# Jhana 0

> Happiness is a prerequisite to the jhanas. 
> 
> \-\- Rob Burbea

The jhanas are a series of eight, discrete states of experience that are described as extremely happy, pleasurable, and calm. They are accessible through specific meditation practices and are non-addictive. You may have heard of them from Buddhism or [Scott Alexander](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nick-cammarata-on-jhana).

I have spent a year practicing jhana meditation and have experienced zero of them. Here are some of my reflections.

Generate a positive feeling
===========================

> "Good luck at school, Harry. Do you think I bought you enough books?"
> 
> "You can never have enough books... but you certainly tried, it was a really, really, really good try..."
> 
> It had brought tears to his eyes, the first time Harry had remembered and tried to put it into the spell.
> 
> Harry brought the wand up and around and brandished it, a gesture that didn't have to be precise, only bold and defiant.
> 
> "Expecto Patronum!" cried Harry.
> 
> Nothing happened.
> 
> Not a single flicker of light.
> 
> \-\- [Chapter 43: Humanism, Pt 1, HPMOR](https://hpmor.com/chapter/43)

[Jhourney](https://www.jhourney.io/) is a startup that teaches the jhanas in a one-week retreat. I attended a Jhourney retreat in 2024.

Briefly, the meditation technique we used can be summed up as:  
1\. Generate a positive feeling using some mental object X.  
2\. Collect your attention around where it is felt in the body.  
3\. Gently refresh X whenever it fades.

For the object X, it can be anything. Common ones were lovingkindness phrases (e.g. "May you be well, may you be free from suffering"), literally smiling, or a happy memory[^vb171sfxagg].

We meditated for 6-10 hours a day during the retreat, with each sit ranging between 30 to 90 minutes. Most of them were self-directed, some were guided, and some were done in pairs.

For step 2, there was a particular emphasis, that we were not just paying attention to random pleasant physical sensations in the body, but that positive feelings have physical sensations associated with them (or, worded differently, positive feelings are MADE of positive physical sensations). And it is those that we collect our attention around.

This is where things went wrong for me. How do you differentiate a positive feeling from a mere positive physical sensation? I remember asking someone this on the first day of the retreat, and, in good pedagogical form, they reflected the question back at me first. I thought for a second, and replied: "You kinda just know when something is a feeling? I can't really describe it."

Well, I don't think I actually knew. I was pretty disconnected from my emotions without realizing it. For instance, whenever I was excited or happy or disappointed, I would know this feeling was happening, but I never really paid attention to how I knew. It just felt like the feeling was "happening in my head". I don't even know if I actually "felt" anything in my head. It was as if feelings had no associated spatial location in my experience, but since I was forced to pick where they were, I imagined they were in my head because that's where "I" am right? That's where my brain is, and "I" am (running on) my brain.

So during most of the retreat, it was with this emotion-blindness that I stumbled through the practice. When I could feel joy, but could not find it in the body, I would find some positive sensation and infer that, since this sensation was happening at the same time as the joy, it must be part of the joy. And when I did not feel joy, I would look around for physical sensations, and try to convince myself that one of them was some positive emotion's associated physical sensation that I should concentrate on.

One such sensation was (what I think can be called) a neutral piti. It's a tingling sensation, kind of like goosebumps, but it also feels hot, and expansive. I felt it on the surface of the skin. This sensation arose very consistently during most of my sits, and is definitely not a thing I feel in everyday life. And it does not feel good, it's just neutral. As I now understand it, there are other practices that work with this kind of sensation in a way that leads to jhana, but it definitely is not an emotion. One instructor had pointed out to me that what I was describing did not sound like an emotion, but I didn't get what else I could focus on.

There was a litmus test we were taught, that if you feel bad at the end of a sit, or even just non-positive, you probably are doing something wrong. After most sits where I tried working with this neutral piti, I would feel a bit tired and blank after.

On the last day of the retreat I started realizing this litmus test failure. The point of the "generate a positive feeling" thing is that the positive feeling is supposed to feel good, so if it doesn't, then obviously I'm not actually paying attention to a positive feeling. So I tried doing a sit where I looked for where the "feel good"ness was. I thought of a happy memory, and I found there was a happy sensation that was like a trickle of sweet liquid in my chest. That's what the sensation actually felt like, it felt like it had the texture of a liquid, and it somehow "felt" sweet. I did feel much better when I ended that sit than when I started.

