Apologies for dropping this rant on an only-semi-related post[1].
It looks to me like people differ tremendously in how easily/quickly they are are to enter the jhanas, from people who enter them on their first sit to people who never manage to, despite best efforts and thousands of hours of practice on retreats; the TTFJ (time to first jhana) looks (roughly) lognormal to me, based on informal conversations/observations of online conversations about this. Some of this might be due to different mental motions being differently intuitive to people, and hard to transmit.
There are some caveats, here, due to differences in labeling for what counts as a “jhana”; especially since it’s a contested term (with Brasington jhanas, Pa Auk Sayadaw jhanas, Visuddhimagga jhanas spanning a wide range of possible states of mind. See here for more detail.)
On top of all of this is that claiming to have entered the jhanas conveys social status, which probably leads to overclaiming, since there is currently no way to check.
But my current best theory is that most meditative states/changes/attainments are heavily gated by neurology, be it developmental (from infancy/very early childhood) or even genetic (e.g. differences in the reward system), and one can get lucky here, or unlucky—and if one gets unlucky one will have to at least spend hundreds of hours undoing traumas/conditioning until the jhanas are accessible.
Teachers probably help, on average, but my best guess is that teachers don’t help a tremendous account. A teacher could be able to earlier discover if a student is bashing their head against an unopenable barrier, and redirect them to do emotional processing that could resolve the barrier. But there is probably a residue of stuff that needs to be worked through, for people who take a while to enter the jhanas.
I, of course, as always, wish that people studied all of this in greater detail; I don’t have high hopes.
It’s still valuable to attempt to enter the jhanas! And even if one can’t, or not quickly or easily, there is still much to be gained from meditation. I don’t know the optimal foraging/optimal stopping time for meditative techniques, it’s probably quite tricky. But it does look advisable for people to sometimes give up in their short-term pursuit of the jhanas.
(Context: I spent north of 1k hours on absorption meditation, including a month-long retreat when I got a teacher, with the goal of reaching the jhanas.)
Personally, it took me months (around 9, I think) to access jhana from when I first seriously started trying, but that was from me trying to self-teach through videos, audio, books, tweets, et cetera. I had a lot of frustration with trying to grasp jhana too much and thus not reaching it even though I could get some piti. Though that’s kind of an inflated number because I was extremely inconsistent with how much I sat and put off sitting a lot. I think I sat for less than ten hours in total before I got 1st jhana and had a big reaction. So, I suppose I’m a very fortunate person.
I follow Brasington’s schema which I think is the same as Pa Auk Sayadaw’s schema, because Brasington studied under him.
Yes! I so wish there was a way to check too, though for me it’s more the fact that I feel very pathetic and sad as a teacher when I can’t give a student a guarantee that they have indeed accessed jhana because I can’t access their qualia.
Could you say more about your theory? I think Nick Cammarata said something similar in a tweet that went something like “it’s more useful/easier to teach teenagers/young people meditation because they have less karma to deal with”. Personally, I do not remember having experienced jhana in childhood. I would read a blog post from you about this.
I would love to hear more about your experiences in attempting to access jhana!
Have you tried other meditation styles? Recently, I’ve been doing some of the meditation described in Charlie Awbery’s Opening Awareness, which I think is basically Dzogchen shi-ne. It’s kind of funny to me because I keep inadvertently entering/nearing jhana when I try to do it even though that is not the point of that style of meditation. I actually don’t know what Dzogchen thinks of jhana, because jhana is very Theravada.
Huh, wow. You sat less than an hour a month? That is indeed lucky :-)
I follow Brasington’s schema which I think is the same as Pa Auk Sayadaw’s schema, because Brasington studied under him.
My intuition is that most people teach the same technique, but have different standards to what counts as {access concentration, j1, j2, …} etc.
Could you say more about your theory? I think Nick Cammarata said something similar in a tweet that went something like “it’s more useful/easier to teach teenagers/young people meditation because they have less karma to deal with”. Personally, I do not remember having experienced jhana in childhood. I would read a blog post from you about this.
Oh, I don’t have a deep theory around this. I have also heard that it’s easier to teach jhānas to children, and that people remember encountering them as children:
Approximately 10 percent of the students I’ve worked with report having experienced one (and sometimes more) jhānas as a child. Occasionally they tell me this based on my description of the jhānas; more often they report is after learning to enter a jhāna, noticing how familiar the state seems, and then remembering having entered that state as a child.
