Prudence Primrose

随筆Essays

Jhana Is Possession by Kami, or Ur-Sooth

29 December 2025 · 4 min read

I was asked a few times to elaborate on what I meant by this statement and while I meant it as a quip originally, I do have some thoughts on this with regard to the "jump off point" provided by Herr Guy here

It starts off with "Late Jhanas are weird because1 they demonstrate you can inhabit ABSTRACT states" his amazement here being the function of "embodying abstraction" via your conscious experience. My quip, "It is interesting how the Jhana frame gatekeeps tantra and makes it opaque, is in reference to the flat absurdity of Herr Guy's comment here. We can assume Herr Guy has been doing Jhana for awhile, he likely has heard of it for even longer, it is of course a mainstay of "tpot" ritualism, yet he still, years after first likely interacting with this idea, shows amazement at the fact that "you can embody abstract states". This amazement encapsulates something that I've always complained about "tpot" brand Theosophy, the inability to explain the function of things while solely focusing on the practice and spectacle. Always forgetting that function precedes form. What do I mean by this? Let me explain blunty--

Jhanas are a form of 'Tantra' which is just the Sanskrit word2 for what we in English might call 'Magic' or earlier might have called 'Sooth' (Like a Soothsayer3), technically Jhanas are not actually a form of Tantra epistemologically, but when you look at the function they provided they are doing essentially the same thing. You can bake wheat, eggs, and sugar in various ways to get a multitude of different deserts, but ultimately, functionally speaking, you are just making different kinds of bread. The 'eigen-tantra', or as I'd prefer to call it, Ur-Sooth, that we're dealing with here is the basis for ALL ancient esoteric magic systems, and in a proper education on these subjects, is instructed to you pretty much immediately.

This ur-sooth is essentially the idea that, simply put, abstractions are real, abstractions are alive4, we control them and shape them and embody them, and we can use our free will offered by the awesome and terrific power of our minds to mold them to our bidding. The point of Jhana states is to embody states of abstractions, simply put5, yet no introduction to Jhanas will say that, they won't say "The point of Jhana meditation is to become possessed by certain kami", but that is what it is, and this is the essential function of Tantra as well, it is also how you do divination like Tarot or Iching6.

The idea of kami is the7 best functional description of what abstractions are, in Tianmu we call them 'Ghosts', in Hinduism and Buddhism they call them Devas or Asuras8, but ultimately the function here is the same. There are abstractions, they exist, and humans interact with them and change them from our relationships with them.

Jhana meditation is basically a form of deity yoga (devatayoga)9 and this concept can be applied to so many other things outside of the narrow Jhana framework.

In my research I studied New Age cults and how they often monopolize and territorialize esoteric folk practices, the way that Jhana is framed where the 'function' of it is essentially ignored or glazed over in favor of the benefits, the spectacle, provided in hand with "Jhana retreats" and other money making schemes, reminds me a lot of how Sukyou Mahikari pretends that10 they invented "qigong" and that only they are capable of doing it, and in doing so, strip away all of the deep folk history of qigong11 in favor of a very narrow outcome based understanding that can only be preformed through the correct rituals under the proper authoritative guidance.

So, with all of this context it is easy to explain what I mean now. Jhana meditation is real, and does something real, but it is something that is not exclusive to Jhana or any other esoteric tradition, you can meditate on kami/ghosts/abstractions/ideals/gods/daemons all you want, and it is a real thing, you don't need the Jhana framework to understand it, when we do Jhana we are just embodying states of abstraction, we focus on a narrow range of abstractions like happiness, contentedness, and fall into them. This can be done for everything, from concepts like Liberty, to Love, to even Envy or Hate. Many people in fact live their lives day by day doing the 'function' of Jhana meditation with things that only make them miserable, think about lookism culture, that is what it means to be 'possessed by a demon12'.

To anyone who understand kami and yoga outside of the Jhana framework the "OMG I just realized Jhana is embodying states of abstraction!" comment is hilarious because it is like being blindfolded and being taught how to ice skate without knowing that is what you are being taught and then saying "Wow if I move my legs like this, I start gliding" of course you are, you're ice skating, that is what you are doing. Take the blindfold off, the frame limits your understanding of what is and isn't possible. Apply the function of Jhana to everything in your life, this is what it means to 'be mindful'.

