatic ecstasies in other religions, then we'd have to contend with the path to experiencing them being extremely different, which undermines the idea that this is a real, consistent effect with a biological basis that is strong enough and specific enough such that "wrong" meditation can be worse at getting you to it than "right" meditation.
There's also a no true Scotsman effect in people who talk about Jhanas. If I say "I meditated but didn't get Jhana" they say "you must not be meditating right." If I say "I reached Jhana and it was lame and unimportant" they say "that's not really Jhana then."
What is the evidence that would convince you people are editing their memories and exaggerating their claims about Jhanas, telling themselves they experienced something that would actually be very boring or even nonexistent to you or me? What is the evidence that would convince you meditation doesn't lead to altered states in anyone but the extremely suggestible and should be treated the same as hypnosis?
That latter seems pretty easily disconfirmable: If several people known to you to *not* be extremely suggestible reported this result, that should count against that notion.
But you’re arguing with yourself. Several people have said their experience of jhana was good but not mind blowing (including myself) and I haven’t been told I’m not experiencing jhana.
Why was *anything* invented in one part of the world but not another?
Or: Tummo, for the most similar example I can think of, is demonstrably a real, effective practice for raising internal temperature — but it was only found in one part of the world too, AFAIK.
I will only focus on your last paragraph here, as I pretty much agree with you on everything you said (though I haven’t tried MDMA). I’m not sure we would want to draw the line between jhanas and other religious experiences. Actually, my sense was that the feeling I had was a lot like other people’s description of encountering the holy. But the path to get to the jhanas via meditation seems easily replicable, hence all the people sharing their stories of getting into them.
On second thought, I will address one other thing. For me, at least, jhanas are merely pleasurable and calming, they are not rapturous (though I can escalate them, with significant effort, to full body orgasm level, it takes me a lot of work and concentration, and I’m not always successful). Sex is also more about validation than pleasure for me, and in fact I think pleasure motivates very little in my life, but then again I am a depressive. In any case, I think there is significant variation in experience. Is my jhana weak because I am anhedonically depressed? Or am I depressed because my physiological capacity for pleasure is very low? Am I just bad at the jhanas and this will get better with time? Who knows yet.
There's a too-strong selection argument here: for example, it's possible for there to be negative selection pressure on Jhanas, but for them to be inextricably linked to other brain function that has a much greater selection value. Also, we know there is an incredible amount of selection pressure against being gay, yet evolution hasn't taken a path that makes gay people not exist.
On the question of "why would people lie about this?": I'm moderately skeptical about Jhannas, less because I don't believe that they're real and more because they seem to fall into a category of internally experienced, seemingly profound, status raising experiences that can be reported on, but are difficult or impossible to directly measure.
So while I'm fully willing to believe people can meditate their way into intense pleasure or satisfaction, I'm much more skeptical that the whole category phenomena reported here isn't being substantially overemphasized. And to be clear - I think people broadly aren't lying, but I do think there's a natural human temptation to first delude yourself into thinking something is more significant than it actually is, and to then embellish the retelling to further inflate it.
Unfortunately this really does generate a bit of an impasse - I can't image it's fun to be told "this thing you experienced probably isn't significant", but this sure seems to pattern match a lot of other things (people thinking LSD let them talk to the universe, monks talking to God, etc.) where there might actually be something fundamental going on, but it takes more than a few grains of salt to get to it.
I guess an interesting question for people who have experience Jhannas - is there anything about it that seems consistent across people and not predicted by this theory of successive embellishment? Because while I'm not very convinced, I wouldn't say I've ruled it out either and that seems like the way you'd distinguish between something real and counterintuitive (Jhannas) and something that just isn't real (mushrooms letting you talk to god).
Wait. What do you think is being claimed about jhana beyond "intense pleasure and satisfaction"? Granting that, to my mind, is granting essentially the whole thing, unless you're thinking about the stuff on how it reduces desire in other areas (but that isn't a universal claim in the religion or anything, not even close; and I'm not personally worried about defending it).
>is there anything about it that seems consistent across people and not predicted by this theory of successive embellishment?
When I imagine asking this question about migraines, or any other internal experience, I come up short. I'm not sure it's a meaningful standard, although maybe I misunderstand what you mean.
So on the question of "what do I think is going on", I think the origina Jhana claim is a stronger claim than "this is pretty great". The standard you're stating "intense pleasure & satisfaction" feel to me like the kind of thing someone who had a "pretty great" meditation experience would say to try and hype up meditation. And it's not that I don't think they experienced "intense pleasure & satisfaction", it's just that I think of someone who experiences runners highs - they found something that's great for them, I'm just not sure it's a "significant" thing (i.e. something that either says something substantial about the human mind, or is on obvious optimization for most of the population).
I think the question on the migraine thing is a really good question and to my understanding things like the "aura" and the way it precedes a migraine would be a great example - I wouldn't expect "weird visual artifacts" to be correlated with "intense head pain", but it's broadly enough reported with enough people saying "Oh yeah I know that", that I'm inclined to think (most) migraines are appropriately described as being in a single category instead of being a collection of different things.
I was somewhat skeptical so I decided to give it a try, despite reading that it takes a lot of work to do. Surprisingly, I managed to get it after a few false starts.
I haven't been able to reach that state again, most likely because of what the first comment mentioned, i.e. after experiencing Jhana my desire/focus balancing act is out of whack.
I didn't start with 0 experience: I've always been interested in lucid dreaming, and have tried a number of lucid dreaming techniques which are similar to meditation. Just wanted to post a bit of anecdata to say that you might not need 6 months of focused effort to get it.
Same, I have a little meditation experience, but nothing specifically about jhanas. Read the question "are you aware?", thought, huh, that's a weird way to get into oh crap this is J1. And then I knew what I was trying to do, and it got harder until I stopped pushing.
Feels like a Yoda thing; trying to reach it doesn't work, you just have to realise you're already there.
“ Without distracting yourself/breaking focus, smoothly transition your attention to turn reflexively onto itself.”
Respectfully, what the fuck does that mean? That’s part of my challenge in approaching any of this. I’ll see descriptions like this and all the successful meditators are like “yes yes that’s exactly it” and to the non meditators it’s a word salad that doesn’t really pattern match with how they expect the words to be used. Having not done it, I have literally no idea what “transitioning attention to turn reflexively on itself” would even look/feel like.
Sorry, I was being too vague there. I really just mean to shift your attention away from your breath, and instead focus entirely on the growing energy. It's hard to describe, but you also want to bring your focus somewhat onto the 'process of being aware' of the growing energy as well.
I was being a bit unfair to you in using you as an example of a general trend I’ve noticed in descriptions of these phenomena. The language available isn’t really sufficient, and as you note it requires a level of “meta-awareness” to even be able to make sense of the way practitioners talk about doing these things, but without that meta-awareness it kind of sounds like gibberish. Imagine it’s frustrating on your end, where your original description seemed perfectly clear and obvious to you.
Many things can be focused on, during meditation. You can focus on a lamp, or on the feelings of breathing in your chest, or the sensations in your right hand, or anything, really.
And so, there are questions of "when you focus attention on something, what sensations compromise that? How do you know you're focusing attention over here, and not over there? What sensory experience does focusing and defocusing attention correspond to?"
And if you're focused enough to start with, and play around a bit with where your attention is pointed and its intensity (note: there's no substitute for actually doing this and not reading about it), you can notice "oh hey, there's some sensory input associated with my attention skipping around my field of sensory input, which is how I know my attention is aimed over here and not over there"
And once you've noticed that "where I'm focusing my attention" is a senseable experience and what it's like, then you can, uh... focus your attention on it. It's kind of slippery, not nearly as easy as focusing your attention on a lamp.
I will note that, having tried this, I didn't hit first Jhana or get anywhere close to it, really, so there's some disconfirming evidence.
The closest I've gotten is as follows. The experience of focusing on something can shift from
lamp, drift off thinking, lamp, side of lamp, core of lamp, drift off thinking, dog barking, hand tingles, lamp, lamp, earworm song, earworm song, air conditioner sound, lamp ridges (baseline attention)
to the attentional strobe dropping away and things getting easier and feeling like there's some sort of invisible film that got ripped away. Or like I was previously looking at a mental representation of the object/how my attention was interacting with the object, and now I'm looking at the actual object. Get out of the car! And attention goes
And I think this might be access concentration? It feels pretty fragile, takes a fair chunk of time to get into, feels like finally percieving stuff clearly when you weren't previously doing so, and my breath quiets down a bunch.
And then to hit first you just sustain that third level of concentration on pleasant body feelings until it feedback-loops, but I haven't successfully pulled that off yet, or gotten close, it feels like. Pleasant body feelings are way harder to focus on than a lamp, it's a lot harder to track whether you're at a sufficient concentration level, any thoughts about "wait maybe I'm getting near Jhana?" or "dang this isn't working" or "hang on I got a cool feeling in my arm lemme try to build it up" promptly demolish the concentration state needed, and if it gets anywhere good the good feelings are also liable to mess with your intense attention and evaporate whatever state you had going.
The closest I've gotten has been getting that third level of concentration on pleasure going for a bit and promptly getting derailed by a fit of giggles.
I'd love to, but, uh, I wasn't really expecting it to work. I read the question "are you aware", noticed it brought some meditation-like feelings to mind, allowed those feelings to grow, and then got weirdly intensely happy all of a sudden.
If this seems laughably unhelpful as advice, well, yeah, I get that. GedAtThwil's description sounds more useful to me, but to some extent I think it's just a weird mental motion that's easier to recognise than to describe.
I'm glad you quoted Dekans above because I hadn't seen the comment originally and like this whole thing:
"When you see ice cream in the advertisement or an attractive person walking down the street you will still feel desire. When someone cuts you off in traffic you will still feel aversion. But, you now know to some degree that it's bullshit. You obviously might still act on these cravings/aversions. But, the more times this insight gets hammered into you the less likely compulsive action is. There is a difference between "knowing" something and knowing something."
Arriving at that more continuous awareness that one's dance of clinging and aversion "is to some degree bullshit" produces in my experience a substantial improvement in one's quality of life, both because of the reduced suffering in the moment and the reduced tendency to say and do things that amplify the suffering.
Good CBT can also produce this permanently shifted perspective that supports equanimity, but there's not as much depth to that usually as the one to be had through Buddhist practice.
Beyond bliss or other pleasant emotional states, there's just a steadiness and a confidence that comes with being less driven around by one's continuous stream of desires and aversions. I would say part of what the practice does is build other rooms in your house, and once you've built them, you may still walk past them some days, but you know where they are and how to get into them should you choose to.
Tangent re. "I usually hate this kind of thing (cf. Bulverism)":
Isn't Bulverism (and the ad hominem "fallacy") correct in Bayesian reasoning? It seems obvious that if you're questioning witnesses as to whether Alan murdered Bob, Alan's "no" gives you far fewer bits of information than Chuck's "no". The fraction of possible worlds in which Alan murdered Bob and then said he didn't, is probably much larger than the fraction of possible worlds in which Alan murdered Bob and Chuck said Alan didn't.
Bulverism is explaining why someone is wrong before you have demonstrated they are wrong. And it doesn't really apply to a murder mystery, its a fallacy for logical reasoning and debate. If Alan comes to a debate about, say, abortion and puts out an argument (like, "All humans have right, regardless of development") then if Chuck comes back with "Alan only believes that because he's a man" then an Bayesian observer shouldn't update all that much based on Chuck's statement: he already knew Alan was a man, that has nothing to do with whether his argument makes sense.
Even applied to the murder scenario, while recognizing Alan has a motive to lie would mean that his "No" answer gives you fewer bits than Chuck, you also have to recognize that Alan saying "No" does not give you many bits in favor of him killing Bob either. If Doris, who was not a witness, came by and said "Of course Alan did it, if he confesses he'll go to jail" then she has provided no new bits.
In both examples, you're trying to get out of updating on the ad-hominen attack by locating that information somewhere else. In the first case, you say the Bayesian already knew Alan was a man. In the second, you say you don't have to update on Doris' statement, because you already what Alan had said he didn't do it AND that Alan has a motive for doing so. But in both cases, you have to update by some measurable quantity on the data presented in the ad-hominem attack.
You're actually arguing not that ad-hominem is a fallacy, but that a person making an ad-hominem attack is necessarily late to the party because ad hominem attacks are based on public info, and so a good Bayesian should have already updated on that information. To argue that ad hominem itself is a fallacy--that information about the speaker is irrelevant--you'd have to say that if in the first example Chuck had pulled the cross-dresser Alan's pants down and said, "Aha! Alan is a man!", it would be wrong to update on that (new) information.
The fallacy is in equivocating "less bits of information" with "zero bits of information" - that is, in saying "you *only* believe X because of irrelevant reason Y, so I don't have to evaluate your actual argument."
If anyone’s interested, I spent two years in college getting pretty deep into lucid dreaming. For me, the goal was to use it to help me with a novel I was writing.
And in the beginning, it was incredibly useful in that regard. After a while, though, a few things happened for me which ultimately made me stop:
1. My dreams became less creative. I think this is because being more in control of them meant that my more-creative sub conscious had a smaller role.
2. I was spending too much of my dream trying to remember what was happening long enough to write it down when I woke up, instead of staying in the moment.
3. It was kind of a useless skill. I felt in the end like I was developing elaborate strategies to help me cheat at solitaire.
I will say though that ten years later it’s left behind some interesting effects. In my dreams I tend to see myself like an actor playing out a role. Even if I don’t remember I’m dreaming specifically, I usually know that what’s happening isn’t real and if I get into a bad situation I tend to switch into a sort of “god mode” where I just overpower whatever problems I’m having.
I did a lot of scary things in my lucid dreams. It's not that heights don't scare me anymore, it's that I understand my fear is basically bullshit, just a knee-jerk reaction that is sometimes useful but more often keeps me from doing epic shit. And I explored a fear of public speaking, of quitting the job I hated, of wearing my hair how I wanted... all of it. My dreams became a safe place for me to do exposure therapy on myself. I knew I was dreaming, but it still had a big impact. I quit in college, when I ran into many more interesting things to explore than my own inner life... but I still blame my lucid dreaming days for, e.g., my utter lack of curiosity around drugs or other altered mental states...
"Chords are elements combined in a way that is appealing, but not because the combination describes reality. Chords exploit the many evolved sweet spots of the senses. They can be comprised of “real” things but prioritize creation of an experience over transmission of knowledge...
...Maps describe what exists. They exploit the evolved need to understand how reality behaves. They can be aesthetically pleasing but they put the task of abstraction first."
Jhana sounds like the deepest expression of the "chord". Maybe it doesn't fulfil the need for mappier things.
A similar phenomenon of the form of 'basic state of experience that has almost definitely been lying around all along that went unnoticed' is ASMR. ASMR is a much more shocking example in my opinion- jhannas were at least written about thousands of years ago whereas as far as I can tell ASMR was first described by Virginia Woolf in 1925. It went unnamed until *2010*. ASMR is not difficult to trigger and it's not especially rare- something like 25 to 50% of people are thought to experience it in some form. I think this is strong evidence that internal states go under-noticed, so it's not surprising to me that jhanna is so ignored.
Getting into weirder much more speculative epistemic territory, I notice a wider pattern with phenomena such as:
-people without ASMR seem very uncurious about it.
-people with synaesthesia often really dislike encountering other people with contrary synaesthesia.
-people with genetic issues like the one that causes people to taste coriander/cilantro as soap don't seem to be very upset about missing out on the non-soap taste that the rest of us enjoy. In my experience even after learning about this, they talk about it as if we actually do taste the soap and just don't care, like, the knowledge about this being genetic just doesn't connected to anything.
-people tend to be very disinterested in hearing about other people's dreams.
I suspect these might all be related somehow- I've read speculation about the dream thing being a module evolution put in there to prevent us from muddying our training data, and maybe the other examples are instances of this module being overactive.
Look man. The claim you're arguing is that incorrectly detecting a non-poisonous thing as poisonous is a valuable part of the body's defense system, because if people who do that were eating poison instead of non-poison, they would be better at detecting the poison. I understand how that would be an advantage if the described situation were the case, but it is not the case.
You haven't actually linked anything demonstrating that lacking the soap gene impairs one's ability to taste actually poisonous aldehydes, but even taking that for granted, those who lack the soap gene will nonetheless be much likelier to get accurate information about the toxicity of what they eat than those who have it, because humans often eat cilantro and very rarely eat poison.
I can tell you've got some irritation built up around the idea that your gene is negative to have, and I'm sorry if people have treated you poorly because of having it in the past, but it's frustrating that you're allowing yourself to overstate your case because of it.
I think what this discussion is really missing is the role of jhanas in a larger context of practice. They are not there simply to be learned, done, and then added to your list of accomplishments. Jhanas 1-4 (and any subsequent are just icing on the cake) help narrow your concentration to such a fine point that you can then move into a vipassana/insight practice. Vipassana practice is centered on deep understanding, which cannot happen without deep concentration; otherwise, your mind becomes too distracted to attend for more than a few moments or minutes at a time.
All of that to say…who cares if it’s better than sex? Who cares if you don’t believe it’s real? The purpose of jhanas is completely lost in this discussion. The Buddha’s big message was “try this for yourself and see.” So if you don’t believe, try it and find out for yourself.
I also don’t understand how people can openly refute that altered states of consciousness (which is exactly what the jhanas are) do not exist or are equivalent to claiming you have ESP (?!?). ASOC are researched in many different contexts, including jhanas, guided imagery and music, and breath work, to name a few. try substituting ASOC for jhana and then reassess your opinions on the topic.
Okay one more additional comment. Should you be open to learning more about jhanas, the foremost expert on their history, context in practice, description, and mechanics of practice is Leigh Brasington. He has written THE book on jhanas and has plenty of interviews to listen to.
But what are the insights that Vipassana delivers? Can they be explained to others that have not experienced them? Can they effect the lives of others? Is Buddhism, at its heart, just wireheading?
There is plenty of writing on the insights derived from vipassana that can be explained to non-meditators. The Visuddhimagga explores this in detail, particularly in the third section; Matthew Flickstein’s Swallowing the River Ganges is an accessible, layman’s entry point into this text. And to your third question, once you’ve explored the insights derived from sustained practice, the effects both on “self” and others become quite clear.
As to your last question, if your summation of Buddhism is that it’s simply “wireheading”, there is very much a fundamental misunderstanding of the heart of the tradition. To seek Buddhism or any Buddhist practice with the ultimate intention of deriving pleasure or “hacking” your brain is very misaligned and won’t get you very far. A cursory reading over the Four Noble Truths sheds some light on this.
I am both Joshua Graham (not real name) & the quoted PericlesOfGreece.
I am eagerly awaiting the publication of the results of Delson Armstrong's jhanas 1-9 brainscan done by Ruben Laukkonen and others: https://imgur.com/gallery/rYLJMye at an unnamed university in the Netherlands. Delson discusses the brainscan in some detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn9WlWH3rPE (until the study is published, I think this is the best resource for learning about jhana brain science; it is sub-optimal, but still very interesting).
Few bits I remember from the video:
1. 9th jhana is experientially (not neurologically) equivalent to anesthestic/death (absolutely no experience/oblivion). From what Delson says, the moments before and after 9th jhana are unmatched in terms of pleasure as compared to any other known experience. Frank Yang has said that coming out of 9th jhana is more profound than his positive peak 5-MeO-DMT trip, and the profundity never stops. I had an anesthestic used on me when I was a child, so I remember what it's like to go into and come out of oblivion extremely quickly: the doctor counted down from 5 and before he got to 1 I instantly woke up in a different room.
2. Delson claims to be able to go into 9th jhana (cessation/nirodha-samapatti) for 6 days straight. Tells a funny story where he later found out that Covid-lockdown began while he was still outdoors in 9th jhana, and his friends couldn't wake him up, so they carried him to their house where he came out of the jhana many days later.
3. Delson said that 8th jhana experientially is extremely similar to deep sleep (you can learn to be aware while in deep sleep). He said the people scanning his brain weren't sure if he actually was in deep sleep when he was, because included in the types of brain waves active in his brain scan were the kind that you only see in waking minds. They also weren't sure that he was actually awake (and not just sleeping) while he was in 8th jhana, because included in the types of brain waves active in his brain scan were the kind you normally only see in minds that are asleep.
4. For those who feel the 5-8 jhanas are even more woo than 1-4, Delson makes very clear descriptions of these jhanas in a non-poetic way. The sense of space going away. The sense of clear forms going away (no more thoughts, but maybe fractions of a thought). Seeing individual moments of experience (much less woo-sounding than "infinite consciousnesses", the common term for the same thing).
I recently read in Ajahn Brahm's book that the method of using the entire body as a the meditation object for "breathing" is an incorrect translation of the original Pali, but that method is what Delson Armstrong used to reach 9th jhana and subsequently enlightenment. I've used both the "only nostrils area" and "full body" and have been able to get into jhana either way, but I prefer the "full body" method, just using the nose area feels contracted.
Last suggestion: watch Frank Yang (he has done an interview with Daniel Ingram and Andres Emilsson, but his monologues and Instagram posts are the real gold).
I think there's a wishy-washy middle ground for soft Jhana-scepticism. Specifically, people aren't achieving "neurological Jhana" but "placebo Jhana."
What I mean by this is that the best rational explanation for a real Jhana is that some people can hack/distort your own brain in some way through intense meditation to switch it to a state of consciousness that brings pure bliss (neurological Jhana). I think that's materially different from people who really want to achieve Jhana, identify as the sort of person who achieves Jhana and think they're at about the point where they would achieve Jhana just convincing themselves that they're experiencing a state of pure bliss. Given the numbers of people who can convince themselves of obviously, observably false claims to satisfy their egos, and what we know about the placebo effect, a combination of placebo and self-deception seems sufficient to get people who will genuinely say they feel pure bliss through meditation, even to themselves (placebo Jhana). It also sits more comfortably with "It was pretty cool, but I kept forgetting about it and just went back to finding pleasure the normal way."
I'm only 80% sure that neurological Jhana and placebo Jhana are meaningfully different conceptually. However, I don't think that placebo Jhana is an explanation that any Jhana-claimant would accept so I think the answer to whether people can achieve Jhana is still "no" if they only achieve placebo Jhana. Placebo Jhana (along with its correlate, placebo enlightenment) is my default hypothesis, as it seems way more compatible with Buddhist sex scandals, the guy with the brain tumour, the general slightly seedy dodginess that pervades Buddhsim etc). Also, I'd struggle to believe that placebo Jhana wouldn't be a thing even if neurological Jhana also was, so until we've stuck these people in an MRI it seems parsimonious to say its only placebo Janaa.
"They're all lying" is a pretty strong claim. "They're all lying to themselves" is the human condition.
I was raised Mahayana/Theravada Buddhist (my parents converted when I was about 8), so re: point 1, why don't more people do it, is that most regular Buddhists in societies with big Buddhist populations is that we're pretty sure we can't manage it without losing a whole shitload of external stressors. Sure, there might be someone at the temple claiming to have reached it but most adherents, if they ever get there, only ever manage it on a month long meditation retreat that runs once a year, during a year their business is doing really well and they don't feel stressed about their livelihood, and also being the sort of person who already meditates every single day for like decades leading up to that point. And monks. I'd expect monks to have managed it.
But hey, if you're some upper middle leanFIRE retiree who earned the entire GPD of a small third world town in the first 5 years of your career, and all your friends and family are safe and secure, I can see how you got there pretty quick.
Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome (see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brainspotting/202201/hypergraphia-neglected-sign-in-neurology ) is a form of temporal lobe epilepsy that makes people write compulsively and want to save the world. Once at a Portland SSC meetup I met someone with this condition. He had a job writing things for effective altruist organizations, which I guess means he is living his best life.
Never attempted meditation personally, but I did once have a dream in which I experienced such intense pleasure that it kind of broke my desire/pleasure mapping mechanism. So I can buy the "I can experience infinite bliss on demand but don't often care to" argument, though I'm still skeptical of the "but the *later* jhanas are where the *real* action is" followup.
It's a contradiction in terms: by definition, if you're perceiving something, you must be using one of your senses to do it. If it's extrasensory, how can it be perception? ESP proponents solve the problem by positing some kind of supernatural entity - the Force, magic, the Holy Spirit speaking to you - that lets you perceive things without using your regular senses like hearing and sight. This supernatural/magical thing is very powerful, but its energy is not detectable by any instruments we have (no electromagnetic waves that correspond to it, for example). That's why it breaks the known laws of nature: it posits a powerful yet undetectable source of energy.
And yes, I understand that "dark energy" is a scientific concept, but "human brains can interact with dark energy and obtain useful information thereby" is very much not.
I guess then ESP being a contradiction in terms is correct, by definition, because if you can sense something it's a sense. But that's not a (scientific) law of nature but a grammatical one. To steelman ESP, I would say that we have more than 5 external senses we know of, so it's not against a law of nature for (some?) humans to have a sense that's unknown to the general public. For example, I definitely remember learning about our only five senses in school. If someone had said then, "well actually I'm excellent at telling north from south even with my eyes closed" I'd have hoped no one would have said, "well that's against the laws of nature." Some mammals do have this sense. Maybe humans do, at least according to this paper "thus, human CRY has the molecular capability to function as a light-sensitive magnetosensor, and this finding may lead to a renewed interest in human magnetoreception." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3128388/
You make a good point. But (at least to my understanding) the people who make ESP claims aren't saying, "I'm using a previously unknown but scientifically explicable mechanism like magnetosensing or whatever." They are claiming to interact with some kind of mystical Energy Field that gives them precise information through... some unknown and unknowable mechanism that has to be accepted by faith.
I would argue that magnetosensory ability, while super-cool, wouldn't count as "ESP"; as in, it would not be an "*Extra*-Sensory Perception", by definition. All of the descriptions of ESP that I've ever heard describe it as being undetectable by science (in fact or even in principle). Magnetic fields are obviously detectable; all you need is a compass.
This is a good point that I don't think it breaks any official law of thermodynamics or anything, it just doesn't seem possible with what we know. You would need either some kind of exotic energy (and it doesn't seem like any brain region is optimized for production or reception of this exotic energy) or something else equally wild. I think we can say pretty confidently that it doesn't work through radio waves or any of the kinds of energy we know, just because we could detect those (or calculate how strong we would expect them to be, and whether something of that strength could cross however much boundary ESP is supposed to cross). I think precognition does trivially break some laws of physics (arrow of time), although maybe not super strong ones that it's absolutely impossible for some exotic new phenomenon to break.
It also seems kind of contrary to how evolution works to imagine that we evolved this amazing ability, have kept the machinery for it intact enough that some people use it sometimes, but most of us almost never use it.
(I guess it could be a spandrel, but that's one *heck* of a spandrel!)
FYI from a physics perspective, breaking the arrow of time breaks locality (I.e. if you have two things far apart in some way, and you want thing A to affect thing B, you need to be affecting everything on at least one path between them), which then breaks large swaths of already empirically verified physical theory reliant on it.
The reason why confirmation of Bell's theorem "confirmed" that quantum mechanics was real and not based on hidden state was because if you took the hidden state interpretation, you also need nonlocality.
So arrow of time, while not directly a physical "law", is a vital assumption and thus fairly important to keep as an axiom.
(There are theoretical ways to slight of hand in time travel while not breaking locality but they are extremely exotic and usually depend on things that either can't physically exist, like infinitely long and massive cylinders, or involve things which aren't literally banned by physics but we have no evidence for, like negative mass matter)
This is stuff I remember from around 10 years ago, so I welcome corrections.
I'm honored to have my comment featured on the "front page", as it were -- thanks, Scott. That said, pure unvarnished vanity compels me to point out that the link just leads to the discussion page for the post where I made my comment, not to the comment itself ( https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10017660 ).
I don't really describe my dreams as "lucid", but there were a few occasions where I didn't have access to my computer for a few days, and the result was I would sleep for 22 hours a day. Any time I wasn't eating I was sleeping.
(The dreams I remember, I always have some control over, but I don't actually want anything more than just seeing what happens. People underestimate how limiting one's imagination really is.)
Good on you for shooting down the “it’s all made up” theory. Were you to adopt that theory, I would be unable to take you seriously anymore. Denial of the existence of something I know 100% to be true would be proof of flawed heuristics.
> As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
This one certainly made me stop and think. Unilaterally decreasing one's own utility (all else equal) seems *obviously* morally permissible, even within a hedonic utilitarian framework. Does this result in weird paradoxes if taken seriously? If you'd asked me to write out a formal mathematical statement of utilitarianism before reading this comment, I probably would have missed that edge case.
At first I wondered if this might just be quibbling over the definition of "moral" ("morality for others' utility, instrumental rationality for my own"), but I don't think it's that easily separable—for example, I'm pretty sure it's normally permissible under utilitarianism to make selfish decisions as long as the utility for yourself outweighs the total harm to others. So a moral agent's own utility is still part of the picture, even if we then postulate that the agent is not obligated to optimize it.
2) what people freely choose to do is max utility to the best of their ability
If people do something that isn’t max pleasure, then there’s a contradiction somewhere. One can bite the bullet and say choosing not to do the early, pleasurable jhanas as much as possible is a very bad form of akrasia.
I agree that someone who equates utility with pleasure would be behaving suboptimally with respect to their own utility function by not doing jhanas and other highly pleasurable things. That seems different from saying they're acting immorally, though. Is there a point to making people feel bad about themselves for failing to achieve the things they value? (Extra bad, I mean, beyond the intrinsic badness of not getting what one values.)
Inspired by the link to the review of "Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha", I checked out his website and came across the extensive section of the book dealing with "magickal" phenomena that--he asserts--can be frequently achieved through meditation.
He makes it clear that these phenomena which he and many others have experienced--like reading other people's thoughts, foretelling the future, and telekinetically moving physical objects--are in his view *real*, and are sufficient to disprove our current scientific paradigms.
I'd be *extremely* interested to know what other people here think about this.
Unfortunately, the SlateStarCodex review doesn't discuss this aspect of the book at all. Ingram does have a lengthy disclaimer about how he was reluctant to include the discussion of magical powers because he was afraid it would lead people to dismiss the whole book as hopelessly unscientific.
The fact that he's willing to harshly deny traditional Buddhist claims that enlightenment leads to guaranteed happiness or moral perfection means that I can't dismiss him as a "fundamentalist" determined to maintain all the traditional supernatural claims of Buddhism.
My memory is that that magick section didn’t exist when I read it six years ago. If so, that could be why Scott’s review doesn’t cover it?
I’m up front extremely sceptical about magick. A couple of scientific minded people I have some confidence in who’ve meditated a lot, say they’ve experienced unexplainable things. This gives me a bit of doubt.
Daniel Ingrams is one of those - generally he has a very scientific view, trained and working as a conventional emergency medic.
If there is some odd phenomena going on it is on the edge, intrinsically hard to hold on to. So not necessarily valuable, and certainly not what woo-believers want it to be. Still…
Actual superpowers -- be it reading people's thoughts, remote viewing, telekinesis, levitation, or whatever -- would be almost trivial to conclusively demonstrate. As the old joke goes, "those of you who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand". Thus, the time to believe in these things is when evidence for them is presented, and not before.
"[...] having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much [...]"
I don't talk about it much, but not because of skeptical people. Think of it this way: I don't talk about paper clips much, either. Paper clips and pleasure are both super useful, but you wouldn't want to tile the universe with either of them.
The image for your thumbnail is very reminiscent to me of my own emblem and a background I made using some photo editing software and a program I use to create patterns for alteration.
I've recently started using DALL-E 2, as well for a recent project. But my other stuff is self made using GIMP and an app I like to use for making textures for these sorts of things. Non-AI generation based that is.
I have no problem believing you can enter a very pleasant state by training your mind enough. I just really doubt it's worth using up so many hours to get there.
Sumilarly, I can believe that by trying a lot (i.e. meditating) you can eventuay also end up reconfiguring your brain. I just doubt the chance of the new configuration being 'better' is sufficiently high for the cost of putting in so many hours to be worth it.
Additionally, I've spent quite a lot of time on lucid dreaming, can do it, and it's never been as consistently amazing as described here. I thought it would be but in practice control is more limited, I feel less, and everything is just less in lucid dreams including my cognitive abilities and the world itself.
I'll defend my hypothesis on a numbers basis, despite having no actual numbers: Culadasa is obviously one of the few "bad apples" that lied about and/or resists even the effects of jhana, but *overall* they have beneficial effects on behavior.
