The first two parts of this series introduced jhanas, altered states of consciousness (ASC) achieved via Buddhist meditation, and the first neural recording taken during jhanas, in 2013.
This week’s substack covers another neural recording – published not in the academic literature but on a website for a Buddhist organisation, Suttavada Foundation, in the Netherlands. Details of the experiment are sketchy – a single reading from an “advanced meditator” who remained in each jhana for about five minutes before hitting Nirodha, the “cessation of perception and feeling”.
Let’s illustrate Nirdoha with an extract from the 111th sutta of the Anapada Sutta:
QUOTE
And further, with the complete transcending of the dimension of neither perception nor non-perception, Sāriputta entered & remained in the cessation of perception & feeling. And when he saw with discernment, his effluents were totally ended. He emerged mindfully from that attainment. On emerging mindfully from that attainment, he regarded the past qualities that had ceased & changed: ‘So this is how these qualities, not having been, come into play. Having been, they vanish.’ He remained unattracted & unrepelled with regard to those qualities, independent, detached, released, dissociated, with an awareness rid of barriers. He discerned that ‘There is no further escape,’ and pursuing it, he confirmed that ‘There isn’t.’
And here’s what that looked like, shortly after 8.46am.
And a paper by “independent researcher” Paul Dennison sheds more light on what’s happening inside the brain as jhanas dial up in intensity. (It’s a preprint, so add a pinch of salt.)
Using EEG data from 29 subjects, with experience from a couple of years to over five decades, he’s come to see jhana consciousness as not an ASC but as a different form of consciousness.
Progressive disengagement from usual mental habits, such as naming, liking, thinking about, shows in a shift to ever deeper states of stillness and a swapping of the “I” to one of presence.
Dennison writes that he made a breakthrough when he discarded the idea that EEG readings would provide clear signatures of the jhanas. Instead, he pinpoints three themes which he believes represent that switching off from default consciousness (DC).
The first is spindles – bursts of waves at about 10Hz alpha frequency, of the type found in light sleep or early stage anaesthesia. However, subjects are fully alert, and the spindles appear in as disruption in attention networks.
This would correlate with placing and sustaining attention in the first jhana, and signal the beginning of disconnection from DC.
The second was seen as half his cohort showed occipital spike waves similar to that seen in absence epilepsy – but the subjects were unaware of any disturbance.
Dennison thinks the location of the waves is evidence of disruption to the “I/Eye” component of consciousness, and that as this happens the thalamus is triggered into harmonic activity to “stimulate or re-establish” the brain’s default activity.
The third theme was the development of infraslow waves (ISW) for half his cohort. These meditative waves were similar to those seen in deep sleep or coma – but, again, the subjects were fully alert. They were also more rhythmic and even deeper. Five subjects developed ISWs of such intensity they were “unprecedented in neuroscience”.
And one (see below) had activity focused around the crown of the head – over 99 per cent dominant, with frontal (0.2 per cent) and occipital (0.1 per cent) activity negligible.
He speculates that those demonstrating “unprecedented” ISWs were developing their lower jhana skills.
“Subjectively,” he writes, “meditators describe their experience of the jhanas as fundamentally different to everyday consciousness – deeply peaceful, all encompassing and free of the constraints of language; an experience of embodied presence rather than feeling conscious of ‘this’ or ‘that’, as in sensory consciousness. Some have described it as being fully conscious or being consciousness, with an increasing sense of timelessness as the higher jhanas develop.”
He adds, “The less that consciousness depends on the limiting assumptions of ‘I’, the more vivid and all-encompassing does the experience of ‘presence’ become, with no loss of a fundamental experience of being and selfhood.”
This has interesting implications for much current neuroscience research, he suggests. Looking for neural correlates in default networks will at best find evidence supporting the illusory “I”, not the embodied presence that – you can argue – is shared by all beings.
Next week: the science behind gratitude.