One Guy’s Journey to Jhāna
The jhānas are meditative states that are characterized by joy, happiness, and tranquility. They are especially prominent in the Buddhist tradition, but you can find them in other spiritual traditions as well. The jhānas are also real states that we can reach today. Here I’ll document my experience with the jhānas. These are merely my own personal reflections and thoughts. I don’t claim that my experience will necessarily apply to others.
My Background
I’ve practiced meditation for about eight or nine years. I have a regular practice. When I get up in the morning, I drink some coffee and meditate for about one hour, give or take about 15 minutes. I didn’t start this way, of course. When I started meditating, I could only last for about 10-15 minutes before I wanted to do something else. I gradually worked up to a longer period. I’ve been on a few retreats at Buddhist monasteries. But I have a job and children, which makes it hard for me to get away for an extended period of time.
What I Do During Meditation
Over the years, I’ve tried a variety of meditation styles: kasina practice, open awareness, hyper-focused attention on the breath or lights in the mind, and more.
Here’s what I do nowadays. The breath is the meditation object. But the body is in my awareness too. My concentration is gently focused on the breath – the sensations of air coming in and out of my nose. But awareness radiates outward to include bodily sensations.
Like I’ve said, I’ve tried hyper-focused attention on the breath or a kasina in the past. This makes me feel groggy and it makes my head hurt. I also think that hyper focus interferes with insight practice, which I’ll get to later. A gentler and wider focus is better. I maintain this concentration for a fairly long time.
What are the Jhānas?
The jhānas are states of joy, happiness, clarity, and equanimity. For a long time, I thought that the jhānas were bullshit or, at least, exaggerated. It turns out that they’re quite real. Experiencing the jhānas doesn’t fix my problems in life or make me enlightened or whatever. But they are wholesome, positive experiences that make my life better.
People notoriously disagree about what the jhānas are and how to attain them. I don’t want to get into that here. Again, this is just, like, my opinion. Take it or leave it – or see for yourself!
How to Reach the Jhānas: First Steps
You need to be comfortable practicing meditation for at least about 45 minutes. You won’t likely have much luck if you’re only sitting for 15 minutes. I recommend an hour.
You start with breath awareness, with body awareness in the background. Here’s the tough part for many people: you need to maintain continuous breath awareness for long stretches of time. Not hyper focused. But a gentle focus, with your awareness radiating throughout your body.
Aim for continuous awareness, with no distractions, for a minimum of 5-10 minutes. This is hard to do. Thoughts are okay, but you need to avoid getting lost in them. Your awareness should be almost continually centered on your breath. If you find yourself lost in thought, that’s okay. You can recover from lapses in concentration and getting upset about these lapses is counterproductive. Come back to the breath and try again.
Eventually, your mind will quiet down. You might think: “It’s not doing that!” Yep, it may take time and practice. But, one day soon, your mind will start to become less noisy.
Entering the First Jhāna
When your mind calms down, you need to spread your awareness throughout your body.
Then, you’ll find something: a pleasant sensation. This will be a feeling of pleasure, joy, giddiness, rapture, or excitement. In the language of ancient Buddhist scriptures, this energy is called pīti. Has this rapture always been there? Or did your mind just create the pleasure when it started to quiet down? I don’t know. But the rapture is there once you start looking for it.
Sometimes, there are obstacles. If I’m pissed off, depressed, or very tired, the joy might not be there. What to do? First of all, it just may not be your day today. But you can try thinking of happy memories or wishing people that you care about well. This can generate joy and get the engine running. I think of my family doing well, visiting a wonderful art museum, and Buddhist monks and nuns being happy. This often works for me.
Once your awareness touches the joy in your body, you should gently focus on it. Not hyper focus – gentle focus.
Now, here’s a tricky part. You need to spread the joy around with your mind. It’s hard to say exactly how you do this. But you focus on the joy and hold it with your mind in a gentle way, like you’d hold a baby bird. And gradually spread it around by moving your awareness to these parts of your body. This process is a little like kneading dough. You start with a lump of pleasure. You then knead it so that it spreads out throughout your body.
Pretty soon, your whole body will feel alive with this strange, pleasant energy. You’re now in the first jhāna.
When I first did this, I was scared. It’s not really like anything I’ve experienced before. But I’ve now done this hundreds of times without any apparent bad effects.
My wife says that it sounds like the feeling a mother gets when she breastfeeds her baby. Since this isn’t something that I’ve experienced, I can’t comment.
Other people say that it’s like an orgasm. It’s true that the joy of the first jhāna is a cousin to sexual pleasure. But it’s not the same – it feels less intense and agitating, it sticks around for much longer, and it doesn’t satisfy that particular need. I wouldn’t really describe it as erotic.
It’s more like the joy of sitting in the sun, with nothing to do and no cares in the world.
Entering the Second, Third, and Fourth Jhānas
In the Buddhist tradition, there are four jhānas. The first is defined by rapture, the second by rapture and a cooler, quieter happiness, the third by only happiness, and the fourth is a quiet state with no pleasure in it.
To move from the first to the other jhānas, you need to tune into a quieter, stiller frequency in your mind. Two methods are useful.
