It’s pretty wild to me how different I interpreted the article- to me it sounds like jhana itself allowed Nick to detach from pleasure. if other folks are still enjoying it isn’t that be part of the path too?
I know this feeling so well. It hits me hardest stalking in the woods. I never knew I could be so quiet and attuned, but since I can reliably sneak up within 25yd of turkey broods... when I take the time to get into that mental state.
Maybe check out papers that Willoughby B Britton has co-authored. They explore rates of unwanted and extreme side effects for a subset of types of meditation.
With Jhana, it's pretty low. Especially if you go in with the epistemics of "I might see stuff but I don't have to believe it/act on it". Or also "Make decisions once I have come back out of the state for a while". With these caveats the worst place you can go is feeling really good as equivalent to mania, and then not feed them and come back down from the nice places.
Most people, when untrained, won't stumble into Jhana without access concentration which is a sort of "barrier" to moving the body and helps with getting still enough to access jhana. This stillness prevents acting on psychosis. Is it still psychosis if it's just a dream or an imaginative journey through your psyche? (Yes but it doesn't matter. The problem with psychosis is that you are acting it out in the concrete world and having a bad time about it)
I think the cookie analogy raises more questions than it answers. Plenty of people binge all the cookies, and plenty more develop a cookie habit if they eat them regularly. These patterns are the opposite of what people describe with jhana.
You talk about a distinction between pleaser goods and reliever goods. Perhaps "relief cookies" are used differently from "pleasure cookies".
I literally depend on a reliever good ("reliever" is British English for an asthmatic's rescue inhaler). Do you think use of any reliever good is inherently a sign of unhealthiness? I could see how someone might: why would the perfectly healthy need relief?
What's funny is that asthma went through a period of being thought of as the "archetypal psychosomatic condition", "a mild and benign condition, affecting mostly neurotics of the privileged classes":
The unpredictability and air-hunger of asthma that's not under control can be pretty crazy-making. I wouldn't claim that not getting relief for, or even acknowledgment of, an actual physical problem is the main driver of bad habits, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were still a fairly significant one.
I disagree. I think it's a matter of degree. I've been known to eat a whole bag of chips or cookies despite being very healthy otherwise. Most people find pleasurable behavior like eating cookies reinforcing. Jhana sounds completely different, which is intriguing and/or confusing.
No, I do think the cookie analogy is a questionable one. Most people don't eat tons of cookies because they are bad for you, not because they're bored of them. The other limiting factor is that my enjoyment of cookies maxes out after X cookies per hour (depending on the size of the cookie). If cookies were like Jhana I would eat a cookie and then all dessert would be less interesting for me.
Are you saying if cookies/desserts weren't bad for people then most people would eat 8 cookies/desserts per day every day for a month and then get bored of desserts? Because that's speculative. And I'm not sure it's true.
I know it's rude but I basically just don't believe this is a real thing. The emperor may or may not have clothes but at least an outside analyst (a child, traditionally) can look at him and decide one way or the other. But everyone who makes claims to be able to do the Jhana thing is just saying stuff about their internal state, without even as much potential evidence as people who spend their lives claiming to be able to do telekinesis or clairvoyance.
Don't you ever remember something as being better than it is? For me it's KFC. Talk to me when I'm walking past a KFC and I'll say "Oh man, KFC, that stuff tastes great". But if you talk to me while I'm eating KFC I'll say "Man, this stuff is just not as good as I remember".
Imagine a mental state a thousand times stronger than KFC, so that when you're in it you think "yeah this is kinda alright" and when you're out of it you consistently mistakenly remember it as the greatest experience of your life.
You seem to be disproving your idea here. You remembered KFC being great, and then you did it a second time and stopped remembering it that way. So if you do jhana twice and still believe it, it's not the KFC effect, right?
Melvin did come up with a counterexample to my point, noting it's possible in concept to be wrong because of an error of memory. Their example was imperfect in the way you describe, though. Perhaps dreaming is a better example. Some people from time to time experience total amnesia after the fact, but it's been pretty well shown that we're experiencing dreams every single night we have a reasonable amount of sleep.
Well it's a general class of examples, it's probably not true of me and KFC at this particular point in time. I think it took me a while to realise this so it might be true of past me. I picked KFC because I hoped that the experience of craving or and then being disappointed by it might be familiar to others.
I did have this feeling about Pizza Hut pan pizza for a number of years. For years I would think about Pizza Hut pan pizza as my absolute favorite and relive a hundred memories from childhood and want to recreate them for my kids, but then actually eating there I felt like it was okay, not great. But I did this a dozen times over several years, and would continue to say that Pizza Hut pan pizza was the best pizza I ever had. I think they actually changed the recipe, but there's also the possibility that my memories formed as a kid were so positive and my frame of reference was so narrow that I associated it with "best ever" and delicious, but have since had enough alternatives that it no longer feels special. Even if they also changed their recipe this is probably at least somewhat true.
I find the idea that there's a mental state that is alright but after the fact convinces you that it was actually totally awesome to be more unlikely than a mental state that is actually totally awesome. Sure we remember some things as better than they are, but the gap is never that large as far as I can tell.
But...these are people describing experiences they had *that day*, and regularly. The mistaken-memories hypothesis in that context seems prima facie very weak.
I have done the jhanas 1-4, by the way. Jhana 1 is strikingly like MDMA. I am not so in love with it as Cammarata is, and don't practice them regularly.
If I knew that an experience would be neutral in the moment, but give me great false memories, I think I would give it some positive value. I'd have to think about it to be sure.
People are often wrong about what they are internally perceiving. How could this be? Hippocampus activity - they literally change their own memory of what they perceived. Robert Sapolsky talked about this on this podcast recently (here: https://youtu.be/9YYZQAXoghc - thanks to whoever posted that link on ACT recently). If you can change your memory about externally perceived events, you can probably do it just as well for internally perceived events.
I have been around people that self-report all these amazing experiences from spiritual practices all my life, and I am pretty sure most of it is bullshit. I have done a lot of meditation and know what is possible and how easily it is to fool yourself to think that you have had a much more profound experience than you actually did. There seems to be a certain percentage of people that are really comfortable with changing their own memory of what they perceived to fit their expectations. The classic pop culture example of this is in that South Park episode when Cartman convinces himself he came up with a joke and his memory becomes more elaborate with each retelling, until he is fighting off a dragon. I know people like this, that embellish stories in which I participated until they are unrecognizable to me and, often, these happen to be the same people that self-report amazing spiritual experiences.
EDIT: I am not trying to say that jhanas are not a real and positive experience. I question claims such as it is comparable to having sex, or is 10 times better than sex, or is an experience of complete bliss and not crave-able.
In my experience, meditation is a very unattached behavior. Unless I'm already in the motion of just getting things done generally, I will not meditate. There is not only no compulsion, but lots of resistance to meditating. Very pleasant experiences from meditating are very rare (albeit significant) for me, and if they do occur it's because I patiently waited 45 minutes.
I've gotten into 1st (maybe 2nd) jhana multiple times. There definitely can be a desire to get into the 1st jhana, but the chance that I get into first jhana is near 0 if I chase that desire (or even if I try to supress that desire).
Best combo I've found for getting into jhana is:
1. Be sleepy (especially in the middle of a they day, when usually you might nap)
2. Be exposed to psychedelics. Will increase trait openness. Too much skepticism leads to not even attempting it (I certainly used to believe jhana was some woo woo non-sense).
3. Be in an emotionally neutral or happy (not excited) state of mind. Negative mind-state is jhana-killer.
4. Do Metta (loving-kindness) meditation. Idk why, but this dramatically increases the probability of entering jhana for me.
5. Let go of as much as you can, especially including meta attachments (things you identify with) you are usually unaware of. Objectify everything you consider to be self, and then just wait.
Eventually some threshold snaps and you enter into an unmistakably different mind-space. I'd bet my life a brain scan would pick up on it. It is anything but subtle.
If you listen to ajhan brahm, he says (I have no reason to think he's lying) that it is possible to get into jhana while walking. You just have to make a meditation of walking. I have tried this, but my walks are always too short (I really should just put in more effort).
Also, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, there's no privilege to your internal experiences - when you report them, you're getting involved with *language*.
Sometimes people claim we can't be wrong about the experience of pain (that it is, in fact, privileged), but who hasn't told a child "that doesn't actually hurt", that is teaching them to report their experiences in a more proper manner as well as what counts as "real pain"?
I haven't, and I never would. To say something like that is somewhat acceptable if the point is to reassure the child that the pain will go away and that it is not dangerous. It is unacceptable if the point is to actually claim that the child is not feeling pain, which they claim they are.
Surely we can test if one of the features of partaking in Jhanas is that you seek less pleasure? I mean, just look at the pleasurable activities someone did before, like having sex, or taking drugs, or having dessert, and see if they do it less after they start getting Jhanas.
I started eating a lot healthier after I first learned to jhana and was doing it a lot each day. Stopped eating desserts and mostly ate whatever the healthiest thing I could find was, because I already had enough pleasure
Later on I instituted a rule where I could eat dessert only after doing a bit of jhana, and most of the time I didn't crave it so much anymore. Tweeted about it here when I was playing with that habit https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1470535862001672194. I don't do that anymore, but I also don't eat dessert so often either
I've also stopped all recreational drugs & drinking and so did my gf from similar meditations. I still do coffee but only a half cup now because meditation increased my sensitivity
Seeing That Frees is probably my favorite general mindfulness book with a leaning towards insight over shamatha, but it's intermediate
Right Concentration is good for specifically the jhanas, or this retreat (https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/4496/) by the same author as Seeing That Frees . I don't know beginner books though, I kind of just stumbled my way through various resources for the first couple years
For anyone paying attention, this guy is a complete fraud and narcissist, he dated a roommate of mine years ago and the only thing he loves more than himself and juggling is constant attention. When he came to our house he’d constantly be talking about how he only eats cucumber and chicken. He’s incredibly picky and neurotic, he’s never had trouble with food he’s was totally fit back then and talked at length about his disdain for sugar.
I don’t know why he lies like this, why he feels compelled to shill stuff for attention. But facts are facts, stop selling for once man it’s really sad. You’re valuable just being yourself you don’t always need some thing to attach to just because you’re super short and weird looking.
Please don't write like this; I suppose the first paragraph can be something that's necessary to write down in some occasions, but the second paragraph is unnecessarily mean and and totally unsuitable here.
The first part of this is potentially useful context. As for the second part, you completely undermined your own credibility as "helpful person sharing important social info" by going after the dude for his looks.
That very much depends on the meditators goals. Peace, bliss, stress reduction, or lastly, replicating Buddha's awakening. There's scads of guidebooks for all those purposes. But if you are aimed at the last one, you'll need more than a guide manual, you'll definitely need an authentic teacher.
Responding to shlomo alon, there's a nice, very short book meant to convey some basics of jhana (zen), published many years ago but still in print: "Zen Mind: Beginner's Mind." It records some talks by Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen master who came to the US about 1960 and died a decade later.
I had the good fortune to meet one of his first generation disciples in Oregon about forty years ago. A most impressive individual. I sometimes wonder where she is now.
I've had similar post-jhana - cut out drinking, started regular exercise, much less desire to go out to events, low cravings, just started to do details right. The sensory clarity and wakefulness of meditation makes a lot of your choices more purposeful - like alcohol is much less pleasant because I am very keenly aware of the negative impact to my body in a way that was kinda background before
I lived next to a chicken salad place so I ate that for most meals with random variants to my salad each time. I’m sure it wasn’t actually the most healthy thing I could have done, but it was reasonably easy and quick
There is no magick foods, nor 'this one weird trick.' Outside of junk food, regular foods are neither better nor worse than others. Just eat what you like and stay within reasonable boundaries of your budget and availability, and a reasonable mix of fruits, vegetables, meats, starch ... stuff a boomer granny would recognize.
Boomers after all have the greatest life span of all time.
At what age did you make these changes? Such life changes are usual around certain ages, especially turning 30 and turning 40, and certain life events, like a death in the family or a health scare.
Basically I think if you were younger than 27 or older than 45, and didn't have any major life events, then I'm inclined to think the meditation really did something for you. Otherwise your changes are hard to distinguish from the background rate.
Practicing introspection and meditation is part of taking life more deliberately - making more considered choices, etc. The causation could go one way (meditation caused deliberation) or the other (deliberation caused meditatation) or it could all be part of a general shift in lifestyle.
(Which is to say - I agree this happens to people generally as they get older, I don't think that diminishes the effect though, maybe just your framing of it)
"I know it's rude but I basically just don't believe this is a real thing."
Why should I believe you? You're just reporting your internal state without any evidence.
Trying to put this objection more seriously: whether we believe people or not depends on some combination of how much we trust them, and our priors. If you say you're hungry, I have no reason to disbelieve you, so I believe you without evidence. If you say you saw ball lightning, that's pretty weird, but I know and trust you, and some other people who don't really seem like liars also claim to have seen this, so maybe I believe you. If you say you saw Dracula, that's so weird that it's hard to believe - although maybe since I've known you a long time and I've never seen any evidence you're a liar, if you insisted really really hard I would believe you had a real hallucination, or saw a fraudster in a vampire costume or something.
Thousands of people claim to have reached jhanas, including ~5-10 who I personally know and trust. Usually this would be enough evidence for something, unless it's really implausible. Is it? To me a natural point of comparison is extreme negative states, like panic attacks, migraines, or cluster headaches. There are a bunch of these, and we also have no evidence they exist besides people's self-report, but we believe in them (well. I assume someone has measured these with an EEG or something, but we believed in them even before that happened). Given that those exist, I don't really see a reason to have such a strong prior against extreme pleasure states that I doubt a bunch of people who report having them.
I'm not really interested in the "but is it a hallucination?" question because as far as I can tell a consistent hallucination of an internal state *is* an internal state, although I suppose maybe they could just have, I don't know, had a good mood and then talked it up a lot in their head / to others. Seems implausible though.
Panic attacks are a great analogy. I had panic disorder for a year or so in 2016 after getting stressed out running startups. They built up in the same exponential feedback loop that jhanas do. Jhanas are actually scary the first couple times you do it, until you learn to let go and allow the exponent to grow.
Incidentally, the way I got over panic disorder after ~8mo of being afraid of it and avoiding anxious situations was to sit and cause panic attacks until I had equanimity with them. Not so different than how one learns to accept the growth of jhana as it cultivates
* Some psychiatrists (e.g., Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford Medical School) use hypnosis to treat conditions like panic disorder.
* Some people can learn to self-hypnotize.
Would there be a significant difference between the traditional meditative account of jhanas vs. an account that describes them as the result of a particular practice of self-hypnosis?
The view that self-hypnosis and meditation are very similar and perhaps sometimes identical is itself interesting.
I see this view as providing another angle on Scott's observation that "consistent hallucination of an internal state *is* an internal state." I agree with this perspective but want to push it in the direction of reproducibility. I see hypnosis, which has been fairly well studied clinically, e.g., by Spiegel, as providing one avenue for that investigation.
Hi, I have a bunch of questions borne of curiosity: I wonder if you can comment on these?
I've read a few accounts of people who claimed something similar, many of whom also had philosophical and / or religious explanations or frameworks for them (advaita, Buddhist, Hindu, Kashmiri shaivist, kundalini). A few things some of them have attested I wonder if you experienced?
1. Golden light. A few accounts of these bliss states I've read described them as being accompanied by golden light suffusing everything. In those cases, I think the experiencer was not claiming literal visible light, but rather an unusual mental experience akin to sight that made everything seem to be suffused with golden light layered on top of normal vision.
2. Experiences and sensations beginning in the spine and feeling like they rose up sometimes in the form of a small solid shaft to the brain. This is a classic and well-known aspect of kundalini accounts of bliss, of course.
3. Extreme bliss starting out as being uncomfortable. In the kundalini accounts eventually the rising of the "kundalini" into the brain makes this seem to settle down. Until it does, some people report involuntary motions, noises, and other mildly unpleasant experiences mixed in. Some report feeling very energetic and keyed up.
4. Transition from energetic / orgasmic experience to deep peace. In some accounts, bliss experiences seem to start out as energetic / downright uncomfortable (in one account that I'm thinking of the experiencer felt compelled to walk for hours in the middle of the night because he couldn't or didn't want to sleep and he felt he had so much energy) but eventually mellow into an even more pleasant deep feeling of peace. In one account I'm thinking of, this peaceful state marked when the golden light became visible, or perhaps more visible. In at least some of the accounts, reaching this peace state was necessary to make the experience a kind of background constant. Just one experiencer I've read claimed this was like an ascending spiral staircase (not his metaphor) where after the peaceful phase would come an even more intense energetic phase, then an even deeper peaceful phase, and so on, through at least a couple of iterations.
5. Making the experience constant -- more than one experiencer talked about upon transitioning to experiencing the bliss as deep peace, it was possible to make it constant.
6. Increased compassion -- I believe more than one experiencer described an outcome of these bliss experiences as a deep feeling of love for everyone.
I've been fascinated by these kinds of accounts for some time, so I wonder if you have any comment on these related experiences? Thanks for taking the time to relate your experiences!
You did not ask me here, but since I have some experiences in the field, let me issue a friendly warning if you desire to do meditation & other types of exercises aimed at what in Eastern traditions is called Kundalini. There are lots of stories on the web concerning reactive psychosis or disability or both. In short: That way may easily lead to a future in and out of psychiatric wards, and a life on Special Supplementary Income if you live in the US.
Being under the round-the-clock guidance of someone who knows what can happen to you, and can help you find grounding exercises, may tide you through. But then again it might not. In any case it often takes time. Lots of time.
You will find interesting life stories if you search the many Kundalini Warning websites. (Some - not all - of the webistes have a somewhat irritating Christian agenda, but disregard that. )
Fair enough. For what it's worth my own modest attempts to achieve the same state are not kundalini meditation; I've only read about it and tried a few of the very basic breathing exercises.
My own interests lie mainly in the self-inquiry method, which I'm not sure even qualifies as a meditative technique. But practitioners of various methods have all written quite similarly about some remarkable aspects of what sounds like a very similar bliss state, so I was curious to see if it matched up in this case, too.
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.
There are all sorts of cultural or personal reasons to make such claims regardless of truth, just as there are religious and social incentives to claim to be able to experience Jhanas.
Most simply, the people making these claims get to receive your impressed attention at their unusual level of mental achievement, without having to actually do anything difficult to show how impressive their brains are.
"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. "
I assume some large fraction of these people are schizo-spectrum and honestly reporting their experience. As for the rest, their claims are so absurd by my current understanding of physics that it overwhelms however many eyewitness reports there are.
If you seriously believe that is your dead friend and not a figment of your imagination - Have you ever asked your dead friend to provide you with some information you could not otherwise have had? Such as "I hid this love letter from an ex in my Organic Chemistry textbook, which is in a box in the basement," or something like that? Why or why not?
Nah, he doesn’t do stuff like that. Too proud, and if he had a good investment idea he’d keep it to himself. He’s such a prick that way.
Seriously though.
He is a hologram of everything I have learned and observed of him, and because I valued his intelligence and loved his presence, and hated his arrogance I keep him around as best I can to share some chat with him.
On another note, why is it everyone assumes that the spirits of dead people are omniscient? Why should they be?
Of the thousands of people who claim they can speak to the dead, or talk to God, or etc., it’s reasonable to assume at least some of them genuinely *believe* what they’re claiming.
It’s also reasonable to assume that at least some people claiming to have reached jhana genuinely believe they have.
Is there a meaningful difference between experiencing bliss and believing yourself to be experiencing bliss?
Absolutely. There is just a fact of the matter as to whether there is a blissful experience. Qualia are a real part of the world and there are objective facts about them just as much as there are about wave-functions.
But yes, it's harder to be mistaken. So I'm fairly persuaded. It's possible but relatively unlikely given that this isn't just coming from monks who have been indoctrinated for years.