*cough* Or, uh, maybe not. I maintain still that there's more reason to be skeptical of supposed "dry path" masters — I'd *bet* some small amount that if we did have numbers, we'd see more e.g. Tibetan and Zen scandals than those in notably "wet" schools like the Thai Forest tradition (which I keep using as an example because I can't think of any more at the moment, so it will be real bad if it turns out those guys are also riddled with scandal); but Scott brings up a good point here.
*****
As outlined in Slime Mold Time Mold's interesting post about scurvy, which I cannot remember if I found here or from Eliezer: it feels fishy to add epicycles to rescue an idea, but sometimes there actually *are* epicycles, so...
...I'll note that Culadasa's background — teaching meditation from a "scientific, progressive perspective" and having largely (half-ly?) Tibetan Vajrayana training — is one I would have been skeptical of before any scandal broke (and indeed I was! I have receipts on the crank-y, weird, but somehow still sort of charmingly earnest Great Western Vehicle forum!).
The former view (progressive, Western, scientific) wouldn't tend to buy into — or, at least, buy into *as much*, on a deep subconscious level — Buddhist disapproval of sense pleasure or sexual, uh, innovation, so might be less protected against this sort of temptation; the latter (Tibetan Vajrayana) has sex all over the place in it, endorses "shortcuts" (using what appears to be somewhat suspiciously-convenient theories about how doing the stuff you'd want to do anyway is okay), and seems to commonly result in this sort of thing.
Additionally, Culadasa is known to favor the commentaries for jhana practice, rather than the original "suttic" form. In other words, he does not teach jhana *as found in the suttas*... although I will admit that there's controversy over whether the suttas and the commentaries really differ all that much; and the "strong" jhanas from the commentaries are very interesting and attractive to me, so I wouldn't have thought it'd be a problem to go that route.
So... If we go to someone who teaches Buddhism from a traditional Buddhist perspective, advocates the jhanas, and doesn't go in for any "shortcuts"... maybe we'd see the behavior we're expecting a bit more?
***
As with the Visuddhimagga vs suttas, I'm also pretty divided on the Tibetan stuff, to be honest. On one hand, I have been pretty... unimpressed with the behavior of a lot of the community, and the emphasis on guru yoga seems like a terrible idea, and having lots of traditions of "crazy wisdom" — where a guy goes "sure I attack people and get drunk and have sketchy creepy sex orgies, but it's because actually everything I do has deeply wise and beneficial effects" — also seems like a recipe for bad apples.
That said, *it's just so cool...* I admit being a bit seduced by all the flowery Jewel Ornaments of this and Wish-Fulfilling Gems of that. It's so elaborated and has so many wild practices — some of which ARE legit, like tummo — that I can't bring myself to write it off entirely. As Scott is convinced, in some respects at least, by the weight of self-report evidence here, so am I; I do feel like *even if it's whacky religious stuff*, surely centuries of study and (self-)experimentation have yielded *some* fruit... if only in the area "how to do weird stuff to your mind" — and hey, that's what I'm after in the first place, really, so...
(And, c'mon, "enlightenment in this very lifetime"? Shortcut or not, I'm totally on board.)
But anyway, that'd be my defense on the Culadasa thing. Now, if a bunch *more* jhana teachers turn out crummy... then I give up.
I'm skeptical... ish... of jhanas. Why? They seem to me like the equivalent of a $100 bill on the sidewalk: if the $100 bill is real, why hasn't anyone picked it up by now?
I agree with many other commenters that pure pleasure, without meaning, does not make for a good life. Even so, people do want to be happy and to experience pleasure. So many people are desperately unhappy/depressed and self-medicating with illicit drugs, alcohol, junk food, etc. If there was a way for people to experience supreme bliss with no side effects, why wouldn't more people know about it and use it? Shouldn't there be tremendous demand for learning how to achieve jhanas? Why isn't anyone picking up the $100 bill that's better than sex with [your favorite celebrity] and the best food and a dose of the most potent psychedelics all rolled into one?
Because it's hard, is what I'd say. It's not picking up a $100 bill, it's *working for it*. To my mind, this is like saying "there's something that makes you more attractive, have better sex, live longer, gain admiration, AND feel better? why isn't everyone doing it?!" — and yet we don't see everyone exercising.
We see a lot of people, but by no means everyone, make sort of half-hearted, brief efforts at it — much like a lot of people will briefly attempt jhana once they hear about it...
...but neither will get much from it without sticking to it, and you don't see much benefit at *all* at first (so it's not "hey I got half a jhana! now I wanna keep doing this" but "this isn't doing anything; now I want to watch Netflix"), so most will not get there — and hence will not be going around telling everyone "HEY YOU GOTTA TRY THIS."
(And the people who do tell others — in the case of jhana, at least — get responses like this! I mean, are YOU going to be meditating half an hour every day and trying to deeply understand and buy into Buddhist doctrine? It seems unlikely; but if everyone reacts that way...)
I think that latter element also makes it even harder to get jhanas to a mass audience: without some element of Buddhist belief, it seems very hard to achieve these states. I won't say it's impossible, but it seems plausible to me that part of the recipe might be a certain attitude toward the self or sense impressions.
And those attitudes are not easy to cultivate without some sort of confidence in the teachings.
One reason why the analogy between exercise and jhana breaks down, though - exercise doesn't really feel good *in the moment.* (People who get runner's high, I salute you! I'm not like you.) You know it has lots of good effects, health, longevity - but in the moment it just feels sweaty and tiring and your leg is cramping and you'd rather sit on the couch and watch TV. Jhana is supposed to feel amazing *while you're doing it*, once you've gotten past the hurdle of however many hours of meditation you have to put in to be able to achieve it.
That's *also* a very good point (and I also have never once got anything even *close* to a runner's high — it's always miserable — though I don't salute those lucky bastards; I glare enviously at 'em...).
One possible explanation that leaps to my mind is that people just don't make sense, heh. I'm kind of biased here, because I appear to be much, much more pleasure-driven than most, but I have never understood how little people seem to value it (or, more uncharitably, *admit to* valuing it).
Like, in threads like this, or about wireheading thought-experiments, or about drugs, etc. etc., I am always puzzled by how many people seem to feel a need to assert that they actually value pleasure/happiness very little. I swear it's a thing — any time the subject is amenable, you get comments like "well I personally wouldn't feel the need to experience this, but..." or "IMO a life of pleasure is a waste; I'd rather work for my oats!" or "x y and z matter much more to me than being happy, actually", and so on and so forth.
I — again, perhaps uncharitably — attribute this to a sort of confused notion about it being more virtuous and worthy to proclaim that *I* am totally more resistant to the temptation of wanting good feelings than *most* people. Similarly, I maintain that you'd be a fool to ignore any source of easy happiness, and "well I don't want my happiness in a pill" or "I think I'd prefer a hard life of adventure to an easy one of pleasure" are just posturing or confusion over a conception of "unearned" euphoria as being somehow less "real"...
...but I admit that I may just be weird here; certainly many people I respect seem to go at least a little ways in this direction (e.g. Scott has said he probably wouldn't take most wireheading options).
I don't think so. Many have experienced blissful and profound alerted states of consciousness from drugs without any substantial side effects and yet they're not maximizing their time getting high, even if these drugs are still easily available to them. And jhanas require much more of a commitment to get there.
In fact, the ability to do drugs could be the reason why going on the jhanas path is not common. Why would I want to make this very large commitment without any guarantees of success when I can do LSD/DMT/Ketamine/MDMA with an almost certain chance of success if done in a somewhat smart way? It's true that jhanas are legal and more natural. But is it enough in the modern world overloaded with attention-stealing opportunity costs?
>the pleasure that you get from jhana, while intense and lovely, has a flatness and artificiality to it, because it's totally separate from any narrative content and doesn't have much variety
This kind of thing is why I'm unenthusiastic about hard drugs or simple wireheading, even if there were non-addictive variants of them. If it's one-size-fits-all experience that doesn't interact with unique features of my personality, then is it really me that would experience intense bliss or whatever, or just some blob of meat undergoing chemical reactions, and "I" might as well be dead?
I was pretty drunk a couple of times, not to blackout or hangover-in-the-morning degree, but enough for a noticeable effect. I'd say that it was consistent with my concern, in that it modified my perceptions and behavior compared to the sober state, and not in the way that I endorse. It was somewhat enjoyable on net, but taking into account that heavy drinking is expensive and physically harmful, I'm more than fine with refraining from it.
As said below, I endorse this: I'm definitely "me" on heroin (I prefer reading a good historical novel on heroin than anything else, much like when I am sober and much unlike most other drug users I've met, heh), and I perceive no flatness or lack in the good feelings from opioids or MDMA.
Thanks for your perspective! What's your opinion about the sort of the claim that I heard a few times, that at first sex feels better on heroin, but eventually it starts getting in the way, as does everything else, and you end up wanting only heroin?
It seems as though this same argument would generalize to worry about whether flow states with sufficiently high focus involve the death of you (after all, in sufficiently intense flow states, your actions tend not to interact with unique features of your personality). The property you mentioned, of one-size-fits-all experiences that don't interact with unique features of your personality, *definitely* isn't a property that's unique to hard drugs or wireheading.
And so I suspect this specific line of argument was picked up as a supporting argument after you already arrived at the "hard drugs and wireheading are bad" conclusion for other reasons, instead of you deriving "hard drugs and wireheading are bad" from "it's a one-size-fits-all experience". I could be wrong about this, though.
Am quite unsure what you'd count as a hard drug, but outside of ego-death quantities of psychedelics, the inner "I" remains quite intact and I definitely remember it as me. Not sure how much you count this as disconfirming evidence, though.
Also, out of curiosity, what do you think about the argument that there's an important sense in which the "I" of today might not be the same as the "I" of yesterday given that your thread of consciousness was quite thoroughly interrupted when you slept?
>after all, in sufficiently intense flow states, your actions tend not to interact with unique features of your personality
Hmm, maybe I never experienced sufficiently intense flow states, but this claim doesn't seem plausible to me. I used to play poker semi-competently and definitely was "in the zone" from time to time, while retaining awareness and my play style, which would qualify as unique personality features in my understanding.
>The property you mentioned, of one-size-fits-all experiences that don't interact with unique features of your personality, definitely isn't a property that's unique to hard drugs or wireheading.
Maybe? A potentially important distinction is what Scott compared to "hacking into a video game". I expect there to be a qualitative distinction between states that you can reasonably reach in the course of ordinary life, and some of the stuff that you have to go out of your way for.
>you already arrived at the "hard drugs and wireheading are bad" conclusion for other reasons
I'd characterize myself as a consequentialist hedonist, to a first approximation, so I'm definitely pro-intense bliss, but only as long as it's "me" that's there to appreciate and reflectively endorse it.
>the inner "I" remains quite intact and I definitely remember it as me
I'm definitely not an expert on this, and it's quite possible that there are reasonably safe drugs that I would enjoy and endorse, but I'm lazy and risk averse enough not to bother with the more interesting illegal stuff.
>Also, out of curiosity, what do you think about the argument that there's an important sense in which the "I" of today might not be the same as the "I" of yesterday given that your thread of consciousness was quite thoroughly interrupted when you slept?
It's not exactly the same, but I'm fine with change, as long as it's subjectively smooth and slow enough. The way it's most plain to me is that I have a list of favorite tracks, which I randomly intersperse into my playlist, and from time to time I both add and remove songs from that list. I can grow cold to a song which I loved a year ago, but my overall taste in music is pretty stable.
I'll second this and Wasserschweinchen's comment. I do not perceive the feelings from heroin or MDMA to have any flatness or artificiality at all; indeed, the first time I tried opioids, I forgot I had taken anything and was going around thinking "wow, I am loving life and having a fantastic day for some reason".
Has anyone collected statistics on what percentage of people who attempt to learn to enter jhana succeed (or say they succeed), and how long it takes them?
Seems like that could be useful both for convincing people that the training process is actually doing something and for helping people make cost/benefit decisions on whether it's worth trying.
(Of course, I realize that neither of those confers any particular benefit to the person doing the hard work of collecting those stats.)
> For example, I've seen people get access to Jhana 1 through a mental question "Are you aware?" "How do you know you are aware?"
> Then observe the actual mechanism by which you validate your own experience of awareness, and stay in that place. That "place" is essentially the location of Jhana 1, at least for a good handful of people I've seen.
Oh wow. Worked for me! So, uh, are there any other cheat codes you can offer?
Are you asking me or the author of the quotation I was responding to?
I simply tried the step in the section I quoted. Unexpectedly to me, it provided a repeatable sudden wave of intense bodily pleasure, kinda tingly, it felt concentrated somewhat in my muscles. For me it was clearly more intense than average sex, but less than the best sex.
However I'm not a meditator. Perhaps because of untrained concentration, I can't hold on to the feeling; it slips away from me in moments. And similarly I'm unpracticed in explaining the process.
Since Steven knew this cheat code for the first jhana, I figured he might know other cheat codes for other jhanas.
I can't help but suspect that all of this focus on debating the validity of the pleasurable qualia of jhana experiences is missing the point. I am not myself a practiced meditator, but isn't the whole point to learn how to set aside attachments to the particular form of central-agent-focused cognition we typically find ourselves in, with its attendant desires, sensations, and modes of processing? Whether you are interested in achieving that as instrumental toward some higher good or a goal in and of itself, it seems like the bliss of jhana is mostly a beneficial side effect at best, and indeed many experienced meditators seem to treat it as such. I suspect much of the pushback to these claims within this community comes from strains of utilitarian impulses that place significant (though not necessarily primary or sole) weight on hedonic experience, which would struggle to deal with highly pleasurable low-motivating experiences, even outside of the neuropsych evidence that might bear on the plausibility of such experiences.
That article is magnificent and even-handed ( if a bit disjointed). I highly recommend reading it, regardless of where one falls on the jhana spectrum.
Congratulations! You have found the "RC cannot consume marijuana" Easter Egg:
I look like a guy who smokes pot. If you saw me walking down the street, especially younger me, you'd say "There's a guy who knows you have to take the seeds out and who talks about how big crystals are, and who sometimes says "flower vaporizer".
I too was once drawn in by the glamour of my weed-smoking image, and attempted to do the whole weed thing. What I found is that weed, for whatever reason, does not work well with me.
To put a pin on "not work well", I once stood over the corpse of my father, contemplating what he had meant in my life and what his absence would now mean. While the long-term experience of the death of a loved one obviously outweighs a short term drug interaction, when performing a moment-to-moment comparison, *weed was clearly worse*.
I live in a world where everyone else can smoke all the marijuana, and where I take a few puffs then curl up in the fetal position, convinced that all my friends are trying to trick me and knowing, deep down, that everyone who has ever loved me has stopped and will never come back. My rent will not be paid, and my world will lie in ruins.
Basically I've smoked weed twice and I don't wanna do it again.
Nicotine and other weak stimulants thought to act as cognitive enhancers.. I'm actually going to try and kick nicotine this week, though, for convenience/social reasons.
Weirdly enough, I also look like a weed smoker, to the extent that random people on the street used to ask me for weed (back when I was younger, at least). But unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) weed has no effect on me. If I smoke enough of it, I get dizzy, but that's about it. I don't experience any beneficial effects; or in fact any effects other than dizziness (and the resulting loss of motor control). I guess that is a step up from your experience, though...
I think it took about 10 tries before I felt any strong effects from weed. Maybe I wasn't smoking it right, I don't know. Even now, taking a gummy just leads to a feeling of relaxation and later good sleep. Sometimes I feel some light buzzing or vibrations in my body, or a feeling of lightness. It is not that strong. Now pure THC or hash is a whole another kettle of fish. My whole body vibrates and I can't walk, and sometimes there is paranoia. I don't like it much.
That was an excellent write up, thank you. I am now a fan of your blog.
Let me expand on my personal take on this. After Scott's post, I went and read Leigh Brasington's books on jhanas to learn more about this. When I used to do a lot of meditation, it wasn't in the Buddhist tradition, but a Taoist tradition and then later a Western esoteric tradition. The practice I did went from what Leigh calls access meditation straight into the fourth jhana. After months of practice, I was able to attain this state on a regular basis. It is a very peaceful state devoid of any thoughts. It is pleasurable and utterly calming, but it is not comparable to sex. If I was siting in this state and my girlfriend came up to me and said "let's go have sex," I would immediately exit my practice and go have sex. If I was single and meditating in a park and an attractive girl walked up to me and started talking to me, I would stop my meditation and give her my full attention.
Scott brings up the examples of migraines and MDMA. But just about everyone has had a migraine (or at least a headache) and millions of people have done MDMA. Also, the experience of MDMA is readily verifiable by anyone who takes it. While thousands of people claim to have experienced jhanas, this is a pretty small number when it comes to human experience. Furthermore, a large percentage of these same people also claim to have past life experiences, talk to dead people, travel out of their bodies, or interact with non-human sentient entities. If we are skeptical of these other claims, made by the same people, why should we fully believe their description of their jhana experiences? People exaggerate and lie about all sorts of things. The number of people who claim to have had a jhana experience and also do not claim to have experienced supernatural phenomena is a small percentage of those thousands of people. I am much more likely to trust someone like that, but I would definitely assess how this person describes their other experiences and how much his person is prone to exaggeration.
I achieved Jhana on the first try, never meditated before. I tell you how. When I was a kid (like 9 years old), I have heard something about meditation. They said, you can learn to switch off your thoughts. There was no internet and I have no books about meditation. I have no idea what is this about. But I liked to experiment. So I though, OK let's try to switch off my thoughts for at least couple of seconds using any method I can find.
So I tried to switch off my thoughts somehow in my brain without any success. I could hold my thoughts for 0.1 second and than my brain started to process incoming information from senses and generate a thought the very next second, so there was no silence of mind.
One day I watched how birds move their head. Some birds have very robotic head movements almost looking like driven by servomotors. They look at something very shortly, than change position of the head sharply. OK, I tried to mimic this because why not. And I found a funny thing, while quickly jerking the head with eyes fixed like a birds do, I was able to shut down all thinking and pattern recognizing in my mind! So I trained this ability and gradually was able with this method to shut down thoughts in the brain for minutes. After that, I ditched the "head jerking movements" method and just looking straight, I was also able to shut off the brain. There are things though, that make the brain start thinking and it is not possible to stop the thoughts. One example is, if any letters are in the field of vision, the brain immediately recognizes a pattern and tries to read it and that starts the thinking.
Till today, I am able to shut down any thinking in my brain very effectively at will. After I read the SSC post about Jhanas, let us try this! I just kneeled silently (I tried also lying), I switched off thinking, as I know to do it almost immediately, focus on the breath, breathe without any thinking going on in my mind. Than go with the focus to a pleasant place in my body and whoa it works! Really pleasant. The other day I tried my second try and already got a tingling and pleasant sensation all over my body!
Perhaps there is a relation between some neck muscles and thinking, and you first stumbled upon a combination of muscles that stop thinking, and then gradually isolated the one muscle responsible for that (and that muscle achieves the effect by mere tension, without movement).
I like this combination of trusting Buddhism that there are such things as "stopping thoughts" or "achieving bliss by mere thinking", but ignoring the ancient wisdom and experimenting with more efficient ways to achieve that. Perhaps collectively we will find a way to achieve full enlightenment in a week, by performing a sequence of weird robotic movements. Only there will the rationalist community truly deserve to be called a "robot cult"!
The only examples I have so far is your "bird head movement", and some people said that asking yourself "how do I know that I am aware?" (or something like that) produces rapid effects, which traditional Buddhists need to meditate for months to achieve.
We would need a brainstorming for more ideas like this, plus someone with an EEG to separate the good ideas from bullshit. Measure the official 9 jhanas, then measure whatever people come up with.
My physiology course has been long ago but I remember the method as quite artifact-prone. The lectoring colleague claimed he could get a perfectly nice reading from a pudding, by the way.
While I haven't experienced them (yet?) I suspect Jhanas are real, but...
> Why not just classify meditation as “nonreligious” if it’s going to screw you up like this?
That would be easier if it didn't keep coming packaged with dopey stuff. Traditionally the same people who teach it, teach about reincarnation and what not. But modern people seem to get infected too. Even David Ingram, who was supposed to be this pragmatic, down to earth meditator, gives considerable attention in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha to psychic powers and even "casting spells" (your review didn't mention that!), lists them as one of the missing items on his checklist to full Buddhahood, and I recall he even came to this blog to defend them.
Cause it sells books? My experience is that there are plenty of practitioners that don't go for the woo, but they don't make as much noise. I don't know if "smashed thumb bias" (the bias that makes you think you only bump your thumb when it's already damaged) has a real name, but I suspect it does some of the work towards answering your question.
On the subject of addictiveness and degree of pleasure from hacking the brain:
If there's an intensely pleasurable, addictive state you can enter by cultivating a particular plant, refining a psychoactive chemical from it and injecting it into your veins, human evolution plays out the same way it actually has. We haven't had the ability to produce e.g. heroin for a significant length of time, in evolutionary terms.
If there's an intensely pleasurable, addictive state you can enter by thinking the right (or wrong) way ... then people who are susceptible to it will spend time in that state rather than eating or having children, and will be out-evolved by their less-susceptible peers.
I take Scott's point that you would expect a "brain-hijacking" form of pleasure to be more intense than a natural one ... but if it's attainable by something like meditation, which in principle can also be done by primitive humans, then I'd expect evolution to ameliorate it, tack on an aversion to repeatedly entering the state, add a tendency to get bored of it, etc.
How long ago was the first meditation? Let's say 10,000 years? Given the complexity of the fix, I doubt individual evolution could patch out our ability to brain-jack in that time. "Social evolution" probably has a lot to say about it, though.
I don't think Culadasa's case quite qualifies as a sex scandal. Sure, it was a scandal and it involved sex, but usually what we mean by "Buddhist sex scandal" is something along the lines of "teacher having sex with students, with varying degrees of consent". In his case it was "having sex with someone who was not his wife, but definitely also not his student, and possibly giving that someone money that was donated by his students into his non-profit". His excuses were along the lines of "my wife and I have grown apart by that time" and "I considered that money to be my own". I think it's also important to note that at the time he was suffering from chronic Lyme disease and perhaps also undergoing chemo treatment from metastasized cancer (not 100% sure about the timelines here though), which may have affected his judgement (despite being an advanced practitioner).
Like a couple of others on this thread, I experienced *something* from trying the "are you aware?" shortcut (having almost never meditated before), and it seems to be reproducible.
I don't know whether it's a jhana or not (or maybe some sort of partial jhana or step on the way). I would describe it as pleasurable, but not supremely blissful, and not better than sex. It's like a fizzy, excited, expansive feeling in my chest and throat - a little bit like being wired on caffeine. It's definitely more of a physical sensation than an emotional state.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have experienced jhana about whether or not this is similar to what they experience.
What baffles and intrigues me about jhanas (based on only this thread and the previous one; I haven't done any further reading) is that they're a subjective emotional experience but they seem to be categorisable and classifiable in a way that people agree on. The inter-rater reliability gestures towards there probably being something real there, IMO.
Scott quotes a commenter talking about "bliss, happiness, contentment, or deep peace (i.e. the first four jhanas)". Bliss, happiness, contentment, and deep peace seem really similar: like, a priori, I'd expect them to all fade into one another in a kind of spectrum, and I'd expect one person's "bliss" to be another's "happiness" and yet another's "contentment". But jhana practitioners seem able to talk about the first four jhanas as if they're four distinct things, and as if there's no confusion or fuzzy edges between them. People don't sound as if they're in any doubt about which one they've experienced.
To me this is as surprising as if, say, sufferers of depression (as opposed to medical professionals) had categorised depression into four types, with really similar-sounding names like "sadness, unhappiness, misery, and deep gloom", and when two depressed people got together they could talk about which one they were experiencing and about other ones they'd experienced in the past, without any uncertainty or confusion between the types, and with a confidence that A's "misery" was meaningfully similar to B's "misery" and meaningfully distinct from either of their "unhappiness".
(FTOAD, I am not saying depression isn't "real"; I'm saying that if we can't do this clean categorisation for depression and we can for jhanas, that seems to imply jhanas are at least as "real" as depression. Feel free to pick a different analogy: maybe four distinct types of sexual pleasure, or four distinct types of flow state.)
People often impose arbitrary taxonomies on types of human experience, and then argue or introspect about which one a given experience falls into (e.g. "is this true love or just infatuation?"). But I'm not seeing that in these comment threads (although maybe I would if I read more widely on the topic?) I'm just seeing people stating that they experienced the first jhana or the second one or whatever, as if there's no uncertainty about the categorisation.
This is a great comment and captures something I was having a hard time expressing. There’s a weirdness to the way jhana practitioners use mundane words that is mutually intelligible within the practitioner community and a little impenetrable / confusing to those outside. It’s offputting in a hard to describe way - not “I don’t believe you” more “trying to understand you makes my brain hurt and it gets worse the more you try to explain it”.
That, and the part where it starts to sound like Thetan levels.
it's worth noting that jhana meditators use more specific technical terms like sukha ("clear uplifting" joy) and piti (energetic vibrations, often pleasurable, more like amphetamines) to discuss this stuff. These words points to more orthogonal feelings than the words we normally use in English. Then they convert these two words like "joy" and "energy" which are a bit more watered down
Secondarily meditation tends to increase sensory clarity of feelings, such that it's a bit easier to distinguish nearby feelings. But I think it's mostly the former
Which reminds me of the fact that emotions and insight are different on the autistic spectrum. Most of the time a neurotypical person knowing me well has more to say about my emotional state than me. Are we aspies capable of this jhana stuff at all?
The distinctions are fairly clear right in the language used: do you not agree that most native English speakers can clearly distinguish the meanings of "bliss, joy, contentment, and peace", particularly with even a word or two to further clarify (e.g., physical bliss, emotional joy, general contentment, and deep peace)?
And, as a long-time depressive, there are absolutely distinct modes of depressive feelings that the words you used do describe better than each other, and that articulate sufferers can talk about meaningfully, at least to each other.
While I'm open to the claims being true (indeed post inspired me to really practice my meditation more to check it out) I think it's worth presenting the best case for the skeptical side.
And I don't think that skeptical claim is that no one experiences the kind of pleasure described but that, like the aforementioned seizures, it's a rare lucky few who are capable.
And that would explain the apparent paradoxes. I mean it seems like fewer people who aren't part of certain religious movements put in the effort and succeed than put in the effort to do things like regularly run for the endorphins high or learn chess or whatever. It would also explain how there can be an amphetamine abuse problem amoung young monks in southeast asia.
I also tend to believe that individuals who experience ecstatic states during prayer or group worship are telling the truth as well but that for most of us only a weak version is available. That seems like a possible explanation here.
--
But I'm not convinced of that position. I just think it's worth presenting it.
I think a version of this is at least true. If you look at people not aiming for pleasure, some percentage of them still keep getting jhana-like states no matter what kind of meditativey or prayer thing they try. Their body just inclines towards that. So in most disciplines you see something like what you mentioned.
However, when practicing for jhana specifically it seems less random. Most people who aim for it can get it after a while if they've worked through of their psychological content such that their mind is calm, alert, and quiet as a baseline
Well, Im giving it a try but I worry that there is just a general sensitivity to meditation and those who lack it end up looking indistinguishable from those who just flake out.
Honestly, I think it's just the sort of thing that I put a really low prior on but their seems to be enough evidence that even so I'm taking it seriously.
Weirdly enough after reading Leigh B's description of them it seems obvious that they could/should exist. Like, yes, if you empty your mind of thought through sustained focus and then focus on something nice, that nice thing can be more intense than when your mind is otherwise distracted? Putting the mysticism aside, I can rationally see why this could work and also why it doesn't address the Buddha's fundamental concerns, of being upset when nice things are taken away or being happy when they're provided.
I think the best explanation for the people who claim to have reached jhana is that jhana isn't the bliss in itself, it's the ability to convince yourself that you've achieved bliss. Does this mean it's not real? Depends on how you think about emotional states. I'm on team "emotions are downstream of what you think about reality, and messing with your interpretations of reality in a way that colours your perception doesn't actually matter much". If you wear rose-tinted glasses you do actually know the world isn't pink, even if it does "look pink" in some real sense.
This also explains why it rubs many people here the wrong way when people talk about reaching jhanas. For a lot of us our whole thing is that we should focus on reality and try to walk away from our biases and attempts to fool ourselves. To see people be smug and self-congratulatory over their supposedly successful attempts to fool themselves is pretty grating.
You don't think it's the least bit smug or self-congratulatory to decide that other people's experiences not only aren't real, but are actually delusional, and to let yourself be annoyed at them because of your own highly uncharitable interpretation?
Unless I've screwed up the reply mechanics here, I think I was replying (and I meant to be replying) to Shaked. And I was suggesting to them that if they are put off by smugness, they might want to consider the plank in their own eyes before they go trying to help others remove the mote in theirs.
On the basis of what evidence? What non-biased, non-fooling yourself, ready to look at reality as it is no matter how unexpected, reasons do you have for arriving at the conclusion that a state described and discussed for 2500 years is actually just people deluding themselves about the real nature of an experience they've had?
I think drethlin mostly covered it, but also it's much more consistent with the tone - people using bad/personal arguments ("thousands of years of tradition can't be wrong" - yes they can, look at all the contradictory religions. "I'm offended by your skepticism" - not really an argument, but the kind of social manipulation that's more consistent with people convincing themselves something is true for status reasons than with people actually believing it in a non garage-dragon-y way).
Claims of some mystical enlightenment require strong evidence, and so far the evidence I've seen is entirely consistent with the model of people just convincing themselves of a high-status claim and then going around trying to convince others (which is an entirely common dynamic - lots of religious people claim to feel God in their hearts and such).
I think you're heavily over-fitting to a skeptical and cynical worldview that isn't particularly strong in the first place, but I'm just some guy on the internet who finds that attitude tedious, and I'm not going to take the time to make arguments with you about what I think is flawed about it in general, so you're welcome to entirely discount my perspective on it.
But specifically in this case, none of your objections are arguments either: you object to a perceived tone and a suspected status manipulation, to which intangibles you give more weight than you're willing to give to the accumulated mass of many other people's reported experiences (while calling *them* smug) - and all this while completely misunderstanding what is even being claimed, even though Scott has been, as usual, very careful to spell out and distinguish what is being claimed and what isn't.
There are no "claims of mystical enlightenment" being discussed here. Merely the claim that it is possible to induce a few distinct forms of altered consciousness with some practice, some of which apparently feel really, really nice. Why would that be particularly surprising, when we know already through psychedelic drugs that the human brain is capable of experiencing very different states of consciousness, some of which do in fact feel really, really nice?
"But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much. Maybe there are dozens of infinite-bliss hacks like jhana or lucid dreaming floating around out there, and we just never hear about them."
If it gets old isn't that also consistent with developing tolerance to the experience and thus the amount of pleasure actually felt being reduced?
On the contrary, the feelings stay strong. What changes is the subjective value of those feelings. I find it less tempting to pursue pleasure per se, and the prospect of pleasure distracts me less from many decisions. I think more clearly, for example, about why I eat more and exercise less than I'd like. I understand more about the failures of imagination that put glass ceilings on my abilities. And etc., etc. along those lines.
I don't think that's the same as developing tolerance. It's not like I still want the rush of my first hit, but can't get there any more. The rush hits me just as hard, I just don't value it as much.
"But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much."
I think this hits the nail on the head. I have loads of friends I know who would be into the Jhanas if they believed they were possible, and not just spiritual mumbo jumbo. I hint at them every now and again but never really talk about them outside of very specific circles because people just default to not believing in them.
My experience is that Jhanas actually amplify other pleasures, while reducing attachment to them. Learning Jhana gives you more subtle powers of attention that seem to make it easier to really get into things like sex and listening to music. You get the ability to better tune out distractions and really amplify the pleasurable parts of those experiences. But, when you know you have pleasure on tap, other pleasures are more of a nice-to-have than an existential necessity.
One other tiny correction, the resources from Rob Burbea are audio, not video. If anyone is interested in Jhanas I think they're a great resource. Rob has an incredibly intelligent and subtle approach that I think lots of people here might appreciate.
Grunching but I want to weigh in because I have over 5000 hours of meditation:
I haven't read about jhanas and obviously I have never tried to achieve them. There is a sensation though after about an hour of silent meditation that I often experience. It feels like something is slowly and warmly detonating inside my spine and spreading into my brain. It tingles, and it feels warm and good. I suspect that achieving this state has lasting positive effects on my mental state, but that is pure speculation.
Just to say that I personally don't find this state to be anywhere near as "good as sex" or whatever. I agree with the commenter who says that people may be exaggerating. But then again people would probably say the same thing about me so who am I to say?
