URL: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/06/manufacturing-bliss
Highlights
Ayya Khema, a Buddhist nun and German Holocaust survivor who discovered meditation while traveling through Asia, saw them differently. In the 1980s, she began teaching the jhanas as a “lost art” that could help practitioners attain the wisdom they sought. But Khema’s interpretation of the jhanas — using the suttas as a reference — differed from the doctrine taught in the Visuddhimagga. Instead of expecting Buddhists to progress through all eight jhanas, Khema thought that even experiencing the first jhana would be beneficial to one’s practice.
In spreading awareness of the jhanas, modern teachers also attracted a community of those who — like the Buddha — had organically discovered these states, but either didn’t know what they were, or were discouraged by their teachers from exploring them. This “amateurization” of the jhanas, when it collided with the internet, is how it found purchase among a growing group of technologists.
Where rationalists emphasize the use of logic to govern their decision-making, tpot believes that “vibes” and feelings are unaccounted for by pure logic and advocate taking them more seriously.
After many more hours of practice, he realized he could replicate the experience at will.
Instead of spreading jhanas through teaching, as Brasington or Burbea did, Zerfas — a former software engineer and management consultant — took the tech-minded approach. Jhourney’s physical product is currently in development, but they plan to use neurofeedback — signals that tell users how they are progressing, based on evaluation of their neural activity — to help people experience jhanas more deterministically.
So far, scientific research has been slow to catch up. There is some limited evidence to support the idea that the jhanas engender a distinct neurological experience. An early study, from 2013, used fMRI and EEG data to show that its subject had stimulated his own dopamine/opioid reward system while in jhana — without the use of any external stimuli, such as rhythmic movement or mental imagery. A 2019 study of 29 meditators found that its subjects displayed brain activity during jhanas similar to that during nonrapid eye movement (nREM) sleep, despite being conscious.
My goal was simple: I wanted to see what my brain could do.
Zerfas and Gruver offered general guidance on the methods that were likely to facilitate success with the jhanas. The basic technique was finding a “meditation object” — something or someone that sparked a pleasant sensation — then trying to intensify and heighten that sensation. But we were told to experiment, because certain techniques were likely to work better for some than others. This, too, was a marked departure from the typical dogma of meditation retreats.
The dynamic felt closer to that of a researcher and principal investigator — which I vastly preferred — than a meditation student seeking the wisdom of a guru.
I’ll cut to the chase: In my first hour of practice, I found myself in first jhana — the most euphoric of the jhanas. The experience felt like an MDMA roll hitting at the exact moment of a bass drop. My hands and chest tingled; my head snapped back; I felt a distinct “pushing” up through the center of my spine. Eventually, the sensations dissipated, and I opened my eyes, feeling peaceful, as I watched the rain patter against the windows.
I later realized that was a mistake. The power of the jhanas was not that they offered a temporary escape from our otherwise pallid lives — as we typically think of pleasurable vices — but that, with repeated practice, they somehow elevated my everyday life to be more jhana-like.
I didn’t want to experience J1 anymore. It was too much.
By the next day, J1 had mellowed out to a state that was enjoyable, but no longer stifling.
Even when I wasn’t in the jhanic states, my world had become noticeably … boosted, somehow. Colors were brighter, visuals sharper, sounds sweeter.
the best part of jhanas wasn’t just the good feelings they brought to one’s life. It’s that they were a tool for clearing away the cobwebs, making it possible to examine one’s life more impassively.
Many practitioners believe there is a natural path from experiencing the jhanas to “insight,” or meaningful learnings that improve one’s life. According to Brasington, the jhanas teacher, jhanas work by “quiet[ing] down the normal ego-making processes” so that you can see the world as it is, instead of “in terms of your advantages and disadvantages.” 1
Another theory is that by giving people a taste of how happiness feels, they will find ways to bring themselves closer to this ideal state.
“You come for the bliss and stay for the personality change.”
One reason might be that jhanas have a natural half-life. Beacham had once mused to me that jhanas had a sort of anti-mimetic effect, where instead of evangelizing, practitioners tend to lose interest once they’ve had their fill of pleasure.
But as a nonmeditator, my experience with the jhanas felt closer to behavioral therapy than a spiritual practice. (Jhanas are sometimes compared to MDMA or psychedelics in terms of their therapeutic potential, with the added benefit of being legal and freely available, and with fewer side effects.)
I didn’t need hundreds of hours of training to access a mental state that had an unmistakably positive impact on my affect; I just needed a new way of thinking about how to think. If panic attacks are real, and people can be coached to not experience them, why is it so controversial to assert that people can learn to induce the opposite of a panic attack? Furthermore, why isn’t there a secular word for such a concept?
Jhanas are not a panacea; no behavioral intervention could ever be. Some people might benefit more from cognitive behavioral therapy, psychiatric treatment, or simply spending more time with loved ones than they would from the jhanas. But jhanas surely deserve to reach more people than they are now.
I personally found that the relaxation techniques I’d been taught to use in mindfulness meditation didn’t help me with the jhanas, which required invoking what more closely resembled flow state