Friday, June 12, 2009

please keep the crap out of vipassana

If you go to a 10 days vipasanna course, In the beginning it will be taught that it's a scientific technique, it like an excise of mind, where you learn to tame your mind. They tell you that how mind play game and how you see things just because you believe in them. They give example that how a rope might look like snake if you think about snake biting you and about westerners who believe god is a "white old man with beard", see god as "white old man with beard" in their dreams.

Then they talk about bubble chamber experiment and how it proved that everything is made up of small particles which are continuously getting created and destroyed like bubbles. ( in reality bubble chamber experiment was done to show that the trajectories of energetic particles could be made visible by photographing the bubbles that form within a few milliseconds after particles have traversed a suitably superheated liquid.) and also claim that Buddha experienced same thing 2500 years ago.You could see that how they smoothly move from bubbles to wave and say that everything is like wave and show you how you can experience the same.

Till now everything seems scientific( although i see it as something to beguile people with scientific misinformation) but now slowly they move to concept of "Sanskara" and how every bad sensation felt in the body is due to "Bad Sanskar" (something bad stored in body due to Bad Karma of current or past life) stored in the body. How by observing the sensations in our body and not reacting it we can get rid of "Bad Karma" and enlighten ourselves.

How hypocritical it is to ridicule other religions for being non-scientific; proving that your technique is most scientific technique ever and then teaching something which is totally unscientific. I know that lot of people will argue that Buddha gave the disclaimer about his teaching that "Don't believe it because I am saying it or because it's written in a holy book, believe it only if you find it logical" but unfortunately (if I remember correctly, but I may be wrong) this disclaimer is told on last day of the course, when they have already convinced you to believe everything. Although vipassana give freedom of cherry-picking only the logical and scientific stuff but then setting aside Karma and Reincarnation will make it purposeless, as the soul purpose of vipassana is the freedom from re-birth cycle.

Now, a lot of new people come to vipassana course with some physical or mental problem. The view of vipassana about physical and mental problem is that it's result of your bad deeds in past or current life. So there is no cure, and you have to suffer, but what you can do is stop making new bad karma which will ensure that you won't get new sufferings. It's a dangerous idea to believe that disease is result of bad deed, if you are rejecting medical help. I hope that very few people subscribe to this idea. I think it's also ungrateful act to take medical help for your disease but then believe that you know better that doctors about the cause of disease and vipassana is greater than medical science and you are cured only because of some good karma. This is a bad idea.

More to come....................

such a long time

I can't even count how much posts are sitting in the draft now, i failed to publish a single post in like a year. But it's gonna changed now, from now on, I will publish at least 1 post every week, no matter how shitty it is!!