Buddhists say that if you meditate enough, you can learn to enter a state of extreme bliss called jhana.
(there are many different jhana states - there’s a discussion of the distinctions here - but I’m lumping them together for simplicity. For attempted explanations of why jhana should exist, see here and here.)
Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during meditation sessions, then leave when the session is over. Enlightenment takes years or decades of work, but some people describe reaching jhana after a few months of practice. Hardcore Buddhists insist that jhana is good only insofar as it serves as a stepping stone to enlightenment; others may find extreme bliss desirable in its own right.
Nick Cammarata of OpenAI sometimes meditates and reaches jhana. I’ve found his descriptions unusually, well, descriptive:
![Twitter avatar for @nickcammarata](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="96" height="96"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
And he links to others with similar perspectives:
In other words: jhana is incredibly blissful, orders of magnitude better than even amazing sex. With enough meditation ability, you can access it on demand, with no side effects. But it isn’t addictive; Nick maintains a normal job and social life. As far as I know, he doesn’t steal from his friends to buy more incense and meditation cushions. In fact, jhana is so non-reinforcing that Nick often “forgets” it’s even an option.
We’ve been talking recently about the difference between happiness and reinforcement (cf wanting vs. liking). If jhana works the way that Nick and others describe it, then it’s an extreme example of this distinction - almost maximally pleasurable, but with disproportionately little (zero?) reinforcement value. I don’t think normal models of reward have a good explanation here.
This is one reason I’m still interested in Qualia Research Institute ideas like the Symmetry Theory of Valence, even though there are some strong objections to them. I interpret QRI as coming at the problem from the opposite direction as everyone else: normal neuroscience starts with normal brain behavior and tries to build on it until they can one day explain crazy things like jhana; QRI starts with crazy things like jhana and tries to build down until they can explain ordinary behavior. This is naturally going to be shakier and harder to research - but somebody should be trying it.
Discussion questions:
Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
Suppose that you read this post and decide to study meditation to reach jhana. You study hard for six months, succeed, and it’s even better than you imagined - but it isn’t reinforcing on a neurological level. Does this register as negative prediction error in the reward center? Would it make you less likely to try plans like “study meditation” in the future, because they “don’t pay off”?
When Nick says that he’s less interested in casual sex now, because jhana is an easier way to get pleasure, what is going on at a neurological level? Is this nonsense? If some sex addict who says “it’s not even pleasurable anymore, I just feel like it’s a compulsion” learned to access jhana, would this cure his sex addiction?
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P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
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.
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?
That's when we were most often going to Pizza Hut, yes.
I'm fairly sure Pizza Hut was substantially better during the late 80s than anytime since. At least, that was the only time I ever had really good pizzas from Pizza Hut and I wasn't a small child or inexperienced with pizza at the time.
That's for helping with my memory!
Early 90s was when they went from making dough in-house to using pre-formed frozen dough discs from a factory.
I used to work in a P-Hut and after the deep dishes were done there was a quarter-inch deep pool of oil left in the pan, that pizza is literally SATURATED with canola oil. The canola oil proudly lists all the terrifying sounding anti-foaming agents and stuff thats in it as well.
Never eat fast food. It isn't food.
This comports with my experience of Pizza Hut both in the 1980's and the 2020's as well.
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.
Yup. Breathing exercises is what I was particularly thinking about. What you do then is to manipulate the oxygen uptake to the brain. Alternating between flooding and depriving the brain of oxygen in various ways. You can get quite dramatic mental consequences, and fast, with these techniques.
Of all the techniques to reach altered mental states this is likely to be the fastest & strongest. Full-blown reactive psychosis is right around the corner, even after a few weeks of training. (You can induce psychosis through other techniques as well, even with T’ai chi, but it happens far less often and in any case demands much longer and more intense practice.)
If you look for a sort-of positive, “Western” take on similar phenomena as Kundalini, there is/was a group of psychologists who were into what they call/called “transpersonal psychology”. The basic idea is that the mental phenomena you experience through various techniques can result in personal growth, once you are on the other side of them. And the phenomena certainly are life-changing, similar to psychedelic hard drugs. (The debate on the personal growth-potential of the trips you get on psychedelics has strong parallels.)
I have not checked what has happened to this sub-group of psychologists in recent years, but the go-to book in its day was Grof & Grof: The stormy search for the self. If my information from back then is correct, they were also the group who for a time managed to lobby the diagnosis MEPS into the DSM manual: “Mystical Experience with Psychotic Features”. MEPS was intended as a psychosis-diagnosis that was not altogether “bad”. (I think it has been removed again in later versions, but haven’t checked).
All of this just FYI😊
Well, the breathing exercises that were recommended to me were a gentle accompaniment to meditation, and to be frank I lost interest in them. But they don't sound like the intense thing you are referring to.
The self-enquiry thing is still something I practice both for its own sake and the hope of eventually attaining various benefits.
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.
Another factor to consider is evolutionary fitness; if entering Jhana just makes you happy and content, and is easy to forget about, and it doesn't command you to teach others about it, then... It has little reason to spread. Normal practitioners aren't out evangelizing, meditation seems like a hard thing to teach, and an even harder thing to market yourself as a trustworthy teacher of, so even very successful meditation techniques have a hard time taking hold.
Good point. Being happy with nothing to show for it seems much less contagious than status achieved through conspicuous consumption or fame (even if it's for a good cause).
Not sure how you parsed that out of what I said.
>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.
Hmmm, I'd assume most people couldn't perform their day-to-day activities from a deeply absorbed meditative state such as a jhana. Perhaps if you live a monastic life where all your duties can be performed in such a state it is possible, but I don't think that describes most people's lives.
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.
And yet he also says he doesn't feel inclined to stay in this state indefinitely, which is the point I'm trying to get across. The OP I was responding to made it sound like if people could reach a state of static bliss they would never leave it. I'm saying that's not true.
I get it, I'm just saying it doesn't boil down to "just pleasure" as stated in the post I'm responding to. Exercise takes a great deal of time, but plenty of people do it every day because it has benefits even though it objectively hurts to some extent.
It doesn't mean he'd definitely stay in the state all the time, but it changes the algebra somewhat from "just pleasure". For instance, it changes how much I'd expect the CCP to mandate Jhana-state-acquisition in their school curriculums, stuff like that.
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?
> 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.
I recommend doing a Jhana retreat with Leigh if at all possible. I've made what felt like years of progress on retreats. While the immediate effect gradually fades, I've retained a strong sense of how to get back to those states, and can generally do so again with much less effort.
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 said they were "more comparable," not " completely analogous."
Still, my original point is that you can know something is good for you, or will make you feel really good, but because it is difficult and you don't feel good or see results right away, you don't do the thing. It takes a lot of hard, painful mental work to reach the first jhana, and plenty of people report that they've been meditating for years and never achieved it. Both meditation and exercise make me feel better immediately afterward, and the "better" typically lasts a day or two after as well, but I still struggle , a lot, with actually getting both into my schedule and staying consistent with it.
There are entire industries that revolve around exercise, as you said before, but most people who buy a gym membership don't actually use it.
"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.
Agree.
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.
For the record, Drethelin's post is very likely responding to Scott's; Scott's more or less describes Jhana as the pure-bliss-and-sex-and-habit-improvement version Bugmaster is talking about.
I think overall if you respond to people in the comments on this one as if they are using Jhana to mean "a long drawn out meditative journey with very compact, common-sense claims" it's going to end up being confusing - most people are learning the term from the article.
Let the record so reflect, Contrarian.
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 guess part of the reason I'm still a bit skeptical is that if it's both real and repeatable why is there no mass movement pushing it for depression or just to make the world happier (that isn't laden down with religious/philosophical beliefs).
I mean ok it takes 6 months of work but having known some really depressed people and knowing how much life sucks for ppl in many parts of the world why isn't this as big a thing as bed nets?
Then again they keep coming out with papers showing various benefits from hypnotism but it has relatively little use in psychological treatment.
I think this is a question a lot of people who have access to this, including myself, are asking too.
I think it's utterly insane this isn't at the forefront of all psychological research.
If I had to wager a guess as to why, it's that the people who gain access to this feel like they won't be able to convince others of it's reality.
I also think it is somewhat of a metaphysics challenge to modern materialism. It's runs a risk of overturning certain widespread metaphysical assumptions that people cling to.
It's a hard thing to accept without impacting SOME of your worldviews in most cases.
How does it in anyway challenge materialism? I mean I'm not a physicalist (ok actually I don't believe that's well defined but I believe qualia are real things the laws of universe must address) but it seems like the idea that certain kinds of activities could change the way the brain works in a way that is pretty pleasant isn't anything even Dennet would deny.
Yeah, that's one interpretation. It's just some weird brain hack thing. The challenge is the experience itself lends itself to other interpretations as well.
But if it's purely brain phenomena, why isn't there hedonic adaptation? Shouldn't your receptors eventually become saturated?
That's one challenge, the other is the later stage Jhana experiences can be stunningly non-local.
It's just a bit of a sticky topic I think for certain assumptions.
Why should there be hedonic adaptation? Indeed, while it makes sense why there is adaptation to reward and that a particular thrill fades there are plenty of things that aren't really subject to hedonic adaptation. Yes, we want novelty but safe, pleasant social interaction or even daily work at a pleasant job (not to mention flow experiences) don't seem to have hedonic adaptation.
As for why drugs etc all seem to have hedonic adaptation of some kind isn't well understood but it makes sense that the brain is evolved to deal with quite a bit of variation in the underlying nuerochemistry so has some kind of high level feedback to adjust for that so it gets the right level regardless of variation in low level neurochemistry.
I mean.the very fact that pleasure and reward diverge suggests different evolutionary purposes and it seems like reward handles the novelty seeking aspects so I'd expect there to be brain mechanisms that can adjust pleasure to the "right" (Evo optimal) levels and that those mechanisms would be immune from adaptation.
Yes this is very speculative but I guess I'm just saying I'm not sure it's surprising.
That's a good answer! And yeah, that might be right.
Tbh, and there is no way I can really back this up objectively, but Jhana just opens a door to the traditional Buddhist domain of "Insight" for many people and some of those insights get sticky when they tangle with certain materialist/physicalist paradigms.
Again, I have no way to back that up objectively though.
If you spend long enough meditating to find jhana, you can find yourself going on the main 'buddhist' path of insight. The stuff you will realize there can like permanently change your worldview - not unlike psychedelics. The way buddhism works - it's like each person discovers the memeset again for themselves just from interrogating their conscious experience, so you can't really separate the state from the memeset here.
Also, I said this above, but in more traditional buddhist practices, jhana is a bit underemphasized/underadvertised. Because it is a temporary state, it is viewed as an incomplete solution as opposed to insight path & enlightenment. Considered to be valuable but not a goal
Yeah, Id agree with the first part for sure. It fundamentally starts having implications on your worldview.
So if you go back to what was originally attributable to the Buddha, he was basically just like "Do Jhana", there later came debates around Jhana vs Insight.
I get where that comes from, Jhana isn't the goal but I think Jhana leads to insight which together lead to the "goal" (experiential recognition of an abiding state which doesn't come and go)
Ohh and re: placebo I just meant that some ppl seem to get the effect and it's locked for others. Like my wife can basically get the full effects of weed just from believing she's stoned and I'm surely not totally immune but it's nothing like that.
Totally! Got it.
On the surface I'm optimistic Jhana is *far* more accessible than it seems, and even than Buddhists think it is. Ive seen enough to confirm this anecdotally.
I don't know if it's accessible to everyone ultimately, few things are, but gun to my head I think a double digit percentage of the human population could do Jhana.
Well thanks you've at least convinced me to be serious about giving it a try.
It's worth it! I mean what does anyone have to lose? Worst case scenario you get better at meditation which has proven benefits.
Best case scenario it's real.
I learned how to do this from Steven in a few workshops and solo practice
Any chance there is an online manual?
Variety of teachers give slightly different ways, but the tldr is you meditate until your mind gets very focused and quiet, then you look for any pleasurable sensations in your body, and then you submerge yourself into that sense of pleasure and it grows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K5ypXyF3dY&t=4s&ab_channel=MichaelTaft
The Mind Illuminated seems to be one commonly recommended manual for the details on access concentration. It also includes a path to Jhana.
Right Concentration assumes you have access concentration and talks about getting from there to Jhana with a lot of different troubleshooting tips.
how do I sign up for one of these workshops? 👀
Seconded :)
Have you ever heard of people spontaneously having Jhana experiences without meditation?
Yeah, if you mean like stumbling into them accidentally or spontaneously absolutely.
That was the case for me actually, I spontaneously encountered Jhana 1 and literally had the thought "Oh this must be what meditation is"
That's actually how self evident they are. I had done literally zero meditation, didn't know anything about anything.
I had an experience of it and to my Western mind was just like "OH - THATS what this is all about".
I literally told someone the next day that I figured out how to meditate.
So Jhana 1 has some descriptions like rapture? I had an experience of "rapture" in my teen years, which felt like a lifting out of my body followed by a huge ecstasy and a "presence of God"-like-feeling. I had this a few more times over the next few years but it mostly subsided. A friend got me into proper meditation and these experiences came back when I meditated a few times (I wouldn't say I'm an especially good or experienced meditator). I mentioned it afterwards and they did say they'd heard of similar sounding things, and it could have been Jhana. However I was still quite worried I had something-like schizoid tendencies and that meditation was unleashing some dissociative type of experience due to the feeling of actually lifting slightly out of my body. Whilst it was ecstatic, I'd describe it as a kind of intense ecstasy rather than a calm focused bliss-like ecstasy. A bit like that feeling when you go over a hill slightly too fast in your car and you're hanging in the air, just sustained over a few minutes. Anyway it didn't happen every time, but it did bring some worries which led to me meditating less, especially stopping if I could feel that coming on. I'd be interested now if those are things I should actually try and cultivate, or whether it's best avoided as it could have some other factors comingling (mental health).
I would say don't specifically try to cultivate that experience, but if it comes I wouldn't worry about it really.
The gateway to Jhana 1 is feeling pleasant sensations in the body, if you really go deep into it it can get quite intense and potentially mirror what you've described.
But the entryway should feel more calm and pleasant than what you are talking about. You also don't have to take it to it's utmost, I do it in short bursts throughout the day and it's always nourishing and managable not some big fireworks.
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.
It seems to me, Contrarian, that your argument is about criteria for skepticism, rather than whether jhana is "a real thing." I agree with you that it's perfectly allowable to be skeptical of claims about jhana (and similar things), and more so the more intense the claims are. I agree with you that people lie and will do so for attention as well as money and other tangible goods, etc.
I can't agree with your reasoning on similarities between jhana practice and phenomena like DiD, Spoonieism (thank you, Google), etc. I don't think there are defensible grounds to compare those who make claims about jhana to demonstrable con artists--psychics, fortune tellers, or boastful secret levitators. The only similarities I see are in the skeptic's attitude towards them. It may be that you're led to see these similarities because you have interpreted Nick C as saying, "I have a special mental state which makes me special." That would be a red flag indeed, but I read him as saying something dramatically different: "I have experienced a mental state that is wonderful and I want to let others know because I'm not special and it's available to everyone." (Yes, the one who spreads the gospel gets the reward of attention, which may invite doubts about motives, but Buddhism actually had this argument two thousand years ago, and the Mahayana tradition that dominates modern Buddhism outside Southeast Asia rejects the earlier aversion to the self-advertisement of missionary action on the basis of ethical arguments concerning the duty of salvation that should be familiar to Christians.)
Your comments on religion are more germane. You would be skeptical, as a Christian, of a Christian who said God told him to take possession of your Honda Odyssey, but you would believe a lot of stuff a Buddhist might find silly. I assume a Buddhist would be skeptical if Nick C said that while in a jhana state he'd grokked that the Buddhist should give him his Ford Explorer, but would believe a lot of stuff that Christians would find silly, including Nick's descriptions of the power of jhana. Your cars not at issue here. What Nick is describing would not be particularly controversial in Buddhist communities over the past 2.5 millennia--it would fit in with what millions of others have reported . . .
A tangent: I'm neither a Buddhist nor a Christian, but one of the most impressive features of Buddhism is the huge canon of analytic doctrine that rationalizes the experiences of meditation, grounding them in a parsimonious metaphysics and tight logical argument--no miracles, no divine agency (although there is also a vast popular literature that is filled with miracle tales and devoid of logic). The rigor of the argument was largely a product of competition with contemporaneous Hindu logical treatises, as if Aristotle had been forced to perfect his ideas in competition with a dissenting and comparably brilliant contemporary, the arguments continuing in succeeding generations.
. . . So both you and Drethelin are entitled to your skepticism; it's certainly not hard to understand, and I'd guess most people unfamiliar with Buddhism would share it. But, as I wrote earlier, your skepticism is not an argument. Your last paragraph seems perfectly fine--"I think these assertions are probably false; I could be wrong, but I think that's unlikely enough that I won't devote my time to testing them through practice." But in the turns of your long comment the overall tone I hear is, "They look so much like liars to me that only decorum constrains me from calling them out flat." Still, perhaps I'm listening according to my own biases. If the final paragraph is what you really mean as your bottom line we really have no disagreement.
Contrarian, I just added a new comment linking these issues to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (the author of "Flow"). I think that comment provides more viable comparators for jhana practitioners than the charletans, etc., you and Drethelin have chosen.
So about this: I haven't chosen charletans for the most part. I've chosen *other people with unverifiable internal states or internal states that match about the same intensity of claim that ARE verifiable.
The reason I'm doing this isn't actually to insult you. It's to say "I don't know if this is true or false, but I'm responding to a threat where Scott suggested it's not reasonable to doubt this, and justified it by saying "some amount of people have said this is so".
I think from your perspective, you are saying something like "he's accusing me of lying, but I'm on the side of this being true!" and any comparison to any known-liar group is insulting for you. But the suggestion others have made, and have made again throughout this conversation, is that I should adjust my belief towards "certain" because "why would they even do that? what could they stand to gain?".
When someone makes that argument, you *have* to show that lying in similar situations is not uncommon. That's the response. Because otherwise you are left with a method of determining your belief that looks like this:
"A person came to me and made a claim that seems instinctively unlikely to me. However, they say they are not lying and would be offended or say they are offended if I don't believe them. I'm also not allowed to point out that there are other known situations in which people (not them, but just people) have lied in similar ways with similar reward structures. Thus I have to believe them."
That's fine in a sense, because at least in that moment I can avoid offending someone. That's an upside. But it also means that eventually the DiD-hobbyists or someone like them will show up and say "Hey, remember how you established that criteria of belief before? Unless you are very unfair, it also applies to me. You also can't verify my internal state, and I'm also prepared to tell you I'd be very upset if you suggested I might be lying". It's not a sustainable model, unless you are willing to express belief in any not-definitively-disproved claim, and I'm not.
Contrarian, I'm not really interested in the "offensive" part. I'm interested in what I see as problems in reasoning. Unlike Scott (if you've described him accurately here), I think it's perfectly reasonable to doubt jhana advocates--I actually think it would be weirdly naive not to. I also don't feel accused of lying because I haven't made any first-hand claims, other than indicating that my long-ago foray into jhana has made extreme claims seem plausible--I don't suspect you've thought I wasn't being truthful.
My point hinges on the fact that there is a replicable methodology for confirming claims like Nick C's, and that is not the case for either charletans or delusional members of the broader group you point to. Given that jhana advocates offer a means of subjective confirmation--and, as in my case, confirmation can be by degrees, so that the time/effort investment does not have to be great to generate a judgment of plausibility--I think skepticism in this case should take the form of either, "I don't believe you, but let me test it out a bit," or, "I don't believe you, and I'm not interested in the available test of whether my disbelief is well grounded." I take you to be saying the latter, but trying to legitimize your skepticism by claiming you've found an alternative test--or perhaps, an equally legitimate substitute decision tree. I don't think you have.
I do think if you use Search to find my comment concerning Csikszentmihalyi's research you'll find the alternative comparator group interesting. I'm sorry I didn't think of it at the outset.
Here's where the disconnect is: Say I told you to shoot your spouse in the head, right now, and handed you what I claimed to be a magic bullet. The bullet, I said, would rewire her blood, bones, brain and DNA to make her everything she was before, but better; it would make her superhuman and powerful.
Let's say you didn't feel confident doing that, and I said "Listen, man, there's a simple way to verify this - just shoot them in the head. If you don't want to do this simple test to see if I'm telling the truth, that's on you - it's sort of shitty for you to say I'm not trustworthy if you won't do a little work to verify, though."
There's an element here in which I'm right - you could absolutely see if I'm telling the truth, and you refuse to. But you also have an incredibly clear interest in judging the truth of my claims *before* you try my verification method, because my verification method is *incredibly costly if the payout isn't real*.
Now to jhana-bliss-state-claims: To get to the Jhana benefits Nick's jhana state claim (not yours) describes, people describe a meditation outlay that takes a significant amount of time and effort on a daily basis for periods of time ranging from months to years. That's not shooting your wife in the head, but it's an incredibly expensive outlay of time and effort *unless* I get to jizz while touching duvet covers at Target as described.
Since the verification method here (again, in Nick's model) is *incredibly expensive*, I have an interest in determining whether or not I think the payout is real before I spend potentially thousands of hours "testing it out a bit".
Every time I bring up other unverifiable mental states that nobody believes are real, or verifiable claims of mental state that have been proven false, you go "But that's not fair! What Nick describes is *totally real* and you verify it in just 1000-2000 short hours, not like these things that aren't verifiable or have been verified false!".
But that's *completely irrelevant to what anybody who isn't already in the tank on this wants to know*, which is entirely stuff like "How do I talk about this to other people" and "Should I spend 3000 hours trying to achieve a claimed mystical bliss state". For anybody who wants to get an indication on those kinds of things without an outlay of hundreds or thousands of hours, the best way to go about it is the build a model, to establish priors on "claims like this" that informs their opinions on whether or not it's worth it.
For that, you want comparitors. So you go looking for examples of things like "person who claims special mental state in situations where they'd look better/get attention if they had it" and "person who claims to possess special mental superpowers", and that kind of thing. And when you do that, you find things like DiD-fakers, spoonieism, levitation, psychics, etc.
None of those things are 1:1 with jhana, but they are relevant to *assessing* Jhana before you do an outlay of thousands of hours based on a claim that's unverifiable before you shoot your wife in the head. And when you do, you find a lot of people very often lie about things *at least somewhat comparable to jhana claims* in ways that are either verified (psychics) or unverified but clear (DiD TikTok).
Now, your claim is different from Nick's, or seems to be, and I have *much less issue* with it if we are constricting the argument down to your side of things, which I read as "There's lots of benefits to meditation, do a very modest outlay of time and see if it doesnt' help you a bit". If this article had been about "There are some people who say meditation has some modest effects you can test cheaply and easily; try it a bit and I think you might be surprised how far you go!" I wouldn't have ever mentioned any of this.
But the article isn't about calming down a little or feeling a bit better after a bit of meditation; it's about a state of unearthly, maxed-out bliss that makes you quit drinking, eat better, and jizz all over big-box stores because of the adjacency of textiles in a way that's only accessible after thousands and thousands of hours of cost.
