Thank you. You are spot on with the quackery! This matches my experiences in participating in a course in Germany.
> Maybe try hanging out with people praising homeopathy and not saying a single negative word as preparation for the kinds of things you're going to feel?
Honestly, the day when silence is broken was hard to grok. The vast majority of participants were deep into esoteric and quackery themes and had a religious admiration for the teachings. Critical discussion is not exactly forbidden but usally swept away.
It's also powerful, I remember speaking that day to someone more sceptical than me at the time and trying to calm him down. In retrospective he was right and I turned into an advertising machine the following weeks - I realized that only quite a while later.
The topics and language used in the course also had a lot of pseudo-scientific topics (even quoting engineers) that are hard to dismantle on first sight.
That beeing said, it's still worth the experience and it was comfortable but be ready to get exposed to all kinds of quack.
At first the supposed religiousness of it annoyed me too - but over time it sat ok with me. If you think about it, the audio course they use for the sessions was recorded back in the 90s, and back then this was refreshingly religion free. Lots of the work on meditation (things like Search Inside Yourself) which have completely reduced the amount of religion in it, are very recent compared to Goenka's course, so I think you have to take it as a product of its time. With a partial Indian background, a few times I've tried Indian writing on meditation, etc, and it is so seemingly intricately bound up with religion (almost to the point of superstition), that to extricate it as much as Goenka did for the vipassana course I think is still great work.
Unfortunately I have to agree that it does attract a lot of participants who want to believe in magic and superstition. I was very disappointed when the course was over and I found this out. Perhaps that is why Goenka is very clear in the recordings to be skeptical and only take what one finds useful from the practice.
> Maybe try hanging out with people praising homeopathy and not saying a single negative word as preparation for the kinds of things you're going to feel?
Honestly, the day when silence is broken was hard to grok. The vast majority of participants were deep into esoteric and quackery themes and had a religious admiration for the teachings. Critical discussion is not exactly forbidden but usally swept away.
It's also powerful, I remember speaking that day to someone more sceptical than me at the time and trying to calm him down. In retrospective he was right and I turned into an advertising machine the following weeks - I realized that only quite a while later.
The topics and language used in the course also had a lot of pseudo-scientific topics (even quoting engineers) that are hard to dismantle on first sight.
That beeing said, it's still worth the experience and it was comfortable but be ready to get exposed to all kinds of quack.