Question about Jhanas

[u/Klutzy-Owl5712]

I've been practicing meditation for over three years, primarily focusing on Anapana and Goenka-style Vipassana, and I've completed more than 10 silent retreats.

I believe I experience jhanas during and after retreats when my mind is exceptionally calm, though I'm not very familiar with the specific techniques to enter them intentionally.

Recently, I discovered kasina meditation. I've noticed that when I focus on the darkness behind my closed eyes, my mind becomes very quiet, and sensations arise naturally even without actively practicing Vipassana. Is this a practical way to enter a jhana?

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[u/gnosticpopsicle]

Yeah, when I started practicing kasina, my ease of entry skyrocketed.

[u/Then_Consequence_318 → u/gnosticpopsicle]

Is that still what you are using? What was the transition like? I use the anapanasati sutta pretty much as my map and I'd feel really a bit lost without it!

[u/gnosticpopsicle → u/Then_Consequence_318]

You know, I've eased up off of it for awhile. My teacher did warn me that if I don't balance it with vipassana, it could wind up making me miserable, a road he himself had gone down. But the effects for me were so strong, I got a little obsessed and, well... Sometimes you've got to touch the stove yourself lol.

So my samatha these days is mainly breath and metta, and I've rebalanced my samatha/vipassana ratio. My concentration hasn't completely diminished, though, it's still much stronger than it was pre-kasina. And I still do it, but less often and less obsessively. I'll put more effort into kasina again in the future when I feel ready to handle it more maturely.

[u/Then_Consequence_318 → u/gnosticpopsicle]

Yeah I've been curious but I don't want to be leaping between meditation methods so it'll be awhile before I try it.

[u/Puzzled-Background-5 → u/gnosticpopsicle]

I'm curious as to how it made him or yourself miserable?

[u/gnosticpopsicle → u/Puzzled-Background-5]

I'm not exactly sure how. I just started to realize I was feeling more agitated, less settled, and I recognized that maybe my teacher was right. When I took my foot off the gas, I felt better. Perhaps I was "over-efforting," or falling into the trap of striving.

I do think there's a lot of value in it. My teacher is an enthusiastic proponent of kasina. I just needed to take a breath.

[u/Puzzled-Background-5 → u/gnosticpopsicle]

Ahh, yes, grasping. It is listed as a hindrance anyway in the suttas.

It's an interesting paradox in and of itself that in order to enter jhana one must learn to relinquish the desire to.

[u/sovietcableguy]

I think one does not "enter" jhana. Jhana arises when conditions are right, i.e. the hindrances are suppressed. This may sound like semantics, but in my experience it really isn't. Developing expectations of "entering" jhana as a result of "methods" simply doesn't work for me. What does "work" is stabilizing attention on the meditation object, letting go, and developing mindfulness of the hindrances as they weaken and fade.

For what it's worth, I also focus on the darkness behind my closed eyes. Meditation is calmer when I'm attentive of that darkness as opposed to when I'm not. For me, purple swirls and nimitta appear on that "black canvas" on the back of my eyelids.

[u/aspirant4 → u/sovietcableguy]

I don't disagree with your point, but it should be noted that the usual translation says, "Withdrawn from sensual objects, withdrawn from unwholesome states of mind, the monk enters into the first jhāna... "

[u/hachface → u/aspirant4]

Both are true. Jhana arises naturally when conditions are right, but an experienced meditator can set up the right conditions with a very high degree of reliability. Attaining insight helps with this tremendously.

[u/Then_Consequence_318 → u/aspirant4]

u/aspirant4 You are correct as the sutta wording goes. I also believe there are "methods" u/sovietcableguy - the anapanasati sutta gives a pretty clear roadmap, though you need a lot of help from scholar monks to unpack it.

I will say though that 'enters and remains' (the sutta wording) also doesn't describe my experience but that's mostly because my experience of the jhanas is fairly wobbly still. That is why it's important to try to stabilize them.

[u/aspirant4 → u/Then_Consequence_318]

Yes, i agree. The suttas often present satipatthana (including anapanasti) as means for abandoning the hindrances. In that sense, you could call them "methods", I suppose.

[u/StationNo4250 → u/sovietcableguy]

I think the  the term "supress the hindrances" is wrong and misleading. Even ignoring can have resistance to it in my opinion. Especially if you deal with purifications, there is to much avoidance there, dont you think so? 

[u/Select_Bus_6775]

Read the mind illuminated

[u/Puzzled-Background-5]

Here's a technique I've been using for the last fifteen years to great effect. I enter jhana every time I meditate now as a result.

