Jhanas Are Human, Not Buddhist

Christian mystics and Sufi masters found the same states. So did I.

One of the most important things that’s ever happened to me was by accident.

Years ago, I attended a meditation retreat during a tough time. I had just broken up with a co-founder and a girlfriend in the same week and gone from two jobs to no jobs in a day. The retreat was supposed to help. It didn’t. I injured my knee trying to sit still, and I had three migraines in eight days. Worst of all was my self-critical looping. I was frustrated that I couldn’t do it right, then frustrated at the frustration, then frustrated at that.

On the last day, desperate, I broke my promise to practice only as instructed and changed the technique. Almost immediately, my latest stress headache went away. Four hours later, tears rolled down my face, something between bliss and relief that I had little reference for.

The instructors told me to ignore it. “States come and go,” they said. “Don’t get attached.”

But I had no choice. I suspected such a peak experience in an otherwise dark time was a fluke. But what if it wasn’t?

So I did what I thought any engineer would do. I committed to running personal experiments on the edge of my bed for an hour a day for four months. If I couldn’t get back there in four months, I’d have given it my best shot and could rest assured it was a fluke.

It wasn’t a fluke. At first, I re-entered that state 10% of the time. Four months later, it was 80% of the time after 45 minutes of meditation. A few months after that, it was deterministic and fast. It was often 10-20 minutes, sometimes less.

Clearly, it was a skill.

I tried talking to other meditators about it, but I always discovered our experiences were fundamentally different. Sometimes someone would have a story of a peak experience, but it was almost never something that became a skill.

There was nothing more I wanted to share with family and friends, but I was at a complete loss for how. That I couldn’t connect with even advanced meditators suggested novices were way out of reach. I eventually stopped talking about it altogether. I continued practicing daily, but it more or less stayed my secret for two years.

Then I read a book on the jhanas and realized I’d independently found what the Buddhists mapped 2,500 years ago.¹

The descriptions matched. The progression matched. What I’d stumbled onto through desperate experimentation had a name, a literature, and a history stretching back millennia.

The discovery felt almost as significant as entering jhana for the first time. I remember the light and temperature of the room, the page of the book, and my sequence of thoughts. First, I was relieved. I’m not the only one! I thought. Then I was excited. This book is proof it is possible to share the experience with others.

Then I was confused. But wait, why are only a few thousand people practicing the jhanas instead of millions?

I found them without the tradition, without the beliefs, the lineage, the identity. Without knowing it, I had become another data point in a pattern I hadn’t yet seen.

The jhanas aren’t Buddhist. They’re human.

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At first, I assumed the Buddhists had simply figured this out, and everyone else missed it. Twenty-five hundred years is a long time. Plenty of opportunity for the discovery to spread, or for others to catch up.

But that’s not what happened.

When I started looking, I found the same states described, in the same sequence, with the same transition points, by people who had never read a Buddhist text.

Consider Teresa of Ávila.

Writing in 16th-century Spain, Teresa was a Carmelite nun with no access to Buddhist teachings. Her Interior Castle describes seven “mansions” of prayer, a progression from effortful concentration through stages of increasing absorption, joy, tranquility, and eventually a kind of union she struggled to put into words.

Bernini sculpted this from Teresa’s descriptions. He’d never heard of jhana.

The mapping to jhana territory is uncomfortably precise. Her “prayer of quiet” describes attention settling and a self-sustaining sweetness arising. That’s the first jhana. Her “prayer of union” describes the faculties becoming suspended, a profound stillness in which effort becomes impossible because there’s nothing left to effort toward. That’s the later jhanas.

She even describes the same failure modes. Trying too hard. Grasping at the good states when they arise. Mistaking early signs of absorption for the real thing. These aren’t generic mystical warnings. They’re the specific ways people get stuck on the way to jhana, and she catalogs them like someone who made every mistake herself. See Interior Castle, Fourth and Fifth Mansions.

Teresa was describing the soul’s journey toward the Christian God. But the phenomenology she recorded matches what Buddhist contemplatives recorded a thousand years earlier, using completely different language and an entirely different metaphysical frame.

And she’s not alone.

The Hesychast tradition in Eastern Orthodox Christianity developed practices around the Jesus Prayer—a short phrase repeated continuously until something shifts. Their instructions read like a somatic manual.

Theophan the Recluse, a 19th-century Russian bishop drawing on centuries of tradition, wrote: “You must descend from your head into your heart. At present, your thoughts of God are in your head. And God Himself is, as it were, outside you.” The instruction is explicit: attention must move from head to chest to heart. Nicephorus the Solitary, writing in the 13th century, was even more direct: “Lead your mind into the channel of breathing through which air reaches the heart.”

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s the same body-location progression jhana practitioners report: attention settling from head through chest into a deeper, more embodied place.

The Hesychasts also describe the same effortlessness threshold. The Jesus Prayer begins as effortful repetition. Then something changes. In their language: “Without effort, without force—the prayer breathes itself. The heart itself prays.” Compare this to how experienced jhana practitioners describe later states: “The jhana does you.” The phenomenology is identical. Trying gives way to being moved.

Al-Ghazali, the 11th century Persian Sufi, mapped four degrees of dhikr (remembrance practice) that trace the same arc:

1. The tongue repeats the phrase; the heart is elsewhere

2. The heart engages, but effort is required to keep it there

3. The heart becomes so absorbed that turning away would require effort

4. “The invoker disappears in the act of invocation... only the Invoked remains”

Notice what happens at stage three: the direction of effort reverses. Staying in the practice no longer requires work; leaving would. This is the effortlessness threshold—the point jhana practitioners describe as “the jhana does you.” The state becomes self-sustaining.

