The JASI post was about what jhānic force does on the cushion. This one is about the other twenty-three hours.
Jhānic force doesn’t wait for you to sit down and meditate. Given any opportunity it is already working: trying to pervade the entire physical body, balancing the four elements, expressed through the wind element (vāyodhātu). That is what I’m calling autonomous jhāna.
What gates it is citta passaddhi. Passaddhi has two halves, and kāya can’t do jhānic-level relaxation while citta is still running verbal thought — vitakka and vicāra, the mental talk. For second jhāna and higher those go silent; mental activity continues non-verbally.
Here is the part I think is worth arguing about: autonomous jhāna does not audit what you were thinking about. If your vitakka and vicāra are merely calm and gentle rather than Dharmic, the force still operates and you still get the health benefits. What you don’t get is sammā samādhi — the four jhānas that specifically abide in Dharmic mental activity. The health mechanism and the path mechanism are not the same mechanism.
The immune system is one of its clearest expressions. The yellow in your boogers is jhānic force pushing pathogens out through the mucous membranes. Coughing up phlegm, or a dry cough, is the same thing. I’ve had balls of earwax pushed out of my ears both in sitting meditation in the four jhānas and while lying down falling asleep — which is exactly the demonstration: it doesn’t care whether your vitakka was Dharma or not. The distinct flavor of sukha after a good night’s sleep is the four elements having been rebalanced.
The post also works through morning wood as a diagnostic — an erection with no lustful thought behind it is jhānic force pervading the body, and it weakens when you overindulge in sensual pleasure. That cuts both ways for celibate practitioners: very old men keeping brahmacariya still get it, including in sitting meditation, and young men make a serious mistake assuming lust and wood must co-arise.
The mechanism, put simply: indulgence spends the battery. Virāga stops the leak. Kāya passaddhi is what actually charges it.
Virāga is the mental fuel — it keeps you from spending the battery on what drains it — but it is not the charger. That distinction gets collapsed a lot, and collapsing it is why people expect renunciation alone to produce jhāna.