Jhana erection

Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/16/21 4:21 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/16/21 4:21 PM

Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
I've been practicing jhana since last summer. I can get into the 4th pretty solidly, for a period I was going into the 5th solidly as well. 

Now I have a question: So when I enter jhana I have an erection. I just assumed this was how it was for everyone and just no one ever mentioned this particular detail. But I have done some searches and I can't find anyone else discussing this. If this was normal you'd think somewhere on the internet someone would of mentioned this. 

My question is: Is this normal? Am I a freak?
thumbnail
David Matte, modified 2 Years ago at 4/16/21 5:09 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/16/21 5:06 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 108 Join Date: 8/3/19 Recent Posts
Hi! To answer your question, yes absolutely you are a freak and you should be ashamed of yourself.
​​​​​​​
Just kidding! emoticon But my view is that it's not really a normal thing to have happen all the time in jhana. But still it can happen as the potential is there. The piti cultivated in jhana is very much like sexual energy if you haven't noticed; 1st jhana can feel quite like an orgasm with the strong piti. After you turn down piti in 3rd/4th jhana, it makes sense to me that this shouldn't be possible anymore, especially at 4th jhana. 
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/16/21 5:46 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/16/21 5:46 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
David Matte
After you turn down piti in 3rd/4th jhana, it makes sense to me that this shouldn't be possible anymore, especially at 4th jhana. 


It is possible. Its present at all levels for me. Its not as if I am experiencing an orgasm located in my genitals. I am expericing the jhana and I just happen to have an erection. My view has been that fundementally jhana is "sexual energy" but extremely rarified. 

This is so weird.
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/16/21 6:21 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/16/21 6:21 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
I just attempted to enter without acheiving an erection and it worked. Its much easier to "control", less intense, and ramps up much more slowly.

...Interesting.
Emil Jensen, modified 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 3:02 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 3:02 AM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 319 Join Date: 7/16/20 Recent Posts
I suck at jhanas! But I have noticed the same thing sometimes. I feel that it really is a lot like sexual energy emoticon


"Babe? I'm in first jhana..."
"Coming, dear!"
George S, modified 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 5:46 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 5:46 AM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 2722 Join Date: 2/26/19 Recent Posts
I'm starting to think that jhana books and retreats should carry some kind of disclaimer:

'If you have an erection for more than 12 hours, please go to the nearest emergency medical department.'
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 1:51 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 1:51 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
Emil Jensen
"Babe? I'm in first jhana..."
"Coming, dear!"
lol
Derek2, modified 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 7:13 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 7:13 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 231 Join Date: 9/21/16 Recent Posts
If you have the book Advanced Yoga Practices, lessons 174 and T28 discuss sexual arousal during meditation.
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 10:00 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/17/21 10:00 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
Derek2
If you have the book Advanced Yoga Practices, lessons 174 and T28 discuss sexual arousal during meditation.


That sounds very intriguing. Which one? Looks like there's more than one on amazon.
Derek2, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 7:40 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 7:40 AM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 231 Join Date: 9/21/16 Recent Posts
Advanced Yoga Practices - Easy Lessons for Ecstatic Living (AYP Easy Lessons Series Book 1) by Yogani
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 11:41 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 11:41 AM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
Derek2
Advanced Yoga Practices - Easy Lessons for Ecstatic Living (AYP Easy Lessons Series Book 1) by Yogani


Excellent. Thank you!
Sam Gentile, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 12:05 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 12:04 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 1310 Join Date: 5/4/20 Recent Posts
What an interesting topic title! Seriously, I must limit my discussion to the first Jhana as that is as far as I have been able to go so far but yes I do feel extra sexual energy. My teacher said this energy could be cultivated and rattled off some advanced Yoga books (I could try to find out the titles if you would like). The Yogani might have been one of them.
Stickman3, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 2:42 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 2:42 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 166 Join Date: 1/15/21 Recent Posts
I'd say, looking at our evolutionary heritage of constant polyamorous rumpo that we've moderated during the development of civilization, that sitting down and cultivating jahnas is the weird bit.

Let's face it, triggering your desire and reward system while doing nothing desirous or rewarding is pretty mad.

So, yes, you're a freak :-)
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 2:58 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 2:57 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
Sam Gentile
My teacher said this energy could be cultivated and rattled off some advanced Yoga books (I could try to find out the titles if you would like). The Yogani might have been one of them.


