How to be skeptical about meditation/Buddhism

As far as I know (and I’m not an expert here), the location of chakras is only found in forms of meditation that are related to Buddhism, not in other forms (eg. Christian meditation, Native American practices, etc.)

Hindu religion focuses a lot more on chakra's than Buddhism does. 

When it comes to locations of chakra's there's one interesting question. There's a chakra that the Hindu's call the Manipura chakra. 

You sometimes read that it's located where the navel is. Other sources say it's located where the solar plexus is. Years ago I asked a question in the Hindu stackexchange and they told me "Place the little finger of your hand on the navel. Your navel is the solar plexus or the manipura chakra". Quite obviously, in Western anatomy the navel and the solar plexus are not the same place. 

To me, this experience was really weird as I would have expected to get clear answers about where the chakra is supposed to be. It's quite unclear to me what those people for whom chakra's are a central concept actually believe about them. 

The lack of concern from the users of the Hindu StackExchange for the inconsistency also felt weird. 

Ah, true, the locations themselves could very well have been expectation effects, though what that would reveal about the power of expectation effects would be even more interesting than the existence of specific points along the spine. These weren't subtle sensations! they were often intense to the point of great discomfort, and the books did mention weird "channels" that were supposed to link the points along the spine, but I never experienced those, so it's not like my experience fully matched what the chakra books said should happen. And I never got deep enough into chakra-based practices for them to yield any positive effects that I could see, apart from the generic concentration benefits that any focusing practice yields, regardless of focus object. To me they remained just a weird phenomenon that happens when I pay attention to the spine. I got into chakras out of a "surely that stuff can't be real too, can it?" instinct after some initial weird experiences shattered my view on what meditation could do.

I'd test the meditation -> vibrating thing first, and start with a control group not taught about that before trying to modify it.

I did not think I was burning alive before I started meditating. I've never been depressed and I generally thought of myself as a happy person before I started meditation (now I'm the happiest person I know, and a bunch of friends have told me that I'm the happiest person they know), so it's not quite a matter of me being especially miserable before starting meditation, and then becoming normally happy. The insights of meditation kind of reveal to you a suffering that's always been there, all your life. It's like I realized that I had been clenching my fist all my life, the very concept of an unclenched fist being inconceivable until the moment that my hand finally opened, and I realized just how much better life is capable of being. Said another way, my estimation of the ceiling of human well-being got dramatically increased. I should be clear that in the "clenched fist" metaphor, I'm not going around through life with my fist completely unclenched, that's a much higher level than I am, but I can see my fist unclench regularly enough to let me understand what is possible, and I've talked with very advanced meditators who confirm that my extrapolations about the ceiling of human well-being are accurate.

However, the journey of increasing happiness was not monotonic, and at times I did feel significantly unhappier than I started, and it is true that some people are hit much, much harder than I was. This is a pretty heavy-duty psychological transformation, and people have been known to quit jobs and generally ruin their lives when passing through the difficult stages. This is not an easy journey, and only going through it halfway can leave you in the worst of all worlds. Generally the people who really try to go this route are either really desperate, or feel that they've achieved everything in life, yet still feel incomplete, I just didn't know about the risk when I started, and by that point I had experienced enough to be irresistibly attracted to the upside. Everyone I know who has gotten to the end feels like it was massively worth it, and are moved to tears when thinking of the people who have made their journey possible, but the fact remains that I am basically advocating that you sail across the Atlantic in search of gold, and your prior should probably be to not do this.

