It is not even access concentration the Jhana 1 description. It is "just" the natural joy that arises from doing wholesome states like ethical behavior or generosity or unconditional love. (Which is good! Really good! just lets not appropriate the term 'jhana')
It is great people are discovering that there is a happiness within that is not dependent on getting things or things being a certain way and you can increase and cultivate wholesome states that are outside the sensory world. But the sort of description of so called "jhana" in the article misses it - it points to the feelings generated in the body. They are rather like a boat and its wake... the wake is the feelings but the boat is something else - they are the wholesome states. We don't focus on the feelings, rather keep driving the boat (focusing on our meditation object). Then ... boom... we suddenly hit a river bank and have no idea what happened. It's unmistakable. For instance with metta the boat would be the intention "may I be happy" the feelings are the by-product or wake. Jhana is proper like a boat that suddenly unexpectedly hits the shore... It rocks and blows the mind (and as the mind contains model of the world - it feels like the world shook a bit then froze). A good "geeks guide" is "Mindfulness Bliss and Beyond" written by someone who finished a physics degree at cambridge and spent 9 years with Ajahn Chah.
If we instead mistake something else for "jhana" like some positive feels, we're going to be stuck cultivating a local maxima. It's not to say the practice is wrong, it's actually quite good. It's just not jhana. We should listen to the professional community just like we listen to the professionals of physics in academia, instead of some posts from people on the internet that have done a few 30 day retreats.
But please do not call it jhana and have some humility ... these terms are central to some of the okdest institutions in the world and theres a professional community in the dharmic traditions who literally do this full time all over asia.
If someone wants to hear a competent speaker who has done the necessary time and training at those institutions and is also trained in the conventional university system, someone like Ajahn Brahm (Theoretical Physics Cambridge) Beth Upton (Economics Cambridge) or Shalia Catherine or Sayadaw U Jagara
I dunno, I think it’s worthwhile to acknowledge that this describes the (very?) shallow end of the pool but these language game land wars are profoundly uninteresting to me.
This–and TWIM jhanas in general–certainly involve the arising of the relevant jhana factors. People feel real and somewhat life-changing experiences of piti, sukha, equanimity… are those, due to limited concentration, below some critical threshold to earn the name “jhana”? Sure there are reasonable arguments for this position but it’s just a language game. Both strong and weak versions of these states are real phenomena that lead to increases in wellbeing.
Besides, it’s not even entirely clear that the earliest texts are actually describing something all _that_ much more concentrated than Nadia does, although the later visuddhimagga most certainly does, and those teachers certainly teach it.
I’ve heard some teachers contrast Sutta-jhanas to visuddhimagga-jhanas and I think that’s a reasonable distinction.
Claiming that someone attains Arhat (or Arahant, if you are used to Theravada texts) with just a couple of meditation retreats is just wild. Because the 9 dhyana, or 9 samadhi, or 9 Juana corresponded to the level of wisdom of an Arhat. It corresponds to enlightenment in Theravada, and in Mahayana too - just not the "biggest" one.
So it's actually very harmful to do these claims; each dhyana (or jhana) level corresponds to a certain level of wisdom, and you are supposed to have less and less afflictions as you move up. The problem with meditation training is that is very common (and easy) to get sidetracked for 10 years thinking you have attainment but you are stuck. The Chinese style is to find a good teacher, an enlightened teacher, a so called Good Knowing Advisor who can certify your attainment or put you on the right track. Because otherwise it's just wishful thinking.
Best or luck to the author, but like the GP said, have some humility and find a competent, certified teacher. Making false claims, even out of ignorance will prevent you from accessing the proper instructions in the future.
>Claiming that someone attains Arhat (or Arahant, if you are used to Theravada texts) with just a couple of meditation retreats is just wild. Because the 9 dhyana, or 9 samadhi, or 9 Juana corresponded to the level of wisdom of an Arhat. It corresponds to enlightenment in Theravada, and in Mahayana too - just not the "biggest" one.
To be fair, the Pali Canon is filled with episodes of followers spontaneously achieving arahantship after practicing only a brief time. I'm having trouble finding the sutta, but even the Buddha says with a single moment of appropriate practice, enlightenment is obtainable immediately.
