What are jhanas? The meditative state breaking through the mainstream, explained

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/354069/what-if-you-could-have-a-panic-attack-but-for-joy

Mindfulness is one thing. Jhāna meditation is stranger, stronger, and going mainstream.

Some of the rhetoric around meditation can get pretty extreme: awaken us from the illusion of selfhood, dissolve the mental habits that generate suffering, and maybe merge with the primordial oneness that our thinking minds make us feel separate from. 

In the past few years, though, the study of more advanced meditation than basic mindfulness has been developing. So far, its most robust finding is that our scientific understanding of just how deep meditation’s effects can go has hardly scratched the surface.  

One series of eight meditative states — the jhānas, often described as successive states of “absorption” into bliss, rapture, or ecstasy — is now beginning to rise from obscurity, raising a powerful example of meditation’s more transformative potentials into mainstream attention across academia, tech, social media, and Western meditation communities. The jhānas are detailed in the Theravāda Buddhist traditions of Southeast Asia and have their own particular meditation instructions, which typically involve sustaining attention on feelings of pleasure in the body.

“It’s a completely different mode of consciousness,” said Paul Dennison, a former psychotherapist and meditation teacher who published a book about the jhānas in 2022. “The sense of time disappears temporarily, the sense of why you’re doing anything disappears ... and when you come out of that, the mind is so clear that you can get a lot deeper understanding of who we are and how we get caught up in the patterns that lead to suffering.”

“This is one of the biggest secrets on the planet right now,” said Stephen Zerfas, who along with Alex Gruver is a co-founder of Jhourney, a meditation startup focused on bringing blissful meditative states like jhānas to the masses. “Access to the jhānas is shockingly available to folks with all kinds of meditation backgrounds.”

The eight stages of jhānas, briefly explained

David Snyder, author of a number of books on Buddhism and founder of the Dhamma Wiki, has a usefully sparse list drawn from the Aṅguttara Nikāya of the Pāli Canon, a collection of Theravāda Buddhist scriptures.

First jhāna: Delightful sensations

Second jhāna: Joy

Third jhāna: Contentment

Fourth jhāna: Utter peacefulness

Fifth jhāna: Infinity of space

Sixth jhāna: Infinity of consciousness

Seventh jhāna: No-thingness

Eighth jhāna: Neither perception nor non-perception

While each jhāna seems to grow a little more difficult to describe than the last, even the first is not a mellow starting point. Descriptions range from “a laser beam of intense tingly pleasurable electricity,” similar to a sustained orgasm, to MDMA therapy without the drugs.

Reporting for this piece, I got the sense that the jhānas, like psychedelics, are things you can’t really understand without having the experience for yourself.

Why the jhānas haven’t received as much attention as mindfulness in the West

Ancient Theravāda texts can give the impression that the jhānas are really difficult to learn and that very few who try will succeed. That depends on your definition of jhāna, but observations from this century suggest that at least the shallower ends of jhāna are surprisingly accessible.