Meditation: My blog is a terse, cryptic, rambling, ungrammatical rabbit hole, but it's highly opinionated and absolutely packed with links and resources:

https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/articles/

Here are two practical posts:

https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/07/22/additive-meditation/ https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/how-to-do-foregroundbackground-meditation/

Shinzen Young, Daniel Ingram, Kenneth Folk, and Culadasa have systems that can get you very far depending on how well they fit you.

I've been doing meditation, bodywork, "energy" work, phenomenology, and much more for over a decade, via many different systems

I don't think reading books gives you real access to a system. I started meditating a decade ago after reading Koichi Tohei's book about Ki. Around three and a half years ago I switched actual in person training and it was a remarkable difference. Yes I could sit in full lotus beforehand. It wasn't difficult to figure out on my own because it's easy to get a good description in a book, but I missed a lot.

You may be trained in PP, but are you trained in phenomenology? Russell T. Hurlburt has been publishing peer-reviewed phenomenology papers for decades. He gives examples of people who are absolutely certain of their inner experience but quickly and confidently revise their claims after a few training sessions.

Phenomenology is part of what Danis Bois teaches. Speaking directly after a meditation about what you experience and hearing what the other people experience is an essential part of building concepts.

Not wanting to use the word "energy" for a long time Danis simply speaks about "inner movement" and ignores the subject of the medium that moves. In that context there are people who need a year with guidance till they develop the relevant perception. To me it's not at all surprising that you can spend a decade with books and trying to do what you think the book tells you, without developing those qualities.

I don't want to get to deep into the subject on LW, but chakra's are in my conception places where energy is bound. If all of you intention is on having energy concentrated in those chakra's, then there's no movement. An orgasm is something where energy flow happens. If you stopped flow by binding all your energy to your chakra's that would be an explanation for the negative side effects you are describing.

I certainly frequently discover something new in my inner experience, but the fact that energy movement happens is very basic. I might be that my perception is numb for a few days, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing there.

It's like my heart beat. There are times when I can feel my heart beat. there are times when I don't. I think most people don't perceive their heart beat on a daily basis. Certainly in school when we tracked our pulse the teacher told us to feel our arteries with our fingers to track.

I would guess from your experience that you know what it feels like to feel your heart beat and also know what's like to not have a conscious perception of it. For me energy flow perception is similar, but a lot more essential. I feel blind if it's down. Fortunately it's relatively stable over the last months.

At the beginning it showed up for a few days to then go away, so that any decent investigation was impossible because the perception constantly changed.

Now it would be worthwhile to see whether I can match my energy perception with another person, to be more clear about what's just in my head and what's "out there" and perceived the same by multiple people.

It would also be worthwhile to make experimental predictions about the results of particular energy interventions. Sitting in a seminar last weekend I did things when passing a note to a person sitting in front of me to get their attention more by drawing energy, then by tapping them on the shoulder but at the moment things like that are more playing around then running real trials the QS way.

What systems do you work with?

I developed most of my perception in the framework of Danis Bois perceptive pedagogy (PP). I however played with many different systems.

What do you think "energy" is?

I don't know. It's a word I consider useful to label certain things I experience, even through it's not standard PP-vocabulary. Especially when talking to people without a PP-background who do have "energy perception" it's a useful word to communicate. On the other hand it's not useful when talking to someone who cares about understanding but who doesn't have a reference experience for the term. Having that term makes things for me easier.

When looking at a more biological explanation, fascia vibrations seem to me an unexplored and potentially worthwhile field to investigate. A healing hand that's over a part of the body could interact with it via some form of resonance like a tuning fork.

But I would also say there's nothing wrong with using a term without been clear about the underlying mechanism. When studying bioinformatics I had a professor who said that it takes "energy" for the heart to switch from 80 bpm to 110 bpm and back to 80 bpm and it's not quite clear that what he was talking about can be measured in watt. At least he couldn't point to a biochemical source of the "energy".

System biology doesn't have to limit itself to what's easily explainable via biochemistry but can be it's own framework and label effects it's finds on it's own terms.

In general the term "energy" allows good orientation to order experiences I have in my life. On the other hand there's a lot I'm not clear about and where it would be useful to make controlled trials. Unfortunately the scientific research done by Danis Bois and his PHD students is published in French and I don't know French :(

In general the amount of people who both care about doing scientific work and who do have the perceptive abilities is quite small.

Nothing is “flowing,” at least for me. This was really annoying to me, in every “energy” book ever. Authors, get past the dogma and pay attention to the actual experience!

To me energy flow is a word that describes a phenomena that I actually experience. You likely lack the relevant experience. Given that you lack it's also not surprising that you didn't get much benefit from your exploration.

Which is also not surprising if you just take a book, and try to follow along.

The "truth" about "energy work," according to me:

https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2014/12/08/the-truth-about-energy-work-reiki-chakras-spiritual-healing-energy-healing-healing-touch-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

(with a brief nod to psychoneuroendoimmunology.)

It seems like quite a few people on Less Wrong are interested in improving the quality of their writing. "Writing" obviously covers many different pursuits, and perhaps every unhappy document is unhappy in its own way, but I'd like to share my own frustrations in this area and see if this is similar to others. If it is, maybe we can do something about it.

I can write well enough to get distinctions for undergraduate-level essays, but this doesn't seem like a very high bar. If you can comprehend an essay question, form a reasonably coherent answer to that question, and put forward this answer as a structured argument which the reader can follow, you're pretty much set. I understand these are exactly the features an undergraduate essay is testing for, but I want to be better than that. George Orwell didn't get his work back with "96%, Well Done". He got tears and accolades and enduring respect. While I don't want to be George Orwell, I'm not ashamed to admit I'd like those things.

I've read a few introductory-level books on subjects like written composition and rhetorical technique. It's given me a broader vocabulary to describe what's going on, and a selection of tips, tricks and patterns. I can say what's good about a piece of writing I like, but I can't fit it into an overarching coherent theory. I can steal elements of style that I like, but I don't really know why they're stylish.

I don't know to what extent this is a skill you just have to work at, or a body of knowledge I don't know where to learn. I'm lacking general support and feedback. Is anyone else in this position, and would they like to offer mutual constructive criticism? Alternatively, is anyone a secret gatekeeper of the arcane lore I seek?

I've been using a personal wiki to develop my rationality skills, and I've recently written about it, here:

http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/what-rationality-actually-looks-like-from-the-inside-4500-words/

Not a book, but a blog post and a paper:

PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness

http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=791

http://www.rifters.com/real/articles/Morsella_2005.pdf

Perfect information? As far as I know all tricks used in most TAS videos were discovered by players, most of the time by accident. Kinda like how scientists discover(ed) the laws of physics.

Meditation and metacognitive training in general.

Self link: http://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/how-to-do-foregroundbackground-meditation/

I have made some unsubstantiated claims in the "I’ve given you some reasons to meditate:" bullet in the link above. More generally, there is plenty of evidence that meditation does good things to you.