Problems with Goenka courses

[bksubhuti]

It would be fun to ask a few personal questions to ven Candana about his experience as a monk, and why he made this topic and how it relates to what he is doing now. It would be fun, but one or two years ago, I asked him about his ordination year and he refused to answer. It was easy to find out because he had videos posted as a lay person.

I think there are two sides to every story. I would like to dig deeper as to why this recording was made and more about his life as a monk. I don’t think he would like to speak with me about that. If you are a lay person, perhaps you can contact him and ask a few questions. Contact me with a private message and I’ll give a list.

[ekocare]

@hinterlander

Can one fulfill the Seven Factors of Awakening without even knowing that they exist or what they are?

Good point!

[bksubhuti]

I think there is criticism without research. Here is a link to his chanting on the 7th day. You can look at the standards chants within this video. You will see that the lack of “religious” criticism is unfounded. However, it is slightly hidden from the newbie who attends his first course. Later he can learn and discover. As to the personal beliefs of Goenka. I think it is very clear that he was a Buddhist.

S. N. Goenka Chant English Translation 10 Day Vipassana Meditation Morning Chanting

[mrunal_mhatre]

Goenka do involve Buddhism in his practice…
In his retreat we start with taking trisharan and panchashila in Pali…

There is new global Vipassana pagoda in Mumbai where whole life of buddha is carved and also dhatu of buddha are kept…

Success of goenka in India is mainly because of baba saheb ambedkar. Under whose guidance many people took refuge in Buddhism… those people were considered untouchables before…

Other majority of young people who attain that course are 1) people who are curious about mistisizm…2) people curious about meditation jhana and samadhi experience…

The problem I see with goenka course is …
They do not explain anything…
And I saw many sad faces after the course who has come to seek ans and get nothing in return.
Those people help themselves by reading Buddhist texts and books explaing meditative practices…
I see people who literally lough so loudly like a demon…just because they are free from this 10 days jail…
And then there are blind followers. People in which no question arises…they do whatever have been told …some believe in there past life they have not practice Vipassana hence they are not expecting anything now …

Meditation need continuity and ethics…social empathy…some people naturally have this …some cultivate it. Some don’t consider it even nassesary.

I do not know what a Deep meditater must feel or what a strong Vipassana practitioner must experience…hence I am not commenting on that field…

[CandanaAu]

I think he lives in Armenia

[bksubhuti]

Welcome Greenelf!.
Goenka passsed away… I think it was in 2016.
The main international center outside of India was started in Shelbourne Falls, MA.
I’m quite sure that is where the English videos are made. His teachings are by video so his legacy seems to live on.

Nothing is perfect. It is a good introduction. It is definitely Buddhist but they hide that from the newcomers. In short, it was not enough for me, and I moved forward with Theravada Monastic Life.

[CandanaAu]

I think some of the videos where made in Australia. Goenka first went to Aus early 1980’s

[RobertK]

https://davidleon.blog/2019/11/08/why-g … -so-culty/ by DSleon, Librarian at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies

Here are the main points.
It’s [U Ba Khin’s technique] not the unique teaching of the historical Buddha, lost to humanity for two millennia. He taught an integrated approach to meditation, and explicitly recommended a dozen other different things you can try (focusing on the repulsiveness of the body… developing lovingkindness and empathetic joy…) which I haven’t mentioned here.

There is no “technique”. What’s more, anyone who tells you they have the one correct way of teaching meditation is fundamentally deluded.There can be no set technique for teaching a skill. Skills are creative; they are adaptive to different circumstances; they are a process. Thus, there can be no static, universalizable, exclusive way of attaining mastery in them. People will become great writers doing a huge variety of specific things; the only similarities will be general ones (good style; good structure; etc.). Just so, the only universals in becoming a great meditator are extremely general (calm; awareness; insightfulness; equanimity…). There are only different approaches, which emphasize different things to varying extents, and have different historical idiosyncrasies. Which leads me to my next point…

The only reason Goenka thinks that what he’s doing is optimal or unique is because of twists and turns in the history of thought. It’s only the division of meditation into two unrelated streams of concentration and observation that allows him to champion the supremacy of “Vipassana”, as opposed to something else. And it’s the bare-bones approach of Burmese modernism which created the idea that simply looking at physical experience, without any further intellectual or spiritual sophistication, is the road to enlightenment. On which note…
What he teaches is literally just mindfulness. In terms of ‘technique’, everything he teaches is identical to what you’d find on a mindfulness course. He doesn’t actually teach insight (vipassana). He teaches the establishment of mindfulness (satipatthana). Only Burmese Modernists think they are the same thing. He tells you where to look; he doesn’t teach you how to understand what you see there. In fact, he only even does the first half of it; the last two parts of the Satipatthana Sutta are pretty much ignored. So, he just tells you to pay attention to the breath, then your physical sensations. And he tells you to do it clearly, calmly, and equanimously. What you see when you get there… never goes farther than the most basic and universally known of Buddhist doctrines — the three marks of existence.
There are, in fact, only three main things which make Goenka’s particular approach to teaching really unique.

The courses are free.
This one is pretty self-explanatory. This means that way, way, way more people will go to them than the competition.

They actually make you sit down and meditate
Imagine a fitness programme where they take you for ten days and make you run ten laps around a track, then do a hundred push-ups and then a hundred sit-ups, on a loop, for ten hours a day. By the end of it… you’d be physically fit. Is it because those laps around that specific track are f*** magic? No. It’s because they actually make you do it. Other fitness programmes don’t sequester you and force you to do it. So, other fitness programmes don’t get the same results. That being said, other fitness programmes don’t usually end up with a bunch of brainwashed drones running the same ten laps around the same track for ten days in a row again and again and again… forever… but… whatever.

They emphasize bodily sensations
The U Ba Khin–Goenka tradition has exactly one key innovation — one element of their teaching and practice that is relatively unique to them. It is unique from any other strand of Burmese modernism and the wider Vipassana movement. It is, as best I can tell, fairly unique in Buddhist history. They emphasize the heck out of the physicality of vedanā. That the pleasant and unpleasant sensations which lead to your patterns of reaction are physical sensations that affect your actual, physical body. That’s an astonishingly good call, which tends to get criminally under-emphasized in the traditionally mind-body-dualistic trend of Indian and European thought. Because even if you don’t buy their theory of mind, it is, in practice, much, much easier to notice that your chest is tightening than that the general tone and direction of your thoughts is trending towards anger or anxiety. And, noticing that, one can start to arrest the pattern of blind reactions.
But those three points aside, there is nothing — nothing — to the core technique which is unique to Goenka and his way of teaching.

And everything he says to obfuscate that fact is either a misdirection or, very often, a straight-up lie. That being said, there are things Goenka does that other New Burmese Method or Mindfulness teachers do not do. And it’s those that I’ll discuss in the next section.
II.
He points you down a path that leads you not to liberation, but back to him

OK. So let’s say Goenka were actually a teacher of vipassana. He might sit you down and make you focus on something until you developed an elementary level of samādhi — mental clarity, calm, concentration. And then he’d establish mindfulness (sati) — telling you to observe different aspects of your experience, like your breath, or bodily sensations, or emotional states. And then he might give you a few pointers as to how to gain insight into the nature of existence (vipassana). He could introduce you to the basic Buddhist notions of the three marks of existence, for example. So far, so good. But then again… nearly anyone could do that. As he himself says in his discourses: the ten-day course is just the “kindergarten” of vipassana. Just the shallows of the great ocean of insight. So you’d keep at these things. But sooner or later, you’d notice that you’re not fully enlightened. You still experience suffering. You act in ways you’d rather not. And you don’t fully understand how and why all this happens the way it does. And so you’d come to him with questions. Elementary school questions, middle school questions, high school questions, undergraduate questions, post-graduate questions… And, as a guide to liberation, who knows the path ahead, he could explain these things to you; suggest new ways of looking at it; gauge where you are, where you want to get to, how you take on board input… and come up with the right thing to say, which will induce you to go in the right direction. This is what the historical Buddha did. And nothing about Goenka’s words or actions leads me to believe he would be capable of this, to virtually any degree. And so he has to misdirect you, to stop this from happening, and showing him up as a charlatan and a fraud. What’s more — such an approach would be useless for marketing purposes. Because if he taught you how to do it, and you came to understand it… then you could just go off and do it yourself. And you could even teach it to other people, using different language and different teaching methods (you know… like the Buddha did). And so, he doesn’t do that. What he does instead is establish the following model:

Step 1 : Meditation means going round and round your body, doing body scans for the rest of your life. As you get better at this… well, you can scan your body with a finer-tooth comb. And then you keep doing it.
Step 2 : Every so often, come back to the meditation centre… and do the exact same course you did the first time.
Step 3: There’s not really a Step 3. Just repeat Steps 1 and 2.

