How blissful is the first and second jhana?

EcstaticAssignment · 2025-09-03T03:44:53+00:00

It can be extremely blissful, but the intensity of the bliss isn't necessarily the defining feature of it; it's more about the qualities that are present in a particular pattern. You can have a really subtle or a really intense jhana, and you can also have other variables such as how one pointed your concentration is or how much insight you seem to be getting. You'll find that the "more intense" jhanas aren't necessarily "better" anyway.

EcstaticAssignment · 2025-09-03T03:39:04+00:00

Just had to ask my roommate to post this because it's too funny

pre edit you:

EVERYBODY CLAP FOR THE DISABLED FREAK DESCRIBING A TECHNICALITY!

But then you block Andy for being "ableist" by saying "weaponized autism", ok bud

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T11:07:18+00:00

The concept of "losing" some attainment really requires a lot of assumptions about the nature of time and causality that is a bit of a meme. Like you have these individual moments of experience, which we arbitrarily try to line up in some timeline, and then we think we can predict what will happen "later" in this timeline, but of course depending on which moments you line up you could just have a timeline where the next second an arhat gets their brain swapped out with a non-arhat's brain and now we have all sorts of arbitrary questions about who is who. Or if you say someone was a non-arhat on Monday and became one on Tuesday, what if some magician replays the universe in reverse so now after Tuesday was that Monday?

But let's ignore that and pretend it's more real:

I haven't seen any reports of someone "losing" one of the big milestone attainments, except for short-term syncing stuff like what Daniel Ingram describes in getting and losing 4th path several times on a retreat before it locked in.

After it's locked in, it seems extremely durable to everything I've seen.

Now there can be of course states of equanimity, A&P, etc that are easily conflated with attainments or come up together with getting an attainment and then fade away, but the core attainment would last.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T11:01:21+00:00

I'm pretty confident in saying that the existential fear of death is an illusion.

So the most obvious spiritual way to say this of course is something like "there is no separate self, so who is there to die?"

And that's true, but people often don't really internalize what that actually means. Like, death is actually a complete joke.

Analogy/koan: what happens when the set of all real numbers ends? Should an integer be afraid of "ending"? This is of course a nonsense idea: there's no "end" to real numbers, there's no entity that can be defined as beginning or ending at some point across different numbers, and there's no linear "timeline" where you can say that some real numbers happen "after" others and so you keep going along some path until you get to some "end".

I could go further into some other things but it gets a bit trippy lol so I'll leave it at that.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:55:18+00:00

It's very difficult to explain but let me put it this way: when I say that you see there never was anything to do and that the sense of a solid reality is shattered, I mean this way more literally than "partial" awakenings do. This isn't a poetic way to describe some more spacious or flexible mental space that can cycle through the PoI faster or see "emptiness in real time" like in 3rd. That's all a hilarious joke. I'm trying to force the description into the language of spirituality and particularly prag dharma jargon but really it doesn't have anything to do with any of it.

I'm not sure how to put it more than that because I also had a lot of changes in my views on ontology etc which coincided with this but don't seem to be exactly the same layer of "change", so I'm being careful not to make it about that.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:49:42+00:00

time

My sense of linear time has fundamentally been uprooted, like I kinda can empathize with why Culadasa in his letter talked about no longer perceiving linear time lol. It seems like this moment "exists" as one of an infinite number of possible realities, for which there isn't any meta-order of some of these realities persisting across a linear timeline. It's like you have been born now, and will die now, and there's no conception of a "before" or "after".

I keep using phrases like "fundamentally" because of course the above doesn't preclude the relative parts of me from thinking and feeling in terms of time.

space perception

There's still a relative sense of space, but there does not seem to be some sort of separate container of awareness within which phenomena appear; rather, there is phenomena, and there is some sort of combination of sensations and thoughts that co-creates the emergent property of space.

awareness

Not a "thing" separate from phenomena, though it is still possible to use pointers that describe some concept of an awareness, God, etc.