> Is there a meaningful difference between experiencing bliss and believing yourself to be experiencing bliss?
Given all the other experiences people can be mistaken about, sure? In some sense conscious experience itself might be illusory, so it doesn't seem difficult to conceptualize belief in an experience and "having" the experience as being only somewhat coupled.
It seems there could, and almost certainly would, be a difference in whether other people could be taught to experience it as well. If someone genuinely misunderstands why they feel a way they do, they can't share it with others and their guidance will be pretty meaningless.
A memory, if it’s real, points to something external and objective. An emotional state, like bliss, is an entirely internal, subjective phenomenon. So I’m not seeing the analogy here.
Jhana states have been written and talked about for a very long time in the whole history of Buddhism. Modern meditators in western societies are definitely not the central instance of people who have experienced jhanas. If you are standing inside of a Buddhist tradition, they are not remarkable or brag-worthy.
By way of analogy, think of the sometimes exceptional physical and mental states that long-distance runners attain (and some get attached to). We don't question these experiences because long-distance running is a pretty "normal" activity in western societies -- starting with school sports, etc. Spending months meditating (including going on long retreats) is done more now in those same societies than it was twenty years ago, but it's not considered "normal" in the way long distance running is. (This is just an analogy, right? I'm not saying long distance running produces jhana states.)
I think the skepticism is more about lack of exposure to non-mainstream-for-that-society experiences. I suspect in cultures that have long had large numbers of Buddhist practitioners that there isn't so much doubt about whether jhanas are a real thing people experience, as opposed to something they lie about for fame or status. People on Twitter comparing jhana states to the best sex they've ever had is maybe not so illuminating about how jhanas are situated inside the practices and traditions in which they developed.
We have done a lot to commodify Buddhism in the West and I am wary of our tendency to pluck out the pieces of this very long and rich tradition and elevate those pieces without awareness of how they fit with the more important and central parts of the teachings. A lot of misunderstanding has followed from that.
Talking to god or dead people seems to me like a FAR more impressive claim than having reached jhana. Anyone holding all of these as equivalently weird if true, ought to reassess in my opinon.
I guess your line of thinking would be that claims of jhana work better than claims of necromancy for getting attention from certain communities (such as this one), and so the weirdness of the claim isn't so relevant.
I think there are many possible alternative explanations, some more likely than others:
* Jhana is a state that most people can reach after a few months of training, and it's a state of no-strings-attached perfect bliss. The reason every human on Earth is not immersed in Jhana right now is, uh, reasons.
* Some rare individuals possess an inborn ability to enter jhana after a period of training -- similarly to how some people can run extremely fast or factor large numbers in their heads or whatever. For those people, jhana training unlocks their true potential. For the rest of us, it does nothing.
* Meditation can indeed lead to a reasonably pleasurable state, as can many other pursuits. However, meditation is currently all the rage in the zeitgeist, and thus all those who enter this pleasurable state tend to exaggerate when reporting it, consciously or unconsciously.
* The world is full of people who want to trick you into believing false things, either for money or for the lulz. Many gullible people go along with these tricksters willingly.
* Some combination of the above, or some additional unknown factor not listed here.
The smart thing to do would be to devise a test that could help us distinguish among these hypotheses (and to devise new ones), and to do so with better rigor than relying on self-reports from a self-selected group of people. The comfortable and arguably more pleasurable thing to do is to endorse the fist explanation that makes you feel good. I suppose choosing the correct approach here is a kind of Zen.
>The reason every human on Earth is not immersed in Jhana right now is, uh, reasons.
Probably the same reason we aren't all doing heroin, including those who have previously used. Because most humans aren't single-mindedly focused on maximizing pleasure, we're much more complex than that.
There's a huge difference though in terms of long-term consequences. Opiates are very addictive and reliably destroy their user's life and the high gets worse the more you use it. Jhanas are (reportedly) the opposite of that.
Yes, but being in Jhana still requires the person to be in a heightened state of concentration without being engaged in their regular activities. I contend that most people care about their day-to-day life beyond just pleasure and would not trade the meaning and purpose they get from it in order to become some static bliss machine. To put it bluntly I don't think wireheading will ever take hold of a significant majority of the population. Some people for sure, but not everyone or even most everyone.
I think Nick C's claims in the comments that this basically eliminates harmful rec drug use, minimizes caffiene use by sensitizing you to stimulants and also functions as a diet aid should modify this a little. If all those claims are true, the activity would be much more profitable and would carry more weight than pleasure alone.
Posit a heroin-analogue with no addictiveness, positive psychological outcomes, and no ill effects on health. *That's* the comparison here. It would be a Big Deal.
If opiates were legal, free, unlimited supply, lacking any negative side effects whatsoever, and high-status, I think instead of 3% of Americans using them it'd be 97%
>The reason every human on Earth is not immersed in Jhana right now is, uh, reasons.
You're presumably a human - hearing about this state are you going to practice meditation for 6 months+ to see if you can get this state?
(i encourage you too, but recognize for a fair amount of people, the answer would be "no". So - there's your first reason)
Second reason - Nick is actually a bit unique in how much he emphasizes jhana. Most dharma people know about it but don't emphasize them so much. They're important in buddhism but also recognized as a bit of a potential distraction from the stuff 'further in' into buddhism that is better. Buddha studied with teachers of jhana before he had his enlightenment.
Nick is kind of like a singer who particularly likes a specific vocal warmup and talks about the benefits of that warmup a lot - most singers know about it but it's not their main focus
I think it may be less of a "jhanas are a distraction" and more "the desire/craving for jhanas can be a distraction", but I'm not speaking from experience here.
Hello! I'm a meditator who has been working on developing the ability to get into jhana reliably for about the last year and a half. While I have been able to hit the edges of it and gotten into first jhana (in the sense described in the book Right Concentration) on at least a dozen occasions, I don't have reliable access to it.
If you're concerned about evidence, there has already been some small amount of scientific study of the jhanas, and more research that is currently underway. For example, Leigh Brasington, the author of Right Concentration, had EEG and fMRI measurements taken while he went through the 8 jhanas, and you can read the paper here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23738149/
There are a few reasons why it is not more common:
1) While some people are able to get there in just a few months, that is fairly rare. You have to get to access concentration, which is a fairly deep state of concentration which for most people requires hours upon hours of sitting and practice.
2) It's possible to do it wrong and dig yourself into a whole. To reach jhana, you have to drop conceptualization. It's easy to think you're dropping conceptualization while instead piling on more layers. Trying to push to make something happen makes it not happen. Wanting to get into jhana (in the moment, in the wrong way) can stop jhana from arising.
3) Most people who teach mindfulness to the masses are not teaching the kind of meditation that leads to jhana. They are teaching one to remain aware, centered, in the moment, etc., which can help, but don't lead to jhana on their own. You have to develop single-pointed concentration in order to enter jhana, and most mindfulness teachers don't teach you how to do it. The techniques to enter jhana are usually only studied and practiced by the kinds of meditators who spend hundreds of hours per year in their sitting practice.
4) The route into jhana can be quite bumpy. You have to sit through hours and hours of boredom with nothing seeming to happen, and often physical discomfort in the body. Once you get past that, developing concentration often causes various psychological issues and traumas to arise--things that may be bugging an individual under the surface, but which they often push out of conscious awareness. It's actually an opportunity to face your emotional struggles and get some substantial level of healing with regard to the underlying problems, but it can be frightening, scary, and potentially destabilizing if too much comes up at once.
For the benefit of those of us just starting out, can you write more about your process / what resources you've used / what a typical sit looked like at 0 mo., 3 mo. etc. in detail somewhere?
I can attain to various jhanas and have talked with hundreds if not thousands of people who can also, have lost track at this point, as 25+ years of those conversations.
Yes, jhanas are a thing.
Yes, I totally get why people don't believe this, as I also didn't believe in lots of things that I hadn't experienced until I had experienced them, so validating that skepticism as being normal and natural. I realize that smacks a bit of paradigmatic developmentalism, and, yeah, it basically is, and we need to find ways to deal with that also, as it is weird to be on the side of the fence that is labeled as less developed, and weird to be on the side of the fence that might be thought of as more developed, as comparison creates internal judgement and weird social dynamics, and we need to work to help deal with the social awkwardness of that as well, such that people apply more mature psychological coping mechanisms across those splits rather than the immature ones (denial, splitting, dismissal/devaluing, etc.). This is a huge topic for all of these sorts of experiences and abilities.
Yes, there is a wide range of what appears to be intrinsic ability to cultivate jhanas, with some getting into them easily/spontaneously with little effort, and some trying for years without that much effect, and everything in between. The tails are long on both the low and high ends. The range is so wide and striking that I think there has to be some genetic/receptor/something-like-that component to it, and have discussed how to study this with someone who does genetics at Johns Hopkins, so, if anyone wants to help fund that, let me know, as it won't be cheap, but could be quite profound in its implications.
Yes, there is real research on jhanas, such as the Brasington paper above, and hopefully soon research I have been involved in at Harvard/McLean/Martinos doing jhanas in EEG and fMRI with a number of other accomplished practitioners. I can't talk about the results of that yet beyond the fact that you can see real, reproducible changes in measurements when one shifts through the jhanas. Stay tuned, as that study is still in progress, and could benefit from more funding for data analysis, so let me know if you can help fund that. Apologies for the shameless plug here, but hopefully this is a group that appreciates science.
Yes, there are risks to attempting this, as one may easily drift into insight stages, which have their highs, lows, and weirds to them in a predictable pattern, though these can also, ultimately, lead to lasting and beneficial upgrades to conscious experience.
Yes, jhanas can be mind-bogglingly awesome, and, yes, they are weirdly non-habit forming, sort of, though there are people that, from an insight point of view, keep cultivating them rather than move on to what are called stages of awakening and other names, as, once the mind finds those tracks, it gets easier and easier to just have the mind go down them when one sits down on the cushion, lays down, or inclines to them in some other conducive situation.
Yes, they can producing losing psychological benefits, though, as mentioned above, the path to get to them can also bring up a lot of psychological stuff.
Yes, they can also produce some very weird experiences often referred to as "the powers", which, regardless of their "validity" from some external point of view, experientially can be quite potent and compelling, amazing and destabilizing, healing and traumatic. That is a large and complex topic. Why they produce powers experiences in some and not in others is not well understood. This is part of the risks and benefits that it would be good to have reliable numbers on so people can go in fully informed of the possibilities.
Regarding all of the above funding requests: these are all for other talented academic researchers, not a cent for me, just FYI.
Thanks, Scott, for addressing this topic, as its mental health implications could be huge if better appreciated by the clinical, scientific, and mental health mainstreams.
Yes, people are studying this, and the Brasington paper mentioned above is a good one, and I have been involved with a study at Harvard/MGH/Martinos doing jhanas measured by 7T fMRI and EEG, as well as biometrics and elaborate phenomenology, and what I can say at this time is that you can see obvious changes in the brain in various jhanas, and that that study could benefit from more funding for more data analysis, as it is very complicated to sort all this out, and there is tons of data, so let me know if you can help fund that, and I can put you in touch with them.
Yes, jhanas are a funny mix of non-habit forming, and, on the other hand, when the brain discovers those tracks, it tends to follow them in contemplative situations, which, from an insight/awakening point of view might be skillful or distracting, long discussion, with good points on both sides and in between.
Yes, there are other people researching these topics, such as the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium https://theeprc.org, which could use some funding for a very direct jhana study and a number related to it: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/I7uiRSF2S/fund-me?v=M6pP_Tb7W6 So, if people like good data from which to make informed decisions, please help support that study. Of note, I get zero funds from any of these worthy projects, just FYI.
"The reason every human on Earth is not immersed in Jhana right now is, uh, reasons."
There are many things otherwise reasonably free and healthy people could do to increase their wellbeing, longevity, reproductive fitness, social status, power and so on, assuming they put in the effort of practicing diligently two to three hours a day for at least several months, perhaps several years (or a similar level of effort in say, eating or networking).
Still, we see a lot of (most?) people doing anything but that. Because, uh, reasons.
Also, a significant percentage of people really do have to choose one or perhaps two of those things. We don't have all the time for everything at the same time, forever. So perhaps most people simply don't want to meditate for several hours a day in order to maybe gain some benefits, but instead want to chase power or mating partners.
That seems to imply that Jhana is not nearly as beneficial as explained, though. That it is a potential substitute for sex or any worldly pleasure because it's so great is not the same as eating well and feeling somewhat better.
I think it's more that people who eat terribly and are unfit have a very poor sense of just how terrible their lives are compared to healthy people. Eating well isn't a 'somewhat better' thing. I used to never exercise and ate garbage all the time. The difference in my life is night and day, radically improved happiness. But it took me ages to actually work at it even though, objectively, it costs me approx. 1hr of my life per day.
The "uh, reasons" part is pretty simple. Meditation is hard.
I believe jhana states exist, although I have never experienced one. I am attempting to introduce meditation into my life. I was successful for about a month and then fell off the wagon. *Even though* I always feel better *after* a meditation session (relaxed, less anxious, etc), the beginning and middle parts are difficult and boring and my mind fights me the whole time. It also takes time and I am busy so more often than not I skip the session.
People don't meditate for similar reasons to why people don't exercise. It's hard and it takes time to see results.
Plenty of people exercise; in fact, exercise is a normal part of day-to-day life in most places. There are entire market segments devoted to facilitating exercise. Most importantly, perhaps, the positive effects of exercise are readily observable, quantifiable, and (due to the sheer number of people who practice it) pretty much undeniable.
None of that is true of jhanas. Some of this is true of meditation in general; but, as I said above, "regular meditation has some positive health benefits" is a much weaker claim than "with 6 months worth of training you can have no-strings-attached bliss on tap".
I don't think anyone reputable guarantees a jhana within six months.
Do you know of people who talk about stuff like the "runner's high"? That seems more comparable. Plenty of people exercise, yes, but far fewer experience something like that. I've felt something similar while cycling long distances (>50 mi in a day) but when I first started exercising I kinda thought it was bullshit.
Also, plenty of people *know* exercise is good, and that they should do it, but simply... Don't. Because it's hard.
I've experienced "runner's high" on a few occasions, but it doesn't feel even remotely as good as Scott makes jhana out to be. Also, it takes quite a lot of hard, painful physical work to achieve that state; again, contrary to Scott's descriptions of jhana.
"I'm not really interested in the "but is it a hallucination?" question because as far as I can tell a consistent hallucination of an internal state *is* an internal state"
I disagree actually. I think it's possible for people to fool themselves about internal states. My favorite example is time perception. You can meditate or take drugs in ways that make you think that your clock speed has gone up and your subjective experience of your subjective experience of time is slowed down. But your actual subjective experience of time isn't much faster clock speeds (as could be evidenced by trying to do difficult computational tasks in those stats).
Similarly people can have emotions that aren't raised to the level of conscious awareness, or even consistently reject that they're feeling certain emotions (e.g. jealousy).
The ability to perform computations faster would be objective rather than subjective. I do agree though that is possible to convince yourself that you're experiencing something without actually experiencing that.
If yourself is your conscious self it actually makes a lot of sense: the conscience can be seen as an a-posteriori interpretation of your decisions and state of mind (maybe it's now the prevalent mmodel for conscience in neuroscience), with the goal to provide a sequential and consistent summary easier to remember and present to other.
So yes, there could indeed be a very big difference in mental state, even if the compressed/sequential/consistent edited version you remember is the same, or very similar. Kind of same effect as memory erasing drug: Is a drug that prevent formation of any long term memory and block muscles a good anesthetic ? Even if you actually are in tremendous pain during your operation? I think this is not a rhetorical question, AFAIR, such things exists and were used as anesthetics....
Now a much more serious question: is there a way to remove the mental image of Paul Finch from American Pie 2 from my mind after reading about Jhana? ;-p
I think I agree with you but I'm drawing the line between experience and reality at a different place - I would argue that the "subjective experience of time slowed down" person is truly hallucinating the subjective experience of time going very slowly, but that this doesn't correspond to the objective fact of them having a faster reaction time.
Hmm do you believe this about sense perception? I remember reading a Quora article about someone who didn't have a sense of smell and didn't realize this until they were like 15. I think if someone is congenitally anosmic, and *think* they can smell, it is more likely that they genuinely don't have the experience of smelling and deluded themselves, rather than that their nose can't smell but they've hallucinated all the experiences that go with smell.
Likewise, I expect people who are born colorblind without knowing that they're colorblind to not dream in different colors for the relevant cones.
Will you at least agree that this is an empirical question? Ie, for situations where you have an experience that doesn't correspond to objective reality, there's a meaningful difference between
a) there's a real experience that corresponds to my beliefs, but my experience does not correspond to reality?
b) there's no real experience that corresponds to my beliefs, but I might have mistakenly thought that I had those experiences.
EDIT: I agree that in most circumstances trusting them about internal experiences is a reasonable thing to do.
It seems pretty clear a lot of people with Covid don't realize they lost the sense of smell either - that's why they give one-star reviews of scented candles.
I test-sniff my large can of Earl Grey when I want to check.
In my (made-up) definitions, a version that's consistent with Scott's story is *possible* (people are right about their experiences but are wrong about the objective correlates of that experience). E.g. people can be physically unable to smell things but are psychologically able to hallucinate those experiences.
I'm just saying that it's more plausible that in many of those cases, people are wrong about those experiences and *did not* hallucinate the relevant experiences, rather than correctly think they smelled the relevant things but just didn't have the actual smells pass through their nose.
I feel like a lot of the objections here follow the line of reasoning, "This is subjective, not objective experience. Therefore I am discounting it." Others point out that, "Because it's subjective, it's not falsifiable. Therefore, it should be discounted or ignored." I'm skeptical of this epistemological approach, because I think it risks missing a lot of important things.
I'm also constrained in my professional scientific work, in that I can't take this approach to subjective experience. I work in clinical trials, and right now we're working on pain from toxicities related to cancer treatments (not the cancer itself). Subjective reporting is unavoidable. We call them 'patient reported outcomes', and we do a lot of work to ensure we can take subjective experiences and apply a statistical model to them. But what we can't do it ignore these subjective experiences, because in the end that's the meaningful endpoint we're trying to target.
Nobody goes to their doctor saying, "Help me get my LFTs under control!" or "I'm concerned about my hypertriglyceridemia". Sometimes they come in because of a weird bump, but if that bump isn't bothering them they might put it off. Instead, they might complain about severe pain every time they pee, or fatigue doing simple chores, etc. Subjective things, for which they require medical intervention. They'll know the intervention worked, when the subjective complain goes away.
If we get their hypertension under control, we hope the headaches go away. But if the headaches remain the patient doesn't care that we can point to their blood pressure measurement and say, "look, you got better!" They care about their subjective experience. All those objective measures are surrogate endpoints. From the patients' perspective, the REAL problem is the subjective one, and the 'pretend' problem is the thing we can objectively measure. Who cares what the ECG readout says if I still can't walk without feeling weakness in my chest?
So in our clinical trials, we're often forced to measure and rely upon subjectively-reported outcomes. Yes, we do the statistics on large populations. We then hope that statistical evidence can be applied to specific instances. Because in the end, we're developing these treatments to help patients live better, and that's something only they can tell us if we've succeeded or not.
I'm wary of a knee-jerk reaction against subjective experience as being something that can be dismissed out of hand. The things that matter most in life are very often subjectively experienced. If the most important observations in life don't fit into the way I prefer to analyze the world, that doesn't mean I should ignore them. It means I should be wary of the limits of my epistemology.
I think that you are cutting out a bit of importance here in terms of "what causes belief". If I say I'm hungry, you believe me because you trust me that much, because you know me, and *also very much and more than the others because what I'm reporting isn't weird or unusual". But reports of Jhanas are weird and unusual; they are an incredibly niche claim made by an impossibly small amount of people (thousands isn't a lot).
To put it another way, there are many more people who claim they are a network of cooperating characters, like an ensemble cast on a sitcom, than claim they have experienced Jhanas.