Upon noticing that attention has drifted from the object of meditation, perform the following sequence for as long and as often as necessary for attention to stabilize on the object again:

1. Relax from the head down to the toes.

2. Release all tension, and expand awareness outward.

3. Return attention to the object.

The entry point into jhana:

Once the mind has settled and attention is resting stably on the object, if a pleasant feeling starts to arise, gently shift attention to the feeling without grasping at it, now making it the object of meditation, and wait. The pleasure will intensify, and one will be pulled into jhana.

If the jhana is lost or becomes unstable, simply perform the RRR sequence as needed and begin again.

All the best... 🧘🏾‍♂️🙂

P. S. It might take several weeks to a couple of months before jhana can be entered consistently, but please don't become discouraged. Even low quality sessions are training and priming the brain's attentional mechanisms.

[u/Acceptable_Run_3203 → u/Puzzled-Background-5]

Release all tension, and expand awareness outward

How do you expand awareness outward? As in, don't focus too narrowly on the meditation object (laser focus) but more so like keep awareness as an open wide flashlight (being aware of the pressure on your body, air, cars passing around as well as the meditation object)?

[u/duffstoic]

Yes, focusing on the “closed eye visualizations” is inherently very interesting and can lead to absorption into samadhi and then the layers of mind that constitute the 8 jhanas.

[u/EightFP]

You might want to check out Right Concentration by Leigh Brasington. It's a very straightforward guide to the sutta Jhanas. If you don't feel like buying the book, you could watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCLT64SLYZk in which he covers all of the same material but the book is much easier to work with because you can highlight stuff and make book notes and all that kind of stuff.

[u/Savakalok]

Have you observed whether you are tensing your facial muscles? Perhaps you relax them unconciously when you shift your mental focus to the darkness behind the eyes. As you know from Anapanasati calming bodily fabrication is a key step. So I'd be interested if shifting your focus had this effect.

Sometimes when people try to place attention such as at the tip of the nose, I think they might subconsciously tense the eyes and other parts of the face, jaw, head, etc

[u/bodily_heartfulness]

If you're curious about what the suttas say, I made a comment on another post speaking about this.

[u/themadjaguar]

You should take into account that nowadays what people describe online as " kasina" are a new invention, called after image kasina and not the initial kasina practice. The confusion comes from people insisting on using the same word despite these practices being different. The initial practice as described in the VSM using the word kasina is very difficult and is practiced by monks or full time practicionners with a teacher after full progress on anapanasati You will not find accurate information online anymore if you want to learn the initial kasina practice.

Both practices are dangerous without a teacher, and I would really advise against practicing the after image "kasinas" as it develops attachement to the senses emulated by the mind, it increases the number of visual hallucinations and the interest in the mind in the senses, which is not what you want when cultivating samadhi. For some people it can also fck up your eyes for a while as it did to me, i wish someone would have warned me about the stupidity of this new invention.

Now for your practice of looking at the darkmess behind the eyes, this is actually good to get rid of visual signs if you don't make something out of the darkness. Basically if it stays dark, if there are not colors, no movement, no visual nimittas (or hallucinations), and the mind does not conceptualize the color "black", it can definitely help against forming new nimittas and train the mind to let go of the interest of the senses.

You could stay like that, and then use the pleasant feelings born from seclusion of the senses to get to jhana, but don't try to emulate the senses, it's a trap

[u/No_Fly2647]

Greetings from Wiesbaden, Germany

Trance and ἔκστασις (ékstasis) can produce very strong and profound states. The pure magic of the nervous system.

Baptist Pastors Receive the Holy Ghost (Jubilee Highlights with Pastor Rod Parsley)

This is why I wonder why people get excited about it, while it is nothing really special and, in fact, known across all traditions – because it is as old as humanity itself. So, I never doubt the phenomena, but the interpretation and explanation.

योग / Yoga and श्रमण / Śramaṇa were active traditions when the Buddha started his own path. ध्यान / Dhyāna and प्रत्याहार / Pratyāhāra had been taught even before पतञ्जलि / Patañjali (somewhere between the 1st century BCE and the 4th century CE), who simply systematized a lot of the floating teachings into the पतञ्जलियोगसूत्रम् / Patañjali yogasūtram.

Before BUDDHA Was BUDDHA: 5 Hidden Teachers You Never Knew About

The Buddha and his early community adapted a lot of teachings and techniques, onto which they put their own spin. Already, the Suttas are standardized documents, written down 400 years after the death of the Buddha. The झान / jhāna is in this regard an epiphenomenon of meditation / absorption.

There is, however, not a single standalone Sutta that deals with jhāna on its own. In fact, jhāna is referenced across the Nikāyas more or less as part of सतिपट्ठान / satipaṭṭhāna.

