Chapter 4 - LWC Book 3 - The Jhanas 1 to 3

If you've meditated, you've probably have heard about the Jhānas. They are unique mental states of consciousness.

They are described in old Buddhist scriptures. In the Sanskrit, they are called dhyāna. And for LWC theory, I interpret each Jhana uniquely.

Notes for the interested: Buddha’s teachings on the jhānas appear in the Majjhima Nikāya (e.g., MN 8, MN 111, MN 119), Dīgha Nikāya, and others. The Visuddhimagga, by Buddhaghosa (5th century CE), gives a systematic explanation, and adds technical elaboration.

⚠️ Note on the Use of Jhanas in LWC Theory

While LWC Theory uses the terms “Jhana” and “Jhanic Masses,” it does not pursue the same goal as classical Buddhist meditation systems.

In Buddhism, the Jhanas are progressively used to dissolve the ego and reach a state of no-self, especially by the 7th and 8th Jhanas, where entitial identity is vaporized through full opening of all internal and external doors.

LWC Theory differs.

• The goal is not egolessness, but spiritual architecture.

• The self is retained, modulated, and selectively deployed.

• Doors are not opened universally, but strategically, to build, explore, or navigate higher-dimensional consciousness states.

Warning: Opening too many entitial doors for too long can lead to destabilization of self-structure, disorientation, or spiritual diffusion. LWC Theory emphasizes selective traversal, anchoring, and return loops to preserve integrative coherence — in alignment with Christian principles of soul and agency.

The First Jhāna (paṭhama-jhāna): 

"Quite secluded from sensual pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states, a bhikkhu enters upon and abides in the first jhāna, which is accompanied by applied and sustained thought, with rapture and pleasure born of seclusion."

In the theory, the First Jhāna involves:

• Qualities or Qualia (abbrev.: Q): The individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The smallest unit of sensation, i.e., the tiniest dot you can see - or the smallest pressure on your skin. The faintest trace of smell. Any sense. (Qs can be put together into a configuration, like Qs as Lego bricks.)

• Pressure, Psi Pressure: Like peer-pressure, but for your mind. Changes the mental effort or energy influencing perception. Pressure that causes a Q to tend to manifest or can block or hinder a Q from manifesting.

• Opening "doors" or "portals" in the mind that were formerly separating conscious Qs from subconscious Qs. This allows blips or moments of Qs that can be noticed consciously. In First Jhana Qs tend to come from subconscious/unconscious processes more often. 

• By allowing the subconscious and the conscious to mix - more sensations are allowed to cross from one to the other. 

• The changes can at first feel random. However - doing 1st Jhāna like this allows the meditator to notice more sneaky Qs which tend to otherwise escape unnoticed into or out of conscious perception. Aids in noticing "doorways" and "paths" between consciousness and subconsciousness.

A very simplified model of the brain, it could feel like this:

The Qs feel random, their entries/exits feel random, and the changes to pressures (shown above as light grey curved lines) sometimes tend to accompany the Qs.

During the First Jhana, Psi Pressure is automatically changing. Rebalancing. The mind learns to be able to relax and move pressures around, sometimes depressurizing in an area, while pressurizing in another.

Accompanying these changes, may be random Qs, sensations that appear to consciousness, seemingly out of nowhere.

In the mind, this opening and closing of various "doors" begins to allow you to feel the psi pressure. Either it bounces off the door, or it moves through a door.

In LWC Theory, the First Jhana corresponds to 1D.

The reasoning the First Jhana is like 1D?

Qs and point-feelings of changes to pressures - are dots in perception.

They are unconnected, mostly random, because they occur in the First Jhana, when you are not making normal associations that you would outside of meditation, where you would connect the dots, and make reasonings and conceptualize by adding Qs together in space and over time.

They are like little First Jhanic Masses.

You can think of it also in terms of distributions (shaped as surrounding cubes in previous chapters and blog-posts): random overlap between random distributions begins, causing dots in perception. Dots of a pressure or a Q. In the First Jhana, you may not how to close or open "doors" or know how or what will come or go through the doors next.

The effect is almost like starting miniature epileptic seizures in the brain.

But the changes are so small that the brain has ways of handling these changes, that they usually manifest as random twitches in the body (similar to an actual epileptic seizure but much less intense). And you may also feel random spikes of a pleasurable feeling in various places of the mind and body.

Soon after attempting the First Jhāna, the brain will notice the - hit or miss, for now - ability to "hit the pleasure button".

Though it doesn't yet know how it's happening. The physical body gets random pleasure and new interesting (internal) stimulation and of course the brain notices. What catches its attention is that they aren't arriving via external stimuli from the physical, and sometimes even imagined, environments.

