What is Meditation For?

Thoughts on the small surge of interest in jhana meditation, once a thing that only I and a few other people cared about.

Is jhana meditation, of all things, now having a moment?

For the 99.8% of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, “jhanas” are altered states of mind, often quite profound, that can be cultivated through intensive meditation. As it happens, I am a teacher of this obscure practice, having been authorized to teach by my teacher, Leigh Brasington, who was authorized by his, Ven. Ayya Khema.  I’ve spent roughly 1,000 hours meditating on jhana retreat, and another few hundred assisting Leigh and teaching on my own.

I don’t talk about it much, however, because, well, no one knows what it is.

Until maybe now. Ten days ago, Vox’s Oshan Jarow wrote the longest mainstream journalistic coverage of jhana in, I think, recorded history.  There’s a startup, Jhourney, which is offering jhana retreats and hopes to one day offer neuro-feedback machines for jhana meditation similar to Muse headbands (Muse’s former chief scientist is one of their advisors); my old friend and Evolving-Dharma-compatriot Vince Fakhoury Horn recently articulated a strong critique of Jhourney on the Buddhist Geeks podcast. And there are a handful of neuroscientists studying jhana states to see if we can learn anything about them.  (I’m ahead of the curve on that one: below is a picture of me entering jhana, though not that deeply given the circumstances, hooked up to EEG equipment in Jud Brewer’s lab back in 2012.) 

So, it’s a moment, or maybe a mini-moment. But I think the interest in this form of meditation has wider relevance in terms of why people try meditation in the first place, and why I’ve started having doubts about its capacity.

1.

First, here’s a very short introduction to what jhana meditation is – there are longer ones in my 2013 book Evolving Dharma, this 2016 article in Tricycle, and in these 2009 articles for the magazine I founded many years ago, Zeek (housed at Jewcy.com).

Jhana practice is a form of intense concentration meditation, tightly focusing the mind on a single object.  Where mindfulness might take on many objects (the breath, thoughts, sensations), concentration ignores everything but the one primary object. When you do this for a long time, the mind (and presumably the brain) changes.  We know this from ordinary experience: if you’re totally absorbed in a book, movie, or activity, you lose track of time, you get into a flow state, you block out everything else that’s going on.  That happens on steroids during concentration meditation.

Eventually, with a little bit of coaching, the concentrated mind slips into four distinct jhana states, and from the fourth one, you can venture to four additional imaginal (or real, who knows) “formless realms.”  The classical Buddhist descriptions of these states are available here, on Leigh’s website. 

The experience is profound.  The deepest jhanas I entered, on a two-month retreat back in 2008, are some of the most sublime experiences I’ve ever had – and as an Enneagram 7, I’ve had a lot of them.  They are sublime, blissful, and for me, thanks to my Jewish karma, filled with a sense of the sacred.  (It appears that, historically, early Buddhism co-opted the jhanas from pre-existing meditative traditions, which may have viewed them as an experience of enlightenment and/or God.  That tracks.)

In fact, the jhanas are so wonderful that they kind of take the magic out of “experience” as a spiritual goal.  Okay, I’ve had the most mind-blowing bliss state imaginable… now what?

In Theravadan Buddhism, the answer to that question is clear: the mind warmed by jhana has a much easier time accessing the profound insights and shifts in consciousness that actually bring liberation.  It’s hard to describe how much easier meditating with jhana is compared to meditating without it.  It’s like bicycling downhill instead of uphill.  Or, as a more poetic phrase in Majjhima Nikaya #36 puts it, the mind is “concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of imperfection, malleable, wieldy, steady and attained to imperturbability,” and so the meditator directs it to “true knowledge,” i.e. the insights into why we suffer and how to stop doing so.

In other words, the point isn’t simply to have the blissful, amazing experience, but to use the mind conditioned by that experience to really uproot the greed, hatred, and delusion that I write about every week in this newsletter.

2.

