Astral Codex Ten

jhana

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jhana

Article

jhana is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between October 27, 2022 and November 07, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “explain crazy things like jhana”; “people who claimed to have experienced jhanas”; “people also mentioned that they experienced jhana and it wasn’t that great”. It most often appears alongside Buddhism, Buddhists, Lucid Dreaming.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: October 27, 2022
  • Last seen: November 07, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Nick Cammarata On Jhana
October 27, 2022 · Original source
(there are many different jhana states - there’s a discussion of the distinctions here - but I’m lumping them together for simplicity. For attempted explanations of why jhana should exist, see here and here.)
Inline links: there’s a discussion of the distinctions here, here, here
Buddhists say that if you meditate enough, you can learn to enter a state of extreme bliss called jhana.
Jhana is different from enlightenment. Enlightenment changes you forever. Jhana is just a state you can enter during meditation sessions, then leave when the session is over. Enlightenment takes years or decades of work, but some people describe reaching jhana after a few months of practice. Hardcore Buddhists insist that jhana is good only insofar as it serves as a stepping stone to enlightenment; others may find extreme bliss desirable in its own right.
Highlights From The Comments On Jhanas
October 31, 2022 · Original source
[Original post here]
Inline links: here
Okay, “half” is an exaggeration. But by my count we had 21 people who claimed to have experienced jhanas (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21), and 7 who said they were pretty sure it wasn’t real as described (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
Inline links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
I've experienced samatha jhanas. I don't do it so much now. The first few times you get on the edge of 1st jhana, it's difficult to achieve, because you see the wave of pleasure approaching, and grasp for it, and that grasping takes you away from it. So it's a careful balancing act of pleasure/desire in the first place to get there, which you have to master to some degree. To even get to 1st jhana, you have to internally figure out some stuff about the craving/pleasure dynamic on a subconscious, mechanical level.
Contra Resident Contrarian On Unfalsifiable Internal States
November 11, 2022 · Original source
The evidence for jhanas is thousands of people over thousands of years saying they’ve experienced it, a bunch of my friends who I trust a lot saying it worked for them, a handful of experiments with EEGs that seem to show positive results, and a promise that if I tried hard enough I could replicate the results. The evidence for Resident Contrarian being especially good at detecting lies is he says so.
Resident Contrarian writes On Unfalsifiable Internal States, where he defends his skepticism of jhana and other widely-claimed hard-to-falsify internal states. It’s long, but I’ll quote a part that seemed especially important to me:
Inline links: On Unfalsifiable Internal States
At the extremes of those extremes, you see things like the jhana thing: where it’s something that seems unlikely to most but is unfalsifiable, and because of that unfalsifiability is then assumed to be true because it was claimed at all. By Scott’s standard above, we would basically assume that any claim we couldn’t disprove was true, provided we could find at least a few thousand people who claimed it.
In What Sense Is Life Suffering?
November 07, 2025 · Original source
But also, it does seem to match some of the other ground we’ve covered about what people notice during meditative experiences - for example, in Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem. The neuroscientists say the brain tries to minimize prediction error. But a natural way to minimize prediction error is to sit quietly in a dark room and never expose yourself to any unpredictable stimuli at all. Why isn’t this maximum bliss? The qualiologists propose that you’re just bad at sitting in a dark room. If you were good at it - that is, a trained meditator who could calm their brain down enough to pay full attention to the lack of stimuli - it would be amazing. This is why trained meditators are always talking about all the cosmic bliss that they feel. And from here it’s a short hop to the symmetry theory of valence, where the unpleasantness of mental states tracks a sort of irregularity or asymmetry in brain activity.
Inline links: Jhanas And The Dark Room Problem, the symmetry theory of valence
Against all this, many Buddhists claim to be able to reach jhana, a state described as better than sex or heroin - and they say nirvana is even better than that. Partly it’s better because jhana is temporary and nirvana permanent, but it’s also better on a moment-to-moment basis. So nirvana must mean something beyond bare okayness. But then why the endless insistence that life is suffering and the best you can do is make it stop?
Inline links: jhana