I’d read Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Lindy effect for the strongest defense of this proposition. Basically all ideas and culture are constantly fighting in a market of culture. For every Jhana there are 1000 different spiritual concepts, which try to occupy the same niche. There has to be something to Jhana’s that leads to it still being done today, while the rest became history. That something does not have to necessarily mean that the idea is true, for example meditation in general is known to be very good for you, so if Jhana’s work as the carrot on the stick to get people to meditate, then the idea would also stick around, as people start praising Jhana’s due to the benefits they got from meditation. But every idea that is old needs to have some sort of payload, something that helped it survive on the market of ideas and culture for millenia.
I’d read Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Lindy effect for the strongest defense of this proposition. Basically all ideas and culture are constantly fighting in a market of culture. For every Jhana there are 1000 different spiritual concepts, which try to occupy the same niche. There has to be something to Jhana’s that leads to it still being done today, while the rest became history. That something does not have to necessarily mean that the idea is true, for example meditation in general is known to be very good for you, so if Jhana’s work as the carrot on the stick to get people to meditate, then the idea would also stick around, as people start praising Jhana’s due to the benefits they got from meditation. But every idea that is old needs to have some sort of payload, something that helped it survive on the market of ideas and culture for millenia.