For those who think a $1700 life changing retreat (teacher pay included) is for millionaaihes and billionaaihes, Wystan Bryant Scott is offering a secret online jhana retreat for $250 (teacher pay not included). I'm not making this up. Lineages will be credited!

What type of suffering do you find unbearable?

watching long term meditators argue on twitter makes me not want to meditate

Yeah and they only hang at the Viennese table at their broddhism buffet

Whilst I’m jhana-posting, a common refrain you hear these days is that nimitta jhanas have no basis in the original Buddhist suttas. The claim is that nimitta jhanas were made up out of whole cloth by the later commentarial tradition. But it’s not true. There is a basis in the suttas for the development of the nimitta jhanas. In the Upakkilesa Sutta (MN 128) the Buddha teaches a technique of developing a visual nimitta, expanding its intensity via removal of the defilements and then using it as a basis for progressing through the jhanas. Sure, he doesn’t label each jhana stage with the word “jhana” here but he uses the usual stock phrases for describing each of the jhanas, which is a common format in the suttas for communicating phenomena that have already been labelled elsewhere. It’s true that some of the commentarial presentations of nimitta jhana progression add new details to what’s present in the suttas. But so too do almost all widely taught “soft jhana” techniques, which usually add further specific and themes to what is explicitly present in their source material, where it’s underspecified. For my part, I think in the vast majority of cases, neither “hard jhana” nor “soft jhana” proponents have an exclusive claim to being faithful to one of the range of techniques described in the suttas. The techniques presented in the suttas are too varied to make such a claim. Putting the suttas to one side to focus on practical matters, it seems pretty clear to me that the modal output of “soft jhanas” and “hard jhanas” is a different type of state. I believe that both of these states can have value depending on a practitioners goal and there’s no need for one to fight for universal supremacy over the other. I do think keeping the distinction clear is helpful for ensuring that neither modality becomes obscured for those who can benefit from it.

Stephen, I respect and admire a lot of your work and you clearly have a special talent for meditative pedagogy. So I offer these comments in the spirit of truth-seeking rather than as some kind of dunk. But you must know that you are relying on a dishonest sleight of hand when you push this line that the type of jhanas you teach at Jhourney are ones that were normally thought to take years previously. From what I understand, Jhourney teaches non-nimitta based jhanas. Since at least 40 years ago when Ayya Khema started raising more widespread public awareness of non-nimitta based jhanas (which were widely practiced traditionally long before then), it’s always been taught that they are very much achievable within a matter of days. By contrast, it is the nimitta-based jhanas that are taught to take months or more to master. This, as I’m sure you know, is a different type of meditation with different fruits. Literally every teacher for decades that has ever taught non-nimitta based jhanas has spoken to them being largely accessible within a matter of days. Ayya Khema’s own students report that on her one week retreats had a ~50% success rate of experiencing Jhana. 95% for the month long retreats. TWIM, who’ve been teaching since the 90s, report that 80% of their students hit 4th jhana on their 10 day retreats, and say the 1st jhana usually takes significantly less time. Thanissaro Bikkhu - who has also been teaching non-nimitta based jhanas since the 90s - discourages people from placing too much emphasis on time-based goals, but he has run 7 day retreats that he says are aimed at hitting jhana and every indication is that he sees it as very feasible in these sorts of time frames. Leigh Brasington tends to suggest 10 days is more optimal, but we’re still talking a short amount of days, not *years*. If we were to seek a gray area exception, it would be Rob Burbea who preferred to have a month (not years!) to teach non-nimitta based jhanas, but this was more down to his philosophy that deliberately marinating in pre-jhana piti and then taking a long time to really acclimatise to each jhana was highly beneficial, rather than some limit on the efficacy of his technique. Honestly, in the 20+ years since I first heard about the jhanas, I’ve never met or otherwise heard of a single person that teaches non-nimitta jhanas who says they take anything more than a matter of days, or at most weeks, to attain (with the latter always a question of preference and value rather than pedagogical potency). As I’m sure you well know, it’s the nimitta-based jhanas that are said to more often take months or years to master. This is because nimitta-based jhanas are an entirely different meditation technique. The general consensus from people who have mastered both nimitta-based jhanas and non-nimitta-based jhanas is that the latter are a different phenomena - usually experienced as a much deeper absorption - hence the different time frame. That’s not to say nimitta-based jhanas are inherently “better” than non-nimitta based jhanas for any given goal someone might have. It’s just to say they are different techniques with different fruits and hence have different timeframes. So when you say something like: “Jhana has a reputation as something that takes years [but] 58.5% of our students reached it within a week.” What you’re really saying is: “[Nimitta-Based] Jhana has a reputation as something that takes years [but] 58.5% of our students reach [Non-Nimitta-Based jhanas] within a week [which is roughly consistent with how long it’s always taken non-nimitta jhanas to be reached when taught by other teachers and organizations historically]” By leaving out the bit in brackets, it’s clear you’re trying to give the impression that Jhourney has achieved a remarkable breakthrough in reducing jhana timescales, when in reality you’re conflating two different sub-categories of meditation and presenting results that are entirely ordinary for the category you actually teach. The repeated pushing of this rhetoric is polluting the spiritual commons. It’s giving people the impression that if they don’t pay multiple thousands of dollars to attend your retreat they’re missing out on some super duper secret method of getting into non-nimitta jhana 52x+ quicker than normal, which simply isn’t the case. It’s also spreading implicit mistruth about the rest of the jhana teaching ecosystem. Given that Jhourney’s vision is to educate people about the jhanas, spreading this kind of disinformation seems very counter to your mission. It also seems totally unnecessary when by all accounts Jhourney is an extremely successful business, with very high demand from organic word of mouth and you are very good at what you do. As a big advocate of both nimitta-based and non-nimitta-based jhanas, I find so much to admire about your mission to bring non-nimitta-jhanas to new audiences And I can see why this sort of hyperbole might seem tempting when bootstrapping a business. But at what point do you think perpetuating this myth becomes irresponsible and, actually, unnecessary?