Sure, the two I'd recommend Energy Work, by Robert Bruce and Kundalini Exposed. The former has lots of very weird techniques for paying attention to the spine that I found very effective, stuff like paying attention to the spine at the level of your navel using a circular motion, kind of circling around one of your vertebras as fast as you can. The other way that I know to elicit chakra-like reactions is through breathwork, in particular through holding your breath while doing a bunch of weird "bandhas", and the latter book I mentioned was the best one I found for that, in particular check out the "Kriya Supreme Fire" section for the most extreme technique in that genre. That basically involves holding your breath for 2 minutes while paying attention to your navel, holding your gut in and up toward your ribcage, squeezing your perineum as hard as you can and holding your chin tucked-in. I have no idea which parts of this weird technique are load-bearing, but I know that it was frighteningly effective for me, the author spends a bunch of time on warnings to not do this is you are a novice meditator.

Oh, very interesting, from what I can see that technique is a sort of Body Scan technique with a focus on relaxation and calm. A technique that makes you focus systematically on various parts of the body is generally called a "Body Scan", the most famous one is the Goenka variation, that makes you scan your skin in an MRI-like fashion, focusing on horizontal slices across your body, moving the slices from head to toes and back. Yes, body scans in general are reasonably good at eliciting the general phenomenon of chakras, and people going on Goenka retreats can sometimes be badly surprised (since the Goenka teachers never mention that any of this is possible) by a ridiculously intense feeling moving up their spines, getting more and more intense as it gets closer to the head, until it feels like the top of their heads are about to explode and the whole world is vibrating furiously or twisting on itself. If their heads do end up exploding, this is called a "kundalini awakening", and is generally accompanied by quite a mind-blowing experience, this causes a bunch of permanent changes in people, not all of them good.

However, body scans aren't really made to awaken chakras, and generally focusing more directly on the spine goes much faster, together with specific breathing techniques. Check out this book for the least dogmatic and most clear instructions I've found on this stuff.

You can go unbelievably far with the book The Mind Illuminated, that was my primary ressource and generally considered the best way to start, the book describes a 10-stage journey from complete noob to meditative virtuosity, with detailed instructions about the pitfalls and goals of each stage. For any questions you might have the subreddit r/themindilluminated is very active and you can quickly get answers if you post there. The subreddit r/streamentry is also a place for "serious meditators", in the sense of people who don't just meditate for stress relief, like people on r/meditation might do, you'll also likely get your questions answered if you post there, there are some very good meditation teachers who frequent that subreddit, but there's also lots of very dogmatic people with less-than-stellar epistemic habits. Though that goes with the terrain here, It took me a while to stop being annoyed every time I heard a pali word like "dharma", that's just kind of the style of the hardcore meditation subculture, and it's the price to pay for getting information that would otherwise be restricted to buddhist temples.

There is a "pragmatic dharma" movement consisting of people who mostly care about how to actually achieve results in the real world, largely without imposing unnecessary beliefs. In this vein, check out:

• Daniel Ingram and his book Mastering The Core Teachings Of The Buddha, which Slatestarcodex reviewed here. This is the book to read for warnings about what negative effects can arise in meditation, though keep in mind that Daniel describes extremes more than modal effects, and he has a very irreverent style. You can also literally email him with any questions, and he'll respond, Daniel also goes on lots of podcasts as a guest, which you can find on Youtube.
• Shinzen Young has lots of videos on youtube which are helpful, he tries to be scientific, though I think he only partly succeeds. He has a book called "The Science of Enlightenment", but the title is misleading, and it's mostly useless for beginners and contains no practical instructions.
• Kenneth Folk has a book-in-progress called Contemplative Fitness, which is very good and ties together a bunch of concepts you might have to kind of pick up through osmosis otherwise.
• Michael Taft has a very good podcast called Deconstructing Yourself and lots of guided hour-long meditations on Youtube that are very good at introducing new techniques to you.
• For specifics about those on-demand states of high pleasure and happiness that I mentioned, Leigh Brasington's book "Right Concentration" is very lucid.
• Sam Harris' app Waking Up is ok, though be very wary of depending too much on guided meditations. They tend to give you a sense that you're better than you really are 

There is of course a large literature on meditation with a more religious style that is still very useful, and you'll find plenty of references to many of these books in all of the above. Again, I highly recommend you start with The Mind Illuminated and only check out those other ones if you feel like you want to learn more. 