Without conscious effort - 

with prolonged experience(s) and exposure to the First Jhāna - 

the brain will quickly learn to capitalize on this newfound ability.

It begins to systematize and rationalize these new sensations, Qs and pressures to instantiate Qs, that are popping up over the physical body and mind and conscious perception. It has intention to make it a tool. Your mind and brain may want to harness the randomness of the First Jhana.

This is similar to how the brain of a baby will automatically attempt to make sense of the random Qs: the sensations it perceives as random, since they are new and yet unpatterned - that are in its environment, and with enough exposure and incoming data, categorization and patterns can be made of the sensations, as well as even tools (such as muscle control and language). Therefore, the Second Jhāna is when the brain begins to make broad sense and simple tools from the First Jhāna, even if the mind doesn't consciously understand these tools fully.

The Second Jhāna (dutiya-jhāna): 

"With the stilling of applied and sustained thought, a bhikkhu enters upon and abides in the second jhāna, which has self-confidence and unification of mind, is without applied and sustained thought, and has rapture and pleasure born of concentration."

In the theory, the Second Jhāna involves:

• Applied Thought and Sustained Thought being stopped during meditation. But allowing applied thought and sustained thought to congeal around new structures (2nd Jhanic Masses).

• For Second Jhana, don't allow ordinary old movements of thought and focus to interfere with new ways of moving your focus and new ways of allowing your focus to be moved.

• Competition and cooperation between new and old ways of shifting attention and focus. New relationships between psi pressures and mental efforts are being made - to replace or to use simultaneously alongside older relationships.

• Habits and "protective" suppressions of focus and thought that caused the mind to ignore the chaotic "noise" that is emphasized in the First Jhana, may be recognized as competing with new ways of focusing.

Before meditation, you may not notice things that are happening in your own mind. It is like driving down a road and deliberately blocking off roads or deliberately speeding past other roads, ignoring them. You may never actually have cared if the roads were there or not.

The Second and First Jhānas make you aware of these roads.

The First Jhāna allows you to realize that other roads even exist. There exist other turns your focus can take.

The Second Jhāna then is to actually start to recognize these roads gradually.

Imagine that you learn about a road, and start to have a vague sense of it, but it is still difficult to distinguish one road from another. You know the road exists but not where it is.

Maybe they all sort of blur together. You don't know how far one road is from another.

You may not have ever turned onto those roads.

After some practice, you can start to recognize roads and pathways your focus has randomly taken, as you rapidly drive past during your usual thought commutes. Your attention is drawn to these roads because you notice other moving vehicles (even in your peripheral senses) that turn onto or off from those roads.

These are the Qs and changes to psi pressure that seem to pop in and pop out. They help draw attention to - and vaguely give a sense of - each road as you pass.

During Second Jhana, you still experience quick sensations that pass. But you can combine Qs and pressures together. You can say, maybe this place where Qs enter, and this place where Qs enter. Maybe that place where pressures change, and this other place where pressure changes.

Soon enough, you can recognize simple roads. If you try to hold onto the sensation, in memory for example, it may fade away, but in the process you can make quick bonds between them. It's sort of like trying to remember a synapse versus trying to remember a neuron. Which one is easier to keep? The neuron. But which one involves the actual living, thinking process? The synapse. 

So although these are biological limitations to these sorts of interactions with spirit - in the Second Jhana, the interactions become more of a deeper relationship.

When you get more practice, the Qs of the bond may change and the pressures may change, but the bonds between them will be easier to remember and last longer than Qs or pressures.

You sometimes have Q-Q bonds or pressure-pressure bonds, or pressure-Q bonds, (or even lack of psi pressure on one or both sides of a bond). They flit into the blurry mix between consciousness and subconsciousness. Look at the above image. It shows a simple model with Q-Q bonds, a pressure-pressure bond, a Q-pressure bond, and a Q-negative pressure bond.

When you have two sides to a bond, you get a difference in contentment or discontentment across them. This is like creating a voltage or potential difference between sides. Potentially, almost anything is likely to come up on either side, but when any two things show up on either side, you are able to tell at least a comparison and difference between them. But how could you tell a difference if you didn't first pick a "road", a "doorway", a bond?

The comparison between the two allows a flow in psi-pressure, or focal pressure.

There will be a difference in focal pressure between the two of them.

This is a difference between the contentment with one Q or pressure and the contentment with another. 

An overall difference of discontentment between them is made.

If you have contentment with both: the slight different properties of the components on either side of the bond, path or relationship, cause focus to have to choose which one it slightly prefers more than the other. Even if that preference changes over time.