Sure! But those were not ordinary people but special disciples, who had accumulated alot of blessings over a long time, thus were able to meet the Buddha and become enlightened with a couple of sentences from the Buddha. Still, the Buddha himself certified their enlightenment, they didn't go around claiming it themselves. Huge difference.
"Energy" is also a "language game war" between internet posts on physics and professional physics.
> This–and TWIM jhanas in general–certainly involve the arising of the relevant jhana factors.
Yes. So someone suggested calling them "mindfulness of the jhana factors". Also the word for joy in several languages is "piti". We can talk of joy and happiness, and see it's not the same as jhana. Is any joy and happiness from non-sensory wholesome states jhana? No.
> People feel real and somewhat life-changing experiences of piti, sukha, equanimity… are those, due to limited concentration, below some critical threshold to earn the name “jhana”?
Yes I don't want to dismiss these states they are wholesome, just not jhana. Do cultivate joy in wholesome states!
> Besides, it’s not even entirely clear that the earliest texts are actually describing something all _that_ much more concentrated than Nadia does
Well, how do the early texts describe the insights that happen as a result of jhana? they are quite deep and quite challenging to conventional world view (just like if someone did an excellent physics experiment). Consider AN 9.42... senses disappear to the mind at the first jhana https://suttacentral.net/an9.42/en/sujato
And anyway… isn’t it the case that Theravadan meditation practice went practically extinct before being reconstructed from the suttas and commentaries sometime in the 18th/19th centuries? Vipassana at least was reinvented as such. Unless some enclave somewhere preserved an actually unbroken thread of jhana practice based on what was written in the suttas (maybe there was?), it weakens the authority of interpretation argument anyway!
I think there's always been monks meditating following the vinaya strictly in forests. They may not have a marketing department.
However that sort of question " isn’t it the case that Theravadan meditation practice went practically extinct" is a very theravada move as the "way (vada) of the elders (thera)" it always asks "is this modern buddhism really what the buddha taught" and that characteristic emphasis at the center distinguishes it from the mahayana
Fair. Probably this phenomenon is more limited to Vipassana specifically than I was guessing.
I take the point about the Theravadan rhetorical move here but I still feel like at the very least the original texts deserve to not be written _out_ of the definition of a word if they can be reasonably interpreted to mean something different from what’s practiced in schools working from later turnings and teachings.
That leaves room for determining what is a reasonable interpretation though, and I am extremely far from any kind of authority on that.
> Well, how do the early texts describe the insights that happen as a result of jhana?
The main reference I can think of off the top of my head is something along the lines of “with a mind thus purified [by jhana] the meditator inclines the mind to [insight practice]”, which feels compatible with either the very strong Vsm version or the weaker end of loose interpretations of the suttas. Even a really really weak experience of J4-flavored equanimity still reduces stray selfing enough to make insight practice work better. Obviously this effect is magnified many many times by the pa auk style jhana states.
Perhaps there are other specific claims I haven’t read.
[edit to respond to AN reference in edit] interesting, first I’ve seen this one. On one hand it does seem to imply a slightly higher level of concentration than other suttas I’ve read but even here it only talks about elimination of desirable/arousing sensory phenomena, not the sense of “pretty much all sensual phenomena” that Vsm points to. I don’t actually have a super hard time squaring this with what Jhourney and TWIM teach.
Another one to read would be the Uppakilesa Sutta (MN128) which the buddha is giving specific meditation advice to someone who is experiencing lights but not yet cultivated first jhana. It's an awesome sutta as it also connects that depth of practice with communal harmony and how that sort of inner emotional "good-with-oneself" connects with deep meditation and it's also a clear example of the buddha talking about first hand experience in a phenomenological way that we see common today.
Vitakka and vicara are these two terms translated as applied and sustained thought or so, and are kind of famously debated in terms of their specific meaning.
Some translations/interpretations just take this to mean that the second jhana is “stable” and doesn’t require constantly redirecting your attention at it to sustain it, while the first takes active maintenance. Others interpret it in more of an “any kind of thinking” sense.
This is what I expected just from the title- anytime I’ve seen the jhanas mentioned online most of the responses are “that’s not the jhanas, this person does not even understand what they are” and then the followup comments are each someone saying the same about the above commenter.