Yes I would be very interested in any information on this subject you could point me towards. emoticon
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 3:17 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 3:16 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
Stickman3
I'd say, looking at our evolutionary heritage of constant polyamorous rumpo that we've moderated during the development of civilization, that sitting down and cultivating jahnas is the weird bit.

Let's face it, triggering your desire and reward system while doing nothing desirous or rewarding is pretty mad.

So, yes, you're a freak :-)
Haha...yes indeed.

It is pretty weird in a way. You're essentially hacking the pleasure center of your brain.
George S, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 4:28 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 4:22 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 2722 Join Date: 2/26/19 Recent Posts
You could also consider it as reversing the process of infantile development ... from Ken Wilber's essay in the book Kundalini Rising:

The infant, according to psychoanalytic observations, is under sway of “polymorphous perversity” and moved solely by the Pleasure Principle, which means that the child lives in a noncorrupted, blissful, and erotic unity with all of nature. For all practical purposes, its awareness is transpersonal, timeless, and spaceless. Very simply, its world is one of transcendent bliss, and for this reason alone Freud was quite right in announcing, much to the horror of his contemporaries, that children have a richer, more extensive, and more satisfying sex life than adults; for the infant takes equal erotic and blissful delight in all organs, surfaces, and activities of the body, and thus his entire cosmos is one of bliss, while the normal adult finds exuberance and bliss, if at all, in only one specific and narrowed region of the body—the genitals. Genital bliss can thus only be viewed, in comparison with the body’s natural possibilities, as a constriction, a restriction, a cramp, a knot. Now it is not so much genital sexuality that comprises this knot, but rather the restriction of bliss to only one specific region of the body, excluding all others. This restriction of transcendent bliss is thus normal, but not natural. It is but one peculiar arrangement, out of infinite possibilities.

How, then, comes this unnatural restriction of man’s potential participation in transcendent bliss? According to the last formulations of Freud—which, alas, are carefully scrubbed out of all modern psychiatric texts—this restriction is engineered by a separate-self sense in flight from death and from loving unity with all objects; for the infant’s earliest “identity” is literally with the cosmos itself—a type of immature “cosmic consciousness.” He cannot distinguish his world from his actions upon it; nor differentiate self from other, subject from object, inside from outside. He knows nothing of the illusions of space nor of time, and thus, as Jung constantly emphasized, lives in a transpersonal and supraindividual world.

But as the infant learns to construct an irreducible barrier between self and other, between inside and outside, he forfeits his loving and blissful at-one-ness with the cosmos and centers his identity instead on his personal organism. He shifts from a Supreme Identity with the All to a personal identity confined to the boundaries of his skin. Thus Freud’s famous dictum: “The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling that embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world.”

This shift in identity carries with it a host of unforeseen ramifications, for, identified almost exclusively with the personal organism, the infant is faced, for the first time, with the imminent fear of death. He suffers anxiety, and “anxiety is the ego’s incapacity to accept death.” Since he has identified his once transcendent self exclusively with his organism, the death of that organism seems to be an utter annihilation of his very self, a total subtraction that he cannot bear.

The infant, therefore, arrives at a fantasy solution to this illusory problem of death—a solution that eventually culminates in what is known as the Oedipal project. Now the Oedipal project is only secondarily the wish to sexually possess the mother and kill the father, for the infant’s primary aim in the Oedipal situation is to abolish death by becoming the father of himself. He imagines, in his infantile fantasy, that he can gain a type of immortality by conceiving himself. As strange as this sounds, remember that even a typical adult will feel he can in some ways cheat death by leaving behind progeny, something of himself that will “survive death.” Conceiving a child thus seems at least to touch immortality, and even more so to the infant’s untutored fantasy.

The infant, therefore, attempts in fantasy to conceive himself, to become his own parent and thus assuage the anxiety that death presents to him. And by the time of the Oedipal project, the child’s fantasies have centered around the genital area, as common sense and the analysis of children as well as adults disclose. But more significantly, the libido of the infant has also concentrated in the genital area, by and large to the exclusion of all other bodily regions. Now libido does not mean sexual, genital pleasure. Libido, in its undiluted form, is simply that capacity for overall bodily pleasure, for transcendent bliss, and in the earliest years of infancy it is distributed equally throughout all bodily organs, surfaces, and activities. The infant participates in transcendent bliss through any area or activity of his body.

