How Does Deep Jhana Meditation Change You?

This is a post I’ve been thinking of wriritng for a long time. I am constantly telling people I coach to be aware of the changes that happen as they meditate, but I’ve never really gone in depth into the changes that I experienced over the course of my meditative journey.

Deep Jhana meditation changes a person from the core, and in so many ways that it will take me a couple of days to write them all down as I think hard about all the changes that happened especially over that first year of meditation.

Some of these changes can be considered Benefits. Others are actually hindrances to living life. Eventually, all the negative things that happened resolved themselves in the current (final?) state I’m in now. They are still part of who I am, and yet I can also be largely, Vern, the guy I was before I began meditating. There have been MANY changes, but I still basically feel like me and I’m glad I still have that option. I never wanted to lose the ego entirely 100% and not be able to go back to me as the person I grew up as. Anyway, read on!

I recently began offering “Jhana meditation coaching calls“ – 30 to 120 minute calls.

Changes Occuring Early in Meditation Practice

When I just started to meditate, there were some changes that were difficult to see and like most people I spent some time wondering if anything was happening at all. I kept with it every day and eventually I began to notice some changes that were happening as a result of my daily meditation practice.

Observing the Mind

With time, I started to notice that there was some time between my perception and thoughts, and perception and reactions – emotional reactions. There was just enough time that I was able to choose a better way to behave because I could see what was happening in the mind. Hearing someone say something triggering to me was met with a pause, sometimes a long one, as I grappled with how to respond or if to respond at all.

Mindfulness

I practiced some mindfulness during the days. In fact, I started in about 1995-1996 with mindfulness. I read some books by Thich Nhat Hanh and I put into practice a lot of what he was teaching. One of the best books was Present Moment, Wonderful Moment. If you ever decide to do any mindfulness training, just go straight for his books and videos. I don’t know anyone better on the topic.

Spontaneous mindfulness would arise sometimes when I wasn’t consciously practicing. Mindfulness starts to just pop up as a natural function of the brain once you do it for a while – some weeks and months. This also allows the brain to slow down and be in the present instead of ready to react to things that are triggering from the past. It helped to ground me in the present and keep me out of the future where my head often was, planning some thing or other.

Peace of Mind

In time, a couple of months, I noticed the mind becoming quite a bit more transparent. I could see what was happening in my mind. I could see the thoughts there and how they started. I could see how negativity could drag on. I saw that I wasn’t my thoughts. I saw that I wasn’t my emotions. I saw that I wasn’t often even there in my head.

I began to see that the body can function on its own just using memories already in storage. It need not always have some other me there, some other ego there. I saw it in sports a lot. Riding my bike fast. Playing racquetball. Playing volleyball. The mind gets into this rhythym or flow and the ego is hardly present in that state at all. The body is simply going through the motions by knowing what it should do due to memories already well ingrained there about the type of activity one was taking part in.

Stability – Tool for Calming Down

Within a month I was already experiencing some sort of stable feeling in everyday life. It was a feeling as if the emotional side of me just wasn’t in complete control. There was a side of me that could rationalize first, and though emotion may come and come out strongly, there began this knowing that I could react with less emotion and more wisdom if I just slowed down a bit. This is a subtle feeling in most people I think, but I noticed because it was so unlike me to feel that way.

As time went on, this feeling grew to remarkable levels. I listen much more deeply to what people are saying before I react. I breathe a few times slowly and concentrate on the breath as it moves in and out. It centers me. It stabilizes. It slows me down and makes me realize the reality of the situation needn’t have so much emotion.

You start to realize that emotion is not helping most things you experience that are a challenge in your daily life. You start to react with less emotion, and more rationally as a result.

Post Deep Jhana Changes

The major changes that happened in my head began after I started getting into the deep Jhanas. Keep in mind, I didn’t even know what the Jhanas were, but it didn’t matter. The power they have to change a person from the inside out is astonishing. I have often said I got more than I asked for with meditation, and it was the Jhanas’ power that changed me dramatically in just a few days at first, and then months and years later.

The Ego

As I began meditating, I was also doing some reading and especially listening to Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell audio talks. I remember Alan Watts asking listeners what really IS the sense of ‘me’? What is you? Where is it located? What is the tangible feeling of it? He said something like it’s really just the feeling of muscular tension in the arms and chest mostly where we feel the most like ourselves. This is sort of the center of the individual ego as far as he could tell.

