note: this is part 2 of a series! links: 1, 2, … (still in progress)

another note: this post is an experimental draft! i think i’m ready to share this version with you guys, but please email me via [corbin at brown dot edu] with ANY questions or feedback, so i can try my best to clear things up!

Some preface: this topic can be unnecessarily confusing!

As I said in the previous blog post, we’re recently seeing a lot of cool nerds get into advanced meditation.1 Some of those nerds hang out online, especially the ones in San Francisco, and somehow I found myself talking with them.

One of the things I kept hearing about were these “deep meditative states” called “jhanas.” That sounded really weird and exotic, especially when I already had some funky preconceived notions of “advanced meditation.” To make it worse, meditators sometimes use funky jargon to explain things; even the word “jhana” itself made it sound really exotic to me!2 So, I didn’t believe them for a long time, and there weren’t many good public resources on how to clearly make sense of this — everything was either a woo traditional explanation, or a practice guide for experienced meditators, or a short blog post describing someone’s retreat experience, or a non-comprehensive FAQ section, etc.

Still, I was really intrigued, so I spent a lot of my free time trying to decipher what the heck they were trying to talk about. Eventually, it became clear to me that these are not magical or exotic at all! In fact, I’d argue that it might be better for a curious bystander/beginner to not even think about them as “advanced meditation,” so that we can do away with any preconceived notions and popular misconceptions. They’re kind of just a cool little mental trick, with effects that are surprisingly empirically reproducible, and also surprisingly profoundly positive.

Now I wanna share that understanding with you guys! (I’m partly writing this blog post so I can finally send my friends something instead of me just rambling to them, haha.)

The approach I’ll take here is similar to how my favorite professor might explain “entropy” or “KL divergence”: not as some spooky abstract thing, but just as... a definition that follows naturally from familiar cases we already understand.

Yes, there are some surprising empirical results, but the core idea is pretty intuitive and perhaps familiar!

(1) It’s pretty reasonable to expect that humans can learn the mental motions to reliably spark a positive emotion — we can obviously do it with negative emotions by simply visualizing a triggering situation, and we can learn how to reliably do the same thing but for positive emotions.

In practice, this can look like visualizing an uncomplicated joyful memory, or cultivating a sense of love or gratitude for something or someone, or just gently smiling, or imagining a puppy or a smiling baby, etc. The positive emotion here is more important to attend to than whatever you choose to spark it.

(2) Then, hopefully it’s not hard to see how (with enough practice) this can develop into a more stable, continuous positive feedback loop. We can obviously create this kind of self-sufficient fire with negative emotions (e.g. rumination, grudges, etc.), and it turns out that we can learn how to do the same thing with positive emotions (bathing in joy, love, peace).

In practice, this can look something like: taking a few minutes to physically relax, then starting a loop of gently re-sparking the positive emotion, relaxing any subtle physical tension, and noticing any mental tension (including distractions) then softening it via welcoming / accepting / loving / embracing / comforting / befriending / listening to / opening up to / hugging / holding / sitting with / forgiving that inner part of yourself; then repeating this whole loop a few times per minute. It’s better to relate to experience more openly with less tension, instead of trying to spam a big happiness button to forcefully change experience. The tiniest emotions are enough to start a feedback loop. With a relaxed mind, the positive feeling will naturally stay continuous (and even grow on its own), like a hockey puck on an ice rink. If any stubborn mental tension exists and doesn’t straightforwardly relax, it can usually be an emotional blockage that needs a bit more attention, like a longer session solely focused on gently untangling your mind as if you’re patiently talking to a group of preschoolers that aren’t getting along.3 Just like befriending other people, the motions of befriending your own mind has a rich landscape of possibilities to try out. And, just like with other people, you can’t command / contrive / force friendship with yourself. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Curiosity helps a lot. With enough experimentation and engagement, all of these motions become second-nature over time.