To put it another way:
1. I don't want to put out 3000 hours of time (or be unable to give people qualified advice about the same) without a pretty high level of confidence that I'm going to get paid in some way or another, and I've provided several examples of people lying about similar stuff that I think increase the probability I would not, in fact, get paid.
2. You are saying "listen, that's not fair - you really shouldn't use counterfactuals for this, you should just do the incredibly expensive verification process".
3. What anybody in my situation actually wants are *counterweights* that will negate the bad examples we know about - situations where people did the one weird trick and doctors really DID hate it because it had all sorts of benefits, especially where they track well on to this situation.
This is probably my last post on this - it's consuming a lot of time, to the point where I should probably just do an article on it. But the practical upshot on this is that my position is "Every time I see people make claims like this and I can verify it, it either turns out to be crazy people or charletans. It's possible this is real, but why should I think it is, or how could I verify it without sinking an amount of time that would otherwise make me a Java expert or something?"
Contrarian. I haven't said anything like, "There's lots of benefits to meditation, do a very modest outlay of time and see if it doesnt' help you a bit." What I've said along those lines is that with *much* less outlay of time and effort you experience enough of what Nick's talking about to understand what he means, have reason to recalculate the probabilities that he's reporting a real thing.
I'll make this last post a repeat of the one I've been trying to steer you towards: perhaps it will provide the "counterweights" that negate the bad examples you keep bringing up.
******
Another way to relate to Nick C's over-the-top description of the experience of mastered jhana practice would be to link it to descriptions of experiences deploying skill mastery that were explored by Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi in developing his concept of "flow." People who describe ecstasy in flow experiences--e.g., highly skilled athletes or performing artists--sometimes resemble Nick C in the extremity of their language. In a book that preceded the better known "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience," called "Beyond Boredom and Anxiety," I believe Csikszentmihalyi did include Zen masters among the classes of people he felt achieved this type of experience [he did]. In later research, involving more lab monitoring, he and collaborators looked at EEG correlations that extended, if I recall, to video gaming as well [I've checked; they did].
The model of flow can be useful because it identifies the brain states Nick celebrates as pervasively available in reduced form--we all can get pleasurably lost in small activities involving deployment of ordinary skills (puzzles, games, sports)--with the potential to become overwhelmingly satisfying if honed to a very high degree and optimally deployed. We might feel it's a stretch if a ballet dancer said she felt that when she was locked the midst of a complex performance she had totally mastered, the joy was ten times better than casual sex . . . or a pianist, skier, etc. . . . but we probably wouldn't consider it mysterious or dismiss it out of hand, and we might grant the possibility based on smaller-scale rewards we encounter ordinarily for smaller-scale skill mastery and deployment.
A common feature among these experiences is the measurably suppressed scale of frontal-lobe activity that accompanies focused deployment of mastered skills--correlating to reported loss of any sense of personal identity ("I")--along with intense but effortless attention to the physical environment, as seen, heard, or felt. Hypofrontality--the suppression of the brain's executive function--and the experience of losing the sense of self (in this case raised to a central tenet of ideology) is equally a measurable feature of meditative trance states such as jhana.
Piling it on: sorry. Here is an anecdote from the fourth century BCE Chinese text "Zhuangzi," written long before Buddhism appeared in China, that expresses through a metaphorical tale some of the ideas Csikszentmihalyi explores that resonate with Buddhist meditational discipline. It illustrates how the idea of deploying mastered skill to achieve an exhilarating loss of self was widespread in some Asian cultures. (The "Zhuangzi" is a foundational text of the school that came to be called Daoism.)
*****
Cook Ding was carving an ox carcass for Lord Wenhui. With each touch of his hand, heave of his shoulder, step of his feet, thrust of his knee – whop! whish! – he wielded his knife with a whoosh, and every move was in rhythm. It was as though he were performing the Dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping to the beat of the Constant Source music.
“Ah, marvelous!” said Lord Wenhui. “Surely this is the acme of skill!”
Cook Ding laid down his knife and replied, “What your servant loves, my lord, is the Dao,
and that is a step beyond skill.
“At the beginning, when I first began carving up oxen, all I could see was the whole carcass.
After three years I could no longer see the carcass whole, and now I meet it with my spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding cease and spirit moves as it will. I follow the natural form: slicing the major joints I guide the knife through the big hollows, and by conforming to the inherent contours, no vessels or tendons or tangles of sinews – much less the big bones – block my blade in the least.
“A good cook changes his knife once a year, but this is mere slicing. An ordinary cook
changes his knife once a month, because he hacks. I’ve been using this knife now for nineteen years; it has carved thousands of oxen, yet the blade is as sharp as one fresh off the grindstone. You see, there are gaps between these joints, but the blade edge has no thickness. If a knife with no thickness moves into a gap, then it’s wide as need be and the blade wanders freely with plenty of leeway. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is as sharp as one fresh off the grindstone.
“But nevertheless, whenever a tangled knot lies ahead, I spot the challenge and on the alert
I focus my sight and slow down my hand – then I flick the blade with the slightest of moves, and before you know it the carcass has fallen apart like earth crumbling to the ground. I stand with knife raised and face all four directions in turn, prancing in place with complete satisfaction. Then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”
“How fine!” said Lord Wenhui. “Listening to the words of Cook Ding, I have learned how
to nurture life!”
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"
Thanks for the kind words, Steven. I'm not an expert on Buddhism, but I think the distinction you're drawing is best resolved by distinguishing between doctrine and practice. In doctrine, there are various stages towards enlightenment that the practice produces, and the analysis of these can grow contested among and within different schools. Chan/Zen traditions name themselves after the practice itself--a book I referenced in an earlier comment, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," uses the title's idea that ultimately the practice is the end in itself, because when it's pursued "correctly" the beginner attitude never wanes. So the self-adopted name "Zen Sect" is in some ways an assertion that to separate zen practice from the enlightenment it produces is false thinking. That doesn't mean there isn't more to say, but it generally does mean the less said the better, a theme of Zen in East Asia. Analysis does not serve practice: it may serve recruitment into practice (and lay financial support for monasteries!).
Not all schools are like Zen. For example, in Madhyamika--an Indian school that contributed a lot to Zen's development in China--enlightenment tends to be pictured (in my recollection) as much through the goal of exploding the limits of logic and reason as through meditation. That is, logic-destroying logic is used to break down faith in intuitive understanding and lay the ground for experiential breakthroughs that the reasoning mind might foreclose.
The way I looked at practice personally (which was a lot different from working with scripture per se) was that successful meditation was like acquiring any other challenging skill. It was hard to sit right, it was hard to breathe right, it was hard to count right, and it was nearly impossible to get my subvocalizing mind to shut up (much like my vocalizing mouth). Nothing much useful happened for a while, but as I got some control over the basic physical skills, I was able to focus on bypassing the mental racket, and after a while, I experienced episodes where that noise went away for a period of up to perhaps a couple of hours. I take that to have been some experience with the state denoted by "dhyāna," and that's as far as I got. As soon as it would subside, there would be an uproar of "I did it! I'm wonderful!" in my head, even if I was still sitting, so I didn't ever make it further, and then my life moved on. When I was into practice, reading Buddhist texts and commentary was engaging, but it had virtually nothing to do with the actual practice of sitting. The challenges were immediate and skill-based, not concept-based.
I figure that the Buddha, first encountering these experiences while mimicking Hindu ascetics, wouldn't have had the whole "Let's see how good I am!" psychology surrounding the practice that hindered me, and simply persisted, stilling the mind and experience of self for longer and longer intervals and in different ways, encountering many new insights that would be hard to put into words. But when he then wanted to describe to others what had occupied his months or years in the forests of northern India, he had nothing but words to use, and he reduced a continuum of deepening experience into separate "articulated" stages--how else to convey that there's more to find than what you find at first?
Here's a metaphor. Language teachers will tell you that when a person learns a foreign language the most typical profile is one that begins with rapid learning that reaches a plateau where no progress seems to be occurring. But after a plateau period, the progress resumes, with this pattern repeating a few times till practical, comfortable fluency is reached. The specifics vary a lot from person to person, but this is the norm, and in spoken language proficiency testing you generally search for cues as to what plateau is the highest yet stably attained. But there's stuff building during the plateaus; most people can't skip them and it's all a continuous process--you just keep studying and practicing until you reach a kind of terminal level of fluency, which also varies among people. Some people seem naturally good at the process, others seem to have some lack of essential wiring that may make the challenge too great (though I'm not sure that the bulk of those latter cases don't simply involve poor motivation or poor teaching). If you get really good at a language, the rewards can be huge--it can be like becoming a new person in a new world: magical, when you reflect on it. But there are lots of intermediate rewards, and so long as you keep moving forward, it's all one ongoing process.
So I think doctrine and discussion are simply means of pushing practice forward, and we shouldn't get too hung up on them unless we're simply studying doctrine (religion, philosophy, etc.), rather than looking for whatever "enlightenment" may be. And if we're not buying the whole proposition, that's fine--it's just one life enterprise among many: I've never been at all sold on the distinctive "truth" of Buddhist metaphysical models. (I don't believe in the cycle of rebirth, for example, and it's foundational to Buddhist religious ideology.) But I do think the attitude of skeptics needs to retain some humility, especially in light of how historically widespread these practices and reports have been, and how easy it is to try out the initial steps and see whether there's anything new to learn within easy reach.
Again, I deeply agree with you with almost all of what you wrote. All of the ideas, concepts, practices, and states are not the thing itself, at worst almost entirely nonessential, and at best a vehicle that delivers you to the actual goal.
The reason I brought up the Buddha's comments is less to debate scripture, and more as a way to say that I actually agree with the view that Jhana is a vehicle to a more permanent and abiding shift.
I say that because that was my experience with it. I did countless micro meditations throughout the day for many years. Eventually this opened into a permanent and abiding shift which has been stable for close to 7 years.
So for me, continuous micro Jhana meditations was the actual vehicle by which something which isnt Jhana, isn't a state, doesnt come or go happened.
The reason I find the Buddha's comments interesting is that experientially Jhana was a vehicle for me.
It was a means to an end beyond itself. I agree with all of your comments on the limitations of what Jhana actually is.
Ultimately, yet another state another arising. Yet for me it birthed something which isn't a state.
No disagreement, Steven. I admire your experience persisting with jhana practice, and I'm intrigued by your description of it.
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.
Paid for Transendental Meditation mantra, tried and tried, couldn’t do it. I meditate on not cutting my finger while chopping an onion.
I’m a melancholic person and I have experienced jhana. It is genuinely very pleasurable.
In my experience, people who describe themselves as "melancholic" (rather than "chronically depressed" or "i dunno life just sucks man") aren't really capturing even one of the three items I threw out there (mood/pleasure, motivation/dopamine, attention/concentration).
If you'd like you can accuse me of doing the no-true-scotsman bit. In fact, I'd invite it -- that's actually the whole point of the mental barrier I mention. Doubters (whether of daily walking for weight loss or meditation for jhana) are saying that if you (yes you in particular) managed to meditate enough to experience jhana then we can be assured you're no true low-motivation, low-concentration scotsman. Do please respond that in addition to being melancholic you're also unmotivated and prone to distraction. Any of the doubters reading your reply will (semi-consciously? at some level?) scoff and say "lol yeah sure".
To make it a bit pithier, someone once told me "I don't take diet advice from people who are naturally skinny."
I have been at various times diagnosed with MDD but tend to avoid medication since I was younger. I am low motivation but concentration-wise think I am more average. If there is one lesson in the jhanas for me it is that pleasure is not a major motivator for me, but it is nice.
I got into the jhana first after desperation from a breakup eventually coaxed me into trying some mindfulness practice where I spent time trying to regulate my bodily reactions. After a long period I focused on a pleasurable part of my body and this led me to enter the jhana.
In my experience it is possible to go from very low motivation, energy, and concentration to moderate motivation, energy, and concentration. Because a lot of the things that increase energy/concentration require motivation, it has to be extreeeeeemely stepwise. E.g., I worked up to an hour of meditation by starting at literally 5 minutes and increasing one minute at a time over months. I never would have been able to do an hour at the start. And now that I've fallen off the wagon again (stopped practicing daily) I max out at 30ish minutes.
It's like exercise tbh. Some people are naturally stronger and can start lifting at 25 lbs or whatever. If you're wasting away you might need to start at 3 lbs.
No one has zero motivation (they'd starve to death if they did). So the idea is to do small stepwise actions that you're capable of doing in your low motivation state that build up your energy & concentration and then loop around to increase your motivation itself.
It's real, I've experienced it.
I'd like to submit the following to evidence: https://www.reddit.com/r/streamentry/comments/rrmh1u/why_is_this_happening_in_jhana_how_to_stop_it/. The person claims to orgasm every time they enter the jhana. Now this doesn't happen to me, but I'm not surprised at all that it can happen. This seems like a rather objective, qualitative bar of evidence. So unless the person is lying...
"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".
So do people saying they're happy, sad or depressed. As do people saying they're hungry, tired, stressed, anxious, inspired, bored, etc. As do people saying they care for someone (not showing it via actions, but simply saying it). We do have some physiological, behavioral, expressional and body language correlates to these claimed states, but they can be faked or misattributed. On the other hand, jhanas likely also correlate with bradychardia, lower blood pressure and lower serum cortisol levels, lower aggression, lower [self-proclaimed or observed] anxiety etc.
To apply that demand for rigor universally: what reason do we have to believe anything anyone says about their experience, ever?
(https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/)
If you're having problems believing claims of achieving the pleasure Jhanas (1-4) you will likely be even more skeptical about the Immaterial Jhanas (5-8). http://www.leighb.com/jhana2.htm
One step away from scientology superpowers.
Same here. I'm not sure why Scott suddenly drops the skeptical thinking when it comes to meditation-related subjects. This is self-reported introspection - is basically worthless as evidence, and it tends to come from people who are trying to sell you something.
What is Nick C trying to sell here?
Scott is a Psychiatrist, so evaluating "self-reported introspection" is rather in his wheelhouse. Imagine someone says that they feel great, euphoric even, after a long run. Would you believe them, or is that merely more "self-reported introspection"? Just because meditation actions aren't visible does not make them less plausible as a means of achieving a certain outcome, though it does make them harder to study.
I took a history of psychiatry class in college and thought it was really interesting and weird how every form of psychiatry ever used had accounts of miracle cures achieved by it. Psychoanalysis achieved miracle cures. Exorcism achieved miracle cures. Past life regression therapy, gay conversion therapy, recovered memory therapy, special diets, prayer, cold parenting styles, warm parenting styles, lobotomies, putting people on SSRIs, taking people off SSRIs, everything worked amazingly well. Then I realized after about halfway into the semester that maybe this is why we don't use collections of anecdotes compiled by interested parties to evaluate the effectiveness of psychiatric interventions.
Also, placebo (exorcism could easily be a remarkably strong placebo, the same way having needles stuck into you results in stronger placebo than just sugar pills).
And just how a substantial percentage of people will eventually get better no matter what.
All of these examples have far more broken incentive structures for both the psychiatrist and the patient. Aren’t anecdotes where a lot of scientific questioning begins?
Many people I see making claims of reaching the jhanas today are independent and almost anti-attention seeking (ie they’re like, “ go read this book or listen to these talks from a guy that died seven years ago” rather than, “ah yes let me teach you come to my retreat”)
As a hedonic utilitarian I think it might actually be immoral for these individuals to not spend much more time in Jhana.
The fact that it's only themselves they are hurting doesn't really seem to change the matter. Unless their job/life is so beneficial to others as to make up for the difference they are choosing to fill the world with more suffering and less pleasure than they could by spending more time in that state.
Also I gotta get my act together and quit lazying out on meditation.
this take seems to act as a neat reductio ad absurdum for hedonic utilitarianism
I'm willing to bite the bullet here.
I honestly thought you were poking fun at hedonic utilitarians.
Agreed, but as they say, “one man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens”
GP's principle seems to be "all else equal, people should do things that they enjoy", which I think almost everyone would agree on, even if they're not utilitarians.
I think hedonic utilitarians can be hedonic utilitarians and still refuse to enter Nozick's experience machine, no? Or is it immoral to not enter the machine? This seems analogous
I would go into the machine, easy.
A more interesting (to me) thought experiment is "if you press this button, everyone goes into the machine, regardless of their wishes". Here I'm intellectually convinced that I should, but it still feels iffy.
I don't think I'll ever understand this philosophy. Who keeps the cosmic ledger of utility? Who are you letting down if people are allowed to have lives, with joy and disappointment as may come?
There is no value in the universe, except for the positive and negative experiences morally relevant beings have. Therefore, the only moral is maximizing such experiences. There's no "ledger", but there *is* the net total of experiences.
Since *everyone* will have the best possible experiences in the Nozick Box (by definition), pressing the button is the only thing that makes sense. There are often good reasons against paternalism, but this example has been set up so that typical such risks can be discounted (I believe this is the source of my feelings of iffiness - in most cases, you *shouldn't* do these kinds of things because of uncertainty and other relevant factors).
After all, you would try to save the life of someone who has attempted suicide in the large majority of conditions, fully against their will.
I think the St Petersburg game is another tough one (basically you set it up so the expectation is infinite or arbitrarily large utility but with 99.99999 percent probability you get tortured for a million years).
I don't think S:t Petersburg is actually interesting. *Either* noticing that the world doesn't actually contain infinite amounts of money, *or* taking marginal utility into account, dissolves it.
"Iffy," you say. Pushing someone into the machine is tantamount to rape. Pushing the whole world into the machine, well, it was said that Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands, but in these more enlightened times we must now talk of millions and billions.
You should learn to do this bc, while it won’t refute hedonistic utilitarianism, it will challenge your idea of what “hedonism” would have to be.
Extreme physical/mental bliss is apparently not the thing to be maximized, if you can find yourself in such a state and still have the temptation to look at your watch.
Have you considered that there's more to life than just raw pleasure? Engaging with art, learning, experiencing variety, play, etc. Do you think there's nothing that is valuable to do other than experience endorphins? Would lying in a vat and flooding your brain with serotonin for a few decades until it turns to mush really be a desirable life? That's an extreme example, but if you understand why someone wouldn't do that then you understand why someone wouldn't just spend hours of his limited time on earth in jhana every day.
While I agree with your conclusion I think it's worth picking apart what you've said to the point of atomization (as annoying as such a process can be.) You *get something* from variety of experience. What is that thing in its most pure form? A desire for novelty? A desire for power? A learned heuristic from culture which supports survival? A fear of death? etc. Yes, novelty is rewarding. What is the nature of that reward, refined to its essence like sugar is refined from sugar cane? What does it require to feel authentic as opposed to simulated or fake?
I think "happiness" is better than "pleasure" - you can imagine feeling a lot of pleasure but still feeling like something is missing, but with happiness, it's almost absurd to say "yes, I'm perfectly happy, but there has to be something more".
I'm fairly sure this is what a lot of utilitarians actually mean, anyway.
That's fair. But what is 'happiness' mechanistically speaking? Would it be fair to say that pleasure is good sensory input in the moment while happiness is an alignment of our perceived reality with our perceived long term goals?
The former yes; the second... not sure? It's just another state of mind. It probably involves a sense of doing meaningful things (so it's important that Nozick's box simulates that - I believe we can do much better than mere wireheading or heroin), making a difference, strong relationships, and so on, but it's also probably highly dependent on the individual. Your phrasing could easily be part of it, but I'm not sure about it as a *definition*.
This *is* a downside - a hedonometer seems like something that could in principle be constructed using brain scanning, while a felicitometer seems a lot trickier.
An example of how I'm thinking: (A) is eating excellent food, drinking superb wines, has a great house, good health, economic security, excellent sex and so on. (B) works long, hard hours for poor pay as a physician for children in a crisis area in Africa.
It's quite possible that (A) experiences more pleasure (for the obvious reasons), and (B) is happier (from a sense of fundamental meaningfulness). This makes everything tricky, but it's also a strong argument for liberalism - the individual can be pretty imperfect at judging his or her prerequisites for happiness, but still very likely better at it than anyone else. This is also how I understand Popper - not as any coarse (and patently absurd) negative utilitarianism where we only care about eliminating pains, but as the understanding that it's *really hard* to ensure someone else's happiness, but a lot easier to assist against the things most would agree stands in its way.
Thank you. That is well said.
I would really like to see someone trying to construct a felicitometer.
I would die fighting hedonic utilitarians to keep nick free to pursue his preferences.
Also a hedonic utilitarian, and this *is* one of the weirder conclusions - that everything else being equal, I have a *duty* to maximize my *own* pleasure, and that I'm failing *morally* if I don't.
With no disrespect to Nick and others it’s going to take a little more than these anecdotes to persuade me that they are having an experience that is both extremely pleasurable and that they do not much care to seek out very often.
What *would* it take to persuade you?
I found this article utterly fascinating and a reminder that I *have* achieved such a state on rare occasions, but the habits of daily life got in the way.
I came to these comments to say, thinking of why I haven't pursued this more, I was reminded of https://stevenpressfield.com/books/the-war-of-art/ and a similar not-in-my-best-interest "resistance" to doing things.
That’s a fair question. one way would be for me to take up meditation and go see for myself.
"I found this article utterly fascinating and a reminder that I *have* achieved such a state on rare occasions, but the habits of daily life got in the way."
This. So this.
Lately, exalted meditative states have been rare for me, but they haven't always been. And when they weren't, it was because I could afford not to be preoccupied with the cares of daily living.
Well, it's expected, and nothing to be smug about, either way. Having cares interfering with deep absorption into something isn't a sign of leading a realistic or productive life. Many responsible, productive people are responsible and productive because they organize their time and attention to achieve deep absorption.
Can you organize your attention, relative to the demands made on it, to achieve such states? At one extreme, perhaps you can because there aren't real-world demands on your time. At the other extreme, the real world demands plenty of you, but you are just that organized. Many fall somewhere in between.
My cares, as a young mom with lung problems in a post-COVID world, happen to be particularly frustrating right now. Our local hospital system is making a necessary move to separate infectious from non-infectious cases, but the way it's doing it happens to be screwing me over, and overtures I've made to practices outside this system so far have gone nowhere. There is nothing about this predicament making me more productive, or authentic, or even more in touch with reality than the better-sheltered (or simply better-organized) souls who still have time for bliss. Indeed, I'd argue modern medical bureaucracy is a particularly hellish form of unreality. (For example, this week, I ran aground on a rule saying that I officially had never been seen before by a doctor I see regularly Because Reasons.) Meanwhile, a deteriorating physical condition *also* makes it harder both to focus deeply and to get all life's sundry not-focused-deeply chores done, too. This isn't just "more worry", this is a particularly agency-sapping kind of worry. People who have many cares *because* of the agency they're able to exercise are in a different predicament from mine, I think.
In my experience it's not that you don't care to seek it out often, I've had access to Jhana for close to a decade.
I think it's more accurate to say it is somehow impossible to "crave" them. The neurological mechanism simply doesn't happen or can't happen.