In this model, there is no development, no further progress, no liberation. It’s just a tight loop with his face and his voice and his exact words at the centre. And so, most of the unique elements of his teaching are designed to get you to buy into this model, rather than lead you to greater insight. I’ve boiled these elements down to two main points.

II.1. Developing awareness = more subtle sensations
Goenka devotes a huge chunk of the ten days to develop the following narrative:
When you first start observing your bodily sensations, you notice “gross, solidified” sensations. That is, basically, normal sensations. Pain, muscle tightness, heat, cold, pressure. You also have “blind spots”, where you don’t particularly feel anything on that part of the body. But, if you keep on observing your bodily sensations, and keep narrowing down your field of observation (from the whole arm at once… to the whole forearm at once… to a few inches of the forearm at once), you start to experience “subtle” sensations. Tingling. Buzzing. Glowing. Something like an electric current. Basically, stuff that isn’t there in everyday life. And if you keep going at it, the gross, solidified sensations and blind spots start to disappear. And you begin to feel subtle sensations uniformly, all across the body. OK.

Now, get this. The path to full enlightenment is to keep doing this until you constantly feel this uniform field of subtle sensations, and to be constantly aware of it, at all times. At that point, you keep sweeping up and down the body… until your awareness becomes so acute that you start to feel the subatomic particles of your body. When you get to the point of feeling the subatomic particles of your body, you are now directly experiencing how they arise and pass away instantly — popping up in one location and then winking out of existence, only to pop up somewhere else. Once you directly experience the quantum field, you literally observe impermanence. You no longer perceive objects as permanent — literally and directly. As such, you no longer have any objects you can attach yourself to. You literally do not perceive them. As a result, you are liberated from attachment. You are actually incapable of it. There is nothing in your field of awareness you can attach yourself to. You are fully enlightened. You are now a Buddha.

OK. So. First off. This is absolute insanity. But let’s put that aside for the moment. The important point is that what he has done is take you away from the path of insight and understanding, and led you onto a path that will stretch on forever.

Let’s say you went to Goenka to learn mathematics. You want to understand maths at a deeper and deeper and deeper level. And Goenka says “OK. Before I can teach you to understand mathematics, I first have to teach you numbers. The first number is 1. The second is 2. But actually there are lots of numbers between 1 and 2. So go sit over there until you find all the numbers between 1 and 2.” You will be there forever. There are infinite numbers between 1 and 2. And knowing them all has basically nothing to do with understanding mathematics. But it does take a long time. And it can be quite addictive, if you start to get into it. Just so: there will never be an end to the subtlety of the bodily sensations you can experience. The more you sit there and do it, the more the neural network responsible for monitoring physical sensations will expand. And it can keep expanding, keep expanding, keep expanding. Keep dedicating more and more neurons to the task… keep making more and more complex inter-connections between those neurons.

So you’ll just sit there for the rest of your life, until you are, essentially, on a constant, high dose of LSD, experiencing a raging wildfire of sensation. And he will never have to do anything again, except keep telling you to scan your body until you reach the f*** quarks. It’s like putting you on a treadmill, dangling a carrot in front of it, and telling you to keep running til you catch it. So, that’s Part I of his Closed-Circle Path to Liberation. One quick note before we move on, though. Despite the generally disparaging tone I’ve fallen into… I’m not actually against doing any of this. In fact, I’m increasingly of the opinion that this is one of the best things you can do with your time. For one thing, you don’t even need a partner or a equipment to practice it, so there are no external circumstances which would get in the way. For another, you will almost certainly feel amazing all the time. For a third, the body is, at minimum, super super super super super important. And, at maximum, it’s the one and only thing you have. So spending all your time getting intimate with it is a pretty safe bet.

So, to be clear: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with doing this. All I’m trying to do is point out how it’s used as an intrinsic part of Goenka’s propaganda machine. The same way that building roads and holding parades on them where people congregate and play music and have fun is a great thing… but parades can still be used to manipulate you by totalitarian regimes.

II. 2. Developing equanimity = rote repetition
Goenka establishes a parallel narrative of the Path to Liberation, which interacts with the first in a few interesting ways. The story goes thus:
The state of ignorance (avidya) and the constant cycle of suffering (samsara) is the result of the deeply-ingrained habit pattern of the mind to crave pleasant sensations and be averse to unpleasant sensations. Every time you feel a pleasant sensation, and desire it, you create a sankhara. From that point on, you want it more, and are frustrated when you don’t get it, or can’t keep hold of it (which will eventually happen, because things are impermanent). Every time you feel an unpleasant sensation, and desire to stop feeling it, you create a sankhara. From that point on, you are frustrated when it comes again, and you can’t get rid of it (which will eventually happen, because things are impermanent). So. The way out of this is to stop this habit pattern of craving and aversion. And this is how you do that. You scan your body, on the lookout for sensations. When you find a pleasant one… you resolutely refuse to crave it. And when you find an unpleasant one… you resolutely refuse to be averse to it. You keep doing this… keep doing this… until you reverse the conditioning.

OK. So this next bit may be a little bit of a stretch. But I think the kernel of insight here is potentially very important. He is not saying “examine your field of sensations, and maintain a general attitude of equanimity. As you keep doing this, day by day, this attitude will become more natural to you, until it permeates your life.” He is saying “examine your field of sensations… and at each thing you find, one by one, maintain your equanimity. Each time you notice something, first assess whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. If it is pleasant, exert an active effort not to react with craving. If it is unpleasant, exert an active effort not to react with aversion. Once that has been accomplished, move on. At the next thing you notice, repeat the process. It is the rote repetition of this process which will eventually lead you out of unhappiness.” He is saying that the way to reverse your underlying disposition to crave and be averse is to avoid doing that, on a micro scale, until you brute-force yourself into a different disposition. Like turning around a landlocked aircraft carrier by pushing at one end of it, one millimeter at a time… I’ll give an example to illustrate the point. Suppose someone says: “Always tell the truth. If you keep doing that, you’ll change your general disposition — the trend of your speech. It’ll become a habit, and thus be very easy.” Great. Now suppose someone says: “Every time you are about to open your mouth, rehearse what you are going to say. Assess whether it is the truth or a lie. If it is a lie, stop, and then tell the truth instead. If it is the truth, proceed. It is by paying conscious attention to every single moment of speech that you will gradually re-wire yourself to tell the truth.” He’s suggesting you manually reroute each moment of experience, one by one. Rather than adopt a general approach to your experience. It’s like trying to divert a river by dipping a bucket into it and tossing the contents to the side, one bucket at a time. Rather than digging a new channel and putting up a dam — doing something so that the river flows a different direction on its own, without active effort or intervention. Or it’s like trying to cut down a tree by snapping off each leaf and branch individually, rather than pulling it up by its roots. I hope that’s clear.
Alright. So here’s how this traps you.
First point.

Just like the last one, this is, in my opinion, an endless path. You will never get to a point where you don’t desire pleasant sensations and not desire unpleasant sensations. Pretty much by definition. What you can do is increase your detachment, your equanimity. You can care less and less about it, through calming yourself down. And you can certainly diminish your disappointment when the pleasant goes away and the unpleasant arises, through understanding. But you can keep doing that forever. Just like there are infinite numbers between 1 and 2, there are infinitely many numbers between 1 and 0. You’ll never reach Absolute 0. You’ll just keep getting asymptotically closer, and closer, and closer… until you die. But that’s just my guess, and constitutes a departure from Buddhist tradition. So we won’t linger on it.
Second point.

Basically, he’s f*** with you. He spends all this time and all this effort building up this myth of Subtle Sensations as the Path to Liberation… and then punishes you for seeking them out. “These tingles are the best things in the world. But you’re not allowed to like them! …but they’re the best thing in the world. Hey! You’re not allowed to like them. …….have I ever told you how great they are? They’re really great. They’re actually the best. But……hey! Is that you liking them? Bad boy! Bad!” It’s like dangling a doggie treat in front of a dog, and striking it every time it tries to have a lick.
Third point .

Basically……. he’s still f*** with you. Let’s say you didn’t buy that these Subtle Sensations are so amazing when he told you to. Well, you almost certainly will now, via reverse psychology. Cus the more someone tells you NOT to crave something… the more you’ll crave it. (And then we cycle back to the previous point, where he smacks you for craving it.) So, the first time he put this forward, I was like: “Cool. Fair point. I mean, I didn’t come here to feel a pleasant tingling up my butt. There are definitely quicker ways to do that. But, fair enough. Some people might indeed be here cus they can’t afford the drugs or dildos. So yeah, Goenka — you tell ’em!” And then, the fifty-seventh time he put this forward, I was like: “…oh. He’s doing the ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant…. don’t think of a pink elephant!’ trick. The one thing that accomplishes is making us think of a pink elephant. I see that every time the tingles disappear from a part of the body, I’m now disappointed. I wasn’t disappointed on Day 4. I wasn’t disappointed on Day 5. But now it’s starting to get to me. He’s definitely, definitely f*** with us.”
Fourth point.