(3) Then, the surprising empirical result (i.e. what we surprisingly observe in advanced meditators) is that with enough stability/continuity of positive emotion, there’s a sort of step jump or inflection point where it grows exponentially, into a profoundly positive state. This is measurable4, not just subjective report, but it’s still kinda hard to believe if you think about it like an exotic meditative state — I think it’s way more believable if we again compare it to the familiar case with negative emotions. We know it’s totally possible to have panic about panic that “takes off” exponentially; we call this a panic attack. It just turns out we can learn how to do a similar thing but for positive emotions; we can learn the skill of having a love attack, a happiness attack, a peace attack. And this is what is called a jhana!

In practice, you have to let this final step happen to you, in some sense. It’s a lot like sneezing or falling to sleep, in the sense that you might initially put in some effort to cultivate the proper conditions, but the final jump happens on its own, the body automatically carries out the final step of process, you don’t have to consciously enact it (in fact, you intervening to try to skip to the end sometimes makes the happiness-feedback-loop less effective, just like when trying to fall asleep).

I want to again emphasize that this phenomenon is not necessarily because of anything mystical, magical, or exotic. It’s just what reproducibly happens when we attend to a positive feeling while the mind is sufficiently relaxed and collected.

And, it turns out that people can get pretty good at this, such that they’re able to reliably self-induce these states after just a few minutes silently going through the preparatory mental motions, or even while walking!

Apparently, there’s 8 kinds of these experiences, and they feel really great!

After lots of “jhana practice”, it becomes evident that these experiences can be sorted into 8 distinct categories. This is kind of a surprising empirical result! One might expect that it would be a fully continuous spectrum, but we instead observe that these profoundly-peaceful-feedback-loops have discrete modes.

In addition, these experiences generally follow a kind of natural progression, such that deepening one kind of experience leads to the next one! Thus, by convention, they’re denoted as jhana 1, jhana 2, and so on, commonly abbreviated as J1, J2, etc.

The first four categories of jhana experiences (denoted J1 to J4) feel really, really, really good. Here are some descriptions from meditators!

I want to emphasize that these are not just mildly positive experiences; practitioners consistently report feeling the most joy/peace they’ve felt in months or years. In fact, it’s pretty common for meditators to compare J2 and MDMA. For reference, here’s a beautiful quote of the MDMA subjective experience:

The woodpile is so beautiful, about all the joy and beauty that I can stand. I am afraid to turn around and face the mountains, for fear they will overpower me. But I did look, and I am astounded. Everyone must get to experience a profound state like this.

I feel totally peaceful. I have lived all my life to get here, and I feel I have come home. I am complete.

— Alexander Shulgin, biochemist, rediscoverer of MDMA

The next four categories of jhanic experience (J5 to J8) are less emotional, and their prominent defining qualities are more about quirks in how our experience gets rendered, especially aspects like our sense of space.

I also wanted to include the following diagram (below) which puts into perspective how good things can feel. Don’t think of it as strictly accurate, but I do think it does a good job at illustrating that the range of positive valence is vast and spans many orders of magnitude (i.e. the fact that we can feel not just 10% better or 100% better, but like 100x better), which is generally consensus among advanced meditators.

Another surprise is that jhanas are basically completely non-addictive?!

There’s many accounts of meditators literally forgetting they have this skill, or just having no desire to do it. Despite being profoundly outlier positive experiences, jhanas generally just don’t really mess with our value system; we don’t get addicted to them and narrow out everything else in our life.

If anything, jhanas actually do the opposite of addiction, helping us cultivate equanimity and open up to life in more nourishing ways. This might seem really strange! How can better-than-MDMA experiences be non-addictive?

Maybe one good analogy is being thirsty for water! A lot of us walk around chronically parched for joy, pleasure, contentment — and if you’re that thirsty (or if water is generally scarce), then your whole motivational system orients around finding the next drink. (And if you see most people like this, you might even conclude that humans are water-maximizers!) But once you have reliable access to a faucet with surplus water, you just drink when you’re thirsty, and then go do other things. You might usually even forget the faucet is there.

Jhanas and happiness seem to work the same way. Just like we aren’t actually water-maximizers, we also aren’t actually pleasure-maximizers! Practitioners consistently report that having reliable access to surplus profound joy doesn’t make them chase it harder, but actually does the opposite. They literally forget they even have this skill. The desperate edge comes off, we develop more equanimity, etc!

