The jhānas are great but they’re just a tool, and an addictive tool at that.
You are training your body to produce dopamine, serotonin, etc, at will. By doing this you crowd out the dopaminergic and serotonergic responses you previously got from… everything.
You cut your sense desires by imbibing in something more satisfying.
It’s drugs without the drugs.
This is how MDMA and aripirazole therapy work: they flood you with these neurotransmitters and induce bliss and neuroplasticity. They also stop you eating. Pills aren’t known for the munchies and I think I ate a total of 2 apples in 2 months when aripiprazole held me in permanent jhānic ecstasy. My addiction to food was gone.
This is just another case of upgrading addictions. You’ve upgraded to an addiction which isn’t harmful - well done. But it’s still just crowding out one addiction with another. Alcoholic to workaholic to ironman to jhānaholic.
They are a scalpel. They cut the old habits and the old cravings by overpowering them. They cause bliss but more importantly they induce neuroplasticity. A sharp scalpel is better than a blunt one - refine your focus. Then make sure you use the tool for its intended purpose: insight.
If you line up some good code like the Buddha gave us, you can use the jhāna to cut a lot of the trauma from your life.
The trauma of self, the trauma of greed, hatred, delusion. The trauma of change and the trauma of uncertainty. You can use the states of elevated dopamine and serotonin to manipulate your neural network, cutting off harmful and traumatic thought-feeling loops.
You can do this with MDMA and aripirazole too; plenty of research happening into them for trauma therapy. Stick with the jhāna if they're accessible; fewer side effects and a shorter half-life.
But don’t go measuring dick size with how hard you can jhāna it up. I could drink with the best of them, got to world champs level ironman, retired at 40. I’m known for going hard. If you sit there in your hyper-neuroplastic state going ‘hnnnng jhāna’ then you will spiral like any other addict and nobody will be able to tell you otherwise.
Don't forget to use that sharpened scalpel for its intended purpose.
Some people will experience the jhāna differently because of lower endogenous dopamine. For me they usually remain localised and that is ok, because that is the environment my brain developed in; you only need the right tool for the job.
Aripirazole threw me into a full-body 2nd jhāna for a solid 2 months, where it would make a normal brain feel dull and slow. And somehow I broke that addiction too.
I wonder what this means for my trajectory from here. The addiction to jhāna is supposed to be the last one to go. You sharpen that scalpel, you use it to sever your traumatic programming, and then you put it down.
I am now into real meditation and the jhāna seem pretty easy to get into, but they don’t ‘hold’ me. I don’t find myself sinking into bliss; I’m like ‘huh that’s nice what’s next’. I wonder what this means for my practice. Is it good? Bad? New and neutral? I guess we will see.
But remember that the jhāna are a tool. Nothing more.
The fact the commentaries go into ‘full body hard jhāna’ bullshit is just evidence of how addictive they are. The buddha said to get to j4 and use it to sever your suffering.
Don't just sit there with the needle in your arm staring at the ceiling and thinking you’re enlightened.
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