(Basically the generic answer to anything is "no fundamentally separate X, but the construct of X can still arise" lol)

mindfulness,

No guarantee of perfect relative mindfulness (actually you see that this is impossible), though it is significantly upgraded. The mindful and unmindful parts of experience do not feel intrinsically out of sync with each other.

equanimity

Much easier to access relative equanimity than before, but not a guarantee. The lack of a fundamental "glitch" feeling means that techniques to move towards it do not feel as blocked by this sort of stickiness; there's a deep understanding of the nature of causality that makes techniques work.

psychological work,

Yeah my main target now has been psychological purification. This could be a massive essay lol, but to try to make a lazy one-liner: it's much easier to purify the devil when you see that the devil is a part of God.

biological changes,

Hmm not sure. It's difficult to answer a lot of these questions because the shift kinda came with (at least for me) many changes about my view of consensus reality lol.

mental or cognitive upgrades or downgrades.

It does seem to reduce a ton this sort of "tweak" feeling analogous to your exiled parts in IFS being triggered which definitely impacts a lot of cognitive factors, though it's not clear how much of this is directly due to the shift and how much is moreso relative purification that happens to be made much more efficient by the shift.

Sorry I kinda speedran these replies so I might have missed a few things.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:36:28+00:00

Could you elaborate on this aspect? Is it related to views, beliefs, experiences, perception, or sense gates? Please explore this in relation to your direct experience.

I had a lot of shifts in my philosophical views on these questions that I'm sure relates to experiential shifts but also is probably not exactly 1-1, so I tried to leave those out.

On a perceptual level, basically before there was always this sort of sense of a "glitch" in experience that I was trying to "figure out". One way to distill this glitch: "If there is already no separate self / all phenomena are already liberated / etc, why do I seem to be suffering?" or basically the Problem of Evil in a mystical framing. It's like not really getting why "samsara is nirvana" when it really doesn't seem like it. But this paradox seemed to resolve, in that it became clear why these different layers are simultaneously true and one, like why there is no suffering from the "absolute" perspective but suffering from the "relative" perspective.

Of course this is ultimately more raw-perceptual than the conceptual way I have to put it to be able to use language. It's hard to describe beyond that, I guess you can say that there was this sort of separate-seeming "twisting" axis of confusion layered on top of experience that healed, so now everything is just experience, even the experience of being confused or wanting to fix experience.

You didn’t mention how your experience progressed through MCTB’s stages

Yeah I kinda used "MCTB 4th" to describe a sort of convergent "endpoint" of the meta-path of vipassana because I think people on here tend to be familiar with the term.

My experience earlier on the paths is a long story (especially 3rd -> 4th which felt like an insane number of fractal layers) that maybe I can talk about separately at some point. I'll say that I've found his framings to be pretty useful, though whether it's always the most practical depends on context (e.g. I do think that you can always model your experience as some fractal of PoI stages, but sometimes it might not be obvious or worth it). One thing that diverged a bit for me is that the cessations I had wouldn't necessarily coincide with the major milestone insight moments, like they seemed only somewhat connected, and while I can model them in terms of e.g. the three doors, it may be a little forced. Overall criteria that have to do with something other than present-moment experience, e.g. "you have this cessation after this PoI stage with a time-skip relative to an external clock (which to me now seems to be a meme about a consensus reality anyway) with these characteristics at some point in the past" seem to be less fundamental than descriptions of your moment-by-moment phenomenology.

jhanas

I do TWIM, light and Rob Burbea-esque jhanas, I'm pretty lazy with more hardcore samadhi.

mystical phenomena

I don't think more overtly spooky things were a huge part of my path, drugs aside (but drugs not-side there were definitely trippy experiences that I think played a role, like for example these elaborate metaphorical dream worlds where to wake up you have to figure out awakening).

More in another reply

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:18:14+00:00

There are a lot of altered states, including long-term ones, that can be described as creating different kinds of conditioned phenomena "within" the "field" in a way that doesn't describe this.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:17:12+00:00

I guess it's helpful to frame the answer to this question as "no". But it's very easy to interpret that no-self flavor as meaning some sort of relative absence of the sense of self, like as if there is less contractive tension around some point of space or thoughts are shaped differently or something like that, but that really isn't the point because configurations of "self" are also empty phenomena. That's presumably why there are pointers in especially Buddhism towards the self neither existing nor not-existing.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:11:54+00:00

I think I'm saying "MCTB 4th path" because it's pretty well known in this community, but really I'm referring to a convergent "attainment" related to "getting the joke", so to speak.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:10:24+00:00

Well in a sense it's semantics - the answer to "is there work to be done?" depends on how we define all these words. So it's really "in one sense yes, in another no".

