What an intense experience I just had.
For a change, I decided to meditate on a "prophetic word" I was given from someone in my mother's church (I'm generally skeptical, yet open-minded, about this stuff, but this particular "word" has some personal significance to me).
To start, I simply followed the breath and mentally chanted the "word" as mantra. After a while of that, I stopped chanting and just let myself be open to my experience. Occasionally, I asked myself what the word meant. I experienced all the usual sensations I've so far come to associate with the early jhanas: a sense of calm and concentration, pleasant tingly sensations on my skin, pressure around the "third eye," and since more recently, an acute awareness of ringing in my ears.
After a good while of this, I started getting a little antsy, because I felt my timer would soon run out (I had set it for 25 minutes tonight), and I really wanted to penetrate this object. I noted my antsiness and came back to calmness, then I asked myself again what the word meant, except this time I prefaced it with "God" (as in, "God, what is such-and-such?"). Then I simply let myself remain open to receiving some kind of answer, supernatural or otherwise.
This is what happened soon after that: I started to feel my whole body vibrate very intensely. I actually heard the vibrating, like a buzzing. The thought occurred to me that I was about to have an out-of-body experience, as it seemed very similar to descriptions I'd read about astral projection. I felt like I was being gently pulled out of my body. The thought of it made me feel kind of scared, but at the same time immensely curious, so I stuck with it to see what would happen next. On top of this vibrating, I also felt a cool shivering wave run up my body, from the base of my spine up to my head, but it only happened once and went away, while the vibrating stayed longer.
The next thing that happened was my heart started pounding. I've experience increased heart rate during meditation before, but nothing like this: my heart was booming in my chest, like a big drum, fast but steady. I think I could even hear it beating, this loud thump, thump, thump. It didn't feel like it was just in my chest though. My whole body seemed to be beating, that's how intense it was. I started to really feel afraid at this point. I thought my heart was going to explode and I was just going to drop dead there on the cushion. I knew I wasn't really going to die right then, though, so still, I stuck with it.
I started to breathe in heavy gasps, because I felt so overwhelmed. After that, I tried to ease my breath, and just stopped breathing altogether on the outbreath, just experiencing the whole frightening experience. My breathing got back to normal, though very light, hardly on my radar.
Then the bell rang, and my eyes snapped open. And then everything was normal again. I didn't have any strong lingering sensations such as you hear about sometimes (other than a sense of "What the hell was that?").
I must have had some kind of vippassana-nana experience, I'm sure of it, but I'm not certain which. Before this, I haven't had any experience of the nanas, only the samatha-jhanas (at least the first two).
Someone, please, enlighten me? What did I just experience?
