When I first heard about Jhana, it didn’t seem real. These special mental states are described in the sacred texts of ancient Buddhist schools. Today, advanced meditators usually access them by focusing on something. It is a feeling of fire, breathing, and loving tenderness. The meditator releases his mind little by little until he reaches a state of almost complete absorption. If you direct your focus in the right way, you will experience a series of intense experiences that begin with bliss and end with total-body peace. A state of jhana bliss is different from the slight increase in happiness associated with mindfulness meditation. It’s not like a runner’s high. “This is really powerful,” says Matthew Sachet, director of the Meditation Research Program at Harvard Medical School. In comparison, orgasms are said to be quieter. Tears of joy may flow down the meditator’s face.
Although early Theravada Buddhists placed no limits on jhāna, some later traditions taught that jhāna was very difficult to achieve. Over the past 20 years, a small group of teachers has introduced jhāna to a new generation of advanced meditators in the West. These days, a tech-adjacent subculture in the Bay Area takes up Jhana with enthusiasm. Perhaps unsurprisingly, technology startups are now trying to make Jharna accessible to almost anyone, almost anytime. It’s called Jhourney, and according to its founders Steven Zelfas and Alex Gruber, its combination of artificial intelligence and brain EEG recording can give novice meditators an hour of bliss on demand. That’s what it means.
I recently participated in a video call with Zerfas and Gruver. They were stopped on the side of the road on their way to one of the jhana meditation retreats they have been leading to develop their own techniques. (Participants pay up to $3,000, they said.) Zerfas did most of the speaking, communicating almost entirely through founder stories. He said that the goal of Jhana is that he will teach 100 million people how to enter Jhana. I asked how they got to that number. He believes the Headspace meditation app has tens of millions of subscribers, but otherwise he said he “found it out of thin air.”
Zelfas first experienced jhana while going through two different breakups: one with his girlfriend and another with his former startup co-founder. After reaching emotional rock bottom, he attended a meditation retreat where he unexpectedly encountered his first jhana state. With time and instruction, he was able to enter jhāna at any time. He said he still practices jhana meditation every morning and hinted that I didn’t want to date someone who didn’t do that. Learning jhanas was one of the most important things that ever happened to him. It left him feeling emotionally rich and imbued with the evangelical fervor characteristic of the tech industry: “Why isn’t this happening on a large scale?” he remembers wondering.
Zerphas learned how to enter jhana the old-fashioned way through continuous practice on long meditation retreats, but he and Gruber want to fast-forward the process. They claim that by presenting a student with real-time biofeedback from sensors attached to his scalp, he will soon be able to cultivate bliss within a day. After that, we want students to be able to re-enter Jhana at any time within a minimum of 15 to 30 minutes. Terje Sparby, a philosophy professor at Rudolf Steiner University in Oslo, Norway, who studies the phenomenology of jhana, said that a retreat usually requires several days of meditation before entering.The idea that someone could get there every morning in the time it takes to watch his two episodes of the movie Bluey He felt unusual.
For the past year, Zerfas and Gruber have been collecting data by attaching brainwave electrodes to experienced jhana teachers while they meditate. They want to use this to train an algorithm that determines in real time whether someone is experiencing a jhana state. They imagine future teachers leading a class of novice meditators, all wearing EEG headsets. (A tennis instructor can see what’s wrong with your strokes, but today’s meditation teachers can’t see into your mind.) Being able to track your progress and view it outside the headset will allow your teacher to give you tailored advice and real-time instructions. They may say, “You’re on the right path, keep going.” Or, if things aren’t going well, you might say, “Let’s relax for a bit before getting back into focus.”
Eventually, Zerfas said, the algorithm could teach itself by playing the same kinds of instructions through the speakers in the consumer helmets Journey hopes to eventually produce. I pointed out that EEG-based meditation headsets are already on the market, but they only indicate whether you are in a general meditative state and are not functional enough to transform your meditation practice. There doesn’t seem to be anything to do. “Those products are a good idea, but they’re not targeted at life-changing experiences,” Zelfas told me. If his product is successful, he said, it will be “the most important intervention in human well-being in a generation.” He sent me a document with further details. “Imagine if Biden and Putin shed tears of joy and gratitude for 30 minutes every morning,” it read. There will be “all sorts of knock-on effects”. The meaning seemed to be that Journey would help bring about world peace.
