PS. I tried reading the article on smallish groups (my best social structure for learning), but it was unfortunately a paid article and I'm not currently enjoying free access to the publication. If you have a way of enlightening me that does not require 35$ for me upfront, I'll be more than willing to check it out.

Here's a free link for the small groups article

Crap! I'm sorry I didn't see this. I've had a love/hate relationship with LessWrong while I've been getting as far as I can with meditation. a year late, hopefully you get this response so that it may have some use.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/blr/attentioncontroliscriticalfor/6frz. In this post I describe the steps for learning the prerequisite to Taoist meditation. At the time, I was not able to properly describe Taoist meditation, despite being very familiar with it. I can at least try now.

The prerequisite to Taoist meditation is about practicing being aware, and practicing controlling awareness. Controlling awareness requires being aware of what one is aware of, and so is also a practice of that.

Once one becomes adequate at being aware of anything for a sufficient amount of time, the next step is about figuring out how to find and fix the problems.

The most advanced way to fix a problem is to simply be aware of it until it goes away. maintaining awareness of the problem makes it go away on it's own, without requiring any additional action. However, that is too advanced for most people, and so there are other methods along the way.

Step one is to be aware of tension in the body. There are a myriad of ways to activate tension to make it much easier to observe, and thus be aware of. Breath control (both the fast and slow varieties) is one such way. All tension in the body hinders the passage of fluids and mental signals. Neurons can be tense too.

Step two is to slowly try relaxing everything. This is the basic form of what is known as "dissolving" in meditation.

Step three involves a whole bunch of complicated ways of dissolving tension on deeper levels (Periostium is "deeper" than neurons are "deeper" than ligaments are "deeper" than muscles) To make it less complicated, there is a common practice of breathing slowly while being acutely aware of a block of tension. And in that state, trying to focus the breath in the area of awareness (practice breathing into your stomach, then breathing into your whole body, to make this easier and safer). In this step, emotions rise and come to light, thought patterns arise and come to light, and underlying ways of identifying concepts arise and come to light. The idea is that everything that comes up is a result of tension, and getting rid of the tension makes it not come up again.

Step four is about continuing to try to become better aware. continuing to be aware of deeper and deeper tissues, and corresponding cognitive processes (deeper and deeper emotions, thoughts, intuition, etc). To be aware of deeper cognitive processes, one must relieve the tension on the surface. As such, this is a long process of continuing to go deeper and deeper, going back and forth between steps 1, 2, 3 and 4.

It is possible to force the cognitive result of tension to change, or to push tension somewhere else. This can act as a temporary solution, and is sometimes necessary to deal with particularly strong or deep tension by forcefully removing the surface layers. Doing so usually causes tension to appear somewhere else, and on a equally deep or deeper layer. This is called the "fire method" of meditation.

The order of depth of cognition is: first physical feeling, then instinct, emotion, thought, intuition, identification (subconscious mental grouping), then last the "space" that is occupied by consciousness and cognition. Each layer contains it's own feeling of tension. Each layer also contains it's own feeling of pain, which can be used to find tension.

After about ten years of meditating regularly, I got to the deepest (seventh) layer two weeks ago. FYI: identification, subconscious mental grouping, is the source of karma. Intuition is about quickly(near instantly) solving NP-complete problems (the hardest part is figuring out whether the answer is true, just probable, or false and based on a false premise).

"preferred method" is hard to think about, since I only used others' methods as guidance to create my own. Breathing is integral to any good method, as is relaxing tension. The fastest way to improve is to never go beyond about 70% of your ability. The goal is to continue to go deeper, resolutely. In essence, meditation is extremely simple; but not at all easy. The point of meditation is to confront everything you can't handle, and learn to handle it. The method is really up to you. Taoist meditation is a path, with as many methods as there are martial arts moves (hint: there's not very many).

Once you can use your intuition (which you may already be able to do to an extent), these next things become possible.

Once you get to the level where you can feel Chi, move your body and chi at the same time. Use your moving body to move your chi. Normal ChiGung is equivalent to fast, heavy breathing. Moving your body and chi at the same time is equivalent to slow, controlled breathing.

Step five is to "open" spaces in your body that feel closed. This feels like expanding the capacity of a body tissue. Most importantly, open your joints, to allow proper fluid movement. This should simultaneously improve your posture.

Step six is to "tonify" (acupuncture word), which feels like re-invigorating atrophied tissue (not that I've ever had atrophied tissue).

The next step requires psychic awareness (direct awareness of intuition), and I'm not willing to explain it without room for sufficient detail (I am working on a way to explain it properly). The step after that happens on the deepest layer, and I'm not willing to explain that without going into extreme detail of everything before it (which I am working on). I have been told there is a step after that, but I have no idea what it is.

