Conversation

I have a friend who's been meditating 2-3 hours a day for a few years now, and has somehow managed to never run into normal meditation knowledge at all. He'd never heard of Jhanas before! So I read him descriptions of the Jhanas to see he'd encountered them independently 1/
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He related to some of the descriptions, but inconsistently. like first and second jhana he was like ??? never felt that, but I read third jhana and he was like oh yeah that sounds very familiar. overall he didn't find them to be much of a pattern match
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Not sure what this means, but it updates me slightly in the direction of "ppl who experience jhanas are doing so because they've been previously primed by hearing ppl describe jhanas'
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I'm not sure I personally count cause I did most of my own meditation while on psychedelics, but I have spent very many hours in bizarre states, most of them before hearing about jhanas, and I also do not find the jhanas to be a natural description of anything I've experienced.
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tho mebbe u gotta do very specific jhana meditation to experience them, and it's not just something that happens to anyone who stares at their own mind enough?
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er to clarify: I was under the impression jhanas are supposed to be a progression, but he claimed to have experienced something that the third jhana description sounded like, but not the first two; maybe he did independently discover them, but not in order?
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Replying to
For me meditation is one path to make the discovery: - All of my stories/character are made up BS, therefore they should stress me out no more than a TV show. Engaging in them is a choice, for fun - Employing “methods” to achieve “goals” is cope for existential angst
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A rigid meditation routine with the goal of achieving jhanas is another form of cope IMO. No different than “practicing” your golf swing 1,000,000 times to become pro (it doesn’t work) We dream that simple structure will solve problems, but it’s embracing chaos & flow that does
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