Jhourney is a new silicon valley based startup that aims to “teach jhana in a week.” They offer weeklong in person retreats, 10-day online work-compatible retreats, and online weekend retreats. Here is their podcast, FAQ, and blog. Here is a paywalled Atlantic article. (I took the title of my post from here, but wasn’t able to read the full article), and here is a blogpost.
To quote from their website, “We’ll be teaching a secular interpretation of the jhanas inspired by the TWIM community, Leigh Brasington, and Rob Burbea.” In other words, it is what has been called by some folks “jhana-lite.” Lets briefly set aside whether or not this actually jhana (I am personally inclined to say that it is not, but I’ll get to that).
They have only had a retreat center for around 6 months. From what I can tell, their basic approach is a heavy emphasis on metta, “open awareness,” focus on surrending and letting go, and experimentation with a variety of techniques like yoga, pranamaya, etc. I also think they offer high-intensity exercise, sauna/cold baths at their retreat facility, and I imagine at some point they might add things like sensory deprivations tanks, etc. (I have not actually been to the retreat facility, or done any of their online retreats, so I could be mistaken about some of this.)
But the biggest new thing they are aiming to offer is neurofeedback. Consumer grade EEG, basically a brain helmet, can monitor some of what is going on in a person’s brain. By taking folks who can access jhana while wearing such a device, it is possible to train statistical models so that a computer can learn to tell when a person is in jhana. Then, real-time feedback can be given to a novice meditator to let them know if they are heading in the right direction. This feedback can be something as simple as a non-distracting song playing in the background which decreases in volume when a person is heading towards jhana. They have already had success in getting their statistical model to accurately identify when a person is in (their definition of) jhana.
Learning meditation is very different from almost every other skills we learn. Normally, a mentor can watch what a student is doing and provide immediate feedback based on what they notice going on. Now, we know from psychological studies that immediate feedback is one of the most important factors that determines how quickly a person learns something. Furthermore, one-on-one real time training with a teacher has been shown to be one of the best ways to learn new skills. Part of the reason that meditation takes so long to learn is that this is not possible. Instead, there is a lot of personal trial and error, and even when there is a teacher, the teacher has to guess what is going on in the student’s mind.
So, it is plausible that neurofeedback can dramatically increase the speed of learning. They do not offer it yet, but they likely will within months to years. And they claim that without neurofeedback they can already get around 70% of their novice retreatants to jhana at the end of their weeklong retreat.
All that being said, there are some things that are potentially worrying here.
First, is the state they are teaching actually jhana? Likely not. Still, I do not think this is necessarily as big of a deal as it may seem. In another thread, @Sujato writes
Indeed, I’d be much more comfortable if they simply used 'ecstatic meditation" or even “absorption” or something. “Jhana” is just such a specific and doctrinally overburdened term.
I agree with this. It is likely that this is not jhana, but it is still “ecstatic meditation,” and non-jhana ecstatic meditation can still be useful and very powerful. The testimonials seem quite positive. Optimistically, this could be just part of a broader trend, and in the future projects like this will mean that more people end up interested in “actual jhana.”
Still, there is an obvious danger here. Conceit and overestimation can lead a person to neglect the possibility of something more. And offering a product labeled “jhana” is essentially cashing in on the social value of Buddhist wisdom. You might notice something here: when pushed in a conversation about whether or not these are “actually” jhana, they will often concede that it may not be what the Buddha had in mind. But this raises the question: “why call it jhana then?” - and the answer is basically that it sells better.
A second concern is the training of the statistical model. In order to do this, you first need a large sample of people who can get into “jhana.” But if you start out with a group of people who are actually getting into PseudoJhana, then the when you use the results of this data to train novices, you will just be shepherding them right into PseudoJhana.
A third concern of mine is that offering jhana classes in a completely secular framework risks people missing out on the other potentially transformative aspects of the Buddhist path. When packaged in such a way, it might raise the chance that folks feel like they got all of the “good stuff” while being able to discard the bad “religious” stuff. We have to remember, though, that nobody owns meditation – or jhana for that matter – and I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with secular for-profit meditation retreats. Optimistically, a jhourney retreat might have the opposite effect as what I just described: folks might think to themselves, “if this was so good, then maybe there is other stuff worth looking at too.” Also, although I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with secular for-profit meditation retreats, the ethics becomes murky when the meditation tradition you are drawing from explicitly prohibits selling that information.
A fourth concern of mine is simply a personal fear: One of the things that Buddhism has to “offer” is jhana, and if jhana gets reduced to what is happening in the brain, why do we need the rest? If it gets reduced to something happening in the brain, then maybe it was never a supernatural state to begin with, and the other supernatural claims in Buddhism can be dismissed too? Whether we like it or not though, this is already happening and will likely only become more common, and so we have to live with it.
Fifth, supposing we grant that this allows practitioners to reach ecstatic meditation much faster than they normally would have been able to, it still raises the concern that maybe other imporant and less flashy lessons and skills that you learn along the way are being discarded. On the other hand, it is easy to slip into the Protestant Work Ethic here: you always need to “work hard” before you “earn” something – an attitude I think is often harmful.
Lastly, I could be wrong about this, but I get the impression that the startup founders have not engaged very much with the source material (the suttas). Instead, their interpretation of jhana seems to come entirely from the authors I listed earlier (Brasington, Burbea, TWIM). This is mostly a personal dissapointment, because I would say that this is actually the norm for most meditators and Buddhists outside of communities like the one on this forum. Still, it would be nice to know that they have done their homework before deciding to teach their interpretation.
So, what do folks think of all of this? I am anticipating a lot of you will not like it 
, so I will end on a more positive note and say that there are some things they are doing which I think are likely useful. The attitude of treating meditation as something which can be fun/pleasant/exploratory and focusing on metta first and foremost for novices is probably a positive development and will yield much faster returns for the average person. And if neurofeedback is just like having an excellent personal meditation coach without any bad side effects, then great!