Also, it sounds like you're in prime position to try to achieve a jhana - which does not sound to me like the sensation you describe - so why don't you give it a deliberate effort before deciding that other people are exaggerating?
I am not surprised that people experience Jhanas, and I imagine people really feel, on the inside, that they experience all kinds of spiritual things, especially in times and places where it is more social acceptable. I can also imagine people faking it for clout. Ever since I learned about Amok Syndrome, I have been increasingly convinced that most mental illness is just culturally bound conversion disorder, and a lot of people really just have anxiety(status anxiety of some form seems like it would be pretty much a human universal) and attach those feelings to whatever is a plausible explanation in their life/culture. Anecdotally I have always been shocked by the ability of the people around me to confidently proclaim that they understand their own body on a physical level, much less on vague experiences of consciousness. I don't understand my body very well at all, headaches allergies nausea aches and pains, out side of a small subset of very straight forward cause and effect issues, I have an incredibly hard time pinning down what is going on inside me. I think I am lactose intolerant, pretty sure anyways. I eat dairy all the time, and some times, under some conditions I still don't understand, it seems to really fuck me up, but some times I eat literally the exact same food, and I am fine. I mostly take lactate and have never had problems after taking it, which is what mostly convinced me, but I feel this way about almost everything. It is all just so confusing in here, and I guess I imagine that has something to do with the pattern matching slider in my brain. I think that people experience reality differently, and their level of confidence in that experience is also variable, and so it seems to me that almost any strange human experience could feel real from the inside.
Can anyone speak to meditation as a cure for depression? People talk about how if you want to get off of SSRIs, you should start meditating. Does this actually work? If so, when should you actually stop taking SSRIs? And why does it work? It's it just that you can see your mind more, and choose to suffer less, or do the jhanas cause you to have less depression, or something else?
I’d be surprised if meditation is a cure. A treatment maybe, however depression literally reduces grey matter volume. And there is no way (yet) to reverse that, only manage the effects.
I think you need to reach a super high-energy state if you want to cure depression. This can theoretically be done with meditation, but it's going to be hard. Psychedelics are a more realistic option.
Meditation can absolutely be, if not a cure, at least an enormous improvement if you're depressed. Partly this is just that a regular meditation practice is, by itself, a good way to lift your mood, but the big difference for me came from what is described as "insight" by Dekans above.
One of the key depressive symptoms is a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that nothing will ever improve. Learning to feel happy and at peace through meditation is very clear proof that your situation can get better, that it's under your control. I can't tell you what a relief it was to figure out that this feeling I'd been stuck with for years was something I could actually get rid of, with just a little time, quiet, and focus.
I don't think you need the jhanas for this, or even to actually do all that much meditation (though it helps). The big turnaround for me happened in a single hour-long Samatha class; you could probably do the same by yourself, though I think having a class of people around you does make it easier to focus.
On SSRIs, no idea. Naively, I'd suggest staying on them if you think they're helping, but I never took them myself.
"The reason other people aren’t in jhana is because they don’t believe it exists, or haven’t heard of it. These all seem like good logical explanations. "
Less sure these are good logical explanations. The tweet said 2000 years, so we should be expecting societal effects or something. Compare sex (perhaps unfair, sex has been known and important to the species for longer than 2000 years, plus biology). Why are people not having sex right now? Well, finding/convincing a willing partner can be hard, which seems a reasonable parallel to "I tried mediation but didn't stick with it." But there aren't really people who haven't heard about sex, or don't believe it feels good, even if they only have other people's reports for what it's like. Is innate sex drive enough to explain the 0.001% -> ~100% gap? Maybe, not sure.
Everyone always implicitly assumes that how much you want something is primarily a function of how good it is. I'm increasingly certain that this is simply untrue. If you think about it, there are so many examples of things people do that predictably won't make them feel good, and of things they don't do even though they will make them feel good.
I would postulate that people's desire for sex just doesn't have that much to do with sex feeling good. I do think there's some relation, but the primary thing is that just the desire itself is hard-coded.
I don't think it needs to be the primary factor for people to follow incentives. I also don't think that sex is only about the desire being hard coded.
Compare drugs. Perhaps alcohol specifically. There are very few people who don't know or believe that alcohol gets you "buzzed", even if they don't have their own experience. Why is jhana not as well known as alcohol, or other drugs? There is no hard-coded desire for drugs (beyond their pleasurability), as far as I know.
I suspect the primary reason is that the barrier of entry is very low (i.e., takes no effort to get drunk), and that's why the (under my model) relatively smaller motivation from the pleasureableness is enough to make people do it. (Though once they're addicted, you have another factor). Comparatively, barrier of entry for jhana is very high.
Anything that sounds like supernatural claims is going to get some people's hackles up. The hardcore materialists will be (1) that didn't happen, you're deceived or lying (2) if it did happen it was only because of wiggly bits in your brain, and drugs or machinery will make those same bits wiggle so it wasn't supernatural (3) if you said it was different to ordinary experiences, you're self-deceived, lying, or not having good sex
(That last really makes me laugh. "Well *I* have *great* sex, you poor loser don't know what you're talking about!" 🤣)
Your tyrannical commenter has a good point. I've never actually gotten that much out of sex. and once I finally had it, it was so disappointing I always wondered what was so great that it motivated people to do all those crazy things for it, but then I never actually managed to do it with anyone I was attracted to. Perhaps that is the difference.
I've had sex with people I was attracted to (in a couple of different ways) and with people that I wasn't particularly attracted to, and didn't find a lot of difference. The thing that's always made the difference for me is being in a long-term relationship, so you get better at it. Sex with someone I really fancied seemed too tense and high-stakes to be really good.
Sorry if this has already been brought up. Regarding the confusion over Jhanas being something religious, this might come from the fact that today's religions could have originated in Jhanas and similar experiences (although they have certainly evolved to something very different).
Our modern languages have evolved very much, we have vocabulary to distinguish between religious and non-religious things, we can say we are "meditating" instead of "praying", but thousands of years ago, I am pretty sure the languages didn't always have such, uh, subtleties. So if a person experienced the Jhanas thousands of years ago, they might not have said "I have experienced a state of consciousness that brings much pleasure", but instead "I have been one with God" or "I have seen the light" or something similar.
And when people would have asked them "how can I see the light too?", they would not have answered "you need to meditate an hour a day, keep distracting things away from you and concentrate on something pleasurable, don't expect anything but let it happen" - rather they would have said "you need to pray an hour a day, lead a simple life, keep temptations away; ask and you will be given" - see religious scripts for other examples.
So, maybe most religious founders and prophets were experiencing Jhanas or similar states, and they tried to lead other people to them, using the language that was available to them back then. I think many religious texts and, uh, "wisdoms" could have been meant as some kind of meditation advice.
Of course, modern religions are something very, very different from that, which makes it necessary for us to use concepts like "meditation", because "praying" is something different today.
Lots of these points remind me of something I can do which I think is unusual - with a small amount of effort akin to tensing a muscle, I can induce a pleasurable sensation throughout my body, on the scale of perhaps 1/4 of an orgasm. I found out my brother can do the same, and like me he'd never mentioned this ability to anyone up until then. I later mentioned it in passing to my PCP and he had no idea what I was talking about.
I can do this at any time, as much as I want. Its a (small) amount of pleasure on demand. But like the jhanas, I sometimes just forget I can/don't do it at all for days/weeks sometimes. I don't sit around doing it all day every day.
I'm pretty sure its not frisson, as I have experienced that as well and it is very different.
Can other people do this? Can everyone do it and no one talks about it for some reason? Is there a name for it? Is this a mini-jhana, or a precursor to a jhana?
I can do something like this - though I wouldn't call it 1/4 of what most people experience as orgasms, it just feels like a pleasant shiver going up my spine. I eventually figured out that what I'm doing is the same thing the yoga people call mula bandha (see eg https://www.ekhartyoga.com/articles/practice/the-four-main-bandhas ). They say a lot of stuff about it channeling the life force or whatever, but I assume it's just massaging/stimulating/irritating nerves or something.
I don't think I'm doing any of the 3 things listed there. Its maybe closest to the uddiyana bandha - the effect is strongest when I trigger it while inhaling, though I can do it without breath or on the exhale.
If I had to locate the pleasure, I'd say its mostly in the chest, shoulders, and neck, though it is to some extent everywhere. No spine tingling though. Best I can describe it is as a single sustained 'note' of pleasure for as long as I can hold it, usually a few seconds though if I really focus I can keep it going longer.
I also have some sort of pleasure lever I can pull on demand, though there's no sensation through my body and it's unlike tensing a muscle. The only sensation I might get is ears rumbling, but I can get that from any intense pleasure. I don't know if there's a name for it (or if I'm describing something incresibly banal that everyone can already do)
It feels like some sort of increasing {happiness, giddiness, sunny mood, bliss, laughter} when I 'push' mentally. It's not a contentedness, or love, or warthm, or relaxation. It feels acutely happy, with no reason or purpose. Intensity varies, it goes higher if I keep pushing, resistance increasing up to a soft ceiling. It takes a low effort to maintain, but the good feelings and good mood fade gradually back to baseline in 10-20s
Below ceiling is very nice but I'd put it at maybe 60% or 70% of amazing sex, depending on how amazing your amazing sex is =)
I've been above that ceiling once, and it's also not the highest pleasure I can imagine. It seems at least as good as good sex, but probably lesser than how jhana is described. (Although for me it's comfortably past the point where I'm curious what higher feels like. If I could wirehead myself and had to pick a setting, I wouldn't want to turn the dial much further than that.)
It makes me smile wide, and it feels like the smile maybe feeds back into it a little. At some point the smiling is almost involuntary.
It would have been really useful to do this to lighten a bad mood that has outlived its usefulness. But I either can't or don't really want to do it when I feel bad.
The reason is that if it starts feeling too "insincere" or "fake" then I quickly feel uncomfortable, my smile turns deeply awkward, and it also makes me feel a little stupid for added flavor.
I get the "fake" feeling if I push too hard above baseline, or if I try to start when I'm already feeling bad.
Most of the time I also forget I can do this. I've tried it around a dozen time total I think. The time I went past the ceiling, I kept thinking about that experience for a while, but I notice that didn't make me try to repeat the experience.
When I consider doing it, I feel roughly neutral about the idea. It takes little effort and it start immediately, but I have little desire to do it. If I had to pick, I've slightly more desire to get pleasure from drugs than from this, though both are usually only slightly above zero desire.
I've never tried meditation and I'm not a very spiritual person, so I'm unsure if I'm secretly doing something that was already well known in the previous millenia. Or if I just stumbled on a random internal glitch that couldn't usefuly be reproduced through a method.
There are many people who meditate for years if not decades and never experience such states. Two family members of mine, for instance, met in a zen commune in the 1970s and have been practicing daily meditation, attending retreats, etc. ever since. One of them has passed koan study and so (I am led to understand) could become a zen master if he so wished (he does not). I'm fairly confident neither of them have ever experienced the Jhanas as described here, and I'm certain that they cannot obtain such states on a regular basis. Nor do their teachers or colleagues seem to be regularly experiencing such states, or expect such states to be a regular part of their meditative practice.
Thus it seems to me that an important component of what the Jhanas are or may mean seems to be missing from this discussion. Namely, whatever the Jhanas are, they are rare and (appear to me to be) unrepresentative of meditators in general.
Getting into jhanas requires actually keeping attention on the same object with almost no distractions. If you don't practice this explicitly, you don't learn it. I've used the Waking Up app for years and didn't learn it because I wasn't instructed to. (Sam Harris doesn't consider the Jhanas to be important.) Just being generally mindful and switching your meditation object around is not the same skill.
And it also requires high valence. ImE, super intense concentration doesn't do it if it doesn't also feel nice. Likewise not something that comes automatically; you have to take explicit steps.
As I've already said, there are meditators who spend years if not decades meditating (i.e., "keeping attention on the same object with almost no distractions") without finding themselves in such states. I'm not talking about people who happened to download a Sam Harris app. I'm talking about people who have spent literal decades involved with Buddhism, often involving highly disciplined meditation routines and instruction (not "generally being mindful", whatever that means).
I am personally acquainted with some of these people, and my personal experience implies that they are in fact in the considerable majority of meditators. If your personal experience differs, great, but it verges on arrogance to assert that such people simply don't know as much about meditation as those who claim to experience the Jhanas.
The (i.e. ...) in your post doesn't make sense -- just because they've spent years meditating doesn't mean they've practiced actually keeping attention on a single object. It is entirely possible to spend years without ever learning this. I'm also not surprised that a majority of meditators never learn it.
If they have, in fact, learned it, then fine. But you didn't say this in your first post, and I'm not sure if you actually said it in this post or just assumed it because they've spent a lot of time on it. But this isn't a safe assumption, which was the entire point of my first reply. Have you actually asked them?
I used "i.e." to clarify what I intended by the term "meditation." *I.e.*, I could have also written "years if not decades meditating (that is to say, 'keeping attention on the same object with almost no distractions')". I believe this is an ordinary usage of "i.e.", see, e.g.,
And yes, I have discussed meditation with them many times.
My point remains a simple one: many (if not most) people who practice Buddhist meditation (*i.e.,* cultivating focused attention) intensively never experience the sort of ecstatic states discussed in this post.
Doesn't the link say i.e. means "in other words", so, just saying the same thing differently? That's different from refining the thing further. Not super important ofc, but maybe useful to prevent misunderstandings down the line.
Yes, it means "that is" or "that is to say" or "in other words", i.e., it clarifies what the author intends by the term just used in the case where the reader can't be expected to know or where the term may be ambiguous or underdefined. This can absolutely involve "refining the thing further".
E.g., take the second example given on the page I linked: "self-supported bicycle touring, i.e., traveling hundreds and thousands of miles on a bike with all my camping gear and other supplies." Now "self-supported bicycle touring" could mean a lot of things. It could for example mean self-funded bicycle touring staying in hostels and bed and breakfasts. Thus the author uses the "i.e.," clause to clarify what *they* mean by "self-supported bicycle touring".
"Getting into jhanas requires actually keeping attention on the same object with almost no distractions."
This has always been a thing that I would just do, without requiring any practice. When I was little and my mom dragged me to church and I was bored out of my mind I would sometimes just stare at one point on the organ woodwork for 10+ minutes without moving my eyes at all until my entire field of vision faded from becoming neurologically accustomed to receiving the same signal for so long, like tuning out a constant background noise. When I am taking a test or playing certain video games, nothing outside of that crosses my mind. Conversely it seems pretty easy to expand my awareness to encompass all sensory modalities too. I think my childhood ADHD diagnosis was wrong because I have this fantastic ability to focus when I actually want to. Elementary school was just boring as hell so I wasn't paying attention there.
I've done lucid dreaming, along the lines of "summon your ideal sexual partner and have sex with them" and it is much less pleasurable than IRL sex. If I get too excited I wake up. That's possibly one reason why people don't do more lucid dreaming.
If I just close my eyes and try to be happy, I can make myself almost orgasmically happy in 20 seconds, without having ever studied meditation. I wonder if this is the first Jhana.
No offense, and this is probably a bad argument, but the descriptions of higher Jhana levels remind me of Scientology's OT levels, which are just sci-fi written by some charlatan, and there are lots of otherwise sane people who genuinely believe they've reached OT levels. I'll bet people who try hard enough can conform their experiences/memories of meditation to any arbitrary levels a culture expects them to reach. e.g.: Jhana 69: the sensation of 69ing Elon Musk in zero-gravity after humanity is a multiplanetary species with good AGI and no further X-risks and nothing to do but enjoy life. I'm sure somebody could go to a quiet place and close their eyes and have that fantasy in great detail and enjoy it but that wouldn't make it a level in some objective system.
I believe Jhana exists *now*, but I definitely didn't in your previous post. You've presented it in a way that essentially was maximally sketchy.
"Buddhists say..." great start if you want me to think something is wrong.
"Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. [...]"
OK, so now you are saying Jhana exists to the same extent that Enlightenment exists (i.e. it doesn't). Got it, you are trying to say Jhana does not exist. Understood.
Then you go into Nick's tweets, and his description just sounds *super* fake. Complete with the implication that he still likes sex, just not *casual* sex. I mean, what? Most people in the world don't like casual sex; they prefer some romantic bonding first (just ask most women). The average number of sexual partners is, like, 6, so most people in practice just don't have much casual sex. It's not special not to seek casual sex!
Notably absent is any claim that Nick no longer masturbates. Did anyone else catch this? I assume Nick still masturbates at least when away from sexual partner(s).
Now, OK, if the claim is that you can futz with your brain via meditation until you reach a bliss state, and there's a bajillion witnesses attesting this is true, I believe it. But that's not what you started with, and it feels weird to make an argument of the form "Buddhists say..." and then complain when people are skeptical.
Sorry I explained it so poorly. I didn't want to avoid crediting the Buddhists in case the "you're just reinventing the wheel / stealing other people's ideas" brigade showed up, and the Buddhists get very pissy if you don't mention that jhana is less good than enlightenment (I think they think of it as potentially a dangerous wireheady distraction from the real work of getting enlightened unless you promise to only use it as an enlightenment study aid).
So now, obviously, you've updated your worldview to be a little less immediately contemptuous of anything associated with Buddhism, I take it? Maybe a little more open minded about things that happen to trigger your self-imposed criteria of what's too weird to even consider?
Fair, and probably more enlightened, but I don't entirely agree here - I didn't intend to be a jerk (although I can't predict how it will have felt to the specific recipient), but rather to make a pointed reinforcement of the lesson that they (begrudgingly and defensively) describe but do not actually explicitly acknowledge having learned. And I don't fully agree with the suggestion that a clear majority of people (at least of people who like to think of themselves as smart, the demographic I think most of your commentariat are in) will take the lesson "don't change your mind" from someone saying "your prior opinion was bad and you should definitely improve it". My perception is that many people will instead learn "be more careful to think and express thoughts that aren't obviously bad". But I have no data outside my own experience and I may be wrong.
Enlightenment exists within the continuum of experiences you can conceivably get when you're able to experience visual hallucinations through meditation. I don't see why one would assume you can glitch your brain out into bliss via meditation but not into a more controllable, coherent variety of visuals one can see through drugs like LSD and DMT as is - and then travel further into those states as sobriety makes them different in nature.
It's a lot more complicated than that, I was a skeptic till I talked to someone who described it in more rational terms and I don't want to go into surreal detail but 'sober psychedelia' is how I'd sum it up.
Buddhism is more of a philosophy of that state than a religion, put into semi-mystical terms that tend to be more helpful to those experiencing that set of states than going 'well, you've meditated so much that you got brain glitches of varied helpfulness that may follow you around at least for a while'. It's more conducive to one's sanity to approach those via faith or supernatural-seeming metaphor than rationality(even if they can fit the latter in hindsight).
Are some of these jhanas simply a variant on the "flow" state, also known as being "in the zone", that happens when you're strongly focused on executing a skill to the exclusion of everything else, as commonly experienced by athletes, musicians, and video game players?
Certainly Argentus' description sounds much more like "flow" to me than what is described as jhana by others. Otherwise (having never experienced jhana), it almost sounds like they are opposites to me.
For me, "flow" is extremely intense focus that leads to a complete lack of awareness of self, but also a complete lack of awareness of sensory input that is not related to whatever the object of focus is. I don't feel hot or cold, hunger or pain, and lose all sense of self. The only awareness I have is of whatever I'm doing.
I've never experience jhana, but it sounds more "in the body" to me. As in, you'd be intensely aware of all bodily sensations, but in a detached and self-free way? But, then again, that is just the impression I got!
Hey, can anyone recommend a rationalist-friendly teacher for this kind of stuff (insight, concentration/jhana, etc)? I’ve looked a little, but never found someone to work with via voice chat.
>A few people have started speculating on why people are so reluctant to believe jhanas.
Well, here is one reason: People who keep going on on how jhanas are so awesome sound bit too similar to that not-exactly-your-friend who keeps telling you how awesome weed/MDMA/opening up your relationship/drinking binges/grinding your own coffee/potato diet/traveling/rock climbing/not having kids/having kids/GURPS [1] are and how you are missing out. You can smell his scorn (it usually -- but not always -- is a "he") at your square boring lifestyle choices when he feigns politely "you do you" [2] after you politely tell you are not interested (and you know the topic is going to come up again next Saturday as long as you hang out together).
[1] Non-exhaustive list of activities without any consideration of how they rank on the Oh-My-Mohs scale of blissful experiences, but I for one like to think the each pushy person is overrating the respective experience they are gushing about.
[2] Picture in your mind the aliens guy meme, but replace the text with following: "I am not saying you are missing out ... but you are missing out".
Not enjoying pushy people is exactly zero reason to disbelieve in the experiences they're pushing on you. There are plenty of non-pushy people who will tell you how much they have enjoyed various things they've done, if you can manage to ask them about it without coming across contemptuous or defensive.
Regarding lucid dreaming, I have a friend who has a problem with what's called 'maladaptive daydreaming', in a way that operated kind of like a drug or video game addiction. Basically the fantasy worlds of his mind are so much more appealing than their real life that they do it compulsively, and every hour they aren't doing it feels like wasted time.
Are all of these different states of Jhana a human universal or more a cultural conditional? Would a human doing meditative exercises on their own with no preconception arrive at the same system, up to isomorphism?
Priming is obviously a thing. Telling a human that they shall see a vision of dread Cthulhu will have an influence on the probability of that outcome.
I suspect that most schools of meditation do not even bother with control groups and double blind experiments. :-)
How many distinct states of human consciousness are there anyhow? From my mundane experience, there are quite a few (continuous) axes (joy, exhaustion, arousal, depersonalization, pain, panic, etc) and some linear combinations of them might deserve their own word, but most of them don't: "Exhausted joy mixed with a hint of arousal" does not need a label any more than the color 255*(r,g,b)=(63,255,0) needs one. ("Harlequin", btw.)
From the distinct descriptions, these meditative states seem more like the (clearly separate) doors of the Mansus in Cultist Simulator than any particular setting on the dozen state variables I would perhaps use to describe macro state of the human mind.
Off-topic:
Could substack perhaps save typed responses locally using cookies and javascript? It is not like the are adverse to the use of either technology. Typing in an external editor (emacs, once laughed at for its resource consumption) because there is a 20% chance that the substack page will get out-of-memory-killed every time I open a wikipedia tab is getting really old really fast. In the alternative, I would also take recommendations for browser plugins to accomplish that.
This is an incredibly difficult question to answer since there seem to be a variety of interpretations and recordings of experiences for jhana, but:
I have never meditated following Buddhist instructions or even heard of jhanas before the ACX post and yet have had meditative experiences similar to what Mishra describes for the 1st & 3rd forms and the 5th formless jhana, albeit not with any degree of what I would call skill. This indicates to me that at the very minimum the framing of having experiences in the particular order written is primed.
On the other hand, I would guess that the experiences themselves are mostly-but-not-quite universal based on able-bodied status and not cultural exposure, since the jhanas seem to be based on experiences that most people have: physical and emotional sense, sense of peace, sense of space, sense of reality, and of course awareness of causality existing (a favorite subject of rationalists and other statisticians or logicians, though we can tone this down to much more simple cause-and-effect we become aware of early on to better generalize the experience.)
Off-topic: I’ve never lost a comment when switching between tabs, even 3 hours later or with 150 tabs open on my phone. Time to troubleshoot your device?
"If orgasms and jhana are both very good, would orgasm during jhana be super-amazing? I tested this out with a romantic partner who is an experienced meditator. ..."
This is what I come here for - information you can't find anywhere else. Thank you Scott.
...I didn’t read any models for what the stages/forms are actually like when reading the first ACX post about them, merely speculated about the potential therapeutic usages with addiction reduction, but after reading them linked here, I have a lot of questions. I consider myself a novice meditator- I don’t follow any particular guidelines and even went back to some pre-meditating basics my partner recommended recently- yet I have had experiences similar to what Mishra describes for the first, third, and fifth jhana.
I get extremely bad "stress headaches" when I am not managing my sleep/stress well. As much as a couple times a month until I figured out the triggers, and still a couple times a year. And I still don't believe 90% of the reports of "migranes".
In my experience, I get addicted to things that serve as an escape. Things that have the power to come into my brain kicking and punching out the shallow suffering or the anxious narrator in my head.
If being calm and disciplined and accepting and introspective is a pre-requisite for some intense positive experience, that doesn't work. It's like the advice to lonely men that you have to be happy being alone before you are ready for a romantic partner -- kinda defeats the purpose.
How people describe the euphoria achieved through Jhana 1 sounds similar to an effect I've been able to achieve since I was a child while trying (and obviously failing) to learn telekinesis.
I close my eyes and I build up tension in my brain (even though my brain isn't able to be tensed) and then I release it and hold (but not hold?) onto the feeling of relief and manipulate it in a way that it spreads throughout my body. Like tensing your arm without performing the act.
I imagine it works in a similar way to the body transfer illusion. I'm exploiting some dumb flaw in my brain by trying to do something it's incapable of doing and by doing that I'm able to semi-consciously tap into the behind-the-scenes part of the normal brain function of tension->release->pleasure.
But the pleasure is entirely hollow unless you ascribe meaning to it. As a kid, I thought I was tapping into something mystical and powerful, which enhanced the experience by magnitudes and filled me with adrenaline and a sense of mystery and wonder, but now it's just an experience devoid of attachment. Like mentally picturing a vibrant red. I can do that, but so what? It can't compare with a vibrant red I see in the real world with all the contexts surrounding it, like a red dress on a beautiful woman. It's pleasure devoid of context. Even the pleasure you get from drugs has context.
How would we evaluate claims of "speaking in tongues" (which may have just meant being a polyglot) and the ability to translate ostensible "tongue speaking" vis a vis the evaluation of jhanas?
The question of migraine claims came up. But there are objective ways to distinguish a migraine from some other kind of headache or from purely psychosomatic claims. People do lie about migraines or self-diagnose incorrectly.
There may also be a useful distinction between malingering and factitious disorder. There could be lying about jhanas as a specific con to get people to buy books or enroll in classes and there could be an exaggeration of ostensibly achieved states as an intentional or unintentional means of self-aggrandizement or attention seeking behavior.
I have been involved in thousands of claims of injury. There is exaggeration and sometimes outright fabrication.
In Maryland law, for example, the test for purely emotional claims of injury as been recognized by the Courts as viable when "it is capable of objective determination." What does that mean? Good question. But it certainly means more than the subjective statements of a claimant. Expert medical testimony is required. And a question that astute (in my estimation) attorneys will ask a medical expert: is there a way to tell the difference between an actor pretending to make the claims and a claimant who actual has this emotional injury.
Can we tell the difference between an actor claiming to have (is have the right verb?) jhanas and a person who has actually experienced jhanas.
Is there a way to falsify the hypothesis? It does not seem to me that has been properly investigated.
The one fMRI study is very problematic for the same reason that Clever Hans is problematic. It is a case study of 1 person! "At the time of testing, this subject was to our knowledge the only person in the US who had the requisite training in jhana who was willing to submit to the experimental protocol." The subject signaled with double tap - kind of just like Clever Hans.
Maybe it's a thing, maybe it's not. Meditation practices are not without dangers. "Zen sickness." We should not push that under the rug.
I sometimes find myself "speaking in tongues". Not real tongues like Latin or Greek or anything, but when I get very stressed or excited, I get some pressure to start speaking nonsense syllables in a speech-like stream (and when I'm alone and nobody's listening, I often do this). The particular nonsense syllables are auto-generated (ie I don't feel like I'm "choosing" them) and they sound a bit like Hebrew and Greek (two languages that I've put some effort into learning and have a good sense of what they sound like - I'd speculate that I sort of trained some area of my brain to be receptive to Hebrew/Greek-sounding syllables).
I always kind of think of this as just me being a very verbal person and when there's a lot of brain activation buzzing around some of it goes through the language center and gets it firing kind of randomly.
I have no idea why anyone would claim to be able to "translate" someone else's tongues except that they're a liar (or, more charitably, have some message they want to send and assume that the person's tongues *have to* be that message)
My wife says I talk in made up languages in sleep. I've caught myself doing it but while sleeping.
I'm unlikely to attribute it to the Holy Spirit, but who knows?
But in waked state in front of others as evidence of my deeper spiritual connection to the transcendental, no!
In a Pentecostal tent, no! As part of show to increase collections, no! As attention seeking behavior, no!
The jhana is claimed to be a transcendental experience not a physiological experience.
Perhaps tongue speaking could be trained as a quiet version of primal scream therapy. There could be placebo benefits with none of the downsides of meditation sickness which I think are documented.
Wouldn't this also be based on a person's views on life? If one of your principle values is to make the world a better place, time spent in meditation is time you aren't spending eg. feeding the homeless.
> [In response to a claim that thousands of people claim to have reached jhana:] Thousands of people have also claimed to be able to speak to the dead, or perceive things over long distances, or hear god telling them what to do.
This is such a weird response. Yes people have claimed to be able to speak to the dead. The ones that sincerely believe it no doubt have some kind of *experience that implies they are speaking to the dead*. You can doubt that their experience is an accurate reflection of what's happening, but you can't doubt the existence of the experience itself. For jhanas, the self-report is about the experience itself, so there is no reason to doubt such self-reported experiences.
One interesting direction that I've discovered as I dug further -- I've heard it reported by Jhana practitioners that the sensation of ecstasy in Jhana ("piti") seems to be the same thing as (or at least very similar to) the experience of "frisson"/chills when listening to music, which has in turn also been connected to the euphoric states produced by ASMR. These areas have been studied a bit more than Jhana (which isn't saying much and it seems they are not well-understood). So perhaps we could get more data points by looking at the studies done on these phenomena too; for example, do we see the same patterns of neural activity? If musical frisson is euphoric, why doesn't this trigger addictive behaviors? It seems to be a similar quesiton to the one you originally posed on Jhana.
For example Salimpoor et. al. 2011 investigates frisson with PET and MRI (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21217764/), and finds activation in the Caudate preceding chills, and the NAc during the experience of peak emotional response. The discussion in that article is very interesting (but alas a bit above my pay grade):
> One explanation for this phenomenon is that it is related to enhancement of emotions. The emotions induced by music are evoked, among other things, by temporal phenomena, such as expectations, delay, tension, resolution, prediction, surprise and anticipation. Indeed, we found a temporal dissociation between distinct regions of the striatum while listening to pleasurable music. The combined psychophysiological, neurochemical and hemodynamic procedure that we used revealed that peaks of ANS activity that reflect the experience of the most intense emotional moments are associated with dopamine release in the NAcc. This region has been implicated in the euphoric component of psychostimulants such as cocaine and is highly interconnected with limbic regions that mediate emotional responses, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. In contrast, immediately before the climax of emotional responses there was evidence for relatively greater dopamine activity in the caudate. This subregion of the striatum is interconnected with sensory, motor and associative regions of the brain and has been typically implicated in learning of stimulusresponse associations and in mediating the reinforcing qualities of rewarding stimuli such as food. Our findings indicate that a sense of emotional expectation, prediction and anticipation in response to abstract pleasure can also result in dopamine release, but primarily in the dorsal striatum. Previous studies have found that amphetamine induced dopamine release in the NAcc spreads to more dorsal regions after repeated exposure to the drug, which suggests that this area may be involved in improved predictability and anticipation of a reward. Similarly, previous studies involving rewards such as food and smoking that contain a number of contextual predicting cues (for example, odor and taste) also found dorsal striatum dopamine release. Conversely, in studies in which there were no contextual cues or experience with the drugs involved, dopamine release was largely observed in the ventral striatum. Finally, evidence from animal research also suggests that, as rewards become better predicted, the responses that initiated in the ventral regions move more dorsally in the striatum. These results are consistent with a model in which repeated exposure to rewards associated with a specific context gradually shift the response from ventral to dorsal and further suggest that contextual cues that allow prediction of a reward, in our case the sequences of tones leading up to the peak pleasure moments, may also act as reward predictors mediated via the dorsal striatum.
This result gives more detail than Hagerty et. al. 2013, which didn't do PET scanning.
This is interesting to ponder; it seems quite plausible to me that there are different mechanisms at work in the initial production of these ecstatic states from music vs. Jhana (say, perhaps the Caudate is not involved in Jhana?). Indeed this must be so at some point, since in one case you're hearing music and in another you're concentrating without music; these are two distinct activities upstream of the euphoria. But then at some point downstream they merge, at the latest in the NAc into the same pattern of brain activity. However it's not ruled out that the Caudate could be involved in Jhana too, so I suppose a PET + fMRI study would be what you want to explore this further?
