Sorry for such a late reply, this is the first chance I've had in weeks to sit down at my laptop.
First I should clarify that I see a clear distinction between meditation/vipassana generally and what is taught at Goenka courses. My concerns are restricted to the latter (more on that below).
Secondly I should add that by saying I had a bad experience does not mean I found the conditions overly trying. I understood the general limitations & restrictions I would be subjected to and I found them challenging but reasonable. It was the other parts of the course that troubled me. (This, by the way, is necessary to explain because I've found that among Goenka devotees any criticism is generally met with a blank, 'Oh, you just couldn't hack the conditions'.)
So, to the PDF - I don't see it as a definitive argument against Goenka courses or some authoritative analysis, but merely a starting point for a discussion that's way overdue. In fact the speculation and crankery seems the point in a way - ie, the thrust of the document is that we need to start questioning what's really going on at these centres and where they could lead in future. The point about hypoxia is obviously incorrect - but the impression I got was of someone struggling with a bad experience and trying to make sense of it. I've spent the past few months trying to make sense of what happened to me and feel frustrated that others are still being led blindly into these courses.
My chief concern is that they are sold as safe and psychologically sound when this is not necessarily the case. I had expected the course to be challenging but within essentially safe boundaries. What I saw went way beyond that.
These risks do not seem to be widely understood, and in fact everyone I spoke to about attending the course beforehand only had the highest praise (including from medical professors on both sides of the Atlantic).
A useful analogy might be to compare Goenka courses to teaching dangerous adventure activities (abseiling, mountain climbing etc). It's one thing to teach these things with plenty of supervision & proper instruction and with everyone kitted up and trained for the perils and challenges ahead. It's another to grab 100+ people, put them in the care of a skeleton staff of frighteningly amateur instructors who do little more than press play on a video tape, and then shove students over the cliff or up the mountain.
I should emphasise my negative experience does nor mean others won't have a healthy and productive time. My worry is that those who promote the courses believe them to be at best wonderful and at worst harmless, when I now realise I'm one of many who came away with a terrible experience.
Sure, the research is in on the benefits of meditation generally speaking but here's the issue - I'm not sure what Goenka centres teach is really meditation. It seems some mishmash of hypnosis and selective parts of vipassana delivered in an isolating, coercive environment that's geared to making students highly suggestible and compliant, and in some cases fearful.
There are a couple of points that especially trouble me:
The content of the courses (especially regarding coercion, isolation, hypnosis, video delivery, mysticism) and risks involved are not adequately spelt out before the course. The support available during the course is inadequate. I did not give my informed consent to many of the techniques used and felt what was promised beforehand was vastly different to what was delivered.
Many of the claims made about the courses - including how effective they are - are questionable. Doctrinal matters are important because Goenka makes them so. The courses teach Goenka's methods are pure and effective and that all others must be discarded. But from what I can see, they may be neither & in fact take some dangerous liberties with ancient tried-and-true techniques. Massive chunks of the course are devoted to persuading students that Goenka is the only path forward, that his methods will change your life if you devote yourself to them, that you will want to tell everyone about the courses when you leave, that you should support and promote the cause, that the technique is wonderful, etc etc. This is all delivered in a highly repetitive, monotonous manner until at one point Goenka even says in a slow, methodical voice "there ... is ... no ... suggestion ... of ... hypnosis". If you've ever been hypnotised, you will instantly recognise all of this.
So to your question - is it good for you, does it work? - well, I don't know. Some say it works for them, so I guess it does. What I can say is the courses seem to be about making students suggestible, isolated and compliant, teaching them a compromised version of vipassana via video over an incredibly short timeframe, then hypnotising them to believe that this all works. It's not a cult - not yet, anyway - but it isolates and manipulates students in a similar way.
I'm really not sure I've expressed this well at all, but Craig_Heldreth on October 10 puts it very well.
Thanks for the extended explanation. It all seems very clear to me.
You might like Cutting through Spiritual Materialism, a book about how greed gets entangled with the search for enlightenment-- mostly about greed for ill-conceived change and/or repetition of past experiences, but also about the desire for status.