The catch is that these states are hard to cultivate.  After many years of practice, I can get to them with two days of concentrated meditation.  I can also evoke echoes of them in daily life, kind of like intentionally re-experiencing a psychedelic state (which I also do).  But in retreats I’ve led, it usually takes experienced students three to four days, and new students five to seven days – and that’s meditating 8-10 hours a day in a quiet context where there are few distractions and no talking or tech use.

The difficulty of this practice is why the Burmese reformers who created modern Insight meditation around 150 years ago—the forerunner to today’s secular mindfulness—cut it out of their systems.  They were adapting Buddhist meditation for laypeople, and jhana meditation is really designed for monastics, or for people able to be quasi-monastics for weeks at a time.

It’s also why I haven’t done serious jhana meditation in seven years. I’m not willing to be away from my family for as long as it takes to get really deep.  In fact, one reason I’ve returned to psychedelic spiritual practice in the last few years is that you can get to similar states, though not as stable and malleable, with the aid of certain compounds.

So, jhana would seem to be tough sell.  Unlike mindfulness, which can yield benefits in a matter of minutes, jhana takes days.  You can’t fit it into your daily routine. 

The folks at Jhourney think they’ve streamlined the process, but I’m not so sure.  While the startup makes some impressive promises, their only current “product” is a weeklong retreat.  Perhaps one day, neurotech will shorten that process, but it doesn’t yet.  Their hypey website copy – “Life-changing meditative bliss used to take thousands of hours to learn. We teach it in a week” – could just as easily apply to the weeklong jhana retreats I’ve taught.  Jhana never took “thousands of hours to learn”; just around forty to fifty, if you’re diligent enough.  Of course, learning isn’t the same as mastery.

There is, as Vince noted in his critique, a degree of early-stage enthusiasm, and a serious lack of deep teaching experience, at Jhourney.  As Vince also notes, when you take a practice that is traditionally done under the close supervision of an experienced teacher, and turn it into a kind of ready-made product with none of those guardrails, you’re risking superficial results at best, potential mental health issues at worst. I agree with

Sasha Chapin

that the risk of doing a Jhourney retreat seems no greater than a lot of others, and clearly some people have experienced benefits. But I can also say firsthand that people get weird on a jhana retreat. You definitely want experts around, and a mere 100 hours of experience (which Vince reports is the standard for Jhourney teachers) is woefully inadequate.

But there is something that Jhourney gets right—and that is my real concern.

3.

Why do people meditate?  Statistically speaking, by far the most popular reasons are stress management, relaxation, and relief.  People are anxious – for plenty of good reasons – and they are looking for help.  Meditation, they think, will help them relax. And it does do that, as countless studies have shown.

But how does it do that?  In my experience, the relaxation comes from concentration, not mindfulness. 

Mindfulness is what helps you see past appearances into the truth of experience, and in so doing, to set oneself free from the endless push-pull of desire and aversion that causes us to suffer so much.  Eventually, the mind does change – the brain does too, we now know – and you are less attracted or repelled by the good and bad aspects of life that we all experience. These are the real fruits of meditation in the Theravadan Buddhist view.

Concentration helps you mellow out.  It’s a necessary prerequisite to insight, but it doesn’t generate it.  Take concentration to the extreme, and you get jhana.  Take it lightly, and you “find your zen.”  Which may be fine — people are hurting, and this helps.  But there’s an inherent divergence of purpose between Buddhist practitioners like Vince and around 90% of the people who practice meditation in America. 

This, at least, is what I saw during five years of working at Ten Percent Happier, and throughout my decades-long immersion in the worlds of both Buddhist and secular mindfulness.  And the market bears this out.  The leading meditation app, by a mile, is called Calm, and it’s not even really about meditation – meditation is only one of many tools that it offers to help people calm down.  Other apps, like Headspace, Ten Percent Happier, and Waking Up, offer some combination of wisdom/ mindfulness/ insight and relaxation/ concentration/ calm, but, in my experience, these commercial enterprises are intrinsically torn between what their founders think is the liberating dharma and what the market actually wants.