Basically… he’s still f*** with you. As with so many things, he’s super vague about this point, so it’s hard to pin him down on it exactly. But he definitely says dozens and dozens of things which all imply that the gross, solidified sensations are the result of past aversion. So, if at some point you stop feeling uniform subtle sensations, and instead feel a pain in your knee, or the feeling of pressure where you’re sitting on your cushion… it’s because at some point, you generated a negative sankhara of aversion. So, firstly, this makes you feel guilty for feeling pain or mundane sensations. But secondly, it leads you on this feedback loop between the two things he has you doing forever. Unless you literally sit all day body-scanning, you will eventually return back to normal and not feel constant tingles. At which point, it’s not just that you failed on the first thing (you’re not body-scanning enough), it’s that you failed at the second thing (you must have been reacting negatively to unpleasant sensations without noticing!). It’s as if he gave you two sandpits and told you to make two cubes of dry sand. You won’t be able to — you’ll just keep picking up sand and pouring it on top, and it will keep sliding off sideways. But then he tells you that when the first pile of sand slips down, it’s because you didn’t stack the second pile of sand well enough. So you get into a more frantic feedback loop, where the success of one task is dependent on the other.

But anyway. None of that is the main point, in my opinion. The main point is that it makes you depressed as f***. I’m not saying “it will make you sad”, or “it will make you unhappy”. I’m saying it will make you depressed. That it will make you get stuck in a cycle of sadness and unhappiness. (And then you’ll reach for salvation from this depression… in the very thing that made you depressed. In other words, it’s a classic example of addiction.) There’s the obvious argument for this — namely, that you’re telling people to stop enjoying things. Which is asceticism. Which is, famously, not Buddhism. That’s why it’s called the Middle Way — between asceticism and just doing whatever the hell you want. At which point, you rock out the usual quotes about sukha and piti — wholesome mental joy, and wholesome physical pleasure, where the Buddha says things like:
‘Know how to assess different kinds of pleasure. Knowing this, pursue inner bliss.’ (…) This is called the pleasure of renunciation, the pleasure of seclusion, the pleasure of peace, the pleasure of awakening. Such pleasure should be cultivated and developed, and should not be feared, I say. ‘Know how to assess different kinds of pleasure. Knowing this, pursue inner bliss.’ That’s what I said, and this is why I said it.
Araṇavibhaṅga Sutta, MN.III.230-236 (Sujato translation)

[RobertK]

Part II
https://davidleon.blog/2019/11/08/why-g … -so-culty/

But, whatever. That’s veering into substantive critique — something I have a genuine, fundamental disagreement about with Goenka, not just a way I think he’s messing up something we both agree is good. The more important argument is this.

Giving people a dynamic, creative task is the surest way to make them happy in the long term. Give them a goal, give them resources and guidance, but go ahead and let them determine how to get there themselves. And each time they repeat the task, give them room to express their skill — let them do it differently each time; let them improve upon the last one. For example, tell them to make a table. At first it will be confusing and difficult, and the table will be crude. But it’s a satisfying task. Eventually you’ll get someone who’s really in the zone while they work, and you’ll get increasingly more beautiful tables out of them. By contrast: The surest way to make people depressed is to give them a repetitive, linear, unvarying task without a clear goal. Like standing on an assembly line and doing one, small action, again and again and again and again…
If you give people the notion that they are improving the skill of Calm Observation — that they’re getting better and better at observing their experience without reacting to it — then they’re much more likely to be happy.

However. If you give them the notion that what they’re doing is rewiring their reaction patterns, one by one, for each part of the body, at an increasingly minute scale… then they’re much more likely to be unhappy.

So here’s another example. Imagine you wanted to improve someone’s speed and balance. Option 1 Give them a goal. Tell them to run to that tree over there without falling over. Then maybe tell them to dribble a ball with their feet or hands while they’re at it. Then maybe install a hoop or a net at the other end, and tell them to score. You’ll soon get them playing sport for life, very happily running along with great agility. Option 2 Tell them they are going to run an arbitrarily long distance — to just keep running until some vague point in the distant future. And then tell them no one has been recognized to have reached this vague point in millennia.

So, unless they’re better at this than Goenka, and his teacher, and his teacher’s teacher… they’re going to be doing this their whole life, up until they die. So, in other words, tell them to just keep running forever. And then tell them to pay attention to each step. When they step with the left foot, make sure you don’t fall over to your left. When you step with your right foot, make sure you don’t fall over to your right. And then tell them that the Way ahead — the road to balance and being really good at moving around — consists in repeating that same exact action, again and again and again. This does not sound like a very sensible way to trace out the road to enlightenment. What it sounds like to me is a recipe for people to get discouraged. At this point, remember the way Goenka’s retreats fit into the structure of society. They’re geared towards lay people who live in the social structure of late capitalism. People whose lives are constructed so as to distract them in every way possible from serious and sustained meditation or solitary contemplation. People whose mental health and self-esteem are being systematically eroded like in no other point in human history. Because before, all the people in power needed to maintain and increase their power was for you to stay where you were, not bother them, and maybe pay taxes once a year. Now, the way to increase your power if you’re powerful is to get people to buy your things or pay attention to you. So everything is designed to grab your attention and keep hold of it and stop you from going off and doing something entirely by yourself. OK. So now, give someone in such a society a method that will be likely to discourage them. What do you think will happen? Most probably, they’ll get discouraged, and fail to keep up the practice.

At this point, remember that Goenka has been telling you, at least once an hour — sometimes two or three times an hour — that continuity is the secret of success. That you must be diligent and ardent, patient and persistent. That the whole core of the technique is putting in the hours, manually shifting yourself into enlightenment, one physical sensation at a time. That when you stop doing that, you start sliding backwards — so that for every day you fail to bring down your debt, your debt gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger… What do you think will happen? You’ll feel guilty and ashamed for getting discouraged. So you’ll try again. And because the technique gets you discouraged, you fail, and feel more guilty, etc.

What do you think will happen when you add all these things together? Well. Where is the one, single place in the world these people will think of to get away from their distracting, spiritually eroding daily life? That’s right. A Goenka retreat. It’s the only place they know, after all. So you go there… and suddenly it’s all easy again. So easy… when you’re removed from all your daily distractions. When there’s someone telling you exactly what to do, holding your hand through the process in the same old, familiar way which you remember being so life-changing the first time you felt it… Rinse. Wash. Repeat. And, of course, what if you do get the hang of it? (And if you keep going to these, it’s bound to happen eventually.) What if you do get into the groove of it? Get to the point where your mind immediately starts to systematically dissect and sweep through your body, in order, out of habit, every time you sit down? Without any real difficulty? If you develop the general disposition of equanimity, where it’s there quite effortlessly for anything you encounter in your body sweeps? Well, then mission accomplished. You’re now a true believer in Goenka’s system — even though it’s really you that learned to navigate your consciousness skilfully, based on his vague prompting. You’ll probably keep going to the retreats wholeheartedly, taking advantage of the golden opportunity to practise. Even better for Goenka.

OK. So that’s my slapdash attempt to describe the core mechanism of what Goenka’s doing.
Establish mindfulness. [Nice.]
Pretend it’s your exclusive trademark. [Huh?]
Add manipulative, addictive mechanisms. [….yuck.]

He then does a few other things to reinforce the core mechanism and establish his power over you. …one quick point before we continue, though. This will give away the big punchline to the whole piece, but I think it’s important to mention it now. I’m not necessarily suggesting that Goenka is doing any of this on purpose, or even that he’s aware of what he’s doing. That’s between him and his maker. Everything I’m describing is perfectly understandable as: “There are thousands of meditation teachers, each doing their own thing, which they all genuinely believe in… and the one whose thing just so happens to have the most manipulative and addictive elements will gain more followers and resources.” But I’ll elaborate on this point in the next post. For now, let’s move on.

III. Nipping criticism in the bud
The thing Goenka probably spends the most time doing is spinning a narrative which is designed to take the place of any alternative narratives which would lead you away from him and his courses, and stick tight to you so that it will be very hard to alter or remove. And then he hammers this narrative in again and again and again. After ten days, this is now your narrative. And when people make critical remarks, there is no slot in your narrative for them — you can’t properly take them in and process them. Not only is there no room for them — the place where they would have gone has been reinforced again and again to make sure anything that comes there bounces off. Again, I couldn’t take notes while I was in there. But here are a few representative samples that he repeated so much I’ll probably be able to quote them verbatim two decades from now.