I don't think this by any means disproves the jhana thing - like maybe you really can think yourself into a happiness state that also disables all your evo-psych reasons to want to eat candy, etc. It could be! I can't disprove it! But no internal-state thing can be disproven; generalizing your argument as presented pretty much bans anyone from doubting any claim of internal state for any reason, full stop. It's a big ask; it deserves to be treated like one if for no other reason than the fact that if followed it would create a bad-actor dishonesty paradise.
I think my thinking comes down to something like this: I think you are right to push back on "There's no possible way this is true" type of claims (since it is possible that some weird neuron stuff is happening). But I think you are wrong to pretend that there's no reason to distrust completely unverified claims of mental specialness and enlightenment, which is why I brought up DiD-TikTok people above; many thousands of people claim that in ways most find to be clearly-false attention seeking. Like all internal-state stuff, it's unfalsifiable - but it's also not something we give credibility to *simply because a lot of people make the claim*.
Again, this might not be those; it might be a real sort of neuron-hacky type of thing we don't understand really well that might really happen. But I don't think you can (fairly) pretend like there isn't anything to pattern-match to here; there's enough hobbyist-DiD stuff floating around that it's not entirely weird to go "this seems a lot like that".
This seems on target to me. But I think there is a mistake being made throughout this discussion. Jhana is a practice, not an achievement. For those who find the practice productive, it yields good results in an sort of ascending fashion (with plateaus). Buddhist ideology pictures a type of end-result ("enlightenment"), but those who engage in the practice rarely claim to have achieved enlightenment (although many may feel they have reached the state it refers to for a short period).
I'd also add that the number of people who claim to have garnered psychological gains from jhana number many, many millions, not thousands. This is a set of practies with a two thousand year history that dominated the most populous portions of the world (South, Southeast, and East Asia) for a millennium. The populations of those parts of the world through most of recorded history would find this conversation to be pretty funny--maybe a bit like us listening to a group of English aristocrats in 1700 trade ideas about whether people who say, "Vigorous exercise makes you feel better" are deluded fools or con artists.
I think you're moving the goalposts. The claim under discussion is not, "jhana is a meditative practice that can improve your mood, enhance focus, and provide other relatively minor psychological gains". Rather, the claim is, "jhana is a technique that can reliably deliver addiction-free pure bliss". By your exercise analogy, the second claim is more akin to saying, "vigorous exercise will give you the power to leap over tall mountains at will".
Oh. I was not responding to the claim you are citing. I was responding to Drethelin's, "I basically just don't believe this is a real thing." Thats what this substring grows out of.
Actually, the ultimate claim of jhana is that it can free you from the cycle of rebirth that entails only suffering. I don't believe in the cycle of rebirth, and I think Buddhists make a category error when they claim all existence in the phenomenal world is ultimately suffering. I wouldn't however, be skeptical about individuals who report extemely high levels of contentment through jhana practice, unless they are trying to sell me prayer beads, etc. I did enough zazen when I was young half a century ago to know that it can generate very strong effects on consciousness and affect.
"it is possible that some weird neuron stuff is happening"
Clearly, we should put people into some brain-scanning machine and have them achieve this state in them. If all of a sudden certain parts associated with pleasure lit up like fireworks, then that will go a long way towards convincing me. If they report supreme bliss without very strong neuro-correlates, than that's what I would in fact expect.
I question the psychological credibility of "this is ten to a hundred times better than sex and I can achieve it at will, but I only do it occasionally". Does this seem to match *any* other activity we know about?
Also, ten to a hundred times is at the *same* time both pretty non-specific (it's an order of magnitude, after all) *and* surprisingly numerical (what factor more pleasure do you get from good sex than from eating great pizza - can you even put a particular number on it?).
"I don't think there are many people who masturbate three times a day. Indeed, I am pretty confident that most people masturbate at a rate far below any constraints imposed by time, convenience, or biology. Why?"
The marginal utility combined with the decreasing supply of ejaculate.
I like the thinking in your post, Mutton, and I'm going to try to sharpen the focus. I know quite a few people who were significantly into forms of Buddhist meditation--enough to understand from experience the positive direction the rewards were going, as well as the ideology that framed them--who simply gave it up after a while, often without any conscious decision process.
This is true for me too. I can't speak for the others, but when I reflect on why this is so in my case I have no clear answer. It's a question I revisit often: the meditation cushion I used in the '70s has sat by my bed at least as long as I've lived in my current home--over thirty years--and I periodically pick it up to stare at it and wonder why I haven't used it since moving here (or to vacuum!).
The best answer I have is that the rewards I experienced were in some deeply felt way tied to the circumstances of my life back then, and when those changed, the personal meaning of the experiences meditation yielded changed as well, and in a manner that frayed the strong attachment to meditation I had formed.
Buddhism seems to anticipate this possibility by stressing the critical role of the "sangha"--one's meditation community--which forms an intersubjective context to sustain the meaning of subjective experience. Practicing in a social group, which is the dominant mode of Buddhist practice historically, helps overcome ordinary akrasia and also serves to anchor context and reinforce the sense of consistent progress towards an unchanging goal. After all, although we tend to speak about neurological phenomena we experience repeatedly as though they were constants, they always occur within complex networks within the brain and in social living that together shape how we construe their meaning and respond with affects and prompts to action accordingly.
There's also an aspect of diminishing returns - you don't masturbate five times a day because there's little urge and a much lessened reward for it, and I'm not seeing this reasoning about Jhanas. But we're not just talking sex, we're talking something that's supposedly better than sex with a supermodel while on the best possible cocktail of drugs (if we're taking the x100 claim seriously.
If the claim was that when you're really stressed out and do this with meditation, it clears things up and it feels *amazing*, then I would be a lot closer to buying that (the same way I could with massage for when it's desperately needed) than the notion that you can pop in and out of it freely but just don't.
Why would sex sith a supermodel while on drugs be particularly good? That sounds awful to me tbh.
Regardless, the idea behind jhanas is that you don't pursue them for their own purpose. Meditation is more about releasing your attachment to everything, including pleasure. So it makes sense that you wouldn't try to constantly cultivate any particular state. Instead you'd be at peace with most possible states, and you'd pick activities that are best for you in the long term.
My tentative position is that Jhana exists, but the valence of it is exaggerated because of SDB / religious profession. If it was actually that good, people would do it more. I haven't heard any other examples of supreme bliss that aren't reinforcing, and that makes me suspicious.
> I haven't heard any other examples of supreme bliss that aren't reinforcing
The idea of something like that calls into question how we would even measure it. If you claim to have a preference for something that you can get at will, but actually don't do it that much, and instead do other things, then in what sense do you really prefer it to the things you *actually* do?
Buddhism is a religion. It's common for religious people to do excessive cheering about the Great Thingy but then not act as if they actually believe it. So I'm sort of pattern matching Jhana to that.
Or maybe I'm wrong and the most effective EA cause will be teaching everyone to reach Jhana and reminding them to do it more often when they forget to do it.
Because “I don’t believe you” is predictive of a bunch of behaviours. You can see where that conversation is going (The conterfactual exists where they do believe you but are just contrarian, but I usually see Athena conversation go differently in that case)
“I’m hungry” is predictive that a person is about get food (The counterfactual exists where not really, they just want to complain and never actually go for food)
But those other kinds of statements on internal states don’t tend to be predictive of anything. If someone told me they were do something 100x more blissful than an orgasm I’d expect them to shortly be in a dopey convulsing mess not quiet meditation
I wouldn’t call them liars though, it’s just that the language around discussing internal states can be completely unfit for purpose. There’s a reason it took so long for people to realise something as straight forward as aphantasia exists
"Why should I believe you? You're just reporting your internal state without any evidence."
You're making a category error here. Drethelin's position doesn't depend on whether or not he was lying when he articulated it. His statement was analytical, not testamentary. (Also his use of the phrase 'I believe' is just a colloquialism; it could be rephrased as 'Cammarata's claims aren't credible'.) Cammarata's claims, on the other hand, are themselves proffers of evidence; if he's lying then the argument over the ontology of jhanas falls apart.
Also your point is the Nuclear Option of philosophical discourse, as it can be met with the retort "I don't believe YOU that you don't believe me." Infinite recursion is fun and all, but the only acceptable response to anyone who starts down this path is just to punch them in the face immediately.
"some combination of how much we trust them, and our priors"
This is probably nitpicky, but that's a distinction without a difference. Trust is just another prior, after all.
At first I thought they were lying but then I realized that I know people who talk about pizza or weed or napping with similar enthusiasm, so now I think maybe a lot of people just are easily made happy, or having bad sex, or both.
Here's some describing the experiences on camera. Not trying to convince you, take it for what you will: https://youtu.be/nns1AWPLvcU?t=1114 (timestamped to 18:34)
another video of going through the jhanas on camera. Roger is a meditator I respect a lot and is far better than most at describing the phenomenology of meditative states
Unfortunately, I cannot see the phenomena on the video, only a person sitting calmly for an hour, once in a while saying something like "this feels really good". :D
jhourney.io is trying. It's super early and tentative but it looks like they're able to detect jhana from raw eeg signals in some cases. Seems like jhana 2 is the easiest, which other labs have found too. Mostly because jhana 2 is calm, so it doesn't trigger muscle tension which messes with eeg
I've had access to Jhana(s) for close to a decade, it's real. It's like a "place" inside of consciousness you learn the location of, and then can go to when you want to. That's not what it actually is of course.
I agree with most of his descriptions, I would change a couple things.
I'm skeptical too but I think at the outset it's good to ask if it seems plausible that the human brain could be hacked in this kind of way. And I think it does. If it was incredibly motivating it might have been selected out but it isn't.
And I don't think the "they are just making it all up" explanation makes much sense.
However, I do think it's quite plausible that the state isn't as blissful as claimed and what is actually being reported is that it reduces their desire to engage in these other sorts of pleasure, is decently pleasant and that social and internal pressures encourage them to state it in the most appealing/amazing way.
Or maybe it feels that blissful to them because their experience of life is so full of tension, anxiety and self-criticism that the mere absence of those negatives is hugely blissful.
But it also seems plausible it's as described. Plausible enough I'm going to do more to conquer my meditation akrasia.
I'd love to pay a bunch of ppl who are skeptics (but not antagonistic to the idea) about this to meditate for six months and see what they say about it.
So there is this interesting thing where you can be having a pleasurable experience and can toggle between that experience and Jhana and you will find yourself preferring Jhana.
It's not really that it's always something huge fireworks or anything, sometimes it can literally be like that, but a lot of the time it's more subtle, it's more underlying but deep and pervasive.
The one place i would probably tweak Nick's description is verbiage where it is made to sound so much better than all worldly pleasures *along the same dimensions*.
I find that Jhana literally exists on like a finer gradient, rather than just being *more* sex than sex, etc.
When you compare the two, it's like oh this other sensation doesn't really hold a candle to Jhana, but they don't exist on the same spectrum IMO.
Ok, that sounds much more like what I would expect. Thanks.
I presume when you say you prefer it you don't mean it's just more rewarding (in the way that say video games or stimulants can be even when they aren't that fun).
Yeah, when I say you prefer it I mean that let's say you gave me a pleasurable narcotic experience.
If I were to do Jhana while on the narcotic, and then ask myself "Which of these things felt better/was more pleasurable" the answer would be Jhana although to reiterate they don't exactly exist on the same spectrum.
Part of the reason for it, and this might sound crazy, but it's the only thing in the world with zero hedonic adaptation.
I can't tell you why, but everything else drops off and you are left grasping and this leaves the experience fundamentally unsatisfying.
Jhana, for whatever reason, doesn't drop off and you don't grasp at it. I've done it for a decade, there is no hedonic adaptation.
Well it makes sense that one might be able to hack the brain in this kind of way. I'm still somewhat skeptical but still going to get serious about not being too busy for meditation.
I mean I'm not skeptical that you had that experience but that it's something that is relatively universal and I'll be able to do it as well. I mean I'm so jealous that my wife can get these huge placebo effects and I get nothing so I hope it's not like that (Well it could also be your brain is tricking you but that could always be the case and for all I know drugs and sex do the same ;-))
I’m skeptical, but if there’s even a 10% chance the jhanas are real states of mind then it would be worth 6 months of time to find out. I would certainly practice and write about the experience if it was funded.
> I'd love to pay a bunch of ppl who are skeptics (but not antagonistic to the idea) about this to meditate for six months and see what they say about it.
As a sort-of-skeptic, if anybody felt like throwing money at me, I'd go for it.
No. I was skeptical of such a thing, but open to it when it happened. That being said, it takes some time to get there, and it’s most important to regulate your desire. I literally got to this state because I was regulating a sense of longing after a breakup.
being skeptical might even help. Craving anything tends to get in the way, and for people trying for jhana they obviously crave jhana, which is an issue. If you not only don’t crave jhana but don’t even believe it’s real you’ll have advantage
Same as others here. Skeptical but not antagonistic. I don't think I'd try it for 6 months on my own. I could probably try if you throw me a bunch of money, but I have to say I'd need to think about it a little bit before committing to this
Jhana is the same word and activity that English speakers usually call "zen." (Jhāna is the Pali form of Sanskrit: dhyāna --> Chinese: chán --> Japanese: zen. It's a familiar and widespread practice/experience. It isn't arcane. Unlike telekinesis or clairvoyance, which can be tested by objective demonstration, the demonstration of jhana is subjective, but simple enough. There are protocols a person can follow to achieve it, available through teachers; in principle, an instruction sheet could be a guide, but it does take fine tuning to get the idea of how to do such a simple thing as doing nothing. A person follows the protocol, and if it works, the experience confirms itself; if it doesn't, it doesn't.
There's nothing wrong with skepticism like Drethelin's, unless it's maintained as a position alongside a refusal to experiment through attempting the simple protocol for a reasonable period in good faith. If the attempt doesn't confirm the claims for you, then stay a skeptic--there's no possibility of adjudication (unless you'll accept the evidence of brain wave studies, an objective measure, but only if one accepts the science and its interpretation [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zen-gamma/]). However, there isn't much more of a claim that a skeptic can make than to say, "I can't confirm it so I don't believe it." In the cases of telekinesis and clairvoyance the confirmation is objective and requires no interpretation. The difference is between an "I can't confirm it" context and a "you can't confirm it" context.
To choose among endless possible analogies: Someone who has never listened to music could say, "I know it's rude, but I basically don't believe melodic beauty is a real thing." Listening to, say, Bach the first time they may hear nothing of interest. There's no way another person can confirm the experience of melodic beauty for the skeptic. If the skeptic follows the protocol and listens to music as a teacher guides them through it, they will generally experience what lots of people experience when they listen to Bach (and, of course, some don't--try dixieland or Beyonce instead). Some may not, and they'll never really credit the oohs and ahhs about Bach. Melodic beauty can't be objectively confirmed, but that doesn't mean it's not a real thing. Whether Bach is better than casual sex would depend a lot on the performance values in each case.
Yeah, I think the broader implications of your comment is one reason Jhana flies under the radar despite probably being the thing psychological research should study the most.
It exists in this weird dimension of qualia where modern society doesn't quite know how to situate itself.
You cant really objectively confirm someone else's internal experience, but you also can't deny that *if* it did actually happen, then *it objectively occured*.
Jhana is challenging to discuss bcuz society doesn't really know how it feels about this stuff, despite Jhana being something consistently experienced by a substantial population.
I think there's two pretty wrong things here. First this:
***There's nothing wrong with skepticism like Drethelin's, unless it's maintained as a position alongside a refusal to experiment through attempting the simple protocol for a reasonable period in good faith. If the attempt doesn't confirm the claims for you, then stay a skeptic--there's no possibility of adjudication.***
The ask here is something like "you aren't allowed to doubt me unless you spend hours a day for perhaps years, at which point I can just say 'well maybe you aren't very good at meditating' and tell you still aren't allowed to doubt me". The size of the ask matters a lot here; If I was to say "you aren't allowed to doubt Islam unless you spend a lifetime worshipping Allah, then die and find you don't go to Muslim heaven", most wouldn't find that reasonable. This isn't that bad, but it's not exactly nothing, either.
***However, there isn't much more of a claim that a skeptic can make than to say, "I can't confirm it so I don't believe it." In the cases of telekinesis and clairvoyance the confirmation is objective and requires no interpretation. The difference is between an "I can't confirm it" context and a "you can't confirm it" context.***
One way to reverse what you've said about telekinesis and clairvoyance here is to note that, like the overwhelming majority of externally falsifiable claims of mental specialness in a way that strikes people as woo, the claims end up being false when tested. If anything, this should establish a prior that unfalsifiable claims that resemble those are somewhat more likely to be false. If there are five chain burger joints of a particular franchise in my state and a sixth in antartica that I can't get to, finding that the five I can test in my state suck should increase my confidence that the one in antartica sucks too, even though I can't check that particular location out.
I think you misconstrued part of my point, Contrarian. There is nothing wrong with a skeptic maintaining their doubt--they're "allowed" to. But their doubt is not an argument; it's a doubt. If the claims that Zen masters made were ones subject to objective confirmation--which includes inductive reasoning from evidence, such as the poor taste of Antarctic White Castle burgers--then you could argue against them. But they are not that kind of claim. Nor is the "ask" the big one you envision. In general, the "ask" is something like, "Try out meditation in ten-minute intervals a few times a day for a week. If you find something there, move on to twenty-minutes, and so forth, committing more in proportion to what you feel you receive." For people who move on, it's generally a self-motivating process. I think it would be very strange not to doubt claims about jhana before trying it, and those doubts will keep many people from testing it out (It's not worth my time and effort!--perfectly reasonable). But those doubts demonstrate nothing but the doubt itself. (By the way, this process is very similar to that which characterizes more objectively visible ones such as Taichi martial arts. The psychological payoffs of Taichi are less often doubted because the physical skills of increased grace are observable, but they are, in fact, comparable and equally unverifiable--or verifiable only by indirect means, such as EEGs, etc.)
Your last paragraph starts with a sentence that I don't think works--I think you restated rether than "reversed" what I said--but I think I understand what you mean. The principle of falsifiability distinguishes between claims that are scientific and not scientific. If I tell you I have a headache, it's not a falsifiable claim, and so not scientific, but that doesn't mean it's false. Moreover, there is nothing in Zen claims that "resembles" the claims of telekenesis/clairvoyance, which are indeed falsifiable. Uri Geller doesn't offer to teach you how to perform his "feats" so that you can do them too--he is claiming privileged powers. The structures of claim-and-demonstration are categorically distinct.
There is a completely different set of issues that pertains to the ideology that surrounds meditation practice: Buddhism (or other religious structures that rely on similar meditative practices). Different schools of Buddhism will each offer thousands of doctrinal assertions: metaphysical, historical, ethical, psychological, and so forth. A lot of that is woo indeed--and some Buddhist schools are up front about it, acknowledging that the assertions are basically pedagogical heuristics, designed to frame meditation in ways that will attract followers in an end-justifies-the-means dynamic. This ideological framework is religious, not practical; it can easily be exploited as a con to draw money from the gullible (although also in good faith, just as in an above-board missionary church setting). Most of these claims are not, in fact, subjectively verifiable through meditation practice: they appear confirmed because they are built into the meaning-structure of the practice (which is, tangentially, true of a great deal of common belief). However, the post is about jhana itself--the physical practice and its psychological concomitants--and none of the ideological components of Buddhism need to be entailed in the practice.
There might be a mismatch of *what* we are discussing. I'm going off this quote:
***the demonstration of jhana is subjective, but simple enough. There are protocols a person can follow to achieve it, available through teachers; in principle, an instruction sheet could be a guide, but it does take fine tuning to get the idea of how to do such a simple thing as doing nothing. A person follows the protocol, and if it works, the experience confirms itself; if it doesn't, it doesn't.