I remember looking at that question over the years. I still ask myself where is ‘me’ really at? What part of this body/mind is the ‘me part’? The ego? Lately I can’t see it at all. When I ask myself that, the mind goes flat and I go into the non-dual state. It’s empty as far as ego, so the question becomes pointless. There’s no answer coming from this mind or body. It’s quite odd.

After the mind has calmed down and reached a thoughtless state over and over, one realizes that the ‘me’ that one always assumed was inside the head and in control of everythiing – wasn’t even there sometimes. There are breaks between thoughts and the self-talk or self-conversation where there IS NO YOU. Then you hear the mind chatter and assume that must be you. However, there’s no enduring you that is always there. It’s just a function of what the phsyical brain is doing at the time.

I also cannot meditate now. It’s just impossible to sit and meditate on the breath. As soon as I consciously decide to start focusing on the breath, I get quiet and begin to watch the tingling sensation in the nose and I go straight into the non-dual state where there is no ego. There is no real watcher that can watch the breath. So I sit there in a thoughtless, egoless, and pain-free state of mind which is better than an ego-filled state of Vern if one wants to calm down and reset.

I’ve tried to bring Vern into this situation to make him watch the feeling of the breath at the nose. It works for a while, even full concentration on the breath for 5-10 times, but the usual state of complete 100% focus on the breath at the nose never launches into the effortless concentration state. It just feels like a forced and very attentive Vern sitting there watching the breath with good concentration, but nothing happens. The concentration remains very difficult and it never goes into the automatic mode.

Aesthetics

I began to see aesthetics as pointless. I wasn’t concerned about impressing anyone with how I looked or clothes or jewelry I could buy. I didn’t pay anyone to cut my hair, I bought clippers and buzzed my head to 1/16th of an inch long. I stopped buying any clothes. I had plenty of clothes. I didn’t buy books, I read them in the bookstore. When we had bookstores!

Combing Hair Doesn’t Matter

I sometimes forgot all day to even look in a mirror to see what I looked like. I literally just had no concept of looking presentable any more. I felt fine. I couldn’t make any effort to shave until my face got too itchy to keep the hair on my face.

Wearing Clothes that Match Doesn’t Matter

I either stopped being capable of matching, or I just cared so little about whether clothes matched anymore that I didn’t pay attention. I would sometimes leave the house with different socks on. Who cared? It wasn’t like someone was going cause me some sort of embarrassment by pointing it out, it just didn’t matter at all.

Choices were minimalized not by choice, but just as a result of the state of my mind in that time. Regular choices that would show up before, were no longer presenting themselves. There were very few choices to make because many of them had to do with what society expected and those things just disappeared. They just quickly became unimportant.

Wearing New vs Old Clothes

I began to see no good reason to buy any new clothes. I had plenty of clothes for every occasion. I just wore what I had. I didn’t shop for new clothes for myself at all. I didn’t buy new clothes for anyone else. I chose clothes I wore that day based on what I was doing. That usually meant shorts, underwear, and a t-shirt.

Importance of Material Items

One by one everything I owned meant nothing to me anymore. At first, there was this general blanket idea that nothing small was important at all. I could lose it and not feel a loss from it.

Disenchantment

At some point after Jhana there became a total disenchantment with things of all kinds. It didn’t matter what it was, and even the two dogs we had were not special after this ripped through my mind and destroyed all notions of specialness with the things I ‘owned.’ Here’s a post from my journal long ago showing some disenchantment with things that happened in a very short period of time.

This idea eventually covered everything in my life. Shoes, clothes, exercise stuff, bike, rollerblades, books, furniture, car, dogs, wife, friends, co-workers, jobs, and literally everything else just meant nothing. The change was not just some things or most things, it was every single thing as it came to mind whether through seeing it, or thinking about it.

It later affected all types of ambition, drive, wants, needs, hobbies, etc.

Money

Very early on when Jhana came, there was this absence of specialness about money that persists to this day. It just isn’t something that I can make myself care about much. That’s a problem because now I have a family and have to take care of four other people. I need to really concentrate on making money in order to do it. I have to sort of fool myself into thinking that it is important so we don’t all starve to death. It’s a problem even today. We are just barely on the brink of having to do something crazy like move to the northeast of Thailand and work on a farm and grow our own food or something.

This is a major problem that has affected the mind in a very big way.

Exercise/Fitness

The love of exercise – running, cycling, rollerblading, beach volleyball, racquetball, swimming, just all went away very soon after reaching Jhana levels. Odd, because exercise had always been a large part of my life. I typically spent 15-20 hours a week exercising and playing sports. There wasn’t any sadness about the loss, just like with all of it that was suddenly unimportant, it was just gone without fanfare.