I do them frequently throughout the day, but I never crave them or feel disrupted if i don't do them
Pure speculation here: I think the difference may be in the specific timing sequence of entering the jhanas vs e.g. drugs. With drugs, there's a known correlation between the immediacy of getting high after taking them vs addictivity (injecting is more addictive than snorting, which is more addictive than ingesting, even for the same substance), which reliably forms a craving-action-reward feedback loop. With jhanas, entering them requires a certain relaxed state, which (I think) necessarily involves letting go of craving _before_ you enter the jhana, and so there's no feedback loop.
So I have access to them in as little as a second or less, I can basically enter at will. Intensity varies for sure, but I can essentially turn my attention to them and enter.
I don't think this is like crazy rare or hard to attain either, Ive seen other people get this quite quickly.
I personally have found certain techniques are more conducive to this at will access (compared to methods like focusing on the breath until something changes).
For example, I've seen people get access to Jhana 1 through a mental question "Are you aware?" "How do you know you are aware?"
Then observe the actual mechanism by which you validate your own experience of awareness, and stay in that place. That "place" is essentially the location of Jhana 1, atleast for a good handful of people I've seen.
Regardless, I wouldn't say the phenomena can be broken down to time of onset compared to substances!
Perhaps people that are able to reliably enter jhanas fast are consistently in a sufficiently "let go" state that they are not experiencing enough craving for the feedback loop to form? It's a craving-action-reward loop, not just action-reward.
I think there is something to that, maybe not exactly that but the thing that sticks out is your comment on "let go".
A core aspect of Jhana is that it only happens in a "let go" state, craving and grasping will interrupt it.
Perhaps because it can only be experienced absent the craving mechanism it interrupts it like you saidm
Sounds tautological doesn't it?
Steven, please become a Jhana instructor and then write a book about the fastest methods for entering it. We will believe you to be enlightened, throw money at you and forgive your sex scandals.
Ooo this is really interesting!
>How do you know you are aware?
This hasn’t worked for me. Are there any other techniques like this?
Lock Kelly has a similar access point via the question, "What's here now, when there's no problem to solve?" I don't think he'd frame this as having anything to do with jhanas, per se, but state shifting certainly doesn't require the jhana framework.
Bizarrely illustrating your point...
I think I just experienced Jhana for the first time, to my total surprise, immediately after reading your comment and trying out those mental questions. I'm not a regular meditator. Weird!
I'm not surprised! I've seen this happen *many* times with forms of recursive investigations of awareness :)
>For example, I've seen people get access to Jhana 1 through a mental question "Are you aware?" "How do you know you are aware?"
As it happens, when I meditate I do so by concentrating on my own awareness of myself (and my awareness of my awareness, etc.). This is not something I learned anywhere, just what I eventually converged on, I forget how.
I have never experienced anything like the jhanas through this or any other means. Perhaps, like wart cures, this is simply what they happened to be doing when it happened?
I've seen this directly lead to Jhana 1, there is even a guy in these comments who said he read the instructions and got Jhana 1.
That being said there is like awareness looking at awareness > pleasant sensations arise > turn attention to the pleasant sensations > Jhana 1
I've also seen this not work for people tho for sure
>That being said there is like awareness looking at awareness > pleasant sensations arise
I don't get that far. It's interesting to see how many levels of awareness I can sustain my attention on at once (low single figures), but no particular "pleasant sensations" arise.
What do you mean by levels of awareness exactly?
I can be aware of what I am doing. Call that the zeroth level, the base level. Then I can be aware of that awareness: first level. The first level has to coexist with the base level, because the base level is what the first level is about. (I find that being at that first level generally enhances performance of the base level task. Without it, I'm sleepwalking.) Absence of even the base level might correspond to what people are talking about when they talk about "zoning out" while driving a familiar route and arrive with no recall of the journey. (I do not experience this.)
Then I can be aware of that first level awareness: second level. Which similarly has to coexist with zeroth and first. If the whole chain is not present, at least some level of it is mistaken. And so on.
So atleast from the description that actually sounds closer to like a cognitive "awareness" going into recursion.
The thing I'm pointing is like focusing your attention (the directed stream of awareness we can point at thing) at the "location" where all sensations (sights, sounds, smells, feelings) are "experienced"
Alternate explanation, absorb your attention into the perceptual field. Go "back" to the core of reception.
You are currently perceiving and seeing. "Where" are you seeing from? What is doing the seeing? Where do you existential experience the act of seeing?
Hopefully one version of that made sense
The key here is there is only one level of this.
There are no deeper levels, or further recursions. There is just Attention and the total experiential reality of all perceptions.
Any further alteration is just yet another perception or piece of content within the total field of all experiential perceptions
A difficulty in talking about this sort of stuff is that the words each person uses point to a place that only they can see. Trying to find a path inside myself from someone else's account is like trying to navigate Paris with a map of Berlin.
Absolutely right, experiential/existential descriptions can only ever fall short and occur to different people's mental models in different ways.
> The thing I'm pointing is like focusing your attention (the directed stream of awareness we can point at thing) at the "location" where all sensations (sights, sounds, smells, feelings) are "experienced"
Like a physical location? Inside my head? I find that I can point my attention at my neck, ears, forehead, etc, but it's hard to point it _inside_ my head. One thing that sorta works is making bubble of attention around the outside of my head and then pushing it inwards. This creates a kind of numb, buzzy feeling. A little like falling asleep.
Or do you have to somehow jump out of the 3 dimensional spatial field of awareness?
This may or may not click, but if you really look closely at your experience of being aware you will find it does not *experientially* live within your body.
By experientially I mean there is nothing you can actually find directly via direct investigation and without relying on thought (well I *know* my brain is inside my body) that shows that your awareness is actually inside your body.
So try to investigate very closely what awareness is *actually like* without relying on any ideas about what it should be experienced as.
> try to investigate very closely what awareness is *actually like* without relying on any ideas about what it should be experienced as.
I'm not really sure how to look at "awareness" per se. But when I look at "attention/focus", I noticed some interesting things:
- When focusing on what's in front of me, attention as something like a telescope moving across a 3 dimensional facade.
- I can also focus my attention behind myself, and I have a sense of the environment behind me as a sort of blob-y, lava-lamp-y (blue-black?) space.
- Or if I turn my attention to the back of my head or upper back, then it feels like there's a lot of space in there. Possibly infinite space extending backwards.
- I also realised that I had been thinking of attention/awareness as like a little sun moving around my field of experience, but that that's not _really_ what I was experiencing, it's just something I heard once and latched onto. Attention is more like an octopus ghost which can expand or contract, or extend tentacles in several directions. It has a dense core and an insubstantial body, although I can flatten out the ghost so that it has less of a core.
- I was looking at a bookshelf, and if I'm looking at the text on one cover, the text on other covers looks like the distorted text in AI-generated art
- I can spread my attention more widely across my visual field than I thought. When I do this the main details I can make out are edges.
- Somewhere along the way I found that if I focus on the top-inside of my head and cross my eyes then I can induce a warm serene type of state, which feels a bit like being hugged or like my brain is taking a warm bath. I also experienced a ~1Hz up-and-down oscillation in my visual field.
I'm going in totally the wrong direction, aren't I?
So you are in your direct experience which is a good thing, but yeah not exactly what I'm pointing at.
Try this, so awareness and attention are different. Attention is a sort of directed focus you can put on certain aspects of experience.
But if you notice, prior to attention springing into being, you were still *aware*. Regardless of where attention was ,or what you did with it, awareness was already happening.
Think of it like a television screen, a TV screen can have countless objects on the screen. It can display basically anything.
However, all of those things take place in/on the actual screen themselves, and nothing displayed on the screen is actually anything other than the screen.
What I'm trying to point to is to look at the "screen" not the "content" on the screen.
The screen, which is awareness, is operating 24/7. Even when you are dreaming!
When you have a dream, you still "see" the dream in the same "place" you experience normal sensory stuff.
It sounds like you might be focusing on the idea of or snapshots of awareness rather than awareness itself.
That is an error one can make. One could think "a million levels of awareness! ω levels!" but then one is only contemplating the idea, or even just the words, not experiencing the reality. The thing I keep my attention on is the reality, not the idea of it.
I ended up meditating on this for a little bit. My first thought was "duh, of course I'm aware, I feel my body very clearly", and it felt like there was no mechanism to introspect because it's such a direct connection. But then I realized the intent was probably about self-awareness in the sense of observing one's own *thoughts*. :-P
So I did that -- observe a thought, try to figure out where that observation was happening. It felt like it was coming from a space in the front/top of my head, and I felt a weird sort of increasing pressure/intensity there as I focused on it. I kept losing focus and the intensity would fade, and I'd regain focus and it would come back.
I have no idea if that's related to the jhanas in any way, but it was certainly interesting!
(One thing that kept getting in the way is that I have a half-joking hypothesis that humans *aren't* actually conscious, not in the way people talk about consciousness, so my answer to "are you aware" kept being "no" at first. :-P)
> like there was no mechanism to introspect because it's such a direct connection.
This is actually more along the lines of what I'm pointing at! The "awareness" is the most direct thing you have access to.
"So I did that -- observe a thought, try to figure out where that observation was happening. It felt like it was coming from a space in the front/top of my head, and I felt a weird sort of increasing pressure/intensity there as I focused on it. I kept losing focus and the intensity would fade, and I'd regain focus and it would come back."
Wow. You literally just described what it felt like to meditate when I tried it and gave up after a couple weeks.
It felt just like I was pressing thoughts away physically, through a certain spot on my forehead, and it was really challenging to hold them away, like I was focusing a muscle to increase pressure to that spot.
"Pushing your thoughts away" is the most common mistake in meditation. Do not push them away, simply bring your attention back to the object of focus. Any time something takes your attention away, simply bring it back.
Exactly the same feeling here. Tried that method several times. Sometimes I got nothing, but sometimes I felt a huge intensity of something in my forehead, or at the top of my head. I kept losing focus however.
The feeling is intense, and somehow it seems clear that the feeling *will* be something pleasurable, but the intensity and the non-familiarity of it also seems a bit scary, which might be the reason it goes away so quickly.
Very interesting. Thanks Steven.
+1 on that.
I had to feel around the mindstate a bunch before something started happening, for me the key was something along the lines of... feeling the entire shape of my thoughts at once? I'm reminded of the Bruce Lee line, of water pouring into a bottle becoming a bottle, etc, except my consciousness is the water and it keeps changing forms as thoughts and perceptions arise.
There's a very slippery, visceral understanding of this that I can hold for fractions of a second, and it gives a massive, roaring, vibrating feeling. Still got a slight afterglow after barely skimming this state a minute ago.
I've never meditated for more than ten minutes at a time, I made a lot of attempts to start a habit but suck at sticking to it. This shortcut is... something.
The best description I have of that feeling (which indeed lasts about 200ms in my experience if you aren't ready for it) is that it's just like the buildup to a *particularly good* orgasm, the kind that only happens about once a month and is of a distinctly different, fuller character than most. The energetic feel after holding this for a few seconds is also very recognizable to me, which makes me wonder if they are actually one and the same and this is simply another way to trigger it that bypasses and averts the typical ending.
I think the skill of mediation, practicing focus and letting go of distractions, is what allows this to continue much longer than it otherwise does.
It's also a good theory of the exponential nature of jhanas
1. You pay attention to your experience
2. This changes your experience, to the experience of observing your previous experience.
3. Repeat step 1
Constant attention to your experience results in the experience changing itself, creating a feedback loop.
This is usually what happens to me when I work with koans, or Huatou in the chinese zen tradition. A great pressure builds and builds, it feels like it'll explode but just keep at it. It's not for any specifical jhana but for direct insight into the mind.
Here's a good resource where they talk about it:
https://www.ddmbachicago.org/chan/methods/hua-tou/
This is also pertinent: http://www.cosmoschan.org/reading/articles/entering-the-gate/
Wow, just tried it , and immediately entered the state. Wild. Thanks for sharing that. (Background: been meditating for a few months)
I honestly did not think this would work for me, but I sat for just a couple of minutes with this question and then it started coming on. Actually letting it continue happening and grow once it started was more of a challenge than getting there in the first place.
Totally agree with the fact that holding it is harder than getting there, this was my experience on first a glance at Steven's technique. I can now hold something weaker for about a minute but have to intentionally both ignore and reduce the intensity at once while simultaneously intentionally not doing so (this is difficult to explain, "let it pass" is close to a proper wording but loses enough nuance that taking it literally will get you to the wrong place). https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana/comment/10030707
Most Buddhists would say the only persuasion is in doing it for yourself. Buddhism isn't really much of a missionary kind of philosophy. If you want to know if it's real, and how it feels, you'll have to try it. One of the key things that separates Buddhism from many religious traditions is there's not so much a role for taking it on faith. It's a whole road made up of "see for yourself."
There are other things like this -- what's a flow state? If one hasn't put in the time to reasonably master some arena of more challenging practice (playing the violin, surfing? marshal arts, etc), one may not really have had much by way of flow state experiences and could remain skeptical that they exist.
How about a sense of personal boundaries dissolving, a state of ego dissolution and feeling of oneness with the world? This is available sometimes in meditation, with psychedelics, in nature, and in sex. Also sometimes when a person has a stroke. But because it's only sometimes possible in those experiences, one can go through most of a life not ever experiencing it and thus disbelieving it exists despite many people talking and writing about it.
Ah I meant to add also childbirth -- another place this ego dissolution/oneness experience can show up. But it by no means shows up in all childbirth experiences. I do know women who only ever experienced it there and nowhere else in their life.
Interesting. Is this related to pain? Like, do women who get an epidural ever report oneness during childbirth?
> having an experience that is both extremely pleasurable and that they do not much care to seek out very often.
While different for a huge number of reasons, an MDMA experience also meets this description. Without that fact, my prior on truth of Nick's description of jhana would be much, much lower.
Do you think MDMA is an example of what you're describing? If so, does it change your priors on believing Nick's experience?
don't a lot of people rarely masturbate
Totally, and another reason my prior on believing Nick’s examples is height. Sex is also a supporting example, to a lesser degree.
I’d even bet the same / similar brain mechanics are involved.
You should just do it -- the first jhana or some part of it didn’t take that much time in my experience.
The inverse seems to be possible though. It seems possible to have cravings without much hedonic pleasure (nicotine, at least for long term users, some other drugs, gambling, social media for some users, I've heard some people describe certain fetishes this way, etc.) though in their more extreme form we tend to call them compulsions and those may even associate with negative pleasure / pain (e.g. self-harm compulsions). Given that, implies there some decoupling so the inverse doesn't seem crazy.
Some years ago, I played a video game called Crying Suns. It's a very well-designed game, highly polished, and I derived a great amount of enjoyment from playing it. My memories of it—even memories of runs where I crashed and burned—are uniformly positive. I have nothing but good things to say about it. I often think of it, and consider that I would enjoy playing it again. Nothing is stopping me. Yet, after I reached the end of the story, I stopped playing. There's plenty still for me to do; higher difficulty levels, other ships, other officers, other branches of the plot. All that aside, I enjoy the space combat sub-game, probably more than any other strategy game I've ever played, and that alone would be a fun experience. Yet it's been years since I've launched the game.
Conversely: I am extremely sensitive to the taste of alcohol. I described my subjective experience drinking a cream soda with 0.4% ABV to a connoisseur friend, who said that I had just described the experience of drinking really strong whiskey. I have been able to "taste the alcohol" in a spirit that everyone else around me claimed was tasteless. When I consume any significant quantity, I feel a lasting, unpleasant burning in every surface it touches. I can plot the progression: lips, tongue, roof of my mouth, back of my throat, all the way down the esophagus, until it erupts into my stomach. Post-absorption, very small amounts of alcohol have no discernible effects other than reducing my stutter. Larger amounts make me feel *poisoned*. My head hurts. The world hurts. Coordinated movement is hard. My thinking is sluggish, and I have trouble wrapping my head around ideas. I feel depressed. Unhappy. Hopeless. There is *absolutely nothing pleasant* about any part of the experience, and there never has been.
Yet I sometimes find myself adding some vodka to my soda, or being willing to try some new exotic liquor that one of my roommates has bought. This in spite of the fact that the experience is *always* bad. So bad, in fact, that, if I consume any significant quantity, I inevitably spend the next several hours drunkenly begging my roommates to *physically stop me* from ever consuming alcohol again.
I don't find it strange at all to consider that pleasure and motivation are on different axes. Hopefully my anecdotes are easier to swallow than Nick's.
Did you mean jnana?
I know that I hear them discussed as "jhanas", though I do see discussion of "jnana" in some places. I can't tell if these are different things, or different Indian languages' words for the same thing, but I think different.
Jhana is Pali word for Sanskrit Dhyāna (dhy->jh is a regular correspondence) meaning meditation.
Jñāna is a Sanskrit word meaning knowledge completely unrelated to Dhyāna.
Jnana means knowledge in Sanskrit. Another word for Jhana in the Buddhist tradition is Dhyana.
When something is pleasure on demand (like heroin) it can lead to an addiction and people taking too much of it. But if something requires work to achieve, it will be harder to overdose and get addicted. To achieve jhana one needs to meditate pretty intensely, so it's naturally more difficult to overdo it, and it would be difficult to "overdose". Meanwhile all that work makes the experience less superficial and empty and more meaningful. Similarly if someone likes the runner's high, they're less likely to mess up their life then if they get addicted to heroin.
Jhnana is literally worthless. What good is an eon of being immersed in bliss if when you emerge you still haven't figured out what this place is all about?. It's ignoble to seek bliss for yourself, ignoring the darkness and suffering of others. Jhnana up to the fourth is actually an obstacle.
Do you believe the same thing about eating delicious food, going in hot tubs, curling up with someone you love by a warm fire, and all other positive experiences?
Do you live as a pauper?
I try but it can be hard.
I don't think EA would put it in exactly these terms. To some degree this is the definition of "selfish", but I think debating definitions is not really interesting.
I *really* wish there was a way to externally validate jhana, because I want to know if the meditative-blissful-thing I know how to do is the same thing. Whether or not it is changes the confidence of my answer.
Because I figured out this jhana-like-thing fairly young, and it's a huge part of why I lean towards preference utilitarianism instead of hedonic. You can achieve blissful serenity - now what? Maybe this has value as a tool in a life in need of de-stressing, but as an end state I can only really describe it as empty. When each moment is just like the last, is there any point in distinguishing them? How meaningless would it be to try to maximize the time spent in a textureless state - not the joy *of* something, just.... joy?
I think directly answering your question is illustrative: even when I have ready access to a hot tub, I almost never use it alone except for reasons of physical therapy. When I'm vacationing with friends, it can instead be an everyday thing, providing a pleasant background to elevate social time. Is hot tubbing (by myself?) worthless? It's not something I intrinsically value, but "worthless" feels like a categorically wrong descriptor.
I sometimes approach food as a nutritive tool, and when doing so I don't terribly care about deliciousness. When I'm instead approaching it as a culinary art, straightforward deliciousness is one of many important axes to play with as paints on a canvas. Different value in different contexts.
Curling up with someone I love by a fire is really great. Yet I have no desire to do that all the time, maybe not even every day. Some days I'd rather go on a hike with someone I love, or go out dancing, or just be by myself in one of any number of ways.
I keep coming back to the idea that there's a difference between positive experiences, and just raw positivity. The former is motivating, the latter somewhere between neutral and a category error.
If rupa jhanas are necessary to achieve the (useful) formless jhanas, they are hardly worthless.
Why are formless jhanas useful?
Allegedly, because they lead to insights into fabrication etc.
they're also a good gateway to cessation which is useful for various other insights. When your experience is almost nothing it's easier to get to absolutely nothing
they are closer to a "void" of experience. Sensate particles are finer (more like infinitely small dust than say, sand) and there's more nothingness. For various reasons this state is useful. When you come out of it you're more concentrated, and also you get to diff normal reality and voidness and this leads to insights that cause more permanent changes
In case everyone else's reply is buddhist jargon - the jhanas are kinda like a meditation practice warm-up for enlightenment - they sharpen your mind. Enlightenment and various steps along the insight path to it are the 'true' goals. I think this is also why they are not more emphasized - it's a warmup.
Basically, they show through direct insight that the whole process explained in dependent origination can stop: no perception, no thought, no feeling etc. Beyond this they aren’t useful and you don’t need more than first jhāna for day-to-day practice. This is often described as a “mind fit for work”.
I agree completely; in the causal paths that involve traversal of meditation states you are exactly right. I just have been taught that byproducts of these stages, like bliss, are obstacles if fixating on them one believes they've"arrived" and stop progressing.
This is a weird thing to say unless you level similar criticisms against, basically, anything that isn't altruism.
I think you're right there. In any case, I had no business (or competence) poking my nose into a discussion of Theravada meditation! I'm a half century child of the Mahayana and Vajrayana meditation training so what do I know about jnanas? Darn little!
I think it's weird even then. I understand why people like to treat altruism like its some privileged source of happiness, but it always feels dishonest for me when people do.
To paraphrase Abu al-Hasan al-Bushanji, "First Altruism was a reality without a name, then it became a name without a reality"
I’ve read reports of jhanas massively increasing motivation and desire to do good in the world. When craving goes to zero all the attention directed toward gaining pleasure can be redirected to more worthwhile things.
FWIW, something vaguely parallel, from Sufism:
Hāl (pl. ahwāl), or Haal, translated "spiritual state", appears many times within Sufi texts as the opposite and complement to maqaam.[1] As an early authority on Sufism, Ali bin Usman Al-Hujwiri in his book Kashf ul Mahjoob: a Persian Treatise on Sufism, defines Hal as "something that descends from God into a man’s heart, without his being able to repel it when it comes, or to attract it as it goes, by his own effort."[4] The maqaamat and the ahwal are clearly presented as two series of spiritual states, the first being something one must acquire and the second being something that must be received. To reach a new maqaam does not destroy the preceding maqaam. Hāl, on the contrary, is by its very nature "instantaneous", though not necessarily passive. The most prominent distinction made between the two spiritual states is that the ahwāl are essentially gifts from God, while the maqaamat are acquired through the exertion of effort.
It would be great if people who do lots of jhana would provide evidence they are exceptionally happy / productive / (outside of Jhana time) because to me that's the missing attraction.
Attestations of friends would do : "X seems so much happier now!"
Context: I'm pretty sure I reached the first Jhana a few yrs ago when I meditated twice a day. It was nice while it lasted, but didn't have powerful effects the rest of the day.
Accomplishing more in my life career wise has been a far more consistent mood enhancer, weirdly enough.
Hmm. I don't think jhana makes a great productivity hack. If anything, all the meditation may help reveal that achievement based desires and happiness are fleeting.
"reveal that achievement based desires and happiness are fleeting."
But this is not empirically true for me. My mood is consistently higher after achieving more. It's not fleeting.
I'm enormously more happy post gaining access to Jhana
Also much better concentration
Do you think friends/family would attest to you being happier?
When you say better concentration, what do you mean precisely?
Yeah, I think they absolutely would and have.