There's nothing wrong with skepticism like Drethelin's, unless it's maintained as a position alongside a refusal to experiment through attempting the simple protocol for a reasonable period in good faith.***
Most people in the comments (and the article) seem to be talking about Jhana as the "event" - the thing where you get the ecstasy and other effects. And they seem to to be talking about that years in. If we are just talking about "any observable benefits of meditation", my bar for belief is much much lower both because it's more plausible (most people are familiar with calming down) and because the costs are lower (almost immediate instead of years).
I think the distinction between "I am a little psychic" and "I can give myself mind-orgasms with my mind that make me quit drinking" are probably a little bigger for someone *inside* the Jhana bubble than outside it. What I'm saying is that, to the person outside that bubble, they seem pretty close. Telekinesis/clarivoyance are pretty falsifiable and generally get falsified, but to the person outside the bubble that establishes a prior of "claims like this usually falsified, when falsifiable at all".
Well, sure. Dhyāna (to use the original Sanskrit term) is a stepwise process. Each step up makes the expectations for the next more plausible, and if you're at the start of the process, it's perfectly ok to be skeptical about claims concerning remote steps. (At least I hope so, because I was always a beginner and I personally think many claims about "enlightenment" are implausible, colored by ideological interpretation.)
But there's a big difference in the two claims you note in your last paragraph. "I am a little psychic" really has nothing to do with meditation and is objectively falsifiable, just as "I am a whole lot psychic" would be. "I quit drinking because of the way advanced meditation made me feel" is subjective and not falsifiable, except the part about being on the wagon. But why would you doubt it if someone had been an alcoholic, got sober, and said that experiences in meditation is what had enabled him to do it? It's certainly plausible, and unless he's trying to sell you a meditation pillow for an exorbitant price, why would you think it less plausible than the idea that he just sobered up out of the blue? What's the motive for making it up? Quitting cold turkey is just as much to brag about. When people who are not trying to make money out of religion say they reformed their bad lives because of the spiritual joy and peace they found when they "accepted Jesus as their personal savior" do you doubt that's what happened? You don't have to believe in Christianity to understand the ordinary plausibility of that.
So I think breaking this down might be helpful. Here's sort of my thinking on a bunch of questions here:
1. Are some people making claims like "Jhana is a process or state of unimaginable bliss, one that is far beyond other experiences, and that has other beneficial follow-on effects like being a diet aid, drug-use cessation, and caffeine sensitivizing without any the significant downsides we'd expect from other treatments that accomplish similar things besides time outlay?"
Answer: Yes.
That's more or less what the post is about and Nick C has been reinforcing it through the comments and expanding on various claims in that direction.
2. Are these claims falsifiable?
Answer: No, not significantly.
3. Can we imagine a rewards system in which people making these claims would receive benefits beyond Jhana, whether Jhana is true or not?
Answer: Yes.
In a very local sense, we've observed it. Scott's support is worth a lot; he provides a lot of very high-quality exposure to one of the best audiences on the internet. I've been on the receiving end of it, and it's great, and I'm very thankful for it (and don't actually begrudge anyone else getting it, it's not like I earned it).
But we can also imagine some other ways - most people would enjoy believing themselves to be enlightened and to have access to a kind of superpower. Others might find a sense of community. Others might set themselves up as gurus. Others might gain attention from others. All of these would be considered upsides for many people.
4. Are there any other claims of internal mental states that would see similar rewards, whether falsifiable or unfalsifiable?
Answer: Yes.
Spoonies, recreational DiD people, people with claimed psychic abilities and spirit mediums all would see at least the benefits described from their claims in at least some situations. Some are falsifiable, while others aren't.
5. Are any of the falsifiable versions falsified?
Answer: Yes.
Most claims of clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other types of psychic powers are mostly considered falsified.
6. Are any of the non-falsifiable versions generally considered to be obviously false?
Answer: Yes.
Most people understand both DiD and Spoonieism to make false claims for various reasons. Note that some people DO have hard to diagnose illnesses and some folks have clinical DiD, but the "TikTok" versions of these are generally doubted.
So moving on to the discussion:
You have repeatedly said that things like "claiming you are psychic" don't have anything to do with special claims that meditation gives you internal superpowers, in that they are externally falsifiable where meditation is not.
The flaw here is that the logical, responsible thing to do when faced with a particular unfalsifiable claim is to look at similar claims that ARE falsifiable and see if they generally hold up. This allows you to build some priors/expectations for "things like that" which can help you interpret the likelihood that the unfalsifiable claim is true.
For instance, I might claim that I can levitate, but only when people aren't looking. If I did so, you would be well-advised to look at people who make the same claim of limited flight, but without the "when people can't see me" modifier. You'd find that those claims were universally false, which would and should affect your confidence in my claim.
In this case, I can look to people who say "I have a special mental state which makes me special" who are falsifiable. When I do (psychics, mediums, telekinetics, spoonies) I find that they are generally thought to be falsified to greater or lesser degrees. I can also look to see if there are other unfalsifiable similar claims (recreational DiD, Otherkin) and whether or not they are broadly thought to be obviously false via conventional social lie detection, and I find there are.
If I'm trying to build a model for "How likely is it that the claims of exceptional effects from Jhana states are true", and I am, these are the tools I'd use to do that. From them, I can derive certain principles:
1. People sometimes make claims of verifiable or unverifiable mental states/abilities that are false.
2. The probable motivations for these false claims (mental illness, being mistaken, self-deception, attention-seeking, profit, celebrity) are all as probable for a false-Jhana-claims scenario as they are to a person who claims psychic abilities or DiD-for-fun.
3. Given 1-2, I would expect that at least *some* Jhana-state-claimers are lying simply because even if the state is real, it requires a great deal of work to achieve; some would seek to reap the benefits without putting in the work.
4. It is easy to imagine a world where, given 1-2, all Jhanist-state-claims of the kind described in the article are false, just as we assume all or nearly all "DiD is fun and rad and I totally have it" claims are false.
5. In both 3. and 4., it's not necessary for me to actually know *which* motivation an individual might be using to doubt their claim, since I also don't know it in the case of the psychic or the DiD person with any high level of certainty, but can still observe that *something* was a powerful enough motivator to drive the lie.
It's now important to note that none of this *proves* that jhana states as described in the article are fake. They could be an outlier that defies the other examples. If I went up to a person and said "I am absolutely certain you are lying - it is impossible that you found an odd neuron hack that allows you to feel really good", I'd be in the wrong.
But at the same time, I'm *not* wrong to let my knowledge and experience of the world guide how credible I find claims of this kind, and the world (as I've observed it) seems to indicate that claims of this kind are usually false.
Side notes:
1. On alcoholism/drug abuse: I didn't address your rationale here because there's no way for me to verify Nick C's alcohol and drug intake. It is in effect as unverifiable for me as the jhana claim.
2. On a person's claims of religious experience: I'm a practicing, sincere Christian; I believe in a lot of stuff other people would find silly, but I very much believe it.
If I went to a person and said "Hey, God told me you should give me your 2023 Honda Odyssey, just a full pink-slips transfer of ownership to me." And I really believed it, they would still be justified in saying "You know, this seems a lot like a weird con job to me. Usually things that sound like this are - I'm not going to give you my car". I might believe they *should* give me their car, and that God actually spoke to me, but their caution and skepticism is justified.
More to the point I don't think that people *shouldn't get to make claims of personal, unverifiable experience*. We'd otherwise not have any way to communicate that we were sad, hungry, in pain, or many other important concepts.
But that said, often a claim of sadness is a tool of manipulation. Sometimes a claim of pain is an attempt to get opiates. There are many cases in which reasonable judgments about how likely you feel it is that another person's statements are true are useful, necessary tools for negotiating the world and protecting yourself and others as you do.
In this case, I have to make a decision that's something like "Will I spend months or years pursuing a promised reward, and advise others to do so?" and the decision I make would have a real, significant affect on my life and the lives of others.
So assessing the *probability* that the claim is true is important. In this case, I have come down on the side of "this is probably false, but it's possible I'm wrong", which means I won't pursue the practice at all but I also won't run up to people who make the claim and go "I'm sure you are lying" while burning their meditation mats.
Meanings of words are as malleable as their spellings. I have never seen anything resembling jhana mentioned in writings on Zen Buddhism, and if it was, I would expect to see jhana states dismissed as merely a distraction from the path and not to be sought out.
Richard, "zen" 禅 is the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese "chán" 禪, which was the term assigned for the Sanskrit word "dhyāna" ध्यान when the Buddhist canon was translated into Chinese during the first millennium. The Pali canon rendered dhyāna as "jhāna" झान. When you write "I have never seen anything resembling jhana mentioned in writings on Zen Buddhism," you are saying, "I have never seen anything resembling zen mentioned in writings on Zen Buddhism."
meaning of "jhana" = meaning of "dhyāna" = meaning of "chán" = meaning of "zen"
or we might think that the English word "arrive" must mean to specifically arrive at a shore ("ad ripam").
But I could be wrong. Can you show me where the blissful states that the OP describes are spoken of in Zen writings? I am here using "Zen" to mean the so named school of Buddhism, and its teachings and practices.
Buddhist scholars fight constantly about this, its by no means a settled thing.
What we do know for sure is if you go back to what was actually attributed to the Buddha, his primary point was Jhana is the way to enlightenment. He is quoted as saying this multiple times and put a heavy emphasis on Jhana.
There are two levels operating here. The word level is one. "Zen" is the Japanese prounciation of the Chinese word "chán." The identical character is used to write both, although calligraphic variants have emerged over the ~1300 years since Japanese monks brought Chán/Zen texts from China to Japan. When Chinese first began to translate Buddhist scripture, brought over the Silk Route by Indian and Central Asian monks ~1800 years ago, into Chinese, they chose "chán" because its pronunciation at the time (reconstructed as "dzan"--you can see how the Japanese got "zen") replicated the aspirated initial in "dhyāna." Thus chán/zen are not etymologically derived from "dhyāna" through linguistic evolution (such as you described for "arrive"), they are loans that speak the identical word, like "karaoke" in English, which simply borrows the Japanese name for an entertainment form invented in Japan ("kara OK": から OK). Pali is an Indian dialect derived, like Hindi, from Sanskrit. Versions of the Buddhist canon are preserved in Pali, and the term "jhāna" is not derived from "dhyāna," it is simply a pronunciation variant of the same word. The common features of these words (dhyāna/jhāna --> chán/zen) are constrained by the authoritative uses of the term that appears in the Buddhist canon (Tripitika), which was translated from Sanskrit and is best preserved in Pali and Chinese.
So, basically, the definitional meaning of all four words is, indeed, identical. The way the term is used in the Tripitika constrains meaning far more tightly than is normal for words even within a single language. They refer to a single technical term, something like the constraint on the meaning of loan terms like "habeus corpus." (Of course, once a word strays from the Buddhist context into the general lexicon, it can quickly morph, the way that "zen" has to some degree in colloquial English--have you ever heard, "Cool, man; that's so zen"?)
The second level concerns practice. Buddhism is a living religion and has many forms, which continue to evolve as practitioners who are regarded as authoritative embellish them. The Pali canon and the Chinese canon actually belong to two very different branches of Buddhism (Theravada and Mahayana) with largely discrete geographical ranges and many differences in doctrine, practice, and interpretation. In that sense, your point makes much more sense: What "jhāna" "means" in Theravadan practice may be different from what "zen" means in Japanese (or American) Zen practice. And this goes further, since there are, in fact, different schools of Zen, with somewhat different takes on both how to practice "zazen" (zen sitting), and what happens when you do. Point taken--in my comments I implied too simple an equation between Nick C's practice and Zen, as I've encountered it.
I don't know what particular sect of jhāna practice Nick C. trained in, so I can't compare his description with others in the same tradition. But I really don't see anything odd about his claims. I was introduced to Zen by a well known master named Philip Kapleau (he's famous, so let me make clear my introduction was brief and I was never "trained" by him), and he spoke about the joy that accompanied release from desire. You can find descriptions in the "testimonials" Kapleau included in his best known book, "The Three Pillars of Zen" (if you get hold of it, you can use the index, "joy," and find the relevant ones in Part Two of the book). When I spent a couple of months at an institute presided over by a Tibetan master named Chogyam Trungpa (Tibetan traditions are like Zen on steroids) the "better than sex" trope was pretty common. (I sure never got there.) But "bliss" was always pictured as ultimately a diversion. Yes, you'd find it along the way, but if enlightenment succeeded it, the bliss would matter then no more than the sex had once you'd achieved initial trance experiences.
As I wrote in other comments, I just don't see any of this as extraordinary. Would we be inclined to doubt a virtuoso opera singer who said, "When I'm in full voice in a great opera, the joy is blissful and far greater than great sex"? Or a champion skier, or a chess grand master, or a scientist on track for a breakthrough in the lab, or--on the other hand--a compulsive gambler, alcoholic, or opioid addict. Of course, any individual report is subjective and can be doubted. But unless a person has never experienced for some period this type of total immersion and satisfaction, why would the claim that it can come about through meditation practies with extremely long histories provoke any special doubt? The skepticism should be that any such state of joy existed in anyone anytime via any pathway. That seems a little solipsistic to me, but solipsism is certainly one form of rationalism.
I want to drill down on one point though, that I think is at the heart of this.
I agree that bliss/Jhana/states in of themselves *are not* the goal and a fixation on Jhana being the end in of itself is misguided and canonically inconsistent.
However, the argument is that the Buddha *did* say that Jhana is the *path* to Enlightenment.
Now, being the path implies that it is not the thing itself. But we can look at his words and validly interpret his meaning as saying one practices Jhana, which leads to insights, which leads to Enlightenment.
There is debate around this within Buddhism of course, but from everything I've read it we focus solely on what the Buddha actually said it was basically "Practice Jhana to achieve Enlightenment"
I would have said the same thing, but I have been accessing low level jhana states recently (since last week). I am not religious, but the experience sure gives me sympathy for those who believe. If you were to stumble on this mental state you’d think you’d contacted the holy.
fwiw i've spent some time around nick irl (he's cool) and have found him to be very non typical when it comes to resting pleasure state, like way off on some bell curve somewhere, iirc he reports never feeling negative emotions? I'm under the impression this was the case for him before he started meditating? should doublecheck with him tho
i didn't get the same impression from romeo tho so idk, and I personally have had some orgasmic meditative experiences (no idea if jhana tho) and i'm nowhere near nick's level of intensely positive base mood. maybe the good jhanas hit high positive mood people harder?
hey! Yeah good point. I do feel negative emotions sometimes (if I slept poorly, or if I'm overwhelmed) but most days not so much. Meditation broadly reduced the amplitude of mood shifts and bumped up the mean but I was quite happy growing up too.
Jhana specifically didn't lead to many permanent shifts other than some habit things due to fewer cravings (eg fewer desserts, stopped drinking). I think happiness helps in entering the jhanas, bc the jhanas are about turning a spark of pleasure into a flame of pleasure. If you always have access to a spark it's easier. But after you've started the flame cultivation process (during a sit) the benefits of being happier than normal tend to go away. When I hear other practitioners talk they say the same things I feel after that point.
> I personally had orgasmic meditative experiences
Leigh Brasington (jhana teacher) says that women often experience jhanas as sexual. Specifically first jhana, which to me feels like buzzy pleasurable energy. One women calls it "The Orgasmatron". My gf experiences it kind of like that too
It seems to me that both you (Nick) and Aella have sidled-up to the more-important meta-point about doubting such things, which is purely psychological: people who experience low resting pleasure state, low motivation, and low capacities for directed concentration can immediately tell that the entire conversation about Jhana is About Someone Else. Scott has spoken about this problem in other language when he mentioned how Motivational Interviewing techniques for drug addicts make use of such slights of hand as "heroin costs X per week so if you didn't do it your budget would be +X per week" -- it's a slight of hand because the person addicted to heroin knows that they are literally zero percent likely to try as hard to get money for anything other than heroin as they are to get heroin. Likewise, telling a person who is literally dying of type-two diabetes that daily walking and moderate changes in diet will save his life does nothing -- he already knows there is something wrong with his motivational structure that will absolutely prevent this from happening. Working hard for not-heroin or daily walking are conversations About Someone Else.
In the same way, a person who knows very well that they're not going to be able to meditate for 20 minutes once isn't in a mental space to hear about what might happen if they were to magically become able to meditate for 60 minutes every day for six months, especially when we begin with the admission that 'months' is only for a minority of meditators and most take years. What are the chances someone who feels he couldn't meditate if his life depended on it would turn out to be one of the six-months-only types?
All this calculus occurs for most people at some not-fully-recognized-as-conscious level, and results in them shrugging and saying "yeah sounds like bullshit". It absolutely is bullshit for them, and is in the same bucket of bullshit as other buddhist claims, like reading minds or flying through the air or going at will to visit the gods in heaven.
Is it bullshit generally? Obviously not, but you can understand why it is psychologically necessary for most to presume it is.
It’s pretty wild to me how different I interpreted the article- to me it sounds like jhana itself allowed Nick to detach from pleasure. if other folks are still enjoying it isn’t that be part of the path too?
I know this feeling so well. It hits me hardest stalking in the woods. I never knew I could be so quiet and attuned, but since I can reliably sneak up within 25yd of turkey broods... when I take the time to get into that mental state.
I've had the same experience hunting. It's a wonderful experience, but I would not describe it as blissful or orgasmic.
I've never hunted but I've done a lot of meditation over many years in various contexts, and that seems very plausible to me.
See dark night of the soul
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Night_of_the_Soul
https://aboutmeditation.com/the-dark-side-of-meditation/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-knight-of-the-souls/372766/
Maybe check out papers that Willoughby B Britton has co-authored. They explore rates of unwanted and extreme side effects for a subset of types of meditation.
With Jhana, it's pretty low. Especially if you go in with the epistemics of "I might see stuff but I don't have to believe it/act on it". Or also "Make decisions once I have come back out of the state for a while". With these caveats the worst place you can go is feeling really good as equivalent to mania, and then not feed them and come back down from the nice places.
Most people, when untrained, won't stumble into Jhana without access concentration which is a sort of "barrier" to moving the body and helps with getting still enough to access jhana. This stillness prevents acting on psychosis. Is it still psychosis if it's just a dream or an imaginative journey through your psyche? (Yes but it doesn't matter. The problem with psychosis is that you are acting it out in the concrete world and having a bad time about it)
I think the cookie analogy raises more questions than it answers. Plenty of people binge all the cookies, and plenty more develop a cookie habit if they eat them regularly. These patterns are the opposite of what people describe with jhana.
You talk about a distinction between pleaser goods and reliever goods. Perhaps "relief cookies" are used differently from "pleasure cookies".
I literally depend on a reliever good ("reliever" is British English for an asthmatic's rescue inhaler). Do you think use of any reliever good is inherently a sign of unhealthiness? I could see how someone might: why would the perfectly healthy need relief?
What's funny is that asthma went through a period of being thought of as the "archetypal psychosomatic condition", "a mild and benign condition, affecting mostly neurotics of the privileged classes":
https://mecfsskeptic.com/psychosomatic-history-of-asthma/
The unpredictability and air-hunger of asthma that's not under control can be pretty crazy-making. I wouldn't claim that not getting relief for, or even acknowledgment of, an actual physical problem is the main driver of bad habits, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were still a fairly significant one.
I disagree. I think it's a matter of degree. I've been known to eat a whole bag of chips or cookies despite being very healthy otherwise. Most people find pleasurable behavior like eating cookies reinforcing. Jhana sounds completely different, which is intriguing and/or confusing.
No, I do think the cookie analogy is a questionable one. Most people don't eat tons of cookies because they are bad for you, not because they're bored of them. The other limiting factor is that my enjoyment of cookies maxes out after X cookies per hour (depending on the size of the cookie). If cookies were like Jhana I would eat a cookie and then all dessert would be less interesting for me.
Are you saying if cookies/desserts weren't bad for people then most people would eat 8 cookies/desserts per day every day for a month and then get bored of desserts? Because that's speculative. And I'm not sure it's true.
