The jhanas are one of the most important and least understood areas of Buddhist practice. They are sometimes translated as "absorptions" or "concentrations," though the word "immersion" is actually closer to the experience. These are specific states of mind that arise as you go deeper and deeper into the nature of consciousness itself. The Buddha described them as the pathway to liberation, and in my own practice and teaching, I've found that to be exactly right.
What makes the jhanas so valuable isn't just that they feel good, though some of them feel extraordinary. It's that the time you spend in these states does something to the mind. It matures what the tradition calls the enlightenment factors, which are qualities like equanimity, tranquility, mindfulness, and faith. When those enlightenment factors are sufficiently developed, the mind has the foundation it needs to gain genuine insight, to touch the unconditioned, and to experience things like cessation.
So that's the reason to care about this. Not because absorption states are impressive. Because they work.
What the Jhanas Actually Are
If you've been meditating for a while and you've ever noticed moments where the happiness from your practice felt like it wasn't coming from anything outside of yourself, where there was just this quality of inward contentment arising from the simple act of being present with your meditation object, that is the threshold of the first jhana.
Every time you bring your attention to loving kindness and the quality of joy is present, even if only to a minor degree, that is a light version of the first absorption. In first jhana there are five factors: applied attention, sustained attention, happiness or rapture, bliss, and equanimity. If you have any state where these five factors are present to any degree, that's considered the first jhana.
The thing is, one of the factors can take the forefront while the others are quieter. If you're doing loving kindness and the happiness factor really comes to the forefront, you may not notice the bliss or the equanimity as clearly. They're there, but the happiness is what's primary.
You can think of each jhana as a radio station. Each station is a specific jhana, and the strength of the jhana is the clarity of the signal coming from that station, or the volume on that particular channel. So it's like they only play R&B on that station, or they only play jazz, but the volume is turned a little low. Still classified as that given jhana, just not at full intensity.
And they can range. The first jhana can go from just a gentle, small happiness all the way to being hit with a semi-truck of all five jhana factors at once. I've used that analogy before because it captures what it feels like. You don't always get the semi-truck. Sometimes it's very soft. But it counts either way.
The Five Factors and Why They Matter
The first jhana is considered to be the cessation of unwholesomeness and sensual desire, temporarily. The words in many of the discourses put it this way: secluded from unwholesome states, secluded from sensual desires, one enters and abides in the first jhana, accompanied by applied attention, sustained attention, rapture, bliss, and equanimity.
What this means practically is that the orientation we usually have toward sense pleasure, that constant reaching for pleasant sights, sounds, tastes, and touch, temporarily suspends. The mind discovers that it can generate happiness from within itself, from its own nature, without anything external coming in to make it feel better. That discovery is profound.
The applied attention and sustained attention in first jhana are like the drivers. You apply your mindfulness to the meditation object, whether that's loving kindness, the breath, or a mantra. That application gives rise to the rapture, the bliss, and the equanimity. The equanimity in first jhana refers to a profound balance of mind. In some presentations of the jhanas it's called one-pointedness, because as the factors intensify, nothing else can happen. The mind becomes so collected that wandering is simply not an option in that moment.
The Progression Through the Form Jhanas
In the second absorption, the applied attention and sustained attention begin to fall off. The absorption starts having its own momentum. That's the diagnostic sign you've moved into second jhana. The mindfulness was doing the work of keeping you with the object, and now the object itself, the rapture and bliss, is self-sustaining. You're no longer driving. You're being carried. The joy becomes stronger. The bliss and equanimity also increase in power and clarity.
In the third jhana, the rapture falls away. Rapture can be quite explosive, quite intense. When that settles, bliss becomes the primary quality. This is a deeply pleasurable state, but pleasure in a specific sense, pleasure born of mind contact, not of sense contact. It's bliss from letting go. And because the mind enjoys that bliss, it naturally deepens its immersion. You'll notice when this factor is growing that you become inclined toward conditions that support it. You don't want to do things that would burn it off. That's a good first step. Your mind is starting to taste the happiness of seclusion and like it.
In the fourth jhana, equanimity becomes the primary quality. Bliss has fallen away, happiness has fallen away, and what remains is this perfect, unshakable balance. Equanimity is the word for imperturbability, for not being concerned whether things are going well or heading toward disaster. Most of us are on a pendulum swing between craving and aversion, wanting more of what feels good and wanting less of what feels bad. The fourth jhana is the first real freedom from that push and pull.
When you're in meditation and you feel this deep peace, this unshakableness of mind, that's fourth jhana equanimity. Even if your attention wanders every few minutes, you get a few minutes of that absorption at a time, and that has its effects.
The Formless Attainments
Once you've reached the fourth jhana, equanimity has a specific outflow that is unique compared to bliss or joy. It begins to radiate outward, and as it does, it expands into spaciousness. The loving kindness naturally dissolves into a spacious peace, and when that happens, you let it. You let go of the loving kindness as an object, and equanimity itself becomes the entire field of your experience.
