Love and Happiness in the Jhanas

Meditators have long known that during the practice of meditation they can raise consciousness to higher states of mind. In Buddhism these states are called jhana (in Theravada) or dhyana (in Mahayana). The first state, the easiest one to attain, is common to all religious and secular contemplative practices around the world, and is called jhana 1. Hence these states of mind are independent of the seeker’s belief system and religious orientation. In Buddhism these states are separated into eight ascending levels, of which the lower four are more easily attained than the higher four. My analysis features just these lower four.

In Theravada Buddhism, each state or level has been analysed and the various characteristics of each state have been tabulated. Primarily they are states of concentration, and the progression from one state to the next one occurs by deepening the intensity of one’s concentration. The advantage of using a Buddhist framework for these states of mind is that the Buddhist analysis is purely a phenomenological one: it just describes the presenting states of mind in a neutral fashion, without any doctrinal overlay on them. By a doctrinal overlay, I mean that the person reads into an experience what he hopes and expects it to mean, so that seekers coming from different traditions will usually give different interpretations of the same experience. Theravada Buddhism is usually free of that overlay.

I list just a few of the typical characteristics of the first four jhanas, the lower four, as described in Buddhism. In the first jhana, happiness occurs in two stages: the first stage is joy and the second one is bliss. In the second jhana, the first stage is rather nondescript, rather “plain”, whilst the bliss state is less exciting than that of the first jhana. Typically, a characteristic of one level of jhana ceases in the next higher jhana. In my notation, I use a hyphen, instead of a space, to designate which jhana I am referring to. So jhana 1 becomes jhana-1. Some of the major characteristics of each stage are as follows.

So far I have given a typical psychic classification of jhana states. Soon I was to abandon the psychic classification (a classification based on mental attributes) and instead I formulated a psychological classification (a classification based on emotion). This psychological classification opened up to me the ways in which the jhana states functioned.

It is jhana-1 and jhana-2 that will feature in the rest of this article. Ecstasy is extreme happiness and is also called bliss and rapture. The joy indicates that jhana-1 has been reached, but it does not always lead to bliss. In my experience the joy stage is easily reached, though the bliss stage is harder to attain. The interesting point to note is that cognitive thinking, or applied thought, only significantly occurs in jhana-1; it is much less evident in jhana-2. Usually if the seeker is in a higher jhana and attempts to think rationally, he exits that jhana and descends to jhana-1.

Getting to Jhana-1

How to access the jhanic states of mind is covered in many web articles on jhana, usually within a setting of meditation practice. I give just a short note on how I initially started. In a relaxed pose, do some concentration exercise, such as being mindful of the breathing process. When relaxed enough, begin thinking of a smile and how happy it makes you feel. Avoid being distracted by anything else. As you concentrate on the smile, you begin to get happier and happier, and soon the ecstasy will come and your face will light up with a big smile.

Other objects are just as good as a smile. Anything that is beautiful to you can be used as an object of pleasurable concentration. In essence, you just focus on a pleasant sensation and feel the happiness grow in intensity until you reach ecstasy.

The characteristics of jhana-1 that I am interested in are the joy, the ecstasy, and the applied thinking. The applied thinking is important since it is in this jhana state that the flow of ideas is encountered. Or, to put this the other way around, when a person finds that he is experiencing the flow going through his mind, then at that moment he is in jhana-1, in the stage of joy. The joy and ecstasy are important since it is by analysing them that I finally managed to analyse happiness.

The Experience of Bliss

Traditional Buddhist thinkers and writers focused on joy and bliss as the representative moods of jhana-1 and jhana-2. They rarely mentioned any other emotions, presumably because either they could not identify them or they were not aware of them. This indicates a serious limitation to the Buddhist analysis of jhana. There is more going on in jhana than they were aware of. In particular, even when jhana is attained, sooner or later abreaction begins [²], and the emotions that feature in abreaction start to intrude into the jhanic states of mind. The presence of abreaction indicates that the joy functions as the first stage of abreaction, since joy is based on narcissism, and abreaction cannot begin without narcissism.

The bliss of jhana-1 is an experience of happiness that is over-the-top. My most amazing experience of it was on Christmas day 2017 when I was in raised consciousness. The happiness was stupendous and overwhelming: I was blissed-out for 1½ hours, although at that time I was not really aware of the jhanas. Bliss is an experience that everyone should have at least a few times in their life.

The intensity of the bliss will vary according to the person and to the circumstances of his or her childhood. A contemplative person can be attracted to the bliss because of his childhood trauma: the more intense the trauma was, the more he is likely to be overwhelmed by the bliss. Why is this? Usually a mystic has a lot of fear and guilt in him, and so has a poor opinion of himself. He finds it hard to feel good about himself. This fear and guilt can be temporarily over-ridden by going over-the-top emotionally.

There are two ways of going over-the-top emotionally, by using either vanity or love. The person goes over-the-top in order to surmount an emotional barrier in his subconscious mind. Vanity is used to surmount fear, whilst love is used to surmount both fear and guilt.

At first I thought it was vanity that pushed the mystic over-the-top into blissful happiness. After more experience of jhana, I identified the emotion as being love, divine love. The more fear that the person has, the greater the intensity of love needs to be in order to temporarily neutralise the dominance of that fear. Hence when love overrides the fear, the person experiences it as an overwhelming experience. Then eventually when the fear dissipates over a period of time (due to repeated experience of bliss), the intensity of the love will decrease as well.

Bliss or Flow ?

During one occasion in raised consciousness, I was going to focus on a smile as a way to get to jhana-1. But I quickly forgot, as I became absorbed in the flow. This implies that the technique of inducing jhana by focusing on a smile will inhibit the flow. My concentration was too fixed to allow the flow to occur. Whereas, for the flow to start, concentration needs to be fluid. Fluid concentration means watching the changes occur, without having any preconceived (and hence controlling) desires and questions. I have to refrain from attempting to shape the flow.