Isn't the goal 'may I be happy' at odds with the underlying philosophy as it ignores the reality that without sadness, we cannot understand being happy. Wouldn't 'may i be at peace' or 'may i be present' be more suitable? And even futher 'may I' is a wishing of a future state which is a attachment to a certain state and which also means we are not at peace nor present. If we constantly wish this, are we not missing the point?
The description in brackets for each jhana, if that's what you're referring to, seem to be sourced from "dhammawiki.org".
> But the sort of description of so called "jhana" in the article misses it - it points to the feelings generated in the body.
I mean, they are referred to (the first 4 jhanas) as the "rupa jhanas" - that is, form or bodily jhanas. That's because they're coarse and involve sensations of the body and materiality.
> We don't focus on the feelings, rather keep driving the boat (focusing on our meditation object). Then ... boom... we suddenly hit a river bank and have no idea what happened. It's unmistakable.
I think the article may gloss over it a bit, but the author does seem to say this too - in that the meditation practice aspect of it is just a way of organising attention such that the jhana state is invoked (they describe it as like a "sneeze", in that there is an intentional, physical build up followed by an involuntary and hard-hitting release, and that they hit "hard and fast") - and then the practical technique aspect of the sitting is not really useful because the jhana takes over. That sounds pretty accurate to me, as a practitioner of Theravada for 10 years or so.
I'm not that familiar with them but the people I know that do the traditional jhanas I think some think they are mistaking a profound state called "bhavanga" for jhana. (It's mentioned page 140 of Mindfulness Bliss and Beyond by Ajahn Brahm and in the first few pages of Pa Auks book as something often mistaken for jhana and nibanna - a sort of cessation).
They are good states and do it, wholesomestates are good joy in the wholesome is good.I am interested in not appropriating words that are well understood by communities for 100's of years and taking amateur internet posts about them as truth. Words like "Energy" should be taken as understood from the physics community, although we understand in certain contexts someone else may use that word in other ways. It's the same when it comes to the term "jhana".
Still, pass. Seems weird to fear standing on the shoulders of giants for fear of appropriation. And to be clear I think you sharing your opinion and expertise is great, theres just this element of 'leave it to the experts' when we are talking about a sort of bodily understanding that my culture seems to utterly lack that I disagree with.
It's heresy to say that social relations are valuable for their own sake, instead we have to give it a term that suggests monetary value and potential to enter some accountants balance sheet - "social capital".
it's just not the case that all value can enter into monetary terms or be quantified or exploited, bought and sold - but the stupidity and ignorance of the age is we even have to suggest like ethics or holding values has some "value" in the sense of money for it to be "ok" in our dominant social norms that structure society - the corporation and workplaces under capitalism
It's as if it's not ok to hold values that are not monetary or capital - that is the message of our social relations in workplaces and in the culture at current - what are called "capitalist social relations"
It's heresy to say ... It's ok to have values that are not money. There are things we should value outside of some cost.
it's gotten to this point.
even "progressive" arguments for like "hey maybe kids playing together in community is ok" has to be quantified into some imagination "social capital"
I really don't get the discord phenomena, it seems like more bloatware and demands on attention and notifications - I mean - IRC is right there and you can at least control your own attention span however you want.
I didn't get it either. At first. Then I had a reason to use it.
I am a long time IRC user, and still use that to this day, but in a much less frequent capacity. IRC is a comparative ghost town when thrown up against Discord.
Part of the reason for that is accessibility. Discord does everything IRC does in terms of channels, bots, etc, but packages it in a UI that the masses can easily consume. The addition of voice without having to run Teamspeak or something alongside like we did back in the day. A stable mobile app brings it all together in a portable, easy-to-use package.
I resisted it for awhile, with my younger friends adopting it fairly quickly. Then small businesses and we apps started using it and suddenly half the things I interacted with on a daily basis had their own Discord server. So, I broke rank and tried it
What I found were a few key communities relevant to my interests that were having actual neverending conversations about this I like. Compared to IRC, where response time can be days for any type of question, and that's if someone is in the mood to be friendly instead of crufty. This is the primary reason why I stay in Discord and IRC is just sort of collecting dust in my world. The community either aged out or just became so jaded that they made it inhospitable.
Had the same experience more or less. I was on IRC during 9/11, and many other major world events, and it's key to my online experiences back in the day, but these days I haven't used it in almost a year. I moved to Slack over a decade ago, for business, introducing it to where I was working at the time, and then five years ago or so, moved to Discord for the community aspect.
