The Buddha spoke of the jhānas as providing a “pleasant abiding here and now”6—in other words, since the four jhānas are primarily emotional states, they provide positive emotional abidings. Certainly from a subjective viewpoint, the first three jhānas are positive emotional states. In fact, unmistakable visual evidence provided by fMRI and EEG measurements show that all four jhānas involve increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex—even the subjectively neutral fourth jhāna shows increased left prefrontal cortex activity.7 Although using the jhānas to move your emotional set point to be
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