III.1. “Non-sectarian”
He never, ever, ever stops banging on about how rational, how scientific, how NOOON-SEEEEC-TAAAAAAA-RIAAANNNNN… this wonderful technique is, this wonderful dhamma… What he’s doing here is very simple. Well, firstly, he’s playing to exactly what secular people in post-industrial societies in the late 20th Century want to hear. The fashionable orthodoxy is “no religion; no ideology; no dogma. Just simple, practical, technocratic utility-maximization.”

But more to the point, he’s labelling every other group out there a sect… whereas his group is the only one that’s not a sect. Every other teaching is partial, only his teaching is universal. And, of course, almost every time he says this, he says this about the Buddha, rather than himself (never mind it’s his totally unique and idiosyncratic interpretation of the Buddha, shared by no one else ever). Which is just him being sneaky. He does all this, despite his strand of the Vipassana movement being the single most sectarian, closed-minded, One-True-Way-ist, and dogmatic religious group I have ever personally experienced. And one of the main ways it got to be that way is through his constant, hypnotic insistence on his non-sectarianism. Once that idea is established, someone says something you disagree with, and the story you start telling yourself is “See how attached they are to their dogma? Because they’re so attached to these particular ideas, they’ll never be universal. They’ll only appeal to their closed circle of followers, who share the same attachments and ideas. Thank Goenka that my group isn’t attached to any single figure or set of ideas and is universally acknowledged as the truth.” So that’s step one.

III.2. “How can they have anything against sīla? Against samadhi? Against paññā?”
Very early on, he presents the Noble Eightfold Path in its threefold division into:
Sīla (morality)
Samādhi (as he terms it, “mastery of the mind”)
Paññā (wisdom).
And then, every day, he tells one story or another about how some mean evil people came to the Buddha because they were ignorant and consumed with hate and tried to get one over on him… only to find that they could not! Because, after all… what he taught was Sīla! Morality! And who could have anything against morality? And he taught Samādhi! Mastery of the mind! And who could have anything against that? And then Paññā! Wisdom! Who could have anything against wisdom? And so these silly, deluded people saw the error of their ways and signed up to one of the Buddha’s ten day courses so he could teach them this wonderful and strictly patented technique. Well, just try telling George W. Bush he’s a war criminal.
“But I stand for freedom! Do you have something against freedom? I stand for justice! You can’t tell me you’re against justice?! I stand for democracy! Are you saying you’re against democracy?!!”

“Umm… well, no. It’s just that I don’t agree with the way you’re doing it… and most of what you’re doing doesn’t really have anything to do with those things at all…”
“Nonsense! You’re just ignorant and full of anger because you haven’t tasted the glory of this wonderful American patriotism…”

Or if you don’t like that example, try Xi Jinping.
“But I’m for a people-centric approach for the public interest! Are you against the people and the public interest?! I’m for the rule of law! Are you an anarchist?! Do you want murderers running around the street, killing your family and friends? My manifesto states that improving people’s livelihood and well-being is the primary goal of development. Are you are horrible greedy person who’s against improving people’s livelihood and well-being?!!!”

It’s the oldest trick in the book. Very few are the leaders who claim to be here to spread evil, confusion, and ignorance. So then, having identified themselves with these good qualities, anyone who criticizes them must be evil, confused, and ignorant.

III.3. “Your own experience”
This one’s the real jewel in the crown. It’s so totally shameless that it makes my head spin. Goenka will not go twenty minutes without repeating the fact that every other tradition will have you accepting things because God said so, or because such-and-such a saintly person said so. Whereas the Buddha — and, by extension, him — only asks you to observe your own experience, and only accept what you have witnessed yourself. But, of course, everyone else is wrong in how they observe their own experience. And it’s impossible to point out the right way in an open conversation… like the Buddha did in every single recorded discourse. No — you have to come and take a 10-day course. Only then will you know how to observe your own experience the right way. This is a little bit like saying “The world is essentially black.” “But I don’t see it as black…” “That’s because you’re doing it the wrong way. Here, come to our ten-day course. And swear to stay the whole way through. OK. Now stare at the sun for ten hours a day. Now what do you see?” “Yeah… everything is totally black… I… I can’t see anything…” “You see?! The system works!” OK, I’m being a little glib. But the main point I’m making is the that the way you look at something determines what you see. Take a historical question. Then ask a political economist why it happened. And ask a sociologist why it happened. And ask a psychologist why it happened. And ask a behavioural biologist why it happened. And ask a physicist why it happened. You’ll get a different answer in each case. The physicist will give you a physical answer, the psychologist a psychological one, etc. Just so: examine your experience from the perspective of Goenka’s McBuddhism, and you’ll get a rather shallow understanding of your changing phenomenal field as impermanent and impersonal and prone to the misery of clinging and aversion. Look at it from a Hindu perspective, and you’ll see Pure Being, Consciousness, and Bliss. In other words, exactly the opposite (at least, at face value). So what you see and how you see it is deeply influenced by how you look at it. And indoctrinating you into looking at it a certain way is the main point of these courses.

Quick anecdote. In my early days at university, we were assigned to do a group project. When we met up to prepare it, each of us had brought a rough outline and plan of the presentation. And so the question became which of these outlines to use. The field quickly narrowed down to me and this girl. I didn’t really like her outline. We debated it a bit, and in the end, I pointed out that I had brought my laptop, which had my outline saved on it, so, all other things being equal, we might as well use that. And so, even though she was perfectly free to suggest any changes she might want, the end product came to look pretty much exactly as I had originally laid out. I was immediately aware of what had occurred, and felt quite guilty about it, which is why I still remember it so vividly. And what I observed was that a huge amount of power lies in the hands of the person who sets the original terms, who lays down the template that future developments are added to. Once that has been set, it is extremely difficult to change course — because that would require uprooting everything, as everything which comes subsequently depends on that initial structure. So, the presentation came out looking like I had set out, NOT because my structure was necessarily the best one, but because I had brought it on my laptop, and we made edits to my outline. If she had brought her laptop, and I had suggested edits, the end product would have looked more like her plan. And so, that’s mainly what the course does. It sets out a way for you to look at your experience: a certain procedure, and a certain interpretetive lens. He’ll constantly harp on about taking these ten days to “give the technique a fair trial”. But what it really does, in effect, is entrench it as a habit. If you spend ten hours a day repeating it for ten days straight, that will be just enough time for it to have sunk in deep enough that you’ve gotten really used to it. It will take real effort to change — especially if you didn’t have a prior, similar habit to fall back on. But, of course, with Goenka insisting constantly that this is all your idea, your insights, your experience, you don’t really notice this happening. What’s more, this insistence sets it up so that you never come to him with further questions. Any and all inquiries beyond which shoulder to start with will be met with “don’t ask me, you have to find out for yourself; you have to practice as I tell you to, more and more, forever.” It’s a good thing that what he has you doing is (apart from the stuff in section II.) so generic. Otherwise, this would all be much more disturbing. Though, of course, if it were any less generic, then the whole gimmick wouldn’t work; these things rely on mass appeal. These are just three of the dozens of rhetorical strategies he employs over the course of the ten days. I could go on here ad nauseam, but we’ve just ticked over 10,000 words… so I’ll move on and try to bring this to a close.

IV. Exploiting accidental association
The next element of cultiness is a really important one. It’s something I am probably going to be explaining, in different ways, for as long as I’m still ticking. OK. Here goes.
Two things happen to us at once. And so, the mind forms a connection between them. And so, when we remember one, we will tend to remember the other. And the way we feel towards one, we will tend to feel towards the other.

This is the process of accidental association. Most of our experience is explained by this. When we were young, we heard a certain kind of music. It was followed by feelings of great happiness. So now, when we hear that music, we will think of being young and very happy. But other people listened to a different kind of music when they were young, and felt happy after listening to it. So they keep playing that. And so we’re confused. Why are they playing those noises? Because we don’t have a positive association with them, and they do, we react differently to the same input. And because we don’t understand how our minds work, we act out of ignorance, and look down on those people, or get into arguments about which band is better. To a certain extent, this is inevitable. It’s just the way the mind works. But it’s something we have to become aware of if our goal is liberation from the cycle of misery. And it’s also this which explains most organized religion. So, let’s take three people. Each of them is going through a rough period in their lives. Each of them goes to a quiet place and does the same thing. They fall to the floor, burst into tears, and inwardly declare:

That’s it… I give up… I’m too tired to keep on trying… If things go badly, they go badly… If things get better, they get better… I’m done trying to force the issue… I surrender myself entirely… Let whatever happens, happen… I’ll take whatever comes.
Except the first person did this in front of a picture of Jesus, and the second did it in front of a statue of a Bodhisattva, and the third did it in front of a poster of their favourite rock star. Well, you see what’ll happen. They will take the inner motion of renunciation to inevitable forces which we cannot change, and they’ll associate it with the single external object which was there at the time. And so one will become a devout Christian, the other a Buddhist, and the other a Marilyn Manson fanboy. And, in the future, whenever anyone says something against Jesus or Christianity, by association, the first person will take it as something said against their internal motion of renunciation. Just so, with the second, for Buddhism. And so, with the third, for goth rock.

