What is meditation for?
Hello! You may recall that a few months ago, I went on a meditation retreat as part of research for an article I was writing about the jhanas, and came out of it with my mind blown. (Jhanas, to jog your memory, are altered states of consciousness that can be accessed through concentration alone.)
Well, I’m still doggedly on the jhanas train. I went back to try it again, and accidentally discovered how to voluntarily turn my consciousness on and off, which occasioned an experience so profound that I decided not to write about it.
Because everything I could find online about the jhanas is heavily shrouded in spiritual language, I wrote up a set of instructions on how to get into jhana that is pragmatic and straightforward. These instructions were well-received, and to my delight, several people on Twitter reported that it worked for them on their first try. (I’m not sure why I didn’t send that post to this list. I guess I was sort of shy about it, and I felt more comfortable lobbing it into the internet void vs. sending it to a group I’m more acquainted with.)
There were, however, some seasoned meditators who raised an eyebrow at how quickly I progressed through all eight (or nine) jhanic states, as these experiences are expected to take much longer to attain: months, years, a lifetime. My self-reported tally was around 20 cumulative hours.
Is this a red flag? Should they be suspicious of my claims, based on the number of hours that I practiced? Anecdotally, many teachers say that it’s not unusual for inexperienced practitioners to find success with the jhanas, nor for experienced meditators to struggle with them.
I decided to team up with Jhourney – the retreat company that taught me the jhanas – to figure out whether there is any relationship between meditation experience and success with the jhanas. We looked at an anonymized sample of meditators to find out.
TLDR: We did not find any correlation between meditation experience and success with the jhanas. This finding casts into question why jhanas are described as a “meditation practice” at all. And, doing this research raised some interesting questions for me regarding “What does it even mean to be an experienced meditator?” – and then, “Is meditation a desirable goal in itself?”
My friend recently shared the phrase “fingers pointing at the moon” with me, which means that sometimes we get so caught up looking at the fingers that we ignore what they’re pointing towards. I think meditation is a finger, and we don’t know what the moon is yet. Meditation is one method for, say, cultivating attention, but someone who meditates every day is not necessarily adept at that skill. They’re just someone who meditates often. We shouldn’t conflate “meditation experience” with the underlying skills it develops.
A lot of people have asked me why I think I progressed through these states so quickly, and my answer has been: I don’t know!1 But I think searching for the answer could uncover some interesting theories about not just how the jhanas work, but the mind itself. I’ve shared some early ruminations on my evolving framework towards the end of the post, which I’ll be working with Jhourney to validate with more research. I’m excited to share what I learn.
My best theory so far is that, even though I don’t formally meditate, I am very lucky to spend pretty much all day in a focused, creative state, thanks to the nature of my work (writing and research). And, as a new parent, I have a cheat code for sparking joy: thinking about my baby!
Tangentially, this is a nice perspective on the varieties of parental experience. I love my son extremely dearly and am very glad to be a parent and to be his parent specifically -- but at no point in his life would thinking about him have been a cheat code for sparking the kind of uncomplicated joy you seem to say leads to jhana entry.
In fact on reflection I am not sure what thought *would* spark that purity of joy, despite having a very satisfying, meaningful, loving and loved, and comfortable life. This kind of dispositional variation may be an underrated barrier for those who don't have as successful an experience as yours.
The lack of correlation is certainly a surprising initial result.
My kneejerk reactions would be: pooling the various measurements of meditation into a single latent variable might reveal a more meaningful correlation as these do sound very noisy; doesn't Jhourney have EEG equipment or other measurements which could be a more objective measurement of meditation experience?; n = 81 might just not be a big enough sample for such noisy measurements combined with such a short intervention (1 retreat), and a power analysis might show that the nulls here are no surprise at all; and maybe there could be some sort of selection bias where people interested in the Jhourney concept of 'let's build a machine to optimize jhanas' are those who regular meditation doesn't work for and so a different approach puts them on equal footing with newbies.