[uberuberuber]

I completed my first 10 day Vipassana course recently, and genuinely believe that a slightly modified version of the course should be an essential component of any person’s psychological maturation/development. The course I did was the ‘Goenka course’ (dhamma.org), and I would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about meditation. It is free of charge to attend, and you can actually only donate to the organization if you complete the full 10 days.

The course is almost entirely rational and in the spirit of honest scientific inquiry. The rules seem arbitrary and silly but they are very helpful in quieting your mind, and enabling you to focus entirely on the practice at hand. It took me until Day 3 to let myself relax and enjoy the absence of tweets, posts and text notifications rather than feel anxiety about being disconnected. Assuming one is there for 240 hours, I only have an issue with ~5 of those hours being a bit ‘woo-woo’ as The Amazing Randi would say. I think of Goenka (the videos used in the evening lectures are available on youtube) as a kindly grandparent who just wants the best for you but occasionally tangents into bullshit. Despite his continual admonishments to only believe what is rational, he seems to genuinely believe the magical stories surrounding the Buddha, and it was distracting to have to segue from ‘this is a genuine insight into how the mind generates its own suffering’ to ‘oh wait he is talking BS’. If one replaces some of his more magical terms that are almost Freudian (ie Sakarnas) with 'Maladaptive neuronal connections' they actually make sense.

The sheer number of hours one is able to practice in this setting really accelerates the development of concentration/mindfulness. I think of the ~110 hours spent meditating during the course as equivalent to 220 days worth of 30minutes/day practice, and feel like I have ‘time traveled’ past 60% of a year of training. Happy to answer specific questions if anyone is considering attending a course.

[ca98am79]

I agree with you 100% - I think it should be an essential component of any person’s psychological maturation/development, and I felt the same way in regards to the "woo-woo."

One way I describe it to my friends is a "meditation boot camp." They break you down so that you can build yourself up. It's not that they break you down, but the environment (no speaking, reading, writing, etc...) is one where you are stuck in your own head for 10 days without distraction - so a lot of your "issues" come out. And you then learn to deal with them through mindfulness.

I had panic disorder before going and nothing really helped. During my 10-day course I had really bad panic attacks often. But meditation has pretty much "cured" me of them, because I now know how to observe them without reaction.

[uberuberuber]

It's obviously very hard to convey how much one advances in their practice in an objective manner without having an fMRI. The only real 'data point' I have in support of my experience was how radically my ability to watch my breath and maintain my posture changed after the course.

Before the course I was more or less haphazardly trying a breathing meditation where you count your breaths (say 5 or 10), and with a bead necklace I would count how many cycles of 10 I would manage in an hour. If my mind wandered during the 10 seconds then I would start again from 1. I averaged perhaps 20 successful cycles in an hour. I know this sounds, and probably is, atrocious. It was a sobering insight into how distracted I was by the rush of thoughts despite my own deliberate efforts at modulating those thoughts. Additionally, I would feel compelled to re-position my body every few minutes. The slightest pain or itch was enough to break my will and force me to readjust the pile of pillows I relied upon, again despite my own conscious desire to not move or scratch.

After the course, I can now sit comfortably on a simple Zafu cushion for an entire hour without losing awareness of my breath more than a handful of times, and certainly without having to move a muscle.

I don't expect my own anecdotes to convince anyone of the efficacy of these courses. I can only strongly encourage anyone interested to 'walk the path' by attending a formal course to give it a try. I have already signed up for another course to further my own practice.

[DenisM]

>'Maladaptive neuronal connections'

That's a mouthful, and just as obscure for most people. Might as well go with "Sarkana" - it's easier to pronounce. Besides, the script worked well for a few thousand years now, there is hardly a reason to change it now.

But yeah, if you're scientifically inclined and the ancient Indian mythology is rubbing you the wrong way, you can safely skip it, and it still makes perfect sense in the end.

[uberuberuber]

I should have fleshed out that thought more fully. I agree it's a mouthful, but I was trying to convey that we no longer have to believe in such strange (bad) ideas because we have a new set of strange (better) ideas (connectomes and such) that actually have evidence underlying them. The way the course described Sakarnas was as 'bad non-physical spirits/objects/states' that were generated by the body, and that meditation would enable one to "release" them, and prevent their development in the future. Obviously the more evidence-based interpretation of meditation is that it in some way re-wires certain neural connections in a manner that seems to be generally positive.

I'm not in favor of change for the sake of change, but when better reasons are available to describe a phenomenon, I think we should adopt those reasons. Surviving for thousands of years is not a virtue when it comes to the validity of ancient texts or the actions of (historical?) individuals (Buddha, Jesus, Big-Mo, etc.).

[initself]

If you think sankharas are non-physical, you missed the point. They are entirely physical and experienced as "vedana", bodily sensations. Nothing woo-woo. You just feel your body objectively.

[hosh]

I wouldn't be in a hurry to be so dismissive. Attachment to bad ideas is the same as attachment to better ideas: they arise, they pass.

Sit long enough, and you will encounter all the interesting attachment surrounding the notion of rationality.

[xk_id]

(following up on uberuberuber's reply)

> Besides, the script worked well for a few thousand years now, there is hardly a reason to change it now.

Imo, that is a big fallacy. I believe religious beliefs can no longer provide sound ground for adjustment in today's world. It is harmful to have within your semantic environment both "spiritual" factors such as the notion of "aetheric body", and scientific factors such as the notion of "space-time" (which currently shape our civilisation). This is because the two belong to inconsistent sets, so they conflict.