OK. So what Goenka does is try to get himself as front and centre as possible in your vision when you are going through these kinds of moments. Thus, you associate your inner journey of self-discovery as much as possible with his arbitrary sequence of steps and catchphrases, and his person in particular. So whenever you make progress in your life, and continue to discover things about yourself, you associate that with him. And whenever someone criticizes him, you act as if they criticized your self-improvements. How does he do this? Well, in every way he can. I’ll just hit the highlights. Every single session, he starts with five minutes of him singing and ends with five minutes of him singing. He always sings the same set of tunes, so that by halfway through the course, you are repeating them in your head, in his voice, for hours and hours. Oh yeah. And it’s twenty minutes at the end of the morning session. Just to get you started on the right foot each day. He does the same thing with his instructions. The whole course is built around the repetition of these short, catchy phrases, delivered again, and again, and again, until they’re so deep in your head you’d need a team of wreck divers to take them out… part by part… piece by piece… patiently and persistently… And the clincher is the evening talks. You’ve come to the end of another day. You’re exhausted, dispirited, discouraged. And on comes jolly Uncle Goenka, to do the same set he’s honed from years and years of courses until it’s a perfectly well-oiled machine. He says, again and again, that they’re only there to explain the technique, not to be mere intellectual entertainment. If that’s the case, I think he did a very poor job. What they excel at doing is precisely entertaining you. It’s the only thing like that in the day, and it’s perfectly designed to encourage you, to pick you up, to be the place of relief and solace in a challenging world. …and what does that add up to, by the end of the course? The association of his face and voice with feelings of relief and safety and encouragement. Which, again, serves the purpose of entangling himself with your own quest for enlightenment.

Another little parable, to sum up what we’ve covered so far. Imagine a cooking instructor who runs the following scheme. He goes to your house for free. He takes out a pile of stickers, each of which has different words, but all of which prominently feature his beaming smile. He puts these stickers on your refrigerator, your oven, your hob, your kitchen knife… And your refrigerator, he labels “Goenka’s Magic Coolness Box”. And your oven is “Goenka’s Magic Hot Box.” And your hob is “Goenka’s Little Fire Blossoms”. And your knife is “Goenka’s Sharpy Cut Slicer”… Then he tells you to take things in and out of your fridge for two days. Then to cook them in your oven or on your hob for eight days. And he gives you a big jar of Special Goenka Spice to sprinkle on top of your food. Then he gets an assistant teacher to stand there and make sure you do it.

At the end of the day, all he’s done is just relabel a bunch of faculties you already had at your disposal, but just didn’t have an immediate prompting or setting to develop by yourself. In this example, the fridge-oven-hob-etc. are the basic qualities of consciousness which are conducive to meditation and a holy life. Morality, calm, insight, equanimity, etc. And the big jar of spice is his nonsense about subtle sensations and quarks and understanding impermanence and whatnot. So the main gimmick is:
take a bunch of faculties which are universal, and which you already have latent within you
relabel them
get you to associate them with him.

And then he sprinkles a bunch of nonsense to confuse you as to what is essential and what isn’t, so that you don’t figure out what he’s done, and extricate these crucial qualities from his framework. So now, every time you use the qualities you’ve actually had in you all along, you think it’s all thanks to Goenka. And when other people refer to basically the same things, you won’t recognize it. You’ll only ever think of your refrigerator as “Goenka’s Magic Coolness Box”. And you’ll only be capable of holding a conversation if the other person calls it the same thing. If they talk about what they learned from keeping a journal, you won’t recognize that as vipassana — because vipassana, to you, means sitting in these rows listening to Goenka singing and looking at your body buzzing, not writing about your day. Because you fail to recognize that these are just the things you happen to be doing to engage the process of introspection. And if people cook the same dish, but don’t add the special spice, you won’t recognize it as the same. You’ll think they’re doing it wrong. If they meditate, but don’t do body scans, or don’t talk about maintaining equanimity case-by-case in the way Goenka does, you’ll think they’re doing something else. Because Goenka has prevented you from developing an objective, adaptable understanding of your mind, and then systematically exploited the process of accidental association to get you to understand yourself through him.

[RobertK]

Part III
https://davidleon.blog/2019/11/08/why-g … -so-culty/
V. Stockholm Syndrome, and moving from hate to love

OK. So. Here’s how I’m going to try to set about explaining this one. You know how, when a friendship or romantic relationship goes sour, you end up hating the person you once loved way more intensely than someone you never loved in the first place? And you know the effect of the “zealotry of the converted” — that once you change your mind about something, and start loving what you used to hate, it comes with a kind of devotion usually not present in someone who loved it from the start? Well, the 10-day course milks this effect for all its worth. This “hate-to-love-multiplier-effect” is the quickest way I can think to describe the mechanism that lies behind things like Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages start to identify, and then develop deep attachment to, their captors. It’s also the thing behind the abusive boyfriend dynamic, and why it’s so insidious and tough to extricate yourself from. It’s the “hurt me, be nice to me” tension at the core of S&M. The core memory of this, in my own case, came at a Queens of the Stone Ages concert. The whole experience could be summed up as two hours of this guy staring at you and going:
Hey honey, I love you… but don’t f*** with me, I’ll cut you… Ah, come on babydoll, don’t look at me that way, you know I love you… but don’t f*** with me OK, I’m crazy, I don’t know what the f*** I’ll do… Ahhh, come on, you didn’t think I’d do anything mean to you, did you…………or would I? Nah, of course I wouldn’t, I love you……… but I’m out of control… Nah, it’s cool, I’m sober now… oh shit the voices are starting up again…
Makes for a real good concert. But that’s a situation where you’re actively paying someone to take you for a ride. You’re consciously asking them to manipulate you, to suspend your disbelief. You enter a social contract for him to play with your emotions – make you feel vulnerable and exposed and hit you with maximal emotive force. A meditation retreat, designed to teach you the skills to manage your existence… is something a little different. It’s also the thing stand-up comics do, when they purposely lose the audience, push things too far, say things that cross the line, and aren’t really funny, just abrasive… and then bring it back. You laugh all the harder, from the slingshot effect of having stopped enjoying it for a while. And basically, Goenka plays the same game. Except with him, it’s more like:
Work, work. Work diligently, ardently, patiently and persistently… OK, now take rest, take rest… Work work work…! OK, now rest, rest… Gosh, look at you, your mind’s a mess, you’re weak, you can’t focus… but it’s OK, I understand, I’ll help you… But only if you work! OK, you’ve done good — now sit down and I’ll tell you an amusing little story as a treat…
This push-and-pull is something he’s playing on consistently in an active way. But the main way it operates is more of a fundamental undercurrent.
It is inevitable, in the first few days, that you’ll engender frustration and doubt towards the person who’s making you do all these initially unpleasant things.

But once you get used to them and start to turn the corner, you’ll go entirely the other way.

And all the force of that frustration and doubt will become force of attachment and devotion. Without him having to say or do a thing.

This is something that’s built into the very structure of the experience. The mind will have to go through an adjustment period. It is experiencing an abrupt change: from activity to inactivity; from sensory stimulation to sensory deprivation. During this period, it will necessarily generate thoughts which push against what you are doing. And the more difficult you find it, the more exaggerated those thoughts will become. And, if you’re not used to this kind of experience, you will generate sankharas at this stage. You will take these thoughts seriously. You will not only have these thoughts, you will start validating them, believing them. And then, once you turn the corner, you’ll be ashamed of them. You’ll feel like such a fool. And who was it who so calmly insisted you should keep at it…? Oh, right. The guy you had been cursing out. Wow. He is so wise. He knew all along. How silly of you to get angry at him, to doubt him. Clearly he knew what I was thinking, and yet kept on going, taking my ire, for my own good. What a saintly person… So you end up loving him twice as much as you would have, and much more unshakeably… because he arranges things so that you get angry at him first. This kind of process is virtually guaranteed to happen. Because the whole course is built around learning to observe your thought patterns, see their tendency to engender negativity and make excuses, observe how miserable it’s making you, and then letting these thought processes go. As such, the process of the course is one of (in common parlance) “cutting down your ego”… at which point, Goenka puts his own ego in its place. So that when you leave, you leave with just as much of a misplaced sense that you understand what’s going on. The only difference is that, instead of thinking that you get what’s going on — that you’re the smartest person in the world — you think that Goenka gets what’s going on.
And because you’ve now identified with Goenka, and have taken refuge in the Three Jewels and are now a member of the Vipassana family, then you still get to feel good about yourself. You still get to be important. Because you’ve seen the truth of Vipassana, and are practising this Wonderful Technique… and everyone who doesn’t is such a sad, deluded person. So full of anger and spite… just like you used to be.

