Recommending Vipassana retreats to others?

Hi everyone,

I've been thinking about this question for quite a while and even more so these past few days as one of my best friends returned home after years abroad and I persuaded him to sign up for a Goenka retreat (no good, long Mahasi retreats to jump-start the practice around here).

The thing is that I am wondering if I am doing him any good by recommending Vipassana to him. Consider my premises:
- There is a big chance that he would eventually do a number of Goenka retreats.
- Goenka retreats seem to work pretty well at getting people past A&P and into the DN.
- My friend will probably cross into the DN
- Even if my friend finds out about maps, etc, the chances are very slim that he will be determined enough to take the challenge head-on and get past DN to first path.

Therefore, I am probably going to get my friend stuck in the DN. While DN is not necessairly as horrible for some as for others, I have not heard anyone saying that it's better than not having started practicing at all.

My question, put simply, is this: should I (we?) recommend Vipassana practice to people, knowing that they are most likely to get stuck in the DN?
Is it better to be in DN than to not have started to practice at all?

Finally, I have some doubt about the basic premise that the Dark Night is horrible in the first place. Some here have mentioned that it is something you can come to enjoy and appreciate. Furthermore, I have been conducting an academic research project with Goenka meditators for the last couple of months. I have been interviewing many who have been to many retreats and who have been practicing for years. Presuming my premises stated above are correct, these people have crossed into DN territory and have probably stayed there (Does anyone have any estimate of how many people in the Goenka tradition actually get first path?).
(continued)

But from what I've heard from them, it seems that their quality of life has only improved. How can we explain this? One of my premises is wrong? The DN is not that terrible? Some other explanation I am missing?

Thanks,
Squee

EDIT: I should add that most of the people I interviewed did not attend long retreats but only 10-days and 8-days. That seems to me to reaffirm my statement that they have probably not reached first path and that they are probably in DN territory.

I'm starting to think there may be two extremes in how we tend to evaluate our practice: one, the attainment extreme, in which the only thing valued is what has been "attained". This is the extreme that no-mushroom dharma can slide towards. The other is "practice", in which all notion of attainment- as in the apparently permanent transformation of some aspects of mind function- is downplayed or ignored while developing skillful practice in the present moment is emphasised and valued. Clearly the mainstream mushroomy dharma leans this way, right?
A balanced approach is more realistic though, isn't it? Having various maps of attainment and being open to the possibilty of lasting transformation is vitally important, as is developing a stable practice of equanimous mindfulness in the present moment, going deeper and deeper into present experience. Even if a yogi doesn't "attain" a path, yet develops highly skilled mindful engagement with their experience, they will feel great relief from a lot of their ignorantly self-imposed suffering and will become less troublesome to others as well.
So cultivating strong practice with an open mind towards the possibility of transformation seems like the most wise route to ever-deepening appreciation of the present moment in all its messy, relational, open-ended and thus unfinishable glory.

So yes, I say much better to have strong practice in the DN than to skim on the surface of life, perpetually being born again and again in one thought loop after another while believing that the world is how I see it through my rosy or dark glasses!
-Jake

"My question, put simply, is this: should I (we?) recommend Vipassana practice to people, knowing that they are most likely to get stuck in the DN?
Is it better to be in DN than to not have started to practice at all?"

The Dark Night is something I believe every meditator experiences regardless of the tradition or the path they choose to take. It is NOT a mystical occurrence that has no relationship to anything else. It is the process of starting to recognize "you" and just how busy your mind is while protecting its conception of "you." It's difficult for many because they are, for the first time, being exposed to the selfish, brutish, ugly, angry, overly protective and paranoid sense of self, fully. Fully. So however you do your practice, be it Theravada, Zen, Vajrayana, Advaita, by yourself alone with no outside influences, you will face that juncture.

As Jake very aptly states, better to face that full than to skim over it. A real practice demands it.

The primary problem I had with the dukkha ñanas was due to not knowing I was in them despite knowing of their existence and some of their characteristics. What I experienced as the main feature of this territory was not the unpleasant mental sensations, not unpleasant physical sensations, but rather mental trickery.

I wanted those dukkha ñanas! I went looking for them. While I was in them and wishing I could somehow get to them, I thought I was not making any progress and just wasting my time, being stuck in the Arising and Passing away and Dissolution ñanas, seemingly wasting my precious retreat time on mildly pleasant fast-moving vibratory sensations. I doubted that I was meditating correctly, despite being repeatedly assured that I following instructions. Despite this, because the physical sensations were pleasant, I was mostly upbeat and was having a good time, despite the mild feelings of disgust,etc...towards the objects.

I did suffer a great deal from unpleasant mental reactions to physical sensations and ugly mental sensations in the first Mahasi-style retreat I did, but had I known I was in the dukha ñanas, I would have been overjoyed. In the second Mahasi-style retreat I did, I mostly just suffered from boredom and the doubt mentioned above. The one time I did figure out exactly where I was on the map was when the characteristics of physical sensations during the dukha ñanas were pointed out to me and I recognized that I was in them. That day I got Equanimity, didn't sleep much that night, went back down into Re-observation and was grumpy for several hours, figured out that that's where I was, deliberately gladdened my mind and got stream entry.

Knowing you're in a dukha ñana and that the sensations you're feeling are caused by the ñana robs the negative sensations of most of their power. It's something to be embraced rather than feared as it's a sign of being close to stream entry.