There is also one unfortunate reality: 15 minutes a day won't cut it. At the beginning 30 minutes a day is a good place to start, and you will see week-to-week improvements with that amount, but eventually you really do need at least 45min or 1h/day in order to see reasonable improvements in the first year. More time spent meditating makes you progress faster, and I settled at a 2h/day comfortable pace. Occasional retreats are also very useful.

I sincerely wish you luck on your journey, it almost certainly won't be easy, but it is worth it.

I don’t, but… I’d like to see some indication that the real knowledge is generated by discussion or investigation of meditation or Buddhism here. For example: global workspace theory, predictive processing, cognitive psychology, EEG, neuroscience, these weren’t motivated by meditation and Buddhism, I don’t think? Yes, there are neuroscientists who will write books about meditation and talk about interesting things in these books and also about less interesting things like their profound spiritual insights and I’m afraid the latter part of these books is the one motivated by meditation and Buddhism. Sometimes these books will contain very good presentations of their subjects and rationalists will write good reviews of them and that will have value. This indicates that there’s a market for such books, not really that meditation and Buddhism generate useful knowledge. It’s not a justification for investigating meditation and Buddhism to a particularly greater degree.

Seems to describe "meditation" as a single thing with exact predictions in the books.

This is precisely what I find weird about this. When I first studied Zen, the book I read listed four different basic techniques, and that's just Zen! (A lot of early meditation studies were also on TM, which is mantra-based. I think modern studies of meditation, however, are now more focused on "mindfulness" rather than meditation per se, and that mindfulness may in fact be more precisely defined than "meditation" in its full generality, since there are meditation practices aimed at other things -- such as compassion, for example.)

A long time ago I read about an EEG study of the effects of different meditation on the meditator's response to unexpected stimuli, and remember how one type of meditation made people's EEG not show any response, and another had them appear to briefly notice the sound and then return to the meditative state, vs. how an non-experienced meditator's brain would stay active and have difficulty settling back down after an interrupting sound.

That seems to suggest that different meditative practices have differing long-term effects, but since I don't recall any details of the study I can't really say more on that point. (In particular I'm wondering about sample sizes - I don't think they were large.)

FWIW, Zen masters also generally suggest different meditation techniques depending on whether you just want to improve your concentration (or other secular/individual benefits) vs. doing it for religious reasons or to attain enlightenment.

That being said, I did the secular-recommended kind (counting breaths) for a while when I was younger and nonetheless experienced some altered states, as well as some increased confidence or centeredness or... not really sure how to describe it. One of the altered states was a weird sense of compassion for everything in my apartment, such that I felt sorry for the dirty dishes and so I cleaned them. That only happened once, though. The other kind of altered state was the sense that everything was alright in the world and that I was a part of it. That happened a couple of times.

Anyway, I think it's hard to argue that meditation of almost any sort can't induce altered states. The question is more which states and whether they're good or bad for you. Zen literature basically says to ignore them either way, even if they make you feel like you could fly or have psychic superpowers, or conversely if they make you think you're being attacked by demons. This seems to imply there's a pretty good chance of unpleasant altered states if you stick with it long enough, and it's also implied in a lot of meditation literature that if you keep going then the positive and negative hallucinations will stop and things get better generally, but I never meditated long enough to get either kind of hallucination, unless you count feeling part of everything or compassionate for everything as a hallucination rather than an attitude adjustment. ;-)

It sounds a bit like all (or most of) the Buddhists are wrong about what Buddha meant, only you understand it correctly. While technically possible, it is suspiciously tailored to the modern Western audience.

I think a more likely hypothesis is that the historical Buddha and his followers believed in supernatural. Almost all people in the history did.

Do you have any evidence for Buddha not believing in supernatural, besides "it would make Buddhism more cool from our perspective"?