Jhanas Are Older Than Human

A response to Stephen Zerfas’s “Jhanas Are Human, Not Buddhist”

Stephen Zerfas of Jhourney recently argued that jhanas are human, not Buddhist, that the same absorptive states mapped by Theravada meditators were independently discovered by Christian mystics, Sufi masters, and Hesychast monks. Apparent attractor basins built into the nervous system.

Buddhists deserve credit for the best map, but the territory was never theirs. Zerfas makes the case well and I won’t rehash it.

Jhanas Are Human, Not Buddhist

But I don’t think he probes deeply enough to overcome an implicitly individualist frame. What if the solitary meditator accessing jhana is not discovering something new but recovering something much older?

The Fore Boys

In the 1960s, the anthropologist E. Richard Sorenson documented what he later dubbed Preconquest Consciousness among uncontacted peoples in highland New Guinea. Among the southern Fore, he found a mode of distributed, somatic, pre-verbal attunement that operated below symbolic thought.

At the risk of drawing a big conclusion from a single anecdote, Sorenson’s description of a hunting trip by some adolescent boys shouted “this is where jhana comes from” at me. He describes their rapport intensifying into “a ceaseless, spirited, individualistic input into a unified at-oneness,” a phrase he calls self-contradictory in English, and takes as evidence of the cognitive gap between their world and ours.

The story goes that a boy named Agaso, about thirteen, spots a cuscus in a tree but only has inferior arrows. Without a word, the sharpest arrow in the group moves into his hand so fast Sorenson can’t see where it came from. Simultaneously, another boy begins pulling a branch aside to clear the shot — synchronized to the exact speed of Agaso’s draw, clearing by millimeters at the moment the bow is fully drawn, slow enough not to startle the animal. A third boy begins climbing the tree a fraction of a second before the bowstring releases, grabbing the wounded cuscus before it can recover.

Then it gets playful. One boy rides a branch down to dangle the cuscus in Agaso’s startled face. The startle transforms into ecstasy shared by all. They roast everything together, and as night falls, they drop off to sleep “entangled in what can only be described as a contagiously subdued rapture coalescence.”

Rapture as the Reward Signal for Collective Coherence

Zerfas describes the first jhana as “a self-sustaining pleasure that doesn’t require thought to maintain.” The later jhanas: “the meditator is pulled into a place where they no longer ‘do’ anything.”

The Fore boys’ hunt follows the same arc. Intense coordinated effort, then the threshold where effort reverses: the arrow arrives unsolicited, the branch clears without instruction. Trying gives way to being moved. Then the quiet spreading rapture that sustains itself. Nobody is doing a spiritual practice. They are doing the thing small-band humans evolved to do together, and the jhanic phenomenology arises as a natural consequence.

The free energy principle offers a formalization. When multiple agents are tightly coupled; when I predict your movements, you predict mine, and our model of the shared environment is accurate, prediction error plummets in the collective. Each agent’s generative model extends to include the others, and the whole system settles into a state where almost nothing is surprising. The arrow arrives because Agaso’s model already predicts it will. The branch clears because Karako’s model already includes Agaso’s trajectory.

What does minimal prediction error feel like from the inside? Absence of surprise; of effortful modeling. Absence of the self-other boundary that prediction error itself maintains. It feels like jhana — not metaphorically, but because the underlying computational process is the same. The effortlessness threshold every tradition describes (”the prayer breathes itself,” “the jhana does you”) is what happens when the system’s predictions run so accurately that top-down models generate experience with almost no corrective input.

This state is designed by natural selection to be entered collectively. A solitary meditator can access it by manufacturing extreme predictive simplicity — one object, quiet room, no social demands. It works, but it’s a hack. The original trigger was coordinated action among intimately known others.

What This Could Explain

This may be why jhana practice is difficult. Zerfas spent four months on the edge of his bed. That’s because a solitary nervous system is doing alone what it was designed to do with others.

It might also explain the specific affective texture. If jhana were simply “what concentrated attention feels like,” the hedonic tone would be somewhat arbitrary. But if jhanic states evolved as the reward signal for collective coherence, the internal marker that says your predictions about the group are accurate, you are synchronized, you are safe, then the intense well-being starts to make functional sense.

Sorenson saw something like the same phenomenon across populations with zero mutual contact: sea nomads in the Andaman, maritime nomads in the Sulu Sea, forest nomads on the Malay Peninsula, herders on the Tibetan plateau. His six-part “Sensuality and Consciousness” series in Anthropology of Consciousness (1993–1998) documents these parallels. Cross-cultural consistency among people with no access to any contemplative tradition is, I think, stronger evidence for the universality of these states than the cross-traditional comparisons Zerfas marshals. Though Sorenson’s methodology has real limitations: single observer, unreplicable conditions, a niche journal. The observations are consistent with broader ethnographic work on intensive alloparenting and low-individuation identity in small-scale societies,

Teresa of Ávila wrote in the sixteenth century. The Buddha’s maps are twenty-five hundred years old. But the Fore boys are a suggestive window onto something that far predates all contemplative traditions. Maybe the traditions didn’t independently discover jhana. Maybe they independently rediscovered it, after the social conditions that originally produced it were disrupted by the very process of civilization that made formal contemplative practice necessary.

Zerfas says the rooms were already there. He’s right. But they weren’t empty rooms waiting for lone explorers. They were full of people.