Concentration, it's like if you are fundamentally content and satisfied on a deep level there are infinitely less thoughts and impulses vying for your attention.
With writing, it's rare that I can't just sit down at any time and enter a flow state writing. My girlfriend remarks that I produce coherent written output very easily.
My latest article was around 14 pages single spaced, and I did it in around 3 hours without any breaks from start to finish.
It's mostly just that when I'm engaged in a focused activity, there is very little in me that has any grasping to be doing or feeling anything else.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. What practice did you do to specifically improve concentration ability?
For me it was pretty much solely short micro jaunts into Jhana and effortless meditation throughout the day. Think 20x a day for a minute or two.
Sometimes I did longer or more, but this was essentially the way I practiced.
Resting in the felt sense of open awareness was the main doorway for me personally, the traditional Buddhist way is watching breath but I stumbled into Jhana 1 spontaneously.
The main productivity improvement is that I have less fomo over various things (eg going to parties) bc the only reason I wanted those things is pleasure which I can get in two seconds if I want. Causes a more wood behind fewer arrows effect for most people I know, they just do fewer things overall that they like more
Interesting. Thanks!
Jhana is just another form of meditative experience (nyam in Tibetan Buddhist texts). Meditative experiences are numberless. Similar to the Siddhis (supernormal powers) in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the Jhana states and how to achieve them are merely formulas for how to manipulate mind states. Most Buddhist teachers, even those who teach Jhana agree, these techniques never lead to realization or liberation. Ultimately, Jhana practice provides humans more opportunity to directly experience clinging to and craving for pleasurable experience and avoidance of displeasuable experience. When the practitioner finally realizes that point, insight and liberation can dawn and the pointlessness of Jhana is known.
This was my initial reaction: is this not escapism by another means? My rudimentary understanding of various spiritual teachers is that happiness comes from existing in the world as it is. The act of transcending into oneself is an acceptance that you are part of the world, and the world is part of you. Everything is as it should be: all is well. Seeking pleasure through meditation seems like it puts limitations on your happiness: “I will not be content until I experience Jhana”, for example.
I once read about a machine that claimed to induce this state. It was a series of programmed multicoloured lights which would flash on you as you meditated/lay down under it. I never had the chance to use it though and forget what it was called. Just an odd bubbling up from the internet which I'd forgotten about until I saw your post.
"Mind machines?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_machine). I have browsed listings for these, but their expense exceeds my curiosity. I have not seen anyone reporting ecstatic experiences from them, or anything much, really.
So anyone have any resources for learning how to do it?
The Mind Illuminated (dry, gradual, but insightful and well-suited for diligent students)
Or
Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book (wacky, jump-right-into-the-deep-end, maybe less didactic, free online, also in print)
Both books (and their authors) have received tons of criticism, negative and positive.
I have compiled a guide to recommended Jhana resources:
https://bit.ly/JhanaByPatri
(I'm the guy mentioned in the article)
I like the book Right Concentration and these dharma talks by Rob Burbea
https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/4496/
+1 to the talks, that is what I was listening to before I had my Macys experience.
I started meditating in July and have been to jhana between 5 to 10 times at this point - it can be kinda hit or miss when starting
Highly recommend "A Mind Without Craving" by Delson Armstrong. It is very straight to the point, you will not have to do weeks of reading before you begin to meditate using the ideas (6R's & TWIM).
If you like guided meditations, I strongly recommend Michael Taft's YouTube channel. He has hundreds of videos that are remarkably well done. I have entered jhana multiple times while listening to him. If Frank Yang is to be believed (I think he can be) it is possible to be enlightened while listening to Michael Taft (Frank would probably say it was coincidental, but you can see Michael Taft's video in the background the moment Frank Yang claims he experienced enlightenment (9th jhana) while being filmed - this can can sound unlikely, but Frank did years of practice before this happened), and Roger Thisdell has done it casually on film as if it's nothing special lol (somehow Roger skips jhana 1-8, and I don't even he knows how).
Is sex addiction a real thing? I think this is the first time I've seen Scott discuss behavioral addiction
It sounds to my ear like jhana is a sort of proof by negation: you think you want pleasure, but that's not really what you want. Jhana proves this by providing maximum pleasure, thereby demonstrating irrevocably that pleasure isn't really what you wanted. After that is just the best of a rather uninteresting set - on to better things!
"The Heart asks Pleasure—first—
"And then—Excuse from Pain—
"And then—those little Anodynes
"That deaden suffering—
"And then—to go to sleep—
"And then—if it should be
"The will of its Inquisitor
"The privilege to die—"
– Emily Dickinson
The "liking" vs "wanting" distinction has a ton of research available online. There are many ways you can end up liking something without wanting it, or wanting it without liking it.
It's an open question in ethics, and maybe also your personal life philosophy, how much importance you place on getting what you like vs getting what you want when they're different. Personally I think both the liking and the wanting are "reasons to act" in my own twist on hedonic utilitarianism!
Have had access to Jhana(s) for around a decade, agree with most of what he said. It surpasses any normal pleasure, yet is integrated, stabilizing and reduces pleasures for other things.
It makes you more stable as a person as well, atleast those two things were correlated.
glad it was helpful for you. It's pretty beautiful what our attention can do. It stabilized my mood quite a bit too, I have few mood fluctuations in a given month
Yeah, me too. It's hard to draw a perfect causal relationship since I did a lot of other stuff over that time, but I would probably say
- stabilized mood
- improved focus and attention
- reduced cravings for other things
- much better ability to handle difficulties
It also was the primary vehicle for more abiding shifts
How do you find that it affects your desire to do creative or otherwise productive work? I know I experience the craving to get things done as similar to other cravings in my life, and if jhana or other meditative experiences were to reduce that craving I think it would be a bad thing.
In my experience it refines it and makes it cleaner. I find myself more aligned and focused when it's time to work, and able to drop it all when it's not time to work.
I'm probably top 1%-5% driven proffessionally and intellectually despite having access to Jhana whenever.
For whatever reason, you don't just spend all of your time soaking in it. It's the only experience I've ever found that has no hedonic adaptation too.
I sort of suspect harmful addiction is caused mainly by things that are pleasurable in the moment, but carry a significant cost. Junk food is addictive, not only because it feels good to eat it, but because it makes you feel lousy soon after you eat it (and thus craving the easy pleasure of eating it again). You could easily say the same thing about most drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc. It’s the pleasure-pain cycle that keeps people trapped, not the pleasure alone.
On the other hand, no one’s ever been addicted to fruits and vegetables.
I would like to see some receipts on the "no more pussy for me please" dimension here
But then what is the point of the "no more casual sex" claim? Few people seek casual sex regularly; most grow out of it by the time they finish college, preferring long-term relationships. I also don't seek casual sex, and I've never meditated in my life.
"Jhanas are so good I no longer seek casual sex, though I still fuck regularly and I watch porn and masturbate several times a week" is not as convincing as you might think!
Uh, just look around you? Do you see older-than-college adult nerds seek casual sex all the time? They're mostly in long-term relationships. Even incels seek relationships!
I did look up some statistics just now and found this: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm
which claims that of sexually active men over the age of 25, the median number of lifetime sexual partners was 6. What did you expect this number to be, exactly?
Most people have a couple one-night stands in college, but otherwise stick to long-term relationships and eventually settle down with one permanent partner. My model of a typical person would be something like "casual sex 0-5 times in college, then ~3 long term relationships before getting married, then perhaps cheating or divorcing once or twice by old age". Very little casual sex.
What's your model of a typical person?
I find myself mistrusting this without disbelieving the qualia of the jhanas themselves. My uneducated prejudice says that there is some insufficiently explored neurological catch to entering these states enough times, possibly creeping general anhedonia (which may well look a lot like enlightenment from some angles) induced through some kind of exotic desensitisation very high upstream.
Also, it's remarkable how difficult the Paradise Town thought exercise is. Maybe it's Slavic paranoia or something, but I'd start looking for the Westworld angle immediately.
There's no all-seeing entity that only gives you a real cookie if you worked hard enough. It's just an evolutionary beneficial meme.
True enough. The entity in question is actually quite myopic.
"How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?"
Currently, close to zero minutes, walking. I've spent the fall stuck at home sick caring for small kids, sometimes confined indoors from of seasonal allergies, sometimes kept from gatherings of people by respiratory infections. After childbearing and the COVID slowdown in medical care, this is a fairly normal way for me to spend my time.
"Suppose that you read this post and decide to study meditation to reach jhana. You study hard for six months, succeed, and it’s even better than you imagined - but it isn’t reinforcing on a neurological level. Does this register as negative prediction error in the reward center? Would it make you less likely to try plans like 'study meditation' in the future, because they 'don’t pay off'?"
At this stage in my life, I'd expect that six months of intense study would mean a backlog of family responsibilities afterward. Since meditation takes uninterrupted time, I likely wouldn't pursue it past the six months for the foreseeable future -- and yes, achieving something only to conclude I can't actually use it might be rather deflating.
"When Nick says that he’s less interested in casual sex now, because jhana is an easier way to get pleasure, what is going on at a neurological level? Is this nonsense?"
Without speculating on the neurology, finding some mental state "better than sex" does not surprise me. I would consider music, and in my younger days, when I could avoid distracting cares, math, "better than sex". My rough equivalent of jhana is probably composing music, or getting to focus intently on some music I love.
That said, now that I have small kids and inadequate medical care, I've developed a stress-eating problem. Never had that before, and if sex addiction is like that, not really pleasurable, just something to smother the primal scream until the next time you've gotta stuff the scream down again, I'm not sure temporary exalted states could cure that, unless they were also helping you change all the mundane hours in your life when you couldn't be in them.
> At this stage in my life, I'd expect that six months of intense study would mean a backlog of family responsibilities afterward. Since meditation takes uninterrupted time, I likely wouldn't pursue it past the six months for the foreseeable future
I find it remarkable that this opportunity cost is not self-evident to more people in the comments here. Meditation is hard, and time consuming, and requires a ton of cognitive effort that could be put towards preexisting responsibilities.
The wim hof breathing method gives me very euphoric feelings but I similarly forget to do it for months at a time. Perhaps related.
If that's true then you are probably quite close to Jhana 1. Do your wim-hoff and sit afterwards and soak in (surrender - like being pushed by inexorable ocean waves) to the euphoric feelings. Give that a go a few times in a relaxed state and you may find the euphoria grows.
Hmm, seems similar to the states you reach on shrooms, which is kind of like a state of radical acceptance, where you are able to relinquish all resistance. Material pleasures, sex, food, etc all become frivolous because in that blissful state of unconditional self love, there are no more “holes” to fill with these desires. The great paradox which many report is that in spite of being in such an intense altered state of consciousness, it is in fact this state that feels like the natural “default setting”, while the day to day experience is in fact the “altered reality”.
The best thing about shrooms is how this feeling lingers long after the experience. Sort of a return to nature that allows you to temporarily cleanse yourself of all of the negativity we humans tend to dwell on. How long it lingers depends entirely on how well you can actively integrate the experience into your day to day habits. This is why I’m so optimistic about mushrooms combined with long term CBT for depression. They don’t actually “cure” it, but they give you the blueprints, toolkit, and step by step instructions for allowing a person to heal themselves.
Anyways, I’m curious from those who’ve experienced both, if the experience in similar. I assume there’s a lot of overlap between communities, and I’m wondering if many got into this form of meditation only after psychedelic experiences gave them a “model” of this mental state.
I’ve also realized that there are certain people who just don’t have a profoundly meaningful experience on mushrooms. It’s just cool colors and being high. Is it possible that this could be an alternative for them to reach this state? Or are these people just largely incapable of having meaningful experiences in this way at all? My gut kind of says the latter.
By “bodied by life” do you mean rocked by the intensity of something like a shroom trip? I think that’s true in some way but then what % of people are considered “emotionally hypersensitive”? From what I remember there’s like an 85% success rate for shrooms+therapy reducing symptoms of treatment resistant depression. Obviously hyper sensitive people are going to be over represented in that group but I don’t think everyone who benefits from psychedelics is a sensitive deep thinker. I have a few meathead friends who became much kinder people after mushrooms, but no one would ever call them emotional or sensitive. Interesting thought nonetheless...
Wow really interesting. I’ve never heard of him so I’m completely unfamiliar with his work, but a quick skim of positive disintegration on Wikipedia and I’m fascinated. Already have a lot of questions but will dig deeper. It’s funny because I always used the saying that there is a difference between people practicing kindness from a position of “strength” vs kindness from a position of “weakness”. The former you are acting in accordance to your own deeply held values, the latter is motivated by the fear of being disliked. This distinction was a revelation I had on my first shroom trip at age 17, and ever since then my main motivation in life has been a conscious effort to stay true to my values.
Just from a brief skim of Wikipedia, it kind of looks like I was describing a very surface level version of the distinction he gives between primary and secondary integration.
This is the first part of the entire discussion that rings personally with me. I must be missing some gene for "spiritual evolution". I'm agnostic to the experiences of jhana and enlightenment, but even accepting the descriptions here at face value, no part of me is interested in pursuing meditation. My life is great as is, I don't have some spiritual/hedonic/blissful hole waiting to be filled. I've had fantastic mushroom experiences, but never anything that I would describe as spiritually. I wouldn't describe myself as emotionally insensitive, but I'm definitely not hypersensitive.
Missing the "prerequisites for enlightenment" is probably true but implies some shortcoming to my ears. A better description might be that I am missing the need for enlightenment.
How would you describe your “fantastic” mushroom experiences, if not spiritual? What would it take to make that jump? Perhaps it’s just a semantics thing where one person has a lower threshold for what constitutes “spiritual” vs just “really good”.
I also never really felt any desire to pursue meditation. And I’ll also admit when I hear about Jhana I have to fight the urge to dismiss it off hand as self serving nonsense. But even taking their claims at face value I too feel no desire to pursue such states. I feel like I get all of the supposed benefits of meditation through entering a flow state, usually working on music for a few hours a day. A therapeutic shroom trip every 6-8 months helps me manage my depression.
There are counterexamples for jhana reducing desires for casual sex. Culadasa got a lot of flack for hiring prostitutes late in his life (no judgement from me on this) and he undoubtedly could access high strength jhanas. Also sexual abuse from prominent meditation teachers is not rare.
I only have access to low strength jhanas (which is different from numbered jhanas) so I cannot confirm/deny this desire aspect first hand. For me, while I see the comparison to sex, I think of it like comparing chocolate cake to vanilla ice cream. They're sweet and tickle something in the brain but I could see myself wanting both, unless I've stuffed myself on jhana(or cake). Also, wouldn't there be some sort of adaptation to whatever chemical cocktail is released by jhanas in the brain?
Subjectively, jhanas are close to the most pleasant moments I can achieve, but I don't spend all my time meditating because at least for me, there's also friction in meditation, which builds with duration and also a sort of activation friction in the beginning.
I think it depends why you want the sex? For me casual sex was about pleasure, which is why getting access to a better form of pleasure obsoleted casual sex. But if you're doing it for validation or company or something, jhana won't necessarily override it. I still do tons of things (actually everything) that are less pleasurable than jhana, but do them for other reasons
What's the main reason you don't pursue Jhana more?
I just don't crave it. I'm surprised I don't crave it though
Another piece of anecdata:
I am someone who claims to be able to experience jhana states.
I also still enjoy casual sex, as well as various kinks.
It seems a lot of people are caught up on the "satiety" aspect. And I experience that. But there's many areas of life where we don't maximize positive feelings even when they don't have drawbacks.
Example: kissing a partner passionately feels better than a goodbye peck on the cheek, doesn't really take that much longer, and has only positive benefits. We still kiss different ways as appropriate.
well that's the point isn't it. when you meditate you realize you aren't always making the choices. you swim into what's appropriate and makes sense in the moment.
you should try 3hrs of soaking at each Jhana (not stacked on the same day) and see if changes your relationship with craving and casual sex (it may still not) but the extended soak seems to do something that shorter stunts don't do.
Why would I want to change my relationship with casual sex?
I don't crave it. I enjoy it.
I would be asking, "is there anything in my life that will fall away if I do the jhana work?". If you enjoy it, it won't fall away. But if there is something you are relating to in an unhealthy way, then you might notice it fall away. Is everything going great? Then you should also have no resistance to the jhana practice. It's just an experiment. If it does nothing then it does nothing. Or do you have something you are defending from falling away?
Haha, I have ended up eating basically the same bland meals every day.
I'm the kid who was blissing out at Macy's
re: 2:
> Suppose that you read this post and decide to study meditation to reach jhana. You study hard for six months, succeed, and it’s even better than you imagined - but it isn’t reinforcing on a neurological level. Does this register as negative prediction error in the reward center? Would it make you less likely to try plans like “study meditation” in the future, because they “don’t pay off”?
I don't think Jhana being non-addictive means meditation hasn't paid off - at the point you can do it, you've probably figured out that meditation is pretty key to unlocking yet more profound realizations about the nature of life and suffering. It feels like waking up from a dream - like your life before you begun to meditate was a dream. It becomes clear there is a ton of value inside your head and it's worth meditating every day.
Also, I don't know how strongly we should take "non-addictive", since many experienced meditators are meditating daily and taking regular breaks from daily life to indulge it further. It's confusing to mix enjoyable things with addictions - are model trains addictive? is christianity? Meditation tends to be a lifelong pursuit and community, once you get into it.
I've been back to Jhana about twice since Macys. The time in Macys is one of my happiest memories, not gonna lie, it feels a bit embarrassing to say that. I'm continuing to practice and hopefully will become a lot more proficient at jhana and further states.
I used to doubt all sorts of things like chakras, jhanas, enlightenment, religion, etc - total skeptic of all woo. But then I found jhana myself and had an 'alice through the rabbit hole' moment. Now I have to go back through my whole worldview and reevaluate everything. Hate to say it but chakras are looking 'real', and the path to enlightenment seems like it's pretty well understood and explained by many different people.
With all due respect to Nick, the fact that "jhana killed my desire for casual sex" seems like a rather low bar. Of course people can define "casual sex" in different ways (is there such a thing as "formal sex"?) but being in a loving sexual relationship with someone you're genuinely attracted to can also kill (or at least greatly reduce) the desire for casual sex.
Casual sex is mostly just a combination of fantasy and friction with someone you either don't know well or don't want to spend much time around, or someone that isn't interested in spending much time with you, aside from copulating. That doesn't hold too much appeal, except for providing marginal validation for those that crave it, or brief gratification (which masturbation also provides).
When I do my kind of meditation -- with no connection to Buddhism or any other spiritual practice -- I essentially am just thinking and focusing, the opposite of "emptying my mind," and am often able to resolve problems or work out a creative challenge. More akin Sherlock Holmes mentally wrestling with a difficult case, perhaps, than any kind of Eastern meditation. Afterwards I'm always glad for the mindfulness and focus.
Meditating solely to reach some kind of bliss state, especially one whose effects don't really last, must be pleasurable to the meditator, but doesn't seem to do much for anyone else. Kinda like having a good dream at night. Or surfing.
Jhanas are not specifically Buddhist, FWIW. They were known before the Buddha, he just leveraged them for reaching enlightenment. And he had the same view, BTW - that they are not much use on their own even though they make you happy. What he discovered is that being in jhana helps with getting insights (probably because a happy mind is not as busy thinking about getting more pleasure any more). And the insights are actually liberating.
Thank you Alex, I appreciate your perspective, and I agree about conclusions reached. I know how genuine insights can remain long after an experience has passed.
Once while doing shrooms at Lone Pine Creek in the Owens Valley, I sat beside the little creek enjoying the water sounds. But then I stopped hearing just a generic "flowing water sound" and started studying what was producing each sound -- shallow riffles made a higher pitched, breathy noise, a side trickle dropping into a deeper pool made a base tone, the main channel chuckled and plopped. . . It was a little symphony of aquatic sound with many instruments. Since then I've never regarded sound like I used to, and I now perceive even basic sounds, like wind in the trees, as it makes different noises while it passes among different-sized leaves of assorted tree species, and even the sound of a vintage farm tractor idling is composed of a medley of noises made by various engine parts.
A long time ago, I made sure I could get into the first couple jhanas. And it was fizzy, exhilarating, even a little thrilling, but also in some sense really boring. Like it was sort of "contentless" and palpably "wasn't going to go anywhere," or something. Like it didn't really plug into my metaphysics, goals, or meaning. So I very consciously didn't bother to pursue it further. "Enlightenment," though, is a completely different ballgame, in my experience.
That said, learning to get into them is instructive (though not critically so, as best I can tell); there are some nice feedback loops and transferrable skills. And I could see them being a good investment for some people, modulo goals and opportunity cost.
The classical texts tend to push them as a prerequisite for enlightenment, I think, though debates as to whether they're really necessary have been going on for thousands of years. In my experience, they are not necessary.
This is exactly my experience. Same issue with the Finder's Course. On the other hand, the one time I experienced kensho and my entire sense of a separate self disappeared was something entirely different.
Is the finder's course worthwhile?
it's educational but doesn't necessarily deliver on all promises. Although for some people it does seem to deliver. There's probably tricks about getting it to deliver that they haven't worked out yet. It's a larger time commitment than they admit up front but still useful. Just know that "1hr a day" is more like "2hrs a day" for the 45 day duration of that cohort.
I discussed my first jhana experience with a Thai Forest Monk. He told me that in his 24 years as a monk, maybe a total of one year was spent in a state of jhana. He said that what is important about jhana is not to spend so much time in that state. What is important is to recognize that it is there, so we stop seeking happiness in the wrong places. Having so recognized, our attachments to worldly pleasures and aversion to pain begin to lose their grip on us.
The difficulty is sustaining the concentration necessary to attain jhana, and then becoming discouraged with our meditation practice when it isn’t readily accessible anymore.
worth noting that thai forest tradition is a bit different than the tradition I'm used to. In particular, they have a way higher bar for how concentrated you have to be to enter "jhana"
What I call jhana I can enter whenever (entering directly), what they call jhana (entering through the nimitta) takes being on a long retreat
Absolutely. The (tragically disgraced and then deceased) Culadasa has a fantastic graphic in the appendix of his book that places jhana on a spectrum from light to heavy, depending on the practice used and amount of concentration built up prior to entering jhana. I only experience jhana during and immediately after intensive retreats. Then it fades away. Alas, annica.
Though even within the Thai Forest Tradition, this spectrum exists between different teachers and teachings.
I have started to enter these weak jhanas, but are they fundamentally the same as the nimitta jhanas but at different intensities?
I'm not sure, I've never entered the nimitta jhanas. I'd like to do a long retreat sometime and try though!
As some comments have observed how good sex is varies alot between people.
Can anyone who has had both Jhana and some really good MDMA/heroin/meth experiences compare it to the first time drug experience? As Scotf has observed they don't remain quite as euphoric even if they stay motivating but that first time euphoria is probably our best bet for interpersonal comparison.