To a certain extent, this is inevitable. Anyone working as a doctor, or a teacher, or coach, or any role with authority over someone, where you’re doing something initially unpleasant that will (hopefully) be for the person’s own good in the long run, knows that this is something that will happen. The difference lies in how much you encourage it. And Goenka encourages it a lot. But here’s the most important point. Up until now, the thoughts I’ve been talking about are things like:
“Ow, my legs hurt, f*** this guy.”
“Ugh, I just wanna get out of here, this technique is bullshit.”
“I just wanna check my phone, or read a book, or talk to someone… and I can’t do it… these guys are sadists. They’re getting off on hurting me. They’re horrible.”
Once you’ve gone through this kind of thing, you’ll be used to these, and it won’t be a challenge to stay cool through them (plus, they’ll appear less and less). But there’s another kind of thought that’s a little different. Thoughts like:
OK, no, so, I’m cool with the whole legs hurting and no talking and no books etc. But… this guy is being really manipulative. He actually is. He’s giving an extremely deceptive account of Buddhist history. He’s using pretty hardcore brainwashing tactics. This set-up shares a lot of characteristics with scams and Ponzi schemes. And he’s garnering the respect and devotion of hundreds of thousands of people through these tactics, all while presenting a saintly image. That’s really twisted.

These thoughts will probably bug you on a much deeper level than the first. And so, when you turn the corner, and start examining your sankharas — how deeply you’re reacting to the negative sensations brought about by your thoughts — these will be the first to go. What I’m saying is that the course, by its very structure, serves to eliminate critical, analytic thought about its operating procedure. Because those critical thoughts will cause you great tension, great misery, great agony. And there’s almost no way you’re going to survive ten days with them. You’ll go insane. Something has got to give. And, unless you quit the course, it will probably be the critical thoughts that have to go.
There is only one way to get through it without getting rid of the criticisms. And that is… to notice these things… and articulate these thoughts… and watch your mind work out the ramifications… WITHOUT generating a trace of anger or resentment or ill will. Just observing your surroundings objectively, dispassionately… then observing the thoughts that arise from that observation objectively, dispassionately…

And this is almost impossible. It’s like trying to thread a needle. To run through a narrow and winding corridor without ever bumping against the sides. The whole course is built around isolating you from the things that cause you misery. That way, you think of someone who has made you angry, and you feel unpleasant sensations… and you notice that they’re not actually there. They’re just in your head. And so you can begin to settle down and not react to the thought of them, in a perfectly safe, isolated environment. So that when you return and run into them in real life, you’re much more calm. But then, imagine if you were sitting there on the course, trying to do this… except the person who made you angry is standing right there in front of you. Talking to you. Doing the thing that pissed you off. At some point, you’ll snap. You need to be away from them for a while so that you can gain sufficient internal distance from your anger… and then be able to interact with them calmly. So if the person making you angry is the person giving the course… well… good luck trying not to bite at the bait. Cus it will present itself to you on a silver platter every minute. Which is why you will almost never see someone criticizing this kind of course. Either they feel uncomfortable with it from the outset, and wouldn’t go — at which point, they can easily be accused of flingin’ shit without even trying it out. Or they go to the course, and leave, and can easily be accused of being weak, or not getting the full picture. Or they go, and stay, and get really angry, and give up on their anger, and the mindset that engendered it. How likely do you think it is that someone will go, and stay, and think these things, and not get angry, and then explain them? They will always be in a minority compared to the other categories. And so, through this selection bias, things like this end up seeming like they have universal acclaim.
Conclusion
So those are the main mechanisms by which the Goenka courses, on top of actually teaching meditation, also exploit human psychology to get you to view the institution and its figurehead in a uniformly positive light, lead to a feedback loop of indoctrination, and to induce you to spread the message in a way that will help the institution to maintain and expand itself. And the proof of all this is, as they say, in the pudding.
Course format
The format these courses follow is unheard of. I cannot think of a single other example of an institution so rigidly tied to the person and teaching of one man. It is not only unique in Buddhist history (other than the veneration of Gautama himself)… it’s fairly unique in world history, at this scale. It actually boggles my mind. It’s so blatant that it’s actually almost easy to miss. But take a step back for a moment and think of it. Hundreds of centres around the world; over a hundred thousand students yearly. All repeating the exact same syllables in the same order, without variation, without evolution, without interpretation, without question… ostensibly forever. Name one institution that works this way. Not even Scientology is so sclerotic. There are only two explanations for this. Either SN Goenka is a uniquely enlightened person and gifted teacher, above all other figures in human history, and that one course he recorded in New York in 1991 is the single, optimal sequence of sounds and images for any human to experience under any circumstances. Or there is something else in the nature of the courses that leads to this outcome. There is something about the way he does things that makes it so that the institution takes the form it does. Something about the way he spreads his message that makes it so uniquely fixated on him and his specific way of doing things.
Assistant teachers
The format of the courses aside, another tell-tale sign is the assistant teachers. Every single person who recommended the courses to me shared a single criticism:
Goenka was such a great teacher… but I found the assistants weren’t very helpful. Whenever I asked them anything, they just repeated what Goenka had said, verbatim.
What that means is that Goenka is not a great teacher. If you are incapable of getting your best, most senior students to be as good at something as you are, then you are not a teacher — you are a charlatan. If all your students can do is repeat what you said, word-for-word, and redirect questions back to you, and never develop their own interpretation or move beyond your way of doing things, then you have failed as a teacher. You have failed to develop their own insight, failed to develop their own understanding; you have only succeeded in making them dependent on you. And the mechanisms which lead to dependence are essentially the opposite to the mechanisms that lead to liberation. An institution that exhibits such universal signs of dependency is an institution built around mechanisms of control.
The normal students
The same thing that’s true of the assistant teachers is true, to a lesser extent, of the normal students who’ve been on the course. If you haven’t been on one of the courses yet, but are considering it, you’ll almost certainly recognize this point. You’re excited about the idea of someone taking you by the hand and finally guiding you through the proper way to meditate, which you’ve found so frustrating to get a hang of until now. And it seems to have had a very good effect on the people who are recommending it to you. But… still. There’s just something that makes you a little uncomfortable. Something a little off about the way they’re talking about it. They seem so keen about it, and yet can’t explain what it is, how it works, and why it’s valuable. They just insist you have to go on it yourself. And they do so in a way that makes you feel unable to respond. It’s like, once they start on it, they’re on a roll, their eyes take on a stubborn glint, and you get the sense you can’t really say anything about it without getting into an argument. Well, that slightly creepy tinge is the result of the mechanisms I’ve explained above. That kind of edge is what you’ll get when people have been manipulated in those ways. And hopefully now you can start to get some sense as to why you’ve gotten this uncanny feeling. On the one hand, Vipassana sounds like the best thing ever. On the other, something seems off. How can both these things happen at once? Well, this is my best attempt at articulating my underlying understanding as to why that is. Hopefully you’ve found some of these ideas useful.

[bksubhuti]

@RobertK have you been to a 10 day retreat? I hope you can invest 11 days and go to one if you have not done so. However, like any mainstream teaching, if you know too much it sort of spoils the cake. Nevertheless, it is a great environment for meditation.

I have found the above reposted long winded criticism to have only a fraction of the truth to it, and there seems to be a lot of axe grinding being made here. However, the length and axe defeat themselves because the length and vibe only deserves a few minutes investment to read.

There are faults in the Goenka system, and I think it is no secret. Nevertheless, it is a great introduction and great place to build Theravada practitioners who are lost in the Western versions of Watered Down Buddhism, usually with Mahayana flavors. Goenka is not so bad and the choice to go to goenka courses is still a good one considering what is available. It is also a non commercial dana based teaching.

There is not much of a choice in the West and I have seen people’s change when they go to Goenka 10 day meditations. I hope that you can invest 10 days and go to a ten day course, especially if you have never been to one. At least you can get a first hand judgement.

I do think it runs its dead end course after a few 10 day sessions, but it is great exposure. I still recommend it today even though I have not been to a course in well over 20 years.

[RobertK]

Dear Venerable,

Thank you for encouraging me to take one of these courses. I was exposed a little to the scanning technique on the courses I did with IMS teachers (first one in 1984 with Joseph Goldstein ) although they lean mostly on Mahasi sayadaw technique.

However currently I am as tempted to go on one of these as I am to go on a pilgrimage to see the dalai lama, get hooked up to the machine that Scientology uses, or go on a retreat with the Mormons.

Let me explain more.

Sati and panna are conditioned realities, they cannot arise unless there are conditions and if there are those conditions they must arise.