First, observe your mind once you’re in the first jhāna. You’ll feel the rapture. But there will also be a less intense, quieter, calmer happiness or sense of contentment somewhere in your mind. Focus on that. This task will be more challenging because this quieter happiness is harder to focus on – it’s less loud than the rapture. Once you can focus on it, though, you can repeat the process. Spread the quiet happiness around your whole body, like kneading dough.
Second method: contemplate any disturbance that you’re feeling. The frenetic joy of the first jhāna can get irritating. Or you just get bored with it. Once you appreciate the downsides of the first jhāna, you start to look for a quieter, less noisy place for your mind to go. Your mind wants to tune into this quieter frequency where there is still joy, but it’s less intense. Once you find this calmer place, you can start the process of spreading a quieter, stiller happiness around.
The same procedure works for getting to the third and fourth jhāna. You’re looking for a stiller, quieter place in the mind. Gradually, you’ll get rid of the frenetic rapture and enter the third jhāna. Finally, all of the rapture and happiness goes away and you’re in a very still state: the fourth jhāna. Instead of spreading pleasure and happiness throughout your body, you spread mindfulness and equanimity in order to enter the fourth jhāna.
At first, I was puzzled by why people like the fourth jhāna. It’s quiet there and not much happens. But now I get it. Recently, I was in a forest, away from civilization. The forest was extremely still and quiet. There was hardly any noise and scarcely a leaf was falling. I liked it and felt at peace. That’s the same nice thing about the fourth jhāna. There are few disturbances there.
The Formless States
There are four or five other meditative states that often are associated with the jhānas, and they’re called the formless or immaterial states. Until recently, I was pretty confused by the immaterial states. In fact, I’m still mostly confused. But I think that I’m slowly starting to understand them (maybe). Once I get a better handle on the formless states, I may write more about them here. My current understanding is that they’re like the fourth jhāna except even quieter and also weirder.
After Meditating
The joy and happiness of jhāna can stick around all day, although it will be less intense. You’ll often feel this pleasant, happy feeling in the back of your mind. But it will go away unless you keep meditating regularly.
Why Do the Jhānas Exist?
Like, why would we have the capacity to reach the jhānas? How does this even make sense? I honestly don’t know. My guess is that there are various subsystems in the mind that serve evolutionary purposes (why else would they be there?). Jhāna meditation is a way of hacking into some of those subsystems and using them for our own goals.
Relationship Between Jhānas and Insight Meditation
Buddhists like to debate the difference between tranquility meditation (samatha) and insight meditation (vipassana). Is jhāna tranquility meditation or is it insight meditation? Like many others, I now believe that the dichotomy between insight and tranquility meditation is a false and misleading one. Jhāna meditation involves both tranquility and insight. How so?
Some preliminaries: I don’t think that you’re going to discover any secrets of the universe or correct metaphysical principles when you’re meditating. That’s a bad model of insight meditation. If you’re looking for deep metaphysical insights when you practice meditation, you’re probably going to be either disappointed if you’re honest with yourself or deluded if you’re not.
Instead, insight meditation involves observing your mind, seeing if there is suffering there, and figuring out how to adjust your mind so that there’s less suffering. This process involves both insight (insight into how your mind is working and what is creating a disturbance in your mind) and tranquility (using this insight to adjust your mind so that there is less suffering there – usually by going to a stiller, quieter place). That’s all there is to insight meditation – meditation is not a seminar on metaphysics. Hence, the jhānas are practices of both tranquility and insight.
Resources
I learned the jhānas from books plus trial and error. The books that have helped me the most are:
Ajahn Brahm, Mindfulness, Bliss, and Beyond. This book helped me learn how to focus continually on the breath for a long period of time, which is a hard skill to learn, and this alone makes it worth the price of admission. But Brahm’s advice on how to get to the jhānas didn’t work for me. Brahm is into the so-called “hard” jhānas that require hyper focus on a meditation object, which I don’t think is the way to go.
Leigh Brassington, Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhānas. The best all-around book on the jhānas out there. Brassington is not doctrinaire, which makes me trust him more, and his advice works for the most part. That said, I have a few quibbles. First, Brassington says that the jhānas are useful for insight meditation, but he doesn’t really clarify how. Second, his advice on how to access the formless states didn’t work for me. Brassington says that you should imagine an object and expand it until it’s boundless/infinitely large, and this will take you into the first formless state (infinite space). I’ve tried it many times and it hasn’t worked. Don’t let these quibbles distract from the headline that this is a great book.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu, With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation, especially the section on advanced meditation. Thanissaro Bhikkhu basically has it right, in my opinion. Thanissaro is a proponent of “whole body” jhānas (works for me) and has the right model of insight meditation (it’s insight into the workings of your mind and how to reduce one’s suffering, and it’s not about uncovering metaphysical truths). Furthermore, Thanissaro’s advice on how to reach the formless states is the only useful advice that I’ve ever heard about these states, after years of searching, and finally allowed me to skirt around their edges (still working on it). The only downside is that the section on the jhānas is too brief and I think that blending Thanissaro’s and Brassington’s advice works best overall.