Dear Isaac,
Hey, there are actually quite a number of skeptical reviews out there, so look around if you find them interesting and you will find them.
If you have any questions about this stuff I will be happy to answer them or talk or whatever. Skype name is dan i el m in g ra m without the spaces.
Other thoughts: check out the original source material, or Mahasi, or something else and see what those things say, and realize there will be some tensions between all of those things if you look closely. You will find sutta-heads who can't stand the Visuddhimagga, Visuddhimagga-heads who can't stand the limits of the sutras and those who are down on some of the better commentaries, Tibetans who don't like any of that stuff, considering it low-brow hinayana primitive Buddhism at best, and those who will freak out at anything that is not Buddhist, as Buddhism must be best at all things.
Does what Achaan Chah teaches really look the same as the old Suttas?
What to do with Chogyam Trungpa? His stuff is clearly brilliant, and a lot of people have gotten a lot out of his work, and yet he was clearly a consummate screw-up in so many ways.
Can wisdom be gained from imperfect sources? My imperfections are many and I hope obvious. Can we draw what we need from a number of authors that don't all agree? Do authors always even agree with themselves? What do we do when people's practices end up going off in various directions we don't like or other's don't like? I have gained wisdom from reading Rumi, a non-Buddhist! I also have learned from Kabir, from Rilke, and from sources much stranger. The Buddha studied with a bunch of non-Buddhist before he became the Buddha, obviously, and he learned useful things from them that he later taught. Further, what I talk about is very, very Buddhist.
Has the author of that critique of the book had a full PCE? They are so compelling that it would seem hard for anyone who had had one to argue against them, and what, prey tell, is wrong with appreciating them? Is it a given that Buddhism will have terms and maps that include all possible meditatively-induced mind states?
Why would the author criticize me when I started spending more time investigating emotional/feeling territory, something my Mahasi practice didn't emphasize much? It seems a strange critique. I saw something that needed flushing out, and so I gave that aspect of life more attention: the problem is what? Why criticize exploring what PCEs have to teach? It seems a bizarre and limiting view. I hope their practice is not similarly limited, as it will be poorer for it with that sort of mentality. I continue to expand and integrate my practice, continue to explore what it has done and what it hasn't. This is wrong somehow?
Also, if you read the lives of the arahats, you will see that they continued to grow, explore, learn things, and develop. They had various skill-sets, some had jhanas, some had powers, some were really good at remembering things, some had various issues from their past to learn from and deal with, and they continued to practice, continued to mature, as I hope I slowly am.
The Buddha himself was clearly a very different creature 45 years after his first moment of awakening. Why did he spend weeks after his awakening checking things out if there was no possibility of further development or learning: he learned all sort of things, perceived more clearly all sorts of things, gained lots of wisdom, and further clarified what he had done and accomplished and its implications for others.
As to Dark Night cycling: it is a problem, but it is not a unique problem to this particular strain of meditation or even tradition. I have met and/or read the accounts of literally hundreds of people who have crossed the A&P, had it derail their lives, and most didn't have it happen during anything related to meditation, and the vast majority had no idea what it was, so it is something inherent in the developmental process of the mind, sort of like puberty is part of the developmental process of humans, so I assert and would be happy to back up, and it may just be that the author of that critique hasn't crossed it yet, or has and didn't realize it, or did and doesn't want to admit it, or got freaked out by their own dark night and ran screaming off to something else to help them (which I can understand), or something else I haven't thought of.
As countless testimonials here will tell you, people do a hell of a lot better when they have a heads up about this stuff.
Further, as to Dark Night cycling being a problem that needs further work, yes, that is true. I think that we need better technologies for helping people get through the consequences of what happens just by paying a whole lot of attention to reality, as that is what causes it. Concentration can help, but it can also gunk things up, so must be used carefully. There are other solutions, such as some of the AYP techniques that were bounced around here a while ago.
I read the rest of the review and it has many problems with it. One gross one is here:
"Well, Parts II and II are largely not teachings of the Buddha, core or otherwise. The meditation practice that Ingram teaches ("noting") was developed in the twentieth century in Burma. It wasn't taught by the Buddha. The "Progress of Insight" that Ingram teaches comes from a document called the Visuddhimagga written in Sri Lanka in the fifth century AD, more than eight hundred years after the Buddha's death in Northern India. The Buddha didn't teach that either. So the title is misleading, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the practices are not helpful. Or does it?"
This is clearly from a sutra-head. Ok, fine. There are thousands of them and they are as they are, and if you like them, well try their way and see what it leads to. However, this is a sutta-head who clearly hasn't read this particular sutta, namely MN 111 One by One as they Occurred, where Sariputta clearly does noting practice.
MN 111Further, as anyone who has gone on a good Mahasi retreat knows: it works and works well. Do other things work also? Yes, definitely. This debate keeps coming up perennially, and you will find thread after thread here on the DhO where similar points of view are expressed. However, go see for yourself, if you really want to answer the question: do a serious Mahasi retreat around serious Mahasi practitioners, really actually practice, and also listen to the reports of those around you, and see what happens to them, and notice the staggering degree of precision, awareness, penetrating insight, and deep wisdom that the better ones have, and see if you really think that this is so horribly un-Buddhist that that sort of very sectarian and limiting review is merited.
I would stick to what works rather than spending too much time listening to the old sectarian battle-cries and tired old ignorant debates, and instead stick to the fundamentals and practice well and see for yourself. Notice the number of strong Western teachers that came from various sources, such as Mahasi and Thai Forest, and Zen, and all sorts of other places, such as Advaita and the like. They don't all have the same skill-sets or abilities, nor all the same perspectives, nor would they all give you the same advice about how to practice, nor would they all agree with each other all the time, even if they came from the same tradition, and this is an important point.
Anyway, these are my thoughts this evening. Basic practices, fundamental practices, simple practices, applied well, done again and again, can transform the mind: do the experiment and see for yourself. If you don't like noting, or don't like MCTB: try any of a wide range of other good practices: there are many, many out there. If you somehow think noting is good, you will be in the company of hundreds of thousands of people who have tried it and found it very powerful and revealing.
Good luck sorting this out, and let me know if you want to talk sometime. I can find a little time here and there, but it usually takes scheduling.