If the conditions for them to arise was focusing on the top of head until sensations are felt there, and then scanning the body over and over, wouldn’t the Buddha have taught that over and over. It would be the main part of the teaching. Why bother with 84,000 teachings if that is the core that everyone should do.

A child could be trained to notice these sensations and mentally say they are anicca and try to be equanimous. It does not mean there is any actual panna and sati.

Yes millions of people have taken Goenka’s courses and I don’t deny they may feel nicer and be more law abiding and so forth, much as someone taking up Jehovah’s Witness is. Yet this path of the Buddha is subtle and deep - in no way is it a simple technique “S. N. Goenka teaches a simple yet powerful technique of close attention to every sensation.”.The Universal Meditation Technique of S.N. Goenka | Lion’s Roar

BTW the Dalai Lama denied that he sent Lamas to the Goenka retreats.

I think it would show a lack of confidence in the teaching to go to such a place. Because the Abhidhamma is here and now - it is not when we listen to someone telling us to focus on this or that. Vedana is not something anyone needs to look for - it is arising right at this very moment - it is showing its nature but ignorance obscures that it is anatta. And so it is with all the khandhas.

Many Buddhist these days seem to separate Abhidhamma from life. But I think if they could understand more they would not feel that they should be doing something else other than studying directly the present moment - and if they get a taste of that - then Dhamma becomes utterly real and there is no more looking outside for some special place or practice. Reading a book on Abhidhamma becomes like reading life itself.

So the various vipassana technique proponents have got the right idea that satipatthana is seeing directly into the nature of realities. And they try to do this by a subtle forcing out or forcing through concepts to get to the reality that is there. But this obscures sankhara khandha and reinforces an idea that sati can be made to arise- and concentration is easily mistaken as sati.

Anyway I think we largely agree as you mentioned

I do think it runs its dead end course after a few 10 day sessions

.

,

[mikenz66]

Hi Bhante,

@bksubhuti

There is not much of a choice in the West and I have seen people’s change when they go to Goenka 10 day meditations. I hope that you can invest 10 days and go to a ten day course, especially if you have never been to one. At least you can get a first hand judgement.

That was certainly my experience. I had done some short retreats, studied Bhikkhu Bodhi’s book In the Buddhas words, was working through his talks on the MN, and was reading the Visuddhmagga, so I found the one Goenka retreat I did in 2007 very helpful. Some of the ideas in his Dhamma Talks are quirky (as with many modern teachers), but if you already have a background in Dhamma it’s easy to ignore those aspects.

I actually found the blog posts that @RobertK quoted interesting, though much too long winded. Many groups (not just that one) do exhibit some cultish aspects (often accidentally) and the analysis there gives some insight on how that plays out and how to watch for the signs in ones own groups.

@RobertK

If the conditions for them to arise was focusing on the top of head until sensations are felt there, and then scanning the body over and over, wouldn’t the Buddha have taught that over and over. It would be the main part of the teaching. Why bother with 84,000 teachings if that is the core that everyone should do.

Obviously mindlessly focusing on anything is pointless. It requires a context and a purpose. As I said on DhammaWheel regarding Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s recent talk, Concentration develops Right View:

I sometimes see comments like: “How are you going to get enlightened just watching the breath?” And of course that would be a ridiculous idea. But if you attempt to pay attention to the breath, your walking, or you big toe, you start to notice things about the mind (usually that it would rather be doing something else). That’s one of the points Thanissaro Bhikkhu is making in the talk, that it is an investigation. And to be lined with the goal of liberation one needs to be doing that investigation it in the right context. The Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, etc.

I certainly learned a lot about what my mind was up do by doing the breath and body-scanning exercise on the Goenka retreat. Like @bksubhuti I would have found it limiting to just do Goenka retreats, but it was a helpful learning experience.

[bksubhuti]

@RobertK

Many Buddhist these days seem to separate Abhidhamma from life. But I think if they could understand more they would not feel that they should be doing something else other than studying directly the present moment - and if they get a taste of that - then Dhamma becomes utterly real and there is no more looking outside for some special place or practice. Reading a book on Abhidhamma becomes like reading life itself.

Yes… abhidhamma is very important for practice. Unfortunately, it is seen as a scholarly practice as much as a fixing cars is to gearhead versus driving. However, race car drivers do indeed need to know how every part of the car works, and they most likely started out as gearheads.

Nevertheless, I usually still recommend it as a first stepping stone. Those who do so feel very happy about , often stick to following precepts and have little problems with a daily practice afterwards. Most people don’t have time to do many retreats, and so it can keep them satisfied for a long time. As an comparatively speaking extremist in the Buddhist world (amongst most Buddhists), I wanted more, and I also grabbed that opportunity.

[RobertK]

This is an interview with an ex ‘Senior assistant teacher’. I think he now follows Pa Auk.

Episode #225: Jonathan Crowley, Part 3 — Insight Myanmar

This conversation starts with Jonathan reflecting on his appointment as Assistant Teacher, which happened just after his prison course work, and he found deeply moving. In describing how the Goenka organization makes these appointments, Jonathan explains that in addition to the need to have completed several Long Courses (i.e., any retreat of 20-days or longer), there is an unwritten “rule” that any student harboring an interest in becoming an Assistant Teacher quickly learns: “You almost have to pretend you don’t want to be an Assistant Teacher.” He describes how would-be teachers are incentivized to act in self-deprecating ways in order to mask their desire for an appointment, which often creates a sense of “false ego” around the process. Jonathan acknowledges that he had engaged in that same kind false humility around his own aspiration to become a teacher as he grew more involved with Center work and his meditation practice

Before his appointment, Jonathan had a sense of awe and admiration for the Teachers he encountered, acknowledging a certain “mystique” that many students attribute to ATs. While he believed many to be selflessly devoted to their mission, he grew to seeing them as human who had their share of strengths and weaknesses, and realizing that the reality is far more complicated.

Jonathan describes the basic role of the Assistant Teachers as facilitating the ten-day courses with loving kindness and compassion. Because many students have challenges particularly on their first few courses, he felt that providing support and instruction was rewarding and inspiring. At the same time, he found part of the work quite “rote,” such as the many “stock answers” that Assistant Teachers are trained to give.

As Jonathan began to take on this role, he also realized that in representing the tradition in an official capacity, he had to unpack some of its deeper—and often unspoken—messaging. One of the more challenging issues was the organization’s tendency towards “gurudom.” He describes a paradoxical dynamic in which, on the one hand, Goenka strongly eschews the idea of being seen as guru… while on the other hand, the culture of the organization strongly encourages it. “His audience of students were certainly creating that role… relating to him in that way,” says Jonathan. “I had a wariness around gurudom in general, and so I did keep it at an arm’s length when and where I saw that occurring in the organization.”

As a meditator, and then as a Pali student in India, he had been in fairly close contact with Goenka, and on one occasion even helped him establish a new meditation center. While he had great respect for Goenka as a teacher and as a person, he grew uncomfortable with the organizational dynamic that puts Goenka on a pedestal, and raises him to a position of unquestioned authority.

And Jonathan points out that in spite of how Goenka dismisses gurudom in his discourses, he, himself, was not a passive participant in his elevation to guru figure. Jonathan explains how Goenka promoted a mythos about the tradition and technique that reinforced his status as supreme authority figure and exalted place within the dissemination of the teachings. For example, Goenka emphasizes in the ten-day retreat discourses that his first course took place at the same time as the 6th Buddhist Council held in Rangoon, strongly implying that the timing was not coincidental. “He begins to position himself, in terms of that timing and in terms of talking about how he received this pure jewel of the teaching from Sayagyi [U Ba Khin],” and segues to his role in bringing these teachings back to their country of origin, India. Goenka then insinuates that this might well be connected to a prophecy that some allege the Buddha made about the resurgence of vipassana practice in the world 2,500 years after death, a mythology which carries an outsized weight within the organization. Goenka’s enhanced biography is, in turn, woven into an even more personal prophecy; one, however, that is shared only among serious Goenka yogis: that Sayagyi U Ba Khin will be the next Buddha, Metteyya, and Goenka will be his attendant.

For Jonathan, this narrative—a belief system that animates and informs the meditation practice —has very serious implications for a committed meditator in this tradition. It clearly signals that adherence to this tradition, alone, will guarantee significant involvement in the future of the Sāsana. It also suggests there’s a danger in even attempting to learn any other form of meditation, as that could put one’s hope of liberation at risk. And as yogis become more involved in the organization, part of the process of belonging is the strong expectation that they take on this package of beliefs. Jonathan found its weight a lot for him to bear as a student, but an even greater burden as an Assistant Teacher charged with supporting practitioners coming to the Center.