Related to: The Trouble With "Good"
Followed by: Vipassana Meditation: Developing Meta-Feeling Skills
I describe a way to understand vipassana meditation (a form of Buddhist meditation) using the concept of affective judgment1. Vipassana aims to break the habit of blindly making affective judgments about mental states, and reverse the damage done by doing so in the past. This habit may be at the root of many problems described on LessWrong, and is likely involved in other mental issues. In the followup post I give details about how to actually practice vipassana.
The problem
Consider mindspace. Mindspace2 is the configuration space of a mind. Each mental state is identified with a position in mindspace, specified by its description along some dimensions. For human mindspace the affect of a mental state is a natural dimension to use, and it's the one that's most important for a conceptual understanding of vipassana meditation.
According to vipassana meditators, every time we pass through a point in mindspace we update its affect by judging3 whether that mental state is good or bad. On the other hand, the path we take through mindspace is strongly determined by this dimension alone, and we tend to veer towards clusters of positive affect and away from those with negative affect. The current judgment of a mental state is also strongly determined by its present affect. This can result in a dangerous feedback loop4, with small initial affective judgments compounding into deep mental patterns. It seems that this phenomenon is at the root of many problems mentioned here.5
Aside from causing systematic errors in thought and action it is claimed that this mechanism is also responsible for our mental suffering and restlessness. Vipassana aims to solve these problems by training us to observe and control our affective judgments, and break out of the pattern of blind reaction.
How it works
There are four aspects to the process:
They are synergistic practices and should be developed simultaneously. This will only be possible later on; at any given time you may only be able to practice one or more of them.
1) Slowing the flood
The ability to calm the mind and concentrate is essential. Without this, one remains involved in the rushing pattern of affect perception and judgment, and there is no possibility of seeing the process and ultimately changing it. This ability is trained by having one maintain awareness of a neutral mental process, which serves as an anchor that one continually returns to. Gradually one becomes aware of the subtle pattern of affective judgments and can distinctly observe them.
2) Not compulsively judging
While periodically returning to the mental anchor, one attempts to observe the mental states that arise without making affective judgments about them. In trying to do this it becomes clear how such judgments can cascade and create deep mental paths that it can be hard to escape from.
3) Smoothing old emotional gradients
Applying this new skill of neutral observation, one works on the long task of undoing old emotional gradients. When observing a mental state without making an affective judgment one can lower6 its present affective value. This is opposed to the previous pattern of making another affective judgment in the same direction, and increasing (or sustaining) its affect. A great variety of mental states will arise during this process, and by neutrally observing them one slowly dismantles the affective structures that are widely distributed in mindspace.
4) No longer forming strong emotional gradients
While smoothing old emotional gradients one must take care not to create new ones. The goal is not to never make affective judgments (I'm not even sure this is possible), but rather to take control of the process and prevent dangerous feedback patterns from occurring.
Conclusion
Vipassana meditation aims to change the way we assign affect to mental states, and reverse the damage accumulated from doing so poorly in the past. Our default way for doing this may be the root of a number of rationality problems. Vipassana serves as a meta-tool, helping one to defuse harmful affective structures that are causing particular problems. I expect that these are common but vary in intensity, and the benefits of vipassana are obtained mainly through correcting these "pathologies".
1 My basis for using this concept is mainly introspective observation during my daily meditation practice the past three years. At the very least I expect it will be helpful for understanding and practicing vipassana meditation, but it may turn out to be a fundamental cognitive process.
2 Note that this concept is distinct from mind design space. In mind design space each point corresponds to a possible mind, and hence each point has an associated mindspace.
3 For a simple case where the distinction between making an affective judgment and not making one is clear, consider experiencing a painful sensation. I claim that this pain is actually a composite phenomenon; it consists of a strong negative affective judgment (or series of such judgments) and a physical sensation. Not making an affective judgment in this case would mean that all that remains is the physical sensation. You would keep experiencing this physical sensation but not have a dying urge to do something about it (like shift your sitting position, for example). As long as you make sure that you are not causing bodily damage, I think that observing pain in meditation can be a really great learning experience.
4 In Buddhist literature the positive feedback spiral is called craving and the negative one is called aversion.
5 Don't forget this and this. This phenomenon may also be responsible for the cached thoughts and cached selves problems, depending on the degree to which cached mental structures are implemented as emotional gradients.
6 This is meant in the sense of absolute value.
Edit: On Academian's recommendation I've added a footnote attempting to clarify the notion of an affective judgment, and what it means not to make one. It's an excerpt from my comment here.