Today, I saw an article in ‘The Print’ in which the author explained why he quit the 10-day Vipassana course run by Sri SN Goenka’s organization.
He criticized many aspects of the program such as the ‘noble silence’ and the lack of discussion and debate. The author has the right to criticize any program and we should respect that.
But it also highlights a misunderstanding of Vipassana. The goal of Vipassana is to train your unconscious mind to see through and overcome how your mind responds to different situations and creates suffering.
To illustrate: We see a person we hate and immediately, our body’s ‘fight or flight’ system is activated and we feel angry. This response, triggered by our amygdala, happens unconsciously — we can’t control it.
And even though I know this intellectually, I will still respond the same way until my unconscious mind has been trained to overcome that automatic response.
That can only happen by directly seeing our mind’s reactions to these situations over and over again. Gradually, our mind will stop reacting that way. This is very similar to exposure therapy in psychology.
Discussions and debates only lead to intellectual understanding, which doesn’t change our unconscious mind.
Not everything can be intellectualized — some things can be learned only through direct experience.
– Rajan