It's "diminishing marginal utility," not "diminishing margin of utility." As in the utility of just one more (the margin) is diminishing.
Pedantic Man to the rescue!
I know it's rude but I basically just don't believe this is a real thing. The emperor may or may not have clothes but at least an outside analyst (a child, traditionally) can look at him and decide one way or the other. But everyone who makes claims to be able to do the Jhana thing is just saying stuff about their internal state, without even as much potential evidence as people who spend their lives claiming to be able to do telekinesis or clairvoyance.
One step away from scientology superpowers.
They could be lying, but how could they be *wrong*?
Don't you ever remember something as being better than it is? For me it's KFC. Talk to me when I'm walking past a KFC and I'll say "Oh man, KFC, that stuff tastes great". But if you talk to me while I'm eating KFC I'll say "Man, this stuff is just not as good as I remember".
Imagine a mental state a thousand times stronger than KFC, so that when you're in it you think "yeah this is kinda alright" and when you're out of it you consistently mistakenly remember it as the greatest experience of your life.
You seem to be disproving your idea here. You remembered KFC being great, and then you did it a second time and stopped remembering it that way. So if you do jhana twice and still believe it, it's not the KFC effect, right?
Melvin did come up with a counterexample to my point, noting it's possible in concept to be wrong because of an error of memory. Their example was imperfect in the way you describe, though. Perhaps dreaming is a better example. Some people from time to time experience total amnesia after the fact, but it's been pretty well shown that we're experiencing dreams every single night we have a reasonable amount of sleep.
Well it's a general class of examples, it's probably not true of me and KFC at this particular point in time. I think it took me a while to realise this so it might be true of past me. I picked KFC because I hoped that the experience of craving or and then being disappointed by it might be familiar to others.
I did have this feeling about Pizza Hut pan pizza for a number of years. For years I would think about Pizza Hut pan pizza as my absolute favorite and relive a hundred memories from childhood and want to recreate them for my kids, but then actually eating there I felt like it was okay, not great. But I did this a dozen times over several years, and would continue to say that Pizza Hut pan pizza was the best pizza I ever had. I think they actually changed the recipe, but there's also the possibility that my memories formed as a kid were so positive and my frame of reference was so narrow that I associated it with "best ever" and delicious, but have since had enough alternatives that it no longer feels special. Even if they also changed their recipe this is probably at least somewhat true.
Was your childhood by any chance in the late 80s?
This is nostalgia in a nutshell.
That's a great observation!
Has anyone else noticed that nostalgia isn't as good as it was in the past?
I find the idea that there's a mental state that is alright but after the fact convinces you that it was actually totally awesome to be more unlikely than a mental state that is actually totally awesome. Sure we remember some things as better than they are, but the gap is never that large as far as I can tell.
But...these are people describing experiences they had *that day*, and regularly. The mistaken-memories hypothesis in that context seems prima facie very weak.
I have done the jhanas 1-4, by the way. Jhana 1 is strikingly like MDMA. I am not so in love with it as Cammarata is, and don't practice them regularly.
If I knew that an experience would be neutral in the moment, but give me great false memories, I think I would give it some positive value. I'd have to think about it to be sure.
People are often wrong about what they are internally perceiving. How could this be? Hippocampus activity - they literally change their own memory of what they perceived. Robert Sapolsky talked about this on this podcast recently (here: https://youtu.be/9YYZQAXoghc - thanks to whoever posted that link on ACT recently). If you can change your memory about externally perceived events, you can probably do it just as well for internally perceived events.
I have been around people that self-report all these amazing experiences from spiritual practices all my life, and I am pretty sure most of it is bullshit. I have done a lot of meditation and know what is possible and how easily it is to fool yourself to think that you have had a much more profound experience than you actually did. There seems to be a certain percentage of people that are really comfortable with changing their own memory of what they perceived to fit their expectations. The classic pop culture example of this is in that South Park episode when Cartman convinces himself he came up with a joke and his memory becomes more elaborate with each retelling, until he is fighting off a dragon. I know people like this, that embellish stories in which I participated until they are unrecognizable to me and, often, these happen to be the same people that self-report amazing spiritual experiences.
EDIT: I am not trying to say that jhanas are not a real and positive experience. I question claims such as it is comparable to having sex, or is 10 times better than sex, or is an experience of complete bliss and not crave-able.
In my experience, meditation is a very unattached behavior. Unless I'm already in the motion of just getting things done generally, I will not meditate. There is not only no compulsion, but lots of resistance to meditating. Very pleasant experiences from meditating are very rare (albeit significant) for me, and if they do occur it's because I patiently waited 45 minutes.
I've gotten into 1st (maybe 2nd) jhana multiple times. There definitely can be a desire to get into the 1st jhana, but the chance that I get into first jhana is near 0 if I chase that desire (or even if I try to supress that desire).
Best combo I've found for getting into jhana is:
1. Be sleepy (especially in the middle of a they day, when usually you might nap)
2. Be exposed to psychedelics. Will increase trait openness. Too much skepticism leads to not even attempting it (I certainly used to believe jhana was some woo woo non-sense).
3. Be in an emotionally neutral or happy (not excited) state of mind. Negative mind-state is jhana-killer.
4. Do Metta (loving-kindness) meditation. Idk why, but this dramatically increases the probability of entering jhana for me.
5. Let go of as much as you can, especially including meta attachments (things you identify with) you are usually unaware of. Objectify everything you consider to be self, and then just wait.
Eventually some threshold snaps and you enter into an unmistakably different mind-space. I'd bet my life a brain scan would pick up on it. It is anything but subtle.
If you listen to ajhan brahm, he says (I have no reason to think he's lying) that it is possible to get into jhana while walking. You just have to make a meditation of walking. I have tried this, but my walks are always too short (I really should just put in more effort).
Also, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, there's no privilege to your internal experiences - when you report them, you're getting involved with *language*.
Sometimes people claim we can't be wrong about the experience of pain (that it is, in fact, privileged), but who hasn't told a child "that doesn't actually hurt", that is teaching them to report their experiences in a more proper manner as well as what counts as "real pain"?
I haven't, and I never would. To say something like that is somewhat acceptable if the point is to reassure the child that the pain will go away and that it is not dangerous. It is unacceptable if the point is to actually claim that the child is not feeling pain, which they claim they are.
I seriously hope that you don't spend much time around children.
Great post!
Surely we can test if one of the features of partaking in Jhanas is that you seek less pleasure? I mean, just look at the pleasurable activities someone did before, like having sex, or taking drugs, or having dessert, and see if they do it less after they start getting Jhanas.
(I'm the guy from the article)
I started eating a lot healthier after I first learned to jhana and was doing it a lot each day. Stopped eating desserts and mostly ate whatever the healthiest thing I could find was, because I already had enough pleasure
Later on I instituted a rule where I could eat dessert only after doing a bit of jhana, and most of the time I didn't crave it so much anymore. Tweeted about it here when I was playing with that habit https://twitter.com/nickcammarata/status/1470535862001672194. I don't do that anymore, but I also don't eat dessert so often either
I've also stopped all recreational drugs & drinking and so did my gf from similar meditations. I still do coffee but only a half cup now because meditation increased my sensitivity
Do you have any meditation guides you would recommend?
Seeing That Frees is probably my favorite general mindfulness book with a leaning towards insight over shamatha, but it's intermediate
Right Concentration is good for specifically the jhanas, or this retreat (https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/4496/) by the same author as Seeing That Frees . I don't know beginner books though, I kind of just stumbled my way through various resources for the first couple years
For anyone paying attention, this guy is a complete fraud and narcissist, he dated a roommate of mine years ago and the only thing he loves more than himself and juggling is constant attention. When he came to our house he’d constantly be talking about how he only eats cucumber and chicken. He’s incredibly picky and neurotic, he’s never had trouble with food he’s was totally fit back then and talked at length about his disdain for sugar.
I don’t know why he lies like this, why he feels compelled to shill stuff for attention. But facts are facts, stop selling for once man it’s really sad. You’re valuable just being yourself you don’t always need some thing to attach to just because you’re super short and weird looking.
Please don't write like this; I suppose the first paragraph can be something that's necessary to write down in some occasions, but the second paragraph is unnecessarily mean and and totally unsuitable here.
The first part of this is potentially useful context. As for the second part, you completely undermined your own credibility as "helpful person sharing important social info" by going after the dude for his looks.
That very much depends on the meditators goals. Peace, bliss, stress reduction, or lastly, replicating Buddha's awakening. There's scads of guidebooks for all those purposes. But if you are aimed at the last one, you'll need more than a guide manual, you'll definitely need an authentic teacher.
Responding to shlomo alon, there's a nice, very short book meant to convey some basics of jhana (zen), published many years ago but still in print: "Zen Mind: Beginner's Mind." It records some talks by Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen master who came to the US about 1960 and died a decade later.
I had the good fortune to meet one of his first generation disciples in Oregon about forty years ago. A most impressive individual. I sometimes wonder where she is now.
I've had similar post-jhana - cut out drinking, started regular exercise, much less desire to go out to events, low cravings, just started to do details right. The sensory clarity and wakefulness of meditation makes a lot of your choices more purposeful - like alcohol is much less pleasant because I am very keenly aware of the negative impact to my body in a way that was kinda background before
How do you figure out what's the healthiest thing you can find?
How closely correlated is your perception of which food is healthy to eg a normal American's?
I lived next to a chicken salad place so I ate that for most meals with random variants to my salad each time. I’m sure it wasn’t actually the most healthy thing I could have done, but it was reasonably easy and quick
The healthiest thing is moderation.
There is no magick foods, nor 'this one weird trick.' Outside of junk food, regular foods are neither better nor worse than others. Just eat what you like and stay within reasonable boundaries of your budget and availability, and a reasonable mix of fruits, vegetables, meats, starch ... stuff a boomer granny would recognize.
Boomers after all have the greatest life span of all time.
It's *really* hard to improve on the oracle of Delphi, even when just applied to food:
1. Know yourself
2. Nothing to excess
At what age did you make these changes? Such life changes are usual around certain ages, especially turning 30 and turning 40, and certain life events, like a death in the family or a health scare.
Basically I think if you were younger than 27 or older than 45, and didn't have any major life events, then I'm inclined to think the meditation really did something for you. Otherwise your changes are hard to distinguish from the background rate.
27. Also the changes weren't so radical, my diet isn't perfect nowadays, although it's not bad
I think of it with this frame:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/13/does-reality-drive-straight-lines-on-graphs-or-do-straight-lines-on-graphs-drive-reality/
Practicing introspection and meditation is part of taking life more deliberately - making more considered choices, etc. The causation could go one way (meditation caused deliberation) or the other (deliberation caused meditatation) or it could all be part of a general shift in lifestyle.
(Which is to say - I agree this happens to people generally as they get older, I don't think that diminishes the effect though, maybe just your framing of it)
> I started eating a lot healthier after I first learned to jhana
Do you have any external evidence of this, such as logs from a fitness tracking app, or blood tests showing improved health?
This feels rude
"I know it's rude but I basically just don't believe this is a real thing."
Why should I believe you? You're just reporting your internal state without any evidence.
Trying to put this objection more seriously: whether we believe people or not depends on some combination of how much we trust them, and our priors. If you say you're hungry, I have no reason to disbelieve you, so I believe you without evidence. If you say you saw ball lightning, that's pretty weird, but I know and trust you, and some other people who don't really seem like liars also claim to have seen this, so maybe I believe you. If you say you saw Dracula, that's so weird that it's hard to believe - although maybe since I've known you a long time and I've never seen any evidence you're a liar, if you insisted really really hard I would believe you had a real hallucination, or saw a fraudster in a vampire costume or something.
Thousands of people claim to have reached jhanas, including ~5-10 who I personally know and trust. Usually this would be enough evidence for something, unless it's really implausible. Is it? To me a natural point of comparison is extreme negative states, like panic attacks, migraines, or cluster headaches. There are a bunch of these, and we also have no evidence they exist besides people's self-report, but we believe in them (well. I assume someone has measured these with an EEG or something, but we believed in them even before that happened). Given that those exist, I don't really see a reason to have such a strong prior against extreme pleasure states that I doubt a bunch of people who report having them.
I'm not really interested in the "but is it a hallucination?" question because as far as I can tell a consistent hallucination of an internal state *is* an internal state, although I suppose maybe they could just have, I don't know, had a good mood and then talked it up a lot in their head / to others. Seems implausible though.
It would be more analogous to an experience identical to panic attacks except that people have no particular desire to avoid them.
(I'm the guy mentioned in the article)
Panic attacks are a great analogy. I had panic disorder for a year or so in 2016 after getting stressed out running startups. They built up in the same exponential feedback loop that jhanas do. Jhanas are actually scary the first couple times you do it, until you learn to let go and allow the exponent to grow.
Incidentally, the way I got over panic disorder after ~8mo of being afraid of it and avoiding anxious situations was to sit and cause panic attacks until I had equanimity with them. Not so different than how one learns to accept the growth of jhana as it cultivates
This is an interesting comparison.
* Some psychiatrists (e.g., Dr. David Spiegel at Stanford Medical School) use hypnosis to treat conditions like panic disorder.
* Some people can learn to self-hypnotize.
Would there be a significant difference between the traditional meditative account of jhanas vs. an account that describes them as the result of a particular practice of self-hypnosis?
I see only very minor differences between self-hypnosis and meditation. They are both intense states of concentration/relaxation.
What do YOU mean by this? What would the difference be?
The view that self-hypnosis and meditation are very similar and perhaps sometimes identical is itself interesting.
I see this view as providing another angle on Scott's observation that "consistent hallucination of an internal state *is* an internal state." I agree with this perspective but want to push it in the direction of reproducibility. I see hypnosis, which has been fairly well studied clinically, e.g., by Spiegel, as providing one avenue for that investigation.
Well put.
As though one was sailing and “allowed“ the wind to change.
Sounds like do-it-yourself exposure therapy.
Hi, I have a bunch of questions borne of curiosity: I wonder if you can comment on these?
I've read a few accounts of people who claimed something similar, many of whom also had philosophical and / or religious explanations or frameworks for them (advaita, Buddhist, Hindu, Kashmiri shaivist, kundalini). A few things some of them have attested I wonder if you experienced?
1. Golden light. A few accounts of these bliss states I've read described them as being accompanied by golden light suffusing everything. In those cases, I think the experiencer was not claiming literal visible light, but rather an unusual mental experience akin to sight that made everything seem to be suffused with golden light layered on top of normal vision.
2. Experiences and sensations beginning in the spine and feeling like they rose up sometimes in the form of a small solid shaft to the brain. This is a classic and well-known aspect of kundalini accounts of bliss, of course.
3. Extreme bliss starting out as being uncomfortable. In the kundalini accounts eventually the rising of the "kundalini" into the brain makes this seem to settle down. Until it does, some people report involuntary motions, noises, and other mildly unpleasant experiences mixed in. Some report feeling very energetic and keyed up.
4. Transition from energetic / orgasmic experience to deep peace. In some accounts, bliss experiences seem to start out as energetic / downright uncomfortable (in one account that I'm thinking of the experiencer felt compelled to walk for hours in the middle of the night because he couldn't or didn't want to sleep and he felt he had so much energy) but eventually mellow into an even more pleasant deep feeling of peace. In one account I'm thinking of, this peaceful state marked when the golden light became visible, or perhaps more visible. In at least some of the accounts, reaching this peace state was necessary to make the experience a kind of background constant. Just one experiencer I've read claimed this was like an ascending spiral staircase (not his metaphor) where after the peaceful phase would come an even more intense energetic phase, then an even deeper peaceful phase, and so on, through at least a couple of iterations.
5. Making the experience constant -- more than one experiencer talked about upon transitioning to experiencing the bliss as deep peace, it was possible to make it constant.
6. Increased compassion -- I believe more than one experiencer described an outcome of these bliss experiences as a deep feeling of love for everyone.
I've been fascinated by these kinds of accounts for some time, so I wonder if you have any comment on these related experiences? Thanks for taking the time to relate your experiences!
You did not ask me here, but since I have some experiences in the field, let me issue a friendly warning if you desire to do meditation & other types of exercises aimed at what in Eastern traditions is called Kundalini. There are lots of stories on the web concerning reactive psychosis or disability or both. In short: That way may easily lead to a future in and out of psychiatric wards, and a life on Special Supplementary Income if you live in the US.
Being under the round-the-clock guidance of someone who knows what can happen to you, and can help you find grounding exercises, may tide you through. But then again it might not. In any case it often takes time. Lots of time.
You will find interesting life stories if you search the many Kundalini Warning websites. (Some - not all - of the webistes have a somewhat irritating Christian agenda, but disregard that. )
Fair enough. For what it's worth my own modest attempts to achieve the same state are not kundalini meditation; I've only read about it and tried a few of the very basic breathing exercises.
My own interests lie mainly in the self-inquiry method, which I'm not sure even qualifies as a meditative technique. But practitioners of various methods have all written quite similarly about some remarkable aspects of what sounds like a very similar bliss state, so I was curious to see if it matched up in this case, too.
Most of our dreams are nightmares iirc, yet we usually still want to go back to sleep. Sort of the opposite to the non-addictive bliss.
I'm reading this in May of 2023. That's a valid and very interesting point.
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.
There are all sorts of cultural or personal reasons to make such claims regardless of truth, just as there are religious and social incentives to claim to be able to experience Jhanas.
Most simply, the people making these claims get to receive your impressed attention at their unusual level of mental achievement, without having to actually do anything difficult to show how impressive their brains are.
If you're trying to understand someone else's mental state, isn't that part of the process?
I would say if you’re attempting to assign a mental state to someone then yes.
Understanding someone’s mental state, not so much.
"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. "
I assume some large fraction of these people are schizo-spectrum and honestly reporting their experience. As for the rest, their claims are so absurd by my current understanding of physics that it overwhelms however many eyewitness reports there are.
Many of these people don't seem to be going for impressiveness - I've talked to some people about this and they've said "oh, yeah, I had that happen to me" without having boasted of it beforehand. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10017371 is sort of an example of that.
I chat with a dead friend of mine all the time. It’s between us...
If you seriously believe that is your dead friend and not a figment of your imagination - Have you ever asked your dead friend to provide you with some information you could not otherwise have had? Such as "I hid this love letter from an ex in my Organic Chemistry textbook, which is in a box in the basement," or something like that? Why or why not?
Nah, he doesn’t do stuff like that. Too proud, and if he had a good investment idea he’d keep it to himself. He’s such a prick that way.
Seriously though.
He is a hologram of everything I have learned and observed of him, and because I valued his intelligence and loved his presence, and hated his arrogance I keep him around as best I can to share some chat with him.
On another note, why is it everyone assumes that the spirits of dead people are omniscient? Why should they be?
Of the thousands of people who claim they can speak to the dead, or talk to God, or etc., it’s reasonable to assume at least some of them genuinely *believe* what they’re claiming.
It’s also reasonable to assume that at least some people claiming to have reached jhana genuinely believe they have.
Is there a meaningful difference between experiencing bliss and believing yourself to be experiencing bliss?
Neural correlates?
Absolutely. There is just a fact of the matter as to whether there is a blissful experience. Qualia are a real part of the world and there are objective facts about them just as much as there are about wave-functions.
But yes, it's harder to be mistaken. So I'm fairly persuaded. It's possible but relatively unlikely given that this isn't just coming from monks who have been indoctrinated for years.
>Is there a meaningful difference between experiencing bliss and believing yourself to be experiencing bliss?
No.
> Is there a meaningful difference between experiencing bliss and believing yourself to be experiencing bliss?
Given all the other experiences people can be mistaken about, sure? In some sense conscious experience itself might be illusory, so it doesn't seem difficult to conceptualize belief in an experience and "having" the experience as being only somewhat coupled.