Alcohol

At the time I was meditating, I was about 30 years old. I would have a beer or glass of wine when I ate out with my wife sometimes. We might share a bottle at home some night on the weekend once a month. I wasn’t very into alcohol at the time because I already got it out of my system in my late teens and early 20s while in the Air Force in Honolulu.

The desire for alcohol of any kind just faded out quickly in days after reaching Jhana. There was no longer any craving, want, or need to escape from ‘me’ in any way anymore. Probably because the me was dissolving so fast.

Importance of Sex & Masturbation

Sex, also a huge part of my life from the time I could engage, was one of the first things to completely disappear upon reaching Jhanas. It wasn’t like there was any suppression of the sexual instinct or urges, they just didn’t exist any more. There was nothing that came through the senses – the eyes, primarily – that started any kind of sexual desire.

Today I still have desire occasionally, but nothing like what it once was. Please don’t read anything into the fact that my kids are 14 and 4. Heh-heh. It wasn’t that long between sessions!

Eating Out, Favorite Foods Cease to Exist

To this day, I can eat the same food for every meal, or every day, it doesn’t really matter. My wife constantly asks me if I want to eat this or that for the next meal. You know, it doesn’t even matter. Sometimes I’ll realize I need more protein because I’ve worked out extra hard recently so I’ll ask for eggs or something.

Years ago when Jhana first started I had no real concern about what I would eat and any meal was ‘good enough.’

Today I still love eating pizza and other Italian food, but I don’t get near the joy I used to from eating it. Even with some of the best authentic Italian pizza places in Thailand right here in our town, it’s just not the same craving for and satisfaction derived from eating it.

Going Places – Traveling, Concerts, Camping, the Beach (Stops Altogether)

Going anywhere just never came to mind, believe it or not. I must have stayed around the house for months, only venturing out to get food to eat.

Importance of Relationships & People Dwindles then Ceases

When we’re married, we put that person up on a pedestal. We think of them as bigger than life. We adore them. We want to spend our lives with them, doing things together, sharing experiences. Once deep Jhana kicked in, the whole idea of relationships, friendships, family, everything – all of it – just went away. People were still important as people, but not in the role they were to me prior to Jhana.

I remember wanting only peace for anyone I interacted with. Yet, I wasn’t capable of providing any comfort or helping someone get over neurosis’ or tiny issues that I could see affecting them. I was a silent observer of people. People I knew. People I once loved.

Views on Animals, Plants & Vegetarianism (Once Important, Means Nothing)

Animals have always had a special place in my heart. I’ve loved animals all my life. Dogs, cats, hermit crabs, snakes, whatever. We had two dogs at the time I began getting into the deep Jhanas. I still took care of them. They were still important to me. They were not loved anymore. The attachment to them as things I loved and could hardly live without – just went away.

I still gave them attention when they came to me and needed it. But when I pet them and cuddled them, I wasn’t getting anything for myself as I did so. If that makes any sense. I was there for them but I wasn’t taking anything, any satisfaction or pleasure, from the interaction. I knew they were, and so I did it.

I was in a place where I needed nothing for myself. I was content and as at peace as a human being possibly could be. It was quite a state, to be honest. Looking back on it.

Ambition/Accomplishing

My meditation journal stops once I started spending time in the deep Jhanas. Why? There was just zero ambition to continue. I couldn’t see a point. Everything was fine as it was – without recording anything. Without thinking that I might like to look at it years from then. Luckily the experiences were so vivid, and are recorded directly to memory without any distraction. I can remember so clearly things that occurred. I wrote a lot of it in the books I published. Today I wish I had direct insight into every little thing that went on back then. It would have been an amazing journal for me to read today.

But, whatever. Part of the massive changes that occurred have tamped down any desire for things that don’t exist, won’t exist.

Importance of Telling Others of Meditation and Experiences

There came a point after I was entering the Jhanas pretty regularly that I stopped writing in my journal. Before this, I would write everything that happened during a meditation session in detail. I thought I would like to read it later. I didn’t know I’d ever post any of it here on this site. I did it for me. There came a point that this stopped completely. There was no point at all writing down the experiences because it was seen as a type of ambition or doing with a motive.