I realized I had actually been feeling things like this throughout many sits. Often it's some kind of blob of good feeling in my chest, but I've also felt things like light behind my face, or a small ball-shaped thing in the head. For negative emotions, I have felt things like a hole opening up in my stomach region for dread. These obviously don't correspond to any real anatomical thing or happening. There wasn't actually liquid going down my chest, so I think I dismissed things like this because they sounded like I was imagining things. I expected feelings to be consistent with my mental model of body anatomy. I also for some reason expected feelings to be more on the surface of my body, than inside my body. But a feeling is the thing that you are directly experiencing, not something in your model of your body.

The map is not the territory, even when the territory is your own body!

After the insight into the True Shape of Emotions, I was pumped. It was time to do the jhanas for real now!

There were more hindrances.

Do the obvious healthy things
=============================

Aside from positive feelings, there were several other major blockers that I encountered, which stopped me from doing the main practice entirely.

Not practicing
--------------

Outside of a retreat, it's hard to keep yourself motivated to practice. After work, spending 60-90 minutes meditating is a pretty big opportunity cost if you have things you want to learn or you're just tired and want to relax. About every 2 months I'd see people talking about the jhanas on the internet and get motivated again, and then it would fade as I encountered obstacles and difficulties or if life got busy.

Uncomfortable posture
---------------------

There's a lot of physical issues with meditating for long periods of time. Sitting is really uncomfortable. But they actually gave a really good tip during the retreat: You can just lie down. You don't have to sit upright. This makes things a lot more comfortable. I would stack up my blankets, then put a pillow on top and lean back on it. It was great.

However, after two days on the retreat, I encountered leg pain. It felt like a cramp / a contraction that would not go away until I moved my leg. And if you're constantly moving your legs every 20 seconds, you can't focus on the meditation at all. The best solution I found for this was to lie down but let my legs hang over the bed, but this wasn't perfect. It would still happen maybe every 1 in 3 sits.

It was only long after the retreat that it went away completely, and as far as I can tell it was because I started exercising more regularly. All I really did was go on walks every day, go for a run maybe once a week, and on weekends go to the gym. It's not super intense exercise. But I don't get weird leg discomfort anymore. This is a good example of what I have started referring to as "Doing the obvious healthy things is a prerequisite to the jhanas".

Daydreaming
-----------

I often fall into a daydream state during meditation. It's not like a regular distraction where you think "oh I forgot to make dinner, what should I cook later" and then a few seconds later you notice you're distracted and can return to the meditation object. It was more like, I would just completely forget I was meditating for over 10 minutes, and have no agency or mental capacity to even notice that I was supposed to be meditating. I would be lost in a non-lucid dream, though I don't think I was actually asleep, so I call this a "daydream".

These were particularly pernicious. During the retreat, since we were meditating so many hours of the day, usually I'd encounter one of these maybe once or twice early on, but then after being more rested from the meditation, later sits I'd be fine. But, after the retreat, every day I would have time for at most 1 sit at night, and I think well over half the sits I would slip into the daydream state within 10-15 minutes. I would set a timer every 15 minutes to snap me out of it, but even then, I would still often slip back each time, or feel oddly groggy and irritated after "waking up".

At some point last August, I looked at what was happening and realized, if most of the time I meditate, I'm not actually doing the practice (the positive feeling loop thing), what am I even doing? It is not surprising that I am not making any progress. I had the stubborn belief that if I kept practicing, maybe this daydream thing would go away? But it had persisted for half a year.

I am now pretty sure this was just due to not sleeping well. Last year, I would often sleep at 2am and get up at 9am. Although the number of hours sounds fine, sleeping that late leads to much worse sleep quality for me. There were several brief periods where I slept earlier, and the daydream problem went away each time.

I no longer meditate unless I have had reasonable sleep quality the previous few days.

Aside: Fail (slightly more) loudly
----------------------------------

This is probably hindsight bias, but I feel like I could have caught the feelings confusion issue earlier if I was more willing to say "this isn't working, I'm doing something wrong" to myself and the instructors. I probably felt that this would be embarrassing, both for myself and for them (?!). What if they thought that I thought that they were bad teachers? I would feel bad if they thought that.

