A response to ACX’s “Nick Cammarata and Jhana” post
The below started as a comment to Scott Alexander’s post and became a post of its own.
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’ve entered the jhanas most days for the past four years. I learned to do so during a difficult mental health time in which I experimented for an hour a day for 10 months as a coping mechanism, rotating the technique every 7 days. I knew little about meditation and did not know the jhanas existed. After 100 hours I had my first peak experience. After 400 hours they were deterministic. I thought I had won some crazy lottery nobody told me about, or that I was a freak. I continued entering the jhanas for three years every day before learning that people have entered these states for millennia, that there are traditional methods of access (similar to ones I hacked together myself), and that some meditation teachers are famous for teaching them. It’s probably best I discovered them on my own because my technical training as an engineer and management consultant may have made me too skeptical to try.
Scott’s questions focus on the curiously pleasurable-but-not-addictive nature of the jhanas. The rest of this post is an unordered list of related observations.
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 that with a little personal experimenting you can learn to create that same positive feedback loop with a happier emotion… and the results are far better than you imagined.
They are extraordinarily pleasurable. More pleasurable than anything I experience outside of meditation for weeks at a time.
At the same time, doing them all day doesn’t seem super attractive. I’ve wondered in the past if this might be in part due to neurotransmitter depletion – you just get tired after a while.
But even when you stop before you’re tired, they’re not addictive. It’s not as if you wirehead yourself into some un-relatable headspace. You just never go reaching for them the same way you start automatically reaching for your phone if you’ve been spending 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 don’t see such addictive responses. I suspect that despite their extreme pleasure, a high dopaminergic rate of change is not part of the neurology of jhanas.
Even greater reassurance for those concerned about wireheading is that weaving jhanas into everyday activities is more rewarding than doing nothing else but jhanas. Once you have easy access to the jhanas, you’re able to “splash” bliss, happiness, contentment, or peace (i.e. the first four jhanas) into other activities on command. Walking in the woods with your partner? How about a little J2? Coming home after a long day? How about infusing the evening with a little J3? Rob Burbea describes mastery of the jhanas as learning to playfully weave the jhanas into one another and throughout everyday life.
Jhana meditation now has an afterglow that lasts for me between 6 - 12 hours; this afterglow makes it much easier to weave into day-to-day life, which is one reason I enjoy sitting everyday.
Emotional events can temporarily block access to the jhanas, and finding your way back can require some challenging psychological work. Fortunately, finding oneself back to the jhanas gets faster over time, to the point that emotional processing that may have once taken months or years may now take days, hours, or even seconds. One very obvious sign that emotional processing is complete is that the jhanas are once again accessible. Romeo Stevens has a great post on the cyclical relationship between concentration, insight, and integration.
Access to the dramatic pleasure of jhanas didn’t shift my personality overnight, although it’s perhaps changed me over time. Nor did it replace the fulfillment of creative work or community. This suggests whatever neurological mechanism underlies the jhanas, it’s not a shortcut to all forms of valence. Nor did they eliminate suffering – I cried myself dry after a breakup and after my grandfather passed despite having access to the jhanas.
Many people report the jhanas being eerily familiar once they experience them. Leigh Brasington says about 10% of his students report experiencing them in childhood. The Buddha used an analogy familiar to most: drinking water when severely dehydrated after a grueling workout. The first gulp of water is absolutely rapturous. Halfway through chugging the water bottle the experience changes to a strong but softer happiness. Once you’ve had your fill, you may want to cool off in a shower or swimming pool, so contented you can feel it in your bones. And then at some point there’s nothing better in the world than lying down to rest. The jhanas seem to be a way to use our attention to trace this arc of the nervous system.
The jhanas appear more accessible on psychedelics, although possibly a bit “noisier.” This aligns nicely with Robin Carhartt-Harris’s REBUS theory and Scott’s discussion of mental mountains.
Kati (my neuroscientist colleague) observed recently that people seem to go through phases with the jhanas:
Pre-jhana: lack of awareness and then either rejection or fascination
Phase 1: Fascination and attempts to learn
Phase 2: Once learned, there’s a period of fascination and perception that they’re life-changing
Phase 3: Internalization, followed by forgetting how big of a deal they were and possibly a loss of interest
Phase 4: Cycle periodically back through Phases 2 and 3
I think Nick would admit he too was fascinated for a while – I believe he spent over an hour a day for a year in the jhanas. So did I.
Perhaps more exciting than the first-order access to pleasure are three second-order effects:
As Nick described, my relationship to other desires definitely changed. Nick’s water analogy is great – water is a great thing to have in your life, and it’s better for your life as a whole to not be terribly thirsty all the time. I feel like I used to do all these convoluted things to quench my pleasure thirst. Now I have a more direct route that allows me to right-size my pursuit of these forms of pleasure with other things.
The jhanas can provide a mentality of abundance. Behavioral economist Mullainathan of Harvard has research showing scarcity worsens decision-making. By contrast, just knowing I have jhana access is insurance in tough times, and makes it easier to live into values-aligned behavior, whether it be prosocial or delayed gratification.
They have therapeutic value. This is my favorite quality of the jhanas: typically when I meditate, I enter a jhana and then go looking for the most psychological pain I can find. From inside a jhana, I can let that pain wash over me again and again until… poof! A sense of acceptance/relief/love explodes into my experience and the painful negativity is permanently rewritten. Before I knew what the jhanas were, I called this “personal brainwashing.” I would also reference the end of the movie Inside Out when joy and sadness finally learn to make memories together. This sounds eerily similar to me to research on memory consolidation and MDMA assisted psychotherapy. Andrew Huberman describes how states that are simultaneously very relaxed and focused like hypnosis and non-sleep-deep-rest have unusually high levels of neuroplasticity (which may be why hypnosis has decent size effects for smoking cessation). I’ve wondered if the idea that jhanas have unusual neuroplasticity may explain why they’ve traditionally been used as a warmup exercise to increase the odds that you have a permanent “Insight” later in your meditation that will last with you long after the jhana fades.
There’s large variance in the time people take to learn these states — the lucky learn in hours and the unlucky in months or years, and most of that time is spent guessing whether or not you’re doing it right. I have a strong prior that these states can be taught much faster with a little more understanding, measurement, and optimization. The fastest I’ve ever coached someone without prior meditation experience into the jhanas was under two hours; I’ve heard of faster.
I’ll close with two ideas that may be surprisingly relatable for those new to jhanas. First, since hearing that “the secret to a long term relationship isn’t falling in love, but learning to fall in love over and over again,” I’ve realized some people periodically practice loving-kindness meditation with their partners. For those who do, if you get to the point where tears are in your eyes, it’s likely you’re very close to jhana 2 — all that’s left is to drop any mantras and learn to manipulate your sensations and emotions preverbally, using just your attention. I find it unusually easy and rewarding to enter jhana 2 while cuddling. (Which may be an additional data point for QRI’s theory of social annealing, and offer a new lens on the Christian phrase “couples that pray together stay together.”)
Two, I find the crux of entering a jhana involves a lifeskill many of us are familiar with but rarely talk about: mental surrender. The feeling of genuinely changing your mind or saying you’re sorry to someone and meaning it. That feeling is a gateway to many wellbeing-enhancing updates, including bootstrapping a jhana. (Since learning about predictive processing, I’ve started thinking of this feeling as one phenomenological counterpart to relaxing my priors.) It’s also why I think we frequently hear guidance like “the key is not to strive” or “you can’t have a goal in meditation.” I find such advice unhelpful, but appreciate that it’s difficult to emphasize how valuable it is in meditation to paradoxically hold clear intent while feeling your way into mental surrender.
