Tuesday brunch: reaching the first Jhana

And other ecstatic stories from around the web

This newsletter can sometimes be a little critical of aspects of New Age spirituality. I suppose I am a Cynic. Not a cynic – ie a person who ‘knows the price of everything but the value of nothing’ - but a Cynic, who believes in laughing at falsehoods to let the truth emerge.

Cynicism in ancient Greece was not just a negative, critical, Satirical philosophy, it also had a positive moral vision: happiness comes from virtue, and virtue is within all of us and attainable through practice. There’s a similar idea in Stoicism and Buddhism – if you follow a wise, virtuous path diligently, it will make you happy and (maybe) the world around you slightly happier as well.  

One optimistic and (at the moment trendy) idea in Buddhist psychology is the Jhanas. These are four progressively deeper meditative states which supposedly occur along the meditative path as you become more awake.

I say the jhanas are ‘trendy’ at the moment as Silicon Valley dharma nerds increasingly bang on about them, and there’s now a start-up company that specializes in leading people up the jhana path, in a week, for $5000. Clients emerge from this week declaring on Twitter how they ‘totally achieved the jhanas and it’s way better than sex but you wouldn’t really understand’.  Basically, saying you’ve achieved the jhanas is the new ‘I went to India on my Gap Yah’.

But hey, my positive Cynic side is also interested in the jhanas, particularly in the achievable-sounding first jhana, known as Calm Abiding. So I asked Daniel Ingram about the first jhana and how we can get there. He is an advanced meditator and founder of the Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium, which I’m a part of.

What follows is a brief free interview with Daniel, then after the paywall there’s some links about the last week’s news, including ‘what happened to Microdose Wonderland?’

What is the first jhana?

In the literature, there are five aspects: applied thought, sustained thought, rapture, happiness and one-pointedness of mind.  Teachers disagree over how much of those things you need to have to qualify as being in the jhana.

Where does the Buddha talk about the jhanas?

The Buddha talks about it in a number of sutras. You can find this in things like The Fruits of the Homeless Life. You can kind of summaries of them in something called the Abhidhamma, which talks about the states and stages of meditation. The Buddha actually said that he learned them from previous teachers. So if you look at the story of the Buddha, he would have learned a whole bunch of jhanas and then said, ‘Well, these are good, but they don't last, and they didn't provide me the salvation I was looking for’, although they did then become incorporated into Buddhist fundamental training.

There’s a story he first attained the first jhana as a child.  The story was he was just sitting under a tree as a child, feeling relaxed yet alert, and this intense bliss arose.  I like that story – don’t strain too hard, just relax and let it happen. Very Daoist! So is the first jhana like allowing our natural Buddha nature to arise? Is it the true essence of Mind?

Well, this is complicated – it’s both true and not true. It depends on the lens you're looking at it from - to label something as the natural state is adding a bit of a dogmatic overlay. All qualities are transient, right? Even bliss and peace are transient things that do not last. That was the Buddha’s original critique of the jhanas - they're great, but they end.

But you do have other traditions, including some Vedantic traditions, which will take happiness and stability as part of an eternal True Self that is abiding at all times, even some strains of Buddhism will go there.

There’s a new wave of meditation research focused on deep states, involving people like you and Dr Matthew Sacchet of Harvard.

There are not a lot of papers covering this territory. Meditation research itself was taboo. Then it became coo to research mindfulness, but the really deep end weird stuff was still taboo. So we're definitely pushing some boundaries and some thresholds here. [Daniel was one of the study participants in this paper on cessation of thought in deep meditation].

I imagine the number of people in the world who are likely to go through all four jhanas is relatively small but the number of people possibly who can get to this first jhana of calm abiding might be bigger.

Oh yes, much larger. It involves the cultivation of positive qualities. With more attention, these things get stronger, generally. It's not just secluding the mind and concentrating. It's actively nourishing positive qualities, figuring out how to amplify them.

The Buddha teaches that the obstacles to obtaining this state of calm abiding are the ‘hindrances’ – what are they?

There’s a standard list, but I'm going to be a little less dogmatic. It's things like fear and worry and restlessness as well as desire. Okay, I am getting a little dogmatic. And things like boredom, skeptical doubt, anger, anything that's taking the mind away from this moment and these very particular positive factors, and making it think about the past or the future or some other situation.

Do you have a recommended intro meditation course?

I really like Right Concentration by Lee Brasington. I really like Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Gunaratana, I think these are really good places to start. [Daniel’s own book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha is also a great read.]

What else is the EPRC working on?

The big thing we’re fund-raising for is the expert opinion project. I'm also a doctor and emergency medicine physician with a public health background, and used to do clinical practice for 12 years. We're trying to figure out how my colleagues in the field can relate better to the deepened experiences that come from meditation, psychedelics, shamanic sweat lodges, intense yoga sessions and all of these things that can produce these powerful shifts of consciousness, powerful experiences of body and mind and heart, powerful energetic experiences, powerful shifts in the sense of self, powerful existentially challenging or amazing experiences like your whole body dissolving, your sense of identity becoming very confused, or profound realizations that are really healing and beneficial.

The clinical mainstream has precious little understanding of those beyond the sort of low-level thing that is mindfulness. Either these things don't exist or there's some other neurological condition - they're a seizure, mania, psychosis or whatever. There is a whole world in between ‘doesn't exist’ and ‘is purely mental illness’ that needs exploring to learn the potential, healings, upgrades, shifts, challenges that might ultimately be workable. We're asking experts, people who can bridge the worlds between the deep end of human experience and the clinical mainstream: ‘Hey, what should mainstream clinicians know? What should ER doctors know and mainstream psychiatrists and psychologists know? What would you put in the textbooks of these professions?’

More news after the paywall, with links to stories including ‘what happened to Microdose Wonderland’, Braxia sold for peanuts, a crazy new eco-community project, and dodgy shaman Roger Bardales condemned by Shipibo leaders. Plus the full video of my interview with Daniel Ingram for those who want to explore the jhanas deeper.