You might at some time after having an experience realize it wasn’t the “real thing” after all. I guess the question is a bit of a rabbit hole.
It seems there could, and almost certainly would, be a difference in whether other people could be taught to experience it as well. If someone genuinely misunderstands why they feel a way they do, they can't share it with others and their guidance will be pretty meaningless.
"Is there a meaningful difference between experiencing bliss and believing yourself to be experiencing bliss?"
Of course. Is there any meaningful difference between real memories and false memories?
A memory, if it’s real, points to something external and objective. An emotional state, like bliss, is an entirely internal, subjective phenomenon. So I’m not seeing the analogy here.
I believe two important questions here are:
* Can we trust the person's memory of the experience?
* Can we trust the person's reporting of the experience (this isn't just about lying)?
Jhana states have been written and talked about for a very long time in the whole history of Buddhism. Modern meditators in western societies are definitely not the central instance of people who have experienced jhanas. If you are standing inside of a Buddhist tradition, they are not remarkable or brag-worthy.
By way of analogy, think of the sometimes exceptional physical and mental states that long-distance runners attain (and some get attached to). We don't question these experiences because long-distance running is a pretty "normal" activity in western societies -- starting with school sports, etc. Spending months meditating (including going on long retreats) is done more now in those same societies than it was twenty years ago, but it's not considered "normal" in the way long distance running is. (This is just an analogy, right? I'm not saying long distance running produces jhana states.)
I think the skepticism is more about lack of exposure to non-mainstream-for-that-society experiences. I suspect in cultures that have long had large numbers of Buddhist practitioners that there isn't so much doubt about whether jhanas are a real thing people experience, as opposed to something they lie about for fame or status. People on Twitter comparing jhana states to the best sex they've ever had is maybe not so illuminating about how jhanas are situated inside the practices and traditions in which they developed.
We have done a lot to commodify Buddhism in the West and I am wary of our tendency to pluck out the pieces of this very long and rich tradition and elevate those pieces without awareness of how they fit with the more important and central parts of the teachings. A lot of misunderstanding has followed from that.
You’re doing powerful amount of thinking on behalf of other people.
Talking to god or dead people seems to me like a FAR more impressive claim than having reached jhana. Anyone holding all of these as equivalently weird if true, ought to reassess in my opinon.
I guess your line of thinking would be that claims of jhana work better than claims of necromancy for getting attention from certain communities (such as this one), and so the weirdness of the claim isn't so relevant.
Furthermore, seems like a good way to get rid of cognitive dissonance of having meditated literally hundreds of hours and gotten nothing from it.
I think there are many possible alternative explanations, some more likely than others:
* Jhana is a state that most people can reach after a few months of training, and it's a state of no-strings-attached perfect bliss. The reason every human on Earth is not immersed in Jhana right now is, uh, reasons.
* Some rare individuals possess an inborn ability to enter jhana after a period of training -- similarly to how some people can run extremely fast or factor large numbers in their heads or whatever. For those people, jhana training unlocks their true potential. For the rest of us, it does nothing.
* Meditation can indeed lead to a reasonably pleasurable state, as can many other pursuits. However, meditation is currently all the rage in the zeitgeist, and thus all those who enter this pleasurable state tend to exaggerate when reporting it, consciously or unconsciously.
* The world is full of people who want to trick you into believing false things, either for money or for the lulz. Many gullible people go along with these tricksters willingly.
* Some combination of the above, or some additional unknown factor not listed here.
The smart thing to do would be to devise a test that could help us distinguish among these hypotheses (and to devise new ones), and to do so with better rigor than relying on self-reports from a self-selected group of people. The comfortable and arguably more pleasurable thing to do is to endorse the fist explanation that makes you feel good. I suppose choosing the correct approach here is a kind of Zen.
>The reason every human on Earth is not immersed in Jhana right now is, uh, reasons.
Probably the same reason we aren't all doing heroin, including those who have previously used. Because most humans aren't single-mindedly focused on maximizing pleasure, we're much more complex than that.
There's a huge difference though in terms of long-term consequences. Opiates are very addictive and reliably destroy their user's life and the high gets worse the more you use it. Jhanas are (reportedly) the opposite of that.
Yes, but being in Jhana still requires the person to be in a heightened state of concentration without being engaged in their regular activities. I contend that most people care about their day-to-day life beyond just pleasure and would not trade the meaning and purpose they get from it in order to become some static bliss machine. To put it bluntly I don't think wireheading will ever take hold of a significant majority of the population. Some people for sure, but not everyone or even most everyone.
In other words, people are afraid of change they don't understand. That's a valid reason for sure.
>person to be in a heightened state of concentration without being engaged in their regular activities.
Why? I fail to see the necessity of the conditional absence you propose.
I think Nick C's claims in the comments that this basically eliminates harmful rec drug use, minimizes caffiene use by sensitizing you to stimulants and also functions as a diet aid should modify this a little. If all those claims are true, the activity would be much more profitable and would carry more weight than pleasure alone.
Posit a heroin-analogue with no addictiveness, positive psychological outcomes, and no ill effects on health. *That's* the comparison here. It would be a Big Deal.
If opiates were legal, free, unlimited supply, lacking any negative side effects whatsoever, and high-status, I think instead of 3% of Americans using them it'd be 97%
>The reason every human on Earth is not immersed in Jhana right now is, uh, reasons.
You're presumably a human - hearing about this state are you going to practice meditation for 6 months+ to see if you can get this state?
(i encourage you too, but recognize for a fair amount of people, the answer would be "no". So - there's your first reason)
Second reason - Nick is actually a bit unique in how much he emphasizes jhana. Most dharma people know about it but don't emphasize them so much. They're important in buddhism but also recognized as a bit of a potential distraction from the stuff 'further in' into buddhism that is better. Buddha studied with teachers of jhana before he had his enlightenment.
Nick is kind of like a singer who particularly likes a specific vocal warmup and talks about the benefits of that warmup a lot - most singers know about it but it's not their main focus
I think it may be less of a "jhanas are a distraction" and more "the desire/craving for jhanas can be a distraction", but I'm not speaking from experience here.
If I thought that this state is achievable as described, I totally would.
+1
Hello! I'm a meditator who has been working on developing the ability to get into jhana reliably for about the last year and a half. While I have been able to hit the edges of it and gotten into first jhana (in the sense described in the book Right Concentration) on at least a dozen occasions, I don't have reliable access to it.
If you're concerned about evidence, there has already been some small amount of scientific study of the jhanas, and more research that is currently underway. For example, Leigh Brasington, the author of Right Concentration, had EEG and fMRI measurements taken while he went through the 8 jhanas, and you can read the paper here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23738149/
There are a few reasons why it is not more common:
1) While some people are able to get there in just a few months, that is fairly rare. You have to get to access concentration, which is a fairly deep state of concentration which for most people requires hours upon hours of sitting and practice.
2) It's possible to do it wrong and dig yourself into a whole. To reach jhana, you have to drop conceptualization. It's easy to think you're dropping conceptualization while instead piling on more layers. Trying to push to make something happen makes it not happen. Wanting to get into jhana (in the moment, in the wrong way) can stop jhana from arising.
3) Most people who teach mindfulness to the masses are not teaching the kind of meditation that leads to jhana. They are teaching one to remain aware, centered, in the moment, etc., which can help, but don't lead to jhana on their own. You have to develop single-pointed concentration in order to enter jhana, and most mindfulness teachers don't teach you how to do it. The techniques to enter jhana are usually only studied and practiced by the kinds of meditators who spend hundreds of hours per year in their sitting practice.
4) The route into jhana can be quite bumpy. You have to sit through hours and hours of boredom with nothing seeming to happen, and often physical discomfort in the body. Once you get past that, developing concentration often causes various psychological issues and traumas to arise--things that may be bugging an individual under the surface, but which they often push out of conscious awareness. It's actually an opportunity to face your emotional struggles and get some substantial level of healing with regard to the underlying problems, but it can be frightening, scary, and potentially destabilizing if too much comes up at once.
For the benefit of those of us just starting out, can you write more about your process / what resources you've used / what a typical sit looked like at 0 mo., 3 mo. etc. in detail somewhere?
I can attain to various jhanas and have talked with hundreds if not thousands of people who can also, have lost track at this point, as 25+ years of those conversations.
Yes, jhanas are a thing.
Yes, I totally get why people don't believe this, as I also didn't believe in lots of things that I hadn't experienced until I had experienced them, so validating that skepticism as being normal and natural. I realize that smacks a bit of paradigmatic developmentalism, and, yeah, it basically is, and we need to find ways to deal with that also, as it is weird to be on the side of the fence that is labeled as less developed, and weird to be on the side of the fence that might be thought of as more developed, as comparison creates internal judgement and weird social dynamics, and we need to work to help deal with the social awkwardness of that as well, such that people apply more mature psychological coping mechanisms across those splits rather than the immature ones (denial, splitting, dismissal/devaluing, etc.). This is a huge topic for all of these sorts of experiences and abilities.
Yes, there is a wide range of what appears to be intrinsic ability to cultivate jhanas, with some getting into them easily/spontaneously with little effort, and some trying for years without that much effect, and everything in between. The tails are long on both the low and high ends. The range is so wide and striking that I think there has to be some genetic/receptor/something-like-that component to it, and have discussed how to study this with someone who does genetics at Johns Hopkins, so, if anyone wants to help fund that, let me know, as it won't be cheap, but could be quite profound in its implications.
Yes, there is real research on jhanas, such as the Brasington paper above, and hopefully soon research I have been involved in at Harvard/McLean/Martinos doing jhanas in EEG and fMRI with a number of other accomplished practitioners. I can't talk about the results of that yet beyond the fact that you can see real, reproducible changes in measurements when one shifts through the jhanas. Stay tuned, as that study is still in progress, and could benefit from more funding for data analysis, so let me know if you can help fund that. Apologies for the shameless plug here, but hopefully this is a group that appreciates science.
Yes, there are risks to attempting this, as one may easily drift into insight stages, which have their highs, lows, and weirds to them in a predictable pattern, though these can also, ultimately, lead to lasting and beneficial upgrades to conscious experience.
Yes, there is more research being done on all of these topics by the group I work with called the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium https://theeprc.org/, so please help with that if you are interested. We have specific studies ready to go on the jhanas here that just need funding: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/I7uiRSF2S/fund-me?v=M6pP_Tb7W6
Yes, jhanas can be mind-bogglingly awesome, and, yes, they are weirdly non-habit forming, sort of, though there are people that, from an insight point of view, keep cultivating them rather than move on to what are called stages of awakening and other names, as, once the mind finds those tracks, it gets easier and easier to just have the mind go down them when one sits down on the cushion, lays down, or inclines to them in some other conducive situation.
Yes, they can producing losing psychological benefits, though, as mentioned above, the path to get to them can also bring up a lot of psychological stuff.
Yes, they can also produce some very weird experiences often referred to as "the powers", which, regardless of their "validity" from some external point of view, experientially can be quite potent and compelling, amazing and destabilizing, healing and traumatic. That is a large and complex topic. Why they produce powers experiences in some and not in others is not well understood. This is part of the risks and benefits that it would be good to have reliable numbers on so people can go in fully informed of the possibilities.
Regarding all of the above funding requests: these are all for other talented academic researchers, not a cent for me, just FYI.
Thanks, Scott, for addressing this topic, as its mental health implications could be huge if better appreciated by the clinical, scientific, and mental health mainstreams.
Yes, people are studying this, and the Brasington paper mentioned above is a good one, and I have been involved with a study at Harvard/MGH/Martinos doing jhanas measured by 7T fMRI and EEG, as well as biometrics and elaborate phenomenology, and what I can say at this time is that you can see obvious changes in the brain in various jhanas, and that that study could benefit from more funding for more data analysis, as it is very complicated to sort all this out, and there is tons of data, so let me know if you can help fund that, and I can put you in touch with them.
Yes, jhanas are a funny mix of non-habit forming, and, on the other hand, when the brain discovers those tracks, it tends to follow them in contemplative situations, which, from an insight/awakening point of view might be skillful or distracting, long discussion, with good points on both sides and in between.
Yes, there are other people researching these topics, such as the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium https://theeprc.org, which could use some funding for a very direct jhana study and a number related to it: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/I7uiRSF2S/fund-me?v=M6pP_Tb7W6 So, if people like good data from which to make informed decisions, please help support that study. Of note, I get zero funds from any of these worthy projects, just FYI.
"The reason every human on Earth is not immersed in Jhana right now is, uh, reasons."
There are many things otherwise reasonably free and healthy people could do to increase their wellbeing, longevity, reproductive fitness, social status, power and so on, assuming they put in the effort of practicing diligently two to three hours a day for at least several months, perhaps several years (or a similar level of effort in say, eating or networking).
Still, we see a lot of (most?) people doing anything but that. Because, uh, reasons.
Also, a significant percentage of people really do have to choose one or perhaps two of those things. We don't have all the time for everything at the same time, forever. So perhaps most people simply don't want to meditate for several hours a day in order to maybe gain some benefits, but instead want to chase power or mating partners.
That seems to imply that Jhana is not nearly as beneficial as explained, though. That it is a potential substitute for sex or any worldly pleasure because it's so great is not the same as eating well and feeling somewhat better.
I think it's more that people who eat terribly and are unfit have a very poor sense of just how terrible their lives are compared to healthy people. Eating well isn't a 'somewhat better' thing. I used to never exercise and ate garbage all the time. The difference in my life is night and day, radically improved happiness. But it took me ages to actually work at it even though, objectively, it costs me approx. 1hr of my life per day.
* Meditation seems like pretty decent relaxation, and that's kinda useful if you're having troubles doing it otherwise?
Sure, but that's a very different claim from this whole jhana business.
The "uh, reasons" part is pretty simple. Meditation is hard.
I believe jhana states exist, although I have never experienced one. I am attempting to introduce meditation into my life. I was successful for about a month and then fell off the wagon. *Even though* I always feel better *after* a meditation session (relaxed, less anxious, etc), the beginning and middle parts are difficult and boring and my mind fights me the whole time. It also takes time and I am busy so more often than not I skip the session.
People don't meditate for similar reasons to why people don't exercise. It's hard and it takes time to see results.
Plenty of people exercise; in fact, exercise is a normal part of day-to-day life in most places. There are entire market segments devoted to facilitating exercise. Most importantly, perhaps, the positive effects of exercise are readily observable, quantifiable, and (due to the sheer number of people who practice it) pretty much undeniable.
None of that is true of jhanas. Some of this is true of meditation in general; but, as I said above, "regular meditation has some positive health benefits" is a much weaker claim than "with 6 months worth of training you can have no-strings-attached bliss on tap".
I don't think anyone reputable guarantees a jhana within six months.
Do you know of people who talk about stuff like the "runner's high"? That seems more comparable. Plenty of people exercise, yes, but far fewer experience something like that. I've felt something similar while cycling long distances (>50 mi in a day) but when I first started exercising I kinda thought it was bullshit.
Also, plenty of people *know* exercise is good, and that they should do it, but simply... Don't. Because it's hard.
I've experienced "runner's high" on a few occasions, but it doesn't feel even remotely as good as Scott makes jhana out to be. Also, it takes quite a lot of hard, painful physical work to achieve that state; again, contrary to Scott's descriptions of jhana.
"I'm not really interested in the "but is it a hallucination?" question because as far as I can tell a consistent hallucination of an internal state *is* an internal state"
I disagree actually. I think it's possible for people to fool themselves about internal states. My favorite example is time perception. You can meditate or take drugs in ways that make you think that your clock speed has gone up and your subjective experience of your subjective experience of time is slowed down. But your actual subjective experience of time isn't much faster clock speeds (as could be evidenced by trying to do difficult computational tasks in those stats).
Similarly people can have emotions that aren't raised to the level of conscious awareness, or even consistently reject that they're feeling certain emotions (e.g. jealousy).
The ability to perform computations faster would be objective rather than subjective. I do agree though that is possible to convince yourself that you're experiencing something without actually experiencing that.
>. I do agree though that is possible to convince yourself that you're experiencing something without actually experiencing that.
If convincing yourself is an issue then what experience is “something“?
I would say it’s the experience of arguing with yourself.
If yourself is your conscious self it actually makes a lot of sense: the conscience can be seen as an a-posteriori interpretation of your decisions and state of mind (maybe it's now the prevalent mmodel for conscience in neuroscience), with the goal to provide a sequential and consistent summary easier to remember and present to other.
So yes, there could indeed be a very big difference in mental state, even if the compressed/sequential/consistent edited version you remember is the same, or very similar. Kind of same effect as memory erasing drug: Is a drug that prevent formation of any long term memory and block muscles a good anesthetic ? Even if you actually are in tremendous pain during your operation? I think this is not a rhetorical question, AFAIR, such things exists and were used as anesthetics....
Now a much more serious question: is there a way to remove the mental image of Paul Finch from American Pie 2 from my mind after reading about Jhana? ;-p
I think I agree with you but I'm drawing the line between experience and reality at a different place - I would argue that the "subjective experience of time slowed down" person is truly hallucinating the subjective experience of time going very slowly, but that this doesn't correspond to the objective fact of them having a faster reaction time.
You might be interested in what in the Nyingma meditation tradition is called "the Fourth Time."
Hmm do you believe this about sense perception? I remember reading a Quora article about someone who didn't have a sense of smell and didn't realize this until they were like 15. I think if someone is congenitally anosmic, and *think* they can smell, it is more likely that they genuinely don't have the experience of smelling and deluded themselves, rather than that their nose can't smell but they've hallucinated all the experiences that go with smell.
Likewise, I expect people who are born colorblind without knowing that they're colorblind to not dream in different colors for the relevant cones.
Will you at least agree that this is an empirical question? Ie, for situations where you have an experience that doesn't correspond to objective reality, there's a meaningful difference between
a) there's a real experience that corresponds to my beliefs, but my experience does not correspond to reality?
b) there's no real experience that corresponds to my beliefs, but I might have mistakenly thought that I had those experiences.
EDIT: I agree that in most circumstances trusting them about internal experiences is a reasonable thing to do.
It seems pretty clear a lot of people with Covid don't realize they lost the sense of smell either - that's why they give one-star reviews of scented candles.
I test-sniff my large can of Earl Grey when I want to check.
In my (made-up) definitions, a version that's consistent with Scott's story is *possible* (people are right about their experiences but are wrong about the objective correlates of that experience). E.g. people can be physically unable to smell things but are psychologically able to hallucinate those experiences.
I'm just saying that it's more plausible that in many of those cases, people are wrong about those experiences and *did not* hallucinate the relevant experiences, rather than correctly think they smelled the relevant things but just didn't have the actual smells pass through their nose.
I feel like a lot of the objections here follow the line of reasoning, "This is subjective, not objective experience. Therefore I am discounting it." Others point out that, "Because it's subjective, it's not falsifiable. Therefore, it should be discounted or ignored." I'm skeptical of this epistemological approach, because I think it risks missing a lot of important things.
I'm also constrained in my professional scientific work, in that I can't take this approach to subjective experience. I work in clinical trials, and right now we're working on pain from toxicities related to cancer treatments (not the cancer itself). Subjective reporting is unavoidable. We call them 'patient reported outcomes', and we do a lot of work to ensure we can take subjective experiences and apply a statistical model to them. But what we can't do it ignore these subjective experiences, because in the end that's the meaningful endpoint we're trying to target.
Nobody goes to their doctor saying, "Help me get my LFTs under control!" or "I'm concerned about my hypertriglyceridemia". Sometimes they come in because of a weird bump, but if that bump isn't bothering them they might put it off. Instead, they might complain about severe pain every time they pee, or fatigue doing simple chores, etc. Subjective things, for which they require medical intervention. They'll know the intervention worked, when the subjective complain goes away.