But Al-Ghazali doesn’t stop there. His fourth stage describes something deeper: not just effortless absorption, but the dissolution of the one who absorbs. The invoker disappears. This maps to later jhana territory, where even the sense of being a meditator in a meditation falls away.

The Sufis didn’t just stumble onto one parallel. They mapped the same progression—from effort to effortlessness to self-transcendence—with the same transition points.

The Sufis also mapped what jhana practitioners call the “quality arc.” They distinguish between sukr (intoxication—ecstatic, rapturous states) and sahw (sobriety—calm, settled equanimity). Crucially, they consider sobriety the more mature attainment. Al-Qushayri writes that “the one in the state of sahw is considered to be of greater spiritual maturity than the one in the state of intoxication.”

This maps precisely to the jhana progression: early jhanas are characterized by intense joy and rapture; later jhanas by profound equanimity and peace. The direction is the same. Fireworks first, stillness deeper.

Here’s the convergence laid out side by side:

Four traditions. Four continents. Zero contact. The same progression.

If this were vague, it would mean nothing.

What’s strange is the specificity. The sequence matches. The transition points match. The ways people get stuck match.

Teresa’s “prayer of quiet” and the Buddhist first jhana both describe a self-sustaining pleasure that doesn’t require thought to maintain. Her “prayer of union,” where the faculties become suspended and effort becomes impossible, mirrors the later jhanas, where the meditator is pulled into a place where they no longer “do” anything. The Hesychast tradition describes the same threshold as a point where trying harder stops working, and something else takes over. Al-Qushayri’s stations follow the same arc from effort to effortlessness to self-transcendence. These aren’t loose similarities.

And these are only the traditions I’ve looked at closely. Hindu yoga describes dhyana—etymologically related to jhana—with strikingly similar phenomenology. Jewish Kabbalah maps states of devekut, or cleaving, that follow the same arc. Quaker meetings describe “gathered” states of collective absorption. As far as I can tell, the pattern repeats wherever contemplatives looked carefully enough.²

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The obvious counterargument is transmission. Trade routes did exist, and ideas did travel. But the timing doesn’t work. Teresa wrote centuries before Buddhist texts were translated into European languages. The Desert Fathers practiced in 4th-century Egypt with no documented contact with Indian Buddhism. The Hesychasts drew on Greek Christian sources, not Asian ones.

The vocabulary is also completely different—not borrowed terms with new definitions, but entirely independent language. And the failure modes match. If you were copying without underlying shared phenomenology, you’d copy the instructions. You wouldn’t independently discover the same wrong turns.

The simplest explanation isn’t transmission. It’s that they’re all looking at the same thing.

The jhanas appear to be something like attractor basins—stable configurations that the human nervous system can enter when conditions are right. Not learned behavior. Not cultural transmission. Grooves in the landscape of possible experience that different traditions stumbled into through different doors.

They gave the rooms different names, embedded them in different stories, understood them through different metaphysical frames. But the rooms were already there.

Attractor basins: stable configurations the nervous system can enter when conditions are right.

What’s perhaps most striking is that these traditions also converge on what the states do to people over time.

Teresa describes her final mansion not as perpetual rapture but as “tranquil certitude”—raptures cease, and what remains is stable peace integrated with daily life. She writes of “attending to the indwelling Trinity while carrying on daily activities.” The peak experience becomes a baseline.

The Sufis have a term for this: baqa, or “subsistence.” It follows fana (annihilation of self in the experience). The teaching is explicit: “The selfhood at the stage of baqa is different from the selfhood before it was annihilated.” Not just a temporary state, but a structural change in how the person operates.

Isaac the Syrian, drawing on the Hesychast tradition, describes the endpoint as “a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals.” The transformation ripples outward.

These aren’t promises of magic. They’re descriptions, from people who did the work, of what happens when temporary states become permanent traits.

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Buddhists didn’t invent jhana any more than Newton invented gravity. They mapped something that was already part of human experience.

What they did do—and deserve enormous credit for—is map these states with unusual precision. The Theravada tradition in particular developed a phenomenological vocabulary and a progressive training structure that remains the clearest map of the jhanas we have.³ This essay owes a debt to that mapping. Without it, I couldn’t have recognized what I’d found.

This reframe changes what’s possible.

If jhanas are Buddhist, then spreading them means spreading Buddhism, or at least a Buddhist-adjacent identity. That’s a high bar for most of humanity. Christians, atheists, Muslims, Jews, and the “spiritual but not religious” filter themselves out. The addressable population caps.

If jhanas are human, they can travel the way yoga traveled. Once it was extracted from its original worldview, yoga was made legible to people who had no interest in the Yoga Sutras. Hundreds of millions now practice who otherwise never would have.

The word “jhana” is roughly where “yoga” was a century ago. Most people haven’t heard of it. Those who have tend to assume it requires a specific identity or belief system.

But I didn’t need to become Buddhist to find the jhanas. Neither did Teresa. Neither did the Desert Fathers.

The territory belongs to the species. It always has.

1. For readers unfamiliar with the jhanas, I’ve written a more detailed introduction here. The short version is that they’re states of absorption characterized by effortlessly stable attention and extraordinary wellbeing. They span a spectrum from high-energy bliss to low-energy peace. They’re described as powerful mystical experiences.

2. Having experienced the jhanas myself, it's plausible to me that similar experiences inspired the start of entire religions. If I'd had these experiences in the 4th century instead of 21st-century Silicon Valley, I might have drawn very different conclusions. As it is, it didn't change my epistemics, but I still went in active search to understand them.

3. Later Buddhism has its own maps, some of which detail other phenomenology, and some of which perhaps overlap with the jhanas under yet another name.