Why not? An ability to get blissed-out on demand sure seems like it could be dangerous. And, relatedly, I have seen stuff mentioning jhana addicts a few times.
Ingram has actively hunted for any jhana hunters for twenty years and hasn’t found any. The reason why becomes obvious once one gains a bit of insight into why/how jhana works. Though it’s trickier to describe.
Just to drive this point home, an important feature of concentration practices is that they are not liberating in and of themselves. Even the highest of these states ends. The afterglow from them does not last long. Regular life and reality might even seem like an assault when that afterglow has worn off. However, jhana junkies abound in all traditions and even outside traditions, and many have no idea that this is what they have become. I have a friend who has been lost in the formless realms for over twenty years, attaining them again and again in practice, rationalizing that he is doing Dzogchen practice when he is just staying in the fourth through sixth jhanas, and further rationalizing that the last two formless realms are “emptiness”, and that he is enlightened. This story, or a version of it, repeats countless times. It is a true dharma tragedy.
Unfortunately, as another good friend of mine rightly pointed out, it is almost impossible to reach such people after a while. They get trapped in temporary attainments so exquisite that they have no idea they are in prison, nor do they take at all kindly to suggestions that this may be so, particularly if their identity has become bound up in their false notion that they are a realized being. Chronic jhana junkies are fairly easy to spot, even though they often imagine that they are not. We are all presumably able to take responsibility for our choices in life, so if people want to be jhana junkies, that’s their choice, and the jhanas clearly beat most things one could become addicted to. However, when people don’t realize that this is what they have become and pretend that what they are doing has anything to do with insight practices, that’s a truly lost opportunity to put those attainments into the service of achieving actual realization and true freedom.
This is oddly different from what he said in person. Also he wrote the first edition of mctb also about twenty years ago now, so I wouldn’t be surprised if his opinion is different from his thirty year old self.
Update, I pinged him on Twitter and he said that people getting jhana on retreat and then thinking that the path is about getting ‘back to that’ is very common, instead of the person pursuing insight practices that lead to day to day changes Rather than peak experiences.
I’ve never seen a jhana junkie for myself, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t exist. I’m using the word “addictive” to refer to the results of a mental process that does not include jhana junkies. “Jhana junkie” is, I believe, one of many failure modes, but I believe jhana junkies do not technically constitute “addiction”, because they have a different root cause.
I think that’s a completely reasonable question to ask. The answer is non-obvious.
To fully answer your question is beyond the scope of this post, but I think there’s two systems operating in the brain. One of them is a reinforcing operant condition system that can get addicted. Jhanic bliss states require that the operant conditioning system not be active, so it’s not getting reinforced.
Why not? An ability to get blissed-out on demand sure seems like it could be dangerous. And, relatedly, I have seen stuff mentioning jhana addicts a few times.
Ingram has actively hunted for any jhana hunters for twenty years and hasn’t found any. The reason why becomes obvious once one gains a bit of insight into why/how jhana works. Though it’s trickier to describe.
That seems like the opposite of what he wrote in MCTB?
This is oddly different from what he said in person. Also he wrote the first edition of mctb also about twenty years ago now, so I wouldn’t be surprised if his opinion is different from his thirty year old self.
Update, I pinged him on Twitter and he said that people getting jhana on retreat and then thinking that the path is about getting ‘back to that’ is very common, instead of the person pursuing insight practices that lead to day to day changes Rather than peak experiences.
That’s odd. (Note that while this excerpt was already present in the first edition, it was also retained in the second edition.)
Clarification time.
I’ve never seen a jhana junkie for myself, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t exist. I’m using the word “addictive” to refer to the results of a mental process that does not include jhana junkies. “Jhana junkie” is, I believe, one of many failure modes, but I believe jhana junkies do not technically constitute “addiction”, because they have a different root cause.
I think that’s a completely reasonable question to ask. The answer is non-obvious.
To fully answer your question is beyond the scope of this post, but I think there’s two systems operating in the brain. One of them is a reinforcing operant condition system that can get addicted. Jhanic bliss states require that the operant conditioning system not be active, so it’s not getting reinforced.