> The notion that dopamine can be released in anticipation of an abstract reward (a series of tones) has important implications for understanding how music has become pleasurable. However, the precise source of the anticipation requires further investigation. A sense of anticipation may arise through one’s familiarity with the rules that underlie musical structure, such that listeners are anticipating the next note that may violate or confirm their expectations, in turn leading to emotional arousal, or alternatively it may arise through familiarity with a specific piece and knowing that a particularly pleasant section is coming up
This doesn't sound out of place referring to Jhana instead of music, from my readings.
How do people typically react to first jhana physically? Like, does it tend to make you smile? Laugh? Cry? Moan? Jump up and down? Go limp and collapse? Shake and tremble?
I'm sorry, did I do something to offend you by highlighting the personal bias based on your personal experience, while sharing my own experience that is contra-your perception of the experiences of other? If so, I don't know what did it or made you feel the need to turn my (intended to be) compassionate invitation into a jab at my reality. You can simply decline the invitation.
Not at all! I see you as a facilitator in this convo and open minded to the concepts, with some attempts at pursuing them yourself as you've described. I like the way you've blended anecdotal and empirical here.
Maybe I was just bad at it, but even when I was lucid dreaming almost every night, I definitely wouldn't call it "infinite bliss". It was fun, but I've had equal or greater amounts of fun while awake.
The big issues IME are a) you're never *entirely* lucid, you're always kind of dozy and stupid
in the usual how-did-I-not-notice-thar way of dreams because you are ultimately asleep, and b) dreams are not actually the kind of high-fidelity a simulation as you may initially assume, and if you've practiced lucid dreaming you've gotten much better at seeing the seams. You're not actually an omnipotent god, you're just lying there in bed *picturing* all the cool things you *would* do as a god in slightly more vivid detail than while awake.
Oh, I will say that it's an excellent antidote for nightmares and other dream annoyances (although I was never particularly prone to nightmares). And everyone should try flying in dreams at least once or twice, for some reason flying is a legitimately magical feeling.
It seems a bad sign that no one would ever be able to tell a person is "enlightened" without the person talking a lot about it as if they are. Seriously, no one's ever found any behavioral correlates or special skills linked to this phenomenon? That just doesn't bode well at all.
If I've spent thousands of hours meditating over years and years, it's very much in my interest to explain why it wasn't a complete waste of time. Just saying.
Even with the jhanas... This chap roon claims it's a wonder that these things have been known about for thousands of years, and yet almost no one goes on and finds them. It's not that much of a wonder. Spending an hour or two a day for several months or more is a huge investment and for all you know it won't happen for you at all. People who *do* claim they access the jhanas don't have any discernible benefit from it other than the claims they make. So like... yeah...
If someone could invent a way to get there much quicker with much less risk, great. I'm 100% going to do it. I sense, however, that those who claim to have accessed these states would be quite sour about the notion of others getting there without a lot of masochistic discipline. Also a bad sign.
Generally one enlightened person can tell another. But Shinzen Young notes that enlightenment is high-dimensional, many-faceted. It wakes you up and frees you, which can enable you to become a better person but doesn't mean you will. I think the only solid correlate you might find is more happiness and vividness than would have been the case, good luck measuring that!
Also note that accepted Zen masters say within Rinzai Zen are few in number.
I agree it's not such a wonder jhanas and meditation in general aren't much practiced. Contemplation/meditation is a minority practice in every religion, including Buddhism.
I think most people who have accessed these states would love to see others get there faster. In fact this is a core concern within the tradition - the teacher's famous dilemma. Any meditation instruction tends to obscure as much as it clarifies, "the finger pointing at the moon" sort of thing. I agree that kind of attitude would be a very bad sign!
>Jhnana is literally worthless. What good is an eon of being immersed in bliss if when you emerge you still haven't figured out what this place is all about?. It's ignoble to seek bliss for yourself, ignoring the darkness and suffering of others. Jhnana up to the fourth is actually an obstacle.
That's epic. Basically what I believe. This is the problem with eastern religions in general; this total collapse into the mush of undifferentiated subjectivity. The real world is out there, not within us.
Also, to your point about believing what people say—why not believe what people say about prayer? That in prayer they experience a real experience of connection with God? Nothing is more human than that connection, it's virtually a cultural universal. Surely worth trusting as much as Jhana.
Wow I just experienced it after reading your article. Can definitely confirm that it is real. Exactly as described here: https://www.lionsroar.com/entering-the-jhanas/ just took half a dozen attempts, although I guess it may be pre-jhana piti as they describe it. I have been meditating on and off for basically my whole life and never knew this was a possibility. Thank you so much for brining it to my attention!
Isn't that cool? I also got a rough but real experience in my first few attempts, after reading Leigh's wonderfully clear and down-to-earth instructions. Rob Burbea has some great commentary and guidance on them as well. Great to hear of someone diving in!
Right, that was my point, that "better than sex" often isn't a very high bar!
(I also don't think that MDMA is 10x-100x better than sex, although I guess I could understand why someone might feel that it is.)
Yeah, there’s such a vast range in quality of sex, from "ew, I wish I hadn't done that" to spiritual mountaintop experiences, that "better than sex" has very little meaning.
I think it would be more useful if framed as "I'd rather lose my ability to have sex than my ability to reach Jhana." Unfortunately there aren't really any ways to do an experiment on that.
No, but even the framing is informative. It's like, "How much would I have to pay you to never use the Internet again?"
True, we've compared Jhana to sex but what about the internet. I think I'd take the internet over sex.
Oh for sure. I can make money and improve my career through the Internet, but I can't do either of those things via sex (although some folk can, of course).
This assumes that you already have kids, I wouldn't change that for anything.
Losing your ability to have sex may bring other consequences to your love life.
Before I read your comment, I was thinking about the peak pleasurable experiences, and I also thought of eating particularly satisfying food when hungry. But probably the best experiences I've had were social ones, feeling pure acceptance and contentment.
Good orgasms are up there too, but we all know that most sex is not a peak-tier experience.
I remember a woman describing being maced as being more painful than childbirth. Lots of subjectivity to things.
I've heard multiple women describe kidney stones as far worse. Or even stubbing their toe! It's not just subjectivity -- there's also just a tremendous range of personal variation.
In this I wonder if I'm an outlier, then? For one, I was a virgin at marriage and have stayed faithful for nearly 23 years now, so I'm already a sexual outlier. For the other, even in middle age, I still enjoy sex quite a bit. It's not always transcendent, and it's often mediocre, but GOOD sex is probably the top tier sensation, if I was ranking them. And it's not even that I have to work that much for it, or that it's infrequent. About 2-3x a week, I guess? And about 1 in 10 of those is GOOD. I'd take good sex over a perfect steak about 80% of the time, if I was putting numbers on it. Would depend on how hungry I was, I guess.
About the same deal with me, at 15 years of marriage with a similar setup.
Maybe there's something to be said for the traditional sexual setup, when it's working as intended. It's been good for me too. I'm not excellent at ranking my experiences, but roughly I'd say that for me only spiritual feelings (which are for me the most thoroughly embedded, as someone put it, in a narrative) are stronger than the best sex.
Ditto, would guess the wife and I are at about 15 times a month after 14 years of marriage. And usually a couple of those are amazing, and most of the rest are pretty great for me and of varying quality for her. Can’t think of any other activity I would rather keep.
I love team sports, books, video games, traveling. I wouldn’t trade sex for any of it.
People seem to vary a lot in how much they enjoy sex, and it can vary enormously from one sexual encounter to another, as well. But cheap sex is about the same price as an expensive meal, so I think we should expect them to have about the same value on average.
I think it also depends on what constitutes the 'sex' part. All of my best memories and all of the best moments in my life are similar, I meet a girl, we flirt, a hand on the arm turns into dancing, turns into a kiss, turns into sex. The whole 3-24 hours from when we first met to when I fall asleep is what I sort of intuitively compare things to when people compare things to sex. The orgasm in isolation is nice but it doesn't come close to the whole experience. Obviously this is a very idiosyncratic way to view this, but it always seemed like a clearly bounded concept to me on the inside, and the sort of persistent exhilaration and excitement, the nervous energy, and the focus that it elicits in me is really something.
That is a really great point. Those first stages of relationships are for sure among my “most enjoyable days” top 20 or whatever. Even when they didn’t necessarily end in intercourse.
That feeling that someone is truly into you and accepting of you is the greatest drug there is.
I think both that "sex" is underspecified, and that it's entirely possibly for people to have different internal models of the experience.
Firstly, are we talking about the best/worst/average/mode sex? You're right that "worst sex in my life" is a low bar for another experience to clear, and as a result probably so is "the average hedonic value I'd expect to get from a sexual encounter". But I generally have really good sex, and there's _maybe_ one or two things that I can favorably compare to "the best sex I've had so far". So if we're really talking "a sample from the set sexual experiences I've had", that's already a higher bar. And if "jhanas are better than sex" expands to "jhanas are better than the best sexual experience you're capable of having", that's both surprising and (if true) a rock solid argument that you should spend six months or however long getting the ability to enter jhana.
Secondly, people are different. I could imagine both someone having a different sexual-pleasure distribution curve (in the sense that they have really good/really bad sex much more or less frequently than me), and also a different relation to sex (in the sense that they derive less pleasure from it in general than I do).
My favorite thing in the world is foot worship. I could do this everyday, for hours at a time, tho I do need different women on occasion. I wouldn't say it's better than sex, but I don't more, I want it more, and I can do it longer. But I'd still consider this in the realm of sex. I never had an experience that was near as fun as foot worship ... Or sex.
I'm with the commentator who basically dismissed the entire thing (about jhana) and the other commentator who said basically everyone he's ever met that talks about this stuff is ... Well, basically, an ineffectual. There was a discussion about bias and people were arguing what bias is and what it means - and it pretty much went exactly how I and the two commentators I mentioned see it of the jhana crowd.
I know people who do mushrooms - and my friend regularly chats with that MacKenna guy (I forget which one) and his discriptors of trips is wild and I don't disbelieve him but mostly that's because I understand drugs can make your brain do stuff (sorry I'm no scientists) and there's dozens of phds (if not hundreds - or thousands even now) doing research into psychodelics.
But anyway, maybe you disbelieve about the foot thing as much as I disbelieve then about the Jhana thing and that's kinda funny.
I find this perspective fascinating because it's just so different from my experience. Sex for me is hundreds of times better than say the best tasting meal I've ever had, or any other experience I have had. It seems people have drastically different experiences of sex.
I feel like "Artist Tyrant" might have a point, for me (as a straight male) the quality of sex depends a lot more on how attracted a woman is to me, than how physically attracted I am to them. I'm not sure if it's appropriate to be this graphic, but good sex always involves having my partner be aggressively, desperately motivated. For example, I like to tell women what to wear to go on a date with me, which involves a dress and no underwear. Sometimes I will usually notice that her leg is wet down to her feet at some point during the date, which is always a precursor to a really intense experience for both of us.
I think the first 3 or maybe 4 might be relatively simple and basic, but after that diving into the details has many real benefits.
imo nearly all of the work is having a clear mind. In that sense, jhana is mostly a therapy/psychology/integration thing. Once you have a clear mind most of the time going in and out of jhana is relatively simple
Clearness of mind can be traded off with more shamatha before switching into jhana, because shamatha leads to a tranquil and alert mind
Thanks for this comment, haven't heard it put this way much before.
Lines up with what I seem to be experiencing personally ATM - just did a 10 day solo jhana retreat to try to learn (at least) the 1st jhana, didn't succeed (yet :) ), and it seemed like the main reason was a particular psychological thought pattern/subroutine of hypervigilance/checking for what might go wrong. I experience this in daily life a lot as well, associated with anxiety, and in meditation and trying to enter jhana I would get close to jhana 1 (I described what I was experiencing to an experienced meditator and he agreed it sounded like approaching jhana 1), but this anxiety/hypervigilance thing would still be running hard and felt like it was stopping me from being able to "flow" into the jhana.
(I'm now trying out looking at this as the hindrance of doubt (vicikiccha) and working on reducing it :) )
The postrat Discord thing is missing a link.
Sorry, fixed.
Nitpick: I was very excited to read about Rob Burbea videos being available somewhere, but nope, it's still just the same audio-only files on Dharma Seed.
Also, I think Steven and I came to an agreement that the non-addictiveness of jhanas is likely less about the time and effort necessary and more about the requirement of being in a sufficiently let-go/non-craving state to enter them.
Have you seen these? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i4x0Nx5rGrfDuqJV6z5U8h28xAw4UCwlaVqukOZaBNM/edit
I have not, thank you!
In case that's of interest to you: his students have also transcribed, tagged and annotated all of his recorded talks for years (total transcripts are 6000+ pages long).
It's all available here: https://airtable.com/shr9OS6jqmWvWTG5g/tblHlCKWIIhZzEFMk/viw3k0IfSo0Dve9ZJ
I prefer the audio, but that's pretty impressive nonetheless!
https://publish.obsidian.md/rob-burbea/2019+Practising+the+Jhanas/Talks/Orienting+to+This+Jhana+Retreat text+audio mixed together + references to other documents
That's amazing. Thank you for sharing!
Nice!
>that the non-addictiveness of jhanas is likely less about the time and effort necessary and more about the requirement of being in a sufficiently let-go/non-craving state to enter them.
I'm not sure if I can offer useful input, but with N=1 there's a intensely pleasurable qualia separate from jhana that I can reach for without the requirement of a meditative, calm, or non-craving state. It also takes negligible time and effort, and I've normally no real desire to do it.
That leads me to believe there must be some other major dynamic that inhibits addictiveness (though non-craving states could still be the explanation for jhana's non-addictiveness).
It'd be interesting to try to test whether the meditative non-craving state could inhibit a different trigger that would normally causes temporary desire/craving (assuming we could devise a harmless reproducible trigger for cravings)
Another hypothesis is that the lack of a physical act might reduces the potential for addiction and conditioning. Not very many addictions are entirely in one's head. The act of having a cigarette in their mouth, or the act of insufflating powder can become the majority of a craving, even while people derive less pleasure from the drug.
Perhaps if you did a sufficiently distinct physical ritual before each attempt to reach jhana, it might be possible to start thinking about the ritual itself, start desiring the ritual? I'm inclined to say no, but I'd be interested to see the outcome =)
(Unfortunately, the pleasurable state I can reach should be a lot less credible than jhana, which has thousands of claimed reproduction and still evokes doubts. So I'm not sure how useful my case is, but here's a sincere attempt at a data point..)
Interesting! What makes you think this state is actually separate from jhana?
I'm actually not sure it isn't! I'm a little curious to try to reach jhana to compare (also curious, if they're different, whether both could stack?)
I assumed it's different for a few reasons: it doesn't require an absence of distractions, focus, or absense of want. It's something that happens when you reach for it actively, as opposed to arising from quiet meditation and growing stronger on its own. This state you have to keep pushing to maintain, or it fades on its on.
I got the impression that jhana is something that has to find you, or that you have to locate each time (though it may only take a few seconds or a minute to reach). In comparison, I move towards that state the same way I move my hand, it responds immediately to the will
And I thought the intensity might not match exactly, jhana seemed stronger (though I'm not sure I have a solid base for a comparison, having not (that I know of) reached jhana)
I should pick up meditation, out of curiosity if nothing else!
As I do not have twitter, do you mind emailing me the link at promo -at- dnesic -dot- com; I'd like to join but don't want to open an account just for that. Thanks in advance!
They seem to not be publicizing the link and only passing it around through private Twitter DMs, sorry.
I started the server and I just emailed you a link.
I’d also appreciate a link, if that’s okay. I’m really interested in achieving 9th Jhana, not sure how feasible that is though
I've never heard anyone talk about the 9th, but there are about ~200 members now so a wide range of experience. You're welcome to join... gmail me at mcscope or on twitter
do you mean cessation?
Yes, seems the most interesting one of all.
Though I'm curious if it has the same risks as anaesthesia
From my understanding cessation is only rarely referred to as being a "jhana" and the route there is usually pretty different than the other 8 (cessation usually reached via insight practices), so Im not sure the jhana server would be the most helpful place to get help/info for that. That being said, I'm sure there's some very experienced meditators there who would also know a bunch about insight stuff.
"I went through a similar dynamic with lucid dreaming. For years, for hours every night, I was a god, I could create any world, do any thing, the only limit was my imagination. I explored a lot of things deeply, and I'm glad I did it, but it got ... old. It cured me of the hunger for experiences, or something like that."
Reminds me of H. P. Lovecraft ('The Silver Key'):
"When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon."
Oomph. I miss the easy impact that something like Lovecraft could have on me. Now I only get excited when a fundamental life-long belief is threatened by new evidence...
'Now I only get excited when a fundamental life-long belief is threatened by new evidence...'
Ouch, I identify with this all too well.
"When Randolph Carter was thirty... middle age hardened upon him"
/sobs at the age of forty
Other than that, it's a beautiful quote, thanks for sharing.
Men At Forty
By Donald Justice
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/men-at-forty-by-donald-justice
I still find myself aspiring to have the same sorts of dream-adventures as Randolph Carter did, years after reading "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadesh". That imagery just sticks. If lucid dreaming is anything actually like that...and jhana is anything actually like lucid dreaming...well. Big Delta If True.
(Also makes it somewhat hard to encounter third-rate fourth-hand inspirations based on Lovecraft, after reading some of the originals. "You're not capturing the true majesty of Leng!" "That is *not* how Azathoth works!", etc.)
I have seen people argue that Lovecraft could have been at least a semi-lucid dreamer - Randolph Carter is his alter ego, after all.
> This was a fun one. I think it’s the first time half the commenters accused the other half of lying.
As someone who experiences Jhana through meditation and other practices, I can't stop giggling about the fervor with which so many people seek to doubt my experiences and those of others. Helloooo, they are my experiences!! I do not need your approval, I am sharing them for your benefit and not mine. What do you have to lose from spending a small amount of time sitting with yourself, bringing awareness to your thoughts, and relaxing?
There's no evidence whatsoever that you let out even a single giggle. Knowing how much and how frequently such things are exaggerated online, I have every reason to doubt your self-reported “evidence” of laughter.
I think giggled at this but it was almost five seconds ago now and I can’t just trust past nick’s non-scientific subjective experience like that
lol (I warrant that I did actually make a slight laughing sound, by using the unusual phrase warrant I am providing evidence that I am either telling the truth or willing to lie in a novel manner that would be particularly noticeable to myself and therefore threaten my self image as truthful)
Hahaha now I'm past giggling. I'm taking this as a sarcastic joke and having a good chuckle hahaha
Well, my understanding of what I have to lose is that I have to spend a few months "learning how to meditate" before I find out whether I can have this experience or not.
> I have to spend a few months "learning how to meditate"...
Another way of phrasing this would be "I get to spend a few months learning how to meditate...".
If someone views meditation as obligation rather than something that can nourish their soul, then they will likely struggle to experience all the benefits of meditation. The benefits are in the process, and the more profound experiences are an outcome of that. Focusing on the outcomes, such as Jhana or Enlightenment, turns the practice into a process and defeats the intention of meditating. The outcomes of others can spark and inspire curiosity within ourselves, but our intention is a crucial component.
Okay, but supposing that I am a foolish and misguided person who does not know what "viewing meditation as something that can nourish my soul" even means, then I should expect to struggle and defeat my intention, and in that case trying to meditate will be a waste of time on my part - either indefinitely, or until I somehow realize what the deeper meaning of it all is.
I'm not even arguing about what you are or are not experiencing; I just think that (1) assuming there's something there, it's not trivial to get to it, and (2) as a result, there is a tradeoff in spending time trying to attempt to get there.
I see where you're coming from now and I'm with you!
> (1) assuming there's something there, it's not trivial to get to it
I completely agree with you here. That is part of the difficulty, each of us has to undo our minds own tricks. There is no definitive path we can all take.
> (2) as a result, there is a tradeoff in spending time trying to attempt to get there.
Objectively, there is a tradeoff yes I agree. As there is a tradeoff with brushing your teeth or learning how to exercise your body. I find the mind likes to optimize its resource use, i.e. there needs to be a good enough outcome with a good enough probability with low enough input to justify the action. Again, this is part of the difficulty in deciding to try a new practice like meditation and sticking to it. You could be making progress and not feel the outcome is good enough for the time spent and give it up.
For all these reasons and more, Jhana and meditation in general is not something I expect everyone to seek, not something I expect everyone to "succeed" in" and not something I expect of anyone... even though increasing the amount of consciousness worldwide is likely essential to our survival as a species. It is an uncomfortable and often painful duality to hold.
My initial comment about giggling was a playful jab at the conversation within this specific community, because I was indeed giggling about the fervor with which so many people here reject anecdotal experiences.... when all we really need to enjoy life is to connect with our own (inherently anecdotal) experiences.
You can believe jhana exists and decide not to do go through all that hassle. Seems like the classic situation where you don't want to do something, so you proclaim you *can't* do it, to free yourself of the obligation. No need to go so far! Simply say you don't want to do it! I don't want to learn to fly an airplane, but I'm sure I could learn if I tried!
Yes!! I don't see any rational basis for denying the possibility of Jhana from the dissenters in these two blog posts. In one thread of comments to this, you can read someone explicitly defining the reasons for their personal bias against it and holding onto their right to have that bias. Just choose not to do it for yourself, no need to stomp on or deny the experiences of others because you don't want it to serve you or it challenges your world view.
Well, I don't think the two examples are really analogous. I'm sure I could learn to fly an airplane, but if someone tells me that flying an airplane is a really great feeling, I won't necessarily conclude that I'll enjoy it. On a recent open thread, someone tried to tell me that running is a great feeling, or possibly that the feeling you get after running is great, and personally for me it's a hard "no" on both counts.
With jhana, the personal experience is the only part that there is. I personally wouldn't phrase my objection as "jhana doesn't exist", because I like being precise about my language and I don't even know what the precise version of that claim would be. But without putting in the effort to learn to meditate, I'm not sure I can have any kind of solid conclusion about whether I'm missing out on anything.
I agree with the emphasis on personal experience vs saying "something doesn't exist".
I also agree the comparison is rough, though I think it can be cleaned up and the intent of the comparison will hold. "flying an airplane" would be analagous to "meditation" and a certain experience while flying (e.g. doing a barrel roll) would be the blissful analogue to jhana. The same way that "running" is not the same as achieving a "runners high", which is something I'm still working to achieve more readily and only get in short bouts when I do. Curious to hear your thoughts!
I'm curious: would you consider it a meaningful claim if someone said, "I experienced jhana, but I did not enjoy it"?
I would certainly be curious. At the surface it sounds a bit paradoxical, since jhana is described with positive term... but I know from my own trauma related experiences that a "positive" experience can feel bad based on how you relate to it. So I would be quite curious to understand their experience of jhana. I would say I'm a generally curious person and I try not to cling to speciics :)
I think there's a double kick that's motivating the "it isn't a real experience" response. First it doesn't fit with a person's model so there's natural defence of your world model. I think what kicks it in to gear is that if your world model is wrong by not incorporating the possibility of Jhana it also means you are also missing out on what sounds like the ultimate life hack. This is a pretty overwhelming combo in favour of rejecting the realness of it
I quite agree. Attachment to our worldviews and "knowledge" often does us a disservce. I have been going through the process of detaching from all this myself.
Simpler explanation. People I know who are into this kind of crap are ineffective unhappy people so I doubt it has much real life changing benefit.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some benefits. All sorts of things have some benefits. Eating a burrito, walking in a park.
What I'm hearing is you have personal bias from your experiences.
> People I know who are into this kind of crap are ineffective unhappy people so I doubt it has much real life changing benefit.
I don't understand the basis for your doubt. I was an effective unhappy person and now I am more of an effective happy person. In between that there was a period where I was ineffective and unhappy. Yes, people who are struggling are drawn to things that can help them struggle. Why does that inspire doubt in you? Is it because you haven't witnessed a certain change in those people?
>What I'm hearing is you have personal bias from your experiences.
That is literally how people form 98% of their opinions about everything. My personal experiences also lead me to believe the sky is blue and junkies cannot be trusted.
It is a good system! You would prefer people who don't use the information of their day to day lives to make personal updates to their models of the world?
I know lots of people I respect and think have it together and are great human beings, none of them are nattering on about meditation or even practice it as far as I know. I know a bunch of people who are sort of unfulfilled by regular markers of success and kind of failing at life at least a little. Some of those people love to go on and on about how much "meditation helps them".
To be clear I don't doubt it helps them, as I said all sorts of things "help people". I doubt it is some actually transformative useful experience because none of the people I know seem very transformed. They seem exactyl like that person who has been transformed by starting to eat St. John's Wort each day or whatever.
Now if my life experience I had come across some ass kicker who was 45 is interesting and smart, has a challenging job they excel at, a thiriving family, and a wide social circle who was super into meditation, I might take notice.
But it is always the girl who didn't try super hard in college and took an easy major, then travelled the world "volunteering" in villages or whatever, then got knocked up along the way, and is now back and claiming to be super together and happy and effective due to meditation while needing very simple advice about starting a business and lacking any real thought out plan for that business. Moreover she doesn't seem particularly happy, or particularly enlightened.
You might say "you are reading too much into your interacitons with the small set of the couple hudnred people you really know well". Except I have found such interacitons generally to be an absolutely wonderful guide to the world and what epople are like. They aren't perfect, but they are certainly better than "dude you aren't going to believe how Amyway changed my life"..
Well you have done a great job of detailing your bias. I invite you to let go of it, open up to the possibility, maybe even try it for yourself. I don't have much more to say :)
Bias is the name you use for evidence you don't like. I invite you to open up to the possibility that you are deluding yourself.
Well, Jack Dorsey is a meditator, was 45 at the time you wrote your comment and quite a few people consider him to be fairly smart, interesting and successful. I don't know if he has a family though. That said, success is hell of a drug so I imagine few successful people would be able to get off that treadmill regularly once they're there, and progress in meditation requires time. On the other hand, people who "succeed" at meditation are much less likely to seek worldly success and fame, so your heuristic makes sense. That does not mean meditation or jhanas in particular don't work - only that the social dynamics at hand lead to the observable outcome.
A master in the art of living makes no difference between work and play. Action and quiescence are one and the same, there is no distinguishing between them.
It is possible to "succeed" in a worldly sense while also maintaining one's true self, however that can't be done if one is focused on the outcomes (success) rather than on the intent of their action in the present moment.
Bruce Lee seemed to have achieved this duality. He had a profound impact in the world despite his short life, and his late memoir contains tombs of simple deep human wisdom. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/518792.Bruce_Lee
Eckhart Tolle has also seems to have achieved this duality, if we want to call it that. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6708.The_Power_of_Now?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_12
Well certainly I had my first jhana experience trying to recover from an emotional experience that had ruined me. I’m not born again as a different person, but I’ve been more functional since then.
I'm happy to hear the experience helped you grow! Kudos to you for putting in the work :)
This is also my experience with mysticism. I know a few successful people who meditate, but all of them seem pretty grounded in its benefits and describe meditation in similar terms as Christians who do spiritual retreats. The outsized mystical experiences ("it's better than sex," etc) come from anonymous Internet comment sections, people who are unreliable in every other aspect of their lives, and grifters who prey on the second category.
The more outspoken that someone is about stuff that nobody can validate, ("You can't prove that I'm not experiencing something profound!") the more skeptical I am. Maybe they believe it, but 5 minutes on the Internet will demonstrate that people earnestly believe all kinds of crap.
> The outsized mystical experiences ("it's better than sex," etc)
I think it is worth nuancing that "it's better than sex" is someone's subjective and comparative view of their experience. I've had a friend eat an ice cream flavor and say that it's better than sex. Purely subjective, but did they have the experience of eating that ice cream flavor? Yes.
> Maybe they believe it, but 5 minutes on the Internet will demonstrate that people earnestly believe all kinds of crap.
I'm with you on this, most of the time. An exception would be in this context right now. The concept of Jhana (Dhyana the OG spelling) and experiences of it date way farther back than the internet. There is a collective of humans reporting experiences of Jhana across a long period of time. I don't let the masses on the internet tell me what to believe nor what not to believe. A propensity to "believe all kinds of crap" does not mean that everything they end up believing is crap... just as a propensity to NOT "believe all kinds of crap" does not mean that everything they end up up believing is crap.
I know what you mean by that! Such a common thing... In this particular context it was re-emphasized again and again, they couldn't get over the experience they were having and were struggling for words. Otherwise, I'd have taken it as a hyperbole
I'd have been more skeptical a few years ago about the whole topic, but I think I might've experienced something slightly similar in, of all places, smallbore rifle shooting - on a particularly good shot, the moment of absolute focus that you can achieve as you pull the trigger comes with a sensory void and a slight high that I imagine is at least a little similar to what meditation enthusiasts describe experiencing. I definitely wouldn't be as weird about it as the jhana guys and say that it's like, super sensually pleasurable or something, but there is certainly that feeling of tipping off an edge, and in a sense it is a very pleasant sensation, just a short one compared to what I imagine meditation can achieve.
With centerfire rifle and most other shooting disciplines you're too busy thinking about other stuff and anticipating the sound and motion, so you'd have to be some kind of ascetic to get that focused. I've asked a friend who practices archery whether he's experienced anything similar, and he said no, but that he'd heard from his fellows that some people did experience that. Hearsay, basically, so who knows.
"I've asked a friend who practices archery whether he's experienced anything similar, and he said no, but that he'd heard from his fellows that some people did experience that. Hearsay, basically, so who knows."
You might enjoy https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Archery-Eugen-Herrigel/dp/0375705090
I did enjoy it, since it's been recommended to me in a similar setting, though I didn't think it fully covered the question of whether the meditative state is associated with the sort of sensory high that modern meditation adherents describe.
Funnily enough, some other guy has written a whole little series on Zen in bullseye pistol, often considered one of the more meditative shooting disciplines: https://www.bullseyepistol.com/zeninfo.htm, so the association definitely isn't a rare observation. I found some of the advice in it useful, but am slightly suspicious that some of it might be engaging in mysticism for mysticism's sake. I'm not knowledgeable enough in this area to tell for sure.
"Zen" is usually the adjective I reach for to describe my own experience with smallbore rifle shooting, although I confess I'm very much using it in the lay manner as I can't claim to have experienced a bliss-like state when doing it and am more of a skeptic of Scott's whole psychonaut / credulity-afforded-to-mystic-traditions-without-external-corollaries exploration of meditation and enlightenment.
Can't say I've experienced that in real life (I'm not very serious about target shooting), but maybe a few times way back when Team Fortress 2 was still great and I would play sniper sometimes (though in my heart I'll always be a Pyro.)
A group of people with a shared interest transforming into an insular community with its own ingroup rituals and subculture then transforming into a pretty traditional and run-of-the-mill cult is a fun thing to watch in real time – and hopefully the restraints on some kinds of beliefs like 'speaking to the dead requires a high burden of proof' prevent it from doing much real-world damage.
During lockdown I took up meditation, got as far as achieving 1st jhana a few times, and nevertheless lost interest in meditation and gave up. Which I've struggled to explain even to myself, considering 1st jhana was pretty amazing like everyone says, but I think Sasha Chapin's comment articulates it really well – the problem is it's a completely contentless, untethered form of pleasure.
Maybe it's useful to distinguish between pleasures you desire while you're having them and pleasures you desire even while you're not having them. Certainly, during the times I was in 1st jhana, I never wanted it to end. But while I wasn't in 1st jhana, it held no magnetism at all. With sex or MDMA, by contrast, my memories of those things, and the reasons I want them to happen again, aren't just about pure pleasure – they're about the combination of pleasure and other elements of the situation. With 1st jhana there isn't any such combination.
Oh, snap. It’s not a *reward* for anything! That’s why we don’t crave it. It’s not a signal we’ve done a good job; it’s just a pointless good feeling. Nice, but purposeless. So you don’t chase it, because it doesn’t *do* anything.
Yeah, this is where it feels like the whole conversation starts to point toward Christianity, which has always de-emphasized pleasure and pain (even the pleasures of heaven and the pains of hell) in favor of the meaning and significance of being in a relationship with the creator of the universe.
“ Christianity, which has always de-emphasized pleasure and pain (even the pleasures of heaven and the pains of hell)”
That is extremely variable. Plenty of devout Christians care quite a bit about the pleasure and pain of heaven or hell.