If I want to get to jhana in order to experience joy and bliss, I need to increase my concentration, whilst if I want to experience the flow and be stimulated by great ideas, I have to relax my concentration. Then if I focus on an idea so that I can remember it and then immediately write it down, I come out of the flow. Afterwards I have to make the effort to get back into it.

If the flow is not producing great ideas, then I listen to vocal music. The flow picks up on what I find inspiring in the lyrics, and that takes me off into a phantasy. Sometimes I use music that is either purely orchestral or else simulates white noise, such as “space” music; in this way no desires and phantasies intrude into the flow and I get ideas about reality.

There are three common variations in the way that the first jhana is experienced. These variations are not exclusive, since the person can easily switch between them.

Physical – such as dancing to music. This is common in “raves” where crowds of young people gather together to dance the night away.
Emotional – which produces happiness and ecstasy.
Cognitive – this is a mental experience, by watching the flow.

The Stages of Jhanas 1 and 2

The flow is a distraction if I want to get to jhana-2. Jhana-2 does not feature continuous applied thought and so the flow is much less prominent. Therefore I have to ignore any flow that happens in jhana-1 if I want to access jhana-2.

When the bliss in jhana-2 is felt, it is very different from the bliss of jhana-1. In jhana-2, the bliss is calmer, and not over-the-top. I subsequently identified that jhana-2 bliss lacks the excitement of jhana-1 bliss. So now I call the bliss of jhana-2 mellow bliss. The bliss can still be intense, but it is mellow instead of being exciting. The bliss of jhana-1 is still called ecstatic bliss.

In the bliss of jhana-1, my face muscles tense in order to produce a smile, sometimes called the rictus grin. Then I let the muscles relax, so that the tension drains out of my face. This relaxation allows me to progress to jhana-2. In jhana-2 bliss, my heart sings as I feel gentleness and gentle love.

The joy feature of both jhanas has two variations. When sexual interests are aroused, the joy of jhana-1 changes to exciting joy; the mellow joy of jhana-2 changes to sensual joy (the type of joy found in having intimate contact between two or more people). Both forms of bliss seem to be unaffected by the sexual tone. The first two stages of both jhanas are as follows.

When sexual interests are absent.
Jhana-1 stages are joy and ecstatic bliss.
Jhana-2 stages are mellow joy and mellow bliss.

When sexual interests are present.
Jhana-1 stages are exciting joy and ecstatic bliss.
Jhana-2 stages are sensual joy and mellow bliss.

The Analysis of Happiness

What is happiness? Until the middle of the second decade of the 21st century, there wasn’t much happiness in my life during the time I engaged in my psycho-analysis. So I was unable to analyse it. I never noticed the flow, as a flow, until 2020, although I had many inspiring ideas. . Eventually I noticed the flow and began analysing it and exploring the jhanas. The joy component of jhana-1 was fairly easy to identify: it is narcissism in vanity mode. Sorting out rapture was more difficult. Soon my ideas settled on the view that happiness is derived from vanity modes. Since there are three vanity modes, then there are three basic forms of happiness.[³]

Initially, to begin the analysis of rapture, I compared the three forms of vanity. My first ideas were as follows.

c). Vanity as a mode of pride leads to a respectable role and contentment with one’s position in life. Respectability brings the satisfaction due to social validation.

Each form of vanity produces its own kind of happiness. If narcissism (in vanity mode) is added to any practice, then we get pleasure from engaging in that practice. Another way of understanding this mode of narcissism is that it is the “feel-good factor”: whatever makes a person feel good, this is a source of happiness for him. However, pride gives rise to a problem, in that it does not necessarily produce happiness. This suggests that happiness has another factor in addition to the vanity mode factors.

One clue to this other factor was love. Pure love can be easy to detect when it is intense, but not when it is of low intensity. Love appears to intensify other emotions. Then my final discovery was that in jhana-1 bliss, the mode of narcissism is love, not vanity. This discovery enabled me to fit jealousy in the scheme of happiness. Now I can give my final analysis.

Ecstatic bliss denotes the mixture of pure love and narcissism (mode of love).
Joy is a moderate happiness and denotes narcissism (mode of vanity).

Mellow bliss denotes the mixture of pure love and jealousy (mode of love).
Mellow joy is a moderate happiness and denotes jealousy (mode of self-pity).

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.

Ian Heath
London, UK

If you want to contact me, use the address at the bottom of the Home page.

Also, since there are numerous articles on this site, please include the title of the article if you want me to clarify or discuss particular issues.

It may be a few days before I can respond to correspondence.

.zzz	Extreme Distress In January 2020, the hard astrological conjunction of Saturn and Pluto brought me extreme distress. All my old traumas, which I had thought had more or less been healed, came back at full intensity. I was immersed in intense states of hatred and guilt. Then in March the corona virus hit Western Europe, making my hatreds and guilt even more intense. For most of 2020, I had a bad time. I had previously noticed, during my bad times of the 1990s, that extreme distress brings me extreme awareness. I still visited the flow of ideas.[¹]. Then in January 2021, I noticed a new phenomenon. When I was in a state of raised consciousness, I entered the mental states of jhana. The first state of jhana, that of ecstatic bliss, I was already familiar with. I had encountered the bliss many times in the past, but I had not realised that it represented a jhana state. However, now I entered higher states of jhana. I spent the next five years analysing the psychology of the first four jhana states, till I exhausted what there was for me to learn about them.
Sub - Headings
Getting to Jhana-1
The Experience of Bliss
Bliss or Flow
Stages of Jhanas 1 and 2
Analysis of Happiness
References