Hello Venerable, Sorry for the confusion. I was responding to some of the questions that @Green posed as I thought he might have missed, “he was fully aware.” 
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If only people at large had the same fear a monk has when it comes to speak about his superhuman attainments to unordained people (false: you are expelled / true: you have a pacittiya) and fear of leading people into the wrong paths, I believe there would be more cautiousness when speaking about jhānas …
But do people at large even really believe in the realms of deprivation and in the importance of virtue ? …
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I remain, as ever, jealous of your vocabulary!
I actually spoke at length with the guy who told this story, he was a long term regular at the BSWA. A big bear of a man, you wouldn’t expect him to be a great yogi (which is often the way). This would have been in the late 90s, and he was quite comfortable discussing his experience.
So the details as per that book are mostly as he told me. He said that he was meditating in the morning, and his wife called him for lunch, but he didn’t reply. She called him again and again, even shook him, but he didn’t come out. So she called an ambulance, and the rest happened.
He wasn’t someone who had a lot of fluency in technical concepts or ideas, so he didn’t describe his experience as jhana to me, although of course he may have done to others. He used a descriptive phrase, which I can’t remember, but it was something like “deep state of mental trance”. That wasn’t it, but the point is, when listening to meditators, one of my personal red flags is when they use Pali terms to describe their experience, it usually means they’re distanced from what is happening and caught up in doctrine. He didn’t do that, he used the words that had the most meaning for him. I had no doubt he was describing a genuine experience.
The bit about being “fully aware, but only of bliss” isn’t exactly what he said to me. It seemed there were some different phases of the experience. At some times he was fully absorbed, but at other points he seems to have had an out-of-body experience. He remembered moving down the hospital corridor, then, IIRC, being called back to his body.
One additional detail, it seems that one of the doctors at the hospital was Indian, I think, and had heard of deep samadhi states, so when they couldn’t get any response, he suggested that they just wait.
But yes, it was more or less a “fluke”, his wife told him to never do it again! Not sure how serious she was about that. But he said that he could feel such a state being present, but since that time had never moved into it.
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I had a conversation with him in 2005, again at Dhammaloka. His described the out of body experiences like so (paraphrasing, this was a personal conversation a long time ago):
My consciousness moved in all directions at once, throughout the hospital. The doctor I spoke to afterward was drinking orange pekoe tea upstairs and was spooked out when I told him so.
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Doesn’t sound like Jhana.
Maybe He had a Jhana and NDE at the same time. To prevent him from dying.
I have no knowledge of whether it was or was not, but it does not sound from Venerable @sujato’s description, that the experience related to him meets the description of Jhana according to Venerable Brahm:
SUMMARY OF THE LANDMARKS OF ALL JHANAS
It is helpful to know, then, that within a Jhana:
- There is no possibility of thought;
- No decision making process is available;
- There is no perception of time;
- Consciousness is non-dual, making comprehension inaccessible;
- Yet one is very, very aware, but only of bliss that doesn’t move; and
- The five senses are fully shut off, and only the sixth sense, mind, is in operation.
Which is curious because it seems it was the same lay followers experience that Venerable Brahm’s used as a prime example of Jhana and then gave this summary above.
Sounds like this experience included out-of-body and wandering into another doctors office etc. The summary and the prime example sound discordant which does not auger confidence.
OTOH, maybe as @Dharma said he was moving in out of Jhana? Is that possible? Isn’t stability a part of Jhana?
He could have been in Jhana the whole time, also during another type of Meditative experience that was dangerous, or an NDE as well. It doesn’t have to be either/or.
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Yes it’s possible to move in and out of Jhāna, stability is trained as mastery of Jhāna. Why is there 3 Brahma realms for 1st to 3rd Jhāna each? Due to mastery of the Jhāna.
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Not sure if anyone else has provided this link in the thread (not going to read it all, sorry) but here is an archived version of the full article:
The Meditation Start-Up That’s Selling Bliss on Demand - The Atlantic (archive.is)
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From the article:
If his product is successful, he said, it would be the “most important intervention in human well-being in a generation.” He sent me a document that explained more. “Imagine if Biden and Putin shed tears of joy and gratitude for 30 minutes every morning,” it read. There would be “all kinds of cascading effects.” The implication seemed to be that Jhourney would help bring about world peace.
EEG data are also notoriously difficult to collect and isolate. Extracting bona fide neural activity from the noise created by muscle movements and other sources is tedious work, even for experts. When I asked Zerfas if Jhourney has a full-time EEG scientist on staff, he said no, but added that he’d “read a bunch of textbooks,” and taught himself with the help of a tutor. The current state of EEG research coming out of academia underwhelmed him, he said. And in any case, he saw this as more of a machine-learning problem than a neuroscience problem.
Good grief.
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Venerable Dhammanando,
Are there two or three jhāna books/articles you would recommend, as it seems Ajahn Brahmavamso’s is not one? (I had to look up “puerile dysphemism” to understand what I think you’re saying in that paragraph.) Thank you in advance, if there are.
I’ve been enjoying this Watercooler discussion. Now, when I read this in Ajahn Brahmavamso’s linked essay:
Furthermore, when a meditator has actually experienced a profound state of meditation, they want to find out exactly what it was, to recognize the state in terms of the Buddha’s accurate descriptions. So it is important to be able to correctly identify the levels of depth in meditation.