As a life-long contrarian and skeptic I was quite surprised to have a road to Damascus conversion experience in my 20's. The results were so very different from jhana. Increased attention to cause and effect. Reduced vanity and delusion. Compassion. Desire for holiness and agape. A nexus of love between self other and god. But the key point was a sense that this kind of perception is actually the natural state of man. Years later I learned that this has been the mystical theology of Eastern Christianity for 2,000 years. At that time this just seemed easy, instantly replicable though it has not remained so, as is often the case. But contrary to the belief that faith was just a form of self delusion, it became obvious then that I and the default state of mankind was one of constant denial of how the unseen world is constantly communicating to us in many varied ways, and because of either pride or X we were denying the obvious truth that surrounds us at every moment.
I don't expect rationalists to believe me or follow the path of reversing one's priors and becoming skeptical of one's own skepticism. But I was talking to a friend from college recently, a lifelong atheist and student of philosophy. And we both agreed the ultimate question is why does something exist rather than nothing. And no explanation for existence existing makes any rational sense at all.
Residing in the bliss of the jhanas is not the end state of Buddhism either, it is more or less what you are saying. Buddhadasa has literally called cause and effect the “God” of Buddhism, and the ultimate goal of the jhanas is to increase attentiveness to self and the world and the relationships between it all.
Maybe a bit like how people who struggle to the top of a mountain relish the views, but the extraordinary views from an aeroplane seem unearned. Most people don’t stare out the window despite flying higher than the clouds.
that's an interesting one. If a traveller told a mountain climber who'd never heard of planes, there was a way to get 10000 feet higher than they'd ever been and look done, the mountain climber would be in awe at what vistas the traveller has seen.
But then when you're looking out a window, down at the clouds, you think "what an amazing view! Much better than any mountain vista. Well, now I'm going to finish this Time article."
Hmm, I do enjoy looking out plane windows more than average, especially when flying over something interesting (glaciers in Greenland is a favorite) but I wonder if plane height is just a relatively bad vantage point. Too high up to see most of the smaller scale beauty you'd see from a mountain top and too low too see the larger structure beauty you'd see from space.
I do. "Look people, we can see the clouds from above! See outside! We are fullfilling the millennia-old human dream of flying!" That's what I want to shout to my fellow passengers each time. For some strange reason I never do, though.
I feel the same way. I can never do work on planes because i am always gripped by reverence, and by a sad awareness I will only have x more flights before I die. It’s one of my favorite experiences. But yet I don’t structure my life to constantly be flying…
An old colleague claimed "lift off is better than sex". I thought to myself that this might tell more of your marriage than you wish to reveal, but given the many comparisons wih jhana people do here, maybe I should have given him the benefit of doubt.
Not really. The experience of sitting in a passenger airplane is that of sitting still in an enclosed box that sometimes you can feel move. It doesn't feel like moving through air the way that swimming feels like moving through water.
But you are flying!
I always go for the window seat - it’s different than a view from a mountaintop, yeah - but also really cool.
I’m beginning to think this jhana thing is a bit like spiritual wanking - and who doesn’t like a nice wank now and then? It appears I’ve been missing a trick. This would explain the “better than sex?!?” disagreements too: mustn’t the fantasy, almost by definition, be more perfect than the real thing?
I’m an indolent hedonist, never had the temperament to practice meditation seriously yet. But whiling away a few afternoons messing around with this jhana stuff might be cool at some point
In my short experience with meditation - I've experienced both jhanas and some glimpses of insight that were similar in some ways and very different in others - both the jhanas and the insight were extremely pleasant, but the insight experience had a sense of potent significance that I can still taste - whereas the jhanas to evaporate when they are over.
Is it also possible that there's a physiological requirement that isn't universal? At some point as a kid I figured out how to manually flood my body with anxiety, with basically the same amount of conscious effort as holding my breath. I've never heard of anyone else doing this, so I've always thought it was probably something like being able to wiggle your ears.
Or you figured out something few others have, but could do if you could figure out how to teach them.
I figured this out, too! I've also never heard of anyone else doing it. I tried to explain it to an adult and they were super dismissive/thought I was just being my weird-kid self, so I never brought it up again.
Never found it useful for much - content-less anxiety is even less desirable than content-less pleasure.
I think I can do this too. I've never known how to describe it; it's like the physical half of anxiety without the emotional content. Only mildly unpleasant. Like tensing up my whole body slightly.
I think it’s really silly to compare Jhana to migraines. Other than maybe getting time off work, there is absolutely no incentive to lie about migraines. No one is going to admire you as a super enlightened spiritual guru and write articles about how cool you are when you get migraines. I don’t think it’s fake, but I do think that for every person who claims to have reached Jhana there are many, many more who just had a nice time meditating and told themselves it was Jhana to be a part of the cool kids club.
"Not tonight, dear, I have a migraine." "I can't cook dinner tonight, I have a migraine." "I have migraines, they're awful, don't you feel bad for me?" "You think you've got it bad? Let me tell you how bad my migraines are." There are *plenty* of reasons to lie about migraines, and I'd bet large sums of money that many people do. On the other hand, why lie about Jhana? "I know how to feel super-awesome sometimes, therefore I'm superior to you." Yeah, sure, but that doesn't seem to match up with many of the accounts, which don't seem to be about being one of the cool kids.
I dunno, I think for lots of people, feeling superior to other people, in the different possible forms that can take, is at least as powerful a motivator as getting out of work.
Sure! That's certainly true. I'm just saying that I think the comparison to migraines holds up pretty well. Perhaps not perfectly—I'm not saying that the incentives to lie are anything like *identical* in these two cases—but I don't think the objection here holds water. And again, several of the accounts here really don't have the "look how much better I am than you" vibe, which, I mean, is almost the default in online communication nowadays.
It may even be better than sex
“Get out of work” can be generalized to just “get out of stuff” for sure lol. But there’s a couple things here. Assuming the person is acting in bad faith, intentionally being deceptive for personal gain, i think the comparison holds up a little better.
However, that’s kind of beside the point, because I don’t think most people “lying” about Jhana are being intentionally deceptive to anyone except themselves. They may be meditating consistently with the goal of achieving it, then maybe after having an extra satisfying session they convince themselves they got there when in actuality they were just in a great mood that day. They may really believe they’ve achieved it but they *probably* didn’t. I’m not saying *everyone* is lying, and the people writing detailed articles on it are probably sincere. But the % of people lying about Jhana is much higher than the % of people lying about migraines, even though in aggregate lying about migraines is probably much more common.
This is why I’m curious about how similar Jhana is to a mushroom trip, and whether a psychedelic experience can serve as a “proxy” for the experience when studying Jhana. There have been many times where I’ve described the enlightenment of a mushroom trip to a friend only for them to reply “I already feel that way without mushrooms.” When they finally take shrooms they always realize how wrong they were about that. I have a feeling it’s a similar dynamic here. I imagine there’s a lot of overlap between the communities, so I’d definitely like to hear how the 2 experiences relate to each other.
This made me think of an ecstatic state I get into while competing in fencing that, kind of maybe, sounds adjacent to this. I've spent <10 hours trying to meditate in my life so if this is an adjacent experience it is probably not via meditation.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4857.msg171497.html#msg171497
>having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while
This strongly backs up my long-held belief that, contrary to popular and scientific opinion, we are not after pleasure per se. We want what pleasure points us toward: Achieving our goals in the real world. But, despite many claims, we would not simply stay on the holodeck forever. After a while, it gets old, and we want something *real.*
I have heard with some consistency that the expectation of 'reward' is what really motivates people, that reliable happiness is most linked to having a goal and working towards it. I haven't personally looked into this claim but it seems likely to have at least some substantial truth
That's certainly my personal philosophical conclusion.
Agreed. Also sort-of a theological point in Christianity, as some commentators here have remarked: Pleasure is not the purpose in life, but to achieve something. And that goes for non-Abrahamic religions as well, I guess. At least per buddhism, as far as I know, the long-term goal of meditation and all related practices is to avoid rebirth. That is, to finally die and be out of it. "Pleasure" as an effect of yoga, meditation, breathing excercises etc etc can be ok but only as long as it is viewed as a pleasurable distracrion and nothing more serious. (Also to bear in mind, though, is the old buddhist saying" if you search for it [i. e. Enlightenment], you are already way off the mark. ") However, if you do not think reincarnation is a convincing idea, the Buddhist reservations against simply to enjoy the pleasures of these altered states seem to disappear. (Although I have puzzlingly come across Buddhists who did not think the idea of reincarnation was really that important for their beliefs. Difficult people to understand. )
> But maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised. The reason I’m not in jhana right now is that I tried a bit to learn meditation, got distracted, and didn’t keep up with my practice, which is the same reason I never succeeded at learning foreign languages or running a marathon. The reason other people aren’t in jhana is because they don’t believe it exists, or haven’t heard of it. These all seem like good logical explanations.
The reason *I'm* not in jhana, nor trying to achieve it, is that I am extremely cautious about alterations to how my brain works. I am very aware that meditation can shift one's sense of self and priorities a whole lot, and frankly, current-me who doesn't want to be rewritten finds that prospect very creepy, and doesn't wholly understand why people pursue it.
NOTICE: POTENTIAL INFOHAZARD WARNING:
Fair point, but to kinda rain on your parade a bit, current you that doesn't want to get overwritten doesn't have a choice in the matter. You're getting overwritten every second of every day (especially when you go to sleep). Slowly, piece by piece, the ship of Theseus that is you is being swapped out. The choice isn't between being overwritten or not, it's control and understanding of the overwriting.
You do know this forum has a subset of the community that seriously worries about Roko's basilisk, right? If anything, what i said about there being no true self seems much more severe then that, and that one got some people seriously asking for these warnings.
I mean, yes i agree it's egotistic, but the other risk is that people get genuinely angry at me for "ruining their lives", so either way i lose and this one loses a bit less.
I don't think we mean quite the same thing by "overwritten".
Like… an important fact about the Ship of Theseus is that it doesn't stop being a ship. I am worried that certain meditation-based "epiphanies" are more like making a bunch of alterations to the blueprints, sharply taking all future iterations of the Ship into very different directions from what the person who first set the precedent of replacing parts of the Ship thought they were consenting to.
To put it another way, I have a certain number of certainties about the amplitude of potential "natural" future mes; unless something goes very wrong they will still share my core tastes and moral intuitions, and their consciousnesses will work the same way as mine. If current-me and an arbitrarily chosen future-me could experience each other's qualia for a minute, I am reasonably confident that we would recognise the experience as still being "ourselves". I care very much about that continuing to be the case for all likely future-mes, and (in much the same way a paperclip AI doesn't want to be rewritten to not care about paperclips) I care about caring about it.
hmmmm, i see. I guess one metaphor for this might be to describe your mind as a sort of landmass, with mountains and rivers, and your current position in it as your "you-ness". You are willing to accept movements around the map, but not alterations to the map itself? A lobotomy or heroin will fundamentally alter the physical structures of the brain/your location in the landmass of the brain, which you don't want. But just normal thinking and interacting with people will only change your location in the map.
Is this a fair metaphor? If so, then i agree, but i would be surprised if meditation counts are actually changing your physical brain structure. It's ultimately just thinking about stuff real hard! If that can change your physical brain chemistry, it seems like totally normal everyday behavior also can. Which, i mean i guess it can, spontaneous schizophrenia is possible. Maybe it's just more likely for meditation then in normal behavior? That's possible but seems unlikely to me.
> To put it another way, I have a certain number of certainties about the amplitude of potential "natural" future mes; unless something goes very wrong they will still share my core tastes and moral intuitions, and their consciousnesses will work the same way as mine.
So you're saying that you have morality figured out, and there's no possible way that you might have some moral awakening in the future about some important topic? That seems pretty narrow-minded if so. If that's not what you mean, then how do you know that meditation is not a tool that can lead you to greater moral awakening and self-understanding?
That's an interesting reason, the fear of your present self being overwritten in some sense.
Do you feel that way about other activities that seem like might also change the brain (I think some of them have been researched) like playing a musical instrument well, learning martial arts, taking up an intensive exercise regime, falling in love, taking antidepressants, etc? Or does meditation seem uniquely brain-changing to you?
This is not a fear I've ever had about anything, though I've heard other people voice it, and I wish I understood it better. (I'm capable of being afraid of or anxious about all kinds of various things so it's not that I don't get fear or anxiety).
I'm certainly leery of brain-altering drugs (though I've been lucky enough not to *need* any for my mental health). Learning ordinary skills is alright, insofar as I'm reasonably sure from prior experience that they won't alter the way my cognition works in the ways I care about. But I would be very very displeased if e.g. learning a martial art caused me to, I don't know, become permanently aware of my breathing on a conscious level and unable to go back to blissful pre-bodily-awareness subconscious breathing.
I had a girlfriend, years ago, who was very worried/upset about my psychedelic experimentation (LSD, psilocybin) because she feared it would change me into someone else.
Looking back, I could’ve said hey, turning 50 changes you into someone else: I’m hoping to be ‘old guy with an interesting past’ not ‘old guy who hasn’t changed in any meaningful way for decades.’
But that was in another country, etc.
> The reason *I'm* not in jhana, nor trying to achieve it, is that I am extremely cautious about alterations to how my brain works. I am very aware that meditation can shift one's sense of self and priorities a whole lot
In my experience, you are correct that meditation does have this effect (and IMO other people who are interested in this as 'only' a cool brain hack may find the tree gives more fruits than they expected). I think this "I don't want to change myself and priorities" is a pretty general argument against human corrigibility, education and self-betterment - it's a pretty good argument against college, which is known to change people's sense of self and priorities. Is the goal to preserve your current priorities, or are your current priorities a result of deliberation and reflection of your understanding of the world. If more deliberation would cause you to update them, shouldn't that be welcome?
We're definitely talking about different meanings of "sense of self" and "priorities".
When I say "sense of self" I mean "what consciousness feels like", not the self-help book sense of "self-image". One hears about "the illusion of self dissolving", for example, and I happen to quite like being a self, and I don't want to dissolve.
Likewise, when I said "priorities", I meant in a core-utility-function sense like "whether I am prima facie inclined to pursue pleasure or not", rather than the more intellectualised sense in which more deliberation or more information can cause you to "shift your priorities".
Take moral convictions; I am all for getting more context on how best to alleviate death and suffering for my fellow humans. I'm even in favour of things like e.g. examining whether the core values I already hold logically extend to animals in a way I hadn't previously thought through/noticed. But I am not in favour of things which I suspect could cause my brain to glitch and stop caring about death and suffering because I have suddenly and irreversibly slipped into a mind-state where I perceive the material world as ineffably illusory and irrelevant.
Thanks for explaining - it sounds pretty cohesive to me, I do expect a lot of people who profess a very rationalist and materialist worldview, who start a serious meditation practice - will find that worldview challenged. It has already begun to happen to me in small ways.
On the topic of comparisons to sex and the question of why anyone capable of achieving jhana isn't doing it constantly, my question was "Why are you not masturbating right now?" (Assuming you aren't, you do you I guess.) As a non-asexual adult man, I have a very good mental model of something which is pleasurable, easy, free, and basically devoid of risk but which I don't always want to do, even when in private.
But it is not that (most) men go “been there, done that” after having sex a view times. And even masturbation needs a little logistic, while some people claim to being able to switch Jhana on in a few seconds?
Sure, there's some minor inconvenience associated with masturbation, but I don't think that's why I do it way less often than I could.
From my experience it both has quickly diminishing returns pleasure-wise and requires escalating effort/stimulation in order to reach climaxes in quick succession.
The male human body has limits on how much high-quality masturbation (or even intercourse) it will allow. I strongly resent these limits and am envious of those women who have much less strict physiological limits on sexual pleasure.
Masturbation frequently causes immediate urinary problems for me, so it's not actually devoid of risk. It also invites uncomfortable levels of introspection. I have no idea how common either of those drawbacks are.
Colloquially known as a 'post-wank hangover'.
Yeah. . . masturbation remains masturbation, if you take my meaning. Sex (for me, at least) transcends that because of the involvement and pleasure of another human. But as I mentioned above in another reply, I don't know that my situation or expectations are at all universal. I've had just one partner, and we've been together for 23 years, so maybe it's just that we know what we like and have some practice with it?
I do very much take your meaning, and I would never claim that this is a perfect analogy.
> But why believe seizures can cause this, but not meditation? Is it because meditation feels “religious” and seizures don’t? Why not just classify meditation as “nonreligious” if it’s going to screw you up like this?
> I agree that many meditators seem to become convinced meditation has supernatural effects. The very smart and careful ones say something like “I know there’s a lot of evidence supernatural effects aren’t real, and this could just be something I’m saying because I’ve fried my brain too many times with weird states, but I can’t help feeling like [description of some very unconvincing evidence] had to be supernatural, take that however you want”. The dumb and reckless ones just go around claiming to have psychic powers.
Asked and answered. The genetic fallacy isn't logically valid in the true sense, but one can't just declare any usefulness it might have as a heuristic to not exist.
>> As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
>> My ethics are a little odd because I don't believe suffering (or pleasure) is any kind of fundamental entity in moral calculus, and I believe that years of intense, constant lucid dreaming plays a large role in that.
> But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much. Maybe there are dozens of infinite-bliss hacks like jhana or lucid dreaming floating around out there, and we just never hear about them.
I seconded this takeaway, in a different comment branch: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10027703
Meditative bliss on demand is better to have than not have, but it's demonstrably not Earth-shattering. The conclusion that hedonic utilitarianism is deeply flawed follows.
I love your applied rational arguments, about a topic with so much rationalisation!
I would like to add an argument from authority: there are a bunch of provably smart and rational buggers that quietly support what superficially appear to be “mental” ideas. My go to example is
Jim Keller (undeniably smart) mentioning using meditation to help his thinking in: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb2tebYAaOA
As someone who was raised Mormon, what you are describing sounds like what Mormons would call an "intense experience of the spirit." I remember one time in particular that I felt this after praying. I felt calm, happy and at peace, recognized that I was feeling the spirit, and was happy about that fact, which kind of started a feedback loop where I was feeling more happy and at peace because I was feeling happy and at peace. It's interesting to hear a similar experience described from another point of view.
As a Mormon myself (still active) I find the comparison interesting. I don't know that I've "felt the Spirit" in quite that same way, but I have felt calm and peace coming from what seemed like a source outside myself, or I've felt a sudden selfless love for another person, especially in situations where I wouldn't reasonably have even liked that person before. But I find prayer hard, and it doesn't ever get to where it would seem like what's being described here. Interesting, though, to read how your experience was similar to jhana.
It wouldn’t surprise me if intense prayer and rituals produce a similar effect to Jhanas . Some sects of Christianity have a similar phenomenon called “slain in the spirit”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slain_in_the_Spirit
I did a lot of lucid dreaming at one point but stopped because it was messing up my life. I found lucid dreaming incompatible with properly restful sleep. This made waking life worse and worse and escape to lucid dreaming more and more attractive. This was a nasty vicious spiral. And the lucid dreaming wasn't that great in the scheme of things because I was aware that it was only a dream. Aware in a very particular, gentle sort of way - too aware woke me up - but aware nonetheless. I stopped lucid dreaming and now deliberately forget my dreams as a valuable part of sleep hygiene for me.
Other people's experiences are very different.
Yeh. A friend of mine recommends lucid dreaming but it’s clear you have to be half awake and half aware that you are dreaming. So it’s never really attracted me.
This reminds me of when I got my first "real job" and was terrified of oversleeping or being too tired to do well, so I figured out how to force myself to go to sleep. And it worked! I could fall asleep almost instantly. And then later I spent the next ten years UNlearning this, because it stole my nighttime relaxation/imagination ability. Ultimately it wasn't worth it.
I suffer from insomnia. Can you tell me what you figured out?
I mean, it wasn't a method or anything. It was just really important to me that I go to sleep, so I forced myself to go to sleep. I was surprised that it worked. It took a few days, and then after a while I couldn't fall asleep any other way. How? How do you raise your arm? You just do it. I know that's not very helpful, but that's what happened.
I guess ask yourself: What's more important to me than sleeping right now? What am I doing that, on some level, seems more important than sleep?
(Edit: It didn't really take a few days. It took a few days before I didn't really have to actively force myself to do it.)
I've suffered from insomnia, and it returns when my sleep hygiene slips. Doing nothing mentally energetic (no work, no browsing the internet pursuing fascinating topics... really it's better not to browse at all but to passively watch a movie or show, or read something long-form) after 9:00 is important, and so is keeping the lights rather low (yellow lamplight) during the cool-down stage from 9 to 10:30 or so. Once I'm in bed I read a little while by candlelight then blow the candle out. All that takes my brain step by step down the downward path to the lowest level of arousal and activity. It's really active thought that stops sleep.
I'm not saying no evening outings or activities ever, but ones where I'm relaxed and not under pressure are more workable.
As far as mental techniques, these are mostly stopgaps for times when I haven't done the process properly or my mind is still too active for some reason. Some of these are idiosyncratic--I sometimes think about where I left off writing in my novel and try to write the next sentence in my head, but weirdly this worked with my previous novel but doesn't with my current one. Another that I think would work for more people: recall a recent dream and play it through my head step by step. This mimics the free-associative, nonlogical thought that favors sleep, and I think it generally triggers more of the same, leading my brain on that downward path. A similar technique is to form illogical word pairs in your head: "jungle cake," "peppery armchair," "kitchen tree," etc. It gets easier as you do it.
Also, go easy on yourself. If nothing's working and I'm getting frustrated, a snack and some more reading by candlelight (no screens!) can "reset" the process and sometimes bring on sleep right afterwards.
One last solution, which I only use when necessary, for reasons, is masturbation. It's shockingly effective (though when occasionally it doesn't work, nothing will) and I'm perennially surprised nobody seems to talk about it as an insomnia cure. I can't tell if it's assumed or socially unacceptable to talk about, or if maybe it wouldn't work for a lot of people. It also can't completely replace sleep hygiene. There's no magic bullet.
I've done MDMA, had decent sex, and lucid dreamed. Sex is significant better than the other two. Lucid dreaming is bullshit, everything feels fake and disjointed because half of your brain isn't working normally, but when this inevitably annoys you, you try to fix it by focusing but the only fix is to wake up. I don't think the concept of fully lucid dreaming is meaningful - if you're fully lucid, you're not dreaming, just fantasizing. If you're dreaming and parts of your brain aren't in consciousness mode then you're not fully lucid.
MDMA is well understood and anyone can do it. If you've never felt like everything's going well in your life and things will be ok no matter what, then yeah, it's life changing. But if you're mentally and emotionally healthy I can't imagine it seeming very good.
I personally believe 95% of reported migraines are malingering, along with the other diseases that get this accusation frequently. I also am skeptical that there is an infinite pleasure brain hack that's relatively easy to achieve and reduces desire for sex, food, etc. - this ability should face negative selection pressure, especially if it can spontaneously arise from something like hunting or waiting or watching the environment, extremely common in the EEA. Why do Jhanas only come from one part of the world if they're realistically achievable? Where are the New World Jhanas? The African and European Jhanas?
If we want to try to draw lines between Jhana and charismatic ecstasies in other religions, then we'd have to contend with the path to experiencing them being extremely different, which undermines the idea that this is a real, consistent effect with a biological basis that is strong enough and specific enough such that "wrong" meditation can be worse at getting you to it than "right" meditation.
There's also a no true Scotsman effect in people who talk about Jhanas. If I say "I meditated but didn't get Jhana" they say "you must not be meditating right." If I say "I reached Jhana and it was lame and unimportant" they say "that's not really Jhana then."
What is the evidence that would convince you people are editing their memories and exaggerating their claims about Jhanas, telling themselves they experienced something that would actually be very boring or even nonexistent to you or me? What is the evidence that would convince you meditation doesn't lead to altered states in anyone but the extremely suggestible and should be treated the same as hypnosis?
That latter seems pretty easily disconfirmable: If several people known to you to *not* be extremely suggestible reported this result, that should count against that notion.
But you’re arguing with yourself. Several people have said their experience of jhana was good but not mind blowing (including myself) and I haven’t been told I’m not experiencing jhana.
Why was *anything* invented in one part of the world but not another?
Or: Tummo, for the most similar example I can think of, is demonstrably a real, effective practice for raising internal temperature — but it was only found in one part of the world too, AFAIK.
I will only focus on your last paragraph here, as I pretty much agree with you on everything you said (though I haven’t tried MDMA). I’m not sure we would want to draw the line between jhanas and other religious experiences. Actually, my sense was that the feeling I had was a lot like other people’s description of encountering the holy. But the path to get to the jhanas via meditation seems easily replicable, hence all the people sharing their stories of getting into them.
On second thought, I will address one other thing. For me, at least, jhanas are merely pleasurable and calming, they are not rapturous (though I can escalate them, with significant effort, to full body orgasm level, it takes me a lot of work and concentration, and I’m not always successful). Sex is also more about validation than pleasure for me, and in fact I think pleasure motivates very little in my life, but then again I am a depressive. In any case, I think there is significant variation in experience. Is my jhana weak because I am anhedonically depressed? Or am I depressed because my physiological capacity for pleasure is very low? Am I just bad at the jhanas and this will get better with time? Who knows yet.
There's a too-strong selection argument here: for example, it's possible for there to be negative selection pressure on Jhanas, but for them to be inextricably linked to other brain function that has a much greater selection value. Also, we know there is an incredible amount of selection pressure against being gay, yet evolution hasn't taken a path that makes gay people not exist.
What’s the biological mechanism by which meditation leads to pleasure?
On the question of "why would people lie about this?": I'm moderately skeptical about Jhannas, less because I don't believe that they're real and more because they seem to fall into a category of internally experienced, seemingly profound, status raising experiences that can be reported on, but are difficult or impossible to directly measure.
So while I'm fully willing to believe people can meditate their way into intense pleasure or satisfaction, I'm much more skeptical that the whole category phenomena reported here isn't being substantially overemphasized. And to be clear - I think people broadly aren't lying, but I do think there's a natural human temptation to first delude yourself into thinking something is more significant than it actually is, and to then embellish the retelling to further inflate it.
Unfortunately this really does generate a bit of an impasse - I can't image it's fun to be told "this thing you experienced probably isn't significant", but this sure seems to pattern match a lot of other things (people thinking LSD let them talk to the universe, monks talking to God, etc.) where there might actually be something fundamental going on, but it takes more than a few grains of salt to get to it.
I guess an interesting question for people who have experience Jhannas - is there anything about it that seems consistent across people and not predicted by this theory of successive embellishment? Because while I'm not very convinced, I wouldn't say I've ruled it out either and that seems like the way you'd distinguish between something real and counterintuitive (Jhannas) and something that just isn't real (mushrooms letting you talk to god).
Wait. What do you think is being claimed about jhana beyond "intense pleasure and satisfaction"? Granting that, to my mind, is granting essentially the whole thing, unless you're thinking about the stuff on how it reduces desire in other areas (but that isn't a universal claim in the religion or anything, not even close; and I'm not personally worried about defending it).
>is there anything about it that seems consistent across people and not predicted by this theory of successive embellishment?
When I imagine asking this question about migraines, or any other internal experience, I come up short. I'm not sure it's a meaningful standard, although maybe I misunderstand what you mean.
So on the question of "what do I think is going on", I think the origina Jhana claim is a stronger claim than "this is pretty great". The standard you're stating "intense pleasure & satisfaction" feel to me like the kind of thing someone who had a "pretty great" meditation experience would say to try and hype up meditation. And it's not that I don't think they experienced "intense pleasure & satisfaction", it's just that I think of someone who experiences runners highs - they found something that's great for them, I'm just not sure it's a "significant" thing (i.e. something that either says something substantial about the human mind, or is on obvious optimization for most of the population).
I think the question on the migraine thing is a really good question and to my understanding things like the "aura" and the way it precedes a migraine would be a great example - I wouldn't expect "weird visual artifacts" to be correlated with "intense head pain", but it's broadly enough reported with enough people saying "Oh yeah I know that", that I'm inclined to think (most) migraines are appropriately described as being in a single category instead of being a collection of different things.
I was somewhat skeptical so I decided to give it a try, despite reading that it takes a lot of work to do. Surprisingly, I managed to get it after a few false starts.
I haven't been able to reach that state again, most likely because of what the first comment mentioned, i.e. after experiencing Jhana my desire/focus balancing act is out of whack.
I didn't start with 0 experience: I've always been interested in lucid dreaming, and have tried a number of lucid dreaming techniques which are similar to meditation. Just wanted to post a bit of anecdata to say that you might not need 6 months of focused effort to get it.
Same, I have a little meditation experience, but nothing specifically about jhanas. Read the question "are you aware?", thought, huh, that's a weird way to get into oh crap this is J1. And then I knew what I was trying to do, and it got harder until I stopped pushing.
Feels like a Yoda thing; trying to reach it doesn't work, you just have to realise you're already there.
Can you elaborate on the details of this method?
That isn't the method I used, but I imagine it worked similar to how I reached J1:
- Focus your attention on something, i.e. your breath or a visualization or something.
- If you're doing this right, you should eventually feel something. To me it feels like an attractor force, or like building energy/warmth.
- This is the tricky part. Without distracting yourself/breaking focus, smoothly transition your attention to turn reflexively onto itself.
That's just how I did it, but I doubt it's the same for everyone.
“ Without distracting yourself/breaking focus, smoothly transition your attention to turn reflexively onto itself.”
Respectfully, what the fuck does that mean? That’s part of my challenge in approaching any of this. I’ll see descriptions like this and all the successful meditators are like “yes yes that’s exactly it” and to the non meditators it’s a word salad that doesn’t really pattern match with how they expect the words to be used. Having not done it, I have literally no idea what “transitioning attention to turn reflexively on itself” would even look/feel like.
Sorry, I was being too vague there. I really just mean to shift your attention away from your breath, and instead focus entirely on the growing energy. It's hard to describe, but you also want to bring your focus somewhat onto the 'process of being aware' of the growing energy as well.
For me, I followed this: http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma7/enterjhana.html.
I think some amount of meta-awareness is necessary, but it's not something that I can explain how to do in steps.
I was being a bit unfair to you in using you as an example of a general trend I’ve noticed in descriptions of these phenomena. The language available isn’t really sufficient, and as you note it requires a level of “meta-awareness” to even be able to make sense of the way practitioners talk about doing these things, but without that meta-awareness it kind of sounds like gibberish. Imagine it’s frustrating on your end, where your original description seemed perfectly clear and obvious to you.
Many things can be focused on, during meditation. You can focus on a lamp, or on the feelings of breathing in your chest, or the sensations in your right hand, or anything, really.
And so, there are questions of "when you focus attention on something, what sensations compromise that? How do you know you're focusing attention over here, and not over there? What sensory experience does focusing and defocusing attention correspond to?"
And if you're focused enough to start with, and play around a bit with where your attention is pointed and its intensity (note: there's no substitute for actually doing this and not reading about it), you can notice "oh hey, there's some sensory input associated with my attention skipping around my field of sensory input, which is how I know my attention is aimed over here and not over there"
And once you've noticed that "where I'm focusing my attention" is a senseable experience and what it's like, then you can, uh... focus your attention on it. It's kind of slippery, not nearly as easy as focusing your attention on a lamp.
I will note that, having tried this, I didn't hit first Jhana or get anywhere close to it, really, so there's some disconfirming evidence.
The closest I've gotten is as follows. The experience of focusing on something can shift from
lamp, drift off thinking, lamp, side of lamp, core of lamp, drift off thinking, dog barking, hand tingles, lamp, lamp, earworm song, earworm song, air conditioner sound, lamp ridges (baseline attention)
to
lamp lamp sidelamp lampcolor lampridges dogbarks lamp I'mCold lampglow lamp lamp lamppattern lamp dogbark wallpaper lamp lampglow lampedge lamp (fast attentional strobe)
to the attentional strobe dropping away and things getting easier and feeling like there's some sort of invisible film that got ripped away. Or like I was previously looking at a mental representation of the object/how my attention was interacting with the object, and now I'm looking at the actual object. Get out of the car! And attention goes
laaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmmmpppp-dog-laaaaaaaaaaaaammmmpppppp-wall-laaaaaaaaaaaaaaammmmmppppp-laaaaaaaamm-col-laaaaaaammmmppp
And I think this might be access concentration? It feels pretty fragile, takes a fair chunk of time to get into, feels like finally percieving stuff clearly when you weren't previously doing so, and my breath quiets down a bunch.
And then to hit first you just sustain that third level of concentration on pleasant body feelings until it feedback-loops, but I haven't successfully pulled that off yet, or gotten close, it feels like. Pleasant body feelings are way harder to focus on than a lamp, it's a lot harder to track whether you're at a sufficient concentration level, any thoughts about "wait maybe I'm getting near Jhana?" or "dang this isn't working" or "hang on I got a cool feeling in my arm lemme try to build it up" promptly demolish the concentration state needed, and if it gets anywhere good the good feelings are also liable to mess with your intense attention and evaporate whatever state you had going.
