Inspired by a fascinating post in fellow substack Astral Codex Ten, TWS will spend the next few weeks looking at jhanas – altered states of consciousness that can be entered and exited during Buddhist meditation.
What caught my eye was ACT’s summary of a set of related tweets: “[J]hana 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.”
Honestly, how could you not?
“Jhana” is a Pali word, translated variously as “meditation” or “meditative absorption state”, with the latter seeming closer to the experience. There are eight jhana meditations, followed sequentially, which the authors of a 2013 paper in Neutral Plasticity helpfully plonked on a grid to illustrate the relationship between joy/happiness and freedom from external stimuli. Each is reported to be deeper than the prior one, with ever more subtle and profound perceptions.
More poetically, a piece for Metanoia Press presents an “imperfect and incomplete take” on the journey from jhanas 1 to 8 (they’re being way too modest). Take the description of the fifth jhana, “infinite space and luminosity”:
The Oceanic Space of Light explodes like a cosmic roar and indestructible lightning bolt. It spreads with neither beginning nor end as it completely consumes any sense of physical or mental boundary. The body reduces to a tiny dot and vanishes into a translucent Space of Light as Infinite Spaciousness roars from the Source and extends outside one’s mind, body, and being in all directions. The virtual sense of self is completely burned once and for all. This Light consumes everything. It burns like 10,000 suns. No outline whatsoever. Utter Boundlessness. The boundary of a boundary is Zero. This is True Enlightenment. This is Yoga (Union). When there is no experience of any boundary, there is a living Union.
One may unintentionally shed one’s body by being overwhelmed by the sheer explosive intensity of all-encompassing Light.
No unintentional shedding of bodies, please!
The first step is to achieve access concentration (AC), which can be reached by focusing on the breath until it becomes imperceptible. Start-up Jhourney is developing a headset that promises audio feedback that will guide you into the jhanas for a mere $US1199 – a theoretical saving of $300 from $US1499, though the models aren’t actually available yet. Still, every penny counts.
“Despite their benefits,” declares Jhourney’s website, “the jhanas can be difficult to master. At Jhourney, we aim to make jhanas more accessible using non-invasive neurotech. By measuring brainwaves, we can give realtime, individualised feedback to help everyone learn these transformative states.”
Looks like it’ll have to be done the old-fashioned way – watching YouTube clips. Here’s an explanation of how to enter the first jhana.
After establishing AC, look for a pleasant bodily buzz called piti by shifting attention from, say, the breath to a pleasant sensation (such as a smile) which sets up a positive feedback loop. Simply observe, though, rather than trying to increase the sensation. (Michael Taft, in the clip, suggests waiting for piti to appear and stabilise before shifting attention.)
Next week: more from that ground-breaking Neural Plasticity paper, which used fMRI and EEG evidence to investigate whether an experienced meditator was self-stimulating his brain reward system while in jhana.