I also used to think that everything I did fundamentally reduced to a desire for a positive emotional state, however, after a few years of hardcore meditation practice I was convincingly disabused of that notion. There is a state you can train yourself to enter called the Second Jhana (the second in a sequence of four[1] distinct states), this state could be described as pure emotional happiness without any reason for the happiness to occur. You can prolong the state as long as you want, and you can make it more intense than almost any experience of happiness you’d get in daily life. Imagine capturing the moment in time after you opened the present you desperately wanted on Christmas morning when you were 8 years old, that’s what the second Jhana done correctly feels like, extended for as long as you want. Seems appealing, doesn’t it? And it is, it’s extremely pleasant.
However, something weird happens when you feel in your bones that you have happiness on-demand. When you have entered this state so often that no doubt can remain in you of your ability to be happy at the drop of a hat, you realize that something is still missing. You’ve stopped craving happiness, since you now have it on-demand, yet emotional happiness was not, in fact, what you actually wanted. Not only that, but your “emotional palate” starts to change, so to speak. The third Jhana is “pure satisfaction” instead of the “pure happiness” of the second, and over time you start to find happiness to be too gross of a state, too unrefined, too intense, and you start to prefer the satisfaction of the third Jhana to the happiness of the second. Yet this too is considered unrefined after a while, and you settle into the fourth Jhana, which is “Calm Neutrality”. There is no happiness there, nor satisfaction, just a purely neutral emotional state filled with lots of calm, and this you somehow immensely prefer to the happiness of the Second Jhana. This preference would have been unthinkable before you started these practices, just like a child might not understand why anyone would prefer an expensive steak to a pound of chocolate.
In the end even the fourth Jhana cannot truly Satisfy. Even after you have all the happiness, contentment and calm in the world, you still feel something missing from your life, mere emotional happiness cannot possibly be fundamental in the way that you think it is.
Sometimes the list includes 4 additional states after the fourth Jhana, but those are something a bit different, it’s a new sequence of states that used the fourth Jhana as a jumping board, but they don’t naturally cluster together with the first four jhanas.
I also used to think that everything I did fundamentally reduced to a desire for a positive emotional state, however, after a few years of hardcore meditation practice I was convincingly disabused of that notion. There is a state you can train yourself to enter called the Second Jhana (the second in a sequence of four[1] distinct states), this state could be described as pure emotional happiness without any reason for the happiness to occur. You can prolong the state as long as you want, and you can make it more intense than almost any experience of happiness you’d get in daily life. Imagine capturing the moment in time after you opened the present you desperately wanted on Christmas morning when you were 8 years old, that’s what the second Jhana done correctly feels like, extended for as long as you want. Seems appealing, doesn’t it? And it is, it’s extremely pleasant.
However, something weird happens when you feel in your bones that you have happiness on-demand. When you have entered this state so often that no doubt can remain in you of your ability to be happy at the drop of a hat, you realize that something is still missing. You’ve stopped craving happiness, since you now have it on-demand, yet emotional happiness was not, in fact, what you actually wanted. Not only that, but your “emotional palate” starts to change, so to speak. The third Jhana is “pure satisfaction” instead of the “pure happiness” of the second, and over time you start to find happiness to be too gross of a state, too unrefined, too intense, and you start to prefer the satisfaction of the third Jhana to the happiness of the second. Yet this too is considered unrefined after a while, and you settle into the fourth Jhana, which is “Calm Neutrality”. There is no happiness there, nor satisfaction, just a purely neutral emotional state filled with lots of calm, and this you somehow immensely prefer to the happiness of the Second Jhana. This preference would have been unthinkable before you started these practices, just like a child might not understand why anyone would prefer an expensive steak to a pound of chocolate.
In the end even the fourth Jhana cannot truly Satisfy. Even after you have all the happiness, contentment and calm in the world, you still feel something missing from your life, mere emotional happiness cannot possibly be fundamental in the way that you think it is.
Sometimes the list includes 4 additional states after the fourth Jhana, but those are something a bit different, it’s a new sequence of states that used the fourth Jhana as a jumping board, but they don’t naturally cluster together with the first four jhanas.
I think there are times I’d prefer calmness to what you describe as happiness or satisfaction. But the calm gives me a positive emotional state.
Granted, I’ve barely meditated. Maybe you’re using calmness to refer to a feeling that I can’t relate to.