If we get their hypertension under control, we hope the headaches go away. But if the headaches remain the patient doesn't care that we can point to their blood pressure measurement and say, "look, you got better!" They care about their subjective experience. All those objective measures are surrogate endpoints. From the patients' perspective, the REAL problem is the subjective one, and the 'pretend' problem is the thing we can objectively measure. Who cares what the ECG readout says if I still can't walk without feeling weakness in my chest?
So in our clinical trials, we're often forced to measure and rely upon subjectively-reported outcomes. Yes, we do the statistics on large populations. We then hope that statistical evidence can be applied to specific instances. Because in the end, we're developing these treatments to help patients live better, and that's something only they can tell us if we've succeeded or not.
I'm wary of a knee-jerk reaction against subjective experience as being something that can be dismissed out of hand. The things that matter most in life are very often subjectively experienced. If the most important observations in life don't fit into the way I prefer to analyze the world, that doesn't mean I should ignore them. It means I should be wary of the limits of my epistemology.
Very much like your post and appreciate your thoughts on the role of the patients' subjectivities.
This is an excellent reply, and has changed my thinking on the topic. Thanks!
I think that you are cutting out a bit of importance here in terms of "what causes belief". If I say I'm hungry, you believe me because you trust me that much, because you know me, and *also very much and more than the others because what I'm reporting isn't weird or unusual". But reports of Jhanas are weird and unusual; they are an incredibly niche claim made by an impossibly small amount of people (thousands isn't a lot).
To put it another way, there are many more people who claim they are a network of cooperating characters, like an ensemble cast on a sitcom, than claim they have experienced Jhanas.
I don't think this by any means disproves the jhana thing - like maybe you really can think yourself into a happiness state that also disables all your evo-psych reasons to want to eat candy, etc. It could be! I can't disprove it! But no internal-state thing can be disproven; generalizing your argument as presented pretty much bans anyone from doubting any claim of internal state for any reason, full stop. It's a big ask; it deserves to be treated like one if for no other reason than the fact that if followed it would create a bad-actor dishonesty paradise.
I think my thinking comes down to something like this: I think you are right to push back on "There's no possible way this is true" type of claims (since it is possible that some weird neuron stuff is happening). But I think you are wrong to pretend that there's no reason to distrust completely unverified claims of mental specialness and enlightenment, which is why I brought up DiD-TikTok people above; many thousands of people claim that in ways most find to be clearly-false attention seeking. Like all internal-state stuff, it's unfalsifiable - but it's also not something we give credibility to *simply because a lot of people make the claim*.
Again, this might not be those; it might be a real sort of neuron-hacky type of thing we don't understand really well that might really happen. But I don't think you can (fairly) pretend like there isn't anything to pattern-match to here; there's enough hobbyist-DiD stuff floating around that it's not entirely weird to go "this seems a lot like that".
This seems on target to me. But I think there is a mistake being made throughout this discussion. Jhana is a practice, not an achievement. For those who find the practice productive, it yields good results in an sort of ascending fashion (with plateaus). Buddhist ideology pictures a type of end-result ("enlightenment"), but those who engage in the practice rarely claim to have achieved enlightenment (although many may feel they have reached the state it refers to for a short period).
I'd also add that the number of people who claim to have garnered psychological gains from jhana number many, many millions, not thousands. This is a set of practies with a two thousand year history that dominated the most populous portions of the world (South, Southeast, and East Asia) for a millennium. The populations of those parts of the world through most of recorded history would find this conversation to be pretty funny--maybe a bit like us listening to a group of English aristocrats in 1700 trade ideas about whether people who say, "Vigorous exercise makes you feel better" are deluded fools or con artists.
I think you're moving the goalposts. The claim under discussion is not, "jhana is a meditative practice that can improve your mood, enhance focus, and provide other relatively minor psychological gains". Rather, the claim is, "jhana is a technique that can reliably deliver addiction-free pure bliss". By your exercise analogy, the second claim is more akin to saying, "vigorous exercise will give you the power to leap over tall mountains at will".
Oh. I was not responding to the claim you are citing. I was responding to Drethelin's, "I basically just don't believe this is a real thing." Thats what this substring grows out of.
Actually, the ultimate claim of jhana is that it can free you from the cycle of rebirth that entails only suffering. I don't believe in the cycle of rebirth, and I think Buddhists make a category error when they claim all existence in the phenomenal world is ultimately suffering. I wouldn't however, be skeptical about individuals who report extemely high levels of contentment through jhana practice, unless they are trying to sell me prayer beads, etc. I did enough zazen when I was young half a century ago to know that it can generate very strong effects on consciousness and affect.
Yes, exactly; you've said it better than I ever could.
This is a really well thought out comment that captures some of my sentiments. Thanks, Resident Contrarian.
"it is possible that some weird neuron stuff is happening"
Clearly, we should put people into some brain-scanning machine and have them achieve this state in them. If all of a sudden certain parts associated with pleasure lit up like fireworks, then that will go a long way towards convincing me. If they report supreme bliss without very strong neuro-correlates, than that's what I would in fact expect.
I question the psychological credibility of "this is ten to a hundred times better than sex and I can achieve it at will, but I only do it occasionally". Does this seem to match *any* other activity we know about?
Also, ten to a hundred times is at the *same* time both pretty non-specific (it's an order of magnitude, after all) *and* surprisingly numerical (what factor more pleasure do you get from good sex than from eating great pizza - can you even put a particular number on it?).
"I don't think there are many people who masturbate three times a day. Indeed, I am pretty confident that most people masturbate at a rate far below any constraints imposed by time, convenience, or biology. Why?"
The marginal utility combined with the decreasing supply of ejaculate.
I like the thinking in your post, Mutton, and I'm going to try to sharpen the focus. I know quite a few people who were significantly into forms of Buddhist meditation--enough to understand from experience the positive direction the rewards were going, as well as the ideology that framed them--who simply gave it up after a while, often without any conscious decision process.
This is true for me too. I can't speak for the others, but when I reflect on why this is so in my case I have no clear answer. It's a question I revisit often: the meditation cushion I used in the '70s has sat by my bed at least as long as I've lived in my current home--over thirty years--and I periodically pick it up to stare at it and wonder why I haven't used it since moving here (or to vacuum!).
The best answer I have is that the rewards I experienced were in some deeply felt way tied to the circumstances of my life back then, and when those changed, the personal meaning of the experiences meditation yielded changed as well, and in a manner that frayed the strong attachment to meditation I had formed.
Buddhism seems to anticipate this possibility by stressing the critical role of the "sangha"--one's meditation community--which forms an intersubjective context to sustain the meaning of subjective experience. Practicing in a social group, which is the dominant mode of Buddhist practice historically, helps overcome ordinary akrasia and also serves to anchor context and reinforce the sense of consistent progress towards an unchanging goal. After all, although we tend to speak about neurological phenomena we experience repeatedly as though they were constants, they always occur within complex networks within the brain and in social living that together shape how we construe their meaning and respond with affects and prompts to action accordingly.
Good points, Mutton, and I suspect I can confirm them with more chronological credentials than you.
I *would* like to hear if the second time is anywhere as good, too.
Being married and pursuing casual sex are not mutually exclusive.
There's also an aspect of diminishing returns - you don't masturbate five times a day because there's little urge and a much lessened reward for it, and I'm not seeing this reasoning about Jhanas. But we're not just talking sex, we're talking something that's supposedly better than sex with a supermodel while on the best possible cocktail of drugs (if we're taking the x100 claim seriously.
If the claim was that when you're really stressed out and do this with meditation, it clears things up and it feels *amazing*, then I would be a lot closer to buying that (the same way I could with massage for when it's desperately needed) than the notion that you can pop in and out of it freely but just don't.
Why would sex sith a supermodel while on drugs be particularly good? That sounds awful to me tbh.
Regardless, the idea behind jhanas is that you don't pursue them for their own purpose. Meditation is more about releasing your attachment to everything, including pleasure. So it makes sense that you wouldn't try to constantly cultivate any particular state. Instead you'd be at peace with most possible states, and you'd pick activities that are best for you in the long term.
My tentative position is that Jhana exists, but the valence of it is exaggerated because of SDB / religious profession. If it was actually that good, people would do it more. I haven't heard any other examples of supreme bliss that aren't reinforcing, and that makes me suspicious.
> I haven't heard any other examples of supreme bliss that aren't reinforcing
The idea of something like that calls into question how we would even measure it. If you claim to have a preference for something that you can get at will, but actually don't do it that much, and instead do other things, then in what sense do you really prefer it to the things you *actually* do?
Buddhism is a religion. It's common for religious people to do excessive cheering about the Great Thingy but then not act as if they actually believe it. So I'm sort of pattern matching Jhana to that.
Or maybe I'm wrong and the most effective EA cause will be teaching everyone to reach Jhana and reminding them to do it more often when they forget to do it.
Because “I don’t believe you” is predictive of a bunch of behaviours. You can see where that conversation is going (The conterfactual exists where they do believe you but are just contrarian, but I usually see Athena conversation go differently in that case)
“I’m hungry” is predictive that a person is about get food (The counterfactual exists where not really, they just want to complain and never actually go for food)
But those other kinds of statements on internal states don’t tend to be predictive of anything. If someone told me they were do something 100x more blissful than an orgasm I’d expect them to shortly be in a dopey convulsing mess not quiet meditation
I wouldn’t call them liars though, it’s just that the language around discussing internal states can be completely unfit for purpose. There’s a reason it took so long for people to realise something as straight forward as aphantasia exists
"Why should I believe you? You're just reporting your internal state without any evidence."
You're making a category error here. Drethelin's position doesn't depend on whether or not he was lying when he articulated it. His statement was analytical, not testamentary. (Also his use of the phrase 'I believe' is just a colloquialism; it could be rephrased as 'Cammarata's claims aren't credible'.) Cammarata's claims, on the other hand, are themselves proffers of evidence; if he's lying then the argument over the ontology of jhanas falls apart.
Also your point is the Nuclear Option of philosophical discourse, as it can be met with the retort "I don't believe YOU that you don't believe me." Infinite recursion is fun and all, but the only acceptable response to anyone who starts down this path is just to punch them in the face immediately.
"some combination of how much we trust them, and our priors"
This is probably nitpicky, but that's a distinction without a difference. Trust is just another prior, after all.
"I think we're talking about different priors."
Yes, they're different priors. But they're both priors. That's my point.
At first I thought they were lying but then I realized that I know people who talk about pizza or weed or napping with similar enthusiasm, so now I think maybe a lot of people just are easily made happy, or having bad sex, or both.
Yeah, that was my impression too. If you find meditation, napping, or pizza better than sex, then you're doing sex tragically wrong.
Can’t beat a good sleep all the same.
Here's some describing the experiences on camera. Not trying to convince you, take it for what you will: https://youtu.be/nns1AWPLvcU?t=1114 (timestamped to 18:34)
another video of going through the jhanas on camera. Roger is a meditator I respect a lot and is far better than most at describing the phenomenology of meditative states
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejShBMgtlCo
Unfortunately, I cannot see the phenomena on the video, only a person sitting calmly for an hour, once in a while saying something like "this feels really good". :D
This dude immediately after begins talking about his experiences with "beings, spirits, angels, and devils," which makes me pretty skeptical.
jhourney.io is trying. It's super early and tentative but it looks like they're able to detect jhana from raw eeg signals in some cases. Seems like jhana 2 is the easiest, which other labs have found too. Mostly because jhana 2 is calm, so it doesn't trigger muscle tension which messes with eeg
https://twitter.com/zerfas33/status/1576300651885142016
I've had access to Jhana(s) for close to a decade, it's real. It's like a "place" inside of consciousness you learn the location of, and then can go to when you want to. That's not what it actually is of course.
I agree with most of his descriptions, I would change a couple things.
I'm skeptical too but I think at the outset it's good to ask if it seems plausible that the human brain could be hacked in this kind of way. And I think it does. If it was incredibly motivating it might have been selected out but it isn't.
And I don't think the "they are just making it all up" explanation makes much sense.
However, I do think it's quite plausible that the state isn't as blissful as claimed and what is actually being reported is that it reduces their desire to engage in these other sorts of pleasure, is decently pleasant and that social and internal pressures encourage them to state it in the most appealing/amazing way.
Or maybe it feels that blissful to them because their experience of life is so full of tension, anxiety and self-criticism that the mere absence of those negatives is hugely blissful.
But it also seems plausible it's as described. Plausible enough I'm going to do more to conquer my meditation akrasia.
I'd love to pay a bunch of ppl who are skeptics (but not antagonistic to the idea) about this to meditate for six months and see what they say about it.
So there is this interesting thing where you can be having a pleasurable experience and can toggle between that experience and Jhana and you will find yourself preferring Jhana.
It's not really that it's always something huge fireworks or anything, sometimes it can literally be like that, but a lot of the time it's more subtle, it's more underlying but deep and pervasive.
The one place i would probably tweak Nick's description is verbiage where it is made to sound so much better than all worldly pleasures *along the same dimensions*.
I find that Jhana literally exists on like a finer gradient, rather than just being *more* sex than sex, etc.
When you compare the two, it's like oh this other sensation doesn't really hold a candle to Jhana, but they don't exist on the same spectrum IMO.
Ok, that sounds much more like what I would expect. Thanks.
I presume when you say you prefer it you don't mean it's just more rewarding (in the way that say video games or stimulants can be even when they aren't that fun).
Yeah, when I say you prefer it I mean that let's say you gave me a pleasurable narcotic experience.
If I were to do Jhana while on the narcotic, and then ask myself "Which of these things felt better/was more pleasurable" the answer would be Jhana although to reiterate they don't exactly exist on the same spectrum.
Part of the reason for it, and this might sound crazy, but it's the only thing in the world with zero hedonic adaptation.
I can't tell you why, but everything else drops off and you are left grasping and this leaves the experience fundamentally unsatisfying.
Jhana, for whatever reason, doesn't drop off and you don't grasp at it. I've done it for a decade, there is no hedonic adaptation.
Kind of wild really.
Well it makes sense that one might be able to hack the brain in this kind of way. I'm still somewhat skeptical but still going to get serious about not being too busy for meditation.
I mean I'm not skeptical that you had that experience but that it's something that is relatively universal and I'll be able to do it as well. I mean I'm so jealous that my wife can get these huge placebo effects and I get nothing so I hope it's not like that (Well it could also be your brain is tricking you but that could always be the case and for all I know drugs and sex do the same ;-))
Yeah! I get that it probably sounds weird from the outside.
I would definitely say the experience is far too reliable, nuanced, and consistent to be anything resembling a placebo.
Without getting into mechanisms/how's/why's , I truly believe there is something substantial at play here.
Also, like Scott said in some of his comments I've known a good number of people who have access to it and the experiences are remarkably consistent.
I’m skeptical, but if there’s even a 10% chance the jhanas are real states of mind then it would be worth 6 months of time to find out. I would certainly practice and write about the experience if it was funded.
> I'd love to pay a bunch of ppl who are skeptics (but not antagonistic to the idea) about this to meditate for six months and see what they say about it.
As a sort-of-skeptic, if anybody felt like throwing money at me, I'd go for it.
I'm very skeptical and feel the same. Is this the kind of thing that doesn't work if you're skeptical of it? (Like hypnosis)
No. I was skeptical of such a thing, but open to it when it happened. That being said, it takes some time to get there, and it’s most important to regulate your desire. I literally got to this state because I was regulating a sense of longing after a breakup.
being skeptical might even help. Craving anything tends to get in the way, and for people trying for jhana they obviously crave jhana, which is an issue. If you not only don’t crave jhana but don’t even believe it’s real you’ll have advantage
Same as others here. Skeptical but not antagonistic. I don't think I'd try it for 6 months on my own. I could probably try if you throw me a bunch of money, but I have to say I'd need to think about it a little bit before committing to this
Is jhana a "real thing?" (asks Drethelin).
Jhana is the same word and activity that English speakers usually call "zen." (Jhāna is the Pali form of Sanskrit: dhyāna --> Chinese: chán --> Japanese: zen. It's a familiar and widespread practice/experience. It isn't arcane. Unlike telekinesis or clairvoyance, which can be tested by objective demonstration, the demonstration of jhana is subjective, but simple enough. There are protocols a person can follow to achieve it, available through teachers; in principle, an instruction sheet could be a guide, but it does take fine tuning to get the idea of how to do such a simple thing as doing nothing. A person follows the protocol, and if it works, the experience confirms itself; if it doesn't, it doesn't.
There's nothing wrong with skepticism like Drethelin's, unless it's maintained as a position alongside a refusal to experiment through attempting the simple protocol for a reasonable period in good faith. If the attempt doesn't confirm the claims for you, then stay a skeptic--there's no possibility of adjudication (unless you'll accept the evidence of brain wave studies, an objective measure, but only if one accepts the science and its interpretation [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zen-gamma/]). However, there isn't much more of a claim that a skeptic can make than to say, "I can't confirm it so I don't believe it." In the cases of telekinesis and clairvoyance the confirmation is objective and requires no interpretation. The difference is between an "I can't confirm it" context and a "you can't confirm it" context.
To choose among endless possible analogies: Someone who has never listened to music could say, "I know it's rude, but I basically don't believe melodic beauty is a real thing." Listening to, say, Bach the first time they may hear nothing of interest. There's no way another person can confirm the experience of melodic beauty for the skeptic. If the skeptic follows the protocol and listens to music as a teacher guides them through it, they will generally experience what lots of people experience when they listen to Bach (and, of course, some don't--try dixieland or Beyonce instead). Some may not, and they'll never really credit the oohs and ahhs about Bach. Melodic beauty can't be objectively confirmed, but that doesn't mean it's not a real thing. Whether Bach is better than casual sex would depend a lot on the performance values in each case.
Yeah, I think the broader implications of your comment is one reason Jhana flies under the radar despite probably being the thing psychological research should study the most.
It exists in this weird dimension of qualia where modern society doesn't quite know how to situate itself.
You cant really objectively confirm someone else's internal experience, but you also can't deny that *if* it did actually happen, then *it objectively occured*.
Jhana is challenging to discuss bcuz society doesn't really know how it feels about this stuff, despite Jhana being something consistently experienced by a substantial population.
I think there's two pretty wrong things here. First this:
***There's nothing wrong with skepticism like Drethelin's, unless it's maintained as a position alongside a refusal to experiment through attempting the simple protocol for a reasonable period in good faith. If the attempt doesn't confirm the claims for you, then stay a skeptic--there's no possibility of adjudication.***
The ask here is something like "you aren't allowed to doubt me unless you spend hours a day for perhaps years, at which point I can just say 'well maybe you aren't very good at meditating' and tell you still aren't allowed to doubt me". The size of the ask matters a lot here; If I was to say "you aren't allowed to doubt Islam unless you spend a lifetime worshipping Allah, then die and find you don't go to Muslim heaven", most wouldn't find that reasonable. This isn't that bad, but it's not exactly nothing, either.
***However, there isn't much more of a claim that a skeptic can make than to say, "I can't confirm it so I don't believe it." In the cases of telekinesis and clairvoyance the confirmation is objective and requires no interpretation. The difference is between an "I can't confirm it" context and a "you can't confirm it" context.***
One way to reverse what you've said about telekinesis and clairvoyance here is to note that, like the overwhelming majority of externally falsifiable claims of mental specialness in a way that strikes people as woo, the claims end up being false when tested. If anything, this should establish a prior that unfalsifiable claims that resemble those are somewhat more likely to be false. If there are five chain burger joints of a particular franchise in my state and a sixth in antartica that I can't get to, finding that the five I can test in my state suck should increase my confidence that the one in antartica sucks too, even though I can't check that particular location out.
