Reply To: Goenka´s Vipassana

#20777
Lal
Keymaster

Hello Nikita! Welcome to the forum!

Those “bodily feelings” are nothing to worry about. They could be related to jhanas too.

Yes. Even breath meditation or mundane kasina mediation can easily get one to experience such things (including jhana), especially if one had cultivated jhanas in recent previous lives as a human.
– Then one could have even been born in a brahma realm, and may have come back to the human realm.

As we know one can be born (jati) as a human many times within a given human existence (bhava): “Bhava and Jāti – States of Existence and Births Therein“.

So, those who had cultivated (anariya) jhana in the recent past may easily experience such “bodily feelings” or even jhana. It is those who also can easily experience “out-of-body” experiences where the “mental body” (gandhabba) can come out. Those who can do “astral travel” do that by coming out of the physical body with the gandhabba.

However, those previous jhana experiences are NOT likely to be Ariya jhanas. If they were one would not be coming back to the human realm or even deva realms. That is because one’s kama raga would have been REMOVED; see, “Mundane versus Supramundane Jhāna“.

In any case, Nikita is on the right track. As he says, one should not be satisfied (complacent) with any jhanic experiences. Those are temporary. We all had cultivated not only jhanas, but also supernormal (iddhi) powers in our deep past.

I always point out to the fact that Devadatta had cultivated jhanas and iddhi powers, but he lost all that and born in an apaya.
– On the other hand, being able to get to any jhana is a good thing (and may not be easy for some). That means one is able to at least suppress kama raga temporarily, and thus get to a better state of mind.
– However, it is not necessary to cultivate jhana in order to attain magga phala.