[btilly]

Disclaimers. I am also an atheist. I took this exact meditation course 20+ years ago and know people who have followed it for decades. I am not so enthralled.

The meditation itself is fine. However the problem is in the tapes. Goenka is not just trying to teach people to meditate, he's trying to teach a particular religious philosophy. He doesn't want you to just be aware of your body, he wants you to pay attention to how things arise and pass away, and from that conclude that all attachment is bad because you will feel grief when it passes. This ties into Buddhist philosophy.

To me the problem with this philosophy can be summed up by, 'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.' I was fascinated by the experience, but receiving indoctrination while I was in such a delicate state was not to my liking.

[Florin_Andrei]

As things are right now, any meditation technique worth the effort is coming from one or another religious background. So there is going to be some infusion of dogmatic elements into it. At least some schools are honest about it and tell you to feel free and ignore the mythology and focus on the psychological work.

I practice a different meditation system, and they have their own dogma attached to it. I found that whether I "believe" in it or not is irrelevant. Meditation itself is far too fascinating to get distracted with extras.

Another way to look at it is that some dogmatic aspects may not represent literal truths, but are metaphors for certain psychological aspects occurring in meditation or as an effect of it. This appears to be a very appropriate interpretation for many pantheons - heck, even the Greek gods are quite obviously representations of states of consciousness and functions of the mind, and the ancient greeks were not exactly famous for their meditation techniques.

[nimblegorilla]

I've been doing transcendental meditation. I imagine its roots are from a "religious background", but I don't feel like there are any religious elements. There are only a few dogmatic rules such as don't eat 2 hours before/after meditating.

[macknowledge]

There is a recommendation to wait a while after eating until the main digestion is completed before meditating. But there is no recommendation to wait any time after meditating before eating.

[Florin_Andrei]

Actually, the stuff about eating is quite practical. It's quite noticeably harder to meditate well when your belly is full.