The closest I've gotten has been getting that third level of concentration on pleasure going for a bit and promptly getting derailed by a fit of giggles.
I'd love to, but, uh, I wasn't really expecting it to work. I read the question "are you aware", noticed it brought some meditation-like feelings to mind, allowed those feelings to grow, and then got weirdly intensely happy all of a sudden.
If this seems laughably unhelpful as advice, well, yeah, I get that. GedAtThwil's description sounds more useful to me, but to some extent I think it's just a weird mental motion that's easier to recognise than to describe.
I'm glad you quoted Dekans above because I hadn't seen the comment originally and like this whole thing:
"When you see ice cream in the advertisement or an attractive person walking down the street you will still feel desire. When someone cuts you off in traffic you will still feel aversion. But, you now know to some degree that it's bullshit. You obviously might still act on these cravings/aversions. But, the more times this insight gets hammered into you the less likely compulsive action is. There is a difference between "knowing" something and knowing something."
Arriving at that more continuous awareness that one's dance of clinging and aversion "is to some degree bullshit" produces in my experience a substantial improvement in one's quality of life, both because of the reduced suffering in the moment and the reduced tendency to say and do things that amplify the suffering.
Good CBT can also produce this permanently shifted perspective that supports equanimity, but there's not as much depth to that usually as the one to be had through Buddhist practice.
Beyond bliss or other pleasant emotional states, there's just a steadiness and a confidence that comes with being less driven around by one's continuous stream of desires and aversions. I would say part of what the practice does is build other rooms in your house, and once you've built them, you may still walk past them some days, but you know where they are and how to get into them should you choose to.
Tangent re. "I usually hate this kind of thing (cf. Bulverism)":
Isn't Bulverism (and the ad hominem "fallacy") correct in Bayesian reasoning? It seems obvious that if you're questioning witnesses as to whether Alan murdered Bob, Alan's "no" gives you far fewer bits of information than Chuck's "no". The fraction of possible worlds in which Alan murdered Bob and then said he didn't, is probably much larger than the fraction of possible worlds in which Alan murdered Bob and Chuck said Alan didn't.
Bulverism is explaining why someone is wrong before you have demonstrated they are wrong. And it doesn't really apply to a murder mystery, its a fallacy for logical reasoning and debate. If Alan comes to a debate about, say, abortion and puts out an argument (like, "All humans have right, regardless of development") then if Chuck comes back with "Alan only believes that because he's a man" then an Bayesian observer shouldn't update all that much based on Chuck's statement: he already knew Alan was a man, that has nothing to do with whether his argument makes sense.
Even applied to the murder scenario, while recognizing Alan has a motive to lie would mean that his "No" answer gives you fewer bits than Chuck, you also have to recognize that Alan saying "No" does not give you many bits in favor of him killing Bob either. If Doris, who was not a witness, came by and said "Of course Alan did it, if he confesses he'll go to jail" then she has provided no new bits.
In both examples, you're trying to get out of updating on the ad-hominen attack by locating that information somewhere else. In the first case, you say the Bayesian already knew Alan was a man. In the second, you say you don't have to update on Doris' statement, because you already what Alan had said he didn't do it AND that Alan has a motive for doing so. But in both cases, you have to update by some measurable quantity on the data presented in the ad-hominem attack.
You're actually arguing not that ad-hominem is a fallacy, but that a person making an ad-hominem attack is necessarily late to the party because ad hominem attacks are based on public info, and so a good Bayesian should have already updated on that information. To argue that ad hominem itself is a fallacy--that information about the speaker is irrelevant--you'd have to say that if in the first example Chuck had pulled the cross-dresser Alan's pants down and said, "Aha! Alan is a man!", it would be wrong to update on that (new) information.
The fallacy is in equivocating "less bits of information" with "zero bits of information" - that is, in saying "you *only* believe X because of irrelevant reason Y, so I don't have to evaluate your actual argument."
I think this is related to what I wrote about in https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/
If anyone’s interested, I spent two years in college getting pretty deep into lucid dreaming. For me, the goal was to use it to help me with a novel I was writing.
And in the beginning, it was incredibly useful in that regard. After a while, though, a few things happened for me which ultimately made me stop:
1. My dreams became less creative. I think this is because being more in control of them meant that my more-creative sub conscious had a smaller role.
2. I was spending too much of my dream trying to remember what was happening long enough to write it down when I woke up, instead of staying in the moment.
3. It was kind of a useless skill. I felt in the end like I was developing elaborate strategies to help me cheat at solitaire.
I will say though that ten years later it’s left behind some interesting effects. In my dreams I tend to see myself like an actor playing out a role. Even if I don’t remember I’m dreaming specifically, I usually know that what’s happening isn’t real and if I get into a bad situation I tend to switch into a sort of “god mode” where I just overpower whatever problems I’m having.
I did a lot of scary things in my lucid dreams. It's not that heights don't scare me anymore, it's that I understand my fear is basically bullshit, just a knee-jerk reaction that is sometimes useful but more often keeps me from doing epic shit. And I explored a fear of public speaking, of quitting the job I hated, of wearing my hair how I wanted... all of it. My dreams became a safe place for me to do exposure therapy on myself. I knew I was dreaming, but it still had a big impact. I quit in college, when I ran into many more interesting things to explore than my own inner life... but I still blame my lucid dreaming days for, e.g., my utter lack of curiosity around drugs or other altered mental states...
The stuff about untetheredness reminds me of this post, from back when wordpress blogs roamed the earth. https://lipoblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/01/chords-and-maps-3/
"Chords are elements combined in a way that is appealing, but not because the combination describes reality. Chords exploit the many evolved sweet spots of the senses. They can be comprised of “real” things but prioritize creation of an experience over transmission of knowledge...
...Maps describe what exists. They exploit the evolved need to understand how reality behaves. They can be aesthetically pleasing but they put the task of abstraction first."
Jhana sounds like the deepest expression of the "chord". Maybe it doesn't fulfil the need for mappier things.
> The boundary of a boundary is Zero.
Why are there chain complexes here...? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_complex )
A similar phenomenon of the form of 'basic state of experience that has almost definitely been lying around all along that went unnoticed' is ASMR. ASMR is a much more shocking example in my opinion- jhannas were at least written about thousands of years ago whereas as far as I can tell ASMR was first described by Virginia Woolf in 1925. It went unnamed until *2010*. ASMR is not difficult to trigger and it's not especially rare- something like 25 to 50% of people are thought to experience it in some form. I think this is strong evidence that internal states go under-noticed, so it's not surprising to me that jhanna is so ignored.
Getting into weirder much more speculative epistemic territory, I notice a wider pattern with phenomena such as:
-people without ASMR seem very uncurious about it.
-people with synaesthesia often really dislike encountering other people with contrary synaesthesia.
-people with genetic issues like the one that causes people to taste coriander/cilantro as soap don't seem to be very upset about missing out on the non-soap taste that the rest of us enjoy. In my experience even after learning about this, they talk about it as if we actually do taste the soap and just don't care, like, the knowledge about this being genetic just doesn't connected to anything.
-people tend to be very disinterested in hearing about other people's dreams.
I suspect these might all be related somehow- I've read speculation about the dream thing being a module evolution put in there to prevent us from muddying our training data, and maybe the other examples are instances of this module being overactive.
just to be clear, you're aware that cilantro is not in fact poisonous, right?
Detecting non-poisonous aldehydes as poisonous doesn't seem that useful to me, though.
Look man. The claim you're arguing is that incorrectly detecting a non-poisonous thing as poisonous is a valuable part of the body's defense system, because if people who do that were eating poison instead of non-poison, they would be better at detecting the poison. I understand how that would be an advantage if the described situation were the case, but it is not the case.
You haven't actually linked anything demonstrating that lacking the soap gene impairs one's ability to taste actually poisonous aldehydes, but even taking that for granted, those who lack the soap gene will nonetheless be much likelier to get accurate information about the toxicity of what they eat than those who have it, because humans often eat cilantro and very rarely eat poison.
I can tell you've got some irritation built up around the idea that your gene is negative to have, and I'm sorry if people have treated you poorly because of having it in the past, but it's frustrating that you're allowing yourself to overstate your case because of it.
I think what this discussion is really missing is the role of jhanas in a larger context of practice. They are not there simply to be learned, done, and then added to your list of accomplishments. Jhanas 1-4 (and any subsequent are just icing on the cake) help narrow your concentration to such a fine point that you can then move into a vipassana/insight practice. Vipassana practice is centered on deep understanding, which cannot happen without deep concentration; otherwise, your mind becomes too distracted to attend for more than a few moments or minutes at a time.
All of that to say…who cares if it’s better than sex? Who cares if you don’t believe it’s real? The purpose of jhanas is completely lost in this discussion. The Buddha’s big message was “try this for yourself and see.” So if you don’t believe, try it and find out for yourself.
I also don’t understand how people can openly refute that altered states of consciousness (which is exactly what the jhanas are) do not exist or are equivalent to claiming you have ESP (?!?). ASOC are researched in many different contexts, including jhanas, guided imagery and music, and breath work, to name a few. try substituting ASOC for jhana and then reassess your opinions on the topic.
Okay one more additional comment. Should you be open to learning more about jhanas, the foremost expert on their history, context in practice, description, and mechanics of practice is Leigh Brasington. He has written THE book on jhanas and has plenty of interviews to listen to.
But what are the insights that Vipassana delivers? Can they be explained to others that have not experienced them? Can they effect the lives of others? Is Buddhism, at its heart, just wireheading?
There is plenty of writing on the insights derived from vipassana that can be explained to non-meditators. The Visuddhimagga explores this in detail, particularly in the third section; Matthew Flickstein’s Swallowing the River Ganges is an accessible, layman’s entry point into this text. And to your third question, once you’ve explored the insights derived from sustained practice, the effects both on “self” and others become quite clear.
As to your last question, if your summation of Buddhism is that it’s simply “wireheading”, there is very much a fundamental misunderstanding of the heart of the tradition. To seek Buddhism or any Buddhist practice with the ultimate intention of deriving pleasure or “hacking” your brain is very misaligned and won’t get you very far. A cursory reading over the Four Noble Truths sheds some light on this.
I am both Joshua Graham (not real name) & the quoted PericlesOfGreece.
I am eagerly awaiting the publication of the results of Delson Armstrong's jhanas 1-9 brainscan done by Ruben Laukkonen and others: https://imgur.com/gallery/rYLJMye at an unnamed university in the Netherlands. Delson discusses the brainscan in some detail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn9WlWH3rPE (until the study is published, I think this is the best resource for learning about jhana brain science; it is sub-optimal, but still very interesting).
Few bits I remember from the video:
1. 9th jhana is experientially (not neurologically) equivalent to anesthestic/death (absolutely no experience/oblivion). From what Delson says, the moments before and after 9th jhana are unmatched in terms of pleasure as compared to any other known experience. Frank Yang has said that coming out of 9th jhana is more profound than his positive peak 5-MeO-DMT trip, and the profundity never stops. I had an anesthestic used on me when I was a child, so I remember what it's like to go into and come out of oblivion extremely quickly: the doctor counted down from 5 and before he got to 1 I instantly woke up in a different room.
2. Delson claims to be able to go into 9th jhana (cessation/nirodha-samapatti) for 6 days straight. Tells a funny story where he later found out that Covid-lockdown began while he was still outdoors in 9th jhana, and his friends couldn't wake him up, so they carried him to their house where he came out of the jhana many days later.
3. Delson said that 8th jhana experientially is extremely similar to deep sleep (you can learn to be aware while in deep sleep). He said the people scanning his brain weren't sure if he actually was in deep sleep when he was, because included in the types of brain waves active in his brain scan were the kind that you only see in waking minds. They also weren't sure that he was actually awake (and not just sleeping) while he was in 8th jhana, because included in the types of brain waves active in his brain scan were the kind you normally only see in minds that are asleep.
4. For those who feel the 5-8 jhanas are even more woo than 1-4, Delson makes very clear descriptions of these jhanas in a non-poetic way. The sense of space going away. The sense of clear forms going away (no more thoughts, but maybe fractions of a thought). Seeing individual moments of experience (much less woo-sounding than "infinite consciousnesses", the common term for the same thing).
I recently read in Ajahn Brahm's book that the method of using the entire body as a the meditation object for "breathing" is an incorrect translation of the original Pali, but that method is what Delson Armstrong used to reach 9th jhana and subsequently enlightenment. I've used both the "only nostrils area" and "full body" and have been able to get into jhana either way, but I prefer the "full body" method, just using the nose area feels contracted.
For anyone interested, Daniel Ingram did an interview with Delson Armstrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znX6w6shQ7c
Last suggestion: watch Frank Yang (he has done an interview with Daniel Ingram and Andres Emilsson, but his monologues and Instagram posts are the real gold).
I think there's a wishy-washy middle ground for soft Jhana-scepticism. Specifically, people aren't achieving "neurological Jhana" but "placebo Jhana."
What I mean by this is that the best rational explanation for a real Jhana is that some people can hack/distort your own brain in some way through intense meditation to switch it to a state of consciousness that brings pure bliss (neurological Jhana). I think that's materially different from people who really want to achieve Jhana, identify as the sort of person who achieves Jhana and think they're at about the point where they would achieve Jhana just convincing themselves that they're experiencing a state of pure bliss. Given the numbers of people who can convince themselves of obviously, observably false claims to satisfy their egos, and what we know about the placebo effect, a combination of placebo and self-deception seems sufficient to get people who will genuinely say they feel pure bliss through meditation, even to themselves (placebo Jhana). It also sits more comfortably with "It was pretty cool, but I kept forgetting about it and just went back to finding pleasure the normal way."
I'm only 80% sure that neurological Jhana and placebo Jhana are meaningfully different conceptually. However, I don't think that placebo Jhana is an explanation that any Jhana-claimant would accept so I think the answer to whether people can achieve Jhana is still "no" if they only achieve placebo Jhana. Placebo Jhana (along with its correlate, placebo enlightenment) is my default hypothesis, as it seems way more compatible with Buddhist sex scandals, the guy with the brain tumour, the general slightly seedy dodginess that pervades Buddhsim etc). Also, I'd struggle to believe that placebo Jhana wouldn't be a thing even if neurological Jhana also was, so until we've stuck these people in an MRI it seems parsimonious to say its only placebo Janaa.
"They're all lying" is a pretty strong claim. "They're all lying to themselves" is the human condition.
I was raised Mahayana/Theravada Buddhist (my parents converted when I was about 8), so re: point 1, why don't more people do it, is that most regular Buddhists in societies with big Buddhist populations is that we're pretty sure we can't manage it without losing a whole shitload of external stressors. Sure, there might be someone at the temple claiming to have reached it but most adherents, if they ever get there, only ever manage it on a month long meditation retreat that runs once a year, during a year their business is doing really well and they don't feel stressed about their livelihood, and also being the sort of person who already meditates every single day for like decades leading up to that point. And monks. I'd expect monks to have managed it.
But hey, if you're some upper middle leanFIRE retiree who earned the entire GPD of a small third world town in the first 5 years of your career, and all your friends and family are safe and secure, I can see how you got there pretty quick.
> this isn’t even in the top three weirdest subtypes of epilepsy I know
I'd be interested in hearing some details (or at least sketches) of the top few elements of this list.
Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome (see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brainspotting/202201/hypergraphia-neglected-sign-in-neurology ) is a form of temporal lobe epilepsy that makes people write compulsively and want to save the world. Once at a Portland SSC meetup I met someone with this condition. He had a job writing things for effective altruist organizations, which I guess means he is living his best life.
Never attempted meditation personally, but I did once have a dream in which I experienced such intense pleasure that it kind of broke my desire/pleasure mapping mechanism. So I can buy the "I can experience infinite bliss on demand but don't often care to" argument, though I'm still skeptical of the "but the *later* jhanas are where the *real* action is" followup.
Wow, that person you quoted saying that all nerds are ugly certainly had... a take of some kind.
ok serious question... what law of nature does ESP break?
It's a contradiction in terms: by definition, if you're perceiving something, you must be using one of your senses to do it. If it's extrasensory, how can it be perception? ESP proponents solve the problem by positing some kind of supernatural entity - the Force, magic, the Holy Spirit speaking to you - that lets you perceive things without using your regular senses like hearing and sight. This supernatural/magical thing is very powerful, but its energy is not detectable by any instruments we have (no electromagnetic waves that correspond to it, for example). That's why it breaks the known laws of nature: it posits a powerful yet undetectable source of energy.
And yes, I understand that "dark energy" is a scientific concept, but "human brains can interact with dark energy and obtain useful information thereby" is very much not.
I guess then ESP being a contradiction in terms is correct, by definition, because if you can sense something it's a sense. But that's not a (scientific) law of nature but a grammatical one. To steelman ESP, I would say that we have more than 5 external senses we know of, so it's not against a law of nature for (some?) humans to have a sense that's unknown to the general public. For example, I definitely remember learning about our only five senses in school. If someone had said then, "well actually I'm excellent at telling north from south even with my eyes closed" I'd have hoped no one would have said, "well that's against the laws of nature." Some mammals do have this sense. Maybe humans do, at least according to this paper "thus, human CRY has the molecular capability to function as a light-sensitive magnetosensor, and this finding may lead to a renewed interest in human magnetoreception." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3128388/
You make a good point. But (at least to my understanding) the people who make ESP claims aren't saying, "I'm using a previously unknown but scientifically explicable mechanism like magnetosensing or whatever." They are claiming to interact with some kind of mystical Energy Field that gives them precise information through... some unknown and unknowable mechanism that has to be accepted by faith.
I would argue that magnetosensory ability, while super-cool, wouldn't count as "ESP"; as in, it would not be an "*Extra*-Sensory Perception", by definition. All of the descriptions of ESP that I've ever heard describe it as being undetectable by science (in fact or even in principle). Magnetic fields are obviously detectable; all you need is a compass.
This is a good point that I don't think it breaks any official law of thermodynamics or anything, it just doesn't seem possible with what we know. You would need either some kind of exotic energy (and it doesn't seem like any brain region is optimized for production or reception of this exotic energy) or something else equally wild. I think we can say pretty confidently that it doesn't work through radio waves or any of the kinds of energy we know, just because we could detect those (or calculate how strong we would expect them to be, and whether something of that strength could cross however much boundary ESP is supposed to cross). I think precognition does trivially break some laws of physics (arrow of time), although maybe not super strong ones that it's absolutely impossible for some exotic new phenomenon to break.
It also seems kind of contrary to how evolution works to imagine that we evolved this amazing ability, have kept the machinery for it intact enough that some people use it sometimes, but most of us almost never use it.
(I guess it could be a spandrel, but that's one *heck* of a spandrel!)
FYI from a physics perspective, breaking the arrow of time breaks locality (I.e. if you have two things far apart in some way, and you want thing A to affect thing B, you need to be affecting everything on at least one path between them), which then breaks large swaths of already empirically verified physical theory reliant on it.
The reason why confirmation of Bell's theorem "confirmed" that quantum mechanics was real and not based on hidden state was because if you took the hidden state interpretation, you also need nonlocality.
So arrow of time, while not directly a physical "law", is a vital assumption and thus fairly important to keep as an axiom.
(There are theoretical ways to slight of hand in time travel while not breaking locality but they are extremely exotic and usually depend on things that either can't physically exist, like infinitely long and massive cylinders, or involve things which aren't literally banned by physics but we have no evidence for, like negative mass matter)
This is stuff I remember from around 10 years ago, so I welcome corrections.
I'm honored to have my comment featured on the "front page", as it were -- thanks, Scott. That said, pure unvarnished vanity compels me to point out that the link just leads to the discussion page for the post where I made my comment, not to the comment itself ( https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10017660 ).
Sorry, my mistake, fixed now.
>There would be lucid dreaming junkies
I don't really describe my dreams as "lucid", but there were a few occasions where I didn't have access to my computer for a few days, and the result was I would sleep for 22 hours a day. Any time I wasn't eating I was sleeping.
(The dreams I remember, I always have some control over, but I don't actually want anything more than just seeing what happens. People underestimate how limiting one's imagination really is.)
Good on you for shooting down the “it’s all made up” theory. Were you to adopt that theory, I would be unable to take you seriously anymore. Denial of the existence of something I know 100% to be true would be proof of flawed heuristics.
> As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
This one certainly made me stop and think. Unilaterally decreasing one's own utility (all else equal) seems *obviously* morally permissible, even within a hedonic utilitarian framework. Does this result in weird paradoxes if taken seriously? If you'd asked me to write out a formal mathematical statement of utilitarianism before reading this comment, I probably would have missed that edge case.
At first I wondered if this might just be quibbling over the definition of "moral" ("morality for others' utility, instrumental rationality for my own"), but I don't think it's that easily separable—for example, I'm pretty sure it's normally permissible under utilitarianism to make selfish decisions as long as the utility for yourself outweighs the total harm to others. So a moral agent's own utility is still part of the picture, even if we then postulate that the agent is not obligated to optimize it.
I think the paradox comes from thinking
1) utility = pleasure
2) what people freely choose to do is max utility to the best of their ability
If people do something that isn’t max pleasure, then there’s a contradiction somewhere. One can bite the bullet and say choosing not to do the early, pleasurable jhanas as much as possible is a very bad form of akrasia.
I agree that someone who equates utility with pleasure would be behaving suboptimally with respect to their own utility function by not doing jhanas and other highly pleasurable things. That seems different from saying they're acting immorally, though. Is there a point to making people feel bad about themselves for failing to achieve the things they value? (Extra bad, I mean, beyond the intrinsic badness of not getting what one values.)
Inspired by the link to the review of "Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha", I checked out his website and came across the extensive section of the book dealing with "magickal" phenomena that--he asserts--can be frequently achieved through meditation.
He makes it clear that these phenomena which he and many others have experienced--like reading other people's thoughts, foretelling the future, and telekinetically moving physical objects--are in his view *real*, and are sufficient to disprove our current scientific paradigms.
I'd be *extremely* interested to know what other people here think about this.
Unfortunately, the SlateStarCodex review doesn't discuss this aspect of the book at all. Ingram does have a lengthy disclaimer about how he was reluctant to include the discussion of magical powers because he was afraid it would lead people to dismiss the whole book as hopelessly unscientific.
The fact that he's willing to harshly deny traditional Buddhist claims that enlightenment leads to guaranteed happiness or moral perfection means that I can't dismiss him as a "fundamentalist" determined to maintain all the traditional supernatural claims of Buddhism.
My memory is that that magick section didn’t exist when I read it six years ago. If so, that could be why Scott’s review doesn’t cover it?
I’m up front extremely sceptical about magick. A couple of scientific minded people I have some confidence in who’ve meditated a lot, say they’ve experienced unexplainable things. This gives me a bit of doubt.
Daniel Ingrams is one of those - generally he has a very scientific view, trained and working as a conventional emergency medic.
If there is some odd phenomena going on it is on the edge, intrinsically hard to hold on to. So not necessarily valuable, and certainly not what woo-believers want it to be. Still…
Actual superpowers -- be it reading people's thoughts, remote viewing, telekinesis, levitation, or whatever -- would be almost trivial to conclusively demonstrate. As the old joke goes, "those of you who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand". Thus, the time to believe in these things is when evidence for them is presented, and not before.
"[...] having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much [...]"
I don't talk about it much, but not because of skeptical people. Think of it this way: I don't talk about paper clips much, either. Paper clips and pleasure are both super useful, but you wouldn't want to tile the universe with either of them.
The image for your thumbnail is very reminiscent to me of my own emblem and a background I made using some photo editing software and a program I use to create patterns for alteration.
I made it on DALL-E. I can't remember the prompt, but it was something like "psychedelic fractal Buddha"
I've recently started using DALL-E 2, as well for a recent project. But my other stuff is self made using GIMP and an app I like to use for making textures for these sorts of things. Non-AI generation based that is.
I have no problem believing you can enter a very pleasant state by training your mind enough. I just really doubt it's worth using up so many hours to get there.
Sumilarly, I can believe that by trying a lot (i.e. meditating) you can eventuay also end up reconfiguring your brain. I just doubt the chance of the new configuration being 'better' is sufficiently high for the cost of putting in so many hours to be worth it.
Additionally, I've spent quite a lot of time on lucid dreaming, can do it, and it's never been as consistently amazing as described here. I thought it would be but in practice control is more limited, I feel less, and everything is just less in lucid dreams including my cognitive abilities and the world itself.
I'll defend my hypothesis on a numbers basis, despite having no actual numbers: Culadasa is obviously one of the few "bad apples" that lied about and/or resists even the effects of jhana, but *overall* they have beneficial effects on behavior.
*cough* Or, uh, maybe not. I maintain still that there's more reason to be skeptical of supposed "dry path" masters — I'd *bet* some small amount that if we did have numbers, we'd see more e.g. Tibetan and Zen scandals than those in notably "wet" schools like the Thai Forest tradition (which I keep using as an example because I can't think of any more at the moment, so it will be real bad if it turns out those guys are also riddled with scandal); but Scott brings up a good point here.
*****
As outlined in Slime Mold Time Mold's interesting post about scurvy, which I cannot remember if I found here or from Eliezer: it feels fishy to add epicycles to rescue an idea, but sometimes there actually *are* epicycles, so...
...I'll note that Culadasa's background — teaching meditation from a "scientific, progressive perspective" and having largely (half-ly?) Tibetan Vajrayana training — is one I would have been skeptical of before any scandal broke (and indeed I was! I have receipts on the crank-y, weird, but somehow still sort of charmingly earnest Great Western Vehicle forum!).
The former view (progressive, Western, scientific) wouldn't tend to buy into — or, at least, buy into *as much*, on a deep subconscious level — Buddhist disapproval of sense pleasure or sexual, uh, innovation, so might be less protected against this sort of temptation; the latter (Tibetan Vajrayana) has sex all over the place in it, endorses "shortcuts" (using what appears to be somewhat suspiciously-convenient theories about how doing the stuff you'd want to do anyway is okay), and seems to commonly result in this sort of thing.
Additionally, Culadasa is known to favor the commentaries for jhana practice, rather than the original "suttic" form. In other words, he does not teach jhana *as found in the suttas*... although I will admit that there's controversy over whether the suttas and the commentaries really differ all that much; and the "strong" jhanas from the commentaries are very interesting and attractive to me, so I wouldn't have thought it'd be a problem to go that route.
So... If we go to someone who teaches Buddhism from a traditional Buddhist perspective, advocates the jhanas, and doesn't go in for any "shortcuts"... maybe we'd see the behavior we're expecting a bit more?
***
As with the Visuddhimagga vs suttas, I'm also pretty divided on the Tibetan stuff, to be honest. On one hand, I have been pretty... unimpressed with the behavior of a lot of the community, and the emphasis on guru yoga seems like a terrible idea, and having lots of traditions of "crazy wisdom" — where a guy goes "sure I attack people and get drunk and have sketchy creepy sex orgies, but it's because actually everything I do has deeply wise and beneficial effects" — also seems like a recipe for bad apples.
That said, *it's just so cool...* I admit being a bit seduced by all the flowery Jewel Ornaments of this and Wish-Fulfilling Gems of that. It's so elaborated and has so many wild practices — some of which ARE legit, like tummo — that I can't bring myself to write it off entirely. As Scott is convinced, in some respects at least, by the weight of self-report evidence here, so am I; I do feel like *even if it's whacky religious stuff*, surely centuries of study and (self-)experimentation have yielded *some* fruit... if only in the area "how to do weird stuff to your mind" — and hey, that's what I'm after in the first place, really, so...
(And, c'mon, "enlightenment in this very lifetime"? Shortcut or not, I'm totally on board.)
But anyway, that'd be my defense on the Culadasa thing. Now, if a bunch *more* jhana teachers turn out crummy... then I give up.
I'm skeptical... ish... of jhanas. Why? They seem to me like the equivalent of a $100 bill on the sidewalk: if the $100 bill is real, why hasn't anyone picked it up by now?
I agree with many other commenters that pure pleasure, without meaning, does not make for a good life. Even so, people do want to be happy and to experience pleasure. So many people are desperately unhappy/depressed and self-medicating with illicit drugs, alcohol, junk food, etc. If there was a way for people to experience supreme bliss with no side effects, why wouldn't more people know about it and use it? Shouldn't there be tremendous demand for learning how to achieve jhanas? Why isn't anyone picking up the $100 bill that's better than sex with [your favorite celebrity] and the best food and a dose of the most potent psychedelics all rolled into one?
Because it's hard, is what I'd say. It's not picking up a $100 bill, it's *working for it*. To my mind, this is like saying "there's something that makes you more attractive, have better sex, live longer, gain admiration, AND feel better? why isn't everyone doing it?!" — and yet we don't see everyone exercising.
We see a lot of people, but by no means everyone, make sort of half-hearted, brief efforts at it — much like a lot of people will briefly attempt jhana once they hear about it...
...but neither will get much from it without sticking to it, and you don't see much benefit at *all* at first (so it's not "hey I got half a jhana! now I wanna keep doing this" but "this isn't doing anything; now I want to watch Netflix"), so most will not get there — and hence will not be going around telling everyone "HEY YOU GOTTA TRY THIS."
(And the people who do tell others — in the case of jhana, at least — get responses like this! I mean, are YOU going to be meditating half an hour every day and trying to deeply understand and buy into Buddhist doctrine? It seems unlikely; but if everyone reacts that way...)
I think that latter element also makes it even harder to get jhanas to a mass audience: without some element of Buddhist belief, it seems very hard to achieve these states. I won't say it's impossible, but it seems plausible to me that part of the recipe might be a certain attitude toward the self or sense impressions.
And those attitudes are not easy to cultivate without some sort of confidence in the teachings.
You make very good points.
One reason why the analogy between exercise and jhana breaks down, though - exercise doesn't really feel good *in the moment.* (People who get runner's high, I salute you! I'm not like you.) You know it has lots of good effects, health, longevity - but in the moment it just feels sweaty and tiring and your leg is cramping and you'd rather sit on the couch and watch TV. Jhana is supposed to feel amazing *while you're doing it*, once you've gotten past the hurdle of however many hours of meditation you have to put in to be able to achieve it.
That's *also* a very good point (and I also have never once got anything even *close* to a runner's high — it's always miserable — though I don't salute those lucky bastards; I glare enviously at 'em...).
One possible explanation that leaps to my mind is that people just don't make sense, heh. I'm kind of biased here, because I appear to be much, much more pleasure-driven than most, but I have never understood how little people seem to value it (or, more uncharitably, *admit to* valuing it).
Like, in threads like this, or about wireheading thought-experiments, or about drugs, etc. etc., I am always puzzled by how many people seem to feel a need to assert that they actually value pleasure/happiness very little. I swear it's a thing — any time the subject is amenable, you get comments like "well I personally wouldn't feel the need to experience this, but..." or "IMO a life of pleasure is a waste; I'd rather work for my oats!" or "x y and z matter much more to me than being happy, actually", and so on and so forth.
I — again, perhaps uncharitably — attribute this to a sort of confused notion about it being more virtuous and worthy to proclaim that *I* am totally more resistant to the temptation of wanting good feelings than *most* people. Similarly, I maintain that you'd be a fool to ignore any source of easy happiness, and "well I don't want my happiness in a pill" or "I think I'd prefer a hard life of adventure to an easy one of pleasure" are just posturing or confusion over a conception of "unearned" euphoria as being somehow less "real"...
...but I admit that I may just be weird here; certainly many people I respect seem to go at least a little ways in this direction (e.g. Scott has said he probably wouldn't take most wireheading options).
I don't think so. Many have experienced blissful and profound alerted states of consciousness from drugs without any substantial side effects and yet they're not maximizing their time getting high, even if these drugs are still easily available to them. And jhanas require much more of a commitment to get there.
In fact, the ability to do drugs could be the reason why going on the jhanas path is not common. Why would I want to make this very large commitment without any guarantees of success when I can do LSD/DMT/Ketamine/MDMA with an almost certain chance of success if done in a somewhat smart way? It's true that jhanas are legal and more natural. But is it enough in the modern world overloaded with attention-stealing opportunity costs?
>the pleasure that you get from jhana, while intense and lovely, has a flatness and artificiality to it, because it's totally separate from any narrative content and doesn't have much variety
This kind of thing is why I'm unenthusiastic about hard drugs or simple wireheading, even if there were non-addictive variants of them. If it's one-size-fits-all experience that doesn't interact with unique features of my personality, then is it really me that would experience intense bliss or whatever, or just some blob of meat undergoing chemical reactions, and "I" might as well be dead?