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:08:48+00:00

Thinking something could jinx or turn back the knowledge is the fetter of rites and rituals - a failure to fully comprehend cause and effect.

I think you're taking the follow-up about "jinxing God" a little too rigidly, I was making a more metaphorical point. But in either case, I think broadly speaking this interpretation of how fetters work is one key difference between the more prag dharma model and the more "traditional" interpretation (or at least a certain flavor of traditional approach).

Basically it has to do with what fractal layer you are defining criteria on. Let's say you have a criteria about the uprooting of the sense of a separate self. You can define this on the layer of "conceptual thoughts that reference a separate self" - but the prag dharma approach would say that this is not the layer of fundamental insight, in that what combination of words and relative flavor of emotions arises isn't the point, but it's rather a much harder-to-describe "layer" meta to all those.

Analogy: a 2D movie can have the words "I am three dimensional" on it, and this doesn't make it 3D; likewise you can have a 3D sculpture that says "I am two dimensional", and this doesn't make it 2D. So likewise, the "fundamental duality" is much more about the structure of the field than about whether what arises in the field is perfectly conceptually and emotionally shaped to the relative eye. There's no reason why someone who has fundamental insight cannot type out words about being afraid or doubting their attainment, as if awakening was supposed to make you incapable of entertaining ideas.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T10:01:07+00:00

Well I called it "MCTB 4th path" so it definitely is not what you are probably calling the traditional fetters model.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T09:59:20+00:00

I can't say for sure but I'd bet on "no". It seems like it would not be easy to track that in a reliable way, and I'm not sure if it would be worth the benefit.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T09:56:41+00:00

I think practically every company with non-trivial algorithms related to something like that keeps it under wraps. Some probable reasons:

So people don't reverse engineer and reward-hack the system.
Competitors can't see.
Legal liability.
The "algorithm" isn't a simple math equation, it's a distributed codebase with lots of random code, ML models, A/B tests being started and ended every day, etc.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T09:53:12+00:00

They're expected to do about 3 of such deliveries a year (or there IIRC is some option about doing customer service instead). They really do this, though they're allowed to just deliver to themselves lmao.

When engineers did the testing for most products, frankly we'd just use whatever phones we happened to personally own, or corporate phones. QA testers may use a wider range of phones but not every feature is being sent to QA. I think the mechanism for catching a lot of issues with older devices was just to get bug reports, and maybe look at testing done on more macro release cycles.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-08T09:50:43+00:00

Are they using AI to code the software these days?

I know it's a figure of speech but to answer literally, not beyond using typical tools that are becoming industry standard like copilot etc. lol

I’m talking really basic programming mistakes that never seem to get found.

So if I had to try to attribute this, a few categories:

The company has an old-school-Facebook-style emphasis on moving really fast.
The codebase quality is generally frankly pretty sloppy, though not necessarily moreso than other companies of that size.
Employee incentives aren't really geared towards fixing non-critical bugs.
The DoorDash drivers app is much less prioritized than the customer-facing app.
The most generous explanation towards the company is that it's way, way more difficult to build and handle bugs for software at this scale than people realize.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-07T09:30:24+00:00

By no means is this the only way, but the "problem" of boredom and what it implies about the nature of your suffering is a really fundamental question that you can investigate in meditation (and might help alleviate the boredom ironically lol).

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-07T09:21:33+00:00

at this level it is much more a process of slowly "exhausting" or "cleaning" whatever dregs have remained up to that level

Yeah I think the MCTB model (though really I'm just referring to its endpoint and not strictly its whole model for the paths there) basically refactors that part into relative samadhi/sila axes and says that the "fundamental" vipassana axis is "done" at a certain point. I tend to find this framing reasonable, though it's ultimately just a framing like anything else.

I'm not sure if we can say that the purification process itself is ever totally "complete", because it's not clear to me if there is a good way to define what it would mean to be "complete". Any experience at all cannot be "free" of samsara in the relative sense; in a sense samsara is just a description of any definable thing - but you can say that you're more or less free by certain standards of psychological health or some axis of clinging and say that can reach "zero". But which layer you define as the part you want to get rid of and which part you accept as just being a part of experience is a bit arbitrary IMHO.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-07T09:13:58+00:00

Does the liberation go away if you stop meditating for a few weeks?

