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A few months ago, I did the same course here in the US and I am sorry to report that I did not have a great experience. For one, I was disappointed with the su
by blurry 17y ago
A few months ago, I did the same course here in the US and I am sorry to report that I did not have a great experience.
For one, I was disappointed with the supposed difficulty or profundity of the course. Just like miles above, my fellow attendees, the teacher, the guru, and the friend who recommended the course to me in the first place, all described the experience in very dramatic terms (hell, heaven, profound impact, etc, etc). In reality, for 10 days, you don't do anything but sit in a dimly lit room for hours on end and concentrate on your breathing and other sensations. In between, you eat and sleep. That is all. Personally, I haven't found it especially challenging to shut up and focus for a few days. I also can't say that several days of highly-enhanced perception that followed the course had any profound long-term effect on my life. It was nice, but not more than that. (Those of you who do yoga probably know what I am talking about - those couple hours of feeling balanced, clear-headed and less "ADD" immediately following a yoga class).
Also, I felt that the course was misrepresented. What attracted me to this particular form of meditation was the promise of a 100% non-religious, 100% evidence-based practice. The website, the live teacher and the videotaped guru/founder S.N. Goenka stressed over and over the importance of personally and physically experiencing any insights. On the first day, we were told that we must simply observe any sensations that come with the breathing and not intellectualize the experience or give it any meaning other than what is. However the very next day, we were fed a whole bunch of hooey about the life of Buddha Gautama and the attendant reincarnation theory. The Buddha's tale was presented as a true story, and the reincarnation cycle was presented as the imperative to practice Vipassana mediation. The gist of it was, if you are good (i.e. you practice) you will eventually graduate to an enlightened status, but if you are bad (you don't practice, or waste your time with other meditation methods that may mean well but are silly because they focus on chanting or other false techniques) you will continue to suffer here on Earth. I really didn't appreciate the disconnect between the non-sectarian promise of the course and the reality of what the guru was telling us from his videotape each evening.
To be fair, I will add that the brainwashing is of spiritual rather than commercial nature and the course organizers do not want anything from you other than to "get" it. I would say that if you can set aside the negative aspects I mentioned above and you have 10 days to spare, it's a great way to reset your focus. Just don't buy it when they tell you that something incredible happens on the sixth day. They re-iterate over and over during the first 5 days that you must stick it out and something profound will happen on Day Six, but it's the same thing every day - meditate, eat, sleep, meditate, eat, sleep.
- rjurney 17y agoThis is interesting, because in my course nobody that felt the way you did lasted the entire ten days :) You must have been totally miserable. To me the course was mostly a secular study in mind hacking. Yes, you are just quiet and meditating. But most people find that... in that total silence that stretches to days, during the extended meditation sessions using the techniques, profound and terrifying things you have long suppressed come bubbling up. Its really intense and emotional. Women often burst out crying during the sessions. The idea is that while you are cultivating detachment, these things bubble up, and you are not reacting, only observing... you condition yourself to deal with them. By doing this for ten days at length, you wash yourself of your demons. I found that this happened for me. I stopped worrying about the things that had bothered me daily after that course. I was in India when I took the course, and consider myself a half-assed buddhist, so I didn't have a problem with the relgious aspect, but you're right, it is not totally free of dogma. The key thing to remember though is that they don't claim that a single ten day course will dramatically improve your life permanently. They just claim that you can learn the technique in that length of time. You still have to practice daily, several hours a day according to them. I admit that... I don't, really. I did for several months and then stopped. But what I have taken away from the course is a deeper understanding of myself, and I make daily use of anapana when I experience distress. It works, helps return me to equanimity, and I think it actually makes me smarter. I can say that for me, the experience was... deeply spiritual. Only I don't believe in spirits, I'm an athiest. The things that happened to me during that ten days were profound, and were pretty on par with the claims the hippies coming out of the courses before me were saying. The course was the hardest thing I've ever done, by far. I'm really glad I did it. But as your experience points out, mileage will vary. The key to the whole thing for me was that... verbal thinking is not thought, its just a reflection of underlying mental processes... and if you just shut the fuck up inside your head, you find that you have a lot more room for productive work, and thought, and you become smarter. Before that, I confused thought with productive mental work, and so the chatter in my head never ended. Now I can clear my thoughts, and have an empty mind and this is so important for using my limited brain power productively. The REALLY interesting thing is that at the beginning of the course, nobody can NOT THINK for more than a few seconds. By the end of it, you can go for minutes at a time. And it feels GREAT :)