Meditation

After the Jhanas began showing up, it became much easier to sit and focus on the feeling of the breath in the nose. Distractions didn’t distract nearly as much at this time. Post 2004 when I began meditating a bit off and on at the top of a mountain temple near our home in Krabi, Thailand I noticed that I could sit and focus on the feeling of the breath in the nose very easily no matter what distractions were going on around me.

It was really interesting because I could be in a crowd of people who were loud and talking about all kinds of things, and yet I could sit there and focus on the breath with 100% concentration and not disturbed at all by any sounds.

Listening, Speaking to Others, Expressing the ‘Self’

Listening to others dominated my time spent with other people. I rarely engaged. I often saw how they suffered by how their mind was working. It was as if I could see their pain and suffering and why it was there, and that they couldn’t see it. I usually just listened and knew what was going on but I didn’t confront them with their faulty thinking or unhelpful emotions or responses to some situation they told me about because I wasn’t in an expressive state of mind. I was only taking in, I wasn’t giving anything out from myself. If that makes any sense.

There were days when I was married where I didn’t speak a word to my wife. It wasn’t out of anything negative, it was as if I was incapable of speaking. The Jhana states sort of dumb down the mind and take it away from its normal functioing in society. The mind becomes capable only of absorbing – of experiencing what comes in through the senses – and incapable of expressing anything from the still mind.

Silence

The biggest change others saw in me – outwardly – was my almost silent nature. Once I was experiencing Jhana nearly every time I sat to meditate, I became a nearly silent human being. Like the choices above had dissipated, the choice to speak, to express at all, was severely muted. Sometimes for days at a time I was quiet when I was married. Obviously that’s not ideal. There was just absolutely no compulsion to say anything. I must have seemed like a zombie to my wife at the time. Though she knew of Buddhism and meditation from her father, she didn’t meditate herself. She wasn’t interested. She saw it as a religious thing her dad taught her. She did it to satisfy him sometimes maybe, but she had no real interest in it.

She couldn’t have known the power it had to change someone’s life like she was watching happen to me daily.

She couldn’t have guessed that the ego-filled person she married would slowly evaporate before her eyes.

The changes that CAN happen when one starts having Jhana can be ego-changing. Ego destroying. Life-changing. Life destroying. Relationships dissolve in a short time when one person in the equation is no longer the same person. When likes disappear, ambition fades to zero, preferences mean nothing, possessions mean nothing, people mean nothing special other than they are people deserving of love and respect and kindness, your old life changes and is destroyed really.

It may not be a gradual thing. You may not see it happening and be able to stop it or slow it. It seems to go on its own at whatever pace it wants to move. It’s as if your ego – your life – becomes a casualty of these massive changes that touch every part of your life whether you want them to or not. Whether you even understand what is changing or not – things just change. You change. Ego dissolves like egg shell in vinegar. Soon there is only this tiny membrane-thin border holding in the you from the past.

If you are lucky enough to realize this state you’re in, do you keep going? Do you press on and meditate in Jhana as much as possible to remove you completely from the equation? Or, do you run from it?

Initially, I ran for 6 years by stopping all regular meditation. In the next half-dozen years I meditated very rarely.

Post Permanent Non-Dual State with Vern Ego State

Sometime in the late 2000s, I think 2009, a state change occurred. I had done some deep Jhana meditation for a short time – a number of sessions and at some point while doing it, this Non-dual state arrived temporarily a few times, then permanently. It hasn’t gone away. It appears to be permanent. It has been 15 years now.

The Non-dual State is my baseline operating system so to speak. There are 2 states of mind I can have. Two basic states of mind.

1. Non-dual State. This state is egoless. Vernless. Thoughtless. Painless. Free of suffering. Free of wanting. Free of ambition, desire, fear, regret, emotion of any kind, It’s a bare-essence state, a sort of flat-line state, in which the unit (this body and mind) function without Vern. It’s crazy to think it’s possible, but I believe this is exactly what UG Krishnamurti was trying to get across to people he spoke with for decades. It’s a state he says the body knows what is needed, what is necessary, and that is all that is needed for the organism to function. It’s true. I say it’s the mind’s memory functioning and that the body is somehow using that memory to function just fine.
   
   There is no happiness, sadness, or doing of any kind in the mind in this state. That part of the mind isn’t working. The thought part. The mind is just not active in that way to give me emotion, thoughts, or ambition to do something specific.
   
   
2. Vern State. This is the ego-filled state in which I am being me so I can get things done like work and having fun with my daughters, exercising, and taking care of responsibilities around the house. In this state there are desires, anticipation, fears, wants, needs, attachments, emotions like joy, anger, bliss, and ego all to some degree. The degree I can experience these things is nothing like it was in the past (pre-meditation). All of these experiences are muted somehow. Tamped down. It’s as if I know I’m playing the role of Vern in this game of life.