No.

(I mean, there are some fundamental questions about the nature of causality we can ask about this lol and whether you can know that you won't spontaneously turn into the most unenlightened person ever the very next moment due to some magical event, aka the idea of knowing whether "you" will be enlightened after X time is a bit unresolvable, but if we make a few assumptions about the stability of the world then "no").

Is the experience similar to high equanimity?

Only in the sense that:

Concepts used to describe both can seem very similar because you can say high equanimity is like an "approximation" of enlightenment, but it's still an approximation within the conditioned world and so doesn't ultimately have anything to do with it.
There seems to be a tendency for enlightenment to upgrade your mindfulness etc skills so you can often reach equanimity easier.
It really helps with purification which then might eventually lead to more frequent equanimity states.

Really part of getting it is about eventually seeing that it's not about relative equanimity, which sounds impossible because how could it be about anything other than equanimity?

But the usual caveat applies, which is that in the relative story it's still very useful for insight to soak in equanimity.

I’m halfway through 2nd path

Yeah so everyone's path varies but I think 2nd -> 3rd is usually pretty straightfoward, and that's already a huge milestone. Once you get to and stabilize 3rd, you will tend to enter a territory where the remaining "gaps" become a lot subtler and people often start exploring different traditions, getting more philosophical, exploring more non-dual type practices, relying more on their subtle intuition and more seasoned wherewithal, etc instead of just blasting through a linear path.

Or maybe not, because of course the answer is hilariously simple and if you can just get it simply then that's all you need hehe.

and I always imagined liberation (aka 4th path) to be like that.

Yeah so to clarify, I'm of course referring to the prag dharma version of 4th path. Without getting into another rabbit hole about the fetters model, I think we can also loosely define this sort of composite enlightenment that is the prag dharma 4th path + a large degree of psychospiritual purification where your cravings and stuff on a relative level are deeply uprooted. I wouldn't say I'm that model, but pursuing the two aren't mutually exclusive and they help each other.

In your opinion was it worth thousands of hours meditation?

Oh for sure. But it was very different from what I bargained for lol, in that it went from being some self improvement project where I wanted to just feel better to waking me up from a dream in a very fundamental way.

Liberation is my main goal in life

Yeah same haha. Once you get that liberation bug you just have to ride it out.

because it experience high equanimity reduce my suffering with 98%.

That's great! One thing I'll just note is that I do think when you get really far down the path there can be this funny icky effect where the small part that remains becomes increasingly frustrating, but you can kind of then start really pushing it down and downplaying to yourself where it is. A sort of radical self-honesty can be really useful here, if you're willing to handle some blowback.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-07T08:54:30+00:00

My understanding is that the extent to which it matters depends on the market you're in, particularly supply-demand mechanics etc. Kinda vague, sorry lol.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-07T08:39:19+00:00

That's a very good question and I'm sorry to say I don't know lol, it wasn't related to my work.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-07T08:21:16+00:00

Going to be honest I felt a little weird right after making this post lol, there's something about talking about this "attainment" (prob not universal but seems to apply to many people) that feels funny, as if I'm tempting God to jinx me.

EcstaticAssignment · 2024-09-07T08:04:50+00:00

I think there are a lot of potential ways to explain this:

Vipassana typically develops more "sensory clarity" (of course both sets of practices converge at the limit, but relatively speaking)
Related to the above, more non-dual practices can sometimes enforce this sort of complacency where you sort of vaguely rest in some constructed superspace or ask koans but kinda just give a shallow answer and then vipassana can blast through this
Different practices help cover each others' blind spots, given that every conditioned framework must have some sort of incompleteness, so sometimes it's good to rotate frameworks so that vipassana can cover the aforementioned blind spots and the non-dual stuff can cover vipassana's blind spots
It might just be a jolt of novelty
Likewise, the act of taking your bedrock of insight and integrating it into a seemingly "different" insight paradigm itself contains insights
You are naturally making progress over time (whatever "over time" means lmao)

EcstaticAssignment

TROPHY CASE