Edit: For a more relevant example, consider the implicit assumption of many "spiritual" doctrines that there is a "soul", which is separated from a "mind", which is separated from a "body". This contrasts with our modern scientific assumptions, that there is just an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment, which functions as such. The word "organism" is more recent than "Sankharas"! As such, it doesn't carry with itself the older metaphysics.

Also, consider our modern scientific perspective that we don't drop into this world from a vacuum – we come from an environment, the uterus. This, again, stands in sharp contradiction with many "spiritual" doctrines.

[ams6110]

Your point of view is certainly not unique, but neither is it anything close to universal. Many people myself included comfortably reconcile belief in a "soul" and a "higher power" with the demonstrated accomplishments of scientific research and study.

[microtonal]

> Imo, that is a big fallacy. I believe religious beliefs can no longer provide sound ground for adjustment in today's world.

The Buddha himself rejected to answer metaphysical questions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_unanswerable_questions

Buddhism puts the emphasis on direct experience of impermanence and how it leads to suffering.

Apart from that, most people have not trouble believing in contrasting theories or living by contrasting morals ;).

[xk_id]

> Apart from that, most people have not trouble believing in contrasting theories or living by contrasting morals ;).

Please see my reply to fusiongyro, which is currently below yours.

[fusiongyro]

> It is harmful to have within your semantic environment both "spiritual" factors… and scientific factors such as the notion of "space-time" (which currently shape our civilisation). This is because the two belong to inconsistent sets, so they conflict.

Harmful to what? Prove it—and not from first principles, because the human mind seems to have no trouble at all with combining arbitrary and contradictory concepts into one big mushy whole. Ask any non-programmer for software requirements, or really anybody why they did anything and not something else.

The only tangible harm is that it annoys people who attempt to apply logical reasoning to every situation and interaction, even where other human faculties are obviously more appropriate.

[xk_id]

> The only tangible harm is that it annoys people who attempt to apply logical reasoning to every situation and interaction, even where other human faculties are obviously more appropriate.

You are applying logical reasoning at any given time. What varies only are the assumptions you're concsciously or unconsciously making about yourself and the world.

As time passed by, humanity made various conscious and unconscious assumptions about the structure of the world. These assumptions got captured into language, which enabled passing the assumptions from one generation to the next. This is what happened with words like "soul" and "mind" (which assume possibility of absolute separation between elements). But as scientific revolutions occurred, assumptions were revised, and we created new terms, like "network" (a very important term from the semantic pov, as it assumes connectedness). Unlike thousands of years ago, today (year 2013), we know that the impossibility of absolute separation between elements is a fact of the world in which we live. By subscribing to the older systems of thought, you are going against scientifically (i.e publicly) accepted facts in your thought and actions.

>human mind seems to have no trouble at all with combining arbitrary and contradictory concepts into one big mushy whole.

The "mind"? Yes, maybe. The nervous system? Not so sure.

We know from neurology101 that observations are given by impulses received from the senses and processed in the thalamus. The cortex enables more abstract processing of observations (i.e interpretation, ideas, theories, etc.); the impulses reach the cortex after they have been processed by the thalamus. The entire thing is cyclical [1]. As the brain is one connected whole, it is neurologically important that the cortical and thalamic processes remain coordinated. This means it is undesirable that ideas are in a mushy relationship within themselves and with the empirical observations. If they were, this would essentially disconnect the activity of the brain. A very handy example of this is (my Western understanding of) mantras: they are not words, yet they are treated as if they have meaning (i.e, if I start repeating a mantra, I will deal will purely cortical products, instead of starting from observations and facts – that is, starting with thalamic products, and afterwards proceed by processing those cortically).

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq7d4ROvZ6I

[fusiongyro]

And people call me crazy.

[xk_id]

My advice is not to dismiss it so easily, and instead try to understand.

[Daniel_Newby]

> This contrasts with our modern scientific assumptions, that there is just an organism-as-a-whole-in-an-environment, which functions as such.

The rubber hand illusion shows that mind and body are far from unified.

[sushimako]

I completed my (first and only, but definitely not last) 10 day vipassana retreat few years ago and i can completely support everything uberuberuber said. Definitely one of the most transforming and interesting experiences in the last years.

To anyone interested in the practice, i can recommend reading [0]. Personally, i started by reading this book and doing some practice at home. After about half a year i attended the retreat (same as uberuberuber). Those retreats are offered worldwide, follow the same rules and are all donation based. List of centers in north-america at [1].

[0] http://vipassana.org/meditation/mindfulness_in_plain_english...

[1] http://www.dhamma.org/en/bycountry/na/

[Florin_Andrei]

(I also practice meditation, although a different system.)

To me, it seems like 10 days can barely begin cracking the ice, so to speak. I think even more powerful results would be achieved by removing yourself from your normal environment for 10 days (just go somewhere else and do something unusual), and then go and do the 10 day meditation boot camp.

But of course, very few people can afford the luxury of spending so much time away from work, family, etc. That's just an unfortunate fact of life.

[microtonal]

To me, it seems like 10 days can barely begin cracking the ice, so to speak. [...] But of course, very few people can afford the luxury of spending so much time away from work, family, etc.

I have an acquaintance who meditated in the East for some years. He told me that one of the biggest disappointments was that monks who spent years of their life meditating, could be very arrogant and selfish.

I also know of persons who meditate regularly, but never or rarely attended retreats, who seemed very enlightened.

Daily life and retreat may be a false dichotomy, I think the latter group of people were able to see every single moment of life as practice.