Has this been tested on experienced meditators? Maybe you need to introspect for months or years, and by special methods, before you get at least decent at it.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I don't know whether 'vibrations' are necessarily observable by anyone who has passed through any of these stages, or are just a side effect of the specific exercises I prescribe to cultivate attention, which would not occur if someone has passed through the stages by another method.

"but most people have the most energy during a period starting a few hours after they wake up and lasting 4 hours"

There's no way this is true. Mentally, you're much slower in the morning than the evening. In fact, for optimal intellectual functioning, your body temperature has to be at its highest, not at its lowest and thus you're most productive in the last 4 hours before going to bed rather than the first after rising. I've had other programmer colleagues confirm this to me: how they feel twice as productive at the end of the day than at the beginning and my own experience is the same.

So your statement is simply the opposite of how reality works or there's more human diversity out there than either of us realizes. :)

Am I missing something? Why don't the practical instructions lead up to the final stage of "enlightenment" and instead stop at "partial enlightenment"? Is there a further stage after #4 that might be even more dangerous than #3 and that you don't think is safe to describe to anyone who isn't already at #4?

Unrelated question: Does this "enlightenment" include any experience/realization of the sort described in Gurdjieff's "Fourth Way" as the "many 'I's"? That hypothesis seems very plausible to me given the structure of the brain as subdivided into lobes that subdivide into circuits that subdivide into neurons. At my current level of understanding, I like to think of the "ego" as the locus of the majority of your neural activation potentials, continuously flowing around from circuit to circuit (according to the rules imposed by the particular structure of your brain at a given time), with some circuits able to take control of your body and others not. This would mean that what you call "I" is actually various things, successively: "I am John's hurt feelings", "I am John's desire for revenge", "I am John's intention to put revenge into practice", "I am John's action plan manager" etc. Sometimes the "many 'I's" could even be concurrently active, which in common terms might be experienced as being conflicted about something, or being "of two minds".

First of all, I don't believe I said anything about detachment from emotion.

You used the word "attachment" a lot, as an example of something bizarre and, it seemed, negative.

What do you mean by attachment? (And why is it that this word is so often used for so many different things?)

I am looking forward to part 2 and 3, and I hope that you are planning to give full instructions on how to do the meditation.

"we send some photons toward the half-silvered mirror, one at a time, and count up how many photons arrive at Detector 1 versus Detector 2 over a few thousand trials. The ratio of these values is the ratio of the squared moduli of the amplitudes. But the reason for this is not something we are going to consider yet."

OK, but I'd still like to see a little link or something here that takes me straight to the next article where this is properly dealt with, since this seems to be the biggest gap in understanding that the current article leaves open: over and over you tell us that there are no actual probabilities involved in the phenomena at the level of the territory, yet in my quote you have exactly a probabilistic description, with multiple trials that arbitrarily yield one of the two possible results, in stark conflict with the rest of your explanation which tells us the same thing is actually happening each time (the amplitudes are always the same).

The tiniest extra hint would do a world of good here (or at the end of the article): is it that quantum impurities always stray unpredictably into our experimental setups in the real world and actually change the amplitudes involved? Or what?

According to A New Challenge to Einstein, General Relativity has been refuted at 98% confidence.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be more accurate to say that, actually, 98% confidence has been refuted at General Relativity.

-- Black Belt Bayesian