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RichardKennaway comments on Meditation, insight, and rationality. (Part 2 of 3) - Less Wrong
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This is all very interesting, and I look forward to Part 3, although despite having meditated somewhat I've never experienced the "vibrations" you describe.
That precisely describes all of the meditation classes I've encountered, and most modern books on the subject. Where would one find a meditation instructor operating at a more serious level, and how would one tell, before investing a large effort?
Weed (indica, mainly) brings about the experience much more simply than lots of meditation.
Alas, I have little knowledge of how one obtains such things (and as I'm posting under my full real name, that should not be construed as a request for advice). I once had a space cookie in Amsterdam, but the effect was no different from a glass of beer.
Besides, beer puts me to sleep, and I gather that pot does the same. Caffeine seems a better fit with meditation -- the story has it that coffee was first used by monks to stay awake, a monk having noticed how goats chewing the leaves of a certain bush became more frisky. Certainly you'd get more vibrations from a quad espresso than a pint of Owd Roger.
The Wine of Islam
I am disappointed that an Amsterdam pot cookie had such a mild effect on you. Take two next time and you'll definitely notice the difference. A $7 brownie from one of my local medical marijuana dispensaries would likely have you laid out on your back incapable of functioning while going on a multi-hour psychedelic odyssey into your own psyche as well as experiencing such vibrations to a degree of strength on the same order as orgasm. You might rate it an event of profoundness on the order of a birth of a child.
A quad espresso does indeed induce more body altering sensations akin to weed than a pint of Owd Roger.
Just have to interject here that there is no particular relationship between "vibrations" (my definition) and orgasm.
On the basis of Kevin's description, caffeine is probably more useful for meditation, since it doesn't produce a "multi-hour psychedelic odyssey into [one's] own psyche." Caffeine's effects on attention and wakefulness can be helpful, especially in light of the fact that it produces no overt kind of experience. Meditation cultivates attention and perception. What Kevin is describing sounds like it would get in the way!
"Vibrations" are not a particular kind of experience. "Vibrations" are the manner in which experience presents, independent of content, when attention and perception are cultivated in specific ways. Everything from orgasms to blank walls vibrate.
And if you take it frequently you also get to experience the perspective altering state of having approximately 10 less IQ points!
There are far better recreational drugs to play with. Perhaps the only advantage pot has is convenience.
That's just not strictly true.
It may have been 8 or 9. I rounded up. :)
I'm not sure how one goes about finding a good meditation instructor in person. That's sort of the problem, isn't it?
I hear that if you go to a retreat center or monastery run by someone who endorses the methods I've described, they approach and teach meditation in a very serious way. (You might ask something like "are these teachings in the style of Mahasi Sayadaw's methods?", though I have no idea whether that's a gross faux pas or not.) I believe there are a number of Burmese monks who run organizations in various parts of the world who could help you (no idea what their geographical distribution is). And this assumes you want a method similar to what I've described, and that you want to deal with monks at all.
Outside of Burmese Theravada, there are lots of traditions with their own beliefs, methods, dogma, etc. and evaluating whether they can do anything to help you is much harder. They are highly unlikely to frame meditation or enlightenment in the ways I have, for better or worse.
I would suggest that a good way to tell whether an instructor is likely to be helpful as a meditation teacher is not much different from how you would tell whether they would be helpful as teachers of any other hands-on skill. Do their explanations make sense to you? Can you ask questions? Do they give feedback? Have other people successfully learned from them what you want to learn? I imagine these are especially important if you're looking at a tradition that you have minimal information about.