Have tried many many substances though only pharmaceutical versions of opiates and methamphetamines which are low dose compared to recreational use. Deep first jhana is much more like a full body orgasm that lasts for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours (I have personally experienced up to 10-15 minutes, hard to judge time, didn't have a clock at the time, can only enter them on demand on retreat.) This is much more pleasureable than drugs on the pure physical pleasure and contentment axes, though psychedelics + mdma can lead to insights that are a different axis of pleasure/happiness. I imagine that high dose opiates hit many of the same dimensions of first jhana, but with the problem of dullness that scales with dose, whereas jhana is vivid.
Did you ejaculate during this full body orgasm?
no, does not feel concentrated around the genitals the way orgasm does, and in fact that's one the main ways it feels better than orgasm, the lack of contraction.
Orgasm at its best IS a full-body experience, not concentrated around the genitals. At least in my experience, and at least some of the women I've been with.
Relevant: https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/eb6eb18ea76800043529635011563e3807dfa122/bfacb/images/distill/log-scales/true_pleasure_pain_scale.png (though not a direct answer because it doesn't have heroin and such).
Oh wait my friend definitely went to a party with this guy last week and said he was crazy- apparently he was covering the four stages of enlightenment? edit- friend is currently taking credit for inspiring the first tweet
#3- neurological changes- asked a room full of neuroscientists just now: meditation increases BDNF in the CSF, brain changes differ dependent on whether or not you're teaching people to meditate, all the studies suck, the monks that meditate frequently and are good at it are the only people where you'd definitely see a marked difference between meditating vs not on an MRI, and Richard Davidson at U Wisconsin does some of this research
Anyway this is why you don't use your social circle as a proxy for lit reviews
I'm pretty solid at jhanas, as in, I can reliably get up to 5th, and I can touch the others occasionally. Thanks, partially, to Nick Cammarata helping me out with some personal instruction!
And I'm less enthusiastic about them. Still pro jhana, but not as much as my creditable meditative colleagues quoted above. I think there's a lot of personal variation here; many meditators can do them, not all care that much about them. After a jhana phase of a couple of months, I got somewhat bored, and, even during that phase, they didn't really change my desire for pleasure, sexual or otherwise. They're really cool, but, to me, the pleasure that you get from jhana, while intense and lovely, has a flatness and artificiality to it, because it's totally separate from any narrative content and doesn't have much variety. It's like a giant package of mental sour candy that only comes in a few flavors. I revisit them occasionally, and it's fun that I can get myself harmlessly high with my brain if you give me a few undistracted minutes, but, at this point, my meditation life wouldn't feel that impoverished without them.
That said, if you're into meditation, I recommend trying them out, it's worth a try. I think they're easier than is commonly assumed, and it's fascinating watching your brain feedback loop itself into being on drugs. (And then dropping body sensations and doing all the weird stuff that happens in the formless jhanas.) Also, learning them teaches you an interesting attentional skill, the ability to lean on something with your attention without fucking with it. This video is good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K5ypXyF3dY
yeah, these states (i'm not up to where you are, so maybe not, but it seems that way to me) do seem like feedback loops, sort of the equivalent to back in the old days when you'd turn a video camera on a screen and get cool patterns. they're cool and they do give you some insight into how reality is created in the mind, and that's cool too, because it gives you a kind of spell with which you can dispel whatever spell you're under, if you don't want to be there.
that being said, i'm committed to real life and reality, despite the impossibility of living it in this mind and body which have so many quirks and feedback loops and enticing local minima.
Sasha- why did you leave twitter? The masses want to know.
"Pleasure without reinforcement value" is the dual of a well-known technique to avoid preference falsification, punishment-free/anonymous error reports.
And this is the most interesting aspect to me, disentangling the qualia from the function.
It seems like most basic human emotions (happiness, anger, lust, etc.) have plausible evolutionary explanations-- is there such an explanation for jhanas? If so, why do we not all naturally experience them without practice? Or are jhanas an 'accident' which result from some quirk of human neuropsychology that we have successfully figured out how to exploit.
I meditate occasionally, and while I've never reached a jhana, I can say that meditation in general has the same kind of 'Enjoyable but not that reinforcing' quality to it.
The closest analogue I have in my life is the post-workout high. I wouldn't say that it's a thousand times better than sex, but I'd say that it's definitely pretty great, and more than enough to cancel out the hassle and pain of the workout itself... and that's without even considering the longer-term benefits.
And yet I don't work out nearly as often as I optimally could or should, even though I know perfectly well it will be a major net-positive experience, the very-short-term pain of actually having to do the workout seems to win most of the time unless I really pull tricks on myself (like paying a PT to show up and make me do it).
I'm very jealous of people who report post-workout high, I barely get any of that. Certainly not enough to motivate me to exercise. Is it trainable?
I've only gotten post workout high after at least 6 months of trying to attain it. (Just kidding)
It hits me most after I over-exert. Have you tried pushing yourself way further than you usually do?
>I've only gotten post workout high after at least 6 months of trying to attain it. (Just kidding)
You joke, but it's more obtainable and carries less of a tired flavor if you're already decently in shape and can go longer or harder.
> How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
Why not live there permanently? I thought Singapore looked dope so I moved there.
My point being, what motivates people to exit jhanas if they're so good? Just thirst and hunger?
As I understand it people often get ‘kicked out’ of the jhanas. The brain just exits the mode of being after awhile. There is also talk of satiety. If you’ve been wandering in a desert for hours and you find water, you will drink and drink and drink but eventually you just stop.
So, like, what's the deal with meditation, anyway? If I can get past my skepticism, articles like this make me want to meditate more and get better at it, because if it's real, jhana sounds amazing with only upsides, no downsides. For decades, I've had therapists preaching meditation and mindfulness at me, but for all of the talk, it's never progressed past "close your eyes, relax each of your muscles, breathe fully with your diaphragm, try not to think of any thoughts, except wait, it's actually okay to think of thoughts. But then try to stop or quiet those thoughts. Or just let the thoughts happen, and follow them. Whatever!"
I've never really gotten past any initial mindfulness stuff. I can find mindfulness useful, but I have no clue what comes after it. As you may be able to tell, I'm annoyed with the meditation pushers' attitude towards the "quieting your thoughts" thing. I find the lack of instruction about how to quiet your thoughts, or if you should in fact quiet your thoughts or just let them happen, with this sort of "it's impossible to do it wrong, man, you do the mindfulness the way you want, man!" to be supremely unhelpful, and maybe this is why I've never progressed further than the basics.
Actually, the whole "quieting your thoughts" aspect is a bit of a misconception. Meditation is more about developing the mind skills that would, eventually, among other good things, cause your thoughts to quiet down when you want them to. I think "The Mind Illuminated" is a good starting book for rationally-inclined folks, even if you don't end up sticking with it down the road.
I recommend The Mind Illuminated (you can find free copies online). It's extremely clear on what you're supposed to do and practices the kind of thing you need for jhanas (i.e., really stable concentration).
I think learning to meditate (along with the teachings out of which meditation arises) is more like learning a language or learning to play an instrument than it is like eating an apple -- it's not something we just know how to do if a person says go do it. It's a whole path of mind training and spiritual and ethical self-development. I would wish every time a therapist recommends to someone to take up meditation that they provide referrals to teachers.
I am a therapist and I have had so many clients say to me "yeah, a therapist told me to take up meditation. I tried following my thoughts, breath, whatever and it didn't work for me." There are only so many chances you'll have with a person to be willing to try a new thing and it makes me sad when they get burnt this way.
Meditation was never a thing people did all by themselves without instruction, the support of a community, and a collected body of wisdom. It was always something done in the context of a larger spiritual/philosophical tradition of which meditation is only one practice. Just like how jhanas are just one of many features of meditation.
Even just learning ways to apply simple secular mindfulness in everyday life takes some guidance and support to get the most out of it.
That we get these messages that it's just something you kind of go do and figure out by yourself without regard to the whole tradition behind it is very consistent with how we do things in Western cultures, but it doesn't really set people up for success.
The cool thing is that there are now so many resources readily available to almost anyone. Many of the really good dharma halls went online during Covid and so now people anywhere can practice daily with the best teachers in the West. I think books are good, but they are limited in the sense that without the back and forth and real-time teaching provided by a live person, they are open to misunderstanding, and new meditators can easily get caught in unproductive eddies that are easily addressed with a real person teacher.
I think the "it's impossible to do it wrong" part is false, but ironically can be useful, if it makes you experiment with various things, and there is a chance that you will stumble upon something that works.
As opposed to always trying to do it right, but having a wrong preconception of what is right, so you actually keep doing it the wrong way, and never stumble upon the right one.
In general, communication about these things is terribly frustrating. It's like trying to explain to an alien how exactly you "do" the inner speech. You obviously do it somehow, but can you explain it in words? Can you explain in words how to *stop* doing the inner speech for a minute? Because that is a thing I have figured out, but I cannot explain it, other than "just notice how you actually do it, and then simply stop doing it", which obviously is super unhelpful if you haven't figured it out yet.
One BIG Question comes to mind:
**Does anyone have a theory why sex scandals have most definitely occurred among meditation teachers of great renown, including ones widely reputed to have achieved jhana-at-will abilities? **
This seems to me like a relevant BIG question since one such scandal in our lil' niche of meditation teachers popular round these here parts (i.e., the rationalist and rational-adjacent communities) was, IIRC, a much-commented-upon article on ye olde Slate Star Codex in 2019:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/
(Sidenote: My quick skimming, aided by CTRL+F, showed no one mentioning this 2019 Slate Star Codex article... at least as of circa 11pm EDT on Wed 10/26 when I started writing this comment. Apologies if people have now mentioned it or I missed the people who did... and ADDENDUM 11:47pm EDT: I now see user "0k" had earlier referenced the main scandal motivating the article, namely that of John Yates aka Culadasa, the author of the popular round-these-here-parts meditation manual _The Mind Illuminated_.)
So, this question of "how are *jhanas* not addictive?!" might in the context of all this advanced, systematic meditation stuff be more like "Is it somehow that jhanas are A-OK, but other altered states of consciousness on the road to 'enlightenment' --- at least according to some traditions of mindfulness meditation --- are in fact the dangerous ones, the ones that breed temptation / behavioral addiction / sociopathy / etc?!"
FWIW, two cents of hypothesizing on the issue is this: jhanas just hit that oh-so-sweet spot of giving you major actual satisfaction **that doesn't noticeably decrease each time you try to engage in it again**. (And if numerous commenters have pointed this out while I've taken my dang sweet time finishing this here comment, then I humbly second all your motions.)
This idea of diminishing-returns-on-momentary-joy/ecstasy/etc seems to me to be an-oh-so-diabolically-effective heuristic to engender compulsions in our po' po' lil' brains and personalities. Presumably, it got naturally selected as a tendency in many of us since it really drove some particularly fecund individuals in our evolutionary past to rise to the top of sex and status competitions. (Ok, I'm compelled to say it not just seems to me to be so, but seems to major bestselling nonfiction authors to be so, e.g., Robert Wright of Bloggingheads/Meaningoflife.tv fame and, most pertinently for this discussion, the book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Buddhism_Is_True )
To bring this comment to a close, two closing thoughts:
1) First, a "bleg" (does anyone say that anymore for an ask on a blog?): Didn't some formerly-heroin-addicted musician or other poetic soul have some pithy quote to the effect that heroin isn't addictive because it puts you in the throes of ecstasy, but *because the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc times you try it* it tantalizes you with just a little less ecstasy... just a little oh-so-PAINFULLY-noticeably-less ecstasy... hence you spend your life "chasing the dragon" of your first high, yada yada yada? If so, does anyone know who and when exactly?
2) What's the community's consensus on that classic and controversial experiment that supposedly shows rats won't compulsively push a lever for morphine, insanely eschewing food and water until they die, *provided that they're given lots of other, wholesome, rat-eudaimonic activities to do with other sociable rats?* I'm speaking of "Rat Park" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park).
P.S. This might just be a confession that I'm a weird person, but I gotta share that first thought after first being exposed to the story of the "Rat Park" experiment was "Oh, that explains why Mickey and Minnie haven't flamed out in some horrible addiction scandal like oh-so-many-other Hollywood stars! They have each other and many friends with whom to engage in wholesome activities!")
Connecting to someone sexually has deep roots that don't just seem physical pleasure motivated. I think many of the approaches touted by various schools do not emotionally prepare people to deal with the reality of lust vs narratives about how lust is supposed to magically go away after practicing for some time.
'Chasing the Dragon' is about figuring out the maximum dose you can take without killing yourself, since that is the most pleasure.
This is speculation, but I suspect the main answer is that [how good the act feels] and [how motivated you are to obtain it] are more separate than most people think. I know this sounds unintuitive, but I more and more think it's true. There's no evolutionary drive that makes you want to enter jhanas. And consider that people can pursue addictions that don't feel good anymore at all.
Separately, in what sense is jhanna per se pleasurable at all? Is that not sukha? The sensual references employed seem rather counter to the elimination of stimulus response Buddhist meditation generally aspires towards, unless they are meant strictly apophatically ("this is so much unlike X, it is like X").
Yes, it is sukha. The Buddha identifies it as unsatisfactory. It is an intermediate stage between attachment to worldly pleasure and the sublime equanimity that characterizes enlightenment.
So a bit like methadone in that respect. Something pleasurable to wean oneself from harmful addiction on the road to full recovery.
Maybe this is one of those things where believing it is true is what makes it true, since it’s all internal states? But I do think that gets fuzzy because mental models of internal states definitely enter feedback loops with the rest of your body. I do know a bit about that.
I know that may sound discrediting to people entering Jhana but I’ll explain. Note: the next part will sound braggadocios so I will add that I am a poor athlete, have a childish sense of humor, and overeat as a bad habit, which I confess just to raise my believability in terms of me not saying the following for ego reasons.
I am really good at altering my internal states/forcing myself to deeply emotionally believe something until my body starts to involuntarily react as if it is happening and I have the best dexterity/internal body control of anyone I have ever met including magicians. I don’t think I did anything in particular that made me this way other than maybe noticing I was better than some stuff as a kid and then I just kept doing it. I also tend to stumble and drop stuff when I am not actively doing something like this so maybe it’s a weird optimization valley.
Weird stuff I can do: give myself goose bumps at will. Which I do by imagining that I am really, really cold. It’s like I make myself believe that I am cold so that my body responds as though I am. I am good enough at this that I can give myself goose bumps on one side of my body but not the other by imagining only that side is cold. Or just an arm or just a leg. Doesn’t seem to matter what temperature the room is I can make my arm hair/leg hair/whatever stand straight up.
All sort of weird finger manipulation stuff that has no practical purposes other than being really remarkably good at twirling a pencil around and getting people to ask if I’m a drummer. To which I have to respond I’m just a pencil twirler but a really good one. Then I’ll add in a second pencil to my twirl and have it go the opposite way of the first pencil so people know I wasn’t lying about being really, really good at pencil twirling.
I can write different things with each hand at the same time… kinda. I can definitely do this better than most people including people who were born ambidextrous (I consider myself to ambidextrish) but I have to do it by coordinating pencil/pen strokes between each hand. I can do simultaneous to a limited extent but it is a for sure practiced skill and I’ve lost a lot of it with time because I no longer have enough free time to just fill up legal pads with practice all day. Even after I’d dedicated like three months to it I was definitely straining to make it happen. Doing a circle with one hand a square with the other was the hardest, even more than words of different lengths. But the weird thing was that it became strangely easier when I imagined I was my own left handed twin brother, writing next to my own right handed self.
All of which is to say there is certainly plumbing from your brain to the rest of your body and it’s a bit sloppier and more slippery than we tend to think. Your mental model of reality, insofar as it is connected to the reality of your actual body, can certainly exercise some sort of recursive control. Your nerve endings can tell you it’s cold but also your brain can tell your nerve endings they are cold. If you believe you are left handed and just writing something with your right handed brother maybe for a few minutes your brain can just operate as multiple agents.
I’m a bit eccentric and I don’t know if that helps. I’m higher IQ but probably only average here. I have done something like Jhana, or a sense of deep profound contentment at least, although I don’t really consider what I do to be meditation or anything more than the result of being profoundly bored a lot as a child and wanting to show off for friends. I’m also probably a bit nuts.
Part of me wants someone to dare me to post evidence. It’s been a bit since I’ve done a good pencil twirling or two handed writing (which was great for writing down ideas and keeping my hands strong but was just too precocious to do at coffee shops without feeling like an asshole).
Back when I was meditating intensively I had intermittent access to jhana. There’s been a lot of comments essentially asking “If it’s so great, why isn’t everyone doing it?”. I think there are a couple major reasons:
- It’s not actually that quick or easy for most people. The subreddit for The Mind Illuminated is full of posts like “I’ve meditated diligently 45 minutes a day for the last year and still haven’t experienced jhana or had any special meditative experiences.” 6 months to achieving always-on access to the jhanas is remarkably fast.
- Many people run into some at least temporarily destabilizing experiences. If you’re meditating enough to get into jhana, you’re meditating enough to trigger a nice little existential crisis or three. People keep trying to break meditation down into concentration(the fun stuff that puts you into jhana) and insight(the stuff that triggers existential crises but also makes you enlightened), but at the end of the day concentration experiences lead to insight experiences and vice versa. It’s a bit of a mystery box from person to person as to whether your 6 months of intensive meditation will earn you access to the jhanas, complete boredom and lack of progress, some really weird experiences, an existential crisis, or re-opening a mountain of trauma you didn’t know you had.
When nerdy types start talking about “amazing sex,” I can’t help but roll my eyes. Sorry, but I don’t really value your opinion on this subject because I don’t think you’re attractive enough to have a serious understanding of that kind of pleasure. Maybe if a movie star or Hugh Hefner preferred jhana, I’d sit up and listen.
Bwahahaha! Seen. Thanks for your authenticity.
One time I checked out a Society for Creative Anachronism gathering that was held near my home. Two nerdy gamer-type locals lads in their early 20s, who I knew, were offering me unsolicited advice on how to pick up damsels. These two betas, way down the sexual hierarchy, who probably hadn't had a combined total of five partners between them, and never had a threesome or other unconventional sexual experience, were telling me "This is what you need to do. . ." I laughed lightly, I wandered away.
Is your theory that attractive people inherently enjoy sex more, or that attractive people get attractive partners and having an attractive partner helps you enjoy sex more?
Both, I think. Being attractive usually comes with being confident, as well as being physically fit and capable of more exertion. There’s also the nature of desire and of being desired; in other words, sex is better when your partner desires you more, which is greater when you are attractive.
Beyond that there’s also the simple fact that yeah, attractive partners make it more enjoyable than ugly ones. I don’t think this is different from any other sensory endeavor, e.g. staying in a nice hotel is more enjoyable than staying in a highway motel, or eating a Michelin-star meal is more enjoyable than leftover McDonald’s.
Re 'sensory endeavor' paragraph:
- First of all, the global range of possibilities says very little about the marginal differences between things near the top. After all, why stop at leftover McDonalds - you could contrast Michelin with eating literal nuclear waste. But ultimately it makes no difference because the theoretical low end provides no insight into how different *my best meal* is from Michelin.
- Second, there are probably decreasing marginal returns for most sensory endeavors near the high end. Given a meal, hotel, or sexual encounter, it is far easier to make it arbitrarily worse than arbitrarily better!
- Third, you seem to be assuming that our imaginations cannot be good enough to figure out how much better a sensory endeavor we've never had can be compared to one we've had. But roughly, I think it is reasonable to extrapolate out of sample for small-ish / easily-imaginable quantitative differences, and not reasonable to extrapolate for large/discontinuous/qualitative changes. To take your food example, I've experienced a range of saltiness of food, and so I can confidently say that if you put my favorite food in front of me with the platonic ideal amount of salt, it'd be a bit better than previous times I had that food but not by much. But I can't as easily say what it would be like with some new spice I've never tried. Similarly, I'm fully ready to believe that there's some "new spice" I've never tried with regards to sex which would cause a huge increase in my enjoyment. But partner attractiveness level seems much more like varying the salt: I've already experienced a range of attractiveness in partners, and the media/internet makes sure I know exactly how much higher the global range goes, and so I believe my imagination is good enough to extrapolate that sex with someone at the top of the range would be (all else somehow equal) not all that much better than what I've experienced. (I can't quite apply this argument to my *own* attractiveness level, since I have obviously not experienced a range of that. But I remain similarly skeptical that it would make an enormous difference.)
Wait that couldn't be further from reality- Aella has a writing piece that talks honestly about factors that influence whether she comes or not with a partner that I know definitely matches my experience/the experience of most of my girl friends.
"Fun fact; there was possibly a negative correlation between my likelihood of real orgasm and his physical attractiveness (r=-.12, LR 7.5), but a positive correlation between my real orgasm and how much I liked his personality (r=0.18, LR 60)"
Do you think that someone who is profoundly unattractive would ever get the volume of experience to discover that correlation or even to experience sex with someone whose personality that person deeply enjoys?
Huh? Nerds come with various levels of attractiveness and sexual activity. Unless you redefine the attractive ones as "not really nerds", of course.
(The relationship between attractiveness and sexual activity is also less straightforward than it may seen, although I assume that there is a positive correlation.)
> Maybe if a movie star or Hugh Hefner preferred jhana, I’d sit up and listen.
As a side note, most non-nerds are not movie stars either.
Idk man. The "amazing sex" of being married 25+ years, deeply in love, and having had so much practice with each other your motions are as close to perfect as possible (as my mother described to me) seems more desirable than lots of first-time sex with hot strangers.
Anecdotal but I have had much more amazing sex after three years with my fiance than I ever had with previous partners. And perhaps this is because I am female (I don't know how male attraction works), but I find my partner more physically attractive the deeper I fall in love with him. Seeing him naked turns me on very quickly. He was a regular dude when I met him but my deep love for him has made him the most physically and sexually attractive man I have ever known.
this thread is wild
Thank you Jan Everywhere, I thoroughly enjoyed your post.
Although I have been blessed to have many lovers over the years, practically none were strangers to me, and it's been more than 30 years since I had sex with anyone who I didn't love and didn't love me.
I was with the mother of my child for 8 years, followed by a longtime partner for 10 years, and parted amicably and lovingly with both as life circumstances changed. Now been with the same woman for 3 years, am engaged, and the sex and love is great. One of the biggest turn-ons in life and sex is being with someone who both loves you and finds you attractive.
Best of luck to you and your lucky partner.
I happen to be doing a retreat soon to try to learn (some of) the Jhanas, can anyone think of any question/experiment for which it would be useful to get data/a question from someone both before and after trying to learn the Jhanas? I mean I guess an obvious one is just like, "pre-registering" to say whether I do end up experiencing them or not, as one data point for how hard it is. Anything else?
From my experience, the best thing is to not think about it at all. The moment you have the thought “is it happening?” you lose all momentum. Just concentrate on the meditation object and let everything else come and go. It’s like planting a tree. You can create the conditions for the tree to grow, but you cannot will it to grow. You can supply soil and water, but you can’t pull the tree up towards the sky. Likewise with jhana, you can create the proper conditions but you cannot will it into being.
Oh thanks! I actually more meant like, things that other people would find useful for me to answer/do to get data, rather than stuff that would be helpful for me to reach jhanas, but thank you!
