New report: How altered states shape our minds
When I first pitched a magazine piece about a meditation subculture surrounding the jhanas1 at the beginning of this year, there hadn’t been any media coverage of the practice yet. The Twitter discourse mostly centered around two questions: 1) Are the jhanas even real? and 2) If you can self-induce extreme bliss, why would you do anything but “press the pleasure button” all day?
Fast forward to the end of the year, and the jhanas have now been covered in The Atlantic, Vox, Time, and Men’s and Women’s Health. Instead of debating whether they are real, the question I hear now is: “How can I try it?” Or, “I went on a retreat / tried the instructions in your blog post, and some crazy things happened!” I’ve been especially surprised to hear from people I would’ve never expected to hear from (read: not meditators or “spiritual” types) – it’s been a cool way to get to know some of my acquaintances on a deeper level.
Now that we’ve established that jhanas exist, my focus has turned to understanding their impact. Jhanas feel like self-induced psychedelic states, so – do they offer similar benefits?
Answering this question, however, turns out to be a challenging research question. Firstly, there aren’t that many researchers studying the jhanas yet, and frankly, academia doesn’t move as fast as my curiosity. Secondly, of the few published studies I’ve read about the jhanas, recruiting participants is a barrier to study, because jhanas are a skill that must be taught, and there just aren’t that many people who’ve tried them yet. And thirdly, because jhanas occupy a weird space between “meditation” and “psychedelics,” it’s not even clear which type of impact to look for, much less measure. (Mindfulness and MDMA might both change your outlook, but in very different ways.)
A big, open research question with little prior art to draw from? Sounds fun!
I decided to team up with the good people at Jhourney, a retreat company that teaches the jhanas to beginners – and therefore have unique access to practitioners – to tackle these questions. We asked their alumni how their lives have changed since going on a retreat. You can read our findings in a report that we just published today:
I’ve also summarized our key insights and takeaways in this Twitter thread.
As far as I know, this is the most extensive report yet on the impact of the jhanas on meditators. There’s a lot here that needs to be validated by research, but my initial goal was helping us figure out the right questions to even ask. (To that end, this report has already helped inform another project we’re working on with an academic lab – more on that soon.)
If you need me to jog your memory: the jhanas are a series of intensely altered, psychedelic-like states that are induced solely through meditation, which I first wrote about for Asterisk magazine.
Thank you for doing this! There are just so many basic questions here that no one seems to have bothered resolving or, at least, sharing their answers. In particular, I'm glad you introduced the concept of "deterministic access" as opposed to pretending that it is automatic (which had made me believe that if I could not reproduce my J1, then I couldn't have been to J1 in the first place...).
Did you ask people what people did to focus attention? Reducing stressors (mosquitoes, itches, uncomfortable positions, ...) vs. meditating on them? Is there a balance to be struck here or is one choice definitely better? (I'm talking of mindfulness meditation in particular, as I'm not familiar with the other schools.) These practical issues might be what stands in the way for many people currently on the fence.