What Jhana Meditation Can Teach Us About LLMs

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper goes in depth with author and researcher Nadia Asparouhova. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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Nadia Asparouhova wasn’t looking for a spiritual awakening. 

She was just curious why Jhana—mental states of bliss that can be reached through an intense program of meditation—had become so popular in tech circles. The more she read, the more she wanted to experience it firsthand. Nadia went to her first Jhana retreat without having a regular meditation practice, and on her second one, she reached what practitioners call “cessation,” the final stage of Jhana where one slips out of consciousness at will.

Afterward, something shifted. Nadia found that she had better control over her attention, emotions, and distracting self-talk. It challenged her assumption that these messy qualities are an integral part of being human—and made her wonder if we’re more like LLMs than we know.