These days it's almost primarily all on Discord. There are a lot of features that I don't use, but it's what Slack should have been, back when Slack was meant to replace IRC. The interface works, it's available on my phone, it has call ability, multiple servers within my account and no need to keep a bouncer running.
Your mention of being on IRC during 9/11 brings back memories. I happened to have taken a sick day and was home watching the news when the first tower fell.
I immediately got on EFNet where I knew a few people that worked for CNN and CNBC at the time. We'd usually get together and talk old broadcasting/radio tech, but not that day.
My close friends and I have a Discord server that we interact on regularly and I've actually looked at switching us over to irc, since I like open, self-hostible standards with competing servers and clients better than proprietary software, but there were a couple reasons that the switch would be unsatisfying for us.
First, with Discord if you aren't online for awhile you don't have to miss the conversations that happened while you were offline — you can just read them later. Whereas with IRC, you will absolutely have to miss everything you are not online for, which creates a much larger fear of missing out, without any benefit in not being distracted or whatever since you can (and I do) just turn off all notifications that aren't direct pings in Discord so you can just check the app whenever you feel like it. So Discord has all the benefits of not getting notifications while you're offline, with none of the downsides of literally missing out on important discussions between your friends where they might have been pouring their heart out with no one currently on the server or whatever.
Second, Discord just has a lot more features that we actually really like using. Maybe that's "bloatware" to you, but the purpose of software is to have features users use. For instance, embedded images and gifs, custom emojis, the possibility of having voice channels and sharing your screen, and stuff like that. Having custom emojis is actually a pretty great way to expand your expressivity and have really fun in jokes and losing that is actually pretty sad.
Third, like the other commenters have said, the Discord servers for stuff I care about are actually active and friendly and interesting.
Finally, although you could make an IRC interface that works like the Discord app, which happens to be my favorite layout for a chat app that I've ever used, I don't think anyone has to my knowledge.
We ended up going with an open source clone of Discord called revolt, which I developed a custom Android application for.
Side note; you can disable all notifications or be selective about the ones you receive, like most apps. The idea of being bombarded with pings is not really a thing that happens unless you are a dev and forgot to disable that on your server.
This reads like you're part of the salty thugs that killed IRC to begin with. Offer zero help because you built some mythos about being self-taught and think everyone else should suffer the same, ejaculating "RTFM!" every chance you get, your biggest gripe ultimately distilling down to whining about change, an inevitable outcome of progress that you spite for the simple reason that you liked how "the way things were" denied use to a lot of people who were not as technically proficient. That attitude is the problem, not the solution. Make no mistake.
Stay in the cave and be quiet, or step out into the light abd be helpful. Those are your choices.
We have conventions and protocols for dealing with text before - discord is some platform it will bring a whole bunch of new conventions and protocols - needlessly complicated and just a waste of human energy and time - but you know - maximize "engagement" or what have you for your KPI metrics - it's like selling water in bottles to people with easy access to drinking water.
This reads like you're part of the salty thugs that killed IRC to begin with. Offer zero help because you built some mythos about being self-taught and think everyone else should suffer the same, ejaculating "RTFM!" every chance you get, your biggest gripe ultimately distilling down to whining about change, an inevitable outcome of progress that you spite for the simple reason that you liked how "the way things were" denied use to a lot of people who were not as technically proficient. That attitude is the problem, not the solution. Make no mistake.
Stay in the cave and be quiet, or step out into the light and be helpful. Those are our choices.
They're not instant-messaging platforms. Though it's true that Discord often gets misused as a permanent knowledge-base (where a forum would be much better)
And in the EU it is probably why they have free healthcare, high minimum wage, work weeks of 34-38 hrs, welfare, 8 hour work days, overtime after, high proportion of part time workers, and highest productivity per hour in Germany.
But yeah, unions, hate what you gotta hate. I personally hate long hours for bullshit pay.
I pay 9% of my income in Poland for the public healthcare I couldn't use due to enormous queues. Therefore I pay subscription to the private medical provider, pay for dentistry, for all the medicine prescribed by any doctor(public as well).
What percentage of income typical software spends for medical insurance and bills?
In the US? Having to go to the hospital, having an illness etc can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Other countries pay more per paycheck, we pay a lot more per bill.