But under the Oedipal project, this libido is concentrated in the genital region alone, driven there by the fantasies of overcoming death by uniting bodily with the mother. The libido is no longer democratically available to the entire body, but is now tyrannized by a single region. And the fate of this tyranny is sealed by what is known as the castration complex, for this complex—whose intricacies we need not detail here—smashes to pieces the Oedipal project, but leaves the genital organization of the libido intact. The Oedipal project continues its aims in other forms of fantasy, but the body itself remains deformed, with its libido, its transcendent bliss, diluted and restricted to only one particular area of the body. The body, in short, is left crippled with the constrictions and knots of infantile wishes. The ego becomes the dominant element in consciousness, and the genital the dominant element of the body and world.

And so it comes about that the normal adult’s only access to transcendent bliss and ecstasy is through genital sexual release, a drastic and morbid reduction of the delight he enjoyed as a child. As Norman O. Brown put it, in infancy a person tastes the fruit of the tree of life, and he knows that it is good ... and he never forgets. This is why Freud ultimately, unlike Ferenczi, Fenichel, Reich, and others, did not see full genital release as a cure for neuroses, because even the genital act itself is a necessary source of conflict, since full and unobstructed bliss is frustrated by its unnecessary restriction to a single, tyrannizing region of the body. But again I must emphasize that the “tyranny of genital organization” results not so much from genitality itself, but from the restriction of bliss to this region alone.

Now notice that with this restriction of transcendent bliss to the genital area, we arrive at. the first major chakra![1] And notice also the path that original consciousness-bliss has taken in order to arrive at this first major knot: from a blissful, transcendent, timeless, and therefore eternal unity with all of manifestation, to a partial, fragmented, and abysmally restricted ego awareness stealing what bliss it can from a genital tyranny. From a cosmic body to a personal body—indeed, only a region of a personal body! This is the normal, but not natural, state of affairs for the ordinary person, and this is the state of affairs that kundalini yoga seeks to reverse.

I don't know if there's any way of testing this theory, but think of how easy it is to make babies smile and giggle :-)
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 6:08 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 6:08 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
George S
You could also consider it as reversing the process of infantile development ... from Ken Wilber's essay in the book Kundalini Rising:

Interesting. I think I have perhaps thought about it this way implicitly. It's definitely an angle I can get behind. Also, interesting blub, thanks for sharing.

On a side note, have you seen Ken Wilber lately? I saw him for the first time in maybe 10 years like a few months ago. Dude got skinny asf
Stickman3, modified 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 9:31 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/18/21 9:30 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 166 Join Date: 1/15/21 Recent Posts
I think Wilber's along the right lines there, infancy is bliss. Freud thought it should be left in infancy, though, which is maybe why he was so fond of his coke.
George S, modified 2 Years ago at 4/19/21 6:52 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/19/21 6:51 AM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 2722 Join Date: 2/26/19 Recent Posts
In my experience coke is more of an ego thing than a bliss thing.
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/19/21 10:01 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/19/21 10:01 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
One could argue that all addictive drug use is an attempt to return to the "bliss of infancy". Whether it actually suceeds or is just a pale substitue is a different consideration.
Stickman3, modified 2 Years ago at 4/21/21 9:58 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/21/21 9:58 AM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 166 Join Date: 1/15/21 Recent Posts
Rat Park - addiction as substitute for social life.
Stickman3, modified 2 Years ago at 4/21/21 10:06 AM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/21/21 10:06 AM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 166 Join Date: 1/15/21 Recent Posts
I've never tried it. But I have tried talking to people on it, and I think you've got a point.
Andy, modified 2 Years ago at 4/21/21 4:43 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/21/21 4:43 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 35 Join Date: 12/1/19 Recent Posts
Reminds me of something a friend of mine said once when we were discussing this topic: "the reason I don't smoke crack isn't because it's illegal."
Stickman3, modified 2 Years ago at 4/21/21 5:08 PM
Created 2 Years ago at 4/21/21 5:08 PM

RE: Jhana erection

Posts: 166 Join Date: 1/15/21 Recent Posts
Indeed, living in a cardboard box is a fine disincentive.

Breadcrumb