Apparently, we can teach this skill pretty quickly?

Or, at least, it’s a lot more tractable than people usually think, and we’re observing that it doesn’t take many years of practicing like a monk.

First, let me take a small detour: In general, we already have many examples of how really good pedagogy/metalearning allows us to learn way faster than usual. Not just 10% or 50% faster, but more like 10-100x faster, getting to a basic level of fluency within a few days or weeks, rather than a few years. One example I like is how Betty Edwards teaches drawing. The premise of her pedagogical method is that drawing can be broken down into a set of certain perceptual skills. She’s isolated the specific micro mental muscles that seem to fundamentally contribute to the overarching skill of drawing. Then, she makes students do exercises that she designed to activate those specific fundamental micro mental muscles (kinda like wiggling your ear for the first time). It turns out that this kind of pedagogy is robust enough to make confused/untalented beginners progress really fast5, getting to a kind of fluency that usually takes years otherwise. The below screenshot shows self-portraits drawn before and after a 5-day workshop (30-40 hours of instruction and practice).

Conveniently, it just turns out that we can do a very similar thing with the skill of self-induced happiness feedback loops (jhanas).

There’s this team of people (Jhourney) who wanted to see how fast the jhanas could be taught. So, they found some really advanced meditators and took lots of measurements (incidentally creating the world’s largest EEG dataset for advanced meditative states), because they wanted to try creating an effective neuro-feedback loop that might help beginners learn the jhanas. Surprisingly, it turns out the neurotech wasn’t even needed for massive improvements in learning speed! They’re seeing reasonable success in teaching the jhanas to novice meditators in under a week, without neurotech, just from improvements in pedagogy and metalearning.6

For some more public resources on jhanas, check this footnote.7

And, for some more nuances, check this footnote.8

But jhanas are only temporary!

They’re profoundly positive, but they’re temporary, so why is this good for us? Well, first of all, we’ve seen that they’re quite a scenic adventure with some reproducibly profound effects! That’s cool already.

But more importantly, how does this lead to lasting improvements towards profound baseline wellbeing??? Well, it turns out that jhanic experiences are one of the things that create really great conditions for investigating the micro-mechanics of suffering/happiness!

This is really cool; it’s not a trivial result! In fact, it’s exactly one of the main things that the Buddha’s innovation was about!

It seems like people knew about the happiness-feedback-loops (jhanas) long before the Buddha guy, and people were practicing them for the various cool side effects. The Buddha guy comes along and he starts autistically obsessing about how to solve suffering, so he leaves home and he goes to a couple well-known teachers, and it turns out he’s a prodigy at this meditation stuff, but he’s like, “Wait, it’s not actually solving my suffering/happiness.” He does a lot of quirky, careful experiments on himself (kinda like Bryan Johnson but for happiness) and goes through a whole adventure, then eventually he was like, “Ohhh, jhanas can help us look closely (i.e. quiet the mind + gain high sensory clarity), and it turns out that if we look really closely, we notice some certain strange quirks about how the mind works, one of which is that a certain subtle mental motion seems to generate all our suffering, and we can eventually stop doing it which allows us to feel really good all the time!”

So that’s what the next blog post will be about!

1

One small example is that many Anthropic staff members have gone on a “jhana” retreat.

note: this is part 1 of a series! links: 1, 2, … (still in progress)

another note: this post is an experimental draft! i think i’m ready to share this version with you guys, but please email me via [corbin at brown dot edu] with ANY questions or feedback, so i can try my best to clear things up!

some preface: my favorite interest

i’ve been making a lot of new friends at brown/risd over the past semester! and it’s also the holidays, so i’ve been seeing many relatives and family friends. this means that i’ve had to introduce myself a lot of times in the past few months. i’m not the best at social things, but they usually ask me what i study, and i get to talk about my favorite interest, so i’ve got those first couple minutes down. that usually looks like this:

“so what do you study?”

“oh uh physics and applied math computer science”

“wow, that sounds hard! [says smth about the cs/tech industry, blah blah]”

“no haha actually i wanna go into meditation research!”

“oh hm medication research? like, medicine?”

“no, meditation research haha.”