Going to the hospital would bankrupt me even as a relatively well off software engineer and even with my decent (work-tied) healthcare I still have months of wait time. In order to get into a doctor I made an appointment in February for a visit in September.
Well, it's not really free healthcare, at least not here in Finland. You're expected to spend at least an hour every day exercising with all the time we have off here to make sure you don't get super sick in the first place. In practice then we actually work 45 hours a week every week.
Would love a deeper explanation of this! Is it voluntary or required for all employers or what? There seems to be a Finnish program called Fit For Life originated in 1995 but I can’t tell if it’s compulsory and/or effective?
US median income, even disposable income after all the medical/housing costs, is higher than all of the large EU countries (France, Germany, etc). So if anyone has bullshit pay, it’s the Europeans.
The list below represents a national accounts derived indicator for a country or territory's gross household disposable income per capita (including social transfers in kind). According to the OECD, 'household disposable income is income available to households such as wages and salaries, income from self-employment and unincorporated enterprises, income from pensions and other social benefits, and income from financial investments (less any payments of tax, social insurance contributions and interest on financial liabilities)…
This indicator also takes account of social transfers in kind 'such as health or education provided for free or at reduced prices by governments and not-for-profit organisations.'
The USA wallops even tiny, rich Luxembourg. There are some not-insignificant Covid-related distortions here, will be interesting to see the 2022 numbers.
The opposite is true in my experience. The stats are very clear but Europeans never seem to accept that maybe their perception is skewed, it's a weird form of nationalism.
(I'm not American, it's just something that I keep observing recently. Europeans have a much harder time reflecting on issues Europe has. It reminds me of Americans back in the early 2000s.)
A lot of European countries have a higher household debt load than the US. Compared to Europe, especially the richer parts of Europe, the US compares favorably:
Median household net worth (assets - liabilities, not including NPV of future cash flows from personal labor income) in the US is $192,900 according to the latest Fed data: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scfindex.htm
I am so confused, for the lay person - can someone explain how does something with a copy-left license the GPL end up in this situation of being "acquired"? We can just fork it right?
I have lately been wondering if culture has forgotten how to run any organisation apart from a for profit corporation or a KPI driven NGO. E.g. an association, a co-operative etc. These all require collaboration and entrepreneurship and innovation without it being a competition via KPI or everything justified by the dollar (as is often the case sometimes even in charities)
GPL is what allowed Monty to fork after selling the MySQL trademark and copyright to Oracle. So Monty lost the ability to dual license, yet gained much money. Arguably with GPL2 he could even fork with proprietary plugins created later. Or he may have negotiated a backroom deal with Oracle to keep some relicensing rights.
It is great people are discovering that there is a happiness within that is not dependent on getting things or things being a certain way and you can increase and cultivate wholesome states that are outside the sensory world. But the sort of description of so called "jhana" in the article misses it - it points to the feelings generated in the body. They are rather like a boat and its wake... the wake is the feelings but the boat is something else - they are the wholesome states. We don't focus on the feelings, rather keep driving the boat (focusing on our meditation object). Then ... boom... we suddenly hit a river bank and have no idea what happened. It's unmistakable. For instance with metta the boat would be the intention "may I be happy" the feelings are the by-product or wake. Jhana is proper like a boat that suddenly unexpectedly hits the shore... It rocks and blows the mind (and as the mind contains model of the world - it feels like the world shook a bit then froze). A good "geeks guide" is "Mindfulness Bliss and Beyond" written by someone who finished a physics degree at cambridge and spent 9 years with Ajahn Chah.
If we instead mistake something else for "jhana" like some positive feels, we're going to be stuck cultivating a local maxima. It's not to say the practice is wrong, it's actually quite good. It's just not jhana. We should listen to the professional community just like we listen to the professionals of physics in academia, instead of some posts from people on the internet that have done a few 30 day retreats.
But please do not call it jhana and have some humility ... these terms are central to some of the okdest institutions in the world and theres a professional community in the dharmic traditions who literally do this full time all over asia.
If someone wants to hear a competent speaker who has done the necessary time and training at those institutions and is also trained in the conventional university system, someone like Ajahn Brahm (Theoretical Physics Cambridge) Beth Upton (Economics Cambridge) or Shalia Catherine or Sayadaw U Jagara