—Leigh Brasington, “Right Concentration” p. 83, 2015
My best speculative guess, going off the little neuroscience I’ve learned from reading Byrnes 2025, is that jhānas are in some way related to the reward system (maybe it can become kind of looped in on itself?, so the possibility is there for every human to enter the jhānas), but usually the reward system is wired up with lots of thought assessors and other inputs, depending on the specific developmental trajectory. This is a bit at odds with why the jhānas aren’t self-reinforcing, but since the reward system is hard-coded maybe the reward system looping back in on itself doesn’t actually change any behavior?
My own attempt(s) to enter the jhānas was to start with absorption meditation (basically just doing anapanasati for several hundred hours (the first 200 of which were fruitful, afterwards not so much), while getting a bunch of pīti but very little sukha), interspersed with a little bit of mettā, and then deciding to do a month-long retreat where I did enter some jhānas on the 21st day, but only unreliably and without transfer to normal life. (More reports of the experience at the link.) I’ve since re-entered jhānas on other retreats, but only briefly, and have basically have decided to push on other axes first because this seems blocked.
I’ve done a lot of different meditation styles, my current favourite is Mahasi-style fast noting. I guess that’s because it dovetails nicely with my mild ADHD? It’s also very non-judgmental, at least in the way that I do it.
For a while I’ve had vague ambitions to explore different meditation techniques, I’d meditate ≥1h/day with a specific technique for ~2 weeks apiece, and then switch to a new technique; I haven’t done this yet.
I do say that I’ve only sat that long formally but it’s possible that “in reality” I’ve undergone preparatory practices. I could name a few things but one prominent thing I could point to was me being raised Christian (nondenominational but doctrinally Pentecostal) where we did stuff like ecstatic worship and praying in tongues. I attended a youth camp when I was in primary school where we were taught how to speak in tongues.
It involves an element of ~surrender or ~release which I feel is one of the necessary components in jhana (I don’t tend to talk so much about it because I feel it’s often counterproductive in coaching, in the same way telling people to ‘just relax!’ is useless) because I feel like it helps to relieve atta, or to learn the sort of mental motion necessary to reduce it. I think atta is a blocker for jhana and I feel like I can sort of tell when someone has more of it than another, and of what kind.
Ten hours a day! That’s so long! I think I’ve only meditated a maximum of four hours total in a day.
Which technique haven’t you tried yet? Sorry, pronoun referent ambiguity strikes again.
Apologies for dropping this rant on an only-semi-related post[1].
It looks to me like people differ tremendously in how easily/quickly they are are to enter the jhanas, from people who enter them on their first sit to people who never manage to, despite best efforts and thousands of hours of practice on retreats; the TTFJ (time to first jhana) looks (roughly) lognormal to me, based on informal conversations/observations of online conversations about this. Some of this might be due to different mental motions being differently intuitive to people, and hard to transmit.
There are some caveats, here, due to differences in labeling for what counts as a “jhana”; especially since it’s a contested term (with Brasington jhanas, Pa Auk Sayadaw jhanas, Visuddhimagga jhanas spanning a wide range of possible states of mind. See here for more detail.)
On top of all of this is that claiming to have entered the jhanas conveys social status, which probably leads to overclaiming, since there is currently no way to check.
But my current best theory is that most meditative states/changes/attainments are heavily gated by neurology, be it developmental (from infancy/very early childhood) or even genetic (e.g. differences in the reward system), and one can get lucky here, or unlucky—and if one gets unlucky one will have to at least spend hundreds of hours undoing traumas/conditioning until the jhanas are accessible.
Teachers probably help, on average, but my best guess is that teachers don’t help a tremendous account. A teacher could be able to earlier discover if a student is bashing their head against an unopenable barrier, and redirect them to do emotional processing that could resolve the barrier. But there is probably a residue of stuff that needs to be worked through, for people who take a while to enter the jhanas.
I, of course, as always, wish that people studied all of this in greater detail; I don’t have high hopes.
It’s still valuable to attempt to enter the jhanas! And even if one can’t, or not quickly or easily, there is still much to be gained from meditation. I don’t know the optimal foraging/optimal stopping time for meditative techniques, it’s probably quite tricky. But it does look advisable for people to sometimes give up in their short-term pursuit of the jhanas.