Not sure which drugs you consider hard, but I doubt that anyone who's experienced say MDMA or alcohol would share that concern.
I was pretty drunk a couple of times, not to blackout or hangover-in-the-morning degree, but enough for a noticeable effect. I'd say that it was consistent with my concern, in that it modified my perceptions and behavior compared to the sober state, and not in the way that I endorse. It was somewhat enjoyable on net, but taking into account that heavy drinking is expensive and physically harmful, I'm more than fine with refraining from it.
As said below, I endorse this: I'm definitely "me" on heroin (I prefer reading a good historical novel on heroin than anything else, much like when I am sober and much unlike most other drug users I've met, heh), and I perceive no flatness or lack in the good feelings from opioids or MDMA.
Alcohol does nothin' for me, though.
Thanks for your perspective! What's your opinion about the sort of the claim that I heard a few times, that at first sex feels better on heroin, but eventually it starts getting in the way, as does everything else, and you end up wanting only heroin?
It seems as though this same argument would generalize to worry about whether flow states with sufficiently high focus involve the death of you (after all, in sufficiently intense flow states, your actions tend not to interact with unique features of your personality). The property you mentioned, of one-size-fits-all experiences that don't interact with unique features of your personality, *definitely* isn't a property that's unique to hard drugs or wireheading.
And so I suspect this specific line of argument was picked up as a supporting argument after you already arrived at the "hard drugs and wireheading are bad" conclusion for other reasons, instead of you deriving "hard drugs and wireheading are bad" from "it's a one-size-fits-all experience". I could be wrong about this, though.
Am quite unsure what you'd count as a hard drug, but outside of ego-death quantities of psychedelics, the inner "I" remains quite intact and I definitely remember it as me. Not sure how much you count this as disconfirming evidence, though.
Also, out of curiosity, what do you think about the argument that there's an important sense in which the "I" of today might not be the same as the "I" of yesterday given that your thread of consciousness was quite thoroughly interrupted when you slept?
>after all, in sufficiently intense flow states, your actions tend not to interact with unique features of your personality
Hmm, maybe I never experienced sufficiently intense flow states, but this claim doesn't seem plausible to me. I used to play poker semi-competently and definitely was "in the zone" from time to time, while retaining awareness and my play style, which would qualify as unique personality features in my understanding.
>The property you mentioned, of one-size-fits-all experiences that don't interact with unique features of your personality, definitely isn't a property that's unique to hard drugs or wireheading.
Maybe? A potentially important distinction is what Scott compared to "hacking into a video game". I expect there to be a qualitative distinction between states that you can reasonably reach in the course of ordinary life, and some of the stuff that you have to go out of your way for.
>you already arrived at the "hard drugs and wireheading are bad" conclusion for other reasons
I'd characterize myself as a consequentialist hedonist, to a first approximation, so I'm definitely pro-intense bliss, but only as long as it's "me" that's there to appreciate and reflectively endorse it.
>the inner "I" remains quite intact and I definitely remember it as me
I'm definitely not an expert on this, and it's quite possible that there are reasonably safe drugs that I would enjoy and endorse, but I'm lazy and risk averse enough not to bother with the more interesting illegal stuff.
>Also, out of curiosity, what do you think about the argument that there's an important sense in which the "I" of today might not be the same as the "I" of yesterday given that your thread of consciousness was quite thoroughly interrupted when you slept?
It's not exactly the same, but I'm fine with change, as long as it's subjectively smooth and slow enough. The way it's most plain to me is that I have a list of favorite tracks, which I randomly intersperse into my playlist, and from time to time I both add and remove songs from that list. I can grow cold to a song which I loved a year ago, but my overall taste in music is pretty stable.
I'll second this and Wasserschweinchen's comment. I do not perceive the feelings from heroin or MDMA to have any flatness or artificiality at all; indeed, the first time I tried opioids, I forgot I had taken anything and was going around thinking "wow, I am loving life and having a fantastic day for some reason".
Has anyone collected statistics on what percentage of people who attempt to learn to enter jhana succeed (or say they succeed), and how long it takes them?
Seems like that could be useful both for convincing people that the training process is actually doing something and for helping people make cost/benefit decisions on whether it's worth trying.
(Of course, I realize that neither of those confers any particular benefit to the person doing the hard work of collecting those stats.)
> For example, I've seen people get access to Jhana 1 through a mental question "Are you aware?" "How do you know you are aware?"
> Then observe the actual mechanism by which you validate your own experience of awareness, and stay in that place. That "place" is essentially the location of Jhana 1, at least for a good handful of people I've seen.
Oh wow. Worked for me! So, uh, are there any other cheat codes you can offer?
This has yet to work for me.
Can you elaborate on the details of this method?
Are you asking me or the author of the quotation I was responding to?
I simply tried the step in the section I quoted. Unexpectedly to me, it provided a repeatable sudden wave of intense bodily pleasure, kinda tingly, it felt concentrated somewhat in my muscles. For me it was clearly more intense than average sex, but less than the best sex.
However I'm not a meditator. Perhaps because of untrained concentration, I can't hold on to the feeling; it slips away from me in moments. And similarly I'm unpracticed in explaining the process.
Since Steven knew this cheat code for the first jhana, I figured he might know other cheat codes for other jhanas.
Glad I'm not the only one! Likewise very surprised that jhanas have cheat codes, who knew?
I can't help but suspect that all of this focus on debating the validity of the pleasurable qualia of jhana experiences is missing the point. I am not myself a practiced meditator, but isn't the whole point to learn how to set aside attachments to the particular form of central-agent-focused cognition we typically find ourselves in, with its attendant desires, sensations, and modes of processing? Whether you are interested in achieving that as instrumental toward some higher good or a goal in and of itself, it seems like the bliss of jhana is mostly a beneficial side effect at best, and indeed many experienced meditators seem to treat it as such. I suspect much of the pushback to these claims within this community comes from strains of utilitarian impulses that place significant (though not necessarily primary or sole) weight on hedonic experience, which would struggle to deal with highly pleasurable low-motivating experiences, even outside of the neuropsych evidence that might bear on the plausibility of such experiences.
I wrote a thing about this: https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-unfalsifiable-internal-state-claims
That article is magnificent and even-handed ( if a bit disjointed). I highly recommend reading it, regardless of where one falls on the jhana spectrum.
I really can't joint things lately. I'm not sure why, or even if I could ever joint them.
Have you tried partaking of... joints ? :-)
Congratulations! You have found the "RC cannot consume marijuana" Easter Egg:
I look like a guy who smokes pot. If you saw me walking down the street, especially younger me, you'd say "There's a guy who knows you have to take the seeds out and who talks about how big crystals are, and who sometimes says "flower vaporizer".
I too was once drawn in by the glamour of my weed-smoking image, and attempted to do the whole weed thing. What I found is that weed, for whatever reason, does not work well with me.
To put a pin on "not work well", I once stood over the corpse of my father, contemplating what he had meant in my life and what his absence would now mean. While the long-term experience of the death of a loved one obviously outweighs a short term drug interaction, when performing a moment-to-moment comparison, *weed was clearly worse*.
I live in a world where everyone else can smoke all the marijuana, and where I take a few puffs then curl up in the fetal position, convinced that all my friends are trying to trick me and knowing, deep down, that everyone who has ever loved me has stopped and will never come back. My rent will not be paid, and my world will lie in ruins.
Basically I've smoked weed twice and I don't wanna do it again.
Do you have a preferred drug of choice?
Nicotine and other weak stimulants thought to act as cognitive enhancers.. I'm actually going to try and kick nicotine this week, though, for convenience/social reasons.
Weirdly enough, I also look like a weed smoker, to the extent that random people on the street used to ask me for weed (back when I was younger, at least). But unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) weed has no effect on me. If I smoke enough of it, I get dizzy, but that's about it. I don't experience any beneficial effects; or in fact any effects other than dizziness (and the resulting loss of motor control). I guess that is a step up from your experience, though...
I think it took about 10 tries before I felt any strong effects from weed. Maybe I wasn't smoking it right, I don't know. Even now, taking a gummy just leads to a feeling of relaxation and later good sleep. Sometimes I feel some light buzzing or vibrations in my body, or a feeling of lightness. It is not that strong. Now pure THC or hash is a whole another kettle of fish. My whole body vibrates and I can't walk, and sometimes there is paranoia. I don't like it much.
That was an excellent write up, thank you. I am now a fan of your blog.
Let me expand on my personal take on this. After Scott's post, I went and read Leigh Brasington's books on jhanas to learn more about this. When I used to do a lot of meditation, it wasn't in the Buddhist tradition, but a Taoist tradition and then later a Western esoteric tradition. The practice I did went from what Leigh calls access meditation straight into the fourth jhana. After months of practice, I was able to attain this state on a regular basis. It is a very peaceful state devoid of any thoughts. It is pleasurable and utterly calming, but it is not comparable to sex. If I was siting in this state and my girlfriend came up to me and said "let's go have sex," I would immediately exit my practice and go have sex. If I was single and meditating in a park and an attractive girl walked up to me and started talking to me, I would stop my meditation and give her my full attention.
Scott brings up the examples of migraines and MDMA. But just about everyone has had a migraine (or at least a headache) and millions of people have done MDMA. Also, the experience of MDMA is readily verifiable by anyone who takes it. While thousands of people claim to have experienced jhanas, this is a pretty small number when it comes to human experience. Furthermore, a large percentage of these same people also claim to have past life experiences, talk to dead people, travel out of their bodies, or interact with non-human sentient entities. If we are skeptical of these other claims, made by the same people, why should we fully believe their description of their jhana experiences? People exaggerate and lie about all sorts of things. The number of people who claim to have had a jhana experience and also do not claim to have experienced supernatural phenomena is a small percentage of those thousands of people. I am much more likely to trust someone like that, but I would definitely assess how this person describes their other experiences and how much his person is prone to exaggeration.
I suspect the "spoon" thing might be ADHD.
I achieved Jhana on the first try, never meditated before. I tell you how. When I was a kid (like 9 years old), I have heard something about meditation. They said, you can learn to switch off your thoughts. There was no internet and I have no books about meditation. I have no idea what is this about. But I liked to experiment. So I though, OK let's try to switch off my thoughts for at least couple of seconds using any method I can find.
So I tried to switch off my thoughts somehow in my brain without any success. I could hold my thoughts for 0.1 second and than my brain started to process incoming information from senses and generate a thought the very next second, so there was no silence of mind.
One day I watched how birds move their head. Some birds have very robotic head movements almost looking like driven by servomotors. They look at something very shortly, than change position of the head sharply. OK, I tried to mimic this because why not. And I found a funny thing, while quickly jerking the head with eyes fixed like a birds do, I was able to shut down all thinking and pattern recognizing in my mind! So I trained this ability and gradually was able with this method to shut down thoughts in the brain for minutes. After that, I ditched the "head jerking movements" method and just looking straight, I was also able to shut off the brain. There are things though, that make the brain start thinking and it is not possible to stop the thoughts. One example is, if any letters are in the field of vision, the brain immediately recognizes a pattern and tries to read it and that starts the thinking.
Till today, I am able to shut down any thinking in my brain very effectively at will. After I read the SSC post about Jhanas, let us try this! I just kneeled silently (I tried also lying), I switched off thinking, as I know to do it almost immediately, focus on the breath, breathe without any thinking going on in my mind. Than go with the focus to a pleasant place in my body and whoa it works! Really pleasant. The other day I tried my second try and already got a tingling and pleasant sensation all over my body!
Perhaps there is a relation between some neck muscles and thinking, and you first stumbled upon a combination of muscles that stop thinking, and then gradually isolated the one muscle responsible for that (and that muscle achieves the effect by mere tension, without movement).
I like this combination of trusting Buddhism that there are such things as "stopping thoughts" or "achieving bliss by mere thinking", but ignoring the ancient wisdom and experimenting with more efficient ways to achieve that. Perhaps collectively we will find a way to achieve full enlightenment in a week, by performing a sequence of weird robotic movements. Only there will the rationalist community truly deserve to be called a "robot cult"!
It would be nice to know the "more efficient ways to achieve that", could you elaborate?
The only examples I have so far is your "bird head movement", and some people said that asking yourself "how do I know that I am aware?" (or something like that) produces rapid effects, which traditional Buddhists need to meditate for months to achieve.
We would need a brainstorming for more ideas like this, plus someone with an EEG to separate the good ideas from bullshit. Measure the official 9 jhanas, then measure whatever people come up with.
EEG recording while the head is jerked around sounds like fun. I bet one could read whatever one wants from the results.
Is that such a big technical problem? The electrodes are glued to the head.
My physiology course has been long ago but I remember the method as quite artifact-prone. The lectoring colleague claimed he could get a perfectly nice reading from a pudding, by the way.
While I haven't experienced them (yet?) I suspect Jhanas are real, but...
> Why not just classify meditation as “nonreligious” if it’s going to screw you up like this?
That would be easier if it didn't keep coming packaged with dopey stuff. Traditionally the same people who teach it, teach about reincarnation and what not. But modern people seem to get infected too. Even David Ingram, who was supposed to be this pragmatic, down to earth meditator, gives considerable attention in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha to psychic powers and even "casting spells" (your review didn't mention that!), lists them as one of the missing items on his checklist to full Buddhahood, and I recall he even came to this blog to defend them.
Why is that?
Cause it sells books? My experience is that there are plenty of practitioners that don't go for the woo, but they don't make as much noise. I don't know if "smashed thumb bias" (the bias that makes you think you only bump your thumb when it's already damaged) has a real name, but I suspect it does some of the work towards answering your question.
On the subject of addictiveness and degree of pleasure from hacking the brain:
If there's an intensely pleasurable, addictive state you can enter by cultivating a particular plant, refining a psychoactive chemical from it and injecting it into your veins, human evolution plays out the same way it actually has. We haven't had the ability to produce e.g. heroin for a significant length of time, in evolutionary terms.
If there's an intensely pleasurable, addictive state you can enter by thinking the right (or wrong) way ... then people who are susceptible to it will spend time in that state rather than eating or having children, and will be out-evolved by their less-susceptible peers.
I take Scott's point that you would expect a "brain-hijacking" form of pleasure to be more intense than a natural one ... but if it's attainable by something like meditation, which in principle can also be done by primitive humans, then I'd expect evolution to ameliorate it, tack on an aversion to repeatedly entering the state, add a tendency to get bored of it, etc.
How long ago was the first meditation? Let's say 10,000 years? Given the complexity of the fix, I doubt individual evolution could patch out our ability to brain-jack in that time. "Social evolution" probably has a lot to say about it, though.
I don't think Culadasa's case quite qualifies as a sex scandal. Sure, it was a scandal and it involved sex, but usually what we mean by "Buddhist sex scandal" is something along the lines of "teacher having sex with students, with varying degrees of consent". In his case it was "having sex with someone who was not his wife, but definitely also not his student, and possibly giving that someone money that was donated by his students into his non-profit". His excuses were along the lines of "my wife and I have grown apart by that time" and "I considered that money to be my own". I think it's also important to note that at the time he was suffering from chronic Lyme disease and perhaps also undergoing chemo treatment from metastasized cancer (not 100% sure about the timelines here though), which may have affected his judgement (despite being an advanced practitioner).
Here's his own response https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMindIlluminated/comments/kw6wbl/a_message_from_culadasa/
Like a couple of others on this thread, I experienced *something* from trying the "are you aware?" shortcut (having almost never meditated before), and it seems to be reproducible.
I don't know whether it's a jhana or not (or maybe some sort of partial jhana or step on the way). I would describe it as pleasurable, but not supremely blissful, and not better than sex. It's like a fizzy, excited, expansive feeling in my chest and throat - a little bit like being wired on caffeine. It's definitely more of a physical sensation than an emotional state.
I'd be interested to hear from people who have experienced jhana about whether or not this is similar to what they experience.
What baffles and intrigues me about jhanas (based on only this thread and the previous one; I haven't done any further reading) is that they're a subjective emotional experience but they seem to be categorisable and classifiable in a way that people agree on. The inter-rater reliability gestures towards there probably being something real there, IMO.
Scott quotes a commenter talking about "bliss, happiness, contentment, or deep peace (i.e. the first four jhanas)". Bliss, happiness, contentment, and deep peace seem really similar: like, a priori, I'd expect them to all fade into one another in a kind of spectrum, and I'd expect one person's "bliss" to be another's "happiness" and yet another's "contentment". But jhana practitioners seem able to talk about the first four jhanas as if they're four distinct things, and as if there's no confusion or fuzzy edges between them. People don't sound as if they're in any doubt about which one they've experienced.
To me this is as surprising as if, say, sufferers of depression (as opposed to medical professionals) had categorised depression into four types, with really similar-sounding names like "sadness, unhappiness, misery, and deep gloom", and when two depressed people got together they could talk about which one they were experiencing and about other ones they'd experienced in the past, without any uncertainty or confusion between the types, and with a confidence that A's "misery" was meaningfully similar to B's "misery" and meaningfully distinct from either of their "unhappiness".
(FTOAD, I am not saying depression isn't "real"; I'm saying that if we can't do this clean categorisation for depression and we can for jhanas, that seems to imply jhanas are at least as "real" as depression. Feel free to pick a different analogy: maybe four distinct types of sexual pleasure, or four distinct types of flow state.)
People often impose arbitrary taxonomies on types of human experience, and then argue or introspect about which one a given experience falls into (e.g. "is this true love or just infatuation?"). But I'm not seeing that in these comment threads (although maybe I would if I read more widely on the topic?) I'm just seeing people stating that they experienced the first jhana or the second one or whatever, as if there's no uncertainty about the categorisation.
This is a great comment and captures something I was having a hard time expressing. There’s a weirdness to the way jhana practitioners use mundane words that is mutually intelligible within the practitioner community and a little impenetrable / confusing to those outside. It’s offputting in a hard to describe way - not “I don’t believe you” more “trying to understand you makes my brain hurt and it gets worse the more you try to explain it”.
That, and the part where it starts to sound like Thetan levels.
it's worth noting that jhana meditators use more specific technical terms like sukha ("clear uplifting" joy) and piti (energetic vibrations, often pleasurable, more like amphetamines) to discuss this stuff. These words points to more orthogonal feelings than the words we normally use in English. Then they convert these two words like "joy" and "energy" which are a bit more watered down
Secondarily meditation tends to increase sensory clarity of feelings, such that it's a bit easier to distinguish nearby feelings. But I think it's mostly the former
Which reminds me of the fact that emotions and insight are different on the autistic spectrum. Most of the time a neurotypical person knowing me well has more to say about my emotional state than me. Are we aspies capable of this jhana stuff at all?
The distinctions are fairly clear right in the language used: do you not agree that most native English speakers can clearly distinguish the meanings of "bliss, joy, contentment, and peace", particularly with even a word or two to further clarify (e.g., physical bliss, emotional joy, general contentment, and deep peace)?
And, as a long-time depressive, there are absolutely distinct modes of depressive feelings that the words you used do describe better than each other, and that articulate sufferers can talk about meaningfully, at least to each other.
While I'm open to the claims being true (indeed post inspired me to really practice my meditation more to check it out) I think it's worth presenting the best case for the skeptical side.
And I don't think that skeptical claim is that no one experiences the kind of pleasure described but that, like the aforementioned seizures, it's a rare lucky few who are capable.
And that would explain the apparent paradoxes. I mean it seems like fewer people who aren't part of certain religious movements put in the effort and succeed than put in the effort to do things like regularly run for the endorphins high or learn chess or whatever. It would also explain how there can be an amphetamine abuse problem amoung young monks in southeast asia.
I also tend to believe that individuals who experience ecstatic states during prayer or group worship are telling the truth as well but that for most of us only a weak version is available. That seems like a possible explanation here.
--
But I'm not convinced of that position. I just think it's worth presenting it.
I think a version of this is at least true. If you look at people not aiming for pleasure, some percentage of them still keep getting jhana-like states no matter what kind of meditativey or prayer thing they try. Their body just inclines towards that. So in most disciplines you see something like what you mentioned.
However, when practicing for jhana specifically it seems less random. Most people who aim for it can get it after a while if they've worked through of their psychological content such that their mind is calm, alert, and quiet as a baseline
Well, Im giving it a try but I worry that there is just a general sensitivity to meditation and those who lack it end up looking indistinguishable from those who just flake out.
Honestly, I think it's just the sort of thing that I put a really low prior on but their seems to be enough evidence that even so I'm taking it seriously.
Weirdly enough after reading Leigh B's description of them it seems obvious that they could/should exist. Like, yes, if you empty your mind of thought through sustained focus and then focus on something nice, that nice thing can be more intense than when your mind is otherwise distracted? Putting the mysticism aside, I can rationally see why this could work and also why it doesn't address the Buddha's fundamental concerns, of being upset when nice things are taken away or being happy when they're provided.
I think the best explanation for the people who claim to have reached jhana is that jhana isn't the bliss in itself, it's the ability to convince yourself that you've achieved bliss. Does this mean it's not real? Depends on how you think about emotional states. I'm on team "emotions are downstream of what you think about reality, and messing with your interpretations of reality in a way that colours your perception doesn't actually matter much". If you wear rose-tinted glasses you do actually know the world isn't pink, even if it does "look pink" in some real sense.
This also explains why it rubs many people here the wrong way when people talk about reaching jhanas. For a lot of us our whole thing is that we should focus on reality and try to walk away from our biases and attempts to fool ourselves. To see people be smug and self-congratulatory over their supposedly successful attempts to fool themselves is pretty grating.
I don't see smug or self-congratulatory airs, could you point out some examples?
You don't think it's the least bit smug or self-congratulatory to decide that other people's experiences not only aren't real, but are actually delusional, and to let yourself be annoyed at them because of your own highly uncharitable interpretation?
1. Not necessarily. Again, if you can point out some examples, I'll be more clear about what you mean.
2. I think Shaked's comment refers to the smugness of the people who talk about the experiences, not the people who disbelieve them.
Unless I've screwed up the reply mechanics here, I think I was replying (and I meant to be replying) to Shaked. And I was suggesting to them that if they are put off by smugness, they might want to consider the plank in their own eyes before they go trying to help others remove the mote in theirs.
Ah! You're right, sorry, I thought your response was to me. My mistake.
No worries :)
I guess? But I also think it's true.
On the basis of what evidence? What non-biased, non-fooling yourself, ready to look at reality as it is no matter how unexpected, reasons do you have for arriving at the conclusion that a state described and discussed for 2500 years is actually just people deluding themselves about the real nature of an experience they've had?
I think drethlin mostly covered it, but also it's much more consistent with the tone - people using bad/personal arguments ("thousands of years of tradition can't be wrong" - yes they can, look at all the contradictory religions. "I'm offended by your skepticism" - not really an argument, but the kind of social manipulation that's more consistent with people convincing themselves something is true for status reasons than with people actually believing it in a non garage-dragon-y way).
Claims of some mystical enlightenment require strong evidence, and so far the evidence I've seen is entirely consistent with the model of people just convincing themselves of a high-status claim and then going around trying to convince others (which is an entirely common dynamic - lots of religious people claim to feel God in their hearts and such).
I think you're heavily over-fitting to a skeptical and cynical worldview that isn't particularly strong in the first place, but I'm just some guy on the internet who finds that attitude tedious, and I'm not going to take the time to make arguments with you about what I think is flawed about it in general, so you're welcome to entirely discount my perspective on it.
But specifically in this case, none of your objections are arguments either: you object to a perceived tone and a suspected status manipulation, to which intangibles you give more weight than you're willing to give to the accumulated mass of many other people's reported experiences (while calling *them* smug) - and all this while completely misunderstanding what is even being claimed, even though Scott has been, as usual, very careful to spell out and distinguish what is being claimed and what isn't.
There are no "claims of mystical enlightenment" being discussed here. Merely the claim that it is possible to induce a few distinct forms of altered consciousness with some practice, some of which apparently feel really, really nice. Why would that be particularly surprising, when we know already through psychedelic drugs that the human brain is capable of experiencing very different states of consciousness, some of which do in fact feel really, really nice?
"But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much. Maybe there are dozens of infinite-bliss hacks like jhana or lucid dreaming floating around out there, and we just never hear about them."
If it gets old isn't that also consistent with developing tolerance to the experience and thus the amount of pleasure actually felt being reduced?
On the contrary, the feelings stay strong. What changes is the subjective value of those feelings. I find it less tempting to pursue pleasure per se, and the prospect of pleasure distracts me less from many decisions. I think more clearly, for example, about why I eat more and exercise less than I'd like. I understand more about the failures of imagination that put glass ceilings on my abilities. And etc., etc. along those lines.
I don't think that's the same as developing tolerance. It's not like I still want the rush of my first hit, but can't get there any more. The rush hits me just as hard, I just don't value it as much.
"But I think maybe it is just that some people can do this amazing thing, that having infinite pleasure gets kind of old after a while, and that since most people are skeptical of this the people who can do it learn not to talk about it too much."
I think this hits the nail on the head. I have loads of friends I know who would be into the Jhanas if they believed they were possible, and not just spiritual mumbo jumbo. I hint at them every now and again but never really talk about them outside of very specific circles because people just default to not believing in them.
My experience is that Jhanas actually amplify other pleasures, while reducing attachment to them. Learning Jhana gives you more subtle powers of attention that seem to make it easier to really get into things like sex and listening to music. You get the ability to better tune out distractions and really amplify the pleasurable parts of those experiences. But, when you know you have pleasure on tap, other pleasures are more of a nice-to-have than an existential necessity.
One other tiny correction, the resources from Rob Burbea are audio, not video. If anyone is interested in Jhanas I think they're a great resource. Rob has an incredibly intelligent and subtle approach that I think lots of people here might appreciate.
Grunching but I want to weigh in because I have over 5000 hours of meditation:
I haven't read about jhanas and obviously I have never tried to achieve them. There is a sensation though after about an hour of silent meditation that I often experience. It feels like something is slowly and warmly detonating inside my spine and spreading into my brain. It tingles, and it feels warm and good. I suspect that achieving this state has lasting positive effects on my mental state, but that is pure speculation.
Just to say that I personally don't find this state to be anywhere near as "good as sex" or whatever. I agree with the commenter who says that people may be exaggerating. But then again people would probably say the same thing about me so who am I to say?
:)
> It feels like something is slowly and warmly detonating inside my spine and spreading into my brain. It tingles, and it feels warm and good.
Now I am jealous, because when I damaged my spine by sitting too much, it hurt like hell. :D
"Grunching"??
Also, it sounds like you're in prime position to try to achieve a jhana - which does not sound to me like the sensation you describe - so why don't you give it a deliberate effort before deciding that other people are exaggerating?
I am not surprised that people experience Jhanas, and I imagine people really feel, on the inside, that they experience all kinds of spiritual things, especially in times and places where it is more social acceptable. I can also imagine people faking it for clout. Ever since I learned about Amok Syndrome, I have been increasingly convinced that most mental illness is just culturally bound conversion disorder, and a lot of people really just have anxiety(status anxiety of some form seems like it would be pretty much a human universal) and attach those feelings to whatever is a plausible explanation in their life/culture. Anecdotally I have always been shocked by the ability of the people around me to confidently proclaim that they understand their own body on a physical level, much less on vague experiences of consciousness. I don't understand my body very well at all, headaches allergies nausea aches and pains, out side of a small subset of very straight forward cause and effect issues, I have an incredibly hard time pinning down what is going on inside me. I think I am lactose intolerant, pretty sure anyways. I eat dairy all the time, and some times, under some conditions I still don't understand, it seems to really fuck me up, but some times I eat literally the exact same food, and I am fine. I mostly take lactate and have never had problems after taking it, which is what mostly convinced me, but I feel this way about almost everything. It is all just so confusing in here, and I guess I imagine that has something to do with the pattern matching slider in my brain. I think that people experience reality differently, and their level of confidence in that experience is also variable, and so it seems to me that almost any strange human experience could feel real from the inside.
Can anyone speak to meditation as a cure for depression? People talk about how if you want to get off of SSRIs, you should start meditating. Does this actually work? If so, when should you actually stop taking SSRIs? And why does it work? It's it just that you can see your mind more, and choose to suffer less, or do the jhanas cause you to have less depression, or something else?
I’d be surprised if meditation is a cure. A treatment maybe, however depression literally reduces grey matter volume. And there is no way (yet) to reverse that, only manage the effects.
I think you need to reach a super high-energy state if you want to cure depression. This can theoretically be done with meditation, but it's going to be hard. Psychedelics are a more realistic option.
Meditation can absolutely be, if not a cure, at least an enormous improvement if you're depressed. Partly this is just that a regular meditation practice is, by itself, a good way to lift your mood, but the big difference for me came from what is described as "insight" by Dekans above.
One of the key depressive symptoms is a sense of hopelessness, a feeling that nothing will ever improve. Learning to feel happy and at peace through meditation is very clear proof that your situation can get better, that it's under your control. I can't tell you what a relief it was to figure out that this feeling I'd been stuck with for years was something I could actually get rid of, with just a little time, quiet, and focus.
I don't think you need the jhanas for this, or even to actually do all that much meditation (though it helps). The big turnaround for me happened in a single hour-long Samatha class; you could probably do the same by yourself, though I think having a class of people around you does make it easier to focus.
On SSRIs, no idea. Naively, I'd suggest staying on them if you think they're helping, but I never took them myself.
The goal of trying to cure my depression would be to make it so I don't need SSRIs to treat it. SSRIs come with many frustrating side effects
"The reason other people aren’t in jhana is because they don’t believe it exists, or haven’t heard of it. These all seem like good logical explanations. "
Less sure these are good logical explanations. The tweet said 2000 years, so we should be expecting societal effects or something. Compare sex (perhaps unfair, sex has been known and important to the species for longer than 2000 years, plus biology). Why are people not having sex right now? Well, finding/convincing a willing partner can be hard, which seems a reasonable parallel to "I tried mediation but didn't stick with it." But there aren't really people who haven't heard about sex, or don't believe it feels good, even if they only have other people's reports for what it's like. Is innate sex drive enough to explain the 0.001% -> ~100% gap? Maybe, not sure.
Everyone always implicitly assumes that how much you want something is primarily a function of how good it is. I'm increasingly certain that this is simply untrue. If you think about it, there are so many examples of things people do that predictably won't make them feel good, and of things they don't do even though they will make them feel good.
I would postulate that people's desire for sex just doesn't have that much to do with sex feeling good. I do think there's some relation, but the primary thing is that just the desire itself is hard-coded.
I don't think it needs to be the primary factor for people to follow incentives. I also don't think that sex is only about the desire being hard coded.
Compare drugs. Perhaps alcohol specifically. There are very few people who don't know or believe that alcohol gets you "buzzed", even if they don't have their own experience. Why is jhana not as well known as alcohol, or other drugs? There is no hard-coded desire for drugs (beyond their pleasurability), as far as I know.
I suspect the primary reason is that the barrier of entry is very low (i.e., takes no effort to get drunk), and that's why the (under my model) relatively smaller motivation from the pleasureableness is enough to make people do it. (Though once they're addicted, you have another factor). Comparatively, barrier of entry for jhana is very high.
Anything that sounds like supernatural claims is going to get some people's hackles up. The hardcore materialists will be (1) that didn't happen, you're deceived or lying (2) if it did happen it was only because of wiggly bits in your brain, and drugs or machinery will make those same bits wiggle so it wasn't supernatural (3) if you said it was different to ordinary experiences, you're self-deceived, lying, or not having good sex
(That last really makes me laugh. "Well *I* have *great* sex, you poor loser don't know what you're talking about!" 🤣)
Your tyrannical commenter has a good point. I've never actually gotten that much out of sex. and once I finally had it, it was so disappointing I always wondered what was so great that it motivated people to do all those crazy things for it, but then I never actually managed to do it with anyone I was attracted to. Perhaps that is the difference.
I've had sex with people I was attracted to (in a couple of different ways) and with people that I wasn't particularly attracted to, and didn't find a lot of difference. The thing that's always made the difference for me is being in a long-term relationship, so you get better at it. Sex with someone I really fancied seemed too tense and high-stakes to be really good.
Sorry if this has already been brought up. Regarding the confusion over Jhanas being something religious, this might come from the fact that today's religions could have originated in Jhanas and similar experiences (although they have certainly evolved to something very different).
Our modern languages have evolved very much, we have vocabulary to distinguish between religious and non-religious things, we can say we are "meditating" instead of "praying", but thousands of years ago, I am pretty sure the languages didn't always have such, uh, subtleties. So if a person experienced the Jhanas thousands of years ago, they might not have said "I have experienced a state of consciousness that brings much pleasure", but instead "I have been one with God" or "I have seen the light" or something similar.
