Exploring altered states of consciousness

When researchers were trying to understand the effects of LSD in the early 1960s, a team in Toronto strapped and blindfolded their subjects in sterile rooms before administering a dose and walking away. (You can imagine how that went.) Years later, we learned the importance of set and setting – one’s mindset, and one’s environment – and how they influence the nature of highly subjective experiences.

Last year, as I prepared for my own momentous event – unmedicated childbirth – I was surprised to learn that giving birth operates similarly, even though we don’t talk about it that way. Psychology strongly influences physicality: when we are afraid, our bodies seize up, and birth slows down. When we are calm, our bodies relax, and birth can progress smoothly.

These observations seem obvious now that I’ve been through it, but at the time, this was news to me. Because birth manifests so clearly in the body, I had assumed it was something that happened to me – like getting the flu, or arthritis – rather than something could be influenced, to some degree, by my mind. (By contrast, positive thinking has only a marginal impact on illness or degenerative disease.)

In researching birth, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels with psychedelics. Both these “exotic states of consciousness,” as the Qualia Research Institute might call them, suggest that there are still vast oceans to explore inside our brains, which influence not just fuzzy, hard-to-measure things like mood or motivation, but in some cases – as with birth – vastly different medical outcomes.

Around the same time, I took fresh notice of growing Twitter chatter about the jhanas, a series of eight altered states of consciousness that are accessed via a special form of meditation. Practitioners claim that they can enter blissful, euphoric states that are comparable to MDMA or psychedelics – without the use of substances.

Like many others, I thought these claims were interesting, but likely exaggerated. But my recent learnings tugged at me. It took decades for researchers to understand how psychedelics worked: to differentiate them from chemically-induced psychosis, to identify that they had therapeutic benefits, and to be able to discuss them openly. And, despite its many advancements, the United States medical establishment still treats childbirth – a phenomenon that occurs thousands of times per day – as a purely physical, rather than psychological, experience. So…why not the jhanas?

When Asterisk magazine approached me about contributing a piece to their upcoming issue, I decided to use the opportunity to understand what the jhanas were about. I expected to write a piece that was a more anthropological, observed account of a strange Twitter subculture. I did, in fact, write that piece, and initially submitted it to my editors. But in the course of my research, I met Stephen Zerfas, who co-founded a company, Jhourney, that aims to teach the jhanas to novices. Stephen invited me to one of their upcoming retreats, which, after much deliberation, I agreed to attend.

I am not a meditator. (Even after experiencing the jhanas, I still have no desire to develop a meditation practice.) Nor am I a “spiritual seeker” of the sort you might find at Burning Man or a Vipassana retreat. Despite my lack of experience, within my first hour of practice, I found myself in the equivalent of an MDMA roll. With ten hours of practice, I had an out-of-body experience. Less than fifteen hours, a psychedelic experience that rivaled what might be had on LSD. All of this took place using only concentration.

If you’re raising an eyebrow right now, I must once again stress that I, too, did not believe this was a thing. I arrived at the retreat feeling rather silly for being there. I left astonished, and perplexed, as to why barely anyone has studied the jhanas at all. Public accounts of jhanic experiences are widely dismissed or snickered at by skeptics. I’ve found only three notable academic studies about the jhanas that were published in the last ten years. These studies used fMRI and EEG data to examine whether the phenomenon was real – and they did, in fact, find that their subjects displayed unusual brain activity, comparable to being asleep or in a coma while conscious – but conspicuously missing still is the secular language needed to describe how the jhanas work, how they are accessed deterministically, and their impact on practitioners’ minds. Strangest to me, as an outsider, is that the jhanas are still firmly lodged in meditation circles and norms, rather than studied as a form of behavioral therapy.

I am less interested in making the argument that everyone should try the jhanas. But it seems to me that if people can access these experiences with relatively little mental effort – and to do so legally, for free – more ought to know that such a thing exists. At the very least, shouldn’t there be more than three published studies about it?

If anything I’ve said so far has caught your attention, then I’d love for you to check out the piece I published in Asterisk today. I think it’s a good primer on the jhanas and their history, as well as a narrative account of my experience at the retreat.

Finally, if you’ve followed my work for awhile, you know I love a good unexplored landscape, and – against all odds – the jhanas have grabbed my attention like a dog with a bone. If they’re interesting to you as well, I’d love to talk about it, particularly from a qualitative research and storytelling perspective. Drop me a line!