Jhana 5: Romance with the Void

Sasha Putilin

Oct 06, 2026

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Day 1/9 of a meditation research retreat. I close my eyes and my body immediately starts to dissolve into the void. Void juice slowly flows into emotional wounds and they begin to heal and fade. Over the next few minutes the state gets extremely pleasurable — more pleasurable than any drug I tried, including MDMA, opioids, various dissociatives, stimulants and sedatives — but it’s caused by meditation and not drugs. Only some rare psychedelic trips rivalled or surpassed it in pleasure — and I had 100+ trips on two dozen different psychedelics.

Despite being so pleasurable, the state is not addictive. If anything, it’s mildly anti-addictive: it acts like a tuning fork for the mind, dissipating internal stress left by past addictive behaviours and traumatic memories.

Popular culture has a particular image of meditation: you sit in a lotus position, you observe your thoughts, and you try to make your mind as still as a pond on a windless day, acquiring the seemingly superhuman mental stability of a Zen monk. Some meditation techniques do work like this. But the kind of meditation I’m doing is very different. It’s geared towards achieving jhanas — super-pleasurable concentration states. There are eight jhanas, and I am trying to enter the fifth one — hence the title of this post.

The nine-day meditation retreat was a part of the 8-week HEART research retreat in Tepoztlan, Mexico organised by Qualia Research Institute (QRI) in May–June 2026. HEART stands for “High Energy Awareness Research Team”.

QRI is a non-profit focused on building a new science of consciousness. QRI’s approach combines first-person phenomenology of exotic states of consciousness — such as those arising from meditation and psychedelics — with rigorous mathematical modelling and leading-edge neuroscience.

Physicists study matter not just under ordinary room-temperature conditions but also in particle accelerators, where they create exotic forms of matter — these allow us to better understand the underlying rules of the universe. Similarly, studying exotic states of consciousness helps us better understand consciousness and the computational medium of the brain.

QRI’s goal is to reverse-engineer consciousness, figure out the mathematics of pleasure/pain, and apply these insights to reducing suffering at scale and developing sustainable and wholesome bliss.

In Tepoztlán, a team of physicists, mathematicians, visual artists, advanced meditators, philosophers, and rational psychonauts gathered for eight weeks to study the jhanas (pleasurable meditative absorption states) and 5-MeO-DMT — a powerful psychedelic that’s unscheduled in Mexico. The retreat was led by Andrés Gómez-Emilsson, QRI’s President & Director of Research, and supported by Hunter Meyer, its Director of Operations.

I was invited there as an experienced meditator and a software engineer with a background in Applied Mathematics due to my familiarity with philosophy of mind and broad alignment with the organization’s mission. I had followed QRI’s work for years and had been running regular meetups for the community around QRI in London.

In Tepoztlan we studied meditation and 5-MeO-DMT by:

writing qualitative reports about experiences

conducting microphenomenology interviews;

creating software-based visual replications of our psychedelic and meditative experiences.

We also used tools created by QRI, such as oscilleditor and tactile visualiser to map out the dynamics of the states and pinpoint mathematical properties of their generators. And we collected 15 hours of EEG brain data along with associated pleasure/pain reports for later study.

The overall event lasted 8 weeks, and only 2.5 weeks focused on directly experiencing meditation and psychedelics — the rest was focused on the work described above. Some people attended only part of the retreat, while others stayed for its entire duration.

I stayed for all eight weeks, but this post is about my experience during the nine-day meditation retreat within it.

There are 8 Jhanas. They are all highly pleasurable, but the pleasure differs in texture and structure. The first jhana is an explosion of bodily pleasure. In the second jhana, the fireworks settle into a smooth current of joy. In the third, the joy softens and becomes deep contentment. In the fourth, even contentment gives way to perfect equanimity — vast, still, and almost affectless.

These four jhanas are called the formed jhanas. Their meditation objects are in the material world: sensations of the breath, pleasure in the body, and so on. The next four are called formless jhanas, or formless realms. Their meditation object no longer corresponds to anything in the “material world”.

In the fifth jhana, your entire experience becomes a smooth, uniform, boundless space that feels infinite. And by your entire experience I mean exactly that — you lose all perception of your body — you become that boundless space.

The sixth jhana is called “Infinite Consciousness”: you notice your awareness of boundless space and tune into the awareness itself. In the seventh, “Infinite Nothingness,” space falls away completely, leaving only — well, this will sound abstract and self-referential — a kind of thin nothingness. It is no longer empty space, it’s even less than that. The eighth one is “Neither perception nor non-perception” — Daniel Ingram, the author of “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: an unusually hard-core dharma book”, describes the state as “largely incomprehensible. There is no reasonable way to attempt to describe it, save that it is a mind state”.

