This sounds like more feel-good pseudoscientific hogwash.
Is there any evidence that "not talking" can actually lead to an improved life, or is this yet another fad that makes people feel good about themselves?
Is there any evidence that "not talking" can actually lead to an improved life, or is this yet another fad that makes people feel good about themselves?
You sound like one of those annoying fellows who would dismiss the works of Dostoyevsky as pseudoscientific, or the music of Beethoven as hogwash. Get out of your limited perspective every once in a while and see that there exists a whole world out that that does not require classification in mathematical models to appreciate.
I don't think it's feel-good anything, and not claiming to be scientific. I think it's stressing the mind in a way that it's typically never stressed, resulting in outcomes that others have never experienced. And because of that, they want to share it -- as is human nature.
So, yes. Anecdotally, anyway. Leaving entirely aside, you know, all the research on the benefits of meditation, ever.
1. to abstain from killing any being; 2. to abstain from stealing; 3. to abstain from all sexual activity; 4. to abstain from telling lies; 5. to abstain from all intoxicants.
With "not talking" you automatically follow number 4 :)
As such therapies involve only guiding and helping people to think differently, it demonstrates that such guidance has have scientifically measurable effects on the mind and body.
It follows from the above that the likelihood that practices such as meditation could have non-zero effects is high. Whether Vipassana itself does so could therefore be tested in the same manner as CBT was, and perhaps that is what should be done...
[1]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=randomized+contro...
Looking at a 2013 report (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23796855), results are quite different. Or this interview (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05/...) showing potential physical changes in the brain.
Furthermore, meditation isn't about objective health gains to many people. It's about living in a different way, in a different state.
The western lifestyle, simply put, is messy, and you get pulled in many directions, with the most important side effect of losing attention to yourself.
Meditation simply restores (quite forcefully, in this case) at least part of that attention.
If you find hard to grasp the concept, you can imagine it as being the analogue of being "in the zone" when programming (or anything else).
I don't think it would actually be too far-fetched to think "the zone" as a form of meditation.
Does scientific curiosity these days hinge on someone else having done the tests ?
Does it automatically qualify as hogwash because there isn't and evidence yet ? or because we have a tendency to doubt things not deeply rooted in numbers and double blind tests, /even if/ the reason for that is a simple -- nobody has bothered to do this yet.
I think this is in a different class though, it's subjective, so the tests aren't necessarily necessary.