Meditative Trance states no one told me about (Part 3)

Mythic meditation induced trance states

(Continued from my previous post titled Speeding up your brain until it breaks where I talk describe the meditation “noting” technique)

To be honest, my initial thought was that this noting technique where you sit down and try and notice everything that occurs in your conscious awareness seemed too simple to be worth doing. Then I tried it. Meditation is typically thought to be a way to de-stress and relax, but when I sat down and tried the noting, it was actually very hard and quite tiring.

With very minimal practice I did notice one thing that wasn’t really apparent to me before. It seems like the brain spends a lot of time locating things. I was trying the noting in the shower and noticed that a split second after the mind had the intention to wash my hair, it was locating the shampoo. (Not so surprising, but something about the automatic and immediate, domino-like nature of that process was interesting to me) I was trying to note while running and felt that the intention to turn arose immediately after the previous turn was completed (even if where I would turn was about 100 meters ahead of me). Other than that I just felt there were many times where the mind would remember something, plan something, desire something and with it would come a piece of mental activity tracking where that thing happened, where something could happen, where the thing I want might be. Nothing mind blowing, not even all that revelatory, but it was interesting to notice it first hand. Just interesting enough to think “OK if 2 hours was slightly interesting, maybe 1000 hours of this would indeed reveal something mind-blowingly interesting.” I was still skeptical but optimistic.

In Daniel Ingram’s book he talks about the “jhānas.” This is essentially a very deep meditative state where there are no distractions and your mind is entirely focused on the object of meditation (usually the breath). This results in something like a very pleasurable trance state. Your external awareness dims, internal verbalizations fade, the sense of your physical body as a barrier between you and the world starts to blur and you experience some sort of bliss, joy, or happiness. This sounded like a pretty sweet deal. I was surprised that in Zen, at least as far as I had seen, the texts had never talked about these jhānas. Then again, I was skeptical that jhānas were actually even a thing but started to get more interested when I read that there were eight specific jhānas with their own unique characteristics.

In fact, fMRI/EEG research has been done on advanced meditators who can actually pull this technique off. They found that this “jhānic” state indeed produces distinct activation in the brain that would suggest they were self-generating an abnormal amount of joy. To quote this paper from 2013 headed by Dr. Michael R. Hagerty of the University of California: “the extreme joy is associated not only with activation of cortical processes but also with activation of the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the dopamine/opioid system … these results demonstrate and apparently novel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject.”

In the paper they describe the results of strengthening concentration and entering the eight jhānas.
J1 - strong physical pleasure, “better than sexual orgasm”*
J2 - joy “permeates every part of the body”
J3 - joy transforms into “deep contentment and serenity”
J4 - an experience of “equanimity—a profound peace and stillness”
Jhānas 5 through 8 are more subtle but more “profound.” The experience sounds quite hard to put into words, but they each have names that may give you a hint at what is experienced.
J5 - “Infinite space”
J6 - “Infinite consciousness”
J7 - “Nothingness”
J8 - “Neither Perception nor Non Perception”

(*The first jhāna is either amazing or orgasms are not very exciting for this person. Then again, which part of the orgasm? Is it like the brief but intense climax or the warm relaxed and content feeling that follows afterwards? Could be more descriptive... but if you read further, the subject in fact describes it as continuous multiple orgasms, and that the third jhana feels like postcoital bliss.)

Figure 1 of the paper shows that the first three jhanas produce a substantial increase in joy, then from jhana 4 onward, the joy lessens but your awareness of the external world fades more and more.

The researchers noted that there were small but significant differences in the brain for each jhana state tested. So, seems like some exciting preliminary evidence that (1) jhana is a thing, and (2) there are in fact different jhanas with their own characteristics.

Leigh Brasington, one of the authors on this paper, talks in depth about jhana and what he thinks is going on in the brain, here:

What stood out to me is he said that the word “jhana” is in fact more or less the same as the word for “meditate.” So in some texts where the Buddha is telling his monks to go out under a tree and meditate in pursuit of enlightenment, he wasn’t saying “go meditate,” but “go do the jhanas.” These eight jhanas are not new at all, some argue they were the core of pre-sectarian Buddhism (i.e. Buddhism in the time of Guatama Buddha)

Compared to the more exhausting “noting” method, pursuing these apparently hyper rewarding jhana states sounded more exciting. The method for doing jhana is pretty simple, you can find it here on this short post by Leigh Brasington: http://www.leighb.com/jhana3.htm I had to do a bit of digging to see just how long it would take to actually get your concentration strong enough to where you could do this jhana technique, and on the low end it was months of consistent practice. Others have estimated a year or more. Leigh Brasington said about six months in this podcast from 28:36 - https://deconstructingyourself.com/dy-014-diving-deep-jhanas-guest-leigh-brasington.html Brasington said it took him about three years of not super consistent meditative practice to get him ready for jhana practice.

I’m kind of impatient so I wasn’t too excited that it would take six months just to confirm for myself whether these jhanas were real. In any case, I was determined to give it a shot. But if noting (vipassana) takes you through the insight stages up to the four stages of enlightenment where do these jhanas come in? Are they just fun or are they supposed to help one’s journey towards enlightenment?

(To be continued)