This 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 cours

This 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 :)