Each of the eight jhanas progressively deconstructs and strips away aspects of experience. The eighth is so attenuated that people can barely say anything about it. Can you strip down the experience further? It turns out you can, but you get to an unconscious non-state Nirodha samāpatti in which there is no experience whatsoever. It typically lasts for minutes, but can sometimes last for hours and, in rare cases, even days. To the meditator, that time passes in an instant.

The goal of the eight-week research retreat was to compare and characterise different jhanas and different levels of 5-MeO-DMT experience. There are anecdotal reports of people accessing jhana-like states on 5-MeO-DMT, and we wanted to find out whether empirical evidence could support those reports.

Experiencing formless jhanas was considered especially valuable for research. Their high pleasure and simplicity (low informational content) are especially useful for studying mathematics of pleasure/pain. We were also interested in phenomena suggestive of non-linear optics, hoping to find further evidence for QRI’s theory of “Brain as a Non-linear Optical Computer”.

Needless to say, I wanted to maximise my impact, so I was especially motivated to reach the formless jhanas.

Traditional methods instruct practitioners to attain the jhanas in order. Each state is a progressively more “deconstructed” version of the previous one, so it helps to proceed sequentially — allegedly.

A few months before the retreat, I read Sasha Chapin’s claim that some meditators find it easier to start at jhana 5 rather than 1. And indeed, suttas — canonical scriptures in Buddhism — do describe people reaching formless jhanas first:

The Buddha himself reached formless jhanas (jhana 7 & 8) first, before embarking on a systematic exploration of other jhanas. And while the same sutra mentions him spontaneously reaching the first jhana as a child, at minimum it makes clear that it’s not necessary to experience every lower jhana before experiencing the formless ones.

Another sutra, MN 121, Cūḷa Suññata Sutta, The Shorter Discourse on Emptiness describes a monk reaching jhana 5 — and then 6, 7, and 8 — after first focusing on the perception of earth.

But how often does this happen? Nobody truly knows. Wystan Bryant-Scott, another retreat participant and the retreat’s meditation coach, was skeptical that it happens often — his guess was that it happens in <1% of cases.

As for me, I was skeptical that it was that rare, simply because we lack reliable numbers. Buddhists do not run randomised controlled trials to identify the most efficient routes into various states, so any statistics will be dominated by people practising as they were taught. Students typically follow the instructions as given, without asking, “Is there a more efficient way to meditate?”

Not me, though. I am interested in speedrunning enlightenment — figuring out the most effective ways to transform your mind towards it. The term comes from video-game speedrunning. Speedrunners explore a game to find the fastest way to complete it, sometimes by doing seemingly crazy ridiculous things. For example, rather than assuming that walls are solid, they treat them as thin textures that the game engine prevents you from walking through. By studying what the engine actually does under the hood and experimenting with it, they can sometimes literally pass through walls, as in this Super Mario 64 video:

In meditation, we are handed imprecise maps: nebulous instructions and knowledge passed down by experienced practitioners. Maps are valuable — they encode the results of past successful experiments. If you have a treasure map with a path on it, following it may be useful — but you can also study the map, study the territory and chart your own route to the treasure.

Still, embarking on a quest through largely uncharted territory with an estimated low probability of success could mean wasting my time and losing valuable research data for QRI — the organisation I was invited to help.

Why did I decide to do it anyway? I ran some preliminary experiments.

Before coming to Mexico, I began experimenting with modern instructions for entering jhana 1. First, you focus on the breath in the area beneath the nostrils and stabilise your attention — reaching a state called access concentration. Then you focus on a mildly pleasant sensation in the body. Attending to that pleasure without grasping or clinging creates a feedback loop that eventually leads you into jhana 1.

I also experimented with entering jhana 5 directly by focusing on the boundlessness of the space we all inhabit. I would attend to the sense of space around me and find myself in mildly mystical territory within minutes.

Here are the instructions I developed through trial and error, based on Sasha Chapin’s note I mentioned. Close your eyes. You retain some awareness of your surroundings, right? Try attending to them in order of increasing distance. Let’s say you are in a room, and the room is in a city. Begin with the nearest objects. Try to locate the surrounding streets in your experience. Then locate various landmarks and place them on a mental map. Next, notice that other cities and continents exist somewhere beyond them — these, too, can become part of your experience. Finally, remember that distant stars are out there (which don’t go out even if it’s daytime where you are). And as you do these instructions, you may notice your perception of space expanding and becoming a single whole. This sense of expansion and unification is the point — placing objects is a hack and you don’t have to be super precise with it.

The instructions to focus on the breath around my nostrils, however, did not feel right, and my mind would be distracted. There were two main reasons:

When I practised Vipassana extensively in 2019 and 2020, I focused on the breath at the roof of my mouth. At the time, my nose was permanently blocked because the cartilage separating my nasal cavities was deformed — a condition called deviated septum. In 2021, I had surgery to correct it (briefly described in this post), but even now, breathing through my nose does not feel entirely natural. And when I tried breathing through my mouth as I used to, the sensations felt too faint.

I now simply prefer more spacious