Meditation Becomes Impossible

When attempting to meditate on the feeling of the breath at the nose now, there’s a real problem. There’s nobody there to focus on the sensation.

When this Non-dual State arrived, it became the baseline. When I’m not being Vern, then I’m in the Non-dual state. So, when I am quiet, Vern is not there and there is nobody there to focus on the breath. The breath can be sensed and yet there is no special attention paid to it because there is no special attention paid to anything in the Non-dual State.

Questions of Continuing Meditation or Reaching Enlightenment – Gone

When I talked with the monk on the phone who had spent many years in Thailand at Wat Suan Mokkhabalaram in Chaiya, Suratthani – Santikaro – in 2004, I wondered if the best path from there was to follow everything Buddhism said. I wondered if following exactly what Buddha did would produce that same quality in me.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I don’t want to add Buddhism to my life. I don’t want to sit in a temple as an enlightened monk all my life. I really love living life. My life has been absolutely FILLED with novel experiences like nobody’s I have ever heard of.

Meditation, and specifically the deep Jhanas, changed me in ways I could never have foreseen or dreamt. Prior to 2009, I would ask myself pretty often whether I would choose to start meditating again knowing what I know. The answer back then was an honest – “I don’t know!”

Today, and past 2009, I can honestly say, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, YESSSSS!!” I am so lucky to have found what i found. I didn’t have any plan for getting where I am, and nor had I ever heard of anyone in this same state prior to arriving. SInce then, I have maybe found a few people that have similar ways of describing their states of mind.

• UG Krishnamurti
• Jiddu Krishnamurti
• Adyashanti
• Gary Weber

There are probably hundreds more, but where are they hiding? For many people, and as I said during the times I was constantly getting into the deep Jhanas, there was just no drive to share it with anyone.

Somehow I’ve snapped out of that silence and I’m able to write books and many articles here at Jhana8.com about the experiences.

No Questions About Buddha and What He Did or Didn’t Do

At some point, the journey became my own. It had nothing to do with what Buddha did. I wasn’t Buddhist, sure, but for a while I was wondering about trying to replicate what he did. I wanted to experience things myself, but I figured they would parallel what he did until the end game.

I see now that I’ve chosen my own path. Through a series of decisions and experiments and trying to hold on to some part of my ego so I could enjoy things I enjoy as an ego filled person – I chose my own path.

Bonus – ADD/ADHD GONE!

While going to grad school, I remember taking a test that finally made me realize I had ADD/ADHD for much of my life. I scored around 75 on the test when 25 was the baseline indicator. It explained a lot. My mind could never focus for more than seconds at a time. A full minute of concentration on something that wasn’t related to sports was unheard of.

Getting through college was a supreme effort. I must have studied 2-3x more than other people who had some level of concentration possible. For me, I often gave up in the middle of study sessions and resigned myself to fate come test day.

Luckily, shortly after starting my graduate program I found some information about Genko Biloba. The Japanese tea. It was in pill form too and some people were claiming it had the amazing effect of increasing concentration. I tried it. Nothing happened for a few days. I had to build up a level of it in the body. Then, magically, I found the ability to actually study and retain information to some degree. This was a major development! Though concentration was still only 5-10 minutes at a time, that was enough to get through grad school. I graduated with a high graduate GPA and then promptly forgot about taking the tea pills.

In 2009 when I realized that my mind had changed subtilely, but remarkably, I also came to the realization that I could focus on anything. For hours. For 8 hours in a row. I began writing books and churning out websites, online businesses, and hundreds of YouTube videos. We lived off the royalties from all of those efforts over 2 years or so, for more than 15 years.

Let me be clear here, simple meditation – like feel-good meditation, didn’t do anything for my ADD/ADHD. I did some of that before I tried in earnest to focus on the tiny area of the nose where i felt the tingling of the breath. It was the micro focus on this spot, the 100% concentration on the breath, and then the arrival of Jhana, that had the effect on my attention deficit issues.

I had a free book here at the site for a long time about this, you can possibly find here. It is in desperate need of revision, so it may be revised and back on Amazon by the time you look. Here’s the page about it >

Introduction to Jhana (overview)

How Does Deep Jhana Change You?

I recently began offering “Jhana meditation coaching calls“ – 30 to 120 minute calls.