I hope I'm not too late to give this advice. I hope this advice is helpful or useful in some way. I hope everything is at least vaguely understandable. If you, or anyone else, chooses to follow the path of meditation, good luck. It takes the resolution to succeed at impossible tasks, with equal rewards.

Great guys!

How'd it go? Did you talk about a 2nd meeting?

First: Singing out of tune would be defecting on other people's community building practices, which is what I feared I might be doing by posting my comment in the first place. If a context loses the safety property and I can't fix the context, why on earth would I stick around clogging up other people's attempts at semi-random socially bonding? (Its not like I'm a seven year old being dragged to church against my will.) If a context works for others but seems bad to me, I can just exit the context rather than doing something to passive aggressively thwart it...

The reason I've brought this up here is that this community is notionally aimed at not being crazy, and I like the idea of a community of non-crazy people, and want to help with that project. My understanding is that I'm commenting in a way that advances the deep interests of the community, rather than injecting noise. If I'm wrong, that's worth knowing, but I don't think I'm wrong here.

More directly... did you understand the metaphor from computer security I was suggesting? If someone roots your server then one option is to format the drive and rebuild from scratch (after patching the security hole). Another is to do some kind of complicated sifting to filter the new malware out of your previously trustably valuable system... using external tools to handle the newly untrusted content safely, because the system itself has become potentially deeply unstrustworthy. Rebuilding from modified backups is vastly preferable in terms of time and efficiency.

However, it is a tragic fact about our souls, that they are currently implemented in a single piece of lipid and protein which can neither be backed up, nor restored, nor significantly manipulated by a separately secured exoself. As near as I can tell, in practice, all humans are regularly being hacked and mostly erased over and over again each day, with a small amount of stuff that "seems good" saved in long term storage. But much of what we think of as "our declarative selves" is, in some sense, just half-broken viral leftovers, especially (if you'll permit me to switch metaphors) if we don't cultivate our minds they way we'd cultivate a garden: planting things that are good, making sure it gets plenty of sunshine, regularly eliminating weeds, and generally practicing good husbandry. Ultimately, if you hope to do very much of significance with your mind, it will take months or years of intentional practice, information foraging, environmental selection, etc.

If someone's mind was already full of weeds then they could do much worse than to throw a bunch of random heirloom seeds from well cultivated minds into their own mind to see what happens. What have they got to lose? However, I suspect that my mind is less overrun with weeds than is normally the case, so I take a measure of care with it. It makes sense to me that some people here would be "seeking heirloom seeds" and some people here would be "careful mind gardeners".

For myself at this time, I'm more interested in "mental weeds as an object of study" because sometimes they sometimes have interesting features (especially related to survival characteristics like transmissible robustness) that are worth experimentally crossing with other thoughts to see if the results are better than what I started with, but this process is much much less haphazard than engaging in ecstatic dancing with people I don't know very well. If someone with a head full of weeds wanted to learn from me, it seems like teaching might be better than dancing :-P

Do you know of any community building exercises that do not have a potential negative backlash?

A community building exercise that doesn't have a potential negative backlash would be one that induces justified trust in the benevolence and sanity of other members of the community, while revealing real expertise that can be shared or leveraged for community benefit. Such a process might eliminate people who didn't meet both criteria (benevolence and sanity) on some level or another. Conditioning on that kind of thing happening first, then... um... sure, break out some ecstatic dancing maybe? Preferably in smallish groups full of thoughtful people with multiple weak cross-links to other people in similar groups?

But if you're proposing a cultural process that accepts everyone, and gets everyone to believe whatever is in everyone else's heads at the beginning, that would trigger one of my heuristic detectors for mental malware. A novel meme-package that included content that induced such practices would probably spread faster than otherwise while picking up a bunch of parasitic elements in the process... to the detriment of the hosts.

To allow people to log in to your server and make helpful changes without hassle, change all the passwords to "password": this is technically true, but applied in the wrong context it could lead to various problems. The hard part is figuring out which contexts have this safety property, and which don't, especially keeping in mind that contexts change over time.

Awesome! This is very useful. I now have a perfect way to describe why Taoist meditation is among the most useful things someone in this community can learn to do. And I have tons of experience to back it up.

Mindfulness meditation is the prerequisite for Taoist meditation. And Wikipedia doesn't explain how to practice Mindfulness meditation.

It's not, but then LW group members can't be presumed rational. What sort of synchronized group movement or synchronized group voice or both would bypass the Cthulhulian-horror-of-conformity filters?

Downvoted, not very rationality-related.

While I love the idea I think you're missing the problem that most of our in-group view themselves as people who don't dance.