At the same time, Jonathan was trying to get a better perspective on where the Goenka tradition fit into the wider Buddhist landscape. “I was reading a lot of the Pāḷi Canon, and I was broadening my knowledge, trying to put everything—the history of the practice of this tradition, the other strains of vipassana that are out there—trying to put all that into context,” he notes. “There was this larger entity of the Dhamma. Going back to what Goenkaji was teaching, [it was but] one component of it, or one slice of it, with certain emphases that I was increasingly weighing and trying to understand and to integrate and make sense of, because it was a very narrowed-down version.”

Jonathan was also deepening his understanding of the modus operandi of the organization. For example, he realized that the ten-day course format actually functions as a kind of “Trojan Horse.” By this, he means that the practice is presented publicly as non-sectarian and scientific, casting a very wide net to attract many prospective students. Indeed, even during a course, this non-sectarian and scientific messaging is heavily emphasized, further enhanced by Goenka’s frequent statement that “you are your own master.” Although there is no overt pressure put on new meditators to stay with this tradition after their course is over, more committed yogis gradually become funneled into what Jonathan calls “narrower scopes.” He explains it like this: “You get into the fortress, and then it becomes a different ballgame, one that provides less and less questioning and examination as you go further. I began to experience that… I started to feel a certain level of dissonance, really, and the need to belong.”

An important component of belonging in the tradition is faith, which Jonathan calls a “valuable currency.” Of course, it is not that developing faith on the spiritual path is a negative attribute. He notes that the Buddha himself taught that faith is one of five important qualities that a practitioner needs to cultivate on the Path (along with effort, wisdom, concentration, and mindfulness), Jonathan also acknowledges that in the 10-day discourses, Goenka discriminates the right kind of faith from blind faith… yet at the same time—as with the organization’s relationship to gurudom—the actual practice and culture of the organization pulls in the opposite direction.

For Jonathan, it is problematic when faith in the Dhamma, which the Buddha encouraged in seekers to help them advance spiritually, is conflated with a kind of faith that manifests as fidelity to the organization, and which severely inhibits critical thinking. “The difficulty is that the faith and confidence that one has in one’s own practice gets conflated with the necessity for some of the [Goenka organization’s] rules and regulations, and for some of the framework around the practice, and the practice itself, and the exclusion of other practices that the Buddha [taught]. But then it also becomes conflated with the way the organization is operating… There’s some folks who feel like they cannot question at all what Goenka says.” So when meditators in this tradition express a faith in the Dhamma, Jonathan believes that quite often, what they really mean is an expression of faith just towards this particular technique—and often, the mythology behind it.

In Jonathan’s experience, faith and thinking critically are not mutually exclusive, and both have their value on the Path. In fact, the Buddha not only taught about the value of faith, he also famously told the Kalamas to not believe anything because someone tells them unless they can verify it for themselves, no matter who tells them, even an elder or a teacher. So for Jonathan, a key part of the practice is balancing the development of genuine faith with the ability to continue to think critically about what one is doing. Jonathan says he approached meditation as a critical thinker, so he had to learn how to soften that through developing a faith in the practice. But while he came to appreciate the role that devotion could play as a yogi, he nonetheless found the organization’s faith-orientation to be excessive, and more concerning, as squelching critical thought.

Much like the messaging around non-sectarianism and the scientific nature of the practice, Jonathan describes how the dynamic involving faith in the tradition starts off benignly in 10-day courses, when Goenka asks new students to give the technique a “fair trial.” Jonathan acknowledges that this is an important and sensible injunction for a new practitioner. “There is a place for just accepting instructions and practice, and trying it giving it a trial, seeing what emerges, going through that unknown process,” he says. However, he goes on to say that this “fair trial” gradually morphs into a more all-encompassing expectation for returning yogis, trapping the student in a kind of closed-loop system. This was certainly the case for Jonathan. “As I began to get more involved as an Assistant Teacher, I did become a little bit more critical. And I also got more messages around the resistance to examining and questioning things, and that I needed to not do that. So that became a concern for me.”

In further unpacking how faith manifests in this tradition, Jonathan refers back to the organization’s mythos, and the important role that storytelling plays in its dissemination. “[The tradition] is couched in these terms of pure and pristine, that it dates from this unbroken chain of teachers back to the Buddha. And again, we’re speaking about the need to belong, or have faith or confidence in the practice, the tradition, and in Goenkaji, and how that gets conflated with this larger mythology.” To Jonathan, it is clear that embedded in that initial “fair trial” is the organizational belief that if the student really applies him/herself in the “right way,” meaning in line with Goenka’s instructions, it can only turn out that one sees the superiority of this technique.

However, as Jonathan began to realize, key elements of the tradition’s foundational narrative are not actually historically accurate. But if someone begins to inquire along those line, Jonathan says, “It becomes problematic, even while the practice may be having benefit… In order to continue to stay in, you find yourself compartmentalizing these pieces. And then to some degree, at least for me, and this was a big piece, I found that I was compartmentalizing parts of myself!”

Over time, it became increasingly challenging for Jonathan to balance his enthusiasm for the practice with unresolved and unanswered questions that continued to linger. “There were many things I was observing that I was excusing or saying, ‘Okay, well, let me put that aside, there’s so much benefit here!’ I wanted to belong, I wanted just to be part of that whole thing. I was profoundly transformed by it. And yet, as time went on, I found myself needing to recover my critical voice and critical thinking.” This ultimately left him feeling as though the only way to continue the practice was to contort himself in a way that conformed to the organization’s expectations. “I started to feel like, my whole self is not able to show up. That increasingly became more and more difficult for me.” Not being able to bring this “full self” to the practice obviated the greater integration that Jonathan described himself as seeking in Part 2 of his talk.

In a similar vein, he began to see a sharp divergence between those who regarded the silent retreats (and by extension, the Center, itself) as a buffer from the world, and his own desire to apply the practice and inspire real change within society. Moreover, he saw a tendency towards escapism being reinforced by the retreat experience: the benefits that so many students do get, combined with the very admirable selfless service given by so many, results in a cocoon-like environment at a Center that is very comforting, especially when compared to the loudness and harshness of everyday life. As a result, Jonathan saw a number of meditators seeking greater involvement with the Center to avoid the challenges of life, such as finding meaningful employment or committing to a relationship. Jonathan even saw this tendency in himself for a time. Combined with the organization’s overall discomfort with any kind of societal engagement, it becomes an isolated, bubble experience for many serious yogis, creating a divide between their intensive meditation experience and everyday life.

And to complicate matters further for Jonathan, he saw that even the teachers who are most committed to that insular model have to navigate some complex and even contradictory objectives. For example, he would ask them, “[Are we] just distributing seeds for the masses to just get a taste of the Dhamma? Or is this really a tradition that is supporting students to attain the highest levels of liberation, nibbana? Both those messages are given right from the get-go.” But because the tradition continued to expand at such a rapid pace (the wide net cast by its messaging, as described above), Jonathan felt that there was simply never time to reflect on these essential (and for the organization, even existential) questions.

Jonathan concludes that, taken together, the mythmaking, the emphasis on unquestioning faith, and the inward-looking tendency of the organization unfortunately combine to promote a kind of anti-intellectualism. This became more apparent when some of Jonathan’s peers began to look askance at his interest in sutta study. “The ‘take home message’ I was getting was that Goenkaji essentially is the harbinger of the Buddha’s second Sāsana, and that we’re here to fulfill this message as a pure and pristine form of the Buddha’s teaching,” he says. In fact, “it was almost as if Goenkaji, himself, was being elevated above the Pāḷi Canon in many students’ minds, as evidence of the Buddhist scriptural heritage, but even in some ways above the Buddha himself! I think that [it points to] a certain organizational arrogance and superiority, and, I would say, even supremacy.”

In addition to the way Goenka prioritizes his message of “pristine purity,” Jonathan believes there is another dynamic at play in Goenka centers, at least in the West. He sees a tendency towards superiority and arrogance about the tradition among many committed disciples, which he believes may be an outgrowth of neo-Colonial times, when the teachings were translated and given meaning from a more Western point of view. Taking this perspective a step further, it even has racial implications for Jonathan, in terms of who has access to attend vipassana courses, and how much the organization reflects the voices and perspectives of marginalized communities.

At the same time, Jonathan also owns the arrogance he took on in the process. He is aware it had always been within him, and the conditions of the organization simply triggered it. “Those pieces were inside me, all those seeds were in me! The organization gave shelter to that, and allowed those, unfortunately, to become insulated around all that.”

At the end of the day, Jonathan still has much gratitude towards the tradition, but also hopes that conversations like these can “engender more critical examination, and allowances and permissions without being [seen as] a threat.”

[bksubhuti]

Great summary! I’ll try to listen to it later.
As someone who has been involved in the goenka system in my earlier years (late 90’s), plus knowing some long time practitioners who later became monks or who visited pa-auk, I see everything described here as valid.

Goenka is a great stepping stone.
Pa-Auk is often a next logical step for those who want to go further and deeper after seeing the limited slice that goenka provides…