“whoa i’ve never heard that before! uhh so what does that look like?”

“haha yeah so it turns out that recently, like over the past 5-20 years or so, we’ve been seeing some really smart nerds get into advanced meditation, and so we’re kinda seeing that advanced meditation is actually a really empirically reproducible path towards profound wellbeing, like way more than world-record therapy. but it’s a really early field, kinda like ai in the 1970s, and i think it rly needs more smart people working on it”

then, at this point, either the person tunes out and says something like “oh okay haha wow” and we move on to another topic, or they get interested and i get to rant for a few more minutes about my favorite interest!

then we get into “it turns out we can train the mental motions to spark positive emotion and induce the opposite of a panic attack and then surprisingly we can get into these states as good as mdma” and then if they’re still interested we get into “yeah so it turns out that with enough sensory clarity we can see that certain micro-tensions seem to cause all suffering” and i get to go through funny analogies like a cold shower’s brace/embrace1 to really drill down that this isn’t just a vague philosophical abstraction, it’s just a really quick/subtle mental event that we can observe (and you can even give it a name like grabbygrab2), and then i’ll say smth like “and once we see grabbygrab then we can eventually stop doing it and then it turns out we just get outlier amounts of joy, peace, connection, wholeness, beauty for free. which is surprising but yeah it turns out the grabbygrab was causing all the suffering.”

and they usually have a billion misconceptions, because it’s so easy to get confused, and there’s just not many anticonfusing resources out there!! (so they ask me questions and i get to pretend im like my favorite math youtuber and explain away confusing things, which is one of my favorite activities ever, i get so giddy about it.) but of course they usually don’t wanna listen to me yap for a few hours, and in general i just wish there was a small book i could recommend to them, or a video essay, or a cool website, or something like that. but i don’t think there is one!3

so, this blog post series is my attempt at making some kind of explainer :D

i’m gonna try my best to give you a good overview of the field, and i wanna make sure that you’re sufficiently unconfused on what this is even all about, and how to make sense of this stuff. and, as another guy interested in meditation research once said,

Take my attempt here with a grain of salt. Many book length treatments have argued different sides of this. I only hope that this can serve as a starting point for your own experiential investigation that is somewhat less confused, as well as make future engagement with other interpretations less confused.4

a lot of meditation explanations are like if a guy learned how to think in japanese and he’s like “wow i should write a book to teach everyone” but of course he writes it in japanese

these things can usually be kinda confusing! meditators typically aren’t super good at precisely describing their experience (or prescribing instructions to get there), and they also use a lot of quirky vocab with quirky connotations, which can lead to a lot of misunderstanding for a curious bystander or beginner. here are two funny jokes about that:

these things can usually be kinda unreliable! there are many pursuits which are mistakenly understood to promise outcomes in mental/emotional wellbeing, whether those claims are implicit or explicit. we often see examples of this play out in domains like philosophy, spirituality, psychology, or self-help, where people can mistakenly feel like they’re making breakthroughs but don’t actually have permanent shifts in wellbeing.5 these domains hold immense beauty and are necessary for navigating the human condition, but it’s also really important that we carefully discern what actually leads to robustly reproducible improvements in baseline wellbeing!6

but recently, we’ve been seeing some really precise nerds get into advanced meditation, so we’re getting more and more precise talk about this stuff!

we can talk about meditation precisely! in the past few decades, we’ve been seeing some really precise nerds get into advanced meditation. (even more recently, we’re even seeing a growing meditation scene around silicon valley.7) this means that the surprising empirical claims of advanced meditation are finally becoming less “woo” and more legible — it turns out that we can look at canonical theravada buddhism as a proto-science of wellbeing, and through this lens we can sort of decouple the philosophical, ontological, moral claims from the empirical claims about observable shifts in experience.

and what we’re seeing is that advanced meditators have a pretty operationalizable, reproducible path towards improving wellbeing by extreme orders of magnitude. in other words, we can talk about meditation very technically and precisely, and it does lead to profound permanent shifts in wellbeing.