Another reason is that all the messaging around accepting and letting go and how wanting the jhanas is counterproductive to reaching the jhanas made me think that I should try to have an accepting attitude toward my progress, which is directionally correct. However, I may have confused "accepting attitude" with faked optimism, and in talks with the instructors, I probably focused too much on things that could be construed as progress, instead of talking more about my doubts about how things were going and asking for help.

I have noticed myself doing the same thing during daily standups at work.

Mundane joy
===========

A few years ago, I asked rational!Quirrell (GPT 3.5 Base simulation) for life advice, and in one branch of the [Loom](https://generative.ink/posts/loom-interface-to-the-multiverse/), he told me:

> First, figure out how to make yourself happy by your own choice of what gives you pleasure." The Professor's lips narrowed. "In the absence of true happiness, you cannot make any useful decisions; you will always be warped by the absence of that true happiness, and your decisions will always turn out wrong.

I've read some stories of people who, through doing the jhanas, became less interested in pleasurable activities, like eating dessert. It sounds like the experience of jhana can let you become more resistant to [Lotuses](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KwdcMts8P8hacqwrX/noticing-the-taste-of-lotus) and [Junk](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wQnJ4ZBEbwE9BwCa3/personal-experiment-one-year-without-junk-media). It's an elegant idea that I still find compelling: by making happiness abundant, you can better focus on the important things.

The jhanas turned out to be more difficult for me than I expected. But, from a default of feeling kind of bad on most days, I have become happier over the past year through mundane means, like taking a lot of walks (even small circles indoors help), cooking food that I like to eat, and various forms of [play](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RryyWNmJNnLowbhfC/please-don-t-throw-your-mind-away) (ranging from reading [very old books](https://ctext.org/book-of-poetry) to trick-shotting pillows at chairs). Learning to feel my emotions more directly definitely helped with this. I more often notice when I feel bad, and then I try things to resolve it. Previously, I would just ignore it and keep feeling bad.

As I became happier on average, I no longer felt that desperate to experience the jhanas. But I still find the jhanas very cool and interesting, and will continue to practice. One thing I plan on trying next is experiments on reducing expectations and efforting.

Related posts
=============

Here are two detailed success stories written by Jhourney attendees:

*   [https://nadia.xyz/jhanas](https://nadia.xyz/jhanas)
*   [https://nintil.com/jhanas/](https://nintil.com/jhanas/)

And here is one person who learned the jhanas on their own:

*   [https://x.com/pixqc/status/1896102977141948634](https://x.com/pixqc/status/1896102977141948634)

These are LessWrong posts about personal experiences with other interesting Buddhist states:

*   [Kenshō by Valentine](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tMhEv28KJYWsu6Wdo/kensh)
*   [Awakening by lsusr](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/99PwFdz7qwHxQgwYx/awakening)
*   [Razied's experiences with meditation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XqpkCAHrtwBfLSSzk/how-to-be-skeptical-about-meditation-buddhism?commentId=Nn5qetCDG6N3xwCMr)

As well as warnings of the dangers of meditation:

*   [Meditation is dangerous](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fhL7gr3cEGa22y93c/meditation-is-dangerous)
*   [lsusr's Second Insight Cycle](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pCqfmmpbe8AE3FePy/p/99PwFdz7qwHxQgwYx#Second_Insight_Cycle)

Finally, these are some non-mystical models of Buddhist states:

*   [A non-mystical explanation of insight meditation and the three characteristics of existence by Kaj Sotala](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mf2MCkYgSZSJRz5nM/a-non-mystical-explanation-of-insight-meditation-and-the)
*   [\[Intuitive self-models\] 6. Awakening / Enlightenment / PNSE by Steven Byrnes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GvJe6WQ3jbynyhjxm/intuitive-self-models-6-awakening-enlightenment-pnse)

[^vb171sfxagg]: This does sound awfully like the Patronus charm right? There was a day where I actually thought, hey, what if I used my Rejection of Death As The Natural Order as my happy thought and achieved the Jhanas? That would be the coolest rationalist moment. It didn't work. But I only tried once.