some analogies for jhana?
(mostly copy pasted from notes app)
i forget if i wrote this down anywhere yet but i've been thinking abt a few more maybe possible analogies for jhana
- it's more like flow state and getting lost in a positive emotion?
- kinda like when you're jamming w music or fiddling around w a music instrument then you get rly curious abt a melody or a few notes or smth and then you enter this flow state and all of the sudden youre lost in the sauce and the music is enveloping you
- yknow when you're trying to lock in and you start out fiddling around and kinda scattered but you build momentum and then you enter a flow state of being locked in
- like runner's high but for positive emotion
- it's like yknow when you get rly curious abt your visual field or wiggling your ear or smth and then you enter a flow state
- i have some analogies in this thread
- it's like when i was trying to learn overtone singing? (link) and that reminds me of this tweet (although idk if it's actually mechanistically similar)
- jhana snowball analogy (theres one extreme of terrible snow. and then rly rly good snow that rolls into a snowball almost automatically. then snow that needs you to pack it right and roll it right before it sorta rolls on its own)
- like a sneeze? https://nadia.xyz/jhanas
- yknow when you get like autistically curious about some random micromovement and then you reach a flow state (like staring at smth for a long time and youre like "whoa my visual field gets wack if i keep my eyes extremely still for a minute") (or like idk maybe you get rly curious about the sound of swishing around a water bottle and you genuinely reach a flow state being curious about the sound intricacies) and so i think the texture of jhana focus might be rly similar, but bc of the mechanics of positive emotion it just happens to gain momentum into a big step shift that feels rly good
also important to note that it can totally be like a fun sport, it's a very physical skill that you can debug just like learning tennis or speedcubing
and it can totally be fun befriending the bottlenecks like speedrunning (or i guess that word can have some weird connotations but i mean like yknow how we have fun debugging a skill like speedcubing)
also i hypothesize that reaching jhana 1-4 might only be as hard as running like 2-10 miles (in the sense that it can feel slightly hard if you're not baseline athletic and you've never done this kind of thing before, but it seems like our bodies are sorta built for this motion, and it seems like we all sorta have this latent ability if you just train for a few hrs/week for 1-2 months with non-shitty metalearning)