I think you misconstrued part of my point, Contrarian. There is nothing wrong with a skeptic maintaining their doubt--they're "allowed" to. But their doubt is not an argument; it's a doubt. If the claims that Zen masters made were ones subject to objective confirmation--which includes inductive reasoning from evidence, such as the poor taste of Antarctic White Castle burgers--then you could argue against them. But they are not that kind of claim. Nor is the "ask" the big one you envision. In general, the "ask" is something like, "Try out meditation in ten-minute intervals a few times a day for a week. If you find something there, move on to twenty-minutes, and so forth, committing more in proportion to what you feel you receive." For people who move on, it's generally a self-motivating process. I think it would be very strange not to doubt claims about jhana before trying it, and those doubts will keep many people from testing it out (It's not worth my time and effort!--perfectly reasonable). But those doubts demonstrate nothing but the doubt itself. (By the way, this process is very similar to that which characterizes more objectively visible ones such as Taichi martial arts. The psychological payoffs of Taichi are less often doubted because the physical skills of increased grace are observable, but they are, in fact, comparable and equally unverifiable--or verifiable only by indirect means, such as EEGs, etc.)
Your last paragraph starts with a sentence that I don't think works--I think you restated rether than "reversed" what I said--but I think I understand what you mean. The principle of falsifiability distinguishes between claims that are scientific and not scientific. If I tell you I have a headache, it's not a falsifiable claim, and so not scientific, but that doesn't mean it's false. Moreover, there is nothing in Zen claims that "resembles" the claims of telekenesis/clairvoyance, which are indeed falsifiable. Uri Geller doesn't offer to teach you how to perform his "feats" so that you can do them too--he is claiming privileged powers. The structures of claim-and-demonstration are categorically distinct.
There is a completely different set of issues that pertains to the ideology that surrounds meditation practice: Buddhism (or other religious structures that rely on similar meditative practices). Different schools of Buddhism will each offer thousands of doctrinal assertions: metaphysical, historical, ethical, psychological, and so forth. A lot of that is woo indeed--and some Buddhist schools are up front about it, acknowledging that the assertions are basically pedagogical heuristics, designed to frame meditation in ways that will attract followers in an end-justifies-the-means dynamic. This ideological framework is religious, not practical; it can easily be exploited as a con to draw money from the gullible (although also in good faith, just as in an above-board missionary church setting). Most of these claims are not, in fact, subjectively verifiable through meditation practice: they appear confirmed because they are built into the meaning-structure of the practice (which is, tangentially, true of a great deal of common belief). However, the post is about jhana itself--the physical practice and its psychological concomitants--and none of the ideological components of Buddhism need to be entailed in the practice.
There might be a mismatch of *what* we are discussing. I'm going off this quote:
***the demonstration of jhana is subjective, but simple enough. There are protocols a person can follow to achieve it, available through teachers; in principle, an instruction sheet could be a guide, but it does take fine tuning to get the idea of how to do such a simple thing as doing nothing. A person follows the protocol, and if it works, the experience confirms itself; if it doesn't, it doesn't.
There's nothing wrong with skepticism like Drethelin's, unless it's maintained as a position alongside a refusal to experiment through attempting the simple protocol for a reasonable period in good faith.***
Most people in the comments (and the article) seem to be talking about Jhana as the "event" - the thing where you get the ecstasy and other effects. And they seem to to be talking about that years in. If we are just talking about "any observable benefits of meditation", my bar for belief is much much lower both because it's more plausible (most people are familiar with calming down) and because the costs are lower (almost immediate instead of years).
I think the distinction between "I am a little psychic" and "I can give myself mind-orgasms with my mind that make me quit drinking" are probably a little bigger for someone *inside* the Jhana bubble than outside it. What I'm saying is that, to the person outside that bubble, they seem pretty close. Telekinesis/clarivoyance are pretty falsifiable and generally get falsified, but to the person outside the bubble that establishes a prior of "claims like this usually falsified, when falsifiable at all".
Well, sure. Dhyāna (to use the original Sanskrit term) is a stepwise process. Each step up makes the expectations for the next more plausible, and if you're at the start of the process, it's perfectly ok to be skeptical about claims concerning remote steps. (At least I hope so, because I was always a beginner and I personally think many claims about "enlightenment" are implausible, colored by ideological interpretation.)
But there's a big difference in the two claims you note in your last paragraph. "I am a little psychic" really has nothing to do with meditation and is objectively falsifiable, just as "I am a whole lot psychic" would be. "I quit drinking because of the way advanced meditation made me feel" is subjective and not falsifiable, except the part about being on the wagon. But why would you doubt it if someone had been an alcoholic, got sober, and said that experiences in meditation is what had enabled him to do it? It's certainly plausible, and unless he's trying to sell you a meditation pillow for an exorbitant price, why would you think it less plausible than the idea that he just sobered up out of the blue? What's the motive for making it up? Quitting cold turkey is just as much to brag about. When people who are not trying to make money out of religion say they reformed their bad lives because of the spiritual joy and peace they found when they "accepted Jesus as their personal savior" do you doubt that's what happened? You don't have to believe in Christianity to understand the ordinary plausibility of that.
So I think breaking this down might be helpful. Here's sort of my thinking on a bunch of questions here:
1. Are some people making claims like "Jhana is a process or state of unimaginable bliss, one that is far beyond other experiences, and that has other beneficial follow-on effects like being a diet aid, drug-use cessation, and caffeine sensitivizing without any the significant downsides we'd expect from other treatments that accomplish similar things besides time outlay?"
Answer: Yes.
That's more or less what the post is about and Nick C has been reinforcing it through the comments and expanding on various claims in that direction.
2. Are these claims falsifiable?
Answer: No, not significantly.
3. Can we imagine a rewards system in which people making these claims would receive benefits beyond Jhana, whether Jhana is true or not?
Answer: Yes.
In a very local sense, we've observed it. Scott's support is worth a lot; he provides a lot of very high-quality exposure to one of the best audiences on the internet. I've been on the receiving end of it, and it's great, and I'm very thankful for it (and don't actually begrudge anyone else getting it, it's not like I earned it).
But we can also imagine some other ways - most people would enjoy believing themselves to be enlightened and to have access to a kind of superpower. Others might find a sense of community. Others might set themselves up as gurus. Others might gain attention from others. All of these would be considered upsides for many people.
4. Are there any other claims of internal mental states that would see similar rewards, whether falsifiable or unfalsifiable?
Answer: Yes.
Spoonies, recreational DiD people, people with claimed psychic abilities and spirit mediums all would see at least the benefits described from their claims in at least some situations. Some are falsifiable, while others aren't.
5. Are any of the falsifiable versions falsified?
Answer: Yes.
Most claims of clairvoyance, telekinesis, and other types of psychic powers are mostly considered falsified.
6. Are any of the non-falsifiable versions generally considered to be obviously false?
Answer: Yes.
Most people understand both DiD and Spoonieism to make false claims for various reasons. Note that some people DO have hard to diagnose illnesses and some folks have clinical DiD, but the "TikTok" versions of these are generally doubted.
So moving on to the discussion:
You have repeatedly said that things like "claiming you are psychic" don't have anything to do with special claims that meditation gives you internal superpowers, in that they are externally falsifiable where meditation is not.
The flaw here is that the logical, responsible thing to do when faced with a particular unfalsifiable claim is to look at similar claims that ARE falsifiable and see if they generally hold up. This allows you to build some priors/expectations for "things like that" which can help you interpret the likelihood that the unfalsifiable claim is true.
For instance, I might claim that I can levitate, but only when people aren't looking. If I did so, you would be well-advised to look at people who make the same claim of limited flight, but without the "when people can't see me" modifier. You'd find that those claims were universally false, which would and should affect your confidence in my claim.
In this case, I can look to people who say "I have a special mental state which makes me special" who are falsifiable. When I do (psychics, mediums, telekinetics, spoonies) I find that they are generally thought to be falsified to greater or lesser degrees. I can also look to see if there are other unfalsifiable similar claims (recreational DiD, Otherkin) and whether or not they are broadly thought to be obviously false via conventional social lie detection, and I find there are.
If I'm trying to build a model for "How likely is it that the claims of exceptional effects from Jhana states are true", and I am, these are the tools I'd use to do that. From them, I can derive certain principles:
1. People sometimes make claims of verifiable or unverifiable mental states/abilities that are false.
2. The probable motivations for these false claims (mental illness, being mistaken, self-deception, attention-seeking, profit, celebrity) are all as probable for a false-Jhana-claims scenario as they are to a person who claims psychic abilities or DiD-for-fun.
3. Given 1-2, I would expect that at least *some* Jhana-state-claimers are lying simply because even if the state is real, it requires a great deal of work to achieve; some would seek to reap the benefits without putting in the work.
4. It is easy to imagine a world where, given 1-2, all Jhanist-state-claims of the kind described in the article are false, just as we assume all or nearly all "DiD is fun and rad and I totally have it" claims are false.
5. In both 3. and 4., it's not necessary for me to actually know *which* motivation an individual might be using to doubt their claim, since I also don't know it in the case of the psychic or the DiD person with any high level of certainty, but can still observe that *something* was a powerful enough motivator to drive the lie.
It's now important to note that none of this *proves* that jhana states as described in the article are fake. They could be an outlier that defies the other examples. If I went up to a person and said "I am absolutely certain you are lying - it is impossible that you found an odd neuron hack that allows you to feel really good", I'd be in the wrong.
But at the same time, I'm *not* wrong to let my knowledge and experience of the world guide how credible I find claims of this kind, and the world (as I've observed it) seems to indicate that claims of this kind are usually false.
Side notes:
1. On alcoholism/drug abuse: I didn't address your rationale here because there's no way for me to verify Nick C's alcohol and drug intake. It is in effect as unverifiable for me as the jhana claim.
2. On a person's claims of religious experience: I'm a practicing, sincere Christian; I believe in a lot of stuff other people would find silly, but I very much believe it.
If I went to a person and said "Hey, God told me you should give me your 2023 Honda Odyssey, just a full pink-slips transfer of ownership to me." And I really believed it, they would still be justified in saying "You know, this seems a lot like a weird con job to me. Usually things that sound like this are - I'm not going to give you my car". I might believe they *should* give me their car, and that God actually spoke to me, but their caution and skepticism is justified.
More to the point I don't think that people *shouldn't get to make claims of personal, unverifiable experience*. We'd otherwise not have any way to communicate that we were sad, hungry, in pain, or many other important concepts.
But that said, often a claim of sadness is a tool of manipulation. Sometimes a claim of pain is an attempt to get opiates. There are many cases in which reasonable judgments about how likely you feel it is that another person's statements are true are useful, necessary tools for negotiating the world and protecting yourself and others as you do.
In this case, I have to make a decision that's something like "Will I spend months or years pursuing a promised reward, and advise others to do so?" and the decision I make would have a real, significant affect on my life and the lives of others.
So assessing the *probability* that the claim is true is important. In this case, I have come down on the side of "this is probably false, but it's possible I'm wrong", which means I won't pursue the practice at all but I also won't run up to people who make the claim and go "I'm sure you are lying" while burning their meditation mats.
Meanings of words are as malleable as their spellings. I have never seen anything resembling jhana mentioned in writings on Zen Buddhism, and if it was, I would expect to see jhana states dismissed as merely a distraction from the path and not to be sought out.
Richard, "zen" 禅 is the Japanese pronunciation of Chinese "chán" 禪, which was the term assigned for the Sanskrit word "dhyāna" ध्यान when the Buddhist canon was translated into Chinese during the first millennium. The Pali canon rendered dhyāna as "jhāna" झान. When you write "I have never seen anything resembling jhana mentioned in writings on Zen Buddhism," you are saying, "I have never seen anything resembling zen mentioned in writings on Zen Buddhism."
jhāna --> dhyāna --> chán --> zen
does not imply
meaning of "jhana" = meaning of "dhyāna" = meaning of "chán" = meaning of "zen"
or we might think that the English word "arrive" must mean to specifically arrive at a shore ("ad ripam").
But I could be wrong. Can you show me where the blissful states that the OP describes are spoken of in Zen writings? I am here using "Zen" to mean the so named school of Buddhism, and its teachings and practices.
There are doctrinal debates in Buddhism.
Theravada heavily emphasizes Jhana.
Tibetan Buddhism heavily emphasizes Tantra.
Vipassana heavily emphasizes insight meditation.
Zen heavily emphasizes mindfulness ( I think ).
Buddhist scholars fight constantly about this, its by no means a settled thing.
What we do know for sure is if you go back to what was actually attributed to the Buddha, his primary point was Jhana is the way to enlightenment. He is quoted as saying this multiple times and put a heavy emphasis on Jhana.
All debate over this came later.
There are two levels operating here. The word level is one. "Zen" is the Japanese prounciation of the Chinese word "chán." The identical character is used to write both, although calligraphic variants have emerged over the ~1300 years since Japanese monks brought Chán/Zen texts from China to Japan. When Chinese first began to translate Buddhist scripture, brought over the Silk Route by Indian and Central Asian monks ~1800 years ago, into Chinese, they chose "chán" because its pronunciation at the time (reconstructed as "dzan"--you can see how the Japanese got "zen") replicated the aspirated initial in "dhyāna." Thus chán/zen are not etymologically derived from "dhyāna" through linguistic evolution (such as you described for "arrive"), they are loans that speak the identical word, like "karaoke" in English, which simply borrows the Japanese name for an entertainment form invented in Japan ("kara OK": から OK). Pali is an Indian dialect derived, like Hindi, from Sanskrit. Versions of the Buddhist canon are preserved in Pali, and the term "jhāna" is not derived from "dhyāna," it is simply a pronunciation variant of the same word. The common features of these words (dhyāna/jhāna --> chán/zen) are constrained by the authoritative uses of the term that appears in the Buddhist canon (Tripitika), which was translated from Sanskrit and is best preserved in Pali and Chinese.
So, basically, the definitional meaning of all four words is, indeed, identical. The way the term is used in the Tripitika constrains meaning far more tightly than is normal for words even within a single language. They refer to a single technical term, something like the constraint on the meaning of loan terms like "habeus corpus." (Of course, once a word strays from the Buddhist context into the general lexicon, it can quickly morph, the way that "zen" has to some degree in colloquial English--have you ever heard, "Cool, man; that's so zen"?)
The second level concerns practice. Buddhism is a living religion and has many forms, which continue to evolve as practitioners who are regarded as authoritative embellish them. The Pali canon and the Chinese canon actually belong to two very different branches of Buddhism (Theravada and Mahayana) with largely discrete geographical ranges and many differences in doctrine, practice, and interpretation. In that sense, your point makes much more sense: What "jhāna" "means" in Theravadan practice may be different from what "zen" means in Japanese (or American) Zen practice. And this goes further, since there are, in fact, different schools of Zen, with somewhat different takes on both how to practice "zazen" (zen sitting), and what happens when you do. Point taken--in my comments I implied too simple an equation between Nick C's practice and Zen, as I've encountered it.
I don't know what particular sect of jhāna practice Nick C. trained in, so I can't compare his description with others in the same tradition. But I really don't see anything odd about his claims. I was introduced to Zen by a well known master named Philip Kapleau (he's famous, so let me make clear my introduction was brief and I was never "trained" by him), and he spoke about the joy that accompanied release from desire. You can find descriptions in the "testimonials" Kapleau included in his best known book, "The Three Pillars of Zen" (if you get hold of it, you can use the index, "joy," and find the relevant ones in Part Two of the book). When I spent a couple of months at an institute presided over by a Tibetan master named Chogyam Trungpa (Tibetan traditions are like Zen on steroids) the "better than sex" trope was pretty common. (I sure never got there.) But "bliss" was always pictured as ultimately a diversion. Yes, you'd find it along the way, but if enlightenment succeeded it, the bliss would matter then no more than the sex had once you'd achieved initial trance experiences.
As I wrote in other comments, I just don't see any of this as extraordinary. Would we be inclined to doubt a virtuoso opera singer who said, "When I'm in full voice in a great opera, the joy is blissful and far greater than great sex"? Or a champion skier, or a chess grand master, or a scientist on track for a breakthrough in the lab, or--on the other hand--a compulsive gambler, alcoholic, or opioid addict. Of course, any individual report is subjective and can be doubted. But unless a person has never experienced for some period this type of total immersion and satisfaction, why would the claim that it can come about through meditation practies with extremely long histories provoke any special doubt? The skepticism should be that any such state of joy existed in anyone anytime via any pathway. That seems a little solipsistic to me, but solipsism is certainly one form of rationalism.
Great comment, agree with what you shared.
I want to drill down on one point though, that I think is at the heart of this.
I agree that bliss/Jhana/states in of themselves *are not* the goal and a fixation on Jhana being the end in of itself is misguided and canonically inconsistent.
However, the argument is that the Buddha *did* say that Jhana is the *path* to Enlightenment.
Now, being the path implies that it is not the thing itself. But we can look at his words and validly interpret his meaning as saying one practices Jhana, which leads to insights, which leads to Enlightenment.
There is debate around this within Buddhism of course, but from everything I've read it we focus solely on what the Buddha actually said it was basically "Practice Jhana to achieve Enlightenment"
Can confirm, I do not exist
I would have said the same thing, but I have been accessing low level jhana states recently (since last week). I am not religious, but the experience sure gives me sympathy for those who believe. If you were to stumble on this mental state you’d think you’d contacted the holy.
fwiw i've spent some time around nick irl (he's cool) and have found him to be very non typical when it comes to resting pleasure state, like way off on some bell curve somewhere, iirc he reports never feeling negative emotions? I'm under the impression this was the case for him before he started meditating? should doublecheck with him tho
i didn't get the same impression from romeo tho so idk, and I personally have had some orgasmic meditative experiences (no idea if jhana tho) and i'm nowhere near nick's level of intensely positive base mood. maybe the good jhanas hit high positive mood people harder?
hey! Yeah good point. I do feel negative emotions sometimes (if I slept poorly, or if I'm overwhelmed) but most days not so much. Meditation broadly reduced the amplitude of mood shifts and bumped up the mean but I was quite happy growing up too.
Jhana specifically didn't lead to many permanent shifts other than some habit things due to fewer cravings (eg fewer desserts, stopped drinking). I think happiness helps in entering the jhanas, bc the jhanas are about turning a spark of pleasure into a flame of pleasure. If you always have access to a spark it's easier. But after you've started the flame cultivation process (during a sit) the benefits of being happier than normal tend to go away. When I hear other practitioners talk they say the same things I feel after that point.
> I personally had orgasmic meditative experiences
Leigh Brasington (jhana teacher) says that women often experience jhanas as sexual. Specifically first jhana, which to me feels like buzzy pleasurable energy. One women calls it "The Orgasmatron". My gf experiences it kind of like that too
It seems to me that both you (Nick) and Aella have sidled-up to the more-important meta-point about doubting such things, which is purely psychological: people who experience low resting pleasure state, low motivation, and low capacities for directed concentration can immediately tell that the entire conversation about Jhana is About Someone Else. Scott has spoken about this problem in other language when he mentioned how Motivational Interviewing techniques for drug addicts make use of such slights of hand as "heroin costs X per week so if you didn't do it your budget would be +X per week" -- it's a slight of hand because the person addicted to heroin knows that they are literally zero percent likely to try as hard to get money for anything other than heroin as they are to get heroin. Likewise, telling a person who is literally dying of type-two diabetes that daily walking and moderate changes in diet will save his life does nothing -- he already knows there is something wrong with his motivational structure that will absolutely prevent this from happening. Working hard for not-heroin or daily walking are conversations About Someone Else.
In the same way, a person who knows very well that they're not going to be able to meditate for 20 minutes once isn't in a mental space to hear about what might happen if they were to magically become able to meditate for 60 minutes every day for six months, especially when we begin with the admission that 'months' is only for a minority of meditators and most take years. What are the chances someone who feels he couldn't meditate if his life depended on it would turn out to be one of the six-months-only types?
All this calculus occurs for most people at some not-fully-recognized-as-conscious level, and results in them shrugging and saying "yeah sounds like bullshit". It absolutely is bullshit for them, and is in the same bucket of bullshit as other buddhist claims, like reading minds or flying through the air or going at will to visit the gods in heaven.
Is it bullshit generally? Obviously not, but you can understand why it is psychologically necessary for most to presume it is.