[Nikita]

Thanks everyone for your replies. Upekkha100, thanks for such a detailed comment with many links, I’ll certainly check them out.

I understand that the subject I brought up is relatively unimportant when considering the main message of the Buddha, but just as Lal said, such small details, when backed up by science, can be of great help to strengthen one’s saddha and appreciate the wisdom of the Buddha even more.

The bottom-line of the book I mentioned was that there is a pineal gland in each and every mammal studied so far, that produces a substance capable of inducing mystical and “transcendental” experiences.

Btw, what about animals without brains? Do they have mana indriya? There are also animals with some of the 5 senses being absent. I know that whales and dolphins cannot smell. Does that mean that their ghana pasada lies dormant?

[Nikita]

In this discourse it was said that Gandhabbas of all living beings are of the same size, smaller that the size of an atom. Lal also drew an example of bodybuilders sweating so hard to make their physical body big, while being ignorant of their manomaya kaya being infinitesimal.
But in many posts on Gandhabba here, it is said that manomaya kaya overlaps physical body: “As the physical body grows, first inside the womb and then outside the womb, the fine body of the manomaya kaya expands with it when the physical body grows from the single cell. Thus overlapping the physical body that we see, there is a very fine body (manomaya kaya) of the gandhabba.”
So, if I get it right, that means that manomaya kaya of a bodybuilder does actually get bigger when he’s growing in size. And according to other posts on the gandhabba, it copies the shape of a physical body it left after death.

[Nikita]

In this desana Lal said that only the completed kamma (kamma pata) can cause suffering in future lifes. In the example of a man planning to kill many people with a bomb, it was said that if the man didn’t bring his plan to a fruition, i.e., no one got hurt, that wouldn’t have been considered as kamma pata.
But then it was also said that vaci sankhara (including talking to oneself) can be considered as kamma pata and thus such apunnabi vaci sankhara should be avoided.
So I got a little bit confused. Can an act of planning an immoral deed bring future births in the apayas if the actual act was not realized?

[Nikita]

Hello everyone!

I went to one of the Goenka’s retreats this summer and tried to follow all the instructions to the best of my ability, even though I read this thread right before going there, which made me skeptical about the advantages of this meditation. Even though I found Lal’s words pretty convincing, I still decided to give it a shot since I was already going there.

So while meditating in the hall, I eventually reached a state of deeper concentration, which is referred to by Goenka as “bhavanga”. I read a post here on “bhavanga citta’ and as I understood it, It’s a “mindset” free of any thoughts, where there is no processing of sense input. But the “bhavanga” state Goenka was talking about is different – it’s a state of mind when one can feel subtle sensations all over the body， something like an energy flow. In my case that was similar to waves of small particles rushing through my whole body in a way that I couldn’t even discern my body parts, I was just a heap of waves and vibrations. Does it have anything to do with the jhanic states?

Now, this feeling is being described as “pleasurable” and “desirable” by others, including Goenka. So many people get stuck in their practice, trying to get this feeling again. But for me, both times I experienced it, I was pretty much overwhelmed and it started so suddenly that I kind of freaked out. My heart rate increased and I couldn’t help but gasped, therefore leaving that state.

I wonder if anyone else experienced any fear or panic when mediating. What’s the reason for that? I used to have a period of time when I was dealing with mild anxiety episodes back in the days just before the retreat, but those gradually became less and less frequent and I don’t have them now. So I think that in my case, the anxiety I had back then caused my fear of that “bhavanga” state. But I also believe that I’ve always been like this – freaking out when there’s something unpredictable or/and uncomfortable happening with my body. Something I would describe as “fear of loosing control over my body”.

I stopped following Goenka’s technique after maybe 2 weeks of practicing it at home and started contemplating on the three seals and other dhamma concepts. It’s hard to point the mind to the right direction and sometimes I feel like I don’t know what to think next and it seems like I’m forcing myself to review a paragraph from a book I read and now have to make a summary in my head, but sometimes there are moments when I naturally “stick” to some topic and it’s relatively easy to contemplate and to make parallels with my life. In general, it’s much easier to get in a concentrated state when I’m doing a Kasina mediation, but everything I really learned and understood about Buddha Dhamma came to me when I was contemplating on those concepts or doing real Anapana throughout my day.

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