Delicious Luminosity, Om Nom Nom

There's Yvain's Limits of Introspection post, which links to a paper on the scientific study of what we can access introspectively. Yvain isn't exaggarating when he calls it a "classic": Google Scholar lists over 6000 cites.

You may also wish to take a look at the papers citing it to see if there's anything more recent that's relevant, though from a brief glance it looked like the top results were about something else than introspection entirely. Still, there are probably more relevant results buried there somewhere.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Introspection. As usual (based on my brief skim of the article), SEP has good coverage of the topic and provides plenty of references for looking more into the topic. Among other things, it covers both the history of introspection in science, from its early rise to its decline to its modern re-emergence, as well as a discussion about the accuracy of introspection.

What's the point of trying to justify it after the fact? Unless you do some sort of systematic literature review, this is just going to be an exercise in confirmation bias.

Wikipedia on Focusing. I have no idea of how useful this is, but it's apparently an introspection technique that's used in psychotherapy and disciplines related to it. To the extent that you consider psychotherapy to be of some use, it might be worth looking into.

Despite the common view about psychotherapy being nonsense, there are reviews suggesting that it often does no worse than cognitive behavior therapy or other more "fashionable" forms of therapy.

Amanda Baggs's blog, currently at https://ballastexistenz.wordpress.com/, has a lot of introspection / self-discovery material by a person who is both quite intelligent and quite far from neurotypical; as well as a lot of material that should be precautionary for any therapeutic or other-optimizing approach.

The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome by Tony Attwood seemed like applying luminosity to the particular problems of Aspergers. It might be useful, for a compare and contrast with your method, if nothing else.

Btw, I might not have gotten to the Luminousity sequence if not for this post, so thanks for posting.

E. Schwitzgebel book on inner experience.

"The User's Guide to the Human Mind" by Shawn T. Smith. It's a self-help book centered around the idea that the best way to cope with undesirable mental phenomena is to observe them with detachement, accept them and move on. Surprisingly, it manages to turn that idea from a vaguely eastern-sounding piece of mumbo-jumbo into something actionable and effective in practice. Well, at least for me it did.

It seems to be based on ideas of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is a recent offshoot of CBT. The book doesn't mention this explicitly -- I'm guessing based on the things it cites and the similarity between it's ideas and the description in the Wikipedia article. And said article contains a longish list of relevant books so chance of successful information acquisition through library infiltration is high.

I don't have specific recommendations, but Gurdjieff and Ouspensky did a lot with self-observation. The only specifics I remember is that there was considerable concern about whether you were really observing yourself or just kidding yourself that you were doing so, and there was some mention of finding out what you were doing that saw a waste of energy, and ceasing to do those things.

On Anger by Seneca

This is the oldest and simplest work that deals with introspection that I know of. It is probably worth a read even if you weren't doing this kind of research. Also, it is short and the modern translations are easy to read.

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

This is a book about the technical aspects of meditation. I haven't finished it yet (nor put it into practice), but it seems like a very low woo-factor book on introspection practice.

I volunteer to guinea pig.

In addition to my glowing cavy army (er, I mean, my luminosity guinea pigs) I would like a volunteer or three who is not also a guinea pig and who is not already my close personal friend to sanity-check methodologies I develop before I contaminate my glowing cavy army (that is to say, my luminosity guinea pigs) with any input. (Close personal friends may also be consulted but I should probably have at least one or two less interested parties.)

Volunteer guinea pigs, please email me (alicorn@elcenia.com) or IM me (AIM: Alicorn24; MSN: alicorn@elcenia.com; Gtalk: elcenia@gmail.com).