we can talk about suffering & happiness precisely! historically, these outcomes have mostly required people to spend thousands of hours observing the causes of mental/emotional suffering — not mainly via philosophy or psychology, but mainly via directly observing the micro-phenomena surrounding suffering/happiness, via high-resolution sensory clarity (which is why meditative practice is helpful).

a good analogy might be: it’s kinda like how we can look at our visual experience and easily gain a bit of insight into our brain’s visual processing. we can notice saccades and realize that our eyes never actually see a full, clear picture at any given instant, and they instead move around 10 times a second while our brain cleverly generates a clear, smooth visual experience for us. now imagine that kind of investigation, but for the micro-motions surrounding how our brain generates suffering/happiness.

this is really cool!! in the same way that we learned about our brain’s visual processing by simply looking closely at subtle events, we can also learn some surprising things about what exactly causes suffering/happiness! (it’s a pretty simple thing in the end, but lots of complicated things can constipate it, which is why meditation effects turn out to be really useful for the investigation.)

and what we’re seeing is that advanced meditators seem to generally agree on the same micro-mechanistic model of what causes suffering and happiness, and it generally suggests a singular, fundamental cause that can be observed clearly and dealt with.

in this series, i want to explain three awesome conjectures

okay, so i think the important ideas mostly orbit around three main categories.8

we can kinda label them like this:

1. toward wow… (empirically reproducible practices with surprisingly profound effects)

2. ow! how ow? (a micro-mechanistic model of suffering and happiness)

3. no ow, wow! (we can have persistent deep okayness / profound baseline mental wellbeing)

i like this order because i think the “toward wow…” investigation shows what kinds of things we can observe, such that the “ow! how ow?” model emerges straightforwardly.

these are what the next posts are going to be about. see you there!

3

currently, i feel like the meditation field has almost zero public resources that are sufficiently anticonfusing, comprehensive, and legible to a curious, intelligent bystander. as in, when i think about pointing a curious friend to some resource, very few resources come to mind where i can be confident they’ll actually be less confused after reading it. (i mean, there’s lots of really valuable resources like Seeing that Frees, The Science of Enlightenment, MCTB, TWIM, etc… and i think they’re super awesome. but, pedagogically, are these actually anticonfusing and legible to a confused beginner? or are they more like those weirdly confusing math textbooks that confused students have to unnecessarily slog through?) on the other hand, there’s so many resources for a beginner physics student (or someone just getting into coding, or math, or whatever) who’s really curious. they can go through some really good textbooks, and i can remember many videos that i’ve been very excited to recommend to confused classmates.

i mean, i know explainers aren’t necessarily the biggest bottleneck for the field, but i really wanna share my favorite interest with other people!! it’s one of the things in the world that i care the most about, it’s like a cool little fandom, and of course i wanna share that with people. and also, if we want this field to really take off then we need to be better at sharing this stuff with curious people! it seems like advanced meditators have the most tractable model of suffering/happiness, and the most reproducible path towards feeling persistently, profoundly, deeply okay. but, it seems like there’s only a relatively tiny ingroup of nerds who know about these things because this is also somehow their favorite interest so they’ve spent a few years deciphering a wide array of mostly-illegible stuff from advanced meditators or whatever.

5

here’s a related article on “flaky breakthroughs”.

one common cause of this is advice that’s being poetically descriptive of the desired state instead of being precisely/technically prescriptive about a deterministic solution to get there.

or, advice that isn’t fully comprehensively accounting for bottlenecks (forgetting that “the answer is easier than the question”), and thus only works sometimes:

7

one small example is that many members of anthropic staff have gone on a “jhana” retreat.

8

if you’re familiar with buddhist things, you might notice that these are the “four noble truths” that the buddha canonically gave us! i hesitate to call them that, because i like viewing the guy more like a prodigiously talented meditator who just figured out a few really surprising things about how suffering/happiness works.

they’re not necessarily facts, they’re more like newton’s F=ma discovery. it’s just a good model that works for lots of cases and gets us really far. the newtonian model is used for lots of engineering, and the buddha’s micro-mechanics of suffering/happiness have been used for a lot of profound, lasting improvements in wellbeing. after some good science, we might find that it’s not 100% true, like what happened to newton because of general relativity and whatnot.