That’s also true of the most widely-practiced form of secular meditation, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).  What really does the stress reduction?  It’s not seeing through the dependently originated phenomena of the self; it’s quieting down and focusing on breathing.  Of course, dharma practitioners will correctly insist that real stress reduction comes not from mere relaxation but from being able to coexist with difficult emotions, perhaps the essence of mindfulness.  But that takes a lot longer, and is a more complicated sell.

Meanwhile, oddly absent from Vince’s critique and Jarow’s analysis is the leading form of secular concentration practice: transcendental meditation, or TM. Like jhana, TM is straight concentration.  You chant your mantra, over and over and over again, and you generate focus, calm, and equanimity.  You even, at advanced stages, enter (or merge into) forms of consciousness not dissimilar from the fourth, fifth, and sixth jhanas. In some cases, you get a glimpse of the sacred. 

Buddhists tend not to like TM. The TM organization is more than a little culty – watch the film David Wants to Fly for the dirty financial laundry and very weird beliefs.  And TM practitioners include a lot of titans of Big Finance and others who liberal Buddhists tend to disapprove of.  Most of all, TM, like Calm and like Jhourney’s marketing copy, focuses on tranquility, happiness, focus, relaxation, i.e., the fruits of concentration practice. Not, you know, being a better person in the world and waking up from the delusions of samsara.

“Jhana states show that profound, life-changing altered states are accessible,” says Jhourney’s website.  Is that true?  I’m not sure.  Yes, the states are profound, and that profundity may be life-changing. But they don’t uproot the causes of suffering or help people be more ethical.  They can be extremely valuable for doing that kind of work, but they can also just be awesome states.  And then, as we’ve seen in the worlds of meditation, yoga, psychedelics, and, most of all, mainstream religion, people do with their experiences what they will. Many grow wise, but many remain assholes—they’re just assholes who have had awesome experiences. On its own, jhana may be no more relevant to improving the human condition than golf.

4.

That being said, I have found that awesome experiences can indeed be life-changing, if the integration is there.  I am a believer in the power of transcendent experiences, and I also really like them (unlike golf). Moreover, I have seen that such experiences are a necessary but not sufficient ingredient in transformation for myself, my students, and probably everyone else. 

So if jhana does somehow become democratized, which I still think is extraordinarily unlikely, I’m for it.  The jhanas helped me become disenchanted with special states, which clarified what was and wasn’t the point of spiritual practice. At the same time, the experiences from that two-month jhana retreat are still among the most remarkable and powerful in my life.  They resonate, even today, and they inform my other spiritual practices as well.

No, the point is not simply to have amazing experiences —to ascend Mount Sinai, experience ego death, or taste the profound equanimity of fourth jhana.  But I’m not sure you can get the point without them.

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If you’re interested in learning more about the jhanas, I highly recommend this daylong online retreat with my teacher, Leigh Brasington, presented by New York Insight Meditation Center, on Saturday, August 10. (Full disclosure: I booked this retreat when I was working there!) You won’t enter jhana but you will learn all about it, and learn the practices conducive to entering jhana. It will be a great introduction.

Meanwhile, thanks for the many warm responses to last week’s newsletter. I still feel all the things I talked about in that essay, but I’m still fine. For more on “diagonalism,” check out this short introduction and the 2021 article that coined the term during the pandemic, when the phenomenon gained strength. I am still amazed that people think we’re “over Covid” as if it never happened. It shapes our entire world.

Also this week I’ve been reading the Yale Center for Climate Communication’s latest report on American public opinion about the climate crisis. It’s a mix of optimistic and head-scratching.

On Israel/Palestine stuff, I wrote a piece for the Forward this week about how what would be best for Israel (and Gaza) would be a plea deal for Netanyahu. And though it feels really basic to recommend an article by Thomas Friedman, but I think he really nailed the current situation in Israel (and thus Gaza) in his piece this week. Required reading, in my view.

Just like this essay on jhana meditation, no?