I would be amazed if you could set your intention as “I’m going to gather data” and enter into jhana. Maybe you can. But I would think all you can do is set the intention to remain mindful of whatever arises and then provide a self-report afterwards
I think Bill Kaminsky raises a salient point: if meditation and spiritual practice lead to such enlightened states, and freedom from worldly wants and pleasure-seeking, then why have a number of high profile practitioners been credibly accused (and even admitted) to scandalous and/or exploitative sexual behavior?
I'm a dude, and I totally understand the urge to get laid, even when inappropriate, but aren't those endless hours of meditation supposed to cleanse them of that? It has always seemed like a damning indictment when yet another venerable old holy man is revealed to have been more interested in the bodies of attractive younger female acolytes than in their spiritual progress.
It doesn't surprise me coming from Christian preachers, they're a pretty mixed bag of hypocrites and self-dealers, but gurus always claim to have done the hard work to free themselves of that. And yet many of them still sleaze out when they can. . .
This is an interesting phenomenon in need of a good theory. One hypothesis: it is a mistake to believe there is a strong correlation between spiritual leadership status and spiritual attainment. Just as institutions tend to promote those with political/bureaucratic/self-promoting skills/charisma over true technical skills, so too may it be the case that spiritual leadership status is determined by skillful self-promotion and development of an enlightened persona, all the while masking the narcissism that remains inside. And this is compounded by the fact that spiritual attainment is completely subjective. It is a black box. There are no good metrics for objectively measuring spiritual development, thus creating abundant opportunities for charlatans.
Perhaps the true masters in spiritual practice remain anonymous, as seeking status is undesirable to them. Thus we have spiritual materialists/narcissists in the most high profile positions. And their narcissism only grows as they feed off the high that comes from elevation to the exalted status of guru. Who wouldn’t want to be a guru? As a thoroughly unenlightened being, I recognize my desire to be a spiritual leader as entirely ego-driven. Is there any reason to believe the spiritual leaders embroiled in scandal were elevated through a real merit-based system?
Ironically, Chogyam Trungpa, who literally wrote the book on the pitfalls of spiritual materialism, seems to have embodied the corruption he identified. Perhaps the insight into spiritual materialism expressed in his book came from diagnosing his own mind, and he never actually followed his own advice.
On the other hand, the Dalai Lama’s status was foisted upon him. He did not pursue it in any way. And, although I disagree with some things he’s said, he is scandal-free as far as I know.
I think this is a very compelling explanation. The more I delve into the spiritual, the less I want to be a leader or be in the public eye.
>watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free
That's called the internet, and I don't have to leave my room for it. The other stuff would be nice too, and I would be willing to invest some effort into it, like a couple hours on the weekend, but as I understand it, reaching jhanas is much more difficult.
I am one who has gone in and out of what Nick calls Jhana my whole life. Now 67 years old, my first memory of this state is from my fifth year. I can attest to what Nick says, namely, that this ecstatic experience is more pleasurable than sexual orgasm. I can also attest that when one is in Jhana, one can carry on one's regular daily routine, yes, even walk and talk at the same time, except that when one is walking, one floats, and when one talks, the words flow effortlessly.
Those who have not been in Jhana and thus gainsay the actuality of it should realize that it cannot be expressed in words, just as any other experience cannot be expressed in words. For example, if you've never tasted an avocado, it would be impossible for me to describe the taste to you. You just have to taste it yourself. The same with Jhana; you just have to experience it yourself. And I wish that everyone could experience Jhana, as I believe the world would then become a more peaceful and loving place.
This touches on the problem of language. Nick has chosen, and for the sake of this comment I have complied with his choice, the Pali word, Jhana, which is sometimes translated as meditation. In Sanskrit, it is Dhyana, which became Chan in Chinese, Seon in Korean, and Zen in Japanese. It seems that the ancient Indian spiritual practice has given us the most useful vocabulary to try to communicate this blissful, liberating state. Other Indian words attempting to describe this state are Ananda (bliss), Sambhoga (supreme pleasure), Samadhi (concentration), and Advaita (nonduality).
I applaud Nick and Scott for bringing this discussion of this real experience to the foreground and making it a subject to be studied physiologically as well as psychologically. (Sam Harris alluded to this in the closing pages of his book, The End of Faith.) May all be happy, peaceful, and free!
I would also add that one can spontaneously be in Jhana without any formal technique or discipline. Indeed, my supremely pleasurable Jhanas have come unplanned and unsought.
I'm in one now, brought on by reading the article. I was probably in some sense close to one before but didn't bother to check.
A dark green veggie clorophyll taste, with undertones of nuttiness, but with the texture of butter.
That's an avocado.
I’m the founder of Jhourney, a neurotech company attempting to map the neural correlates of the jhanas and use tools like neurofeedback to help make them more accessible.
I started drafting a comment in response to Scott's post and it ended up a bit long so I posted it here: https://www.jhourney.io/blog/scott-alexander-nick-cammarata-jhana
Scott's questions get at the curiously highly-pleasurable-but-non-addictive nature of the jhanas. A few excerpts from my response:
[Experience suggests] they're not addictive. It’s not as if you wirehead yourself into some wildly different equilibrium, you just never go reaching for them the same way you start automatically reaching for your phone if you’ve been spending lots of time on Twitter. My colleague and neuroscientist Kati Devaney informs me that you can predict the addictiveness of a drug by the first derivative of its dopamine spike. Drugs that see more gradual rates of change of dopamine don’t see such addictive responses. This implies that despite their extreme pleasure, the neurological mechanisms of jhanas don’t have a high dopaminergic rate of change.
But for those concerned about wireheading like a heroin addict, perhaps even greater reassurance is that the idea of *living life* with the jhanas seems much more fulfilling than just doing the jhanas all day. By having access to the jhanas, in the form of either bliss, happiness, contentment, or deep peace (i.e. the first four jhanas), I’m able to “splash” them into everyday life. Walking in the woods with my partner? How about a little J2? Coming home after a long day? How about a little J3? Rob Burbea talks a lot about mastery of the jhanas being a process of learning to delight and play and weave together the jhanas with one another and in everyday life. Every now and then I meet someone who talks about the jhanas like “been there, done that” and I think, “Holy shit is this person missing out.” And since it takes a little practice, they’ve lost the ability to get back to the jhanas and need to relearn.
...
My favorite way of explaining the jhanas is “they may be the opposite of a panic attack.” Most everyone is familiar with an anxiety “loop” – one anxious thought begets another. By the time you’ve been at it for a few minutes, you start seeing physiological effects: your heart rate and breathing change, maybe your hands get sweaty. It turns out a little personal experimenting is enough to learn to create that same positive feedback loop with a positive kernel… and the results are better than anything you imagined.
...
Kati (my neuroscientist colleague) observed to me that people seem to go through phases with the jhanas:
- Pre-jhana: lack of awareness and then either rejection or fascination
- Phase 1: Fascinated and trying to learn
- Phase 2: Learn them, fascinated, and think they are absolutely life-changing
- Phase 3: Gradual forgetting how big of a deal they were and possible loss of interest
- Phase 4: Cycle periodically back through Phases 2 and 3
I think even Nick would admit he was fascinated for a while – I think he spent over an hour a day for a year in the jhanas. So did I.
Interested to learn more about what your company is doing, any good writeups? You planning to publish study results after patenting the device?
Looks like EEG, are there any prior art studies you like? I’ve not found much from a cursory lit review.
It seems like there should be more MRI studies, particularly at higher Jhanas, since they are quite distinct states (I only found Hagerty et al 2013). Maybe it’s a problem with identifying Jhana in the first place, but I’m perplexed about why individuals with single-pointed attention and beyond are not studied more in the neuroscience literature. Perhaps if there was an objective & peer reviewed signal like you guys are working on, it would make these individuals more objectively identifiable (and allow control groups).
The literature is unfortunately scarce. Dennison 2019 is the only other published effort, but is EEG only, not fMRI. Our team members, Jonas and Kati, have not yet published data from studies they conducted at McGill and Harvard, one EEG and one fMRI. I was also expecting Sacchet from Harvard to publish this year on the jhanas, but not sure what the status is.
In general the literature is disappointing. The EPRC has an extensive research agenda in hopes of changing that, but is underfunded. The upside is that there’s reason to believe there’s lots of low hanging fruit.
We have a couple approaches available to us at Jhourney, but plan to first collect sufficient EEG data, design various features using neuroscience-informed signal analyses, and feed it through ML models. Our goal is to just get something working, and we’re less incentivized to invest in linking to other neural correlates literature or build a model for mechanistic understanding (as a first move).
I'm fascinated by this, now have some half-coalesced thoughts about Tai Chi and Jhana practice I need to flesh out.
On the topic of the science and other hardware, an Aussie startup Humm got backing from Berkely Skydeck for their tACS (transcranial alternating current stimulation) patch but ran into COVID-based supply issues along with FDA uncertainty.
https://startupnews.com.au/2022/03/03/humm-closes-down-technology-to-assist-californian-startup/
Stephen, your website seems to be selling a prototype, but here you seem to be saying you don't yet have a product ("our goal is to just get something working"). It would sure be helpful if your site had more on how the headset works, what the training protocol is, and what a user might expect from a $1200 up front and $50/month investment. For starters, do you have a product yet or not? If yes, what is it and how does it work?
Out of curiosity how does your product differ from the Muse headband?
The biggest difference is we target the jhanas. They don't.
Oh this is exciting. I remember reading Dennison and thinking yes, this is the way to train for jhana. I haven’t had a chance to read that post but are you using infraslow frequencies or Theta Alpha Gamma synchrony to encourage jhana?
I seem to be able to trigger the "frisson" response to music much easier than others. If I find the right song, I can squeeze as much frisson juice out of it as possible before I get too accustomed to it and it does nothing for me. Of course, you get similar feelings when you smell a fresh breeze and so on, I'm wondering if this Jhana state is in any way similar to that, where you've trained your brain to respond in a very ecstatic way. With that being said, could you potentially have a similar burnout where the same response just isn't felt anymore because you're so used to it?
I'm a meditator who has gotten into 1st jhana maybe a dozen times or so, and dropped past it into 2nd and 3rd jhana a couple of times, but I don't have reliable access yet.
The "frisson" response is called "piti" in the Pali canon of Buddhism, often mistranslated as "rapture." It is the primary characteristic of 1st jhana, and remains prominent in 2nd jhana but recedes into the background as a sense of deep pleasure and satisfaction takes the foreground. It disappears entirely in 3rd jhana and beyond.
Developing access to jhana requires developing high sensitivity to this. From a first person perspective, it feels to me not so much like you're calling up the feeling, but learning how to remove a "bliss limiter" in the mind. Some meditators who do jhana practice find that they become TOO inclined to the frisson, and find themselves experiencing distractingly powerful feelings of pleasure and bliss arising with it at random points in the day.
Are frission and piti really the same body sensation in your experience?
I would describe frission as waves of tingly noise that radially burst in the body. Mostly in my back, neck and arms region.
I watched a Michael Taft video posted in the comments here and he said piti commonly manifests in the hands and mouth area.
If reaching the first jhana is about concentrating on piti would you say music could be helpful for the practice?
I can generate frission just by imagining a particular song in my head, I don't need to actually be listening to it. I'm a beginner meditator, maybe the particular kind of concentration necessary for jhanas doesn't leave room for simultaneously focusing on the object of meditation and the music.
Ah yeah I had this misconception - so Piti is any pleasant, non-sensory sensation in the body - it isn't a *specific* pleasant physical sensation, it's "any". Could be a rushing feeling, the feeling of the smile, a pleasant stretch from your back, tingles, frission - sure.
Music is definitely helpful, and after being in J1 I can say that music is much more enjoyable in the afterglow - I normally don't care for it much.
I say - meditate and get calm, then generate your frission, and then soak in it. Soak it up and just enjoy it and much as you can - remove any bliss limiter you find. You may hit it that way. The focusing on piti is more like "getting swept up/submerged in/surrendering too" than a surgical analytic attention
Thanks, I think I'm starting to get a clearer picture of what this thing is little by little.
Only speaking for my own experience--my experience of what I call piti and the frisson are very similar, if not the same thing. When it occurs through meditation, piti can last longer, can be experienced deeper in the body, and is usually accompanied by sukkha--a smooth, deeply pleasant, satisfied feeling. It can also be FAR more powerful than what one usually experiences when listening to music. I did an at-home retreat in January during which my body was rocked by a huge explosion of piti on the release of some stuck emotions.
Piti in meditation sometimes shows up in the same place as musical frisson--back of the neck up to the bottom of the skull, upper back, skimming along the surface of my arms, etc.--but it can show up in other places as well. Often it starts in my legs or butt. Some people experience it near the mouth, but I tend to have a lot of facial tension (working on figuring that out through meditation and some other techniques), but I have experienced it starting in my hands before.
Piti is one of the jhana factors for first jhana, but it's not the only one. The five traditional jhana factors are piti, sukkha, directed attention, and sustained attention. Some Buddhist also include single-pointedness of mind for first jhana (looking at you, Buddhagosa), but in the original Pali canon this is actually only a factor for second jhana and up, not first jhana. And all this must occur in the context of "seclusion from sense desire." Which I understand as simply being temporarily not jonesing for something good to happen in the future, or something bad to stop happening in the future, or clinging to something that used to happen in the past. Future or past-oriented mind will keep you out of jhana.
Being able to bring up the frisson at will is probably a very helpful skill, but it won't get you into jhana on its own. But you can get into jhana with just about any meditation object. I haven't heard of anyone using music, but sitting and developing concentration on the sound of music playing would be an interesting practice to experiment with.
So. I've only come across the concept of jhana this week, but it resonates because it seems plausibly like a description of an experience that I've had on and off since I was a teenager.
Potentially relevant context: I'm autistic but wasn't diagnosed until I was 34. Before diagnosis I experienced generally high levels of anxiety and stress, mostly due to the effort that I was putting in to act 'normal' plus a deep sense that nobody should have to put in that much effort, plus the relatively infrequent but unpredictable moments when I unwittingly did something weird and suffered social or practical consequences. I was brought up in a pretty religious but non-dogmatic Christian household and discovered Christian forms of meditative prayer fairly young.
At some point I found that if I sat quietly and contemplated, there would be a sort of shift and everything would seem/feel different. Tension just unravels, I become more aware of my own body (in a good way), everything around me feels a bit more spacious, colours and light a bit brighter, and I feel happy and not anxious any more.
Over time I got better at cultivating that 'shift' - when I was a kid it was quite hard, by the time I was at university I could reliably sink into it during prayer and came to classify it as 'the experience of the presence of God' on the theory that what I was doing was setting aside distractions to encounter the (Christian) God. But something felt a bit off about that because the experience - while all-encompassing and generally associated with a deep sense of wellbeing - didn't really feel strongly personified. Though if I just sit there feeling great I often feel like there is some big positive thing around me, but (I am aware how this sounds and am cringing as I type) that's just - everything else out there being great, right?
I'm in my late 30s now and haven't been so sure on the faith thing for decades (I describe myself as a Christian agnostic, heavy on the agnostic). I've practiced various forms of meditation at different times, but I don't meditate regularly, just when I remember to or need to. But I can still summon that different state and occasionally do, not always on purpose. Just typing about it now I keep slipping into deep breathing and can feel some tension lifting. It's always there, kind of available, and given how great it feels it is a bit weird that I mostly don't think of it tbh.
Further description: I do associate the state with meditation though these days I don't have to meditate much to slip into it. I usually therefore sit up straight, cross my legs, or stand still, often close my eyes. There's a kind of release, there's a kind of opening-up, I become very aware in a non-stressed, non-focused way of a kind of comfortable congruence all over my body. Hard to express how comfortable. Everything just feels sort of good, whatever I was worrying about is in perspective and the perspective is that the universe is basically fantastic whatever happens. I'm a big fan of sex but I would 100% say in terms of just pure physical pleasure this state is better than orgasm. Lasts longer too.
Genuinely don't know if that is jhana, but if it sounds like it is then put me down as a data point of some kind.
Sounds like you have mastery of at least one of the jhanas, probably 1 or 2 - there are ~8 jhana states. This is the most in-depth guide to them that I know, it may help you find the other ones.
https://dharmaseed.org/retreats/4496/
Dhammarato is a former American engineering professor and PhD psychologist who became a Buddhist monk in the lineage of Bhikkhu Buddhadāsa in Thailand. He’s now a layperson, but teaches (free-of-charge) over Skype from his home on Koh Phangan. You could do a lot worse than follow his explanation of the jhāna. https://youtu.be/P3mxq8h8o4I
Incidentally, if you want to know about how to practice in this lineage I tried to sketch it out on Dharma Overground here: https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/message/24161034
„ When Nick says that he’s less interested in casual sex now,“
It depends how easy that was to get previously.
1) Once you know you have immediate pleasure right here and now, you tend not to seek it anymore.
It also reveals that most of our pursuits are indirect pleasure chases, and when you can stop doing something for pleasure, you tend to view it from a more detached perspective, which reveals the mechanics.
Once you see how a loop works you tend to fall into it less (disinterest)
2) There are other paths than meditation that lead to the same result. Deconstructing the nature of self, our models, epistemology. None of this needs to be on a 'neurological level', it changes the nature of the software that runs on the mind.
3) Physical pleasure might evoke some kind of signal that the software on the mind is interested in. It activates some kind of pleasurable representation that you experience virtually in the mind. This you can shortcut and directly activate the representation of pleasure. So you get disconnected from the neurological or physical, as it gets revealed that is an indirect path
I believe I've been experiencing 'jhana', but approaching it from the more 'scientific' angle of trying to recreate drug-like euphoria at will. My interest started when I read about people reporting euphoria during psychedelic drug tests, even though they were given a placebo. I took a 'euphoric' substance and paid more attention than usual to how it felt, and used some old Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques to 'anchor' the experience (https://inlpcenter.org/nlp-anchoring/), to help re-enter the state later. Over the following weeks I experimented, and successfully was able to enter various levels of contentment-delight-euphoria-frisson, by using my recollections as triggers, along with musical cues (playing techo in my head), and imagining my 'chakras' being filled with warmth/energy. Also saying to myself "Man, I'm so high right now!" is surprisingly helpful.
A low level is now is achievable in a few minutes, and can be done while walking or performing other simple tasks (such as commenting on blogs ...). More intensity takes a bit more time and concentration, and isn't always achievable. But, like in the post, I often forget to use it for days on end, still regularly feel anxiety, and still drink too often.
Three things: 1. Interesting, though small numbers. N 1 (or N10, but from a rather non-representative sample);
2. Scott wrote before about a real-life-master-meditator who got caught with prostitutes, and Scott concluded that this "bliss" does seem to do much less than advertised.
3. I do like my sex (non casual for whatever that means), my chocolate (Lindt-dark) + a few other sins, thank you. Reminding me of Scott`s "last-non-enlightened hero" . - Both pieces SSC-era, if I remember correctly. Won`t go there to look, as I have my tax-declaration to do - and only 4 days left. SSC too full of bliss. No time for this. :/
If you are curious about the methodologically rigorous, ontologically neutral, and globally scalable research on jhanas (and other phenomena classified as "psycho-spiritual"), I highly recommend looking up The EPRC (https://theeprc.org/). The Jhana Study is a core part of Consortium's agenda, and feeds into its numerous projects, explained in the whitepaper (see: https://hypernotes.zenkit.com/i/UFIY1UO1cp/0aqIDHp5R/the-jhana-study?v=M6pP_Tb7W6).
I think there is no wonder that something can be extremely pleasurable but not attracting/attaching.
For example, DMT is always blissful for my friend's cat but she has no desire (in a sense like having desire to check inbox when you are waiting for some email) to do it.
So then what explains all the sex scandals with Buddhist gurus?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/16/is-enlightenment-compatible-with-sex-scandals/
I think one possible explanation is that "most traditions have lost the emphasis on jhana." In particular, the sex scandals almost all come from traditions like this, AFAIK — Zen, Tibetan; I don't know of any Thai Forest monk scandals (although possibly they do exist).
I have strong opinions on this, because a reading of the early suttas clearly indicates that jhana is perhaps the single most important factor in the Buddha's path to enlightenment, and traditions which try to reach it from normal cognition ("dry" paths) seem to be missing something.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lMpjh6ueqj9q4ebY3sDhDcvm5o8FNVIcZqjDKnnrWco/edit?usp=drivesdk
Here's a really easy guide to a light form of jhana. It's like the deep jhana but mild. it can probably give you a clue about what is going on. You could spend 6 months working on it or you could find good guidance (like this one or a direct pointing out instruction).
The book "practicing the jhanas" by Tina Rasmussen talks about setting up a 3hour window for each jhana (on different days or whatever) to sit and soak in them. The proposal is that the really grabby parts of the psyche who are like, "the only way to feel the good j1 feeling is to eat ice-cream" (or other material desire), will tend to pop up over that 3hr window and release their grabby desire. You can still have ice-cream but your grabby suffering mental loop is now freer from thinking the only way to get the good thing is ice-cream.
This causes a general "falling away" of desires that were crud anyway. The deep desires remain and the meaningful desires definitely remain. In fact it's easier to put up with the negative hardship on the road to the deeper desires when you have access to jhana.
A colloquial question is - why are meditators always depicted as smiling? It's because they can access all kinds of good subjective states, any time they like.
Meditators also know of a maturing relationship with bliss. Where you get enough of it, often enough that it gets less interesting and you prefer more stable states like equanimity (j4) to the energetic, exciting, blissful and irritating state of j1.
People like Daniel p Brown (meditator and psychologist passed away in 2022) put state skill as a part of healthy adult development. The (it's not consensus in the) integral community agrees that state navigation and skill is important and has people showing up more adult and more mature. Daniel Goleman also said similar that skill over emotional states is important for maturity. (and many more researchers)
Yep, Jhana is the shit. And while I agree with what was said, it makes other pleasures even better so it’s a “yes, but also...”
Have some experience meditating and come from a family (father/mother) of 60´s hippies that truly lived the experience for some years; they went to India worked with gurus and so on. Yogis are real and can do amazing things with body and mind. But it takes years and years of great persistence and practice for someone who is born in the non-narcisistic cultures to achieve starting levels. To westerns I would say it can increase lifes experience and have benefits in general psicological health, but very marginal for a non practitioner. This people talk is truly bullshit. The detachment from the pleasure center comes from increased conscience; it is nullified as a trigger response by hightened conscience. It is all or nothing; there is not 'less casual sex' for a monk; a monk 'do not sex'; the state of bliss/grace/jahna is achieved after years of great compromised work that entails giving up most of narcisistic life (self, family, community, etc.). All religious traditions have individuals working toward such goals, but in the east it has been organized as 'procedure' and focused as such. Bull
I got a more detached perspective to sex when I started living with a girlfriend whose sexual drive was a bit stronger than mine. Previously there always was this feeling of scarcity, that I would like to have sex more often than I do. But now there is an understanding that the satisfaction of this desire is extremely easy and can happen any time I want it so the desire became less intense.
