The Jhanas are meditative states of extreme bliss, reportedly (I can personally confirm) much better feeling than basically any event in your day-to-day life. They are also practically nonaddictive, to the point where many practitioners basically forget about them for weeks at a time after achieving them.

They are often described as “the opposite of a panic attack”, which gets half the story and some of the implementation. The other half, and in fact the half that I find most interesting and important, is the absence of “the hindrances”. The classic list of hindrances is sensual desire, ill will, drowsiness/dullness, restlessness, and doubt. These are basically different ways that your mind can get stuck, and are therefore hindrances to the unification required for a Jhana. Personally I’d also add something like overconfidence or arrogance as the flip side of doubt, but that’s not in the classic lists.

The key characteristic that makes Jhanas more than a sparkly emotional feedback loop is the absence of the hindrances, and that the pleasure is derived from the absence of the hindrances. In fact, I am somewhat worried about the lack of emphasis on this in the discourse — I think people often implicitly get the idea, but still, worth clarification. More on this another day.

Anyway, there is a sense in which the Jhanas are really weird. Having unlimited bliss and joy and peace of whatever variety you want on tap “should” make someone at least a little superhuman and come with a bunch of pretty universal boons, but it seems that this happens very rarely, if at all. Some people report that access to Jhana cured addictions they had or gave them more baseline energy or reduced need for sleep or other things, but the bulk of practitioners seem to just get Jhanas. What gives?

My take is basically just that generalization is harder than people expect, and that optimization can push specific things farther than people expect. With memory techniques, we get a similar effect. If you had no knowledge of memory sports and you saw someone memorize a deck of cards in 20 seconds, then go put away a few hundred decimal digits in five minutes, you’d be pretty damn sure they could memorize just about whatever they want, and never have everyday memory lapses or whatever.

This is not what we see. Even the literal world record holders in memory sports typically report that their memories in daily life are not much better, unless they actively and effortfully employ techniques in order to remember. Forgetting your keys or whatever is still an occurrence, lapses of attention and forgetting what a person was saying are too. Also, people typically just get better at memorizing what they have practiced memorizing, not at all content flat out.

The memory techniques that we have probably are not quite complete as they are not deliberately accounting for the typical structure of the information we care about nor the processing that we do on it, but they clearly have some hold of the causality of memory considering how large the records are. 4620 digits in an hour, and similar bitrates for other domains. If we can have a reasonable handle on something as important as memory and not get automatic generalization, well, hopes are not high for Jhanas.

I think this sort of thing is probably the norm. It holds for mental calculation as well; even if you get very very fast with arithmetic, this will not automatically make you faster at other forms of inference, even if you abstractly recognize the similarity between the mental motions. Then with sports, typically people just get better at the sport they practice, and perhaps also get whatever they can pretty directly port from one to another such as near-identical techniques or muscular strength/endurance/etc.

This is also a point against a certain type of argument I see for the existence of meditative states. The claim is something like, if you had the ability to access these you’d have xyz behavioral consequences. Ideally, yeah you would have those, but empirically generalization seems to be very hard for people. The lack of xyz consequences is only weak evidence for the lack of the state, unless you have some reason to believe that generalization is especially easy/likely.

Another interesting point is that mental factors/states/abilities seem to span a much greater range than people typically expect. A memory champion can remember an order of magnitude or two more bits of information than a typical person can in the same memorization time. Mental calculators are similar; the official record for ten 5×6 digit multiplications is 26.54 seconds. I can probably do a single 3×3 digit in that time. I expect Jhanas are just another case of this, where the typical person can feel an order of magnitude or two less bliss than an accomplished practitioner can in the same time.

I do think that generalization of these capabilities is quite workable, it’s just typically neglected by practitioners. I expect that if people doing these sorts of things put a third of the effort they put into practice into deliberately using the fruits of their labor and automating the implementation into effortlessness, they’d get much better results overall. Making representations that generalize better before practicing also seems to matter a great deal, so perhaps some of that too. Best to not get your mental software locked into using the QWERTY keyboard. Anyway, I’ll report on generalization in the coming months/years.