And when people would have asked them "how can I see the light too?", they would not have answered "you need to meditate an hour a day, keep distracting things away from you and concentrate on something pleasurable, don't expect anything but let it happen" - rather they would have said "you need to pray an hour a day, lead a simple life, keep temptations away; ask and you will be given" - see religious scripts for other examples.
So, maybe most religious founders and prophets were experiencing Jhanas or similar states, and they tried to lead other people to them, using the language that was available to them back then. I think many religious texts and, uh, "wisdoms" could have been meant as some kind of meditation advice.
Of course, modern religions are something very, very different from that, which makes it necessary for us to use concepts like "meditation", because "praying" is something different today.
Lots of these points remind me of something I can do which I think is unusual - with a small amount of effort akin to tensing a muscle, I can induce a pleasurable sensation throughout my body, on the scale of perhaps 1/4 of an orgasm. I found out my brother can do the same, and like me he'd never mentioned this ability to anyone up until then. I later mentioned it in passing to my PCP and he had no idea what I was talking about.
I can do this at any time, as much as I want. Its a (small) amount of pleasure on demand. But like the jhanas, I sometimes just forget I can/don't do it at all for days/weeks sometimes. I don't sit around doing it all day every day.
I'm pretty sure its not frisson, as I have experienced that as well and it is very different.
Can other people do this? Can everyone do it and no one talks about it for some reason? Is there a name for it? Is this a mini-jhana, or a precursor to a jhana?
Schwarzenegger once said something similar about how he feels when bodybuilding.
I can do something like this - though I wouldn't call it 1/4 of what most people experience as orgasms, it just feels like a pleasant shiver going up my spine. I eventually figured out that what I'm doing is the same thing the yoga people call mula bandha (see eg https://www.ekhartyoga.com/articles/practice/the-four-main-bandhas ). They say a lot of stuff about it channeling the life force or whatever, but I assume it's just massaging/stimulating/irritating nerves or something.
I don't think I'm doing any of the 3 things listed there. Its maybe closest to the uddiyana bandha - the effect is strongest when I trigger it while inhaling, though I can do it without breath or on the exhale.
If I had to locate the pleasure, I'd say its mostly in the chest, shoulders, and neck, though it is to some extent everywhere. No spine tingling though. Best I can describe it is as a single sustained 'note' of pleasure for as long as I can hold it, usually a few seconds though if I really focus I can keep it going longer.
The effect is also massively amplified with thc.
I also have some sort of pleasure lever I can pull on demand, though there's no sensation through my body and it's unlike tensing a muscle. The only sensation I might get is ears rumbling, but I can get that from any intense pleasure. I don't know if there's a name for it (or if I'm describing something incresibly banal that everyone can already do)
It feels like some sort of increasing {happiness, giddiness, sunny mood, bliss, laughter} when I 'push' mentally. It's not a contentedness, or love, or warthm, or relaxation. It feels acutely happy, with no reason or purpose. Intensity varies, it goes higher if I keep pushing, resistance increasing up to a soft ceiling. It takes a low effort to maintain, but the good feelings and good mood fade gradually back to baseline in 10-20s
Below ceiling is very nice but I'd put it at maybe 60% or 70% of amazing sex, depending on how amazing your amazing sex is =)
I've been above that ceiling once, and it's also not the highest pleasure I can imagine. It seems at least as good as good sex, but probably lesser than how jhana is described. (Although for me it's comfortably past the point where I'm curious what higher feels like. If I could wirehead myself and had to pick a setting, I wouldn't want to turn the dial much further than that.)
It makes me smile wide, and it feels like the smile maybe feeds back into it a little. At some point the smiling is almost involuntary.
It would have been really useful to do this to lighten a bad mood that has outlived its usefulness. But I either can't or don't really want to do it when I feel bad.
The reason is that if it starts feeling too "insincere" or "fake" then I quickly feel uncomfortable, my smile turns deeply awkward, and it also makes me feel a little stupid for added flavor.
I get the "fake" feeling if I push too hard above baseline, or if I try to start when I'm already feeling bad.
Most of the time I also forget I can do this. I've tried it around a dozen time total I think. The time I went past the ceiling, I kept thinking about that experience for a while, but I notice that didn't make me try to repeat the experience.
When I consider doing it, I feel roughly neutral about the idea. It takes little effort and it start immediately, but I have little desire to do it. If I had to pick, I've slightly more desire to get pleasure from drugs than from this, though both are usually only slightly above zero desire.
I've never tried meditation and I'm not a very spiritual person, so I'm unsure if I'm secretly doing something that was already well known in the previous millenia. Or if I just stumbled on a random internal glitch that couldn't usefuly be reproduced through a method.
There are many people who meditate for years if not decades and never experience such states. Two family members of mine, for instance, met in a zen commune in the 1970s and have been practicing daily meditation, attending retreats, etc. ever since. One of them has passed koan study and so (I am led to understand) could become a zen master if he so wished (he does not). I'm fairly confident neither of them have ever experienced the Jhanas as described here, and I'm certain that they cannot obtain such states on a regular basis. Nor do their teachers or colleagues seem to be regularly experiencing such states, or expect such states to be a regular part of their meditative practice.
Thus it seems to me that an important component of what the Jhanas are or may mean seems to be missing from this discussion. Namely, whatever the Jhanas are, they are rare and (appear to me to be) unrepresentative of meditators in general.
Getting into jhanas requires actually keeping attention on the same object with almost no distractions. If you don't practice this explicitly, you don't learn it. I've used the Waking Up app for years and didn't learn it because I wasn't instructed to. (Sam Harris doesn't consider the Jhanas to be important.) Just being generally mindful and switching your meditation object around is not the same skill.
And it also requires high valence. ImE, super intense concentration doesn't do it if it doesn't also feel nice. Likewise not something that comes automatically; you have to take explicit steps.
As I've already said, there are meditators who spend years if not decades meditating (i.e., "keeping attention on the same object with almost no distractions") without finding themselves in such states. I'm not talking about people who happened to download a Sam Harris app. I'm talking about people who have spent literal decades involved with Buddhism, often involving highly disciplined meditation routines and instruction (not "generally being mindful", whatever that means).
I am personally acquainted with some of these people, and my personal experience implies that they are in fact in the considerable majority of meditators. If your personal experience differs, great, but it verges on arrogance to assert that such people simply don't know as much about meditation as those who claim to experience the Jhanas.
The (i.e. ...) in your post doesn't make sense -- just because they've spent years meditating doesn't mean they've practiced actually keeping attention on a single object. It is entirely possible to spend years without ever learning this. I'm also not surprised that a majority of meditators never learn it.
If they have, in fact, learned it, then fine. But you didn't say this in your first post, and I'm not sure if you actually said it in this post or just assumed it because they've spent a lot of time on it. But this isn't a safe assumption, which was the entire point of my first reply. Have you actually asked them?
I used "i.e." to clarify what I intended by the term "meditation." *I.e.*, I could have also written "years if not decades meditating (that is to say, 'keeping attention on the same object with almost no distractions')". I believe this is an ordinary usage of "i.e.", see, e.g.,
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/know-your-latin-i-e-vs-e-g/
And yes, I have discussed meditation with them many times.
My point remains a simple one: many (if not most) people who practice Buddhist meditation (*i.e.,* cultivating focused attention) intensively never experience the sort of ecstatic states discussed in this post.
Doesn't the link say i.e. means "in other words", so, just saying the same thing differently? That's different from refining the thing further. Not super important ofc, but maybe useful to prevent misunderstandings down the line.
Yes, it means "that is" or "that is to say" or "in other words", i.e., it clarifies what the author intends by the term just used in the case where the reader can't be expected to know or where the term may be ambiguous or underdefined. This can absolutely involve "refining the thing further".
E.g., take the second example given on the page I linked: "self-supported bicycle touring, i.e., traveling hundreds and thousands of miles on a bike with all my camping gear and other supplies." Now "self-supported bicycle touring" could mean a lot of things. It could for example mean self-funded bicycle touring staying in hostels and bed and breakfasts. Thus the author uses the "i.e.," clause to clarify what *they* mean by "self-supported bicycle touring".
"Getting into jhanas requires actually keeping attention on the same object with almost no distractions."
This has always been a thing that I would just do, without requiring any practice. When I was little and my mom dragged me to church and I was bored out of my mind I would sometimes just stare at one point on the organ woodwork for 10+ minutes without moving my eyes at all until my entire field of vision faded from becoming neurologically accustomed to receiving the same signal for so long, like tuning out a constant background noise. When I am taking a test or playing certain video games, nothing outside of that crosses my mind. Conversely it seems pretty easy to expand my awareness to encompass all sensory modalities too. I think my childhood ADHD diagnosis was wrong because I have this fantastic ability to focus when I actually want to. Elementary school was just boring as hell so I wasn't paying attention there.
I've done lucid dreaming, along the lines of "summon your ideal sexual partner and have sex with them" and it is much less pleasurable than IRL sex. If I get too excited I wake up. That's possibly one reason why people don't do more lucid dreaming.
If I just close my eyes and try to be happy, I can make myself almost orgasmically happy in 20 seconds, without having ever studied meditation. I wonder if this is the first Jhana.
No offense, and this is probably a bad argument, but the descriptions of higher Jhana levels remind me of Scientology's OT levels, which are just sci-fi written by some charlatan, and there are lots of otherwise sane people who genuinely believe they've reached OT levels. I'll bet people who try hard enough can conform their experiences/memories of meditation to any arbitrary levels a culture expects them to reach. e.g.: Jhana 69: the sensation of 69ing Elon Musk in zero-gravity after humanity is a multiplanetary species with good AGI and no further X-risks and nothing to do but enjoy life. I'm sure somebody could go to a quiet place and close their eyes and have that fantasy in great detail and enjoy it but that wouldn't make it a level in some objective system.
I believe Jhana exists *now*, but I definitely didn't in your previous post. You've presented it in a way that essentially was maximally sketchy.
"Buddhists say..." great start if you want me to think something is wrong.
"Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. [...]"
OK, so now you are saying Jhana exists to the same extent that Enlightenment exists (i.e. it doesn't). Got it, you are trying to say Jhana does not exist. Understood.
Then you go into Nick's tweets, and his description just sounds *super* fake. Complete with the implication that he still likes sex, just not *casual* sex. I mean, what? Most people in the world don't like casual sex; they prefer some romantic bonding first (just ask most women). The average number of sexual partners is, like, 6, so most people in practice just don't have much casual sex. It's not special not to seek casual sex!
Notably absent is any claim that Nick no longer masturbates. Did anyone else catch this? I assume Nick still masturbates at least when away from sexual partner(s).
Now, OK, if the claim is that you can futz with your brain via meditation until you reach a bliss state, and there's a bajillion witnesses attesting this is true, I believe it. But that's not what you started with, and it feels weird to make an argument of the form "Buddhists say..." and then complain when people are skeptical.
Sorry I explained it so poorly. I didn't want to avoid crediting the Buddhists in case the "you're just reinventing the wheel / stealing other people's ideas" brigade showed up, and the Buddhists get very pissy if you don't mention that jhana is less good than enlightenment (I think they think of it as potentially a dangerous wireheady distraction from the real work of getting enlightened unless you promise to only use it as an enlightenment study aid).
So now, obviously, you've updated your worldview to be a little less immediately contemptuous of anything associated with Buddhism, I take it? Maybe a little more open minded about things that happen to trigger your self-imposed criteria of what's too weird to even consider?
Recommend not being a jerk to someone who's admitted to changing their mind; that just discourages them from doing so in the future!
Fair, and probably more enlightened, but I don't entirely agree here - I didn't intend to be a jerk (although I can't predict how it will have felt to the specific recipient), but rather to make a pointed reinforcement of the lesson that they (begrudgingly and defensively) describe but do not actually explicitly acknowledge having learned. And I don't fully agree with the suggestion that a clear majority of people (at least of people who like to think of themselves as smart, the demographic I think most of your commentariat are in) will take the lesson "don't change your mind" from someone saying "your prior opinion was bad and you should definitely improve it". My perception is that many people will instead learn "be more careful to think and express thoughts that aren't obviously bad". But I have no data outside my own experience and I may be wrong.
Enlightenment exists within the continuum of experiences you can conceivably get when you're able to experience visual hallucinations through meditation. I don't see why one would assume you can glitch your brain out into bliss via meditation but not into a more controllable, coherent variety of visuals one can see through drugs like LSD and DMT as is - and then travel further into those states as sobriety makes them different in nature.
It's a lot more complicated than that, I was a skeptic till I talked to someone who described it in more rational terms and I don't want to go into surreal detail but 'sober psychedelia' is how I'd sum it up.
Buddhism is more of a philosophy of that state than a religion, put into semi-mystical terms that tend to be more helpful to those experiencing that set of states than going 'well, you've meditated so much that you got brain glitches of varied helpfulness that may follow you around at least for a while'. It's more conducive to one's sanity to approach those via faith or supernatural-seeming metaphor than rationality(even if they can fit the latter in hindsight).
Are some of these jhanas simply a variant on the "flow" state, also known as being "in the zone", that happens when you're strongly focused on executing a skill to the exclusion of everything else, as commonly experienced by athletes, musicians, and video game players?
Certainly Argentus' description sounds much more like "flow" to me than what is described as jhana by others. Otherwise (having never experienced jhana), it almost sounds like they are opposites to me.
For me, "flow" is extremely intense focus that leads to a complete lack of awareness of self, but also a complete lack of awareness of sensory input that is not related to whatever the object of focus is. I don't feel hot or cold, hunger or pain, and lose all sense of self. The only awareness I have is of whatever I'm doing.
I've never experience jhana, but it sounds more "in the body" to me. As in, you'd be intensely aware of all bodily sensations, but in a detached and self-free way? But, then again, that is just the impression I got!
Well, now we know what the Scissor Statement was.
Hey, can anyone recommend a rationalist-friendly teacher for this kind of stuff (insight, concentration/jhana, etc)? I’ve looked a little, but never found someone to work with via voice chat.
A doppelgänger spotted!
Michael Taft and Shinzen Young.
>A few people have started speculating on why people are so reluctant to believe jhanas.
Well, here is one reason: People who keep going on on how jhanas are so awesome sound bit too similar to that not-exactly-your-friend who keeps telling you how awesome weed/MDMA/opening up your relationship/drinking binges/grinding your own coffee/potato diet/traveling/rock climbing/not having kids/having kids/GURPS [1] are and how you are missing out. You can smell his scorn (it usually -- but not always -- is a "he") at your square boring lifestyle choices when he feigns politely "you do you" [2] after you politely tell you are not interested (and you know the topic is going to come up again next Saturday as long as you hang out together).
[1] Non-exhaustive list of activities without any consideration of how they rank on the Oh-My-Mohs scale of blissful experiences, but I for one like to think the each pushy person is overrating the respective experience they are gushing about.
[2] Picture in your mind the aliens guy meme, but replace the text with following: "I am not saying you are missing out ... but you are missing out".
Not enjoying pushy people is exactly zero reason to disbelieve in the experiences they're pushing on you. There are plenty of non-pushy people who will tell you how much they have enjoyed various things they've done, if you can manage to ask them about it without coming across contemptuous or defensive.
Regarding lucid dreaming, I have a friend who has a problem with what's called 'maladaptive daydreaming', in a way that operated kind of like a drug or video game addiction. Basically the fantasy worlds of his mind are so much more appealing than their real life that they do it compulsively, and every hour they aren't doing it feels like wasted time.
Are all of these different states of Jhana a human universal or more a cultural conditional? Would a human doing meditative exercises on their own with no preconception arrive at the same system, up to isomorphism?
Priming is obviously a thing. Telling a human that they shall see a vision of dread Cthulhu will have an influence on the probability of that outcome.
I suspect that most schools of meditation do not even bother with control groups and double blind experiments. :-)
How many distinct states of human consciousness are there anyhow? From my mundane experience, there are quite a few (continuous) axes (joy, exhaustion, arousal, depersonalization, pain, panic, etc) and some linear combinations of them might deserve their own word, but most of them don't: "Exhausted joy mixed with a hint of arousal" does not need a label any more than the color 255*(r,g,b)=(63,255,0) needs one. ("Harlequin", btw.)
From the distinct descriptions, these meditative states seem more like the (clearly separate) doors of the Mansus in Cultist Simulator than any particular setting on the dozen state variables I would perhaps use to describe macro state of the human mind.
Off-topic:
Could substack perhaps save typed responses locally using cookies and javascript? It is not like the are adverse to the use of either technology. Typing in an external editor (emacs, once laughed at for its resource consumption) because there is a 20% chance that the substack page will get out-of-memory-killed every time I open a wikipedia tab is getting really old really fast. In the alternative, I would also take recommendations for browser plugins to accomplish that.
This is an incredibly difficult question to answer since there seem to be a variety of interpretations and recordings of experiences for jhana, but:
I have never meditated following Buddhist instructions or even heard of jhanas before the ACX post and yet have had meditative experiences similar to what Mishra describes for the 1st & 3rd forms and the 5th formless jhana, albeit not with any degree of what I would call skill. This indicates to me that at the very minimum the framing of having experiences in the particular order written is primed.
On the other hand, I would guess that the experiences themselves are mostly-but-not-quite universal based on able-bodied status and not cultural exposure, since the jhanas seem to be based on experiences that most people have: physical and emotional sense, sense of peace, sense of space, sense of reality, and of course awareness of causality existing (a favorite subject of rationalists and other statisticians or logicians, though we can tone this down to much more simple cause-and-effect we become aware of early on to better generalize the experience.)
Off-topic: I’ve never lost a comment when switching between tabs, even 3 hours later or with 150 tabs open on my phone. Time to troubleshoot your device?
"If orgasms and jhana are both very good, would orgasm during jhana be super-amazing? I tested this out with a romantic partner who is an experienced meditator. ..."
This is what I come here for - information you can't find anywhere else. Thank you Scott.
...I didn’t read any models for what the stages/forms are actually like when reading the first ACX post about them, merely speculated about the potential therapeutic usages with addiction reduction, but after reading them linked here, I have a lot of questions. I consider myself a novice meditator- I don’t follow any particular guidelines and even went back to some pre-meditating basics my partner recommended recently- yet I have had experiences similar to what Mishra describes for the first, third, and fifth jhana.
>When people say they have migraines...
I get extremely bad "stress headaches" when I am not managing my sleep/stress well. As much as a couple times a month until I figured out the triggers, and still a couple times a year. And I still don't believe 90% of the reports of "migranes".
In my experience, I get addicted to things that serve as an escape. Things that have the power to come into my brain kicking and punching out the shallow suffering or the anxious narrator in my head.
If being calm and disciplined and accepting and introspective is a pre-requisite for some intense positive experience, that doesn't work. It's like the advice to lonely men that you have to be happy being alone before you are ready for a romantic partner -- kinda defeats the purpose.
How people describe the euphoria achieved through Jhana 1 sounds similar to an effect I've been able to achieve since I was a child while trying (and obviously failing) to learn telekinesis.
I close my eyes and I build up tension in my brain (even though my brain isn't able to be tensed) and then I release it and hold (but not hold?) onto the feeling of relief and manipulate it in a way that it spreads throughout my body. Like tensing your arm without performing the act.
I imagine it works in a similar way to the body transfer illusion. I'm exploiting some dumb flaw in my brain by trying to do something it's incapable of doing and by doing that I'm able to semi-consciously tap into the behind-the-scenes part of the normal brain function of tension->release->pleasure.
But the pleasure is entirely hollow unless you ascribe meaning to it. As a kid, I thought I was tapping into something mystical and powerful, which enhanced the experience by magnitudes and filled me with adrenaline and a sense of mystery and wonder, but now it's just an experience devoid of attachment. Like mentally picturing a vibrant red. I can do that, but so what? It can't compare with a vibrant red I see in the real world with all the contexts surrounding it, like a red dress on a beautiful woman. It's pleasure devoid of context. Even the pleasure you get from drugs has context.
How would we evaluate claims of "speaking in tongues" (which may have just meant being a polyglot) and the ability to translate ostensible "tongue speaking" vis a vis the evaluation of jhanas?
The question of migraine claims came up. But there are objective ways to distinguish a migraine from some other kind of headache or from purely psychosomatic claims. People do lie about migraines or self-diagnose incorrectly.
There may also be a useful distinction between malingering and factitious disorder. There could be lying about jhanas as a specific con to get people to buy books or enroll in classes and there could be an exaggeration of ostensibly achieved states as an intentional or unintentional means of self-aggrandizement or attention seeking behavior.
I have been involved in thousands of claims of injury. There is exaggeration and sometimes outright fabrication.
In Maryland law, for example, the test for purely emotional claims of injury as been recognized by the Courts as viable when "it is capable of objective determination." What does that mean? Good question. But it certainly means more than the subjective statements of a claimant. Expert medical testimony is required. And a question that astute (in my estimation) attorneys will ask a medical expert: is there a way to tell the difference between an actor pretending to make the claims and a claimant who actual has this emotional injury.
Can we tell the difference between an actor claiming to have (is have the right verb?) jhanas and a person who has actually experienced jhanas.
Is there a way to falsify the hypothesis? It does not seem to me that has been properly investigated.
The one fMRI study is very problematic for the same reason that Clever Hans is problematic. It is a case study of 1 person! "At the time of testing, this subject was to our knowledge the only person in the US who had the requisite training in jhana who was willing to submit to the experimental protocol." The subject signaled with double tap - kind of just like Clever Hans.
Maybe it's a thing, maybe it's not. Meditation practices are not without dangers. "Zen sickness." We should not push that under the rug.
I sometimes find myself "speaking in tongues". Not real tongues like Latin or Greek or anything, but when I get very stressed or excited, I get some pressure to start speaking nonsense syllables in a speech-like stream (and when I'm alone and nobody's listening, I often do this). The particular nonsense syllables are auto-generated (ie I don't feel like I'm "choosing" them) and they sound a bit like Hebrew and Greek (two languages that I've put some effort into learning and have a good sense of what they sound like - I'd speculate that I sort of trained some area of my brain to be receptive to Hebrew/Greek-sounding syllables).
I always kind of think of this as just me being a very verbal person and when there's a lot of brain activation buzzing around some of it goes through the language center and gets it firing kind of randomly.
I have no idea why anyone would claim to be able to "translate" someone else's tongues except that they're a liar (or, more charitably, have some message they want to send and assume that the person's tongues *have to* be that message)
My wife says I talk in made up languages in sleep. I've caught myself doing it but while sleeping.
I'm unlikely to attribute it to the Holy Spirit, but who knows?
But in waked state in front of others as evidence of my deeper spiritual connection to the transcendental, no!
In a Pentecostal tent, no! As part of show to increase collections, no! As attention seeking behavior, no!
The jhana is claimed to be a transcendental experience not a physiological experience.
Perhaps tongue speaking could be trained as a quiet version of primal scream therapy. There could be placebo benefits with none of the downsides of meditation sickness which I think are documented.
But it TS could be early sign of potential stroke?
Wouldn't this also be based on a person's views on life? If one of your principle values is to make the world a better place, time spent in meditation is time you aren't spending eg. feeding the homeless.
> [In response to a claim that thousands of people claim to have reached jhana:] Thousands of people have also claimed to be able to speak to the dead, or perceive things over long distances, or hear god telling them what to do.
This is such a weird response. Yes people have claimed to be able to speak to the dead. The ones that sincerely believe it no doubt have some kind of *experience that implies they are speaking to the dead*. You can doubt that their experience is an accurate reflection of what's happening, but you can't doubt the existence of the experience itself. For jhanas, the self-report is about the experience itself, so there is no reason to doubt such self-reported experiences.
Scott -- thanks for putting so much effort into coordinating and collating this discussion; in addition to being fascinating, I think it's also adding momentum to an underserved cause area (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XhD9ooZeJcQD8QJZL/cause-exploration-prizes-jhana-meditation).
One interesting direction that I've discovered as I dug further -- I've heard it reported by Jhana practitioners that the sensation of ecstasy in Jhana ("piti") seems to be the same thing as (or at least very similar to) the experience of "frisson"/chills when listening to music, which has in turn also been connected to the euphoric states produced by ASMR. These areas have been studied a bit more than Jhana (which isn't saying much and it seems they are not well-understood). So perhaps we could get more data points by looking at the studies done on these phenomena too; for example, do we see the same patterns of neural activity? If musical frisson is euphoric, why doesn't this trigger addictive behaviors? It seems to be a similar quesiton to the one you originally posed on Jhana.
For example Salimpoor et. al. 2011 investigates frisson with PET and MRI (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21217764/), and finds activation in the Caudate preceding chills, and the NAc during the experience of peak emotional response. The discussion in that article is very interesting (but alas a bit above my pay grade):
> One explanation for this phenomenon is that it is related to enhancement of emotions. The emotions induced by music are evoked, among other things, by temporal phenomena, such as expectations, delay, tension, resolution, prediction, surprise and anticipation. Indeed, we found a temporal dissociation between distinct regions of the striatum while listening to pleasurable music. The combined psychophysiological, neurochemical and hemodynamic procedure that we used revealed that peaks of ANS activity that reflect the experience of the most intense emotional moments are associated with dopamine release in the NAcc. This region has been implicated in the euphoric component of psychostimulants such as cocaine and is highly interconnected with limbic regions that mediate emotional responses, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex. In contrast, immediately before the climax of emotional responses there was evidence for relatively greater dopamine activity in the caudate. This subregion of the striatum is interconnected with sensory, motor and associative regions of the brain and has been typically implicated in learning of stimulusresponse associations and in mediating the reinforcing qualities of rewarding stimuli such as food. Our findings indicate that a sense of emotional expectation, prediction and anticipation in response to abstract pleasure can also result in dopamine release, but primarily in the dorsal striatum. Previous studies have found that amphetamine induced dopamine release in the NAcc spreads to more dorsal regions after repeated exposure to the drug, which suggests that this area may be involved in improved predictability and anticipation of a reward. Similarly, previous studies involving rewards such as food and smoking that contain a number of contextual predicting cues (for example, odor and taste) also found dorsal striatum dopamine release. Conversely, in studies in which there were no contextual cues or experience with the drugs involved, dopamine release was largely observed in the ventral striatum. Finally, evidence from animal research also suggests that, as rewards become better predicted, the responses that initiated in the ventral regions move more dorsally in the striatum. These results are consistent with a model in which repeated exposure to rewards associated with a specific context gradually shift the response from ventral to dorsal and further suggest that contextual cues that allow prediction of a reward, in our case the sequences of tones leading up to the peak pleasure moments, may also act as reward predictors mediated via the dorsal striatum.
This result gives more detail than Hagerty et. al. 2013, which didn't do PET scanning.
This is interesting to ponder; it seems quite plausible to me that there are different mechanisms at work in the initial production of these ecstatic states from music vs. Jhana (say, perhaps the Caudate is not involved in Jhana?). Indeed this must be so at some point, since in one case you're hearing music and in another you're concentrating without music; these are two distinct activities upstream of the euphoria. But then at some point downstream they merge, at the latest in the NAc into the same pattern of brain activity. However it's not ruled out that the Caudate could be involved in Jhana too, so I suppose a PET + fMRI study would be what you want to explore this further?
> The notion that dopamine can be released in anticipation of an abstract reward (a series of tones) has important implications for understanding how music has become pleasurable. However, the precise source of the anticipation requires further investigation. A sense of anticipation may arise through one’s familiarity with the rules that underlie musical structure, such that listeners are anticipating the next note that may violate or confirm their expectations, in turn leading to emotional arousal, or alternatively it may arise through familiarity with a specific piece and knowing that a particularly pleasant section is coming up
This doesn't sound out of place referring to Jhana instead of music, from my readings.
How do people typically react to first jhana physically? Like, does it tend to make you smile? Laugh? Cry? Moan? Jump up and down? Go limp and collapse? Shake and tremble?
I'm sorry, did I do something to offend you by highlighting the personal bias based on your personal experience, while sharing my own experience that is contra-your perception of the experiences of other? If so, I don't know what did it or made you feel the need to turn my (intended to be) compassionate invitation into a jab at my reality. You can simply decline the invitation.
Are you talking to me? I don't think I mentioned you in the post.
Not at all! I see you as a facilitator in this convo and open minded to the concepts, with some attempts at pursuing them yourself as you've described. I like the way you've blended anecdotal and empirical here.
Who are you talking to, then?
Open expression to the other commenters
Maybe I was just bad at it, but even when I was lucid dreaming almost every night, I definitely wouldn't call it "infinite bliss". It was fun, but I've had equal or greater amounts of fun while awake.
The big issues IME are a) you're never *entirely* lucid, you're always kind of dozy and stupid
in the usual how-did-I-not-notice-thar way of dreams because you are ultimately asleep, and b) dreams are not actually the kind of high-fidelity a simulation as you may initially assume, and if you've practiced lucid dreaming you've gotten much better at seeing the seams. You're not actually an omnipotent god, you're just lying there in bed *picturing* all the cool things you *would* do as a god in slightly more vivid detail than while awake.
Oh, I will say that it's an excellent antidote for nightmares and other dream annoyances (although I was never particularly prone to nightmares). And everyone should try flying in dreams at least once or twice, for some reason flying is a legitimately magical feeling.
It seems a bad sign that no one would ever be able to tell a person is "enlightened" without the person talking a lot about it as if they are. Seriously, no one's ever found any behavioral correlates or special skills linked to this phenomenon? That just doesn't bode well at all.
If I've spent thousands of hours meditating over years and years, it's very much in my interest to explain why it wasn't a complete waste of time. Just saying.
Even with the jhanas... This chap roon claims it's a wonder that these things have been known about for thousands of years, and yet almost no one goes on and finds them. It's not that much of a wonder. Spending an hour or two a day for several months or more is a huge investment and for all you know it won't happen for you at all. People who *do* claim they access the jhanas don't have any discernible benefit from it other than the claims they make. So like... yeah...
If someone could invent a way to get there much quicker with much less risk, great. I'm 100% going to do it. I sense, however, that those who claim to have accessed these states would be quite sour about the notion of others getting there without a lot of masochistic discipline. Also a bad sign.
Generally one enlightened person can tell another. But Shinzen Young notes that enlightenment is high-dimensional, many-faceted. It wakes you up and frees you, which can enable you to become a better person but doesn't mean you will. I think the only solid correlate you might find is more happiness and vividness than would have been the case, good luck measuring that!
Also note that accepted Zen masters say within Rinzai Zen are few in number.
I agree it's not such a wonder jhanas and meditation in general aren't much practiced. Contemplation/meditation is a minority practice in every religion, including Buddhism.
I think most people who have accessed these states would love to see others get there faster. In fact this is a core concern within the tradition - the teacher's famous dilemma. Any meditation instruction tends to obscure as much as it clarifies, "the finger pointing at the moon" sort of thing. I agree that kind of attitude would be a very bad sign!
>Jhnana is literally worthless. What good is an eon of being immersed in bliss if when you emerge you still haven't figured out what this place is all about?. It's ignoble to seek bliss for yourself, ignoring the darkness and suffering of others. Jhnana up to the fourth is actually an obstacle.
That's epic. Basically what I believe. This is the problem with eastern religions in general; this total collapse into the mush of undifferentiated subjectivity. The real world is out there, not within us.
Also, to your point about believing what people say—why not believe what people say about prayer? That in prayer they experience a real experience of connection with God? Nothing is more human than that connection, it's virtually a cultural universal. Surely worth trusting as much as Jhana.
Wow I just experienced it after reading your article. Can definitely confirm that it is real. Exactly as described here: https://www.lionsroar.com/entering-the-jhanas/ just took half a dozen attempts, although I guess it may be pre-jhana piti as they describe it. I have been meditating on and off for basically my whole life and never knew this was a possibility. Thank you so much for brining it to my attention!
Isn't that cool? I also got a rough but real experience in my first few attempts, after reading Leigh's wonderfully clear and down-to-earth instructions. Rob Burbea has some great commentary and guidance on them as well. Great to hear of someone diving in!
@Scott The "[Original post here]" link at the top links to this page, not the original post.
Agreed. And the original post is: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana
Thank you Tim! Came to comments to see if someone had notice the same :)
The bit about boundary^2 = 0 is interesting to hear, since I was first made aware of it in algebraic topology
This was a great article and debate. jhana now back in the news, apparently people are trying to take it mainstream:
What if you could have a panic attack, but for joy?
Mindfulness is one thing. Jhāna meditation is stranger, stronger, and going mainstream.
Read in Vox: https://apple.news/AaOA40yG2SoOG3d6Hq4FJog