I think there is a general pattern here. When you're needs are chronically unsatisfied, the desired are powerful and hurtful. When your needs are met all the time and you know that, it's much easier to deal with rare dissatisfaction.
I’ve meditated for years. I’ve never read anything about this jhana business but I often experience something like what is described above. I used to really enjoy drinking, but I noticed a while back that I prefer, as Nick put it, to “just live a normal peaceful day,” as opposed to craving feeling altered as a way of escaping stress or feeling elevated. Not that I don’t order a manhattan if we go out to dinner. I’m not too holy to have a drink or something. I don’t get the commentary about fun casual sex, though I enjoy sex plenty, just not with random women. My sense is meditation is a psychological/biological self-mediation routine, kinda like jogging or lifting weights for the brain and emotional system, rather than some cosmic thing. It works. Try it.
Yeah, ~same for me!
I've only done jhanas a little bit, and they were mostly less fun than sex, but nevertheless as I've meditated more over the past few years I've been less interested and have done less of drinking, smoking pot, playing videogames, lazing around in bed, etc.
Makes me think that (some of) the things that are causing less pleasure-seeking in the jhana folks are things they have in common with non-jhana meditators, rather than being really specific to experiencing intense pleasure in jhana
Aside from "jhana" which sounds delicious there are the less poignant self-regulating benefits of meditation/mindfulness that we can all benefit from. Even five minutes ~daily proves it's worth!
I've attended 2 and 4 week retreats with Leigh Brasington studying his style of Jhana and have, at times, reliably achieved J1-4 at various levels of intensity. For me a minimum of 1 hour of daily meditation (for weeks) is required to be able to reliably enter Jhanas and the quality is dependent on my recent volume of meditation. Brasington does warn about the risk of becoming a Jhana Junkie but not excessively, it seems a temporary trap. For him the point of the Jhanas is to develop insight, not the pleasure they create. Going through J1-4 then applying the resulting state to a contemplative practices or even work is a huge amplifier. If you're in it for the pleasure, you're missing the point. Becoming addicted to it would be like having to run a daily 10k to maintain a heroin addiction.
J1 is unpleasant for me, too intense. J2-3 are nicer and a solid J4 is amazing oceanic calm that leaks into the next day. I had surgery a few years ago. When they pumped a bunch of opiates into me before doing some nerve blocks I though "meh, I can do better than this", felt like a middling J3.
I have lapsed in my meditation practice despite how much I enjoy Jhanas. This is common particularly without a community of practice around you.
As for the questions:
1) Not sure how to answer this. I'll have to think about it.
2) I have pretty much done this, as described above. Meditation payoff is longer term, more like exercise than drugs. Jhanas give the impression of immediate payoff but it's illusory, demonstrably insufficiently reinforcing to commonly lead to addiction.
3) I dunno. Maybe a lot of meditation was reducing some sort of pathological need that led to having casual sex. Perhaps a control; If he meditates a lot without entering Jhana, just deep concentration, and doesn't feel the need for casual sex it could be argued that the meditation is causing it. Personally I never liked casual sex for the same reason I don't like J1; too intense.
I recommend Brasington's book "Right Concentration" for anyone interested in achieving Jhanas. He makes a solid case (backed by plausible scriptural arguments) that the Jhanas are core to Buddhist meditation but have been neglected. He's an excellent teacher with pretty much all of his content available online.
A little while ago I posted a comment that referred to Suzuki Shuryu's short 1970 book, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind." I'd like to mention a way I think it relates to issues that neuroscience addresses now.
Here's a short description from Suzuki's book ("zazen" = "sitting/doing jhana"):
**When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air goes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think “I breathe,” the “I” is extra. There is no you to say “I.” What we call “I” is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It
just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no “I,” no world, no mind or body; just a swinging door.**
Suzuki is describing one of the signature points of the exercise of zazen, experiencing the contingency of the self (a basic ideological feature of Buddhism is the belief that the experience of the self as a real entity is illusory).
I have in mind parallels with neuroscientific analysis of the experience of self--specifically, Rodolfo Llinas's "I of the Vortex" (which I think is a terrific book [not so much the last chapter], despite Llinas's occasional struggles with English). Llinas, who is a senior neuroscientist at NYU, is concerned (in part) with demonstrating that and how the "self" is a complex and fragile composite; Suzuki was concerned with experiencing that this is so. Llinas's claims are scientific should be judged analytically, by examining his statements and their relation to data. Suzuki's claims can only be judged through a synthetic methodology by trying out the practice he describes in his book. A Scientific American article I linked to in another comment (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/zen-gamma/) reflects research that addresses ways that the relation between what people like Llinas and people like Suzuki discuss can be explored.
Freudian interjection -- what most people want is not "pleasure" but "satisfaction". Nick's second tweet makes a cute equation between the two: he believed he was unsatisfied because he lacked pleasure, so he found One Neat Trick (Psychiatrists Hate Him!) to get pleasure, and then he felt satisfied. The general case is "people want to get what they want", rather than "people seek out pleasure always".
But as with your discussion Q #3, satisfaction isn't always pleasurable. It can even be distinctly *unpleasurable*. It's not like e.g. self-harm actually transforms the sensation of pain into pleasure; it uses the sensation of pain to derive *satisfaction*.
Lacanian extension -- "jouissance" is precisely the repetition of an originally pleasurable action until it becomes painful, but it still remains satisfying, because you made that connection "X = pleasure" a long time ago, and never un-learned it.
So, if you feel like you need a hit of pleasure, you smoke a cigarette, don't feel pleasure, but do feel satisfaction. And the flip side here, is that despite feeling satisfied in your pain, you also somehow still feel empty. Why? Because you didn't get the original thing inscribed into your memory. So, the shallow satisfaction is felt on a deeper level as suffering, as being deprived of the thing you wanted even though you did the thing that your memory-brain believes will get it. Almost as if desire is the root of suffering, or something...
See this part of a thread I wrote for more details on these dynamics: https://twitter.com/qorprate/status/1536087083072249856
1. No matter how far away it was i would just move there permanently. If I really had to commute, the round trip time could be up to 2x the amount of time I spent at the destination, assuming I can listen to a lot of audiobooks while my tesla drives itself.
2. I get very very suspicious when someone describes something as supreme bliss with no negative side effects, but also that they have no desire to do it often. I would think, "is Jhana really that good or just social desirability bias"?
"How come no one voluntarily buys X? Because people don’t actually like X – at least not enough to pay for it. Why does everyone praise X? Because praising X sounds good. Why do people unanimously vote for lavish spending on X? Because voting is just a special kind of talking."
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/the_public_good.html
I don't expect eastern religion to be less bogus than western religion. A non-reinforcing pleasure could be observationally equivalent to an SDB-fueled profession of religion.
3. I'll offer a boring, obvious explanation. Plenty of other people "get religion" in various ways and become less interested in casual sex. A lot of behavior is driven by one's sense of identity. If your sense of identity is as a devout member of a religion like Buddhism that sorta looks down on carnal desires, then you're going to be less interested in casual sex.
So, I've meditated daily for about 4 years. I didn't know the name for the concept of Jhana, but I think I might have felt that at points. I'm still somewhat skeptical that meditation modifies your base desires, even though that is very much a concept and an explicit goal in some forms of Buddhism. From Nick's perspective, it mostly looks like he had a very high baseline happiness and low neuroticism even prior to meditating, and there are many things that could have altered his desire for casual sex which he falsely attributed to Jhana meditation. It would be interesting to see his testosterone levels, because if those had gone down, that would be a much more obvious and mundane explanation for why he doesn't desire casual sex. From reading about people's perspective taking some of the new weight loss drugs, it looks like desire for dessert is much stronger in some people than others, and if Nick was never morbidly obese, then altering his desire for dessert through meditation is probably a much easier task than he is making it out to be.
Personally, I don't really have desire for dessert or really rich food either, but that happened much prior to learning about meditation, and I would attribute it to learning that sugar is bad for you.
My issue is, from learning about my own internal states through meditation, I don't really know why I have my internal states at all. I don't have any access to why desires arise, and I don't know what my internal state will be before I actually notice the state. This part makes me believe in luck much more, because it's mysterious to me why I choose to make good decisions (sometimes), rather than screw up my life really badly.
Although meditation is occasionally very pleasurable, I agree that it isn't really reinforcing the way drugs are. Personally, the reason I don't spend 5 hours a day meditating might be because I still have desires. Maybe if enlightenment is possible and some of the further claims about mental states are possible, I would actually meditate or try to convince others to meditate much more. I do worry that people who claim to achieve these certain types of bliss just have different brains, and the claims they are making are tantamount to tall people giving advice on how to be tall. They are fundamentally missing the point that they are not actually training all too hard to achieve Jhana, and it is impossible for others.
I went through a similar dynamic with lucid dreaming. For years, for hours every night, I was a god, I could create any world, do any thing, the only limit was my imagination. I explored a lot of things deeply, and I'm glad I did it, but it got ... old. It cured me of the hunger for experiences, or something like that. My ethics are a little odd because I don't believe suffering (or pleasure) is any kind of fundamental entity in moral calculus, and I believe that years of intense, constant lucid dreaming plays a large role in that.
Would you mind expanding on the ethics bit here? What do you root your ethics in? I assume that, for example, you still believe pain and suffering are bad things at a fundamental level, right? (or at least, the human experiencing the feeling of pain and suffering is experiencing bad things).
You're paying attention! No, I bite the bullet and say that joy and suffering are instrumental, not fundamental. They are carrots and sticks designed ("designed") by evolution to steer us towards behavior that is evolutionarily advantageous. The fundamental value is (to oversimplify a bit) continued existence.
You know how, biologically, *all* your organs are reproductive organs? Like, your liver only exists because it helped your ancestors reproduce, right? Well, I propose that our moral intuitions are reproductive organs, too, only at a group level. They exist because they allowed our ancestors to collaborate, and therefore outcompete the less-collaborative tribe next door, and therefore reproduce more.
There's more devil in those details, but that's the basic outline...
To be clear, I don't propose throwing out our moral intuitions! Just put them in context. Our intuition that nearby suffering must be alleviated, even at great cost, but far-away suffering can be more or less ignored (Singer's drowning child) makes sense when you consider that our intuitions were built to allow us to collaborate with nearby people, yet do battle with far-away folks. (Far-away folks were unlikely to materially benefit our ability to reproduce - in fact, that ability might be better served by wiping those far-away folks out...)
So our intuitions work pretty well in normal, daily scenarios, but they start to lose accuracy as the scenario becomes less and less similar to the ancestral environment - including the intuition that suffering is to be avoided, and joy is to be maximized.
Fair enough, i understand this framing! And i agree that pain/pleasure are just evolutionary side effects without any meaning beyond what we ascribe to them. But to be fair, everything is also meaningless, there is no stone tablet for the universe that says "x is the real meaning of life/the most important thing". The only real axioms we can ever know are the axioms in our internal consciousness (i am conscious, and my suffering and experiences matter being 2 of them).
So what do you use as the basic axioms for your morals then?
I don't have a complete answer, more like a promising avenue of investigation that has stayed promising as I've thought about it more and more over the years. When I first responded to your comment, I thought *you* were responding to a different comment I'd made on a different post about moral intuitions. That comment might answer your question:
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I lost my religion at a young age, around 8 IIRC, and even then I recognized the major things I got from religion: a social life, and a sense of right and wrong. The social life wasn't interesting to me, but I felt the morality-shaped hole inside me. After a little childish floundering, I came to a similar conclusion as you: just go along, at least for now, with my vague intuitive sense of right and wrong. Keep searching, and maybe someday I'll find a real answer. But I never ever thought that "intuition" was a real answer.
I found the kernel of my real answer, ironically, in a poem by C.S.Lewis called Evolutionary Hymn. The poem makes fun of the whole idea of evolution, and there's one line that says "Goodness = what comes next"
and it blew my mind, when I wondered, what if I bite that bullet? And over the years, handicapped (or maybe enabled?) by my lack of formal training in philosophy, I've built up from that kernel into an interesting ethical system that doesn't require intuition to tell right from wrong. The usual intuitions cash out as a special case: just like our physical intuitions, which evolved in the ancestral environment to make us pretty good at chucking spears, our moral intuitions evolved in the ancestral environment to make us pretty good at escaping Nash equilibria in iterated prisoners' dilemmas. This is evolutionarily advantageous because although the key *fact* of evolution is survival of the fittest, the key *tension* is between selfish individuals (who outcompete collaborative ones) vs collaborative groups (who outcompete selfish ones.)
So our moral intuitions work well to make us collaborate in Dunbar-sized tribes. Those intuitions fail us more and more often, as our world looks less and less like the ancestral environment. We need new physical intuitions as we harness quantum effects for our daily routines; likewise, we need new moral intuitions as we collaborate with people, distant from us in time and space, whom we will never meet.
(To be explicit, I basically propose that "true" morality is behavior that leads to continued existence. Naively, this implies selfishness. With a little more thought it becomes clear that this implies collaboration -- and ever more sophisticated collaboration as our civilization matures.)
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Like I said, I don't have a solid foundation in philosophy, but I majored in it for a while, and have spent almost 30 years since then exploring the topic as a filthy casual. My original motivation was to decide whether an objective, non-arbitrary ethical system was even theoretically possible - I am now comfortable saying that yes, it theoretically is. Fleshing out that theory might have to wait for my retirement, unless (*fingers crossed*) someone else fleshes it out first.
To more directly answer your question, you can know truisms as axioms outside your subjective experience, like "that which exists has continued to exist." You can build up a moral system on that, e.g. with some argumentation along the lines of "that which doesn't exist has no moral value." Like I said, I have a lot of work to do to flesh this out, but the implications, if it were fleshed out, are that our moral intuitions are just a special case of the universal moral imperative to project your patterns into the future.
I agree with all of this, except for your idea of true morality! Wouldn't continued existence imply that the existence of hell is not only acceptable, but desirable if the alternative is obliteration?
Yes! I mean, isn't our aversion to suffering is just evolution's bumbling hack to make us loathe obliteration? And other than a strong aversion to suffering, why would hell be unacceptable?
Interesting! ok, let me phrase my objection a bit better given this stance.
for one, the obvious retort to "i accept hell is fine" is "you will feel differently once you get there".
but for another, you claim that pain/suffering is just an evolutionary byproduct with no real meaning, thus it should be given less important. Isn't that also true of your true morality, continued existence? Existence, and desire for it, is just an evolutionary biproduct to ensure we keep reproducing. Even if we felt no pain, evolution still instilled a fear of death in us. And changing the true morality to continued reproduction is just taking evolutions morals for our own, and i don't think that the blind and dumb alien god has _any_ morals, much less ones with any real meaning.
Basically, good job biting the bullet here (although i don't think you would bite it in reality if hell was real), i must object to your core moral truism i suppose. Why is continued existence good?
Good points, let me address them in turn.
1. You're right - I'd probably kill myself if I only had hell to look forward to. But the correctness of a moral choice doesn't depend on whether I choose it. I have a track record of eating too much and exercising too little, yet I also believe eating healthy and keeping fit are moral choices. I have a hard-wired aversion to suffering, and I'm likely to end my suffering, eventually, rather than continue living on principle. Then again... maybe I'd surprise us both. :)
2. I don't think evolution and/or Moloch have morals, because they exist at a different level of abstraction from morals-having entities like us. Like, quarks don't have wings, because they exist at a different level of abstraction than airplanes. I have more to say here, but it's tangential...
3. Continued existence is good, because ... and here is where I have a lot of work to do to flesh out the details.
The broad outline is that non-existence cannot be good - non-existence has no moral value - non-existent entities are morally irrelevant. Existent entities have at least the potential for good. Therefore, existence is a pre-requisite for good. Any entity that optimizes for "good" will be out-competed by entities that optimize 50% for good and 50% for "continued existence," which would be out-competed by entities optimizing 60% for continued existence, and so forth until you have competition exclusively on the axis of continued existence.
This cashes out as a concept that you can approach from a different direction: morality is not separate from competition for continued existence. Instead, morality is just a set of behavioral rules that led to continued existence for our ancestors. Time will tell if these rules will serve us as well as they served them - or, more likely, time will tell if we manage to evolve our morals to line up more closely with behaviors that are adaptive in the current and future, as opposed to the ancestral, environment.
To expand on point 1, pretend that I could become immortal but it comes at the price of eternal agony. I can say with confidence that I'd choose eternal life, and leave it to my future immortal self to spend eons figuring out how to live with it.
1. That is a good point, choosing to do something doesn't mean that it actually maximizes goodness, fair. I guess that leads us back to the original question of "how do we know if something is good or not", since that cannot be judged by any metric except internal subjective feelings, which are very loosely correlated to external actions. This, however, doesn't mean anything about _universal_ goodness, right? Just because you have a (to pick a term) "soul-level axiom" about what is good for you, that you can know at the axiomatic level because it's intrinsic to your consciousness, doesn't mean everyone else has that same axiom, right? Assuming that you do know yourself perfectly, and you are correct that you would prefer continued existence no matter what, others may not actually have that same axiom! A moral system that doesn't account for this may end up being maximum good for 1 person, but maximum bad for all the others.
2. Agreed, fair
3. I kind of agree (although i don't quite get the "out-competed" idea, since competition is irrelevant to what is good or not). But doesn't your proof by induction ignore the negative case, i.e badness? Existence is also a pre-requisite for badness, so if we want to minimize badness, existence might not be good at all.
Wait is this just the positive utilitarian vs negative utilitarian debate, just at the level of good vs bad instead of the level of positive utility vs negative utility? If so this may not be solvable at this level, and we would need ethics that handle both our cases. Something like "the ideal ethics system is based on wants/desires. The maximally good world state is one where no one has any unfilled desires". That sidesteps this issue, since desires are unique to each individual. You get your world state, i get mine.
Of course, this assumes everyone's desires can be known, and i assume you would claim that everyone's true desire is continued existence, not pain/pleasure, regardless of what they say. I think the only way to prevent a terrible outcome here (i.e i claim that everyone's true desire is continuous pain, nothing else), is to accept that we can never have perfect information, and can only optimize goodness perfectly for ourselves, since only we know our own internal desires. Goodness for others can only be metered out imperfectly and carefully, else we risk giving them something bad.
1. Take two tribes, with very different customs. One tribe's customs tend to allow for better collaboration within the tribe, so that tribe flourishes and out-competes the other tribe. This is evolution we're talking about, not varsity sports, so the out-competed tribe ceases to exist. There is now no one in the world with that dead tribe's customs, so that dead tribe's customs has no moral value to anyone. So even subjectively, in order for a set of customs/behavior to have moral value, some who adheres to them must exist.
3. Competition is central to what is good or bad. People's desires, are not central. Let me say this twice, once for goodness and once for badness, because my morality doesn't answer the question of good and evil, it dissolves the question. :)
GOOD- For something to be good, it must exist, and must therefore out-compete the other stuff. Anything that has been out-competed cannot be good. Anything that optimizes for good will be out-competed by something that optimizes for continued existence, and becomes morally irrelevant. Only those things that optimize for continued existence continue to exist.
BAD- For something to be bad, it must exist, and must therefore out-compete the other stuff. Anything that has been out-competed cannot be bad. Anything that optimizes for bad will be out-competed by something that optimizes for continued existence, and becomes morally irrelevant. Only those things that optimize for continued existence continue to exist.
I'm trying to illustrate the process that has me do away with the concept of good and evil, and transforms morality into deaf, dumb, blind evolution's fumbling attempt to program us with behaviors that will make us continue existing. Evolution has no morality, but it *created* morality. If our moral intuition is any kind of pointer to normative truth, it must be vague and subtly incorrect, like our physical intuitions.
There is a lot here, I can't do it justice in this margin. But consider one more point: this strong sense we have that murder is wrong doesn't reflect some basic moral fact. All our ethical edifices around natural rights and etc etc are rationalizations. The core truth is blunter and less noble: tribes that ban murder will outcompete tribes that don't. It just so happens this way. If the rules of the universe were different, if somehow it were true that daily ritual infanticide helps one tribe outcompete another, then we'd all be speaking Aztec right now, and our moral intuitions would recoil at the thought of letting all babies live and we'd have philosophical treatises that rationalize about that instead of this. But the rationalization doesn't matter, what matters is: does our morality encourage us to behave in ways that cause our continued existence?
Wait, i think i understand. You're saying there is no morality in the common sense of the word, right? To say things are good or bad is meaningless, because there is no good or bad, there is no stone tablet of the universe that determines what things are good or bad. There is only existence vs non-existence, and things that exist are objectively (by the axiom of what evolution gave us) better. You're not describing an ethics system, you're saying "ethics are stupid". Does this make sense/seem accurate? (if not, ignore the following paragraph and correct me)
If so, then i think you're right, almost! There is no ethics, there is no stone tablet of the universe that says what is good or bad. BUT. There is a stone tablet of good and bad in my soul. I have seen it. It has engraved on it "i am conscious" and "my experiences matter", among other things. My soul determines, for myself and myself _alone_, what is good and bad. This exists, and is real. It may be made by something for no reason, and it may be totally fake. But consciousness is also made by something for no reason and is totally fake, but you cannot dispute that it is THE most important thing, right? Without it, there is literally nothing, because it is the light that makes things visible. It is existence. And if you grant that, then we can bootstrap a concept of ethics, good, and bad, from consciousness and the tablet in your soul that has these axioms.
The description of the experience of jhana doesn't seem internally consistent to me, and that greatly increases my skepticism of the whole thing. I think a reasonable definition of pleasure just is "that which is desired" but jhana is described as both intensely pleasurable and not desired/sought by the people who can get it. That just feels like a contradiction. Compare: a scientist has created a device that does something in the brains of mice when they pull a lever, and given the choice the mice pull it maybe every few days. Would you really infer that whatever is happening in their brains is intensely pleasurable, better than food and sex? I don't see how. Maybe another way to phrase it is that the self-reported experiences of jhana-practitioners strongly conflicts with their revealed preferences in a way that makes them seem untrustworthy.
"I think a reasonable definition of pleasure just is "that which is desired""
While this is a reasonable hypothesis, it isn't correct. Neuroscientists have known for a while now that liking and wanting are separate neural processes. Here is a good review:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5171207/
To answer the questions:
1. I'll assume that nothing "productive" happens in this town, other than whatever productivity is implied in experiencing pleasurable scenarios. No shop talk, obviously, but also no conversations that give you an insight you can use in your life outside the town, etc. In that case, I might never go even if it was next door, for myself. Though I might end up going just to exercise a relationship with someone who finds pleasure valuable per se.
2. I don't know how something could be reinforcing on anything other than a neurological level? AFAICT, the whole lesson of bliss-at-your-fingertips is that pleasure is not fundamentally valuable, nor even instrumentally valuable except as a quirk of psychology. Consider money, if you could go get any amount of money you wanted with no negative side effects, how much would you spend? You might get tired of spending a billion dollars a day, but you'd settle on a steady state where you spend more than you do now. With jhana, it seems like the opposite, you settle on a steady state where you seek out *less* pleasure than you did before.
3. If cravings for the pleasure of sex causes sex addiction, then yes, I'd expect easy access to jhana would often cure it. Your description ("it's not even pleasurable anymore...") makes it sound like the causal chain doesn't contain much reference to bliss...