No one should disband the army yet. Jonas Mago, a neuroscientist who consulted for Journey, said the company’s algorithms were unable to achieve sufficient accuracy in classifying neurological conditions. When I asked Zerfas and Gruber how reliably their software can identify whether a person is having an intense experience of being in jhana, they would only say “more than coincidentally.” So far, they have collected data primarily from professional meditators. Kathryn Devaney, a neuroscientist and co-founder of Alembic, a nonprofit body-mind center in Berkeley, Calif., also offered some advice to Journey. She told me that all the brain data that Zerphas and Gruber can record from advanced meditators may not be generalizable to other people. Even if EEG sensors could reliably detect journalist states, this may not be enough. For this product to be useful, it must recognize the intermediate states that precede jhāna and provide feedback and instructions that guide the person across the finish line.
EEG data is also notoriously difficult to collect and separate. Extracting real neural activity from noise generated by muscle movements and other sources is a tedious task, even for experts. When I asked Zelfas if Journey had a full-time brainwave scientist, he said no, but said he had “read a lot of textbooks” and taught himself with the help of private tutors. added. He said he was overwhelmed by the current state of brain wave research coming out of academia. In any case, he saw this as a machine learning problem rather than a neuroscience problem.
Academic research on Jhāna is indeed very small, but it is increasing. Michael Lifshitz, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, recently led a study of the brain waves of experienced jhana meditators. His group chose a respected Western jhana teacher named Shaila Catherine because she belongs to a strict tradition, and for her jhana is an extremely long-term state of absorption. will only be counted. Lifshitz has not yet released the results and stressed that they are still preliminary. But he found that when Catherine entered her deepest state, her brain still appeared to be having sensory experiences, but the neural signals that could be associated with complex cognition were not yet present. Told me no. about Sensations were “reduced to the point of non-existence.”
Lifshitz hopes more scientists will take up bliss as a subject of scientific research. He and Josh Brachinski, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, have been studying evangelical Christians who report having intense blissful experiences when speaking in tongues. Their ecstasy appears to be quite different from that of the average Buddhist monk. Christians who speak in tongues are physically active to the point of convulsions, spewing out meaningless syllables. They also have a very different worldview and a very different metaphysics than meditators. But they may be “hacking the same functions of the human brain” to create very similar internal states, Lifshitz said. “Maybe instead of having really quiet access, it’s getting loud enough to drown out everything. That could be another way to flatten the landscape.”
Last fall, Sachet, director of Harvard Medical School’s Meditation Research Program, published detailed brain imaging data obtained from meditators who entered the state of Jana using an MRI machine. As long as the science is rigorous, a more complete understanding of these brain states could offer “incredible possibilities for humanity,” he says. “I worry about the ‘move fast and break things’ approach when it comes to the mind and deep states of consciousness.”
You may not need to worry. Zelphas and Gruber aren’t moving that fast. Before we hung up, I asked them when they could imagine the first headset retreat taking place. Zerfas told me it could be as early as 18 to 24 months, acknowledging that’s an optimistic estimate. He then detailed his plans for subsequent consumer headset development. (Final step: “Okay, SpaceX!”) Gruber was more cautious. “I would be happy if we could see an effect within two years, but it could take five or 10 years. A lot depends on how seriously we take this as a society,” he said. In this case, society means investors. I told him that his proposal would be very welcome among Silicon Valley venture capitalists. It attracts a lot of their interest. “There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who like to say they’re counterculture risk-takers, but very few of them are,” he says.
I understand what Gruber is saying, but Journey doesn’t seem all that countercultural to me. When I discussed Jhana with the philosopher Superbhi, I remembered that Jhana was not cultivated as an end in itself, but rather as a stop on the long road to wisdom and enlightenment. He let me. Jhourney seeks to extract the bliss from that path and optimize and commercialize it into mass-market gadgets. What could be more mainstream than that?
