Using Gooren's conversion career model, this chapter demonstrates how a person's universe of discourse changes with increased participation in Goenka's Vipassana movement and identifies the linguistic markers of that change. The chapter is divided into four sections: preaffiliation context through biographical narratives; formal affiliation practices and their significance for conversion; sociocultural and institutional factors behind participants' rejection of the conversion category and Buddhist identity, with analysis of linguistic patterns; and commitment, depicting core member identity through meditators' language, reasoning, and self-representation.
People who left Goenka's Vipassana movement after years of intense commitment often used ambivalent language in their disaffiliation narratives. They maintained convictions about the technique's transformative power while doubting their own ability to progress toward enlightenment. Although their conversion process was tacit, many aspects of their stories matched existing literature on religious disengagement.
A new analytical framework called 'tacit conversion' is introduced to understand personal transformation and growing commitment within Goenka's Vipassana movement. By closely examining an experienced student's language, speech inflections, tone, and narrative delivery, the chapter shows that committed long-term students perform narratives resembling 'conversion narratives' found in other traditions. Central themes in participants' self-transformation include self-acceptance, agency, and the mind-body relationship.
Deconversion from Goenka's Vipassana movement is rare. A single case study examines one narrator's attempt to leave the movement's universe of discourse. The chapter introduces 'authenticity talk' as a style of discourse that serves both as a resource for self-reconstruction after exit and as a rhetoric providing the narrator with autonomy, empowerment, and self-validation. The chapter argues that disengagement literature mistakenly takes authenticity talk at face value, treating it as an actual motive for exit rather than a post-hoc rhetorical tool.