You may not have even noticed you and your mind were even on a "road". Especially before and at the First Jhāna. Now noticing that roads are blipping and passing by, you can start to notice that you are indeed moving along your own road.

Roads have at least two sides. Therefore, in LWC Theory, the Second Jhana corresponds to 2D.

Using the other roads to notice changes and "depth of mental field". You can begin to notice the relative "length" of bonds when you compare one bond to another. These are really more just the potential relationships. You can notice the overall changing from one mental state to another by checking many bonds at once. Because there will sometimes be times with higher pressure and times with lower pressure, generally across many bonds.

In the First Jhana, the description said the "rapture that is born of seclusion ". This is the meditative state of secluding oneself from ordinary mental processes that are active during non-meditation, usually activated by the physical environment and imagined environments. The meditator secludes themselves from these activations.

In the Second Jhana, it becomes the "rapture that is born of concentration". This concentration can be like focusing on the roads versus focusing on the vehicles using those roads. It usually takes more concentration to focus on the roads, which are usually more boring than the diversity of constantly moving, colorful vehicles. However - the roads are almost always more useful to know.

Having intuition of these roads and bonds now permits you understanding of whether a Q or pressure, is "on-road" or "off-road", bonded or unbonded. When you realize there are roads, you can notice if something uses a road or not. This leads to the Third Jhāna.

The Third Jhāna (tatiya-jhāna): 

"With the fading away as well of rapture, a bhikkhu abides in equanimity, and mindful and fully aware, still feeling pleasure with the body, he enters upon and abides in the third jhāna, on account of which noble ones announce: ‘He has a pleasant abiding who has equanimity and is mindful.’"

In LWC theory, the Third Jhāna involves:

• Comparing pressure flows between multiple bonds. This allows paths to be formed between paths.

• Comparing lines or "paths" between doors or bonds, allowing some pressures to move between them, and roughly balancing pressures.

• Sacrificing rapture (in the original: "pīti"). Remember the "pleasure button" that you learned how to hit randomly in the First Jhana? You learned to press it more frequently in the Second Jhana. You received a random Q or pressure and tried to connect that to the "pleasure button", making a path for satisfaction. Discontentment was able to travel to the path and then along the path: Your total amount of focus is disturbed before moving to one (First Jhana) or both ends (Second Jhana) of the path. Then, if focus is at both ends, such as in the Second Jhana, then pressure, discontentment, and change of focus can flow between the ends.

• That "pleasure button" is now used as if you were a boss employing your own focus. It can be utilized more of a reward for mental work or movement of focus or change of pressure rather than being the immediate destination. Instead of discharging and consuming instantly, as in rapture, useful work is done with the "voltage". 

• Rapture, or trying to press the "pleasure button" as much as possible, becomes less emphasized.

In the Third Jhāna, you can start connecting your discontentment and focus straight to the "pleasure button"

or

you can have the Q or pressure cause your focus to do useful work before it gets to hit the "pleasure button". Essentially, you can withhold this pleasure from your focus temporarily, dealing it out like a treat or a reward for making useful mental circuitry or forms. 

Eventually, you will be able to not even need triggering Qs or pressures, but will be able to manipulate bonds from any sensations you already have outside of meditation, just by managing bonds (yours or others) and total focus, and you can make pressures or Qs show up at either end of a bond by your own willpower, or even make one bond using other bonds.

Until then, in the Third Jhana focus takes a route towards the "pleasure button" and then is partially denied access (or you can even move the "pleasure button") which allows focus and discontentment to have to loop or take a different path. Before dissipating all of its energy. Once the desire is fulfilled, it "disappears" and the mind & body waits for a new desire.

So the tiny desires of the Second Jhana are short circuits, while the desires of the Third Jhana are more like useful circuits that do work. It trains the focus to do something useful before it gets to release its discontentment fully. And so gain contentment.

This also allows focus to split between two different paths, when focus compares one path to another. Even in the act of choosing, focus is put on both paths, and so on one Door and two Doors that branch from the first Door.

In this way, in LWC Theory, the Third Jhāna corresponds to 3D.

Notice that in the description, the Third Jhana includes equanimity. This is like having some part of your focus that is balanced, and unaffected by the sways of external or internal changes.

For equanimity, pressure-balancing can occur - either total focus or some partial set-aside amount of focus or pressure must be stable. This is like using a wall of pressures or of pressure balancing processes, that can have zones of no pressure or (nearly) zero change to pressure. Thus, "3D mental constructs" of pressures and bonds can be designed.

Or focus can make multiple intersecting loops that look like split paths.

Either way - messing with an energized or discontent amount of focus's access to the "pleasure button" can change its course, midroute. It can so activate two different roads or paths to the "pleasure button" at the same time.

