Vipassana: 10 days of solitude and insights gained from it

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.

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/

Vipassana is about directly seeing impermanence, dissatisfaction, and lack of self in all sensations. The point of practice is to elevate your skill in seeing those. Because direct comprehension of the so-called three characteristics can reboot the mind in a way that is very analogous to how we reboot the computer and remove malware.

Vipassana is not about helping you deal with your psychological issues at the level of content. Its not a therapist-substitute. In fact it will often make matters (temporarily) worse, if you actually follow the instructions and do the practice.

Spending your meditation time pondering your "issues" is the biggest rookie mistake you can make. People can do this for years, and never get anywhere in their practice.

If you want to spend some time alone and contemplate your life, thats great and quite possibly useful, but don't call it Vipassana.