Sometimes, you meet a new person and the first thing that you notice is the immense calm on their faces. You get good vibes from them. And even without talking, you can tell they are nice people.
It happened with me recently a few times. As I got to know those people better, I learnt that they've all done Vipassana at some point in their lives. It might sound mumbo jumbo but these are the facts.
I haven't done Vipassana but my girlfriend did, about a few months back. Honestly, I didn't see any noticeable change in her. I mean she loves puppies now as much as she did earlier. She definitely did have trippy, out of body experiences. Perhaps, others who don't see her as often as I do might be able to tell some very visible, external changes.
However, there was one very peculiar effect. She had been complaining of a chronic back pain for almost a year. After she returned, her back pain was 90% gone!
Some of my close friends have also recently returned from it, and they all seem calmer, more mindful people now.
Unlike Scientology, Vipassana courses are free. They provide food, shelter, and an incredible experience on the donations of others. If you want to give a donation after you've finished the course (and only after you've finished the complete course, they won't accept donations otherwise), then you are welcomed to.
I have never done a Vipassana retreat, but I've played around with that style of meditation with good results. To me this is one of the most admirable aspects of it - so many of these so called "spiritual" (a misguided umbrella term) retreats/courses functions more as a way for the founder to get rich than to do something good. See the founder of Bikram yoga.
Except it doesn't. Vipassana courses are barely advertised, people come of their own volition, and participate for free. People are asked to try their method for ten days, not to change their lives without wanting to.
If they did advertise, they'd have scientific evidence that there are benefits from their methods. However, they don't use that, because meditation is not about proven benefits to them. It's about living a more compassionate and harmonious life.
Hardly a scam of any kind. I don't know why anyone would attempt to discredit it.
It is what you make of it; that's also the whole point, so it's funny because it's meta. That's also why I find people who are super-invested in that type of thing and super serious about it hilarious; it's as if they don't get it because they think they get it so hard.
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.
There are simple psychological reasons for having pains. If a person has a very tense lifestyle, no wonder he/she will get pains due to induced muscle stiffness.
In such cases, even a cup of tea a day (just to say) can "miraculously" cure a back pain, if the latter is caused by induced stiffness, and the first causes a daily relaxation.
I was not wearing my glasses and I read that first sentence as "There are simple psychological reasons for having pants". But I suppose this statement is also true :)
When I started reading Murakami, I couldn't stop. He weaves a world which seems so surreal without feeling absurd. Eventually, I read 4 of his books back to back and then bought the rest.
But, then I read the 5th one. And for some reason it felt like I've read it before. The protagonist in his novels has some very common characteristics - they like being alone, they cook and like to run. More often than not, a cat is involved (probably owing to the crazy high ratio of cats/people in Japan).
The last thing I read by him was actually a short story in New Yorker called 'Town of Cats'. I am now reading 1Q84. After a few pages, I felt like I had read some of it before. Even the character's jobs were the same. Peculiar details were common. And then I realised that I had read this in the short story.
IQ84 turned me off Murakami for a long time. Count how many times he recounts the same incident in almost the same words (narrator, mother). Count how many times he mentions breasts and the shapes of them (it's likely the same number of times he mentions any female). I read book one and two and realised at the end of it that I couldn't bear to buy the third book just to discover what happens to the protagonists.
I agree, it's very easy to wolf his books down, but in the end you don't feel like you gained much from it. After a while it gets a bit same-y. Hard-Boiled Wonderland had some nice ideas though.
