Diversity will be washed away during any millennia-long canonisation process. The Buddha was a big proponent of using the right tools for the job, which is good since we are all born with different tools and different workpieces.
Your brain is softwood or hardwood, indicating the genetic disposition for deep learning. It has a grain, which is your genetic disposition for mood. You have a chisel which is phasic dopamine and a planer which is tonic dopamine; these are also genetic. Your wood gets carved by your encounters with the world. A sharp chisel will carve deeper into softwood than a blunt chisel will into hardwood.
Let’s take two hypothetical people: jb and JY.
jb is born with softwood, a folded-steel tamahagane chisel, and a manual planer. JY is born with hardwood, a store-bought chisel, and an industrial planer.
JY writes a book about how to work with hardwood and industrial tools, which is very helpful to a lot of people who have similar wood and tools. When jb tries to use his manual planer in a similar way though, he is left thinking he must be doing something wrong.
jb also has a piece of wood that heavily is scarred by the tamahagane gouge he was gifted at birth. JY doesn't really touch on how to address this, since the industrial planer makes short work of such grooves.
The aim of the task, as laid out by the Buddha, is to take your brain back to a smooth and receptive state. To remove the scars inflicted by the world commandeering the chisel of your birth, and then to intentionally carve valleys and grooves which match reality instead.
The main tool you use to make your wood workable is your planer. Your planer is tonic dopamine with a bit of serotonin. Your planer is the jhāna.
There is a lot of narrative around the jhāna. Should they be full body or shouldn’t they? How long should you hold them? What even counts as a jhāna?
Well it depends on the wood you are working with and the tools at your disposal. If you were born with low tonic dopamine, as many neurodivergent folks are, you have a manual planer. The instructions for industrial planers probably don't apply. You sharpen your planer, but there are limitations placed on things by your genetic makeup.
The commentaries about fully body jhānic bliss could leave you wanting. If you have lower levels of a neurotransmitter, you may not be able to suffused your body with it head-to-toe. Maybe you get a tingling in the fingers or the brain instead.
This is perfectly workable; the environment shaped you using these tools, after all.
You do not need an industrial planer for softwood. You might even damage it; aripirazole nearly made me psychotic, while it would make a normal brain dull.
What you need is a gentle touch with the tools that you were given at birth.
For me, it is experientially clear that the pīti (rapture) of the second jhāna correlates with dopaminergic surge and the sukha (bliss) of the third jhāna correlates with serotonin, or something similar. It’s hardly fair to set an arbitrary target for success when we all have different quantities of these neurotransmitters at our disposal.
What’s the whole purpose, anyway? It’s to take the wood back to a pristine state, and to be careful that future grooves conform with the reality of impermanence. I personally find it easier to skip the early pleasure jhāna and go straight for the equanimity ones.
JY’s hypothetical book doesn’t touch on removing old encoding; the dark night is added in an appendix, with the unspoken implication being that if you encounter one, you're doing-it-wrong. This is interesting considering that the dark night has been a mainstay of every culture and religion since time immemorial. See below.
JY's book may work for many but he is working with different tools and different wood so his instructions are harmful to people like jb. They encourage us to apply too much pressure and maybe damage our softwood further.
Much better to read the words of the Buddha himself.
The Buddha specifically said that only an untrue man will laud himself for achieving the jhāna (MN113), and that the sign of a truly enlightened one is that they no longer delight in the bliss of jhānic states (MN111).
Maybe explosive awakenings are rare because they only happen to those of us working with softwood that has been heavily damaged through hurtful contact. Maybe the Buddha was a softwood-artist. Maybe he found a way to plane away the pain and was kind enough to share.
The Buddha’s genius was not in offering a single method, but in pointing to the principle beneath them: use the tools you have to smooth out what life has carved, then carve a new understanding which aligns with the four noble truths of impermanence and suffering.
So don’t worry about the jhāna. They're a tool. Partial jhānic states are perfectly workable for achieving lasting change, if that's what your genetics gave you. Take them as far as you feel comfortable and then tear them down and look at them for the unsatisfactory things they are: conditioned states, bound to pass.
The important thing is the neuroplasticity these states induce. Skip j2 and go straight for j3 or j5 if you like; everyone has their preferred tools, after all.
What you've got is all you need.
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