You can intentionally or intuitively ignore roads or intentionally or intuitively block a road.

After some time in the Third Jhana, you gradually learn to block access at times, and open access at other times. This is how you can have a "fading away (as well) of rapture" while "still feeling pleasure with the body".

You get to be more discerning and selective of how the pleasure is used. And when I say, "pleasure" - after enough practice eventually you will be able to use such small units of pleasure that it almost won't seem like pleasure. Like using individual dopamine molecules - you might even not be able to feel them, but you have learned to use them to manage your focus, like moveable units of discontentment and contentment, around the mind and the body.

In the beginning of entering the Third Jhana, though, you will use larger amounts of pleasure. Like wielding a large sword instead of a scalpel or a toothpick.

This means that each session of meditation in the Third Jhana early on, will likely be tiring or boring. Wielding large amounts of pleasure, to construct mental formations from discontentment and contentment, can be difficult at first. It can bore the mind and body, and desensitizes you to meditation.

It's one of the very first humps to get over in meditation, to sensitize your mind more and more to tinier and tinier changes of pressure and pleasure. 

Basically you are then trading unlimited semi-random moments of immediate pleasure spikes - rapture - for more useful and directable paths of focus (which necessarily take a longer path than straight to the "pleasure button") and productive useful work done by your focus as it is forced to take the long or more difficult paths (or the same path in a loop) to "the pleasure button" (or "satisfaction button" or "discontentment dissipation area" or "contentment uptake area").

Maintaining one path for equanimity may mean denial of other paths...for now. Later, the other denied paths will become important.

Soon, in the Third Jhana, you can notice ways to charge focus by using these denied paths. The paths or relationships made in the Second Jhana inadvertently or unintentionally cause competition between maintained paths and other potential paths. Gradients of concentrations of focus are made in the Second Jhana but intentionally used in the Third Jhana.

And the charged focal paths can combine. Sort of like branches of potentials with each potential branch having its own pressures and Qs that could have been a path, a denied encounter that charges up the maintained path like a capacitor or a battery. So the branches are not only in "mental 2D" but "mental 3D" because they have a "depth of potential" as well as a relationship/path, between pressures or Qs.

The 3D nature of the 3rd Jhana allows you to pair it to proprioception.

The branching paths/relationships allow association with perception of space and proprioception.

In the First Jhana, the sensations and pressures were more random. It was difficult to use anything as a reference.

In the Second Jhana, those sensations and pressures were related to each other, which made them less random, but less definite for an anchor or frame of reference.

In the Third Jhana, the doors and bonds and relationships of pressures and Qs can now be associated to "remind you of" structures and places in the body. Think of it as using body or 3D space to imitate the 3D mental contruct, either as a sensory feeling or an action.

Because the Qs and pressures were basically random during the first two Jhanas, you had shifting relationship to the physical body and environment, if you tried to reference them physically.

In the Third Jhana, you now have a chance to use the relationships between paths and denied paths to relate to the physical body and physical environment.

The 3D structure in a brain in the image above (or some similar winding or branching path) is like the overlay onto a physical proprioceptional Q or visual Q.

"3D mental constructs" can now be associated to the breath or to the heartbeat or to some other natural feeling in the body. These are biorhythms that can relate your "3D mental constructs" to time, which leads to the Fourth Jhana, which is discussed in the next chapter.

Think of the Third Jhana as a way to make "almost-physical" - like regions of pressure-balancing - that can be given or associated to physical contents or a real "anchor". They can be overlaid on to some physical structure or process.

I emphasize using biorhythms and physical sensations as references and "anchors" for these mental pressure-to-make-a-structure-'s because they are still quite momentary. They happen very quickly and semi-randomly, from the blurry intersection between consciousness and subconsciousness. 

If they are fully in consciousness, they would have definite 3D coordinates in imagined or physical space. If they were fully in subconsciousness, they would not be perceived at all. The bonds can be thought of as across doors between consciousness and subconsciousness.

So they don't stay as a definite unique conscious structure, UNLESS you "attach" them to more definite conscious processes or structures. When you remember a physical process or structure of the body as having included one or more "3D mental" structures from the Third Jhana, like giving the reference or anchor an alternate past, you are extending out the 3rd Jhana's "blippy lifespan" out into more time. Pressures can be used not only to make 3D structures, but to cause focus to attach a possibility to another later possibility. Like almost thinking of a sphere, and then again almost thinking of a sphere, and almost connecting the two spheres between the moments in which they were almost experienced. (And this extended lifespan of that 3rd Jhanic structure involves one or more curl rates.) This leads to the Fourth Jhāna. We will pick up there, next chapter.