(Context: I spent north of 1k hours on absorption meditation, including a month-long retreat when I got a teacher, with the goal of reaching the jhanas.)
Thank you for writing the post!
Personally, it took me months (around 9, I think) to access jhana from when I first seriously started trying, but that was from me trying to self-teach through videos, audio, books, tweets, et cetera. I had a lot of frustration with trying to grasp jhana too much and thus not reaching it even though I could get some piti. Though that’s kind of an inflated number because I was extremely inconsistent with how much I sat and put off sitting a lot. I think I sat for less than ten hours in total before I got 1st jhana and had a big reaction. So, I suppose I’m a very fortunate person.
I follow Brasington’s schema which I think is the same as Pa Auk Sayadaw’s schema, because Brasington studied under him.
Yes! I so wish there was a way to check too, though for me it’s more the fact that I feel very pathetic and sad as a teacher when I can’t give a student a guarantee that they have indeed accessed jhana because I can’t access their qualia.
Could you say more about your theory? I think Nick Cammarata said something similar in a tweet that went something like “it’s more useful/easier to teach teenagers/young people meditation because they have less karma to deal with”. Personally, I do not remember having experienced jhana in childhood. I would read a blog post from you about this.
I would love to hear more about your experiences in attempting to access jhana!
Have you tried other meditation styles? Recently, I’ve been doing some of the meditation described in Charlie Awbery’s Opening Awareness, which I think is basically Dzogchen shi-ne. It’s kind of funny to me because I keep inadvertently entering/nearing jhana when I try to do it even though that is not the point of that style of meditation. I actually don’t know what Dzogchen thinks of jhana, because jhana is very Theravada.
Huh, wow. You sat less than an hour a month? That is indeed lucky :-)
My intuition is that most people teach the same technique, but have different standards to what counts as {access concentration, j1, j2, …} etc.
Oh, I don’t have a deep theory around this. I have also heard that it’s easier to teach jhānas to children, and that people remember encountering them as children:
—Leigh Brasington, “Right Concentration” p. 83, 2015
My best speculative guess, going off the little neuroscience I’ve learned from reading Byrnes 2025, is that jhānas are in some way related to the reward system (maybe it can become kind of looped in on itself?, so the possibility is there for every human to enter the jhānas), but usually the reward system is wired up with lots of thought assessors and other inputs, depending on the specific developmental trajectory. This is a bit at odds with why the jhānas aren’t self-reinforcing, but since the reward system is hard-coded maybe the reward system looping back in on itself doesn’t actually change any behavior?
My own attempt(s) to enter the jhānas was to start with absorption meditation (basically just doing anapanasati for several hundred hours (the first 200 of which were fruitful, afterwards not so much), while getting a bunch of pīti but very little sukha), interspersed with a little bit of mettā, and then deciding to do a month-long retreat where I did enter some jhānas on the 21st day, but only unreliably and without transfer to normal life. (More reports of the experience at the link.) I’ve since re-entered jhānas on other retreats, but only briefly, and have basically have decided to push on other axes first because this seems blocked.
I’ve done a lot of different meditation styles, my current favourite is Mahasi-style fast noting. I guess that’s because it dovetails nicely with my mild ADHD? It’s also very non-judgmental, at least in the way that I do it.
For a while I’ve had vague ambitions to explore different meditation techniques, I’d meditate ≥1h/day with a specific technique for ~2 weeks apiece, and then switch to a new technique; I haven’t done this yet.
I do say that I’ve only sat that long formally but it’s possible that “in reality” I’ve undergone preparatory practices. I could name a few things but one prominent thing I could point to was me being raised Christian (nondenominational but doctrinally Pentecostal) where we did stuff like ecstatic worship and praying in tongues. I attended a youth camp when I was in primary school where we were taught how to speak in tongues.
It involves an element of ~surrender or ~release which I feel is one of the necessary components in jhana (I don’t tend to talk so much about it because I feel it’s often counterproductive in coaching, in the same way telling people to ‘just relax!’ is useless) because I feel like it helps to relieve atta, or to learn the sort of mental motion necessary to reduce it. I think atta is a blocker for jhana and I feel like I can sort of tell when someone has more of it than another, and of what kind.
Ten hours a day! That’s so long! I think I’ve only meditated a maximum of four hours total in a day.
Which technique haven’t you tried yet? Sorry, pronoun referent ambiguity strikes again.