People are often wrong about what they are internally perceiving. How could this be? Hippocampus activity - they literally change their own memory of what they perceived. Robert Sapolsky talked about this on this podcast recently (here: https://youtu.be/9YYZQAXoghc - thanks to whoever posted that link on ACT recently). If you can change your memory about externally perceived events, you can probably do it just as well for internally perceived events.
I have been around people that self-report all these amazing experiences from spiritual practices all my life, and I am pretty sure most of it is bullshit. I have done a lot of meditation and know what is possible and how easily it is to fool yourself to think that you have had a much more profound experience than you actually did. There seems to be a certain percentage of people that are really comfortable with changing their own memory of what they perceived to fit their expectations. The classic pop culture example of this is in that South Park episode when Cartman convinces himself he came up with a joke and his memory becomes more elaborate with each retelling, until he is fighting off a dragon. I know people like this, that embellish stories in which I participated until they are unrecognizable to me and, often, these happen to be the same people that self-report amazing spiritual experiences.
EDIT: I am not trying to say that jhanas are not a real and positive experience. I question claims such as it is comparable to having sex, or is 10 times better than sex, or is an experience of complete bliss and not crave-able.
People are often wrong about what they are internally perceiving. How could this be? Hippocampus activity - they literally change their own memory of what they perceived. Robert Sapolsky talked about this on this podcast recently (here: https://youtu.be/9YYZQAXoghc - thanks to whoever posted that link on ACT recently). If you can change your memory about externally perceived events, you can probably do it just as well for internally perceived events.
I have been around people that self-report all these amazing experiences from spiritual practices all my life, and I am pretty sure most of it is bullshit. I have done a lot of meditation and know what is possible and how easily it is to fool yourself to think that you have had a much more profound experience than you actually did. There seems to be a certain percentage of people that are really comfortable with changing their own memory of what they perceived to fit their expectations. The classic pop culture example of this is in that South Park episode when Cartman convinces himself he came up with a joke and his memory becomes more elaborate with each retelling, until he is fighting off a dragon. I know people like this, that embellish stories in which I participated until they are unrecognizable to me and, often, these happen to be the same people that self-report amazing spiritual experiences.
EDIT: I am not trying to say that jhanas are not a real and positive experience. I question claims such as it is comparable to having sex, or is 10 times better than sex, or is an experience of complete bliss and not crave-able.