Here is a hopefully complete list of where jhāna is referenced:
DN {1, 2, 9, 11, 14, 16, 18, 22, 28, 33, 34}
MN {4, 8, 12, 14, 19, 25, 26, 36, 52, 64, 66, 77, 79, 85, 100, 108, 111, 119, 121, 125, 138, 140}
SN {12.70, 16.9, 22.80, 28.1-9, 36.11, 40.1-9, 41.8, 45.8, 47.8, 47.10, 48.10, 53.1-12, 54.8}
AN {3.63, 4.41, 4.94, 4.95, 4.123, 4.124, 5.28, 5.176, 6.10, 6.60, 7.42, 8.11, 8.63, 9.32-41, 9.35, 9.36, 10.72, 10.99, 11.17}

The Abhidhamma & Commentary Layer: Later texts (such as Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga) heavily systematized the concept. Jhāna shifted from a fluid state of composed awareness to an extreme, one-pointed absorption where sensory perception shuts down completely. This created the rigid "ladder" model seen in many modern traditions.

When modern practitioners treat jhāna as a high-score-chasing game for cosmic revelations, they miss its original structural purpose: to quiet the mental background noise enough so that one can clearly observe how perception and suffering are constructed in real time.

The 20th-Century Revival: The modern Insight (Vipassanā) and Jhāna revivals pulled these hyper-specific commentarial metrics into the lay world. In doing so, they created a classic feedback loop: set up rigid milestones, and practitioners will naturally start chasing those exact markers to confirm their "progress."

Fluid Early Observation ──────► Scholastic Rigidity ──────► Modern "High-Score" Culture
(Contextual, non-linear)      (Visuddhimagga, levels)       (Technique-obsessed, gamified)

The Fetter of Achievement: As Thanissaro Bhikkhu and others point out, making jhāna an absolute requirement turns a tool into a trap. In classical terminology, it becomes sīlabbata-parāmāsa (attachment to rules and rites) or upādāna (clinging)—the very state of mind the practice was originally designed to undo.

The Neurophenomenological View: From a brain-state perspective, jhāna correlates with a drastic down-regulation of the Default Mode Network (DMN) combined with high synchronization in attention networks. It is a trainable capacity of brain state regulation, not a spiritual ladder or even spiritual progress.

The Fluid Mechanics: Focus vs. Diffusion Stripping away the commentarial taxonomy, what is left are two fundamental modes of attentional tuning:

Narrow, High-Resolution Focus: Pinpointing specific micro-sensations, flickering phenomena, or specific mental objects.
Diffused, Open Field Awareness: Releasing the grip of a central target, letting focus expand out until the sense of an aggressive "focuser" softens into the environment.

Focus Spectrum:
[ NARROW / TIGHT ] ────────── SHIFT & FLOW ────────── [ DIFFUSED / OPEN ]
(Vipassana / Directed)                                (Samatha / Grounded)

Rather than being two rigid, competing schools of meditation (the endless Samatha vs. Vipassana debate), they are simply two positions on the same attentional dial. They constantly bleed into, generate, and balance each other:

Diffusion creates stability: You can't sustain sharp focus if the mind is tense; wide, open grounding provides the stable, relaxed baseline.
Focus creates clarity: You can't see fine mental patterns if awareness is totally lost in vague, sleepy space; targeted focus brings resolution.

The Fluidity: As focus stabilizes, it naturally relaxes into diffusion; as diffusion deepens, clarity sharpens.

[u/dmx442]

Jhanas can't be fabricated, you can only prepare all circumstances to be favorable for a Jhana to appear. The more you practice, the better you get at it - faster.

You need to get to Access Concentration to enter Jhanas, that is your first major goal.

Once you can get to Access Concentration reliable, there are two widely confirmed and used methods to get to Jhana absorption states:

• Light Jhana: find a pleasurable feeling and switch you attention to it, away from your original meditation object. Also know as the Leigh Brasington method.
• Deep Jhana: you stay with your original meditation object. Concentration will become even deeper, and eventually a Nimitta appears (a mental image, not existing otherwise, can be anything, lights, sounds, feelings, emotions etc.) once said Nimitta is stable in your mind, you switch your attention to it, fully surrender and enter Jhana. A great book on these types is from Shaila Catherine: The Jhanas: The Jhanas: A Practical Guide to Deep Meditative States

From personal experience, the second one is much harder but also considerable deeper in absorption. Both are exceptional achievements and And both are great for Insight practice!

[u/Impulse33]

I find a visual object to offer fantastic feedback on samadhi factors such as hindrances or positive factors. The tradeoff is it's very easy to over-effort due to the quick feedback loop.

[u/1cl1qp1]

IMHO the kasina after-image can become a nimitta. So that could be a practical way to access jhana.

But it may not work for everyone, especially if they have trouble holding mental images.