I’m not sure if this state of mind is a good thing. Part of the drive to make your life better is discontent. To be able to retreat from the world and experience unlimited pleasure seems like a possible way to stagnate. Not to mention, it seems dangerous to hack your brain and sensory experience. And I’m not speaking theoretically, some people have reported ill effects: https://www.insider.com/why-meditation-can-be-bad-2018-3?amp
Of course some people can do it safely, but how do I know if I’m doing it safely?
I have a related question:
Are there any meditators out there who have been meditating for years, have reached high stages of meditation, but just never experienced jhana?
probably the majority
It is not taught by all schools. There are a lot of different meditative schools with different practices. Even when taught, it is usually not emphasized to the extent that it is here (in this post), it's usually taught as like a stepping stone toward enlightment - maybe the 1 mile mark of a marathon. It's part of the buddha's main teaching but the religion is extremely diverse so not all use it.
It is interesting how we actually have two opposite scientific explanations of how desires work. From the "homeostatic" perspective, you desire the things you miss, and once you get them, you don't miss them anymore, so you do not desire them so much, at least for some time. From the "reinforcement" perspective, if you get something that feels good, you will want it even more.
These models often provide opposite predictions. After eating a delicious cake, the former predicts that you will say "thank you, I am full", while the latter predicts that you will say "that was awesome, can I have seconds, please?". (If you have read the Sequences, having perfectly logically sounding scientific explanations for both X and the opposite of X should make you a little uncomfortable, right?)
*
There is a concept of substitute goals (not sure how exactly it is called) in psychoanalysis or something. The idea is that you want some X, but either you cannot get it, or it is socially unacceptable to admit that you want X, therefore you start desiring some Y instead, and redirect your emotional energy towards chasing Y.
What often happens is that no matter how much Y you get, you will feel that it is not enough. That is because there is a part of your brain saying (incorrectly) that you want Y, and another part of your brain perceiving (correctly) that you are still not getting X, and if these parts are confused enough to believe that they are talking about the same thing, their joint statement will be that "yes, you want Y, but you are not getting enough of it".
The solution of course is to recognize that you actually wanted X, and when your emotional energy returns to desiring X, you will no longer feel the need to get endless amounts of Y. Thus, if you notice that no matter how much Y you get, it never feels enough, you should suspect that Y is just a substitute goal for some X that you actually wanted.
In this model, sex can play both the roles of X and Y (for different people). Some people believe they are looking for friendship or spirituality, when they actually want sex. Other people believe they are looking for sex, when they actually want to feel powerful or accepted. Maybe most bodily pleasures are just substitutes for something, and the jhana experience makes it obvious on a System-1 level. Maybe the entire sexual experience is a mixture of multiple things, only one of them being what you truly want, and the jhana experience is the concentrated form of that, so it satisfies your needs for a long time.
(It would even make some sense from evolutionary perspective, because nature is not trying to make you happy, it is trying to make you reproduce more. So if people do too much of the "almost right, but not exactly right" things, it would be an evolutionary advantage to make sex one of them.)
The Buddha had no teacher.
Between his first going forth and his attainment of enlightenment, the stories speak of various teachers that he studied with. From each of these, he eventually moved on, not from a rejection of their teachings, but from a desire to go further. His eventual attainment of enlightenment was (according to the stories) not given to him by any of those teachers; perhaps this is what you are referring to?
What's the difference between "jhana" and "really deep meditation"? Not trying to be disrespectful here, I'm really wondering. When I meditate for about 5-10 minutes I feel happiness/peace/calm comparable to other recreational things (running, reading, eating good food, playing a relaxing video game, etc.), but not as good as sex. I feel like this mental state is easily accessible and I'm not addicted to it. Couldn't jhana just be really deep and skilled meditation? Is that significantly different from what people are claiming? Maybe I just wrote a pointless comment???
This is a good explanation of what it is, what it is like, and how to get to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K5ypXyF3dY&t=4&ab_channel=MichaelTaft
Well, I don't meditate, but years and years ago I successfully induced a powerful spiritual bliss state where I felt oneness with the universe and intense lovingkindess towards everyone after a day of prayer. It lasted for about two hours? It was definitely intensely pleasurable in a way unlike anything else I've ever experienced, and it made doing very mundane tasks feel great, like setting the table, because I really intensely wanted to be doing things for other people. It gave me very intense motivation to be a better person for a few weeks after, I don't remember exactly. I made a bunch of massive structural changes to my life as a result. Not all of them the right choice,in retrospect. It also made me believe in religion for about ten years or so, but I never accessed the state again and eventually the weight of skepticism from other more daily factors became overwhelming. I can't confirm whether it's non-addictive because I badly wanted to experience it again and never managed, and it's hard for me to understand why, given an option of existing in intensely pleasurable permanent heightened awareness and motivation and desire to be my best self I *wouldn't* want to stay in that forever. Certainly when I was in the state I hoped it would last forever.
That said, at the time, it made a concept that came up in religious studies class, of five levels of pleasure, much easier to understand.
(The five levels of pleasure, where each is supposed to be incalculably better than the one before:
1. Physical
2. Love
3. Meaning
4. Power and creativity
5. Encounter with God - presumably, the bliss state described above
There was also a lot of discussion of counterfeit pleasures that are fake alternatives to the five, like porn vs sex. Etc. The whole framework was from Rabbi Noah Weinberg if someone wants to read up on it, I definitely think his way of describing the differences between different classes of pleasure might help articulate some stuff people are talking about in this thread, it's just tied in with a bunch of religious stuff I don't really endorse anymore. Maybe I should try some more all day prayer and I'll end up becoming religious again, who knows.
>and it's hard for me to understand why, given an option of existing in intensely pleasurable permanent heightened awareness and motivation and desire to be my best self I *wouldn't* want to stay in that forever.<
Absolutely. I generally buy into Buddhist claims, and jhanas in particular I believe exist and are significant; I'm too lazy / busy (heh) to meditate enough to reach them, but I have a hard time understanding why one wouldn't just do it all the time if it's really so good.
Yes, the first time you achieve it you absolutely look for more. Only when it becomes established, ie you can access it at will, it drives a fundamental shift in your desires. The pull of any desire becomes lesser.
> Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
This would mostly be limited by the monetary costs of travel, not the time costs. But since part of the premise is that you can eat as much food as you want, there's no real reason I'd ever *leave*; the location of my house is moot.
‘Buddhism is religion for paraplegics’ (or something like that, Machado de Assis, I think in the Bras Cubas book)
Seriously, I have meditated more or less frequently (avg sessions of 45 min, around 4 times a week) for around 3 years, since 2017, I think I got jhana once (experience was unmistakable - felt like flying), but often states of very pleasurable deep concentration. Found it very hard to replicate that one time ‘flying’ experience. Gradually I lost interest in meditation, there’s a world out there and things to do. Still meditate very occasionally for relaxation, it’s great with some Brian Eno playing.
Caution: I'm neither neuroscientist nor a psychotherapist, so my lingo may be very much off.
For starters, let me divide positive experiences into euphoria and pleasure. I believe these two are physiologically different, but they can come together sometimes. The pure euphoria experience is the proverbial "reward lever", and the pure pleasure experience is something like making a scientific discovery (have experienced only the latter, but also had some euphoric experiences). By Nick's description, jhana looks like a pleasure and not euphoria.
I believe that any pleasure, besides being pleasure in itself, may be also colored with some other emotions which affect the overall experience. These emotions make the pleasure more meaningful and differently enjoyable, because an extra qualia dimension is added (for a crude analogy I'd suggest watching porn with no sound vs watching porn with sound). However, when we get the pleasure of the same kind over and over again, the payoff from experiencing certain qualia diminishes and these pleasures become less enjoyable. The same also applies to the pleasure by itself: there are diminishing returns from getting every extra unit of pleasure.
Thus, it is reasonable to desire different pleasures to experience different qualia and do not hit these diminishing returns. For example, right now I'm on a vacation and am free to do whatever I find pleasant, so yesterday I went on a hike (aesthetic pleasure from the views + bodily exercise pleasure), and today I'm chilling out at home, because the hike-related emotions won't be so bright today.
From what Nick describes, jhana looks like a rare case of pleasure which is not colored by any other emotions. I would agree that casual sex lies in the same category, while tasty food doesn't: eating a burger is very different experience from eating a white chocolate bar.
As an individual, I strive to have many pleasures of different kinds, that come with different emotional coloring and different qualia attached to them (and thus are more fulfilling). I also want to have some basic level of pleasure in my life, so Nick's story motivates me to learn to get to jhana in order to have a "Advil for my soul pains" for the gloomier days in my life, but not more.
Thus, answering the questions:
1. The description of the town looks way better than the jhana description (shows are interesting, different food is tasty in a different way etc.), so I'd go there every weekend, if it's less than 2 hours commute one way. If we replace this town with a jhana town, I'd probably go there only when I'm sad, so there would be no particular schedule (and the frequency of the trips would depend on how much I feel sad and how long is the commute).
2. The description here is very logical and in line with Nick's description and my perception, so I wouldn't anyhow update my priors.
3. I'm very much unsure about the neurological level, but I think that on the psychological level there might be various reasons for sex addiction. For example, one may feel unattractive and casual sex is a quick way to understand that there is someone who desires you so much they're up to having sex with you. Thus, a jhana for this kind of sex addict may increase overall life pleasure, and in an optimistic scenario this sex addict will be happy from spending enough time in jhana and won't care about feeling undesirable. However, most probably this insecurity will still plague them and they will seek casual sex not for the sake of pleasure, but for the sake of getting validation (which aligns with the description provided by Scott).
Another way to relate to Nick C's over-the-top description of the experience of mastered jhana practice would be to link it to descriptions of experiences deploying skill mastery that were explored by Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi in developing his concept of "flow." People who describe ecstasy in flow experiences--e.g., highly skilled athletes or performing artists--sometimes resemble Nick C in the extremity of their language. In a book that preceded the better known "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience," called "Beyond Boredom and Anxiety," I believe Csikszentmihalyi did include Zen masters among the classes of people he felt achieved this type of experience. In later research, involving more lab monitoring, he and collaborators looked at EEG correlations that extended, if I recall, to video gaming as well.
The model of flow can be useful because it identifies the brain states Nick celebrates as pervasively available in reduced form--we all can get pleasurably lost in small activities involving deployment of ordinary skills (puzzles, games, sports)--with the potential to become overwhelmingly satisfying if honed to a very high degree and optimally deployed. We might feel it's a stretch if a ballet dancer said she felt that when she was locked the midst of a complex performance she had totally mastered, the joy was ten times better than casual sex . . . or a pianist, skier, etc. . . . but we probably wouldn't consider it mysterious or dismiss it out of hand, and we might grant the possibility based on smaller-scale rewards we encounter ordinarily for smaller-scale skill mastery and deployment.
A common feature among these experiences is the measurably suppressed scale of frontal-lobe activity that accompanies focused deployment of mastered skills--correlating to reported loss of any sense of personal identity ("I")--along with intense but effortless attention to the physical environment, as seen, heard, or felt. Hypofrontality--the suppression of the brain's executive function--and the experience of losing the sense of self (in this case raised to a central tenet of ideology) is equally a measurable feature of meditative trance states such as jhana.
Last January, I practiced jhanas 1-4, and I have (what I think is) a somewhat more balanced perspective.
The jhanas are kind of controversial within Buddhism. There's a sutta/story where the Buddha describes mastering jhanas 5-8, concluding they are not very useful, and then remembering jhanas 1-4 and realizing they are very important for progress toward liberation. However the Zen folks don't use them at all and your mainstream Vipassana people have always been a little skeptical of them.
First jhana is basically MDMA. You can find several people who advocate MDMA as absolutely life-changing, everyone should be on MDMA, etc.
If you believe that about MDMA, believe it about first jhana I guess. I will say the first time I did first jhana (with poor technique but hey), I did have the feeling "oh my god this is what I've needed, so much!" Better than really good, mindblowing sex? Well, different anyway, if the love and acceptance feeling is what you lacked before.
Personally I found both first jhana and MDMA to have a rocky comedown, which put me off repeating them. They are really high energy and I crashed hard afterward. However, I may try the jhanas again and I'm optimistic they won't always cause that crash. Maybe my opinion of them will improve!
Dropping into fourth jhana (via 2-3) was really life-changing. I would not have believed I could personally experience a state like that. Deep quiet, feeling physically sitting at the bottom of a well.
Doing the jhanas, and then comedown, got me meditating seriously and consistently for the first time ever, and it's basically slowly solving all my problems (therapy helps).
I'm very skeptical of any tradition that doesn't emphasize jhana. It is referenced constantly in the suttas as essential, even as the main component of the path to enlightenment; the Buddha doesn't say "go, do insight", he says "go, do jhana".
I haven't really gone deep on the MRI side, but I'm interested in citations for empirical work.
This one (Hagerty et. al., 2013: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3659471/) seems to get at the quesiton Scott is posing about which reward machinery is being triggered, using MRI to investigate. In particular they substantiate this hypothesis:
> H5: Jhanas should show increased activation compared to the rest state in the dopamine reward system of the brain (NAc in the ventral striatum and medial OFC). A broad range of external rewards stimulate this system (food, sex, beautiful music, and monetary awards), so extreme joy in jhana may be triggered by the same system (the VTA is also part of this system, but is too small to image with standard fMRI methods, but see [35] for successful imaging methods).
Ok, now what does this mean for Scott's quesitons? I'm far from an expert here, but stitching this together with https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-unpredictable :
> Now, what does the released dopamine do? In PFC (via the mesocortical pathway), it draws attentional resources to the surprising stimulus and its plausible causes, gating out the processing of other, less relevant stimuli. Simultaneously, in NAc, it strengthens connections between PFC inputs and the endorphin-releasing cells, thereby wiring together the hedonic features of the reward and the sensory features of any cues predictive of it. This imbues the cue with the ability to release the GABAergic brake on VTA DA neurons all by itself. Phenomenologically, it results in us "liking" the cue as much (or nearly as much) as we like the reward (this is what allows, e.g., animal trainers to reinforce behavior with only the sound of a clicker that has previously been paired with food).
So, speculatively, if Jhana is somehow short-circuiting NAc to trigger without specific signals from PFC, are we weakening the existing connections from PFC that previously triggered NAc? Something like normalizing the weights over a bunch of input signals, but with the new input signal being "non-causal / Jhanic stimulation"? Thus reducing the weight of other causal hedonic pleasures (like casual sex in this example)? So these signals from PFC would not elicit as much dopamine response through NAc activation as they did pre-Jhana.
Perhaps there is also something here viz the second part:
> But once the brain learns that a reward is reliably predicted by a cue, the reward ceases to elicit a surprise signal. This means it no longer increases VTA DA neuron firing rate. It may still cause endorphin release and thus keep the GABAergic brake off, but if there's no surprise signal driving phasic firing, dopamine release will be minimal.
> That is to say: We still enjoy expected rewards; we just don't much *care* about our enjoyment of them.
If you can reliably produce the Jhanic pleasure state, perhaps this condition eventually obtains as well; it's no longer "surprising" that you can experience this bliss state, and therefore it's not addictive/appealing. But, maybe it's still a strong-enough stimulus in the NAc system to continue to reduce the weight of the other, more-surprising NAc activations from the PFC, so it's also displacing those surprisingly-pleasurable states from firing.
Some citations to the (early) empirical work here (I'm one of the authors): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XhD9ooZeJcQD8QJZL/cause-exploration-prizes-jhana-meditation
This is such a thoughtful and thought-provoking reply. Thank you Paul.
Thanks! I did a little follow-up reading on musical chills and ASMR, which I would love your thoughts on since you guys are working on this stuff.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-jhanas/comment/10180901
(Figured I'd cross-post here to connect the threads.)
Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
I would move there. This would be Shangri-la.
The fact that Nick even has a "max ideal everything is 100 % perfect casual fantasy sex situation" and uses that as a benchmark for real/desirable pleasure/happiness tells me that our minds work so differently as to make anything more he says potentially irrelevant to me.
I realise we're a community of sceptics (and I appreciate that!), but I have to admit I was surprised at the amount of scepticism in the comments. I've never attained jhana, but the pleasure and anti-addictiveness of it reminds me a lot of e.g. "a sense of wonder for the world". I can tap into that any time I want, it's a fairly intense emotion, but I don't tap into it a lot. Similarly, the difference between "contentedness" (basically by definition long-term) and "happiness" comes to mind - once you achieve a certain level of contentedness, happiness becomes a lot less important. I can totally imagine jhana raising contentedness, in the same way some other things raise contentedness (e.g. if I recall correctly, 'having kids' is one of those). So the basic phenomenon passes my sniff test quite easily; which doesn't guarantee it's real, but it means my prior lands quite firmly on that it is.
(To be clear, I still really enjoyed this comment section - big thanks to the community here for insightful and friendly commentary, as always.)
Hello Nick, I Just came off a 10 days meditation retreat where we practised a very peculiar type of Vipassana meditation, that makes you concentrate on differents parts of your body, the sensations you observe in these different parts of the body to reach a state where you flow through your entire body and finally you reach a state (that I did not reach, yet) where you experience complete body dissolution. It was a very, very intensive course and I must admit I did not enjoy it. This kind of Vipassana is been exported out of Burma by Mr. Goenka. You can check it out. Let's say I am much more interested in Zen meditation or mindfulness meditation. I am interested in the workings of the mind, concentrating on one thing, posing the question Ramana Maharshi said one shoud pose to onself: "Who am I ?". And much less in the "sensations" in my body to "purifie" the mind, as I think that the question is not really how to purifie the mind but how to transcend the mind.
All that to ask you what kind of meditation would you suggest I practise to try to reach that state of bliss you so forcibly praise ?
>Suppose there were a town where you could eat infinite amazing food without any weight gain, have amazing sex with as many attractive people as you wanted, and watch the greatest shows and symphonies in the world, all for free. Also you have lots of great friends there who are always willing to hang out and have fun with you. How far away (in minutes) would that town need to be from your house before you went there less than once a week? Once a month?
It's an experience machine. No.
I mean, how come I have "lots of great friends there" already at this remarkable place I've never been to, and as many attractive people as I want who want to have amazing sex with me (because if they're being paid to fake it or they're androids or whatever it's not so amazing), and so on?
Now, for ordinary, real levels of excellence, I found it worth while to go to London yesterday to three museums and an art gallery. I do this every few months, and it's a journey of two hours.
Here's a profile on investigating jhana as an EA cause area (I'm one of the authors): https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XhD9ooZeJcQD8QJZL/cause-exploration-prizes-jhana-meditation
Not hard to accept his internal reports if you've experienced hypomanic states. Surely I'm not the only who has said this? On the "First Floor," I function abnormally well, just w more energy & ecstasy, and less need/desire for voluntary chemical mood enhancements. And sometimes that's as far as it goes. (Second Floor, I worry friends, annoy strangers, make suboptimal decisions, have weird arousals but not often bad enough to get fired or dumped. Third Floor... bad.) But even where meds are the only reliable ceiling, there are ofc life practices to help stay off the rides altogether. Seems only logical that *some* people, with an intense practice like meditation, could initiate, maintain, manage similar mental states. I'd only be dubious of a claim that most or even many ppl would have the same startling results from the same practice. Mood ranges are rather bespoke, I think? Which makes me curious to know if meditation as a way of life is mainly attractive to those with mildly hypomanic potential that could be activated in other ways.
I'm late to this discussion but I think Nick's point about the "non-addictive" nature of Jhanas and even forgetting about them overlooks the importance of bliss states as motivations for meditation. I started meditating because I'd heard so much about how great it was for my brain and my emotional well-being, but even 20 minutes was a chore. After sticking with it and attending a bunch of retreats, I had extended my meditations to 45 minutes or longer because it had not only stopped being a chore, but after 30 minutes or so my meditations got really pleasant. Whether or not I sometimes entered a jhana I don't know, but my meditations always get so pleasant that I'm never tempted to skip them anymore. Another plus is it gets relatively easy to experience, to one degree or another, the pleasantness at other times & places (for example, stopped at a traffic light or waiting in line at a grocery check-out). My hat's off to whoever it was who was able to stay in a jhana while having sex.
Because yes, as various commenters have noted, getting blissed out isn't the goal or main point of meditation. The goal is to reach a deep & intuitive understanding of your relationship with reality, both subjective (your mind and body) and objective (the rest of it). "Enlightenment" might be more than that depending on whose definition you accept, but intuitively apprehending your connectedness to everything else is one way of describing a common thread in most descriptions of enlightenment.
I don’t have much experience with meditations and prefer yoga nidra. But I tried this phrase “am I aware”. I tried to think if I’m dead or alive and what would I feel. And I immediately felt a very powerful feeling, with such intensity that I couldn’t breathe properly and tried to escape it. (I concentrated on a breath for 10 minutes before this). And now even I’m not meditating, when I start to think about if I’m aware, my body starts shaking. I can compare this sensation to a time when I was under a huge stress. (Could it be because of adrenaline? )
Just for historical purposes. I started practicing on Nov 9 and reached 1st/2nd Jhana on Nov 29. I used TMI, the most popular book for concentration and Right Concentration book about Jhanas. At this point (5th March 2023) I can do all jhanas up to the 6th. I can enter very light jhanas quite fast. Usually it takes around 5 minutes. I can also enter deep jhanas but it usually takes some time to build enough concentration (~45 minutes). I also had a feeling that Jhanas are mumbo jumbo when reading this post, but now I think that's just a great instrument in my daily life.
Question #1: Why have I not simply *moved* to Utopia already? ;)
Question #4: The concept kinda scares me because what if I learn to do this and all it does is actually make all of the things I'm currently feeling (generally depression, anxiety, panic, self-loathing, anhedonia, bitterness, rumination) the things that end up being amplified instead?
Question #2: If I did that and that's what happened, it would *definitely* bias me away from trying again. If I tried it and it worked, but didn't self-reinforce, I wouldn't consider that a failure and it would not bias me against trying other techniques in the future. I'd probably just set a calendar reminder to remind me to do it, particularly if I was feeling depressed and it helped "fix" that.
Question #3: I have no idea, not being a psychologist, but having a close friend who runs an Addiction IOP, I *do* wonder if this technique would be useful to teach to people with heightened amygdala response, or if would be the worst possible idea.
Distinctive points in the progression of meditation. I mean, states one encounters as one goes "deeper". (aka "jhana", right?) I have some experience with the concentration-meditation (samatha to the buddhists) version of that. Jhana 1 : get high, 2 : gets easy to keep yr attention on yr object, 3 : encounter a vast space. That's pretty much as as far as I've gone with that. I do dry vipassana these days.
> better than amazing sex
that just means you have not had a threesome
>> I don’t think normal models of reward have a good explanation here.
Maybe can be modeled as "it's easiest when you've been practicing, and gets harder the longer you've waited". So it's like a city with all the good things that is continuously getting further away. It doesn't seem urgent to visit when it's close, and it has diminishing appeal as it gets far, perhaps.