As equanimity expands to such an extent that spaciousness becomes primary, you are transitioning into the fifth jhana, the realm of infinite space.
The four formless attainments are called the formless realms because in them the sense data of the body becomes less and less paramount. You'll still have some body sensation, but the meditation becomes very expanded on its own. This is also when experiences of non-duality become possible. Infinite space means you feel expanded into everything, expanded into total spaciousness.
Infinite consciousness, the sixth jhana, means consciousness as the primary quality comes to the forefront. You notice specifically the presence of consciousness itself, and this is where so many traditions describe the sense of "I am everything." This beingness, this consciousness, is everything. That's the realm of infinite consciousness.
Infinite nothingness, the seventh jhana, is when even consciousness as the primary characteristic takes a back seat. Now there's just spacious nothingness. Not much is going on. Very, very quiet. Infinite nothingness is a kind of edge of consciousness where neither perception nor non-perception then arises, and that is its own very strange and subtle state. It can be psychedelic. It's like being at the edge of individuated consciousness where fractal patterns, geometry, ancient imagery, and unusual visions can start appearing. It's like 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's like clarity in hypnagogia.
In infinite nothingness there's just nothing, just empty spaciousness. A thought here and there. And then suddenly there's a switch and there's all this kind of trippy, strange imagery in neither perception nor non-perception. The mind's eye becomes incredibly vivid. I remember closing my eyes in that state and suddenly being in space with a galaxy-sized fetus. I don't mean that metaphorically. The vividness of it, if the quality of the images, is such that you feel like you could reach out and touch them.
Why am I telling you this? So you're not enamored or sidetracked by it. Equanimity is then applied even to the strange and profound. You just continue to observe. As the mind gets thinner and thinner in that territory, one of the three characteristics of existence, suffering, impermanence, or no self, appears.
Cessation of Perception and Feeling
Nirodha samapatti, the cessation of perception, feeling, and consciousness, is considered the pinnacle of all Buddhist samadhi states. If you've heard the jhanas called gradual cessations, that's because they're nine stages of cessation. Each one lets go of something specific in the mind. Nirodha samapatti is the ninth and final one.
When one of the three characteristics appears in that upper jhana territory, and the mind experiences it as a direct knowledge, something shifts. Dispassion arises. Equanimity becomes so strong and so mature that you just stop wanting anything. And then the universe vanishes. By vanishing I mean literally, consciousness vanishes. There would be a break, a gap in the tape reel of your memories and perceptions. One moment you're there, everything's there, and then like the tape just breaks. And then you emerge out of it.
The first time I experienced cessation was on a six-hour sit. I had told the meditation teacher on that retreat that I would sit for six hours without moving, and so I had to follow through. It was straight war with pain for six hours. Really, really bad pain. And then at some point this immaculate cloud of equanimity arose and brought me all the way up into the heights of neither perception nor non-perception. The suffering characteristic appeared, and I saw my attachments, my dad, my ex at the time. There was this inner voice that just said let them go.
So I said goodbye to everything. And the whole field of experience fell backwards. I started tunneling backwards in perception like as if a DMT trip had just begun in that moment. Like a 9,000-foot drop. The last form I remember was a torus, an energy formation shaped like a donut, as clear as this conversation. And then bang, it all vanished.
When the mind turned back on, reality appeared as code. Not ones and zeros like in The Matrix, but small golden gears, everything made of these tiny spinning golden gears. The mind zoomed in on one of them, the gear was spinning, and then mind-body turned on. Self turned back on. Memories and perception returned. And I found myself slumped over in the chair.
After I emerged, the mind exploded with the enlightenment factors. I had never felt that kind of power. Suddenly your mind is a master meditator. It can put its attention on an object uninterruptedly for hours at a time. The capacities that open right after cessation are very inaccessible outside of this type of state. Even now, in my ordinary state, I don't have the level of refinement I do when I come out of that.
How Jhana Relates to Awakening
The jhanas are not awakening. They are states. You enter them, and you come out of them. Even infinite consciousness, where you have this profound sense of being everything, is a state that closes down when you come out of meditation. It is different from realization in that permanent sense of the word.
But the relationship between jhana practice and awakening is real and deep. The time spent in these states matures the enlightenment factors. And the deeper those roots are for each of the enlightenment factors, the more stable the mind becomes, the less prone to grasping and rumination, the more able it is to recognize the nature of its own experience.
Whole pathway through the jhanas is just you going deeper into the nature of the mind itself. The whole process is just the mind returning to what it always was, discovering the depth that was there all along. You can think of it like an ocean. If you're a ship on the surface, there's turbulence. As you go deeper into the depth of the ocean, the turbulence becomes less and less. At the bottom of the ocean, there is no turbulence. That's what we're doing with the jhanas. It's not that you manufacture stillness out of effort. You're reaching a depth of mind where stillness and the enlightenment factors are already the case.
The ocean doesn't attain the bottom of the ocean. It's just something that, with awareness and attention, is recognized and realized. It was always there. What the jhanas do is give the mind the tools, the stability, the maturation, to recognize that.