As one last aside, I want to say that I actually do think Jhana meditation is cool and real, my critique here is in the narrow frame which is so prevalent on "tpot" (peace be upon them), if you're interested in some of the neurological research on Jhana studies (and with this expanded knowledge, the implications they have on yoga/meditation at large) feel free to watch this lecture from the University of Virginia: https://t.co/rbfshlxG8R

It is an incredibly fascinating and interesting lecture and I recommend anyone interested in this stuff to watch it. Thank you and Good Yule

Notes

By the editor.

  1. Jhana (Pali; Sanskrit dhyāna) is a Buddhist meditative absorption. The Pali Canon describes four form jhanas, with four formless attainments later counted as the fifth to eighth. Her point is that each is a named state a mind can enter and live in, which is the claim to be tested in note 5. source ↩
  2. Tantra literally means loom or weave, and came to mean a system, doctrine or treatise. As a tradition it is a ritual and yogic current that arose in India in the first millennium CE, within Shaivism and Shaktism and later in Buddhism. source ↩
  3. Old English sōþ meant “true,” from Proto-Germanic sanþaz and ultimately the Indo-European participle for “being,” the same root as Sanskrit sat, “being, true.” A soothsayer is a truth-sayer, and forsooth is “in truth.” So sooth names magic as the knowledge of what is, and ghostsooth in What the Ghosts Actually Are follows the same logic. source ↩
  4. Rome built temples to abstractions. The oldest Temple of Concord on the Forum was built in 367 BC by Camillus, and Fides (Good Faith), Pax (Peace), Spes (Hope) and Victoria (Victory) were all worshipped as goddesses. A Roman who prayed to Concordia was praying to an abstraction as a living power, which is her claim. source ↩
  5. The Buddha's own cosmology says so. The Pali texts and the Abhidhamma pair each jhana with a world of Brahma gods: weak, moderate or full first jhana leads to the three first-jhana realms, second jhana to the Ābhassara (Radiant) gods, third to the Subhakiṇha (Lustrous) gods, fourth to the Vehapphala realm. To rise in meditation is to take on the nature of a class of beings. source ↩
  6. Tarot began as a trick-taking card game in northern Italy around 1440–1450. Its occult use dates from Paris in the 1780s, with Court de Gébelin (1781) and Etteilla, who published the first deck made for divination about 1789. The I Ching is far older. Both divide the world into named figures, trigrams or trumps, that a reader treats as living forces; see the trigram note in What the Ghosts Actually Are. source ↩
  7. In Shinto, kami are deities, spirits and sacred forces found in nature, ancestors and honoured heroes, understood as part of the world rather than apart from it. They may be benevolent or harmful. Motoori Norinaga defined kami as anything that stirs uncommon awe, as noted in What the Ghosts Actually Are. source ↩
  8. In Buddhism and Hinduism, devas are the bright gods and asuras the jealous, power-seeking ones; in Buddhism both are beings in the cycle of rebirth, not creators, and they sit in the same schema as the Brahma realms (see note 5). Gods who are states of being, and can be entered, are close to what she means by kami. source ↩
  9. Deity yoga is a central Vajrayana practice in which the meditator visualizes a chosen deity (yidam) and its mandala, recites mantras, and in higher forms identifies with the deity while understanding it as empty of inherent existence. In What the Ghosts Actually Are she writes that ghostsooth is the Sanskrit devatā yoga, with the simplest form being to spend a day as Kiki or Bouba. source ↩
  10. Sukyo Mahikari is a Japanese new religion founded in 1978, branching from the Mahikari movement begun in 1959. Its core practice is directing “True Light” from the palm to a recipient. It is an example of a practice presented as the property of one group's rituals. source ↩
  11. Qigong, “breath cultivation,” was named as a system in 1949 by Liu Guizhen and popularized in the 1950s, but it draws on older practices such as daoyin (“guiding and pulling”). A silk painting from the Mawangdui tomb (burial of 168 BC) shows figures in daoyin postures, so the folk history she mentions goes back more than two thousand years. source ↩
  12. Jung said it in his commentary on the Secret of the Golden Flower: “The gods have become diseases.” His point is that what the ancients met as gods the modern person suffers as symptoms and compulsions, the same functional claim she makes about lookism. James Hillman built archetypal psychology on the line. source ↩