… it brought up the same question for me as I’ve had in the past: Why do I need to correctly identify the levels of depth in meditation?
Do I keep questioning this assumption whenever I see it (in this case, in the essay) because I’m a lay person and, intuitively, it doesn’t matter to me what level I’ve attained? I mean, after a couple of year’s of meditation it was becoming beautiful and blissful. But I’ve never felt compelled to assess whether I’ve reached various stages. My only goal at this stage of practice is to sustain concentration for longer periods of time – but I’m only talking minutes here, not hours. I only practice sitting meditating one hour a day as a lay person.
Also, as an aside I sometimes notice a tendency for “how big is mine” as discussions evolve (apologies if I’m offending anyone; I don’t have one). Or a tendency toward “how quickly did you run the marathon or scale the mountain.” I wonder whether my biological makeup precludes me from gravitating toward biggest/longest/quickest/etc. as a general non-tendency. Again, no offense and I’m simply trying to gauge why some of these attainment measurements don’t resonate with me at all, even after I’ve practiced for so many years.
Gratefully, BethL
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From what I understand this might be a point of disagreement among extent traditions. Certainly my teachers have emphasized not getting hung up with identifying where one might be in terms of meditative attainments. I think they emphasize this because in practice focusing on acquiring attainments and desiring to find oneself on some kind of level of where/what one has attained can quite often transform meditative experiences into just another self-centered ego trip?
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Further down here they say:
- Go-to-market – So far all customers have been organic. We’ll set up paid customer acquisition channels and iterate on our CAC
- Build a content universe – Since our product requires a week off, we expect customers to require multiple touch points before a purchase. Fortunately, our stories are novel and dramatic; we think our podcasts will do well
- Improve jhana speed, reliability, and cost – we can increase our retreat TAM by shortening retreats, or building a cohort model that doesn’t require time off work
This is about ramping up customer acquisition, increasing the addressable market, reducing customer acquisition costs, lowering the barrier to click that “purchase” button, and (reading between the lines) quickly pumping out more “graduates”. Whether the outcome is a real jhana or not, and whether that’s even possible in their target of 2-hours to teach jhana, I’ve no basis to comment and would defer to the people who’ve walked the path. As a layperson, hearing that pitch about getting from zero to jhana in 10 hours or 2 hours sounds dubious and implausible.
I can sort of feel how this will turn out, but it will be interesting to watch this space to see what else comes up, how much money they raise, and how they pivot. I’m curious. Interestingly, I looked at their twitter feed and they claim that a novice meditator attended a recent retreat and went to the fifth jhana (they call it J1, J2, etc.). Perhaps an “emperor’s new clothes” business model where you pay a lot more to reach a higher J-level? And some sort of expensive ongoing subscription to keep that level?
[Edit]
Their website talks about Jhanas 5-8. Jhourney: Spring Summer 2024 Meditation Retreats
No explicit claims about whether their students are guaranteed to reach J5 - J8, but the twitter (X) post above indicates that they (can? may?) get you there quickly.
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Geniuses hey! 
Part of the approach to jhanas is letting go. To practice absorptive meditations with the Jhourney group, you let go of a chunk of money :
“Price:
Online retreat cost is $1,100. In-person retreat cost starts at $1800 and depends on the center, single vs. double room, etc.”
Is it generosity or is it paying for a service ?
There’s nothing new to the idea of people paying for meditation retreats. I’ve always argued that there are places like BSWA and Abhayagiri where folks can get solid teachings and training in samadhi without paying huge fees to lay teachers running for profit organizations. In the west, caveat emptor. These businesses like Jhourney don’t pass the ‘smell test’ for me, but maybe Gen Z and millennials can get some exposure to Dhamma indirectly from groups like this, and then use their intellects to find better (dana-based) sources for Dhamma and instruction.
Not exactly too expensive.
There are other retreats certainly with more expensive price tags. And even some are by Buddhist organisations.
Ajahn Brahm has this exercutive retreats with Singaporeans, living in 5 star hotels, I went for one, my first retreat with him. When I was with a fresh graduate salary. About $1000+ SGD. Then I went for an India Mahayana temporary sāmaṇera retreat, cost me about to sgd 2500.
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No doubt that there are expenses involved. I looked up one of LP Brahm’s Singapore retreats, and the program was all inclusive with hotel rooms and meals etc. at a 5 star hotel. I’m guessing that the $1000 SGD paid covered the hotel and meal costs. Found as well this by example: Meditation Retreat Jul 2024 ~ with Venerable Ajahn Anan in Thailand Tickets, Mueang | Eventbrite . The cost of $160.00 is for 9 days of meals; the teaching and retreat itself is free/dana-based.
Again, caveat emptor. In the real world, there are costs and expenses for any retreat, and I have no quarrel with a program covering its overheads, including at 5 star hotels for Singaporeans.
I suppose my point is that for those seeking Dhamma, and the time to expend on a samadhi retreat, there are very cost effective solutions at good Asian and western wats that almost anyone can afford. Also, because the steps to the jhanas are creating the ethical and positive behavioral environments for the precursor samma sati, I like the idea of being in a renunciate community, with simple community meals and kutis. I like sweeping paths, doing kitchen work, or doing some caṅkama surrounded by glorious trees, flowers, birds, and mountains, like at https://www.wattamwua.com/.
Check it out: https://youtu.be/JrQfBUQJ6KE?si=A3YpLBQLYwvzr0t1
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