Did you sign up just to bash vipassana? I'm curious as to why you feel so strongly about the issue. If it works for some people, it works for them. Does it cause harm to you if other people give it a try?
Scientology and some Thelemic orgs use Vipassana and other meditative techniques to ensnare their students. The wonky experiences like out-of-body experiences are used to market the system. So it works, yet is still abused to capitalize on the spiritual progress of followers. It works, but so does a parlor trick works when your audience does not pay full attention. Your question: 'Does it cause harm to you if other people give it a try?' is a tricky one. A practice can be harmful to others without being harmful to you. Does it cause harm to you if other people try out heroin? Does that void a strong opinion on drug abuse? To people not, or slightly, familiar with Vipassana, such stories do read like someone smoked their first joint and its the cure for every ailment they can think of. Like born-again people talking about "seeing God and having Him save my life". Glad it helped and you are so enthusiastic, but you are still claiming salvation from an invisible man in the sky, aka: you sound like a Scientology ad. Especially when claiming medical benefits, caution is required.
Edit: I am not comparing meditation to heroin. I am showing that the question 'Does it cause harm to you if other people give it a try?' is a trick question, a debating technique. Answering 'no' does not invalidate the statement 'this reads like a scientology ad'. But even if I did compare meditation to heroin, so what? The article compared meditation to psychedelics.
The article compared meditation to psychedelics because the author is misguided. They may produce remotely similar states of mind. That does not mean they are equal.
There is no claim of salvation in meditation. Only claims of personal benefit in terms of calm and compassion, plus an increasing body of scientific evidence of cognitive benefits.
Invisible men in the sky are the antithesis of Vipassana, and anyone who uses it to ensnare anyone are frauds. The only benefits are within yourself, and the teachings make that abundantly clear.
Also, implying that Vipassana and meditation can harm anyone is absolutely ridiculous. It cannot do that anymore than reading a book or eating breakfast can.
Some Vipassana retreats require you to surrender to the Buddha and the master before starting. Invisible men in the sky are the antithesis of Vipassana since Vipassana masters claim that reality is not real anyway. You say invisble men in the sky are foreign to Vipassana. So what is "Nibbana" if not something beyond mind and matter? Why do spirit entities live inside tree-trunks? Why rid yourself of 'mental factors' that are able to "color the mind"?
The cognitive benefits-schtick is also used to justify the religious doctrination: "You have passed and future lives through reincarnation. Buddha existed and we have his teachings. Our goal is to become deathless.". It's scientific right? The cognitive benefits-research focuses on hospital patients and stress/pain relieve. They do not send these patients to a 10-day retreat, where they are not allowed to talk, must surrender to a master, do extreme meditation techniques for hours on end, till they self-operated on their psyche enough it's broken and they now have to repair it.
What salvation is for Christians, is enlightenment for Vipassana.
There are frauds out there who use these techniques to ensnare students, and there are students out there who ensnare themselves through being young, naive and gullible. Since the experiences are so dramatic, you get a host of uncritical people who proselytize Vipassana. Kinda like people who buy expensive Apple products will be lauding Apple, since else their investment was bad, and no one wants to admit to that. The people for who it didn't work remain quiet, especially when the master told them it was their own fault.
Vipassana for prolonged times can do much more than reading a book or eating breakfast. What if the author had gotten a psychotic episode during his tripping balls? Would that be dismissed with another fancy foreign term or garbled psychological babble? Would a master be able to spot deteriorating mental health in their patients? People report disassociation, hallucinations and hearing voices. To a qualified mental health professional that would not be scientific evidence of cognitive benefits, that would be a manifestation of latent schizophrenia. Then there are the documented suicides and self-harm... but then again, people have probably died from eating bad breakfast too.
